The standard operating procedure assignment
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Describing how quickly he was put to work after moving into counterterrorism operations, John Kiriakou reduced the assignment to a single instruction.

The instruction

"My very first week, my boss said, 'Come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house.'"

The scope of the problem was defined by an existing list. "Of course, we had something called high value targets, HVTs. And that was the obvious list." He names its occupants: bin Laden, Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, "the usual cast of characters."

What the procedure had to account for

The fragment that follows in the same passage indicates one of the variables the procedure had to handle: the disposition of prisoners after a raid. Those who were cooperative, he says, would remain in the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

That detail matters because the alternatives were not symmetrical. In Kiriakou's fuller accounts of the same period, prisoners who cooperated produced usable intelligence and stayed in local hands or were shipped to Cuba; those who did not, and who were judged important, went to a secret site.

The mistaken premise

The passage closes on the belief the entire target list rested on. "We believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda," he says. "He was not."

That correction is one Kiriakou has made consistently, and it is characteristic of how he narrates the period: the operational tempo is described without apology, a written procedure demanded in the first week, a list of names to work through, and the intelligence premise underneath it is corrected flatly, without softening.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Abu Zubaydah
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Pakistan Station (2002)
