Sources are not traitors
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Sources are not traitors is John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether, inside the CIA, officers regarded the people they had recruited as traitors and held them in contempt.

Kiriakou called it "an interesting question" and answered it flatly: "the answer is absolutely not."

The reasoning

The explanation he gives is not about the agent's conduct but about the officers' self-image. "You know, we really really believed that we were the good guys." Recruitment therefore functioned as an act of transfer rather than of corruption: "And so if we were able to recruit somebody and make them one of the good guys, we were all one big happy family."

The exceptions he concedes

Kiriakou does not pretend that every recruitment was a friendship. "There were there were a couple of sources that I recruited who in normal life I would not be friends with, right? We would not we would not have had contact. They were scumbags."

One case he singles out: "In one case they were he was a killer like a just a coldblooded stone cold killer."

The proportion

Against those he sets the majority, and gives a number for his career total. "Um but seven of the nine people that I recruited over the years I would love to be friendly with them."

Trust and its verification

The follow-up put to him was the obvious one: whether an officer worried that a person who would betray one master would betray another, the doubt of someone conducting an affair with a married partner. Kiriakou conceded the worry immediately, "Oh, sure. Sure", and named the machinery built to answer it: "And that's what vetting is all about. So, you know, you've got to polygraph them. You have to what we call operationally test them."

His worked example of that testing, a source made to run a surveillance detection route while a full team followed him, then asked to describe what he had done, is set out in the operational test.

See also

- The Operational Test
- Running Into Former Sources
- Blackmail in agent recruitment
- Kiriakou's first recruitment
