Kiriakou has laid out where clandestine meetings actually take place, and the answer is narrower than the popular imagination allows. Most meetings, he says, are going to be either in a hotel or in a car.[1]
The car
The more sensitive the source, the more likely the meeting happens in a vehicle — and, crucially, one that does not stop. You meet them in the car, in his description, and then just keep driving around.[1]
The logic is straightforward. A stationary meeting can be surrounded; a moving one has to be followed, which is expensive, visible, and vulnerable to a surveillance detection route.
The hotel
A hotel room offers none of that, and so the training Kiriakou describes for a hotel meeting is not about avoiding a raid but about surviving one.
If they start banging on your door, his instruction runs, rip off your clothes and jump into bed — both of you. In his phrasing, you are going to be gay for a minute.[1]
The intended result is a reversal of the raiding team’s assumption. When they finally break the door down, the reaction Kiriakou describes is: we thought you were meeting because we thought you were CIA — and instead the scene explains itself in a way that has nothing to do with intelligence. After that, in his account, everybody is fine.[1]
What kind of cover this is
The technique belongs to a category Kiriakou returns to often: covers that work not because they are impressive but because they are embarrassing. The value is not that the story is believed in detail; it is that a counterintelligence officer who has kicked in a door expecting an agent meeting is confronted with a scene he does not want to file a report about, and the operational question he came to answer stops being the interesting one in the room.
The cost, on the same reasoning, falls on the source rather than the officer — which is why Kiriakou frames it as a last resort for a meeting that has already gone wrong, rather than as a plan.