The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) — at the time, by Kiriakou’s account, the biggest union within the AFL-CIO — was John Kiriakou’s employer at the moment his life bent toward the CIA.[1]
The job
Kiriakou worked at the UFCW’s international headquarters on K Street in Washington while studying Middle Eastern affairs at George Washington University — a natural berth for a man with “a long history of labor involvement in my family.”[2][3] The post itself was junior: he has described himself as “just an intern working for a polling unit that they had,” a unit that ran public opinion polls for other AFL-CIO member unions.[4]
The assignment
In Dr. Jerrold Post’s class on the psychology of leadership, students were assigned to shadow their bosses for a week and write a psychological profile.[5][1] Kiriakou’s boss frightened him a little: an old-time tough-guy union organizer, rough and mean, whose back had been broken by scabs during a strike at a previous job with a garment workers’ union.[6][7][8][9] What frightened him were outbursts of temper, and of violence.[10]
Halfway through the week they got into a serious argument, and Kiriakou called him a racist — “which he was.” The man balled up his fists and took a stance.[11][12][9]
What happened next was not a punch. With both men squared up — Kiriakou putting his hands up and thinking “dang it, I went too far this time” — the boss instead said, twice, “my penis is bigger than yours.” Kiriakou’s reply was that he was crazy, and he quit and walked out on the spot, having concluded the man was dangerous. He wrote the paper immediately afterwards.[13][14][15]
The paper and its consequence
The paper Kiriakou turned in concluded that his boss was a sociopath — with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies — and potentially dangerous, with evidence to support it; Kiriakou stresses that he footnoted the whole thing, so that it read as analysis rather than as him venting.[2][13][15] His own reading of why it worked is that the analysis was concise, to the point, and backed with facts.[14][2]
It came back a week later with an A and a note in the margin. In one telling the note read: “I’ve never done this before, but I urge you to quit this job. I agree with your assessment that he’s a sociopath, and possibly a psychopath, and I think you should quit.”[16] In others the margin carried the four words that mattered more — “please see me after class.”[17][15] By the time the advice to quit arrived, Kiriakou had already quit, a week earlier.[17]
In the office afterwards, with the door closed, Post told him what the class had really been for: “I’m actually undercover as a professor here. I’m a senior CIA officer acting as a spotter looking for grad students who I think would fit into the CIA’s culture.”[17][15] Post — who, Kiriakou later learned, had founded the CIA’s political psychology division — had taken notice. The union job ended; the intelligence career began.