The French human sources
========================

Interviewed by Chris Hedges in 2018, John Kiriakou was told what Hedges had heard from French intelligence officials in Paris after the September 11th attacks: that the CIA had no human assets inside al-Qaeda, none at all.

The confirmation

"That was true," Kiriakou answered, "and we saw that in the 9/11 Commission report. This was a complete and total intelligence failure."

He attributes it to two causes rather than one. The first is the failure to do the core job: recruiting spies to steal secrets. The second is institutional, that the relationship with the FBI "was so acrimonious, so poor, that there was literally no cooperation between the CIA and the FBI." Even if the FBI had had sources with access to al-Qaeda overseas, he says, they were not sharing them.

The French counter-example

Hedges put to him what the French had argued: that all the al-Qaeda attacks they were able to thwart were thwarted by having human assets inside the organisation, including a planned attack on the Paris embassy, and a plan to fly planes into the Eiffel Tower.

Kiriakou's answer was flat: "that is absolutely correct."

The principle

From the contrast he draws the general rule he repeats about intelligence work: "you can only truly get inside the mind of a terrorist if you've recruited somebody next to him. You can spend billions of dollars on electronics, you can give billions of dollars to NSA, if you don't have a human source you're not going to get the full story."

The connection he makes to torture

The interview then moves from the absence of sources to what filled it. Hedges' proposition, that torture is what an intelligence system reaches for when it does not work, and that a functioning one does not need it, is one Kiriakou accepts, and he extends it to the political demand it was serving.

"What we saw during those years, especially coming from the office of the vice president, was an effort to come to a policy conclusion and then to cherry-pick the intelligence to support that conclusion." There was no intelligence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda, he says, "because they weren't" linked, noting that Richard Perle went to the White House on 12 September 2001 to argue for attacking Iraq.

He makes the same argument about the effects. Torture and the torture programme are, in his phrase, "the greatest recruiting mechanisms for our enemies," and he draws the parallel with drone strikes from his own experience of interrogating dozens of al-Qaeda fighters: at the fighter level, none of them had any particular problem with the United States "until we started bombing their villages and killing their family members, and so they joined the fight."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Origins of al-Qaeda
- CIA,FBI interagency rivalry and 9/11
- Economic roots of terrorism
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
