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 has since described the round of goodbyes that preceded it as being made under genuine doubt that he would return — “we didn’t know. Am I going to come home?” — and grounded the doubt in fact: two of his colleagues did not come home, or came home in a box.[4][5] 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.[6][7]
A later telling puts the branch at six retirees rather than seven — the count is unresolved between his own accounts — and sharpens the seniority: all six had served in the Senior Intelligence Service, every one had been either chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations, and one had been assistant deputy director of the CIA. They had come back after 9/11, Kiriakou says, for patriotic reasons. The inversion of rank was a rule of the contracting system rather than a judgement about him: a contractor cannot hold the chief’s billet, so all six worked for the one staff officer in the office.[8]
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.[9][10][11]
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.[12] 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.[13]
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.[14] 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.[15] 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.”[16] 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.[17]
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.[18][19]
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.[20][21][22] He set up joint raid teams with equal numbers of CIA, FBI, and Pakistani ISI officers.[23]
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.[24][25][26]
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.[27][28]
Pakistani liaison
Kiriakou liaised daily with three Pakistani intelligence contacts during raid operations: Colonel Tarek, Major Khaled, and Major General Muhammad.[29]
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.[30][31][32]
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.[33][34] 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.[35][36]
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.[37][38] 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.[39] He calls the Pakistan posting, by far, the highlight of his career.[40]
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.[41][42]
Forty-eight hours
Kiriakou describes the sequence of his arrival as an administrative one before it was an operational one. The very first thing he did was to write a standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house. He then walked it down to the FBI, which occupied a lower floor of the embassy, and coordinated with them; then over to the ISI to introduce himself — “I’m the new guy. I’m here to work with you. This is what my plan is.”[43][44]
“And within 48 hours, we received our first tip.” He went out with the Pakistanis and the FBI, put a battering ram through the door of a safe house, and took the station’s first two al-Qaeda prisoners. Both were nineteen years old. Both burst into tears. One asked whether he could call his mother, and was told no.[44][45]
From there the tempo compounded — “two raids a week, three raids a week, sometimes two in a night” — up to a single night of fourteen simultaneous raids.[45]
A 2026 telling gives the same escalation from the other end, starting at once a week and adding the mechanism that made two-in-a-night possible: “from once a week, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and sometimes two in the same night. We would have split teams.” It also supplies the second lead’s provenance, which the other accounts leave out — it came not from ISI but from “a friendly Arab intelligence officer” who telephoned a week after the first raid with an address, and it produced two members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whom Kiriakou describes as “very dangerous people” in contrast to the teenagers of the opening raid. The count he gives for the culminating night in this telling is thirteen.[46][47]
Transcription note: the auto-caption of this passage names the prisoner taken on the night of the fourteen raids as Ayman al-Zawahiri. Across the rest of the corpus Kiriakou names Abu Zubaydah in this same account, and the name is left uncorrected and uncited here per the standing rule on misheard proper nouns.
What the billboards were saying
One of the things Kiriakou reports noticing across Pakistan during his tour was a publicity campaign for the Peace and Friendship Bridge — billboards in Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar celebrating a river crossing on the very short Chinese frontier.[48]
Asked about the scale of the fuss, his regular point of contact, a general, answered “very pointedly”: the Chinese “are the only friends we have in the world who have never turned on us. And then he looked at me.” Kiriakou takes the rebuke as fair — “God knows we’ve turned on the Pakistanis over the years” — and generalises it across the region.[49][50]
The threat that got him sent
Kiriakou volunteered on the day of the attacks and repeatedly afterwards, each time stressing his Arabic, and each time was thanked and ignored. His explanation for the silence is that in the earliest weeks there was nothing for an interviewer to do: “they weren’t interviewing people. They weren’t interrogating anybody. They were killing them.”[51][52]
What broke it was what he calls an idle threat, delivered in the office of the Deputy Director for Counterterrorism, a friend: “Look, if you don’t send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not looking back.” The answer was not Afghanistan. “Can you go to Pakistan?” “Yes, when?” “Tomorrow.” The job on offer was Chief of Counterterrorism Operations, and he accepted it standing in the office, walked to the travel office to book the flight, and told his girlfriend — herself a CIA officer — that evening. Asked how long he would be gone he said he did not know: six months, twelve, he could not say. “She said, ‘Okay, I’ll meet you at your place and help you pack.’”[52][53][54]
The first two raids
The first raid ran on a standard operating procedure he had written in his first week, partnered with the FBI — 9/11 being still an open criminal investigation — and with Pakistani intelligence, “because, after all, it’s their country.” They took the door at two in the morning and found two eighteen-year-olds. “Both of them began crying. One asked if he could call his mother. It was pathetic. And it was easy.”[55]
About a week later “a friendly Arab intelligence officer passed me a slip of paper with an address on it” and identified it as an Egyptian Islamic Jihad safe house. They took that door the same night and took two members of the group. It was the arithmetic of those two successes that produced the change of method: “this is going pretty well. But we’re going to be here for 50 years if we’re going to be breaking down doors and grabbing one guy or two guys.”[56]
The alternative was to stop watching the border. Officers were posted the length of the Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier, “in every little border village, just sort of standing there with binoculars.” His proposal was to pull all of them off it: “We’ll let Al-Qaeda come into the country because you know they’re going to all go to the same handful of safe houses. You know they’re going to make a mistake, probably an electronic mistake, and then we can raid the house and catch 20, 30, 40 of them at a time.” On the night of 22 March 2002 the method produced thirteen simultaneous raids at two in the morning, and with them Abu Zubaydah, the commanders of both al-Qaeda training camps in Kandahar and Helmand, and “dozens upon dozens of low-level Al-Qaeda fighters.”[57][58][59]