The Kite Runner rescue mission
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In 2007, a former CIA colleague referred John Kiriakou, by then working as a corporate-intelligence consultant, to Paramount Studios, which hired him to secretly travel to Afghanistan and rescue the child actors who had appeared in the film The Kite Runner, along with their family members.

Real death threats over the film's content

Bootleg copies of The Kite Runner had circulated in Afghanistan before its official release. The film depicted two scenes objectionable in Afghan culture, a 12-year-old boy raping another 12-year-old boy, and a boy being forced into a homoerotic dance in front of a member of the Taliban, a scene Kiriakou notes was based on a true story. The bootlegs prompted real death threats against the child actors, some of them coming from the children's own family members.

The evacuation

With a literally unlimited budget from the studio, Kiriakou flew to Afghanistan by way of Delhi, hired a British security firm, and located the children's school in a poor neighborhood of Kabul, where he met with the principal and confirmed the threats were real. He bribed a senior official at Afghanistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for passports and exit visas, stacking $100 bills on the official's desk until the total reached $10,000, at which point the official agreed to issue all 27 emergency passports needed, since not one of the 27 people involved, the child actors and their extended families, held a passport already. The group was evacuated overland through Iran and on to Dubai.

While in Kabul, Kiriakou avoided staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, which was bombed during his time in the city; he was on a nearby balcony when the blast went off. He later avoided the Marriott in Islamabad for the same reason, it, too, was bombed, killing 45 people.

A two-week secret trip, exposed by a leak

The mission took two weeks, which Kiriakou told his own employer he had spent on vacation. His boss only learned the truth when Paramount itself leaked the rescue story to The New York Times as a success story.

See also

- John Kiriakou
