Tora Bora is a mountainous cave complex in eastern Afghanistan that served as an al-Qaeda redoubt after the September 11 attacks. John Kiriakou, who was chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan at the time, describes it as central to the post-9/11 hunt for al-Qaeda’s leadership.
The killing of Mohammed Atef
Per Kiriakou, the CIA killed Mohammed Atef — the head of what al-Qaeda called military affairs — at Tora Bora in October 2001. Atef was one of the named senior figures the agency was hunting alongside Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah, and the man then known only by the alias Mukhtar, later identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.[1][2]
First raid: two Tunisians with no plan
Kiriakou arrived in Pakistan in January 2002 as the CIA was bombing Tora Bora, where the entire al-Qaeda leadership had fled after 9/11; the agency set up posts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border expecting fighters to try crossing, though the terrain was so hostile that local Pashtuns were more likely to shoot CIA officers than help them.[3][4] His very first raid, launched on a tip about an al-Qaeda safe house in Islamabad, captured two 19-year-old Tunisians who had escaped from Tora Bora and simply broken into a vacant house to squat, with no further plan. One asked to call his mother to tell her he had been caught; Kiriakou refused.[5]
Kiriakou has elsewhere described his six-month Pakistan posting as shaped directly by the bombing at Tora Bora: the U.S. bombing campaign was so relentless that virtually all of al-Qaeda fled across the mountains into Pakistan, landing in his territory.[6] He has said the last time the CIA had a significant on-the-ground presence in Afghanistan was in the six weeks after 9/11, when about a dozen officers helicoptered in, linked up with the Northern Alliance — which supplied horses — and, carrying secure communications equipment and millions of dollars in cash, set out for Kabul to overthrow the Taliban and find bin Laden.[7] In March 2002 his team conducted a 13-site simultaneous raid that captured Abu Zubaydah along with the commanders of the Derunta and Kandahar training camps and dozens of other al-Qaeda figures.[8]
The escape route
In his first-ever interrogation, Kiriakou asked a Jordanian al-Qaeda detainee to trace his escape route from Tora Bora; the man supplied detail so precise — a village, a man with a Toyota, a night in a barn — that Kiriakou, already familiar with the “rat lines” out of the area, judged him to be telling the truth.[9]
The cruise-missile survivor
Kiriakou recounts an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter — later recruited in a Pakistan coffee shop and referred to elsewhere by the alias Mahmud — who had been hiding in a cave at Tora Bora when the United States fired a cruise missile directly into it. The man was one of only two people who came out alive. He described the explosion as the most “hideous” sound he had ever heard, and said that when he emerged his ears were bleeding. The man’s longing for the family he had left behind in Cairo — a son he had never met — was the operational vulnerability through which Kiriakou recruited him.[10][11][12]
Bin Laden’s escape
Per Kiriakou, in October 2001 the CIA believed it had Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership cornered at Tora Bora amid extensive bombing. What the U.S. did not know was that the translator for the commander of Central Command was an al-Qaeda operative who had infiltrated the U.S. military.[13][14]
Bin Laden, communicating through that translator, asked for a pause: “Can you just give us until dawn? We want to evacuate the women and children.” The translator convinced General Tommy Franks to grant the request.[15][14] Kiriakou has given the same account elsewhere: a U.S. military translator sympathetic to al-Qaeda — a double agent trusted by Central Command — went up the mountain, falsely reported that bin Laden had agreed to surrender, and bought time for him to slip away.[16]
Under cover of darkness, “bin Laden dressed as a woman and he escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan.” When the sun came up at dawn, there was no one at Tora Bora to surrender — they had all escaped, forcing the U.S. to move the fight into Pakistan proper.[15][17][18][16]
Kiriakou dismisses the theory that U.S. officials deliberately let bin Laden escape Tora Bora to prolong the war on terror, arguing policymakers do not need a “trigger” to invade a country or increase defense spending — if the U.S. wanted to triple defense spending, he says, it would simply do so.[19]
An Air Force special operations officer who ran air traffic control at Tora Bora later wrote an account, which Kiriakou has cited, stating that a friendly-fire incident elsewhere in Afghanistan led the Air Force to halt all air attacks across the country for a period — except at Tora Bora, where the operation against bin Laden and Zawahiri continued.[20] Kiriakou says it is widely agreed among the CIA, Delta Force, and others who were present that bin Laden got away from Tora Bora on December 17, and that air attacks there were called off around December 8th, only about a week after the fighting began.[21][22] He says he and other CIA officers vocally and actively opposed the decision to call off the pursuit of al-Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan that December, arguing that the Taliban — however wrong-headed and misguided — was not itself actively trying to kill Americans.[23] Kiriakou says Bob Woodward’s reporting shows that CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice initially favored focusing narrowly on al-Qaeda, but were overruled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted a bigger war so the public would not conclude, once “the bad guys” were killed, that the war was over.[24]