Category: Operations

66 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.
The 1991 Saudi plan for Gaza — A proposal John Kiriakou says he watched Ambassador Chas Freeman float to the Saudis during his first overseas tour in 1991 — that Saudi Arabia fund a port, an airport, a desalination plant and an electrical grid in Gaza. The Saudis agreed; Israel refused outright. Kiriakou raises it because the identical arrangement resurfaced in the Israeli press more than three decades later.
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.
Cleaning up after Tora Bora — John Kiriakou was not at Tora Bora. He arrived in Pakistan in January 2002, two months after the bombing, and says he went specifically to clean up what the battle had left behind — scavenging material, detaining the fighters too slow to get away, and mapping the smugglers' valleys the survivors had used to cross. In his account the clean-up was necessary because the encirclement failed: bin Laden, warned by an al-Qaeda operative working as translator to the commander of Central Command, left in the dark dressed as a woman in the back of a pickup truck, and at dawn there was nobody in Tora Bora to surrender.
Crypto AG — The Swiss encryption-machine company revealed in February 2020 to have been secretly owned by the CIA and West German intelligence, which sold riggable ciphers to governments around the world for decades. John Kiriakou, who held senior positions at the agency, says he knew nothing about it — it was held that closely — and refuses to describe it as a scandal: nobody will be prosecuted, several people will probably win medals, and an intelligence operation is not supposed to be honest or fair.
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.
Dumping cash in a Moscow bathroom — John Kiriakou's examples of what covert action has actually meant in practice — American commandos blowing up the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline, Afghan guerrillas hired to cross the Amu Darya and attack a refinery inside the southern USSR, and cash dumped in a Moscow bathroom to undermine the rouble.
French village LSD bread experiment — John Kiriakou's account of a compartmented MK-Ultra experiment in which the CIA dosed the only bakery of a small French village he does not name with LSD — in some tellings by breaking in at night and spiking the yeast, in others by contaminating the flour supplied to it — so that the hapless baker sold the whole village an unwitting trip. Kiriakou places it as the sequel to the San Francisco bacterium release and calls it, in the agency's own terms, a successful operation.
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.
"He's been ours since the '70s" — An episode John Kiriakou uses to convey the scale of CIA penetration of foreign political classes: spotting a former prime minister at a diplomatic cocktail party, rushing back to the embassy to file for a name trace and vulnerability assessment before anyone else could approach him, and receiving a same-day instruction to cease and desist because the man had already been an agency asset for decades.
Intelligence switching in the Iran–Iraq war — John Kiriakou's account that during the Iran–Iraq war the United States supplied top-secret overhead imagery to whichever side was losing ground, switching as the front moved — giving the Iraqis imagery when Iran advanced, and the Iranians imagery when Iraq advanced. His summary: 'So it was hideous.'
Israeli espionage in the United States — The long-running Israeli intelligence effort against American targets, which John Kiriakou describes from inside the CIA: Israelis barred from the headquarters building, 187 spies identified by the FBI in 1990, a critical-threat counterintelligence ranking alongside Russia and China, and a 2026 warning that activity had intensified.
Israeli training of American police — The practice, which John Kiriakou opposes, of Israeli police and IDF personnel training American local police departments, including at the Atlanta facility known as Cop City.
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.
The killing of Iranian police — A campaign of assassinations against individual Iranian police officers and domestic security personnel during the 2026 war, intended to provoke popular revolt by removing the state's capacity to suppress it. John Kiriakou attributes the killings to Israeli operatives and reports that they produced the opposite of the intended effect.
Magic box — An improvised cell-phone locator that two CIA tech officers built from parts bought in a Pakistani bazaar during the hunt for Abu Zubaydah. It could point toward a phone while a call was live, and did so exactly once — long enough for John Kiriakou to conclude the device was wasted time and to fly in a targeting analyst instead.
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.
MK-ULTRA in Canada — John Kiriakou's confirmation that many MK-ULTRA experiments took place on Canadian soil, and his explanation of why: the CIA asked the Canadian intelligence service for help with its anti-Soviet, anti-Chinese remote-viewing and LSD work, and the Canadians gladly gave it.
Mossad networks in Iran — The Israeli human-intelligence penetration of Iran that John Kiriakou calls larger than anyone suspected — thousands of clandestine reporters, many of them undocumented Afghan refugees paid the equivalent of fifty or a hundred dollars a month, run in person by spymasters inside the country and compartmentalized so that rolling up one network yields nothing about the others.
Mr. Fish — The cover name the CIA used for Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002 — invented because the Americans would not tell their Pakistani partners who the target was, and derived from the only thing they would say about him: that he was a big fish.
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.
Operation Spiderweb — The Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's strategic bomber fleet in June 2025, which John Kiriakou calls a brilliant operation and — against Volodymyr Zelensky's account — one Ukraine could not have run alone. Eighteen months of preparation, drones smuggled across eleven time zones by human couriers, and command from Kyiv all required outside help, he argues; and Donald Trump's uncharacteristic public silence afterwards is his evidence that Washington was in on it.
Pakistani troops for Gaza — The proposal, floated by Israel and Saudi Arabia in late 2025, to send some 20,000 Pakistani peacekeepers into Gaza — which John Kiriakou thought might be a good idea on cultural and religious grounds, and thought Israel would never permit, because a country that will not let journalists in will not let foreign Muslim troops in either.
Prisoner disposition from Pakistan — How captured prisoners were routed out of Pakistan in John Kiriakou's account — cooperation recorded in his reporting, headquarters consulted by telephone, most men flown to Guantanamo on a C-12, and the ones judged important enough sent, as he puts it, a different way.
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.
The propane truck ruse — The improvised environmental emergency John Kiriakou staged to empty a Middle Eastern cul-de-sac so a CIA lock-picking team could search a captured Hezbollah organiser's house — after his liaison partners rejected a gas leak on the ground that the country had no underground gas lines.
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.
Renting Afghan warlords — The CIA's opening strategy in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks — paying the country's warlords in cash rather than trying to buy their loyalty outright, captured in an agency saying that you cannot buy an Afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one.
Salt Typhoon — The Chinese intelligence operation John Kiriakou describes as having hit the jackpot — collecting data on effectively every American through the telephone companies — and his blunt assessment that the Chinese cyber unit is good and American defences are not.
Saudi nuclear program — Saudi Arabia's decades-long pursuit of uranium enrichment, nominally for nuclear power, which John Kiriakou notes was already old news when he arrived at the CIA in 1990 and which conventional wisdom has always read as a weapons programme.
Savas Kalenderidis — Greek intelligence officer, national hero and personal friend of John Kiriakou's, who was involved in the operation to protect the PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan at the Greek embassy in Nairobi in 1999 — an operation that ended when Turkish and Kenyan intelligence diverted part of Öcalan's motorcade and seized him. Kiriakou flatly denies the claim that the CIA and Turkish intelligence tried to kill Kalenderidis there.
The self-destructing terrorist cell — The CIA operation John Kiriakou describes in which a terrorist group was destroyed without a single agency killing — by approaching each member abroad in turn and implying that a colleague had informed, until they had murdered one another and the last man was killed by his own head of state.
Site 13 — The house in Faisalabad, nearest of the thirteen targets to the CIA safe house, where Abu Zubaydah was shot at two o'clock in the morning on the night of the raids — announced to John Kiriakou on the roof a mile away by the sound of a battering ram failing against a steel-reinforced door.
The Stinger buyback — The standing reward programme John Kiriakou administered at the American embassy in Islamabad — a hundred thousand dollars in cash, paid over the counter, for each Stinger missile the United States had given the mujahideen from 1986 and now wanted back before its forty-year shelf life ran out.
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.
The Bay of Piglets — The phrase John Kiriakou wished he had coined for the twice-attempted amphibious landings in Venezuela — and his account of one of the men rounded up coming ashore, who emailed him years later asking to appear on his show as a whistleblower on communism, and was told no.
The botched pitch — The one operation John Kiriakou describes as a failure of his career: a two-year development of a terrorist working under journalist cover, brought to the point of a recruitment pitch and destroyed at the table when his station chief seized the meeting and threatened the target instead of pitching him. The target fled screaming for police, the host government's deputy prime minister complained to the American ambassador, and the man later described the encounter to a third intelligence service as an approach by "two caricatures of CIA men."
The broken side-view mirror — The cold pitch John Kiriakou made in Athens against the incoming intelligence representative of a hostile Middle Eastern state — a manoeuvre suggested by his mentor Gust Avrakotos, in which Kiriakou snapped the mirror off the man's diplomatic car with a bag of books, established cover with the neighbour, apologised at the door, asked for a glass of water, and used the minute alone to kneel down and speak Arabic to the target's four-year-old daughter.
The Caracas checklist — The sequence of steps John Kiriakou says an operation to overthrow the Venezuelan government would run through — pressure Maduro into flight, secure the presidential palace, co-opt or bombard the military, take the television and radio stations, hold the main intersections of the capital — and his insistence that none of it is the hard part.
The Clinton-era asset cull — In the 1990s the CIA reviewed the file of every recruited asset in the world and dismissed any with a history of human rights abuses — roughly a third of its agents, in John Kiriakou's account, in a reform he says was reversed as though by a switch after 11 September.
The code room and the buried weapons — What John Kiriakou demanded when the officer he had cold-pitched in Athens agreed to meet him — access to his embassy's code room and all of its weapons — and the meeting in a hotel coffee shop, surrounded by armed CIA officers at every table, at which the terms were set.
The Colombian air bridge through Venezuela — What John Kiriakou says his own Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation found about drug trafficking through Venezuela — that it exists, that it consists of Colombian aircraft landing there en route to Africa, and that there is no evidence Nicolás Maduro controls it or knows when and where it happens.
The Faisalabad cash run — The drive John Kiriakou made to Faisalabad, Pakistan roughly two weeks before the capture of Abu Zubaydah, with two million dollars in cash in two duffel bags in the van, and the exchange with his colleague about why anyone would cheat the CIA out of twenty dollars.
The false volunteer — A walk-in at an American embassy who claimed access to a high-priority target, was placed under surveillance and found to be a restaurant dishwasher, and whom John Kiriakou deliberately intimidated into never approaching an American embassy again.
The families of the captured — John Kiriakou's statement that the wives and children of men captured in the post-9/11 raids in Pakistan were separated from them and sent back to their home countries — and that the prisoners were not told, and were left believing their wives were still in American custody.
The forged award certificate — A recruited source John Kiriakou says he brought to tears twice — first by telling him his reporting had gone directly to the president of the United States, then by presenting him with an award certificate Kiriakou had made himself in Word with clip art, the agency seal, and a forged signature of the director, which he then took back for safekeeping on the grounds that being seen with it would get the man killed.
The Grasshopper — A recruited terrorist source John Kiriakou ran under a cryptonym, who called him after midnight on a dedicated burner, met him behind a church with a paper bag of his wife's gold jewellery, and was given five thousand dollars from station funds as what the chief of station called an early Christmas bonus.
The hundred-dollar informants — John Kiriakou's explanation of Iran's mass detention of some 20,000 suspected Israeli spies after the 2026 twelve-day war: that most of those rounded up were undocumented Afghan refugees, targeted by Israeli intelligence precisely because Iran had spent two years expelling them, and recruited for about $100 a month to report troop movements and the addresses of nuclear scientists and utility headquarters.
The Jerusalem bluff — An interrogation in Pakistan in 2002 in which John Kiriakou, faced with a senior al-Qaeda prisoner working through the organisation's own resistance training, threatened to send him to Jerusalem rather than Guantánamo. Kiriakou supplied the account to explain a clip of the exchange circulating without its context.
The Kenya mission — Asked in March 2026 whether he had ever run a mission in Africa, John Kiriakou answered that he had — one, in Kenya — and then declined to say anything further about it, adding that he was not certain he was permitted to confirm even that he had been in the country. It is one of the clearest instances in the corpus of him marking the edge of what he will disclose.
The let-them-in strategy — John Kiriakou has claimed one of the ideas he contributed as CIA counterterrorism chief in Pakistan was to stop trying to intercept al-Qaeda fighters one at a time on the Afghan border, and instead let them cross into Pakistan and take them ten at a time in their safe houses.
The North Korea SEAL Team Six operation — The 2018 mission in which American special forces attempted to plant an eavesdropping device on North Korean soil, killed a boatload of fishermen and withdrew without planting it — which John Kiriakou uses to call Donald Trump a liar, because such an operation requires the president's signature on a finding, and to note that Congress was never told.
The plot to divert Maduro's plane — The reported CIA attempt to recruit Nicolás Maduro's pilot so that a flight carrying him into exile in Havana would instead land at Key West, where the DEA would seize him — a Noriega repeat that prompted John Kiriakou to ask why a government pursuing regime change should care where the deposed ruler goes.
The rooftop double agent — A 2001 operation in which John Kiriakou flew out monthly to impersonate a station chief in meetings with a recruited double agent, and, after the hostile service ordered the agent to kill him, frightened the man on a hotel roof rather than confronting him.
The San Francisco bacterium release — The MK-ULTRA experiment John Kiriakou describes in which the CIA waited for an unusually foggy day, released a bacterium across San Francisco and its public transit system to see how many people it could infect, and gave eight people a rare upper respiratory infection.
The Saudi request on Gaddafi — John Kiriakou's account of an approach by Saudi Arabia to the CIA asking that Muammar Gaddafi be overthrown by any means necessary, with Riyadh offering to pay for everything — a request he says was declined, and which lapsed only when Gaddafi announced he would turn his attention from the Middle East to African unity.
The Stratfor cables on Venezuela — Material John Kiriakou says WikiLeaks exposed on American operations against Venezuela — the training of opposition figures including Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López, and plotting to sabotage dams inside the country to help bring down Hugo Chávez. He offers it as an example of detail so obscure that few journalists know it, and as the real reason for the pursuit of Julian Assange.
The tier one walk-up — The recruitment John Kiriakou calls one of the best operations of his career and credits entirely to his mentor Gust Avrakotos: an approach to an official of a tier one country — one of America's greatest enemies — made by the simple expedient of walking right up to the man's house, a technique Avrakotos had used himself in the 1970s.
The two Tunisians — The first counterterrorist raid John Kiriakou led after arriving in Pakistan in January 2002, which produced two eighteen-year-olds from Tunisia who burst into tears when the door came down, one of them asking whether he could telephone his mother.
The toll booth plan — John Kiriakou's first idea for catching Abu Zubaydah in 2002 — to put CIA officers dressed as Pakistanis in the toll booths of the Lahore–Faisalabad motorway and grab him as he came through — drawn from his own summer job as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and abandoned as, in his own words, a terrible idea.
Training foreign intelligence services — The CIA job John Kiriakou took after returning from Athens — travelling the world to teach foreign services how to carry out counterterrorist raids, break down doors, seize people, conduct interrogations and disrupt cells — and why, he says, those countries asked the Americans rather than the Israelis or the British.
The weapons cache map — The single sheet of paper found inside an otherwise empty gun safe in the Middle East — a childlike map marked with an X and written directions past a palm tree and a large rock, which led John Kiriakou's team to a desert bunker packed to the ceiling with Hezbollah's arsenal.
ZunZuneo — Covert social-media platform built for Cuba through USAID during the George W. Bush administration, intended by John Kiriakou's account to instigate an Arab Spring-style uprising. He says Cubans were indifferent to it, the project died, and its existence became public only when it was leaked by accident to the Guardian.