Security, finance and medical is the name John Kiriakou gives to a rule he says CIA recruits were taught in their first week of employment: that of all the offices inside the agency, there are three an officer must never lie to, because each of them can ruin his life.
The rule as taught
Kiriakou has recounted the lesson in a blunt form — that an officer can lie to his wife, and should not but sometimes will lie to his boss, but that medical, finance and security are absolute. [1] In another telling he attributes it to one of his station chiefs early in his career. [2]
He gives a reason for each. Medical is staffed by psychiatrists and psychologists whose function is to establish that an officer is not, in his phrase, too unwell to be sent overseas to do what the agency has spent a million dollars training him to do. [3] Finance follows from the nature of the work: Kiriakou describes intelligence as a cash business, and recalls driving through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan with ten million dollars in cash in his van along with a large quantity of weapons. The money is not the officer’s, and every cent must be accounted for. [3] Security, he says, is self-evident: it exists to watch whether an officer is going to go to the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis — or to the media, which he adds is “just as bad”. [4]
Kiriakou’s additions
In a later telling Kiriakou says the list is in fact longer than three, and adds two rules of his own: never lie to yourself, and never lie to your station chief. He justifies the second on the grounds that an officer needs someone to check his thinking, and gives as the failure case an officer who wakes one morning believing it is acceptable to drug a woman’s drink at a cocktail party and assault her afterwards — something he says has happened. [5]
In practice
Kiriakou has connected the finance rule to the polygraph, noting that officers are examined on whether they have ever misappropriated funds, and recalling that the threshold put to him was twenty dollars. [6] He has said that over his entire career he never saw or heard of anyone taking a single dollar, and attributes this to a sense of patriotism and duty rather than to the controls themselves. [7]