Spotting a CIA impostor is John Kiriakou’s term for the short interrogation he applies to people who claim to have served in the CIA. He treats the agency’s internal vocabulary as the decisive test, saying the lingo is a very important thing to him and that it is how he can spot a CIA phony from a mile away.[1]
He compares the phenomenon to stolen valour among people who claim military service: everybody who claims to be a Navy SEAL claims SEAL Team 6, the greatest of the great, rather than any of the other teams. In the same way, he says, he can spot a CIA fake from a mile away.[1]
The questions
The first question two CIA officers meeting for the first time ask each other, in Kiriakou’s account, is what directorate the other served in. There are only four possible responses: DO, DI, DS&T and DA — the Directorate of Operations, the Directorate of Intelligence, the Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Administration.[2] The form of the answer matters as much as its content: Kiriakou notes approvingly that when he asked Dave Phillips at FCI Loretto, Phillips said “DO” rather than “operations”, which is the correct response.[2]
The second question is always what division the person served in. Here there are about three dozen possible answers — Near East operations, counterterrorism, Africa operations and so on. Phillips answered “AF division”, which Kiriakou likewise accepts as correct.[3]
The tells
What gave Phillips away was not the vocabulary but the institutional knowledge behind it. He did not know who the deputy director for operations — the DDO — had been. Kiriakou’s reaction was that it is not possible not to know who your own boss is.[3]
A second tell was a quite secret training facility Phillips mentioned but named backwards, transposing the two halves of its name. Kiriakou corrected him once, was contradicted, and let it go while making a mental note.[3][4] A third came when Phillips described an elaborate operation he claimed to have been part of and a medal he said he had won. Kiriakou asked which medal — there are about a dozen the CIA bestows — and Phillips did not realise there were multiple intelligence medals, or that half of them are awarded only posthumously.[4][5]
Kiriakou’s conclusion was that Phillips had obviously had some sort of exposure to the CIA at some point, but had never been a CIA officer.[4] The distinction matters to the method: the test is designed to separate people who have been near the agency from people who served in it.