Langley
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Langley, Virginia is the home of CIA headquarters, John Kiriakou's workplace for most of his career, and his shorthand for where American power actually lives.

Kiriakou at headquarters

Kiriakou began as a desk analyst at Langley, in the days, he jokes, when the CIA needed only one analyst for Iraq and Kuwait. He was told to start on Iraq "because nothing ever happened there. Nothing ever changed there." He returned to Langley between foreign tours, from Greece in 2000, and from Pakistan in 2002, when a senior officer approached him in the headquarters cafeteria and casually asked whether he wanted to be trained in the new interrogation techniques.

Getting there in the first place was less cinematic than the question he is sometimes asked, whether a secret tunnel runs under Washington from the campus where he was spotted. "Almost. Oh, figuratively." What actually happened was that the retired officer teaching at his university flipped through a Rolodex on his desk, Kiriakou remembers seeing Oliver North's home number in it, shortly after North's Iran-Contra conviction, telephoned a man called Bob, said "Bob, it's Jerry, I've got a good one for you," and sent him one Metro stop across the river to an address in Rosslyn.

Kryptos

In the courtyard stands the sculpture Kiriakou says he "would look at every single day for almost 15 years", and he was present at its unveiling in 1990. He describes it physically: shaped like an S lying on its side, punched through with letters, the word Kryptos repeating perhaps a hundred times with other letters interspersed between the repetitions.

Three of its four panels have been decrypted; the fourth has not. Kiriakou adds a detail from the inside: while he was there in the 1990s, an attempt was made to load the information into a Cray computer and have the machine crack the code, and it could not. Code-breakers from NSA and CIA have worked on it since. The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, eventually tired of being asked and put the solution to the K4 panel up for auction, the sculpture itself staying where it is, with an expectation of between three and five hundred thousand dollars.

What is actually in the building

Kiriakou has a standing answer to the documentary claim that alien bodies are stored beneath headquarters. Officers used to watch those programmes and laugh: "Dude, the only things in the basement at Langley are the gym, the boiler room, and the supply room. There are no alien bodies down there." His understanding was always that the subject was a Defense Department matter, not a CIA one.

The name is also a trap for the unwary, and Kiriakou uses it carefully: the pilot whose account of unexplained aerial phenomena he relays was based at Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia, a different Langley entirely.

What Langley reaches

Headquarters is also the destination of the take. Kiriakou's favourite illustration of the access agent is a colleague's best-ever recruitment, a copy machine repairman: the man has no access to classified information himself, but when the machine in the prime minister's office breaks somebody has to fix it, and the device he installs sends a second copy of everything back to Langley, "so you see literally everything that the prime minister is seeing." The medal, he notes, is not for recruiting a repairman; it is for compromising a prime minister through one. Smaller reaches: from headquarters, or anywhere, the agency can activate a phone and its camera without the owner realizing the device is on, and a former president wanting intelligence simply calls a liaison officer at Langley, who dispatches analysts to brief him at the secret level.

The bloat critique

Kiriakou concedes the charge that the CIA is bloated and inefficient, "when a majority of your operational staff is actually sitting in cubicles in Langley, Virginia, rather than serving overseas recruiting spies... you have a problem."

He pushes it further into an argument that the place is redundant rather than merely overstaffed. The best analysis in the intelligence community comes from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, not the CIA; the Pentagon's Defense HUMINT service recruits spies to steal secrets "just as well as the CIA does"; interception belongs to NSA. "So why do you have this redundant organization, Langley, that is actually sort of in charge of the intelligence community when they're the ones getting it wrong all the time?" The observation, he notes, was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's, mocked when he made it in 1976.

The permanent government

Langley anchors Kiriakou's darker structural points. Agencies get caught in misdeeds, get dragged before Congress, swear they're sorry, "then they go back to Langley and of course nothing ever, ever changes." He was unimpressed that Trump spent inaugural week at headquarters to "kiss their derriere." If Langley doesn't like a president's orders, he says, it doesn't refuse, it slow-rolls whatever comes from the White House; the people there serve twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five years, are unelected, are accountable to almost nobody, and know they can outlast presidents. And when Scott Horton put it to him that the real government of America is out in Langley and the white marble in Washington is just for the rubes, Kiriakou answered: "Yeah, no, you're right. That's about the shape of it."

See also

- CIA
- CIA recruitment through academia
- Access agent
- Counterterrorism Center
- George Tenet
