Abu Nidal Organization
======================

John Kiriakou described a CIA operation against the Abu Nidal Organization that exploited the group's paranoid internal culture to destroy it from within, without a single direct CIA confrontation with any member.

Kiriakou's portfolio put him in direct contact with the group: as the CIA's counterterrorism representative in Athens, he covered Arab terrorism broadly, including the Abu Nidal Organization alongside the PFLP, DFLP, and PFLP-GC, what he calls the old-school communist and nationalist terrorist groups of that era.

Planting the seed

Abu Nidal was personally conspiratorial to a pathological degree. The CIA identified this vulnerability and exploited it. The approach: rather than trying to recruit members of the organization, which was functionally impossible given the group's extreme anti-American orientation, the CIA planted false information suggesting that various members were already cooperating with American intelligence.

Kiriakou described the mechanism: "I can't recruit you, Muhammad. You hate me. You want to kill me. But I know that there's this other guy, Abdullah, in Abu Nidal's organization. And I say to Abdullah: 'Muhammad told me to talk to you.'" At that point, Abdullah would kill Muhammad. Then Kiriakou would tell Rashid that Abdullah had killed Muhammad, and Rashid would kill Abdullah. "Next thing you know, they've all killed each other and the only one left is Abu Nidal."

The end

Kiriakou stated his belief that Abu Nidal's death, officially attributed to a heart attack, was not natural: "I never believed he had a heart attack. He was snuffed out because he wasn't any use to the Iraqis anymore. He was just a pain, yelling about this and that. And Saddam was weird about control, and this was somebody he couldn't control."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA
- Saddam Hussein
