Asked whether he was still at heart a spy who would like to return to the work, or whether he regarded the agency as tainted and assigned impossible missions, Kiriakou answered without hedging: yes, the CIA is tainted. He would not and could not go back, because that is not the CIA he knew.[1]
The conversation
The reason he gives for the qualification is a conversation from his years at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he worked with a man who had been a senior CIA officer and who became a good friend.[1]
The friend put it to him one day: you always talk about how much you love the CIA but how the CIA has changed over the years, and certainly now it is more of a paramilitary organisation than anything else. Then came the correction. “I always chuckle when I hear you say that, because the CIA that you describe never really existed. It only existed in your mind.”[1][2]
The rest of the argument, as Kiriakou relays it, was that the agency has always been a troubled organisation, and always an organisation antithetical to the American way of life. Kiriakou’s own good experience was explained away by rank: “you had a good time, but you were so junior… you didn’t see what was really going on upstairs at the top.”[2]
Where he landed
Kiriakou’s verdict on the exchange is that the more he thinks about it, the more he realises the man was probably right.[2]
He places the conclusion alongside his own politics rather than against them. He has always been a progressive, he said, and always a civil libertarian at the same time — and the CIA as it now stands, an organisation that gladly carries out operations even against American citizens, is antithetical to the American way of life.[2][3]
The remark is the closest Kiriakou comes to disowning the nostalgia that runs through much of his account of his own career. He does not withdraw the affection; he accepts that its object may have been a period of his life rather than an institution.