Ex-CIA Agent John Kiriakou on the CIA’s Most Successful Lying Techniques
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How did John Kiriakou’s CIA career lead to writing The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques?
Well, the CIA has a well-earned reputation for dishonesty. Of course, the agency lies for a living. That's what they do. So why would you listen to former CIA officers to hear the truth? Well, you wouldn't, except if the CIA officer in question had gone to prison for telling the truth. People willing to suffer for telling the truth are the ones you listen to. And no CIA officer in recent memory has spent more time in prison for telling the truth than John Kiriakou, our friend. Well, he has written a brand new book on what he learned serving for so long as an operations officer at CIA. And it's called The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques. And it's a fascinating read. We are proud to be selling it right now on TuckerCarlsonBooks.com.
Here is part of our conversation with John Kirikou. John, thank you so much for doing this and congratulations on the book, which is absolutely awesome. I'm looking at a copy right now. So I can ask you a million questions. I'm just going to ask you one, and it's about deception. So the business to some extent of intelligence is deception. It's being deceptive, but it's also detecting deception in others, which is a really important skill, I think. How have you been trained to tell when other people are lying?
Well, there are a couple of different levels of training. For those of us who are just going out into the field as operations officers or case officers, you're given some basic training in how to read body language. When you ask someone a question and he looks up, for example, into the air as if he's trying to picture what it is that you're asking, That's that's usually OK. If he looks down, for example, that's supposed to be alerting to you that that perhaps he's coming up with with a lie. And sometimes I catch myself doing things like that. I actually do tend to look up into the air as if I'm working out a formula or something.
But then we can ask you to pause. So if you if someone looks up, he's likely telling the truth. If he looks down, he's likely lying. It's crazy, right? No, it's interesting.
It's one of these odd telegraphed behaviors that are just built into us. Unless somebody is suffering from, let's say, autism, you have to watch the eyes because the eyes, if a person averts his eyes, unnecessarily or regularly looking away, looking away constantly, that's usually a sign of deception as well. Now, if you're going into the Office of Security, you're going to be a polygrapher, you're going to be an investigator, something like that, you get all kinds of training, training that lasts the better part of a year in how to detect deception. And if I could, Tucker, I wanted to add one thing. One of the ongoing problems at the CIA is that you're trained to lie all the time. You're living a lie in most cases.
But a lot of guys just can't turn it off. So I had this boss who acknowledged to me one time as a junior officer that we all lie. We're trained to lie. You lie every day, all day. But some guys don't know how to turn it off or when to turn it off. One of the things that this boss told me was... I want you to lie all day. That's the nature of the job. But don't ever lie to security, finance or medical, because they're the ones who can ruin your life or send you to prison. And I also don't want you ever to lie to me. And that always stuck in my mind that, yes, we lie all day long in that job. And when you're serving overseas, your job is to break the laws of that country, which, of course, involves lying.
But you really do have to turn it off. And then, you know, it's no wonder that so many people at the CIA are married three, four, five times.
Exactly. I was just thinking that exact thing. I mean, how easy is it to turn off if you're living undercover during the day? It's a pretty short step to having a mistress now.
Oh my gosh, yes. I worked for a deputy director, Tucker, who had been married five times and every single one of his five wives had begun as his secretary. And this is a guy who made it right up to the top, but he couldn't turn it off.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How did John Kiriakou’s CIA career lead to writing The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques?
0:04–6:04
2
What basic training did CIA case officers receive to detect deception in the field?
6:04–7:15
3
Which body language cues and eye movements did Kiriakou describe as red flags for lying?
7:15–13:03
4
How does the CIA train specialists like polygraphers and investigators to detect deception?
13:03–14:18
5
Why do CIA officers struggle to ‘turn off’ lying and how does that affect personal lives?
14:18–16:49
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Tucker Carlson Show
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