Another Bentley
===============

Asked about the quality of Pakistan's political leadership, John Kiriakou offered a scene he witnessed himself.

The meeting

"When Benazir Bhutto was in exile in Dubai, I went to see her with another, a senior officer. I went as the note taker."

She was living, he says, "in this five million dollar palace on the Gulf." They were sitting in the front room, the salon of the house, when they heard a car pull up.

The remark

Kiriakou gives what she said as her exact words: "so help me God, if he came home with another Bentley I'm going to kill him."

The arithmetic

What he said to his boss afterwards is the point of the anecdote. "She makes $60,000 a year. She lives in a five million dollar house, and he has a collection of Bentleys. Aren't they ashamed of themselves?"

The question he attaches to it is about the country rather than the couple: "how can they go back to Pakistan and look the Pakistani people in the face when their people don't even have shoes and not food to eat? I understand corruption is a problem there, but that level of corruption? Come on."

His conclusion is delivered as a summary of the whole subject: "well, those are the kinds of politicians that the Pakistani people have to deal with."

Where it sits

Kiriakou names neither the senior officer nor the date. The husband referred to is Asif Ali Zardari, later president of Pakistan.

The story is one of several in which Kiriakou describes Pakistani elite wealth as visible rather than concealed, he has elsewhere said the only large houses he saw belonged to generals, and that those generals were corrupt. Bhutto herself appears throughout his account of the region in a second capacity as well: as the prime minister who, in his telling, created the Taliban by putting madrasa students on trucks crossing Afghanistan to protect them from hijacking.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Benazir Bhutto
- Pakistani corruption and democracy
- ISI
- Imran Khan
