Buzzy Krongard
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Buzzy Krongard was the executive director of the CIA, the agency's third-ranking officer, at the time of Abu Zubaydah's capture. John Kiriakou credits him with the medical care the prisoner received.

The intervention

Krongard happened to sit on the board of directors of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.

As soon as the team reported to headquarters that Abu Zubaydah was in custody but had been shot, Krongard telephoned Johns Hopkins and asked for the hospital's top trauma surgeon. The surgeon was put on a CIA jet, flown to Pakistan, and arrived about twelve hours later.

What preceded it

The intervention answered a genuine emergency. Kiriakou had been told by the young Pakistani doctor at the first hospital that they had a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery than of keeping the patient alive, and Kiriakou's orders were to have any treating doctor stabilise him as best they could and stop the bleeding, treating him beyond that only if an emergency arose. The stated goal was to get him Western-style medical care as soon as possible and then interrogate him.

The promise

Kiriakou places Krongard's action against a promise he had made at the bedside. Abu Zubaydah, crying, had asked what was going to happen to him. Kiriakou said he honestly did not know, but that he could tell him he was going to receive the best medical care the American government could provide.

His own comment on that promise is one word: and indeed he did.

It sits alongside the advice Kiriakou says he gave immediately afterwards, that he was the nicest man Abu Zubaydah would meet in this experience, that his colleagues were not nice as he was, and that if there was one thing to do it was to cooperate, because his life was over but what was left could be easy or terrible. Abu Zubaydah's answer was that Kiriakou seemed like a nice man, but he was the enemy, and he would never cooperate.

Kiriakou says he did not know at the time what would follow. He describes assuming the aircraft would simply fly from the hospital to wherever the treatment was to take place, and states that he had no idea that the thing called enhanced interrogation was in the offing.

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- John Kiriakou
- The Syrian bodyguard
