The President’s Daily Brief (PDB), per John Kiriakou, is a roughly 16-page document produced for the president covering the previous night’s intelligence, marked at six levels above top secret — among the highest of the classification compartments Kiriakou describes — and briefed to the president at 7:00 a.m.[1][2]
A single, anonymous house style
Kiriakou says new CIA analysts spend their first six weeks at the Farm doing nothing but writing for the PDB, because the document — drafted by any one of thousands of analysts on a given day — has to read as though it came from a single author, in a very specific CIA writing style.[3] Part of that house style is a fixed vocabulary of uncertainty: analysts are trained to use qualifiers like “likely,” “possibly,” “presumably,” and “reportedly” to signal degrees of confidence, reserving the phrase “almost certainly” for the rare case of near-total certainty.[4]
Kiriakou recalls his own first PDB submission: a 1990 feud between the Amir of Qatar and his son, the crown prince, over who to name oil minister, a piece that also ran in the National Intelligence Daily, the next tier of distribution for senior bureaucrats holding top-secret clearances. The U.S. ambassador to Qatar sent him a private “official informal” message praising the piece and inviting him to stay at the ambassador’s house on his next visit to the region — an early sign, for Kiriakou, of what it meant to have a piece run in the PDB, comparable to a New York Times reporter getting banner-headlined on the front page.[5][6]
The PDB’s format for minor items was the “snowflake”: a maximum 36-word item, structured as three separate thoughts separated by ellipses, meant to convey a full story to the president in under 30 seconds. Kiriakou illustrates the form with an item he and a colleague wrote on Iran’s 1990s occupation of two islands claimed by the UAE: “Iran occupied two islands owned by UAE yesterday … islands owned by Sharjah, which is unlikely to be able to defend them … no help expected from Dubai or Abu Dhabi.”[7]
Briefing an incoming president
Kiriakou says the CIA begins briefing a president-elect with the PDB the day after the election, regardless of the incoming president’s foreign-policy experience, and that CIA leadership particularly favors presidents who arrive with no intelligence or foreign-policy background because the daily briefings can “suck them in” and make them feel like insiders.[8][2] He says the CIA tracks the president’s reactions to specific PDB items, describing it as effectively psychologically profiling the president using an entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists.[9]
Structure and the Bush-era change
Kiriakou says the PDB is not supposed to offer policy recommendations, since the CIA is meant to be a policy-support organization rather than a policy organization, but that George W. Bush, in his second term, changed the PDB’s structure to add a third paragraph of policy recommendation to each article, on top of the usual paragraph of fact and paragraph of analysis — a change Kiriakou says was deeply unpopular internally because nobody wanted to be responsible for telling the president what to do.[10][11]
Kiriakou has separately described the daily editing process behind the book: analysts pitch articles, PDB staff decide what makes the cut, and the finished product is capped at a hard 16 pages — “the book is always, always, always 16 pages… if it doesn’t fit in the 16 pages, it comes out” — with the final call on inclusion resting with a single PDB director, regardless of how minor an official the excluded item concerns.[12] He says the finished product often tells a president nothing new: ambassadors he worked with, including John Negroponte and Skip Gnehm, told him the PDB and its lower-tier companion, the National Intelligence Daily, usually just repeated what they had already read that morning in the Washington Post and New York Times.[13]
The August 2001 warning
Kiriakou says CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black and White House counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke were “screaming it from the rooftops” in the summer of 2001 that a major al-Qaeda attack was coming, with CIA Director George Tenet raising the same alarm separately. That warning culminated in the now-infamous August 2001 PDB article titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US” — which national security advisor Condoleezza Rice reportedly dismissed, telling briefers she wished they would drop the counterterrorism focus because the real threat was China.[14]