Abu Zubaydah
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Abu Zubaydah, real name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, known to his attorneys as "Zay", is a detainee held by the United States since March 2002, when he was captured in Pakistan by a Central Intelligence Agency team led by John Kiriakou. At the time of his capture he was believed to be a senior al-Qaeda figure, in fact, per Kiriakou, U.S. intelligence had conflated him with a first cousin who used the same nom de guerre, so that reports on "Abu Zubaydah" were really a composite of two people, making the target look like a "terrorist Superman." His conclusion: "I think they were both bad guys, we just didn't realize there were two of them." Per Kiriakou, the cousin, who was living in Montana at the time, fled to Jordan once he realized U.S. intelligence was looking for one of them, and was never heard from again. The man actually caught, per Kiriakou, was a logistician who ran al-Qaeda training camps and safe houses but "was never even in al-Qaeda."

He was the first prisoner on whom the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques program was applied; the program had been pitched to CIA Director George Tenet by Mitchell and Jessen in late October 2001, contracted in January 2002, and was first deployed against Abu Zubaydah on August 2, 2002.

Who he actually was

Kiriakou's summary is that the CIA believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda and that he was not, he never joined the organisation, never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden and never met him. What he was, in Kiriakou's description, was a bad man and a logistician: he created al-Qaeda's Peshawar safe house, known as "the house of martyrs," and created and staffed the two training camps in southern Afghanistan. A fighter who had had enough would be given a passport and a ticket home; a new arrival would be moved across the mountains into Afghanistan to be trained.

The reason he was thought so senior is that there were two of him. A first cousin of the same name generated a stream of reporting that placed Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, Jordan, Montana and Saudi Arabia at once, "some kind of terrorist Superman. He's everywhere", and the CIA did not know there were two. In this telling the cousin in Montana vanished as soon as the real Abu Zubaydah was taken in Faisalabad and was never found; elsewhere Kiriakou has said the cousin fled to Jordan. The two accounts have not been reconciled.

The hunt

Flooding the cities

Kiriakou described a strategy he proposed to accelerate al-Qaeda captures in Pakistan. CIA officers had been stationed in villages along the Pakistan,Afghanistan border, exposed and unprotected, catching al-Qaeda fighters one at a time as they fled the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Kiriakou suggested pulling everyone off the border and letting the fighters flood into Pakistani cities, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Faisalabad, Lahore, Karachi, Quetta, because "they're going to make a mistake." The first thing the fighters did on arrival was get cell phones and call home: "Thank you for your locational information." The CIA then raided safe houses and grabbed dozens at a time, filling the Rawalpindi jail within roughly six weeks.

Kiriakou has said he was ordered on his first day as CIA chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan to write a standard operating procedure for raiding a safe house; with almost no tactical training, he wrote "0200" atop a legal pad and simply ordered battering rams, guns, and vests from the police-supply site Galls.com on his CIA credit card. Early raids netted only weeping 18-year-olds asking to call their mothers. Before the analyst's fourteen-site breakthrough, low-tech ideas, including a scheme built around a highway toll booth, had failed.

The spiderweb and fourteen sites

Kiriakou brought in a targeting analyst friend, flown in within 24 hours, to locate Abu Zubaydah. The analyst took a piece of butcher-block paper "the size of a small American billboard," wrote "Abu Zubaydah" in the center, and built concentric rings, everyone in direct contact by phone, email, or address (mostly travel agencies, since Abu Zubaydah was al-Qaeda's logistics man), then a tertiary ring of contacts-of-contacts, all connected by lines. The result "looked like a spiderweb, very pretty, artistic." It narrowed his probable location to one of fourteen sites, a scale the team had never before attempted; per Kiriakou, "we'd never hit more than two sites in a single night before."

Because the operation was so highly classified and the Pakistanis were not trusted with the target's identity, Abu Zubaydah was code-named "Mr. Fish." Kiriakou cabled headquarters requesting a large team and $10 million in cash; thirty-six personnel arrived within 48 hours, half CIA, half FBI, along with pallets of weapons, ammunition, night-vision goggles, battering rams, and scrambled satellite communications on an unmarked 737. He hired a real-estate agent and bought, in cash drawn from a station cash room, a ten-bedroom mansion and a seven-bedroom mansion in different cities to use as interrogation safe houses, under cover of a textile business, when the agent asked what they did for a living, Kiriakou recalled, "I looked at my friend and he goes, 'We're textile barons.' And I said, 'Yes, we are. We're textile barons.'" The team also rented an entire floor of an A-list hotel as a temporary base. Kiriakou has noted the operation predated the use of Navy SEALs on such raids, the CIA turned to SEAL support only about seven months later, for the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so the Abu Zubaydah raid was carried out entirely by CIA and FBI personnel alongside the Pakistanis.

During reconnaissance of the fourteen sites, the team cut one immediately from the target list: a shish-kebab stand with a pay phone. Al-Qaeda was clearly using the phone, but "you can't raid the shishkabob stand at 2 o'clock in the morning, it's closed." On another occasion the team mistakenly raided an 80-year-old man's home and bought the family shoes by way of apology. A walk-in tip that was really an intercept led to a yellow house holding 27 people, and a final break, Abu Zubaydah accessing his Hotmail account via a spliced landline, pinpointed the last site.

Six weeks, fifteen minutes behind

The full hunt lasted approximately six weeks, with intelligence placing him in either Lahore or Faisalabad; he was constantly moving, and the team broke down doors of safe houses and apartments repeatedly, some days a day or two late, some days missing him by fifteen minutes, the cigarette on the table still lit. Kiriakou measures the pursuit by how narrowly it kept failing. "Some days we'd bust down the door and there's like a warm meal and a half-lit cigarette still on the table. We're like, 'Dang it, with 15 minutes we could have gotten him.'" Other days the team was "a day or two behind." He takes the pattern as proof the pursuit was mutual knowledge: "So, he knew we were after him. He knew we were chasing him all over the freaking country."

The raid

Fourteen sites at once

On the night of the capture, in late March 2002 at 2:00 a.m. (Kiriakou has given the time as both 2:00 a.m. and 2:20 a.m. across separate accounts), all fourteen sites were hit simultaneously. Kiriakou stood on a coffee table addressing thirty-six CIA and FBI officers plus approximately fifty members of the Pakistani Punjab Elite Force, a special-forces unit who wore t-shirts bearing a 9mm pistol image and did not wear bulletproof vests. His only stated rule: don't shoot them; his orders were to take them alive. Kiriakou has separately described the raid as a joint 36-person CIA-FBI team he personally led, capturing Abu Zubaydah along with his bodyguard and dozens of others. He gives the place and month as Faisalabad, Pakistan, in late March 2002.

The rooftop and the three shots

Abu Zubaydah was in the final site. When the door was breached, he, a Syrian bomber, and a bodyguard went to the roof and attempted to jump to the neighboring building. A Pakistani policeman on the street opened fire with an AK-47. The Syrian bomber was killed instantly, dead before he hit the ground. Abu Zubaydah was shot three times. Kiriakou has said he has wrestled since with the question of whether the Pakistanis knew who the target was and shot him deliberately; the CIA never told the Pakistanis who they were hunting. The sharpest attribution of the shot in the corpus comes from a 2026 telling, which identifies the shooter as "a member of the Faisalabad police", places the three rounds in the thigh, the groin and the stomach, and puts an explicit order immediately before them: "after I specifically said, do not shoot him." From there Abu Zubaydah was airlifted to a military base at Lahore.

Identified by the ear

The only photograph of Abu Zubaydah on file was an old passport photo showing a handsome, thin, clean-shaven young man with close-cropped hair; the man on the ground, shot three times in the thigh, groin and stomach, was overweight, long-haired, and unshaven, and "doesn't look anything like our target." The targeting analyst instructed Kiriakou to attempt a retinal scan, but Abu Zubaydah's eyes were rolled back and he was bleeding to death, "so I lifted up his eye, and it was rolled back in his head. All you could see was white. He's bleeding to death, all I get are the whites of his eyes."

The analyst's second instruction is the one Kiriakou says taught him something: "get me his ear. Take a picture of his ear." "I didn't know that no two people on Earth have the same ears until that night. They're like fingerprints. So I take a picture of the ear, headquarters says it's him." The ear photograph was sent to headquarters; confirmation came back within minutes.

Detainees in shifts, and the hoods

Dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters were taken on the same night as Abu Zubaydah's capture, so many that prisoners had to be brought to the CIA safe house for interrogation in shifts, ten at a time in a paddy wagon, because the facility could not hold them all at once. In a 2025 retelling Kiriakou added where they were kept in between: so many were caught that they could not all be held at the safe house, so they were put in the jail in Faisalabad and brought over ten at a time.

When the first group arrived, they had bags over their heads. Kiriakou asked the transporting officer, whom he describes as having flown out to Pakistan for the operation and having wrongly believed himself to be in charge, why they were hooded: "We don't want them to see our faces." Kiriakou replied, "Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. Take the hoods off." The officer refused, "Don't take the hoods off", and told Kiriakou, "I'm going to report you to headquarters." Kiriakou replied, "Oh, I'm already reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime. Take the hoods off." The hoods were removed; in one telling Kiriakou says he pulled them off himself.

The outcome is the part Kiriakou emphasises: "We reported each other to headquarters. I got reprimanded." In the Faisalabad telling he puts it more plainly still, "I got in trouble."

The ringing phone

Among the items seized that night was Abu Zubaydah's cell phone, sealed into an FBI evidence bag in the chaos of the raid, and which then began ringing. An FBI agent, Jen, told Kiriakou that if he opened the bag to answer it she would arrest him and charge him with obstruction of justice; the phone stopped ringing before anyone answered. Kiriakou has said that had he been allowed to answer, he would have tried to keep the caller talking, in his fluent Arabic, long enough for the NSA to geolocate the call, reasoning that word of the capture had likely already spread within al-Qaeda.

Shifa Hospital and the fight to keep him alive

Abu Zubaydah was rushed to Shifa Hospital, which Kiriakou described as "filthy, terrible, disgusting." Word reached the al-Qaeda network that he had been captured, and vehicles began driving past the hospital and opening fire on the building. Kiriakou told the Pakistani major he was working with, "If they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead, we only had a couple of handguns." The major called a helicopter, which arrived twenty minutes later; Kiriakou entered the operating room, told the doctor to wrap up, and the team loaded Abu Zubaydah for transfer to a Pakistani military base roughly an hour away, where surgeons saved his life. He was later moved through six black sites before reaching Guantanamo in 2005.

Pakistani intelligence in fact helicoptered the group to this second, better-equipped hospital only after Abu Zubaydah's own associates attacked the first facility with gunfire; a young Pakistani doctor there told Kiriakou he had a better chance of winning a lottery than of keeping the badly wounded patient alive. Abu Zubaydah's Syrian bodyguard, also wounded in the raid, later told Kiriakou that Pakistani forces had pinned him down and shot him through the leg with an AK-47 at close range despite Kiriakou's explicit order not to shoot the captives, leaving a powder burn the size of a dinner plate; Kiriakou has wondered whether the Pakistanis meant to prevent the bodyguard, and perhaps Abu Zubaydah, from surviving to reveal a possible Pakistani-intelligence collusion. CIA headquarters had ordered "24/7 CIA eyes on" Abu Zubaydah in those exact words, and Executive Director Buzzy Krongard, the CIA's third-ranking officer, who sat on the board of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, personally arranged for a Johns Hopkins trauma surgeon to be flown in by CIA jet, arriving in Pakistan roughly sixteen hours later.

The measure Kiriakou gives of how close the death was is a device he had never seen before. The bleeding after surgery was heavy enough to pool under the bed, "like a scene from a horror movie. I've never seen anything like it in my life", and the clinic attached a pump to the transfusion line, forcing blood into the arm at a greatly accelerated rate simply to replace it as fast as it was being lost.

The bedside vigil

Fifty-six hours

CIA Director George Tenet relayed an order through the targeting analyst: twenty-four-seven CIA eyes on Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou sat at his bedside for what he has described in different tellings as fifty-six hours and as twenty-four hours, at one point tearing up a sheet to tie him to the bed and sitting in a chair at the foot of it, afraid of falling asleep. The fifty-six-hour figure is the one he gives most often, and he says the stretch left him "practically delirious from fatigue." He tied Zubaydah to the bed not because Zubaydah, shot and nearly killed during the raid, could physically escape, but because Kiriakou was afraid he would fall asleep himself and lose custody. In a 2026 telling he added the reasoning behind the restraint: his orders were not to leave the bedside, and he judged that the doctor or the nurse might be al-Qaeda and would use the moment to get the prisoner out. To keep himself awake he sat at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, stared at the patient, and turned the ceiling fans to full blast to make himself uncomfortable. A 2026 telling puts the two measures in sequence and gives the reason for each in his own order: already awake twenty-four hours and afraid of falling asleep, "I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed from his wrists and his ankles. And then I put the ceiling fan on high to make it uncomfortably cold so that I wouldn't fall asleep."

By one account Kiriakou was, by then, exhausted and hungry, wearing a clean red SpongeBob SquarePants shirt he had found at the safe house. The ward had no air conditioning, and mosquitoes drawn to the blood on Kiriakou's and Abu Zubaydah's clothing swarmed through the open windows; a CIA colleague named Amir, brought in from a domestic assignment to help with the capture, relieved Kiriakou at points during the vigil and brought him the change of clothes.

"I will not speak to you in God's language"

When Abu Zubaydah finally came out of his coma, his first lucid words, in perfect English, were "I will not speak to you in God's language." In a separate telling, Kiriakou moved the oxygen mask aside and said, "Shukran, what is your name?" Abu Zubaydah shook his head; Kiriakou repeated the question in Arabic, and Abu Zubaydah replied in English, "I'm not going to speak to you in God's language." Kiriakou answered, "That's okay, Abu Zubaydah. We know who you are." By the SpongeBob-shirt telling, Zubaydah stared at the shirt rather than at Kiriakou, "he doesn't look at me, he looks at SpongeBob", and his pulse surged from 120 to 220 beats per minute, prompting the monitors to sound "Code blue, code blue." Kiriakou has separately described Abu Zubaydah as blind in one pale-blue eye from a shrapnel wound sustained fighting the Soviets, his other eye a dark chestnut brown; his first request on regaining consciousness, in this telling, was for "a glass of red wine," which the treating doctor dismissed as hallucination.

"Kill me. Take the pillow and kill me"

His next request, through the oxygen mask, was consistent across tellings: "Please brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me, smother me." Kiriakou refused: "No, nobody's going to kill you. We've been looking for you for a long time. You're going to get the best medical care the American government can provide."

Abu Zubaydah cried at length, saying he would never know the touch of a woman or the joy of fatherhood, and asked Kiriakou to convey a message to his mother. Kiriakou told him, "Your life is over and the rest of it can be easy or it can be terrible. My friends, they aren't nice like I am, I'm the nicest guy you're going to meet in this experience. So if you do anything, it's that you have to cooperate." Abu Zubaydah replied, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate." Kiriakou's response: "Suit yourself." In his earliest recorded telling of the same exchange, the advice came with a sharper warning about who would follow him: "I'm the nicest guy that you're gonna meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. So if there's one thing that you do, it's that you have to cooperate."

Over the following day Abu Zubaydah recited poetry he had written, spoke about his family, and discussed Christianity versus Islam with Kiriakou, who reflected: "I remember thinking, I should hate you. I should want to kill you. And I don't. You're pathetic." He also thought, "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we're so afraid of. He's practically a child." He has given the same reflection as something he said to the prisoner directly, from the chair at the foot of the bed: "I should hate you. I should want to kill you. And I don't. You're pathetic. You're the fearsome Al-Qaeda? You're what we're so terrified of? You're pathetic." Zubaydah was "only in his twenties."

One 2026 telling of the same fifty-six hours ends on a different word. The subjects are given as three, his family, and his mother in particular, to whom he was very close; his writing, which ran to "very extensive poetry" and "even... plays, little one act plays"; and "the differences between Christianity and Islam and the similarities between Christianity and Islam." The conclusion Kiriakou then put to him is not that he was pathetic but that he was ordinary: "I should hate you. I should want to kill you and I don't. I don't. You're just a man, and that's why you should cooperate."

"I never wanted to attack the United States"

After Kiriakou pushed back on Abu Zubaydah framing himself as a victim, "there were 50,000 people in those towers. Did you really think we weren't going to try to find you?", Abu Zubaydah answered, "I never wanted to attack the United States. I wanted to attack Israel. All I ever wanted to do was to kill Jews." He gave the same account, elaborated, in a later conversation Kiriakou recounted separately: "I never wanted to attack the United States. I wanted to attack Israel," adding, "I never had anything against the United States until I saw a video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian grandmother." Kiriakou's reaction: "How are you going to argue with that?" In a third, fuller telling, Kiriakou told him directly he was "not the victim here, there were fifty thousand people in those towers. What did you think we were going to do?", and Abu Zubaydah again said he had wanted to attack Israel, not the United States, but had been overruled. In the earliest recorded account he made a denial alongside the distinction: he said he knew nothing about 9/11, and that he had never wanted to attack the United States at all, "all he ever wanted to do was kill Jews... he wanted to attack Israel, and they outvoted him."

The diary

Among the items confiscated the night of the capture was Abu Zubaydah's diary, which Kiriakou began reading during the bedside vigil. His 2026 account supplies the mechanics of how he came to be reading it at all: when he woke, an FBI agent who had been in and out had left the diary, confiscated at the safe house, lying beside him. Kiriakou asked what it was, was told it could not be read because it was in Arabic, and took it.

Most of it, he said, was doodles and accomplished sketch art, "I would pay money for some of the drawings that he did", along with poetry and letters the 27-year-old was writing to his own 14-year-old self, urging respect for his mother and Islamic modesty: "Treat our mother with respect. You were rude to her today. Don't whistle at those girls." In the later telling the same letters run: treat our parents with respect, don't say terrible things to that girl down the block, have respect for your brothers and sisters.

The diary caused a rift between the CIA and FBI over Abu Zubaydah's mental state, and by Kiriakou's account it was not a passing disagreement but a running one, "we fought about that for years," and, in a 2026 telling, for twenty-three years. The FBI position was that the writing was the work of a madman; Kiriakou's was that it was "more of a doodle book than anything else" and that the CIA assessed him as extraordinarily intelligent. He read all of it, had much of the poetry recited to him directly, and later consulted on one of the two books written about the diary. The confiscation, he has said, set off "a huge fight between the FBI and the CIA," and his verdict on that fight is unqualified: "the CIA was right and the FBI was wrong."

The three Saudi princes

Set among the diary's letters and drawings were the personal cell numbers of three members of the Saudi royal family. Per Kiriakou, the CIA took the contents to the Saudi government: "In the address book part there were the names and cell-phone numbers of three Saudi princes. So to make a long story short, we went to the Saudis and we said, 'We're going to start killing people, and some of them may be named al-Saud, if you don't get on the stick.' Well, within a week all three of them were dead." Per Kiriakou, one "died at 43 of a heart attack," one "was killed in a single-car accident on the Riyadh,Jeddah highway, his brakes didn't work anymore," and one "died of thirst while camping in the desert."

Handover and transfer

An unmarked private jet landed on the tarmac. Three FBI agents and Kiriakou loaded Abu Zubaydah onto the plane, laying him across the luggage rack in the back and tying him down. Kiriakou leaned over and said one last time, "Remember, you have to cooperate." Abu Zubaydah squeezed his hand. The plane took off; Kiriakou never saw him again. The mechanics of the hand-holding are given only in the fullest telling: he carried the gurney with one hand and held the prisoner's hand with the other. His earliest account of the same moment compresses the whole vigil into it, "I literally picked him up along with three FBI agents. He was on a gurney. We lifted him up and manoeuvred him into a secret CIA jet and strapped him to the luggage rack at the back. He asked me to hold his hand. He was crying, he was very upset", and ends on the exchange rather than the departure: "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate. And I wished him luck, and I never saw him again." In a separate telling of that handoff, Kiriakou recalled a man dressed entirely in black, wearing a balaclava, boarding the plane to take custody of the prisoner; lifting the mask revealed him to be Kiriakou's last CIA Counterterrorism Center boss, who told Kiriakou he had no "need to know" whom the prisoner was being handed to. By this account Kiriakou sat with Abu Zubaydah for 56 consecutive hours in total and was the first person to engage him in any meaningful conversation, the last time he ever saw him.

Because it was the CIA's first capture of a high-value target, Kiriakou has described the operation as the biggest success of his career: he received a medal, a promotion, and a personal handshake from the CIA director, and was brought back to headquarters as executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, a post that gave him visibility into cables from across the agency, including from the secret site where Abu Zubaydah was later held.

Interrogation and torture

The Soufan period

In the early months of detention, Abu Zubaydah was handled by FBI special agent Ali Soufan under the rationale that the September 11 attacks remained an open criminal investigation in which the Bureau retained primacy. Soufan's standard FBI rapport-building approach, coffee, oranges, permission to write to family, produced, after weeks of initial silence, the only operationally actionable intelligence ever obtained from Abu Zubaydah.

Per Kiriakou, that cooperation produced three significant intelligence outputs. First, Abu Zubaydah provided the al-Qaeda organizational structure below the level of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an al-Qaeda cell-structure framework, illustrated with a Dusseldorf example, that the CIA had not previously mapped. Second, he described al-Qaeda's general methodology for planning attacks, naming specific individuals, telephone numbers, addresses, and weapons sources in response to hypothetical scenarios Soufan posed, intelligence passed to allied services to neutralize active cells. Third, and most consequentially, he identified the true name of a figure the CIA had known only as Mukhtar: when Soufan asked about him, Abu Zubaydah laughed and said, "You don't know who Mukhtar is? It's Khaled Shik Muhammad", voluntarily naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and ending a six-year U.S. intelligence blind spot dating to the 1996 Bojinka plot. That identification led directly to Mohammed's eventual capture.

Kiriakou has repeatedly stressed that this, not the waterboarding that followed, was the source of the valuable intelligence: for the first time the CIA got al-Qaeda's "wiring diagram," its whole organizational structure, and the name of the man they had only known as "Mukhtar." Torture, by contrast, produces so much nonsense "just to get you to stop" that analysts need six months to sort it, by which time the next bomb has gone off. Kiriakou has traced the false impression that torture was working to a bureaucratic accident: the CIA and FBI's computer systems were so incompatible, after decades of institutional mutual hostility, that Soufan's daily debriefing cables were not reaching CIA channels through normal distribution, so once the waterboarding began, CIA officers at headquarters simply retyped Soufan's earlier FBI cables into the CIA's own system and presented the FBI's rapport-derived intelligence as confirmation that the agency's own methods, including the newly begun waterboarding, were working.

Handover and the certification offer

Cooperation with Soufan continued until George Tenet persuaded President Bush, on July 31, 2002, to hand Abu Zubaydah to the CIA. During the debriefing period, a senior CIA Counterterrorism Center officer casually asked Kiriakou whether he wanted to be certified in the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques": "hey very casually hey i'm glad i ran into you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques." The officer told him the program had been cleared by the Justice Department and signed off by the President. Kiriakou raised moral and legal objections, citing the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which he said "specifically outlaws exactly those techniques that we used against al-Qaeda prisoners." He noted the program was so compartmentalized that clearances above Top Secret were required even to know of its existence, and identified his supervisor, Jose Rodriguez, and the program's psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Kiriakou recalled that intelligence from allied agencies, "our friends across the river," meaning the NSA, had placed Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in the first place.

Mitchell and Jessen began torturing Abu Zubaydah on August 2, 2002. Kiriakou has summarized the sequence: Soufan built rapport and Abu Zubaydah gave up actionable intelligence, until Tenet handed him to the CIA, whose contractors began waterboarding him 83 times and once stopped his heart, after which "he never told us anything."

Approved techniques and waterboarding

Among the techniques approved by the U.S. Department of Justice and applied to Abu Zubaydah was waterboarding. During one session his heart stopped; the on-scene doctor revived him so the session could continue, and interrogators then continued waterboarding him. "Didn't the Germans do that? Come on now. Now we're doing it." He was waterboarded eighty-three times in total. Kiriakou presented this sequence as evidence that the program's purpose was not intelligence collection: a subject who has just been resuscitated from cardiac arrest and is waterboarded again is not being interrogated for information.

Per Kiriakou, the CIA isolated Abu Zubaydah from June 18 to August 4, 2002, 47 days, during which the FBI team left Detention Site Green and did not return; a CIA cable dated July 15, 2002 stated the agency needed assurance he would remain "in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." His most aggressive interrogation phase began at approximately 11:50 a.m. on August 4, 2002, and he was first waterboarded that evening at around 6:20 p.m., coughing, vomiting, and spasming over a two-and-a-half-hour session; a contemporaneous medical officer's note recorded he "seems very resistant to the waterboard," with the longest single application of the cloth lasting 17 seconds and "NO useful information so far." Over roughly three weeks of continuous torture he spent more than 11 days in the coffin-sized confinement box and 29 hours in the smaller, dog-cage-sized box, during which he "cried, begged, pleaded, and whimpered" and at times became "hysterical and distressed to the level that he was unable to effectively communicate"; during at least one waterboarding session he became "completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth." The CIA videotaped the sessions, ultimately producing 92 tapes, 12 of which depicted the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

Kiriakou's original December 2007 public statement, that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded "one time", reflected what the secret site had reported back to headquarters; the CIA, he says, was "even lying internally," claiming a single session had produced great intelligence, when in fact the useful intelligence had already been obtained earlier by the FBI. The true figure of 83 sessions surfaced only when a 2005 inspector-general report was declassified in 2009.

The cockroach-in-coffin treatment and other unauthorized techniques

CIA interrogators determined that Abu Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects. They placed him in a coffin, dumped a box of cockroaches inside, closed it, and left him there for ten days, wearing only a diaper, a treatment not among the techniques authorized by the Department of Justice or the President. In a separate account of the same regimen, Kiriakou said interrogators placed him in a coffin with a box of bugs for two weeks, then in a dog cage, too small to stand, lie flat, or stretch his legs, for three weeks. Within weeks, through what Kiriakou described as the technique of learned helplessness, Abu Zubaydah was mentally broken. Kiriakou has given a fuller description of the same dog cage, sized for a German Shepherd, leaving Abu Zubaydah unable to stand, sit, or lie down comfortably for weeks at a time, during which he soiled himself, and said interrogators also chained him to an eyebolt in the ceiling to the same end, in a cell chilled to fifty degrees with music blasting and the lights left on continuously, at times throwing ice water on him. By this account, Abu Zubaydah reached the point where he would cry and curl into a ball as soon as Mitchell or Jessen entered his cell, telling them anything he thought they wanted to hear, babbling gibberish to his CIA torturers even as he had given Soufan real, checkable intelligence.

A number of other techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and other high-value detainees were similarly unauthorized, including rectal feeding with pureed hummus and Russian roulette. Kiriakou has separately said interrogators also threatened Abu Zubaydah with an electric drill, telling him they would drill into his skull and give him a lobotomy, a threat never authorized by the Justice Department, part of what Kiriakou described elsewhere as treatment aimed less at gathering intelligence than at "ruining this guy's life."

The eye

Abu Zubaydah's eye patch predates his capture only in part. The blindness came from a shrapnel wound taken fighting the Soviets. The missing eye came later, in custody: "as part of his torture we drugged him one day and we took his eyeball out, which is a human rights violation, it's a crime against humanity. We didn't even ask him, we didn't even tell him. They just gassed him, and then when he woke up he had no eyeball."

He was given a prosthetic eye and has refused to wear it ever since, on the ground that the eye was stolen from him, which is why he appears in photographs wearing the patch.

The second ACLU case, and a prediction

Alongside the Salim suit the ACLU brought a second action against Mitchell and Jessen on Abu Zubaydah's behalf, which Kiriakou described in 2017 as "far more controversial, because he was sort of Mitchell and Jessen's guinea pig for this whole program." He introduced his own stake in it plainly, "I'm sort of tied to Abu Zubaydah for life. I was responsible for his capture", before restating the error: the CIA believed he was the number three in al-Qaeda; "he was never the number three in al-Qaeda, and in fact he had never even joined al-Qaeda. The intelligence was faulty."

The summary of his position he gave there is the one he has kept since: Abu Zubaydah "has never faced any kind of justice. He's never met his accusers in a court of law, he's never faced a jury of his peers, and he's never even been charged with a crime. So not only was he tortured, but he's been held indefinitely and had literally no hope of release."

He also made a prediction about how the second case would end, worth recording as a prediction rather than as a fact. Because Abu Zubaydah was the focus of the Senate Torture Report and therefore the most controversial of the plaintiffs, "the chances are very good that the CIA will invoke a national security defence and ask the judge to dismiss this case with prejudice before any testimony is heard."

Inadmissibility and litigation

Nothing obtained from Abu Zubaydah under interrogation is admissible against him at trial, because the CIA tortured it out of him, the same is true of statements obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. "What do we do? We continue to hold them illegally without charge, or we let him go. The bottom line here is the CIA royally fucked this up."

Abu Zubaydah was the named plaintiff in a 2025 case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in which he sought to sue the private contractors who tortured him. In approximately July 2025 the Ninth Circuit ruled that contractors operating under written CIA contract are legally protected as agents of the agency under Executive Order 12333. See Ninth Circuit contractor ruling (2025).

Continued detention and non-release

The Senate report and the drawings

A gifted artist, Abu Zubaydah drew his own torture in a diary the CIA seized and classified top secret; per Kiriakou, a footnote in the Senate torture report holds that he will never be released and will be cremated in secret at death. Kiriakou, who called publicly for his release on the BBC in 2015, says that even if he were guilty of something, he has served his time. Years later, Abu Zubaydah's own drawings of his torture, depicting a series of horrific positions, were declassified and brought out of Guantanamo by his pro bono attorney Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University, after what Kiriakou said took years of effort; the CIA insisted on blacking out the faces of the stick-figure torturers before release. The drawings ran in the Sunday New York Times. Per Kiriakou, the Senate torture report reveals the CIA made a policy decision that Abu Zubaydah will never leave Guantanamo alive, in part because his release would let him describe the torture he underwent on every television channel in the world.

The Convenient Terrorist

Kiriakou has said that, more than fifteen years after the capture, no one had written a book-length account of Abu Zubaydah's case, so he co-wrote one: The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars, published by Skyhorse in 2017 with cover blurbs from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oliver Stone. His co-author, Joe Hickman, was the Guantanamo guard who had taken custody of Abu Zubaydah from the CIA; Kiriakou wrote the half covering the hunt, capture, and torture, and Hickman the half covering the detention, half each, as two whistleblowers' accounts of the same man.

Contact with his attorneys, and the apology

As of the August 2025 source, Kiriakou is in periodic contact with Abu Zubaydah's attorneys. Per the attorneys, Abu Zubaydah first learned of Kiriakou's December 2007 ABC News interview confirming CIA waterboarding from a friendly Guantanamo guard, who came to his cell that day to tell him "a CIA man went public today about what happened to you." Per Abu Zubaydah, "it was the first time he had experienced a sensation of hope." He has since asked his attorneys to convey to Kiriakou his hope that the two of them may someday have dinner "as free men." His attorney told Kiriakou that when he blew the whistle in 2007, a friendly guard passed word to the prisoners, giving them "New Life," and that Abu Zubaydah looks forward to dining with Kiriakou as a free man. Kiriakou has become friendly with the attorneys and now exchanges messages with Abu Zubaydah himself, to whom he has apologized: "This guy was innocent. He was innocent of everything we had accused him of", but the order was to take him, and the government "can't admit that we made a terrible, grievous error." Kiriakou says he would tell Abu Zubaydah directly that he is sorry for how he was treated, arguing that if Zubaydah really was the terrorist he was described as, he should have been tried and convicted, and if not, released.

The release that nearly happened

Kiriakou reports two parallel negotiations on Abu Zubaydah's behalf: a plea to some minor charge for time served, and relocation to a third country, Palestinians who cannot go home have been resettled in places such as Albania, Switzerland, or Tahiti.

Abu Zubaydah was, per Kiriakou, weeks from release at the end of the Biden administration. The administration had made the decision to release him and was in negotiations with foreign governments willing to take him, on the conclusion that he was innocent, never charged with a crime, tortured mercilessly by the CIA, but had not closed any agreement before the November 2024 election. "And then Trump won. And so he's not going anywhere." No country could be found willing to accept him. Kiriakou is on record publicly stating that Abu Zubaydah should be released and should have been released years ago, once it became clear he was not al-Qaeda's number three, was not guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity, and could not be charged because the evidence against him was tainted by torture.

Between those two positions sits a more hopeful January 2026 report. Kiriakou said then that he had met Abu Zubaydah's attorney "just a week ago" and that the attorney had "very good news, that the American government is in talks with his attorneys to release him from Guantánamo if we could find a country that's willing to take him." He framed his own part in it as long-running rather than recent: "I've become very much an activist over the last 20 years to release Abu Zubaydah and to apologize to him." The March 2026 telling, two months later, records no such agreement and returns to the finding that no country could be found.

Kiriakou has stated he has approached Kash Patel about declassifying related material and has noted there is no statute of limitations because the underlying conduct constitutes an ongoing conspiracy.

"Poor Abu Zubaydah"

Asked for a one-line assessment in July 2026, John Kiriakou answered: "Poor Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah should be should be free and living with his family today." Told that he is still in Guantánamo, he confirmed it, and added that the detainees there are all in relative isolation, "They're in cages."

The stated purpose of the capture

One of Kiriakou''s earliest public accounts of the operation, given in January 2013, frames it in terms of an intention that was later abandoned. As chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan in 2002, he says, "my job was to try to locate al-Qaeda fighters or al-Qaeda leaders and capture them, to turn them over to the Justice Department and have them face trial. That was the original idea, not to have them sit in Cuba for the next decade." In the same telling he compresses the capture and the custody into two facts: Abu Zubaydah "was shot three times by Pakistani police as he was trying to escape from his safe house," and "I was the first person to have custody of him, to sit with him. We spoke to each other extensively, I mean, talked about everything from September 11th to poetry that he had been writing to his family." He was then "moved on to a secret prison."

The number that made him look like a fool

What Kiriakou told ABC News in December 2007 was what the cable traffic said: officers in the field reported that the technique was working, that Abu Zubaydah "had cracked after one session, one waterboarding session," and that he had given up actionable information that saved American lives.

"Nobody knew until the CIA inspector general report was released in April of 2009 that said that no, he was waterboarded 83 times, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 147 times." (The auto-caption gives 147; the figure recorded elsewhere in the corpus is 183, and the transcript text is retained here.) Kiriakou's conclusion from the discrepancy is about the institution rather than the technique: "so they were even lying to each other internally, to try to justify this thing. I told Brian Ross what I thought I knew as facts, but I was wrong."

The report landed about a month into his job at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It made me look like a fool," he says, but he issued a statement saying he had given the facts as he knew them, and "I had no regrets, two years had gone by." What the report showed, in his reading, is "that the CIA will lie to its own staff officers."

The capture, hour by hour

Kiriakou has given the operational shape of the March 2002 capture in detail. He arrived in Pakistan as chief of counterterrorism operations in January 2002, four months after volunteering for Afghanistan, the delay being that his skill set "was not one that was important in those really early days", and had been in country only a couple of weeks when word came that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan.

They tracked him for about six weeks and narrowed his location to one of fourteen separate sites around Faisalabad, plus a couple around Lahore, which they thought less likely. All fourteen were raided simultaneously at two o'clock in the morning on what Kiriakou dates as 22 March 2002, turning up Abu Zubaydah and "more than four dozen other al-Qaeda fighters."

Abu Zubaydah was severely wounded in the capture, shot by a Pakistani policeman with an AK-47 in the thigh, the groin and the stomach. Once he had been patched up, Kiriakou "sat with him for the next 56 hours" before he was flown out to what turned out to be a secret prison in a third country.

"A lost soul"

Kiriakou's assessment of the man is unusually unguarded. He found him "extraordinarily bright, not even really a true believer", and reads his path as despair rather than conviction: "he had assessed his life and he had come to a conclusion that he was going nowhere, and it's because he was Palestinian. He didn't think he would ever see a free Palestine." He had never joined al-Qaeda or pledged fealty to bin Laden; he functioned as its logistician, the man an operative went to for a false passport, a credit card, a disguise, a safe house or a ticket home.

On the attacks themselves, Kiriakou reports him as directly opposed: he supported the idea of an attack but wanted it aimed at Israel. "He said to me very plainly, all I ever wanted to do was to kill Jews, is what he said", and bin Laden overruled him and insisted the target be the United States.

The timeline of the torture

Kiriakou did not witness the torture and dates its start precisely: Abu Zubaydah was captured in late March 2002, was in FBI custody from around 1 April, and the White House authorised the torture to begin on 1 August, "but there's some evidence that he was tortured before August in anticipation of the approval coming through."

The wiring diagram

Kiriakou's fullest account of what Abu Zubaydah actually produced frames it as structural intelligence rather than plot detail. He had founded the House of Martyrs safe house for al-Qaeda in Peshawar, and founded and ran both of the group's training camps in southern Afghanistan; he always claimed he had no part in planning the September 11 attacks, which Kiriakou thinks "in retrospect ... was probably true." What he could supply was "at least as important."

Before him the agency knew only the top of the organisation, that bin Laden had created it, that Ayman al-Zawahiri had merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad into it and taken the number two spot, that Mohammed Atef ran military operations until he was killed in an October 2001 bombing raid, and that a very bad man called Mukhtar existed. Below that, nothing: not how the cells were set up, not where they were, not how foot soldiers reached their leaders, not how money or operational instructions moved.

Abu Zubaydah filled that in on request. Kiriakou's illustration is a hypothetical operation in Düsseldorf: "there's one guy named Muhammad, and Muhammad lives at this address, and Muhammad has access to weapons, and he has a friend named Abdullah, and this is Abdullah's phone number, and Abdullah has access to explosives, and they stay at an apartment that's owned by Rashid, and this is Rashid's email address."

All of it came without torture, "in fact, the only usable information that came out of him or any other prisoner was without torture", from Ali Soufan sitting across a table, treating him with respect and giving him "an occasional cigarette or an apple or a cup of tea." He also remembers Abu Zubaydah laughing that the Americans did not already know Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the lead that took them to a safe house in Rawalpindi.

The night of the raids

Kiriakou dates the operation to a series of raids run over one night in late March 2002, which he led as chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, and which resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, believed at the time to be the number three in al-Qaeda.

He adds that the same raids took many dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters, and marks the limit of what he may say about the figure: "I'm not allowed to say the number."

Never a member

One of the surprises the FBI questioning produced was that the premise of the capture was wrong. "He had never formally joined Al-Qaeda. He had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. He had never sworn an oath. So, he was not the number three in Al-Qaeda." Kiriakou does not soften the finding into exoneration: "He was a bad man. And he did a lot of work on behalf of Al-Qaeda. But he was never a member." He has given the same two-part verdict in the same words on other occasions: "We believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the third ranking person in al-Qaeda. That turned out to not be true. Although he was a bad man, he was not the terrorist mastermind that we thought he was."

The same questioning produced the identification of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The agency knew there was "a very bad man out there somewhere who went by the nom de guerre Mukhtar" and knew Mukhtar had planned Bojinka; it did not know the two were the same person. "Abu Zubaydah was amazed that we didn't know that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." With the name, the target became findable, and he was captured at Rawalpindi in August 2002.

See also

- Guantanamo, Origin Account
- John Kiriakou
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Mitchell and Jessen
- Ali Soufan
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- Waterboarding
- Hummus
- Senate Torture Report
- Ninth Circuit contractor ruling (2025)
