Senior Intelligence Service
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The Senior Intelligence Service is the CIA's executive rank, sitting above GS-15, the highest grade on the federal General Schedule. It is the level at which, in Kiriakou's phrasing, "you're the directors".

What it is worth

The pay step from GS-15 to the first Senior Intelligence Service grade is on the order of $25,000. The larger difference is that Senior Intelligence Service officers also draw annual corporate-style bonuses that the rest of the workforce does not get.

What it requires

Eligibility for promotion from GS-15 to SIS-1 requires two tours outside an officer's own line of work: at least one in another of the CIA's four directorates, operations, intelligence, science and technology, and administration, and one in the policy community, meaning the State Department or the Department of Defense.

It also requires a sponsor. Kiriakou's account of John Brennan's early career turns on that: Brennan was a mid-level manager in the Directorate of Intelligence working Middle East analysis, and did not get along with his supervisor, a legendary and extensively published figure in CIA analysis. When he went to her for support in entering the Senior Intelligence Service, she told him that not only would he never be in the service, she did not want him working for her any more, and he was fired. An officer forced out of a CIA job has six weeks to find another before the dismissal becomes real; it was close to Christmas, when almost nothing opens, and Brennan ended up on the President's Daily Brief staff because there was exactly one job free, that of PDB briefer.

The consequence for staffing

Kiriakou's objection is not to the rule but to how it is satisfied. An officer who lacks one of the two tours needs a posting that will check the box, and the agency has been willing to supply one regardless of whether the officer is trained for it. Jennifer Matthews, an analyst who had already done her policy tour at the State Department, needed the operational half and was given a base command in Afghanistan without operational or security training. She and six other officers were killed there.

Where the torture policy was written

The service is also where the enhanced interrogation techniques originated. In Kiriakou's description the policy was collaborative: Senior Intelligence Service officers in the Counterterrorism Center devised the techniques with the two contract psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, and presented them to the director and the general counsel; the package then went to the White House for approval, on to the Justice Department, and back to the White House for the president's signature. Execution then fell to the components inside the Counterterrorism Center, which is how the chief of base at the secret site became the most sensitive position in the whole structure, and why Jose Rodriguez named the person he trusted most, Gina Haspel.

Outlasting presidents

The service's defining political characteristic, in Kiriakou's telling, is tenure. Its officers are career staff rather than political appointees, with twenty, twenty-five, thirty or thirty-five years behind them, he knew one man who spent forty-two years in Senior Intelligence Service leadership. Presidents come and go; they are always there. So a president they dislike gets waited out, as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were.

Waiting is only the passive half. The agency can also decline outright to carry out a covert action program the president has ordered, saying it is not possible, or too dangerous, or that the manpower is not there, so that a policy the president wants simply does not happen. Below that sits slow-rolling: not targeting the genuinely risky source, not starting the genuinely risky operation, not working hard, and answering an instruction to focus on China with "yeah, yeah, we're going to get right on that" before ignoring it, because in four years he will be gone. Kiriakou concedes he underestimated how far it would go: he did not believe the deep state had the nerve to take active measures against a sitting president, and says he has since watched it happen twice.

He treats the composition of the service as a Brennan legacy. Over four years as director, Brennan promoted his acolytes up through the ranks until they occupied the seniormost levels of the Senior Intelligence Service and ran day-to-day operations, so that his departure changed little, the agency still being run by his people. Even the bottom of the service, at group-chief level, came of age under Obama, Brennan and Petraeus, which is why Kiriakou judged that a president wanting to start fresh would have to conduct a purge. He dates the politicization to Brennan's directorship, and points to the unprecedented spectacle of officers three and four levels below the director leaving the agency to become television talking heads.

See also

- Jennifer Matthews
- John Brennan
- CIA directorates
- Counterterrorism Center
- Deep state
- Forward Operating Base Chapman Attack
- The Directorate of Intelligence
- The Directorate of Operations
