John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E15 The Hunt Begins

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

THE BLURB: John lands in Pakistan where the hunt for Al Qaeda's leadership begins with the hunt for the perfect safe house. John also begins to coordinate his team with Pakistani intelligence (not a very trusting relationship). And then a tip comes in: Al Qaeda's number three, a terrorist with the nom de guerre Abu Zubaydah, has been spotted in Pakistan. John is tasked with coming up with the plan to capture Abu Zubaydah.SHOW NOTESFor more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costa and Touchstone production. I'm John Curioca. Welcome to Deadrock, What Makes a Spy Tick. This is another episode in our series, What Makes This Spy Tick? I hope you've been following along from the start. This is one of those podcast series that's telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the world of spying, not knowing the whole story, that's the thing that catches up with you in the end. Of course, however you're enjoying the podcast in, what?

Whatever order, if there is an order, we thank you for listening, seriously. And we especially thank you for liking, reviewing, sharing, and recommending the podcast. We have grown exponentially in just the last couple of weeks. And that's all thanks to you. We appreciate it. Now, where were we? Ah, right, Pakistan. My girlfriend at the time, another CIA officer, met me at my apartment to help me pack for an assignment

that might last a week or a month or a year. no idea. There's a reason the agency encouraged people within the agency to keep the entirety of their lives within the agency. Before I get on that plane for Pakistan, let me tell you a little bit about dating at the CIA. The CIA culture is such that they encourage CIA romances. And they do that because both parties are cleared for top secret information. That way, you don't get in trouble when you accidentally let something slip over dinner or while you're laying in bed at night, you can talk about work. And it's not just dating that the CIA wants you to do. It's, it's pretty much everything. For years when I was at the CIA, I was a member of a softball team in the CIA

softball league. If you are interested in music, there's a CIA choir, there's a CIA band, There's a CIA chamber orchestra. They even have things like CIA knitting clubs, a CIA LGBTQ organization, literally anything that you want to do in your off time, you can do it through the CIA. Looking back on my very first day at the CIA, my boss was walking me around, just pointing out the important offices. That's where the cafeteria is. That's where the gym is. That's where the supply room is, that kind of thing. He took me into the lobby of the atrium that separated the new headquarters building and the old headquarters building.

There was an office there in the atrium, completely surrounded by glass, and it had different windows inside of it. And one window said, health insurance, right? So he said, that's where you go, if you have any questions about your health insurance. That other window is where you go when you want to buy tickets to see the Washington Redskins or the Baltimore Orioles. Washington didn't have a baseball team at the time. And then at the very end, there was a window for elder care. Or if you had trouble with alcohol, you could talk to them. And he pointed at that window and he said, don't ever go there. In fact, don't ever go in that office at all unless you're going in to buy baseball or

football tickets. I said, why not? He said, because this looks like a harmless little help window and it's not. This office is run by the counterintelligence center, not by HR, not by benefits. And he said, if you go in there and you say, I think I have a drinking problem, I think I have a drug problem, I think I'm depressed because my parents are old and I'm having trouble taking care of them. That is a counterintelligence issue.

You will be suspended. You will lose your security clearance. You will never work in classified government ever again. stay out of that office. Counterintelligence really is spying on spies. They just don't want people to fall out of line. Even when you don't mean to fall out of the line, you just need a little bit of help.

But in any event, whatever you want to do in life, 90% of it you can do inside the CIA. I got out of the car at Dulles Airport, and I went to the United Airlines ticket counter. Now, back in those days, you couldn't self-check. Your bags, you had to go up to the, counter show your passport and tell him where you were going i walk up to the counter and the guy says good morning and where are you headed today islamabad and with a very low voice he said better thee than me

but thank you for what you're doing and i had to chuckle because i i remember thinking between nine eleven or really nine twelve and uh and january of two thousand two which is when i was finally getting on this plane. I wondered how many men, for the most part, almost exclusively, wearing blue jeans and carrying black diplomatic passports and going to places like Tajikistan or Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Pakistan, how many had passed through this guy's line. He knew exactly who we were and he was glad that it wasn't him. In those days, you couldn't fly directly to the Persian Gulf. Nowadays, Boeing triple sevens will take you to Dubai or Doha, and you could pretty much go anywhere in the world from there. But back then, I had to fly from Washington to London,

London to Kuwait, and Kuwait to Islamabad. And I finally arrived in Islamabad at four o'clock in the morning, minus my luggage, I'll add, which somehow managed to take a tour in London. I arrived with literally nothing, except a handful of magazines that I had brought on board with me, an embassy driver picked me up again at four o'clock in the morning. Now, the airport in Islamabad is not actually in Islamabad. It's in a nearby city called Raul Pindi. Islamabad is a pre-planned city that was created in 1947. It is absolutely beautiful. It's on a grid pattern. Everything is either a right or a left. You don't get confused. You don't get turned around. The government buildings are beautiful. Everything is modern. Raul Pindi is as grim a place as I'm

I've ever seen in my life. It's about 20 times the size of Islamabad. It has millions and millions of people. It's also the home of the Pakistani military. I ended up being something of a regular in Raupindi because it also had a large jail, which I made very good use of while I was there. So when the driver took me to the hotel,

I said, whoa, wait a minute, where are you taking me? He said, you're gonna say, stay at the Marriott. I said, I'm not staying at the Marriott. Well, why not? Everybody stays at the Marriott. Buddy, what's the one hotel in town that Al-Qaeda is going to blow up when they have a chance? It's going to be the Marriott. I'm not staying at the Marriott. Well, it's already five in the morning by now. He needs to pick me up at seven to go into work. Why don't you go in, sleep a couple of hours. We can change the hotel. I said, okay, fine. I'm glad that I did that because about Six weeks later, they actually did blow up the Marriott, killed dozens of people.

It created a 30-foot-deep crater from a truck bomb in front of the hotel. I ended up moving to a small 14-room guest house. The CIA won't allow me to tell you the name of it, but it was a perfect match for me and pretty much for everybody else who was working on counterterrorism and Islamabad at the time. When I landed, I honestly didn't know anything. about the job that I was walking into. Okay, I know I'm going to be the chief of counterterrorism operations. What exactly does that mean?

Are there already ongoing counterterrorism operations? Or am I going to have to start from scratch? I had no idea. So I told the driver, I said, please, I'm begging you, just give me one extra hour. Pick me up at eight instead of seven. I don't sleep on planes. I've been up for like 36 hours already. I feel like I'm going to pass out.

He said fine. I had already checked out of the Marriott. So he swung by at a quarter. quarter to eight, picked me up and took me into the embassy. The embassy in Islamabad, it's not where the United States embassy is now. It's an older embassy and we've torn it down. But at the time, it was in the diplomatic quarter. The DQ was where almost all of the foreign embassies were located. There was a DQ and Riyadh. And I kind of disliked being shunted away in a ghetto, so to speak. It was a very nice ghetto, but it was still a ghetto.

In Islamabad, you want to be in a ghetto because it protects you from people just driving by and opening fire on your building, or people just driving truck bombs in front of your building, running away and then blowing you to smithereens. So the diplomatic corner in Islamabad was protected. It was protected by the Pakistani military and the Pakistani military. and the Pakistani police. You had to show an ID just to get into the DQ. I had trouble getting to work literally every single day because I have an olive complexion and Pakistanis just did not believe that I was an American. So I show an American diplomatic passport. I show an ID for the American

embassy and still they would not allow me in. I got to the point where I would swear at them using the filthiest language I could come up with and just drive through the roadblock. After a while, they just backed off and let me in. But I got to the embassy that day, right at 8 o'clock, and I went into the chief's office to introduce myself. He and I had met once before at the farm. He had been the chief of the farm when I was there for counterterrorism training. We shook hands.

He said, I remember you from even before the training. You were in the Director of Intelligence, weren't you? And I said, yes, I was the Iraq leadership analyst. And then briefly, I was the assistant national intelligence officer for the Middle East. And he said, right, I was the assistant national intelligence officer for the Middle East 10 years earlier. I said, right. And I remember you and I having a conversation about how nice it is to not be chasing bad

guys all around the world that you just sit at your desk, think the big thoughts, write papers, and then go home at the end of the day. And he said, right. So I knew he and I were going to get along, which we did. In that meeting, that introductory meeting, he said to me, here's what I want you to do today. I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house.

And then, when you feel like you're ready, I want you to carry out that operation. And I said, okay. I went back to my office. And when I say office, I don't want people to think that it's like an office that you see on TV or you've got fancy, desk and nice pictures on the wall. This was the kind of situation where we had three times as many

people as the building was built for and you had to make do. The counterterrorism branch was made up of me and seven CIA retirees. And I mean very senior level retirees. Literally every single one of them had been at least the director or deputy director of near Eastern operations. One of them had been the deputy director of the CIA for operations. So these were very serious senior level people who, out of a sense of patriotism, had volunteered to come back as contractors after 9-11. I'll tell you in advance that I learned more from these guys in the six or seven months that I was in Pakistan that I learned cumulatively in the remainder of my career. This was an incredible learning opportunity for me, and I was determined to take it very seriously. And so I sat down in this teeny tiny windowless office.

And when I say tiny, I mean it was like five feet by eight feet with no windows. It had room only for a desk and a chair. And that was it. And then the guys were all crammed in an area almost as small that had just folding tables and chairs up against the folding tables. I said, guys, I feel guilty taking this private office. They were like, no, no, you earned it. You go ahead and enjoy your seniority.

And they would all laugh. That very morning, sitting down at the desk in my little tiny office with a legal pad and a pen. I thought to myself, what would I need if I were to carry out a counterterrorism raid? What would a counterterrorism operation look like? And I remember at the very top of the paper, I wrote 0200, 2 o'clock in the morning. I would want it to be dark. I would want everybody to be asleep just so that that risk to my personal safety was as low as possible.

We were running these counterterrorism operations out of Pakistan because at the same time that I'm arriving, we are bombing the shit out of Torabora in eastern Afghanistan. And Torabora is where the entire Al-Qaeda leadership had fled after 9-11. we knew that the only thing they could do to save themselves was to try to cross the border into Pakistan. So what the CIA had done, it set up posts all along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where our officers were trying to catch them as they tried to enter Pakistan. If you've ever seen the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world,

some of the highest mountains in the world, the deepest valleys, extremely hostile territory politically, you're not going to get any help from the locals. The locals are more likely to shoot you than they are to help you find al-Qaeda, because they're all Pashtuns in that part of the country. Pashtuns straddle both sides of the border. So you're essentially on your own. I wrote O200 at the top of this paper. And then I wrote CIA,

FBI, ISI. What I meant by that was this was going to be an ongoing CIA-led operation with assistance from the FBI and from ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. Now, why the FBI? Because 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation. It was an open case. The idea was that were we to capture some of these senior al-Qaeda leaders, we would put them on trial in courts in the United States, very specifically, the Southern District of New York, the Western District of Pennsylvania, the Eastern District of Virginia, where the crimes had been committed. A couple of days after I sat with this legal pad, I got a tip that there was an al-Qaeda safe house in Islamabad, and the tip came with an address. So I went downstairs to the FBI.

They were on the first floor of the embassy. I introduced myself around. I'm the new CIA guy. I'm the head of counterterrorism operations. Got a tip. Wanted to know, you guys want to come along. We're going to bust the door down tonight. Sure, they want to come along.

And I said, well, we're going to have to invite the Pakistanis. Because it is their country, after all. As much as we like to think we can do whatever we want, and in many cases we can, it's still their country. And so we have to at least make. them feel like they have a stake in the success of these operations. So that night, we left the embassy at 1.30 in the morning. We reconnoitered with the Pakistanis. And right at 2 o'clock, I kicked in the door, and we grabbed two 19-year-old kids. They immediately burst into tears. And one of them

asked if he could call his mom to tell her that he had been caught. And I said, no, you can't call your mom. They were both from Tunisia. They had escaped from Torabora and just fast. found that this house was vacant. And so they broke in and they were squatting. They didn't have any plan for what to do to get out. They were just hoping that they could come up with something at the end of it. So we grabbed them. We turned them over to the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis turned them over to the Pakistani police. The police took them to the Raupindi Jail. I remember saying to one of my FBI colleagues, that was too easy, right? It can't be this easy every time. Oh my God. So went back to the embassy, wrote up my cable, mission successful, everybody returned safely.

Here's the name, here are the names of the two guys we caught, found their passports, here is the passport information, and I get a cable back immediately. Kudos to the team. Good job, sleep well. Before I get off this topic, I will admit to you that this was very heady stuff. I had gone down to the FBI office a little bit earlier in the evening and introduced myself to a guy named Tommy McHale. Tommy became my closest friend and closest ally in Islamabad. He was actually not an FBI agent. He was a detective with the Port Authority of New York and

New Jersey, which owned the World Trade Center. Tommy was almost killed in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and he suffered irreversible lung damage from the fallout. On September 11th, He was in the World Trade Center when the attack took place. And his best friend died there that morning. At his best friend's funeral, his friend's wife gave Tommy her husband's handcuffs. And she told him to go to Pakistan and catch these bastards. On literally every operation that we did, Tommy had his friend's handcuffs. And he used them every time to take his prisoner into custody.

Tommy was a little bit older than I. his health wasn't great because of that attack on the World Trade Center in 93. And so we had this conversation. Do you want to kick it in or you want me to kick it in? No, you kick it in. He says, I've got arthritis. And he had bad arthritis in his hands too. And I said, okay, do I use my shoulder?

He said, no, no, don't use your shoulder. You're going to break it. You'll break your shoulder if you do that. Use your foot. But really put your leg into it hard. The Pakistanis, they just kind of shrugged. They're not going to kick it in. This is important for a reason that I'll tell you.

tell you in a minute. I kicked it in like on a TV show. You kick it right at the latch. And again, what splintered. The door flung open. These kids were sound asleep. And then when we rushed into the house, we're screaming, they're screaming, they start crying. They have their hands up in the air. We put them on the ground. We frisk them. One was in his underwear. The other was wearing a t-shirt. As I've said in previous episodes, it was not cinematic. The next day when the station Chief congratulated me. He also gave me approval to just buy whatever I needed to buy. And so I went online to a website called Galls, G-A-L-L-S. G-A-L-S. Gals.com. Gals is a large police supply house in Kentucky. I bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. I bought battering rams. I bought

walkie-talkies that were scrambled. I bought bulletproof vests. Anything I could think of that we might need doing a raid, I bought. Gulls immediately sent the goods to the diplomatic pouch and they were shipped out to me. I had them in less than a week. As soon as they arrived, just about the same day that the equipment arrived, I get a call from a friendly but very lazy Arab intelligence chief in Islamabad, and he said that a little bird told him that I was the guy to go to with tip information on al-Qaeda. And I said, yeah, why don't you come over to the embassy and we'll have lunch? So he came over. I took an immediate dislike to this guy. He was a brigadier general in his country's intelligence service, most of which are sort of joint military civilian organizations.

I could tell from the get-go that this guy was just afraid to do his own dirty work. He was afraid for his safety. And he thought, well, if the Americans are breaking down doors, I'm just going to give it to them. And so he said, I have some information that some very bad people are at this address, such and such a location. And I said, okay, great. I got the team together. I was by then liaising every day with the Pakistani intelligence service, specifically

Colonel Tarek, Major Khalid, and Brigadier General Muhammad. Those were my three points of contact. I called Colonel Tarek, with whom I spoke every day, usually many times a day. I said, we have another target. We got together that night, this time with a battering ram, so I didn't have to use my foot. We broke down the door. And this was a big one. In this raid, we captured a senior member of a terrorist group called Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Egyptian Islamic Jihad was responsible for the assassination of the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, in 1981. EIJ merged in 1995 with Al Qaeda. The director, the leader of EIJ was Ayman Azawahedi, and he became the number two in al-Qaeda. So this was a big deal. We also captured three or four other Arabs. I reported it to headquarters.

They were taken away in a paddy wagon to Rubel Pindi Jail. Headquarters said, wow, this is a good one. This is a serious one. We look forward to the interrogation. If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Custard and Touchstone family.

Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't, what it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David.

Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone. Like the donor, a DNA horror story, the hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop.

You may be wondering whether or not we ever attempted to flip any of these people to make them sources for us against al-Qaeda. The easy answer is, yes, of course we did, with every single one of them. But you can't really develop them as sources like you would somebody on the outside. You already know that they are members of Al-Qaeda. You already know that they have pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. They would just as soon kill you as shake your hand. So you have to do this in a controlled environment. Once we began capturing them, we also decided to rent a safe house with the Pakistanis.

And we would use the safe house to interrogate these. prisoners. We rented a lovely house, a house that I would have been thrilled to live in in a beautiful upscale neighborhood. Of course, like every Pakistani home, it was surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall. It was staffed 24 hours a day by active-duty Pakistani military. We would drive up to the iron gates and toot the horn. They would peek from around the gate, see that it was us, open the gate, we would drive in, they'd close the gate, and we would do our thing inside the house. So we rented this house and we put tables and chairs in all of the rooms on the first floor. We kept the upstairs rooms as bedrooms for a reason that I'll get to in a little bit.

We just decided to use these first floor rooms as interrogation rooms. We drilled eye bolts into the tables so we could keep people handcuffed and shackled to the tables. So they didn't, you know, leap across the table, try to strangle you, try to escape. And it was in those rooms that we began interrogating prisoners. One of the very first people that we caught was a Jordanian. And he was a little older than most of the other Al-Qaeda fighters that we caught. He was in his mid-30s. I had never done an interrogation before.

The CIA doesn't normally do interrogations. The FBI does interrogations. But this was my prisoner. And so I would do the interrogations with Major Khalid. It was almost always Major Khaled. I regret to say, too, that after I left Pakistan, Major Khalid underwent a religious epiphany, and he quit the Pakistani intelligence service and became a member of the Taliban. Once the Taliban realized that he had been in the Pakistani intelligence service and that he had

worked with CIA officers, they beheaded him on video and then sold the videos in the marketplace and Peshawar. This is one of the saddest things I've ever experienced in my life. I genuinely liked Khalid. And in fact, when I left Pakistan, he gave me a gift. I remember marveling at the fact that Pakistani trucks, semi-trucks, are so beautifully decorated. Google Pakistani truck and then look at images. They're stunning. And he bought me a little miniature model of one as a going away present.

When I left Pakistan, six months later, he was dead. They found his body on the side of the road in a ditch. This first prisoner that we interrogated was Jordanian. I had never done an interrogation, so my inclination is to try to be Joe Tough Guy. So he's chained to the table. I'm sitting directly across from him. And I said, what is your name? And he said, my name is, you know, Ahmed Shmachmad, whatever it was.

He answered me perfectly, politely and voluntarily. And I said, are you willing to talk to me and to tell me how you got to Pakistan from Afghanistan? He said, yes, of course. Really? And he said, yes. Why? Because I'm your prisoner. I'm in chains. It's not going to do me any good to resist you. I said, well, I appreciate that. Okay, then let's start at the beginning. And I unrolled this map of the border in front of him. Even though he was chained, he had a little bit of movement with his arms. And I said, I want to know exactly how you got across the border. Well, we already knew how they got across the border. We knew where the passes were. I knew that he was telling me the truth. And I said, where were you on September 11th? He said that he was in Toribora.

What were you doing in Toribora? He said, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Maybe I would, actually. You've been honest with me so far. I'm really interested in knowing what you were doing in Torabora. He said, well, I went to Afghanistan in 1998 because I grew up as an orphan. I grew up in an orphanage. And I wanted to work in an orphanage because there were so many children who were orphaned from the war against the Soviets. He raised money in the Middle East and he went to Afghanistan and he actually built an orphanage. The orphanage was partially maintained by the Taliban. He was the director of this orphanage. The orphanage just happened to be built in Toribora. He said, as to where I was on 9-11, I was in Torabora. And how did you learn of the attacks? He said,

people were literally dancing in the street. And I went outside and I said, what's going on? People said that the Americans had been attacked and that they would be punished for their support of Israel. And he said, I just went back inside and did my work. Have you ever met Osama bin Laden? No, and I've never seen Osama bin Laden. Have you met members of Al-Qaeda? Yes, actually. Look, he says, I'm pretty much the only Arab that you're going to meet from Afghanistan that was not a member of Al-Qaeda. I was there because I was trying to help orphaned children and I just got caught up in things. I'll tell you, to this day, I'm confident that he was telling me the truth. We did not send him to Guantanamo, which will come later.

We ended up, I called the Jordanian embassy and I said, listen, we got this guy. I'm convinced he's telling me the truth. He doesn't seem like a dangerous guy. We certainly don't have any intelligence indicating that he's dangerous. Do you want him back? Because otherwise, we're just going to keep him in jail in Roel Pindi. And they said, sure, just put him on a plane, send him back to Amman. We'll take care of him there.

I told him, listen, we're going to release you to the Jordanian government. As to what they do, I have no idea. But you're going to go home. And he shook my hand. The funny thing, and I say this in my first book, the funny thing was that when I ended the interrogation, he said to me, before you leave, may I ask you a question? Sure. And he said, I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam. I said, you want me to convert to Islam? And he said, yes, and I will be your godfather. I said, well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that offer. It's very kind of you. I'm a practicing Christian, but I very much appreciate that kindness. And I shook his hand and I said, good luck to you. And then we turned him over to the Jordanians and he flew back to Jordan. Looking back on those early interrogations, I learned a lot. I learned that you can't have any preconceived notions when you go into one. I learned that some people are just inherently good people, while others are inherently bad people. I learned that some of them want very much to kill you. And others just want to go home. Most will give you something.

None will give you everything. There has to be a quid pro quo. There has to be something in it for them. But I became more and more comfortable with my way of doing things. In the end, Major Khaled and I were the normal interrogation team. We had this ongoing joke between us, where he would say, well, John, I would like to be the bad cop today. And I'd say, come on, Khalid, you were the bad cop last time. time, let me be the bad cop. But you're not allowed to hit them, he would say. And I said, well, yeah,

that's true. I'm not allowed to hit them. Yeah, you are allowed to hit them. So, okay, I'll be the good cop, you be the bad cop. And then we would play off each other like that. And it worked. It worked. We ended up capturing dozens of Al-Qaeda fighters. None of them were terribly important at that early stage, but we were taking them off the street. And then I had an idea that changed the course of the rest of my tour. I went to my boss and I said, I think that it is wrong of us to have these officers stationed all up and down the border. It's wasted manpower. It's too dangerous. We can't protect them. We know the al-Qaeda people are coming into Pakistan anyway. So why keep our officers in danger? He said, what are you advocating? I said, we pull everybody off the border,

just open the border and let al-Qaeda come into Pakistan. You know that they're going to make a mistake. They're all going to go to a safe house. And then somebody is going to use a cell phone or they're going to send an email and they're going to expose everyone. So instead of trying to catch them one at a time on the border, let's catch them 20 at a time in a safe house instead. And he said, I think that'll work.

And so we cleared everybody off the border and brought them into Pakistan. I kept up this pace for about two and a half weeks. And when I say pace, I mean at least 14 hours a day work, seven days a week. I will admit to you that on the second day of the weekend, the weekend in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday. On Saturday morning, I would allow myself the luxury of sleeping until 7 or 8 in the morning. Otherwise, 14, 16, sometimes 18 hours a day, you're in the office working, working, work, working, working, hunting these guys, and then planning your next raid.

On a Saturday morning in early February 2002, I was asleep and the chief called me. And he said, sorry to wake you, get into the office as quickly as you can. Something important has come up. So I showered as quickly as I could, got dressed, rushed into the embassy. And everybody was already there. It was the station chief and the deputy. the chief of operations, the FBI legal attache, and his deputy and me. We all go into the chief's office.

We're sitting in this circle. I have no idea what I'm doing there. Finally, I said, what's up? And he said, we received a cable overnight from a sister agency who told us that Abu Zubeda is somewhere in Pakistan and we have to catch him. And literally everybody in the room turned and looked at me. Now, I wish I could tell you that I said, leave it to me, Chief. I didn't.

I kind of furrowed my brow and nodded knowingly all the while thinking, Abu Zubeda, Abu Zubeda, that name sounds vaguely familiar to me. Remember, I wasn't working on Al-Qaeda at CTC. I was working on Greek terrorism and training Middle Eastern intelligence services. While we're sitting there, I recalled reading an article in a recent issue of Time magazine saying that there's this guy out there named Abu Zubeda and he's the number three in Al Qaeda and he's responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people and you have to catch him. We knew very little. We knew that Abu Zubeda was moving around Pakistan constantly,

probably because he believed we were on him. And so he never spent more than one night in the same place. He moved constantly. The chief said, come up with a plan. This is going to be the most significant counterterrorism capture in CIA history. In the next episode of Dead Drop, what makes this spy tick? Our target, Abu Zubeda, Zain al-Aabedin, Muhammad Hussein, proves way more elusive than we'd hope. But then persistence with a heaping side order of just pure luck puts Sabu Zabedah squarely in our sights. And like my boss in Pakistan called it, the most important counterterrorism capture in CIA history will begin. That's next time on Dead Drop. If you're enjoying the podcast, please check out my other podcasts. That's Deep Program, Monday through Friday,

with Ted Rahl and John Kirooku. We're at 9 a.m. Eastern on YouTube and Rumble. And deep focus with John Kriyaku. We drop those twice a week, also on YouTube. Thanks again for listening. I'm John Curiaco. Dead Drop is written by John Curiaco and Alan Katz. Cost Art and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costard and Touchstone production.