Yemen, on the southern Arabian Peninsula, was the destination of five visits by John Kiriakou between 1990 and approximately 2010 — a period that begins with the country’s brief unification and ends with the closure and evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Sanaa.[1][2] He has repeatedly called Yemen one of the worst places on earth, and says conditions there worsened on each successive visit — though he notes its Chinese-built roads are better than roads in the United States.[3][4]
The five trips, briefly
- First (~1990) — Kiriakou flew down from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a three-day weekend during the prophet’s-birthday holiday. The two Yemens — the Republic of Yemen (North) and the Soviet-satellite People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South) — were in the process of merging. “People were literally dancing in the streets.”[1][2]
- Second — Unification under strain; the North dominating the South; “it just wasn’t good.”[2]
- Third — Civil war, with North and South launching Scud missiles at each other. South Yemeni Vice President Ali Salim al-Beidh fled to Oman.[5]
- Fourth — Grim. Safe accommodation only at the Marriott, with thirty-foot blast walls.[5]
- Fifth (~2010) — Kiriakou traveled as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The U.S. embassy was being closed and personnel evacuated.[6]
The 2010 al-Qaeda attacks
In the period of the fifth trip, al-Qaeda staged sequential attacks on foreign diplomatic missions in Sanaa: six South Korean diplomats were assassinated en route from the airport to their hotel; a follow-up team of South Korean intelligence officers sent to investigate that attack was assassinated on the same road. “The Koreans just shut the embassy down and evacuated everybody. It’s grim. It really is. And there’s no hope in sight.”[7][8]
Kiriakou’s encounter with the DCIA Deputy
In the Marriott’s lobby during the fifth trip, Kiriakou encountered Steve Kappes, the Deputy Director of the CIA, on a quiet visit; the package-moving protocol used by the visiting protection detail revealed his presence. Kappes departed with a six-vehicle armored convoy. Kiriakou, “on the CIA shit list by then,” waited for “my one poorly armored ten-year-old Volkswagen to come and pick me up.”[9][10]
Expelled from the Gulf after Arafat backed Saddam
John Kiriakou recounts that when Yasser Arafat backed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the roughly six million Yemeni guest workers in Saudi Arabia were expelled essentially to the last man, collapsing Yemen’s economy so badly that, he says, “Yemen has never recovered.” Palestinians — the educated middle class of engineers, doctors and bankers — were thrown out across Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the UAE for the same reason.[11][12][13][14]
In another telling, Kiriakou traces the same expulsion to Yemen’s 1990–91 seat on the UN Security Council: when the Council voted to authorize force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, only Cuba and Yemen voted no, and Saudi Arabia responded by expelling 1.2 million Yemeni guest workers.[15] Kiriakou says he personally witnessed the resulting refugee crisis, flying from Saudi Arabia to Yemen during the expulsion and seeing tent cities stretching along the coast for twenty minutes of flight time before landing in Sanaa.[16] He argues the resulting humanitarian collapse led to the overthrow of Yemen’s Sunni government by the Shia Houthi rebels, who are aligned with Iran — giving Iran a foothold near the 16-mile-wide Bab-el-Mandeb strait.[17]
Strategic chokepoints and the Houthis
Kiriakou frames the Yemen war as ultimately about two chokepoints controlling Saudi Arabia’s access to the sea: the Strait of Hormuz, controlled by Iran, and the Bab-el-Mandeb, which runs past Iran-aligned Yemen — denying Iran control over both, in his view, is what drives Saudi and U.S. interest in the war.[18] He says a 2011 Sanaa cab driver told him the Houthis were using drones to bomb the capital — the first indication to Kiriakou that outside actors were involved, since the Houthis themselves had no drones and U.S. drones were based in Djibouti, sixteen miles across the water.[19] He notes a Houthi attack on Saudi oil fields in the Eastern Province shut down Saudi oil production for three days and nearly collapsed the Saudi economy.[20] Separately, a U.S. ambassador in Yemen told Kiriakou bluntly that the United States has no national interests in the country, apart from a brief past concern over piracy near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait.[21]