The Operating Directive (OD) is the Central Intelligence Agency’s standing instruction to each overseas station enumerating intelligence collection priorities. Every case officer operates against an OD that classifies topics into six tiers, numbered 0 through 5, where lower-numbered tiers are higher priority.[1]
Tiers
| Tier | Description | Examples (representative) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | ”Coming over the walls of the embassy — reported immediately.” | Terrorism, Russian activity, North Korean nuclear program |
| 1 | Drop everything and collect. | |
| 2 | Important, but do not work to exhaustion. | |
| 3 | If it develops naturally during a meeting, report it. | |
| 4 | An analyst at headquarters had a question; do not kill yourself over it. | |
| 5 | Nobody at headquarters genuinely cares anymore. “Don’t bother.” |
Operational application
Case officers tailor their meeting agendas with assets to the host station’s OD: questions are framed so as to elicit reportable intelligence against tier 0–3 topics. A case officer who emerges from an operational meeting with no reportable intelligence has failed; the meeting consumed several hours of risk-bearing surveillance-detection effort to no result, and the asset’s monthly retainer (typically $2,000 to $10,000) might be more productively redirected.[3][4]
A case officer’s competence is assessed in significant part by their fluency with the OD — the ability to recognize, on hearing a passing remark from an asset, which division at headquarters would find it reportable and at which tier. “All you have to know is how headquarters works and what the different divisions and groups are in headquarters, and then you tailor your questions to their issues.”[5]
The tier system
The operating directive ranks collection priorities on a numbered tier system. In Kiriakou’s description: tier zero means “war is imminent”; tier one covers the most critical standing targets — China, Russia, Iran; tier two might cover countries such as Cuba or Venezuela; the system descends to tier five, which Kiriakou characterizes as priorities so marginal that “nobody cares about it — EU grain harvests, nobody cares.”[6][7]
See also
- Case officer
- Asset acquisition cycle
- Central Intelligence Agency