The CIA defense
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John Kiriakou describes two outcomes when someone working for the CIA is arrested and facing serious prison time abroad, and rejects the popular idea of a business card that makes charges disappear.

The first route is informal and, he says, usually decisive: "the station chief might go to the head of your country's intelligence service and say, look, I'm going to ask for a favour, this guy you arrested over here, he's actually my guy, so can you please let him go. 99 times out of a hundred, they're going to let you go."

The second is abandonment. "But there are some times where the CIA says, well, tough luck, you're on your own. And then we see people, as they go to trial, invoke something called the CIA defense, where they say, hey wait a minute, this isn't a crime, I was doing this on behalf of the CIA. Which may or may not be true. But in cases like that, the CIA just walks away. They have no comment, and you're on your own."

The tolerance behind it

The arrangement rests on a prior indifference to what an asset has done. Kiriakou frames the relationship plainly: "are you a nice guy? That doesn't really matter. You're probably a bad guy, but you're working for the good guys now", and the agency "would be willing to overlook a lot of the problems that you bring to the relationship so long as you're productive."

He gives one instance from his own casework. A man he was recruiting confessed at the moment of the pitch to a cold-blooded murder committed a couple of years earlier, something Kiriakou already knew. "And I said, I'm not your confessor, right? You and I have a business relationship. I don't care what you've done in the past, it's none of my business, so long as you give me the information that I need and I pay you the salary that you earn, that's our relationship. I don't care what you've done before we met. And that's really the CIA view."

The same logic explains why officers end up around such people at all. Where an ongoing low-level war turns on the drug trade, Kiriakou notes that stopping traffickers is the DEA's job and not the agency's, "CIA's job is to recruit spies to steal secrets. Period", so to reach the head of a cartel "you need to get close to them, and then you make your recruitment."

See also

- Asset acquisition cycle
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Rick Praau
- John Kiriakou
