A cover stop is a short, ordinary errand built into a surveillance detection route — an SDR — so that an officer moving toward an operational meeting has an innocent reason to be at each point on the route, and a controlled opportunity to observe who follows him.
Where the stop sits in the route
In John Kiriakou’s description the SDR runs in four phases. The first is simply leaving home or the office for the first cover stop, which should be “a totally normal thing that you would do in your neighborhood” — a 7-Eleven near the house, not one ten miles across town, where you get out, buy a Diet Coke and get back in the car. From there the officer leaves the main roads for what are called black roads — neighbourhood cut-throughs rather than highways — so that anyone following has to follow visibly.[1]
The second cover stop is an errand a follower must enter the premises to observe: the dry cleaner, a wine shop, buying a light bulb at Home Depot. The third phase is a stair-step pattern of turns that exposes anyone matching them, while the officer holds in mind the vehicles he has already seen — the blue pickup an hour ago on the other side of town, the minivan with the bumper sticker. The fourth and final phase, into the meeting site, he calls the provocative phase: driving in ways that make no sense at all.[2][3][4]
Demonstrating the technique on a walk, Kiriakou made a cover stop at a place with a back exit, went out the back, looped around and crossed a bridge — the point being to funnel any surveillance across the bridge behind him, where it would have to show itself.[5]
The expense line
The cover stop is also an accountable expense, and Kiriakou treats it as a small window onto the character problems of the clandestine service. Depending on the chief of station, officers were allowed to spend anywhere from about five dollars to twenty dollars at each cover stop. Some made up receipts, or saved them, and pocketed the money — one of three things he says case officers are caught doing, alongside fabricating intelligence reports and holding reports back to smooth out monthly production quotas. His reaction is bafflement rather than outrage: “what would possess you to try to steal $20 from the CIA? Is it really worth being fired to steal $20 from the CIA?”[6][7] The accounting cut the other way too: he says he was once reprimanded for spending five dollars at a Burger King on a cover stop.[8]