College tuition as an inducement describes one of the recruitment offers John Kiriakou identifies as most effective in CIA agent handling, and which he sets out when explaining what an operations officer is looking for during the assessment stage.
Vulnerability assessment
Kiriakou describes vulnerabilities as the most important thing an officer assesses, and argues that they are frequently less lurid than expected. A vulnerability may be that a person is a heavy drinker or an addict, or that he hates his employer and is bitter at having been passed over. But more commonly, he says, it is that the man loves his children and does not earn very much. [1]
The offer
At that point, in Kiriakou’s account, the CIA can enrol the source’s child at any university in America — he repeats “quite literally any university in America” — and pay for it. He names Harvard and Stanford as examples, and notes that one source asked instead for Strayer College. [1]
Asked how this is arranged, Kiriakou says the agency has agreements with essentially every university in America and with every large American company, and attributes the cooperation to patriotism on the part of university administrators and corporate leaders who want to be helpful. [2]
Other currencies
He places tuition within a set of non-cash inducements. Medical access is another: a source whose spouse has cancer or another grave illness can, in his telling, be got into the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic, and will then give anything asked so long as the treatment continues. [3] He also describes recruiting an agent who would take no money and wanted no favours at all — a man who simply loved the United States and enjoyed the clandestinity of the meetings. [4]
Kiriakou frames the whole assessment stage as a single question: what can be given to this person that will make him want to give the officer what he wants. [3] His answer in the general case remains money — he estimates 95 per cent of recruitments are financial — but the exceptions are the ones he returns to. [5]