Kiriakou’s job in Pakistan was to work with the Pakistani services to capture as many al-Qaeda fighters as possible, and there were, he said, a great many of them in the country.[1]
The problem
The CIA had officers posted all the way up and down the border. Kiriakou’s objection to that posture was practical: trying to catch these men one at a time in what he called the most formidable, forbidding landscape in the world was ridiculous.[2]
The proposal
He says he was the one who proposed the alternative, and describes it as one of the ideas he came up with. Rather than contest the border, let them in — let them into the country — and then take them.[2]
The arithmetic is the argument. Instead of catching one at a time on the border, he said, they would get them in their safe houses and catch ten. And, he added, that is exactly what they did.[3]
Why it worked, in his account
The second half of the reasoning is about behaviour rather than terrain. Once inside the country and off the mountains, the men relaxed and became traceable. They were all on their cell phones, Kiriakou said, and all checking their emails.[3]
That is the same vulnerability that ended the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, whom Kiriakou has said was located after he accessed his Hotmail account over a landline — an address that turned out to be one of fourteen on the target list, producing simultaneous raids on all fourteen doors at two in the morning.[4][5]
The strategy Kiriakou describes therefore trades interdiction for surveillance: it gives up the chance to stop a fighter at the frontier in exchange for the far larger yield available once he stops moving and starts communicating.