Agent payment mechanics
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Agent payment mechanics are the handling rules that govern how a recruited agent is actually paid. About 95 per cent of recruitments made by a CIA operations officer are for money, at anything from $1,000 a month to $20,000 a month to a lump sum of $10 million, payable in diamonds or gold or any other form the agent asks for.

The receipt

Payment is monthly and always in cash, against a receipt the agent signs. The signature is not expected to be his own name, he is told to pick a name and stick with it, and Mickey Mouse is an acceptable choice so long as it is the same one every month.

Policing the officer

The control is not on the agent but on the officer carrying the money, and it runs through the polygraph: the question, as Kiriakou was asked it, is whether he had ever misappropriated more than $20, and it has to be answered no with a clear conscience. Over an entire career he says he never saw or heard of a single dollar being taken.

The scale of what an officer may be trusted with is illustrated by a drive he made to Faisalabad about two weeks before the capture of Abu Zubaydah, with $2 million in cash in two duffel bags in the van. His colleague could not understand why anyone would falsify twenty or thirty dollars of accounting paperwork, "If you're going to steal, steal millions", and Kiriakou's reply was that he would not even steal the millions.

Large one-off inducements

The scene in Zero Dark Thirty in which a source is given a Lamborghini overnight in exchange for a phone number is, in Kiriakou's assessment, not far-fetched but easy: a large sack of money is taken to the dealership by the airport.

Bounties

The same cash discipline governs bounty payments, at a different order of magnitude. The reward posted on Abu Zubaydah was $10 million and the one on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed $25 million, and Kiriakou notes that ten million dollars in cash is physically very heavy, several gym bags of it. The agency was, in his words, very happy to deliver the money, and to deliver it immediately.

Where the informant needs more than money he gets it: resettlement, relocation, a new identity, and whatever else is required to keep him safe for the rest of his life. Kiriakou says it is not unusual to ask a source simply to name the country he wants to live in. Underneath all of it is his reduction of the agency's purpose, recruit spies to steal secrets and analyse them so the policymaker can decide well, and his insistence that no volume of intercepted communications substitutes for a human being in the meeting.

Ninety-five per cent cash, and the sliding scale

Kiriakou cites internal agency research for the proportions. "Studies have been done about this internally at the CIA. 95 per cent of these relationships are based on cash exchanges. Simple as that. We have money, you need the money. I''m happy to give you whatever money you want, so long as you give me the information I want. And we shake hands. You sign this ridiculous little contract that I made up in MS Word, and everybody''s happy." The remaining five per cent he splits three ways, ideology ("sometimes they just love, love, love the United States"), excitement ("they''ve seen all the James Bond movies ... they just want to experience the excitement of the clandestinity"), and revenge ("they got passed over for promotion, they''re angry at their bosses, and they just want to screw the boss").

The price scales with the product. Access to a local Communist Party "might be good for $23,000 a month"; for Osama bin Laden, "I''m going to give you 25 million, 50 million dollars, and I''ll give it to you in cash, in gold, in diamonds, in Bitcoin. I''ll give it to you any way you want to receive it. If you want it in land, I''ll give it to you in land", with resettlement "in any country in the world where you would like to live" thrown in.

See also

- CIA cash room
- The polygraph
- Asset acquisition cycle
- Agent Inducements
- Faisalabad
