The CIA Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection is a book by John Kiriakou drawing on his experience as a surveillance-detection instructor at the CIA and as a private surveillance-training consultant.[1]
The book covers the techniques used by intelligence professionals to identify whether they are being followed, including the four-phase surveillance detection route, concealment-device placement and retrieval, and counter-surveillance strategy for private individuals including corporate executives and journalists. Kiriakou described the audience as anyone who wants to know whether they are being followed — whether by carjackers, terrorists, or federal law enforcement.[2]
Kiriakou also operates a private surveillance-training business drawing on the same curriculum.[1]
Surveillance-detection instructor — private training
John Kiriakou disclosed that in addition to the book, he worked as a surveillance and surveillance-detection instructor at the CIA and has taught the subject at Liberty University, George Washington University, and privately through a company called IV Cyber. He described giving a private class through IV Cyber the night before the interview.[3][4]
The instructor who never looked
Kiriakou reports that the training did him no good in his own case, and gives a reason that has nothing to do with tradecraft. During the three years in which his phones were tapped, his emails intercepted and FBI agents following him, he noticed none of it: “No, I had no idea. And I’ll tell you what — I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA, and I never bothered to look, because I hadn’t done anything wrong.” The consequence he draws is that detection is a matter of attention rather than skill; the surveillance was not defeated by his training because he never turned it on.[5]
Publication and companion titles
Kiriakou describes The CIA Insider’s Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid — a companion volume in the same series — as having come out in 2022, with the central message that genuine safety requires zero technology: no cell phone, no internet, cash only, even driving an older car without onboard electronics.[6][7] He announced Surveillance and Surveillance Detection alongside two other CIA Insider’s Guide titles — Lying and Lie Detection and Disappearing and Living Off the Grid — as releasing together on May 25, 2022.[8] The series later expanded with a fourth volume, The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis.[9]
Beyond the CIA Insider’s Guide series, Kiriakou has listed his broader bibliography as including The Reluctant Spy; Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison; The Convenient Terrorist, about Guantánamo detainee Abu Zubaydah; and Remains of the Day, about Washington D.C.’s historic cemeteries.[9] His first book was inducted into the permanent collection of Cuba’s National Library, prompting an authors’ ceremony trip to Havana; his first two books were also translated into Spanish and distributed to Cuban bookstores.[10]
The ambassador’s wife in aluminum foil
John Kiriakou recounts being hired by the wife of a foreign ambassador who was certain she was under electronic surveillance. After confirming she was not being followed, he found her apartment — floor, walls and ceiling — entirely covered in aluminum foil “to reflect the waves.” Realizing she was mentally ill, he refused to take her money and referred her elsewhere; she left the country, furious.[11][12][13]
In the same interview, Kiriakou was asked about a more exotic Cold-War approach — the CIA’s animal surveillance experiments, which mounted microphones on cats and pigeons — and contrasted them with his own “very conventional” bugging methods.[14][15]
Where the book came from
Asked what single thing from his training still shapes his daily life, John Kiriakou answered with the book’s own origin. He took surveillance detection so seriously that on returning from Pakistan after 9/11 he became a surveillance and surveillance detection instructor at the CIA — and went on from there to write the guide.[16]
Twenty-two years out of the agency, he says he is still constantly scanning his mirrors.[16] The field experience behind the instruction included the Islamabad surveillance incident, in which he detected a Pakistani surveillant and came within hours of killing him.[17]
Prepublication review
Like all of Kiriakou’s books, the guide had to clear the CIA’s prepublication review before it could go to the publisher, and the agency redacted an entire chapter of it. Kiriakou appealed on the ground that the material was plainly unclassified; the agency’s answer was that what he had written was “currently and properly classified.” His rebuttal was that he had taken it off the CIA’s own website — “you guys published it. I just took it off the website.” The agency asked for a week, then cleared the chapter for publication.[18][19]
He treats the episode as characteristic rather than exceptional — one instance of what he calls “a constant harassment, constantly little stuff,” alongside the letters he still receives from the agency complaining about particular journalists he has spoken to and telling him to back off.[18][19]
The formal definition
Asked how a person can tell whether they are actually being followed, Kiriakou gives the agency’s formal test rather than an instinct: multiple sightings at time and distance. If the same people appear at different times of the day in different locations, you are under surveillance.[20] The habit that makes the test usable is continuous awareness of one’s surroundings and constant scanning of the side and rear-view mirrors.[21]
The omnibus proposal
In 2026 Skyhorse Publishing proposed reissuing this book together with John Kiriakou’s guides to lying and lie detection and to disappearing and living off the grid, “in one fat book” of roughly 550 pages, updated throughout — with the three still in print at the time.[22][23] The project is treated at the CIA Insider’s Guide omnibus.
The case its author could not detect
Kiriakou returns to the book’s credentials and its central failure in the same breath. He was, he says, particularly good at surveillance and surveillance detection, good enough that he became a surveillance and surveillance detection instructor at the CIA and went on to write this book — and he was still under surveillance in Athens by 17 November without ever noticing it, something he says he will never forgive himself for.[24][25]
The explanation he and his colleagues settled on puts the failure outside his own tradecraft. Stephen Saunders, his neighbour, never saw a camera he did not want to jump in front of; the group was watching Saunders, and while doing so noticed the American embassy plate on the car next door.[25]