Seven cell phones
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John Kiriakou describes the failure of his first marriage as a structural feature of the job rather than a personal one, and calls the pattern "uniquely CIA."

What she knew

His first wife was a ballet teacher. "She knew I worked for the CIA and that was it. She didn't know anything else."

He renders the daily conversation as a closed loop: they are overseas, he comes home from work, she asks how work was, great, what did you do, nothing, who did you talk to, nobody.

The phones

Then the second half of it: "one of my seven cell phones would ring at night, at midnight, and I would speak in Arabic and then leave and not come back for a day."

The question that produced, in his telling, was: "what's her name?"

"And so fourteen years of marriage down the drain, because I couldn't tell her what I did for a living."

The institutional answer

The remedy the agency effectively encourages is to marry inside it, which Kiriakou did. "So I married a CIA officer. Which happens. Which is encouraged, because you're both cleared. And so you can talk about work."

He describes the internal social apparatus that follows from the same logic, a softball league, a quilting club, a choir, "any club that you could possibly want they have", and gives the reason: everybody is cleared, so people can talk about work without fearing they will accidentally reveal a secret.

It does not solve the underlying problem. Kiriakou puts the CIA's divorce rate at eighty per cent, "the highest of anywhere in the U.S. government." His own second marriage also ended, after prison. Asked in 2019 whether he had married again, he said no: "I think it's just not for me."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The CIA divorce rate
- The CIA's internal social culture
- CIA adultery culture
- The job in the medical practice
