Moving a satellite to Kuwait
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Moving a satellite to Kuwait is the anecdote John Kiriakou uses to convey how limited overhead reconnaissance was at the start of his career.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the United States needed satellite coverage of the country and did not have it, because it had never needed it. Kiriakou says it took six months to move a satellite that had been sitting over Moscow so that it could show Kuwait.

He offers it in response to an account of the search for Bill Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief kidnapped in 1984: a young analyst from the National Photographic Interpretation Center would take the day's single satellite image of Beirut and go over the rooftops with a magnifying glass, trying to match them against structures described in hostage debriefings. Kiriakou's reply is that he can only imagine the work involved, and both men reach the same summary at the same moment: "there was no Google Earth."

The same absence shaped his own tradecraft in the field, where planning a surveillance detection route meant photocopying road-atlas pages and taping them together, and where the hunt for Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan was conducted with 1961 maps.

See also

- Bill Buckley
- Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
- Planning a surveillance detection route
- Navigating Pakistan without maps
