Asked why, if the government leaks constantly, nothing has leaked about crash retrievals or recovered craft, John Kiriakou offered a structural answer drawn from the one deeply compartmented programme he knows from the inside.
The reasoning
Having been in the CIA for fifteen years and having been read into special compartmented programmes, he said, he could only conclude that such things are “so compartmentalized, so stovepiped, that there are too few people who actually are read into the program to leak it.”[1]
The example
He then produced his own case as the proof. “You know, this is how torture didn’t leak for so long. In the beginning, there were only sixteen people in the entire federal government who knew about the torture program.”[1]
The circle widened later — “later on it was hundreds of people. There were dozens that were actually carrying out the torture” — but the point he is making concerns the early period, when the number was small enough that secrecy held on its own.[1]
What the argument concedes
The answer is an unusual one for Kiriakou to give in that setting, because it cuts against the interest of the people asking. His host had raised a claim that governments leak deliberately to secure funding, and had wondered why the pattern did not hold for the subject at hand. Kiriakou’s answer accepts that a genuinely small compartment can hold — and by implication that the absence of leaks is not evidence that there is nothing to leak, nor evidence that there is.
It also carries an implicit account of his own significance. On his telling, the torture programme did not surface through the ordinary porousness of Washington. It surfaced because one of the sixteen decided to talk.