Title: After Words with John Kiriakou interviewed by Frederick Hitz
Show: C-SPAN Book TV After Words
Date: 2010-04-23
URL: https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/after-words-with-john-kiriakou/223989
Duration: 61:00

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[00:00] as this fiscal deficit whenever inflation going up and that's going to be also disastrous. Up next, Book TV presents Afterwards, an hour-long discussion with the author of a new book. This week, former CIA officer John Carriacou talks about his service in the agency, both before and after 9-11. He played a key role in the capture of al-Qaeda associate Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan and

[00:30] also aided U.S. officials with the planning of the Iraq War. He's interviewed by Frederick Hitts, former Inspector General of the CIA and current senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law. Sitting here with John Carriacou, talking about his new book, The Reluctant Spy, I told John before we got on the air that I'd like to ask him as my first question, how did

[01:06] you decide to write this book, John? It was a hard decision, actually. I love telling stories. I've been told that I'm a good storyteller, but I was a little bit reluctant to begin because I was intimidated by the review process, the CIA's publications review process. And then I thought, so many of my friends have written books, former colleagues from the agency, and I thought that George Tennant's book really broke new ground in what could be released, so I thought I'd give it a try. And what I wanted to convey, really, was how hard the CIA works to keep the

[01:41] country safe. So much is written about the agency's failures, just because by their nature failures are what is generally released to the public. And I wanted to try to write a story about the agency's successes. I think I'm also, I've enjoyed very much reading this book. I think how you came to go into the agency was very interesting. Could you talk a little bit about how you made that decision? Sure. I hadn't even been considering the agency as a career. I was in graduate school at George Washington University here in Washington, D.C.

[02:14] And I was taking a class called the Psychology of Leadership with an eminent professor, Dr. Gerald Post. And Dr. Post asked me to stay after class one day. He wanted to talk, I thought he wanted to talk about a paper that I had written. So I stayed after class and he said, listen, do you have any plans for what you're going to do after graduation? And I said, oh, Dr. Post, not only do I not have a job, I don't even have any prospects for a job and I'm getting married just a few weeks after I graduate and I don't know

[02:45] what I'm going to do. And he said, well, would you consider the CIA? And I thought, sure, that sounds interesting. I would consider the CIA. So we walked down to his office. He called a man who to this day I know only as Bob. I think Bob was the director of personnel for the agency at the time. This is in the late 1980s. And 30 minutes later, I'm in a nondescript office in suburban Virginia speaking with Bob. It began a series of tests the following Saturday.

[03:16] And it was a long process. It took about 14 months in total. But 14 months later I started working at the agency. Were you aware at the time or did you come to be aware of the fact that this particular technique, one of your professors or an older person known to you, might be a spotter? That is, was there any legend about that around GW that there was a CIA sort of recruiter on the faculty?

[03:46] No. It was kept quiet, I think. And it's funny because in retrospect it was so clear what he was doing. He was acting as a spotter looking for grad students who he thought would be a good fit in the agency. It turned out that Dr. Post was really a legendary CIA officer on the analytic side and someone who has had a lasting positive effect on the agency. So I was really very fortunate not just to have been in a position where he could help me, but really to have known him and studied under him.

[04:19] It's something that really benefited me in my career. And following on that, it's much more impressive, isn't it, when you think that one of your teachers or one of your mentors comes to you with a suggestion that you look at this, and I think the agency over the years has had a lot of success with those persons in various faculties and institutions who have been on the lookout for able young people. And it's certainly a compliment to you when you thought about it, etc.

[04:50] I was very flattered. And then I came to meet a great number of people inside the agency once I was hired who had made it through the process in exactly the same way. And then interestingly enough, when I finally got hired I went to thank Dr. Post and he denied having anything to do with my success in the process other than introducing me to a CIA personnel person who could get the process going. He really insisted that he had nothing to do with it. And I knew that wasn't really true. He was extremely helpful to me.

[05:22] What was your decision process, John, in trying to figure out which part of the agency to go into? I went into the process pretty naive. I mean, I of course knew that there was a directorate of operations. There was a directorate of intelligence. There were two other directorates that weren't really a fit for me. But I was offered interviews in both operations and intelligence. And I had discussed this with my wife at the time. And she really did not want to live most of our adult lives overseas. So in that initial interview with the directorate of operations, they asked me, well, what would

[05:57] your wife say about living in Sudan or some other third or fourth world country? And I said, oh, she wouldn't want to do that at all. And the man stood up and put out his hand and said, well, thanks for coming today. So I knew that that hadn't gone very well. Well, no, it had gone fine because you got to the point that was relevant. That's right. But you weren't going to be a happy person with your wife unhappy and as well get that sorted out. So you made the decision that you wanted to do the analytical side. Did you have any regions or issues in mind coming in that you would intrigue you more

[06:32] than others? I did. I had a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies at the time. And I was absolutely fascinated by the Middle East. When I was in high school, the Iranian government collapsed, the government of the Shah collapsed, and the Aitola Khomeini took power, of course, American hostages were seized, and I was captivated by the whole 444-day saga of what had happened to our diplomats there. And so I decided early on, really in high school, that I wanted to do something related to the Middle East.

[07:03] And I was willing to learn Arabic. My focus as an undergrad was in Islamic theology. I really wanted to have an understanding of what we were up against. And so it's funny. When I first interviewed on the intelligence side, I was told that I was being considered for two positions, one on Iraq and Kuwait and the other on North Korea. And I said, but I don't know anything about North Korea. And they said, that's okay. We can train you. So I was very fortunate in the end that not only was I hired for Iraq and Kuwait,

[07:33] but I was hired to work in the office that Dr. Post had founded, which was no longer exists, but it was involved in the analysis of motivations of foreign leaders. Motivations of foreign leaders. Yeah, very interesting. And at the time, unique agency concern. But back to this question of Iraq, Kuwait, it would have been a waste of your talent and your background if you'd been pitched over to North Korea, even though they doubtless could have gotten you started there.

[08:04] I thought so too. And I was told on my very first day when they gave me my assignment that I shouldn't be disheartened by this assignment. Of course I wasn't. I was very excited. But I shouldn't be disheartened because this was what they called a training account. They said nothing ever happens in these countries. There's a nascent democracy movement in Kuwait that's moderately interesting. And in Iraq, it's the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution. Nothing ever happens.

[08:34] Wrong. Learned the CIA writing style. And you can do something exciting like Romania. I love it. And I thought, well, okay. And then we got to the point where about nine months later, just as I felt like I knew what I was doing, Iraq invaded Kuwait. And then a senior analyst came up to me and said, look, you have a unique opportunity here. He said, it's not unusual for the countries we cover to go to war. But it is unusual for the countries we cover to go to war with us. So you really have to make something out of this. And I worked as hard as I could and became the go-to guy on Iraq.

[09:06] It was a very good piece of information or piece of advice. I'm interested in your GW prep. Did you consider taking or studying Arabic at that time or any of the languages related to the Middle East? I did. I had a problem though in that it wasn't, Arabic wasn't offered at GW. GW at the time didn't have a strong language component to their regional studies programs. In fact, I had a lot of trouble even finding a class on Islam to take.

[09:39] They were more focused on oil, oil security, the history of relations of the region, things like that, the politics of North Africa, for example. So I went out and found courses on Islam to take. Some of them were at the grad level. Some were called experimental classes where they hired the former Shah of Iran's chief of staff to come from Philadelphia. He was teaching at Temple and he would come once a week and teach a class. So I applied for those and was accepted for those.

[10:11] And then even courses on religion, for example, I had to go out and find them. The New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, these Islamic theology courses, I really had to go out and look for them. Yeah, interesting. And on the language business. Now, you had spoken some Greek at home. Right. I spoke some Greek at home. So you knew that you could handle languages. I kind of had a facility for languages. I actually had a little bit of trouble when I got to the university level with Greek because we had spoken Greek at home.

[10:41] Of course. But then when I went to study it formally at school, I was told that I spoke Greek at in 1930 era slang, which was, of course, what my grandparents had taught my parents and my parents passed on to me. Me never having been to Greece and not realizing I was speaking in 50, 60-year-old slang. So I had to relearn Greek from the very beginning. And then at the agency, they offered me Arabic and I jumped at the chance. Well, that's the thing that interests me. So you clearly had a good ear.

[11:12] Now what about the issue in terms of incentives? In other words, the agency offered you an opportunity to study Arabic. Was there any encouragement in terms of a stipend because that's a lot of work? It was a lot of work. Could you earn a little bit extra salary if you really poured on the coal and learned it well? You could. And it was a nice incentive. It was something like a five-year incentive at $3,000 a year to the best of my recollection.

[11:43] I wanted to do well just because I wanted to do well and I always had it in the back of my mind that I should have really sought out Arabic in college and I didn't. I took the easier way out. That was a mistake. Well, you know, not to make you take the pressure off you because I know you believe that in good conscience, but I found in college teaching, combining a hard language like that with a full program of other substantive studies, it is hard. It is really difficult.

[12:14] At the end of my Arabic training at the agency, I told my Arabic teacher, I feel like you owe me a master's degree because I never worked this hard in graduate school. It's interesting. And then once you had acquired the language, that opened up additional possibilities for your career. It did. I ended up transferring temporarily to the State Department. There was a unique program that was offered in the Director of Intelligence at the time that allowed CIA analysts to do a two-year rotation to the State Department just to get

[12:46] an idea of what it's like to work in the policy community. So I did that and I became an economic officer at the American Embassy in Bahrain for two years. And I have to say they were two of the most enjoyable years of my career. I really loved living and working in the field, doing real policy work, accompanying the ambassador to meetings with high-level leaders. It was really the right thing to do. And was that an accompanied tour for you and your family? It was.

[13:16] And my wife really went kicking and screaming. And it was funny because the deal that I made with her was I said, just give it six weeks and if you're truly unhappy at the end of six weeks, I'll send you home and you can wait for me there. So we got there and as soon as we arrived, she saw the enormous house they put us in. State of the art shopping malls, wonderful four-star restaurants, and then we very quickly made friends. And at the end of my two years, she asked me about the possibility of extending for

[13:50] a third. At the time it was just a two-year tour, so I wasn't allowed to extend, but I would have in a heartbeat. But that developed in you the taste for overseas service? I had the travel bug by then, and I really wanted to serve overseas again. But again, at the time, an analyst was only really allowed to do two years in that analyst overseas program. You had to be much more senior in your career to go overseas on a permanent basis again. So it was going to be many years before I had the opportunity. But was that when you started to get a little itchy feet and started looking

[14:23] for possibilities to get involved with the operational end? Oh, it was indeed. By the time I decided to switch over to operations, I had been working almost exclusively on Iraq for seven and a half years. And early on in my career, I told myself, just sit tight on Iraq until Saddam Hussein is overthrown, and then you can move on and do something different. I thought maybe the peace process or something interesting. But by 1997, it was clear Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere.

[14:55] And I had ants in my pants to travel again. And a job opened up that would have allowed me to go to Athens, Greece with real regularity to spend a great deal of time there. And it was in counter-terrorism. But I didn't have any operational experience whatsoever. So I went down to the CIA's counter-terrorist center, and I talked with the senior officer who was in charge of hiring for the position. And I told him I don't have any operational experience at all, but I speak both Greek and Arabic, and his mouth dropped open.

[15:26] And he said, are you willing to be tested? And I said, sure, I just tested recently in Arabic, but I'll test again if you want. What turned out his secretary was born and raised on the same island that my grandparents came from in Greece. So she came out of the office and began asking me questions in Greek, to which I responded in Greek. And she turned and she says, he gets the thumbs up from me. So my Arabic scores were current, and he told me it's going to take some convincing on my part to get the higher-ups to believe that we should put an analyst in this operational

[16:02] position. But he said it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than to take an operations person and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. At the time, did that comment give you cause for thought? It's an interesting point, because the languages are tough. And I thought, do I really understand what I'm getting into here? I think I do. But then when I went back to my office to tell my boss that I decided to go forward with this application, he said, you know, this is going to be a complete life change.

[16:36] There's no turning back here. Once you make this decision, this is it. And I said, I know what I'm getting into. I didn't, in retrospect. But I'm glad I made the decision. But the point is that for people contemplating a career like this, this represents, as you say, a life-changing experience. It really is. And you've just articulated the fact that your wife had reservations about going to the hell holes of the world. Right. Not that Greece was. I didn't mean that. But once you turn your compass in that direction, you know, not every assignment's

[17:08] going to be Athens. That's right. It's funny, too, because she told me at the time the only place that she would want to go would be Athens. If I could get Athens, I would go to Athens. If I could get Athens, great. And then I thought, well, I'll do a good job in Athens. Maybe I can go to another European country. Or I loved the Middle East. Maybe I can go to one of the really great Middle Eastern countries. Not thinking I'm going to end up in Baghdad or Kabul or Islamabad at some point in the future. It just never entered my mind.

[17:39] And I thought, well, I'll just take it one day at a time and see where this leads me. So I applied and got the job. That's terrific. Well, tell us a little bit about that, that first job over there. I really didn't know what to expect. I should have. I should have at least had an idea, because here I was going out as the representative of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. So I would be working on counterterrorism issues. About which would you have said we in the agency knew a lot, a little, not as much as we would like to?

[18:12] I think we knew a lot on the issues that I was going to cover. I went to cover Greek terrorism, which believe it or not, before September 11th, the U.S. government spent more money on security in Athens than it did in any other capital city in the world, including Beirut. People really didn't have an appreciation at the time for how dangerous Athens was for Americans, official Americans. And why was that? Because you go into that in your book and it's fascinating. There were two groups at the time who were killing Americans.

[18:43] One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November, which was named after a day in 1973 when the military dictatorship used tanks to crush a peaceful student rally. And the other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. Popular Revolutionary Struggle, or ELA, it was called as its Greek acronym, mostly targeted Greek policemen and Greek government officials. They also went after U.S. military personnel. Usually low-level people, they would blow up buses or put bombs in cars on the side of the road, things like that.

[19:18] But 17 November was much, much more lethal. They would do close-in handgun assassinations for the most part. They did use some rockets and some bombs as well. As you point out, they had been responsible for the assassination of a very much-beloved and capable CIA station chief. Yes, Richard Welch was assassinated in 1975 on the 23rd of December. And the CIA promised Mrs. Welch that we would bring his killers to justice.

[19:49] Believe me when I say that all of us in the 17 November unit at headquarters really took that very seriously and very personally. And we dedicated our lives to cracking this group and bringing these guys to justice. To the point where we even admitted to each other that we were obsessed with 17 November. I was proud to go to Greece and work against this group. Now it wasn't just 17 November. Practically every Arab terrorist group in the world was represented in Athens as well.

[20:19] Palestinians, Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, well Iranians obviously aren't Arabs, but every bad guy seemed to have had some sort of presence in Athens. And so it kept us very busy from my very first day as a matter of fact. So you were really getting in on the ground floor before the balloon went up on 9-11. You were getting a real exposure to big time kind of terrorist activity. I was and in retrospect it really prepared me well for the post-September 11th world.

[20:55] I had great teachers in Athens too. We had an absolutely fantastic group of people working in and out of Athens, at least working on Greek issues. And I learned a great deal from those men. Well take us into this run up to 9-11 and then to some of the responsibilities you acquired after that. When I returned from Athens I went to work again on Greek issues. There used to be a group that was focused solely on 17 November within the DCI's counter-terrorist center.

[21:32] So on the morning of September 11th I was supposed to go to the White House with Kofor Black, another legendary officer who at the time was the director of the counter-terrorist center, CTC. Kofor and I were supposed to go to the White House to speak with Condi Rice about a Greek issue. And I was walking over to his office to tell him that the car was ready to take us downtown. And as I passed his secretary's desk I noticed that she had her TV on and that one of the World Trade Center towers was burning.

[22:02] And I said, oh, what happened to the World Trade Center? And she said, an airplane flew into it and me not realizing what in the world was happening, I said, oh you know that happened once before in the 1930s an airplane hit the Empire State Building. And it was very foggy that day. And I said, it's funny, it's so clear today. How could the pilot not see that he's flying into the World Trade Center? And just after I said that, the second plane flew into tower one. And it was such a surreal thing that neither she nor I reacted to it.

[22:34] And then finally she turned and said, did you see that? And I immediately ran back to my office. And I said, guys, I think we're under attack, two planes just flew into the World Trade Center. Everybody ran to the front office where Cofer's office was located. By then we had turned on TVs everywhere. And after a few minutes, many more than a hundred people had gathered. And we're standing there in silence. Finally the third plane hits the Pentagon. And somebody behind me shouted, will somebody please lead?

[23:05] I thought that was a terrific part of the book. And if you read a lot of the collateral accounts of what were people in different positions in and around Washington, much the same story could be told that people were just stunned. Things were happening at such a rapid clip that we'd all been told that this was a possibility. But here it was in real time. And we didn't quite know immediately what to do.

[23:35] I go into this in the book too, and I think this is important. I got my first inkling that something was happening. Because as I said, again, I was working on Greek terrorism, and I wasn't at all focused on Al Qaeda. But on July the 6th, 2001, I was leading a group of Arab intelligence officers in the building. We do this all the time. It's good for relations. You do a meet and greet with a director or with a senior officer. You take them to the gift shop and get them some CIA souvenirs. You do a couple of briefings. It's good for relations.

[24:05] And on this day I had asked that Kofor come just to shake their hands and thank them for coming. And he was very generous in that way. But that morning he came and he actually sat down, which was a surprise to me. And he told them in no uncertain terms. He said something terrible is going to happen. We don't know where, we don't know when. But it's going to be an attack on a scale that we've never seen before. He said the mood in the camps is one of jubilation. We're seeing camp commanders talking to their students and crying on the phone and saying,

[24:41] I'll see you in paradise. We're picking up code words about a massive wedding or a massive soccer match. And these are all code words for an attack. So he leans forward and he says, I beg you, if you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us disrupt this attack. Well, it was a stunning briefing, chilling. And at the end of the day I went back to his office to thank him for taking the time. And I said, Kofor, I have to ask you, was that for their benefit or were you serious?

[25:11] And he said, oh, I was very serious. He said, Dick Clark and I, Dick Clark was at the National Security Council. Dick Clark and I have been shouting this from the rooftops. And no one will pay attention to us. But something terrible is going to happen. And then sure enough, two months later, there was September 11th. And that comes out in Dick Clark's book. It comes out in the 9-11 commission report as they were assessing the tidbits that were coming in. George Tenet with his hair on fire, remember that analogy?

[25:43] Knowing something was going to happen, but not having the time, date, place kind of thing. Hardest part of information to get. It really is. And I think also that people inside the agency had convinced themselves that the attack wouldn't be inside the United States. I think that we believed at the time they didn't have the wherewithal to attack us here domestically. So then you became everybody rallying round after the event to figure out what does one have to do to stop the possibility of a follow-on attack?

[26:24] Right. Like everybody else in the building, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. Of course, they were only taking people with special forces experience at the time. And I had come from the analytic side. I didn't have a lot of counter-terrorist experience, but I had Arabic. And I thought at least I could go serve as a translator. So I volunteered over and over and over again. Finally, after a couple of months had passed, I went to the deputy director of CTC who was a friend of mine from the director of intelligence.

[26:54] And I made a completely empty threat. And I told him, if you don't send me over there, I'm going straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I'm never looking back. And he said, fine, all right, all right, we'll send you somewhere. Just give me a day. So the next day he called and he said, can you go to Pakistan as the chief of counter-terrorism operations there? And I said, done. Big job. And it's funny, I didn't realize how big it was at the time. No. But I just wanted to go. I just wanted to serve and do something.

[27:24] So the next day I left. That makes the point that you make often in the book that the culture of the agency is let's do it. Let's do it. This isn't unique to me. Everybody in the CIA was like this. We all wanted to do something. We all wanted to serve. We all wanted to go over there and contribute in any way that we could. Well, John, this is a, I think we're coming towards a moment where we have a little bit of a break. But let's get into, in greater depth, what you found when you took up that assignment.

[27:55] Terrific. Look forward to it. Afterwards, and several other C-SPAN programs are available for download as podcasts. More with John Kiriakou and Frederick Hitz in a moment. Every weekend, C-SPAN 2's book TV features 48 hours of nonfiction books. This weekend on afterwards, John Kiriakou is the reluctant spy.

[28:25] The former CIA officer talks about life in the agency before and after 9-11. He's interviewed by former CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz. Find the entire weekend schedule at booktv.org. Afterwards with John Kiriakou and Frederick Hitz continues. John, you have a very interesting account of the takedown of the Taliban embassy in Peshawar in Pakistan.

[28:58] Talk a little bit about that because that will be, you know, it was news to me. There would be such a thing that you could call it an embassy. It's funny because embassies are almost always in capital cities. This embassy happened to be in Peshawar, which is a town or a city in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan. We had operational reason to go there every once in a while to see what was going on. It's kind of a wild west type of border city and very dangerous.

[29:30] I happened to be with a colleague from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by the name of Detective Tommy McHale. Tommy was on loan at the time to the FBI. I admired him greatly. He is a true American hero, an unsung hero. He was a victim in the first World Trade Center attack. It damaged his lungs and he never fully recovered from that attack. Then his best friend was killed in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.

[30:03] Tommy had his best friend's handcuffs and whenever we would do raid or capture an al-Qaeda fighter, he would cuff him with his best friend's cuffs and say that this was for his friend. It was very emotional and it really made an impact on me. I thought it was very important. We were in Peshawar together and we happened to drive by the Taliban embassy, which was still functioning. This is in March or April of 2002, so it's well after the Taliban government had fallen in Afghanistan.

[30:34] It didn't make any sense to us. As we were driving by, he pointed it out to me and he said, you know what we should do? We should break in there one night and just steal everything they have. I laughed and I said, yeah, that would be funny. Then we looked at each other and I said, you know what? That's exactly what we should do. We went back to Islamabad and Tommy pitched it to his FBI bosses and they gave the go ahead. He requisitioned two vans from the embassy motor pool and assembled a team of people.

[31:10] We drove up to Peshawar, waited until about two o'clock in the morning, broke the cheap lock off the front door and went in and just started taking absolutely everything in the building. Computers, files, cell phones, weapons, money, anything. Anything that wasn't bolted down to the floor, we jammed it into these two vans and drove back to Islamabad. Well, because September 11th was an open criminal investigation, of course the FBI had the lead here. So Tommy, not emailed, but cabled the FBI saying, we did it, no problems, everybody's accounted for,

[31:47] got everything, we're going to start going through it. They said, congratulations, please advise if you find anything interesting. Well four or five days later, he came up to my office and he said, you're never going to believe what I found. It was a file folder with telephone bills in it and the telephone bills were written in English. They were Pakistani issued telephone bills and they documented 168 calls made from the Taliban embassy to numbers inside the United States.

[32:18] And I mean all over the United States, Bethesda, Maryland, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Kansas City, all over the country. And those calls stopped abruptly on September the 10th, 2001 and then started up again slowly on September the 16th. So you had a live one? A live one. This is the best lead that we had during the time that I was in Pakistan. Well he was very, very excited about this. This was a very serious catch.

[32:51] And so he cabled the FBI and said, be advised, this is what we found. We're pouching the originals back. They said, good catch, please make sure the originals come to such and such an office. And we were so busy I kind of put it out of my mind. So went back to the agency several months later, stayed in touch with Tommy, and I asked him whatever happened to those phone numbers at one point. He said nothing that I know of. I know that we sent them back to FBI headquarters.

[33:23] I know that they received them, but I haven't heard any follow-up. Then a couple of years later I left the agency and I spoke to him again in 2005 and I asked him whatever happened to those numbers, were the traces ever done? And he said, you know, the FBI never traced those numbers. They said initially that they didn't have the Pashto translators necessary to dedicate to the job. And I said, but the bills were in English. They didn't need to be translated from Pashto.

[33:54] That was the reason why we knew what they were. And he said, well, all I know is what the FBI is talking about. They were to parties in the United States. Now in a worst case scenario, this is terrorists living among us. Quite. Or terrorists. Which we, it was clear that, and the bureau remember warned us about that. Indeed. After 9-11. They did. They could have sleeper cells. Sleeper cells. Attorney General Ashcroft at the time was very clear about the possibility of sleeper cells in the United States. And Al-Qaeda's leadership had alluded to the fact that there were sleeper cells in the United States.

[34:28] Well, 2007 finally comes. And I asked him once again, whatever happened to those numbers and the FBI traces? He said that to the best of his knowledge, nothing was ever done with them. And then finally I ran into an FBI, a former FBI colleague with whom I had served in Islamabad. And he said that the phone bills were put into a box and sent into an FBI storage facility in suburban Maryland. The box had never been opened and nobody had ever traced those calls.

[35:00] So for all we know, here we are eight years later, those people are still living in the United States. And remember when we went into that complex NSA operation in the beginning of the George W. Bush administration we were trying to get just that information. Who was Al-Qaeda calling in the United States and why? That's right. And there it was in black and white. And you never did anything with it. Well, one of the really most exciting parts of your book is your capture of Zubeida, this high-ranking Al-Qaeda official.

[35:35] Can you take us through that a little bit? Sure. In February of 2002 we got word from headquarters that Abu Zubedah was somewhere in Pakistan. And that's all they said. He's somewhere in Pakistan. Did you know him by that name at the time? Did you know what he was? We did. We thought at the time that he was the number three ranking person in Al-Qaeda. That turned out to not exactly be true because at the time we didn't realize that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in Al-Qaeda or that he had pledged fidelity to Osama bin Laden. So, Abu Zubedah was probably a little lower ranking, fourth or fifth, but still within the leadership.

[36:11] We knew that he was the commander of the larger of Al-Qaeda's two main training camps in Afghanistan. We knew that he was a logistics whiz. And by that I mean other Al-Qaeda fighters described him as the hub of the wheel from which all the spokes go out. He knew everybody. He was the middleman. And he knew bin Laden. We suspected at the time that he may have had something to do with the September 11 attacks. I think in the end he wasn't directly involved.

[36:41] But he certainly was aware of Al-Qaeda's operations and he knew that the attacks were coming. So, we started looking for him. Finally, we heard that he was either in Faisalabad or in a nearby major Pakistani city. Tell us how you describe Faisalabad. It wasn't New York City. Faisalabad was one of the most horrible places I've ever been in my life. And I've been in some terrible places around the world. I never felt so far away from home in my life as I did in Faisalabad.

[37:13] It's a city of seven million people living on top of one another. Most of the roads are just hard-packed dirt. Most of the buildings are made out of mud or concrete block. Open sewers running through the streets. I tell a story in the book that when a colleague of mine or a case officer now retired and I went to Faisalabad the first time just to scope the place out, maybe look for a safe house. We were overwhelmed by the poverty and by the stench.

[37:47] And we realized this is going to be tough. We had nowhere to eat. And finally in the middle of all this garbage and sewage and poverty there's a brand new McDonald's sitting right in the middle of it. So at least we had a big Mac anyway to tide us over until we got back to the office. But we realized early on this was going to be a lot tougher than we had anticipated. And frankly I didn't have any experience in specifically targeting a high-level al-Qaeda person.

[38:20] So we knew early on that he was moving between Faisalabad. Well, it didn't sound like many other people. No, I think not. This is pretty unique operation you were involved in. Right, for all of us. We knew he was moving and I thought, well, I've got a great idea, I said, which turned out to be a terrible idea. There's a toll road between Faisalabad and this other city. We can put CIA officers in the toll booths. We had a four-year-old passport photo of him.

[38:50] And when he comes through the toll booth we grab it. We grab it? Well, that's a terrible idea. 60,000 people a day passed through that junction. So we came up with a couple of ideas that were equally bad. And finally I went to the senior CIA officer in the country at the time. And I said, really, I think what we need is a targeting analyst. I knew of a targeting analyst back home in headquarters at CTC, a fantastic officer, really great at what he did. And I said he can help us sort through these thousands of pages of bits of information.

[39:26] That's what a targeting analyst does. He just tries to narrow down the possibilities. Right. A targeting analyst is somebody who really has a mind for detail but uses that expertise to assist in operations rather than writing intelligence for policymakers. He's a relatively new discipline, new post-September 11th. So he arrived in Islam about a couple of days later and started by taking a large piece of paper about the size of a small U.S. billboard.

[39:57] And he put it up on the wall and he wrote Abu Zubedah in the middle of it with a circle around it. And then around Abu Zubedah he began writing down every scrap of information we could collect, whether it was a phone number or an email address or a physical address, whatever we could find that we could tie to Abu Zubedah, we put it around Abu Zubedah's name and put lines to Abu Zubedah. And then around those, on the tertiary level, he did the same thing. So there were lines connecting the tertiary with the secondary, the secondary with the primary.

[40:31] And at the end of the week, it was really quite pretty, like a work of art. It was like a spiderweb. And finally he came to me and he said, I have a problem. He said, I can't get this down to any fewer than 14 sites. I just can't make it any smaller. He could be in any one of these 14 sites. Well, we had never done more than two counter-terrorist raids in a single night before. And with our... And that was the object of the game. To rate down to a certain number where you think there's a good chance

[41:04] he's going to be in one of these. And then you've got to hit them all at the same time. That's right. And hope that he's in one. Now, he may be in a completely different location. In which case, can we then collect the information from somebody we captured in one of the 14? Do we start back at square one? Is he going to be spooked and then he goes deeper underground? We just had no idea. So I told the senior officer, we're going to need a bigger team.

[41:35] Yeah, 14. 14 was a lot. We decided to split it between the CIA and the FBI. We brought in the Pakistani military. They helped us greatly. And we chartered a plane and brought in this team with millions of dollars in cash, with weapons and equipment and night vision goggles and secure communications. You name it, we shipped it in. And an Arab-American case officer and I, a wonderful heroic guy, I wish I could say his name.

[42:10] I call him Amir in the book. Amir and I went down to Faisalabad to rent a safe house. We did the same thing in this other nearby major city that I'm not permitted to name. And we got things started. In the meantime, the team flew directly in. And we set up in a large hotel temporarily until we could get our new safe house in order. And we started taking a closer look at these 14 sites. So what we decided to do was go out the day before the night of the raids

[42:46] and look at every one of the sites just to make sure we're not driving into an ambush. We're not being set up. We're not making a mistake, which is equally important. And I get into that in the book as well. We did make one mistake that night. And most of these places were very small one or two room huts, made of mud or made of concrete block, corrugated tin roofs. There wasn't much to them. While we're driving around Faisalabad, the targeting officer called me and said, we just got a call from a friendly intelligence service here in town.

[43:19] They say that they have a walk-in. And a walk-in is somebody who just comes in off the street and volunteers information. So you never know if the information is correct or not. But you have to treat everything as though it's true and important, just in case. You have to look into everything. Well, the walk-in said that there was a large group of Arabs inside a large, distinctly painted house. And so we're driving around that day. And sure enough, there's a large, brightly colored house.

[43:52] And I said to our Pakistani escort, What's going on there? And he said, I can tell you right now something bad is going on in there because it was at least 100 degrees outside that day and all the shutters were closed. And it had to have been broiling inside that house. We made a note to put an extra large team on that site. Well, finally, we're headed to the last site. And the targeting analyst called back and said, Abu Zabeda just made a critical error.

[44:24] He said he just accessed the internet from a landline. Well, that was a critical error. So with the landline, we had a phone number. And with the phone number, presumably we could get an address. So I said to the Pakistanis, Can you tell us where this is located? Oh, yes, they gave us an address. Well, the address was the final site on our list. And Amir and I looked at each other and I remember just smiling and he said, We got him. Well, we got to the site and much to our surprise, it was just an empty field.

[44:59] So I said to the Pakistani, how could this possibly be? We're certain that the site is a good site. And he said, no, this is normal in Pakistan. What they do is whenever you have a plot of land, there's a telephone number assigned to that plot of land. And it just, it's in anticipation of somebody building a structure on the land and then you have your telephone. So what happens is people will climb up the telephone pole, they'll splice the wire and steal the telephone line, run it to their house.

[45:31] So when they make a call, the bill goes to the owner of the land, not to the person who makes a call. He calls a young technical officer from his service. The young man arrives and climbs the telephone pole. He goes through this Medusa's head of wires up there. Finally, he finds a wire, he follows it down the pole and he's literally following it hand over hand down an alley. And he says, it's that house right there. Well, then we knew. Then you had it.

[46:01] We had it. That's great. We had the sun to go down. We split up our teams and finally we got everybody together actually before we split up and got into buses. And I stood on a coffee table and I said, guys, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but we're going to have to synchronize our watches. And everybody chuckled. And I said, seriously, we're going to have to synchronize our watches because here's the plan. 0130, everybody heads out in the buses. 0145, you leave the safe houses in cars and go to the site.

[46:32] 0155, eyes on the site. And then right at 0200, I said, not a second before or a second after, we break the door down. Once you get inside, separate women and children from the men, cuff the men, and then start going through everything. FBI has the lead. They take pictures of everything. They process the evidence. We do the debriefings and then we can take it from there. Well, John, it was a big deal, but I want to push you a little bit now because we're just getting to the meaty stuff.

[47:03] In point of fact, you did get it. We did. And he was in pretty bad shape when you got him because he'd been shot. Shot three times, yes. So take it from there because I think we're moving towards this issue of, you know, what has become a sensational case of how do we get information from this individual? Right, he had been shot three times in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach with an AK-47 while trying to jump from the roof of his safe house to the roof of the neighboring house and to escape, the Pakistani military shot him.

[47:34] There were some extraordinary events that took place, that resulted in his life being saved. Extraordinary care by Pakistani surgeons is what I mean. I'll skip ahead to the point where he finally, we had to evacuate him to a military base nearby. And my orders were very specific. Very specific from Director Tenant, conveyed through Islamabad, 24-7 CIA eyes on is what Director Tenant said, which meant I had to tear up a sheet,

[48:05] tie him to the bed, because I didn't know if the doctor's going to help him break out or the nurses, I didn't know, any of these people, tied him to the bed and I just sat there and waited for him to wake up. So finally, about a day later he came to, I go into detail in the book about our first two conversations, if you can call them conversations. In the second of the two he asked me to smother him with a pillow. But later on, when he finally started getting his bearings, I told him, look, I'm the nicest guy

[48:36] you're going to encounter in this experience. So I'm going to tell you, you have to cooperate. The rest of your life can be very difficult or it can be very easy. It's up to you and you have to cooperate. Now, I didn't have any idea what the agency planned for him. Frankly, at the time, the agency didn't have any idea what to do with him, because we had never found ourselves in a position like this before, where we had captured a high-ranking al-Qaeda member. So that policy was being debated at headquarters as we were sitting there having this conversation.

[49:08] He wasn't really interested in cooperating. He wanted to talk about Islam versus Christianity. He wanted to recite poetry. He would cry because he would never know the joy of fatherhood. He would never know the happiness of marriage. And he was very concerned about what was going to happen to him. I didn't want it to sound like it was all going to be flowers and tea at his next destination. But again, I didn't know what was going to happen. And I urged him repeatedly, every time we talked,

[49:39] you have to cooperate, you have to cooperate. Finally, a few days later... But you reached a conclusion, which I thought was terrific. You put it in the book about the value of a direct conversation like this. That's what you said, an earnest, direct conversation is better than blasting him with a baseball bat or all the other coercive stuff. Oh, I believe that strongly. Because in the very limited time that he and I had, we actually did carry on conversations.

[50:09] Now, of course, I wasn't going to get the crown jewels of Al-Qaeda's operational plans from him in those first few days. But I believed then... You were developing rapport. Exactly right. And I still believe that today, that if you have the luxury of time, you can develop a rapport to the point where that person is going to tell you things that he otherwise wouldn't have. And you make the good point of the luxury of time. So, at this point, were you fairly certain

[50:39] that he was going to survive? Was he...? No. I wasn't, actually. The doctor told me that he had never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived. Oh, boy. And Abu Zubaydah was bleeding profusely. I mean, it was pulling under the bed. It soaked him and the sheets. It was all over us every time we tried to move him. He was bleeding profusely. And they could barely get the blood into him fast enough and it would just seep right out. So, Director Tennant asked the agency's executive director,

[51:12] Buzzy Kroengard at the time, who was on the board of directors of Johns Hopkins University to find a Johns Hopkins trauma surgeon who could go out and sort of take charge of Abu Zubaydah's recovery. And that's exactly what happened. This doctor came on an agency plane a couple of days later. We loaded Abu Zubaydah onto the plane. I told him again, you have to cooperate. He was afraid, despite the fact he had asked me to kill him in that initial conversation, he was afraid that's exactly what was going to happen

[51:43] to the point where he was crying. And I said, no, no. I said, nobody's going to do anything to you. You're going to get the best medical care in the world. You're going to recover. You're going to get past this, but you have to cooperate. And that was the last thing I said to him. I loaded him onto the plane, and then I never saw him again. Right. But you came to understand that his life was saved. It was indeed. He did survive. Yes, it took about six weeks. And then the questioning started in earnest.

[52:14] Yes. And you formed a view about that. I did. When I got back to headquarters, I was asked by a senior officer if I wanted to be what he called certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. And he explained to me what that meant. Because, as you were saying, I hate to interrupt, but as you said, nobody really knew what the regime of questioning was going to turn out to be because we'd never captured a high-value person like this. That's right. So they were trying to decide what they were going to do,

[52:45] and then they decided. It was an ongoing process. Right. And enhanced interrogation was going to be the order of the day. So, excuse me, back to you. You were asking about yourself. Right. And he told me what this meant. And I had some serious doubts about it. So I sought the counsel of a very senior CIA officer who I had great respect for. And he said something that sticks in my mind to this day. He said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade. He said, it's torture. They can call it enhanced interrogation techniques

[53:16] or whatever else they want, but it's torture. Second, this is a slippery slope. Something's going to go wrong. Somebody's going to do something that's illegal and somebody's going to get hurt. Third, it's going to leak, either to Congress or to the press, equally bad. And there's going to be a congressional investigation and then a grand jury's going to be called. And somebody's going to go to prison. He said, do you want to be involved in that? And I said, absolutely not. So I went back and I said, thanks for thinking of me, but I'm going to decline.

[53:46] And another officer that I knew went through the same thing and he also declined. So I kind of settled back into my next position, but I kept an eye open for what was happening to him. I was very interested in this person who you had captured and basically saved. That's right. And I wanted to know what was happening. And I was hoping that he was cooperative. But it was clear from the beginning when he first recovered that he wasn't going to cooperate. And so they began using these harsh interrogation techniques

[54:19] on him. Which had been, as we now know, taken to the office of legal counsel and had been approved at that level and sent back to the agency for execution. But there were aspects of this that were troublesome to you, even so. There were not every enhanced interrogation technique as torture. For example, if I grab you by the lapels and say, answer my questions, that's not torture in my mind if I just grab your lapels. But things like waterboarding.

[54:50] I think everybody's familiar with waterboarding now. Or even this notion of a cold cell, where a cell is chilled to 50 degrees, the prisoner's stripped naked or near naked, and he has cold water thrown on him. Or sleep deprivation. I know myself 24 hours and I start to not be right. And I can't imagine going five, seven, nine days without sleep. I think that's torture. I think it's wrong.

[55:20] And then you came to understand that even with your initial conclusion about what waterboarding was, it wasn't just once that it was done to Zubeda. I've come to a conclusion on this. I told ABC News in December of 2007 that Abu Zubeda was waterboarded one time and he gave actionable intelligence that disrupted a terrorist attack. I based that on the cable traffic that I was reading that was coming back from Abu Zubeda's secret site.

[55:51] But the CIA Inspector General released a report, or the CIA released the Inspector General's report last year in April, in which the Inspector General, John Helgerson, concludes that the agency had been waterboarding Abu Zubeda before it had written authority to do so. They were waterboarding him in anticipation of receiving this written authority. And I think that not every waterboarding session was being reported. In fact, I think they just consolidated it into the one cable that I saw and said he was waterboarded.

[56:22] Here's what he said. It's actionable. Now, Director Hayden said in congressional testimony a year ago or so, two years ago, that the information was actionable and it did result in the disruption of an attack. But then you have to ask yourself two questions. Number one, was it right morally? I say in the book I think it was not right. But number two, did it work? If you have to waterboard somebody 83 times, which we now know is what happened

[56:52] before he gives you the information, I think again it doesn't work. If that report had been developed, I think he probably would have given at least enough information to allow us to act on it. A couple of weeks ago, the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA, Mike Sulick, gave a speech at a university in Indiana in which he said that in retrospect, the information we got from Abu Zubaydah,

[57:22] we could have gotten from other sources or we could have gotten just through normal interrogation techniques. He said in the end he concludes that it did not save American lives. And so on a cost-benefit basis. It wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it because of what it did. Well, we haven't got a lot of time but I think let's take this narrative through your succeeding jobs and what you came to conclude that caused you to leave the agency.

[57:54] Right, I was blessed with a fantastic onward assignment once I finished in Pakistan. I went to work as the Executive Assistant to one of the Associate Deputy Directors. Not really realizing at the time that he was named Associate Deputy Director in order to coordinate the agency's participation in the planning for the Iraq War. So on my first day in that job, I was read into a compartment that was shocking to me. Once I signed my secrecy agreement, the officer who read me and said,

[58:25] here's the deal, next March, and this was in August of 2002, next March we're going to invade Iraq, we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and we're going to open the world's largest air force base so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia into Iraq and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques, which is what he calls Saudi Arabia. And I was so stunned, all I could think to say was but we haven't caught bin Laden yet. And anticipating that response,

[58:56] he said it's a done deal, the decision's been made, we're going to invade Iraq. Well it turned out the Associate Deputy Director with whom I was working told me that he had been informed in March of 2002, a full year before we went into Iraq that this decision had been made. The senior officer went on to tell me that we were going to go to the United Nations by the end of the year, and that we wanted an international coalition. We knew that the Chinese, the Russians and probably the French would oppose us

[59:26] and that we were prepared to go it alone. So we were going to wait until the spring and do it in March. And that became my job for the next year was working with the agency to come up with its response. And as you point out that just meant that we were taking our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and the whole effort to find Osama and we were opening up another can of worms. I thought at the time it was a terrible mistake and I'll say one other thing. Inside the agency as word began to get around

[59:56] as we got closer to the March date and Vice President Cheney began talking publicly about some sort of connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda we began calling it the big lie at the agency. Because all of us knew there was no connection between Saddam Hussein. None whatsoever. Well John, you've written a terrific book here. Thank you. We've got a little bit of time.

[1:00:26] Is there anything you want to say as sort of a concluding set of observations? I'd like to say that my goal in writing this book was to show the American people that they have a lot to be proud of at the CIA. You have a group of people that only want to serve the country and I think that some of the agency's success stories need to be told. I think the American people want to know that the agency is succeeding. I think they have a right to please

[1:00:56] that I was able to get this cleared by the CIA and that the story is out there. I hope people enjoy it. I think it's a terrific book John. Thanks for talking about it with me today. Thanks for having me.
