“Kill them all” is John Kiriakou’s canonical scene for the mood inside CIA headquarters in the weeks after 9/11, a whispered instruction from his own boss during the farewell hug on the day before Kiriakou left for Pakistan to run counterterrorism operations there.
The setting
Kiriakou had volunteered “like everybody in the building” to go somewhere and do something after 9/11. The leadership finally accepted: chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, leaving tomorrow. He decided to stop at headquarters to say goodbye before flying out. His frame at the time was practical: “not everybody’s going to make it home, and I don’t know what’s going to happen out there.”[1][2]
The hug
The boss he went to say goodbye to was, Kiriakou says, “a very elegant, very bright guy. Always with the thousand-dollar suits. We always joked that he really belonged in the State Department. He would have been sort of the stereotypical ambassador.” His name was John, the same as Kiriakou’s.[2][3]
“He gave me a hug and wished me best of luck. And when he leaned in, he whispered to me, ‘Kill them all.’”[3]
Kiriakou’s answer: “Really, John? We’re already there.” His boss backed up, took him by the shoulders, and said it again: “Kill them all.”[3]
The reading
Kiriakou treats the exchange as compression rather than aberration. “That was typical of the leadership at the CIA. Like, well, we can’t bring back these 3,000 people, but we sure can kill a lot of the bad guys. And that’s what they set out to do.”[3][4]