# The autographed basketball

> **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 autographed basketball," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-autographed-basketball/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*A recruitment John Kiriakou has cited as proof that an agent's price is not always money: a source who loved the Chicago Bulls, an ordinary basketball bought from the NBA online store with a forged provenance involving Michael Jordan, and an acrylic display box.*

- **Object:** A basketball autographed by Michael Jordan
- **Source of the object:** The NBA store, purchased online
- **Presented as:** A personal gesture from Michael Jordan
- **Cost to the agent:** Nothing; he took no money
- **Result:** Immediate cooperation

The **autographed basketball** is an example John Kiriakou has used to illustrate the assessment stage of agent recruitment — the search for what a target actually wants, as opposed to what an intelligence service assumes he wants.

## The recruitment

In Kiriakou's account, he recruited a man who was, in his phrase, absolutely crazy for the Chicago Bulls. Kiriakou bought a basketball from the NBA store online and had it shipped out to him. He then presented it to the target as an autographed ball, telling him that he knew a man who knew a man who knew Michael Jordan, that Michael Jordan had been told all about him, and that Jordan had signed the ball. Kiriakou placed it in an acrylic display box. [1]

By Kiriakou's telling the man could not give him the information he wanted fast enough, and took no money for it. The reason the source gave was that Kiriakou had been so thoughtful — that he had known how much the man loved the Chicago Bulls. [1]

## The principle

Kiriakou frames the episode as an illustration of a general rule: find what a person's currency is, what they are interested in, and then find a way to get it to them. [2] He places this within a wider account of vulnerability assessment in which the useful vulnerabilities are frequently mundane rather than lurid — a man who loves his children and does not earn much, or a spouse with a serious illness — and in which the CIA's ability to place a child at an American university or to secure treatment at a major clinic can be decisive. [3] [4]

He is nonetheless explicit that money remains the dominant motive, estimating that 95 per cent of recruitments made by a CIA operations officer are for money, at rates running from a thousand dollars a month to twenty thousand a month, or a lump sum, payable in cash, diamonds or gold as the agent prefers. [5]

## See also

- [College Tuition As An Inducement](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/college-tuition-as-an-inducement)
- [The Farm](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-farm)
- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)

## Sources

1. likely = ingested ev1ozulvly8 (2025-04-16), at 33:01. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70zQHKcSxE&t=1981s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-likely-ingested-ev1ozulvly8/
2. likely = ingested ev1ozulvly8 (2025-04-16), at 33:34. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70zQHKcSxE&t=2014s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-likely-ingested-ev1ozulvly8/
3. likely = ingested ev1ozulvly8 (2025-04-16), at 30:53. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70zQHKcSxE&t=1853s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-likely-ingested-ev1ozulvly8/
4. likely = ingested ev1ozulvly8 (2025-04-16), at 31:57. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70zQHKcSxE&t=1917s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-likely-ingested-ev1ozulvly8/
5. likely = ingested ev1ozulvly8 (2025-04-16), at 25:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70zQHKcSxE&t=1535s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-16-the-dr-phil-podcast-likely-ingested-ev1ozulvly8/

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