The honey salesman warning was an unscheduled briefing delivered by Cofer Black, then director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, to a delegation of visiting Middle Eastern intelligence officers at CIA headquarters on 6 July 2001. John Kiriakou, who was hosting the delegation, has described it in multiple interviews as the clearest pre-attack warning he personally witnessed.
The daily liaison routine
Kiriakou has said that hosting foreign liaison delegations was an ordinary and near-daily task at headquarters. A visiting service would fly in, receive a day of briefings, exchange gifts, be taken to the director’s office for a photograph, and then be taken out to dinner. [1] In one telling he names the restaurant as Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. [2]
For this delegation Kiriakou had scheduled a routine briefing on al-Qaeda and had asked the junior al-Qaeda analyst to come in and deliver the basics. [1] Instead of the junior analyst, Black arrived in person, accompanied by the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden unit. Kiriakou has said he was shocked, stood up, and introduced Black to the room. [3] [4]
The warning
In Kiriakou’s account, Black sat down and said that something terrible was going to happen; that they did not know what it was or where it would be, but knew it would be an attack on a massive scale. [3] Black described the intelligence as a pattern of intercepted code words: a honey salesman coming with vast quantities of honey, a great football match, a huge wedding. [5] In the later telling Kiriakou adds that Black described the mood in the camps as one of jubilation, and reported hearing al-Qaeda camp commanders on the telephone with their students, crying and telling them “I’ll see you in paradise.” [6]
Black closed by asking the visitors directly for help: if they had any sources inside al-Qaeda, he begged them to say so. [5] [7] Kiriakou has said the visitors simply sat there. [7]
Afterwards
At the end of the day Kiriakou went to Black’s office to thank him for having taken the time. He asked Black whether the presentation had been for the visitors’ benefit or whether he had been serious. Black answered that he had been deadly serious, and that something terrible was going to happen. [8] [9]
Asked why Black had made the appeal at all, Kiriakou has said the agency was so desperate to penetrate al-Qaeda, and had so few cases running toward a penetration, that Black threw what Kiriakou calls a Hail Mary — asking a random visiting service whether it held a source the CIA did not know about. [10] They did not. In Kiriakou’s assessment the visitors were not being deceptive; al-Qaeda simply was not their problem and they had no such access. [11] He attributes the wider failure to al-Qaeda’s operational security, which he has called so excellent that nobody could infiltrate the organization. [9]