S1E16 Captured

THE BLURB: The hunt for Al Qaeda's number three, an elusive terrorist with the nom de guerre Abu Zubaydah, intensifies but seems to go nowhere. The team scoops up lots of smaller prey, but can never seem to pin down Abu Zubaydah himself. And then an anonymous walk-in tip leads to a (literal) phone line which leads to... Abu Zubaydah? SHOW NOTES For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 0:40John Kiriakou?

  Hi, I'm John Kurayaku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is another episode in the series, What Makes This Spy Tick? But before we get back into what makes me tick, some thank yous. Ours really is a mom and pop size shop. That we're now running with the history podcast Wolves, like seriously, in the top 10? It's wonderful company to be in. So, thank you, thank you for helping us get there. Every last like, share, rating, or review on whatever platform you're listening to us, helps. And we really do appreciate it. When we last got together with terrorists streaming into Pakistan from al-Qaeda's bombed-out base in the mountains at Tora Bora,

• 1:23John Kiriakou?

  a remarkable piece of intelligence came our way. Al-Qaeda's number three, whose nom de guerre was Abu Zubaydah, had been spotted in Pakistan. He was in-country, and it was up to me to come up with a plan to capture him. There was one immediate problem, though. I was only vaguely aware of who Abu Zubaydah was. But my job was to be the chief of counterterrorism operations, and this was going to be the biggest counterterrorism operation ever up to that point. There were several kind of rules that we had to adopt here. First of all, we could not tell the Pakistanis who the target was. We like the Pakistanis, we work very closely with the Pakistanis,

• 2:05John Kiriakou?

  but we just don't know who we can trust and who we shouldn't trust. And so we decide, we decided to tell the Pakistanis that we had a target who was a big fish. He became known as Mr. Fish. We would go over there every day and I'd say, "We have the latest update on Mr. Fish and his movements." And they understood. They didn't even trust their own people. So they understood that we didn't want to tell them who the target was. It was just that sensitive. We couldn't even tell people who weren't in the know in the embassy. Not all the FBI people were read into the operation. Not all the CIA people were read into the operation. If you had a need to know, then I would tell you.

• 2:49John Kiriakou?

  To say that Abu Zubaydah is somewhere in Pakistan and you have to catch him is a non-starter. I called that sister agency in Maryland. I said, "Look, what can you tell me? What does it mean that he's moving? He's on the move. What does that mean? On the move from where to where? Via what? Is he driving? Is he flying? Is he walking? What am I looking for here?" They said that he seemed to be going back and forth between Faisalabad, Pakistan and Lahore, Pakistan, with occasional side trips to Peshawar in the far north and Karachi in the far south. There were no human sources, all technology.

• 3:32John Kiriakou?

  I had never heard of Faisalabad, Pakistan. As it turns out, it's a city of 7 million people. It's huge. Lahore has 12 million people. I said, "Guys, you say he's in Lahore or Faisalabad. Go catch him. This country is the size of Texas. It has 220 million people in it. What do you mean, just go catch him?" "Well, let's try to narrow it down," we decided. He's spending most of his time driving between Lahore and Faisalabad. So I came up with what turned out to be a terrible idea. I said, Okay, how about this? When I was in college, one of my summer jobs was to be a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I know how the toll machines work.

• 4:14John Kiriakou?

  There's a toll road that connects Faisalabad and Lahore. Let's put CIA officers in the toll booths to be the collectors, dressed as Pakistanis, and when he comes through one of our booths, we'll grab him. But that was a terrible idea. They have 50,000 cars a day go through those lanes. We only had a four-year-old passport photo of him. We really didn't know what he looked like, not on a contemporary basis. I had visions of Sonny Corleone being stopped at the toll booth, and then the bad guys jump out and just open fire on him with Tommy guns. Uh, that wasn't to be. I can't tell you how many times in the next six weeks I made that trip between Lahore and Faisalabad.

• 4:59John Kiriakou?

  The funny thing is, it's a toll road, but halfway between the two cities, the road just ends. It just goes from like a major six-lane US-style highway to a dirt track in the middle of nowhere. Where the road ends and the dirt track begins, tea wallas have set up little tents, and they brew tea. Travelers just get out of their car and go have a tea. I was working with a guy at the time, who was really very much into the spirit of things. He had never served overseas before. He was a domestic officer. So he was thrilled to be a part of this, and he was into the whole Pakistan thing. He would always get tea from these guys. One time he got me tea, and he put milk in it. I said, "I'm not drinking that. Are you out of your mind?

• 5:42John Kiriakou?

  Do you have any idea how long that milk has been sitting out?" And that water, they probably scooped it up out of a puddle. He drank it, I tossed it, and he had diarrhea for the next six weeks through the entire operation. I said, "Listen, I'm careful, and I get the shits all the time." That's the thing about serving in Pakistan. Psychologically, you just have to accept the fact that you're gonna get sick. You just have to accept the fact that on many days that you're expected to work 14, 16, 18 hours, you're gonna have a raging fever, and you're gonna probably shit yourself. So just be prepared for it. Everybody goes through it. Nothing to be embarrassed about. You just have to accept it and keep working.

• 6:26John Kiriakou?

  The first time that this colleague, I'll call him Amir. Amir was Muslim and an ethnic Arab. He was a domestic officer, but he was on temporary duty to Pakistan to help us out. Amir and I drove that first time from Islamabad to Lahore and then Lahore to Faisalabad. We saw that road just end and I was like, "You've gotta be kidding me." He was driving the first time we did it and GPSs were brand new. They were these big handheld units that looked like big walkie talkies. He said, "Let's use the GPS." He punches something into the GPS and we're following the GPS and it's mostly just dirt road. I kept telling him, "I think we're going east." "No, no, we're going west. Faisalabad's west." I said, "I know Faisalabad is west. I'm not an idiot." "We're driving east."

• 7:09John Kiriakou?

  He said, "We're not driving east. We're driving west." If we were driving west, we would be in Faisalabad by now. And just as I said that, the GPS says, "Approaching international border." "Approaching international border." I said, "Doc, on it Amir. You've driven us to India. We gotta turn around and get out of India." And just as I say that, we see these Indian border guards come out like, "Who's coming down the dirt track?" We make this big U-turn and then drive back into Pakistan again and add another hour onto the trip to get to Faisalabad. We went to Faisalabad just to sort of scope out the city. This was gonna be very complicated. One of the things that I learned very quickly and learned the hard way is there is no such thing as a map in Pakistan. You can't like go into a store and buy a map.

• 7:54John Kiriakou?

  If you went into a store and asked for a map, they would just kinda, "Look at you funny. Like, a what? A map? Why? Where do you need to go?" Like, "What? What are you gonna do with a map?" They just don't exist. I drove all over Islamabad one day and I found maps in a stationery store, but they were copyrighted 1961. I bought them all. It's better than nothing. Most Pakistanis, if they're really lucky, are gonna buy a little motorized scooter. They're not taking big road trips that they need AAA, trip tic maps. They're just not something that people would need there. They know where they're going. This map issue became a serious issue a little bit later on in the operation.

• 8:39John Kiriakou?

  We end up going to Faisalabad. We got there at night. And wow, this place was grim. Most of the buildings were just made out of concrete block or mud. Some had thatched roofs, some had corrugated tin. Everybody was poor. The industry there is textiles, the manufacturer of clothing, much of which is exported to the United States. But pretty much everybody is working in the clothing industry. By the time we were done just scouting out the city, we were hungry and tired and it was about midnight. And there on the horizon, I see these golden arches. In the midst of this utter abject squalor

• 9:21John Kiriakou?

  is a brand spanking new glass and steel McDonald's. So I said, dude, we gotta go to McDonald's. At least we won't get poisoned at the McDonald's. We drive to McDonald's and I went up and I said, I'll have a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Oh, sir, why don't you try the Big Mac? Thanks, I don't want a Big Mac. I want a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. The truth is, you can't eat the lettuce because they probably used human feces to fertilize it. And don't ever trust anything with a mayonnaise-based sauce. I want the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Oh, sir, but the Big Mac has a special sauce. Yeah, I've had Big Macs. I know about the special sauce. I prefer a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. But the Big Mac is very popular, sir.

• 10:05John Kiriakou?

  I get that, but I don't want a Big Mac. I want a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Amir says to me, just eat the fucking Big Mac. So the poor Pakistani guy says, sir, I'm sorry, we don't have any Quarter Pounder with Cheese. We only have Big Mac. I said, just give me the fucking Big Mac then. So we ate these Big Macs, which to tell you the truth, tasted like manna from heaven. And then we got back in our car. We drove 25 miles on the dirt track again. And then the rest of the way back to Lahore. We ended up the next day going back to Islamabad and we met with the chief. I said, "We scoped the place out. It's rough, but we're going to be able to operate there. I'm going to reach out to ISI and I'm going to tell them that we're going to temporarily move all of our operations to Lahore." He said, "Great."

• 10:51John Kiriakou?

  I had another idea that turned out to be a poor one. I asked that headquarters send me a technical expert. We had to be able to use technology to narrow Abu Zubaydah's possible locations. It had to be easier than what it appeared to be on the face of things. So headquarters sends out two tech officers, both of whom looked like they were 16 years old. They said, "So what do you need from us? We've got a high-level target and we just cannot pin down his location. The guy's all over the, all over the country and we just can't narrow it down. So we need something that is, that can help us to narrow our focus so we can do a raid and grab him." So they created something that they called the magic box.

• 11:34John Kiriakou?

  They just went out into the marketplace and bought a box that was about the size of a standard cigar box. And then they went to the Pakistani version of Radio Shack and just bought a bunch of stuff. Wires and capacitors and LED lights and wires, other wires. I don't know what the heck they bought. They were holed up in our tech shack in the station, making something for two days. And then they finally came out after two days and they said, "We've got it. We've got the box." It looked like a boy scout put it together. Exposed wires and the wires are plugged into something with a AA battery. They said, "When he makes a cellphone call, the box is going to beep

• 12:17John Kiriakou?

  and the compass inside is going to move to the direction in which the call is coming from." I said, "That's ingenious. Okay, great." We had to man the box 24 hours a day. And sure enough, one night around 10 o'clock, the box beeped. "Oh my God, it's him!" We all run over to the box. I open it up, the compass is pointing north. We pick up the box, we start walking to the exit and then it- shuts off. He's like, ah, he shut his phone off. I said, but that's it? That's all that this thing does? And they said, yeah. I said, this isn't going to help us catch him. This is wasted time. I went to the chief and I said, I have a friend who is a targeting analyst. If anybody can help us catch Abu Zubaydah, it's going to be this guy. He said, fine, bring him out.

• 13:01John Kiriakou?

  I called him and I said, what do you do in the next couple of weeks? He said, why? I said, I need you in Pakistan and I mean like yesterday. He said, yeah, I'll grab the first plane. He grabbed literally the first plane, like that afternoon, he flew out. He arrived, as I did at four o'clock in the morning. I picked him up at the airport and he said, what's up? We have a beat on Abu Zubaydah. He says, you've got to be kidding me. I said, dude, we can make our careers out of this, but we've got to catch him. And we've got to take him alive. He said, okay, what do you want from me? I said, we only have the vaguest, barest information on where he might be. And it changes literally every single day.

• 13:43John Kiriakou?

  I need you to go through all of this metadata and try to pin him down. So he slept a few hours. I went and picked him up at the guest house. We went back to the office and he took a piece of butcher block paper about the size of a small American billboard. He laid it out on the floor. He wrote Abu Zubaydah in the center and put a circle around it. And then around that circle, he put the names, the addresses, the phone numbers or the emails, whatever we happen to have of everybody who was in touch with Abu Zubaydah. And then drew lines to the Abu Zubaydah circle. Then around that, at a secondary level, he put the names, addresses, emails and phone numbers of everybody in touch with everybody who was in touch with Abu Zubaydah.

• 14:29John Kiriakou?

  And then at a tertiary level, he did a third ring, doing the same thing, but to both Abu Zubaydah and the secondary. It took about two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, it actually looked pretty, like a work of art. It looked like a spider web. He comes to me and he says, I just cannot get it to any fewer than 14. Possible locations. I said, are you crazy? We've never hit more than two sites in a night before. We can't hit 14 sites simultaneously. We don't have the manpower. I went to the chief and I said, here's the situation. And I explained it to him. He said, 14 sites? I said, I know, right? We're gonna need an army. And he said, well, get on the horn.

• 15:13John Kiriakou?

  He said, come up with a list of everything that you could possibly need. I sent a cable to the counterterrorism center and I said, I need 36 people. I need weapons for everybody. I need ammunition. I need night vision goggles, battering rams, bulletproof vests, and I need $10 million in cash. 30 hours later, an unmarked plane lands at the airport with 36 people, half CIA and half FBI, and everything I asked for. We took over an entire floor of a major hotel. I went to introduce myself to the ISI chief in Lahore

• 15:58John Kiriakou?

  and the ISI chief in Faisalabad. The chief in Lahore, he was a very good guy. He was Colonel Khalid, not to be confused with Major Khalid. Colonel Khalid never wanted to be in the military, but his dad was a general and his dad forced him to go into the military. Colonel Khalid wanted to be an artist. So I'm sitting there in his office. I've introduced myself and he's looking at me and he's writing furiously. I thought, what do you need? I said, I need a safe house. I'll buy a safe house, as big a house as we possibly can get. Okay, and how many of my men will you need? Uh, I'm not sure. Let's say, give me, um, give me 15 or 20 to start off. We may need a couple more than that.

• 16:43John Kiriakou?

  At the end of the meeting, he tears the page out of his notebook and he hands it to me. And it's a portrait of me. He hadn't been taking notes through the meeting. He had been drawing a portrait of me. And I said, my God, Colonel Khalid, you're, you're really talented. Alas, my father would not allow me to go to art school. I ended up Having to go to the military academy. Well, look, you're a Colonel. You landed on your feet. I liked him very much. I told him that the very first thing that I needed was a real estate agent. Amir and I connected with a real estate agent through Colonel Khalid, and he took us to several different, very large houses. There was one, I'm not allowed to say what part of the city it was in, but it was in the part of the city where everybody would want to live. It's like the Beverly Hills of Lahore.

• 17:27John Kiriakou?

  It had ten bedrooms and ten bathrooms. We thought we would need a house that big to do interrogations in. If we caught as many people as we thought we were gonna catch, we were gonna need space. So we went up to the roof of the house, which was flat. We had the GPS, and we were able to catch seven satellites from up there. I'll never forget it. They're not like GPSs are today, where it just, you know, gives you a route to drive on. This was a real honest-to-God, like, military-style GPS. So it identified the seven satellites that we were catching. And I looked at Amir, and he looked at me, and I said, "This is the place." So we said to the Realtor, "We'll take it."

• 18:06John Kiriakou?

  "You'll take it?" "Yeah, we'll take it. In fact, my offer is cash." "Sir, do you mind if I ask you, what do you do for a living?" Well, we were working so hard, and we were so tired, we hadn't thought up a cover story. And Amir says, "We're textile barons." Those were the words he used. "We're textile barons." And I said, "Yes, yes, we're textile barons." "Oh, you are the ones who own the factories outside town." And I said, "Yes, yes, those are our factories." He said, "God bless you, sir. God bless you for bringing all these jobs to Pakistan. You employ everybody in this part of the country." And I said, "Well, we love Pakistan. We love Pakistanis.

• 18:48John Kiriakou?

  The quality is, is just unparalleled. We're very happy to be here." And we paid $2 million in cash for that house. The house was probably worth maybe a million seven. One of the things about this house, and this became important later, it was pretty deep in this fabulous neighborhood, but off in the distance, I could see another McDonald's. I just sort of filed that in my brain, but it became important later. One of the things that you quickly come to learn about Pakistan is they have not yet discovered the concept of street signs. They just simply don't exist. Even if you're invited to somebody's house, You say, "Well, what's your address?" Well, there is no such thing as an address.

• 19:31John Kiriakou?

  They'll say, "Go down the main street, eight tenths of a kilometer or whatever, and you'll see an advertisement for tires. And you make a left at the tire advertisement, and then you come upon a great rock. And I'm across the street from the rock." That's literally how they give you directions. Operationally speaking, logistics are almost everything. In Pakistan, it could be a challenge just figuring out where the hell you were and where the hell you were supposed to be. For the operation to flow the way it had to, we needed a firm sense of Lahore as a location and where everything was. It's a city of 12 million people.

• 20:15John Kiriakou?

  Like I said, it's not a small place. It's very spread out, and there aren't any actual addresses. So, how do we get to the safe house? I've only been there once, and it was during the day. I need to get there at night. So I said to Amir, "You know what? While we have a few free hours tonight, this is 24 hours before the start of the raids, we should really try to figure out where we are and how we get to where we need to be. Because I don't know where the hell I am." By then, it was sunset. It was dark out. And I said, "I remember what neighborhood the safe house was in, but I don't remember how to get there." So we just started randomly just driving around.

• 20:59John Kiriakou?

  Now imagine driving around Los Angeles, or New York, or Chicago, and thinking, "Now where? What do I do? Where do I turn?" I remember going over what Pakistanis call a flyover. We call it an overpass. And seeing an advertisement for shoes. When we were looking for the house, to buy the house, I remember passing the shoe advertisement. He says, "Good." Then we come to a more densely populated area, and he said, "I remember the traffic cop standing in this raised circular concrete stand in the middle of the road." So we make a right at the shoe advertisement, make a left at the traffic cop. I said, "Okay, I remember the British private school.

• 21:42John Kiriakou?

  You come to a T, and you have to either make a left or a right." We made a right at the British private school. And then we went about a mile, and then there's a McDonald's. And I said, "That's the McDonald's that I could see from the front of the safe house." So we made a left into this ritzy neighborhood and eventually we found the safe house. Okay, by now it's midnight and I said, Amir, we gotta do the whole thing over again. We just drove and drove and drove and drove to the opposite side of Lahore. And I said, okay, are you lost? He said, yeah, I'm lost. I said, I'm lost too. So let's start. We're driving all over the doggone place. By now it's like two o'clock in the morning. We find the flyover. Okay, there's the shoe advertisement. Our next thing should be the traffic cop. We find the traffic cop. We make a left. We go to the end of that street.

• 22:27John Kiriakou?

  There's the British school. We make a right at the British school. There's the McDonald's. Okay, now we know where we are.

• 22:36Speaker 03

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• 23:13John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.

• 23:57John Kiriakou?

  It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 24:27John Kiriakou?

  A few days later, Amir and I got in the car and we drove to Faisalabad. Colonel Khalid had set up a meeting with another Realtor in Faisalabad, and there we bought a seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom house to use as our Faisalabad safe house. And then, it came time for the rubber to meet the road. Everybody was at the safe house in Lahore. We met with the entire leadership team: the station chief and the deputy chief, the head of operations, the FBI director and the deputy director, the analyst, and me. I said, "Well, here's the plan. We've got these 14 sites. We're ready to go." The analyst and I drove to Lahore, and he briefed all of us on what the sites were. We took another $2 million in cash down with us in these duffel bags,

• 25:12John Kiriakou?

  just in case we needed to, as we used to say, rent a tribal leader for a little while. That next day, Amir and I, along with Colonel Khalid and his deputy, decided to drive around and look at all 14 sites. We wanted to make sure that we weren't driving into an ambush, that we weren't being set up, that there was ingress and egress at all of these sites, just to make sure that none of us got killed during the course of the operation. We learned very, very quickly that one of the sites was not gonna work. It was a payphone at a shish kebab stand. There was clearly, obviously, Al Qaeda living in the neighborhood. They were using that payphone at the shish kebab stand to make calls, including calls to Abu Zubaydah.

• 25:55John Kiriakou?

  But you can't raid a closed shish kebab stand in the middle of the night. You're not gonna get anything. So we scratched that off the list. It turned out that of the remaining 13 sites, 2 were in Lahore and 11 were in Faisalabad. We looked at the Lahore sites quickly. They were viable sites. Then we drove on that god-awful toll road back to Faisalabad. We started driving around and looking at the 11 sites there. Most of them were hovels, dumps, just concrete block huts. We started driving onto the campus of the University of Faisalabad in order to get to the 12th site. Just as we enter the campus, the analyst calls me from Islamabad.

• 26:39John Kiriakou?

  And he said, "Listen, I just got a call from, I'm gonna call it a friendly Western intelligence service. And they said that they had a walk-in. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks into an American embassy, as I've explained before. They claim to have intelligence and they want to see an intelligence officer. This walk-in said that there was a large group of Al Qaeda fighters in a brightly painted house. I said, "I want to talk to the walk-in." The analyst said, "No can do. I already asked. We can't talk to the walk-in and the walk-in is not available for a meeting at the embassy." Which told me that there was no walk-in. That told me that it was a telephone intercept

• 27:20John Kiriakou?

  and they didn't want to admit to us that they were on Al Qaeda's phones. But that's fine. We come out of the back exit of the University of Faisalabad and as we're approaching Site 12, there it is, an enormous, bright, yellow house. I said, "That's, that's the house. That's the house that the walk-in is talking about." Colonel Khalid said, "I can tell you right now, something bad is happening in that house." "What do you mean?" "It has to be 105 degrees today. All of the shutters are closed. They must be broiling in there. But they want us to believe that the house is closed up for the season and that it's empty. We're gonna have to put an extra-large team on that house."

• 28:04John Kiriakou?

  Then the analyst called me back, just as we're pulling away. And he said, "Are you sitting down?" "I'm in the car, what's up?" "Abu Zubaydah just made a terrible mistake. He accessed his email account with a landline." "Oh my God, we got him." I said, "Tell me that you have an address for the landline." He read me the address and it was Site #13. I turned to Amir, "I think we got him." "What do you mean?" he says. "We have 100% confirmation that it's him and it's associated with Site 13." We high-fived each other in the backseat of the car. I still get chills when I think about it, all these years later. We drove over to Site 13. It's just an empty field. Not only was there nothing there, nothing had ever been there.

• 28:47John Kiriakou?

  I said to Colonel Khalid, "This has to be a mistake. We are certain that the call came from this address." He laughed. "Oh, my friend, you haven't been in Pakistan very long. This is very common. This happens here all the time. When a plot of land is legally divided into building lots, each lot, even if it's vacant, is assigned a telephone number. The wire is live on the telephone pole, even if it's not connected to a telephone. Poor people who can't afford a phone will climb the telephone pole, splice the wire, and then run a new wire to their own homes so they can make phone calls and the bill goes to the owner of the lot."

• 29:31John Kiriakou?

  So he called a Pakistani tech to come to the site. I don't know what it is about technical officers, but they all look like they're 16 or 17 years old. This kid climbs to the top of the telephone pole. There's a Medusa's head of wires up there. He's trying to make his way through this jumble of wires. Finally, he takes a wire in his hand and literally follows it hand over hand over hand down to the bottom of the pole, down the alley, and then he points at a house. And he said, "It's that house right there." It brought tears to my eyes because I knew we were gonna get him. That night, Amir and I drove back to the big safe house in Lahore. Amir said to me, "Do you really think we're gonna catch him tonight?

• 30:15John Kiriakou?

  It just feels like it's too good to be true to me." And I thought about it for a second. And I said, "I think we're gonna catch somebody. I don't know if we're gonna catch him. I'm gonna call it 50/50. But we have so many viable targets. We're gonna catch somebody." The next day was a day of just making sure everything was the way it was supposed to be. Everybody's got a gun. Everybody's got a backup gun. Everybody's got ammunition. Each team has a walkie talkie. We all know the codes for the walkie talkie. Everybody has a cellphone in case the walkie talkies don't work. Because, as I've said, guess what? The number one rule of all operations is the walkie talkies don't work. The batteries die. At 10 o'clock that night,

• 31:01John Kiriakou?

  I stood on a coffee table in the Lahore safe house. There were five dozen people in the room surrounding me. We had our 36 from headquarters. We had a dozen from Islamabad. We had the Pakistani Intelligence Service guys. And they even brought half a dozen men from what was called the Punjab Elite Force, the Central Pakistani SWAT Team. I had great admiration for these guys because they were the only ones who would not wear a bulletproof vest. They said if Allah was to call them that night, they would go to be with Allah. That it was God's will. They wore black pants, black t-shirts that had the outline of a 9mm on the front.

• 31:44John Kiriakou?

  And on the back it said Punjab Elite Force. Very, very impressive. We had to charter a bus to take the team to Faisalabad. We had so many people to do these raids. So we chartered a bus. It was like idling outside the safe house. I stood on this coffee table and I said, "Guys, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, we're gonna have to synchronize our watches." So, 3, 2, 1, check. And I said, "Here's the plan. The team for Lahore is gonna stay here at the safe house. The team for Faisalabad is gonna get on the bus and the bus is gonna leave at 10:30. You'll get there about 11:30 or quarter to 12. But here's the plan.

• 32:28John Kiriakou?

  At 01:30, leave the safe house. 01:50, be in the target neighborhood. 01:55, have line of sight to the target. 01:58, get out of the car." And just as the clock strikes two, break down the door, separate the women and children from the men, grab all the men, put them in the paddy wagon, and then tear the house down. When I say tear the house down, I mean, the FBI goes in and they put Post-it notes on the four walls of each room. On the left is wall number one, straight ahead is wall number two, to the right is wall number three, behind you is wall number four.

• 33:08John Kiriakou?

  They open all the drawers on all the pieces of furniture, and then they photograph every inch of the room. So they can say, "Well, at the base of wall one, there was a cabinet, and when we opened the drawer of the cabinet, we found guns, or we found these documents, or we found IDs," or whatever. Everybody shook hands, and high fives, and whoops, and hollers. Except for the Lahore team, we all got on the bus and went to Faisalabad. So at 01:30, everybody left but Amir and me, and we went up to the roof of the Faisalabad safe house. I looked at my watch, and I said, "Three, two, one, here we go."

• 33:51John Kiriakou?

  And as soon as I said that, I could hear this sound in the distance, boink, boink, boink, like metal on metal. And I said to him, "That's not good. I wonder what the heck that is." And then we heard shots fired. And I said, "Oh, my God, that's really not good." I grabbed the walkie-talkie. I knew that Site 13 was the nearest site to the safe house. Site 13 was what we then called the Abu Zubaydah House. I said, "Site 13, come in, Site 13, come in, what's going on over there?" All I could hear is crackling. The walkie-talkies just never work. I pull out my cellphone. I called the team leader for Site 13. "What's going on over there?" He screams at me, "Shots fired, shots fired!" I know, I can hear the shots being fired. "What's going on?"

• 34:34John Kiriakou?

  He was so excited, I just couldn't get him to calm down to tell me what was going on. I told Amir, "We've got to go." We run downstairs, jump into this rental car that we had, we speed over to Site 13, and it is a site of utter chaos. First of all, there are three people lying in the street. One of them- is clearly and obviously dead. The second one, looks like he's dead, or if he's not dead, he's going to be dead in a few minutes. And the third one is screaming bloody murder and has an enormous gunshot wound right through the center of his femur. I said to the Pakistani who was there, I said, "What happened?" And he said, "We got him, we got your man, we got Mr. Fish. Where is he?" And he points to the man who looked like he was almost dead.

• 35:19John Kiriakou?

  I said, "I told you to take him alive." I said, "No shots were to be fired." It turned out that boink, boink, boink sound that we heard was our guys trying to break down the door of the Abu Zubaydah house with the battering ram. But the door was steel reinforced. And so it took them longer to force their way in. Abu Zubaydah, a Syrian bomb maker, and Abu Zubaydah's bodyguard, who was also Syrian, were on the second floor of this house. There were about 20 guys on the first floor. The 20 guys on the first floor were nobodies, they were just low-level fighters. They knew that there was a VIP on the second floor. Because on the second floor, whoever was up there

• 36:03John Kiriakou?

  had a tea boy who would go to the market every day and buy food and cook food for them and make their tea. And on the first floor, those guys had to fend for themselves. They didn't know it was Abu Zubaydah, they just knew it was somebody very important. As soon as we started breaking down that door, Abu Zubaydah, the Syrian bomb maker, and Abu Zubaydah's bodyguard ran to the roof of the house and tried to jump to the roof of the neighboring house to escape. The Pakistani policeman on the ground saw them and with an AK-47 just began picking them off. The Syrian bomb maker jumped first, he was dead before he ever hit the ground. Abu Zubaydah jumped second and was shot in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach with an AK-47.

• 36:46John Kiriakou?

  The Syrian bodyguard jumped last and was shot through the leg. Abu Zubaydah, and again, I didn't yet know for certain that it was Abu Zubaydah, was laying in the street. I called the analyst and I said, "I'm at Site 13, it's chaos here, shots fired, we got one dead, two casualties."

• 37:08John Kiriakou?

  But there's a guy who looks like he's gonna die any minute now. They're telling me that it's the big fish. I don't know what to do, cuz this doesn't look anything like the picture that we have. The picture that we had of Abu Zabeda, as I said, was a four-year-old passport photo. And the guy in the picture was this young, good-looking, thin Palestinian guy with a closely cropped beard and mustache and short hair. This guy laying in the street in front of me is clean-shaven, forty pounds heavier at least, with crazy, long, wild hair that looked like Albert Einstein on a bad day. Seriously. The analyst says, "Get me a picture of his eye. I'll run a retinal scan."

• 37:53John Kiriakou?

  So I knelt down and I shouted at him, "If the Hayunek! Open your eyes." Nothing. "If the Hayunek!" Nothing. I lifted up his eyelid and his eye was rolled back in his head. I told the analyst, "He's bleeding to death. He's unconscious. All I can see are the whites of his eyes." He said, "Get me a picture of his ear." I didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same ears. They're like fingerprints. So I took a picture of his ear. In those days, you couldn't take a picture with your phone, so I took a picture with a camera. I plugged the camera into my phone and sent the picture to the analyst. He sent it to CIA headquarters. They came back five minutes later. They said, "It's him."

• 38:37John Kiriakou?

  So we picked him up and we threw him into the back of a filthy Toyota Cherry pickup truck. And we drove to one of the most horrible places on earth: Faisalabad Hospital. I'm not overstating things when I tell you about Faisalabad Hospital. The windows and doors were open. Dogs and cats are just strolling up and down the halls like they own the place. Swarms of mosquitoes are just feasting on people's open wounds. There was a bar of Irish Spring soap that had syringes sticking out of it. And so if you needed a shot, they would just fill it with medication, give you the injection, and just stick it back in the bar of soap. And that was as clean as it was gonna get.

• 39:22John Kiriakou?

  By now, it's about 3:20 a.m. And imagine being the emergency room doctor at Faisalabad Hospital.

• 39:32John Kiriakou?

  And a half a dozen guys come in, most of whom are Americans, dressed as Pakistanis. They have an Arab with them, bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds. And I said, "Doc, you've got to save him. My orders were to take him alive." And he just kind of stands there with his mouth agape. And I said, "Come on, let's go." And so they roll him into the operating room, just like that. Major Khalid, Amir, the only female officer on the operation, who was a first tour officer who had never been overseas before, I put her in charge of the budget, just to keep her safe. And I sat there in the waiting room. Word got around, the Al Qaeda community, that we had gotten him.

• 40:16John Kiriakou?

  And certainly, we hadn't gotten all the Al Qaeda people, we got some of them. But word got around that we had gotten Abu Zubaydah. And so they began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. And we're diving down onto the ground, trying to get as low as we can. I said to Colonel Khalid, "If they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead. Can you get a helicopter in here?" And he said, "I think so." He makes a call. Twenty minutes later, a helicopter lands in the parking lot of the hospital. I put my t-shirt up over my nose and mouth, and I just walk into the operating room. "Doc, wrap it up. We gotta go." They sew him closed as quickly as they could. We load him onto the helicopter.

• 40:56John Kiriakou?

  We get on the helicopter, and we take off, and we fly away, and we land 50 miles away, back in Lahore, at a Pakistani military base, that just happened to have, it wasn't a hospital so much as it was an emergency clinic, that abutted the runway. We carried Abu Zubaydah off the helicopter, straight into surgery in the clinic, and sat down again. The doctor came out after a few minutes and said, "I feel that I need to warn you. I have never seen a patient with wounds so severe who live." And I said, "Okay, well, do your best." This clinic had eight beds in it. It was a circle, and the nurses' station was in the center of the circle, like the hub, and the beds were in spokes.

• 41:39John Kiriakou?

  There were, I don't know, four or five other patients there. Every one of them was a Pakistani army enlisted man who had attempted suicide. This was the only actual injury that they had. Colonel Khalid said, "I'm gonna get back to the safe house." And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna stay here." Amir and the female case officer drove all the way back to Faisalabad. And Colonel Khalid stayed with his men in Lahore. The analyst called me and said that he had just gotten off the phone with George Tenet, the CIA director. And George had said, and these were his exact words, “24/7 CIA eyes on. Do not leave his bedside.” Abu Zubaydah was in surgery for another four hours or so.

• 42:22John Kiriakou?

  When he came out, the doctor said, “Well, we did what we could. The rest is up to God.” They were pumping blood into Abu Zubaydah, not as a drip, like you might see in an American hospital or on TV, but they were pumping it, forcing it into him, because as quickly as they could force the blood into him, it was oozing out of his wounds, to the point where the hospital room looked like a scene from a horror movie. There was actually a pool of blood, maybe two and a half feet by two and a half feet, on the floor above the bed. It was just oozing, dripping out of him, as you might assume. I was very, very tired.

• 43:06John Kiriakou?

  I had been up again for another 24 hours at that point, 26 hours, and I was really afraid that I was going to fall asleep. And then I started thinking sort of crazy things. Is the doctor Al Qaeda? And maybe I’m going to fall asleep and the doctor is going to break him out? And then what? I’m going to be prosecuted for allowing this prisoner to escape? I tore up a sheet. I tied him to the bed by his wrists and his ankles, and I turned the ceiling fan on as high as it would go, just to make it a little uncomfortably cold in the room, to keep me awake. And then I just sat at the foot of his bed in a chair with my arms crossed, and I stared at him.

• 43:47John Kiriakou?

  And as it turned out, I spent the next 56 consecutive hours with Abu Zubaydah.

• 43:56John Kiriakou?

  In the next episode of Dead Drop, what makes this spy tick? You'll meet Zain, Abu Zubaydah's actual first name, and come face to face with Al Qaeda's Number Three as his interrogation begins, in essence, with me. On the one hand, he's supposed to be a murderous terrorist with a ton of information that we need right now. On the other hand, he's a terrified, badly wounded human being who knows that the serious shit he is in is just going to get worse. If you're enjoying this podcast, please share that enjoyment by liking, reviewing, commenting on, or telling your friends about us. And if you want to hear more of me, please check out my other two podcasts.

• 44:37John Kiriakou?

  There's D-Program with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. Eastern, Monday through Friday, on YouTube and Rumble, and Deep Focus with John Kiriakou, which drops usually twice a week. That's on YouTube. Until next time, thanks again for listening. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costar and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.