Reading in on the Iraq invasion
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Reading in on the Iraq invasion is John Kiriakou's account of how he learned, in 2002, that the United States intended to invade Iraq the following March.

The appointment

Kiriakou has said that having declined training in enhanced interrogation techniques he was passed over for promotion, but that his record in Pakistan was strong enough that he was sent to the seventh floor, the executive level, as executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director, and given an out-of-cycle promotion by that officer. He describes the post as one that gave him sight of literally everything the CIA was doing anywhere in the world. 

On his first day he walked into the deputy director's office and asked what they were doing. He was told he could not be told until he had signed his secrecy agreements, and was sent to a room where six of them were laid out on a table. He signed all six, undertakings, as he describes them, never to breathe a word as long as he lived unless the material were declassified. 

The briefing

He returned and asked again. In Kiriakou's account the security officer took a deep breath and said that the following March the United States would invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; that it would open the world's largest air force base there; and that it would move all American air assets out of Saudi Arabia into Iraq, in order to deprive Osama bin Laden of the argument that the United States was polluting the land of the two holy mosques. 

Kiriakou has said he was speechless, and that all he could blurt out was that they had not caught bin Laden yet. 

The answer he was given

The reply, as he recounts it, was that the battle lines had been drawn and the decisions made. The side that did not want to attack Iraq was the CIA, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the side he calls the warmongers was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council. The briefing ended: "and guess what? We lose." 

Kiriakou went back to the deputy director's office. The deputy director asked whether they had read him in, and Kiriakou asked whether they were out of their minds. The deputy director answered yes.  Kiriakou attaches to the episode his general characterisation of the agency: that the CIA is a support agency which does what the White House tells it to do. 

See also

- The Tehran slip
- George Tenet
- Osama bin Laden
- Dick Cheney
