Cheney's airstrip question
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Cheney's airstrip question is John Kiriakou's example of the kind of one-off demand that reached him as executive assistant to the deputy director for operations during the Iraq war.

"I got a request from Vice President Cheney one time, and he wanted to know what the longest airstrip in northern Iraq was made of." Kiriakou's own reaction was bafflement, "and I was like, what?", and it was shared by the operations directorate: "nobody in operations knew. They were like, what?" He kept restating the provenance to get anyone to take it seriously: "it's from Cheney. Cheney specifically wants to know."

The resolution came from an unglamorous quarter. "I ended up having to enlist the CIA librarian, and she said, I can find this out." Within twenty-four hours she had told him "exactly what it was made of and what the mix consisted of", so much concrete, so much of everything else, and Kiriakou wrote the memo.

The reason for the question turned out to be a load calculation: "they wanted to fly in tanks, and they wanted to know if the runway was solid enough to handle the weight of a plane carrying two tanks landed on it."

See also

- Dick Cheney
- Executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations
- Central Intelligence Agency
