William Webster
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Judge William Webster was the Director of Central Intelligence during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He had been a federal judge, then Director of the FBI, then Director of the CIA. Per John Kiriakou: "He was a lovely man ... he was just a very kind, nice man."

The 4 a.m. briefing

During the Kuwait task force Kiriakou, a junior analyst working twelve-hour shifts on a six-week rotation, in an office taking ten thousand cables a day, became a regular briefer to the director for the first time in his career. His introduction to the job was abrupt. The shift leader: "Have you ever briefed the director?" Kiriakou: "I've never even seen the director." "Well, you're going to brief the director in 15 minutes, so be prepared." It was four in the morning. Webster: "What's happening in Kuwait?"

Webster already knew all the issues, and was leaving for the White House two hours later to brief the President, an arrangement Kiriakou describes as everyone working hand in glove, with each other and with the Kuwaiti government. Kiriakou was getting into the President's Daily Brief essentially every day at that point, in an office where analysts of many years' standing had never appeared in it once.

The Oval Office, morning of the invasion

On the morning of the invasion Kiriakou was told on arrival at about 6 a.m. not to take his jacket off, because they were going to the White House. A car was waiting outside CIA headquarters; a Marine met them at the West Wing entrance and walked them to the Oval Office. In the room were President George H.W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Director Webster, Kiriakou's boss and Kiriakou, who was 25.

The seating registered the hierarchy precisely. Under Oval Office protocol nobody speaks unless spoken to and nobody sits until the President sits; when Bush finally sat, it was in a very comfortable overstuffed chair, with the Vice President in an identical one. Scowcroft and Webster took two markedly less comfortable chairs that looked to Kiriakou like dining-room chairs, and Kiriakou and his boss sat on the couch.

"Well, now what do we do?" the President asked, and the room turned to the most junior person in it. Kiriakou reported that Iraqi troops had crossed the border at 0200 hours, had occupied the entire country, that the royal family had fled to Saudi Arabia, and that tanks were moving toward the southern border in a threat to the Saudi oil fields. Bush then asked whether anything was known about the man Iraq had installed to run Kuwait, and Kiriakou, who a month earlier had written up the man purely out of curiosity, was able to answer that he was a physician, the son of a woman enslaved in the Kuwaiti royal household, and the college roommate at the American University of Beirut of George Habash.

See also

- Kuwait invasion intelligence
- President's Daily Brief
- George Tenet
- John Kiriakou
