John Kiriakou

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.

That saved lives.

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.

She calls the cops.

The cops come and say, oh, this looks like a terrorist attack.