The CIA as a policy support agency
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The CIA as a policy support agency is the distinction John Kiriakou reaches for whenever an interviewer suggests the agency is pursuing a foreign policy of its own. "Keep in mind that the CIA is not a policy agency. It's a policy support agency. And so they serve at the pleasure of the president."

No protections

The employment consequence is the part he emphasizes. "There are no civil service protections at the CIA, because the CIA serves at the pleasure of the president. And so they do literally what the president tells them to do." He cites the thirty-seven intelligence officers fired the week before the interview as the demonstration: there is "no panel that they can go to within the civil service to say, hey, I was illegitimately fired."

What resistance actually looks like

Kiriakou does not deny that career officers can obstruct, he denies that obstruction amounts to an independent policy. "If they get an order that they don't like, they can sort of just move so slowly that they can delay it ... until the president is no longer present anymore." But they are "always at risk then of being fired," and where a shooting war is under way, "they do as they're told."

The Iraq precedent

He uses the 2003 invasion as the case where the agency's institutional preference was overruled and complied with anyway. The pro-war side inside government was the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President and the Office of the Secretary of Defense; the anti-war side was the CIA, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The agency's objection was not principled but operational: it "had been single-mindedly focused on finding and killing Osama bin Laden. They didn't want to be distracted by going into some unnecessary war in Iraq. They wanted to stay in Afghanistan and destroy al-Qaeda." Then, in Kiriakou's summary of what followed, "the policy decision had been made and they were told: you're going to fall into line. And they fell into line."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Ukraine as a proxy war
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Osama bin Laden
