Kiriakou's CIA recruitment started with a graduate school paper about his racist boss. His professor — actually a CIA officer undercover — graded the psychological profile and invited Kiriakou to join the agency. That practice is now illegal under 1993 EEOC legislation.
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At 17:20 · chapter starts 11:35
Kiriakou traces his CIA origin story to a graduate school class called The Psychology of Leadership, taught by Dr. Gerald Post — secretly a CIA officer working undercover. Assigned to shadow and profile a boss, Kiriakou chose the union organizer he worked for, called him a racist to his face mid-observation, and wrote a forensically detailed sociopath diagnosis. Post gave him an A and invited him to the CIA. Kiriakou recalls his early days parking far away just to walk through the CIA's main entrance past the Wall of Honor, nearly crying with pride. He also places himself within a family context: his liberal parents had argued about the 1976 Pennsylvania primary, his father backing Frank Church who had overhauled the CIA. After careful deliberation about the agency's ugly history, a friend's CIA-officer husband told him 'the bad old days are gone' — true for a brief period, before Reagan and Iran-Contra reversed course.
The practice of CIA officers posing as university professors to recruit students — how Kiriakou was recruited — was made illegal by Congress in 1993 under the EEOC.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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