Bob Grenier is a career CIA officer whom John Kiriakou describes as one of the most highly respected officers to emerge from the Office of Near Eastern Operations in his generation. Grenier served as CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan before, during, and after the September 11 attacks, later became associate deputy director of operations (ADDO) for policy support, and afterward director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.[1]
Islamabad station chief
As Kiriakou’s station chief in Pakistan, Grenier fielded a middle-of-the-night call in which Kiriakou tried to self-report an incident he considered an assault on a prisoner — Kiriakou had pulled a detainee up by the arm during processing, popping off the man’s prosthetic leg. Grenier refused to forward any report to headquarters: “That’s not an assault… You didn’t assault the prisoner.” He ordered Kiriakou back to work, telling him that as chief of station he would have to approve anything written up before it went to headquarters, and he was not approving it.[2]
Associate deputy director for policy support
On August 1, 2002 — the same day the CIA began its most intense torture of Abu Zubaydah — Kiriakou began working at CIA headquarters as Grenier’s executive assistant, in a position created specifically for Grenier with no formal job description.[3] On his first day, Grenier had him sign six separate secrecy agreements before being read into new compartments. Once inside, an unnamed host in the office of the director of Near East Operations told Kiriakou the U.S. had already made a firm decision to invade Iraq the following February — “it’s a done deal. The decision’s already been made” — regardless of the ongoing public congressional debate.[4]
Kiriakou says the pro-war faction inside the government comprised the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council, while the anti-war faction, ironically, was made up of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department. Grenier was formally named Iraq Mission Manager that same day, with direct access to CIA Director George Tenet.[5]
A year as executive assistant
Kiriakou worked as Grenier’s executive assistant for one year — a role he says cannot be sustained longer than that. He was at his desk six days a week at 3:45 a.m., reviewing 10,000 to 20,000 incoming cables each morning to distill the five or six most important for briefing senior CIA leadership at 7:00 a.m. and the Director at 7:30 a.m.[6] Grenier chose Kiriakou for the job because of his work in Islamabad; the two men, Kiriakou says, simply got along, and Grenier valued that Kiriakou never lost his sense of humor under long hours.[1]
The bin Laden stand-down and the falling-out
Kiriakou credits Grenier with doing his job during the hunt for Osama bin Laden: Grenier was positioned to meet al-Qaeda fighters, likely including bin Laden himself, as they tried to cross into Pakistan, but was ordered to stand down and forbidden from engaging — just as Delta Force was forbidden from giving chase.[7] Kiriakou paraphrases Grenier’s own account, given on NPR after January 6th, in which Grenier said the U.S. made al-Qaeda only a secondary target in Afghanistan and instead went to war against the broader Taliban “milieu” in which the group was thriving.[8]
Kiriakou says Grenier reviewed the manuscript of his book before publication and was initially supportive, telling him “you really were tough on a couple of these former colleagues of ours”; the two families had dinner at each other’s houses and went to ball games together. After the book made the New York Times bestseller list, Grenier turned hostile, telling mutual friends and even Senator John Kerry that Kiriakou was “a liar” and “a disgrace” that no one should read or buy.[9] Kiriakou later learned from a Universal Pictures producer that Grenier was lined up to be a script consultant on a movie project and had been furious that Kiriakou’s book might sell its own movie rights, feeling the story was rightfully his: “he was my assistant — I should be the one getting movie deals, not him.”[10] Kiriakou says the falling-out was that simple — Grenier’s jealousy over the book’s success.
Kiriakou says Grenier was fired as director of the Counterterrorism Center after about a year — not, as the Washington Post reported based on Grenier’s own leak, over concern that the CIA was violating human rights law, but because he was too “wishy-washy” to make timely kill-or-capture decisions.[11] Where previous CTC directors gave an immediate “launch, fire” when informants reported bad guys in a jeep, Grenier would take 24 hours to think it over and consult attorneys, by which time the targets had gotten away.[12]
The January 6 op-ed
Grenier’s New York Times piece after the storming of the Capitol argued that the event should be treated as an insurgency, and Kiriakou answered it in print. His grounds for reading it as more than analysis were long acquaintance: “I’ve known Grenier for a very long time, and what he means is we need to be killing people.” He calls him “a very smart guy” who “likes to bill himself as the consummate moderate,” and treats the moderation as the vehicle rather than the content — the argument reaching the public through what he calls the newspaper of record.[13][14][15]
On the reception, he draws a line back to the agency: “as soon as this thing was published, John Brennan just jumped right into the fray in an interview on NPR saying that Bob Grenier is a genius and brilliant, and this was a brilliantly written piece.” Kiriakou treats the sequence as arranged rather than coincidental — “this was the plan. Grenier and Brennan have been friends for 35 years.”[16][17]
The wider claim he attaches is about the class rather than the man: “a lot of people in the CIA believe this kind of thing. They believe that they’re smarter than everybody else… and they’re going to put this out there in the newspaper of record for all the world to see, and they’re going to show how the deep state is going to make this whole thing right.”[17]