Among the changes Kiriakou says he witnessed early in his CIA career, the one he returns to as evidence that the agency could be redirected from the top is a screening of its informants ordered at the very start of the Clinton administration.
The order
In Kiriakou’s account the instruction arrived almost immediately. “When Bill Clinton was elected, we were told every recruited asset who had a problem with human rights was to be fired. And they went through and fired fully 1/3 of all of the recruited assets in the CIA.” [1] He dates the message to “within the first day or two of the Clinton administration” — that the agency was going to respect human rights, and that assets with human-rights problems were to go. [2]
His own reaction at the time was that it was proof of intent. He remembers saying to a colleague: “Wow, Clinton is serious about this. This really is a different CIA.” [2]
Pressed on the figure, Kiriakou corrected a misunderstanding that the number referred to CIA staff. “No, it wasn’t 1/3 of the CIA. It was 1/3 of the assets recruited by the CIA to be informants.” [3]
Why the assets were dirty
Kiriakou’s explanation for why so large a share of the agency’s informants failed a human-rights test is that the collection requirement had put them there in the first place. “If you want to know what the communists are doing in the jungles of Colombia, you’re going to recruit members of the right-wing death squads that are going after the rebels in Colombia.” And, he adds, “sometimes members of those death squads kill Catholic nuns or massacre villages.” [3]
To characterise the position the agency had put itself in he quotes John McCain: “Never get into a fight with a pig because you both get dirty, but the pig likes it.” [4]
The new rule, as Kiriakou describes it, was a blanket end to that class of relationship — “no more close relationships like this with death squads, whether it was in Colombia or El Salvador or Guatemala or whatever.” He offers Manuel Noriega as the type of the asset concerned: somebody recruited who “was going around killing communists.” In those cases, “that was the end of the relationship.” [4]
What it was worth
Kiriakou treats the purge as real but temporary. He places it inside a longer arc in which the reforms that followed the Church Committee held legally until 2001, having already begun to erode under William Casey in the 1980s. [2]
The purge is the high-water mark of that arc, and in his telling it did not survive the attacks. “All of that changed on September 11th,” he says, and the agency reverted to what it had been before. [1]