The General Muhammad equipment gift
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The story John Kiriakou tells about the equipment is a coda to the operation described in Pakistan station 2002, and he tells it as an illustration of what happens when nobody is accounting for anything.

What was bought

As part of the operations to find Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou says, the station bought more equipment than you can shake a stick at: everything from battering rams to bulletproof vests to night vision goggles, guns, ammunition, secure communications, encrypted walkie-talkies and satellite dishes. 

At the end of it, headquarters told him to just throw it away, or just give it to the Pakistanis, we don't want to bring it back. 

The gift

So Kiriakou went to the Pakistani brigadier general he had been working with, General Muhammad, and said they would like to make a gift of all of it. The general's reaction, in Kiriakou's telling, was delight: oh my gosh, thank you so much, it's so advanced, my people don't have any of it. It went over as truckloads. 

A couple of weeks later, Kiriakou made conversation with the colonel who was his day-to-day contact, saying how glad he was that they were going to be so well equipped with everything that had been turned over. The colonel asked: what stuff? Kiriakou listed it, the guns, the ammunition, the battering rams, the walkie-talkies, the satellites. The colonel said: I don't know what you're talking about. The general just took it.  

What he thinks became of it

Asked whether the general had probably sold it to the Taliban, Kiriakou said of course, because he wants to retire in a nice big house someday too.  He had already told his interviewer that he could tell her what the general had done with it. 

The episode is the mirror image of the discipline he says he imposed on his own station's books, described in security, medical and finance: every dollar the station spent, including every dollar given to the Pakistanis, had to be accounted for and the books balanced to the dollar when the operation closed. 

See also

- Pakistan Station (2002)
- Security Medical And Finance
- Abu Zubaydah
- ISI
- The Punjab Elite Force
- Renting Afghan warlords
- Faisalabad
