Admiral William J. Crowe was a former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before that he had commanded CENTCOM and lived in Bahrain for two years, which is why his visit during John Kiriakou’s posting there mattered to the Bahrainis as much as to the embassy.[1]
Kiriakou was assigned by lot as Crowe’s control officer for the visit — responsible for the schedule, transportation, and meeting notes — and spent the whole week with him.[2][3][4]
Pound for pound
As commander of the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based component, Crowe had made a 1976 statement — repeated annually thereafter — that “pound for pound, Bahrain is the best friend the United States has in the world.”[5] Kiriakou describes the line as the single most durable thing Crowe left behind in the country: “this is a quote that every Bahraini knows and every Bahraini quotes and every American ambassador quotes.”[6]
He also endorses it, with a qualification about scale — the pound-for-pound framing is doing real work, “cuz Bahrain is the size and same population as Pittsburgh.”[7] The strategic stake behind the sentiment is the Fifth Fleet, headquartered there; on Kiriakou’s assessment the United States will never permit the Bahraini government to collapse.[1]
The carpet shopping
Kiriakou’s duties as control officer during the visit included accompanying Crowe’s wife on a carpet-buying excursion, and attending a substance-free courtesy meeting between Crowe and Bahrain’s foreign minister, whom Kiriakou liked because he was Harvard-educated and spoke better English than Kiriakou did.[8]
The carpet day produced the anecdote he tells against himself. He spent the entire day with Shirley Crowe and did her price negotiating, dropped her at the ambassador’s residence, went home to shower and change, and returned two hours later for the dinner — at which she put out her hand and said, “Hello, I’m Shirley Crowe.” Kiriakou’s reply that they had spent the whole day together and that he had negotiated her carpets drew only “Of course you did.”[9][6]
The Prime-Minister handshake
Crowe was the senior U.S. official present during Kiriakou’s confrontational handshake with the Bahraini Prime Minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, in the private elevator vestibule of the Emir’s diwan. The party had just come from a meeting with the Emir, and the elevator that opened as they left carried the Prime Minister and the Minister of Interior — the minister being both a prince and the Prime Minister’s son-in-law, and the official Kiriakou had been taking to task.[4][10]
The Prime Minister gripped Kiriakou’s hand and refused to release it while smiling at him; on releasing it, the Prime Minister said: “I have my eye on you, Kiriakou.” Kiriakou’s response: “Yes, your highness. I would expect nothing less.” On the way down in the elevator, Admiral Crowe and the U.S. Ambassador asked Kiriakou what the confrontation had been about. Kiriakou’s answer concerned the Bahraini Interior Ministry’s recent beating death of a fifteen-year-old boy who had marched in a pro-democracy demonstration — an episode Kiriakou had been writing up for the U.S. Human Rights Report and discussing at parties from his home.[11][12][13][14][15]
The surveillance was not a suspicion but a finding. Kiriakou, who was the embassy’s human rights officer, says the Prime Minister “did not like me, not even a little bit,” had surveillance placed on him, and that he found a bug in his own house — the Bahrainis listening to him complain to his wife about the case. His verdict on the intent: “I think that they just think that that’s somehow is intimidating. It’s not.”[16][15][17]
The departure gifts
The sequel came a year later, when Kiriakou left the country. The Emir and the Prime Minister customarily gave departing officers a gift, usually a Rolex, which no American official could keep — anything worth more than twenty-five dollars had to go to the Treasury Department in the diplomatic pouch, and gifts were opened in the presence of witnesses for that reason. The ambassador’s farewell gift was a cigar box; opened in front of the assembled staff, it held fifty thousand dollars in cash, which the deputy chief of mission and the head of public affairs counted before the box was sent to Treasury. Kiriakou notes the one exception to the custom: “I was the only one, the only one who didn’t get a Rolex when we left.”[17][18]