National Security Council
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The National Security Council (NSC) is the White House's principal national-security policymaking body, and a recurring antagonist in John Kiriakou's accounts of how the Iraq war, the torture program, and his own prosecution came to be.

The Iraq battle lines

Kiriakou describes the pre-war split inside the government, behind closed doors: pro-war were the office of the vice president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council; anti-war, "and this is going to sound crazy", were the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted to stay focused on al-Qaeda and bin Laden. He participated in the secure video teleconferences, chaired by Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney, depending on the day. In one, an NSC senior director declared that as soon as U.S. forces crossed the border, the Iraqi people would "throw flowers at us." Kiriakou remembers thinking: are these people insane?

In the approval chain

When Kiriakou was invited into the interrogation program in 2002 and objected that the ten techniques sounded like torture, the answer he got was procedural: "No, it's not torture, we got it approved by the White House, we got it approved by the National Security Council, the Justice Department." He describes the same machinery for covert action: a highly classified finding goes from the CIA to the NSC, in his 2019 Venezuela example, to John Bolton, gets signed, and comes back with all the signatures it needs, the public none the wiser. On Venezuela he also flags Elliott Abrams, the NSC's senior director for Latin America, a man who "spent 12 years working for Republican presidents overthrowing Latin American governments."

After 9/11, he says, it was people across the national security structure, NSC, CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, who decided the attack was a game changer entitling them to do anything, warrant or no warrant.

Brennan at the NSC

The NSC is also where Kiriakou's own case turned: John Brennan, "an old nemesis of mine from the CIA", became the number two at the National Security Council, and at his urging the Justice Department secretly reopened the case against Kiriakou. For the next three years his phones were tapped, his emails intercepted, and three different groups of FBI agents surveilled him around the clock.

The CIA pipeline

A number of NSC jobs are reserved for CIA analysts, Kiriakou explains: reach GS-14 or GS-15 as a top analyst and your reward is a year at the White House, extendable to a second. George Tenet held the NSC's director of intelligence programs slot, at the time the lowest-ranking person entitled to a President's Daily Brief debriefing. On September 11, Kiriakou passed NSC acquaintances on foot, even the White House had been abandoned.

Where collection priorities originate

Asked who decides what the agency collects on, Kiriakou traced the chain upward to the Council. "It originates in the National Security Council. These are supposed to be the issues that are the most important for the president and for policy makers at that level, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser. And then those orders come down to the CIA director, and from the CIA director to the operational division directors."

At the bottom of the chain the abstraction becomes a list. "Every year in December, let''s say I''m working for Near Eastern operations, the division director is going to say, ''okay, everybody in the Near East division, this is what we''re going to collect on over the next year. We''re going to collect on Iran and the nuclear program, and Syria, and what China''s doing in the Middle East.''" Anything encountered outside that list is to be "written down, sent in" for the analysts.

The analyst detail

Kiriakou describes the CIA presence at the NSC as structural rather than occasional. The council "has several slots in every geographic area that are reserved for CIA analysts," alongside several reserved for high-performing State Department foreign service officers, "because the NSC is both a policy and an intelligence organ."

The career mechanics are specific. A respected, high-performing GS-14 or GS-15 goes to the White House for two years, sometimes extended to three, "and you generally come back to a promotion", to GS-15 or to senior intelligence service level one. Reaching the senior intelligence service requires, by internal rule, a rotation in another directorate and a rotation in the policy community, and the NSC tour is the policy rotation. "It's a job that many, many analysts aspire to."

The work itself is "the nexus really of intelligence and policy", using the agency's analysis to better inform policy, and it puts the officer in daily contact with the national security adviser, the deputy national security adviser, and frequently the president. Beyond the political appointees, the working population around such an officer is "a pretty even mix of CIA, State foreign service and DOD uniformed personnel."

See also

- John Brennan
- John Bolton
- Dick Cheney
- Donald Rumsfeld
- George Tenet
- President's Daily Brief
