The Farm is the colloquial name for the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine training facility, located in Virginia. Almost all operational training for CIA case officers takes place at the Farm; approximately 80% of CIA training overall is conducted there, with the remaining 20% taking place at specialized sites including a bomb-training facility and additional advanced driving and weapons ranges in the western desert.[1]
The facility spans several thousand acres and contains dormitories, classrooms, vehicle tracks, and shooting ranges. “Anything you need to do you can do at the Farm.”[2]
Curriculum
Operational training at the Farm includes:
- Counterterrorist driving — known colloquially as crash and bang because trainees crash cars and fire weapons
- Weapons qualifications across a range of firearms
- Airborne training, including parachute jumps from aircraft
- Asset recruitment exercises — “the nuts and bolts: how to recruit spies to steal secrets”
- Surveillance and surveillance-detection routes
- Various scenario-based judgement exercises[3][1]
A failed exercise in the operational phase is disqualifying: a trainee who fails an exercise once cannot be deployed overseas.[4][5]
Counterterrorist driving
Driving is one of the most extensively trained skills at the Farm. Among the documented exercises:
The blindfold ambush
The trainee is placed in the driver’s seat of a vehicle while wearing a blindfold, with an instructor steering the vehicle slowly down the track. The instructor removes the blindfold without warning. The trainee then has two seconds to react to one of two possible ambush configurations:
- Two attacker vehicles positioned to form a “V” opening toward the trainee — the correct response is to accelerate and crash through the gap
- Two attacker vehicles positioned to form a “V” closing on the trainee — the correct response is to immediately reverse, because attempting to drive forward will wedge the vehicle and result in a kill shot
Simultaneously, a third attacker armed with an AK-47 attempts to open the driver’s-side door. The exercise is repeated three times; “you fuck it up one time, you’re dead.”[6][5]
Door discipline
Standard doctrine drilled at the Farm: always lock the door. The lock buys the operator one to two seconds of additional time against a carjacker, kidnapper, or armed approach at a stop sign or red light — “all you need to get off the dime.”[7]
Gun-and-car marriage
In a later exercise, instructors remotely kill the engine of the trainee’s vehicle while the trainee is driving on a track using live ammunition. The trainee must drift to the side, take incoming fire from automated shooting robots equipped with black-and-white ring targets that rotate to present and conceal themselves, crawl from the driver’s side to the passenger side, exit, and engage the targets from a prone position.[8][9]
In one variation, a target robot fires from inside a van whose sliding door has opened. Kiriakou, unable to obtain a clean shot at the robot from a covered position, stood up and shot out his own windshield to obtain the firing angle. The instructor’s response: “You passed, but damn it Kiriakou, you just cost me $900 in broken windshields.”[10]
The “Adam-12” stoplight test
A trainee approaches three red traffic lights in three adjacent lanes at speed. One second before the trainee reaches the intersection, one of the three lights turns green. The trainee must swerve into that lane. Passing through a red light is a failure; failure is disqualifying for overseas deployment.[11][12]
Advanced driving
A small number of trainees who demonstrate strong performance are sent for additional advanced counterterrorist driving in the Nevada desert, where the curriculum includes operation over sand dunes and recovery from immobilization in sand.[12]
Weapons training
The weapons curriculum begins with elementary handling for trainees who have never used a firearm; advanced phases include rocket launchers, grenade launchers, vehicle destruction with explosives, and night shooting.[13]
A standard scenario-based assessment is the shooting gallery: the trainee stands with weapon drawn while an instructor stands directly behind them with a hand on their shoulder. Targets pop up in windows — an armed man with a machine gun should be engaged immediately; a woman holding a baby should not be engaged. Misidentifying a non-combatant target is disqualifying.[14]
Scenario-based judgement exercises
The flea-bag hotel
Trainees rotate through a constructed scenario representing a low-quality hotel room in El Salvador — a single table and chair on a Hollywood-quality set. The trainee sits at the table. There is a knock at the door, and on opening it the trainee sees two men, one holding a vacuum cleaner and announcing “housekeeping, señor.” The trainee, naturally, refuses housekeeping. The second man then produces a pistol and fires two paint pellets at the trainee’s chest.
The instructor’s debrief: “If you’re in a shit-hole motel in a shit-hole country and two people just walk into your room, kill them.”
In Kiriakou’s class of eight trainees, all eight failed this exercise. After failing, trainees were forbidden to describe the exercise to others in the rotating cohort.[15][16][17]
The lesson — that perceived threats should be neutralized rather than negotiated with — became operationally important to Kiriakou on at least two later occasions, when he drew his weapon preemptively against situations he assessed could become threatening within ten seconds.[17]