The Siemens control room
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Asked whether the CCTV cameras that recorded the Mossad team in Dubai in 2010 might have been Israeli-made, John Kiriakou answered from first-hand knowledge of the system.

The tour

He would not be surprised, he said, but when he was in Dubai and got a tour of the whole facility, "the cameras were German."

Pressed on which facility he meant, he described an underground installation belonging to the government of Dubai, "completely created by Siemens, the big German company."

The room

His description is architectural. "It's like walking into an IMAX theater, but instead of one five-story screen, it's five stories of TV monitors. So, you have hundreds of TV monitors that cover every inch of Dubai. Every inch."

The crash

What makes the account concrete is what happened while he was standing there. Watching the screens, the visitors saw a taxi driver looking at his phone while driving. He crashed into a telephone pole.

The operators identified the intersection immediately. The driver got out, rattled, trying to gather himself; someone ran up to him and dialled the local emergency number. "Well, the ambulance is already on the way, because we watched it happen in real time. So the operator is like, yes, yes, the ambulance is on the way."

The point he draws

Kiriakou's conclusion is not about traffic response. "The whole country is covered," he said. "Now, you can't do that in a country like the United States, but you can do it in other places, and then you can intercept what's happening in those other places."

The remark is offered in the middle of a discussion of how a foreign service moved twenty-six operatives through the most heavily monitored city in the world without any of them being identified, a puzzle Kiriakou says his service studied for a long time.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- MOSSAD
- Mahmoud al-Mabhouh
