Freemasons and Opus Dei at the CIA
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Asked whether secret societies had influence inside American intelligence, John Kiriakou described a set of affinity networks at the top of the CIA that he considers real but not conspiratorial.

Who is at the top

Kiriakou says a lot of senior CIA officers are Freemasons, that they tend to be eastern-elite liberal graduates of Ivy League schools, and that, oddly enough, in his phrasing, they include members of Opus Dei. He describes stretches in which almost everybody at the top happened to belong to Opus Dei and attended the same church in Great Falls, Virginia, which he found very strange.

When his questioner restated this as the agency bringing Opus Dei members in as recruits, Kiriakou corrected him: it was not that they were brought in as recruits, but that these senior people happened to be Opus Dei.

Not a plot

Kiriakou is explicit that he does not regard the pattern as official or formal. He calls it almost accidental, and says he never got the impression that members of these organisations were plotting something together so much as looking out for one another.

The Avrakotos test

He illustrates the point with a conversation he had with his operations mentor, Gust Avrakotos, by then an old hand who had been in the agency since the early 1970s. Kiriakou asked him how somebody like him had ever made it to the top: Greek rather than a WASP, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh rather than Yale, not a member of a fraternity, let alone of Skull and Bones. Avrakotos answered: through hard work and sharp elbows.

Kiriakou draws the conclusion directly from that exchange. It was not, he says, that one had to be a Mason to reach the top; rather, the men at the top happened to be Masons, because the Masons all look out for one another.

The same interview produced his separate account of the heavy Mormon presence in American intelligence, which he explains by language ability and by the ease with which clean-living candidates pass the polygraph.

See also

- Gust Avrakotos
- Mormons in intelligence
- CIA feeder schools
- The polygraph
