The Directorate of Science and Technology, or DS&T, is one of the CIA’s four directorates, alongside Operations, Intelligence (analysis) and Administration.[1] Many thousands of people work in it, in John Kiriakou’s estimate.[2]
The gadget shop
When Kiriakou was at the agency the directorate was “almost an afterthought”: it was responsible for disguises, for briefcases with secret pockets in them, and generally for supporting operations.[3][4]
His own operational encounter with it is the best illustration. Asking headquarters for technical help in narrowing down Abu Zubaydah’s location in Pakistan, Kiriakou was sent two DS&T officers who both looked about sixteen years old; what they produced, after two days in the station’s tech shack, was the magic box — a cigar-box-sized device assembled from wires, capacitors and LEDs bought at the Pakistani equivalent of Radio Shack, which beeped and swung a compass needle toward the direction of a mobile telephone call.[5][6][7]
What it became
Kiriakou’s account of the modern directorate is the reverse. It is now, he says, so sophisticated and so far advanced — working with the likes of Palantir, Elon Musk’s various companies, Amazon Web Services and Nvidia — that it has handed the silly concealment devices and disguises off to outside individuals or makeup companies and does “the big ticket items” instead. What the DS&T is doing with things like virtual reality, he says, is closer to DARPA’s futuristic work than to anything the CIA ever did in the past.[4][8] Asked for an example of a big-ticket item, he declines — not out of discretion but ignorance: “I couldn’t even venture to say. It’s become so sophisticated.” He was never cleared even to know what DARPA was doing.[8]
The analyst who became chief technical officer
Kiriakou illustrates the directorate’s rise with the career of a man he sat next to in his twenties — a terrific analyst with a thing for technology, whom the office joked about. On three days off, as a favour, the man wrote a program that let Middle East analysts build family trees of the royal families they covered; no such software existed, because this was before the public internet. When the internet arrived he “jumped right in”. He is now the CIA’s chief technical officer at SIS-4, and Kiriakou says he could be the director if the president wanted him to be. A friend’s verdict on the promotion has stayed with him: “It was the tech.”[9][10]
In the abolition argument
The directorate features in Kiriakou’s case for abolishing the CIA: its functions, like the agency’s analytic and collection work, are already duplicated across a dozen government organisations and could be spread among them.[11] He is careful, in the same breath, about the people: most of those in the directorate, like most of those at the agency, are there because they are patriotic and want to do something in public service.[12]