The ask-forgiveness maxim is the institutional attitude John Kiriakou says he was taught at the start of his CIA career, and which he uses to explain how the agency sustains programmes he considers unlawful.
The rule
One of his bosses told him early on that it is always better to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission.[1] The practical consequence, Kiriakou says, is that officers simply do whatever they want to do; if they are slapped down for it later, they say they are very sorry, and that is the end of it.[1]
Applied to In-Q-Tel
Kiriakou raises the maxim in the middle of an argument that the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, should not legally exist.[2] His reasoning is that a body is either governmental or non-governmental; the CIA is plainly governmental, and so cannot make a profit, cannot make investments, and cannot help companies build products.[2] He grants that the agency’s motive — controlling new technologies — is comprehensible, but concludes that this is one of those programmes where the agency is simply doing it and Congress is looking the other way.[2]
His proposed remedy is not to stop the investment but to declare it. If there is going to be United States government investment, he says, make it official government investment, and do not run it as a secret programme of the CIA with no oversight, no accounting and no explanation to the American taxpayer of what is happening to their money. He calls the arrangement certainly unethical and, in his belief, illegal.[3]
Why nothing stops it
The maxim is one half of Kiriakou’s explanation; the other is the structural weakness he describes in the Gang of Four and Gang of Eight, where the committees nominally responsible cannot cover the agency’s size and are frequently not cleared for what they are meant to oversee.[1][4] Taken together, they form part of his case that there should be no CIA at all.[5]