A targeting analyst is, in John Kiriakou’s account, a specialized CIA analyst assigned almost exclusively to the Directorate of Operations and its Counterterrorism Center, distinct from an intelligence analyst who reads all-source reporting and writes papers.[1][2] The targeting analyst instead pours through millions of pieces of data, “much of it metadata,” to physically locate a person — for only two reasons, to capture or to kill.[3] Kiriakou flew a targeting-analyst friend to Islamabad, who over several weeks built a butcher-paper “spiderweb” around Abu Zubaydah’s phone number — concentric layers of every contact — narrowing the search to 14 sites.[4][5]
Kiriakou has given the same core definition in numerous other interviews, consistently describing the targeting analyst as someone who sifts through millions of pieces of metadata to geolocate a single person so he can be captured or killed — distinct from a regular analyst who writes reports for policymakers.[6][7] In a fuller telling of the Abu Zubaydah search, Kiriakou says a CIA “targeteer” was flown in and narrowed Zubaydah’s possible location down to 14 sites by combing through thousands of pages of documents.[8] In another version, he describes calling headquarters to request a targeting analyst, who after about two weeks of work narrowed the search to 15 possible sites, prompting Kiriakou to organize the simultaneous raid.[9]
Kiriakou says the CIA’s use of skilled targeting analysts — capable of processing a million pieces of metadata to locate a target within about two weeks — made older methods like remote viewing operationally unnecessary once the discipline matured following its advent in the 1990s and its successes after 9/11.[10]
The analyst who resigned
Kiriakou tells one story about analytic work that runs the other way — about someone who decided the job was not worth learning. Still in the Directorate of Intelligence, he was asked to mentor a new hire he describes as “fantastically smart”, a University of Virginia graduate assigned an entry-level account on the United Arab Emirates.[11]
When Iran moved five soldiers onto Greater Tunb, an uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf with “nothing there and a couple of goats”, it came up at the morning meeting. Back at their cubicles Kiriakou said Iran would never leave. She asked why not, given how much Iran had to lose with the UAE. His answer turned on which emirate actually owned the islands: Iran’s relationship is with Dubai, the Tunbs belong to Sharjah, “and the Dubaians don’t care if [Sharjah] lose a couple of square feet of sand” when the economic relationship with Iran is that strong.[12][13]
She came back that afternoon and told him she had resigned. Her reason, as he relays it: “After we talked about the Tunbs, I realized I’ll never know the Middle East like you do.” She became a real estate agent. Kiriakou’s own reading is that the objection was to the volume of detail rather than to her own ability — “too much detail. I don’t want to learn it… nobody’s going to give a shit about it” — and he says he felt badly about it.[13][14]
Light tables, loupes and the baseline
Asked in 2026 how an agency obtains a reliable map of a country that is not volunteering accurate information, Kiriakou described the work as it was done before drones. “They have an army of analysts sitting at these giant light tables like the size of an architect’s drafting board, with these like little — they look like oversized jeweler’s loupes. And they’re looking at literally every square foot of a country.”[15][16] The imagery is satellite; the method is serial, one analyst passing to the next and on to the next; and the first pass is the expensive one, because “once you establish a baseline, it makes it that much easier.”[16][17]
Drones changed the economics rather than the method: “it’s far easier now with drones because if you’re not sure about something, many times you can just send a drone to go take a closer look at it.”[17]
That is also what makes a stale file inexcusable to him. Updating the entry behind the Iranian elementary school strike would have required only “a satellite photo” showing “children there playing in the yard”; and beyond the analyst’s own checking, the product is meant to go “to other offices to check, double check, and triple check.”[18][19]