Colin Powell was the U.S. Secretary of State whose February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council made the public case for invading Iraq. John Kiriakou says the white powder in the small glass tube Powell held up was nothing — a prop — and that the staging, with George Tenet and John Negroponte seated behind Powell’s shoulders, was meant to imply the U.S. government was 100% certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.[1][2] Kiriakou adds that he interviewed Powell’s chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who told him the presentation was knowingly “sold.”[2]
The targeting call that haunts him
John Kiriakou says the one and only phone call he ever received from Secretary Colin Powell was to ask how to target someone in Iraq; Kiriakou gave the man’s address, and later learned that dozens of cruise missiles had vaporized the building, killing eight people. He recalls telling himself “this wasn’t your fault” — but it has “bothered me for decades.”[3][4][5]
In a fuller telling of the same episode, Kiriakou dates it to early 1993, when he was a junior CIA Iraq analyst and Powell — then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — called him directly by name to ask who would run an Iraqi operation to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. Kiriakou told him it would be run out of the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s Basra station, headed by Sabir Abdul Aziz al-Douri, based at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters.[6] That night the U.S. fired 47 cruise missiles into Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters, destroying it — but the strike killed a janitor rather than any intended target. Kiriakou’s boss told him: “Powell killed the janitor, you just answered his question.”[7]
Kiriakou has told the same story elsewhere, giving the general’s name as Saber Abdul Aziz al-Douri and recalling the call itself: an office secretary told him, “John, call in Powell on the phone for you,” to general amusement that Powell knew him by name. Kiriakou took the call on a “green line” secure phone, which by security policy had to sit at least six feet from any open telephone line.[8] Kiriakou was already Powell’s go-to on Kuwait specifically: he recounts that a Commerce Secretary Mosbacher call praising one of his briefings on the Kuwaiti royal family prompted CIA Director William Webster to personally ask to shake his hand.[9]
The 1990 invasion and Thatcher’s call
Kiriakou recalls that on the afternoon of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called a hesitant President George H.W. Bush and told him, “now’s not the time to go wobbly, George” — a line Kiriakou describes as jolting Bush into action.[10] Kiriakou’s own Kuwait expertise was, by his account, unusually deep for a junior analyst; he separately describes the Kuwaiti “diwaniya” — a male-only political salon whose name exists only in Kuwaiti Arabic — as emblematic of a surprisingly free Kuwaiti society that tolerated open criticism of officials.[11]