Ahmed Khatib
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Dr. Ahmed Khatib was the Iraqi-installed occupation governor of Kuwait, announced by Iraq hours after the August 2, 1990 invasion. John Kiriakou, then an eight-month CIA analyst on Iraq, had written a classified profile of Khatib for the agency's internal "Leadership Review" a month before the invasion "just because he was interesting to me," and presented him to President George H. W. Bush in the Oval Office that morning.

Biography per Kiriakou's Oval Office briefing

Per Kiriakou: Khatib was a black Kuwaiti and a medical doctor who "hates the royal family because his mother was a slave in the household of the royal family. They had slavery until 1955 on the Arabian Peninsula." In reaction, Kiriakou says, Khatib became a communist. The royal family, after slavery ended, sent Ahmed "to the American University of Beirut. He trained there as a doctor. But his college roommate was George Habash, and together they founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine."

Kiriakou's account of the Oval Office reaction: "And the vice president says, 'Jesus Christ!' like that. And the president just goes like this and he says, 'Gentlemen, thank you. That'll be enough. I need to think about this.'" Kiriakou has given a shorter account of the same briefing elsewhere, saying that as part of his briefing he told the room that the Iraqis had named Khatib, a man he had personally met, as Kuwait's occupation governor that morning; he traces the later mass expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait after its liberation in part to the association between Khatib's PFLP co-founding and the occupation government.

See also

- George Habash
- PFLP
- Saddam Hussein
- John Kiriakou
