# The asset recruitment cycle

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The asset recruitment cycle," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-asset-recruitment-cycle/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*The four-step professional standard John Kiriakou says governed CIA operations before September 11 — spot, assess, develop, recruit — and without which an officer did not get promoted. He calls it the asset acquisition cycle as often as the recruitment cycle. Spotting looks for access, not rank; assessment looks for a vulnerability, a word he insists is less ugly than it sounds; development is months or years of friendship bought on an unlimited expense account; and the recruitment itself rests not on money, revenge or ideology but on the target believing the officer is his best friend. Threats are forbidden — partly on ethics, partly because the target may come to the next meeting with a gun.*

- **Also called:** The asset acquisition cycle
- **The four steps:** Spot, assess, develop, recruit
- **Why it matters:** No recruitment, no promotion
- **What is spotted:** Access to information — not seniority
- **What is assessed:** A vulnerability, and what the target's currency is
- **What development costs:** An unlimited expense account, and years
- **What the pitch rests on:** Believed friendship
- **Forbidden:** Threats — unethical, ineffective, and dangerous

The **asset recruitment cycle** — which [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) more often calls the **asset acquisition cycle** — is the four-step professional standard he describes as governing CIA operations in the era before September 11, when the work was, in his account, much more old school and much more sophisticated than what followed.[1][2] The steps are spot, assess, develop, recruit, and completing them is not optional: *"that's the only way I'm going to get promoted — is to recruit spies to steal secrets."*[3][1] Kiriakou learned it in operational training and describes it as the substance of the job rather than a formality — *"I never considered it to be work… you work crazy hours but you're having such a good time."*[4][5]

## Spot

Spotting is the search for access, and Kiriakou is emphatic that access is not the same as seniority or likeability. *"You are a nice guy, I like hanging out with you, but you're not operationally interesting to me, because you don't have access to classified information and you don't have access to a terrorist group."*[6] The setting is wherever the target is: a diplomatic cocktail party, a dinner, a meeting at a foreign ministry, the street, or *"a riot."*[7][4][2]

Nationality does the first filtering. At a reception, *"I'm not interested in speaking to the Spanish [agricultural] officer, no interest. I am interested in talking to the Russian, the Cuban, the North Korean… whatever enemy country we happen to have at any given time."*[8][9] Function does the second: an official responsible for coffee exports is of no interest, while a man who works in the part of the port that is off limits to everybody else is — *"I'd like to know what's coming into the port. Is it weapons? Is it precursor chemicals for cocaine?"*[10]

The same logic explains why the agency recruits foreigners rather than inserting its own people. *"You're not going to directly put a CIA officer inside Al-Qaeda, but you can recruit an Arab who can convincingly join Al-Qaeda — or allow Al-Qaeda to recruit him — and then he can act as a double agent for you."*[11]

## Assess

Assessment establishes what the target can reach, and then what he wants. The training premise, Kiriakou says, is that *"everybody has a vulnerability"* — a word he is careful to defuse: *"that's not as ugly a word as it sounds."*[7][12] The question the officer is answering throughout is *"what can I give this person that is going to make him want to give me what I want?"*[13]

The examples he returns to are domestic rather than sordid: a child with a cleft palate and no money for the surgery, a bright son headed for the local college because everyone in the country is poor, a wife with cancer who would rather be treated at the Mayo Clinic than at the local hospital, a man passed over for promotion who resents his boss, a gambler, a drunk, someone simply broke.[14][15][16][17] The trade is then stated in plain terms: *"I'll get your kid into Harvard, no problem — give me two hours in your code room, give me the plans to that new Russian tank that your government just bought."*[16]

Kiriakou says the offers are deliverable because the institutions cooperate. The CIA has agreements with almost every university in America and with the Fortune 1000 and Fortune 1500 companies, and *"university administrators and corporate leaders, they're patriots as well, and they want to do whatever they can to be helpful."*[13][18] Medical access works the same way — get a dying spouse into the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic *"and they'll give you anything that you want, so long as you can provide medical care."*[19]

But the currency is not always material, and Kiriakou's own best illustrations are cheap ones. He recruited an agent *"who was absolutely crazy for the Chicago Bulls"* by buying a basketball from the NBA store online, having it shipped out, telling the man that *"I know a guy who knows a guy who knows Michael Jordan, and we told Michael Jordan all about you,"* and presenting it in an acrylic box. *"He couldn't give me the information I wanted fast enough, and he didn't take any money for it"* — only because the gesture seemed thoughtful.[18][20] He also recruited a man who *"would not take a single dollar from me and didn't want any favors,"* who worked out of affection for the United States and enjoyment of the clandestinity itself.[19] The rule he draws: *"you find what their currency is, what they're interested in, and then you find a way to get it to them."*[21] Money is rarely the constraint — *"we used to have this saying that intelligence is a cash business, and cash is not a problem."*[21]

## Develop

Development is the long middle, and Kiriakou insists it is done *"with a very light touch."*[8] The sequence he describes is deliberately ordinary: express interest in what the target does for a living, exchange business cards, telephone a couple of days later, lunch, then dinner, then dinner with both wives, then perhaps a holiday spent together.[9] *"I start spending money on you, because I have an expense account and you don't"* — an all-expenses trip to New York for a man who has always wanted to see it, or a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day charter to fish for sailfish or marlin.[22][23]

His own example from his posting to the United Nations is the smallest of them: a man he was developing said the Manhattan skyline at sunset was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so Kiriakou bought him a sunset helicopter tour of Manhattan. *"I thought he was gonna cry. That was a few hundred dollars well spent."*[23][12]

None of this is quick. Asked in his training class how long a recruitment takes, Kiriakou recalls the answer distinguishing the cycle from its opposite: *"a cold pitch takes five seconds — you knock on the door and say, hey, CIA, I want you to work for me. That almost never, ever, ever works."* The cycle is a long-term operation, *"not something that happens overnight."*[24]

## Recruit

The pitch comes only when the relationship will carry it. Kiriakou's formulation is consistent across a decade of tellings: the officer becomes so close to the target — *"or at least that person believes he is close"* — that the target will commit espionage, and in some cases treason, because he likes the officer.[25][26][5] Earlier he put it more starkly still: *"over the course of this relationship I'm going to convince you that I am your best friend, to the point where you love me."*[3] He acknowledges the classic motivators — money, revenge, ideology — but insists the real basis of the relationship is friendship, and that *"the easiest way to a recruitment is to convince the target that you are his best friend, and that takes time."*[26][8] The identified vulnerability does double duty at the moment of the pitch: it *"also gives him a way out."*[17]

Coercion is excluded, and Kiriakou says he asked about it directly in training. Does the agency threaten people — *"you're going to work for me or I'm going to pull your teeth out"*? *"And they said absolutely never. First of all, it's not ethical to do something like that. Secondly, it never works. And you run the risk of him coming to the next meeting with a gun so he can kill you for threatening him."* The alternative is *"a bona fide friendship."*[27]

When an interviewer likened the structure to a multi-level marketing scheme, Kiriakou allowed it was pretty much the same idea; when another said it sounded like the work of a confidence man, he did not resist. His own account of what the training does to an officer is set out in [the CIA culture of lying](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-culture-of-lying).[25][26]

## The same skill outside the CIA

Kiriakou credits the FBI with being better at the final step than his own service: *"if there's one thing that the FBI is exceptionally good at, it is establishing that kind of a relationship with a source."* His example is [Ali Soufan](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/ali-soufan)'s interrogation of [Abu Zubaydah](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/abu-zubaydah) at the secret site, where a piece of fruit, a cup of tea, a cigarette and paper and pen to write to his mother produced the al-Qaeda wiring diagram — an organisational structure the agency had known nothing about below Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — and the modus operandi of an al-Qaeda attack.[28][29]

## What replaced it

After September 11, Kiriakou says, the work really did change to paramilitary operations — wearing whatever special forces wear, parachuting in, shooting the place up and grabbing the target. Before September 11, *"that's really not what the CIA was."*[30][25] He develops the same periodisation at greater length in [the CIA as a paramilitary organization](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-cia-as-a-paramilitary-organization).

## See also

- [CIA culture of lying](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-culture-of-lying)
- [The CIA as a paramilitary organization](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-cia-as-a-paramilitary-organization)
- [The tier one walk-up](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-tier-one-walk-up)
- [Walk-in](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/walk-in)
- [Ali Soufan](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/ali-soufan)

## Sources

1. "Reluctant Spy" era radio — probe (2026-01-15), at 07:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grlBxKDqYrQ&t=438s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-15-opperman-report-reluctant-spy-era-radio-probe/
2. The CIA spy who blew the whistle on torture (2023-03-20), at 18:42. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCSSQ0bpBA&t=1122s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-03-20-trt-world-the-innerview-the-cia-spy-who-blew-the-whistle-on-torture/
3. Whistleblower John Kiriakou On the Rob Kall Bottom up Show (2017-06-29), at 12:09. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2t-xAWvn0g&t=729s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-06-29-rob-kall-bottom-up-show/
4. Secrets, Lies, and the Price of Truth: The CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Part 2 (2025-04-23), at 41:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYK16WJ1WsU&t=2473s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-23-dr-phil-podcast-secrets-lies-price-of-truth-part2/
5. The Only CIA Officer Sent to Jail for the Torture Program (Ep 309) (2024-11-16), at 31:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrAf8gK44S4&t=1878s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-11-16-the-team-house/
6. John Kiriakou - CIA Spy Recounts Insane Covert Operations and Assassination Attempts (Part 1) (2023-11-12), at 59:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1kOwRMd3o8&t=3540s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-11-12-dalton-fischer-kiriakou-part-1/
7. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:21:05. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=4865s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
8. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 02:39. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=159s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
9. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 03:10. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=190s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
10. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:21:36. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=4896s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
11. The Sharin Hour 1/11/16: JOHN KIRIAKOU, ex-C.I.A. (2016-01-12), at 32:19. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rss4dc75908&t=1939s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2016-01-12-the-sharin-hour-the-sharin-hour-1-11-16-john-kiriakou-ex-c-i/
12. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 04:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=253s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
13. Top Secrets: The CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou (2025-04-16), at 31:57. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev1ozulvly8&t=1917s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-top-secrets-the-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-ki/
14. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:22:37. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=4957s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
15. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:23:09. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=4989s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
16. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 04:44. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=284s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
17. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 05:16. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=316s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
18. Top Secrets: The CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou (2025-04-16), at 32:29. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev1ozulvly8&t=1949s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-top-secrets-the-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-ki/
19. Top Secrets: The CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou (2025-04-16), at 31:26. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev1ozulvly8&t=1886s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-top-secrets-the-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-ki/
20. Top Secrets: The CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou (2025-04-16), at 33:01. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev1ozulvly8&t=1981s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-top-secrets-the-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-ki/
21. Top Secrets: The CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou (2025-04-16), at 33:34. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev1ozulvly8&t=2014s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-top-secrets-the-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-ki/
22. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:22:06. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=4926s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
23. Inside the CIA: Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reveals What Y (2025-03-29), at 03:41. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUS9gA518Sg&t=221s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-03-29-lionel-nation/
24. CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John (2023-04-12), at 1:45:43. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPpOps1yeI&t=6343s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-04-12-danny-jones/
25. "Reluctant Spy" era radio — probe (2026-01-15), at 08:20. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grlBxKDqYrQ&t=500s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-15-opperman-report-reluctant-spy-era-radio-probe/
26. "Reluctant Spy" era radio — probe (2026-01-15), at 08:51. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grlBxKDqYrQ&t=531s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-15-opperman-report-reluctant-spy-era-radio-probe/
27. Secrets, Lies, and the Price of Truth: The CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Part 2 (2025-04-23), at 41:46. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYK16WJ1WsU&t=2506s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-23-dr-phil-podcast-secrets-lies-price-of-truth-part2/
28. Secrets, Lies, and the Price of Truth: The CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Part 2 (2025-04-23), at 42:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYK16WJ1WsU&t=2538s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-23-dr-phil-podcast-secrets-lies-price-of-truth-part2/
29. Secrets, Lies, and the Price of Truth: The CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Part 2 (2025-04-23), at 42:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYK16WJ1WsU&t=2569s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-23-dr-phil-podcast-secrets-lies-price-of-truth-part2/
30. "Reluctant Spy" era radio — probe (2026-01-15), at 07:50. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grlBxKDqYrQ&t=470s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-15-opperman-report-reluctant-spy-era-radio-probe/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-asset-recruitment-cycle/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt