Twenty-five al-Qaeda members
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Asked when he had seen the CIA turn into a paramilitary organisation, John Kiriakou answered "the day after 9/11", and then made a claim about how quickly the mission that justified the transformation was actually accomplished.

The claim

Among core al-Qaeda, the element based in Afghanistan, "they were destroyed by Christmas," he said.

The study

For the figure he points to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee study produced years before he joined that committee's staff, one which, he remarks, "probably should have been classified and wasn't." It found that by the end of 2001 there were twenty-five active al-Qaeda members still in Afghanistan. He repeats the number: "Twenty-five. It had been destroyed."

Everyone else who had made their way across the border into Pakistan, he adds, was being captured, work he was himself directing as chief of counterterrorism operations there. "So it was done."

The qualifications

Kiriakou does not overstate the claim. There was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, he notes, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Levant, al-Qaeda in North Africa, all of them al-Qaeda-inspired, but not coordinating operations. And neither bin Laden nor Zawahiri had yet been killed.

The conclusion he draws is narrow and specific: "in terms of al-Qaeda as a fighting force, it was done by Christmas of '01."

Why it matters in his account

The figure is the hinge of a longer argument. Kiriakou describes the Agency abandoning its purpose within twenty-four hours of the attacks, "There was no more focus on recruiting spies to steal secrets", in favour of destroying al-Qaeda permanently. His point in producing the number is that the destruction happened, on the government's own analysis, within months, while the institutional transformation it justified continued for decades.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Counterterrorism Center
- Pakistan Station (2002)
