Qat in Yemen is John Kiriakou’s worked example in answer to a question he says nobody had ever asked him before: whether an officer under cover may take drugs when a source expects him to. His answer began not with narcotics but with a shrub.
The substance
Kiriakou is insistent on the spelling. “In Yemen, the national drug of choice is called qat, Q A T, qat. Sometimes you see it K H A T, like khat, it’s not, it’s with a Q, qat, back here, qaf.”[1]
He is equally insistent that it is barely a drug at all. “So, it’s not really a drug, even though it’s banned in the United States and it’s on the list of uh drugs. It’s a it’s a shrub and you pick the leaves off the shrub. You have to chew them while they’re green. Once they start to turn brown, they’re no good anymore.”[2]
The effect he compares to caffeine and to coca. “But, it’s like drinking two pots of coffee. It makes your your heart race like this. Um it also curbs hunger like like coca leaves uh do.”[2]
His image of the long-term cost is physical and specific: “you walk around Yemen and you’ll see old men and one side of their face is hanging down because of a lifetime of a bulging cheekful of qat.”[2][3]
The operational problem
The reason any of this becomes an agency matter is that qat-chewing is not private. “Well, if you want to develop a source there, you got to get close to the guy and literally every man in the country chews qat in the afternoon at 3:00. It’s like the Italians having an espresso to, you know, finish out the day.”[3]
An officer who declined would be marking himself out at exactly the moment he was trying to become unremarkable.
The dispensation
The institutional answer was a formal exemption. “And so, the CIA had to give special dispensation to every officer working in Yemen or in other qat-chewing countries like Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, you you’ve got to do it to fit in.”[3]
Kiriakou treats the dispensation as the beginning of a wider rule rather than an isolated indulgence: the same logic, extended to harder substances and more dangerous places, produces the answer he gives about narcotics under cover.[4]