Private Security Consultant Goes Hollywood

In These Times has this story.

John Kiriakou, the CIA agent who led the team that waterboarded a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda in 2002, served as the security consultant for Paramount’s soon-to-be released film, The Kite Runner. Lobbyists for Viacom arranged for Kiriakou to serve as a security consultant after concerns arose about the safety of the movie’s child stars, Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Ali Danish Bakhty Ari.

Based in Pakistan from 1998 to 2004, Kiriakou led the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, the first high-ranking member of Al Qaeda to be captured after 9/11. On Monday, Kiriakou, now retired from the CIA, became the first person to admit publicly his involvement with the agency’s coercive interrogation program for suspected terrorists. He told ABC News that although he thinks waterboarding Zubaydah “probably saved lives,” he is now convinced the technique is a form of torture and that “Americans are better than that.”

After retiring from the CIA in 2004, Kiriakou returned to Washington D.C. to pursue a career as a private security consultant. He became involved with The Kite Runner in July 2007. Lobbyists for Viacom helped retain Kiriakou and also enlisted Rick Klein, a Middle East Specialist at Kissinger McLarty Associates, an international strategic consulting firm. The “Kissinger” and “McLarty” are none other than Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff Mack McLarty.

A Paramount spokesman told In These Times that Paramount executives had no further comment on how security consultants were chosen for The Kite Runner.

In July, the filming of The Kite Runner was completed, and the picture was scheduled to premiere in November. During the interim, ethnic violence rose substantially in Afghanistan. Though the film was shot in China and San Francisco, instead of Afghanistan, the producers wanted to know if the movie would put the actors in danger.

The Kite Runner, based on the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, is the story of two boys, Amir and Hassan, growing up in Afghanistan. Amir is the pampered son of a local Pashtun bigshot and Hassan is a Hazara houseboy. In one pivotal sequence, Hassan is raped by another boy in an alley and Amir fails to intervene. The movie touches on issues of ethnicity, religion and history that are highly controversial in Afghanistan.