The operational cable is the written record an officer produces after a meeting with a source, distinct from the intelligence report that carries the substance to consumers. In John Kiriakou’s account of training at the Farm, producing one was the unglamorous half of every exercise.
Capturing the material
Before the cable comes the note. Trainees were taught that if something particularly good comes out of a meeting, you excuse yourself, go to the lavatory and write yourself a note — this being before a mobile telephone could do it. Kiriakou did exactly that with the name of a chemical a Cypriot shipping agent had mentioned, having no idea what it was.[1][2]
Writing it
Training days ran long because of the writing. After the meeting the trainee returns to the exercise room, sits at a computer, writes the operational cable, prints it and hands it to the instructor. Then, as Kiriakou describes it, all the instructors gather round and critique the writing, the conduct of the meeting, and what the officer was wearing. “It’s all very comprehensive.”[3]
The cable is also how a field officer asks for help. Not knowing what the chemical was, Kiriakou wrote it up and requested headquarters guidance — “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what it does, I don’t know why it’s important or if it’s important, please advise.” An instructor in the next room typed the reply: it was a precursor chemical for cocaine.[4][5]
At the end of the exercise Kiriakou wrote the material up in both forms — an intelligence report and an operational cable to headquarters — having elicited it from the target the instructors had actually been steering him toward.[6]
The same instrument recurs throughout his operational career: the cable to the Counterterrorism Center listing the thirty-six people, the weapons, the night-vision goggles, the battering rams and the ten million dollars in cash he needed for the Abu Zubaydah raids arrived as equipment thirty hours later.[7]