Dasht-i-Leili massacre
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The Dasht-i-Leili massacre was the mass suffocation of approximately 2,000 surrendered Taliban prisoners in unventilated shipping containers in the Afghan desert on November 30 and December 1, 2001. The prisoners' surrender, accepting roughly 2,000 enemy combatants at Mazar-i-Sharif, had been negotiated by the Central Intelligence Agency via the Northern Alliance; the transport order was issued by the CIA; and the loading and transport was overseen by Northern Alliance warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Operation

> The Northern Alliance came to us and said, "We can't hold 2,000 prisoners. What should we do?" And we told them to put them in trucks, truck them out into the desert, and let's just hold them there out in the desert until we can divide them up and send them to jails around the country. So [Dostum] was in charge of these prisoners. They trucked these 2,000 people jammed into containers out into the desert. And one of the 16 survivors told us that when they opened the trucks, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can, because nobody had punched air holes in the trucks, and there was no food or water. And so almost all 2,000 of them suffocated.

Kiriakou has given this account, nearly verbatim, on multiple podcasts, the surrender numbers, the sardine-can imagery, and the box-up all recur unchanged across tellings.

John Kiriakou's view, shared with other agency personnel of the period, was that Dostum failed to ventilate the containers deliberately: "We always believed Dostam did it on purpose because he was that kind of a psychopath."

In a separate account, Kiriakou described the prisoners beating on the inside of the containers because they could not breathe; Dostam's forces responded by firing bullets through the trucks, "Now you have air holes," Kiriakou characterized their reasoning, killing an untold number before the trucks had even begun the day-long drive into the desert.

The 2009 attempted reopening

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama pledged to direct the National Security Council to investigate the massacre and determine responsibility if elected. The investigation never occurred, "the agency got to him right away." Kiriakou says contemporary news coverage of the box-up amounted to just four lines in the Washington Post, entirely overshadowed by coverage of the Qala-i-Jangi uprising the same day. Once elected, Obama abandoned his campaign pledge, telling aides it was "better to let sleeping dogs lie", a position Kiriakou says he never shared: "I was not inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. Certainly not that one."

In 2009 Kiriakou, then senior investigator on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry, was approached by a prominent human-rights activist who introduced him to a witness, a former twelve-year-old child who had been concealed behind a rock during the "box-up" (the unveiling of the containers) and who had seen two English-speaking men in black t-shirts and blue jeans on the ground. The activist had requested a secret meeting for the introduction, a darkened, empty classroom at Johns Hopkins University; of the witness's account Kiriakou asked, "Who else could possibly be in the middle of the Afghan desert on December 1st, 2001, wearing black t-shirts and jeans and speaking English?" In another telling Kiriakou describes the boy's account as specifically identifying the two men as white, wearing blue jeans, boots, and black t-shirts, and speaking English, which he says directly contradicted the official account that no Americans were present at the site. Kiriakou wrote a Kerry-signed letter to the CIA inquiring whether agency personnel had been on the ground at Dasht-i-Leili, using an autopen to sign Kerry's name, with Kerry's permission. The agency's response, classified top secret and held in a vault Kiriakou did not at that time have clearance to access, was, per a colleague who relayed it to him, "go fuck yourself."

Kiriakou personally traveled to the Dasht-i-Leili site in Afghanistan, where he found human bones, femurs, ribs, skulls, still visible in the sand with weathered clothing despite the years that had passed.

When Kiriakou proposed to take the story to the Washington Post, Kerry stopped him: "And now he doesn't [want to get to the bottom of Dasht-i-Leili]." Per Kiriakou, Kerry said, "I've been thinking about this, and I think we should probably just drop this", because, as Kiriakou characterized it, Kerry "never wanted to do anything that could jeopardize his chances of becoming Secretary of State. That's what he lived for."

The box-up and the buried investigation

John Kiriakou describes the Dasht-i-Leili massacre: after roughly 2,000 Taliban surrendered on November 30 and December 1, 2001, they were sealed into shipping containers on trucks with no air, food or water, the "box-up", and suffocated; one of the 14 survivors said the bodies "fell out like sardines." A human-rights source told Kiriakou that a 12-year-old witness saw two English-speaking men in blue jeans and black T-shirts at the site. When Kiriakou sent a signed inquiry to the CIA, the agency classified its reply above his clearance; a colleague summarized it as "go f--- yourself."

Who closed it

Kiriakou's fullest account of the investigation, given while under house arrest, attributes its death to the Senate rather than the agency. He interviewed everyone at the State Department who mattered from 2001, interviewed several human-rights activists, and sent a letter to the CIA asking for clarification. "Within a couple of days, the deputy office director, or staff director, is what he's called, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told me that the investigation was dead, and to drop it."

This differs from the version recorded elsewhere in the corpus, in which the reply to his agency letter came back classified above his clearance and was summarised by a colleague as an obscenity. In this telling that exchange belongs to a separate inquiry, into the placing of CIA torturers under State Department cover. Both accounts are his; neither is reconciled here.

What he was actually looking for

The investigation was not into the massacre as such but into American presence at it. The tip came from a human-rights activist with a witness, a boy at the time, who did not go onto the truck, who described "two white men wearing jeans and black T-shirts and speaking English" at the loading. Kiriakou's question was the obvious one: "who's going to be in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, speaking English, wearing blue jeans, on November 30th 2001?"

He knew CIA officers were within twenty miles, because the box-up happened on the same day as the Qala-i-Jangi uprising. Asked what would have followed had he confirmed CIA officers at the site, he agreed to both halves of the proposition: they would have been implicated in a war crime, and the war crime "would have been detailed in an official report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." His own explanation for the shutdown is short: "I was poking the hornet's nest."

The count

In this telling he puts the toll at "18 survivors out of 2,000"; elsewhere in the corpus he gives 14. On the deaths themselves the description is constant, no air holes, no food, no water, an eight-hour drive into the desert, and when the doors were opened "bodies fell out like sardines out of a can."

See also

- General Abdul Rashid Dostum
- John Kerry
- Qala-i-Jangi uprising
- John Kiriakou
