Find out the details behind the dramatic capture of Abu Zubaydah, one of the earliest and most high-value al-Qaeda suspects nabbed by US intelligence, as narrated by former CIA officer John Kiriakou. In March 2002, American and Pakistani forces raided multiple safe houses in Faisalabad, Pakistan, wounding and eventually apprehending Zubaydah after a fierce gunfight.
00:00You're also credited for the first takedowns of, I would think, a high value target of the Al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, which eventually led to the actual whistleblowing of torture techniques used on him, which didn't really work out, though.
00:15Can you explain how that happened? How did you nab him? And then I'll go deeper into some other questions I have about Pakistan and terrorists in Pakistan.
00:22Sure. You're right that Abu Zubaydah was the first high value target that we were able to track and to find and to capture.
00:30We believed wrongly at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda. He was not the number three. He had never joined Al-Qaeda.
00:38He was working in support of Al-Qaeda, certainly. He had founded the House of Martyrs, the Al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar.
00:48He had founded and staffed Al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan, one in Kandahar, one in Helmand.
00:56So he was he was a bad guy, but he was not the number three in Al-Qaeda.
01:03Nonetheless, we believed that he was. We tracked his movements and we were close, this close a couple of times to capturing him.
01:13And finally, we we got a beat on him because he made a mistake.
01:17We knew that he would make a mistake eventually, but he made a mistake in that he used his cell phone to access his email account.
01:28OK. And and so when he turned the phone on, we immediately.
01:32Captured its location. We sent teams and we we captured him.
01:41He was taken to a series of secret prisons over the course of the next four years.
01:47And then finally, in 2006, he was taken to Guantanamo.
01:51He's been there ever since. Yeah.
01:53He's been in American custody now for twenty three and a half years.
01:56He's never been charged with a crime.
01:59And I've become one of those voices calling for him to be released.
02:04He was not the number three in Al-Qaeda.
02:06He was not guilty of the crimes that we accused him of having committed.
02:11He was not involved with the 9-11 attacks.
02:13He should be released.
02:15And and he's not been and he likely won't be.
02:18You know, I've heard this story of yours in various podcasts and appearances that you've done.
02:24One question that I always wanted to ask you was the sentiment that you have about Abu Zubaydah, is it shared by, I guess, your colleagues at that time at the Pakistan, Pakistan's ISI?
02:35Because you were working with them to to nab targets, right?
02:40Yeah, but it was a little bit more complicated than that.
02:46Forgive me for saying this.
02:47You're Indian, of course, you're not Pakistani, but we didn't fully trust the Pakistani ISI at the time.
02:53So we never told them who the target was.
02:56OK.
02:56We never said it's it's Abu Zubaydah, Zain al-Abidin, Mohammed Hussein.
03:01I will take umbrage to that.
03:02That's fine.
03:04Because we were afraid that word would leak out and it would get back to Al-Qaeda.
03:09And so we just called him a big fish, which which became Mr. Fish.
03:16So we believe that Mr. Fish is at this location.
03:19Let's send teams and we're going to we're going to snatch him.
03:22So the reason why we we believe that the reason why we did that is because we were of the belief.
03:32And in all these years of retrospect, I know that this is true.
03:35That there really were two parallel ISIs.
03:41There was the the ISI that I was working with.
03:44And these guys were heroes.
03:47They were all trained at Sandhurst in the UK.
03:51They had taken classes in the US sponsored by the FBI.
03:55Their English was as good as mine.
04:01Great guys who were willing to put their lives on the line in the name of counterterrorism.
04:07But then there was another ISI.
04:10Made up of people with long beards who gave you a dirty look when you were walking the halls there.
04:18These were the members of ISI who had created these Kashmiri terrorist groups or Jashi Mohammed or, you know, other groups that were blowing up Shia Muslim mosques and were attacking Americans.
04:36So we we did not have rose colored glasses on at the time, thinking that everybody in ISI is wonderful because our relationship with the counterterrorism units was wonderful.
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