Executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations was John Kiriakou’s post during the Iraq war, and the job he uses when asked what a day inside the CIA actually looks like. “Our job was to prosecute the Iraq war.”[1]
The shape of the day
The alarm went at 2:45 a.m. — “which was tough, man. It took me a good three weeks to get used to that kind of schedule” — putting him at his desk by 3:45 or 4:00. The first task was triage: “I start going through the 10,000 cables that had come in overnight. I whittle those down to between five and 10 that were important enough for the director and the deputy director to hear.”[2]
He briefed all of the deputy directors at 7:00 and the Director of Central Intelligence at 7:30 — “and then I start my day. I mean, I’ve already worked half a day.” What followed was coordination: with the State Department, the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President; answering presidential requests; cables out to the field and answers back; a quick trip to New York to see the CIA contingent at the United Nations, or to London, or to Kurdistan, “just to make sure people have the weapons they need, people have the equipment they need, they have secure communications that they need.”[3][4]
Interspersed were one-off demands from the top of the administration — the most memorable being Dick Cheney’s question about a runway in northern Iraq.[5]
The counterterrorism version
The rhythm in counterterrorism was different: in at 7:00, a couple of hours on the overnight cables, and then whatever the day required. “My boss would come up to me and say, can you brief this group today? Can you fly to Cairo this afternoon? Can you brief the director on XYZ program? Can you go to the State Department and get them off our backs?”[6]
Kiriakou names the variety as the thing that held him: “this is what I love the most about the CIA — that every single day was something completely different from the day before. That’s what kept me engaged.”[6][7]