During a conversation with John Kiriakou and author Ian Trottier on the Michael Jaco show, one of the speakers raised the claim that “Al-Qaeda” is, by his understanding, also the name of a terrorist-tracking software, distinct from — but overlapping in name with — its use as the name of the terrorist organization.[1]
The claim was raised in the context of discussing the Analysis Corporation, a database created in 1990 to track terror movements following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, during the wider Mujahideen-era discussion of the conversation.[1]
Al-Qaeda’s origins, per Kiriakou
Separately from the software claim, Kiriakou has discussed the historical origins of al-Qaeda the organization. He says al-Qaeda was not deliberately created by the CIA, though the agency could be said to have “accidentally” created it as blowback from its anti-Soviet war effort in Afghanistan. He credits this dynamic to his mentor at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos — later dramatized by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War — whose single-minded focus was killing as many Russians as possible, whatever the consequences of arming the fighters who did it.[2] One tactic used to motivate Osama bin Laden and other fighters during the anti-Soviet campaign, per Kiriakou, was portraying the Soviets as anti-religious Communists.[3]
Kiriakou traces a chain of blowback from that campaign: al-Qaeda formed, and when the U.S. began killing al-Qaeda members, ISIS emerged from within an American military prison in Iraq — created, he says, because some detainees considered al-Qaeda insufficiently radical — followed later by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda in the Sahel.[4] He also recalls that a year before the Khobar Towers bombing, al-Qaeda bombed the OPM-SANG building in Riyadh — a location where he used to grocery shop — killing several Third Country Nationals, in part, he says, because the building sold pork.[5]