John Kiriakou

But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal.

So it was every man for himself.

Wow.

Well by then I had been in the CIA Well by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations after 9-11 I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years and and I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country and

Al Qaeda was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them.

And so my job was to find them and grab them.

And then just hold them or send them to trial was the original idea.

And we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right?

Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

We had killed Mohammed Atif.

He was the head of what they called military affairs for Al-Qaeda.

We killed him at Tora Bora.

But then there was Abu Zubaydah.

And then there was this unknown person that we later killed.

learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

So we were looking for any of these four or five people.

And then there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole bombing.

So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah.

And we captured him.

It took us six weeks to track him down.