The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the principal foreign intelligence service of the United States. It is both the institution that trained and employed John Kiriakou for fourteen years and the institution that, through allied prosecutors, pursued him after he publicly described its post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program as torture.
Organization (as described in the source corpus)
Articles already exist for two of the agency’s internal divisions:
- CIA National Resources Division — domestic intelligence collection from American businesspeople returning from “denied areas”
- CIA Political Psychology Division — long-distance psychiatric profiles of foreign leaders
Other entities mentioned in the source corpus, awaiting their own articles:
- Directorate of Intelligence (DI) — analysis. Kiriakou’s first seven years at the agency were spent here, including time as the chief CIA historian for Saddam Hussein in the period leading into the First Iraq War.[1]
- Directorate of Operations (DO) — case officers and covert action
- Counterterrorism Center (CTC) — the unit that doubled in personnel size within two to three days of September 11, 2001 as case officers and analysts were redirected and as paramilitary operators were detailed in from across the U.S. armed forces[2]
- Special Activities Division (SAD) — the agency’s paramilitary arm. A subcomponent of CTC, Special Activities Group (SAG), is the counterterrorism-focused paramilitary unit. Immediately after September 11 SAD and SAG were augmented by detailed operators from Navy SEAL teams, Delta Force, and Army Rangers.[3][4]
Operational training
CIA case officer training is conducted at The Farm in Virginia, where approximately 80% of all CIA operational training takes place.
Cable conventions
CIA operational cables are written exclusively in capital letters — a convention carried forward from the 1950s teletype-era infrastructure and never updated. The all-caps convention is the substrate for the long-running Soylent Green cable easter egg in which case officers spell out “Soylent Green is people” by scattering individual lowercase letters through their cables.[5]
Senior officials of the post-9/11 era
John Kiriakou identifies a number of senior CIA officials of his era as personally responsible for crimes committed in the name of national security, including:
Of these, Brennan is identified as categorically distinct on the grounds that he “plotted against an elected president of the United States.”[6]