The Convenient Terrorist
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The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars is the book John Kiriakou co-wrote about the prisoner whose capture he led. He has said that more than fifteen years after the capture no one had written a book-length account of the case, so he wrote one himself, published by Skyhorse in 2017 with cover blurbs from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oliver Stone.

Two custodians, half a book each

The co-author, Joe Hickman, was the Guantanamo guard who had taken custody of Abu Zubaydah from the CIA, the other end of the chain Kiriakou had begun. The book divides on that seam: Kiriakou wrote the half covering the hunt, the capture and the torture, and Hickman the half covering the detention, so that the volume is two whistleblowers' accounts of the same man rather than one author's narrative. Kiriakou describes the collaborator in a later telling simply as "a former guard from Guantanamo who actually guarded Abu Zubaydah."

The report that started it

Kiriakou dates the decision to a document rather than to a reflection. After he left the CIA, the agency's inspector general released a report that had been written in 2005 and since declassified, and it was there, he says, that the information about the case finally came out.

> "My God, we risked our lives for a lie. The whole thing was a lie. I was ready to die for my country out there. And it was all based on a lie."

The lie he means is the composite that had justified the operation: that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda, which he was not, and the reporting that had made him appear to be everywhere at once, which turned out to describe two different men of the same name. It was on reading the report, Kiriakou says, that he connected with Hickman and the two of them wrote the book.

Why it was written, and the reviews that vanished

Kiriakou's account of the book's origin is that the publisher approached him. Skyhorse came to him and asked him to write it with Joe Hickman, a former Guantanamo guard and himself a whistleblower, and the gap it filled was, in his telling, remarkable on its own: "here we are fifteen years plus after the capture of Abu Zubaydah, and nobody had written the definitive book about him." Their qualification was custodial: "I was the one who captured him. Joe was the one who guarded him at Guantanamo. We both know the man personally."

He is careful to place the book between two positions rather than at one of them. Abu Zubaydah "is a bad guy," and the defence team is wrong to present him as "just this poor guy ... the wrong guy", but equally "he's not the monster that the CIA wants people to believe that he was."

The reception surprised him. "It's been far more controversial than I thought it would be," with people from both the CIA and the FBI lining up to condemn it, and, he says, succeeding in getting two reviews killed. One was in The Daily Beast, which he shrugs off. The other mattered: Newsweek had promised the authors the cover and a three-thousand-word excerpt, due to run three weeks before the interview, and it "just kind of evaporated."

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- The two Abu Zubaydahs
- Doing Time Like a Spy
- Guantanamo Bay
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
