Moving a satellite to Kuwait is the anecdote John Kiriakou uses to convey how limited overhead reconnaissance was at the start of his career.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the United States needed satellite coverage of the country and did not have it — because it had never needed it. Kiriakou says it took six months to move a satellite that had been sitting over Moscow so that it could show Kuwait.[1]
He offers it in response to an account of the search for Bill Buckley, the CIA’s Beirut station chief kidnapped in 1984: a young analyst from the National Photographic Interpretation Center would take the day’s single satellite image of Beirut and go over the rooftops with a magnifying glass, trying to match them against structures described in hostage debriefings.[2] Kiriakou’s reply is that he can only imagine the work involved — and both men reach the same summary at the same moment: “there was no Google Earth.”[1]
Why there was nothing overhead
The gap was not an oversight but a consequence of the alliance. Kiriakou, then a junior analyst, remembers the problem from inside: “Satellites were very difficult to move and we didn’t have any satellites over Kuwait. Why would we?” — and answers his own question: “We didn’t have any satellites looking at Kuwait because we were friends with Kuwait. So we had to move one of our satellites from the Soviet Union.”[3]
The six months of the war
The wait is the part of the story he treats as consequential, and he states the causal link directly: “That’s why we didn’t liberate Kuwait until February of 1991. The Iraqis had invaded August of 1990, cuz we had to move a satellite from over Moscow all the way over to be over Iraq and Kuwait. And it took months to move the thing.” In that telling he widens the figure, giving the general case as six to twelve months to move a satellite from one place to another rather than the six he gives elsewhere.[4][5]
He gives the same sequence in a co-constructed exchange with an interviewer: the satellite “had to move in slow motion from over Moscow to over Kuwait. And once it was in place, then we were like, ‘Okay, now we can do it.’”[6] The contrast he draws with the present is the same one he draws in the Buckley story: it took that long “back then. Now you just go to Google Earth and just look, you know, one day old photographs, but it was a different world back then.”[6]
Kiriakou also uses the constraint as the setup for a different lesson. Introducing an example of a false flag “that we studied at the agency”, he begins from the same premise — that before Google Earth it could take six to twelve months to reposition overhead coverage, and that some countries had no satellites at all — before turning to the Israeli interest in the port of Benghazi.[4][5]
The same absence shaped his own tradecraft in the field, where planning a surveillance detection route meant photocopying road-atlas pages and taping them together, and where the hunt for Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan was conducted with 1961 maps.[7][8]