Abolish the CIA
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Abolish the CIA is John Kiriakou's position that the agency should be disbanded because it does nothing the rest of the intelligence community cannot. There are already 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, he notes: the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research produces analysis "at least as good" as the CIA's; the Pentagon's human-intelligence service already recruits spies to steal secrets; and DARPA, the NSA and the private sector, via In-Q-Tel creations like Palantir, cover the technology. Asked what the CIA does that is unique or particularly valuable, he answers, "Nothing." A realist, he concedes it will not be disbanded, and advises young recruits to enter with their own moral principles and try to change it from within. He argues the FBI should be abolished alongside it, calling both "rogue organizations" unable to exist as lawful entities, and says the CIA has had no major intelligence success he can point to in the past 60 to 70 years.

Rogue since 1947

Kiriakou traces a record he says dates to the CIA's founding in 1947: overthrowing governments, murdering world leaders, interfering in elections and abusing human rights. A close friend and former deputy attorney general, with whom Kiriakou has discussed writing a book on the subject, argues the agency has gotten "literally every major world event wrong" since its creation, missing the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Suez Crisis, and the entirety of the Vietnam War, all the way through September 11. Before 9/11, Kiriakou says, the CIA's mission was narrow and specific, recruit spies, steal secrets, analyze them for policymakers, but the agency went rogue and had to be reined in by the Church and Pike committees in 1975, then went rogue again during Iran-Contra. After 9/11 it became a paramilitary organization, he says, with analysis reduced to secondary or tertiary status behind assassination squads, international kidnappings, rendition to third countries for torture, and a network of secret prisons. He levels a parallel charge at the FBI, which he says entraps Americans for political reasons because agents and federal prosecutors are promoted for prosecuting people, not for clearing them, citing the Uhuru group in Florida and manufactured terror plots in Seattle, Portland and Cleveland in which the FBI itself supplied the explosives and detonators.

Torn down to the studs (Judging Freedom)

John Kiriakou says that even Eisenhower, one of the CIA's greatest early supporters, concluded it was "out of control," and that he believes, as, he says, does President Trump, the agency needs to be "torn down to its studs and rebuilt." He frames the failure as regulatory capture: the Capitol Hill overseers are "little more than cheerleaders" for the CIA. He traces the warning further back: Eisenhower cautioned about the military-industrial complex in 1960, and John Kennedy said just two weeks before his assassination that the CIA should be "broken into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind." Asked in the same Judging Freedom interview what he would do to reform the CIA, Kiriakou first proposed closing the CIA media revolving door, a cooling-off period before officers can become paid media personalities, and revoking retirees' security clearances.

A realist's case

Kiriakou says he has come around to the position that the U.S. doesn't need a CIA anymore, pointing to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as proof the intelligence community is already "layer upon layer upon layer of organizations doing the same thing." He credits the idea not to himself but to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who first proposed abolishing the CIA in 1976. Pressed on whether the agency needs to exist at all, or ever did, he says he isn't convinced, but calls himself a realist: abolishing the CIA would take an act of Congress that will never happen, so he would instead strip it of its counterterrorism role and hand that to the Pentagon, returning the agency to recruiting spies and stealing secrets.

Embassy culture

Apart from the CIA itself, Kiriakou criticizes U.S. embassies abroad for bunkering in rather than engaging the people of their host countries, noting that Hamid Karzai, as president of Afghanistan, was effectively just "the mayor of Kabul." He argues embassies could source a minimum of 20% of their food locally, saving hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of flying in nearly all of it from the United States.

The redundancy case

Asked in 2019 what should replace the agency, Kiriakou answers by dividing its functions among bodies that already exist. He starts from Kennedy's remark about breaking the CIA "into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds," which he says was taken up in a 1976 book by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "he was mocked when that book came out in 1976, but he was onto something."

The substitution he then sets out is threefold: analysis to the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which he rates as the best in the community; human collection to Defense HUMINT Service at the Pentagon, which "recruits spies to steal secrets just as well as the CIA does"; and technical collection and interception to the NSA, "that's what NSA does." The conclusion is a question about the leftover: "so why do you have this redundant organization at Langley, that is actually sort of in charge of the intelligence community, when they're the ones getting it wrong all the time?"

The record he rests it on is one of misses rather than crimes, they "have missed all of the major global political events of the last century, from the Berlin Wall to the Iranian Revolution to the collapse of communism. You name it, they've got it wrong, time and time again", and he is careful about the register in which he says it: "I say that with a pain in my heart, because I devoted the better part of my adult life to the CIA. I was a patriot. I wanted to serve my country... and it turned out to be nonsense."

See also

- Palantir Technologies
- In-Q-Tel
