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]
The scale, and who sets it
Kiriakou gives the range of the directive from both ends. “It goes from a level zero, which means they”re coming over the embassy walls right now, to level five, which means, you know, if you happen to hear anything about growing corn in Morocco, just send us a little message.” Between them: “tier zero is the most important — that is like nuclear proliferation, Iran, the war in Russia and Ukraine, that kind of thing. Tier one means drop what you”re doing and focus on this, and it”s things like terrorism, or threats to an American embassy. And then it goes down from there — tier two, three, four — to the point where nobody really cares about the lower tiers.”[8][9]
The chain that produces them starts outside the agency. “It originates in the National Security Council. These are supposed to be the issues that are the most important for the president and for policy makers at that level — the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser. And then those orders come down to the CIA director, and from the CIA director to the operational division directors.” At division level it becomes an annual event: “every year in December … the division director is going to say, ”okay, everybody in the Near East division, this is what we”re going to collect on over the next year”” — with anything interesting but off-list to be written down and sent in for the analysts.[10][11]
What the tiers leave out
Kiriakou”s objection to the whole structure is that none of its levels reaches beyond the immediate. “That”s not to say that any of these tiers are for a long-term view.” The part of his own service he most enjoyed was the exception: “this was one of the things that I enjoyed the most when I was serving in the Middle East as an analyst, because your job was to look at the long-term view. I was interested in, let”s say, Saudi stability over the next 30 years. What”s not interesting is what”s going to happen in the next 24 hours in Sudan.” The cost he assigns to the imbalance is that the product stops being worth having: the policymaker “can get that information by reading the New York Times or Al Jazeera or the Washington Post. So the CIA is not adding anything to the body of intelligence. It should be focused on the long term, and it”s not.”[12][13][14]
Who writes it
Kiriakou’s December 2024 account places authorship of the directive above the CIA entirely. It is “the DNI who all year long is going through hundreds of thousands, millions of cables, liaising with cabinet members and sub-cabinet members to try to get to what every stakeholder has on his or her plate that the intelligence community can collect on.”[15][16] On this telling the directive is the mechanism by which the ODNI does its coordinating, rather than an internal agency instruction.
His tier gloss in this telling runs: zero means “they’re coming over the wall, we got to do something right this second” — war in the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, China; tier one “might be nuclear proliferation, counterterrorism, Iran”; tier two “that next level down — Cuba, Venezuela, whatever”; “and then three means, ah, if you get around to it, four means, ah, there’s an analyst down the hall who’s interested, and five means don’t waste your time.”[17][15]
See also
- Case officer
- Asset acquisition cycle
- Central Intelligence Agency