United Food and Commercial Workers
==================================

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), one of America's largest unions, was John Kiriakou's employer at the moment his life bent toward the CIA.

The job

Kiriakou worked at the UFCW's international headquarters on K Street in Washington while studying Middle Eastern affairs at George Washington University, a natural berth for a man with "a long history of labor involvement in my family."

The assignment

In Dr. Jerrold Post's class on the psychology of leadership, students were assigned to shadow their bosses for a week and write a psychological profile. Kiriakou's boss frightened him a little: an old-time tough-guy union organizer whose back had been broken by scabs during a strike. Halfway through the week they got into a serious argument, and Kiriakou called him a racist, "which he was." The man balled up his fist in fury.

In a later telling Kiriakou supplies what happened next, and it is not a punch. With both men squared up, Kiriakou putting his hands up and thinking "dang it, I went too far this time", the boss instead said, twice, "my penis is bigger than yours." Kiriakou's reply was "you know what, you're nuts," and he quit and walked out on the spot, having concluded the man was dangerous. He wrote the paper immediately afterwards.

The paper Kiriakou turned in concluded that his boss was a sociopath, with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies, and potentially dangerous, with evidence to support it; Kiriakou stresses that he footnoted the whole thing, so that it read as analysis rather than as him venting. His own reading of why it worked is that the analysis was concise, to the point, and backed with facts. Dr. Post, who, Kiriakou later learned, had founded the CIA's political psychology division, took notice. The union job ended; the intelligence career began.

See also

- Jerrold Post
- CIA political psychology division
- John Kiriakou
