Bashar al-Assad
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Bashar al-Assad was the president of Syria until his fall from power. John Kiriakou recounts one of only two times he gave Senator John Kerry unsolicited advice: after Kerry repeatedly called Assad "my dear friend" in a speech, the Lebanese ambassador and "every Lebanese in Washington" called Kiriakou furious. He told Kerry to stop; Kerry protested that they were genuinely friends who had ridden motorcycles together down to the Golan Heights. Kiriakou answered that, "be that as it may, he's a genocidal maniac." Kerry backed off.

Russian bases and the "illegal" U.S. presence

Kiriakou notes that about a week and a half before one 2023 interview, Assad traveled to Moscow and asked for two additional temporary Russian bases plus offered a permanent one, on top of the small Russian navy base already in northwestern Syria for decades, prompting State Department condemnation despite what Kiriakou calls the illegality of the U.S.'s own presence in Syria. He argues there are only three legal justifications for militarily occupying a foreign country, invitation by that country (as Russia has), an order of the UN Security Council, or that the country attacked you militarily, none of which apply to the U.S. troop presence in Syria. He says Donald Trump, as president, chose to maintain the Special Forces presence Barack Obama had established in northeastern Syria ostensibly to "guard the oil fields," which Kiriakou calls a war crime, since occupying a country's territory to seize its resources is illegal.

Assad, minorities, and the case against "moderate rebels"

Kiriakou states there is no such thing as a Syrian moderate rebel, the Kurds aside, and that the U.S.'s strategic error was pretending the Nusra Front, formerly known in Syria as al-Qaeda, was somehow moderate. He says U.S. allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anti-Assad forces, most of which ended up with Nusra and other al-Qaeda-linked jihadi extremists. ISIL/ISIS, he says, originated as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a byproduct of the U.S. invasion and occupation, and more radical than al-Qaeda because it considered al-Qaeda insufficiently anti-American, and after being pushed out of Iraq found open territory in eastern Syria, working alongside Nusra, which the U.S. had itself designated a terrorist group but could not convince its own allies to stop supplying. Against that backdrop, Kiriakou says Assad has a long history of supporting Christian and other religious minorities in Syria: the foreign minister was a Christian, women served in the cabinet and parliament, and Damascus was home to an active Jewish community with one of the oldest continuously operating synagogues in the world.

The chemical-weapons red line

Kiriakou disputes the attribution of the chemical attack that crossed Barack Obama's declared red line. He says twelve United Nations weapons inspectors who were on the ground, OPCW personnel he describes as whistleblowers, all of whom were subsequently fired, concluded the attack did not come from the Syrian government but from al-Qaeda, specifically the Nusra Front. Their stated evidence, in his account, was residue analysis showing no sign that a missile had been launched from the government side. He adds a motive argument: Assad had no reason to reach for chemical weapons having just been told explicitly that doing so was a red line.

Kiriakou characterises his own position as a middle road between the two dominant accounts, that Assad did it, and that the CIA did it, attributing the attack instead to a rogue element. His verdict on the red line itself is that it was hollow: the line was drawn, crossed, and nothing followed.

The captagon economy

Kiriakou says Assad converted the Syrian economy into a trafficking operation for captagon, an amphetamine-type club drug pushed across Europe. He reports Joby Warrick watching trucks carrying it cross the Syrian border in the autumn before their conversation, and a Syrian contact of the podcast confirming the account to him by phone, with the qualification Kiriakou treats as decisive. The contact's argument was that it is self-fulfilling: American sanctions imposed over the chemical-weapons episode cut Syria off from so much of the world that narcotics trafficking became the way the country stayed afloat.

After Assad's fall

Kiriakou notes that Syria's post-Assad president is a former al-Qaeda member and one of the co-founders of ISIS. He adds that the United States sent a full State Department delegation to meet the new leader and lifted the $10 million bounty it had been carrying on his head. Retelling it later he names the envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Leaf, "an old colleague of mine", and gives his verdict on the sequence: "if that isn't Bizarro World, I don't know what is." The subsequent decision to reopen the American embassy in Damascus he found harder to take than the bounty, calling it a little too much recognition of al-Qaeda for his taste.

His forecast for the country is bleak and specific. Syria is now "a failed state... akin to Libya or Somalia or Yemen," and the only route out he can see is Gulf money arriving "in a very big way", somebody has to build "an airport, water treatment facilities, oil refineries, hospitals, schools, decent roads." If the Saudis, Emiratis and Qataris do come through, his ceiling for the long term is modest: Syria might eventually "look like, let's say, Tunisia." On why Riyadh wanted Assad gone more than almost anyone, his answer is one word, "because he was Shia", and close to Iran.

The 2004 border understanding

Against the reading that Israel gained from Assad's removal, Kiriakou argues Israel had a working arrangement with him and gave it up. He says there had long been secret talks between the Israeli government and the Syrians, and that these produced a specific result: "they came to an agreement in 2004 not to fight over the border." In his account that agreement is the explanation for an otherwise odd fact, "that's why there were never border clashes." His objection to trading it away is the oldest one in the trade: "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't."

What Israel got instead, he says, is chaos, which it prefers: "the Israelis always win in Syria when there's chaos," wanting Syrians "to kill each other" and various factions to hold different parts of the country. He adds a material footnote, that the United States occupies the small part of Syria where oil is produced, and that the oil goes to Turkey rather than to Iran, Hezbollah or Yemen.

Kiriakou reconstructs the final week with a detail he treats as the tell. Exactly seven days before Assad was overthrown, he and his family flew to Moscow, prompting talk that he was fleeing; he returned to Damascus the next day but left his family behind, and the same aircraft made three further Moscow runs over the course of that week, carrying out, Kiriakou presumes, money, artwork, personal effects and furniture. At the end of the week he went back to Moscow and stayed.

The fall humiliated both of Assad's patrons. For Russia the loss included a major naval base, Kiriakou notes Moscow's plaintive announcement on the day of the overthrow that it hoped the new government would respect Russian bases, and that the new government simply ran over them. He rates the consequence for Iran as the greater one: Syria had been the land bridge by which Iranian weapons and cash moved from northern Iraq into Lebanon and on to Hezbollah, with informal onward routes to Hamas. "It's gone. Like, like that, just like that, it's gone."

Asked to forecast, he gave nothing good in the near term and slow development over the long one, the country having been so racked by war that he doubted anyone wanted more of it. Of Syria itself he speaks with unreserved affection, the friendliest people, the best food, and a history so deep that what a visitor to Damascus is looking at is mentioned in the Bible. Discussing the episode with Ted Rall, Kiriakou questions why Israel would have supported Assad's overthrow given the result was an ISIS-linked government on its own border, noting that this new Syrian government publicly endorsed the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran the day before their conversation. More broadly, Kiriakou says intelligence analysts avoid bold, outside-the-box conclusions, such as predicting Assad could be overthrown, for fear of risking their careers.

"There is no good guy"

Kiriakou explains his Syria position through an anecdote he concedes will not sound like one. He took his two eldest sons, the eldest now 33, then about eight, to World Wrestling Entertainment at Madison Square Garden, watched men break chairs over each other's heads, and asked "Buddy, I don't get it. Which one is the good guy?" The answer he got is the one he keeps: "That's just it, Dad. There is no good guy."

The transfer to Syria is direct: "It's possible to just have a situation where there is no good guy. And so, what you do is you support the least bad guy." He grants the case against Assad without hedging, "He was a dictator. He was the son of a dictator. He used a heavy hand against his own people", and then states what he takes the counterweight to have been: "he was the only thing standing between the Christian community of Syria and complete annihilation."

On the overthrow itself he assigns the decision and the partners: "we decided we didn't like his politics, and we worked with the Israelis and the Turks to throw him out," leaving Assad in exile. What followed is his indictment of the policy, Syria taken over by "the former deputy leader of ISIS, who apparently was chosen by the CIA," and "a genocide against Christians." His question is put to American professions rather than to Syrian politics: if the United States is "so pro-Christian, we talk about Judeo-Christian values," why does it "support the wholesale slaughter of the world's original Christians"?

Who the agency was fighting alongside

Kiriakou attributes the Syrian alignment to John Brennan by name and states it without softening: "we can't forget that it was John Brennan who decided to ally the CIA with al-Qaeda, which just changed its name to Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. We were actually fighting on the side of al-Qaeda, if you can imagine such a thing." He raises it in 2021 as the answer to Brennan's public commentary on domestic extremism, "and this is the same guy talking about how you're a traitor and I'm a traitor."

The Christian community argument

Kiriakou's stated position on Assad was never a defence of the government but a prediction about what would replace it. "I said on my own radio show, which of course has been cancelled thanks to sanctions by the Biden administration, I said whether you like his politics or not, Bashar al-Assad is the only thing standing between the Christian community in Syria and complete annihilation."

He reports a specific consequence: "the Washington Post then had somebody listening to the show, and they said that I was a threat to our democracy because I was raising these issues." The 2022 and 2023 accounts of the same Washington Post judgement attribute it instead to his criticism of a Pennsylvania judge who took bribes to send children to a private prison; both explanations are recorded as given.

See also

- John Kerry
- John Kiriakou
