Jennifer Matthews was a CIA analyst who died as chief of base at Khost, Afghanistan in the deadliest day in the agency’s history. John Kiriakou, who sat next to her at headquarters, states the case flatly: “the CIA killed Jennifer.”[1]
Why she was there
Matthews was an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. Under the agency’s promotion rules she could not be considered for the Senior Intelligence Service without a tour outside her own directorate and a tour in the policy community. She had done the policy tour, at the State Department. What she still needed was an operational assignment, and the box was checked by offering her chief of base at Khost — a very dangerous posting out in the mountains — which she accepted at once.[2][3]
There was no time to put her through operational training or security training, and she was told not to worry about it. Kiriakou calls this an incredible disservice: she did not know how to recruit spies to steal secrets, how to keep the more than a dozen people working for her safe, or how to keep herself safe, and she had never been operational before.[4]
The walk-in
While Matthews was going out to Khost, a man walked into the American consulate in Istanbul and said he was a Jordanian doctor, and more importantly Osama bin Laden’s personal physician.[5] He refused to be debriefed in Istanbul, saying he had to return to Jordan and then on to Afghanistan because bin Laden had asked for him, and was told he would be met at the base instead.[6] Kiriakou’s list of what should have stopped it there is short and damning: he was never polygraphed, never surveilled, never asked why he could not meet in Istanbul, or in Amman, or inside the American embassy in Kabul.[6][7]
The cake
Going through the file, Matthews noticed that the day the doctor was due to arrive was his birthday, so she baked him a cake and told everyone on the base they would meet him at his car, present it, and sing to him.[8][9] Nobody frisked him. The car stopped outside the hard line — the fortified area with the sandbags, the guns, the bulletproof glass and the steel doors — and Matthews took the whole base out past the metal detector to meet it.[9][10] It struck no one as strange that the man was in winter clothes in the heat, concealing the bomb, or that he was quietly praying under his breath. When she had everyone gathered around him to sing, he detonated it, killing Matthews and six other officers.[11]
How Kiriakou remembers her
Matthews belonged to what Kiriakou describes as a clique of five women in the Counterterrorism Center, and he says she was the only one of them he did not hate — the others he calls bloodthirsty monsters.[7][8] He sat next to her and calls her a very sweet person who was working with sharks who did not care about her safety.[12] To the best of his recollection she left a husband and three daughters.[13]