Asked what government corruption actually looks like in the American national security world, John Kiriakou set aside the petty kind — the bribe to get a telephone line installed, the payment to make a plumber come to the house, which he says he complained about while serving overseas — and described something else. [1]
The revolving door as a transaction
The corruption he means is spending thirty years at the CIA, retiring on a Friday, going back in on Monday with a different coloured badge, and making ten times what you were making at the agency, because you just joined your buddy’s LLC and you get a no-bid contract. That, he says, happens every single day. It is American taxpayers’ money going to a private company to do exactly what the CIA was doing, for a tenth of the price. [1] [2]
The unnamed company
Kiriakou then gave a case history, declining to name the firm so that he could speak freely. The company did not exist in the very early 1990s. A very senior CIA officer retired and made an LLC — and only made it so that he and his friends could use it as a tax pass-through, smoke cigars, play cards, hang out together and write it off as a tax loss. Then their old friends inside the CIA started giving them no-bid contracts. One thing led to another, and by the end of the decade this was a multi-billion dollar company. [3] [4]
The ratchet, in his description, is what makes it self-sustaining: contracts were passed without competition, and as soon as the person who authorised a contract retired, the company hired that person — and the next generation of senior officers gave them no-bid contracts in turn. That, Kiriakou says, is corruption, and it happens every single day. [4]
The double standard
What he finds ironic, though not in a funny way, is which conduct the system polices. The whole national security apparatus — the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department — will make a very big deal about somebody trying to win a contract by taking people out to a strip club: a dozen felony charges get pressed, and an all-hands email goes out saying do not do things like this, this is corruption. It is a different kind of corruption, he concedes. But how, he asks, have these other men gone through their whole lives making between fifty thousand and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and then retired worth twenty-five million? [5] [6]
Asked whether he could imagine how much money he might have made had he stayed on the inside, Kiriakou said he would be rich — and his interviewer supplied the contrast: the officers who stayed docile got what they got, while the man who blew the whistle went to jail. [7]