The Directorate of Operations, or DO, is the CIA’s clandestine service and one of its four directorates.[1]
John Kiriakou came to it late and sideways. Having spent seven years as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence working on Iraq, he made what he calls a very unusual switch into counterterrorism operations in 1999, on the strength of being the only person in the agency who spoke both Greek and Arabic — the agency’s reasoning being that it is cheaper to teach a linguist operations than to teach an operations officer two languages.[2][3]
The culture
Kiriakou’s account of the DO is consistently less flattering than his account of the analytic side. Where the analysts believe they are the smartest people in the room, the operations directorate is, in his description, structurally short of institutional memory: “we have guys just clawing to get ahead of each other to recruit somebody, to get face time with the director, so that they can get promoted and become a chief of station.”[4] The incentives that produces are the subject of his account of fabricated intelligence reporting and of cover-stop expense fraud.
He also notes that the directorate’s covert-action work is where the agency’s influence campaigns are run.[5]
The torture era
During the period Kiriakou blew the whistle on, the directorate was headed by Jose Rodriguez, who ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes.[6] It was also Rodriguez, in one of Kiriakou’s tellings, who recorded at his promotion panel that declining torture training showed “a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.”[7]
The culture of the directorate
Kiriakou draws a sharp line between the two halves of the agency on this point. Analysts might sit around a table wondering aloud what if, or reporting that someone at the White House had struck them as an idiot. In the Directorate of Operations, in his experience, that kind of intellectual assessment of the state of the country and the world was unusual; it was more common simply to do as one was told.[8]
The exception was operational planning. Officers Kiriakou calls fast movers would hold planning sessions in which someone floated an idea — possibly a far-fetched one — and the group worked it out as plan A, plan B, plan C and sometimes plan D, on the assumption that things would go down the toilet.[9]
Indifference to the analytic side
Asked whether the operations side takes seriously what its own analysts need, Kiriakou”s answer is blunt: “the obvious answer should be yes, that they”re very focused on that. Unfortunately, the true answer is no. They don”t care.” The episode he gives in support is the hot dog lady cable — eight tasked questions about a prominent Middle Eastern politician answered three weeks later with a note about her preferred condiments. “That was when I learned that there was a real split between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence, and the Directorate of Operations was going to do its thing, and it didn”t care what the Directorate of Intelligence was writing and sending to the president.”[10][11]