Djibouti
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Djibouti sits on the African side of the Bab el-Mandeb, a few miles across the water from Yemen, and in John Kiriakou's account it is the physical basing point of the undeclared American wars in Yemen and Somalia. He calls the drone base there "the worst kept secret in the world." He puts the crossing at sixteen miles in most tellings and at about nine in a later one, the latter figure matching the width of the strait itself.

It is also, in his description, a very small and very poor country, one city, also called Djibouti, and a scattering of villages, whose significance is entirely military. He offers its intelligence service as his standard illustration of what a small country's secret service actually looks like: he visited it once, and the office of the director was half the size of his own living room, a room with space for a couch, a chair, a coffee table and a television. He stresses he is not exaggerating.

How he worked it out

Kiriakou dates his own realisation to a taxi ride in Yemen, on a trip made from Djibouti, a five-minute flight to Sana'a. He was supposed to travel only in armoured cars, but he likes Yemen and speaks Arabic and wanted to see the souk, so he took a taxi and asked the driver how things were going with the Houthis. Not bad, the driver said, except that drones were bombing them all the time, which he attributed to the Saudis. Kiriakou said the Saudis do not have drones, and then stopped. "Oh my god, we have drones in Djibouti." He said nothing more for the rest of the ride.

Back in Washington he reported it to John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Kiriakou was an investigator, and whose reaction was a single word: "What?" The same base, he notes, flies the drones for the other war nobody notices, the American war in Somalia, fought mostly from the air out of Djibouti.

Camp Lemonnier

Kiriakou went to Djibouti himself in about 2011 on Senate Foreign Relations Committee business, and gives the base a name and a lineage. Camp Lemonnier was French; when the French pulled out they simply abandoned it, and the Djiboutians asked the Americans whether they wanted it. The answer was yes, it is sixteen miles from Yemen. The fence down the middle is older than the current arrangement: it once separated the American side from the French side, and now separates the American side from the Chinese.

That the two rivals share a perimeter is the part he returns to. China maintains exactly one military base outside its own territory, and, "crazy as it might sound", shares it with the United States; Kiriakou uses the fact both as an absurdity and as evidence for his larger argument that Beijing buys influence rather than invading, a master class in diplomacy conducted while Washington was fixated on counterterrorism, counterproliferation, Russia and Iran.

The base has also served as a holding site in the deportation fight. Kiriakou describes eight men, every one convicted of murder or armed robbery, held at the joint American-Chinese base while the administration sought to expel them to South Sudan, none of them South Sudanese, and in his judgement likely to starve there within weeks.

The neighbourhood

Djibouti is where several of Kiriakou's Horn of Africa threads begin. It was the American ambassador there who asked whether he wanted to see Somalia; they drove, the ambassador, the defence attachés, the chief of security and Kiriakou, and it was on the drive back that he put the question of independence for Somaliland to the ambassador. The country also anchors his account of the wider scramble for the Red Sea approaches: Russian ambitions for a base at Port Sudan, and an Israeli offer of recognition to Somaliland, which borders Djibouti, in exchange for a base of its own. Iran, he says, treats Djibouti as an American vassal state and discounts it accordingly.

He counts it among the hardest places he has worked, one of the countries on the list, with Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Pakistan, that he gives when asked about the worst of the seventy-two he has visited. The one time a stranger recognised him in a Salt Lake City hotel lobby, "Hey, YouTube CIA guy", the man turned out to have been a security officer in Djibouti, and what he wanted to say was that the place is badly underestimated.

See also

- The Bab el-Mandeb
- China's base in Djibouti
- Yemen
- Somaliland
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
