The National Intelligence Council (NIC) is a body housed at the CIA comprising the most senior analysts drawn from across the entire intelligence community. Its officers — National Intelligence Officers (NIOs) — hold positions at the Senior Intelligence Service level and are responsible for long-range strategic analysis on specific portfolio areas, as well as the production of National Intelligence Estimates.
John Kiriakou described an encounter early in his CIA career that constituted, in his words, the first moment he ever seriously considered the existence of a deep state.[1]
The NIO for Warning
One NIO position is the National Intelligence Officer for Warning — the officer responsible for looking five, ten, and twenty years forward to identify emerging threats before they mature into crises. Kiriakou described attending a meeting involving this officer when he was in his twenties. Other attendees were congratulating the man; Kiriakou asked why. He was told the officer had just received an age waiver from the CIA director, allowing him to remain in his position until age seventy.[2][3]
The officer was sixty-five at the time. He had already been in the same position for forty-two years. With the waiver, he would serve a total of forty-seven years in the identical job. Kiriakou’s first reaction was genuine bafflement at why anyone would want this.[3][4]
The deep-state realization
Kiriakou described the moment of understanding that followed. He reasoned: over the course of a forty-seven-year CIA career, how many presidents would come and go? The officer had outlasted many already. The implication was that if a president called and asked the officer to take a hard look at a particular country, the officer could effectively defy the request — not openly, but by slow-rolling the response until the president was long gone and the request moot.[4][5]
Kiriakou’s conclusion: “I realized for the very first time there actually is a deep state. We can call it the state. We can call it the federal bureaucracy. But by God it’s there. It exists.”[5][6]
He described the mechanism not as conspiracy but as accumulated institutional power: the authority built over decades by a single individual who had served through a dozen or more administrations — authority that no elected official, arriving with a four-year mandate, could easily dislodge. He has cited this kind of longevity elsewhere too, noting he once worked with a national intelligence officer who served at the CIA for 42 years, illustrating how senior officials can outlast the presidents — who come and go every four to eight years — that nominally direct them.[7]
Writing a National Intelligence Estimate
Kiriakou has described personally writing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) — including one on Iran — through the NIC’s cross-agency coordination process, which at the time operated under the Council itself rather than the Director of National Intelligence.[8] In late 1997 the National Intelligence Officer for the region assigned him to write an NIE titled “Iraq Post-Saddam’s Next 12 Months,” which concluded that Saddam Hussein could threaten the Kurds, the Shia, or Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.[9] The coordination process brings together representatives of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies — from DIA and NSA to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and Coast Guard Intelligence — seated around a conference table with the NIO chairing line-by-line review of the draft.[10] Kiriakou’s own NIE was coordinated across all 18 agencies in just four hours — the fastest such session the NIO had ever overseen — though Kiriakou felt the speed reflected the paper’s lack of substance rather than consensus: “All we needed to do was take last year’s NIE and just change the date. There’s no new analysis in this paper.”[11]