PFLP
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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a Palestinian armed group co-founded by George Habash and Ahmed Khatib, then college roommates at the American University of Beirut, where Khatib took a medical degree. Khatib later became, briefly, Iraq's installed occupation governor of Kuwait in August 1990.

The Kuwait briefing

The Front's founding history is the reason John Kiriakou's career took the shape it did. In the week before Iraq invaded Kuwait he had written a paper, purely out of interest, on a politically active Kuwaiti physician who was one of the Front's founding members. Overnight the Iraqis announced that the same man would be the new president of occupied Kuwait, and Kiriakou found himself the only person who knew anything about him. Asked in the room what had happened, he gave the full briefing, that the Kuwaiti government had been overthrown, that Baghdad had installed Ahmed Khatib, that Khatib had taken his medical degree at the American University of Beirut and that his college roommate there had been George Habash, with whom he founded the PFLP. The vice president's response was "Jesus Christ." Kiriakou dates his career to that morning: "I became a star that day." He also links Khatib's appointment to the subsequent expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait after liberation.

Athens

Kiriakou moved from analysis into counterterrorism operations because writing papers nobody read had become monotonous, and because he was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic. That combination is what put the Arab targets on his desk in Athens: his branch worked Greek terrorism jointly with the Greek national police and the Greek intelligence service, and none of his colleagues spoke Arabic.

The Greece of the 1990s was a way station for effectively every Arab armed group of the period, several of which also ran training facilities there: the PFLP, the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Abu Nidal Organization, the Iraqi and Libyan intelligence services and a myriad of Libyan groups. They were there by arrangement. Kiriakou describes a semi-secret deal negotiated in the 1980s between the various Arab groups and the government of Andreas Papandreou: transit Athens unmolested, provided you do not kill Greeks, an arrangement that, from the American side, "caused us no end of problems."

It held only for a while. The groups began killing each other, which Kiriakou rates as just as bad, and Greeks were meanwhile travelling to the groups' training camps in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and in Libya and returning home to carry out attacks in the name of 17 November and its counterparts. The Arab groups were not, however, the lethal threat to Americans. That was 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle, both with close ties to Carlos the Jackal, which killed Americans, Greek officials and on one occasion the Turkish ambassador, and whose final assassination was the British defence attaché. By the time Kiriakou arrived the Arab communist groups were made up of old men, and the category had become close to nonsensical, though he credits the tour with teaching him the tradecraft.

The presence had a geopolitical logic. Greece traditionally kept very close relations with the Arabs as the counterweight to decades of close Turkish,Israeli diplomatic and military ties, which is why the Palestinian groups were all in Athens. When Erdoğan flipped Turkey towards the Arabs fifteen or twenty years ago, the Greeks and the Cypriots flipped the other way; the two now watch each other for the next move.

The Jordan shoot

Kiriakou's last professional contact with the Front came through Sacha Baron Cohen. Asked to arrange an encounter with real terrorists, and having warned that the religious ones would kill Cohen, his crew and passers-by who resembled them, Kiriakou proposed the alternative: bona fide but effectively retired secular communist terrorists living in Damascus, the PFLP, the Abu Nidal Organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The meeting was staged in Jordan. Two men came, one from the PFLP General Command and one from the Democratic Front, both in their seventies and adjusting their trifocals as Cohen produced Polaroids of hardcore pornography and asked, in character, whether this was torture and whether the men in the pictures should be sent to Guantánamo. The response was not the outrage the shoot wanted: "no no no no, this not good," and the photograph was put back down on the table.

See also

- George Habash
- Ahmed Khatib
- 17 November
- Abu Nidal Organization
- Sacha Baron Cohen
