The Grand Mosque cover story
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The Grand Mosque cover story is the name for a single fabricated account of innocent travel that John Kiriakou says he heard from roughly twenty-five Arab men detained in Pakistan while he was chief of counterterrorism operations there.

The premise for detention was simpler than the story. An Arab picked up near the Afghan border with no passport and no plausible explanation for being in Pakistan was going to Guantanamo, "I don't care what your excuse is."

What struck him was that the excuse was always the same one. "They had all been trained to tell the same story. It was almost comical after a while." In it, the man had flown to Karachi to study Arabic; on arrival he took a taxi towards the Grand Mosque to give thanks for his safe delivery; in the taxi he accidentally dropped his passport; realising this, he made his way to an Arabic coffee shop, where a stranger offered him lodging in a house with other Arabs until his passport could be recovered. The house was an al-Qaeda safe house, which, in the telling, he had no idea about until the Americans broke down the door.

The story fails on its own details. Nobody speaks Arabic in Pakistan, so there is nothing to travel there to study; the men telling it were Arabs who already spoke the language; and there is no Grand Mosque in Karachi at all, the Grand Mosque is in Islamabad.

Kiriakou says he put this to one detainee directly, Abu Jaffer al-Iraqi, whom he identifies as the head of the Darunta training camp in Afghanistan, and who did not know that Kiriakou had identified him. The complaint he made was professional rather than moral: "you know how many times I've heard that story since I've been in Pakistan? Twenty-five. I used to respect you guys because your operational security was so good. This is ridiculous. This is an insult to me. At least come up with a story that's somewhat believable." The answer was a smile and a nod, "all right, you got me."

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Guantanamo Bay
- John Kiriakou
