Kuwait Liberation Day
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Kuwait Liberation Day in February 1991 was the day Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait by the U.S.-led coalition. John Kiriakou, then in his twenties as a junior Central Intelligence Agency officer, entered the country with U.S. Marines on the day of liberation. "It was very, very exciting. One of the highlights of my life, my adult life."

Kiriakou recalls the overwhelming smell of rotting flesh from Iraqi dead as coalition forces pushed north along the Highway of Death, and again on entering Kuwait City, especially near the Kuwait Towers, where retreating Iraqi soldiers had taken shelter and were killed. "There's this smell of rotting flesh that you just can never forget. I never smelled anything so foul, so rank. I wanted to vomit." He remained afterward at the U.S. embassy under Ambassador Skip Gnehm, reopening it as U.S. forces pushed out the Iraqi troops. With Iraqi forces having burned and killed the country's food supply, Kiriakou says he and other Americans present lived off MREs, some still dated from the Vietnam War, for the three months he was there, occasionally supplementing them with pomegranates, tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce bought from dhows that docked near the Kuwait Towers. Asked by a Kuwaiti why the U.S. had intervened, Kiriakou recounts being told plainly it was because of oil, not goodwill.

Kiriakou recalls colleagues' shock and dismay when the first President Bush called a unilateral ceasefire after liberating Kuwait without removing Saddam Hussein, followed by a decade of no-fly-zone bombing that he says had, in the end, almost nothing to show for it.

The Palestinians of Kuwait

Shortly after liberation, Kiriakou was invited to the wedding of the Kuwaiti defense minister's son, Prince Nawaf, later Amir of Kuwait, where he was told that Palestinians made up Kuwait's middle class of teachers, lawyers, engineers, professors and bankers. A Kuwaiti official at the wedding told him there would be no Palestinians left in Kuwait within 12 months, blaming Yasser Arafat's endorsement of Saddam Hussein; in the end the U.S., U.K., France and even Egypt pressured Kuwait to back off a full expulsion.

The DNC and RNC arrivals

Within days of liberation, Kiriakou observed the arrival of personnel from the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee at the U.S. embassy, there "to help [Kuwait] transition to democracy." Kiriakou's reaction at the time: "It's a monarchy. It's not going to ever be democratic. ... I was in my twenties then, not really savvy enough to know that this is all part of the plan."

The flags

The American flags waved by Kuwaiti crowds as U.S. tanks rolled down the central thoroughfare on Liberation Day were, Kiriakou subsequently learned, organized and distributed in advance by John Rendon, a private contractor and self-described "professional propagandist." Rendon's question to Kiriakou, in a subsequent meeting: "You remember when the American tanks are rolling down the main street, the Corniche? And a million people are out there waving little American flags. Where the hell do you think those flags came from? The country's destroyed."

See also

- John Rendon
- National Endowment for Democracy
- Operation Mockingbird
- Skip Gnehm
- Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
