Exchange of bona fides
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An exchange of bona fides is the recognition protocol between intelligence officers who have no other way to verify each other. John Kiriakou describes it as fundamental and early, "something that is very, very important and is taught practically on the first day of operational training."

The situation it exists for

The case it covers is an officer under cover or deep cover, whose status "no one knows or even suspects," who must be contacted by another intelligence officer. Neither can simply assert who they are.

Kiriakou's illustration is deliberately absurd, which is the point: "If I break into the room, I kick down the door, you turn and look, and I have to say 'The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.' And then you respond with 'Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.' We both know that we're on the same team."

The failure condition is stated without elaboration: "But if one side or the other doesn't know the bona fides, then anything goes."

Why nobody forgets

Kiriakou rejects the dramatic version in which an officer panics and cannot recall the phrase. "It was never, ever my experience that people would panic and not remember the bona fides. It's so drilled into you in training. You almost can't forget."

He grounds the reliability in selection rather than in drilling alone. People hired into operational positions by any intelligence service, he says, have to be people with sociopathic tendencies, "you have to be very cool undercover."

The Armstrong standard

The temperament he names as the target of recruitment is illustrated by a story from outside intelligence altogether. As the Apollo lunar module approached the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin's heart was racing and he feared he would crash it; Neil Armstrong took over, and NASA detected that as he got closer to the surface his heartbeat slowed down.

"That's not normal, but that's the kind of person that an intelligence service would want to recruit. Somebody who not just is cool undercover, but is cool under pressure and becomes even more cool under extreme pressure."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Sociopathic Tendencies
- CIA training doctrine
