Embassy fortification after 9/11 is the rebuilding of American diplomatic premises worldwide as hardened compounds, which John Kiriakou explains as the institutional answer to a specific and continuing intelligence problem: officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps testing the physical security of American installations so that they can be attacked later.
The problem being solved
Kiriakou’s account begins with the technique rather than the architecture. A visitor who presents himself at an embassy with a story is also, while he tells it, looking around to see where the cameras are, how thick the doors are, whether they are armoured, whether the officers are armed, and how thick the glass is at the Marine booth. That, in Kiriakou’s terminology, is “a pre-operational planning probe, is what we call it.”[1]
He treats the practice as systematic rather than opportunistic. “The reason is because this is what the IRGC does all over the world,” he says, with the object being that if the United States, or the United States and Israel, begin attacking Iran, the Iranians can then attack American embassies wherever they have found a weak link.[1]
The building programme
The response, in Kiriakou’s telling, came after 2001 and came in money. “After the 9/11 attacks, we appropriated, Congress appropriated billions and billions of dollars to build new embassies all around the world.”[1][2]
His illustration is Qatar, and it turns on the contrast between two visits. “The first time I ever went to Doha, the American embassy was literally above a grocery store. If you can imagine such a thing, cuz we didn’t really have any national interests in Qatar in 1990.” The comparison is with the present building: “now the American embassy in Doha takes up an entire city block, and it is fortified nine ways from Sunday, specifically because of the reason that you cite, that the IRGC is out there testing the security of American embassies and American non-military installations all around the world just so they can blow them up.”[2]
The judgement attached to it
Kiriakou is careful to separate the security assessment from his politics, and says so explicitly. “Terrorism is real, and I’m not making any judgment on the US and Israeli attack on on Iran. I’m opposed to it. I’ve always been opposed to it, but what I am making a judgment on is that the Iranians do engage in terrorism. They always have, since the 1979 revolution, and they’re always looking to see what of the United States can they blow up.”[3]
The fortification programme is therefore presented as a rational answer to a real threat, and as evidence that the threat was real: the buildings changed because the reconnaissance never stopped.