About five minutes down this Dalton Fisher Podcast, John Kiriakou stops himself in the middle of a sentence about an “underground facility” in Dubai. He chuckles awkwardly, suggests “maybe we should clip that…” but eventually carries on with the recall of his visit to the Dubai Police Command & Control Center (CCC), mentioning the banks of camera feeds and a live demonstration where operators pulled up a traffic accident and responded in real time, the whole apparatus doing exactly what it was built to do while he sat there watching it work.
What’s fascinating is not the pause itself. Kiriakou spent years inside a machine built to sort what could be said from what could not—the latter overwhelming the former—and although he had long since left that world, something in him still ran the check automatically.
The interesting thing is that what he almost withheld had been sitting in a corporate press release since 2005.
That year, the Emirate signed a contract with Siemens about the building of the Dubai Police CCC buried beneath its new headquarters of the Deira District, a stone’s throw from the airport. Not only was the 11-month project reported in the local newspapers, but Siemens announced it themselves, in the tone a company uses when it’s proud of a contract, with all the non-confidential details: a wall of screens twelve meters wide pulling in camera and satellite feeds from across the Emirate, a three-dimensional model of the city, every patrol car and ambulance tracked by GPS so a dispatcher could identify, at a glance, which vehicle sat closest to a given address, not to mention that any camera in the network is callable within seconds of a call coming in.
The choice of Siemens came as no surprise, the company being named a strategic partner of Dubai Police more than once, there relationship dating back to 1973. None of it was ever classified, and I recall reading about it in Gulf News at the time, over my morning coffee. The whole thing was marketing, and fairly effective marketing at that.
So why Kiriakou’s reflex? Partly because it’s just how the training holds, which is no speculation on my end, it’s largely documented. A 2014 directive from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence prohibited current and former officials from citing even leaked information that had already been published by the press. Internal review boards make sure sensitive passages are stripped from memoirs written by figures as senior as former CIA directors Michael Hayden and George Tenet, even years after they’ve left the Agency. Brent Scowcroft, who spent decades inside the system as National Security Advisor, once called the whole habit “a largely mindless reflex”, a pretty candid assessment for someone in his position.
But there is probably more to it, maybe an event involving the CCC that Kiriakou is still not at liberty to discuss.
One night, late January 2010, a Mossad Kidon team killed Hamas’s chief arms smuggler, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel. A month later, Dubai’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim—ironically the one who signed the Siemens contract—had names, passport photographs, and a minute-by-minute reconstruction pulled from nearly two thousand hours of hotel and airport surveillance footage. The passport count kept climbing as the investigation went on, with a total of twenty-six operatives holding twelve British, six Irish, four French, three Australian and one German passports. What should have stayed a clandestine, and therefore deniable killing turned into a ten-minute compilation video released to the press by Tamim himself. And he didn’t stop there, publicly calling for Meir Dagan’s arrest on public TV, taking the case to Al Jazeera, and citing WikiLeaks cables that he said would confirm Israeli involvement. He then pursued the matter for years, until after Dagan’s death in 2016, when the former Mossad chief was still formally wanted in the UAE.
The reconstruction that exposed the operation wasn’t improvised after the fact. It ran precisely on the infrastructure Siemens had installed five years earlier, allowing the CCC to piece together footage scattered across a dozen unrelated locations into one continuous timeline. A few cameras in hotel corridors is a risk operational planners factor in and mitigate. On the other hand, a city-wide correlation engine, specifically built to stitch every camera of the network into a single narrative within hours, is a whole different kind of problem. And it’s highly unlikely that the Kidon team has misjudged the kind of surveillance environment it was operating in. So what?
Over the course of a single day, operatives were repeatedly filmed changing wigs and jackets in the same field of view, while one of the women looked directly up and smiled at a camera. Victor Ostrovsky, who briefly served as a Mossad case officer in the 1980s, told the Los Angeles Times the whole thing looked hastily planned—sloppy tradecraft and that’s it—and that’s the interpretation most coverage has embraced. It’s indeed the simplest explanation and therefore the most likely to prevail.
The problem is that this explanation is hard to square with the Mossad’s decades of operational experience in Dubai, a city that had spent five years publicly describing exactly what it could see. Carelessness may explain why a team gets caught, but what it doesn’t explain is why a team that knew they got caught kept behaving, frame after frame, as if getting caught was the least of their concerns. One plausible explanation is that the Israeli decision-makers concluded that the benefits of assassinating Mabhouh at that particular moment outweighed the cost of exposure. Another—not mutually exclusive with the first— would be that Israel wanted to make a broader point to its adversaries, proving they could reach them anywhere, even under one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems.
Let’s go back to Kiriakou’s interview.
Instinctively, he refrained from mentioning something that has been public for years, perhaps because of the CCC itself, or because of the covert operation connected to it. Conversely, Israel appears to have carried out an operation knowing that the same infrastructure would eventually reveal the team’s every move. What it shows is that one man treated public knowledge as though it were still secret, when the others have treated exposure not as failure, but as part of the operation’s strategic effect. In other words, Kiriakou’s reflex was to protect information long after it had ceased to be secret, whereas Israeli decision-makers may have been willing to sacrifice deniability to send a message.
The lesson is that secrecy does not always require remaining unseen. Sometimes protecting the secret serves the institution, sometimes exposure serves it better.