The Mir Aimal Kansi CIA headquarters attack was a shooting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia — which John Kiriakou recalls uncertainly as 1992 or 1993 — carried out by Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kansi. John Kiriakou describes Kansi getting out of his car in the turning lane leading into CIA headquarters with an AK-47 and going car to car shooting commuters — skipping cars with women — killing two and wounding seven before running out of bullets, getting back in his car, driving to Dulles Airport, and flying to Pakistan on a one-way ticket with no luggage.[1]
The manhunt and the FBI’s credit
Kiriakou says the CIA located Kansi several months later in a “flea bag” hotel in Quetta, Pakistan, after spending millions of dollars on the search. Because the CIA is not a law-enforcement agency, it turned the location over to the FBI, which made the arrest. Time magazine then ran a cover with Kansi’s picture and the headline “How the FBI Got Their Man” — a framing Kiriakou says enraged senior CIA officers, since the agency had done all the work of finding him while the FBI, in Kiriakou’s characterization, “had no idea where Kansi was.”[2]
Legacy: keeping the FBI out after 9/11
Kiriakou says the Kansi case is why the CIA resolved never again to let the FBI take credit for its work. He connects it directly to the agency’s post-9/11 approach to the 9/11 hijackers: rather than share intelligence with the FBI, the CIA’s plan was to double the hijackers as assets, use them against al-Qaeda’s leadership, and kill that leadership without any FBI involvement — “we kill the leadership, we save the country. The FBI had nothing to do with it.”[3]