John Kiriakou
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The other thing that he told us, and he laughed, actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
He was talking about Mukhtar, a guy using the nom de guerre Mukhtar.
We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Mukhtar, who was a very bad guy.
In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka operation.
It was supposed to be carried out
in the Philippines and the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States.
It just so happened that one day Mukhtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch.
And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment.
And she sees all this stuff laid out.
And she said, that looks like a terrorist attack being planned.
The cops come and say, oh, this looks like a terrorist attack.
We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service.
They come and look at it.
And somebody says, we should probably call the CIA on this.
And so we confiscated everything.
And Bojinka was disrupted.