The CIA–Big Tech revolving door is John Kiriakou’s answer to a listener asking how the US government works with companies like Google and Microsoft. His reply is immediate and unqualified: “they work hand in glove with all of the big tech companies.”[1]
The boss who resigned
The case he offers is a former supervisor from the period after Athens, when Kiriakou was assigned to a branch of the Counterterrorism Center training Middle Eastern intelligence services in counterterrorism operations. He describes the man warmly — “really great guy, laid-back,” long-serving, having been chief of one big station and two small ones.[1]
One day he announced he was resigning. The reaction in the office was disbelief on pension grounds: “What? You’re still 5 years away from your 30. Why would you resign?”[2]
The answer: “I got a really great job at Microsoft, and they’re going to pay me eight times what I’m making here.”[2]
Kiriakou’s gloss is that this is not an anecdote but the norm — “and that’s normal. So they’re everywhere.” The list he gives is not limited to the two companies he was asked about: “It’s not just Google and Microsoft. It’s Meta and it’s X and it’s everywhere. They’re everywhere.”[2]
Why both sides want it
The exchange, in his analysis, is mutually profitable. For the agency, “obviously you get access to the biggest, most advanced, most important tech companies in the world.”[3]
For the companies, the asset is the person rather than the post: “you’ve got a direct channel to the intelligence community. You know, you don’t just forget about all your contacts and your friends and former colleagues when you leave to go into the private sector.”[3]
That mutual benefit is precisely what he objects to. The arrangement “works out for both sides — which is actually a dangerous thing."[3]
"Every last one of them”
Kiriakou dates his own awareness of the arrangement to a WikiLeaks disclosure roughly a decade before 2022. “Somebody leaked to WikiLeaks that it wasn”t just Google — it was literally every one of the big tech firms, from Microsoft to Google to Apple to all the big communications companies. Every last one of them was providing information to the CIA and to NSA and to the FBI, with these national security letters.”[4]
The staffing question he treats as the more damning of the two. “You have to ask yourself: when the director of security for Microsoft is the former station chief — well, I shouldn”t say where he was station chief — but you know, there”s a problem. There”s a problem with this. How do we trust this company?”[5]