Title: personal channel, Saudi/9-11 — probe
Show: Leonardo Salvaggio
Date: 2024-05-25
URL: https://youtu.be/adp-UPxtBMs
Duration: 36:00

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[00:08] welcome back to my YouTube channel everybody my guest today is Mr John kiraku a former CIA officer he was the chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan after 911 and today with John we'll talk about many different things first the Saudi connection to 911 the interrogation of Abu zubida and his personal story which is pretty peculiar thanks for your time John thanks for joining me today my pleasure thanks for the invitation would you like to tell us something about yourself like what's

[00:38] your background what happened how you ended up being having such an important role in Pakistan after 911 just to give my viewers some context of uh what we're gonna discuss today sure I joined the CIA uh coming out of graduate school I started in January of 1990 I spent the first half of my career as an analyst working on the Middle East served overseas in that position uh learned to speak uh Arabic fluently and then um after seven years I I got bored in

[01:09] analysis and I made an unusual change to counterterrorism operations I served in in Athens for a couple of years and then back at headquarters training Middle Eastern intelligence services and counterterrorism operations uh 911 took place and uh on the strength of my my operational experience in Athens and elsewhere uh around the Middle East and my Arabic language skills they sent me to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations I left the

[01:39] CIA in 200 uh the middle of 2004 I went into the private sector for a little while and then I blew the whistle on the cia's torture program which I believed to be illegal immoral unethical I know that we'll get into that then I went to the uh Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry as uh as the senior investigator had a little bit of a break after that which again we'll get into

[02:10] and um for the last 10 years I've been a radio host a journalist an author that kind of thing well yes I think that the overview that you gave us is complete and we'll touch all the points that you mentioned so I think that the most important thing that we will be discussing today kick off from the kidnapping of Abu zua who back then was if I remember well the third leader in charge of al-Qaeda and uh being the

[02:41] counterterrorism chief of operations back then you led a whole operations how did you guys track him down it was hard uh you know we learned after the fact that we had been close for a long time sometimes we were three days behind sometimes we were an hour behind we we broke into Apartments where there was still warm food on the table where we had just missed him so we used a a large team of people to track him down and we

[03:13] just couldn't we just couldn't find him we used we used human intelligence we used electronic intelligence and we just simply couldn't find him and so in the end I asked that CIA headquarters send a targeting analyst to Pakistan a friend of mine um to uh to help us narrow the possible locations and he came out and uh he started doing what targeting analysts do that is going through sometimes millions of pieces of data just mostly metadata

[03:46] uh trying to to locate someone he he he took a large piece of Butcher Block paper uh and wrote Abu Zeda in the center put a circle around it and then around that he wrote all of the people the phone numbers and the email addresses of everybody who had been in touch with abuaba and then around that on a third level he wrote the same information for the people who had been in touch with Abu Zeda and so finally he came to me after after analyzing this

[04:18] information for two weeks he came to me and he said look I just can't get it down to any fewer than 14 possible sites well we had never we had never rated more than two sites in a single night and so I cabled headquarters I said we need a big team we need guns ammunition night vision goggles secure Communications uh bulletproof vests battering rams cash you need it or you

[04:48] you name it rather and uh and we we received it and so on the night of the raid we hit 13 of 14 sites one was deemed to be a mistake it was a pay phone and um what finally got us abua was he had made one critical mistake and that was that he accessed his email account with a

[05:19] landline and that allowed us to specifically pinpoint his location uh and I want to add something about ABA uh we believed at the time that he was the number three in al-Qaeda and so he was the first high value Target that we were able to locate um he was not the number three in al-Qaeda we were wrong he had never even joined Al-Qaeda he was a bad guy he was certainly helping Al-Qaeda he had been the founder of al-qaeda's two training

[05:49] camps in southern Afghanistan he had been the founder of al-qaeda's uh Safe House in pesha Pakistan called the house of Martyrs he was something of a logistician for Al-Qaeda but he had a cousin with the same name a first cousin and so at the CIA we didn't know that it was two different people and so we're getting this information Abu zua did this Abu Zeda did that Abu Zeda is planning this attack abua is planning

[06:19] that attack he looked like a terrorist Superman and it wasn't until after we captured him that we realized that there were two Abu zubedas ah okay that's interesting I all always uh mess up with Arabic names because they all sound the same or very similar so I totally understand so when you guys kidnapped him this was a raid with people okay because you didn't want to kill him you wanted him alive is there anything specific that you remember

[06:49] that that that you keep in your mind that does stroke you back then about this rid oh yeah the one thing that is has always been at the very front of my mind we had a large team we had four or five dozen people between CIA FBI Pakistani isi and Pakistani police we had maybe 50 60 people and I could not have been any more clear in my instructions that we must

[07:21] take him alive and of course as soon as we find him a Pakistani policeman opens fire with an AK-47 and shoots him in the thigh the groin and the stomach and killed him later on in the evening the Doctor Who was doing emergency surgery came out to tell me that he had never seen wounds that were so severe where the patient lived he said I think

[07:53] you need to be prepared that he's not going to he's not going to live through this surgery and mirac ously he did he lived through the surgery but it was it was close well I've spoken to a lot of people who have been to Afghanistan and I asked them how was collaboration with the local forces and most of them said that it was a mess because of corruption because they don't get along with each other and something like that all these kind of stories so let me ask you the other side of the coin of the question I was collaboration with the

[08:26] Pakistani well that's actually a very good question and it's not an easy question to answer on counterterrorism it couldn't have been better these guys were prepared to lay down their lives for us and interestingly they were the only ones who never wore bulletproof vests they were Fearless but it was my experience that there were two Pakistani Isis there was the counterterrorism division where they

[08:57] were all educated in the UK K they they had graduated from Sandhurst they spoke beautiful English uh they went to Disneyland and Disney World and they loved American movies and that was just great but then on the other side were the guys with the long beards the guys who would look at you with dirty looks when you were at their headquarters these were the guys who created the Taliban in the 1990s these

[09:28] were the guys who were collaborating with the Kashmir uh terrorist groups or or the or the um uh fundamentalist terrorist groups in Northern Pakistan in the SWAT Valley let's say these were the ones that would just as soon see you dead as they would to flick a fly off of their shoulder so even though they were all members of isi we had to be very careful with who

[09:59] we were dealing uh the counterterrorism guys were great now you said something that's also very important and that's corruption I had never seen this kind of corruption in my life there's an old saying at the CIA it's a joke but it's true you can't buy an Afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one and the truth was the same in Pakistan

[10:30] everybody was for rent very similar well as you said as you mentioned at the very beginning you said in an interview to ABC that zubida had been waterboarded several times so first off to assess the the argument is waterboarding normal procedure it wasn't until 2002 you know this is something that's actually very important for me in

[11:00] 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war in the second world war that was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody in January of 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American Soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner on the day that that picture was published the Secretary of Defense Robert mcamera ordered an investigation and the soldier was was arrested he was

[11:30] tried on a on a torture charge and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at lenworth Penitentiary the law never changed we changed and so my position at the time was how could torture how could water boarding be a death penalty offense in 1946 how could waterboarding be worthy of 20 years in prison in

[12:01] 1968 but in 2002 no problem you want to waterboard somebody go ahead and waterboard him and then the CIA and the military lied consistently after I outed the water boarding saying well they had only water boarded Abu Zeda Khaled shikh Muhammad and one other prisoner that was not true that was a lie they waterboarded dozens of prisoners we still don't know the the extent of the water boarding and torture

[12:32] program um you know thank goodness we have at least an idea thanks to the the Senate uh torture report although most people don't understand that the torture report report was never actually released the torture report is about 5,000 pages long what was released was a very heavily redacted version of the 500 page executive summary so will we'll never really know the extent of the cia's torture program never we have a general

[13:04] idea but we'll never really know how bad it was well after this interview you've been charged and eventually sentenced to 30 months for disclosing classified material disclosing the names of CIA under cover people and the torture on Abu vaa of course this closing classified material is against the law so so what happened yeah well there let me take issue with a couple of different things

[13:35] that you've said there um it is actually illegal in the United States to classify a crime right so if if government is committing a crime it is illegal to make that program classified in order to keep it from the public in my view torture was clearly illegal we have the federal torture Act of 194 46 we have the United Nations convention Against torture which we wrote by the way and we had the

[14:06] McCain finstein amendment that that was reiterated later uh but torture was was illegal so I was charged with three counts of Espionage because of uh the interview that I gave where I outed water boarding all of those charges were dropped they were dropped because the government couldn't prove that the torture program was legally and legitimately classified so they dropped it what they ended up charging me with

[14:38] was violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1982 I'm only the first American that's ever been charged with that crime I'm the only American that's ever been charged with that crime so what happened was a a journalist um wrote to me and said I'm writing a book about the Abu Omar rendition from Milan uh can you introduce me to any of these 12 people and he listed 12 people I said I don't know any of these people kidnapping was not my thing when I was

[15:08] at the CIA I was not a part of the kidnapping team and uh I I can't help you he sent me a second email can you introduce me to any of these 12 people and I said clearly you know this issue better than I do all I know about Milan is what I read in the Washington Post I don't know anything about that operation and then he said in your first book on page whatever it was 165 you mentioned somebody named

[15:39] I'll say John can you introduce me to him and I said and this was my crime I said oh you're talk talking about John Doe I don't know what ever happened to him he's probably retired and living somewhere in the Washington area but I confirmed the last name now this reporter never made the name public so this man was never in any kind of danger his name is not out there nobody knows he was with the CIA but

[16:12] that's what they got me on now the director of the CIA David Petraeus gave the name of 10 undercover officers to his adulterous girlfriend uh CIA director Leon Panetta gave the names of the three Navy Seals who were undercover who killed Osama Bin Laden to a journalist and there was a disgruntled former CIA officer here in Washington who gave the name of seven CIA operatives on his website and none of

[16:43] them were ever charged with a crime but I exposed the cia's dirty laundry I accused them in every news Outlet in the world of committing a crime against humanity and that's why they came after me well that was long ago how do you feel now after so many years do you feel mistreated no yes I mean yes and no sure I every anybody would feel mistreated I went to prison for for two years but I'm so proud of what I did my children are

[17:15] proud of me for what I did Senator John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said that the American people owed me a debt of gratitude because if I had never exposed this crime the American people would never have known what the CIA was doing in their name and so the price has been very high but I'm very happy with my lot in life I'm I'm proud of what I did and I would do it again so what we haven't discussed yet

[17:45] is what Abu zubida actually said to the investigators but before we get to that point I would like to understand something how can we trust someone who's being tortured because if you torture somebody that person is going to tell you whatever you want to hear to make the T exactly so why am I supposed to believe what Abu zua said you are exactly right listen any any psychiatrist or psychologist in the

[18:16] world will tell you that torture doesn't work because the person being tortured will tell you anything literally anything they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them so before Abu Zeda was tortured when he was being in uh interviewed by the FBI you know the FBI is very good at interrogations and they do it in a way that's been successful since the nurmberg trials where they sit across

[18:49] the table from you and they offer you an orange or a cigarette or some dates or some paper to write a letter to your mother and they establish a report Poe and they engage you in conversation and maybe it takes days or weeks or months but eventually you open up and what Abu zua told the FBI that was actionable Intelligence that saved American lives two things he he explained to us the

[19:20] al-Qaeda wiring diagram which we had no understanding of we knew that there was Osama bin Laden and Iman Asawa had and then we didn't understand anything else about the way that Al-Qaeda was structured and he explained it to us he explained how there were independent cells in cities all around the world and he explained us how decisions were made we had no idea the other thing that he told us was the identity of a terrorist that

[19:50] we knew only as MTAR MTAR was of course a ner and we knew that this person MTAR was a very bad man who had uh who had designed a terrorist attack in 1996 called the bojinka uh operation right so the bojinka operation was a plan to hijack as many as a dozen 747s from the airport in Manila Philippines and to crash them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States that plot was

[20:22] foiled by accident when a housekeeper stumbled on some of the documents and called the police so MTAR escaped and we didn't know who he was and Abu zua when he was asked about MTAR laughed and said you don't know who MTAR is and we said no and he said his name is khed shik Muhammad we had never heard of khed shik Muhammad before never heard of him well months later he's in American

[20:56] custody now as soon as that happened the CIA took over from the FBI they began torturing Abu zua he went completely silent and the more reticent or reluctant he was to speak the worse the torture was to the point where we made him insane we moved him from Secret prison to secret Prison from country to Country finally to to Guantanamo and we ruined him we ruined

[21:27] his brain he'll never be released and we know thanks to a footnote in the Senate torture report that the CIA says he will never be released and when he dies at Guantanamo he's going to be cremated and his ashes will be thrown into the sea so the CIA pretty much destroyed their their source with their own hands that's exactly what happened

[21:58] well there's something weird also that happened in 2005 the CIA announced that they had destroyed all the interrogation tapes why did that happen and again is this normal procedure it's not normal procedure but I can tell you exactly why it happened it happened because it exposed crimes against humanity so here's here's what happened the CIA normally does not tape torture sessions or interrogations but

[22:30] this torture program was so new that they thought they could use it as a teaching tool as a training tool for new torturers the White House general counsel at the time Harriet Meers told the head of the cia's counterterrorism um Center uh Jose Rodriguez do not film The Torture and he filmed it anyway and then when word got back to the White

[23:00] House that it had been filmed she saidd do not destroy the film because it shows a potential crime and so what did Jose Rodriguez do not only did he destroy it but he ordered um Gina haspel who was his Deputy to throw the tapes into an industrial grinder and grind them up so they could never be reconstituted now what would happen if normal person if you or I looked at this

[23:32] at these tapes and we worked for let's say the justice department or the international court of justice or the international criminal court or the United Nations or even Amnesty International this is clearly a crime against humanity that is being carried out and and they're and they're filming it it's like you know the Germans used to document all of their own uh war crimes and crimes against humanity during the second world war well the CIA was doing exactly the same thing and so

[24:04] Jose Rodriguez did it so that the people who had carried out the torture the people who had designed the torture and the people who had approved of the torture could never be prosecuted that's well there's one other thing that Abu zuid said that I think that it's very important he said that the the Saudi royals had for knowledge of the attack because they were actually founding Bin Laden under the rug yes in an agreement

[24:35] According to which they will they were uh letting Bin Laden do whatever he wanted as far as he didn't do anything inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is that trustworthy I've always believed that that was true yes yes for for a number of reasons um when we captured abuaba that night uh in in March of 2002 we also captured his diary um books have been written about the diary but one of the most

[25:06] interesting things in the diary was that he had the names of three Saudi princes and their cell phone numbers so we reported this back to headquarters and we said hey we have a problem here these are three members of the Saudi royal family he's in touch with them by cell phone so we went to the Saudis and we said hey we are G to start killing people even if they are named Al SAA unless you get your act together within one

[25:36] week all three of those Saudi princes were dead one of them was said to have died following stomach surgery he was 43 years old one of them was involved in a onecar crash in the desert and one of them died of thirst while on a camping trip in the desert okay that was 2002 then we learned later that the Saudi Embassy in

[26:08] Washington transferred $50,000 in 2001 from an account controlled by the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince bendar bin Sultan Al saoud to an account controlled in Los Angeles to an account controlled by one of the co-conspirator murders of the 911 hijackers why in God's name would the Saudi ambassador's wife be sending $50,000 to the 9911 hijackers they've

[26:40] never answered that question the third Point immediately after the 911 attacks the then crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Abdullah Al Saud he later became the king um went to Crawford Texas to President Bush's Ranch to talk about 911 counterterrorism all these different issues he brought an Entourage with him one of the members of the Entourage was recognized by the FBI as being a

[27:13] collaborator with the 9911 hijackers now he had diplomatic immunity so we couldn't snatch him but we went to the Saudis and we said we either want you to turn this man over to us right now so he can face charges related to 9/11 or get him out of our country and so he immediately left for Saudi Arabia and the Saudis have never allowed us to interview him in Saudi Arabia right and um the fourth thing is after 911 we were

[27:47] able to trace millions and millions of dollars transferred from the Saudi royal family or from the Saudi government through Saudi NOS to Al-Qaeda and more than a dozen other terrorist groups so that's a long way of answering your question and saying the Saudi government was involved in 911 the Saudi royal family was involved in 911 and none of them have ever paid a price well you're the first person who

[28:19] has been to Pakistan I talk to and there's a piece of the whole story that I cannot really understand because according to Abu zua there was also a high rank Air Force officer a Pakistani officer by the name of mushaf alir I have to read it because I didn't recall it by who was part of the agreement between Bin Laden and the Saudis but what is the role of Pakistan in this story I cannot put the pieces together yeah I don't know if that allegation is

[28:49] true but I've heard it for the last 20 years 22 years um it rings true to me it sounds true and it comes back to that idea that there was this wall down the middle of the Pakistani intelligence service so on the one hand you have these wonderful these wonderful counterterrorism people uh who were all educated at uh at Sandhurst and then on the other side you have these these criminals whose jobs

[29:21] are to to fund and to arm and to train terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda and let me add another thing one thing that many people don't understand is that there is a very deep love between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to the point where the city where we captured Abu zua fisel Abad was named after king fisel of Saudi Arabia because he had given so much money to

[29:54] Pakistan to develop it so pakistanis have this deep love of Saudi Arabia and the Saudis are very generous but they're generous many times in the wrong areas for example instead of building schools they build mosques instead of building hospitals they send plan loads of qurans and instead of building water treatment plants or power plants they send money for weapons and ammunition and training in in various camps

[30:29] so this is a problem really for the United States where we've allowed ourselves to believe over these many many years that the Saudis are our friends and they're not our friends they're our enemies and it was always my view that we should treat them as enemies well let me get to the main point here that is why did the Saudis do something that weird or that evil I think that we have multiple options here because it can either be corruption like

[31:00] Al-Qaeda infiltrated the um Saudi government or we can have like a sort of mixture in which somehow the Saudi royals had to let the terrorists do something to Plate themselves to to Plate them and prevent a revolt against the government of Saudi Arabia itself or we have another option I've heard uh from uh uh former FBI special agent by the name of mar rosini you probably know him because he's very famous who believes that maybe the Saudis were

[31:33] actually trying to recruit the 91 I jackers as sources therefore they didn't mean any evil but they were trying to do their job and probably the the guys that were tusked to with this were not too smart and they underrated the threat what you think I think all of those scenarios are true I think they all play a role you know my my first overseas tour with the CIA was in Saudi Arabia and I maintained relationships with several Saudi diplomats one of them told

[32:04] me later on in the late 90s that one of the reasons why he was so strongly anti-democracy for Saudi Arabia he said democracy was the last thing that they wanted in Saudi Arabia because if they had an election in Saudi Arabia Osama Bin Laden would be elected president so part of the problem wasn't necessarily that the senior most members of the Saudi royal family loved Al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden I think that they were afraid that the average Saudi loved

[32:36] Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden and so they had to try to walk this fine line where they can steal the country's wealth and drink wine and smoke marijuana and have sex with women and go to you know London and Paris and Monte Carlo and and Los Angeles Beverly Hills and live The Good Life life while appearing to be Pious Muslims to their people and so I think it was this combination of things that that many members of the Saudi

[33:09] population are fundamentalist true believers they hated the United States or they hate what the United States stand stands for or at least they did in 2001 and they were perfectly happy when 911 took place I think that at the working level in the government that was that was for the most part the case as well where they were perfectly happy that the US was humbled on 911 but you know at the same time I remember telling a Saudi a friend of mine right after 911

[33:42] it was like the day after two days after I said my god do they realize what they've done do they realize this is going to result in the deaths of millions of people they have no understanding of what they've done and I said something to abua too when he was laying in in the bed I said he he told me that that he didn't want to attack the United States on 911 he wanted to attack Israel but that he was outvoted and I said listen you're not

[34:14] the victim here there were 50,000 people in those Towers like what did you think was going to happen did you think we wouldn't try to hunt you down like an animal did you think we wouldn't try to find Bin Laden and kill him and bring him to justice for this you live in a dream world I said we're not going to stop until you're all either dead or in prison you seriously underestimated us on this and in the end that's exactly what happened absolutely that's what Happ but

[34:44] apart from what Abu zua said that we discussed that the evidence is overwhelming because we have a dry run funded by the the Saudi Embassy in Washington we have many things going on for instance we have a team of Saudi agents in California uh helping out the aers and in a few months I'll be going to La and I want to go see that restaurant where Omar albumi met the two terrorists so how come the US government

[35:15] is so unwillingly to investigate what happened and blame the Saudis that's beyond me you know that's really the most important question um the evidence against Omar Alay and the people that he was working with is overwhelming it's overwhelming now he has pretended to be stupid over the years he can't remember anything he he he met those hijackers by accident they were just happened to be in the same restaurant it's all

[35:45] nonsense but I think that the US government well this is going to sound horrible but I think that the US government has decided that it is more important for us to continue selling Saudi Arabia weapons and Weapons Systems and airplanes and for the Saudis to sell us oil than it is to further damage the relationship by getting into something that happened 22 years

[36:17] ago that's awful but I I think that's real politic yeah that's criminal it is but I agree with you well John many thanks for your time I think that we discussed the whole Topic in a very great detail and I think that you gave us a very unique angle thank you the pleasure was mine the Pakistani angle was never covered at least on my YouTube channel and blog therefore many thanks for your time and uh and thanks for your your explanations

[36:47] today thanks very much for having me it was a pleasure thanks everybody else for watching this and see you all next time bye-bye
