The mad minute is a CIA case-officer procedure for the opening seconds of every meeting with a recruited source. Per John Kiriakou, recounting his standing instructions to a double-agent target in a Middle Eastern country three weeks before September 11, 2001:[1]
Since this is our first meeting we need to talk about some of the basics. The first thing we’re going to do every time we see each other is something that we call the mad minute at the CIA. So I ask you: Are you safe? Were you followed here? Did you do a surveillance-detection route? And we make plans for the next meeting. So if somebody busts down the door, we’ve at least gotten the important stuff out of the way.[2]
The questions
The wording varies with the telling but the content does not. In one account the items are whether the source was followed, whether he is in fear for his safety, how much time he has for the meeting, and the booking of the next one — “you do that all in the first 60 seconds in case you’re disrupted.”[3] In another they are whether he was followed there, whether he was followed home from the last meeting, whether he has had any problems or concerns over the intervening month, and then the appointment itself: one month from tonight, at eight o’clock, at a named hotel.[4]
It begins physically as well as verbally. “As soon as you walk in, I give you the bear hug” — an embrace that doubles as a pat-down — before the questions and the booking of the next meeting at a named hotel.[5]
The rationale is constant across every version: it is insurance against interruption. If somebody bursts in and seizes the source, the essentials are already established.[5][2]
What follows it
The mad minute is the compressed opening of a meeting that is otherwise unhurried. Once it is done, Kiriakou describes sitting down over coffee and working through the month — how things have been going, what the source has heard, what he makes of a particular man, whether anyone needs worrying about, who will control a weapons cache. It is not unusual for such a meeting to run two or three hours; one of his ran eight.[6]
The setting varies with the risk. Meetings can be held at a safe house or walking along a beach — anywhere private and safe. One source was too dangerous to meet in the country where Kiriakou had recruited him, so the two flew to Europe once a month, met eight hours a day for three days, and Kiriakou then took a train to a different country so that they would not be seen flying home from the same city at the same time.[6][7]
Where a meeting has to happen in a car, the timing discipline is tighter than the mad minute itself. For a two o’clock car pickup, the officer wants to arrive between 1:58 and 2:02; if the source is not there at 1:58 the officer makes one more run, and if he is still absent by 2:02 the meeting is aborted and retried twenty-four or seventy-two hours later, per the standing agreement. The reason is the same discipline that produces the mad minute — a car circling a block is what gets a licence plate written down.[7][8]
In practice
Kiriakou’s own use of the procedure supplies its best illustration. Meeting an asset whose surveillance-detection route had been so good that the CIA’s own countersurveillance team could not follow him without blowing cover, Kiriakou nonetheless ran the mad minute first — “were you followed?” — before anything else was discussed. The source’s answer: no, but he had run a very good route.[9][3]