The CIA entrance examinations John Kiriakou sat at the end of the 1980s came in two rounds, and he has described both in unusual detail.[1]
Round one
The first round had three parts. The first was a long multiple-choice test on current events, which he found so easy that “you don’t even have to read the newspaper every day — if you just look at the headline or look at the front page every day without actually reading anything you’re still going to do well on this test.” His example: a question asking whether the prime minister of Greece was Andreas Papandreou, Leonid Brezhnev, Mao Zedong or U Thant — “even if you didn’t know you could assume which one was the Greek name and which was the Asian name.”[1][2]
The second was a large fold-out map of the world with every country left blank, to be filled in from memory.[3]
The third was the psychological inventory — several thousand items, phrased as statements to be agreed or disagreed with rather than as questions. The one he remembers is “I like boxing.” He did not care about boxing either way, reasoned that he would probably stop if Mike Tyson were on, and said yes — and then met the same statement again 285 questions later, and again some 415 questions after that. “So I saw what they were trying to do. It was a psychological exam and they just wanted to see if you were consistent and if you were trying to tell them what you thought they wanted to hear.”[4][5]
Round two
A call from personnel a couple of weeks later told him he had “blown the doors off” the exams. Round two was held in a nondescript building in Virginia, where he faced a psychologist, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist seated together on the other side of a table. The questions were personal — “can you describe your relationship with your mother”, “was your father the disciplinarian of the family” — and one stayed with him: “have you ever betrayed a friendship?”[6][7]
He had no idea what the right answer was. “I said, oh my gosh, no, I don’t think so. I said, let me think about it for a minute. And they said, no, no, that’s the answer we were looking for.”[8] The panel then took hair, blood and urine and sent him away; another call weeks later said he had aced those too, and he was sent to headquarters for interviews.[7]
His own reading of why he passed is candour plus temperament: he tested “very highly on the extrovert chart”, and that, with his professor’s recommendation, was what persuaded them.[9]