The CIA divorce rate
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The CIA divorce rate is, on John Kiriakou's account, the highest of any part of the U.S. government. He has put the number at "over 75 percent" and, elsewhere, "upwards of 80%", and attributes it to the same cause each time: officers lie and cheat professionally all day and cannot switch it off at the front door. "They end up lying to their wives and cheating on their wives until marriages fail."

He frames it more precisely elsewhere as the cost of "having to live two lives, and in some cases more than two lives", the job being "the greatest job I ever had in my life" and, in the same sentence, the thing that "cost me my first marriage."

His own case

The mechanism in his own marriage was not infidelity but the clearance. He could tell his first wife nothing beyond the fact that he had to work, and "she never believed me when I said that I was going out in the middle of the night because I had to work ... and so she left me and my first marriage fell apart." His second wife was herself a CIA officer: "so when I told her I was going to work, she understood. She knew I was telling the truth."

The parallel failure

Kiriakou links the divorce figure to a second pattern, officers who get into legal trouble after leaving, and "not for things like whistleblowing, but for things like fraud." His evidence is first-hand: "I actually served in prison with a former CIA officer who was in prison on multiple counts of fraud." The explanation he offers is the same one: "you lie and trick and cheat and steal for a living for 25 years, 30 years ... a lot of guys are not able to turn that off."

See also

- The CIA entrance examinations
- The polygraph
