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Alfreda Bikowsky

Senior CIA officer who headed Alec Station and, before that, served as its chief of operations, overseeing the CIA's torture program; per John Kiriakou, "bad news from the get-go," and part of a failed attempt with Rich Blee to turn a San Diego al-Qaeda cell into double agents.

Alfreda Bikowsky is a senior Central Intelligence Agency officer who headed Alec Station, the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, and before that served as its chief of operations, overseeing the agency’s torture program. John Kiriakou describes her as “bad news from the get-go.”[1]

The San Diego cell

Kiriakou says Bikowsky and Rich Blee tried to turn the San Diego al-Qaeda cell into double agents but failed, and “dropped the ball.”[2]

The clique of five

Kiriakou describes a group of five women in the Counterterrorism Center around whom the detention programme was built, and says Jennifer Matthews was the only one of them he did not hate; the others he calls bloodthirsty monsters.[3][4] Asked directly whether the officer he calls the red-headed devil had been trained in the torture techniques, his answer was that she had not merely been trained in them — she was the programme’s founder and creator.[5]

At the July 2001 briefing

Kiriakou places her in the room for Cofer Black’s warning to the liaison class on 6 July 2001. He had booked a junior analyst; Black arrived instead and brought with him the head of operations for the bin Laden unit — identified in the telling only as “a woman we used to call the red-headed devil”, with the aside “She’s lucky we were that nice about it, too.”[6]

See also

References

  1. Scott Horton, 2023-01-0434:39 on YouTube · Transcript
  2. Scott Horton, 2023-01-0435:11 on YouTube · Transcript
  3. The Never Broken Podcast, 2026-05-097:16 on YouTube · Transcript
  4. The Never Broken Podcast, 2026-05-097:46 on YouTube · Transcript
  5. The Never Broken Podcast, 2026-05-0929:41 on YouTube · Transcript
  6. The Jason Jones Show, 2026-07-0652:03 on YouTube · Transcript

Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.