The propane truck ruse
======================

The propane truck ruse was an improvisation John Kiriakou devised during a double agent operation in the Middle East, in order to search the house of a Hezbollah organiser his team had just taken into custody.

The impasse

The man had been captured and interrogated by Kiriakou's liaison partners, who beat him without result. Kiriakou says he had to play by the rules, which meant he was not permitted to lay a hand on the prisoner, nor, he adds, did he necessarily want to. What Kiriakou wanted was simple and specific: Hezbollah's weapons, all of them.

With the prisoner refusing to talk, Kiriakou proposed calling in a locks-and-picks team to enter the house directly, on the theory that it was big enough to hold a weapons cache.

His partners objected: the man had a Filipino maid who never left the house.

The improvisation

Kiriakou's next proposal was to empty the whole street. The house stood in a cul-de-sac of six mansions; he suggested declaring a gas leak, an environmental emergency requiring evacuation.

His partners said that was impossible: the country had no underground gas lines, because it used propane. Kiriakou records his own exasperated reaction, asking whether he had to think of everything.

His revised plan used the objection as the solution. Bring an 18-wheeler full of propane, spill some in the street, and then declare the environmental emergency.

An hour later the tanker pulled into the cul-de-sac. Kiriakou went out, turned the enormous wheel on the back of the truck, let the propane gush into the street, and closed it again. The fire brigade was called, closed off the cul-de-sac and evacuated the houses.

His comment afterwards was a question to his partners: was that really that hard?

The entry

The locks-and-picks team was on standby and took five minutes on the front door, working with a stethoscope against the tumblers.

Inside they found an enormous gun safe, triple the size of any Kiriakou had seen for sale in the United States. That took a good twenty or thirty minutes to open, and proved to be completely empty except for a single sheet of paper, which turned out to be a hand-drawn map to the real cache.

See also

- Weapons Cache Map
- Double-Agent Capture
- Hezbollah
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
