Training foreign intelligence services was the CIA assignment John Kiriakou held in the year before the 11 September attacks, after returning from Athens.[1]
He describes taking it in the expectation that it would be a dead end. He had been told he would have to sit in the penalty box for a year — meaning he would take a job nobody else wanted and probably would not be promoted for a year, and should simply tough it out until things turned around.[2]
The work
The job placed him in a training group assigned to travel all around the world teaching foreign intelligence services how to carry out counterterrorist raids: how to break down a door, how to seize people, how to conduct interrogations, how to disrupt terrorist cells.[1]
Sessions lasted weeks at a time.[3]
Why the CIA
Kiriakou gives three reasons why these countries asked the Americans. It is understood, he says, that the CIA has expertise in the area. Many of the countries either could not or would not ask the Israelis. And many, having been British colonies, simply did not trust the British to do it.[1]
To which he adds a fourth: the Americans have lots and lots of money, more than anybody else, so the training cost the recipient nothing.[3]
The programme was not universal. Kiriakou says they did this for the countries that needed help and with which the United States had good diplomatic and intelligence relationships.[4]
The portfolio
Kiriakou met his new supervisor on his first day and says the two hit it off immediately. The man’s opening line was a question about whether Kiriakou had beaten up a pastry chef — a reference to an earlier incident — and his own admission that he had done something similar in Yemen to a man who deserved it.[5]
Asked what he wanted to do, Kiriakou said he would do whatever was wanted. He was given the Middle East, and then — because the group was short-staffed and one colleague was, in the supervisor’s assessment, an idiot who could not be trusted with the job — two East Asian countries as well. Kiriakou noted that he had never been to East Asia but that it sounded like fun.[5][4]
The weekends
The assignment had to be reconciled with a custody arrangement that required Kiriakou to be in Ohio every other weekend. He raised it with his supervisor man to man; the supervisor, who had three ex-wives of his own, told him not to worry about it.[6]
Kiriakou said he was happy to travel anywhere in the world so long as he was back by Friday night and could fly out again on Sunday night. The answer was fine.[6][7]
In the year before 9/11, Kiriakou says, he made 24 international trips and never missed a weekend — and he credits his supervisor for it.[7]
The same posting produced the double agent operation that Kiriakou calls the most important thing that happened to him that year, which came to him through a station chief friend who asked him to impersonate himself in meetings with an agent working for a hostile service.[8]