S1E3 Golden Boy

THE BLURB: Having been recruited into the CIA by legendary CIA officer Jerry Post - and by applying himself completely - John's CIA career took off with a bullet. If ever there was a CIA Golden Boy, John was it. That fact that he came up as a golden boy would prove ironic in the end. In this episode, John goes from briefing the President in the Oval Office to the theatre of war itself: Iraq. It's good to be a "Golden Boy". But it isn't all good. SHOW NOTES For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ You can find "Just The Photographer with David Swanson" here - https://shows.acast.com/just-the-photographer-with-david-swanson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Kiriakou?

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 0:07John Kiriakou?

  Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick?

• 0:14John Kiriakou?

  Before we get down to it, a humble request. If you're enjoying the podcast, please help us grow. If you like, review, subscribe, join, or leave a comment, if you show the algorithms that you're not just listening to the podcast, you're doing something about it, it tells the algorithms to up our standings and suggest us to more people looking for a new podcast. That's a long-winded way of saying that our fate is in your hands, so please be kind. At the very least, tell your friends.

• 0:48John Kiriakou?

  When we left off, having told you where I came from and how my Greek background played an essential role in getting me where I got, I was recruited by a graduate class professor whose job, it turned out, was to recruit young people like me into the CIA. Having run the gauntlet of pre-hire testing and interviews, I received a job offer, though not when you looked at it from the CIA. Attended my orientation and looked forward with anticipation to the first day of the rest of my life. Now, that graduate school professor who recruited me, Dr. Jerry Post, he was a legend at the CIA. That gave my recruitment a little extra juice. As Dr. Post told me directly, while he could open certain doors for me,

• 1:33John Kiriakou?

  I was the one who'd have to walk through them and perform on the other side. That was fair enough. If I could make one plus one equal two, or three, or four, whatever it needed to be, that extra juice could really work for me. Mind you, I did not have this perspective back then. I didn't know any better. I wasn't planning anything. I was just riding the most amazing wave anyone could imagine riding. I was about to become a kind of a golden boy.

• 2:02John Kiriakou?

  So, I'm hired by LDA, Leadership Development Analysis, the Office of Leadership Analysis. And I meet my boss at the end of the very first day, it's Monday. And he said, "We decided to assign you to Iraq and Kuwait. Do you know anything about those countries?" And I said, "Actually, I do." Ironically, it's the office that Dr. Post had founded. He so believed in me. He denied it later, but I know he called them and he said, "I want him in LDA." And so, they hired me. On that first day, when my boss said, "We're gonna give you Iraq and Kuwait," I said, "Okay." Nothing ever happened in those countries, ever.

• 2:45John Kiriakou?

  We would go days at a time, sometimes, without receiving a single cable. Later on, it was not unusual to receive 10,000 cables a day. I said, "That's okay. I don't mind going slowly, being a little bored." And my boss said something that was important at the time, but is laughable in retrospect. He said, "Work hard, go to the training, learn the writing style, and in a year or two, you can transfer onto something interesting like Romania." I said, "Okay." So, I took it very seriously. I still remember the first submission for the President's Daily Brief I ever wrote.

• 3:28John Kiriakou?

  "There was a feud between the Emir of Qatar and his son, the Crown Prince, over who to name as oil minister." Like, nobody cares now, but in 1990, it was actually pretty important. And I wrote this, and it appeared not just in the President's Daily Brief, but also in the National Intelligence Daily, which goes to that next layer of bureaucrats with top-secret security clearances. And the ambassador wrote me a private, it's called an official informal, it's a private message, but it's in classified channels. And he just said, "We don't know each other yet. I'm the US ambassador to Qatar. Kudos on you. When you're ready to travel to the region, be sure to come and stay in Qatar. You stay at my house."

• 4:12John Kiriakou?

  To give you a little context for what it meant to be part of the PDB, the President's Daily Brief. It was like a reporter at the New York Times getting their piece banner headlined on the front page. When the President of the United States is reading what you wrote and then taking your advice to make policy. It's heady, especially for a 25-year-old newbie like me. And that fact alone, my age and rawness, well, that just doesn't happen. Not up until then, anyway. It's not normal for someone that new and that young to score entry into the PDB. And it's funny because I was in training with a young, really smart analyst who was working on Australia.

• 4:56John Kiriakou?

  Now, we don't spy on Australia, of course. It's a five-ice country. But you want to provide support to the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. So she would do classified biographies. And we're constantly meeting with the Australians, so she would do like 30 bios at a time. Well, I never had to do any bios because we're not meeting with Saddam Hussein or his kids or his cabinet. So I'd do one a year just to keep it fresh. It never occurred to me then that if you're working on Australia or Canada or whatever, that you will literally never be in the PDB. Ever, under any circumstances. Unless the Prime Minister of Australia is assassinated, you're just never going to be in the PDB.

• 5:41John Kiriakou?

  Well, we got to the point later, everything I wrote made it into the PDB. Where the briefer, the President's briefer, would come back and say, "Listen, the President has a couple of questions for you." And she would just hand me these handwritten questions. And I couldn't keep them because they're handwritten by the President and I have to send them back so that they can be placed in the National Archives. I wrote a piece one time and he wrote in the margin, "No way", with a smiley face, straight to the National Archives. "Everything is automatically classified at the top-secret SITK gamma level." So I'm getting better and better at the writing style.

• 6:22John Kiriakou?

  You've got 500 analysts, all writing and all competing every day to get in front of the President of the United States. And every paper that goes to the President has to look like it was written by the same person. There's just one style and everybody's got to write in that style. It's very specific to the CIA. I think that's a good thing, for the same reason that you don't put your name on the paper. This paper was written by John Kiriakou. No, this paper was written by the top CIA analysts on the subject. The President doesn't care what your name is. He's got more important things to think about.

• 7:03John Kiriakou?

  So I go to the writing training for six weeks, learn the style, and it's not just the writing, it's the briefing as well. And I was especially good at briefings. In fact, one time I was sent to brief the Secretary of Commerce, Robert Mossbacher. And, listen, I don't want to cast aspersions. It was clear to me from this briefing that Mossbacher was going to resign and he was going to go into business. And he wanted a briefing on the Kuwaiti royal family because he wanted to do business outside of government. I had done a classified family tree of the Kuwaiti royal family. It had never been done before. It was huge. It was like six feet across. We laid it out on his conference room table.

• 7:47John Kiriakou?

  I was in his office with him for easily three hours. And before I even got back to the CIA, he called the Director of the CIA, Judge William Webster. And he said, "You have an analyst on Kuwait who came over here to brief me today. It was the most detailed briefing I have ever received in my life." I get back to the office and my boss says, "Keep your jacket on, we have to see the Director." I said, "The Director? What happened?" Thinking somebody got killed, there's a coup attempt. He said, "Mossbacher called to say how much he loved your briefing and the Director wants to shake your hand." "Great!" So I go up and shake his hand. Now that was on Kuwait. Remember, nothing ever happens in Iraq.

• 8:35John Kiriakou?

  So Saddam Hussein, of course, was the air quotes "President of Iraq." This was the same leadership, and the same cabinet, and the same faces, and the same names, since the 1968 revolution. They never changed, nothing ever changed, and nothing ever happened. All Ba'ath Party people, and a handful of generals. And if they became too popular, he would exile them as ambassadors to Indonesia, or Japan, or whatever, just to get them out of Baghdad. In June of 1990, the Iraqis began rattling their cage. There is an oil field, called the Rumelah Field. 99% of it is in Iraq.

• 9:18John Kiriakou?

  It's a very narrow, very long, it almost looks like the country Chile on the map. Very narrow and long oil field, and just the southernmost 1% crosses the border into Kuwait. So it's 99% Iraqi. Well, the Kuwaitis drilled at a diagonal slant, it's called slant drilling, and they were stealing the oil. It's quite common, not hard to do, and the Iraqis caught them. So the Iraqis started rattling the cage, "The Kuwaitis are stealing our oil, the Kuwaitis owe us money, Kuwait's not even a real country, it was created by the British, it's really Iraqi, it's the 19th province." And we started paying attention.

• 10:01John Kiriakou?

  On June 30th, a colleague of mine and I published a paper, which at the time was called a typescript, no more than five pages, cut right to the chase, and it goes to the president. And we said that we believed Saddam Hussein was preparing to invade Kuwait. We predicted, of course, that he would cross the border between 2 and 5 kilometers and seize the oil field. But they kept rattling the cage. And we got to thinking, maybe it's more than that. Maybe he's gonna go in there and really punish the royal family. Overthrow them, maybe kill the emir and the crown prince. Maybe it's something more sinister than we've been expecting.

• 10:43John Kiriakou?

  At the time, I was a member of a team in the CIA softball league. The CIA wants its employees to work together, socialize together, marry each other, have sex with each other, affiliate with no one outside the agency. You wanna do quilting, there's a CIA quilting club. You wanna go praise God, there's a CIA Christian whatever organization. And you're all cleared, so you can talk about work when you're standing at first base. And one of the old timers comes over to me and he says, "Well, things are heating up for you these days, huh?" "Yeah, I'm excited about it, actually. Something, something's gonna pop." And he said, "Yeah, with that said, I'm not sure you fully understand the import of what's happening here." "What do you mean?"

• 11:25John Kiriakou?

  And he said, "It's not unusual for the countries we cover to go to war. It's highly unusual for the countries we cover to go to war with us." And I said, "You really think that's where we're headed?" And he said, "I'm sure that's where we're headed. Saddam's not gonna be able to stop himself." A couple of days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, we had a debate, an analytic debate, where half the analysts thought, "Yeah, he's gonna go in, he's gonna take everything." The other half the analysts said, "No, he's gonna go in, he's gonna take the Ramela oil field." I said, "Why don't we just call the Defense Attache at the American Embassy in Baghdad and ask him to drive down to the border and tell us what he sees?"

• 12:07John Kiriakou?

  See, in those days, it took literally six months to move a satellite from point A to point B. There was no such thing as Google Earth, or live feeds, or whatever. Six months to move the satellite. My boss said, "Yeah, that's a good idea." But I called the Defense Attache, I said, "Colonel, can you do us a favor? We're having a big debate here. On Thursday, can you drive down to the Kuwaiti border and then write back and tell us what you're seeing?" He said, "Sure." So he drives down there and turns around and drives back to Baghdad. And he writes us a cable, and he said, "Literally, the entire Iraqi military is headed south." So we wrote to the president, "It's gonna happen, and it's gonna be big, and he's gonna take the entire country."

• 12:49John Kiriakou?

  You know, it was funny, because, hadn't it occurred to any of us? The embassy in Baghdad at the time had like four people in it. We barely had diplomatic relations with Iraq. The embassy is, it's smaller than a house back then. So it just didn't occur to anybody to say, "I'll just send somebody down there." No, what was motivating him was nationalism, the desire for a legitimate port. The Chata' al Arab is, you can swim. People literally swim from one side to the other, the Iranian side to the Iraqi side, and the reverse. He wanted a relatively deep-water port where he could export oil. So what are we looking at here? Kuwait's gonna just collapse. The Kuwaitis barely had a military. And then what? Does he attack Saudi Arabia?

• 13:33John Kiriakou?

  Is this about all of the oil fields? Because Kuwait was just swimming in oil, and the Saudis had more than them. There's a very common misconception that Saddam was somehow in the pay of the CIA or in the pay of the United States. And I can tell you where that comes from. During the Iran-Iraq war, President Reagan made a strategic decision to supply highly classified intelligence, including overhead imagery, to both sides, the Iraqis and the Iranians. And the reason why he did that is because we hated them both. And we wanted the war to last as long as possible so they would just kill each other, just never stop killing each other. So if the Iraqis got a leg up,

• 14:15John Kiriakou?

  we'd give more classified intelligence to the Iranians and vice versa. It's a very cynical policy. And it worked. The war lasted about nine and a half years. There was a grave downside to us because you can't keep something like that secret. And so finally, in 1989, both sides agreed on a ceasefire. And word leaked out that we were providing intelligence to both of them. And so they both hated us. There's a famous picture of Don Rommsfeld, when he was first Secretary of Defense, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. He was instructed by the president to do that, to travel to Baghdad, to meet with Saddam, and then on the QT say, "Listen, we're gonna give you all the top-secret stuff you want on Iran."

• 14:57John Kiriakou?

  But Saddam didn't know that we were also clandestinely meeting with the Iranians, saying, "Listen, we're gonna give you all the top-secret stuff you need on Iraq. And if you need more, just let us know." On August 1st, 1990, I was getting ready to leave the office to go home. The senior analyst in my branch, Chuck, he said, "What do you think? Tonight's the night?" I said, "Yeah, I think tonight's the night. They're gonna cross the border tonight." He said, "It's gonna be a long day tomorrow. Get some sleep." Saddam had so many troops on the border that it was untenable. You gotta release the kraken or just send everybody home.

• 15:39John Kiriakou?

  His was more of a lightning strike, and there was no indication that he was gonna send his troops home. August 1st, I told my wife, "I think things are gonna get really, really busy starting tomorrow." And I went to bed early. And I got up early. I got to the office around 6:00. My boss said, "Don't take your jacket off. We're going to the White House." I'd never been to the White House except as a tourist. So we get in this car, the driver takes us to the White House. There's a Marine waiting for us, and he takes us to the West Wing, and then we go to the Oval Office. Now, mind you, I'm 25 years old. We go into the Oval Office, and it's the President, the Vice President, the National

• 16:23John Kiriakou?

  Security Advisor, the Director of the CIA, my boss, and me. It's absurd! And you know, the British Ambassador said something to me one time that made me laugh. He said, "You know, I go to the CIA all the time, and it always amazes me just how young everybody is." And I said, "Yes, Excellency, we're young, but we're crazy smart." And I remember thinking very clearly, my friends would not believe me in a million years if I called them and told them right now where I was. When you're in the presence of the President, you have to take your cues from the President. If the President sits, you sit. If the President stands, you stand.

• 17:06John Kiriakou?

  There are these two wingback chairs, one for the president, one for the vice president. Then there are two, like, slightly less comfortable, what look like really nice dining room chairs. And that's where the National Security Advisor and the CIA Director sit. And then there's a couch. So my boss is there and I'm there. The president sits down. He's clearly upset, perturbed. This is President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle. The National Security Advisor was General Brent Scowcroft. The CIA Director was Judge William Webster. The president sits, he says, "Gentlemen, sit, sit." So we all sit down. And then the president says, "Well, now what do we do?"

• 17:49John Kiriakou?

  And then everybody turns and looks at me. Everybody? It took me a beat. I'm just sitting there. "Oh, well, Mr. President, as you know, the Iraqi army crossed the border at O200. The Kuwaiti government has fled. And the Iraqis have taken the whole of Kuwait. Everything, every inch of it. I said, 'They're sending tanks to the southern border. They're threatening the Saudi oil fields. It's war.'" And then he says, "Do we know anything about who's running Kuwait?" And I said, "Yes, sir, actually, we do." Now, I got so down into the weeds on Kuwait as part of this job. We used to have this publication called The Leadership Review.

• 18:32John Kiriakou?

  If you work on a country that nobody gives a shit about, and you really, really need to get published because you have to be published to be promoted, you would write for The Leadership Review. Like Foreign Affairs. But it's classified. Every time you published in The Leadership Review, the article would be considered for an award. There was like a competition, the best biography and the best forward-looking analysis and the best this and the best that. And there was an internal rule that if you won one of these awards, it had to be included in your performance evaluation. Does it help to level the playing field? I'm getting into the President's Daily Brief literally every single day. And there are analysts there who had been there for years, who had literally never... Been in the PDB.

• 19:15John Kiriakou?

  So they've got to publish somewhere so that they can get promoted. To their credit, I mean, one by one by one, they would come up and give me a hug and pat me on the back. We're happy for you. This is what we all wait for. All of us wait for this big break and it came. And I was a nice guy. I was nice to everybody. I would remember people's kids' names and whose husband had surgery and I would ask, "Hey, how's Dave doing?" Or, "Hey, did your kid win that baseball game the other day?" That must have been fun. So people really were happy for me. Well, I had written this piece for the Leadership Review the month before because I wasn't getting published. And it was about Dr. Ahmed Hatib. He was a black Kuwaiti.

• 20:00John Kiriakou?

  His mother was a slave, a Sudanese slave of the royal family. In reaction, he became a communist. He was very, very bright. And he won a government scholarship to study medicine at the American University of Beirut. But while he was at AUB, his college roommate was George Habash. And together, they founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So Iraq invades Kuwait early on the morning of October 2nd and they announced Ahmed Hatib is the new governor of Kuwait. Ahmed Hatib? Holy shit, I've been spending the last two months on this guy. So we pulled it pre-publication out of the Leadership Review and I took it with me to

• 20:45John Kiriakou?

  the White House. So the president says, "Do we know anything about who is running Iraq today?" And I said, "Yes, sir. It's Dr. Ahmed Hatib. Do we know anything about him?" I said, "Yes, sir. He and George Habash co-founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine together." And the vice president says, "Jesus Christ!" And Bush says, "I..." Genuinely don't know what to do. He said, gentlemen, thank you. It's gonna be a busy day. And we got up and we walked out. My boss is like, you hit it out of the park. And in the meantime, the Iranians are saying to us, what are you gonna do about it? Well, a couple of things happened.

• 21:25John Kiriakou?

  That afternoon at 3 o'clock, Thatcher calls Bush and she famously says to him, "Now's not the time to go wobbly, George." That was like a smack across the face. Bush was inclined to be wobbly because he genuinely didn't know what to do. Are the Iraqis gonna withdraw in a day or two? It's gonna take us six months to move that satellite, first of all. Looking back in retrospect at George H.W. Bush's performance, I don't think he was out of his depth for a couple of reasons. Number one, he's one of those rare presidents who surrounded himself with brilliant people. Sometimes presidents are intimidated by the intellect of the people around them,

• 22:05John Kiriakou?

  and they don't want to appear stupid, and so they hire stupid people to make themselves look better. George H.W. Bush was one of those people who hired the best brains in the country. He'd been the CIA Director under Gerald Ford, and he was Ambassador to the United Nations and Ambassador to China, but he was not a military man. In fact, only ran the CIA for 11 months. At the very end of the Ford administration, and then when Jimmy Carter won the presidency, he went to Carter and said, "I really would love to stay on as CIA Director." And Carter said, "No, I want to put my own people in." And he named Admiral Stansfield Turner. Can you imagine how the world would have been different? If Jimmy Carter had kept George H.W. Bush as the CIA Director,

• 22:47John Kiriakou?

  Bush would never have been Vice President under Reagan, and thus probably would never have been President. Everything would be different. One of the reasons we as a government had trouble planning the response to the Iraqi invasion was that the conventional wisdom at the time... Was that the Persian Gulf was so shallow that we couldn't send an aircraft carrier in there, it was too heavy and the draft was too low. Margaret Thatcher told him, "Now's not the time to go wobbly, George." And so, in the next few months, we put six aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf. We believed too, that aircraft carriers are so big, that you can't turn them around in the Gulf, the Gulf's just not wide enough.

• 23:32John Kiriakou?

  "Well, that's silly, of course the Gulf's wide enough and it's not as shallow as we thought it was." So, each carrier battle group has a carrier and 11 ships, times 6. And then we also had ships in the Red Sea, and ships in the Arabian Sea, and ships in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Iraqis were completely surrounded, but they wanted to keep Kuwait, and they wanted to fight. They really believed that they were entitled to Kuwait. The 19th province of Iraq, that had been unjustly stolen from them by the British. The CIA immediately went on 24-hour shifts. We had what was called the Persian Gulf Task Force. I was immediately assigned to the task force. I did that for a couple of weeks, and then my boss called me down and he said, "We're

• 24:17John Kiriakou?

  gonna need to send you to the theater." Meaning the theater of war. I practically jumped out of my skin, I was so excited. I called my wife and I said, "I have to go to the Middle East." Went, tomorrow. "Well, how long are you gonna be there?" I said, "I have no idea, 3 months, 6 months, I don't know." I flew to Riyadh, and when I got to Riyadh, they told me that they're gonna send me to a city in the mountains called Tayeh, which is about 20 miles outside of Mecca. The Kuwaiti royal family had been relocated to Tayeh. And he said, "Just be kind to the Kuwaiti royal family. Whatever they need, give it to them. If there's something you can't give them, write a cable to headquarters and headquarters will give it to them. Just make sure they're okay."

• 25:01John Kiriakou?

  The emir of Kuwait, God bless him, his highness Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmed al-Sabah, he was a very sweet and kind old man.

• 25:12John Kiriakou?

  The invasion was so traumatizing to him, he would just sit in the garden and cry all the time. I remember writing a cable to the White House, and I said, "I'm not a psychologist, but I think the Emir is having a nervous breakdown." And he was. The Crown Prince, Sheikh Saad al-Ahmanis Sabah. I liked the Crown Prince a lot. He was also the son of a slave. His father was an Emir, the leader of the country, but his mother was a household slave. So he was black, and his half-brothers were white. They were very good from leader to leader in taking turns at who got to be the leader. I think I was there for three months. I went back to headquarters. I remember my boss saying, "Don't worry about promotions. The grades are going to catch up with you.

• 25:55John Kiriakou?

  You're the guy on Iraq and Kuwait." I was literally the US government's leading expert on Saddam Hussein's psychology. I was a GS 9 or 10? I was a junior analyst, and I'm briefing the president and the director of the CIA on a regular basis. There was one day, it was later on, it was in 1993. We're having our morning meeting, the daily meeting we would have every day at 9 o'clock just to go over what had happened in our area overnight. And the secretary walked in and she said, with this kind of perplexed tone in her voice, she said, "John, Colin Powell's on the phone for you." And I said, "For me? How does he know me?" "I don't know, but he asked for you by name."

• 26:38John Kiriakou?

  Everybody's like, "Ooh." It was funny, we all laughed. So I get up, I go to the secure phone. We all had secure phones called green lines on our desks, and they had to be separated by 6 feet from the open telephone line. So I get on the green line, I said, "Good morning, General Powell, may I help you?" And he says, "John, if the Iraqis were going to kill the president, who would be in charge of actually carrying out that operation?" And I said, "Well, if you're talking about the attempt to kill former President Bush, that operation was run by Basra Station in southern Iraq. Basra has jurisdiction over Kuwait operations, but Basra Station is headed by the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. His name is General Sabr Abdalaziz Aduri." And he says, "Where does he physically sit?"

• 27:23John Kiriakou?

  And I said, "At Iraqi Intelligence Service Headquarters in Baghdad." And Powell says, "Thank you." And he hangs up. I go back in the meeting. Everybody's like, "What do you want?" I said, "He just wanted to know who runs Kuwait operations for the IIS, the Iraqi Intelligence Service." Eight hours later, we fired forty-nine cruise missiles into Iraqi missile

• 27:49John Kiriakou?

  We flattened the building, but we did it at two o'clock in the morning. He was not in there. The only person who was killed was a janitor. And the next day, I said to my boss, "I killed that janitor." And he said, "I knew you were gonna say that. You didn't kill the janitor. You didn't know why Powell wanted the information. You didn't know Powell was gonna destroy the building. The janitor is on Powell, not on you." But I still feel bad about that. The janitor didn't try to kill President Bush.

• 28:21John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast,

• 29:06John Kiriakou?

  and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop. After Bush lost the election in 1992 to Bill Clinton, the Kuwaitis begged him to go to Kuwait just to run a victory lap. The main street in central Kuwait was Shariah Baghdad Avenue.

• 29:50John Kiriakou?

  They changed it to Shariah Bush. And an entire generation of baby boys, more than 1,000 little boys, all named George. George Ahmed Abdullah, George Mohammed Shah. So he wanted to go, put his fist in the air and do his victory lap. Ambassador Qadim said the funniest thing one day. We were working at the embassy. We had to shoo away these people who were spray painting on the embassy wall, "Long live Bush." And he says, "I have a problem that's unique among American ambassadors. I have a problem with people writing pro-American graffiti on the embassy walls." So Bush goes to Kuwait to do the victory lap. And immediately, the Kuwaiti intelligence service exposes an assassination attempt. And it was a big one.

• 30:35John Kiriakou?

  The Iraqis had recruited a group called Bedoun. Bedoun in Arabic means "without." And what it refers to is nomads without citizenship. So in order to be a Kuwaiti citizen, you have to be able to trace your lineage to the census of 1920. And if you can't do that, you can't be what's called a first-class citizen. If you can prove that your family was in Kuwait in 1920, but didn't answer the census questions, you're a second-class Kuwaiti. And if you are, you know, some Palestinian guy or Pakistani guy who got citizenship in the 50s, you're a third-class Kuwaiti. Each class down has fewer and fewer benefits. If you're a first-class Kuwaiti,

• 31:19John Kiriakou?

  government sends you a check every month from the oil revenue. Everybody's rich, everybody drives Mercedes S600s, everybody lives in a palace. The second-class Kuwaitis, they're business people. Maybe one of them owns the shopping mall. One of them owns the building where the bank is. They're doing very well for themselves. Maybe they drive Mercedes 300E. The third-class Kuwaitis are just thankful that they have a passport that says "State of Kuwait" on. Everybody else is Bedoun, so you don't have citizenship from any country. And they constantly roam around the desert between Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, herding goats and sheep. Camels, lots of camels. I'm sure that they would love to be citizens.

• 32:03John Kiriakou?

  Oil was discovered in the 50s and everybody got rich, except them. Because of that, they were easily recruitable by the Iraqi intelligence service. And the Iraqis said, "We'll give you millions of dollars if you help us blow up George H.W. Bush." And then, somebody ratted. The Kuwaitis wrapped up everybody. To the best of my recollection, they arrested 26 people. Almost all of them were Bedouin, some of them were Iraqi, maybe one or two were Saudi or Saudi Bedouins. Everybody was jailed for life. There's a difference between a Bedouin and a Bedouin. Bedouins also are nomads who roam the desert with their animals, but they have citizenship of countries.

• 32:45John Kiriakou?

  Most of them in that region are Saudi, some are Kuwaiti. Bedouin don't belong to anybody. You can be a Bedouin from Jordan, you can be a Bedouin from Saudi Arabia, you can be a Bedouin from Syria, or from the Emirates, or Oman, but Bedouin are in that triangle of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and they just don't belong to anybody. Tribally, they tend to be Kuwaiti. For example, the Al-Ajmi family in Kuwait, mostly in southern Kuwait, but the Ajmies also have a branch that just never bothered to register in 1920. The Ajmies who live in Kuwait are rich and accomplished, they wear the $5,000 suits

• 33:29John Kiriakou?

  when they travel to London, and the Bedouin Ajmies have nothing. I can imagine the conversation that they must have had in 1920. "The British says we need to register." "The British ambassador says we need to go into town and fill out the forms." "Screw the British ambassador, we don't work for him." Well, in retrospect, it probably should have filled out the form. And there's great resentment of the British, too. I remember telling my first wife, "Why so many people in the Middle East believe what they believed, and why the British are so unpopular? Like, the Arabs will smile at them and treat them nicely, and then just stab them right in the back, they hate the British." And I said, "Let me ask you something. You've heard of the Far East?" And she said, "Of course I have." "What's it far from?" She said, "I...I don't know.

• 34:13John Kiriakou?

  It's far from England, the whole world." Was described by the British in terms of the British. The Middle East, the Near East. It's all based on how far away it was from Buckingham Palace. And then it was the British that drew the borders. And they didn't draw the borders based on what tribe was in what area. They did it based on where the river was flowing, or which way the mountain range was cutting. And they just divided tribes and divided families. Look at Afghanistan and Pakistan. Citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan don't recognize that border. Because it was the British who imposed the border on them. Well, it's the same situation in Kuwait. In January of 1991,

• 34:56John Kiriakou?

  we have hundreds of thousands of troops in Saudi Arabia. We have planes in Turkey, in Egypt, in Syria, in the Emirates, in Qatar, in Bahrain. We've sent secret messages to the Iranians saying, "We mean you no harm. We will initiate no hostilities, but there's a possibility that we may accidentally cross into your airspace. If we do, we apologize, and we mean no ill will." And the Iranians said, "We accept that." So, once we got the Iranians squared away, and the Turks and the Syrians agreed to play ball, we were ready to go. From the Iranian perspective, this was a gift from God. The Americans are going to overthrow the greatest enemy

• 35:40John Kiriakou?

  that Iran has ever had. And it doesn't cost them anything. This was very short-sighted on the part of the United States. It was even more short-sighted on the part of George W. Bush. His father actually played this correctly. In January, I flew back out to the region. This time to Dahran, Saudi Arabia, which is 20 miles south of the border with Kuwait. We went in with the Marines. We wiped out the Iraqi military. General Norman Schwarzkopf was the commander of CENTCOM at the time. This guy was a friggin' military genius. He said in his memoirs that it was a maneuver that is taught to every first-year student at West Point. It's like the first thing you learn. You're here and the enemy's right in front of you.

• 36:23John Kiriakou?

  So, you just go around him and hit him from the rear. It's called a flanking maneuver. We had moved our satellite from over the Soviet Union to over Kuwait. It took all those months. President Bush called Soviet President Gorbachev and said, listen, we respect you. We know you respect us. We're going to attack Iraq and we're really hoping you don't tip off the Iraqis. We know you're friends with them. And Gorbachev said, do what you need to do and we're not saying a word. So what Schwarzkopf did was he had major elements of the US military go 20 miles to the west into Saudi Arabia, cut north into northern Kuwait and then

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 37:46John Kiriakou?

  From down from the Iraqi border, there's a highway that connects Kuwait city with Basra. Actually, the highway goes all the way to Dahrani in Saudi Arabia. It became known as the Highway of Death. The Iraqis attacked us first at Khafti, Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi tanks began to approach American tanks, but their turrets were facing backwards, which is a sign of surrender. And just as they got up to the American tanks, they swung the turrets around to engage us in a battle that became known as the Battle of Khafti. We wiped them out.

• 38:25John Kiriakou?

  In the meantime, with this flanking maneuver, we are going to start heading south from the Iraqi border to kill the Iraqi military as American tanks move into Kuwait City. So, we had overwhelming force coming north from the south. And the Iraqis said, "Shit, we gotta get out of here." But when they turned to run, we were also coming from the north to the south. And we just massacred them. I have absolutely chilling photographs from the Highway of Death.

• 39:02John Kiriakou?

  When we got into Kuwait City, I'll never forget this. There's this smell of rotting flesh that you just can never forget. I never smelled anything so foul, so rank, I wanted to vomit. There are dead Iraqis laying all over the ground. I remember going to Kuwait Towers. It's the symbol of Kuwait, the three big towers with the big bulbs in the middle of them. And the stench was a punch in the face. They'd gone in there to take shelter, and we just wiped them out. So, I remained in the embassy. Ambassador Skip Ganem was the ambassador, one of the finest people I have ever had the pleasure and honor of working for. He went on to greatness at the State Department

• 39:45John Kiriakou?

  and is now a professor emeritus of international affairs at George Washington University. I loved Ganem, and Ganem loved me. He knew that my expertise on Kuwait was deep. Kuwaiti society has this very unique thing, specific to Kuwait, and it's called the Diwania. A diwan is... how do you describe a diwan? It's like a salon, where people can sit and drink tea and talk. The Diwania, the word only exists in Kuwaiti Arabic. It's a meeting place for men, only men, to talk politics. Kuwait is actually a surprisingly free society. You can say whatever you want, criticize whoever you want. They may not like it. They may dissolve the parliament and then call new elections, if you really piss them off, which they did a week ago.

• 40:29John Kiriakou?

  You really are free to say, "Oh, the Crown Prince is an idiot. The Minister of Interior should be shot," whatever. And people are like, "Oh, I disagree, but, you know, give me another cough." Ganem said, "Nobody knows Kuwait like you do." He actually said this to me. "I want you to go with me every night to the Diwania." You could hear people saying, as we're entering, "Asafida la Mariki, the American ambassador."

• 40:50Speaker 01

  The American ambassador's come.

• 40:52John Kiriakou?

  So it was always the ambassador and me. And we had this system set up. He would scratch his nose if he didn't know who he was talking to. And then he would kind of tug on his earlobe when he wanted to leave. So I would get up and say, Mr. Ambassador, I'm so sorry, sir, but we have to leave. And we would go to the next diwaniya. We would hit four or five a night. So we would get up to leave and I'd say, the first guy you talked to was Ahmed Shamahmed. The second guy you talked to was Abdullah Mohammed. The third guy you talked to, he's the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce. The first guy was a big hero from the war. He blew up the Iraqi ambassador. And the next guy, his sister was raped by an Iraqi soldier and now she's the head of the Red Cross or whatever. And then there was one night, he said, I want to spend a night with the Badun. And I said, I've never met a Badun. That'd be fun.

• 41:36John Kiriakou?

  We had a Palestinian guy working at the embassy. He'd been there since the 50s, if you can imagine such a thing. Old man, but nobody in the world knew more about Kuwait than this guy. Yusuf. I liked Yusuf a lot. He was a good guy. I went to his little cubicle and I said, Yusuf, the ambassador wants to go to a diwaniya with a Badun. The Badun? I said, I know, I know, he wants to go out there and check it out. It's going to take a day or two, but I can arrange it. A couple of nights later, the ambassador and I, and there's always a security detail, of course. We get in the car and we drive way out into the desert, like desert desert, like sand dunes, going over the sand dunes. And the Badun had set up this giant tent. My God, it was like a circus tent. It was so big.

• 42:18John Kiriakou?

  And in true Kuwaiti fashion, they had generators out there and the tent was air conditioned, which cracked me up. So there were these two platters, and I mean, they're probably three feet across. They had to have 50 pounds of rice on each platter. And each pile of rice had the hind leg of a goat on it. So we'd sit next to the sheikh. The ambassador's in the middle. The sheikh is on one side of the ambassador, I'm on the other side of the ambassador. As a sign of respect, they had a servant pluck out the eyeball of the goat. And I was thinking, ah, shit. I really don't want to eat this eyeball. And the ambassador just pops it right in his mouth. And everybody's like, "Oh, ah, Mabruk, Mabruk, yes, I fear." Shit.

• 43:01John Kiriakou?

  So I plop it in my mouth, pretend to chew. Mmm, mmm hmm. Just swallow it whole, just to get it down. You eat with your bare hands in Kuwait. You eat, of course, with your right hand. You can't do anything with your left hand in Arab culture. Because they wipe their asses with their left hand. So only the right hand can touch food. That's why you only shake hands with your right hand. And when you pass food to someone, you can't pass it with your left hand. It's considered very bad manners. I ate raw beef heart one time that actually wasn't bad. It was in South America. It's a little rubbery, but the taste was good. You've got soy sauce and barbecue sauce. I wouldn't want to eat it all the time, but it was okay. There were about two dozen men in the tent.

• 43:46John Kiriakou?

  You just reach into the rice, and it's sticky rice. So you mash it with your hand and make it into a little ball. Then you tear off a piece of the goat's leg and stick it into the rice. And then just pop it into your mouth. And then at the end, they pour water on your hands and then rose water on your hands. And it smells good and it feels clean. And we got back in the Jeeps and went back over the dunes, back to Ahmed, and then north, back to Kuwait City. The ambassador asked me if I would like to stay. And I wanted to stay. But headquarters said, "No, there's work to do here. You gotta come back." But I was proud to play a role, as small as it may have been, in the liberation of Kuwait,

• 44:30John Kiriakou?

  the reopening of the American Embassy. And then I went back thinking,

• 44:36John Kiriakou?

  "I'm kind of a star now, so what do I do next?" I continued working solely on Iraq. Things were so important in Iraq now. They decided to bring in another analyst just to handle Kuwait. She sat next to me so I could help as best I could. But my focus then was solely on Iraq. We declared victory very, very quickly. That war only lasted a couple of days. George H. W. Bush called a press conference and announced the cessation of hostility. Many of us were furious. In retrospect, of course, he was right and I was wrong. He announced, "The war's over. We won. We're not overthrowing Saddam Hussein." The truth is, the Egyptians had said, "Don't overthrow Saddam. The Iranians are gonna have a field day."

• 45:19John Kiriakou?

  And the Syrians said, "If you overthrow Saddam, we're gonna quit the alliance and we're gonna ask the Egyptians to quit the alliance. Don't overthrow Saddam. It's only gonna empower the Iranians." Bush said, "They're right. We shouldn't overthrow Saddam." So we stopped. Saddam took that to be a sign of weakness. And so what he did was he started bombing his own people. First, in Saddam's sights were the Ahwari's, the Marsh Arabs. Those indigenous inhabitants of the Mesopotamian and Hawiza marshes that straddle the Iran-Iraq border in southern Iraq. Made up of many different tribes and tribal confederations, the Ahwari's farmed the swamps

• 46:00John Kiriakou?

  and the marshes and developed a culture and an economy based completely in them. But the Ahwari's were Shia Muslims, and Saddam was a Sunni. And that made the Ahwari's expendable. Saddam began murdering and forcibly relocating them. And he also started bombing the Kurds in the north. We were very, very close to the Kurds. Very close. I met routinely with Masood Barzani, the head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. These guys were heroes. Well, Barzani was more of a hero than Talabani was. Talabani was a used car salesman. But anyway, Saddam began killing a lot of his own people.

• 46:40John Kiriakou?

  And so Bush created the no-fly zones, south of, I forget what it was, the 36th parallel no-fixed wing aircraft. Same with the Kurdistan no-fixed wing aircraft. Well, we didn't say anything about helicopters. And so he just started shooting people from helicopters. Another thing that Saddam did that I didn't think could be done, he electrified the swamps. Now, they were growing rice in the swamps. They lived in the swamps for 2,000 years. And then they started being electrocuted to death, just wading into the water. So then we had to say, "No rotary wing aircraft." We had to tighten up the no-fly zones. We started shooting down...

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 48:02John Kiriakou?

  Iraqi MiGs, and we set in for the long haul. Like, there was no end in sight to this conflict.

• 48:11John Kiriakou?

  In a very real sense, the whole point of gathering intelligence, the whole point of spying, is to gain as much hindsight in advance as possible. Hindsight and insight. America would learn in time how little perspective it actually had. Like I said, we settled in for the long haul. We had no idea how long that would be and what that haul would do to us.

• 48:38John Kiriakou?

  In the next episode, the Golden Boy settles into his assignment in Bahrain, a beautiful, almost kind of surreal place, while a guy named Osama bin Laden begins to make his first moves against America. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou.

• 48:56John Kiriakou?

  Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone produced the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.