The National Resources Division (NRD) is the Central Intelligence Agency component responsible for foreign intelligence collection conducted inside the United States. It was created in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, by CIA Director William J. Casey.[1][2] Elsewhere Kiriakou dates the division to the mid-1980s specifically, describing its function as placing CIA officers in dozens of American cities to debrief American business executives who travel to “denied areas” such as Russia, Cuba, China, or North Korea.[3]
The division does not engage in domestic espionage — “it’s illegal for the CIA to spy on U.S. soil.” Its function is rather to collect foreign intelligence from American businesspeople, corporate executives, and other private-sector travelers returning from “denied areas” — countries in which the CIA cannot maintain a clandestine presence because the operational risk is unacceptable. At the time of the division’s founding, denied areas included China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.[2][4]
Method
NRD case officers approach U.S. business leaders overtly. “We’ll just go and say, ‘Hi, we’re from the CIA, here’s our business card. We know you’re a patriotic American — can we ask you some questions about your recent trip?’ And they always say yes.”[4]
The division maintains offices throughout the United States, “all over America — you’d never know they were there.” Nothing about the operation is clandestine; the activity is “all on the up-and-up.”[5]
Output
The division produces “an insane amount of intelligence.”[5]
Contemporary application to private contractors
By the mid-2020s the NRD’s debrief-on-return model is, per Kiriakou, the most plausible institutional vehicle for the CIA to remain aware of foreign work conducted by U.S. national-security contractors such as Palantir — particularly contracts with non–Five Eyes governments (France, Germany, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, etc.). Kiriakou’s framing:
I am going to say that an officer from the CIA’s National Resources Division — those CIA officers around the United States — was created just so when a corporate CEO or other officer went to a denied area, say he went to Moscow for a meeting or Beijing for a meeting, somebody from the NR Division would go and say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m from the CIA, you’re a patriot, can I ask you some questions about your trip?’ They always always say yes — because they’re patriots. I would guess that with Palantir, there are regular routine meetings within NR Division saying, ‘Ah, you know, I was in the United Arab Emirates the other day and I ran into so-and-so, and this is what he’s interested in.‘[6][7][8]
Recruitment via the alma mater course
Kiriakou says he himself was recruited by a graduate-school professor, a practice made illegal by passage of the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act. The agency’s current workaround: senior operations officers within three years of retirement are sent back to their alma maters to teach an innocuous cover course — the actual purpose being for students to approach the instructor after class and volunteer interest in joining the CIA, at which point he offers to introduce them to a friend.[9] This dovetails with the Scholar-in-Residence program described in the main CIA article as the institution’s broader post-1993 answer to the same EEO restriction.
Overt domestic debriefs
John Kiriakou explains that the CIA is forbidden from operating on American soil except overtly, through the National Resources Division: if an American CEO returns from negotiating with Chinese officials, the division openly asks to “come by the office” and debrief him on the personalities and backgrounds involved — nothing secret about it.[10][11]
The governors’ visitors (Judging Freedom)
John Kiriakou recounts a story two former governors told him independently: early in their terms, an aide said someone “who works in the building” wanted to see them; the man introduced himself as CIA and, when told to “get the hell out,” replied that he would go — “but I’ll be replaced by somebody who won’t introduce himself to you.”[12][13]