The bomb course
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The bomb course was the last of the courses John Kiriakou took after the Farm. The CIA runs it at a facility in a different state, reached by air, the class flew down on a private jet the agency then owned, and which, in what Kiriakou calls an ill-advised period of cost-cutting, was donated to the FBI and is now borrowed back.

Working up

The week began with basics and a little chemistry, and the simplest weapon of all: the Molotov cocktail, a bottle of petrol, a rag for a wick, thrown at a wall to produce a fireball lasting about two seconds.

The second day introduced detonators. Kiriakou had never held one and was struck by how small it was, until told what it would do: "it'll blow off both your hands and probably at least one of your eyes. Just the detonator." The class attached detonators to detonation cord and fired them from a bunker sunk almost entirely below ground, with only bulletproof glass at eye level, and found that the detonator alone does far more damage than expected. Its purpose, of course, is to set off the main charge.

Ammonium nitrate

The third day was ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the bomb Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City. Kiriakou says he was surprised how easy it was: "it's just fertiliser and diesel fuel. It's as simple as that."

For his final exam he filled a paper grocery bag about two thirds with commercial fertiliser from a hardware store and mixed in diesel from a filling station very slowly with a wooden spoon, so that each pellet absorbed some fuel. He pushed in a detonator, ran detonation cord, put the bag under a van and fired it. They found the transmission three hundred yards away in the woods. The noise, he notes, is deafening; asked whether people lived nearby, an instructor said yes, and that they complain constantly.

Defusing

Building, Kiriakou says, is fun; the hard part is taking one apart. Training devices were made safe simply by omitting the detonator. He is dismissive of the cinematic version, "do I cut the red wire? do I cut the green wire?", and says the real discipline is about not risking a spark, static electricity, or a stray signal from something like a garage-door opener.

He came out of it, he says, "really feeling smart" and transformed. Two further courses followed: advanced counterterrorist driving in the western desert, and a six-week Advanced Counterterrorism Operations course for which he was one of only a dozen officers in the entire CIA chosen, finished, as it turned out, just in time for 9/11.

See also

- The Farm
- Counterterrorist Driving
- The shooting house
- Cofer Black's warning to the liaison class
