KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Operations

15 articles in this category

  • Abu Nidal Organization — Per John Kiriakou, the CIA destroyed the Abu Nidal Organization from within by exploiting Abu Nidal's pathological paranoia: rather than recruiting members (impossible given the group's extreme anti-American orientation), the agency planted false signals that various members were already cooperating with US intelligence. Members began killing each other one by one. Kiriakou: 'Next thing you know, they've all killed each other and the only one left is Abu Nidal.' He also disbelieves the official heart-attack cause of Abu Nidal's death, attributing it to a Saddam Hussein 'control' decision.
  • CIA animal surveillance experiments — Cold-War CIA efforts to turn animals into listening devices, which John Kiriakou describes as failures — including microphones and cameras mounted on pigeons trained to land on the Soviet embassy, which could reach the compound but never captured anything meaningful.
  • Doctor Zhivago operation — John Kiriakou's account of a joint CIA-Vatican operation to smuggle Russian-language copies of Boris Pasternak's banned Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union via an international book fair — an example of 'declaring victory in small increments.'
  • Marriott double-agent trap — Operation in which John Kiriakou, posing as a CIA station chief in a Middle East posting, lured a hostile-service-controlled double agent ordered to kill him into a Marriott Hotel room, tackled him out of the bathroom, sedated him with Demerol, and smuggled him out under a sheet on a gurney. A children's-style hand-drawn map with an X led the CIA to the terrorist network's full weapons cache.
  • French village LSD bread experiment — John Kiriakou's account of a compartmented MK-Ultra experiment in which CIA operatives broke into the only bakery of a small French village he does not name and dosed the yeast with LSD, sending the entire village on an unwitting trip.
  • Girls' madrasa raid error — A mistaken CIA raid, conducted the night of the Abu Zubaydah operation, on the home of an elderly Pakistani man running an unlicensed girls' madrasa — the only phone in the neighborhood, which al-Qaeda fighters had been using and the CIA had been intercepting. John Kiriakou personally apologized to the man on the president's behalf and arranged compensation.
  • Italian election covert action — What John Kiriakou calls the CIA's very first covert action: bribing Italian journalists in the 1949 election to write in favor of the Christian Democrats, who narrowly beat the Communists — a operation he says amounted to stealing the election.
  • Magic box — An improvised cell-phone locator that two CIA Directorate of Science and Technology officers built from parts bought in a Pakistani bazaar during the hunt for Abu Zubaydah; it could point toward a phone when switched on, but too slowly to act on.
  • Marble Framework — A CIA obfuscation tool revealed in the Vault 7 leaks; per John Kiriakou, the agency embedded snippets of Farsi and Cyrillic in the code of domestic hacking operations so that any discovery could be falsely attributed to Iran or Russia.
  • Operation Gladio — A CIA, MI6, Vatican and NATO operation to leave 'stay-behind' sleeper networks across Western Europe after World War II in case of a Soviet invasion; John Kiriakou, who learned of it only after leaving the CIA, notes it was made public by Italian PM Andreotti in 1990.
  • Operation Paperclip — The program by which the CIA's predecessor brought Nazi scientists to the United States after World War II; John Kiriakou notes the FBI opposed it, that the Nazis surrendered to the U.S. fearing the Soviets, and that V-2 rocket father Wernher von Braun is buried near his home in Virginia.
  • Project Gateway — A CIA astral-projection and remote-viewing effort that John Kiriakou describes as a sub-program of MK-Ultra, launched after a fabricated source claimed the Soviets were experimenting with ESP.
  • Radio and TV Martí — U.S. government broadcasters beaming anti-communist programming at Cuba; John Kiriakou uses their accidental reach into Florida to explain why the Obama administration made it legal, in 2015, to propagandize the American people.
  • Raymond Davis Lahore shooting — A 2011 incident in Lahore, Pakistan in which CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot and killed two Pakistani men who approached his car with drawn guns; per John Kiriakou, Davis stayed at the scene per CIA "getting off the X" tradecraft, and the consulate SUV sent to rescue him struck and killed an uninvolved bystander en route.
  • Taliban embassy raid — John Kiriakou's account of raiding the last functioning Taliban embassy, in Peshawar, in the middle of the night after 9/11 — a raid that turned up phone bills showing dozens of calls to U.S. cities that stopped on September 10 and resumed on September 16, evidence of possible sleeper cells the FBI never translated.