The attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman on December 30, 2009, killed seven CIA officers and wounded more than a dozen others. John Kiriakou described it as the deadliest single day in the history of the CIA and stated he knew the officer in charge of the base personally — he had sat ten feet from her desk at CIA headquarters.
The woman in charge — no training
Kiriakou described the CIA’s promotion pipeline: officers reaching GS-14 need, for elevation to the Senior Intelligence Service, rotations in two different CIA directorates and one in the policy community. His colleague had the directorate rotations completed. She needed the policy-community rotation. Forward Operating Base Chapman, technically a Department of Defense facility rather than a CIA facility, offered that box-checking opportunity. She was offered the post. She accepted.[1][2][3][4][5]
Kiriakou described his own preparation for field deployments: four months of security training, one month of weapons training, a week of bomb-disposal training, six weeks of advanced counterterrorist operations training, and another week of counterterrorist driving. His colleague received none of this. She went from her desk at Langley to Dulles Airport to Afghanistan.[6][7]
The bomber — never polygraphed
A Jordanian national walked into the American consulate in Istanbul and claimed to be Osama bin Laden’s doctor. He said his family had convinced him to defect from jihad and volunteer to the Americans. CIA personnel wanted so badly for this to be true that they violated basic tradecraft: they never put him on a polygraph. They told him he was with the good guys, promised to make him rich, and instructed him to return to Afghanistan, find out bin Laden’s location, and come to the base to report.[8][9]
The attack — birthday cake
On the day of the bomber’s arrival, colleagues had baked him a birthday cake. The base chief — the officer Kiriakou had worked alongside — made an impromptu decision: rather than bring the visitor through the metal detector, they would meet him outside at the car to show how friendly and welcoming the CIA was. Nobody noted that it was approximately 115 degrees Fahrenheit and he was wearing winter clothing. Nobody found it odd that when he got out of the car he was praying softly — “Alhamdulillah.” Everyone gathered around. He detonated the bomb.[10][11][12]
Seven CIA officers were killed. More than two dozen were wounded. Three daughters grew up without their mother. Kiriakou’s reflection: “Was it really worth it? I would say not.”[12][13]
The hard line
The detail Kiriakou returns to is where the greeting took place. The hard line is the fortified area of a base — sandbags, guns, bulletproof glass, steel doors — and the car carrying the Jordanian doctor stopped outside it. Jennifer Matthews took everybody out past the metal detector to meet it, cake in hand, so that the whole reception party was standing in the open and unscreened when the bomb went off.[14][15][16]
Nothing about the man’s appearance stopped it either: he was wearing winter clothes in the heat, which is what concealed the bomb, and was quietly praying under his breath as he got out of the car.[16] Kiriakou’s own reading of the operation is that the bomber had not been a genuine source who later turned — the point from the beginning was to kill as many CIA people as possible.[17]