The seventy-two-year-old contractor
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The seventy-two-year-old contractor is John Kiriakou's account of a brief corridor conversation at CIA headquarters roughly six weeks after the September 11 attacks, which he says explained the agency's silence in response to his repeated offers to interrogate prisoners.

The offer that went unanswered

Kiriakou has said that he volunteered repeatedly to go to Iraq and told himself that his Arabic was excellent, so someone would need him to interrogate the al-Qaeda fighters and leaders being captured. 

The conversation

About six weeks after the attacks he ran into an old friend in a hallway, a contractor he describes as seventy-two years old at the time and since deceased. He asked where the man had been. The contractor looked around and said he had been in Afghanistan. Asked what he had been doing there, the man looked at Kiriakou as though he were mad and answered: "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?" 

Kiriakou has described the inference he drew immediately, that this was why they had not sent him: they did not need a translator, because they were not capturing anybody. 

The demand

He then went into the office of Cofer Black's deputy, for whom he had worked a couple of years earlier, and made what he freely calls a totally idle threat: that if they did not send him to Afghanistan immediately he would walk straight to Exxon with his Arabic and not look back. 

The deputy told him to take it easy and asked whether he could go to Pakistan instead. Kiriakou said yes and asked when; the answer was tomorrow. Asked what he was to do there, he was told he would be chief of counterterrorism operations. He accepted, telephoned his girlfriend, later his wife, to help him pack, and flew out the next day. He remained seven months.  

See also

- Pakistan Station (2002)
- Cofer Black
- Abu Zubaydah
- John Kiriakou
