Kiriakou has told this story in more than one interview, and the tellings differ in their details but not in their shape.
He went one day to the office of something called the Iraq Operations Group to pick up a briefing book. The officer at the desk was the director of Iraq operations — the same man who, in Kiriakou’s account, had earlier laid out the secrecy agreements he was made to sign before being read in on the coming invasion. These were, as Kiriakou puts it, serious, high-level people he was dealing with every day.[1] How long after the read-in the visit fell varies with the telling: in one it is the next day, in another a few weeks later.[2][3]
The markers
The director was sitting at his desk with a blank sheet of white paper and a box of Crayola coloured markers, colouring something in. Kiriakou asked what he was doing. He said he was designing the new Iraqi flag.[4][2]
Kiriakou asked whether he did not think the Iraqis should perhaps design the new Iraqi flag. In the 2019 telling the director looked at him and said: not necessarily.[4] In a 2023 telling the answer is closer to a shrug — “I don’t know, I thought I’d do it.”[5][6] What struck Kiriakou in every account is that the objection appeared to be new to the man: it had simply not occurred to him that the Iraqi people should design their own flag.[2][7]
The colours
The design used the colours of the Israeli flag — a detail Kiriakou says he pointed out at the time and does not treat as coincidence: “which I’m convinced was not an accident.”[5][8][6]
His objection was also technical, and he has spelled out the grammar the existing flag obeys: green because it represents Islam, red because it represents the ethnic minorities, and the three stars because they represent the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds. “You can’t just take the Israeli” colours and substitute them.[9] He attributes the ignorance to the appointment itself — “this is what happens when they put a Mexican guy in charge of the Iraq Operations Group.”[9]
What he took from it
Kiriakou’s reaction is the same in every account. He thought: we are in serious trouble here, serious trouble.[4] He describes the atmosphere of the period as almost surreal.[7]
He also offers the scene as typical rather than exceptional — of the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon and even the State Department, and of a habit he believes continues: “that’s the arrogance that we see in our policy — that’s a normal event, to have a GS-15 designing another country’s flag to be imposed on them.”[3][8]
He tells the anecdote as the second of a pair. The first is the briefing in which he learned that the invasion was already decided — that the United States would overthrow Saddam Hussein, install its own man, and move its air assets out of Saudi Arabia into a new base in southern Iraq — and was told which side of the argument the CIA, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs were on, and which side loses.[1]