Signal and the parking lot describes the mechanics John Kiriakou gives for contacting a clandestine source, offered in answer to a question about what being run by an intelligence service would actually have looked like for Jeffrey Epstein day to day.[1]
The phone call that says nothing
If the source is handled normally, the contact is a conversation with no content in it:
“You get a phone call saying, hey, how’s your mom doing? And the answer is, my mom is feeling much better, thank you. And that means: meet me at the parking lot of the yacht club at 2:00 in the morning. You have this all set up in advance. And then he goes and does his meeting, and gets his marching orders.”
The work is done beforehand. The call carries a single bit of information — that the arrangement already made is on — and nothing an interceptor could act on.[2]
Why there is no email
Asked directly whether there would be an email trail, Kiriakou’s answer is categorical: “oh, no, no, no. There would never be an email trail. This is all done verbally, or just using signals.”[3]
The illustration he reaches for is domestic and famous. During Watergate, the source would react to Bob Woodward putting an American flag in a flowerpot on his apartment balcony — “that triggered a meeting that night at 9:00 in a parking garage in Rosslyn, the Rosslyn neighbourhood of Arlington, Virginia.” The signal did not name the garage or the hour, because both had been agreed long before it was given: “all of this is always set up in advance, so you never have to actually put anything in writing, or say, meet me at 8:00.”[3]
The investigative consequence he leaves implicit but the hosts draw out: an absence of documents between a service and its agent is what competent handling looks like, not evidence that the handling did not happen.[4]