Tommy McHale was a longtime, highly decorated detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — not, as often assumed, an FBI agent — who worked as one of the prominent terrorist hunters in Islamabad, Pakistan alongside John Kiriakou after September 11, 2001. The two became close allies immediately.[1][2]
The 1993 bombing and 9/11
McHale survived the 1993 World Trade Center bombing with lasting lung damage. He was in the towers again on September 11, 2001, when his best friend died. At the friend’s funeral, the widow gave McHale her husband’s handcuffs and told him to go to Pakistan and “catch these bastards.” McHale used those handcuffs on every arrest he made afterward.[1][3]
Working with Kiriakou
Because of his arthritis and the lung damage from 1993, McHale and Kiriakou developed a routine for deciding who would kick in the door during raids. McHale advised Kiriakou against using his shoulder — “you’ll break your shoulder if you do that” — and instead to “use your foot, but really put your leg into it hard.”[4] The pair also carried out the Taliban embassy raid in Peshawar together, emptying the last functioning Taliban embassy in the world of computers, phones, and files.
Daniel Pearl
Kiriakou recounts that McHale, on loan to the U.S. embassy, tried to talk journalist Daniel Pearl out of meeting the source who would murder him, but Pearl went to the meeting anyway; he was later found beheaded, with his head and body discovered in different parts of the city.[5]
The check-in, in Kiriakou’s telling
In a 2025 account Kiriakou gives the meeting in more detail and places himself in the room. McHale, whom he describes as “a Port Authority of New York, New Jersey detective on loan to the FBI in Islamabad” and with whom he had hit it off, telephoned him at the embassy: “there’s a Wall Street Journal reporter down here, Daniel Pearl. He wants to check in because he’s going to go to a meeting later that’s a high threat meeting.” McHale was already downstairs when Kiriakou came down.[6][7]
Both men tried to stop him. When Pearl named the group he was going to meet, “I remember looking at Tommy and saying, ‘That is a very bad idea.’” Pearl’s answer was that six months of contact had gone into securing it, and he went.[7][8]