CIA record deniability is John Kiriakou’s account of how senior CIA officers occasionally keep an event out of the written record entirely — a station chief or the Deputy Director for Operations deciding “let’s not put that in writing.” It happened to him, he says, only once or twice in a career that was “out there.”[1] His example: the agency had recruited and “paid very handsomely” a dangerous, heroin-addicted career criminal, whom Kiriakou (using the invented cryptonym “AB Grasshopper”) warned not to spend the money conspicuously.[2] Weeks later the man shot his girlfriend’s father in the face — on the news — after being refused permission to marry. The DDO’s first reaction was “we have to inform Congress”; his second, hours later, was “on second thought, let’s not put that in writing,” reasoning that overseers “wouldn’t understand the nature of our relationship with the guy.”[3][4]
Other mechanisms for keeping information out of the record
Kiriakou describes a broader toolkit the CIA uses to shield itself from disclosure. Simply asserting “national security” in a courtroom can get a lawsuit dismissed outright: “You go into the courtroom and you say, ‘Your honor, national security.’ And the judge says, ‘Case dismissed.’” Kiriakou speculated the same tactic could in principle be used to keep Trump-related Epstein evidence out of discovery, since the CIA does this “all the time.”[5]
He also describes the CIA’s “cull” under the Clinton administration: the agency went through the files of literally every recruited source, and any with a human rights problem in their background was fired — a purge that removed fully one-third of the CIA’s recruited assets.[6] On official public statements, Kiriakou says the CIA simply does not care what the public believes about it, and the only people it is obligated to keep informed are members of the House and Senate oversight committees; press inquiries to the office of public affairs are routinely met with “no comment” or a formal “Glomar response” — neither confirming nor denying that any information exists.[7][8] The day after Kiriakou himself blew the whistle in December 2007, the CIA filed a “crimes report” against him with the FBI alleging he had divulged classified information — even though, as Kiriakou notes, it is not legally permissible to classify something that constitutes a crime.[9]
Kiriakou also describes the CIA’s system of “declared” liaison relationships as a related form of formal, controlled disclosure: an officer is formally identified to a specific foreign intelligence service as a CIA officer, but most officers go through an entire 30-year career declared to only two to five foreign services in total.[10]