Sleeper Agent
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John Kiriakou described the sleeper-agent program as uniquely Russian. The process begins when a child is taken from a Russian family, with the family's acquiescence, and relocated to a simulated American town built in the Russian hinterland. The child is raised speaking English with an American accent, watching American television, eating American food, following American sports teams, and receiving an American-style education, with no knowledge of any other life.

The identity is built on a dead infant. Handlers search death records for children who died within a day or two of birth in the target birth year, take the name and birth date, obtain a Social Security card, and use it to secure a genuine American passport. The sleeper enters the United States on that passport legally.

The agent is placed in an ordinary civilian job, Kiriakou cited travel agent as an example, and may work there for twenty years without any contact. Activation comes via radio message. If the agent fails to respond, a handler is dispatched to deliver a personal message.

Kiriakou described a woman in his own neighborhood who was outed as a sleeper agent approximately a year before the interview date. She was an elementary-school teacher. She was arrested and traded back to Russia in exchange for two Americans. In a separate account, Kiriakou says Russia is the country best known for using sleeper agents and cites this same Northern Virginia disruption more broadly, a group of Russian sleeper agents arrested there, including the one in his own neighborhood working as an elementary school teacher and another working for an airline.

Kiriakou also interviewed a former East German sleeper agent on his podcast. The man had been taken as a young child, raised as an American, and sent to New York in his early twenties, where he worked in what Kiriakou recalled as a restaurant-supply company. He married and had a daughter. The moment his daughter was born, he decided the life of a sleeper was over for him. He did not respond to his activation message. A handler subsequently approached him on the New York subway, grabbed the strap beside him, and whispered: "If you don't report back, I have to kill you." The man went directly to the FBI field office in New York, turned himself in, and became what Kiriakou described as a prolific FBI source.

How different services recruit

John Kiriakou contrasts recruitment styles across services: the Russians, he says, are better off using their own people as sleeper agents or throwing money at targets with exploitable problems, gambling, alcohol, drugs, or having been passed over for promotion, so the relationship rests on cash. The Cubans, lacking money, recruit through ideology and patriotism, while the Israelis excel at developing people who would be their natural supporters anyway.

The illegals program (Austin and Matt)

John Kiriakou describes Russia's illegals or sleeper program: a recruit taken as young as 12 is trained to speak American-accented English, then given the identity of an infant who died the same year, obtaining a real Social Security card, passport and life in that name. They live ordinary lives, "in my neighborhood in Arlington this woman was a special-ed teacher", for up to 20 years until activated, when they might be told to shoot someone or to walk special adhesive-soled shoes past a nuclear plant to sample its radiation. Kiriakou confirms such illegals are entirely real, elsewhere noting that a former CIA colleague, Joe Weisberg, left the agency to create The Americans, the television series built on the same premise.

Kiriakou's 2026 account

Asked whether sleeper agents exist in the United States now, Kiriakou answers "Absolutely yes, we do", and says they come "almost exclusively from Russia and China." His definition is procedural: someone trained as an intelligence officer by a foreign service and then sent to the United States and told "to just live as an American, pretend to be an American, get a job, and just wait until we contact you", a wait that may run twenty, twenty-five or thirty years before activation.

He supplies two recent cases. Less than two years earlier a woman in his own neighbourhood was arrested, an elementary school teacher in the Arlington County, Virginia public school system, and "here she was a Russian sleeper agent waiting to be activated." The second is Chinese rather than Russian and operational rather than dormant: a group working for the Chinese national security service was arrested in New York a year or two ago, "just going around New York threatening Chinese and telling them to keep their mouths shut or something terrible was going to happen to them."

See also

- CIA
- MOSSAD
- Asset acquisition cycle
