John Kiriakou has repeatedly been asked to grade screen depictions of his former profession. He opens with the audience rather than the films: “CIA people love, love, love to go watch CIA movies. Not because they love necessarily the CIA movies, but because they love to criticize them.”[1]
What the films get right
Hostile operational meetings. The scene of two officers trying to intellectually out-manoeuvre one another is, he says, an accurate portrayal: “Maybe you’d like to recruit him. He’d certainly like to recruit you. If you’re going to make a threat, you have to be able to follow through on that threat. But these kinds of meetings, yes, literally happen every single day.”[2]
Static surveillance from above. Reviewing The Bourne Ultimatum, Kiriakou identifies its use of out-of-the-way vantage points as the detail the films get right and civilians get wrong. Most people who suspect surveillance look behind them — “they’re not looking up in the second, third, tenth floor thinking there’s somebody with binoculars up there. But frequently there are.” And not one person: “there’s one person every block. A person from five blocks back will run around and assume a second static position. That actually is common, and it’s a part of training.”[3][4]
Breaking into offices. “Breaking into offices was one of the funnest things I ever did. I enjoyed doing that very much.” Sometimes the object is a filing cabinet; sometimes it is longer-term, planting a bug or — more unusually — a camera. “But yeah, breaking into an office, sure, people do that all the time.”[5]
Safe houses. Every intelligence service in the world uses them, sometimes jointly — Kiriakou cites the scene in Munich in which Israelis and Jordanians share a safe house without the Jordanians knowing who their counterparts are. What does not exist is the infrastructure around them: “no, there are no Batcaves or hidden lairs.” The military is a different case; it has hidden facilities everywhere.[6][7]
What they invent
Submersibles. There are submersibles — one from the Cold War is on display at CIA headquarters, a one-man submarine of the kind now sold in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue — but not high-speed ones, and “not for use today. Not unless you’re a member of a drug cartel.”[7]
The meeting in the gallery. The Skyfall handover at the Tate would never happen. “Never, ever, under any circumstances would such a meeting take place in public,” because of surveillance, cameras, microphones and passing tourists — and even a park is exposed to parabolic microphones. “This conversation would always take place in a vaulted area inside MI6 headquarters.”[8]
The gadget shop. “The dirty little secret of intelligence operations is that almost all of the tech that’s used is just purchased on Amazon. It’s easier, it’s faster, and it’s far cheaper just to buy something that has already been invented and manufactured than to reinvent the wheel.” Of the Mission: Impossible apparatus: “You might be able to get a green screen for 20 bucks, but that’s about as close as you’re going to come.” What would actually be done is six months of work to recruit the guard, or someone close to the guard.[9][10][11]
Direct infiltration. “It’s almost unheard of for a CIA officer to directly infiltrate a group, especially a terrorist group” — you do not look the part, do not speak the language, or speak it with an American accent. The method instead is to recruit somebody already inside, or able to get inside, and run the operation through that cut-out. Of Tenet’s badge-swap: “that’s nothing that I’ve ever heard of.”[12][13]
The silent helicopter. On 24: “the silent helicopter gets you every time. It’s a good thing nobody could hear that helicopter from 50 feet away.”[14]
Transmitters, and William Buckley’s belt
Reviewing the issue of a radio transmitter in Skyfall, Kiriakou calls the prop oversized. Real transmitters “can get very small, to the point where they’re more like chips, about the size of a penny, but they are not switchable on and off. They’re always transmitting, always sending out a ping.” In extreme cases they are implanted — “in your shoulder or in your butt crack or wherever it is that somebody’s not going to notice it.”[15]
The reason to carry one is kidnapping, and Kiriakou’s example is the reason the technology is not sufficient. William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped in the 1980s and “tortured mercilessly to death.” He had a transmitter, embedded in his belt buckle — and the first thing his kidnappers did was take his belt off and leave it in the parking garage where they took him. “The tech is out there. It’s just a question of implementing it.”[16]
Money, and the accountants
The films make payment dramatic; Kiriakou says it is the dullest part of the job. “Usually the payment is the easiest part about a relationship with the source. The source is perfectly happy to give up whatever information he or she has, perfectly happy to put his hand out and take the payment.” Nine times out of ten it is cash, on a monthly retainer.[17]
The receipt matters more than the signature on it: an agent “could sign Bugs Bunny if they want, just so long as there’s a receipt that’s signed” — because the paperwork goes back to the accountants at headquarters. The warning he was given by a boss is a hierarchy of internal threats: “you never want to mess with medical, security or finance, because not only can they ruin your career, they can get you locked up.”[18][6]
Vaults
At CIA headquarters the entire office is a vault, so material can be left out overnight. In a station — domestic or foreign — nothing is: hard drives come out of the computers and go into the safe, paper files go into the safe, and paper is kept to an absolute minimum. The safe is heavy-duty and reinforced, “not like this that you can just pick it and steal files.”[19][20]
The shows he cannot forgive
“There was one called Covert Affairs. Oh my god, it was the worst CIA show I’ve ever seen in my life” — its analyst walks into the Oval Office and says “Madam President, I need to take out a hit on someone.” Kiriakou’s objection is two felonies deep: “first of all, you’re under arrest for just barging into the Oval Office… Secondly, you’ve just committed a felony, because according to Executive Order 12333 you can’t order hits on anybody.”[14][21]
NCIS draws the same complaint about jurisdiction rather than tradecraft: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has authority “only on Navy bases and on ships, not in the LA housing projects with your gun up in the air.” Of a shootout staged at the Rose Bowl: “Come on, everybody’s under arrest. You’ve all committed felonies.”[21][22]
The one that was true
Watching Frankie Muniz grin his way through Agent Cody Banks, Kiriakou recognised the expression. “That’s exactly how we were.” The first time he entered the Oval Office there were the president, the vice president, the National Security Adviser and the Director of the CIA — “I’m 25 years old and they are there to listen to me and what I have to say. I couldn’t stop smiling, and I couldn’t stop thinking my buddies from high school would never believe in a million years what I was doing right now.”[23]