Abu Zubaydah’s diary was a notebook captured in the raid on the safe house where Abu Zubaydah was taken, and which sat on the nightstand beside his hospital bed while John Kiriakou guarded him.[1]
At the bedside
Kiriakou describes leafing through it while the two men talked. He told Abu Zubaydah he had a gift for drawing and that his work was quite incredible, and Abu Zubaydah directed him to the poetry he had written there. Kiriakou read the poetry aloud.[1]
He attaches a cultural observation to the exchange: that Arabs, and Persians for that matter, are very proud of their poets across the centuries, and that poetry is regarded as honourable in the Middle East.[1]
The diary also contained ordinary domestic advice addressed to family members — instructions not to whistle at people, to be nice to brothers and sisters who looked up to them. Kiriakou’s reading was that Abu Zubaydah was writing about regrets he had in his life.[2] In a later account he describes the same passages as letters written to himself as a young man, warning himself — “treat our mother with respect, don’t whistle at that girl in the village” — and calls their author an accomplished artist and the document “a fascinating, fascinating document.”[3]
The three Saudi princes’ numbers
Alongside the poetry and the drawings the notebook held the private cell-phone numbers of three Saudi princes — the discovery that turned a personal document into an intelligence one, and the starting point of Kiriakou’s belief that the Saudi government was involved in September 11. He cabled headquarters to say he was looking at what appeared to be a diary and that it carried the three men’s personal numbers; the consequences of that report are set out at Saudi princes and 9/11.[3][4]
The dispute
Kiriakou says the CIA and the FBI ended up having very deep disagreements about the diary.[2]
One FBI psychologist called it the rantings of a crazy person. Kiriakou recalls saying the opposite: that Abu Zubaydah was very intelligent and that there was nothing crazy about him at all, and that what the diary showed was creativity — possibly things that he and his colleagues would never commit to paper themselves.[2][5]
His specific objection to the psychiatric assessment is procedural. The psychologist who reached that conclusion had never met Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou says he was basing it on his own biases, frankly, and on what he saw in the diary.[5]
Context
The conversations that surrounded the diary are the ones Kiriakou describes as talking like two men. He says the two had a lot in common and that he told Abu Zubaydah afterwards that in a different life they might have been friends.[6]
They also talked about their families. Abu Zubaydah cried often, saying he would never know the touch of a woman or the joy of fatherhood — a complaint that made Kiriakou angry. He told him he was not the victim: there had been 50,000 people in those towers, and asked what he thought would happen. Abu Zubaydah’s answer was that he had never wanted to attack the United States, that he had wanted to attack Israel, and specifically that all he had ever wanted to do was kill Jews.[5][7]
Kiriakou’s assessment of the diary is bound up with his later correction of the record about the man himself, set out at the two Abu Zubaydahs.[8]