The CIA barber shop is one of the amenities of the headquarters building that John Kiriakou has described, recalled in October 2025 in a digression about how paychecks used to be delivered.
The paychecks
The recollection began with the observation that at the CIA, as in the private sector at the time, “they would just come with our paychecks and flip them upside down and leave them on our chairs.”[1]
Smoking
From there Kiriakou moved to a conversation he had had with a former colleague. “When I started at the CIA, you could smoke at your desk. And then after a year, they made designated smoking areas.” The rule produced an immediate adaptation: “so all of the managers made their offices designated smoking areas.” Asked whether smoking was really that prevalent, he confirmed it: “it was that big, yeah.”[1][2]
The barber
“There’s a barber in the basement of the CIA,” he says. “When I first joined, I was like, oh, I might as well just go get a haircut at the CIA barber instead of going halfway across town.”[2]
What he found there was not what the setting suggested: “I went down there and they had Playboys and Penthouses all over the barber shop.” Inside the CIA.[2][3]
The rest of the town
Agreeing that the compound is “like a whole city in there”, Kiriakou added the other services. Employees use the dry cleaner — “oh yeah, yeah, everybody does” — and “there’s even a little post office substation in there so you don’t have to go into town to mail stuff.” He used it all the time.[3]