Kompromat is a Russian-derived term for compromising material — recordings, photographs, or documentation of an individual’s criminal, sexual, or embarrassing behavior — used to coerce cooperation or silence. John Kiriakou has described CIA experience with kompromat operations and the agency’s formal policy conclusion about their effectiveness.
Failed 1970s operation
Kiriakou described a CIA kompromat operation conducted against a foreign cleric in the 1970s. The CIA arranged for a prostitute to sleep with the target, photographed the encounter, and approached him with the material, expecting to recruit him as an asset. The cleric’s response, in Kiriakou’s telling: “Go ahead and publish them. I’ll tell everybody you’re lying. Give me eight-by-tens and wallet sizes.”[1][2]
The operation produced nothing. The target was not recruited.[2]
CIA policy: coercion doesn’t work
Kiriakou stated that on the basis of operations like this one, the CIA arrived at a formal policy position: coercion and blackmail do not work as recruitment tools. His summary of the underlying logic: when you approach someone with kompromat, you are forcing a binary choice — “You either confess to your wife, or you commit treason. Which do you pick?”[3][4]
In Kiriakou’s assessment, most people — when faced with that choice — confess. The target absorbs a short-term personal consequence rather than a lifetime of espionage. The CIA concluded that voluntary, ideologically or financially motivated recruitment produces far more reliable assets than coerced ones.[4][5] Kiriakou puts a figure on it in a separate interview: internal CIA studies found the agency stopped blackmailing sources in the 1970s because it proved less effective than voluntary cooperation, with roughly 95% of CIA source relationships built on cash and only about 5% driven by ideology, excitement, or revenge.[6]
An intern’s first day
Kiriakou has separately described his own first CIA boss recounting a formative episode from his own earliest days at the agency, as a grad-school intern: on his first day, warned by the office secretary never to look inside a wall of file folders in the room, he looked anyway — and found that every single file was on an American citizen.[7]