Yemen
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Yemen, on the southern Arabian Peninsula, was the destination of five visits by John Kiriakou between 1990 and approximately 2010, a period that begins with the country's brief unification and ends with the closure and evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Sanaa. He has repeatedly called Yemen one of the worst places on earth, and says conditions there worsened on each successive visit, though he notes its Chinese-built roads are better than roads in the United States.

The five trips, briefly

- First (~1990), Kiriakou flew down from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a three-day weekend during the prophet's-birthday holiday. The two Yemens, the Republic of Yemen (North) and the Soviet-satellite People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South), were in the process of merging. "People were literally dancing in the streets."
- Second, Unification under strain; the North dominating the South; "it just wasn't good."
- Third, Civil war, with North and South launching Scud missiles at each other. South Yemeni Vice President Ali Salim al-Beidh fled to Oman.
- Fourth, Grim. Safe accommodation only at the Marriott, with thirty-foot blast walls.
- Fifth (~2010), Kiriakou traveled as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The U.S. embassy was being closed and personnel evacuated.

The 2010 al-Qaeda attacks

In the period of the fifth trip, al-Qaeda staged sequential attacks on foreign diplomatic missions in Sanaa: six South Korean diplomats were assassinated en route from the airport to their hotel; a follow-up team of South Korean intelligence officers sent to investigate that attack was assassinated on the same road. "The Koreans just shut the embassy down and evacuated everybody. It's grim. It really is. And there's no hope in sight."

Kiriakou's encounter with the DCIA Deputy

In the Marriott's lobby during the fifth trip, Kiriakou encountered Steve Kappes, the Deputy Director of the CIA, on a quiet visit; the package-moving protocol used by the visiting protection detail revealed his presence. Kappes departed with a six-vehicle armored convoy. Kiriakou, "on the CIA shit list by then," waited for "my one poorly armored ten-year-old Volkswagen to come and pick me up."

Expelled from the Gulf after Arafat backed Saddam

John Kiriakou recounts that when Yasser Arafat backed Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the roughly six million Yemeni guest workers in Saudi Arabia were expelled essentially to the last man, collapsing Yemen's economy so badly that, he says, "Yemen has never recovered." Palestinians, the educated middle class of engineers, doctors and bankers, were thrown out across Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the UAE for the same reason.

In another telling, Kiriakou traces the same expulsion to Yemen's 1990,91 seat on the UN Security Council: when the Council voted to authorize force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, only Cuba and Yemen voted no, and Saudi Arabia responded by expelling 1.2 million Yemeni guest workers. Kiriakou says he personally witnessed the resulting refugee crisis, flying from Saudi Arabia to Yemen during the expulsion and seeing tent cities stretching along the coast for twenty minutes of flight time before landing in Sanaa. He argues the resulting humanitarian collapse led to the overthrow of Yemen's Sunni government by the Shia Houthi rebels, who are aligned with Iran, giving Iran a foothold near the 16-mile-wide Bab-el-Mandeb strait.

Strategic chokepoints and the Houthis

Kiriakou frames the Yemen war as ultimately about two chokepoints controlling Saudi Arabia's access to the sea: the Strait of Hormuz, controlled by Iran, and the Bab-el-Mandeb, which runs past Iran-aligned Yemen, denying Iran control over both, in his view, is what drives Saudi and U.S. interest in the war. He says a 2011 Sanaa cab driver told him the Houthis were using drones to bomb the capital, the first indication to Kiriakou that outside actors were involved, since the Houthis themselves had no drones and U.S. drones were based in Djibouti, sixteen miles across the water. He notes a Houthi attack on Saudi oil fields in the Eastern Province shut down Saudi oil production for three days and nearly collapsed the Saudi economy. Separately, a U.S. ambassador in Yemen told Kiriakou bluntly that the United States has no national interests in the country, apart from a brief past concern over piracy near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait.

Ali Abdullah Saleh and the multi-part civil war

For decades the country was led by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was close both to Saudi Arabia and to the United States, until he broke with Washington over the Security Council vote on Saddam Hussein. Kiriakou dates the civil war from that break, and stresses it was never a two-sided affair: "it wasn't just, you know, the good guys versus the bad guys. It was a multi-part civil war." Al-Qaeda fought as one party to it; former communists attacked the central government in the south; and the Shia in the north-west attacked it as well.

Al-Qaeda's base was the Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen, also, Kiriakou notes, where Osama bin Laden's family originated. He glosses the name from the Arabic for vegetation and dead: "it's called dead vegetation because it's so dry literally nothing can live there. Animals don't even live there." That, he says, is precisely why al-Qaeda could sit in it, "this no man's land that nobody else could go to."

Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia, which "reluctantly" took him in. Someone reached the palace where he was living and planted a bomb that "quite literally blew his head off. So Ali Abdullah Saleh no longer exists."

The image Kiriakou returns to for the collapse is qat, a stimulant chewed all day, "like drinking a pot of coffee", and the men guarding their supply of it from what look like tree houses, with old rifles: "Their children don't have food, but there's plenty of qat to chew."

The secret war he stumbled into

Kiriakou's last trip was in 2011, arriving from Djibouti, about nine miles across the water at the Bab-el-Mandeb, "where the Horn of Africa almost meets the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula." He asked his cab driver in Sanaa how things were going. Rough, the driver said: the Houthis were attacking the capital. Kiriakou said he had read about it. Then the driver added that they were using drones.

"And I said, 'The Houthis don't have drones.' And then I thought to myself, but we do." His conclusion: "In 2011, we were already involved in a war in Yemen, and nobody knew about it. Thank you, Barack Obama. Another American secret war."

The Bab-el-Mandeb threat, 2026

By 2026 the Houthis had taken the Yemeni government, and if not the whole country, then "the most important parts of Yemen." The specific threat Kiriakou describes is to shipping into and out of Saudi Arabia, effectively Jeddah: mostly oil tankers, plus cargo ships that have come through the Suez Canal and must transit the Bab-el-Mandeb.

The consequence he draws is global rather than regional. Closing the strait forces ships around Africa instead, "which adds 30 days to the trip, and billions of gallons of fuel." From that: "we're talking about the entire planet going into a recession and having to fight what's going to be out-of-control inflation, because this little group of bandits has closed the Bab-el-Mandeb."

Saudi Arabia, in his assessment, cannot answer it. There is a Saudi Navy "for what that's worth," but the Saudi military "has been fighting the Houthis for more than a decade, and they lost. The Houthis won." He adds an observation from living in Saudi Arabia: though the Saudis dominate Yemen economically, geographically and physically, "the Houthis are fierce fighters and they're not afraid of anybody, but the Saudis are afraid of them."

The Israeli air base in Somaliland

Kiriakou reads Israel's recognition of Somaliland, the only such recognition in the world, as an arrangement rather than a principle. Somaliland gets an Israeli embassy. Israel gets an air base, "about 100 miles from the Houthis." If Israeli shipping is threatened in the Bab-el-Mandeb, "they are going to unleash F-35s and attempt to blow the Houthis back to the stone age. That's been tried in the past. It doesn't work."

What he expects instead is atrocity: "I think what we're going to end up seeing here is crimes against humanity." The port of Hodeidah bombed repeatedly, on the pattern of the last time, "they bombed schools. They bombed hospitals. And the Saudis, they're just as guilty. Schools, hospitals, children, private homes. It makes no difference. They just bombed everything."

How it becomes a regional war

The escalation chain Kiriakou traces starts with Saudi Arabia being attacked: Bahrain joins, "because the Bahrainis and the Saudis are joined at the hip," and if Bahrain joins, the Emiratis probably follow, despite the UAE having, by his account, negotiated its own separate deal with Iran ("we'll give you $3 billion in cash if you stop bombing us," and the Iranians stopped). Though the Saudis and Emiratis took opposing sides in Yemen, he expects the UAE to come in for Riyadh if it is endangered.

The resulting line-up he names is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Jordan and Israel against Iran and Yemen, with Qatar and Oman trying to stay neutral: "this is going to be a full-fledged regional war."

The Susan Collins debate

In 2010, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou accepted a think-tank invitation to debate Yemen without preparing, "I figure if I don't know these issues by now, I'm never going to know them", and arrived on Capitol Hill to discover his opponent was Senator Susan Collins, "there with a whole army of aides" and her note cards, while he sat looking at his watch and waving at the crowd.

His argument was the one he still makes: that Yemenis are consistently underestimated, "scrappy and tough and mean and fierce fighters," not afraid of anybody, and that despite Saudi Arabia being bigger, richer and more powerful, the Yemenis would win. He also broke with the standard line that the United States had no national interests there, naming three, counterterrorism, counter-piracy, and open trade through the Bab-el-Mandeb. Collins disagreed. He shook her hand and went home.

The next morning John Kerry came into his office and asked whether he had debated Senator Collins the night before. "I said, 'I did, and if I may say so, I kicked her ass.'" Kerry did not find it funny. He said only "Don't ever do that again," and walked out. Kiriakou's coda: "I didn't work for John Kerry too much after that, so I did whatever the heck I pleased."

The 1990 vote and its price

Yemen held one of the non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council in 1990, the year Iraq invaded Kuwait. Secretary of State James Baker went to the Yemenis and told them that if they had any idea what was good for them they would vote yes on the use of force to push Iraq out. The Yemenis and the Cubans were the only members to vote no.

Saudi Arabia's response was to expel, in John Kiriakou's account, literally every Yemeni in the kingdom, millions of people. "Yemen has never recovered. Never. The economy collapsed, the country split, civil war after civil war." He places the same expulsion at the root of the country's later trajectory, including the rise of the Houthis.

See also

- Anwar al-Awlaki
- Steve Kappes
- Prince Muhammad bin Naif
- John Kiriakou
