The Stinger buyback was a standing reward programme run out of the American embassy in Islamabad, and John Kiriakou describes administering it as routine duty: “one of the things that everybody does when they’re stationed in Pakistan.”[1]
The missiles were American in the first place. “Starting in 1986, we provided Stinger missiles to Mujahedin in Afghanistan to fire at Soviet aircraft, mostly helicopters. It changed the course of the war. The Russians, the Soviets ended up pulling out. But there are hundreds of Stinger missiles still out there.” They are shoulder-fired, and the offer to get them back was a hundred thousand dollars in cash, paid at the embassy.[1][2]
How a purchase went
“Every once in a while I’d get a call from the front gate. There’s a guy here, he’s got a missile in the bed of his pickup truck and he says it’s a Stinger. So I come out and I look at the missile, and they all have these little plaques on them with serial number. So I tell the guy, ‘Hold on. Have a cup of coffee. I’m gonna make a call and I’ll get back to you.’ So I put it in a quick cable, I send it to headquarters — this is the number. They say, ‘Yep, it’s one of ours.’ I go to the money room. I pull out a hundred grand. I go down front. Here’s your money. I take my missile, and that’s one more off the street.”[2][3]
The judgement on it
Kiriakou offers the whole procedure as an illustration of a policy failing rather than of a policy working. “Now, was that really a smart thing to do, to just turn over Stinger missiles to the Mujahedin knowing that they have a shelf life of a good 40 years? And they can be used against us.” Told flatly by his interviewer that it was not a good idea, he agrees, and adds that the weapons do not degrade on their own.[3]