The Soviet Union was the adversary around which the CIA that John Kiriakou joined had been built — and it was dying exactly as he arrived.
Joining the CIA as the USSR collapsed
When Kiriakou joined the agency in January 1990, “the Soviet Union was literally in the process of collapsing” — all eyes were on Eastern Europe while his own expertise was the Middle East.[1] At George Washington University he had studied Middle Eastern affairs “at a time when the Soviet Union was the thing.”[2] With the Cold War ending, Washington talked of a “peace dividend,” and the agency cast about for new missions: the real threats to the United States, the thinking went, were environmental degradation and AIDS.[3] Bill Clinton briefly cut the intelligence budget in the early 1990s — things were going that well — until 9/11 changed everything.[4]
Kiriakou cites the National Commission on Terrorism’s verdict that the United States “took a vacation from history” in the 1990s: congratulating itself on defeating the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991 while intelligence about the new threat accumulated unread.[5]
The Afghan trap
Kiriakou invokes Zbigniew Brzezinski’s own boast about the “Afghan trap” — how the Soviet Union was lured into Afghanistan, and how the U.S. worked with a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden to build an army of extremists against the People’s Democratic Republic.[6] His own CIA mentor, Gust Avrakotos, was the legendary figure who led the agency’s effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan.[7]
The plan, he says, ended with the Soviet defeat — there was no Plan B. The U.S. had radicalized these men, pumped in hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of weapons, ammunition, mines, and rockets — and then simply abandoned them.[8] Even with the Soviet Union “weakened, battered and humbled,” Washington still chose to throw its lot in with the mujahideen — “and you see where it got us.”[9]
Cold War habits
Kiriakou describes the State Department and intelligence community mindset of the era as a zero-sum game: whatever means were at your disposal were fair, so long as the Soviet Union didn’t capture the influence.[10] He also argues the threat itself was inflated: even in the first Cold War, the danger of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was exaggerated — a pattern he sees repeating with Russia today.[11]
Loose ends of the collapse
The Soviet Union’s dissolution recurs in Kiriakou’s material in unexpected places. The borders drawn at the breakup left ethnic Russians asking why they were suddenly in Ukraine — a grievance he traces to 1990, not 2014.[12] Since the collapse, he notes, almost two million Russian and Ukrainian Jews have emigrated to Israel — a “can of worms” shaping Russia’s caution in the Middle East.[13] And in Sofia he once found an FBI course-evaluation form from a class the Bureau taught to Eastern European intelligence generals just after the 1991 fall.[14]
The most jarring Soviet story he tells is Jonathan Pollard’s: the classified documents Pollard sold to Israel — Soviet military movements among them — were traded by the Israelis to the Soviet Union in exchange for Russian Jews being released to Israel.[15][16]