Cleaning up after Tora Bora
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Cleaning up after Tora Bora is how John Kiriakou describes his own role in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the December 2001 battle. He set it out on the DeProgram programme in August 2025, answering a viewer who asked whether either host had been at Tora Bora.

Not at the battle

Kiriakou's answer was a flat correction of the premise: "No, I arrived two months after Tora Bora."

The correction matters to his account of his own career, since he has repeatedly resisted claims made on his behalf about which operations he was present for. What he does claim here is the follow-on assignment: "that's why I went. I went to clean up the remnants of Tora Bora."

What the clean-up consisted of

Asked what that meant in practice, Kiriakou accepted the host's characterisation, that it involved "scavenging for evidence and information and stuff that's left behind", and the exchange added the second half: detaining "people that were a little too slow to get away from us."

The assessment Kiriakou gives in his own words is brief and positive: "we had some real success." He does not itemise it here.

What it left him with

The only physical trace he mentions is a souvenir. In the same breath he described a giant chunk of raw lapis lazuli taken from a house belonging to Osama bin Laden, which he says he still has and offered to bring to a later broadcast.

The period described here, early 2002, in Afghanistan and then Pakistan, is the one from which most of Kiriakou's operational accounts of the war on terror are drawn.

See also

- Tora Bora
- The lapis lazuli paperweight
- Osama bin Laden
- John Kiriakou
