The promotion panel is the CIA board that considers an officer for advancement. In John Kiriakou’s account it is also where the price of his refusal to take part in the enhanced interrogation techniques was first made explicit.
Kiriakou had been offered the training and declined it. Weeks later — “like three weeks” after catching the purported number three of al-Qaeda “with these two hands” — he was passed over for promotion.[1][2]
He went to ask why, and was told what had been said about him in the panel: that in declining to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques he had displayed “a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.”[3] He attributes the remark variously — in one telling to Cofer Black’s successor at the Counterterrorism Center, in another to Jose Rodriguez, the chief of counterterrorism, and in a third to the deputy chief of the Counterterrorism Center, in whose office he sat for his panel feedback, stunned, having just come back as chief of operations in Islamabad from the operation he had led.[4][5][6] In that telling the phrase is reported as the panel’s consensus rather than one man’s line.[6]
The correction came from the officer who had advised him in the first place: seeing that Kiriakou’s name was missing from the promotion list, he promoted him out of cycle. “I realised then I was up against something that was going to be tough."[7]
"The human rights guy”
How far the objection had spread was put to him privately. A CIA psychiatrist he had known for years — a man from the same men’s group and the same church, and both a brigadier general in the army and an agency psychiatrist — told him: “Buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.” Kiriakou said he did not care. “You know that’s not a compliment, right?” His answer was that they were wrong about this and he was right about it, and that he was comfortable with the decision he had made. He says he did not realise until later how much he had angered them.[8]
What panels are usually about
Kiriakou’s other promotion-panel stories are not about torture at all, and he offers them as the ordinary condition of the place. In one, asked whether he expected to be promoted, he said no — because there were only six slots, and a member of the panel was sleeping with the woman he was competing against. “I know how things work around here.” She was promoted, he was passed over, and the deputy director for operations gave him an out-of-cycle promotion because he had been cheated. “That’s what’s common.”[9]
In another, the panel is where he received the most exact description of himself anyone has given. A psychologist in the Counterterrorism Center with whom he had been working on out-of-the-box ways to recruit spies happened to sit on his panel, and spoke in strong support of his promotion: “John Kiriakou will come up with 40 different ideas for an operation. 36 of them are insane, but four of them are going to be really good.”[10][11]
Afterwards
The outcome was not a career ending. The chief of station in Pakistan for whom Kiriakou had worked was promoted to associate deputy director of the whole CIA, made Kiriakou his executive assistant and promoted him. But the formula in the panel had already told him where he stood: “I got the promotion, but I realised I’m on the other side of this thing.”[3]