John Kiriakou

And so we sent Abu Zubaydah out to the secret site and the FBI took over.

The CIA was furious about this.

But there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Soufan who did exactly as he was trained to do.

And he began to engage Abu Zubaydah in a conversation.

And Abu Zubaydah just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.

This went on for weeks, but you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange.

If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever.

And finally he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives.

And I'll give you two examples.

Number one, we had no idea what the Al Qaeda wiring diagram looked like.

We knew it was bin Laden and Zawadi.

And then we just didn't know anything.

what the organization was like, how it was built.

So he explained to us how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized.

So cell A had no idea what cell B was doing.

And Ali said, as an example...

if you want to do an operation in let's say dusseldorf how would you do that and abu zubaydah said well there's this guy muhammad and here's his here's his phone number muhammad lives in dusseldorf and he has a cousin abdullah and abdullah has access to weapons and here's abdullah's email and then abdullah's got a friend rashid they meet at the coffee shop and rashid has has access to explosives

And then we're able to call the Germans and say, hey, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf.

And here's what you need to do.

And then they kick down the door and they grab these guys.