Blackmail in agent recruitment
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Blackmail in agent recruitment is a subject John Kiriakou addresses from the training room rather than from operations: what CIA career trainees were explicitly told, and where he thinks the teaching stops being descriptive.

What the instructors said

"In my training, I was told the same thing. When you're trying to recruit an asset, you want that recruitment to be over the long term. And in order to have a successful long-term recruitment, you need to be able to trust each other. Even if you don't like each other, you have to at least be able to trust each other."

The rule followed from that: "my instructors were very clear in saying that we cannot get long-term working relationships going on the right track if we start with blackmail. It's just not something that we would do." The justification offered was operational, that blackmail is an unreliable and high-risk tool for managing assets, rather than ethical.

The exceptions he volunteers

Kiriakou does not present the teaching as a complete account of agency behaviour. He concedes the historical case immediately: "certainly they did it in the past, pre-Church Committee."

And he separates recruitment from suppression. Where the objective is not cooperation but inaction, where you simply need a target not to do something, "yeah, sure. Blackmail threats." He adds the further step: "maybe even you outsource it to another intelligence service, another friendly intelligence service, uh, who might not be as friendly as you are."

His summary of the doctrine as day-to-day policy is unchanged, and carefully bounded: "as a matter of day-to-day policy, we were told that blackmail wasn't going to be done."

See also

- Asset acquisition cycle
- Church Committee
- Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
