In 1993 Iraqi intelligence attempted to assassinate former U.S. President George H. W. Bush during his planned post-liberation “victory lap” visit to Kuwait. The plot was detected and foiled by Kuwaiti authorities, who arrested some 20 plotters — Iraqi agents and Bedoun. The U.S. response was a cruise-missile strike on the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) headquarters in Baghdad eight hours later. John Kiriakou was the analyst on the other end of the call from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell.[1][2]
Background: an earlier audience with Bush
Two years earlier, during the Gulf War, a twenty-five-year-old Kiriakou had already briefed President Bush directly in the Oval Office, after writing an analytic paper — published just days before the invasion of Kuwait — naming the Iraqi official Baghdad was reportedly planning to install as governor of occupied Kuwait. Bush read the paper, tossed it onto the coffee table, and asked, “Great, so now what do we do?” — with the room turning to Kiriakou for an answer.[3][4]
The Powell call
Kiriakou was sitting in the morning 9 a.m. meeting at CIA headquarters when the secretary came in: “John, General Powell’s on the phone for you.” Kiriakou: “For me? How does General Powell know who I am?”[2][5]
The call: “John, if the Iraqis were going to assassinate the president, who would be in charge of actually carrying out an operation like that?” Kiriakou: “Well, if you’re talking about the aborted attempt in Kuwait, Kuwait operations are run from the Iraqi intelligence service, Basra Station, but Basra station in turn is managed by Sabir Abd al-Aziz al-Duri — he’s the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.” Powell: “Where does he physically sit?” Kiriakou: “In IIS headquarters in Baghdad.” Powell: “Thank you.”[6][7][8][9]
Kiriakou: “I go back into the office and everybody was sitting there. ‘What did he want?’ I said, ‘He wanted to know where the director of the Iraqi intelligence service’s office was.’ ‘Okay.’ Eight hours later, we fired 47 cruise missiles into the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters and we turned it into dust. They didn’t want to fool around with these Iraqis.”[10] In a separate telling Kiriakou gives the count as 49 missiles, fired at 2 a.m. so as to flatten the building while minimizing casualties; the only person killed was a janitor, a death Kiriakou says he still feels guilty about.[11] In yet another telling of the same 47-missile strike, Kiriakou attributes the janitor’s death specifically to the time-zone gap between Washington and Baghdad — by the time the missiles landed eight hours later it was the middle of the night in Iraq — and recalls telling his boss the next day that he felt personally responsible for the death.[12]