CIA agent names ‘world’s most harmful nations’ the place you ‘sleep with one eye open’
A former agent who visited 72 countries for the CIA has revealed the world’s scariest places, including a city where only one hotel is safe – with a 30ft wall to protect from bomb blasts
A former CIA agent has shared a list of countries to give a hard swerve(Image: @LADbible Stories/YouTube)
If you’re looking to survive your next holiday, former CIA agent John Kiriakou has some handy tips on where not to go.
Of the 72 countries he visited for the spy agency from 1990 and 2004, “almost all of them were just awful,” he said.
But a few stand out as especially hair-raising even in this grim collection.
Speaking about one nation, John said: “You have to sleep with one eye open. You just never know how bad things are going to get… We were only allowed to stay at one hotel, and the hotel had a 30-foot high wall around it, to protect it from bomb blasts.”
John was also sent to Pakistan, which ranks among his deadliest destinations, in the aftermath of 9/11.
As Chief of Counterterrorist Operations there, he was tasked with capturing al-Qaeda members.
But after turning whistle-blower to expose the CIA’s torture methods, he was convicted of passing classified information to the media in 2012 and spent 30 months in prison.
The former agent has now shared with LADbible the answers to the questions he gets asked most, such as “What is the most dangerous country in the world right now?”
“There are several, and I’ve been to all of them! I never got to go to the nice places,” he said.
“I went to 72 countries with the CIA and almost all of them were just awful… Some of the most dangerous places in the world include Yemen, Somalia, Gaza, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan,” he said.
“You have to sleep with one eye open,” he said. “You just never know how bad things are going to get.”
He warned of one Middle East destination where travellers take their lives in their hands.
“I’ll give you an example, I went to Yemen five times, and every time I went, it was worse than the previous time,” he said.
“The fifth and final time that I went, we were only allowed to stay at one hotel, and the hotel had a 30-foot high wall around it, to protect it from bomb blasts.
“You couldn’t stay in any other of the hotels by then. The day after I arrived, a group of South Korean diplomats arrived, and on the drive from the airport to the hotel, they were ambushed and they were all killed, six of them.
“A couple of days later, a group of South Korean intelligence officers arrived to investigate the murder of the six diplomats… they were ambushed, and they were murdered.
“The South Koreans just closed their embassy and went home, that’s a pretty dangerous country!”
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