Blackmail in agent recruitment is a subject John Kiriakou addresses from the training room rather than from operations: what CIA career trainees were explicitly told, and where he thinks the teaching stops being descriptive.
What the instructors said
“In my training, I was told the same thing. When you’re trying to recruit an asset, you want that recruitment to be over the long term. And in order to have a successful long-term recruitment, you need to be able to trust each other. Even if you don’t like each other, you have to at least be able to trust each other.”[1]
The rule followed from that: “my instructors were very clear in saying that we cannot get long-term working relationships going on the right track if we start with blackmail. It’s just not something that we would do.”[2] The justification offered was operational — that blackmail is an unreliable and high-risk tool for managing assets — rather than ethical.[1]
The exceptions he volunteers
Kiriakou does not present the teaching as a complete account of agency behaviour. He concedes the historical case immediately: “certainly they did it in the past, pre-Church Committee.”[2]
And he separates recruitment from suppression. Where the objective is not cooperation but inaction — where you simply need a target not to do something — “yeah, sure. Blackmail threats.” He adds the further step: “maybe even you outsource it to another intelligence service, another friendly intelligence service, uh, who might not be as friendly as you are.”[3]
His summary of the doctrine as day-to-day policy is unchanged, and carefully bounded: “as a matter of day-to-day policy, we were told that blackmail wasn’t going to be done.”[3]