Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born cleric who became a senior propagandist for al-Qaeda. He was born in New Mexico — his father served as the Yemeni Ambassador to the United States and subsequently as Yemen’s Minister of Agriculture — and spoke English natively, “without any kind of accent, just spoke English like you and I speak English.” He self-radicalized during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and joined al-Qaeda in approximately 1998–1999.[1][2]
1993 mosque visit
John Kiriakou met al-Awlaki in 1993, in a CIA Arabic-language-training field trip to a mosque on Route 7 in Falls Church, Virginia, where al-Awlaki was the imam. The class — three students from the CIA’s Arabic-language program — was given a tour of the mosque, a Q&A session, and tea.[3][4][1]
Eight years later, the same mosque was where the September 11 hijackers prayed the night before the attacks.[1] Following 9/11, when Kiriakou mentioned in passing that he had personally met al-Awlaki, agency security teams interviewed him at length — “because everybody else had left the agency by then. … I was the only one left who had actually met al-Awlaki.”[5]
Yemen pursuit
In approximately 2010, while traveling in Yemen as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator, Kiriakou met with the U.S. FBI legal attaché at the embassy. The attaché reported full real-time location knowledge of al-Awlaki: “I know when al-Awlaki blows a fart. … I know al-Awlaki’s location to within three feet, 24 hours a day.” Kiriakou’s question of why the FBI did not act produced the response: “Well, that’s the other side of the hall’s job.” The CIA killed al-Awlaki by drone strike shortly afterward.[6][7]
Operational assessment
In the 2025 Dalton Fischer interview Kiriakou was asked whether al-Awlaki had directed the bomb-in-rectum assassination attempt against Prince Muhammad bin Naif. Kiriakou stated that the rumor existed but he had never believed it, on the ground that al-Awlaki was “more of a propagandist than … operational in any way.”[8]