The CIA close-and-continuing-contact rule is the operational counterintelligence policy John Kiriakou has described as “written in stone”, every officer must report to headquarters any close, continuing contact with a foreign national, defined to explicitly include sexual relationships, so a name trace can identify hostile approaches.
The rule as Kiriakou states it
“There’s a rule at the CIA that is written in stone. If you have what’s called close and continuing contact with a foreign national, and that means you see them regularly or you’re sleeping with them, you have to report it to headquarters. You have to.”[1]
The compliance pattern
Kiriakou saw the reporting stream from the DDO’s front office. “When I was the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, I used to see all these cables coming in. And to their credit, officers would report like all the time. Usually on a Monday morning, or in the Middle East on a Saturday morning cuz the weekend is Thursday and Friday. ‘Yeah, I slept with so-and-so last night, and here’s her information.’ And we run a name trace and like, no, she’s just a local girl, or every once in a while you’d find, well, no, it looks like she was born in Russia, she had some kind of government service, or she was in training at some government school, and then you have to back off immediately.”[1][2]
The consequences
“Oh, you can be fired or even prosecuted” for failing to report. Where the foreign national turns out to be intelligence-connected, “you’re going to have to either stop or resign, and a lot of guys resign. And then they get married.” Kiriakou’s line to the interviewer about the choice: “You’ll never work in government again, ever.”[2][3][4]
The case of the officer who slept with her source
“I worked with this woman who had been a case officer overseas, and she recruited a guy, and she started sleeping with him. That’s fireable. You can’t do that. But she started sleeping with him, and then she reported herself. She’s like, ‘Oh, I recruited this guy and I started sleeping with him.’ Headquarters is like, ‘What? You can’t be a case officer anymore.’ They brought her back. Why they didn’t fire her, I never understood. They made her an analyst.”[4][5]
The end of the story: “So she comes back, she’s an analyst, she’s a lousy analyst. And then 9/11 hits. And we’re all like standing there watching the TVs, you know, the Pentagon’s on fire, and the World Trade Centers are collapsing. She’s literally hiding under her desk, literally. And then one of the people that worked for her said, ‘What are you doing under the desk?’ And then she grabbed her purse, and she ran like a scared cat, and they fired her. She sleeps with her source, she’s a lousy analyst, she’s a terrible manager, and then she runs for her life and abandons her people.”[5][6]