Taliban embassy raid
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The Taliban embassy raid was, in John Kiriakou's telling, the middle-of-the-night raid on the last functioning Taliban embassy in the world, in Peshawar, Pakistan, after 9/11. Driving past it one night with Tommy McHale, a Port Authority detective on loan to the FBI, Kiriakou joked they should steal everything not bolted down, then cabled headquarters, got permission, and did exactly that at 2 a.m., filling three embassy vans with computers, phones and files. Days later, McHale found a folder of telephone bills, in English, showing dozens of calls to Buffalo, Bethesda, Kansas City, Estes Park and other U.S. cities, calls that abruptly stopped on September 10 and slowly resumed on September 16. Kiriakou sent copies to the FBI as possible evidence of sleeper cells; two years later an agent told him they never opened the box, claiming they "couldn't find a Pashto translator", though Kiriakou notes the bills were in English. He pairs the story with an FBI agent pointing out a Manhattan storefront as "the headquarters of Hezbollah in New York" that was never raided.

In a separate telling, Kiriakou dates the raid to about three weeks after the Abu Zubaydah capture and names Buffalo, Kansas City, and Boston among the U.S. cities the seized phone bills showed calls to. He says he came to believe the FBI's failure to investigate the phone bills was a deliberate cover-up rather than incompetence, since cable traffic he later obtained via FOIA showed the bureau knew exactly what it had received: "I think somebody made a decision that they're just not going to touch this."

In yet another telling, Kiriakou, then chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, working closely with the FBI once the president had ordered the two agencies to cooperate, places the embassy in Peshawar, not Islamabad, and says a six-man team waited until the Taliban staff locked up and left for the evening, picked the lock after dark, and stole everything: files, filing cabinets, and computers, packing it all to the ceiling of two vans requisitioned from the U.S. embassy before driving it back to Islamabad overnight. The seized phone bills, in this telling, showed hundreds of calls from the Peshawar embassy to numbers across the United States including Buffalo, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Colorado. He sent the records to CIA headquarters and turned the originals over to the FBI, but an FBI agent later told him the box was never opened, it sat in an office for months before being shipped to a storage facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, where its contents remain unexamined.

A further account puts the number of calls at 163, running to numbers in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, and Maryland, and adds a specific detail: the calls stopped abruptly on September 10, 2001 and resumed on September 16. The FBI initially thanked Kiriakou for the catch and asked for the originals, then went quiet; by the end of his Pakistan tour he was told only that "the numbers have been received" with no real follow-through. The excuse he was later given for the lack of investigation was that the FBI lacked Pashto-language translators, despite the records being in English throughout. Years afterward, an FBI agent friend confirmed to him that the records were never taken out of the box and had been sent to an FBI storage facility in suburban Maryland, never examined.

The phone bills

What Kiriakou calls the dramatic find was a file folder of telephone bills. They showed hundreds of calls to numbers all over the United States, Kansas City, Buffalo, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, and the calls "ended abruptly on September 10th, 2001," then began again slowly around 16 September.

He reported the find to headquarters, which agreed it was significant and ruled it an FBI matter; he boxed up the originals, handed them over and moved on. Months later, back at headquarters, he ran into an FBI agent he had worked with in Pakistan and asked what had come of them. The answer was that the Bureau had not gone through them yet "because we're having trouble identifying a Pashto translator." Kiriakou's reply: "A Pashto translator? Those files were in English. That's how I knew what they were. I don't speak Pashto." The agent said it was their mistake.

Asked what the numbers represented, he declines to overclaim, they "could have been legitimate consular calls," or possible recruits, sleeper cells or people waiting to be activated. "You don't know until you investigate. They didn't investigate."

A year and a half later, after he had resigned, he ran into a second FBI agent from Pakistan at a shopping mall and asked again. This time the answer was final: "it's just like the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark", the bills had been boxed up and sent to a storage facility in suburban Maryland, and "human eyes will never see them again."

See also

- Walk-in
- Abu Zubaydah Capture
