Bahrain Posting (1994–1996)
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John Kiriakou was posted to Bahrain from August 1, 1994 to 1996, arriving with his wife Joanne and their 16-month-old son Chris. He served under U.S. State Department cover as second secretary for economic affairs, not declared as CIA, his language skills and the sudden centrality of the Iraq-Kuwait border to world events, following Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, had shaped his early CIA career and put him in the Gulf. He requested the rotation from the CIA to the State Department in 1993; the agency first sent him for a full year of Arabic-language training before posting him to Bahrain as economic officer at the American Embassy in Manama, working Iraq sanctions issues, before he returned to CIA headquarters in 1996. The posting came immediately after the Oslo Accords; Bahrain, like each Gulf state but Saudi Arabia, hosted a component of the resulting Arab-Israeli peace talks, in Bahrain's case, talks on the environment, covering fish and wildlife.

A small, water-rich oasis

Kiriakou describes 1990s Bahrain as fed by an ancient, prehistoric water table running underground from the Atlantic Ocean beneath the whole of Africa before surfacing in Bahrain; as recently as the 1970s, natural springs gushed water like oil. By his posting, overdevelopment had dropped the water table 35 feet and left the water brackish. Attractions were sparse, a history museum, a Quran museum, and the roughly 3,000-year-old "Tree of Life", reflecting a country Kiriakou says was, in 1996, the same size and population as Pittsburgh.

Unlike its Gulf neighbors, Kiriakou says, Bahrain had no significant oil of its own during his posting, producing only about 50,000 barrels a day, roughly matching its own consumption, with its wealth instead built on a long history of trade with India, Iran, Zanzibar, and Oman. He traces this to Bahrain's Dilmun civilization, dated to 1,000 BC and showcased at the National Museum of Bahrain, with ancient ruins on the island tied to Alexander the Great, the Sumerians, and the Hittites of southern Turkey.

Diplomatic-corps life

Kiriakou played right field in the American diplomatic corps softball league, noting the Marine Security Guards were the league's power hitters while he "hit for average, not power." Despite his junior rank, he was invited to nearly every dinner hosted by Bahrain's newly arrived British ambassador, previously deputy chief of mission in Ankara, while American Ambassador David Ransom often was not; asked why, the ambassador told him, "I like you. You're fun. You tell interesting stories." After returning from Bahrain in 1996, other U.S. agencies, DIA, NSA, and the FBI, sent officers bound for Bahrain to consult Kiriakou because of his granular knowledge of the country.

Bahrain has hosted the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet since 1976, the naval component of Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base outside Tampa.

Sectarian tension

Kiriakou describes Bahrain's underlying tension in the mid-1990s: a Sunni royal family, the Al Khalifa, ruling a population roughly 75% Shia. The royal family's policy of naturalizing Sunni Muslims from Syria, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan fueled Shia resentment at being demographically diluted, tension that fed directly into the first Intifada that began two months into his posting. He notes that under the same policy, Shia Muslims were barred outright from serving in Bahrain's police, military, or intelligence services. As the uprising escalated, he says Shia dissidents began planting homemade bombs and killed police officers, and Bahraini authorities responded by capturing bomb-makers and summarily executing them, deploying a black-clad, machine-gun-carrying unit called the UGL Group that Kiriakou says turned out to be composed of Pakistanis.

Human rights officer

Alongside his economic-officer duties, Kiriakou served for two years as Bahrain's human rights officer, a position Congress had mandated for every country with U.S. diplomatic relations starting in 1978, requiring an annual report to Congress on the host country's conduct. He says he took the requirement seriously, unlike many officers who merely went through the motions, documenting abuses such as the killing of a 15-year-old boy for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration. He has since used a hypothetical drawn from the role to illustrate the tension between the State Department's human-rights mission and the CIA's operational one: confronting Bahrain's interior minister over extrajudicial killings of teenagers, only for a CIA station chief to separately request a secret torture prison in the same building.

An Orthodox church in Bahrain

Kiriakou and his wife attended a Malayalam Indian Orthodox (St. Thomas) church in Bahrain once with their infant son, then switched to the closer Anglican Cathedral for regular services. When the Archbishop of Cyprus later visited Bahrain to ask the Emir for land to build an Orthodox church, roughly 40 of the country's Orthodox residents met him at the palace; the Emir, informed of Kiriakou's outsized role welcoming visitors to the island, joked that he liked Kiriakou's "Imam." A Cypriot property developer donated the land, and the Archbishop authorized construction on the spot, Bahrain now has an Orthodox church under the Cypriot Archdiocese.

Friendship with the future Crown Prince

Kiriakou became close friends with Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, later Bahrain's Crown Prince, at the time heir presumptive, holding ceremonial posts as president of the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research and patron of the Bahrain Environmental Protection Association, after the two overlapped studying in Washington. The two once went, Salman in Western disguise he believed made him unrecognizable, to a low-grade nightclub near the Navy base featuring Polish dancing girls and a Filipino cover band, where patrons paid a woman at the foot of the stage in dinars for flower garlands to signal interest in a performer. Salman grew infatuated with one Polish dancer and asked Kiriakou if he thought she'd sleep with him, "I don't have the guts", despite already having two wives; nothing came of it. Salman attended Kiriakou's going-away party at the ambassador's residence with his first wife, and the two still exchange text messages and jokes decades later.

Two visitors, one ministry

Kiriakou has used his own Bahrain posting as the cleanest illustration of American hypocrisy on human rights, framing it around the fact that every American embassy in every country with which the United States has diplomatic relations must produce an annual human rights report for Congress.

On rotation to the State Department from 1994 to 1996 he served in the embassy as the economic officer and also as the human rights officer, which meant going out to interview attorneys, detainees and government officials, anyone with anything to do with human rights.

His account of the demarche is specific. Going to see the Minister of Interior, he would say that you cannot pick a fifteen-year-old boy up off the street and beat him to death for marching in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration and then telephone his parents that night to come and collect the body, that it has to be reported to Congress, and that Congress may cut off arms sales.

Then, an hour later, a CIA officer would arrive and say: pay no attention to the human rights man. If we give you ten million dollars, we want you to open a secret torture chamber; we will bring people here and disappear them, you will torture them, and you will give us a transcript of what they say.

Kiriakou's point is about which visitor gets obeyed: "What are they going to do? They going to listen to John, the human rights guy... or they going to listen to the CIA guy with the suitcase full of $10 million in cash?"

He frames the general principle as a choice the United States has not made: either it is "a shining beacon for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties or we're not", but it cannot lecture other countries while behaving as it does. He is explicit that this is not a partisan matter, "because the Democrats and the Republicans are equally guilty of doing exactly this."

The farewell gifts

Kiriakou has described the customary parting gifts from the Emir and the Prime Minister to departing embassy officers, and the rule that made them a problem: nothing worth more than twenty-five dollars could be kept, so gifts had to be opened in the presence of a witness and sent to the Treasury Department in the diplomatic pouch. The usual gift was a Rolex.

The exception he remembers was the ambassador's. He was handed a cigar box and said "oh, cigars", and opened it in front of witnesses to find fifty thousand dollars in cash. The ambassador refused to touch it; the deputy chief of mission and the head of public affairs counted it in front of the rest of the staff, and it was boxed back up and sent to Treasury.

Kiriakou notes his own place in the ritual: after a posting spent pressing the Prime Minister and the Minister of Interior on human rights, "I was the only one who didn't get a Rolex when we left."

Variance across tellings

Kiriakou has told the story of the two visitors to the Minister of Interior more than once, and the details do not match in every particular. The core is stable: a fifteen-year-old boy arrested at a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration, taken to the police station, beaten to death, and his father telephoned to come and collect the body; Kiriakou's demarche that this had to be reported to Congress and might cost the country its arms purchases, in this telling, F-16s then on order.

The figures move. In this account the CIA station chief follows him in after fifteen minutes and offers "$100 million" for a prison where people can be tortured, or where the host service tortures them and hands over a report. In another telling the interval is an hour and the sum is ten million dollars. The framing question is identical in both: "So who is he going to listen to? Is he going to listen to me, or is he going to listen to the station?"

The variance is recorded here rather than resolved; Kiriakou has not reconciled the two figures.

Not always a dissenter

Asked whether he had always been rebellious, Kiriakou's answer was no: "I was always the good boy. I was always the one who wanted to please adults and do the right thing and get good grades and go to good school and get a good job." The change came at the agency, on seeing things he judged wrong and against the law, and waiting for somebody else to speak. "And then nobody says anything."

The Japanese ambassador

One recurring feature of the diplomatic circuit that Kiriakou singles out is the number of Japanese diplomats posted abroad, including to the United States, who speak no English at all. The example he gives from Bahrain is the Japanese consul general in Chicago, who was made ambassador to Bahrain and whose arrival the American mission looked forward to on the assumption that three years in Chicago would have made him easy to deal with. He could not say hello, my name is. The dinner that followed produced David Ransom's walkout.

The sums, and the interval

The earliest recorded telling of the two-visitors story, from May 2022, differs from the later ones in both of its measurable details, and is set down here alongside them rather than reconciled with them.

In this version Kiriakou frames the whole thing as an indictment of the annual report he was required to write. "We profess to be this shining beacon of hope for democracy and civil rights and human rights and civil liberties, and it''s rubbish." The scene follows: "what would a host country think, for example, when John Kiriakou the human rights guy goes into the Minister of Interior''s office and says, ''your excellency, I have to warn you: your men beat this fifteen-year-old boy to death the other day, because he marched in a pro-democracy demonstration. That is illegal, it''s an extrajudicial killing, and I''m going to put it in the human rights report.'' And then fifteen minutes later the CIA station chief walks in and says, ''don''t listen to the human rights guy. We want you to open a secret prison here where we can bring people to be tortured. Don''t tell anybody, and we''re going to give you fifty million dollars to cover the costs and grease the right palms.''"

Later tellings put the interval at an hour and the sum at ten million dollars. The elements that do not move across any version are the boy''s age, the cause of the demarche, the identity of the second visitor, and the purpose of the request.

Kiriakou''s generalisation from it is about information rather than about Bahrain: "it''s the same thing with information. We say one thing and then we do the completely opposite thing."

Where he was for Oklahoma City

Asked in 2021 what the agency had known about the Oklahoma City bombing, Kiriakou's answer is a flat negative and a location: "No, not a single thing. Not a single thing. Of course, I was overseas at the time. I was stationed in Bahrain at the time." His judgement on the case is reserved for the Bureau: "this was as great an FBI [expletive]-up as there's ever been in American history."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa
- Bahrain Prime Minister "Mr. 10 Percent"
- Bahrain Intifada (1994)
- Bahrain fishing officer demarche
- Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
