John Kiriakou described a CIA operation against the Abu Nidal Organization that exploited the group’s paranoid internal culture to destroy it from within — without a single direct CIA confrontation with any member.
Kiriakou’s portfolio put him in direct contact with the group: as the CIA’s counterterrorism representative in Athens, he covered Arab terrorism broadly, including the Abu Nidal Organization alongside the PFLP, DFLP, and PFLP-GC — what he calls the old-school communist and nationalist terrorist groups of that era.[1]
Planting the seed
Abu Nidal was personally conspiratorial to a pathological degree. The CIA identified this vulnerability and exploited it. The approach: rather than trying to recruit members of the organization, which was functionally impossible given the group’s extreme anti-American orientation, the CIA planted false information suggesting that various members were already cooperating with American intelligence.[2][3]
Kiriakou described the mechanism: “I can’t recruit you, Muhammad. You hate me. You want to kill me. But I know that there’s this other guy, Abdullah, in Abu Nidal’s organization. And I say to Abdullah: ‘Muhammad told me to talk to you.’” At that point, Abdullah would kill Muhammad. Then Kiriakou would tell Rashid that Abdullah had killed Muhammad — and Rashid would kill Abdullah. “Next thing you know, they’ve all killed each other and the only one left is Abu Nidal.”[2][3][4]
The end
Kiriakou stated his belief that Abu Nidal’s death — officially attributed to a heart attack — was not natural: “I never believed he had a heart attack. He was snuffed out because he wasn’t any use to the Iraqis anymore. He was just a pain, yelling about this and that. And Saddam was weird about control, and this was somebody he couldn’t control.”[4][5]