John Kiriakou was posted to Bahrain from August 1, 1994 to 1996, arriving with his wife Joanne and their 16-month-old son Chris. He served under U.S. State Department cover as second secretary for economic affairs, not declared as CIA — his language skills and the sudden centrality of the Iraq-Kuwait border to world events, following Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, had shaped his early CIA career and put him in the Gulf.[1][2] He requested the rotation from the CIA to the State Department in 1993; the agency first sent him for a full year of Arabic-language training before posting him to Bahrain as economic officer at the American Embassy in Manama, working Iraq sanctions issues, before he returned to CIA headquarters in 1996.[3][4][5][6] The posting came immediately after the Oslo Accords; Bahrain, like each Gulf state but Saudi Arabia, hosted a component of the resulting Arab-Israeli peace talks — in Bahrain’s case, talks on the environment, covering fish and wildlife.[7][8]
A small, water-rich oasis
Kiriakou describes 1990s Bahrain as fed by an ancient, prehistoric water table running underground from the Atlantic Ocean beneath the whole of Africa before surfacing in Bahrain; as recently as the 1970s, natural springs gushed water like oil. By his posting, overdevelopment had dropped the water table 35 feet and left the water brackish.[9] Attractions were sparse — a history museum, a Quran museum, and the roughly 3,000-year-old “Tree of Life” — reflecting a country Kiriakou says was, in 1996, the same size and population as Pittsburgh.[10]
Unlike its Gulf neighbors, Kiriakou says, Bahrain had no significant oil of its own during his posting — producing only about 50,000 barrels a day, roughly matching its own consumption — with its wealth instead built on a long history of trade with India, Iran, Zanzibar, and Oman. He traces this to Bahrain’s Dilmun civilization, dated to 1,000 BC and showcased at the National Museum of Bahrain, with ancient ruins on the island tied to Alexander the Great, the Sumerians, and the Hittites of southern Turkey.[11][12]
Diplomatic-corps life
Kiriakou played right field in the American diplomatic corps softball league, noting the Marine Security Guards were the league’s power hitters while he “hit for average, not power.”[13] Despite his junior rank, he was invited to nearly every dinner hosted by Bahrain’s newly arrived British ambassador — previously deputy chief of mission in Ankara — while American Ambassador David Ransom often was not; asked why, the ambassador told him, “I like you. You’re fun. You tell interesting stories.”[14] After returning from Bahrain in 1996, other U.S. agencies — DIA, NSA, and the FBI — sent officers bound for Bahrain to consult Kiriakou because of his granular knowledge of the country.[15]
Bahrain has hosted the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet since 1976, the naval component of Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base outside Tampa.[16]
Sectarian tension
Kiriakou describes Bahrain’s underlying tension in the mid-1990s: a Sunni royal family, the Al Khalifa, ruling a population roughly 75% Shia. The royal family’s policy of naturalizing Sunni Muslims from Syria, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan fueled Shia resentment at being demographically diluted — tension that fed directly into the first Intifada that began two months into his posting.[17] He notes that under the same policy, Shia Muslims were barred outright from serving in Bahrain’s police, military, or intelligence services.[18] As the uprising escalated, he says Shia dissidents began planting homemade bombs and killed police officers, and Bahraini authorities responded by capturing bomb-makers and summarily executing them, deploying a black-clad, machine-gun-carrying unit called the UGL Group that Kiriakou says turned out to be composed of Pakistanis.[19]
Human rights officer
Alongside his economic-officer duties, Kiriakou served for two years as Bahrain’s human rights officer — a position Congress had mandated for every country with U.S. diplomatic relations starting in 1978, requiring an annual report to Congress on the host country’s conduct.[20][21][22] He says he took the requirement seriously, unlike many officers who merely went through the motions, documenting abuses such as the killing of a 15-year-old boy for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration.[23][20] He has since used a hypothetical drawn from the role to illustrate the tension between the State Department’s human-rights mission and the CIA’s operational one: confronting Bahrain’s interior minister over extrajudicial killings of teenagers, only for a CIA station chief to separately request a secret torture prison in the same building.[24][25]
An Orthodox church in Bahrain
Kiriakou and his wife attended a Malayalam Indian Orthodox (St. Thomas) church in Bahrain once with their infant son, then switched to the closer Anglican Cathedral for regular services.[26] When the Archbishop of Cyprus later visited Bahrain to ask the Emir for land to build an Orthodox church, roughly 40 of the country’s Orthodox residents met him at the palace; the Emir, informed of Kiriakou’s outsized role welcoming visitors to the island, joked that he liked Kiriakou’s “Imam.”[27] A Cypriot property developer donated the land, and the Archbishop authorized construction on the spot — Bahrain now has an Orthodox church under the Cypriot Archdiocese.[28]
Friendship with the future Crown Prince
Kiriakou became close friends with Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa — later Bahrain’s Crown Prince, at the time heir presumptive, holding ceremonial posts as president of the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research and patron of the Bahrain Environmental Protection Association — after the two overlapped studying in Washington.[29] The two once went, Salman in Western disguise he believed made him unrecognizable, to a low-grade nightclub near the Navy base featuring Polish dancing girls and a Filipino cover band, where patrons paid a woman at the foot of the stage in dinars for flower garlands to signal interest in a performer.[30] Salman grew infatuated with one Polish dancer and asked Kiriakou if he thought she’d sleep with him — “I don’t have the guts” — despite already having two wives; nothing came of it.[31] Salman attended Kiriakou’s going-away party at the ambassador’s residence with his first wife, and the two still exchange text messages and jokes decades later.[32]