The desert sunset photograph
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Asked by a viewer why it is forbidden to photograph the outside of an American embassy, John Kiriakou drew a distinction he considered important and then illustrated the wider problem with an incident from his own service in the Gulf.

Policy, not law

Kiriakou rejected the premise that a statute is involved. "They're not laws that you can't take photos," he said. "They're policy." The State Department's Office of Diplomatic Security does not permit photographs of embassy exteriors, he explained, "because they can be used to case the embassy." He described the enforcement as physical and immediate: guards posted on the roof, others watching closed-circuit television, and a readiness to "run out and grab your camera."

The distinction matters to his account. The prohibition is a security practice maintained by the mission itself, not an offence a photographer could be prosecuted for, and the response to a breach is confiscation rather than arrest.

The sunset in Saudi Arabia

Kiriakou then offered his own experience of the same instinct in a host government. In Saudi Arabia, he said, he was photographing a sunset "that just happened to have the Ministry of Interior off in the distance to the to the left." Asked whether the authorities tried to take his camera, he answered that they did.

He did not surrender it. "I stood my ground and it was a standoff for a half an hour," he said, and the Saudis "finally backed down when I pulled out the black passport." The black passport is the diplomatic document issued to accredited American personnel; in Kiriakou's telling it was the only thing that ended the confrontation.

He was insistent that the picture was what it appeared to be. "I don't care what the interior ministry looks like," he said. "I was genuinely taking a picture of a desert sunset." Ted Rall, who had raised a comparable experience of his own in a former Soviet republic, told him he believed it.

The two halves of the rule

The episode places two mirror-image restrictions side by side: an American embassy that will send guards down to the street over a photograph of its own facade, and a host government that will hold a Western diplomat for half an hour over a ministry glimpsed at the edge of a landscape shot. In Kiriakou's account both proceed from the same worry, that a photograph is a step toward casing a building, and neither depends on the photographer's intent.

The same conversation covered why American embassies overseas are built so large in the first place.

See also

- Bigger than the Russian embassy
- Embassy fortification after 9/11
- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
