# The booby-trapped Christmas cards

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
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> Cite as: "The booby-trapped Christmas cards," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-booby-trapped-christmas-cards/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*Among the devices al-Qaeda left behind in positions it was forced to evacuate in Afghanistan, John Kiriakou describes a detonator laid flat inside a Christmas card, so that opening the card would take the reader's hands off.*

Asked in 2022 whether he had ever walked into a booby trap, Kiriakou said he had been fortunate, but that in Afghanistan the problem was frequent. Al-Qaeda would booby-trap pretty much everything it was forced to evacuate.[1]

He was asked whether the traps were elaborate, on the model of an adventure film, and said they were not. What they mostly were, he said, was trip wires.[1]

## The card

The exception he volunteered, and said he still has photographs of on his phone, was the greetings card. They would take Christmas cards and put a detonator inside them. Kiriakou explains why the card works as a housing: a detonator is relatively flat, about the thickness of two or three quarters stacked on top of each other, so the card closes over it and looks like a card.[1]

The effect he describes is immediate and specific. You open up the Christmas card, and it blows your hands off.[2]

He returns from the detail to the general point without embellishing it: they would booby-trap a lot of stuff.[2] Kiriakou spent almost all of his time in the region in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan, and he places the account among things encountered in the positions that were taken rather than in operations he ran himself.[1]

## See also

- [Corkscrew landings in Afghanistan](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/corkscrew-landings-in-afghanistan)
- [Pakistan Station (2002)](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/pakistan-station-2002)

## Sources

1. Explores Life as a Spy (2022-04-07), at 11:33. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgFKuk-VyU&t=693s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2022-04-07-david-gornoski-explores-life-as-a-spy/
2. Explores Life as a Spy (2022-04-07), at 12:04. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgFKuk-VyU&t=724s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2022-04-07-david-gornoski-explores-life-as-a-spy/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-booby-trapped-christmas-cards/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt