John Kiriakou describes a route from a CIA operations career into academia that he says is common enough to be a pattern. “I’ve got several friends — more than several — who did their 30-plus years, almost always in operations, and then took positions as scholars-in-residence at either their alma maters or at schools in the cities where they decided to retire. They were all teaching classes like ‘Espionage in Soviet Literature.’”[1]
He reports challenging one of them directly. “I said to this one friend, I said, come on, that’s not a real class. And he said, sure, it’s a real class — I teach it every Tuesday and Thursday.”[2]
Kiriakou then supplied his own reading of what the course is for, and had it confirmed: “and let me guess — everybody who signs up for that class signs up because they know you’re a retired CIA officer, and they all want help getting into the CIA. And he said, well, that’s kind of the idea, isn’t it?”[2] He raises it as an open question about what the agency’s literary self-image amounts to: “we’re all supposed to be so well read, and we’re supposed to be able to think the big thoughts, and half of us retire and write books. So is that just a novel new cover?”[3]
The Officer in Residence program
Answering a student in Colorado a decade earlier, Kiriakou gave the arrangement its institutional name and described it as a benefit rather than a posting: there are still CIA officers on most major campuses through “this thing called the Officer in Residence program,” which he characterises as “a pre-retirement job for people who have done their 30 years and want to go back home.” The placement logic is geographic and sentimental — “let’s say you were born and raised in Bloomington, you want the Indiana University job; or you were born and raised in LA, you want the USC job” — and the teaching load is a couple of classes on the CIA or intelligence. The same friend and the same syllabus surface here as in his later account: one of them, he says, held such a position and taught a course on espionage in Soviet literature, “which he’s apparently an expert on.”[4]
He draws a line, however, between these officers and covert recruitment. The Officer in Residence posts are overt: the holders sit on campus as adjunct or visiting professors and are known to be former CIA. Separately and continuously, he says, the agency’s office of recruitment works colleges and universities “just like they’ve done since the 50s” — a process he describes as having lost its mystique entirely: “it’s much less romantic today. You generally just have to go to CIA.gov and click apply now.”[5]
The older method — the professor acting as a talent spotter, which is how Kiriakou himself was found — he says is no longer lawful. “The way I was recruited has been illegal since the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1993. Bill Clinton saw to that.”[6]
The long game on campus
Kiriakou’s clearest statement of what the university relationship is actually for is about time horizon. Foreign doctoral students in the hard sciences are worth recruiting precisely because they leave: they go home, and “they’re going to rise up through the ranks of the Ministry of Defence or whatever.” The tradecraft he describes is to recruit while the student is still on campus and then “send them back … and have them work in place.”[7]
The same logic makes the shrinking of foreign enrolment a loss rather than a security gain in his account — a point developed at recruiting foreign students.[8]