John Kiriakou

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.

It was shocking that this was the fearsome Al-Qaeda that we were so afraid of.

And then we started doing more of these, from one a week to two a week to three a week.

Sometimes we would do two in a night.

And we started capturing

more and more important people, members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, for example, members of Uzbek extremist groups.

And so we would just take them to the Rawalpindi jail in the nearby city of Rawalpindi.

We got to the point where we actually filled the Rawalpindi jail.

There was just no room to squeeze one more Al-Qaeda fighter in it.

And so my Pakistani counterpart came to me and said, look, the jail's full.

You have to get these guys out.

I didn't know what to do with them.

So I called CIA headquarters.

I said, the PACs want these Al-Qaeda guys out.