Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. John Kiriakou was the CIA officer present at the March 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan — and identifies Abu Zubaydah’s subsequent disclosure to FBI interrogator Ali Soufan as the moment the U.S. learned KSM’s true identity.[1][2]
”Mukhtar” → KSM
Per Kiriakou, the CIA had been tracking a high-value al-Qaeda operative under the kunya Mukhtar since at least 1996, when Filipino police entering an apartment in Manila uncovered plans and photographs for what became known as the Bojinka plot — a plan to hijack as many as 14 747s out of Manila Airport and fly them into 14 buildings up and down the U.S. west coast. “We knew he was al-Qaeda, we knew his kunya was Mukhtar, and we knew that he was serious dangerous. We had no idea who he was.”[3][4]
Six years later, in Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah at the black site: “Abu Zubaydah actually laughed and said, ‘You don’t know who Mukhtar is?’ And Ali said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘He’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.’ We had never heard that name before.”[4] As of mid-2002, before that disclosure, the CIA had still not captured KSM and believed — based on the little Zubaydah had given up — that al-Qaeda’s number-three leader, a post previously held by Muhammad Atef until his October 2001 death in a U.S. bombing of Tora Bora, had likely been filled by Zubaydah himself. That belief later proved false: Zubaydah had never even joined al-Qaeda.[5][6]
The Bojinka plot itself was uncovered almost by accident: in 1996 a Manila cleaning lady, let into KSM’s apartment while he was out for lunch, found bomb-making plans and maps spread across the dining table, recognized it as a terrorist operation, and alerted Manila police, who called Philippine intelligence, who in turn alerted the CIA — a chain of calls Kiriakou describes as each successive agency saying “this looks like a terrorist attack” until it reached Langley.[7][8] Muhtar fled when he returned and saw the authorities present, escaping capture at the time; Kiriakou says Abu Zubaydah later found it hilarious that his interrogators had no idea who Mukhtar really was.[7][9]
Background and stated radicalization
Per Kiriakou’s relay of the CIA name-traces that followed: “They see that he was educated in North Carolina and he lived with an American family as an exchange student.” On KSM’s self-stated radicalization: “He said later that what radicalized him was news video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian woman, and he just decided then, ‘I’m going to kill every Jew I can and every American who supports the Jews.’”[2][10]
Identification via Abu Zubaydah, and the capture
The CIA knew KSM only by the alias Mukhtar prior to Abu Zubaydah’s cooperation with FBI agent Ali Soufan. According to John Kiriakou, when Soufan asked Abu Zubaydah about Mukhtar, Abu Zubaydah laughed and responded: “You don’t know who Mukhtar is? It’s Khaled Shik Muhammad.”[11] Kiriakou described this as the first time the CIA had ever encountered the name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and says it was one of the two most important pieces of information Abu Zubaydah gave the FBI.[12] Once they had the name, they were able to target him. Approximately one year later, he was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.[13] Per a book by two Los Angeles Times journalists that Kiriakou cites, it was ultimately a Saudi human source — not a signals intercept and not a foreign intelligence service — that led the CIA to KSM’s location; Kiriakou notes he had by then moved on to work on Iraq and was not personally involved in that phase.[14] In a separate telling, Kiriakou says CIA colleagues located a single source with specific detail on KSM’s whereabouts and schedule and broke down the door in the middle of the night to seize him, sending him to a secret prison. The famous disheveled photo released to the public — dazed, hair askew — was staged: KSM had stood defiantly for the camera after being cuffed, and the head of Alex Station (the CIA’s bin Laden unit), an old friend of Kiriakou’s, had an officer punch him in the stomach and tousle his hair before the picture was released.[15]
KSM had previously been responsible for planning the Bojinka plot, the 1996 Manila-based plot to hijack fourteen 747s and crash them into buildings along the West Coast of the United States. Kiriakou described him as “the bona fide number three in al-Qaeda and the head of al-Qaeda operations” — and, separately, as “the earthly incarnation of Satan,” a paradox given that KSM had been an Americanized exchange student at a North Carolina state university before self-radicalizing in Pakistan.[16][17]
Waterboarding count and false confession
Kiriakou has cited differing figures for how many times KSM was waterboarded: most often 187 times,[18][19] but elsewhere 147 times.[20][21] He says the still-uncertain toll, combined with other torture “worse than waterboarding,” has left KSM largely not in his right mind — a man who remains alive and awaiting a military tribunal at Guantanamo, periodically leaking contradictory statements through his attorneys about wanting to plead guilty, then recanting.[22][20]
Among the confessions KSM produced under waterboarding was a claim that he had personally beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl. Kiriakou cited this as a textbook example of learned helplessness producing false intelligence: KSM’s arm hair, visible in the execution video, does not match the arm hair of the man who actually beheaded Pearl. Kiriakou’s summary of KSM’s implied logic: “My arm’s that hairy.” The confession was false, and waterboarding generated it.[23] Kiriakou says the CIA knew with 100 percent certainty that KSM had not killed Pearl — Pakistani authorities had already caught and obtained a confession from the actual killer — but KSM, covered in body hair like “a gorilla,” kept insisting the hairy arm wielding the meat cleaver in the beheading video was his own, just to get interrogators to stop torturing him.[24][25]
Kiriakou consistently frames this as the single most important piece of intelligence Abu Zubaydah gave up — that the CIA first learned the name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from him during Soufan’s rapport-based interrogation, having previously known only of a dangerous planner using the nom de guerre “Mukhtar.”[26][27][28] Unlike Abu Zubaydah — who Kiriakou says had never actually joined al-Qaeda — Kiriakou describes KSM as a true believer in Osama bin Laden as a religious leader, despite bin Laden having no religious credentials, and as bin Laden’s expert planner.[27]
Kiriakou notes that even after his capture, KSM’s interrogators found he gave up almost nothing beyond the command structure of al-Qaeda’s cells in Europe, which the CIA passed on to liaison services — a result he contrasts with the FBI’s non-coercive, rapport-based approach, which he says has produced quality intelligence for generations without waterboarding anyone.[29]
Threats against his family
Kiriakou says interrogators went beyond even the formally authorized techniques with KSM, threatening to rape his wives and kill his children — actions that were never permitted by anyone at any level, but were carried out anyway, with no one ever punished for it.[30]
Plea deal
Kiriakou says KSM and his co-defendants agreed to plead guilty to 2,974 counts of murder and material support for terrorism — one count for each victim of the September 11 attacks — in exchange for life without parole, reasoning that no conviction could otherwise be secured given that the evidence against them had been obtained through torture. The defendants’ only special condition, per Kiriakou, was that they not be transferred to the federal supermax prison ADX Florence in Colorado and instead remain at Guantanamo.[31] Citing reporting by journalist Carol Rosenberg — whom Kiriakou calls the only reporter who really covers the issue — he says KSM, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri might all take guilty pleas on the same basis, asking only to remain at Guantanamo rather than be sent to Florence.[32] Any such deal would take the death penalty off the table in exchange for guilty pleas to the full 9/11 conspiracy, since — in the more than two decades since the attacks — no court has ever actually levied a death sentence against the defendants, a paradox Kiriakou attributes to the government’s unwillingness to declassify the torture-derived evidence a trial would require.[33]