The hot dog lady cable is John Kiriakou”s standing illustration of the gap between the CIA”s two halves. He tells it in answer to the question of whether the agency”s analysts get what they ask for from officers in the field. “The obvious answer should be yes, that they”re very focused on that. Unfortunately, the true answer is no. They don”t care.”[1]
The request
Still on the analytic side, Kiriakou was writing a paper touching on women”s role in politics in a Middle Eastern country. One figure interested him particularly: a campaigner for women”s suffrage who was “out there in the media all the time,” sought out by the international press, and who travelled to the United States to address women”s groups. He put eight questions about her through the agency”s tasking office, asking that they be sent to the station and an officer assigned to answer them. They were.[2][3]
The answer
About three weeks later a very short cable came back. “It said: ”oh yes, this woman is well known to us. We call her the hot dog lady, because we understand that when she was living in the United States she loved hot dogs. And here in the Middle East it”s hard to find hot dogs, and so she has them shipped from somewhere — Beirut or something. And she likes them with mustard and relish and this and that.”” Kiriakou”s reaction was immediate and practical: “I can”t send this to the president.”[4]
He went back to the tasking office and said so — that it was “a complete failure to collect the information necessary to send to the president.” The absurdity he spells out is one of consequence rather than manners: the question behind the eight questions was whether the woman should be taken seriously, because she wanted a meeting at the White House. “I can”t say, ”well, I don”t know if you should take her seriously, but she really loves hot dogs, and this is what she likes on her hot dogs.””[5]
What he took from it
“That was when I learned that there was a real split between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence — and the Directorate of Operations was going to do its thing, and it didn”t care what the Directorate of Intelligence was writing and sending to the president.”[6]