California [US], October 25 : Former CIA officer John Kiriakou has opened up about his years of service in Pakistan, sharing insights into the CIA's operations, its collaboration with Pakistan's intelligence agency, and the challenges of counterterrorism work. He also revealed how American defense contractor funds and cash rewards enriched some ISI officers, shedding light on the complex and often transactional US-Pakistan relationship.
In an exclusive interview with ANI, he said, "May I add one thing? I feel that Pakistani groups with an eye towards India benefited because of those American defense contractor monies. Their defense parts were all turned towards India. And I'll add something, we paid tens of millions of dollars in cash as rewards to the Pakistani intelligence service. And God knows what they did with that money."
Kiriakou, who spent 15 years in the CIA, half in analysis and the rest in counterterrorism operations, served as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan in 2002, immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
"My job was to locate al-Qaeda fighters and leaders and to snatch them. Wait a minute. Well, I was based in Islamabad, but I worked all over the country, Peshawar all the way to Karachi. I spent a great deal of time in Lahore and Faisalabad, Quetta, which was a rough place to live and work," he said.
During this period, Kiriakou tracked and captured high-value targets, including Abu Zubaydah. "We believed wrongly at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was not the number three. He had never joined al-Qaeda. He was working in support of al-Qaeda, certainly. He had founded the House of Martyrs, the al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar. He had founded and staffed al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan, one in Kandahar, one in Helmand," he said.
Highlighting the complexities of working with Pakistan's intelligence agency, Kiriakou noted, "We didn't fully trust the Pakistani ISI at the time, so we never told them who the target was. Okay, we never said it's Abu Zubaydah, Zain al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein. I won't take umbrage to that, that's fine, because we were afraid that word would leak out and it would get back to al-Qaeda. And so we just called him a big fish, which became Mr. Fish."
He explained that the CIA worked with two distinct lines within the ISI. "There really were two parallel ISIs. There was the ISI that I was working with, and these guys were heroes. They were all trained at Sandhurst in the UK. They had taken classes in the US sponsored by the FBI. Their English was as good as mine, great guys who were willing to put their lives on the line in the name of counterterrorism. But then there was another ISI made up of people with long beards, who gave you a dirty look when you were walking the halls there. These were the members of ISI who had created these Kashmiri terrorist groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed or other groups that were blowing up Shia Muslim mosques and were attacking Americans."
On the US strategy after 9/11, Kiriakou said, "The United States was reactive at the time rather than proactive. You remember, we waited for more than a month before we started bombing Afghanistan. Yes, we were trying to be deliberate. We were trying to not let emotion cloud our judgment. And we waited a month until we had proper buildup in the region, and then we began attacking known al-Qaeda sites."
Recalling Operation Parakram and the potential war between India and Pakistan in 2002, he said, "Family members had been evacuated from Islamabad. So everybody who was working in Islamabad was working alone, right? There were no family members there. It's 12 o'clock, and I said, they've been evacuated. And she said, why? I said, because India and Pakistan are going to go to war with each other, like at any minute now."
Kiriakou also revealed the first direct link between Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and al-Qaeda. "A couple of months later, in March 2002, we raided a Lashkar-e-Tayyiba safe house in Lahore. Okay, and in that house, we captured three Lashkar-e-Tayyiba fighters who had with them a copy of the al-Qaeda training manual. And it was the first time, analytically, that we were able to connect Lashkar-e-Tayyiba with al-Qaeda."
He described the US-Pakistan strategic relationship as transactional. "The relationship is bigger than India-Pakistan, at least temporarily. The relationship, we needed the Pakistanis actually more than they needed us at that point. We were happy to throw money at them. That's what they responded to. But we really needed them to let us base our drones in Balochistan, for example. We needed a presence in Peshawar. We needed a presence in Quetta. We needed a presence in Karachi and Lahore. We needed for them to say yes to everything that we wanted to do."
Recalling his whistleblowing on CIA torture, Kiriakou said, "I just assumed somebody else would blow the whistle, and so I remained silent. And then I resigned from the CIA in 2004. My resignation was effective in 2005, and still nobody would blow the whistle. And so finally, in 2007, a reporter called me and I decided I was going to do it. I was just going to tell the truth. And so that's what I did."
Reflecting on the prosecution he faced under the Obama administration, he said, "They knew I hadn't committed espionage, and so the espionage charges were dropped eventually. They waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the charges. But what they did is they tapped my phones and they went through my emails, three years' worth of emails, and they were able to find one single email where I confirmed the surname of a former colleague, and they said, aha, that's a crime. And so that's the crime that I pleaded guilty to. They offered me 30 months in prison; I would serve 23."
On life after prison, Kiriakou said, "I still have friends inside the CIA, and we've talked about that. The truth is most of my detractors are either dead or retired, because we're talking about, you know, my actions were 20 years ago. So they're mostly dead or retired. And now that they're retired, nobody pays any attention to what they say. The position inside the CIA has changed about me. A friend of mine told me just a few weeks ago that she was participating in a security briefing, and they showed a slide with my picture and it said, 'The insider threat.' And she said everybody started booing. And the instructor said, wait, why? Why is everybody booing? And she said, he's not a threat, he's the whistleblower, we should aspire to be like him. And she said in the next running of the briefing that they had taken the slide out. I won. It took 20 years, yeah, but I won."
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