Special operations officer, abbreviated SOO and pronounced “Sue”, is the CIA staff category John Kiriakou set out in September 2025 while disputing another former officer’s account of his own career.
What the job is not
Kiriakou’s framing was corrective. The officer in question “was not a case officer. He was not an operations officer. He was what’s called a Sue, a special operations officer.”[1]
His assessment of how people arrive in the category was blunt: “Most of the Sue couldn’t make it through operational training. I don’t know why he was a Sue, but most of them just could not cut the ops ops training.”[1]
What the job is
“A Sue then serves as an assistant to the operations people.”[1] Kiriakou illustrated with two tasks from opposite ends of the working day.
The first, before a dangerous meeting: “Hey, Andrew, uh, put together a surveillance team and a counter surveillance team. I have this meeting. I’m going to do my surveillance detection route kickoff at 6:00. The meeting’s at 9. Make sure I don’t get shot.”[2]
The second, after one: “at the end of a particularly long night, I’d say… I’m tired. I got to do another surveillance detection route. When you get back to the embassy, do me a favor and do my accounting paperwork.”[2]
The adjacent category
In the same passage Kiriakou described the targeting analyst, a role he says the same officer and his wife both held: “your job is to go through thousands and thousands, maybe even millions of pieces of data to try to discern the location of a target so that either your special activities people can go kill him or kidnap him or your operations people can go try to recruit him.”[3]
He has given the same definition elsewhere and at greater length. A targeting analyst “just tries to narrow down the possibilities… somebody who really has a mind for detail but uses that expertise to assist in operations rather than writing intelligence for policymakers” — a discipline he calls relatively new, created after September 2001.[4] In another telling: “somebody who isn’t thinking the big thoughts to write an article in the president’s daily brief… but somebody who’s focused on poring through raw data to try to locate someone who we have as a target.”[5]
Shameless self-promotion
Kiriakou closed with what he says the agency trained its officers to be good at. “One thing he’s very good at is what at the agency we used to call SSP, shameless self-promotion. We were taught early on you have to relentlessly promote yourself as a Superman because everybody else is promoting himself as a Superman and you’re competing against these people in the promotion panels.”[6][7]
Outside the agency, he argued, the technique becomes unfalsifiable: “there’s no way anybody can check your bonafites. All you have to do is say up, take my word for it, it’s classified, and then that’s it.”[7]