The Fifth Fleet in Bahrain is the United States naval presence that has been based on the island since 1976 — the naval component of Central Command, which is itself headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base outside Tampa. Its own headquarters is at Manama.[1][2][3][4]
For John Kiriakou, posted to the embassy from 1994 to 1996, the base was principally a social resource in a country where, as he puts it, there was nothing to do. As a diplomat he could use the officers’ club, which had the better salad bar; for football Sundays he went to the enlisted club and drank cheap beer.[2] He also joined the diplomatic corps softball league, playing right field and hitting for average — the power hitters, he notes, were the Marine security guards.[5]
Pound for pound
The relationship the base represents came with its own liturgy. Kiriakou recalls the visit of Admiral William Crowe, who had commanded the naval component in Bahrain and whose 1976 line the Bahrainis repeated every year: “pound for pound, Bahrain is the best friend the United States has in the world.” Kiriakou spent the first day escorting Crowe’s wife to buy carpets and negotiating for her.[6][7] In a later retelling he describes Crowe as a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who, as commander of Central Command, “lived in Bahrain for two years.”[8]
The substance was thinner than the ceremony. Taking notes at a meeting between the ambassador, Crowe, the defence attaché and the Bahraini foreign minister, Kiriakou describes an exchange consisting almost entirely of mutual declarations of affection — “the meeting was not substantive. It was just a love fest.”[7][9]
The ambassador’s own summary of what the alliance actually was, Kiriakou says, was four words long: “oil flows out, weapons flow in. That’s the relationship.”[6]
What the base outweighed
The fleet is also, in Kiriakou’s account, the reason his reporting from Bahrain changed nothing. He was documenting extrajudicial killings — a government that would “just disappear people,” and police who would take a boy to the local station for questioning and shoot him in the head when he got there — and he says the reports went home.[10][11] Because the Navy’s regional headquarters sat in the port, “the State Department and the Pentagon have a vested interest in making sure that our relations with Bahrain are very close.”[10] Asked directly whether the fleet’s presence trumped everything, his answer was “it trumps everything.”[11]
The arms trade ran alongside it: billions of dollars of American weapons, and “whatever the Bahrainis couldn’t pay for, the Saudis paid for.”[11] Kiriakou dates the beginning of his disillusion to this period — the port, the arms sales and the sectarian framing all outweighing the human rights reporting — though he says the break in his own convictions came about five years later.[12][13]
His conclusion about the arrangement’s durability is absolute: “the United States will never, ever permit the Bahraini government to collapse. Never. We’re joined at the hip with the Bahrainis. Bahrain is the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet.”[8]
The Gulf basing architecture
Kiriakou uses the fleet as one element of an inventory he recites when explaining why Gulf governments do not side with Iran: two American military bases in Kuwait, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, the world’s largest US Air Force base at Al Udeid in Qatar, army bases in the United Arab Emirates, and multiple army and air force bases in Saudi Arabia. “Every one of these GCC countries hosts army, navy, air force, and Marines.”[14][3][15]
Reporting from two visits to Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates, he says the governments state the bargain plainly: “the deal is they were going to host these bases” — including the Fifth Fleet headquarters, Al Udeid, as many as 25,000 troops in Kuwait and some 15,000 in the Emirates — “and the idea was all of those installations and personnel are supposed to protect these countries.”[16][17] One Gulf figure put the same trade to him with a condition attached: “we have your navy base here, they’re the home of Central Command’s Fifth Fleet… we love America and Americans and we’ll do anything, but you have to do something about Israeli settlements.”[18]
2026: the headquarters is hit
In the 2026 war with Iran the arrangement failed on its own terms. Bahrain reported a missile attack on the Fifth Fleet headquarters, and Iranian retaliation reached the fleet’s service centre on the island along with American bases across the Gulf.[19][20] Kiriakou had listed the headquarters among the sensitive targets Iran would reach for, alongside the air base outside Doha, the army base in Kuwait and “most importantly, oil facilities in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.”[4]
The irony he draws is structural: “the whole reason for having the United States in the Persian Gulf in such significant numbers after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 was so that something like this wouldn’t happen.”[21] Instead “everybody’s been hit” — airports destroyed in Kuwait and Bahrain, hotels struck in Dubai.[17] His verdict on what the host countries received for the bargain: “those countries were still attacked. And they still have casualties. So what benefit do they have of hosting American forces… All they have received is death and destruction.”[22]