John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E17 Zain

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

THE BLURB: For 70 hours, almost three days, John was responsible for handling Abu Zubaydah, the terrorist the agency believed was Al Qaeda's number three. Though their time togeter was relatively short - and Zain (Abu Zubaydah's actual name) spent much of it unconscious - John did manage to build a human connection with him and began to appreciate the person inside the nom de guerre. Zain is renditioned elsewhere. John goes back to work interrogating all the other terrorists they'd grabbed alongside Abu Zubaydah while Abu Zubaydah begins to encounter the treatment that would ultimately lead to torture.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 Costerton Touchstone production. When we left off, Abu Zabeda was lying in a hospital bed, in a small eight-bed emergency hospital that sat quite conveniently opposite the end of a military runway. Pakistani intelligence had helicoptered us all there because Abu Zabedah's terrorist cohorts had descended upon the first hospital and began spraying it with gunfire. By that point, Zane was so badly wounded that the young Pakistani doctorate, tasked with his care, took one look at him and told us that we had a better chance of winning

a Powerball lottery than we did of keeping him alive. Seriously, Doc, I said. He's got to live. He's an important guy and we really need to get him the best care we can. I literally had orders to tell any doctor treating Zane to stabilize him the best they could to stop the bleeding and treat him beyond that only if an emergency popped up. Our goals to get him Western-style medical care ASAP and then interrogate the hell out of him. The director's office at headquarters had ordered 24-7 CIA eyes on.

Those were the exact words. As Ains handler, that meant that I would not leave his bedside. Screw being tired. I was out of luck. Inside my head, I pushed wooziness aside. Logistics and strategizing took its place. I quickly prioritized everything I needed to prioritize with a plan, A, B, C, and D. When the doctor ducked out for a moment, I grabbed a spare sheet, I tore it into strips,

and I tied Zane to the bed. The doctor returned and saw what I was doing. No offense, Doc, is what I said. But I don't know you, and my orders are that this man cannot leave until we take him out of here. The doctor said to me, he's in no condition to leave. He's in a coma. But I continued tying Zane to the bed. Just as well, I said, I'm going to keep him tied down.

The young Pakistani doctor just shook his head and he left the room. These Americans and their bizarre behavior. I'm John Kirooku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is another episode in our series, What Makes This Spy Tick? Before we get back to Zane and the beginning of my relationship with him, I want to talk about our relationship, the one between you and me. That we have one is because you're listening to this story, and I'm glad you are, and I'm even

gladder that we have a relationship because of it. Thank you. I've said it before on this podcast, but I'll say it again. One of the great things about this medium, for storytelling especially, is that it really does come down to a one-on-one connection between my voice and your ears. So thank you, as always, for listening. But I also want to thank you for being proactive about your listening. Each and every like, kind rating, review, and share on whatever platform you're listening really does help us grow. It tells more people that this story is worth a listen. So again, thank you. So there I was, sitting at the foot of Zane's bed. This was a much better hospital than the first one. There was no comparison really between the two. But we're talking about

degrees of better. This hospital was definitely less, well, squalid. There weren't the roaming dogs and cats. This place felt like an actual hospital with its eight patient bays arrayed around a central nursing hub. There were a few other patients, but while this hospital was better, it was hardly perfect. An example, in place of air conditioning, it had open windows. That brought in aggressive swarms of mosquitoes drawn by the smell of so much blood. And when we brought Zane in the door, he was pumping blood out as quickly as we could pump the blood in. And I mean that literally.

Those mosquitoes weren't just drawn to the smell of my blood. They could smell Zane's blood. And it was on my clothing and it was on my skin. I was like a mosquito smorgasbord. At least swatting these relentless motherfuckers. to keep me awake. And as I've said before, I have a thing about insects that drink my blood. There were ceiling fans in this ward, and at one point I turned on every fan just to try and blow the little bastards away from me. Amir was my savior. Amir was my colleague from the CIA,

who had come from a domestic assignment just to help us catch Abu Zabeda. At one point, Amir spelled me for a bit while I crashed in an empty hospital bed. Another time he brought me clean clothes from my room at the safe house and then watched our package while I changed and used the bathroom. The shirt that Amir brought me, it was a Christmas gift for my kids. It was bright red and had a huge picture of SpongeBob Squarepants on the front. It might not have been my choice, but that's what I changed into. It was the only clean shirt that I had.

And that's what I was wearing when Zane finally opened his one. one good eye. We'll get to that. And took in this horrifying figure in his crimson SpongeBob Squarepants shirt, his Chalwar Camis pants and the look of absolute resolve on his face. That was me. It wasn't hard to read Zane's mind. You could tell the exact instant that he realized, oh my God, the Americans have me. His heart rate soared from 120 to 220. The monitors all went off. A doctor and a nurse rushed in and told me to leave. I'm not going anywhere, I told them. More Pakistani head shaking at this bizarre American.

A nurse arrived with a crash cart. Zane was in ventricular fibrillation, and they shocked him. Zane's heart rate slowed, and then it steadied finally in the 110 to 120 range, much better. One of the nurses pumped Demerol into his IV, and just like that, he was out again. I actually envied him. the sleep. For me, it was back fighting these mosquitoes and the boredom. At one point, I heard the bodyguard crying in another one of the bays. If you remember, Abiza Veda tried to run, tried to jump from the roof of his safe house to the roof of a neighboring house with two compatriots. One was shot

to death as he leapt from roof to roof dead before he hit the ground. The other, a bodyguard from Syria, got shot through the femur. He was still very much alive and he too was a part of of our, well, traveling road show. He was in pain, a lot of pain, and he was scared out of his mind. I approached his bed. Salamu al-a-a-qum, may peace be upon you. He's crying and he says, Ualakum, as al-a-shalam. I said, Kav'alak. It literally means what is your condition. Kaffa-hav-haw-l-l-l-a, glory to God. And I said, al-hambal-la, in English, I said, you don't look so good. Are you American? Yes, I'm part of the team that captured you.

Sir, please. He said the Pakistanis, they caught me and they held me down on the ground. And they put an AK-47 against my leg. And then they shot me. That's not what I heard. I heard you were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the next door house to escape. His crying stops immediately. And he says, I am 150 kilos. I cannot jump from the roof. 150 kilos is about 330 pounds, and he was about 330 pounds. I went up to him. I pulled the bloody sheet back from his leg, and there was an absolutely grisly gunshot wound

right through the center of his leg, and a perfect powder burn, the size of a dinner plate all the way around it. And I thought, those doggone Pakistanis, I specifically said, do not shoot them. It's like the only direct order that I get. gave, do not shoot them. And of course, they just opened fire and shot them.

I've wondered over the years, did they do that on purpose? Did they want it so that Abu Zubeda couldn't survive and couldn't tell us that he had colluded? Maybe with the Pakistani intelligence service? There was a reason why we never told them that the target was Abu Zabeda. Perhaps this was it. That's a question I think I'll never get an answer to. I walked back over to Abu Zabedas Bay and I sat down. He began to stir again.

after a while. Finally, he opened his eyes. Now, he was blind in one eye. He had had a shrapnel wound to one eye during the war against the Soviets. One eye was a very pale blue, like you imagine you might see on a blind man. The other eye was a dark, rich chestnut brown. He opens his eyes and he's staring at me as he's tied wrists and ankles to the bed. And with his right hand, he motions for me to come next to him. He wants to tell me something. I go up to the bed, I take the oxygen mask off of his mouth, and I put it over to the side on his cheek, and I said, Shusmek, what is your name? He shakes his head. So I said it again, Shusmek. He said to me in English, I will not speak to you in God's language. I said, that's okay, Abu Zubeda. We know who you are.

I asked our patient, what can we do for you? I want a glass. of red wine, he said. That kind of took me by surprise. And I asked, what? The doctor came into Zane's bay as he repeated, I want a glass of red wine. The doctor said he's hallucinating. I put Zane's oxygen mask back over his face. That idea of a glass of red sounded excellent to me. And so did the idea of sleep. They gave him another hit of Demerall. Zane dozed off and I sat back down on my uncomfortable metal folding chair. Fade to a few hours later as Zane came to and he motioned for me like he had done before. He had something to say.

As I went next to him, I could see that he was crying. And he said, please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me. I said, kill you. He said, yes, please, brother, kill me. Nobody's going to kill you. We've been looking for you for a long time. He starts crying again.

What's going to happen to me? Honestly, I don't know. But I can tell you that you are going to receive the best medical care that the American government can provide. And indeed he did. As it turned out, the executive director of the CIA, the third ranking officer in the CIA, Buzzy Cron Guard, happened to sit on the board of directors of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. And so as soon as we reported to headquarters that Abu Zubeda was in our custody, but that he had been shot.

Buzzie called Johns Hopkins and asked for the top trauma surgeon. They put him on a CIA jet, flew him to Pakistan, and he arrived about 12 hours later. I said to Abu Zabeda, I'm going to give you some advice. I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they are not nice like I am. If there's one thing that you do, it's that you have to cooperate. your life is over, but what's left can be easy or it can be terrible. Make it easy.

He said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate. I sat back down. He just kind of stared at me for a while. His English was practically native. It's as though he lived in the United States. He studied in the United States. He didn't, of course. He's Palestinian. but he was raised in Saudi Arabia and learned English at school. He told me later that he loved American movies and American TV shows, and that's where he learned to speak English and just picked the language up. His English was terrific.

He could go through life just speaking English. He was very good with languages. You know, it turned out that he and I actually had a lot in common. And I said to him afterwards, if this were a different life, maybe we would be friends. I'll get to that a little bit later. But in any event, I sat back down at the foot of his bed, and we just started talking, just talking like two men. He kept this diary that I mentioned.

We had captured the diary when we raided the house. So the diary was next to him on the nightstand. I would pick it up and I'd leaf through it. I'd say, my God, you're a talented artist. You really have a gift for drawing. It's quite incredible. And then he would say, well, I've written some poetry there. You see the poetry.

and I would read the poetry out loud. It was in Arabic. And I'll tell you one thing about the Arabs and the Persians, for that matter, is that they're very, very proud of their poets through the centuries. Poetry is seen as something that's very honorable in the Middle East. It's something that intellectuals aspire to. It's an expression of the soul. I would read his poetry and then he would tell me what inspired him to write the poem. He would write these short little one-act plays. most interestingly, he would write letters to himself, but he would write as the 30-year-old Abu Zabeda speaking to the 14-year-old Abu Zabeda. And he would say things like, treat our parents with respect, treat the girls in the neighborhood

with respect, don't leer at them, don't whistle at them, be nice to your brothers and sisters, they look up to you, things like that. You could tell that he was writing about regrets that he had in his life. The CIA and the FBI ended up having very deep disagreements about that diary. One FBI psychologist called it the rantings of a crazy person. And I remember saying, on the contrary, he's very intelligent and there is nothing crazy about him at all. What you're seeing in that diary is creativity. Maybe it's things that you and I would think that we would never commit to paper.

The FBI psychologist who came to that conclusion had never met. Abu Zabeda. He was just basing it on his own biases, frankly, and what he saw in the diary. Abizaabedah and I talked a lot. We talked about our families. He cried often. He said he would never know the touch of a woman. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. And I got angry, actually, when he said that. And I said, you're not the victim here. There were 50,000 people in those towers. What did you think would happen? Did you think we wouldn't try to find you? and catch you or find bin Laden and kill him, you're not the victim. He said, I never wanted to attack the United States. I wanted to attack Israel. He specifically said, all I ever wanted to do was to kill

Jews. I sat there talking to him with the complete belief that he was the number three in Al Qaeda, that he was an operational mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. And as it turned out, that just simply wasn't true. There were two things that we learned after the fact. We learned. We learned, learned that he had a cousin, a first cousin, who was also called Abu Zubeda. And so we would get these intelligence reports. Abu Zubedas in Pakistan. He's creating the House of Martyr's Safehouse for Al Qaeda in Peshawar. Oh my God.

Abu Zubedah's in Amman. He's planning a terrorist attack outside the city. Oh my God. Abu Zabedah's in Saudi Arabia. He's talking to some terrorist. So I remember specifically saying this Abu Zubeda, this guy's a terrorist superman. He's flying all over the region. He's planning these attacks all over the region.

I don't even know how we get a hold of somebody like this. Well, it turned out there were two of them. The cousin, at the time that we captured our Abu Zubeda, the cousin was living in Montana. And as soon as the capture hit the papers, he vanished. And we never saw him again. The FBI told me later, they believed he was probably somewhere in Jordan. But the Jordanians couldn't find.

him. If anybody could, it would be the Jordanians and they just couldn't find him. There's a lot of pride at stake here, too. You can't launch the biggest counterterrorism operation in the history of the CIA, catch the number one target and then say, eh, wrong guy, never mind. That's also not to say that Abu Zabeda wasn't a bad guy. He did establish the House of Martyr's safe house in Peshawar. He did create the Kandahar and Helmand training camps. for al-Qaeda. He did serve as a logistician for al-Qaeda. If you were tired of jihad and you just wanted to go home, you would talk to Abu Zubeda and he would get you a false passport and get you a ticket home. Or if you were just arriving in Pakistan and you wanted to go to Afghanistan

and make jihad, he would be the one to get you over the mountains and into Pakistan. He's not a naif here. He's not an innocent. He was a bad guy. He was just never a member of al-Qaeda, and he was certainly never the number three. We'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 Costard 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. 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. The fact that he was so open to speaking with me was something that I really wasn't prepared for, but because he was just so willing to chat. And God knows, I'm always willing to chat. We just sat there and chat it. We talked a lot about Islam versus Christianity and what the two faiths had in common. He was very religious, as you might expect, but it was really Israel that drove him to ally himself with this organization. He said, I'm Palestinian. What do you expect me to do? When I turn on the television, even in Saudi Arabia, and I see news footage of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian and grandmother, I'm enraged. I'm enraged and I want to kill Israelis. And I said, sure, I understand it.

But 3,000 Americans died that day. And there's going to be hell to pay for that attack. Besides the fact that al-Qaeda turned two of our embassies in Africa into rubble, that al-Qaeda attacked a U.S. warship in the Gulf of Aden, killing 17 sailors, that they planned the millennium attack in the Pacific Northwest with the idea that they could possibly kill 2,000 people celebrating the new year. We had to destroy this organization before it destroyed any more American lives. He said that he understood that. He was very, very worried about what was going to happen to him.

And every time he would ask, I would tell him, I don't know, but you have to cooperate. I did feel like he was keeping secrets from me. At that early stage of his incarceration, I guess I'll call it, he probably maintained some level of hope that somehow, inshallah, he could work his way out of this. So he wasn't going to give me the crown jewels. He wasn't going to tell me in these hospital bedside chats what I really wanted to know. I did go back to the station a couple of days later, and I wrote up a cable for headquarters about literally everything we talked about.

And I said at the beginning of the cable, I realized there's probably very little of intelligence value here, but just to give you an idea of the atmospherics of the conversation, I'm reporting them to headquarters. And the deputy station chief came in and he said, interesting cable, zero intelligence value, but very interesting cable. I said, well, thank you.

I hope the FBI has better luck with him. I got a call from the analyst who said that a plane was going to land right there next to the hospital later that night and it was going to pick up I was a beta. So I told him, I said, listen, there's a plane on its way. It's going to come here tonight about 2 o'clock in the morning and it's going to take you. He was very frightened, started crying again. Where am I going? I have no idea, but you have to cooperate. It's the only way that you can get through this.

You have to cooperate. At 2 a.m., that plane did land. There's kind of a funny side story about the plane. It was a CIA plane until the mid-1990s. During the Clinton administration, there was a series of budget cuts that affected the CIA, and they just decided they weren't really using this plane for anything. They might as well just sell the plane. The FBI said, oh, we'll take the plane.

So we just turned the plane over to the FBI, and whenever we needed it, like to render a particularly sensitive prisoner, for example, we would just borrow it from the FBI. Well, here was the plane, and it came right up to the entrance to the clinic. At 2 a.m., we heard the plane land, and I said, well, I said, this is the end. He's bawling. Three FBI agents showed up. I said, guys, would you help me carry him to the plane? We moved him on to a gurney, and he asked me to hold his hand. And just so you have a visual of this thing, we are covered in his blood, all four of us.

He's just gushing blood. I said earlier it was like a scene from a horror movie. If you've ever seen one of these true crime shows like the first 48, for example, they show you a scene from the hospital emergency room after the guy who's been shot dies. There's blood everywhere. There's blood all over the uniforms of the nurses and the doctors. That's what it looked like. He was not out of the woods.

We loaded a whole bunch of blood onto the plane. The doctor came from Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and brought a male nurse along with him. It was just the two of them for what I mistakenly thought was going to be a direct flight from point A to point B. I'll get to that in a minute. We carried Abu Zabeda over to the plane.

I was holding his hand with one hand and holding the gurney with the other. He's crying soft. we had trouble fitting the gurney onto the plane. We had to physically stand him up as he strapped tightly into the gurney and we maneuvered him onto the plane, carried him to the back of the plane, and laid him out across the luggage rack. And then we tied the luggage rack to the gurney. I squeezed his hand. I leaned over and I whispered to him, remember, you have to cooperate. Good luck. He squeezed my hand back.

My feelings toward Abu Zubeda as a human being were contradictory. I said to him at one point, he's laying in this bed, he's naked, he has the most grisly injuries you've ever seen in your life. I have pictures that would make your hair stand up. I said to him at one point, I should hate you, I should want to kill you, and I don't. you're pathetic. You're just a scared young guy. He just kind of looked at me.

I felt pity for him is what it was. I honestly did not know what was going to happen to him. I had no idea that this thing called enhanced interrogation techniques was in the offing. I genuinely didn't know what the next step was. I just assumed that the plane was literally going to fly from the hospital to wherever it is, he was going to undergo treatment. I had convinced myself, this was my operation. This was my prisoner.

I had a right to know everything. Of course, I didn't have a right to know everything. And in fact, after I said goodbye and good luck, I turned around to walk away and there was a man on the plane who was dressed completely in black with a black balaclava. He says, John, what are you doing here?

He lifted up his balaclava, and he was my last boss in the counterterrorism center. said, oh my God, what are you doing here? I'm here to take your prisoner. Who is he, by the way? And I said, oh, dude, I'm so sorry. You don't have a need to know. He said, fair enough, fair enough. Where are you taking him? And he said, oh, dude, I'm so sorry. You don't have a need to know. And I said, that is true. I don't. Okay, man, safe travels. We high fived each other and I got off the plane. That was the last time I ever saw I was a beta. But that short, 10 second conversation put things back into perspective for me. Yes, I was part of the team that caught Abu Zubeda. Yes, I sat with him for

56 consecutive hours. I was the first person to engage him in a meaningful conversation, in any conversation, really. But there were a lot of other CIA officers that he was going to encounter in this experience. And as I told him, they weren't going to be as nice as I was. In the next episode of Dead Drop, what makes this spy tick? My work in Pakistan continued, and we'll talk about that. Zane's interrogation continued, too, just not in the ways that it should have. How and why it went so far and so violently off the rails. Well, we're going to talk about that a lot.

We'll talk about torture, legally, ethically, culturally. As we get to that part of the story, more than that. anything, I want to give you the widest possible context. I want you to know everything that I knew. Well, everything that I'm allowed to tell you that is. I want to put you as deep inside my head and my experience as we can. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider checking out my other podcasts. There's D-Program, which I do with political cartoonist Ted Rawl. D-Program appears every day, Monday through Friday on YouTube and Rumble. That's at 9 a.m. Easter. Deep Focus also appears on YouTube.

Episodes drop twice a week, and both are definitely worth a listen. Again, don't forget to like, share, rate, and or review us. Until next time, I'm John Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kriaku and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costard and Touchstone production. I don't know.