The hotel bar operation is a story John Kiriakou tells to illustrate what bad management looks like inside a CIA station.
A senior enemy leader was coming to the country and was expected to stay at a boutique hotel with a bar in the lobby, bringing a large contingent of intelligence officers with him. The station chief’s suggestion to the officers was that anyone who wanted a piece of it should go to the bar, since the escorts were said to be drinking there.[1]
Kiriakou did not want to go: it was not his area of expertise, he did not speak the language and he did not care about the country. His wife, herself a CIA officer, told him he should — “you know how they are. If you don’t go, they’re going to criticize you.”[1]
So he went. The bar was smaller than he expected, and every seat in it was taken by a CIA officer. “I was just like, ‘you guys.’” He turned round and walked out.[2]
The bill
The next day the others were complaining, because the chief of station had found, after the fact, an obscure rule that alcohol is not reimbursed unless one is conducting an operational meeting. Officers who had sat there ordering twenty-dollar espresso martinis were about a hundred dollars out of pocket each — for an evening spent hoping somebody from the delegation might wander in, and then competing over who could claim a conversation with him.[3][4]
Kiriakou’s verdict has two halves. Of his colleagues: “bunch of bums.” Of the arrangement that put them there and then refused to pay: “it was bad leadership is what it was.”[4]
The same accounting rules produce the cover stop expense fraud he describes elsewhere — officers inventing receipts for the five to twenty dollars allowed at each stop.[5]