Title: S1E5 Singin' In Bahrain
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-11-24
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/69224fd4e842b164ee8d9071/media.mp3
Duration: 0:41:21

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[00:00] This podcast, it's a casted in touchstone production. Hi, I'm John Kiriakou and welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. In this episode, I'm going to pick up with what makes this spy tick in an episode that we're calling, Singing in Bahrain. But before I start singing, I want to say wow and thank you for the amazing response

[00:30] that we've gotten so far to this podcast. I said before that this is above all a labor of love. That you have taken my story to your hearts as you have coming as it does from my heart. Well, that's the kind of response that spies love. It makes us feel like our work was not in vain. To that end, here's the quid pro quo part. That's definitely how spying works. Whatever you can do to spread the word about this podcast would be very much appreciated.

[01:00] It really does make a difference when you like, subscribe to, comment on, or review the podcast. So thank you for that too. If you haven't listened to the earlier podcasts of this series, What Makes This Spy Tick, I recommend it. Highly. This is one of those stories where details matter and one event really does build on the events that came before it. I knew from when I was nine that I wanted to be a spy. Whatever exactly that was. In college, I attracted the attention of a CIA recruiter, a legendary officer whose recommendation

[01:35] and mentoring set in motion my entire CIA career. That plus a facility for languages put me in the right place at the right time when Saddam Hussein turned the Iraq-Cawait border from Dullesville into the center of world attention. You see, one of my first jobs at the agency was essentially to be Saddam's intelligence community shrink. We started by driving Saddam out of Kuwait, though lots of us wanted to finish the job by finishing Saddam. Then President George H.W. Bush chose to keep Saddam in place to avoid destabilizing the

[02:08] region. In time though, Saddam's relentless cruelty to his own people prompted us to invade Iraq and hunker down in country. And so we settled in for the long haul in Iraq, having no idea just how long that haul would be. Now many of us believed that that was a mistake, strategically, militarily, but that wasn't my call at the time. My vantage point on Iraq would be from Bahrain, at least early on, where I'd be singing and

[02:39] working for the State Department, not for the CIA, as the second secretary for economic affairs. We arrived in Bahrain on August 1st, 1994. It was my wife Joanne, our son Chris, who at the time was 16 months old, and me. Now I had been to Bahrain before. I saw it as a paradise. One of the things that set Bahrain apart from other member countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab

[03:11] Emirates, was that it was actually an oasis. There is an enormous prehistoric water table that starts at the Atlantic Ocean, goes under the whole of Africa, and then comes to the surface in Bahrain. As recently as the 1970s, water would gush out of the ground in natural springs, like oil, just gush out of the ground. And so Bahrain is very green, flowers everywhere, palm trees, absolutely gorgeous.

[03:45] Now they've overdeveloped, of course, and the water table is down 35 feet, and it's a little bit tougher. Now the water is brackish. But when we got there, it was just wonderful, with a little asterisk for two reasons. Number one, there was literally nothing to do. They had a world-class history museum, which was great. They had a Quran museum, which was a lot of fun to go to once, or maybe twice if you have visitors. And then you've pretty much done everything there is to do. They have the oldest tree in the Middle East, it's like 3,000 years old, called the

[04:18] Tree of Life. You could go down there and check out the Tree of Life, maybe ride a camel. But then you've pretty much done it. There was nothing else to do. There was some local culture. It's just that the country was so small. Bahrain in 1996 was the same size and had the same population as Pittsburgh. There's not a whole lot of stuff going on. So for the weekend you would drive across the long bridge called the causeway to Saudi Arabia, to Al-Hobar, Dharan, Dhamam, you go to the mall, you have dinner, and then you drive back

[04:51] home. It was a very small place. I joined the diplomatic corps softball league. I was always in right field. I had a good arm and I was pretty fast. I was thin and I had always played baseball in my life. At the plate I hit for average, not power. It was the Marines that were the power hitters. We had Marine security guard MSG and those guys were just ripped knotted muscle. They were the ones who hit for power. Yeah, it was fun. We had a good time. And then in a country that's small like that, the diplomatic corps makes its own fun.

[05:24] Everybody's having dinners and everybody's having parties. There was one point where the British got a new ambassador. He was a lovely guy. He had been the deputy chief of mission in Ankara and Bahrain was his first ambassadoral assignment. And then all of a sudden I'm invited to literally every dinner that the British ambassador is hosting. And I didn't have the grade for it. I was young. I was junior. The American ambassador at the time, his name was David Ransom, usually wasn't invited.

[05:55] It was just me and the British ambassador. I wondered at the time if the British ambassador might be gay. I was a good looking, well proportioned guy. So I asked him point blank one night. I said ambassador, I always have such a wonderful time at your dinner party. But do you mind if I ask you, why do you invite me and not somebody more important than me? He said, I like you. You're fun. You tell interesting stories. And that was perfectly acceptable for me.

[06:27] So you know, you, you go to these diplomatic functions and like I said, the place has the population of Pittsburgh, but then add 10,000 members of the royal family. Everybody's a prince or a princess. And so you start meeting them and they invite you to their houses. And then there are poor princes and there are rich princes and there are well connected princes and princes that have to work for a living and are not well connected. I got to really know Bahrain on a granular level to the point where when I got back

[06:58] from Bahrain in 1996, other agencies like DIA, NSA, FBI would send people who were going out to Bahrain over to the CIA to talk to me so I could explain to them the lay of the land. Anyway, we got there in 94. There was a small American military presence. Bahrain since 1976 has been the home of the Fifth Fleet. The Fifth Fleet is the naval component of the central command, which is based at McDeal Air Force Base just outside of Tampa.

[07:30] So we would go down to the base and because I was a diplomat, I could go to the officers club. They had a better salad bar than the enlisted club. For football Sundays, I'd go to the enlisted club and watch the game drink cheap beer. So you you found things to do to pass the time. I made really great friends among the Bahrainis. One of the points that I wanted to make at the outset here is that at the time Bahrain had a Sunni Muslim royal family, but the country was 75 percent Shia Muslim.

[08:02] Now this caused chronic tension, chronic tension on both sides. The royal family enacted a policy to give citizenship to Muslims from Syria, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, all of whom were Sunni. The Shia took exception to this, that they were being diluted. Their culture was being diluted. And so I had been there for two months and there was a bombing at the Ministry of Labor. Bahrain had an English language newspaper, continues to have an English

[08:33] language newspaper called the Gulf Daily News. And there was an Indian journalist there by the name of Indira Chand. I liked Indira a lot. She actually lives in Washington now. She's the spokesperson at the World Bank. I called Indira. We had met at a party earlier. I said, who would put a bomb at the Ministry of Labor? And she said, let's meet. She didn't want to talk on the phone, because of course, both my phone and her phone were bugged. We met and she's like, there is a civil uprising, bubbling just beneath the surface and it's ready to explode.

[09:05] The Shia just don't want to take this anymore. When you and literally everybody in your family is unemployed and then they bring in Indians to take the jobs, you're going to move on the Ministry of Labor. That was the beginning of what they called the Intifada, the first Intifada. Intifada meaning uprising in Arabic. It got bad quickly and the government began to execute people. Now, executions in Bahrain were very, very rare, but you kill a cop.

[10:08] I happened to be in a Shia village. Well, the Shia villages had things of historical import. So when friends would come, whether they were CIA people from surrounding countries or my dad and my brother came, friends would come, my best friend from college. We would take them into the villages and say, this old man that you see sitting here at a loom is the last native weaver in the country. Well, that's in a Shia village or these master pottery makers

[10:38] that make their pots out of the mud of the village. It's a Shia village. In the village that I lived in, they had these mounds of earth. They were 2000 year old grave mounds from what was called the Dilman civilization. This goes back to 500 BC. Those mounds were 10 or 20 feet high. Then they had 50 foot high mounds that were the royal grave mounds. Kings, queens were buried in these royal. That was also a Shia village, the village of Sahr.

[11:09] The uprising might be taking place at the Ministry of Labor or at the Ministry of Defense or Ministry of Interior. But the villages are exploded. And so at night, the government would send in first the police and the police realized they were outgunned. Then they sent in the military with armored personnel carriers. In some cases tanks and just started grabbing people. The leader of all of these Shia Muslims involved in the uprising was a guy named Abdul Amir Al-Jammari.

[11:42] As it so happened, I was literally the only person in the embassy who had ever actually met Abdul Amir Al-Jammari. And the way I met him was I went to Bahrain for the first time in 1981 on an official CIA trip. The junior political officer who later in his career became Ambassador to Kuwait. Great guy. He says, Hey, I'm the human rights officer here, which is funny because three years later I was the human rights officer in Bahrain. He says, I'm going to crack the Bahrainis over the way they treat the Shias.

[12:16] So let's go meet this old man. His name is Abdul Amir Al-Jammari. We'll just interview him for the human rights report. I said, Great. So we go and interview him and we finished the interview and we drove back to the embassy and the ambassador is standing on the steps waiting for us, which is not normal. And he said, Did you guys just talk to Abdul Amir Al-Jammari? Yes, sir. My friend, the political officer said, How did you know that? And he said, because the prime minister himself just called me and he says, Mr. Kiriakou, he wants you expelled from the country like today.

[12:47] And he said, Tom, he wants you expelled yesterday. I said, I'm so sorry. He said, Don't apologize. This is exactly what I want you guys to do. I want you to be out there talking about human rights and documenting these crimes. Great. So I enjoyed the rest of my stay. And then I went on to Qatar and then Abu Dhabi and whatever. But from 1991, it just kind of bubbled and then it exploded in 1994. And I'm telling you, it got worse and worse and worse over the course of my two years there. I'm proud to say, and these aren't my words.

[13:20] These were Ambassador Ransom's words. Nobody knew as much about Bahrain as I did. Summertime and the living is easy. Am I right, John? That is one of the best parts of Summer Allen. Living really does feel easier. You're about to travel. Good thing you've got a couple of quince pieces going with you. They are as relaxed and comfortable as I want to feel. That's why, whether I'm traveling or staying at home, I reach for the same quince go anywhere pieces again and again. Quince focuses on well made essential.

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[21:12] he was the commander of the naval component there in Bahrain. And he made a statement in 1976 that they would bring up every single year. The statement was famous. It was pound for pound. Bahrain is the best friend the United States has in the world. Pound for pound being the operative phrase. And we were great friends. Pound for pound. It was true overall. And the ambassador used to say, it's really very simple. Oil flows out. Weapons flow in. That's the relationship. So Admiral Crowell comes.

[21:42] I spent the first day with his wife. She wanted to buy carpets. So I took her around and negotiated for her to buy carpets. And then there was a dinner at the ambassador's residence. Then the next day, the ambassador, Admiral Crowell, the defense attaché and I, it was the four of us, went to see the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I was the note taker. I really liked the Minister of Foreign Affairs. His English was better than mine. And he had gone to Harvard. So he was very impressive. We go to see Admiral Crowell. And the meeting is, we love you, Admiral Crowell.

[22:15] And Admiral Crowell would say, and we love you. And at the Pentagon, they love you. Yes, Admiral Crowell, at our Pentagon, we love you. So the meeting was not substantive. It was just a love fest. And then we get up to walk out. And as we walk to the elevator, it's just a very small elevator. The door opens and it's the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister did not like me. I did not like him. We used to call him Mr. 10 percent because you want to do business in Bahrain.

[22:47] 10 percent in cash in the Prime Minister's pocket. The ambassador says, oh, you're Highness, so nice to see you. We're actually coming to your office in a couple of hours. You remember Admiral Crowell? He had a very deep voice. Yes, of course, Admiral Crowell. It's so nice to see you. And Admiral Crowell shakes his hand. Prime Minister shakes the ambassador's hand and he shakes the defense attaché's hand. And then he puts his hand out and I shake his hand. And he says, Kiriyaku, like that. Your Highness, it's always such a pleasure to see you.

[23:19] And he wouldn't let my hand go. You've been very busy in our little country. Yes, your Highness, I have. You know how much I love it here. And he still wouldn't let my hand go. Finally, I had to physically pull my hand back. And then we got into the elevator. The ambassador says, what the hell was that all about? Ambassador, I have interviewed every human rights attorney in the country. I have interviewed Abdul Amir Al-Jamri's wife and son. I've gone to every Shia village on this island and he hates every minute of it.

[23:50] Crowell kind of smiled. Keep up the good work. I was very well versed in the psychology of the Bahraini leadership before I ever got on the airplane to go out there. The Amir himself, Amir Issa bin Salman al-Khalifa, is about five feet tall, kind of a roly poly guy, sweetest little guy you could ever meet in your life. And let me tell you how sweet he was. He had five or six palaces all around the little country. One of those palaces was on the beach, 10 miles south of my house.

[24:23] As a policy, if you were, and this was his role, if you were from a country that does not have a culture of staring, for example, Pakistanis will just stare at you and not break the line of sight. And you're like, the fuck are you looking at? They don't mean anything by it. They just stare. Indians, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, they all stare. So if you are from a culture that doesn't stare on Thursday and Friday, which is the weekend, you can go to his Majesty's Palace and swim.

[24:55] And he's usually there because he wanted Western women to feel free to wear bikinis. I can't tell you how many times we would get to the palace and he's walking out the back door, which is where you drive into with a golf fair stewardess and he already had four wide. He had a thing for Thai women, which I always thought was very funny. And they were all a foot taller than he was. There was a small building and a little window. And you could walk up to the window and get a soft drink. We would go on the weekends, Joanne and I, with our son.

[25:28] We would just lay on the beach invariably. One of the servants would come up and say, his Majesty is inviting you to have tea. It would happen every single time. The first time we said, oh, wow, great. We jumped up and the servant says to me, not you, her, you have got to be kidding me. I said, go, go, have a good time. My wife goes and says, your Majesty, I'm so happy to meet you. And he says, tell me about yourself, my dear. And she sits down and says, my husband's at the American Embassy and blah,

[26:00] 15 minutes later, they summoned me. So we go and have an orange crush. He said some things. And at the Embassy, the ambassador had a hard and fast rule. Anything the Amir says at the beach is off the record. And we do not put it in a reporting cable because the ambassador had promised him that if you want to speak freely, it's your own home. Let's just make it all off the record and you can speak as freely as you want. And so we never reported anything that he said. He knew that we weren't reporting. So he did speak freely. He said to me one time, why do you like King Hussein so much?

[26:33] Your Highness, he's a great friend of the United States and our relationships go back to the founding of Jordan. He says, you know how a flag flutters in the wind? That's Hussein, whichever way the wind is going, there's Hussein. He just did not like King Hussein. And King Hussein probably didn't even think about him. He had bigger fish to fry. One time it was right after Columbine. We went to the beach and as soon as we arrived, the Amir pointed at me in motion for me to come have a seat with him.

[27:06] So I went and he said, what in the world is happening in the United States? And I said, Your Highness, this is a tragedy. We're not used to something like this. Children killing children on a massive scale. And he said, this is the one thing that I've never understood about the United States. He said like this, even by Arab standards, you have an unusually violent society. And I've never understood why Americans are so willing to tolerate violence against other Americans.

[27:36] I'll never forget it. He was truly heartbroken that Columbine took place. And then after Oklahoma City, he said to me, I pray to God Almighty that this wasn't a Muslim. And I said, Your Highness, I said the same prayer. I had so much deep respect for him. He was such a wise leader. He knew the Iranians could overrun the country in four hours. No problem. But he knew that if he played the game, cultivated his already very close relationships

[28:07] with the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, he had no problem. He was developing the economy. He just couldn't wrap his head around why he should be helping his own Shia community. My wife's gynecologist got caught up in that violence. She was going to get a sonogram. We went to the hospital to check in. And one of the nurses pulls us aside, pulled us into a stairwell so nobody else could hear. And she said, you haven't heard. We haven't heard what the doctor was killed in that bombing over the weekend.

[28:41] They killed the doctor. She's not even Bahraini. She's Indian. And the nurse said she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I said to my wife, we have the option of you going home. She was going to deliver the baby in Bahrain. Bahrain's hospitals, the State Department has assessed, were up to US standards. It was a safe, clean, advanced place. But with our trusted OB now gone, the hospital's trustworthiness didn't matter as much. And since my tour in Bahrain was about to end anyway,

[29:13] we decided that Joanne would go home back to America, back to Ohio. Two weeks before the baby was due, I would fly home too. And we would all be together for the birth. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Our plans were about to change profoundly. The mirror was an easy psychological evaluation. Prime Minister was cold, mean, cunning, calculating and very, very difficult. But he ran the country. He was the definition of corruption.

[29:45] But the country really was developing. It was considered to be the banking center of the Middle East. Now, it was the Intifada that pushed those banks to Dubai. But when the Lebanese Civil War began, Beirut, which had been called the Pearl of the Middle East, the banking center of the Middle East, all those banks left and went to Bahrain. So from 1970, say four or five, much more stable. The British ran the banking system. Standard charter was there at first, and that's where the Emir had his money

[30:19] invested. There was this national saying Allah al-Watan wal-Amir. It means God, the nation and the Emir. In that order, it was written on all the water towers around the country. Allah al-Watan wal-Amir. It didn't say Allah, the nation and the Prime Minister. He knew that when he died, his line, his children were going to be pushed off to the side because the Emir's son, Crown Prince Hamid, was going to become a mirror.

[30:49] And Hamid's son, Salman, was going to become the Crown Prince. Salman and I were great buddies in Bahrain. We went to school in Washington at the same time. He's just a little younger than I was. At the time, he wasn't yet the Crown Prince. He was the heir presumptive. So they had to start giving him official positions to prepare him to become the Crown Prince. At the time, he was the president of the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research. And he was also the patron of the Bahrain Environmental Protection Association.

[31:22] Well, being an economic officer, those were both in my purview. So I would drive down into the desert. That's where the building was. I'd drive down in the desert and we'd walk around and talk and laugh. And then we started going out together on the weekend. I should remind everyone here that I was in Bahrain as part of the U.S. State Department, not the CIA. That meant that I had to keep a healthy distance from the agency. No one at the State Department was supposed to know that I had any CIA connections. I couldn't even talk to the CIA guys in country.

[31:56] Now, that could get complicated because, of course, I was a CIA officer. I was still their employee and I had to do whatever it was that they wanted. And at some point, they wanted me to take a mandatory cultural sensitivity course. That they had created and put on a VHS tape. Remember those? A VHS tape that they stuck in a diplomatic pouch and sent out to me. I couldn't look at the tape at the embassy. I had to sneak it home and watch it there and then sneak it back to the embassy.

[32:27] Salman and I would go out and have fun. And and then the ambassador on Saturday morning would say, would Salman have to say over the weekend? And I'd give him inside baseball that I had learned from the the air presumptive. There was kind of a low grade nightclub right outside the gates of the Navy base. And they had Polish dancing girls. And so we used to go there. It was funny. He thought that if you put on Western clothes, nobody would know who he was, which just always struck me as hilarious.

[32:59] So we went to the club one night and there are these dancing girls and they're singing and there's a Filipino cover band behind them, backing them up. You're not allowed to touch them. In the United States, these would be strippers, but they're not allowed to strip because it's the Middle East. So they wear bathing suits, one piece bathing suits. And if you fancy one of them, there's this woman in her 40s who's sitting in a chair at the foot of the stage. And she has these synthetic lays, you know, the flower garlands.

[33:32] And for one dinar, which is two dollars and sixty five cents, you can get one or you can get five, you can get 10 or however many want. And then you point at the girl that you fancy and then the lady would put the flowers around her neck. And then she would wave and you wave back. It was all very funny to me. It's like you're in sixth grade or something and you'd like the girl across the room. There was this one Polish girl that he took a shine to and he would ten dinars, ten dinars, ten dinars.

[34:03] Finally, he says to me, do you think they're prostitutes? Oh, I definitely think they're prostitutes. Do you think she'll have sex with me? I said, Salman, you own the country. Of course she'll have sex with you. A girl who's probably there illegally. He says, I don't I don't have the guts. I don't have the guts. It was like asking her on a date and he already had two wives. So nothing ever came of it. But my God, we had such a good time. I'll admit it.

[34:33] I was charmed by some of his contradictions. They made him human. He came to my going away party at the ambassador's residence with his lovely first wife, the only one that mattered. We still text each other. All these years later, we text each other jokes and stuff. I hope to go to Bahrain sometime in the next year. I'd love to see him again. It's been so many years. But aside from the prime minister, I loved everybody I met there. It was an absolutely wonderful place. The violence aside, it was a great place to have a family.

[35:04] Now here we are all these years later. The official numbers of the Sunni Shia breakdown are 50 50 and the place is full of Syrians who have been naturalized as Bahrainis. It's full of Indians and Pakistanis who now carry Bahraini passports. So it took them two generations almost, a generation and a half. But they were able to dilute the Shia population. And there's still a problem with Shia unemployment. This explosive dynamic energy still pulses from everywhere.

[35:34] But back then in the early days of the Bahraini social experiment, back then in the Middle East as a whole, that explosive dynamic energy was about to achieve critical mass. June 25th, 1996. It was Joanne and my eighth wedding anniversary. I was in Bahrain. Joanne was in Ohio, where three weeks earlier, she had given birth to Constantine, our second son. I was supposed to be in Ohio with them. But instead I was lying in bed wishing my wife a happy anniversary

[36:05] from 7000 miles away when suddenly it was the most massive explosion I've ever experienced. And I've been in war zones all over the dog on place. This thing was so big, I instinctively rolled out of bed onto the floor and covered my head. And I could hear her shouting, what was that? What was that? She had heard the explosion through the phone. And I said, I think somebody may have attacked the house.

[36:38] Honey, I have to go. I'll call you back and I hung up. I waited on the floor for five minutes thinking, well, the next step is they're going to attack the house. They probably put a bomb right in front of my door to breach the door. This is how it sounded. And they're going to come in with weapons next. And again, because I was in a State Department position, I was unarmed. I had nothing. All I had was a walkie talkie to alert the Marine security guards. But nobody breached the door. And so I slowly got up. I put on my my pants and my shirt and I walked outside and everybody was outside.

[37:13] Now, I lived in a I lived in a walled compound, which is very common to the Middle East. We had eight houses in the compound. It was a good mix of nationalities. My next door neighbor was a Swedish diplomat. The guy across the street for me was an American golf air pilot, a couple of Bahrainese toward the back, another embassy family. It was a good mix. By then, everybody had come out of their house. What the heck was that? We thought it was like right here in the compound. My living room window shattered. I thought my house was being attacked.

[37:46] They all thought their houses were being attacked. And so as a frightened group, we walked all around the compound looking for the crater that had to be formed when the bomb went off. Whatever happened, it wasn't in our compound. And the lack of sirens told us that it wasn't in the area. So I said, well, if it wasn't here, it had to be frigging big. So I closed the drapes of my living room window, my shattered living room window. And then I took books to hold the drapes down.

[38:18] I have a thing about mosquitoes. I hate anything that drinks my blood. So I didn't want mosquitoes in my house. I propped the drapes clothes and I went to bed. My mom calls me at six o'clock the next morning. Are you OK? I said, of course I am. Why? You didn't see the news? No. There was a bombing last night, but we couldn't find it. It was in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia. Turn on CNN. We had CNN International turn it on and it's the Al-Hobar bombing.
