Kompromat
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Kompromat is a Russian-derived term for compromising material, recordings, photographs, or documentation of an individual's criminal, sexual, or embarrassing behavior, used to coerce cooperation or silence. John Kiriakou has described CIA experience with kompromat operations and the agency's formal policy conclusion about their effectiveness.

Failed 1970s operation

Kiriakou described a CIA kompromat operation conducted against a foreign cleric in the 1970s. The CIA arranged for a prostitute to sleep with the target, photographed the encounter, and approached him with the material, expecting to recruit him as an asset. The cleric's response, in Kiriakou's telling: "Go ahead and publish them. I'll tell everybody you're lying. Give me eight-by-tens and wallet sizes."

The operation produced nothing. The target was not recruited.

CIA policy: coercion doesn't work

Kiriakou stated that on the basis of operations like this one, the CIA arrived at a formal policy position: coercion and blackmail do not work as recruitment tools. His summary of the underlying logic: when you approach someone with kompromat, you are forcing a binary choice, "You either confess to your wife, or you commit treason. Which do you pick?"

In Kiriakou's assessment, most people, when faced with that choice, confess. The target absorbs a short-term personal consequence rather than a lifetime of espionage. The CIA concluded that voluntary, ideologically or financially motivated recruitment produces far more reliable assets than coerced ones. Kiriakou puts a figure on it in a separate interview: internal CIA studies found the agency stopped blackmailing sources in the 1970s because it proved less effective than voluntary cooperation, with roughly 95% of CIA source relationships built on cash and only about 5% driven by ideology, excitement, or revenge.

An intern's first day

Kiriakou has separately described his own first CIA boss recounting a formative episode from his own earliest days at the agency, as a grad-school intern: on his first day, warned by the office secretary never to look inside a wall of file folders in the room, he looked anyway, and found that every single file was on an American citizen.

Why the agency stopped

Kiriakou says the question reaches him constantly, "people raise this with me literally every single day", and his answer is operational rather than ethical. "The CIA doesn''t blackmail. We used to, but they haven''t done that since the ''70s, because it''s not effective. In order to really squeeze great information out of a source, the source has to love you. The source has to think that you''re his best friend." The relationship he describes is transactional underneath and affectionate on the surface at the same time: the source knows he is being paid, "but really it''s because you''re in a bromance and he loves hanging out with you, and he''s going to give you the plans to the next-generation Russian tank just because he loves you."

See also

- Asset acquisition cycle
- Gay Diplomat Operation
- Access Agent
- Jeffrey Epstein
