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The post-9/11 name traces
From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's on-record words
Based on 1 recorded interview · Last updated
John Kiriakou's account of his own assignment in the weeks after the September 11 attacks: with people walking into American embassies all over the world offering information on al-Qaeda, the CIA was buried under tens of thousands of names — sometimes thousands arriving in a single day — and needed, as he put it, an army of clerks to search them against its databases.
Asked by Paul Jay what he had actually been assigned to do in the two or three weeks after the September 11 attacks, John Kiriakou gave an answer that had nothing of the cinematic about it. It was mostly name traces. [1]
An army of clerks
All around the world, he said, people began walking into American embassies and saying that they had information on al-Qaeda, and giving up names. There were tens of thousands of these names, and sometimes thousands arriving in a single day. What was needed to deal with them, he said, was an army of clerks — officers to search all of the agency’s databases for any information pertaining to each name that came in. [1][2]
The limits it exposed
The same conversation shows why this mattered beyond the drudgery. Pressed on whether the CIA could have gone straight after Osama bin Laden in the days after the attacks rather than launching a war, Kiriakou argued that the agency simply did not have the reach. To operate in Kandahar you need a sponsor, somebody on the ground to protect you and give you cover; you cannot, he said, just go and rent a hotel room and start looking for bin Laden. [3] He was equally blunt about the technical picture, telling his interviewer that there was no such thing as a live satellite feed then and none now — a claim treated at greater length in the live satellite feed myth. [4]
What the agency did have in that period was volume without resolution: an unmanageable inflow of unverified names from strangers, and no way to convert it quickly into anything actionable. Kiriakou’s own account of the first hours of the attacks — the evacuation of headquarters, the four days he then spent sleeping under his desk — is recorded in CIA–FBI interagency rivalry and 9/11.
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
