Title: Spy Diaries Ep 01 — Hunted Al-Qaeda in Pakistan
Show: TCM
Date: 2025-06-29
URL: https://youtu.be/6aDKlkV4G2A
Duration: 16:00

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[00:00] remember that 9/11 was the greatest intelligence failure in the CIA's history. 3,000 Americans were killed because we didn't do our jobs. I ran into a a colleague of mine in the hallway. So I said, "Hey, where have you been?" And he whispered, "I've been in Afghanistan." I said, "What are you doing in Afghanistan?" And he said, "I'm killing people. What do you think I'm doing?" Now, these are people who just walk into your embassy and say, "I know where Osama bin Laden is, and I want a million dollars or $10 million." Okay, I'll tell you one thing about ISI too is

[00:30] they weren't afraid of anybody. And ISI major in Lahore said you can't you can't run a counterterrorism operation from a four-star hotel. And so we gave we gave the Pakistani government $5 million. We gave them 10 million for Khaled Shake Muhammad and a million here, a million there. And then we bought equipment and we bought, you know, whatever equipment we shipped in for the operations. We just told them, just keep it. Just keep all of it. We're not going to take any of it back. Just consider it a gift.

[01:11] Like everybody else in the building, I I volunteered to go to Afghanistan and I was actually denied three times. And then I ran into a a colleague of mine in the hallway and I hadn't seen him in months. So I said, "Hey, where have you been?" And he whispered, "I've been in Afghanistan." I said, "What are you doing in Afghanistan?" And he said, "I'm killing people. What do you think I'm doing?" And that's when I realized that they didn't need an Arabic translator. So, I went to the uh the deputy director for counterterrorism and I said very

[01:43] angrily, "If you don't send me over there right now, I'm going to resign and I'm going to go to Exxon and I'm going to take my Arabic with me." He said, "Relax, relax. Do you want to go to Pakistan?" I said, "Yes. When?" He said, "Tomorrow." I said, "Done. What do you want me to do there?" He said, "I want you to be the head of counterterrorism operations." And I said, "Okay." And so the next day I went remember that 9/11 was the greatest intelligence failure in the CIA's history. 3,000 Americans were killed

[02:13] because we didn't do our jobs. And so there was this very deep desire for revenge. And as I was leaving the office for that last day, I was going to fly to a slum about the next morning. My boss pulled me aside and he whispered to me, "Kill them all." And I said I said, "Really? We've We've already gotten to that. Kill them all. I'm not going to do that. [Music] I spent most of my day either at ISI or

[02:46] working with ISI officers or meeting with ISI officers or, you know, we did everything jointly, everything hand glove. So, the job itself, it this wasn't just me. This was this was my Pakistani colleagues as well. Uh it was severalfold. It was to carry out operations to capture al-Qaeda fighters who had taken refuge in Pakistan. On my very first day, my boss said to me, "We need to come up with a standard operating procedure for how we do this."

[03:17] Because we had never done anything like this before. And I said, "I have an idea. you know, we have these people in villages all up and down the the the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I said, it's very inefficient and it's dangerous and they're not able to do anything. I think we should take everybody off the border and just let al-Qaeda come into Pakistan because, you know, they're going to go to safe houses and then with the Pakistanis we can raid the safe houses and catch everybody at the same time.

[03:48] And that is exactly what they did. you know they were going to make a mistake. You know they were going to get on their cell phone or get on their Hotmail account or Gmail account or go into the market to buy vegetables or tea or chicken or whatever and we caught them. We caught hundreds of them. Hundreds of them. So a lot of the time I spent planning these operations

[04:22] My Pakistani colleagues would come and say, "We have a lead. We have an address." And we're told that there are Arabs in this address. Or a friendly Arab intelligence officer would call me and say, "I think I have an address. I heard there's somebody from Islamic Jihad." So I'd call ISI and say, "I have an address." They say, "We have an address." We create some teams. We break the door down at 2 o'clock in the morning, grab everybody inside, and it was success after success after success.

[04:54] Number one. Number two is, and this is not unique to Islamabad, but every American embassy around the world, every every embassy around the world, no matter the country, gets something called walk-ins. Now, these are people who just walk into your embassy and say, "I know where Osama bin Laden is, and I want a million dollars or $10 million." Okay, how do you know where Osama bin Laden is? Well, I I washed dishes at this uh restaurant and I heard somebody

[05:25] talking. Okay, thank you. If you know, if we catch him, we'll give you the $10 million, but thanks for coming in. You can leave now. 99% of the people who walk in are insane. They are fabricators, liars, just seeing if they can get some money from you. They are intelligence peddlers, which means what they're saying is true, but they're also going to the British embassy, the French embassy, the German embassy, the Russian embassy, the Chinese embassy to get more

[05:56] money. 1% are real. In Islamabad, we had walk-ins every single day, sometimes several in one day. Now, in other embassies I've worked in, we might get three or four a year. In Islamabad, every single day, and most of the time, they were people just looking for some money, but sometimes they had actionable, real intelligence. And I would turn it

[06:26] over to ISI. They would investigate and then together we would do the operation. The third thing, Pakistan is a big country with a lot of people and while I'm in Islamabad doing my job every day, we have to think about what's happening in Peshawar, in Karachi, in Lahore, in Qua and all over the place. Now, of course, ISI has offices in all of these places. So they would call Islamabad, Islamabad would

[06:58] call me. I I'm happy to say I got to see the whole country which was very exciting and very beautiful. Those were the three things and and it made for extraordinarily long work days. I don't think I ever worked less than 14 hours a day in the entire time that I was there just because there was so much going on. My experience with ISI was 100% positive. These guys became like my

[07:30] brothers. I'll tell you one thing about ISI too is they weren't afraid of anybody. When we would go out on these operations, we would always take the FBI with us. We had bulletproof vests and all kinds of things. ISI didn't. They had just the clothes they were wearing. They were not afraid of anybody. And I learned a great deal from them. You know, almost to a man, at least among the the ISI officers that I was working with, they were trained almost

[08:01] exclusively in the UK at Sandhurst, very very professional. And so I could rely on them for advice. Like I I was new to the country. I didn't know anything about Pakistani history or culture. My entire adult life was spent in the Middle East. And so they they taught me they taught me about the culture and the history and how you deal with different people, how you conduct an interrogation the Pakistani

[08:32] way. So I learned a great deal. But on top of their professionalism, they were just genuinely good people. I met their families. We would all go out to dinner together. [Music] The Pakistani method of interrogation was far more direct and um and efficient than the American uh the American way of doing it. The American I let me let me fix that than the CIA way of doing it. The FBI has its own way which is very

[09:05] slow and deliberate but it works. The CIA way is to have a good cop and a bad cop. So you have one person who's being nice to the to the prisoner and another one who's threatening to beat or kill the prisoner. That rarely works. The Pakistanis did not waste any time. They would just say, "Look, you're in trouble. You're in big trouble. Things can get bad from here or they can get good from here. So I suggest you start answering questions." And nine times out of 10, they would sit there and answer

[09:36] the questions. You didn't have to threaten them. You didn't have to beat them. You didn't have to take them to a secret site halfway around the world and torture them or put a gun to their head and play Russian roulette. You just said, "Look, this is the reality right now. You are a prisoner and this can be easy or it can be terrible. Make it easy." And they got results. Guantanamo aside, the others I I learned as they were being created. And I

[10:08] remember saying to a colleague, "How is this legal? I don't understand how this is legal. It's it's extr territorial. I just don't understand what it's based on, how we can get away with doing this." Um, Guantanamo was different. Colonel Tonic came to me one day in uh in Islamabad and he said, "Listen, the Raml Piney jail is full. Like, it's literally full. You have to take these Arabs and you have to take them somewhere else. We can't keep them forever. So, I called the CIA's

[10:40] counterterrorism center and I said, "ISI is telling me that the jail is full and they want us to take these guys out. So, what do I do with them?" And I was told, "Put them on a C12 cargo plane, Air Force cargo plane, and send them to Guantanamo." And I said, "Guanto, Cuba? Yes." I said, "Why in the world would we send them to Cuba?" And my colleague said, "Well, we have an idea. We're going to keep them in Guantanamo for 2 or 3 weeks and then we'll send

[11:12] them to the federal district court where their crime was committed, New York, Boston, or Washington." And I said, "That's a great idea." Well, there was never any intention of putting these people on trial because, as you said, 90% of them were innocent of any crime. They were Afghan farmers or or nobbodyies or Arabs married to Afghan women. Um they hadn't committed any crime. A lot of them were turned in by neighbors that maybe they had a land dispute with or they owed they were owed

[11:44] money from. What better way to not pay your debt than to tell the Americans this guy is with al-Qaeda. And so you know at at its height we had 770 people at Guantanamo. Now we have what 34 33 and and half of them will be released soon. But um but the idea for Guantanamo was temporary at best because they were going to go on trial in the United States and then they never did.

[12:15] The State Department manages the the federal what's it called? The federal [Music] there's a name for it. It's the program that gives rewards for the capture of terrorists. We gave the Pakistani government $5 million. We gave them 10 million for Khalik Muhammad and a million here, a million there. And then we bought equipment and we bought, you know, whatever equipment we shipped in for the operations. We just told them just keep it. Just keep all of it. We're not going to take any of it back. Just consider it a gift. I don't know what the total amount of money is and I don't

[12:47] know what happened to the money. This is another one of those times when ISI really helped me a lot. Uh because we were, you know, as we were setting up for the abused operation, we were just staying in in a hotel. We had rented the entire floor of one of Lahore's biggest hotels. And ISI major in Lahore said, "You can't you can't run a counterterrorism operation from a four-star hotel.

[13:19] You you have to find a house." house. I said, "How the heck am I going to find a house? I don't speak any of the languages in this country." And what am I going to say? I need a house where I can do interrogations at the same time. So, he said, "Look, we'll go together." So, two Americans, a friend of mine and and I went with this major um and uh we found a real estate agent. The major said we needed the biggest house that they had uh because we entertain a great deal of

[13:50] time and the house needed to be huge for the big dinners and big parties and receptions that we had. He ended up getting us a 10bedroom 10b house in Lahore and a 7-bedroom 7b house in Fisalaba. And they were absolutely perfect. They were expensive, but they were perfect because we caught so many al-Qaeda people that night that we needed every one of those bedrooms to do

[14:21] interrogations in. That's what they ended up serving as. My very first week, my boss said, "Come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house." Of course, we had something called high value targets, HVTs. And that was the the obvious list. It was it was bin Laden, Zawahari, Abu Zuba, Khalichek, Muhammad, Ramsey, Benes, the usual cast of characters. And those people who were that cooperative would remain in ISI custody. We believed at the time that

[14:52] Abu Zuba was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was not. In fact, he had never joined al-Qaeda. He worked along with al-Qaeda. We had very, very specific orders that we had to take him alive because he was this terrorist superman and that he could lead us to bin Laden. George Tennant called the director of the CIA and he told me, these were his exact words, he said, 247 CIA eyes on. So, I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed from his wrists and

[15:23] his ankles. And then I put the ceiling fan on high to make it uncomfortably cold so that I wouldn't fall asleep. And I sat there like this in a chair at the foot of his bed. And I just stared at him. The entire interrogation program uh at the CIA uh they called it enhanced interrogation techniques. I called it a torture program. The entire program was a criminal act. I was ready to die for my country out there and it was all based on a lie. And so I've become very

[15:55] much an activist over the last 20 years to release Abu Zubeda and to apologize to this was a a war crime or a crime against humanity. It's a dark stain on the modern history of the United States.
