Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
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John Kiriakou served as the CIA analyst covering Iraq and Kuwait during the period leading up to and through the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent liberation. He has provided multiple accounts; this is the most detailed.

The Iraq and Kuwait accounts

A "training account"

Kiriakou was assigned Iraq as a "training account" on his first week at the CIA in January 1990. His boss told him: "Nothing ever happens there. It's the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution. Learn the writing style, and in a year you can transfer to something interesting like Romania." He has repeated the same origin story in near-identical terms across later appearances. He was also assigned Kuwait because the CIA needed to give him something to keep his day full; the two countries had good relations and senior Kuwaiti embassy officials, including Ambassador Saud Nasir, knew Kiriakou as "the kid from the CIA" at diplomatic events.

The premise of the assignment was that Iraq was static. Kiriakou says the same leadership had run the country unchanged since the 1968 revolution, all Ba'ath Party figures and generals, and that Saddam exiled anyone who grew too popular as an ambassador to a country like Indonesia or Japan simply to get them out of Baghdad.

The war years on the account

Kiriakou spent his first several weeks of the war on the CIA operations center's analytic task force, then was sent to Saudi Arabia as a liaison officer to the exiled Kuwaiti royal family in Taif, near Mecca. During the war he would receive "critic" cables reporting Scud missile launches and could predict the intended target from the launch location alone: a launch from western Iraq meant Israel, a launch from southern Iraq meant Saudi Arabia.

Kiriakou says the CIA did not believe Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program during the Gulf War, correctly, as it turned out, but was very concerned about chemical and biological weapons, which he notes can be crafted with minimal equipment, in effect out of somebody's kitchen.

The warning, June,July 1990

Unusual movements and the June 30 paper

In June 1990, a political analyst raised unusual Iraqi military movements at the regular 9:00 a.m. meeting. Republican Guard units were repositioning southward. The CIA's first warning paper for the White House went out on June 30, 1990, assessing that Iraq appeared to be trying to frighten Kuwait, though the nature of the threat was unclear. The CIA shared this assessment with the Kuwaiti government, which confirmed it was seeing the same movements.

Rumaila and the "19th province"

Kiriakou traces the immediate trigger to the Rumaila oil field, roughly 99% inside Iraq with only its southernmost 1% crossing into Kuwait; Kuwait had been "slant drilling", drilling at a diagonal to draw oil from the Iraqi side, and Iraq caught them at it, on top of longstanding claims that Kuwait was really Iraq's "19th province," carved out by the British. On June 30, 1990, Kiriakou and a colleague published a short paper ("typescript") to the president predicting Saddam was preparing to invade, but the prediction, made more than a month in advance, forecast only a limited two-to-five-kilometer incursion to seize the Rumaila field, since it was the slant-drilling that had prompted Iraq's initial threats of military action.

The Defense Attaché's drive to the border

CIA analysts in Washington debated whether Iraq would take the Rumaylah oil field only, cross the border briefly and retreat, or take the whole country. Since it took roughly six months to reposition a satellite in that era, Kiriakou suggested calling the US Defense Attaché in Baghdad and asking him to drive to the Kuwaiti border over the weekend and report what he saw. On Thursday evening, about a week before the August 2 invasion, the attaché called back: "Literally the entire Iraqi military is heading south. The whole military. It's going to be an invasion. They're going to take the whole country."

The CIA immediately published a paper in the President's Daily Brief, going to the president, vice president, national security adviser, secretaries of state and defense and their deputies, and the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stating it was the unanimous view of every analyst covering Iraq, Kuwait, or oil that Iraq would cross the border and take the entire country.

The Glasby cable and the "green light"

Baker's instruction

Ambassador April Glasby, stationed in Baghdad, was preparing to take her vacation when she requested permission to meet directly with Saddam Hussein and convey the American position. Secretary of State Baker sent her a notice cable, the most sensitive grade of cable, distributed only from the Secretary directly to the ambassador, with the CIA operations center receiving the only other copy. Analysts could read it in the operations center but could not quote or copy it.

Baker's instruction to Glasby: tell Saddam that the United States "does not take a position on Arab border disputes." The CIA disagreed with the State Department's framing, the CIA assessed this as an invasion, not a border dispute, but Baker instructed her to use those talking points anyway. Kiriakou's assessment: "If I were Saddam Hussein, I would have interpreted that message as an American green light."

The meeting with Saddam

In her meeting with Saddam, Glasby read her talking points. Saddam sat silently, as was his habit. He listened, got up, and left. He also had a particular power trip habit: when visitors extended their hands to shake his, he held his own hand low, forcing them to reach down and bow slightly. Kiriakou says WikiLeaks' publication of State Department cables (via Chelsea Manning) eventually surfaced the State Department's own version of that Glaspie,Saddam meeting, corroborating that she had told him the US did not care whether he invaded Kuwait.

2 August 1990, the Oval Office

"Don't take your jacket off"

On August 2, 1990, Kiriakou arrived at the office around 6 a.m. and his boss told him: "Don't take your jacket off. We're going to the White House." Kiriakou was twenty-five years old and had never been to the Oval Office except as a tourist. It is a morning he has recounted consistently across many appearances.

"Well, now what do we do?"

Seated in the room: President George H.W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, the National Security Adviser, the CIA Director, Kiriakou's boss, and Kiriakou on the couch. The president, on the phone with Kuwaiti Ambassador Saud Nasir when they arrived, was visibly preoccupied. Bush said "Gentlemen, please sit," and after sitting down asked: "Well, now what do we do?" Everyone turned and looked at Kiriakou, at 25, the most junior person present.

Kiriakou briefed the situation, then explained what was known about the Iraqis' announced governor of occupied Kuwait, Dr. Ahmed Katib, a Palestinian physician who had been George Habash's college roommate at the American University of Beirut and co-founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine with him. The Vice President responded: "Jesus Christ." The meeting ended shortly after. That same afternoon, Margaret Thatcher called Bush with the line that became famous: "George, now is not the time to go wobbly." Kiriakou believes that call pushed Bush to commit to expelling Iraq by force.

The room turning

In a 2026 retelling Kiriakou dwells on the moment itself rather than the intelligence. Escorted through the West Wing straight into the Oval Office, he found the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the CIA director, his own boss and himself; the question came, and "everybody turns and looks at me." What he remembers thinking is not the substance: "My friends would never believe me if I told them where I was right now." He says he still gets chills recalling it.

He gives his age at the time in this telling as 26; elsewhere he has put it at 25. Asked whether any part of him felt he did not belong there, his answer generalizes rather than denies: "Oh, everybody has imposter syndrome. All of us did." The internal version he recalls is "Why me? Who am I? I'm just some guy from Pennsylvania. And here I am sitting with the president, telling the president what to do." He adds that he liked it.

The war

The satellite problem

The CIA had no satellites positioned over Kuwait because Kuwait was an ally and no surveillance was warranted. To get imagery over the theater, the US had to move a satellite from over the Soviet Union to over Kuwait, a process that took months in slow orbital adjustment. This is why the ground offensive did not begin until February 1991. Kiriakou described watching a live radar display in his CIA office that showed American and Iraqi jets in real time; when Iraqi jets tried to flee, American jets caught them, and the radar blip disappeared, to cheers in the office.

Bush and Gorbachev

He also described President Bush calling Gorbachev the night before the ground offensive: "I know you're watching our military movements on satellite. I know you're friendly with Saddam Hussein. I'm asking you as a friend not to tell the Iraqis what we're doing." Gorbachev said nothing to the Iraqis. Additionally, Bush had previously warned Gorbachev about a coup being plotted against him, a CIA intelligence tip, and this gesture of goodwill contributed to Soviet restraint during the Kuwait crisis.

Kiriakou also recalls President Bush being utterly shocked that the first Gulf War was costing roughly $10 million a day, a figure he says is about ten times that now.

"We don't want peace. We want to destroy him."

As the January 15 deadline approached, a colleague announced that Saddam had accepted the American proposal to begin withdrawing. Kiriakou's response: "We don't want peace. We want to destroy him." His reasoning: if the Iraqis simply drove back to Iraq, nothing would stop Saddam from doing it again the following year. Kiriakou had spent months reading daily reports of massacres, rapes, and atrocities against Kuwaitis and had, as he described it, come to "feel Kuwaiti almost." Much of that daily reporting came from Kuwaiti resistance figure Asel al-Ghabandi, who phoned in accounts of Iraqi troop movements and atrocities knowing the calls were being intercepted and forwarded to the CIA.

The incubator testimony

Kiriakou recalls that when a young woman testified before Congress that Iraqi soldiers had thrown premature babies out of hospital incubators onto the floor and stolen the incubators, he recognized her: she was the daughter of Kuwaiti ambassador Saud Nasir, whom he had met at a diplomatic dinner party. He and his boss agreed she could not plausibly have witnessed what she described while in Kuwait during the occupation, and the CIA analysts watching concluded on the spot that she was fabricating her account.

Colin Powell's call and the 47 cruise missiles

Several months after the liberation, Kiriakou was at his desk when his secretary told him that General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on the phone, asking for him by name. Kiriakou took the call. Powell asked one question: if the Iraqis were planning to assassinate the president during his Kuwait visit, who would be in operational charge? Kiriakou answered: Kuwait operations are run from the Iraqi Intelligence Service's Basra Station, which is managed by Director Saber Abdul-Aziz Suri, who sits in IIS headquarters in Baghdad. Powell said "thank you" and hung up. Eight hours later, the United States fired forty-seven cruise missiles into the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad and turned it to dust.

Sanctions

Kiriakou says his long tenure working Iraqi sanctions convinced him that sanctions do not work and are cruel to the point of, in many cases, becoming crimes against humanity. As an example, he describes UN Security Council Resolution 986, under which Iraq sought sewer pipes to deliver clean water, only for the CIA to block the request, arguing the same pipes could be diverted to fiber-optic cable applications relevant to weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. A senior CIA officer told him sanctions are always a bad idea because they never affect the person actually being targeted; Saddam Hussein, he says, "didn't give a damn" about the sanctions and ran a sophisticated sanctions-busting operation out of the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, Jordan, run by a cousin, while it was ordinary Iraqis, women, children, and minorities like Kurds and Shia, who suffered. He cites the unresolved US intervention in Iran in the 1950s as a parallel example that countries do not simply "get back to normal" after such foreign-policy actions, noting US-Iran relations still had not normalized seventy years later.

Aftermath

The Shia uprising

Kiriakou says the US encouraged Shia Muslims in southern Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War but did nothing to protect them, resulting in a wholesale slaughter as Saddam turned helicopters on them.

Yemen, Cuba, and the Palestinian expulsions

He also explains that during the UN Security Council's 1990 vote on the use-of-force resolution against Iraq, the US pressured then-members Cuba and Yemen to vote yes; both voted no after PLO leader Yasser Arafat came out in support of Saddam Hussein. In retaliation, roughly six million Yemeni guest workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia, and Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE, wiping out, in Kiriakou's telling, the Palestinian professional middle class.

Planning the 2003 Iraq War

Kiriakou recalls a colleague privately predicting, nine to ten months before the 2003 Iraq War, that the US would go through the motions of seeking a UN coalition while knowing Russia, China, and France would oppose it, and would ultimately go it alone, entering Iraqi territory by March 2003, which is what happened. He also recalls finding a colleague at his desk redesigning the Iraqi flag with crayon markers during the pre-invasion planning period, an image he uses to convey how surreal the atmosphere was at the time.

The analyst who briefed presidents

The Mosbacher briefing

Kiriakou was, separately, especially good at briefings. He was once sent to brief Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, who Kiriakou sensed was already planning to resign and go into business, on the Kuwaiti royal family, using a six-foot classified family tree of the family that Kiriakou had compiled and that, he says, had never been done before. In one telling the briefing ran roughly three hours in Mosbacher's office, and before Kiriakou even got back to CIA headquarters Mosbacher had called CIA Director William Webster to say it was the most detailed briefing he had ever received. In another he dates it to around 1991,92, puts it at roughly two hours at the Commerce Department, and has Mosbacher calling it the most comprehensive briefing he had ever received as Secretary of Commerce.

Briefing presidents

Kiriakou went on to become a go-to Iraq analyst through the rest of the Gulf War, later briefing the president, vice president, and secretary of state directly. Over his career he personally briefed presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and was also asked to brief former president Jimmy Carter; he spent a full day briefing Clinton at one point. He characterizes Clinton as the smartest and most combative of the presidents he briefed, and George H.W. Bush as the most worldly, citing Bush's résumé running the CIA and FBI and serving as UN and China ambassador; he describes George W. Bush as the friendliest but least intellectually engaged, someone who believed he had hired the smartest people and let them run roughshod over him.

What Kiriakou draws from the case

SIGINT is never in the room

Kiriakou uses the Kuwait case as his standing example of the difference between an analytic judgement and a source. He grants the analysis: "analytically, yeah, we made the judgment that Saddam was going to invade Kuwait." What he says was missing is the thing no amount of interception supplies: "SIGINT isn't going to be inside the room when Saddam Hussein makes a decision to invade Kuwait ... you've got to have somebody in the room who can report back to you, so you know exactly what the thought process is", because it is the reasoning, not the conclusion, that a president needs in order to form a response.

Kuwait since

Asked off-topic in November 2025 whether he follows Kuwaiti news, Kiriakou said that he does, and that there is a very serious split in the Kuwaiti royal family which has spilled into the media. What worries him is the response: the government has dissolved parliament, which in his assessment will not help the split in the family at all.

The invasion's domestic aftermath

Kiriakou attributes part of Kuwait's internal political settlement to the occupation itself. Street protest for elections continued after the Iraqi invasion and occupation and after the re-establishment of the monarchy, until the royal family agreed that there had to be democratic elections.

He gives the invasion a similar role in the country's sectarian arithmetic, saying it was one of the reasons the royal family's turn toward rebuilding relations with Kuwait's Shia community was propelled forward, a turn that followed its own violent suppression of that community in the early 1980s.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kuwait Liberation Day
- Saddam Hussein
- April Glaspie
- CIA
- 1993 Bush Kuwait assassination plot
- SIGINT versus HUMINT balance
