Site 13
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Site 13 was one of the fourteen possible locations a targeting analyst narrowed the hunt for Abu Zubaydah down to, and the one that mattered. It was the nearest target to the CIA safe house in Faisalabad, and became known afterwards simply as the Abu Zubaydah house.

From the roof

John Kiriakou watched from the roof of the Faisalabad safe house with his colleague. At half past one everyone else left; at two he counted down, "three, two, one, here we go", and immediately heard a sound in the distance: boink, boink, boink, metal on metal. He said at once that it was not good. Then shots. He called Site 13 on the walkie-talkie and got only crackling, the walkie-talkies never worked, and reached the team leader by mobile telephone, who could only scream shots fired, shots fired back at him.

What had happened

The boink had been the battering ram failing against a steel-reinforced door, which cost the assault team the seconds that mattered. Upstairs were three men: Abu Zubaydah, a Syrian bomb-maker and a Syrian bodyguard. Downstairs were about twenty low-level fighters who knew only that somebody important was above them, they had worked it out because whoever was upstairs had a tea boy who went to the market each day to buy and cook their food, while the men on the ground floor fended for themselves.

The three upstairs ran to the roof and tried to jump to the neighbouring house. Pakistani police on the ground picked them off with an AK-47: the bomb-maker jumped first and was dead before he hit the ground; Abu Zubaydah jumped second and was shot in the thigh, the groin and the stomach; the bodyguard jumped last and was shot through the leg.

The scene

Kiriakou and his colleague drove over to find what he calls utter chaos: three men lying in the street, one clearly dead, one who looked as though he would be dead within minutes, and one screaming with an enormous gunshot wound through the centre of his femur. A Pakistani officer told him they had got his man, they had got Mr. Fish, and pointed at the one who looked nearly dead, a man who resembled the four-year-old passport photograph not at all. Kiriakou's standing instruction from headquarters had been to take him alive and fire no shots. He was identified by a photograph of his ear and taken to Faisalabad Hospital.

The bomb on the table

Kiriakou's earliest recorded telling of the raid, in 2022, supplies what was found upstairs once the shooting stopped. The Syrian who jumped first "was a bad guy": on the table on the second floor were his bomb-making materials and explosives, the soldering iron still hot because he had been working, and beside them the plans to the British school. "He was going to blow up the school. This is how bad these people were."

In the same telling he confirms the compartmentation downstairs and the guess the fighters made from it. The men on the ground floor were cut off from whoever was above them, knew only from the presence of the tea boy that somebody important was up there, "and they wondered if it was bin Laden."

He has never been permitted to say how many were taken. "There were several dozen fighters, al-Qaeda fighters, on the first floor... They still will not allow me to say the number of people captured."

The colonel's inference

The reason a larger team was assigned to the house at all was a piece of reasoning by the Pakistani colonel during the daytime reconnaissance of the sites. Standing outside the big yellow building, he told Kiriakou that something bad was going on inside it. Asked how he knew: "It has to be 110 degrees right now", and every shutter was closed. "It has to be broiling in there. They have something to hide."

The walk-in that was not a walk-in

The tip that put the house on the priority list came, officially, from a walk-in at a friendly Western intelligence service, someone who comes in off the street offering information for money, and who Kiriakou says is a lunatic, a would-be terrorist or a hostile probe about 99 per cent of the time. The report was of a large congregation of al-Qaeda fighters in a big yellow house; Kiriakou was standing in front of it when the call came.

He asked to speak to the source and was refused, "which made me think that there wasn't a walk-in, that it was an intercept, but they didn't want us to know that they were intercepting al-Qaeda's communications", for fear the Americans would try to take the tap over. His gloss on the episode is about the trade rather than the tip: "there are a lot of pissing matches in intelligence, not just between the CIA and the FBI, but between the CIA and all of its allies and friends... the politics involved is ridiculous."

The order, minute by minute

Standing on a coffee table at ten o'clock that night in front of some sixty men, Kiriakou opened with a line he knew how it sounded: "At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we're gonna have to synchronise our watches, like in the movies."

The schedule he read out: 0130 leave the safe house; 0145 be in the target neighbourhood; 0150 be parked in position; 0155 confirm both line of sight to the target and that you are not under surveillance; 0158 out of the car; and at exactly 0200 break down the door, separate the women and children from the men, and cuff every man.

The justification he gave the room for the last instruction he describes as a fiction told for the FBI's benefit, that because this was an open criminal investigation, the Bureau would begin collecting evidence, "which was total horseshit."

The batteries

The walkie-talkie failure became, on Kiriakou's account, a standing law of the trade: "rule number one in intelligence operations is the walkie-talkies always die. They never, ever work."

He raised it afterwards at the NSA, which had asked him for a lessons-learned session because the operation was the first successful major capture after 9/11. "You guys are all geniuses here, right? You build these computers, these super computers we don't even know what they do, you put satellites, you can't make a battery that doesn't die after an hour? Come on."

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Mr. Fish
- Faisalabad Hospital
- The Punjab Elite Force
- Targeting analyst
