# The two ISIs

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The two ISIs," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-two-isis/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*Asked how much cooperation he got from Pakistan's intelligence service after 9/11, John Kiriakou answered that the honest answer was two answers: the counterterrorism officers he worked with had all been trained in America and Britain, while the men who gave him the stink eye in the corridors of ISI headquarters were the ones who had created the Taliban.*

- **The ISI he worked with:** Counterterrorism officers trained in the US and UK
- **The other ISI:** Long beards, short shalwar kameez, hostile
- **Attributed to the second group:** Creating the Taliban; training and arming Kashmiri separatists
- **Told to:** Bo Dietl, 23 December 2019

Kiriakou was the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks, and had very light cover there because he was declared to the Pakistani intelligence service.[1] Asked whether he got a lot of cooperation from the ISI, he called it a great question and gave a two-part answer.

## The short answer

The short answer, he said, was yes. But the ISI people he was dealing with were specifically the counterterrorism people, and they were all educated and trained in the United States and the United Kingdom.[2]

## The corridors

The qualification came from walking through the building. When he went over to ISI headquarters, he said, you would see a lot of people with long bushy beards and short shalwar kameez, giving you the stink eye.[2]

Those, in his account, were the men who created the Taliban. They were the men who trained and armed the Kashmiri separatists.[3]

Hence the formulation he settled on: *"in my mind, there were two separate ISIs."* There was the group of good guys working with the Americans, and the group of bad guys working against them.[3]

## Why the distinction matters

The division is not incidental to the operational picture Kiriakou has described elsewhere. His work in Pakistan depended on Pakistani manpower — the raids that produced his best-known capture were run with the Punjab Elite Force, the SWAT team from Lahore — and on liaison with an ISI he could not audit. A service he describes as containing both his partners and the founders of the organisation he was hunting is a service in which every request for support carries a distribution risk.

Kiriakou did not claim to have resolved which faction dominated. He described what he could see: that the counterterrorism directorate cooperated, that it had been trained by the countries it was cooperating with, and that other parts of the same building were visibly hostile to him.

## See also

- [The Punjab Elite Force](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/punjab-elite-force)
- [The Taliban](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/taliban)
- [Abu Zubaydah](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/abu-zubaydah)
- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)

## Sources

1. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 12:17. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=737s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/
2. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 14:24. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=864s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/
3. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 14:54. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=894s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-two-isis/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt