The capture of Abu Zubaydah was a simultaneous 02:00 sweep of 13 Pakistani safe houses in Lahore and Faisalabad in March 2002. John Kiriakou was the CIA chief of counterterrorism operations on the ground; the operational design was the work of an unnamed CIA targeting analyst flown in at his request.[1][2]
The targeting
The CIA had only a handful of phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses for Abu Zubaydah. His phone discipline — battery out, on only for 15–30 seconds at a time to listen to voicemail — defeated geolocation. Per Kiriakou, the targeting analyst (a peer of Andy Bustamante’s wife) wrote Abu Zubaydah’s name in the center of a butcher-paper sheet “about the size of the table”, surrounded it with everyone in direct contact with him, then with everyone in contact with them. After a week or two of work he reported back: “I can’t pair it down to anything less than 14.”[3][2][4]
The textile-baron cover
Kiriakou cabled headquarters for 36 personnel, weapons, night-vision, secure comms, and “X millions of dollars in cash.” A chartered 737 landed 24 hours later. Headquartered out of a Lahore hotel under the eye of a sympathetic British manager — Kiriakou slipped him a couple of hundred dollars and the troublesome lobby guard was “fired” — the team needed a real safe house. The Pakistani ISI handler provided a real-estate agent. Kiriakou bought a 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom Lahore house for cash. The agent asked what they did for a living. “I looked at my friend and he goes, ‘We’re textile barons.’ And I said, ‘Yes, we are. We’re textile barons.’” A second seven-bedroom house was bought in Faisalabad for interrogations.[5][6][7][8]
The 02:00 sweep
Of the original 14 targets, one was dropped on the dry run (a payphone in a shish-kebab stand), leaving 13. At 02:00 Kiriakou and a colleague were on the roof of the Lahore safe house when they heard “this sound — dink, dink, dink — metal on metal”, then shots. Site 13, the nearest, had gone hot. A Pakistani officer opened fire with an AK-47, killing a Syrian al-Qaeda bomb-maker instantly and shooting Abu Zubaydah three times — in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach — as he leapt from one rooftop to the next.[9][10][11][12]
The identification
Identification at the scene was complicated by the fact that the available photograph was six years old. Per the targeting analyst’s instruction Kiriakou photographed Abu Zubaydah’s ear — “no two people on earth have the same ears” — and transmitted it to headquarters via a wired camera–phone connection (cell-phone cameras did not yet exist). Five minutes later headquarters confirmed: “It’s him.”[13][14][11]
Faisalabad hospital and the helicopter
Abu Zubaydah was rushed to Faisalabad Hospital — “the worst place on Earth”, per Kiriakou — where doors and windows were open, dogs roamed the corridors, and syringes were stored in a bar of Irish Spring soap. Word spread, and al-Qaeda gunmen began drive-by shootings at the hospital. Kiriakou asked Pakistani Major Khalid to fly in a helicopter; twenty minutes later it landed in the parking lot. Abu Zubaydah, mid-surgery, was loaded on; the helicopter flew him 50 miles to a Pakistani military base clinic.[15][16][17][18]
The SpongeBob shirt
Kiriakou sat at the foot of Abu Zubaydah’s bed for a full 24 hours waiting for him to come out of his coma. Exhausted, hungry, and smelling bad, he had a colleague bring him fresh clothes from the safe house. The only clean shirt available was the red SpongeBob SquarePants shirt his children had bought him for Christmas. When Abu Zubaydah finally opened his one good eye — “he doesn’t look at me, he looks at SpongeBob” — his pulse jumped from 120 to 220 in a second and the monitors went off. “Code blue, code blue.”[19][20][21][22]