John Kiriakou says CIA training teaches operatives that “our job is to break the law,” framed as necessary to protect the United States. [1] He says this doctrine applies only overseas, since the CIA is forbidden by law from conducting operations inside the United States — that is the FBI’s jurisdiction. [1]
Kiriakou says he was perfectly happy, and on multiple occasions actively participated in, breaking into people’s houses or offices and planting bugs and cameras as part of CIA operations, describing the underlying rationale as “we’re the good guys” protecting the United States. [1]
The mission, before and after 9/11
Kiriakou says his deputy director for operations was fond of describing the CIA’s core job as simple: recruit spies to steal secrets, then analyze those secrets so policymakers can make informed decisions. He applied the same doctrine — “the first thing I set out to do” — after entering prison himself. He says after September 11 the agency shifted into a paramilitary organization whose job was to kill, capture, and render anyone who could pose a threat.[2][3] Kiriakou himself became chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the Obama administration charged him with five felonies over his public disclosures about the CIA’s torture program; he served two years in prison.[4]
Special operations training
Kiriakou describes CIA special-operations training as covering counterterrorist driving — crashing cars through vehicle roadblocks — along with weapons training ranging from sidearms to .50-caliber weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, bomb diffusion, parachute jumps from airplanes, and surfacing from ocean depths in mini-submarines. He says his own counterterrorism driving course took place in the sand dunes outside Las Vegas, Nevada — not, as sometimes assumed, in Morocco — and that operatives also trained to swim across swamps to make a dead drop.[5][6][7]
Polygraph culture
Kiriakou says every CIA employee is polygraphed before hire, again after three years, and every five years for the rest of their career — even groundskeepers, who must hold full security clearances. He recounts a colleague who had spent twenty years as a CIA polygraph examiner after transferring in from a career as a calligrapher, and who told Kiriakou that people hooked to the machine had confessed to virtually every crime imaginable, including murder — with a hidden panic button under the table to summon guards if needed. In one routine five-year repolygraph, the examiner says a longtime CIA groundskeeper admitted that after fights with his wife, he would go out to the barn and have sex with a horse to get back at her.[8][9][10][11]