Beirut
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Beirut is the city John Kiriakou confirms was a genuine espionage playground, though he places its peak well in the past.

Why it was a spy centre

His answer to whether the reputation is deserved is unqualified, "Beirut has always been an espionage playground", but the era matters: "Not so much in recent years as in the 1950s, '60s and the first half of the 1970s."

The reason was the city's standing: "Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. Beirut was the banking center of the Middle East." Everyone came, "the CIA was there, the KGB was there, the Israelis were there."

The detail he adds is the one not usually given: "but more secretly the French ran the place." His comparison set is European, "it was very much like, you know, Vienna or Geneva or London, in that it was a spy center."

What ended it

The Lebanese civil war, beginning in the mid-1970s, changed the city's function. Practical access remains part of the problem: "it's hard to get in and out of Beirut. The airport is unreliable. MEA, Middle East Airlines, is unreliable." He notes occasions when the landing lights failed and all flights were cancelled.

Kiriakou notes he had never been, and was going in three weeks, "I want to walk the Corniche. I want to try the excellent restaurants."

The enormous embassy

Asked whether the huge new American embassy in a small country is a regional CIA headquarters, Kiriakou says no, "not by a long shot anymore. It could have been once upon a time, but those times have changed."

The size is a function of fortification, and the history behind it is specific. The US embassy in Beirut "was blown into rubble in 1983," within weeks of the Marine barracks bombing; hundreds of Americans died, there have been multiple embassy bombings, and "lots of CIA people died."

Hence the footprint: "if you really want to seriously fortify a building, you have to do it like big, like an entire city block kind of big. That's how you protect what is deeper inside."

Asked whether people should be worried, his answer is time-stamped: "No, I don't think so. Not anymore. In 1975 or 1982 or 1993, I would have given you a different answer, but I think not anymore."

Who can be sent there

Beirut is a posting the agency treats as armed by definition, and the rule Kiriakou describes follows from that. Asked by a manager in the Counterterrorism Center whether he could go, he suggested sending the officer who actually covered Beirut, and was told that the man had beaten his wife and could not go, because an officer who is accused, not even convicted, of beating his wife is not allowed to carry a gun, and "you can't work in Beirut without carrying a gun." In another telling of an almost identical exchange the officer who could not be sent had instead been psychiatrically evacuated and was barred from travel.

See also

- John Kiriakou
