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The regime change approval process

John Kiriakou's step-by-step account of how a proposal to overthrow a foreign government travels through the United States government — beginning as a memo written at an officer's own desk, cleared by lawyers at the Justice Department and the National Security Council, signed by the president as an executive order, and ending in a safe on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters while the order itself goes to the Pentagon.

The regime change approval process is John Kiriakou’s account of the route a proposal to overthrow a foreign government takes through the United States government. He gave it in detail in August 2020, prefacing it by declining to name one link in the chain — “I won’t say the name of the office because they’ll probably fall on my head like a ton of bricks” — and this article follows him in leaving it unnamed.[1]

The route

It begins informally. An officer with an idea “simply sits at your desk and you write a memo and you say, I would like to overthrow this government and these are my reasons for wanting to overthrow the government.”[1] That memo goes up the officer’s own chain of command, which signs off — “and they always do” — after which it is carried to the unnamed office whose job is to walk it through the rest of government.[2]

From there the sequence is legal rather than operational. The memo goes first to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, “the body in government that determines whether such an overthrow would be legal” — and, in his account, “of course, they always decide that such an overthrow would be legal.”[2][3] It then goes to the National Security Council’s team of attorneys, who repeat the exercise and reach the same conclusion, and then to the national security adviser, who decides whether it is “a good enough idea that it should go to the President.”[3][4]

If the president judges that the overthrow fits his foreign policy, he orders it as an executive order, signed by himself and the national security adviser.[4]

Where the paper ends up

The signed order returns to the CIA and is “physically put in a safe on the seventh floor in the CIA’s operations center.” Kiriakou gives the reason for the safe as a collision of two rules: it is a government document “so it can’t be destroyed,” but it is “so highly classified that no one can see it besides the CIA’s leaders and the CIA leader’s attorneys.”[4][5] The order to begin the overthrow itself goes to the Pentagon.[5]

Against that machinery he sets the rule he says is taught early: there are only three circumstances in which regime change is lawful — the foreign country has attacked the United States, its government has invited the United States in, or there is a mandate from the United Nations Security Council. “You can’t just decide one morning that you don’t like another country’s politics, and so you’re going to overthrow that government. That’s not the way that international law works.”[6][7]

He describes two generations inside the agency holding different views of this. Officers who had been there since the 1970s and 1980s were “gung ho for regime change,” treating it as part of the agency’s reason for existing; his own generation, he says, believed “we’re supposed to be the good guys … and regime change is just simply illegal.” The choice he draws from that is stark: either renounce it, “or we have to be willing to watch our own leadership be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”[8][6]

Why he objects to generals running intelligence agencies

The same passage contains his reason for opposing the appointment of military officers to lead intelligence agencies. The question he asks of any such appointee is “how did they get those four shiny stars on their shoulder?” — and his answer is that they got them “by saying, yes, sir, throughout a 30 or 35-year career.” What the post requires is the opposite: someone willing to say “Mr. President, let me tell you why that’s a terrible idea.”[9][10]

The banality of it

Kiriakou’s own gloss on the process is that its horror is procedural rather than dramatic. He reaches for a Banksy work — a cheap second-hand pastoral scene onto which the artist painted a park bench with Adolf Hitler sitting on it, admiring the view — and applies the title directly: “to me, that’s what this is. We all know this is wrong. We all know this is illegal. We all know that innocent civilians are going to die.”[11][12] The cost falls on people with no say in it, he says, because “this banal evil is what created the policy.”[12]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 28:10 on YouTube · Transcript
  2. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 28:41 on YouTube · Transcript
  3. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 29:16 on YouTube · Transcript
  4. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 29:48 on YouTube · Transcript
  5. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 30:23 on YouTube · Transcript
  6. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 25:55 on YouTube · Transcript
  7. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 26:27 on YouTube · Transcript
  8. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 25:21 on YouTube · Transcript
  9. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 26:58 on YouTube · Transcript
  10. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 27:34 on YouTube · Transcript
  11. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 30:58 on YouTube · Transcript
  12. ↑ Clearing the FOG, 2020-08-24 — 31:29 on YouTube · Transcript

Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.

Categories: Concepts