Daniel Pearl
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Daniel Pearl was a Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan in early 2002. John Kiriakou, then working at the American embassy in Islamabad, says he was one of the last people to see him: "just as background, I saw Daniel Pearl the day he died."

The meeting downstairs

The introduction came through Tommy McHale, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey detective on loan to the FBI in Islamabad and a friend of Kiriakou's. "He calls me one day and he said, 'Hey, there's a Wall Street Journal reporter down here, Daniel Pearl. He wants to check in because he's going to go to a meeting later that's a high threat meeting.' I said, 'Yeah, I'll talk to him.'" The three met in the embassy lobby.

Kiriakou's first question was who the meeting was with, and the answer, "Jaish-e-Mohammed or Ansar Allah, I forget. It was one of these groups", settled the matter for him at once.

> "I remember looking at Tommy and saying, 'That is a very bad idea.' And he said, 'No, I've been working on this for 6 months. We've been dialoguing for 6 months. They finally agreed to see me.' I said, 'I don't think you appreciate just how dangerous it is here.' And he said, 'No, I'm doing it. I'm doing it.'"

The ending is given without any softening: "and then they found his head on one side of town, they found his torso on the other side of town. What did you think was going to happen?"

Two confessions

Kiriakou treats the question of who actually killed Pearl as open, and the reason is that it has been answered twice. The Pakistanis "arrested someone who confessed to being the guy to actually saw Daniel Pearl's head off" and who was sentenced to a thousand years. Afterwards, "after waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 187 times, he confessed to killing Daniel Pearl and sawing his head off."

The evidence Mohammed offered for his own claim was the video. "It was KSM who said, 'If you look at the video, you see how hairy the arm is. Look at my arm. How hairy it is.'" Kiriakou's answer is that this settles nothing: "Yeah, you have a hairy arm, but there's already a guy that's been sentenced to a thousand years in prison for confessing to the Daniel Pearl killing."

His doubt extends to the first conviction as much as the second. Asked whether the man in the video might have been al-Julani, his answer is that nobody knows, "we have no idea. We don't know if we can trust the Pakistanis. Did they just arrest this guy because he was a pain in their ass and they knew that the Americans would be happy that somebody was arrested? I think that was probably the case."

See also

- Tommy McHale
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- Waterboarding
- Al-Julani
- Pakistan Station (2002)
