Cofer Black’s warning to the liaison class is John Kiriakou’s first-hand account of the CIA counterterrorism chief’s state of mind in the weeks before 11 September 2001.
Kiriakou was running a class for visiting foreign liaison officers, and Cofer Black — then meeting the president every day or every other day — made time to come and address it. Black described al-Qaeda members saying goodbye to their families in tears, telling them “I’ll see you in paradise”, and set out the code words the agency was hearing for a massive attack: the honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey; there is going to be a great football match; there is going to be an enormous wedding. “These are all code words for a massive attack. We just don’t know when and where.” He then begged the assembled officers: if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us.[1]
Kiriakou’s description of the response is one sentence: “they just sat there and looked at him.” Black shook their hands and walked out.[1][2]
The private question
Shaken by the briefing, Kiriakou went to Black’s office afterwards to thank him for coming — and asked the question directly: he did not work on al-Qaeda, so had Black said all that for the visitors’ benefit, or was he serious? “Oh, I was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen.”[2][3] In another telling the answer is rendered more plainly — “Oh, I meant it. Something terrible is going to happen” — and Kiriakou places the exchange, with the delegation sent back to their hotel and dinner three hours off, at about two months before the attacks.[4]
What Kiriakou did next was leave: a few weeks later he flew to the Middle East for six weeks, stopping in Rome on the way back.[3]
Afterwards
Standing in the Counterterrorism Center bullpen on the morning of 11 September, watching the towers on a dozen televisions among some 150 silent colleagues, the thought Kiriakou reports having is not about the attack itself: “this is what Cofer was talking about. This was the attack that he was talking about.”[5]
The date and the setting
Kiriakou fixes the briefing at 6 July 2001 and says he still remembers the date.[6][7] The setting was routine: the CIA received delegations from partner services essentially every day, gave them a day of briefings, exchanged gifts, took them to the director’s office for a photograph and out to dinner afterwards.[8][9] Kiriakou had booked a junior al-Qaeda analyst — twenty-five years old, in one telling — to give the visitors the basic briefing at ten o’clock. Black arrived instead, bringing the chief of operations of the bin Laden unit with him: the officer Kiriakou calls the red-headed devil, of whom he adds, “She’s lucky we were that nice about it, too.”[6][9][10]
The warning as Kiriakou recounts it here ran: something terrible is going to happen, we do not know what it is or where it will be, but we know it will be an attack on a massive scale. The indicators were code words — the honey salesman coming with vast quantities of honey, a great football match, a huge wedding — and al-Qaeda camp commanders overheard on the telephone weeping and telling their students they would see them in paradise.[11][12][13][14] Black closed by begging the visitors for any source they had inside al-Qaeda.[12][14]
The reason for the appeal was that the CIA had no penetration of al-Qaeda at all and no case in train that might lead to one; Black, believing an attack was nearly upon them, was throwing what Kiriakou calls a Hail Mary at a room of foreign officers.[15] None of them could help, and in Kiriakou’s assessment they genuinely could not rather than would not — al-Qaeda was not their problem and had no quarrel with their services.[15] Going to Black’s office afterwards to thank him, Kiriakou asked whether he had said it for the visitors’ benefit or meant it. “Oh, I was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen.”[16]
What the warning was expected to mean
Asked whether the agency had been caught off guard, Kiriakou’s answer separates the fact of the warning from its content. They knew something large was coming — Black had said so in person two months earlier — but the working assumption was about geography.[17]
“They didn’t think it was going to be here. The conventional wisdom was they’re going to take out another embassy. They’ll probably do it in the middle of the workday. A big embassy — Paris, London, Manila, something big. We didn’t think they’re going to attack us right here in the country.”[18]
His own recognition on the day was immediate and specific: “my first thought was, this is what he was talking about. This is what he was warning us about.”[19]