No-bid contracts
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Asked what government corruption actually looks like in the American national security world, John Kiriakou set aside the petty kind, the bribe to get a telephone line installed, the payment to make a plumber come to the house, which he says he complained about while serving overseas, and described something else. 

The revolving door as a transaction

The corruption he means is spending thirty years at the CIA, retiring on a Friday, going back in on Monday with a different coloured badge, and making ten times what you were making at the agency, because you just joined your buddy's LLC and you get a no-bid contract. That, he says, happens every single day. It is American taxpayers' money going to a private company to do exactly what the CIA was doing, for a tenth of the price.  

The unnamed company

Kiriakou then gave a case history, declining to name the firm so that he could speak freely. The company did not exist in the very early 1990s. A very senior CIA officer retired and made an LLC, and only made it so that he and his friends could use it as a tax pass-through, smoke cigars, play cards, hang out together and write it off as a tax loss. Then their old friends inside the CIA started giving them no-bid contracts. One thing led to another, and by the end of the decade this was a multi-billion dollar company.  

The ratchet, in his description, is what makes it self-sustaining: contracts were passed without competition, and as soon as the person who authorised a contract retired, the company hired that person, and the next generation of senior officers gave them no-bid contracts in turn. That, Kiriakou says, is corruption, and it happens every single day. 

The double standard

What he finds ironic, though not in a funny way, is which conduct the system polices. The whole national security apparatus, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, will make a very big deal about somebody trying to win a contract by taking people out to a strip club: a dozen felony charges get pressed, and an all-hands email goes out saying do not do things like this, this is corruption. It is a different kind of corruption, he concedes. But how, he asks, have these other men gone through their whole lives making between fifty thousand and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and then retired worth twenty-five million?  

Asked whether he could imagine how much money he might have made had he stayed on the inside, Kiriakou said he would be rich, and his interviewer supplied the contrast: the officers who stayed docile got what they got, while the man who blew the whistle went to jail. 

See also

- Private Intelligence
- CIA,Big Tech revolving door
- Abraxas Corporation
- The Analysis Corporation
- PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Permanent wartime economy
- Deloitte Consulting Career
