The two Abu Zubaydahs is John Kiriakou’s explanation for how the intelligence picture of Abu Zubaydah came to be so much larger than the man himself.[1]
Kiriakou is direct about his own position at the time. He says he sat talking with the prisoner in the complete belief that he was the number three in al-Qaeda and an operational mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — and that this simply was not true.[2][1]
The cousin
One of two things the agency learned after the fact, he says, was that Abu Zubaydah had a first cousin who was also called Abu Zubaydah.[1]
The consequence was a stream of reports that could not be reconciled with any one person’s movements: Abu Zubaydah was in Pakistan creating the House of Martyrs safe house in Peshawar; Abu Zubaydah was in Amman planning an attack outside the city; Abu Zubaydah was in Saudi Arabia talking to a terrorist.[1][3]
Kiriakou recalls saying at the time that this Abu Zubaydah was a terrorist Superman — flying all over the region, planning attacks all over the region — and wondering aloud how anyone would ever get hold of such a man. It turned out, he says, that there were two of them.[3][4] In a second telling he attributes the line to a colleague rather than to himself, and widens the geography from the region to the world — “Abu Zubaydah is planning an attack in Afghanistan. Abu Zubaydah is planning an attack in Jordan. Abu Zubaydah was in the United States two years ago” — before the colleague’s summary: “This guy must be some kind of terrorist Superman. If he’s all over the world doing these operations, we can’t find him.” Kiriakou’s own conclusion is the same either way: “Well, it’s because there were two of them.” He couples it there with the standing order that made the error expensive — “we had very, very specific orders that we had to take him alive, because he was this terrorist Superman and he could lead us to bin Laden” — and with the finding that followed the capture at Faisalabad: “it turned out that none of the rest of it was true. None of it.”[4][5]
The cousin was living in Montana at the time of the capture. As soon as the capture hit the newspapers he vanished, and Kiriakou says he was never seen again. The FBI later told him they believed the man was probably somewhere in Jordan — and that if anybody could find him it would be the Jordanians, who could not.[3][6]
Why the picture did not change
Kiriakou attributes the persistence of the original assessment partly to institutional pride. His formulation is that an agency cannot launch the biggest counterterrorism operation in its history, catch the number one target, and then say it was the wrong man, never mind.[6]
What Abu Zubaydah actually was
Kiriakou is equally careful not to let the correction become an exoneration. He states that this is not to say Abu Zubaydah was not a bad guy: he did establish the House of Martyrs safe house in Peshawar, he did create the Kandahar and Helmand training camps for al-Qaeda, and he did serve as a logistician for the organisation.[6][7]
The logistical role he describes in concrete terms — a man tired of jihad who wanted to go home would go to Abu Zubaydah for a false passport and a ticket, and a man newly arrived in Pakistan who wanted to reach Afghanistan would go to him to be taken over the mountains.[7]
Kiriakou’s summary is that Abu Zubaydah was not a naïf and not an innocent — he was a bad guy. He was just never a member of al-Qaeda, and certainly never the number three.[7]