John Kiriakou

My name is John Kiriakou, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U.

I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer, former chief of counterintelligence in Alec Station, and I was in CIA Counterterrorism Center on

9-11.

Within hours of the attacks, in retrospect, it's much more clear, the CIA changed from an intelligence service who saw its job as recruiting spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets so policymakers could make the best informed policy,

to a paramilitary organization whose job it was to capture and or kill anybody who could pose a threat to the United States.

I went to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in January of 2002, and I was given no specific orders.

So on my very first day in Pakistan, I went to see the station chief and I said, what do you want me to do?

And he said, I want you to come up with a plan to take down a terrorist safe house.

I went back to my desk with a legal pad and thought to myself, all right, what would I do to take down a terrorist safe house?

And I wrote at the top of the page, 0200, because I would want it to be dark.

And then I thought, well, 9-11 is still an open criminal investigation, so I'd have to invite the FBI along, and I would have to invite the Pakistani Intelligence Service because, after all, it's their country.

I figured I would need battering rams, guns, ammunition, walkie-talkies, a satellite dish, encrypted communications, all different sorts of things, which I ordered on my CIA credit card.

It arrived just days later in Pakistan.

But the idea was we take the battering ram, we break down the door and we grab everybody inside and then lock them up in whatever local jail happened to be the nearest.

And so that's what we started to do.

In our first operation, we found two Tunisian teenagers

both 18 or 19 years old.

They both burst into tears.

One asked if he could call his mother.

And it was almost disarming.