Anwar al-Awlaki
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Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born cleric who became a senior propagandist for al-Qaeda. He was born in New Mexico, his father served as the Yemeni Ambassador to the United States and subsequently as Yemen's Minister of Agriculture, and spoke English natively, "without any kind of accent, just spoke English like you and I speak English." He self-radicalized during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and joined al-Qaeda in approximately 1998,1999.

1993 mosque visit

John Kiriakou met al-Awlaki in 1993, in a CIA Arabic-language-training field trip to a mosque on Route 7 in Falls Church, Virginia, where al-Awlaki was the imam. The class, three students from the CIA's Arabic-language program, was given a tour of the mosque, a Q&A session, and tea.

Eight years later, the same mosque was where the September 11 hijackers prayed the night before the attacks. Following 9/11, when Kiriakou mentioned in passing that he had personally met al-Awlaki, agency security teams interviewed him at length, "because everybody else had left the agency by then. ... I was the only one left who had actually met al-Awlaki."

Yemen pursuit

In approximately 2010, while traveling in Yemen as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator, Kiriakou met with the U.S. FBI legal attaché at the embassy. The attaché reported full real-time location knowledge of al-Awlaki: "I know when al-Awlaki blows a fart. ... I know al-Awlaki's location to within three feet, 24 hours a day." Kiriakou's question of why the FBI did not act produced the response: "Well, that's the other side of the hall's job." The CIA killed al-Awlaki by drone strike shortly afterward.

Retelling the exchange, Kiriakou dates the trip to 2011 and specifies his role, senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working for John Kerry, with the legal attaché his first meeting on arrival. He also gives a blunter version of the answer he received. Having joked that the attaché ought to be out looking for al-Awlaki and been told the Bureau knew his position to within three feet around the clock, he asked "So why don't you arrest him?", and reports the reason plainly: "there was never any intention of arresting him. The intent was to track him and to kill him. That was a policy decision that was made."

Whether he had been an asset

Presented with the theory that al-Awlaki had once worked with the CIA and was killed partly because of what he knew, Kiriakou called it "entirely plausible," and offered his own version: "I think he was probably a CIA asset at one time... and I think that he self-radicalized after a while, and they just decided to take him out at a time and place of their choosing." The question he attaches to it is why al-Awlaki was allowed to operate as long as he was, "why did we let him go as far as he did?" In this account he places his own meeting with al-Awlaki among a very small number of CIA officers who ever met him, and adds that the Arabic class was taken to the mosque to learn religious vocabulary, was shown an Arabic-language bookshop, and went to lunch with him afterwards.

Operational assessment

In the 2025 Dalton Fischer interview Kiriakou was asked whether al-Awlaki had directed the bomb-in-rectum assassination attempt against Prince Muhammad bin Naif. Kiriakou stated that the rumor existed but he had never believed it, on the ground that al-Awlaki was "more of a propagandist than ... operational in any way."

Obama's American targets (Scott Michael Nathan)

John Kiriakou cites Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaeda's spokesman, an American citizen born in Albuquerque, as proof Barack Obama had "no compunction" about killing Americans by drone, noting Obama killed Awlaki and then, a week later, his 16-year-old American son and 16-year-old American nephew "just sitting in a coffee shop." Kiriakou has separately made the same point discussing the Tuesday morning kill list, noting the US had "already killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the spokesman for al-Qaeda, and his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew", none of whom had ever been charged with any crime. Kiriakou has given the nephew's age with some variation across interviews, 16 in most tellings, 15 in at least one, and has dated the follow-up strike at anywhere from six days to a week after al-Awlaki's death, consistently describing both the son and the nephew as having been killed while drinking tea or sitting at a café. In the austin-and-matt telling, officials called the second strike an accident.

Kiriakou frames Obama specifically as the first U.S. president to kill American citizens without trial, calling al-Awlaki "a very bad guy" but arguing that, as an American citizen, he had the constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law rather than be killed by drone strike. A week after al-Awlaki's killing, the U.S. fired two more missiles into the same Yemeni village and killed his 16-year-old son and his 16-year-old nephew, both American citizens; Kiriakou says the U.S. has a policy of never apologizing for such killings, and that the only official explanation offered was that "the targeting information was faulty." He has separately said the strike that killed al-Awlaki himself, despite al-Awlaki never having been charged with a crime, was legally justified by Attorney General Eric Holder.

In one later telling Kiriakou adds a third killing to the sequence: after the son and the nephew, "then we murdered his daughter just for good measure, an 8-year-old, which made Obama a child killer." He states the underlying objection in its most compressed form, "We murdered him without ever charging him with a crime. He had a constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law and to be judged by a jury of his peers", and grounds the doctrine in Eric Holder's answer to Rand Paul: "If the president of the United States doesn't like your politics, he can make you vapor with a missile." His closing observation is that "nobody really seems to care."

The imam, the tour and the bookstore

John Kiriakou says he was one of a very small handful of CIA officers who had actually met Awlaki. The occasion was a language lesson: his Arabic teacher, a CIA employee, took the class to the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, where Awlaki was imam, so they could learn the vocabulary associated with Islam. Awlaki gave them a tour of the mosque, took them to the Arabic-language bookstore, and then went to lunch with them.

Within three feet

In 2011, as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for John Kerry, Kiriakou travelled to Yemen to conduct a study. His first meeting was with the FBI legal attaché at the American embassy, and he made a joke of it, what are you doing sitting here, you should be out looking for Anwar al-Awlaki. The answer was: "We know where Anoir Alaki is within 3 ft 24 hours a day." Kiriakou asked why they did not arrest him.

There was never any intention of arresting him, he concluded: the intent was to track him and kill him, and that was a policy decision. Asked whether Awlaki might have been a CIA asset who later turned, Kiriakou called the theory "entirely plausible" and said he thinks Awlaki was probably an asset at one time before self-radicalising, after which the decision was taken to remove him at a time and place of the government's choosing. He notes that Awlaki was an American citizen born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and that his father was Yemen's ambassador to the United States before becoming the country's minister of agriculture.

The killings

Kiriakou's objection is constitutional and, in his framing, moral. "We murdered him without ever charging him with a crime. He had a constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law and to be judged by a jury of his peers." A week later, he says, the United States killed Awlaki's sixteen-year-old son and sixteen-year-old nephew as they sat at a café drinking tea, children who had never been charged with anything, "and then we murdered his daughter just for good measure, an 8-year-old, which made Obama a child killer. Of course, he already was a child killer, but made him a child killer again."

He closes on the doctrine that permitted it, recalling Eric Holder's answer to Rand Paul: if the president wants to kill you he is within his legal rights to do so, whether or not you have ever been charged. "If the president of the United States doesn't like your politics, he can make you vapor with a missile."

The list of what never happened

Kiriakou's standing objection to the killing is put as an enumeration of omitted steps rather than as an argument about guilt. Al-Awlaki was "alleged to have been a spokesman for al-Qaeda" and was an American citizen born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was "never charged with a crime. Never formally accused of a crime. Never faced his accusers in a court of law. Never judged by a jury of his peers. And we assassinated him."

He then attaches the killings that followed, with the same flatness and without a stated rationale because he says there was none: "And then 7 days later, we assassinated his 16-year-old son and his 16-year-old nephew just because. And that's illegal. You can't do that."

The uncharged-citizen precedent

Kiriakou returns to al-Awlaki whenever he argues that a designation is not a substitute for a charge. "Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, the spokesman for al-Qaeda, guy's an American citizen, born and raised in New Mexico, self-radicalises, joins al-Qaeda as their spokesman. We blew him up with a drone. He had never been charged with any crime. If he was as bad as you say he was, you, at the CIA, then have the Justice Department file a charge against him."

The conclusion he draws is about the claim rather than the man: "you can't just go around the world murdering people whose politics you don't like and still profess to be this beacon of respect for human rights." See expanding the definition of terrorism.

The second strike

Kiriakou uses the Awlaki killings as his illustration that the drone programme misses, and notes the legal position carefully: Awlaki was an American citizen "who was accused, although not formally, not legally, of being associated with al-Qaeda" and was killed in Yemen.

> "Well, seven days later, we killed his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew who were sitting at a café, both children, neither one of whom was ever accused of a crime. And then months after the fact, the US government finally came out and said, oh, our bad, that was a bad strike. Yeah, sorry about that. Well, that's not acceptable. It's illegal, it's murder."

He credits the disclosure of the general pattern to Daniel Hale, the Pentagon having always maintained that drones are precision instruments with few civilian victims, against which Hale's position was that "we kill civilians all the time, every day."

See also

- Falls Church mosque
- Yemen
- Prince Muhammad bin Naif
- John Kiriakou
