George Habash
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George Habash was the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and in John Kiriakou's account a young Lebanese man at the time the group was formed. He and Ahmed Khatib, the medical doctor whom Iraq installed as occupation governor of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, were college roommates at the American University of Beirut, where they together founded the PFLP.

The Beirut roommate

Kiriakou's tellings reach Habash by way of Khatib's biography. Khatib was a black Kuwaiti whose mother had been a Sudanese slave in the household of the royal family, slavery persisted on the Arabian Peninsula until 1955, in his account, and who grew up resentful of that family and a minority in his own country. He was also, Kiriakou says, very bright, and the royal family gave him a scholarship to study medicine at the American University of Beirut. It was in medical school there that his roommate was Habash, and it was there that the two created the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Khatib returned to Kuwait, declared his support for communism, and remained a thorn in the royal family's side.

The Leadership Review profile

The connection reached the CIA's files by an incidental route. Kiriakou has said that in the month before the invasion he needed to get published to have any hope of promotion, and the Directorate of Intelligence had an in-house magazine circulated to analysts called the Leadership Review. He chose Khatib as his subject simply because the man interested him, and wrote a one-page biographical piece noting that Khatib had studied in Beirut, had lived with Habash, that the two created the PFLP together, and that Khatib was a physician and a communist. When Iraq invaded and named Khatib governor, the piece was pulled from publication and Kiriakou took it with him to the White House.

"Jesus Christ"

Asked in the Oval Office briefing whether the United States knew anything about who was now running Kuwait, Kiriakou answered that it knew a great deal: Khatib had earned a medical degree at the American University of Beirut, his college roommate was George Habash, and together they had founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In every telling the reaction is the same: the vice president said "Jesus Christ," and George H. W. Bush, who by Kiriakou's account genuinely did not know what to do, closed the meeting. In one account it was CIA director Judge William Webster who stood and thanked the room, which Kiriakou took as his cue to leave.

See also

- PFLP
- Ahmed Khatib
- Oval Office briefing, 1990
