[00:00] I I need to hear a little bit about, you know, your personal story. I mean, in addition to you being being extremely knowledgeable and also plugged in with DC and having the angle of CIA, which we really didn't even dive into all that stuff, definitely have to have you back. I mean, you saw some really pivotal parts of of of American history where you were on the lines, you were in Pakistan, you saw that torture program. You mentioned that Cheney was in that room there and then I guess you saw kind of the things that went into place.
[00:31] Maybe I start there. What was Cheney like then when you were in when you were in Pakistan kind of what happened and then how did that lead to you being in prison? Because that's that's a serious thing to happen to someone. Uh, the first question is the easiest one. Cheney was a mean, cold, sociopathic son of a Uh, nothing at all like George W. Bush. Bush was warm and friendly. Not terribly bright, but the nicest guy in the world. I
[01:02] remember going to a briefing at the White House and the guy that I went with was was very portly and um and he had a he had a kind of a handlebar mustache and and the president made a a joke about the mustache and he said, "I see you've got I forget exactly what he said. I see you've got a a so and so thing going." and he he alluded to some entertainer and my friend said, "Uh,
[01:34] actually, I think I've got a I've got a uh William Howard Taft thing going." I had to think about the president because he was so fat. You know, these stories that William Howard Taft got stuck in a bathtub and it took six men to pull them out. It's probably not true, but this is the story in history. And W laughed to the point where like I thought like water was going to squirt out of his nose or something. And Cheney just stood there like a statue. Uh Cheney was a
[02:04] liar, uh a manipulator. When he wasn't getting the intelligence that he wanted from the CIA, he just had the defense department create its own intelligence through Ahmed Chelvi and the Iraqi National Congress. They just made it up. The CIA said repeatedly that there were no weapons of mass destruction. and Cheney insisted that no, there were and the CIA just hadn't found them. So, the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Talib said there were, so we're going to war for that. Um, Cheney Cheney, you know, I
[02:34] can't believe Cheney is still alive, too, with all the health problems that he's had. But he was just one of the most despicable figures I've ever encountered in in government. Now, after 911, literally everybody at CIA headquarters volunteered to go to Afghanistan and fight. And my Arabic was absolutely perfect at the time, fluent. I was very proud of my Arabic language skills. And uh I volunteered repeatedly to go and they just wouldn't send me. And I was enraged.
[03:05] And uh it turned out that they wouldn't send me because I only found out accidentally. I ran into a buddy of mine who was this legendary figure, Billy Wah. Billy was a contractor, but he had won something like 13 or 14 Purple Hearts uh over the course of three wars. And um and there was this period about six weeks that I I just didn't see him. He just vanished. And I ran into him in the hall and I said, "Hey, Billy, where you been?" And he whispers, "I've been in Afghanistan." I said, "Yeah, what are you doing in Afghanistan?"
[03:35] And he looks at me like I'm crazy. And he says, "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?" And it dawned on me that that's why they haven't sent me to Afghanistan. They don't need linguists. They're not like debriefing anybody. They're just killing them. So I went into the office of the deputy director for counterterrorism who was an old buddy of mine and I said, "Listen, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking straight to Exxon and I am not looking back." And he's like, "All right, take
[04:08] it easy. Can you go to Pakistan?" I said, "Yes." when? He said, "Tomorrow." I said, "Yes." "What do you want me to do?" He said, "I want you to be chief of counterterrorism operations." I said, "Done. Let me just go home and pack." And he said, "Okay." So, I called my girlfriend who later became my wife. She she was also a senior CIA officer. I said, "I got to go to Pakistan." She said, "When? Tomorrow." She goes, "Okay, I I'll help you pack." She met me at my apartment and the next morning I went to Pakistan and all hell
[04:39] broke loose. What do you mean by all hell broke loose? >> Oh, I came up with this idea. I'm very proud to say we we had officers like individual officers all the way up and down the the US Pakistan border. And I said, you know, this is so this is so inefficient for us to have all these people just out in the wilderness on the top of these mountains hoping that some al-Qaeda guy is going to be coming up the path, you know, and he he grabs
[05:10] them. I said, "Let's pull everybody off the border, bring them into Pakistan, let the bad guys come into Pakistan. They'll end up in some safe house someplace." And you know they're going to make a mistake. They always make a mistake and then we grab them. So that's what we did. We pulled everybody off the border. Of course, thousands, hundreds, whatever it was, of al-Qaeda fighters come into the country. They all go in these safe houses and what do they do? They immediately get on their cell phone
[05:42] and we're like, "Thank you. Thank you, NSA, for the tip." 2 o'clock in the morning, we bust down the door and we just grab we grabbed more people than we knew what to do with. It was hundreds and hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters. And we got to the point very quickly where the the Pakistani brigadier general that I was working with most closely said to me one night, "Listen, we filled the jail there. There's no more room, not for one more guy. You got to do something with these guys." So I called
[06:13] headquarters and I said the packs are telling me that the jail's full. We we were putting them in Raul Pindi jail because it was centrally located just outside of uh of Islamabad. And I said the jail is full. We got to get rid of these guys. What do you want me to do with them? And they said um put them on a C12 and send them to Guantanamo. And I said Guantanamo, Cuba. And they said yeah. I said, "Why in the world would we send him to Cuba?" And
[06:44] they said, 'Well, we came up with this idea. We send him to Cuba until we can decide which federal district district to try them in. Either either Boston, New York, Washington, or uh Eastern District of Virginia, and then we divide them up and send them to the districts for trial. I said, "Oh, that's a great idea." Okay. So, we had like a fleet of C12s that would just come in, land, we load these guys on in handcuffs, and
[07:14] then they take off and they would all go to Guantanamo. And as it turned out, you know, as they were arriving and populating Guantanamo, which got up to over 700 people at one point, Dick Cheney said, "You know what? Let's not send them to those federal districts." And that's how Guantanamo became Guantanamo. But the way I made a real name for myself at the agency in addition to just blind luck in some of these raids um was the capture of Abu Zuba who was the
[07:45] number three we believed at the time was the number three in in al-Qaeda. He wasn't the number three but he was a very bad man and um he was the very first high-V value target that that we were able to locate and find. uh we had killed Muhammad Atiff who had been the the director of military affairs for al-Qaeda. We we were able to drone him to death in in Tora Bora. But but uh Abu Za was the first one we took alive and um and catching him that night literally
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