Describing how quickly he was put to work after moving into counterterrorism operations, John Kiriakou reduced the assignment to a single instruction.
The instruction
“My very first week, my boss said, ‘Come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house.’”[1] In fuller tellings he places it on his first day in the country, in January 2002, and attributes it to the station chief: “I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house. He said, we’re just not doing it.”[2] His own answer was that the CIA apparently did not do this at all; the reply was that it was about to start.[3]
The scope of the problem was defined by an existing list. “Of course, we had something called high value targets, HVTs. And that was the obvious list.” He names its occupants: bin Laden, Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh — “the usual cast of characters.”[1]
Why the assignment fell to him
Kiriakou has been open about the mismatch: he had never taken down a terrorist safe house before.[3] Asked why the work did not go to the agency’s paramilitary Ground Branch officers or to a special operations unit, he gave two reasons. The first was the objective — the Ground Branch officers, in his phrasing, “only know how to kill people,” and the idea here was to take people alive. The second was simply the state of the institution: “it was chaos in Washington.”[4]
Writing it
The procedure was written from first principles on a legal pad. “I sat down at a desk with a legal pad and I thought, so what would I do if I were to take down a terrorist safe house? Well, I guess I’d want it to be dark — so like the middle of the night. I wouldn’t want anybody to see me, and frankly I would want the terrorist to be sleeping.” He wrote 0200 at the top of the page and built the rest out from there, little by little.[5][6] The hour suited the country as well as the tactic: as many people as Pakistan has, he says, “they just roll the sidewalks up at night — it’s like a ghost town, the whole country at night.”[6]
The next requirement was partners. “I’m gonna need partners,” he recalls thinking — “you gotta invite the Pakistanis because it’s their country.”[6]
What the procedure had to account for
The fragment that follows in the same passage indicates one of the variables the procedure had to handle: the disposition of prisoners after a raid. Those who were cooperative, he says, would remain in the custody of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.[1]
That detail matters because the alternatives were not symmetrical. In Kiriakou’s fuller accounts of the same period, prisoners who cooperated produced usable intelligence and stayed in local hands or were shipped to Cuba; those who did not, and who were judged important, went to a secret site.
The first raid
The procedure was used almost immediately. The Pakistani partners reported a safe house where someone was holed up, and Kiriakou’s answer was “okay, well, let’s hit it.” About half a dozen of them went out at two in the morning with a battering ram and broke down the door. Inside was a 19-year-old Tunisian, who started crying and asking for his mother. He was Kiriakou’s first al-Qaeda fighter, and, in his account, the start of a pattern.[7]
The mistaken premise
The passage closes on the belief the entire target list rested on. “We believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda,” he says. “He was not.”[1]
That correction is one Kiriakou has made consistently, and it is characteristic of how he narrates the period: the operational tempo is described without apology — a written procedure demanded in the first week, a list of names to work through — and the intelligence premise underneath it is corrected flatly, without softening.