The Powell telephone call is John Kiriakou’s account of a call he received from General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while Kiriakou was a junior analyst on the CIA’s Iraq account in the early 1990s.
The call
Kiriakou has said he was sitting in the routine nine o’clock morning branch meeting, at which each branch went over what had happened overnight, when a secretary came in and told him that General Powell was on the telephone for him. Kiriakou has described asking how Powell knew who he was; the secretary answered that she did not know, but that he had asked for him by name. [1]
He went to a secure telephone. Powell, in Kiriakou’s account, asked very evenly: if the Iraqis were going to kill President Bush — meaning former President George H. W. Bush — who would be the person actually in charge of carrying out that operation? [2]
Kiriakou answered that if Powell was referring to the attack that had been foiled in Kuwait, the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s Kuwait station was run from Basra, and that Basra station was personally headed by a named officer he identifies as the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Powell asked where the man sat. Kiriakou answered: Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad. Powell said thank you and hung up. [3] [4]
The strike
Kiriakou returned to the meeting and reported what had been asked. Eight hours later, by his account, the United States fired forty-eight cruise missiles at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters. [4]
Kiriakou’s later assessment
Asked how it felt to know that his words had produced that result, Kiriakou answered that at the time he was excited and proud, and that as time has passed he has come to the realisation that he was responsible for the death of an innocent janitor. The strike came in the middle of the night, Baghdad time, and the building — in his phrase — was blown to smithereens; the one person inside was the janitor. [5]
He has said he felt very bad about that, and places the episode within a growing impatience with the Iraq account, which he came to feel was not serious about doing anything about Saddam Hussein, at least under the Clinton administration. That impatience is what he gives as his reason for seeking a move to operations. [6]