Pakistan Station (2002) refers to John Kiriakou’s posting to Islamabad in January 2002 as CIA chief of counterterrorism operations, under station chief Bob Grenier, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the U.S. bombing of Tora Bora.
Arrival
After repeatedly volunteering to fight in Afghanistan and being passed over for lack of paramilitary experience, Kiriakou was told in March 2002 that he would instead go to Pakistan as chief of counterterrorism operations — “tomorrow.”[1][2] The morning he left, his boss shook his hand and told him “kill them all”; Kiriakou says his actual job was to capture al-Qaeda operatives, not kill them, and he privately resolved to disregard the order.[3] He flew from Washington via London and Kuwait to Islamabad, arriving at 4 a.m. in January 2002; his luggage was lost in transit and did not arrive with him.[4][5]
On his driver’s advice — and against the station’s plan to put him up there for six months — he refused to stay at the Islamabad Marriott, certain it was al-Qaeda’s most obvious bombing target; he moved instead to a 16-room guest house owned by a Pakistani family. Six weeks later the Marriott was truck-bombed, killing 156 people, in a blast so large the crater filled with water seeping up from the water table.[6][7][8]
The old U.S. Embassy compound in Islamabad, where Kiriakou was posted starting around March or April 2002, sprawled across roughly 25 acres and was effectively a self-contained town, with apartment buildings, a nightclub, and a cafeteria that doubled on weekends as a nightclub with a Filipino cover band.[9] During the 2002 India-Pakistan nuclear war scare, Kiriakou recalls the cafeteria — which normally sat 300 to 400 people — nearly empty, most embassy staff having been evacuated and only CIA officers and a handful of FBI agents remaining.[10]
Under surveillance
Kiriakou noticed a motorcyclist in a red helmet — a rarity in Pakistan — repeatedly appearing near him over two days, trying to stay in his blind spot, and concluded he was under surveillance based on the multiple sightings at different times and places.[11] He told a Pakistani general contact he was certain he was being watched and threatened to kill the surveillant if he saw him again; the general denied any involvement, and the surveillance stopped.[12] He later learned Pakistani intelligence had assigned him low-priority surveillance simply to test whether his friendliness was a ruse — reasoning, as one officer put it, that “nobody’s that nice.”[13] During active overseas operations like this one, Kiriakou says he was routinely armed with two weapons, one in a tear-away fanny pack and one on his ankle — a precaution he dropped only in the comparatively safe environment of his later posting to Bahrain.[14]
A skeleton crew of retirees
Kiriakou’s counterterrorism branch in Islamabad consisted of himself and seven CIA retirees — senior former officers, including one former deputy director of the CIA for operations, who had volunteered to return to the agency as contractors after 9/11; one of them had been chief of the Bay of Pigs operation.[15][16]
Setting up the raid teams
On his first day on the job, despite being an analyst rather than a seasoned operations officer, Kiriakou was tasked by the station with writing the standard operating procedure for raiding terrorist safe houses from scratch. He drafted a 2 a.m. timeline and spent about $50,000 of CIA funds — ordered from galls.com, a police-supply house in Kentucky, on his CIA credit card — on guns, ammunition, battering rams, bulletproof vests, and night-vision goggles, delivered a week later via diplomatic pouch.[17][18][19] He set up joint raid teams with equal numbers of CIA, FBI, and Pakistani ISI officers.[20]
First raid
Acting on a tip about an al-Qaeda safe house in Islamabad, Kiriakou’s first raid — conducted at 2 a.m. with a small FBI contingent — captured two crying 18-year-old Tunisian al-Qaeda recruits who had fled Tora Bora and were squatting, with no plan, in a vacant house; one asked to call his mother.[21][22][23]
A week later, acting on a tip from a Pakistan-based Arab intelligence brigadier general, Kiriakou’s team raided a second location and captured a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad — the group responsible for assassinating Anwar Sadat in 1981, which merged with al-Qaeda around 1995.[24][25]
Pakistani liaison
Kiriakou liaised daily with three Pakistani intelligence contacts during raid operations: Colonel Tarek, Major Khaled, and Major General Muhammad.[26]
Pulling officers off the border
Kiriakou proposed pulling CIA officers off the dangerous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they had been catching al-Qaeda fighters one at a time as they crossed and having little success, and instead letting fighters cross uncaught into Pakistan — betting that once gathered at safe houses they would expose themselves via cell phone or email (in practice, logging into Gmail accounts that revealed their physical location), allowing the CIA to capture them “20 at a time” rather than one at a time. The plan led directly into the operation that captured Abu Zubaydah.[27][28][29]
Recruiting “Salm”
Building trust with mid-level al-Qaeda members who met daily at a Pakistani coffee shop, Kiriakou spent weeks posing as a regular, silently reading an Arabic-language newspaper to signal he could read Arabic. He eventually recruited an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter he calls “Salm,” who had been fighting in Pakistan for five years and was homesick for his wife and children, by drawing him into a conversation about his family before revealing he was a CIA officer.[30][31] Salm told him he had already suspected Kiriakou was American, since his Arabic carried an accent beyond what his Lebanese-trained teachers could account for. Asked later why he had agreed to cooperate, Salm said it was because Kiriakou was the first person in five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan who had ever asked about his family.[32][33]
Aftermath
Kiriakou says that after only about seven or eight months in Pakistan he had saved enough to buy a house on return, and had gained 30 pounds from the food.[34][35] He returned from Pakistan in the middle of 2002 and, on the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, was promoted to executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations.[36] He calls the Pakistan posting, by far, the highlight of his career.[37]
Kiriakou says a senior Pakistani military officer told him recently that command and control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has since been placed under the oversight of an American general — reassuring India and reducing the risk of a repeat of the 2002 nuclear confrontation. He considers the greater remaining proliferation risk to be loose nuclear material from former Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan going missing, with no certainty whether it ends up with al-Qaeda, ISIS, or elsewhere.[38][39]