Fabricated intelligence reporting
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Asked whether CIA operations officers ever lie about the intelligence they collect in order to build a career, John Kiriakou's answer is that they do, that a great deal of training time was spent on it, and that it leads to "a very quick firing."

The quota

His explanation is managerial rather than moral. Sometimes, he says, you work for a chief who decrees that everybody must produce five pieces of finished intelligence a month or fall below threshold, not an average of five, but five every month. But the work does not arrive evenly: some months bring ten or twelve, and some months are spent cultivating new agents and bring none. "So what that does is it encourages people to just make it up and write it up as intelligence." Some pull it out of an obscure newspaper.

Holding reports in reserve

The subtler version does not invent anything. An officer who meets an agent and comes away with ten reports files the five he needs now and keeps five back for next month, provided they are not too time-sensitive. Kiriakou does not call this fabrication, but he does call it what it is: "that's intellectually dishonest."

The third offence

The third thing officers are caught at is petty: inventing or recycling receipts for the five to twenty dollars allowed at each cover stop and pocketing the money. Kiriakou finds this the least comprehensible of the three, "is it really worth being fired to steal $20 from the CIA?", and, asked whether it says something about the personality type recruited to be a case officer, agrees that it does.

See also

- Cover stop
- The polygraph
- The polygraph
- Chief of station
