Dr. Ahmed Khatib was the Iraqi-installed occupation governor of Kuwait, announced by Iraq hours after the August 2, 1990 invasion. John Kiriakou, then an eight-month CIA analyst on Iraq, had written a classified profile of Khatib for the agency’s internal “Leadership Review” a month before the invasion “just because he was interesting to me,” and presented him to President George H. W. Bush in the Oval Office that morning.[1][2][3]
Biography per Kiriakou’s Oval Office briefing
Per Kiriakou: Khatib was a black Kuwaiti and a medical doctor who “hates the royal family because his mother was a slave in the household of the royal family. They had slavery until 1955 on the Arabian Peninsula.”[2][3] In reaction, Kiriakou says, Khatib became a communist.[4] The royal family, after slavery ended, sent Ahmed “to the American University of Beirut. He trained there as a doctor. But his college roommate was George Habash, and together they founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”[2][5][6]
Kiriakou’s account of the Oval Office reaction: “And the vice president says, ‘Jesus Christ!’ like that. And the president just goes like this and he says, ‘Gentlemen, thank you. That’ll be enough. I need to think about this.’”[5] Kiriakou has given a shorter account of the same briefing elsewhere, saying that as part of his briefing he told the room that the Iraqis had named Khatib — a man he had personally met — as Kuwait’s occupation governor that morning; he traces the later mass expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait after its liberation in part to the association between Khatib’s PFLP co-founding and the occupation government.[7][8]