Asked how many agents a CIA case officer is normally expected to recruit, and what happens if months of work produce nothing, John Kiriakou answered by reproducing a conversation with his own station chief in Athens.
The numbers
The station chief, Kiriakou said, pulled him aside one day and set out his own record: “I’ve been an operations officer for 25 years, and in my 25 years I’ve recruited nine sources.”[1] That officer had reached senior intelligence service level four — a rank Kiriakou describes as “huge,” a community leader of the intelligence community — on those nine.[2]
He then put Kiriakou’s figures beside his own: “You’ve been here two years and you recruited five people.”[2]
The character of the agents
Kiriakou is emphatic that the comparison is not only arithmetic. “Every one of those people was a badass,” he said. “Let me tell you — dangerous criminals, killers.”[2] He drew the contrast explicitly with padding: “I wasn’t recruiting safe housekeepers, little old ladies, to make sure that the safe house is nice and clean when you need to use it for a meeting. I recruited badasses.”[2]
The knack
Asked to account for it, Kiriakou said he had told the station chief: “it’s the craziest thing, I just have a knack for it.”[2] The skill he identifies is concealment of feeling rather than charm. “I can well hide my disdain for a person. I may hate you, but you don’t have any idea that I hate you, because we’re talking about whatever it is that interests you.”[3]
He listed the range of subjects he was prepared to sustain — baseball, the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who attended the Baader-Meinhof funerals, the theatre, FIFA — and summarised the method: “whatever you want to talk about, and I will make it look like I’m your best freaking friend. And that’s why I was successful.”[3][4]
The counter-example
Kiriakou then supplied the other end of the distribution. He worked for a man who made GS-15 — “the top grade in the GS scale, before you make it to senior service” — knowing he would go no further.[4] In twenty-five years that officer “made one recruitment. One. And it was a guy who reported on Spanish wheat harvests, when that used to be a thing back in the ’80s.”[5]
Kiriakou’s verdict — “he was a disaster, and he made it all the way up to GS-15 with one recruitment” — leads to the answer he gives the original question: “if you have quality recruitments, you’re going to do just fine.”[5] The measure, he says, is not the count. Ted Rall offered the analogy of a police officer writing traffic tickets to make a quota, and Kiriakou’s account is a rejection of it.[5]