Advanced Counterterrorism Operations
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Advanced Counterterrorism Operations was a six-week specialist CIA course that John Kiriakou was recalled from the field to attend well over a year before the September 11 attacks. He was one of only fourteen officers chosen for it worldwide, selected, in his account, because they were the ones moving up quickly in counterterrorism.

Selection

The invitation arrived by cable. Kiriakou was halfway into his tour in Athens when he received a cable inviting him to apply for acceptance to what was then a brand-new course, and "I jumped at it", flying back to the United States for six weeks of what he describes as in-depth, high-threat, high-danger counterterrorism operations. He dates his own attendance to the spring of 2000, at the second running of the course.

It sat on top of, rather than in place of, the standard operations pipeline. The basic course had already covered weapons, the Glock 9mm, the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, the Remington pump-action 12-gauge, tens of thousands of rounds, along with defensive driving, counterterrorist driving, surveillance and surveillance detection. The disguise work also belonged to the earlier training, not to this course. Kiriakou lists the advanced syllabus alongside its neighbours as a single accumulation: "I had advanced counterterrorist driving. I had desert driving. And I did everything the CIA had to offer."

Syllabus

The technical half covered what was, at the time, new equipment: beacons, listening devices, covert video, "and, you know, we were just starting with this notion of drones. It was all brand new." In another telling the same ground is summarised as "bugs and cameras and satellites and drones and all kinds of things like that," alongside weapons and explosives, bomb making and defusing.

The driving half is the part Kiriakou describes in most detail, and it was not defensive. It was about crashing through roadblocks and through cars, and it carried a specific piece of physics: if two cars are blocking a road, the engine block is too heavy to hit, "you're going to kill yourself if you crash into the engine", so the driver goes through the boot, which pushes the car aside and leaves the road open. The scenario he gives is being stopped by al-Qaeda on an island in the southern Philippines.

The desert component ran in Utah and Nevada, sand dunes, how not to get stuck, then track work at sixty miles an hour in reverse and pit manoeuvres. The course was entirely domestic and split across facilities out west. It was also physically punishing: Kiriakou was injured during the training, and "everybody had whiplash when we finished."

One drill taught reaction rather than technique: the student is blindfolded in the driver's seat, the blindfold comes off, and there are three seconds to respond to whatever is in front of him, a roadblock, a man with an AK-47, or somebody easing the door open to put a nine-millimetre against his head and say "bang, you're dead. You fail." Kiriakou says the habit it left has outlasted the career by decades: he locks the car doors before the key goes into the ignition, and still does. Twenty-five years on, he says, "I remember it like I took it last week."

Consequence

Its significance in his telling is entirely one of timing. The course ran about eighteen months before the attacks; when 9/11 came, the fourteen were trained and "we were ready to deploy immediately to the field."

The clearest instance is his first day in Pakistan. Four hours after arriving he introduced himself to the station chief, who immediately asked him to write a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house. Kiriakou attributes his ability to do it to precisely this training, he sat down with a legal pad, wrote 0200 at the top because he wanted darkness and the element of surprise, and listed what he needed: extra weapons, ammunition, encrypted comms, walkie-talkies, battering rams, night-vision goggles. A later telling of the same document adds two items to the list, money and handcuffs, and one rule that is not equipment at all: "the team has to be ISI, FBI, CIA." The list, he says, was ordered and delivered to the embassy soon after he wrote it, and the first operation ran on it unchanged a couple of days later, when ISI called with a lead.

He pairs the course with a standing warning that the surveillance and counter-surveillance element is not a classroom exercise, an officer has to "always always be on the lookout for for somebody following you, which unfortunately happens." By his own account the conditioning never switched off: "my head is on a swivel 24-7."

See also

- CIA Training Doctrine
- Surveillance detection route
- Pakistan Station (2002)
- CIA disguise program
- John Kiriakou
