Counterterrorism Center
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The Counterterrorism Center (CTC) is the CIA unit that ran the agency's war on terrorism and the organizational home of John Kiriakou's counterterrorism career, from his recruitment into operations in the late 1990s to his refusal of the torture program in May 2002.

Joining: Greek and Arabic

In late 1997, Kiriakou saw a CTC posting calling for an officer who spoke either Greek or Arabic, and he was, as it turned out, the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both. He went down to the Center, found the hiring officer, and admitted he knew nothing about operations; the officer asked if he was willing to be tested, and the languages did the rest. He switched from analysis into the Directorate of Operations' counterterrorism center and went to Greece to work against Revolutionary Organization 17 November and other groups.

Back at headquarters, he served as chief of counterintelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit, vetting the stream of walk-ins appearing at American embassies claiming that for a million dollars they could deliver bin Laden.

September 11

Kiriakou was steps from Cofer Black's office that morning, the director's secretary had the only TV nearby, when the second plane hit and he concluded, "I think we're under attack." Everyone ran to "the bullpen," the enormous main room of the Center, ringed by private offices and packed with so many cubicles that the pathways had names: "Bin Laden Boulevard, Hezbollah Highway." One path was named after George Tenet.

The Center transformed overnight: a few hundred employees on September 10, nearly 2,000 by September 12, with a supplemental appropriation, the figure still classified, that dwarfed CTC's actual budget. Kiriakou notes that before the attacks, agency attention was consumed by China; he had argued the focus should shift to terrorism in the Middle East.

Months earlier, on July 6, 2001, part of his job was entertaining visiting foreign counterterrorism officers, he asked a junior al-Qaeda analyst for a 30-minute briefing for an Arab delegation; instead, Cofer Black himself showed up with the chief of operations.

Leadership

Cofer Black headed the Center on 9/11, it was Black who told the president that within weeks "flies will be walking on the eyeballs of your enemies." He was succeeded by Jose Rodriguez, whose protégé Gina Haspel, a 32-year operational veteran, never married, devoted solely to the job, was a very senior CTC officer during Kiriakou's time.

Pakistan traffic

From Pakistan, Kiriakou's cables flowed back to CTC. After one capture yielded phone records showing hundreds of calls to numbers across the United States, Buffalo, Kansas City, Atlanta, Colorado, California, he cabled headquarters that he was deeply troubled; the reply came back within hours: "Good catch. Give it all to the FBI." When Pakistan's ISI reported its jail full and asked the CIA to take its prisoners, CTC's answer set history in motion: put them on an Air Force C-12 and send them to Guantanamo.

Refusing the torture program

Asked in 2002 whether he wanted to be trained in the new interrogation techniques, and warned by a senior officer's counsel that the program was likely illegal, Kiriakou went back down to the Counterterrorism Center and said no: "This is a torture program and I don't want to have anything to do with it." That was the middle of May 2002, months before the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah on August 1. That refusal, he says, is when the CIA began to turn on him: a promotion panel later found he had displayed "a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism."

Years later, Kiriakou says, it was the CTC that drove the effort to prosecute him, with memos flying back and forth even as the FBI resisted that no crime had been committed: "Do it anyway."

China, before the attacks

Kiriakou has described the agency's pre-9/11 attention as overwhelmingly directed at one country. "Right before 9/11 at the CIA, it was China, China, China, China." He was working in the Counterterrorism Center at the time and thought some of that attention should be diverted toward the terrorism situation in the Middle East, "but it was all about China."

What followed the attacks he describes as immediate and pre-formed: the story that Richard Perle was at the White House on 12 September 2001 saying the United States had to attack Iraq. "And then it was just history from there."

Money after the attacks

The centre's post-attack condition was one of unspendable abundance. Kiriakou went to Cofer Black shortly after 11 September with an idea for an operation and was cut off before he could describe it: "Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all." That state of affairs, he says, continued for years. Its source was the supplemental appropriations Congress voted on top of the authorised budget, roughly 160 per cent the day after the attacks, and another at the end of the year.

'Cowboys and hard asses'

Asked why the agency pursued him rather than handling him as it handles others, Kiriakou narrowed the responsibility to one office. "I think that the targeting came from inside the counterterrorism center. It wasn't necessarily the CIA as an organization as a whole. It was CTC. CTC was run by cowboys and hard asses, and I think that they were so furious, that what I had done was unforgivable, that they are the ones who asked the Justice Department to go after me."

The asymmetry he is pointing at is a matter of ordinary practice: there are other cases of serving officers exposing classified information, and "what happens to them is they get a letter in their file and they don't get promoted for a year. They don't get seven felony charges."

He adds that nothing in his record before December 2007 suggested friction. While he was at Deloitte the firm was preparing to bid for work inside the counterterrorism centre; he still held an active clearance, asked the CTC security officer whether he could be added to the list of cleared personnel for the contract, and was told "yeah, that's great with us." He dropped out only because his employer would release him for six weeks and the contract needed six months. "I had no problems whatsoever with the CIA."

Asked whether the centre resembles its television version in 24, his answer was one word repeated: "no. The room? No. No, that's all Hollywood."

The training branch, and Africa

Asked in 2026 whether he had ever worked on Nigeria, Kiriakou said he had not had a single thing to do with it, and used the answer to give the scale of the unit he was in: the counterterrorist training branch was "a branch of like four guys and a chief", within which "I was all Middle East and then I think toward the end I picked up Thailand. But Africa wasn't my thing."

On the relationship itself he is warm: "my colleagues in the Counterterrorism Center thoroughly enjoyed working with the Nigerians. We have a close relationship with the Nigerians, especially in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel. So, relations are good. Close cooperation." Of the region itself his verdict is bleak, the Sahel is "a godforsaken mess" and "the definition of poor, desperate", with no oil to change it.

See also

- Cofer Black
- Gina Haspel
- Osama bin Laden
- Abu Zubaydah
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- Guantanamo Bay
- Walk-in
