Asked in 2021 what the intelligence establishment’s senior figures actually wanted, John Kiriakou answered that he did not think they had an end state in mind at all: “I think that for them the end game is power and authority, and all that matters to them is that they remain in charge when this is all over.”[1]
The lesson
He traces the instinct to a piece of office politics he says he was taught in his first week at the CIA: “in order to make yourself as important as you possibly can you have to constantly work at expanding your realm. You’ve got to be the king of as many people as possible.”[2]
At working level this produces managers forever trying to enlarge their authority. The change Kiriakou identifies comes at the top: “when you get up to that level, that senior level of the John Brennans and the Bob Greniers, and you want to expand your authority, that expands then into other agencies.”[2]
The case he cites
His illustration is a feud he says he watched from close range in 2002, when he worked for Jim Pavitt, the Deputy Director for Operations. Brennan, then the deputy executive director, was in dispute with Pavitt and wanted to be more important than he was. A new organisation was created, at the time called the TTIC — the Transnational Terrorism Information Center — which became the National Counterterrorism Center, and Brennan was its first head.[3]
What Brennan wanted, in Kiriakou’s account, was for the TTIC to break away from the CIA and become its own agency so that he would be the first director of a new intelligence agency — “not for any other reason, not because it would have streamlined the information, the analysis would have been any better, just because he wanted to be in charge of his own little” organisation. It was blocked.[3]
The sequel
The route worked anyway by another road. Brennan, Kiriakou notes, was the only person from the CIA to join the Obama campaign in 2008 — everybody else went to Hillary Clinton or to John McCain — and when Obama won he was able to call his own shot, becoming deputy national security adviser and then CIA director. Kiriakou adds that Brennan told everybody in Washington who would listen that he wanted to be secretary of defense, and says the only reason he was not was that the incoming administration was committed to elevating women and minorities into senior positions.[3]
“So it’s all about power. It’s all about individual authority. It’s all about being as important as you can possibly be in Washington, and the American people be damned.”[4]