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The live satellite feed myth
From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's on-record words
Based on 1 recorded interview · Last updated
John Kiriakou's flat rejection of one of the most common screen conventions about American intelligence: that officers can call up a live satellite picture and watch a target walk through the streets of a city. There was no such thing then, he says, and there is no such thing now.
In a 2023 conversation with Paul Jay about the weeks after the September 11 attacks, John Kiriakou interrupted a line of questioning about how quickly the United States might have found Osama bin Laden to dispose of a screen convention he plainly finds tiresome.
What the movies show
There is no such thing as a live satellite feed, he said — and added that you see it on television all the time, where people say they need a live satellite feed now, and then watch the man walk through the streets of a city. There was no such thing then, and even now there is no such thing. [1] When his interviewer offered that today it would be drones, Kiriakou agreed that it would be drones. Told that this was good to know, he did not qualify it further. [1]
Why it matters to the argument
The correction was not a digression. Jay had been pressing the case that a narrower, faster operation against al-Qaeda’s leadership might have been possible in the autumn of 2001 in place of a full war in Afghanistan, citing reports that everyone in Kandahar knew where bin Laden and Mullah Omar lived and could see their convoys of white SUVs moving in daylight. [2] Kiriakou’s answer was that intelligence of that kind has to be immediate — which, he noted, almost never happens in the intelligence world — and that you also have to have aircraft already in the sky ready to receive it in order to act that fast. Seven days later, you do not have somebody on the ground in Kandahar. [3]
The same passage contains his rejoinder to another familiar screen shortcut, that an officer could put a woman in a burka and walk her anywhere she wanted to go: to work in a city like Kandahar you need a sponsor, someone to protect you and to give you cover. [3] Kiriakou has made comparable arguments elsewhere about the gap between screen tradecraft and the real thing; see spy films accuracy.
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
