The toll booth plan was the first scheme John Kiriakou proposed for capturing Abu Zubaydah — the man the operation called Mr. Fish — after signals reporting placed him moving back and forth between Lahore and Faisalabad, with occasional trips to Peshawar and Karachi.[1][2]
The reasoning was personal. As a college student Kiriakou had spent a summer as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike — a job he says a crooked state senator got him — and so he knew how toll machines work.[3][4] A toll road connected Faisalabad and Lahore. The proposal was to put CIA officers dressed as Pakistanis in the booths as collectors, and grab the target when he came through one of them.[5]
Kiriakou’s own verdict is unsparing: “that was a terrible idea.” Fifty thousand cars a day went through those lanes, and all the Americans had was a four-year-old passport photograph — they did not really know what he looked like on any contemporary basis. He also could not stop picturing Sonny Corleone stopped at a toll booth and machine-gunned through the window.[6] Telling the story elsewhere he lists it among “a couple of terrible ideas” he came up with, and reports the flat response he got: no, not going to work, we’re not going to do that.[7][8]
The underlying problem the plan was trying to solve was scale, and Kiriakou states it in the same breath: Lahore has twelve million people and Faisalabad eight, and being told the target is in one of them is no better than being told a man is in New York, “go get him.”[9][2] What replaced it was a targeting analyst with a sheet of butcher paper, and then thirteen simultaneous raids.