CIA cable priority levels are the five tiers of immediacy assigned to U.S. government cable traffic. Per John Kiriakou on the Bidoun Waraq Podcast, ascending from lowest to highest:[1][2]
- Routine — “Read it or don’t read it. Nobody cares. Maybe it says, you know, Faisal is coming on a visit in three weeks. Okay, thank you. Nobody cares.”
- Priority — “Okay, there’s some diplomatic business here, you should read this sometime today.”
- Immediate — “This is important. Read it now.”
- Flash — “Emergency.”
- CRITIC — “They’re coming over the embassy walls, God save.”[1][2]
Frequency in normal life vs. wartime
Per Kiriakou: “Most people could go through a 30-year career and never see a CRITIC. We were getting multiple CRITICs every day.” During the 1991 Gulf War the NSA was transmitting CRITICs each time it detected an Iraqi missile launch — “NSA would say ‘CRITIC: hostile missile launch,’ and then it would have the geo coordinates.” Kiriakou kept a wall-sized map of Iraq over his desk; on each CRITIC he would call out the coordinates, the office would gather around, and they would project — by launch site — whether the target was Israel or Saudi Arabia/Bahrain.[2][3]