Bob Woodward’s CIA headquarters access is John Kiriakou’s account of witnessing the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward move freely through CIA headquarters while researching a book. In his last CIA job, as executive assistant to the agency’s deputy director for operations, Kiriakou was sitting in his office during a lull when he saw Woodward walk past unescorted. He asked a secretary whether that was really Bob Woodward walking the halls without a security escort; she told him he must have missed the director’s email — Woodward had been given free rein to write a book, and staff had been ordered to cooperate with him.[1][2]
Kiriakou has repeated the anecdote in at least two separate interviews with essentially the same details each time, using it to illustrate that the wall Americans imagine exists between the CIA and senior journalists like Woodward, David Ignatius, and others does not, in practice, exist.[1][2]