Classification compartments are the U.S. secrecy tiers above top secret that John Kiriakou explains through his own clearances. Every CIA hire receives a TS/SCI/TK/gamma clearance — top secret, special intelligence, talent-keyhole and gamma, which together grant access to roughly 99% of incoming reporting — while the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and Office of Personnel Management each conduct their own separate background investigations for that clearance.[1][2][3][4] As executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations, Kiriakou added six more compartments; in one morning briefing, after he mentioned to the director that a cable had come in through the “Rockstar” compartment, the Deputy Director stopped him and ordered the associate deputy directors for operations — who, despite their seniority, were not cleared for it — to leave the room, telling Kiriakou, in effect, “You and I are the only ones cleared for that.”[5][6][7][8][9] Kiriakou says only the CIA director — the agency’s sole political appointee — is cleared for every compartment that exists.[9] He adds that it is possible for an entity within the CIA to exist that nobody knows about except the director, the deputy director, the executive director, and one of the deputy directors for operations or for science and technology, and that the agency’s physical footprint has expanded roughly 50 to 60 percent since September 11 into satellite offices and front companies scattered around Washington.[10] Related is what Kiriakou calls CIA record deniability: the rarer decision by a station chief or Deputy Director for Operations to keep an event out of the written record altogether, rather than merely restrict who may read it.
HUMINT and SCI: the terms taught on day one
Kiriakou says every new CIA officer learns a specific set of classification terms in their first week. Human intelligence (HUMINT) — intelligence collected from a live recruited human source — is automatically classified, by default, at the secret level under an authority called HUM-482, with the controls no foreign, no contract, and ORCON (originator-controlled) attached. No foreign bars the information from being shared with foreign intelligence services; no contract bars it from CIA contractors, who make up roughly half the agency’s workforce, even if they hold a clearance; ORCON means the officer who originated the report must personally authorize the release of that information to any additional named recipient, down to specific individuals such as the secretary of state or the national security advisor.[11]
SCI — Sensitive Compartmented Information — is, per Kiriakou, essentially a euphemism for electronic intercepts, normally classified at the “SI-TK-Gamma” level (Special Intelligence, Talent Keyhole, Gamma), with everything originating from the NSA carrying the SI designation. He says new officers are told in their first week that there are three “holy of holies” that are never to be discussed: liaison relationships with foreign services, sources and methods, and anything originating from the NSA.[12] Kiriakou argues the top-secret tier is itself routinely misused: in his view, nothing should be classified at the top-secret level unless it involves special methods like electronic intercepts, while ordinary human intelligence — something a source said or reported — is by its nature no higher than secret; classifying material above a person’s own clearance level, he adds, is itself improper.[13]
Secrecy agreements and over-classification
Kiriakou says the CIA’s secrecy agreements contain no exception permitting a signer to disclose evidence of a government crime — meaning anyone who signs one can later be prosecuted under that same agreement for revealing crimes they personally witnessed while working under classification. He recalls signing more secrecy agreements over his career than he can count, including six at once related to the invasion of Iraq, all since declassified, and cites J. William Leonard, the Bush administration’s own classification czar, who became an anti-classification activist arguing that most classified material should never have been classified in the first place.[14][15]
Kiriakou describes routine over-classification as a CIA-wide habit: during the Schulte prosecution, the defense asked the judge to force the CIA, through prosecutors, to say whether its “closely held information” designation covers things as mundane as hot chocolate recipes.[16] He says the habit was universal at the agency — he would classify a text to his wife, also a CIA officer, asking whether she wanted to get lunch at the secret, no-foreign level, “because everybody does it.”[17]