Asked how he had fitted into the culture of the CIA as a Greek American, Kiriakou answered that the place was still a WASP-y white man’s paradise when he first joined it. It was not until Bill Clinton became president, he said, that the Agency actively began trying to attract talented minorities and women.[1]
The suit
As late as 1994 — by which time Kiriakou had already been in the Agency five years — all female CIA employees brought a class action alleging that they had been passed over for promotion simply because they were women.[2]
The case was heard, as Kiriakou notes, in the same Eastern District of Virginia that would later handle his own prosecution and those of several other national security defendants. In his account the federal judge said that he had never seen a case in which the defendant had so clearly documented its own crime as the CIA had done.[2]
The remedy
What the Agency then did, Kiriakou says, was to issue an across-the-board two-level promotion for every woman in the entire CIA.[3] He offers the scale of it as the point of the story — that is a lot of people, and a lot of grievance accumulated over the years.[3]
Kiriakou raises the case as evidence for a broader claim about the Agency he joined in January 1990: that the old-boy network was not a figure of speech but an operating method, one that had to be broken from outside rather than reformed from within.[1]