The Islamabad guest house
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The Islamabad guest house is a small hotel in the Pakistani capital that John Kiriakou and his colleagues occupied during CIA deployments to Pakistan, and which he describes at length while explaining that he is not permitted to identify it.

The place

Kiriakou introduces it with the restriction attached. "I was staying in a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan, that the CIA will not allow me to name."

The scale of it explains why the agency could take it over: "It only had It only had like 16 rooms, and CIA officers, we took all 16 rooms."

The economics

The detail Kiriakou dwells on is financial, and he presents it without embarrassment. "But that guest house came with breakfast and dinner and laundry. And it was like 35 bucks a day. It was incredible. And then they give you like 500 a day per diem, so you just pocket the rest."

He states the consequence in a single sentence, and then moves on: "I bought a house when I came home. Anyway."

The arithmetic is left for the listener. A per diem set for the accommodation an American official might be expected to need, paid against a bill of thirty-five dollars a day in a house shared with colleagues, produced a surplus large enough over a long deployment to buy property.

What he remembers instead

Asked separately for the best meals he had ever eaten abroad, Kiriakou's first answer came from the same building, a young Pakistani cook, whose name he nearly said aloud and then withheld, who spent half of each day shaving beef thin for a dish of spices, hot green chillies and rice cooked in chicken stock. That dish, and not the money, is what he calls the best meal he had overseas.

The guest house therefore appears twice in the same conversation, once as a windfall and once as a kitchen, and Kiriakou treats the second as the more memorable of the two.

See also

- The Best Meal Overseas
- The Islamabad surveillance incident
- The Dandelion Salad
- Cover position
