The weapons cache map
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The weapons cache map was the single sheet of paper John Kiriakou's team found inside an enormous gun safe in a Middle Eastern house they had entered under cover of a staged environmental emergency.

The safe was triple the size of any Kiriakou had seen for sale in the United States, took the locks-and-picks team twenty or thirty minutes to open, and was completely empty apart from the paper.

The document

Kiriakou's description of it is deliberately comic: it was like something out of a cartoon, out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It was a childlike drawing with an X on it, and written over the X, literally, were the words the weapons are here, with an arrow pointing to the X.

The written portion, in Arabic, gave route directions: drive to a named village, get out at a particular mile or kilometre marker, walk 150 metres south, turn right at the palm tree, go 50 metres, turn left at the big rock, and continue 120 metres.

The bunker

At the end of the directions was a bunker in the desert, full to the ceiling.

It held not only weapons but explosives: rocket-propelled grenades, landmines and ammunition. Kiriakou says he thought his liaison partners were going to start crying, they were so happy.

Trucks had to be requisitioned from the intelligence service's headquarters to take possession of the ordnance, which was destroyed in a controlled explosion out in the desert. Kiriakou's summary of the day is that they literally put Hezbollah out of business.

Consequences

The operation had a long afterlife. Kiriakou says word spread quickly among people in the know in that country's government, and that he was invited as a guest of honour to the wedding of the crown prince, a man he had never met.

He reports that twenty-five years later he was still taking calls from members of the royal family, as recently as the day before he told the story, because they will never forget what he did and remain appreciative. He says he is touched by it, and adds that he loves the Middle East, its history, culture, literature, poetry, language and food, and that the appreciation runs both ways.

The prisoner whose safe it was, whom Kiriakou names in the retelling as Abdel Azim, was still in prison twenty years later. Kiriakou learned this from a former station colleague he ran into at a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Virginia, who told him the man was going to die in prison.

See also

- The propane truck ruse
- Double-Agent Capture
- Hezbollah
- John Kiriakou
