KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Places

19 articles in this category

  • Spies of Arlington National Cemetery — On the Walk With History podcast, John Kiriakou — author of Remains of the Day: A Definitive Guide to Washington D.C.'s Historic Cemeteries — toured Arlington National Cemetery and told personal and historical stories about the intelligence figures buried there, including OSS founder William Donovan, deputy CIA director Vernon Walters, codebreakers William and Elizabeth Friedman, slain station chiefs Richard Welch and William Buckley, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, and Mike Spann, the first CIA officer killed after 9/11.
  • Bluffdale NSA Data Center — The NSA's purpose-built facility in the Utah desert, characterized by John Kiriakou as having storage capacity for every phone call, text message, and email of every American for the next 500 years.
  • Djibouti — John Kiriakou's observations on Djibouti — Camp Lemonnier, once split by a fence between an American and a French base, now divided between an American side and a Chinese side; and the country's tiny intelligence service, whose entire director's office, Kiriakou says, was smaller than his own rental townhouse living room.
  • Balochistan drone base — Secret CIA drone surveillance base in southwestern Pakistan's Balochistan region; its location was inadvertently disclosed when investigative journalist Jason Leopold filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Pentagon aviation-fuel-delivery records and identified an outsized fuel flow to the otherwise-undocumented base.
  • Falls Church mosque — Large mosque on Route 7 in Falls Church, Virginia; the site at which John Kiriakou, in 1993 as a CIA Arabic-language trainee, met then-imam Anwar al-Awlaki on a class field trip; the same mosque at which the September 11 hijackers prayed the night before the attacks.
  • FCI Loretto — U.S. Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania; the low-medium-security prison at which John Kiriakou served 23 months of a 30-month sentence following his 2013 Espionage Act–era plea deal; the originally ordered "minimum security work camp" placement was countermanded — per Kiriakou, on Brennan's direct intervention — to place him in the actual prison alongside the general population.
  • Fort Gordon — The U.S. Army installation in Georgia where NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, interviewed on Kiriakou's show, worked as a contractor linguist before her arrest.
  • Greater and Lesser Tunb Islands — Two small, largely uninhabited islands in the Persian Gulf, belonging to the emirate of Sharjah in the UAE, occupied by Iran in a 1990s incident John Kiriakou recounts as CIA analyst; Kiriakou correctly predicted the UAE would not go to war over them given Sharjah's heavy trade dependence on Iran.
  • Greenland — Per John Kiriakou, the U.S. is seriously pursuing acquisition of Greenland — not by force, a White House contact told him, but by leaning on a 1951/1953 treaty with Denmark to claim de facto basing and resource rights; every EU member has pledged support for Denmark, and Kiriakou warns that forcibly taking Greenland could end NATO.
  • Guantanamo Bay — U.S. naval base in Cuba; site of CIA detention operations during the post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program; briefly served by John Kiriakou as interim Chief during the summer of 2002.
  • Mount Weather — U.S. government continuity-of-government underground facility on the Virginia–West Virginia line
  • Salt Pit — A CIA black site in Afghanistan — a former Soviet, then Taliban, dungeon and torture chamber the CIA took over for its own post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. Prisoner Gul Rahman died there; per John Kiriakou, the CIA never officially confirmed the site by name.
  • Somaliland — Self-declared breakaway state in the Horn of Africa that Israel became the only country in the world to recognize as independent, gaining a military base positioned roughly 30 seconds' flight time from Yemen; John Kiriakou, who visited Somaliland while posted with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Djibouti, describes it as a functioning city of about 100,000 unconnected to Mogadishu, al-Shabaab, or piracy.
  • Church of Saint Porphyrios — The Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that John Kiriakou describes as the oldest continuously operating church in the world; per Kiriakou, Israel bombed it while 24 women and children were sheltering inside.
  • Strawberry Fields — The CIA's nickname for a secret black-site annex at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base used for the post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.
  • Taybeh — The only fully Christian village in the West Bank, home to the Holy Land's oldest brewery; John Kiriakou recounts it being set on fire and its Marian festival attacked by the IDF with drones, helicopters and stun grenades.
  • The Farm — The CIA's clandestine training facility in Virginia; site of approximately 80% of all CIA operational training
  • Tora Bora — Mountainous cave complex in eastern Afghanistan that served as an al-Qaeda redoubt after the September 11 attacks. Per John Kiriakou — chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan at the time — the CIA killed al-Qaeda military-affairs chief Mohammed Atef there in October 2001, and Tora Bora was the backdrop to the hunt for the senior al-Qaeda leadership that culminated in the capture of Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou also recounts an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter he later recruited who survived a cruise-missile strike on a Tora Bora cave — one of only two who came out alive, his ears bleeding, describing the explosion as the most hideous sound he had ever heard.
  • Yemen — Country on the southern Arabian Peninsula; setting of five John Kiriakou trips between 1990 and approximately 2010, spanning the country's brief unification, its civil war, and its present condition as a high-threat operating environment for U.S. and allied diplomatic personnel.