Mike Scheuer was the founder and chief of “Alec Station,” the CIA unit dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden in the years before September 11, 2001. Per John Kiriakou: “Bill — Mike Scheuer — yeah. Two-junior. And Alec Station was saying from the very beginning, ‘They’re going to attack us, they’re going to attack us, why is nobody paying attention, they’re going to attack us.’”[1][2]
Per Kiriakou, Scheuer and FBI New York counterterrorism chief John O’Neill were both “100 percent correct” about bin Laden — and both hated inside their own agencies for being so persistent about it.[3]
Imperial Hubris and views on 9/11
Kiriakou says he took a great deal of what Scheuer said to heart, particularly after Scheuer published his book Imperial Hubris, describing him as a hardcore anti-al-Qaeda figure whose understanding of the group he respected from very early on.[4] Asked directly whether the White House knowingly allowed 9/11 to happen, Kiriakou says Scheuer told him no — not because of any conspiracy, but because of the sheer “childishness” of the infighting among officials like George Tenet and FBI Director Louis Freeh, who in Scheuer’s assessment simply did not know enough to deliberately look away.[4] Kiriakou disputes a related claim Scheuer has made publicly — that CIA–FBI database incompatibility before 9/11 was purely the FBI’s fault. Kiriakou says the CIA and FBI institutionally hated each other going back to the CIA’s founding, and that the two agencies’ databases genuinely could not share information; integration only came after the September 11 attacks, when President Bush ordered the databases combined.[5] He also disputes Scheuer’s account of the pre-9/11 San Diego al-Qaeda cell, saying there was some internal talk of trying to recruit its members as double agents, but that the women analysts running Alex Station at the time lacked the operational expertise or field experience to have pulled it off even if the cell had been recruitable.[6]
Kiriakou’s break with Scheuer
Kiriakou says Scheuer has become “kind of a nut” since leaving the agency — increasingly conspiratorial, especially since the Obama years — though Kiriakou says he continued to respect him regardless. The point where Kiriakou says he finally walked away from Scheuer entirely was Scheuer’s marriage to Alfreda Bikowsky, the former chief of operations at Alex Station who oversaw the CIA’s torture program.[7] Kiriakou also recounts video of Scheuer testifying before Congress in which, discussing John O’Neill’s death in the World Trade Center on September 11, Scheuer said the building falling on O’Neill “was the only good thing that happened to America on 11 September” — a comment Kiriakou describes Scheuer delivering with visible, lingering anger at O’Neill even years later.[8]