Mir Aimal Kansi CIA headquarters attack
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The Mir Aimal Kansi CIA headquarters attack was a shooting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which John Kiriakou recalls uncertainly as 1992 or 1993, carried out by Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kansi. John Kiriakou describes Kansi getting out of his car in the turning lane leading into CIA headquarters with an AK-47 and going car to car shooting commuters, skipping cars with women, killing two and wounding seven before running out of bullets, getting back in his car, driving to Dulles Airport, and flying to Pakistan on a one-way ticket with no luggage.

The manhunt and the FBI's credit

Kiriakou says the CIA located Kansi several months later in a "flea bag" hotel in Quetta, Pakistan, after spending millions of dollars on the search. Because the CIA is not a law-enforcement agency, it turned the location over to the FBI, which made the arrest. Time magazine then ran a cover with Kansi's picture and the headline "How the FBI Got Their Man", a framing Kiriakou says enraged senior CIA officers, since the agency had done all the work of finding him while the FBI, in Kiriakou's characterization, "had no idea where Kansi was."

Legacy: keeping the FBI out after 9/11

Kiriakou says the Kansi case is why the CIA resolved never again to let the FBI take credit for its work. He connects it directly to the agency's post-9/11 approach to the 9/11 hijackers: rather than share intelligence with the FBI, the CIA's plan was to double the hijackers as assets, use them against al-Qaeda's leadership, and kill that leadership without any FBI involvement, "we kill the leadership, we save the country. The FBI had nothing to do with it."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
