China's base in Djibouti
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Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti is, in John Kiriakou's telling, the strangest piece of real estate in the American basing network: a single installation divided by a chain-link fence, American forces on one side and the Chinese army on the other. He has visited it, and calls the arrangement "the weirdest, craziest thing."

How the ground came to be shared

The base was French. When the French pulled out they simply abandoned it, and the Djiboutians offered it to the United States. Kiriakou renders the exchange as a transaction of one line each: "You want this?", "Yeah, it's 16 miles from Yemen. Sure, we'll take it." The Chinese then asked for a share of the same ground, "Yeah, we'll take some, too," and the result is a chain-link fence down the middle, Americans on the right and Chinese on the left.

When Kiriakou visited around 2011 as an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the fence was still there but the other side was still French; by the mid-2020s the same fence divided Americans from Chinese.

One detail from the visit he returns to is the difference in how the two sides keep their aircraft. The Chinese leave all their hangar doors open; the American doors are closed. Asking an American what was inside, he was told "dude, I can't tell you what's in there", to which he replied that he already knew and was only pulling his leg.

The base as evidence about China

The shared base is the load-bearing fact in Kiriakou's argument that China is not an expansionist power. His case is that, Tibet aside, which the Chinese have always claimed as Chinese, China has never invaded another country, fighting only brief border skirmishes with Vietnam in the 1970s and India, and that it maintains exactly one military base beyond its own borders. That base is Camp Lemonnier, and "crazy as it might sound, they share it with the United States."

From this he draws the conclusion that the military threat is overstated, "so it's not like they're imperialists", while insisting the real Chinese instrument is soft power, at which he considers them masters. He notes that the Chinese are "perplexed as to why we so distrust them," and that it is principally the United States, with Australia and the Philippines, that reads China as a threat.

What the base is used for

The American side is the launch point for the drone war across the water. It is sixteen miles from Yemen across the Bab el-Mandeb, and the drones striking Somalia are flown from Djibouti as well.

It has also served as a holding site. Kiriakou describes eight men, every one of them convicted of murder or armed robbery and originally from countries across Africa, being held at the joint base while the Trump administration sought to expel them to South Sudan, a country none of them came from, and which he calls "hell on earth," the poorest and most war-torn on the planet, where he expects they would starve within weeks. Whether it was the CIA or the FBI that picked them up he does not claim to know, saying only that it is unclear. Of the base itself he says simply: "It's like out of the Twilight Zone."

The Djiboutian service

Against the scale of the foreign presence, Kiriakou sets the size of Djibouti's own intelligence service, which he visited once. His account is a measurement: the rental townhouse he lives in was twice the size of the entire Djibouti intelligence service, and his living room, with room for a couch, a chair, a coffee table and a television, was twice the size of the office of the service's director.

He offers the visit as a case study in how the CIA handles the intelligence services of very small states generally. The method is deference, addressing the director as "Your Excellency" or "Mr. Director" or "General," saying what an honour it is to visit, after which, in his description, "for the most part, those intelligence services, they just do what you ask them to do." The reciprocal side is material: a service calls to say it needs twenty pairs of night-vision goggles and cannot afford them, not the hundred-dollar kind but "real ones that are like 1,500 bucks," and the answer is that they will be shipped over. Relations stay good that way, and he says he always enjoyed working with the little agencies.

See also

- Djibouti
- The Bab el-Mandeb
- Yemen
- Somaliland
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
