John Kiriakou has described Djibouti as a small country hosting an outsized foreign military and intelligence presence. Visiting Camp Lemonnier around 2011 with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he found a base that had once been split by a fence between an American side and a French side; by the mid-2020s, he says, that same fence still splits the base, but the other side is now Chinese.[1]
By contrast, Kiriakou describes Djibouti’s own intelligence service as minuscule: visiting its offices once, he says the entire office of its director was smaller than his own rental townhouse’s living room — a living room with just enough room for a couch, a chair, a coffee table, and a TV.[2]