The Indonesian recruitment question was a hypothetical posed to John Kiriakou and four or five other applicants during the CIA interview process in the late 1980s. Kiriakou has recounted it as the moment that, in retrospect, revealed what the agency was screening for.
The scenario
The instructor set the problem as follows. The applicant is a CIA officer overseas who receives a cable from headquarters directing him to recruit the Indonesian economic secretary, because Indonesian economic information is needed. He cultivates the relationship for a year. The two men become friends, their wives become friends, the families holiday together — and then he comes to realise the man is not recruitable. What does he do? [1]
The answers
One applicant proposed doubling down and giving it another six months. A woman suggested the approach might be worked through the wives. Kiriakou has described looking around the room at these responses before raising his own hand and answering: you break into the embassy and you steal it. The instructor told him that was exactly what you do. [2]
What it was measuring
Kiriakou says he came to learn that his answer was a sociopathic tendency, and connects the exercise to an account he attributes to a CIA psychiatrist: that the agency actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies rather than sociopaths. In that account, sociopaths have no conscience, pass straight through a polygraph examination, and are impossible to control; people with sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience and do react to the polygraph, but are content to operate in moral, legal and ethical grey areas. [3]
Asked directly by his interviewer whether he had such tendencies himself, Kiriakou answered “probably”, and said he had been perfectly happy to break into homes and offices overseas to plant bugs and cameras, and to convince people he was their best friend to the point where they were willing to commit espionage — in some cases treason — for him. He attributes his lack of second thoughts at the time to a belief that the United States were the good guys and that he was acting for the safety of Americans. [4]