The self-destructing terrorist cell is John Kiriakou’s account of a CIA operation that eliminated a terrorist group without the agency killing anyone. He tells it as the origin of a technique he later carried into prison.[1]
The problem
Kiriakou frames it against the tools that were not available. The operation is set out in contrast to smart drones and pinpoint accuracy on targeting — and he says plainly that he did not even have access to anybody in the group.[2][1]
What the CIA had instead was patience and the certainty that people travel. The plan was to wait until one member of the group travelled to a country the agency had access to.[2]
The approach
When the first man travelled to Western Europe, a case officer approached him — very gently, in Kiriakou’s telling. The officer greeted him by name, said he was from the CIA in Washington, and told him that the agency had been talking to his colleague Abdullah, another member of the group, for years; that Abdullah had said he would be a good man to talk to and had mentioned that he was coming; and that they thought they would just have a conversation, perhaps over dinner.[2][3]
The man ran screaming from the room. He also went home and murdered Abdullah.[3]
The agency then waited for the next man to travel and repeated the move: they had been talking to Mohammed the last time he was in Vienna or London, Mohammed had told them about Abdullah, and Abdullah — a true believer — worked with them and thought it would be good if this man did too. That man went home and killed Mohammed.[3][4]
The outcome
Kiriakou says the sequence continued until literally all of them had murdered one another, leaving only the founder of the group.[4]
The founder was not killed by the CIA either. He came under suspicion from the leader of the country he was in, who wanted to know why all his people were dying and killing each other, concluded that something was up and that the man probably meant him harm — and killed him. The group ceased to exist.[4]
Kiriakou’s summary is delivered twice for emphasis: he did not have to kill anybody, and he did not even have access to anybody. They got them to kill each other.[1]
Carried into prison
He tells the story as preface rather than as a set piece. With that in mind, he says, he encountered a problem in prison that in real life probably would not have bothered him — and the response he devised was the merry-go-round prank, a deception built the same way, out of a suggestion the target could not check.[1][5] His stated principle afterwards is that sometimes it is best to use dirty tricks, especially to save your own sanity.[6]