Bojinka plot
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The Bojinka plot was a 1996 operation, planned in the Philippines by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then known to U.S. intelligence only by the alias "Mukhtar", to hijack as many as fourteen Boeing 747s out of Manila and crash them, simultaneously, into buildings along the U.S. West Coast. Kiriakou says that starting in 1996, the CIA knew al-Qaeda intended to use airplanes as weapons, citing the Bojinka operation as the evidence.

Disruption by accident

Per Kiriakou, the plot was undone by pure chance. Mukhtar had left his Manila apartment for lunch, leaving planning materials, papers, maps, notes, laid out across the workspace. The apartment's cleaning lady let herself in to clean, saw the materials, and recognized them for what they were: "What the heck is all this stuff? I better call the police." She called the Philippine police, who arrived, agreed with her assessment, and in turn alerted the Philippine intelligence service, which contacted the CIA. By the time anyone acted, Mukhtar had fled Manila; the CIA was left with nothing but the alias.

Kiriakou has said the foiling of Bojinka confirmed, as early as 1996, that al-Qaeda intended to use hijacked aircraft as weapons, but that even with the plot disrupted, the CIA remained unable to determine when or where a future attack would actually occur, a gap that persisted until September 11, 2001.

The six-year identification gap: "Who is Mukhtar?"

The plot's architect remained an unidentified figure in CIA files for six years; the name "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" appeared in no CIA document. The gap closed only in 2002, during Ali Soufan's FBI interrogation of Abu Zubaydah at a black site. Soufan asked Abu Zubaydah directly, "Who is Mukhtar?" Abu Zubaydah laughed: "You don't know who Mukhtar is?", and gave up the name: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Kiriakou, who was in the office the day the identification came back, has said plainly: "We had never heard that name before." Once identified, KSM was targeted and captured roughly a year later in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

The al-Qaeda wiring diagram

Before Abu Zubaydah's capture, per Kiriakou, the CIA had no picture of al-Qaeda's organizational structure beyond its top two figures: "We knew Osama bin Laden was at the top, Ayman al-Zawahiri was the number two, and then we didn't have any idea how the rest of it was set up." Soufan's rapport-based questioning of Abu Zubaydah changed that: posing hypothetical operational scenarios, what would you do if ordered to carry out an attack in Düsseldorf?, Soufan drew out a full mapping of contacts, phone numbers, weapons access, and explosives access, intelligence the CIA could hand directly to German services. It was the first complete picture of how al-Qaeda was compartmentalized and stovepiped.

The bin Laden courier dispute

CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, Kiriakou's direct supervisor at the Counterterrorism Center, has maintained publicly that the name of Osama bin Laden's courier, which ultimately led to bin Laden's location, came from waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Kiriakou disputes this, saying the CIA had already been tracing the al-Qaeda courier network backward from Al Jazeera since the 1990s, asking where Al Jazeera received bin Laden's tapes, then following the chain back four or five couriers before losing the trail. His assessment: the courier network was already known analytically, and identifying the specific courier did not require coercion. Rodriguez's own former chief of operations has also disputed Rodriguez's account.

The cleaning lady

The CIA had known since 1996 that a man operating under the name Mukhtar was working on a plan to use aircraft as missiles. The plan was Bojinka: hijack fourteen 747s out of Manila airport, fly them across the Pacific and fly them into buildings up and down the west coast of the United States.

It came apart because he left the plans laid out on a table and went out to lunch. The cleaning lady let herself in, looked at them, decided it was a terrorist attack and called the police; the Manila police looked at them, reached the same conclusion and called the Philippine intelligence service; who looked at them, reached the same conclusion again and called the CIA, who confirmed it was an attack being planned against the western United States. By then the man was in the wind, and never came back from lunch. It was Abu Zubaydah, years later and under Ali Soufan's questioning, who supplied the name behind Mukhtar.

See also

- Ali Soufan
- Abu Zubaydah
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- Jose Rodriguez
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
