Osama bin Laden was the founder and leader of al-Qaeda and the central target of the manhunt that framed John Kiriakou’s counterterrorism career, from the creation of the CIA’s dedicated bin Laden unit in the 1990s through the capture of Abu Zubaydah and the eventual 2011 killing in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Family background
Kiriakou describes the bin Ladens as a highly respected old Saudi family, originally from Yemen. The father was worth billions as the country’s — and then the region’s — greatest construction magnate: airports, ports, hospitals, and hotels across Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East were built by bin Laden.[1]
Not a CIA creation — but the ideology was
Asked whether the United States created al-Qaeda, Kiriakou answers yes with a caveat: the misconception is that bin Laden was one of the Afghan mujahideen funded during the war against the Soviets. He was not — he did not arrive in Afghanistan until after the Soviets had departed. What the U.S. did create, through its obsession with communism, was the ideological movement bin Laden inherited.[2]
Enemy number one
By the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government had already named bin Laden’s al-Qaeda as the culprit — but Kiriakou notes bin Laden had been America’s enemy number one since the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania years earlier.[3] In 1996, David Cohen helped create the bin Laden issue station, code-named Alec Station after chief Michael Scheuer’s son.[4]
Before the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou says, the agency knew almost nothing of al-Qaeda’s structure: bin Laden was number one, Ayman al-Zawahiri the number two, and Mohammed Atef — killed at Tora Bora in October 2001 — the head of military affairs. It was Zubaydah who gave up the rest of the wiring diagram.[5][6][7]
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Kiriakou adds, was a true believer in bin Laden not just as a political leader but as a religious one — despite bin Laden’s lack of any religious credentials.[8]
The 9/11 target decision
In his debriefings of Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou was told that Zubaydah had wanted to attack Israel, but bin Laden insisted the attacks be carried out in the United States.[9] Kiriakou has recounted the same account from the wounded Zubaydah’s own mouth: all he had ever wanted was to kill Jews and attack Israel, but he was overruled — bin Laden had made up his mind it would be the United States on 9/11, with the idea of crashing the American economy.[10]
Kiriakou also rejects the notion that bin Laden was trying to lure America into a quagmire: he cites the account that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said al-Qaeda expected the U.S. to pack up and run — as after Beirut and Black Hawk Down — and was surprised by the invasion.[11]
”We haven’t caught bin Laden yet”
When told in August 2002 that the White House had already decided to invade Iraq, Kiriakou says he was so stunned that all he could think to say was: “But we haven’t caught bin Laden yet. Why would we overthrow Saddam Hussein when bin Laden is still running around?”[12] He notes bin Laden had said over the years that he hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated the United States — one reason the claimed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection was baseless.[13]
The official justification for the torture program leaned on bin Laden too: Kiriakou remembers George Tenet saying, in a panic, that bin Laden had promised another attack that would dwarf 9/11. Kiriakou calls that claim nonsense — al-Qaeda had been disrupted from the moment the U.S. began bombing Tora Bora.[14][15]
After capturing “the number three in al-Qaeda,” a passed-over Kiriakou asked what it took to get promoted: “Do I have to capture bin Laden? Is that how I get promoted?” The CIA’s deputy director, hearing he had been passed over for refusing the torture program, gave him a field promotion.[16]
Escape from Tora Bora
Kiriakou’s account of bin Laden’s December 2001 escape — a sympathetic military translator, a fake surrender negotiation, and bin Laden slipping into Pakistan dressed as a woman in the back of a pickup truck — is detailed at Tora Bora.
Abbottabad
Kiriakou notes the irony that bin Laden was ultimately found living in Abbottabad next to the Pakistani equivalent of West Point.[17] He was always of the opinion that the Pakistanis knew: “you have to be a mental defective to not know Osama bin Laden was there.” Everybody knew he was not in some cave in Afghanistan — all of the captured al-Qaeda leaders had been found in major cities.[18]
On the 2011 raid, Kiriakou does believe bin Laden was killed, while faulting the CIA’s over-secrecy for feeding doubts.[19] But he does not think capture was ever the plan: he believes a policy determination had been made that bin Laden would never be taken alive — that he would not talk, that anything he said would already be known from other detainees, and that the felt necessity of vengeance was overwhelming.[20]
”Not crazy”
Kiriakou objects to the reflex of calling adversaries insane — Saddam was “crazy,” Qaddafi was “crazy,” bin Laden was “crazy,” Arafat was “crazy.” He argues bin Laden was closer to an organized-crime boss: there is no evidence he was crazy at all.[21]
The senator who burned the phone intercept
Asked whether modern technology would have caught bin Laden faster had 9/11 happened today, Kiriakou’s answer for bin Laden specifically is no — because the intercept that existed was destroyed by a US senator on television.[22]
The agency was on bin Laden’s cell phone before the attacks. On the night of 9/11, Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, went on CNN and said: “We’re on his phone, so we’re going to find him and we’re going to kill him.”[23]
Kiriakou’s account of the consequence is one sentence: “And then he never used the phone again — thanks to Orrin Hatch.” Bin Laden got rid of all cell phones at, or immediately after, 9/11.[23][24]
For everyone else, he says, better technology would have mattered enormously. “We were like chickens without heads looking for Abu Zubaydah.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was caught with no technology at all — “it was all human intelligence” — but most of the others “made a tech mistake. They made a phone call, they checked their Gmail account.” With today’s tools, his assessment is that “we would have destroyed al-Qaeda as an organization much more quickly, and we probably would have done it with drones rather than with CIA officers.”[24][25]
’Bin Laden light’
Kiriakou uses bin Laden as the measure against which he judges the rehabilitation of al-Julani: a man who was a member of al-Qaeda, a co-founder of ISIS and had allegedly taken up arms against the United States — “everything about this guy shouts Osama bin Laden light” — and who was nonetheless installed in Damascus and fêted in Washington within months.[26]
On the origins of the organization itself, Kiriakou attributes the founding to bin Laden and places it after the anti-Soviet war, noting that the fighters of that campaign fought as mujahideen rather than as al-Qaeda.[27]