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CIA Arabic hiring practices
From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's on-record words
Based on 2 recorded interviews · Last updated
John Kiriakou's account of how few CIA officers historically spoke Arabic, he was one of only two people in the entire agency fluent in both Greek and Arabic, and of how the agency's more recent pool of Arabic speakers, dominated by Arab Christian hires who clear background checks easily, often carries an innate anti-Muslim bias that limits their operational usefulness.
John Kiriakou has described the CIA’s longstanding difficulty finding and using Arabic-speaking officers, both from his own hiring experience and from what he says has happened to the agency’s Arabic-speaking pool since.
Kiriakou’s own hiring
When Kiriakou decided to switch from analysis to operations, he saw a counterterrorism officer job advertised in Athens that listed Greek or Arabic as preferred, not mandatory. He tracked down the hiring manager and pitched himself despite having no operations background, saying he spoke both Greek and Arabic fluently. The hiring manager initially told him to “get out of here,” but Kiriakou pressed his case; it turned out he was one of only two people in the entire CIA fluent in both languages, the other being a language teacher. The hiring manager told him it was easier and cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than to take an operations officer and teach him Greek and Arabic, and gave him the job.[1]
The modern Arabic-speaker pool
Kiriakou says the CIA has gone through cycles of trying to hire as many Arabic speakers as possible, but many candidates who are first-generation Americans or refugees-turned-Americans run into trouble with the polygraph or background investigation and don’t get hired. As a result, he says a plurality of the agency’s Arabic speakers today are Arab Christians, mostly Lebanese and Coptic Egyptian, who have the language skills without the counterintelligence concerns associated with candidates from majority-Muslim Arab countries. He says many of those hires carry an innate bias against Muslims from their own countries of origin, which makes them difficult to use operationally because they are hard to control.[2]
Neither the region nor the language
Asked whether officers posted to the Middle East understand the strategy they are serving, Kiriakou answered by questioning a prior qualification: “first of all, most of the officers that the CIA sends to the Middle East are not Middle East experts and do not speak Arabic.” The observation runs directly into his second, that “almost none of the CIA’s officers in the Middle East have a long-term view. And it’s because the American government usually does not have a long-term view.”[3][4]
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
