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Faisalabad

The Pakistani textile city of some seven or eight million people where Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002 — concrete, mud and corrugated tin in John Kiriakou's description, with a brand-new glass-and-steel McDonald's standing in the middle of it.

Faisalabad is the Pakistani city where Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002. John Kiriakou’s first reaction on being told the target was moving between Lahore and Faisalabad was that he had never heard of the place; as it turned out, he says, it is a city of seven million people, and Lahore of twelve.[1][2]

The city he found

Arriving at night to scout it, Kiriakou describes it as grim. Most of the buildings were made of concrete block or mud, some with thatched roofs and some with corrugated tin; everybody was poor. The industry is textiles — the manufacture of clothing, much of it exported to the United States — and pretty much everybody works in it.[3] That single economic fact later supplied the cover story for the Lahore safe house, when a colleague told the estate agent they were textile barons and the agent concluded they must own the factories outside town.[4]

The McDonald’s

Against the squalor, on the horizon at midnight, stood a brand-new glass-and-steel McDonald’s — and Kiriakou, hungry and unwilling to risk local food, went to it. The exchange that followed has become one of his set pieces: he wanted a quarter pounder with cheese and was steered again and again toward the Big Mac, until his exasperated colleague told him to just eat the Big Mac and the counter staff admitted they had no quarter pounders at all. The Big Macs, he says, tasted like manna from heaven.[5][6][7]

Getting there

The road from Lahore is a toll motorway that simply stops halfway, turning from a six-lane American-style highway into a dirt track in the middle of nowhere, where tea sellers pitch tents at the transition and travellers stop for tea.[8] Kiriakou made the trip many times over six weeks — once, following a new handheld GPS unit down the dirt track, in entirely the wrong direction, until the device announced approaching international border and Indian border guards came out to look at them.[9][10] The city’s own layout offered no help: it had, like the rest of the country, no maps, no street signs and no addresses.[11]

In the compressed version Kiriakou gives when there is no time for the geography, the city is simply the place the operation ended: “In 2002 we captured Abu Zubaydah at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan” — in March of that year, and on a premise about his seniority in al-Qaeda that turned out to be wrong.[12]

See also

References

  1. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  2. ↑ Julian Dorey Podcast, 2024-11-13 — 1:28:03 on YouTube · Transcript
  3. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  4. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  5. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  6. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  7. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  8. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  9. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  10. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  11. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-23 · Transcript
  12. ↑ Global Times (环球时报), 2023-05-30 — 00:41 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.

Categories: Places