# Recruiting from the bottom > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "Recruiting from the bottom," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/recruiting-from-the-bottom/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *The targeting method John Kiriakou believes produced the killings of Iran's leadership: not agents at the top of the state but destitute refugees at street level, paid a hundred dollars a month to write down when a general leaves his building and by which route. He contrasts it with the CIA's own record in Iran, where it spent his career trying and failing to recruit inside the Ayatollah's office, the foreign ministry and the IRGC.* - **Who is recruited:** Afghan refugees in Iran, who 'get nothing, no food, no shelter, no medical care' - **The offer:** About $100 a month - **The task:** Logging when a named officer leaves and returns, and by what route - **What it produces:** Locational targeting rather than policy intelligence - **The contrast:** The CIA's failed effort to recruit at the top of the Iranian state **Recruiting from the bottom** is [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)'s explanation of how a foreign service acquires the physical location of a country's leadership without penetrating its government. ## The method Israel, he notes, *"has bragged for years about the number of people that they've recruited in Iran. And most of them, at least many of them, were Afghan refugees."* The vulnerability is destitution: *"refugees in Iran get nothing. They get no food, no shelter, no medical care, no nothing."*[1] The pitch follows from it, and is deliberately small. *"If you approach these people and you say: look, I'll give you a hundred dollars a month to stand on this corner and write in a little book how often General so-and-so leaves his apartment, and what time, and what time he returns, and what route he took when he left, well, that's a hundred dollars you didn't have yesterday. That's a hundred dollars that you can use to feed yourself, if you're a penniless refugee."*[1][2] ## Why it beats recruiting at the top Kiriakou sets it against his own service's record. *"When I was at the CIA it was virtually impossible to recruit an Iranian"*, because the target set was ministerial: *"the CIA was trying to recruit those people at the top, somebody in the Ayatollah's office, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the IRGC."*[2][3] His conclusion about the 2026 strikes is that the approach was inverted: *"maybe they learned a lesson, that you should start at the bottom, and collect the information from the bottom, and use it for targeting. Because that's apparently what they did over the last three days."*[3] The corollary, on his reading of the *New York Times* reporting, is that the network doing it was not only Israeli. *"I think now that it wasn't just the Israelis that had these operations under way, it was also the CIA."*[2] ## See also - [2026 Iran war](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/2026-iran-war) - [The asset recruitment cycle](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-asset-recruitment-cycle) - [Agent payment mechanics](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/agent-payment-mechanics) - [MOSSAD](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/mossad) ## Sources 1. Iranian Retaliation Strikes the CIA (2026-03-02), at 9:33. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ6yjjr1ogA&t=573s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-03-02-judging-freedom-iranian-retaliation-strikes-the-cia/ 2. Iranian Retaliation Strikes the CIA (2026-03-02), at 10:05. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ6yjjr1ogA&t=605s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-03-02-judging-freedom-iranian-retaliation-strikes-the-cia/ 3. Iranian Retaliation Strikes the CIA (2026-03-02), at 10:36. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ6yjjr1ogA&t=636s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-03-02-judging-freedom-iranian-retaliation-strikes-the-cia/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/recruiting-from-the-bottom/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt