The Eritrea prohibition is an episode John Kiriakou offers as a concrete illustration of a general complaint about American diplomacy — that the United States expends enormous effort on not speaking to people.
The general complaint
The story is framed by a joke Kiriakou says circulated inside the CIA. “when I was at the CIA we had an ongoing joke during the George W Bush Administration that none of us had ever seen an Administration that worked so hard to not talk to our enemies we had a state department with thousands and thousands of employees who just sat there twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing because we don’t talk to the Cubans or the Iranians or the Chinese or the Venezuelans or the Russians or the libyans or a dozen other countries.”[1]
The trip
The example comes from his own service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I went on an overseas trip when I was working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I went to jibuti Somalia Ethiopia and I was forbidden from going to Atria not by the Eritrean government but by the state department.”[2]
The reason given was a phrase rather than an argument. “the only reason they gave me is oh you don’t want to go to erria that’s the North Korea of Africa that’s what I was told.”[2]
The absurdity Kiriakou draws out is that the prohibition attaches to the territory and not to the people. “I was recently invited to dinner at their at the arrian ambassador’s residence here in Washington I can go do that but I can’t go to Atria because we don’t like them.”[2]
What he thinks changes it
Kiriakou allowed himself only qualified hope of a shift under a new administration — “I’m not sure that it will change markedly and even if it does change I’m just not of the belief that those changes are going to be necessarily longstanding” — and put the remedy on citizens rather than officials: writing, speaking, marching, attending hearings, writing op-eds, doing podcasts, “making sure that our voices are heard.”[3][4]