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]
In an earlier telling he names the process outright as a recruitment. The agency, he says, is “very, very good” at “recruiting — in air quotes — recruiting new presidents,” and “especially loves it when a president is elected who has little or no intelligence experience.” He sets the scarcity of the briefing as the lever: in his time only eleven people in the entire government were entitled to a daily PDB briefing — the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, and a handful of NSC staff.[10][11]
What is then dangled, in his account, is graded access: “just wait until you see the cool things that we are doing all around the world. Wait until you see this blue border report that’s classified at four levels above top secret, or black border report that’s eyes only for the president.” The pitch he reconstructs closes on belonging rather than information — “isn’t it great to be one of us now?” — and his verdict on it is flat: “and you’ve done it. You’ve sucked them in.”[12][13]
The consequence he draws is a claim about who governs: the briefers “are the ones running foreign policy, not the president,” and “the ones telling elected overseers on Capitol Hill how things are going to be, not the overseers themselves” — a practice he dates back to the 1950s and 1960s.[13]
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.[14][15]
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.[16] 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.[17]
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.[18]
Sixteen pages, one paragraph
Asked in July 2026 whether presidents and vice presidents actually read documents like the Epstein files, John Kiriakou answered no, and gave the brief as the reason. One of the first things he learned at the CIA was that the president simply does not have time to read everything an analyst would want him to read — which is why the President’s Daily Brief is “never, ever, ever more than 16 pages long, ever.”[19]
He recalls writing one of his first articles for the brief and being sat down by his boss, looked in the eye and told that the president did not care about his opinions: the president wanted the entire story in one paragraph, so make it fit into one paragraph.[20]
The parade
Kiriakou describes the ordinary state of the relationship as structurally close before anything happens to make it closer: most presidents make the CIA director a cabinet officer, the president is briefed as often as six days a week depending on who he is, and on many of those days the director sits in on the briefing alongside the daily briefer, the National Security Advisor and often the vice president.[21]
After 9/11 that widened into something he describes as continuous traffic. “the president kind of did a deep dive” — so the room contained not merely the director and deputy director but the head and deputy head of counterterrorism, the deputy director of counterterrorism for operations, the Osama bin Laden unit, the DDO. “There was a parade of people going over to the White House every day every day.”[22][23]
He adds one asymmetry to the picture: “you had a vice president who was even more hands-on than the president was” — a vice president saying “Kill everybody.”[23]
A change of publisher
Kiriakou cites the Brief as the clearest single marker of authority migrating from the agency to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “The President”s Daily Brief used to be a CIA-only publication. Now it”s a DNI publication.” He puts it alongside the transfer of the major country operations — Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and China — from the agency to the DNI, as evidence that the United States now effectively has “two CIA directors who are competing with each other for primacy.”[24]
President by president
Asked whether presidents actually know what is being done in their name, Kiriakou answered that it varies more than people assume, and ranked them.
George H. W. Bush: “absolutely yes. He had such a deep love of intelligence, having been the director of central intelligence himself, that he wanted to know every single detail. Every detail.” He was briefed six days a week.[25]
Bill Clinton: “didn’t give two shits about the CIA or what it was” — briefed, on Kiriakou’s count, twice in eight years. He gave overarching orders and left Al Gore to implement them, so “Gore was briefed all the time.”[26][27]
George W. Bush: aware, but not the centre of gravity — “really it was Cheney that ran the country. So Bush was pretty well aware. Cheney was intimately, dangerously involved.”[27]
Barack Obama: “deeply involved.” Donald Trump: did not care about intelligence.[28]