Asked whether secret societies had influence inside American intelligence, John Kiriakou described a set of affinity networks at the top of the CIA that he considers real but not conspiratorial.
Who is at the top
Kiriakou says a lot of senior CIA officers are Freemasons, that they tend to be eastern-elite liberal graduates of Ivy League schools, and that — oddly enough, in his phrasing — they include members of Opus Dei.[1] He describes stretches in which almost everybody at the top happened to belong to Opus Dei and attended the same church in Great Falls, Virginia, which he found very strange.[1]
When his questioner restated this as the agency bringing Opus Dei members in as recruits, Kiriakou corrected him: it was not that they were brought in as recruits, but that these senior people happened to be Opus Dei.[2]
Not a plot
Kiriakou is explicit that he does not regard the pattern as official or formal.[1] He calls it almost accidental, and says he never got the impression that members of these organisations were plotting something together so much as looking out for one another.[3]
The Avrakotos test
He illustrates the point with a conversation he had with his operations mentor, Gust Avrakotos, by then an old hand who had been in the agency since the early 1970s.[3] Kiriakou asked him how somebody like him had ever made it to the top: Greek rather than a WASP, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh rather than Yale, not a member of a fraternity, let alone of Skull and Bones.[3][4] Avrakotos answered: through hard work and sharp elbows.[4]
Kiriakou draws the conclusion directly from that exchange. It was not, he says, that one had to be a Mason to reach the top; rather, the men at the top happened to be Masons, because the Masons all look out for one another.[4][5]
The same interview produced his separate account of the heavy Mormon presence in American intelligence, which he explains by language ability and by the ease with which clean-living candidates pass the polygraph.[2][6][7]