Title: CIA Spy Explains How the United States Betrayed Him
Show: Danny Jones Podcast
Date: 2022-05-23
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfYnLqYEnfw
Duration: 49:46

---

[00:00] for people who aren't familiar with your story you uh were a cia spy for a number of years and you eventually blew the whistle on the one of the cia's interrogation programs and essentially got prosecuted and spent two years in federal prison is that right i spent 15 years in the cia the first half of my career was in

[00:30] intelligence in analysis exclusively on iraq and then i got bored after a while and i met made a very unusual transfer from from analysis to operations i went to the cia's counter-terrorism center became a counter-terrorism operations officer a spy essentially and and then chief of cia counter-terrorism operations in pakistan after 9 11. um led a series of raids that resulted in

[01:00] our very first high value target captures and then went back to cia headquarters got promoted on the strength of those captures and then just as i got promoted i was named executive assistant to the cia's deputy director that's when we started this torture program and i objected to it like pretty strenuously and waited for somebody to say something it took years and in the end nobody said anything

[01:30] and then finally i said this this has to be out there and so i told abc news and uh the cia fell on my head with you know it's full weight and um they prosecuted me and i went to prison for 23 months zero regrets none and um yeah i mean i came out stronger on the other end i'm not a it's funny when when you're in your 20s

[02:00] and your 30s you think you have your life all mapped out like the way it's supposed to be i figured okay i'm in the cia i'm smart i have advanced degrees i'm kind of political so i'm playing the game everybody's supposed to play to get ahead and in my mind and my wife was a senior cia officer and she said she said one time you know we're going to be running this place someday and i was like yeah we're going to run the place next thing you know i'm like you know a dissident

[02:30] and um and i'm headed to prison and then she leaves so your life's not all mapped out i went to prison i came back all of a sudden i'm famous thanks to them i never intended to be and people sort of viewed me as this spokesman against torture and in support of transparency and anti-corruption and julian assange and the weirdest things happen you know like

[03:00] i'll be feeling sorry for myself right and when i first got home from prison can't get a job anywhere and then yoko ono calls to see how i'm doing seriously or um i'm thinking oh you know maybe i'll get into radio which is what i do now mostly maybe i'll get into radio and then oliver stone calls to ask if i can be the technical advisor on some film he's doing it's the craziest weirdest thing wow what did oliver stone call you about

[03:30] oh my god oliver oliver bought the rights to my first book it's kind of a funny story if you have a minute to listen to i got plenty of minutes so oliver bought the rights to my first book i've written nine books so far and um he wanted to do this show on what it was like inside the cia the day before the 911 attacks the day of the 9 11 attacks and then the day after and onward where you've got all these really smart patriotic people

[04:00] who want to do the right thing and serve their country and then they become torturers kidnappers murderers like how does that happen in 48 hours and it did that's how it happened and so um we actually sold it to the history channel as a as a one season they wanted to do it as a mini series and oliver said he wanted to choose the writer so we're waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and we're like what are you

[04:30] doing and he said i can't find the right person and then history channel said just forget it and they dropped it oh yeah i was so mad and then he calls me like two years later and he said um did we sell a show together and i said yeah it was based on my on my first book he said what was that show about so i told him what i just told you and he said right right right did we write anything and i said yeah we wrote the first episode that's what we gave to

[05:00] uh to history channel and he says send me that i'm looking for something to do so i sent it back to him and then he calls me again the next day and he's like yeah i'm not interested in doing this anymore really i was like okay wow yeah he's a strange guy he's hard to get along with is he really yeah intro i because i followed his uh i followed his documentaries that he did on ukraine after the whole thing happened and i started watching that and did you notice like one his documentary got banned from youtube oh yeah it sure did which was wild yep yep

[05:30] you know what one of the things that i admire about him and i'm sorry to get so far off subject but he doesn't care what anybody thinks about him and i think that's wonderful it's liberating yeah you know you do what you think is right if you believe in yourself and you genuinely don't care what people think about you you can accomplish all kinds of stuff well he's been through it all from from and being in the vietnam war and all everything

[06:00] all the the work he's done from the history of the united states and that documentary and he just knows so much i feel like and it's so weird to me when people you know he obviously has a lot of people who talk you know against his work and say like this stuff that he says is kind of biased very anti-american he gets labeled american he's a patriot that's the funny thing he's a patriot who thinks that

[06:30] that there are so many things that the government has done wrong or that the government has done that have been illegal right or that has been illegal and he wants to spotlight it right and and bring it to the attention of all americans and people say oh you hate america um you know i don't know if the cia killed john kennedy but oliver certainly thinks that they did and he's got some you know documents that i don't know it kind of makes it seem

[07:00] plausible again i don't know his new c his new documentary about that i don't know if you've seen it or not but it's it's pretty it's pretty matter of fact it is it is i don't even know if that's even considered a conspiracy theory anymore i think it's pretty much everybody knows about it doesn't really talk about it yeah it's very mainstream yeah um another thing like his his po we're getting way off topic here but we can we can bring it back we got time the putin interviews that he did yeah yeah i think he's the only guy who spent you know over 48 hours sitting alone with

[07:30] putin talking to him about things and getting his point of view and i thought those things i thought that was one of the most fascinating pieces of work i've seen and you see the respect that putin treated him with yeah i mean he got criticized for not like being harder on putin during the interviews like why didn't you push back harder on like when he went on the colbert show and he's like well why don't you challenge him on that or talk you know put him in line for saying that and he's like well if you're gonna be in my position in the position of interviewing putin in the first place you have to have some sort of respect

[08:00] for him as a as a human being and the leader of our country you can't just [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] down his throat that's right you can't it's not going to work it's not going to get you anywhere right um so what do you what sort of criticism have you gotten if any from your position and from from what you did with the cia as far as like whistleblowing and and coming out against the the um that program it depends it depends who you talk to

[08:30] um i'll tell you one of the funny things that happened is after my prosecution two of the fbi agents who were involved in prosecuting me called my attorneys and apologized to them and said that this was a political case they did it because they were ordered to do it and they just wanted to express their their apologies i said no hard feelings water under the bridge right i mean i'm i'm sort of a i've come to be a believer in fate and if this is the way that things were

[09:00] supposed to happen then this is the way things are supposed to happen you really get to see who your friends are i'll tell you that when something like this happens so you know for the most part people were like oh my god what you did was so brave nobody else had the guts to do it and then there were a couple of people like there's a right-wing newspaper in washington called the washington uh times uh it's owned by the the moonies you know the the reverend

[09:30] sun myung moon and the unification church it's that cult from south korea yeah um so they they called me a traitor a bad actor um a pro uh terrorist it's like yeah i don't remember yubi in there when we were kicking down doors and taking down al qaeda so i'm pro-terrorist right saying that you whistle blue on a a torture program that makes you a pro terrorist pro-terrorist you know my my

[10:00] point has always been very simple that that the american people have a right to know what the government is doing in their name and it is illegal we actually have a law in this country it is illegal to classify something that is a crime you cannot put a classification on something for the purpose of keeping it from the public and so we're we're signatories to the united nations convention against torture right we were the authors actually of the

[10:30] united nations convention against torture and we have a law in this country called the federal torture act of 1946 which specifically outlawed exactly those things that we were doing against or doing to al-qaeda prisoners let me add to that pardon me but i'm interrupting this episode to bring you our question of the week on versus game the question is will bam adebayo of the miami heat score more than 15 points during game five of the eastern conference finals go download versus

[11:00] game follow concrete and then vote on our questions so you can make some internet money buddy that's versus game one word no spaces go vote now back to the show in 1946 we executed japanese soldiers who waterboarded american pows right that was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody in january of 1968 the washington post ran a front page

[11:30] photograph of an american soldier in vietnam waterboarding a north vietnamese prisoner on the day that that photo was published the secretary of defense robert mcnamara ordered an investigation the soldier was arrested he was charged with torture convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison well the law never changed we changed so how is this a death penalty offense

[12:00] in 1946 it's worthy of 20 years at lenworth in 1968 but then in 2002 no problem you know you want to waterboard the guy go ahead waterboard him you want to chain him to an eye bolt in the ceiling and chill his cell to 50 degrees and then throw ice water on him every every hour until he dies of hypothermia go ahead nobody's going to stop you well why not that's illegal

[12:30] and we shouldn't be doing it let me tell you another thing when i was on assignment to the state department i served for two years in in bahrain little tiny country in the persian gulf same size and same population as pittsburgh right and one of the things that we do in every country around the world where we have an american embassy is we write a human rights report every year and the human rights report is mandated by congress so we write it in the field we interview attorneys and activists and

[13:00] government people and and journalists we write this thing up and we send it to congress every year so i was the human rights officer in in bahrain and i had to write the human rights report so tell me if you were the bahraini minister of interior and i come to you and i say your excellency you cannot murder 15 year olds because they marched in a pro-democracy demonstration right i'm going to have to write that up and

[13:30] send it to congress and maybe they're not going to want to sell you f-18s right because you did this you cannot just murder people when you when you don't like their politics and then 15 minutes later the cia station chief walks in and says don't listen to the human rights guy we want you to open a secret prison here and we're going to bring prisoners and we're going to torture them here or you torture them for us and then you give us a write-up of what they say and we'll give you all the f-18s you want

[14:00] who's he going to listen to is he going to listen to me right he's not going to listen to me right but the problem is that what the cia station chief is telling him he wants is illegal you can't do it now reasonable people can agree to disagree on how to confront terrorism but if you want to torture people you have to change the law and nobody's had the balls to do it wow um [Music] what were you doing in well first of all

[14:30] i've had other former cif cia officers in here um and we've spoken about things like you know snowden and julian assange and other whistleblowers and the consensus seems to be among um most of those people you know former government officials is that they did the right thing but they did the wrong way right yeah what what is your feeling on that when people say that what do you think about like

[15:00] if you could go back in time what if you were to take your complaint or whatever you said on abc up the chain of command and if you would have done it the right way what do you think would have happened you think anything would have changed that's a very good question it's a very difficult question uh for me personally i you know i've thought about this a million times right i play this over in my head all the time my situation was an unusual one because my chain of command created the torture

[15:30] program um going back to uh the capture of abu zubaydah for example in march 2002. i came back to cia headquarters and i was in the cafeteria one day and one of my colleagues from the counterterrorism center came up to me and said hey very casually hey i'm glad i caught you i wanted to ask you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i had never heard that term before

[16:00] i said enhanced interrogation technique what's that supposed to mean and kind of excitedly he says we're going to start getting rough with these guys and i said what's that mean and he described these 10 techniques and i said buddy that sounds like a torture program to me and he said no it's not we got it cleared by the justice department and the president signed off on it a couple of days ago i said i don't know man let me think about it let me give me an hour let me

[16:30] think about it i went upstairs to the seventh floor which is the executive floor of the cia there was a very very senior cia leader who i worked for in the middle east 10 years earlier i knocked on his door and i said i got to ask some advice i said they just asked me if i want to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of that and he said very clearly first of all he said let's call it what it is this is a torture program and you know how these guys are he said

[17:00] somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner and when that happens there's going to be a congressional investigation then there's going to be a justice department investigation then somebody's going to go to prison you want to go to prison and i said no i don't want to go to prison as it turned out i was the only person who went to prison but i said no no i don't want to go to prison so i went downstairs and i said man this is a torture program and i don't want any part of it well as it turned out they had asked 14 people from ctc the counterterrorism center i

[17:30] was the only one who said no and then now here i am six weeks after i catch the number three in al qaeda and i get passed over for promotion and i s i went into the deputy director's office we were old friends i had worked for him in a previous assignment and i said what do i what do i have to do to get promoted around here i have to catch bin laden like seriously what more do you guys want from me and

[18:00] he said you know they call you the human rights guy i said so he said that's not a compliment so i thought okay well this is my lot in life i'm going to have to be the the human rights guy and then the guy that i had asked for advice promoted me out of cycle and he said can i swear on this oh absolutely he said you know why they [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] you and i said yeah because i wouldn't torture

[18:30] abu zubaydah and he said precisely he said now i'm going to promote you now but the next promotion is on you meaning i'm probably not going to get promoted again unless these guys start to retire which is normally the way it happens you have to wait them out so i thought well you know this is so clearly wrong it's so clearly illegal besides being immoral and unethical like who do i report this to

[19:00] and so very discreetly and quietly i started to investigate well i can't report it to my boss my boss was the founder the creator of the torture program it was his idea really yeah yeah my supervisor can you say his name jose rodriguez okay because i heard of another guy who was a cia psychologist who actually lives mitchell and jessen is that who it was yeah james mitchell and bruce jessen james mitchell that's the one that i heard of okay they live right here in tampa do they really yeah

[19:30] okay yeah and uh jose lives in um uh saint augustine that's so funny they're weird yeah they all came to florida so um i can't go to my boss uh the the program was compartmentalized which means that you need special clearances above top secret to even know about it so i couldn't go to the inspector general because he wasn't cleared for the information can you imagine that

[20:00] the inspector general this is so highly classified that the inspector general's not cleared for the information i couldn't go there i couldn't go to the general counsel's office because they were the ones that worked with justice to legalize it couldn't go to justice obviously so what do you do you go to the congressional oversight committees you go to the senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on on intelligence the problem is they were the ones that secretly signed off on it and appropriate the

[20:30] appropriated the money to fund it right so i'm screwed so where do i go the only place to go is the media that was it now that was my situation with with assange and and snowden it's different um i i was a snowden supporter from the very beginning what he what he wanted to blow the whistle on was the fact that nsa was spying on american citizens not only is it against the law for nsa to spy on american citizens it's a part

[21:00] of the nsa's charter that they're not allowed to spy on american citizens since 9 11 it's been literally dragnet warrantless wiretapping on all american communications well that's illegal and again if you want to intercept americans communications fine but you got to change the law right so snowden couldn't go to the oversight committees snowden couldn't go to uh to

[21:30] his his boss they were all involved there's another nsa whistleblower who's become a dear friend of mine by the name of tom drake so tom drake was the first person to blow the whistle on nsa's warrantless wiretapping and his his story make your hair stand up on on 9 11 9 11 was his first day at nsa he had been a an officer in the air force and then he joined nsa in the senior intelligence service so this is he's arguably the country's leading expert on on internet privacy issues

[22:00] so on 9 11 it's his first day and he said they were like giddy at nsa because they were just waiting for us to be attacked so they could start implementing all these programs that they had developed that they knew were illegal so they couldn't implement them and then when the attack comes all you have to say is national security and you can do whatever you want so tom said wait a minute wait a minute you guys want to implement this program

[22:30] that intercepts the communications of all americans when we have this other program this smaller program called stellar wind that recognizes when the communication is from a bad guy or a suspected bad guy and so instead of just grabbing everybody's phone calls and text messages and emails it only grabs the bad guys phone calls text messages and emails um that was stellar win stellar wind

[23:00] and they told him to mind his business so he went through the chain of command first he went to his boss his boss told him you're new this is none of your business you don't know what you're doing so he thought about it for a while and he went to the inspector general at nsa the inspector general like the cia inspector general wasn't read into the program and told him i don't know what the heck you're talking about we're not allowed to intercept the communications of americans

[23:30] then he went to the general counsel the general counsel said you're in way over your head buddy you need to stop so then he went to the pentagon inspector general because nsa is a division a a bureau of the pen of the defense department what did the what did the inspector general do at uh the pentagon they destroyed the evidence that he brought out to to prove his case they shredded everything so he decided then he's going to go to

[24:00] the oversight committee so he goes to the house permanent select committee on intelligence and says listen nsa since 9 11 they've been intercepting the phone calls emails and text messages of of all americans everybody and so what happened when the committee asked nsa for clarification they raided tom's house they arrested him they charged him with seven counts of espionage

[24:30] and two counts of theft of government property being the information right the information's in his head he walked out of the building with the information he stole it right he stole it and gave it to the congressional oversight committee i apologize hit the camera um in the end they're saying he stole it just because he remembered it yes yeah in the end they were forced to drop all the charges against him because he did

[25:00] it exactly the way that we were taught to do it but like many of us in the intelligence community his wife was an nsa officer just like mine was a cia officer and when they were arresting him the fbi went to his wife and said we're arresting your husband and raiding your house right now as we speak you're either with him or you're with us and she chose them so he he lost everything he lost his

[25:30] pension he lost his house he lost his five kids he lost his marriage you know uh i have to there's a just being the devil's advocate there's um another guy who i had on here his um his name's andrew he was a former cia spy and and i made this sort of argument to him and his his response was you have to be okay with giving up freedoms for for the united states that is a very

[26:00] common and very typical right-wing trope because what he laid out was this pyramid that um resembles the creation of a state he said on the lowest on the lowest level of the pyramid you have individualism which is we all are out for ourselves we can all go you know kill whoever we want take whatever we want um the second level of the pyramid is tribalism where you have the tribes and

[26:30] basically what that does that's that protects me from that protects you from me going into your tribe and clubbing your wife over the head and stealing her and you doing the same to me that's that's tribalism you said the the next level of the pyramid is the creation of a state where you have this this separate government that basically protects that does all this stuff for us that's what taxes are for and that's what the government is for to keep us all safe and to do all these things and to deal with other countries and keep the balance the world balance

[27:00] in check um and his argument for that is you have you know you have to be okay with the government infringing on our privacy infringing on on certain amount of things to a certain extent yeah and and um that's one philosophy right of democracy that's incompatible with mine remember dick cheney was asked about um all the innocent people that we had at guantanamo we had over 700 people at

[27:30] guantanamo at one point and almost all of them were innocent of any crime and he said that he would rather arrest a million innocent people than to allow one guilty person to to get off uh yeah and it's the same idea like these guys would rather take away our civil liberties to stop another attack i would rather maintain my civil liberties and risk another attack

[28:00] because the civil liberties are more important to me what is it common for husband and wife to be in the cia together very in fact the cia culture is such that they encourage cia romances because you're both cleared so you can talk about you know [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] at night when you're laying in bed and and you're not violating your secrecy agreement listen the cia has softball leagues and football leagues and lgbtq organizations and a quilting

[28:30] league and christian organizations everything that you would want to do in your life you know with other people it's inside the cia and that way you can talk about work and they can talk about work and nobody gets in trouble so they try to keep you insulated from the outside world they don't want you talking to other people out there it's that's unsafe what were you doing in 2001. you

[29:00] were in pakistan uh i went to pakistan in january of 2002 okay when we we started bombing tora bora at the end of uh of october of 2001 and we pushed al qaeda over the border so instead of trying to you know climb these forbidding mountains to capture them one at a time i had this idea it just it seemed so simple but nobody had thought of it at the time and i said listen if we're just gonna carpet bomb them in torabora we can kill who we're able to kill but

[29:30] the rest of them are gonna are gonna run into pakistan right because we can't bomb in pakistan that it was an allied country so i said instead of having people all the way up and down the afghan pakistan border and we're grabbing them one at a time let's let them into pakistan let them get situated so that they feel like they're safe again they're going to make a mistake they always do and then we can hit the safe houses so instead of getting one at a time we get

[30:00] 20 at a time or 50 at a time and they said i mean they just hadn't thought of it it was it was a crazy period too you know it was you know nobody was sleeping people are jetting around the world just trying to catch people it was it was rough and so um it it was funny too you know like everybody else in in the agency i uh i think sorry i just took it is that camera cool is my camera okay

[30:30] yeah okay cool no you're good like everybody else in the building on 9 11 i volunteered to go to afghanistan everybody volunteered right and they wouldn't they wouldn't take me and i i just couldn't understand it i said to a buddy of mine i don't understand this i volunteered three times they won't take me how long had you been in the cia at that point uh almost 12 years okay and my arabic was fluent right so

[31:00] i ran into a guy he was an old man a contractor a legendary guy by the name of billy wah billy um billy fought in the second world war korea and vietnam and had 17 purple hearts she imagined such a thing there was one guy in north carolina had who had 18 but it's the most in american history right the 18. billy had 17. so billy and i had done some fun stuff in the middle east before 9 11 and about

[31:30] six weeks after 9 11 i ran into him in the hall and i said hey billy i said where you been and he looks around and he goes i've been in afghanistan i said yeah what are you doing in afghanistan and he looks at me like i'm nuts and he says i've been killing people what do you think i've been doing and i said that's why they haven't sent me and he said did you volunteer and i said yeah i said my arabic is fluent i figured they would need interrogators he goes we're not interrogating anybody

[32:00] i was like that's why they don't want me they're just killing people they're not capturing anybody wow so i got frustrated and i went into the deputy director's office and i said again he was a friend of mine and i said man i said if you don't send me to afghanistan right now i am going straight to exxon with my arabic and i'm not looking back

[32:30] a totally empty threat and he goes just [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] relax he says relax can you go to pakistan and i said yes when he said tomorrow i said yes what do you want me to do there he said i want you to be chief of counter-terrorism ops i said okay so i called my then girlfriend she became my wife later and we can get into that later um and i said i got to go to pakistan when tomorrow she said okay i'll meet you at your place i'll help you pack

[33:00] and the next day i went to pakistan wow it was there six or seven months and who one of the first things you did or one of the main things that you accomplished when you were there was capturing abuse a beta yeah right yeah and you look at this beta can you walk me through how that went down yeah yeah it's it's a story it became the defining event of not just my career really it became the defining event of my life and i'm not overstating that

[33:30] so i get to pakistan january of 2002 and my very first day the station chief says i want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-qaeda safe house he said we're just not doing it i said sure so i went back to my office and i i sat there with a with a legal pad and i was thinking all right so if i'm if i'm going to take down an al-qaeda safe house how would i do that

[34:00] and i thought well i'd i'd want it to be dark right and i wrote o 200 at the top of the page i mean in pakistan as many people as they have there they just roll the sidewalks up at night it's it's like a ghost town the whole country at night so um i thought uh i'm gonna need partners i mean you gotta invite the pakistanis because it's their country you know you have to i don't

[34:30] mean to sound crass but you have to allow them to believe that they're in charge you know even if they're not that's a see a spy tactic right yeah yeah make it all make them think that it's all their idea and um and 911 was an open criminal investigation so you have to invite the fbi as awful as that is but i mean i would rather work with the pakistanis than the fbi any day morons so

[35:00] uh so i wrote you know teams you know two pakistanis two cia2 fbi and i would need a bunch of stuff so i need like battering rams and guns and ammo and night vision goggles and bulletproof vests and i made this whole laundry list of stuff so i sent a cable to headquarters and i said um can you give me fifty thousand dollars seed money and i'll start buying this stuff boom six hours later i had fifty

[35:30] thousand dollars money believe me was no problem i mean vast amounts of money we have a lot of time i can tell you some fun stories so i went online galls.com it's a police supply house in kentucky uh and i ordered everything i needed i ordered bulletproof vests and battering rams and guns and ammunition and the night vision goggles and walkie-talkies and a satellite dish and i ordered everything i spent the whole 50 grand

[36:00] so two weeks later it all arrives and we set up our teams and uh i got a tip that there was this al qaeda safe house here's the address so i called the pakistani uh colonel that i was he was my normal contact and i said um colonel muhammad let's let's hit this house tonight i've been telling him look you know i'm waiting for this equipment to come and of course we're gonna leave it all here as a gift for you and your brave men and you know

[36:30] you know what i'm talking about yeah you have to sort of talk them up so i called them and i said okay the stuff's in i got this tip let's hit this this address two o'clock in the morning he's like okay so i get two fbi people one of whom is totally awesome and we still stay in touch the other was an ongoing problem for all of us at the cia cia and the fbi hate each other right and they have since the founding of the cia and we still hate each other so um

[37:00] oh 200 we sneak up to the door of this house and we boom we bashed the door in with a with a battering ram and there are these two kids one was 18 and one was 19. they put their hands up and then they burst into tears both of them one of them's crying i'm cuffing him and he's like can i call my mother she's gonna be so worried about me and i said to this buddy of mine i said

[37:30] this is al-qaeda this is what we've been so afraid of they're children so i was like no you're not going to [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] call your mother you're going to jail we took them to the raul pindi jail how did you know for sure they were all kinda because i said so cause you said so you know i'm being facetious of course um the the rule that we came up with was if you're an arab in pakistan with no passport

[38:00] and no plausible explanation for what you're doing there you're al-qaeda right arabs can't get visas to pakistan unless they're saudi kuwaiti emirati and have lots of money to spend so if you're just some kid from some village in tunisia you shouldn't be in pakistan one of them went so far as to tell me not not one of these two kids but a guy later on that he was there to study

[38:30] arabic and i said arabic you know of course that they don't speak arabic in this country and he just looks at me and a lot of these guys were pretty well trained by al-qaeda like they they all had the same story i mean like exactly to the word the same story they were taught this in their training in the camps in afghanistan that if you're caught tell the americans that um you flew here to volunteer at an orphanage

[39:00] in afghanistan and you flew through dubai and then when you got to karachi you got in a taxi and you asked the taxi driver to take you to the grand mosque to thank god for your safe arrival there is no grand mosque in karachi the grand mosque is in islamabad they don't know that and you accidentally left your passport in the taxi so you lost your passport that's why you don't have it and so

[39:30] you're waiting for your embassy to give you a new passport and then when the americans started bombing you got scared so you had to i mean like a hundred different guys told me exactly the same story and none of it none of it added up so we started putting him at the raul pindi jail and then after a while one of the pakistanis came to me and said listen the jail's full we don't know what to do with these guys and we don't

[40:00] want him here in our country and he says i know you don't want to send them back to their country because they hadn't been interrogated we didn't know are they are they just you know kids who took up the fight because they had nothing better to do are they masterminds we caught bin laden's computer guy we caught bin laden's mechanic we got bin laden's cook we got bin laden's doctor so they've got information that we're gonna want so i cabled headquarters and i said the

[40:30] jail is full and the packs want them out so what do i do with them and i get this cable back saying put them on a c-12 and send them to guantanamo and i wrote back and i said guantanamo cuba like why would i send them to cuba and they said this has been the subject of of much discussion at headquarters we're going to hold them in cuba for two or three weeks until we can figure out which federal district to charge them in because crimes were committed in the

[41:00] in the dc area in the eastern district of virginia that's where the pentagon's based and dulles airport in the eastern district of massachusetts because one of the planes took off from boston and the southern and eastern districts of new york so there are four federal districts we can charge them with terrorism in okay and i said that's a great idea just hold them in cuba for two or three weeks and then once we started sending them to cuba

[41:30] somebody on dick cheney's staff said you know what they have no rights in cuba because the cubans have never signed the lease agreement like in protest so if they have no rights in cuba that means we don't have to put them on trial and i was like well but the constitution says that they have their right to face their accusers in a court of law right

[42:00] well but they don't get the constitution's protections everybody gets the constitution's protections if you're under the command and control of the united states on territory controlled by the united states right i mean that's i'm not a lawyer but the constitution's very important to me and on my very first day at the cia with 300 other people i put my right hand in the air and i promise to protect and defend

[42:30] the constitution of the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic and i i have a real hard time thinking that i was the only one in the room that day who actually meant it [Music] so anyway i had been there about six weeks and we'd been doing these raids a couple times a week and we're getting some good people we caught a couple of guys from egyptian islamic jihad we got a whole bunch of people from these

[43:00] kashmiri terrorist groups in fact one of the things that we found in a kashmiri safe house we found a copy of the al-qaeda training manual and it was the very first time that analytically we were able to prove cooperation between the kashmiris and al qaeda first time and then of course the kashmiris worked with al qaeda to attack those hotels in the jewish center in mumbai a couple of uh well a year or two later

[43:30] so anyway these these raids were successful but we're only catching two three four at a time and so there was one day you know the weekend in pakistan is uh friday and saturday and saturday was like the only day of the week that i i gave myself the luxury of sleeping till 8. you have to work seven days a week we're working 16 18 hour days i came home with enough money i bought a house i had so much overtime it was

[44:00] amazing so um it's like six o'clock saturday morning and the phone rings i'm staying in this little guest house you know cause well the day i arrived they said hey we put you in the marriott and i said are you insane what do you think they're gonna blow up they're gonna blow up the marriott which they did and killed 156 people i said i'm not staying in the marriott they did it with a truck bomb so i stayed at this little pakistani guest house that only had 14 rooms run by a pakistani family so they wake me up

[44:30] six o'clock in the morning you got to get into the embassy immediately so i thought oh something terrible has happened so i get dressed i speed over the embassy and everybody's there the station chief the deputy the fbi uh he's called a league at the legal attache his deputy um we had a representative there from the port authority of new york in new jersey and then me and the station chief says

[45:00] we heard from our friends across the river which means nsa we heard from our friends across the river that uh that abu zubaydah is somewhere in the country we have to catch him everybody turns and looks at me and i'll tell you the honest to god's truth i'm thinking to myself abu zubaydah that name sounds vaguely familiar to me like i i just couldn't place him right right and then i realized oh oh oh the number three in al qaeda which turned out to be wrong but i

[45:30] mean yeah and we thought he was the number three in al qaeda what was he really he had never actually joined al qaeda he he founded al-qaeda's two training camps in southern afghanistan he founded the house of martyrs safe house in peshawar pakistan he was al qaeda's logistics guy right so if you needed a false passport you needed a plane ticket a boat ticket you needed weapons you needed money transferred he was the guy that did all that but he had

[46:00] never actually joined al qaeda he never pledged fealty to osama bin laden so they said he's somewhere in pakistan we have to catch him everybody turns and looks at me and i go you guys i said this this country's the size of texas it's got 150 million people in it what do you mean he's somewhere in pakistan you got to catch him like how do you do that well that's what you're here for i said all right i'll think of something

[46:30] i thought of a couple of really bad ideas you know i was flailing around so i came up with this one idea we had two young technical officers who were on loan from headquarters and i said we have a we have a cell phone number can we find him by the cell phone number and they said we could try so they built this device from scratch from just crap from radio shack you know what i mean

[47:00] batteries and wires and little circuit boards i don't know how they did it and so every time he would turn his phone on it would ping and it would give us a direction right north northeast and we'd be like oh my god and we run out to the car and then it goes off so that's not going to work and and i i said one day in a staff meeting i said you know when i was in college i was a toll collector on the pennsylvania turnpike

[47:30] right so i know how the machines work and you know you get the ticket and you take it to the next one and you pay the ticket paid the toll and i said he keeps moving back and forth between lahore and and uh faisal abad and it's connected by a toll road so i said let's put all cia people in the toll booths and when he comes we grab him they were like that's a terrible idea there are 55 000 people every day that take that toll road right these are two major cities lahore

[48:00] has 12 million people and and faisal about has seven million people you can't just put cia people in the booths and then you know grab them in the car besides they're going to be armed with ak-47s and who knows grenades and whatever right so that's not going to work so finally i went to the chief and i was like i i just can't do this on my own i need a targeting analyst now a targeting analyst is vastly different from an analyst an analyst which is what i was for the first seven and a half years there

[48:30] you think the big thoughts you write these papers you send them to the president the president will make a comment in the margin send it back to you then you answer that question targeting analysts pour through data mostly metadata and their job is specifically to find somebody to physically find the location of someone so that you can kill him or capture him well i had a friend who was one of the

[49:00] top targeting analysts at the cia we were both in the counterterrorism center together and when i was at headquarters we would go for a walk at lunch together every day and just talk about you know this is what they want you to do talk about operations and ideas and you know stuff that you want to do so i called him and i said can you get on a plane to come to pakistan as quickly as possible and he said yeah he said i'll be there in 24 hours so i picked up at the airport four o'clock in the morning we went straight

[49:30] to the office and i said here's the deal we think we found abu zubaydah he's like you've got to be kidding me [Music]
