John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E18 Cross Currents

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

THE BLURB: After John watched Abu Zubaydah's plane rendition him to what turned out to be a black site in Thailad, he still had lots of other terrorists to interrogate. He felt contrite after getting overly physical with a detainee - but no one else in the chain of command felt John had been out of line. Returning stateside, John is approached by the agency. They want to know if he's interested in learning enhanced interrogation techniques. He wasn't. And, so began the fracture that would ultimately set John apart.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 costod and Touchstone production. I'm John Kariaki. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. This is another episode in our series, What Makes This Spy Tick? And it's called Cross Currents. Before we leap into those treacherous waters, though, some thank yous are in order.

We are now a top 10 history podcast on Apple. The rankings are very fluid. They change twice a day. But we have gotten as high as seventh. The competition is literally the best history podcasts in the world. That we are breathing the same air as they are on the charts. Wow. And that is all because of you.

We don't take it lightly. And we certainly don't take it for granted. Your likes, shares, your kind reviews, ratings, and just plain listening has made all the difference. So again, thank you. As I stood on the tarmac of that Pakistani air base, the one with the emergency medical clinic right at the end of the runway. I felt pretty good about things. We pulled off a tricky assignment with a plumb and hopefully we put a serious dent in whatever terrorism Al-Qaeda was planning. It never occurred to me that my brief encounter with Zane, the man behind the Abu Zabedah

Nome de Guerre, would ultimately lead to everything it ultimately led to. Acts of torture by the CIA and its contractors, waterboarding, a complete breakdown in discipline and ethics and rule of law and my own righteously indignant response. If only I had known. Zane, if you recall from when we last saw him, as we maneuvered him onto a plane for rendition, was terrified that we were going to kill him. He had every reason to be afraid of what was going to happen to him. There are things worse than death.

I had told him that I would be the nicest person that he was going to meet on this journey. Even I would have been shocked by just how right I was and why. None of that was in my head as I watched Zane's plane disappear. My work wasn't anywhere near done because Abu Zabeda was not the only game or the only terrorist in town. When we grabbed him, we also grabbed dozens and dozens of other people too. And every last one of them had to be interrogated and processed. So began the parade of Al-Qaeda prisoners. Now, you can tell that your prisoner might be a terrorist and not the innocent bystander

that they all claim to be just by listening to him, by listening to several of them. That's when you realize that they're all repeating the exact same bullshit story, albeit with varying degrees of conviction. The bullshit story that al-Qaeda wanted our prisoners to sell us went something like this. Sir, I came to Pakistan to study Arabic. Well, that's interesting because these guys are all from Arabic-speaking countries, yet they are flocking to Pakistan where they don't speak Arabic to study Arabic. I would just say, go on.

A nice man in Abu Dhabi bought me a ticket in Abu Dhabi. Uh-huh. Can I see your passport? Oh, my passport? Oh, sir, when I arrived in Karachi, I wanted to give thanks to God. So I got into a taxi and I told the driver to take me to the Grand Mosque. that's unfortunate, not about your passport, but about your lie, because there is no Grand Mosque in Karachi.

And so it went. Terrorist after terrorist after terrorist, they lost their passports in the same taxi on their way to the non-existent Grand Mosque. Most of them were polite and well-behaved, most of them. But there was one guy, there's always one guy, who was determined to be difficult. He was a ferocious-looking Libyan with a multicolored beard.

The beard was a little unnerving, and this guy was 20 years older than pretty much all the other prisoners. He started to make trouble. We had the prisoners in a holding area, and this guy started chanting, Allahou Akbar. God is the greatest. Allahu Akbar.

That got the other prisoners to chanting. And finally, one of the FBI agents came up and said, guys, something's brewing downstairs, and it looks like it could be bad. I went downstairs. I confronted this Libyan. Every time I said something to him, no matter what it was, he would respond with Nik Nefsek, fuck yourself, or a Nek ummec, I fuck your mother.

He said this repeatedly to me. Well, he had his hands flexic cuffed behind his back, and I was tired, and I was angry, and I was short-tempered, and I put my arm through his arm under his armpit, and I yanked him up, so hard into a standing position that his prosthetic leg popped off. Now, his prosthetic leg was shackled to his real ankle, but I pulled him toward the paddy wagon and I made him hop with the prosthetic leg dragging behind him. And I said to him in Arabic,

if you don't shut the fuck up, I'm going to take that leg and I'm going to beat you to death with it. His entire demeanor changed. He almost started crying. Sir, I am an alcoholic, I am a drug addict, I'm a thief, but I am not a terrorist. Well, he was a terrorist. As we later learned, not only was he Osama bin Laden's personal mechanic, which, believe me, is actually pretty important in the world of intelligence.

But when we decided to send him to Guantanamo on a C-12 transport plane, one of the Marines who was with me doing the frisking, had to wrestle him to the ground, and we found two handmade, homemade shanks that were sewn into the lining of his clothes. This guy really meant business, and he really wanted to kill an American. To tell you the truth, I actually felt bad about yanking him up like that. He was humiliated when his leg popped off. In good conscience, I thought, you know what? If I'm going to set an example for these other guys, these guys working for me,

I'm going to have to turn myself in. I pulled Jennifer Keenan, the FBI agent, aside, and I said, Jennifer, I got to report myself. I assaulted a prisoner. What? What did you do? And I told her, I yanked this guy up and his leg popped off. And she said, are you out of your mind? Not because you made his leg pop off,

but for even thinking that you had to report yourself, she goes, forget it. I'm not reporting this. But I was serious about it. I felt genuinely bad. If I'm supposed to be the chief, and I'm supposed to set an example for all these young guys who are probably on their first high threat operation, I have to do the right thing. And so here it was, in the middle of the night, I decided to pick up the phone and call Bob Grenier, my station chief in Islamabad. I woke him up.

I said, Bob, I've got to report myself. I assaulted a prisoner. Oh, my God. What did you do? This guy was sitting on the floor and I pulled him by the arm and I yanked him up and his prosthetic leg popped off. And he said, okay. So when did you assault him? And I said, no, that was the assault.

He said, that? That's not an assault. I said, it was. I put hands on him. And he said, yeah, I'm not going to report that to headquarters. And I said, in good conscience, I've got to write it up. And he said, well, I'm the chief of station and anything that you write. up, I have to approve to be sent to headquarters.

And I'm not approving it. Go back to work, forget about it, you didn't assault the prisoner. At the end of the day, did I assault him? Probably technically. But in the greater scheme of things, I'm glad I didn't turn myself in that night. I was in Pakistan for another two months or so after the Abu Zabeda operation. We had done well, like really, really well. We were all high-fiving.

each other and hugs all around and we're gloating about how we're all going to get promoted and we're going to get medals and we're going to get exceptional performance awards and we're going to get our pictures taken with the director. But there was still a lot of work to do. You know, it's probably natural to always want to do a little bit better than your previous best. But it was hard to outdo the Abu Zabeda operation. However, I thought that maybe I had a chance to even better that. I had gone back to Islamabad, and a couple of days after my return, the front desk at the embassy told me that there was a walk-in.

This was a potentially sensitive kind of walk-in, because this was a man who claimed to have direct knowledge of an impending terrorist attack against the American embassy. I put on a disguise, and I went outside the hard line to meet him in what was really just a little concrete building we had on the embassy grounds that we used for walk-ins. This man only spoke Urdu, and so I took an embassy translator out with me. He told me that he had been hired by a country that is a well-known enemy of the United States specifically to attack the American embassy. As part of his bona fides, he just offered up that in 1996 he had fired a rocket at the American embassy in Islamabad. Now, somebody had fired a rocket.

the embassy. It did some damage to the exterior wall but it didn't penetrate the building. Still, that's a pretty serious crime, the crime of terrorism. And so I calmly listened to everything he had to say. The reason why he walked in was frankly he just wanted some money. And I asked him, what is it that you want for me? He said, I'm broke and I want some money. I gave him $100 for the information, which was kind of standard operating procedure. I said, look, if you're working for this enemy country, I want to know exactly what operations they're planning against the United States. And he said, well, there's a building in Peshawar in northern Pakistan, and he gave me the address, and he told me what the building looked like, and he said,

there's a weapons cash there, told me exactly where it was in the yard. And I said, okay. I said, come back in 48 hours. And if your information's correct, there's going to be more money for you. So I immediately went to our Pakistani partners. I gave them this information, and we jumped in the car, and we drove to Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar is a very. very, very rough place. I've been to 72 countries in the world. I have never felt so far from home and so endangered as I did in Peshawar. We found this building and it was exactly as he had described it. And then we started digging in the side yard. We didn't find any weapons. We didn't find any explosives. We did find what appeared to be a shallow bunker, a bunker that may have held weapons

and explosives at one time. So while we didn't put anybody out of business, I knew that the guy was telling me at least half the truth. Another day later, he came back to the embassy, and I said, thanks for that information. You have anything else to give me? He said, yeah, there's a man who lives in a house in the city of Moulton in central Pakistan.

In his bedroom of his house, there's a safe, and in the safe he has weapons. Everybody in Pakistan has weapons. You can buy him in the marketplace. He said, yeah, but these weapons were used to shoot Americans, and you could run the ballistics. He gave me the address to the house. We sent a team down there immediately.

We broke down the door of the house. We grabbed the owner of the house and cuffed him. We separated the women and children from him, and there was a safe in the bedroom. We had a locks and picks team standing by. They broke into the safe in a matter of minutes, and it was empty. This went on for,

two more would-be operations. This guy was giving us just enough information to make it interesting, but nothing ever came of it. Finally, I said to Jennifer Keenan, I'm tired of this guy, I'm tired of his lies, and I'm tired that he's making me run all the fuck over Pakistan for no good reason. She said, well, what do you want to do? You want to cut him off? No, I want to fuck him up. And I'll tell you exactly how I want to do that. In our very first meeting, he confessed to firing a rocket at the American embassy. That's an act of terrorism and there's no statute of limitations. She said, I never thought of that. So I said, let's invite him back to the embassy. And then we just grab him. So I cleared it with the chief and the deputy chief. I talked to Jennifer's boss,

who was the legal attache. And we agreed that, okay, even if we can't actually prosecute him, let's grab him. Well, the CIA is not a law enforcement organization. So John can say, let's grab him. It's up to Jennifer to actually do the grabbing. We invited him back to the embassy. All smiles. He thought he was going to get another hundred bucks, maybe 200 bucks if the information had proven to be good. And instead, Jennifer slapped the cuffs on him. And then we called the Pakistanis and said, take him to jail. He sobbed all the way to the Pakistani's car. And then a couple of months later, the PACs came back to us and said, what do you want to do with this guy? And we said, we don't care what you do with him. I just wanted to scare him. I don't know whatever happened to him,

but I don't think he ever walked into an American embassy again. We also had a situation with an old gentleman. I've told you that there were 13 sites the night of the Abbasobeda operation. One of those sites was a mistake. It happened to be a girl's school, run by an old man with a long, flowing white beard and two sons. They decided to turn their house into a madrasa for girls. Most people in Pakistan don't want their daughters to be educated. They want their daughters to work, to work in the home, learn how to cook, learn how to sew, and then eventually by the time they're 16 or 17, get married.

This old man wanted them to learn how to read and write, even if all they read was the Quran. Well, it turned out that this old man had the only telephone in the neighborhood. If you paid a couple of rupees, he would let you make a telephone call. As it turned out, there were Al-Qaeda fighters hiding in the area. They knew he had a phone, and so they would knock on his door, give him a couple of rupees and make their phone call. Those were the phone calls that we were intercepting. The night of the Abbas Zabeda raid, we broke his door into a thousand pieces.

We arrested him and his sons. and sent his daughters and his wife screaming into the night. It was apparent quickly that this had been a mistake. And again, I felt bad. The man and his son are led into our safe house. They have hoods on their heads. I removed the hoods. And I told the man,

on behalf of the president of the United States, I apologize for what we did to your home tonight. I said, sir, may I ask you, do you have a telephone? He said, yes. I said, do you let strangers, use your telephone. He said, yes. I said, those strangers were using your phone to coordinate terrorist attacks with the al-Qaeda leadership. And he said, my God. I said, I realize that you're innocent and your sons are innocent. I want to apologize on behalf of the president. In the meantime,

I asked my Pakistani colleagues, what could I do to make it right with this old man? He said, well, you could buy him a new door, which was a given. He said, you could also buy them shoes. They didn't have any shoes. They were so poor that all they had were their Shalwar Kamis, their Pakistani clothes and no shoes. So we did that. I gave the Pakistanis. I don't even remember what it was, maybe $500. I said, buy a door and get shoes for everybody in the family. The next day, I happened to turn on the television during a momentary break that I had. And what do I see but this old man being interviewed on Pakistani television? And he's telling

this very compelling story, a frightening story, that the Americans, they broke down the door to my house at two o'clock in the morning, and they grabbed me, and they grabbed my sons, and they put handcuffs on us, and they put hoods on our heads, and they took us to a strange place. But they were very polite to us. They gave us delicious food, which was true, and they bought us shoes in a new door, and I have no hard feelings toward the Americans. I thought, wow, If ever I did the right thing, it was last night. The CIA wasn't the only American organization in Pakistan, and Al-Qaeda wasn't the only target of those hunting terrorists.

One of the other prominent terrorist hunters was a guy named Tommy McAil. Tom was a long time, highly decorated detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was truly a cop's cop, and I'll tell you, he and I hit it off immediately. 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. Most people forget that there was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York well before the September 11th attack.

On February 26, 1993, a Pakistani terrorist by the name of Ramsey Ahmed Yusuf and several others, detonated a 1336-pound urea nitrate hydrogen gas enhanced device that was sitting in a van parked in the parking garage beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center. Their goal was the same as it was in 2001, cause one tower to collapse, if possible, into the other, and kill tens of thousands of people. Tommy McHale was in the parking garage under the World Trade Center when the van exploded. Somehow he survived, but a few weeks in the hospital led to two years in rehab and lungs that were permanently damaged by the toxic gas emitted by the bomb. On September 11, 2001, Tom was back at the World Trade Center. That time, 37 of his colleagues died. When Tom was assigned to Pakistan, on loan to the FBI, he took his return to country very personally.

One of the Port Authority officers killed on 9-11 was named Don McIntyre. Don's widow loaned Tom the handcuffs that Don had used anytime he captured a bad guy. And Tom used them a lot. He would say, this was for September 11th to his prisoners. In March 2002, Tommy and I were in Peshawar, Pakistan, doing an operation together. And as we left to drive that night, late that night, back to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, we drove past the Taliban embassy. This was the last functioning Taliban embassy anywhere in the world.

Well, they were flying the Taliban flag. And I said to Tommy, look at the nerve these guys have. They have a functioning embassy and they have the nerve to fly their flag. It's like an insult to all of us. And Tom said, you know what we should do? We should break in there and we should steal everything they have. I laughed. And I said, yeah, that would be funny.

I thought about it for a second. And I said, you know what? That's exactly what we should do. And so we drove back to Islamabad. First thing the next morning, I went into the station chief's office and I said, I want to break into the embassy of the Taliban in Peshawar. And I want to steal everything that's not bolted to the ground. He said, that's an interesting idea.

Pass it by headquarters. See what they say. So I wrote a cable to headquarters, told them the same thing. And they said, go with God, safe travels. Well, this embassy was inside a run-down, cramped, ramshackled office building in Peshawar, instead of where you would expect it to be Islamabad, which is the capital of Pakistan. Because Peshawar is right on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and it's like the Wild West. That made the Taliban embassy less conspicuous, less likely to draw unwanted attention like ours.

But there it was. what we did was really quite simple. We got a couple of the guys together, CIA, FBI. We requisition three vans from the embassy motor pool. And around 10 o'clock at night, we just drove back to Peshawar. There was no reason to bring a locks and picks team with us. We weren't going to gently pick the lock. We just kicked it in.

And then we stole literally everything that wasn't bolted to the floor. The only thing we left was the furniture. We took all their computers. and we took so many paper files that we literally filled those three vans to the ceiling. And then we just drove back to Islamabad. It took us hours to unload the vans and to get the Taliban computers set up. We told the Pakistanis in advance what we were going to do. And they were there at the embassy in the morning waiting for the embassy officers to show up for work.

They told us a funny story. They said that the deputy ambassador, who was also the Taliban spokesman in Pakistan, immediately realized what had happened. As he's standing there in shock at the entrance to the embassy, the Pakistani authorities walked up to him and told him to put his hands behind his back. He was under arrest. And they made me laugh when they said that as they were leading him away to a police car, he shouted to nobody in particular, tell my wife to sell the car. We began downloading the Taliban computers at standalone stations out in the hall outside the FBI office and the American embassy. About three days after we had completed this operation, Tommy came up to my office and he said, listen, I found something that is very frightening.

Like what? He said, come downstairs. You have to see this. So I went downstairs and he handed me a file folder. Well, there were thousands of file folders that we had taken from the embassy. This one was a file folder full of phone bills. So what? Their phone bills? Well, there were literally hundreds of calls to towns all across the United States. And then those calls abruptly stopped on September the 10th.

And then they started up again slowly on September 16th. These are calls to places like Kansas City, Buffalo, New York, Bethesda, Maryland, Pasadena, California, El Paso, Texas. Could this mean that there were terrorist cells in these towns all across the United States? I ran back to my office and dashed off a cable to the Counterterrorism Center. Be advised. We just found this in the Taliban Embassy take. They responded immediately.

Good catch. Give the FBI the originals. Give the Pakistani's copies and give us copies. This is an FBI lead. So that's what I did. Months later, I had returned to headquarters, and I kind of forgot about the Taliban telephone bills. In 2004, I left the CIA, and about a year after that, I ran into one of my FBI colleagues from Pakistan in the Tyson's Galleria Mall in Tyson's Corner Virginia.

I said, hey, remember the Taliban embassy raid that we did? He said, yeah, of course. Remember those telephone bills that we confiscated? Yeah, of course. I said, whatever happened to those bills? Whatever happened to the investigation? Oh, you know what? We could never go through those bills because we couldn't find a Pashto translator.

I said a Pashto translator, those telephone bills were in English. That's how I knew that they were telephone bills. I don't speak Pashto. And he said, oh my God. Then I don't know what happened. Fast forward another couple of years. And I'm at some event in Washington and I run into another one of my four. former FBI colleagues from Pakistan.

And I pigeonhole them. And I said, whatever happened to the investigation of those Taliban telephone bills? And he said, honestly, no human being ever looked at them? They were sealed in a box and they were put in an FBI storage facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, like a scene right out of the end of Raiders of the Law Star. And so were there Taliban terrorist cells in the United States? Probably, we'll never know, because the FBI dropped the ball. My tour in Pakistan and a diversion to another country and another assignment in the War on Terror that I'm not allowed to talk about.

Now done, I headed home, where I finally got to take my then-girlfriend and later second wife, Catherine, on a week-long holiday in Santa Fe that I had promised her. She had understood being a CIA officer herself that I had to do what I had to do when I had to do it. Santa Fe was wonderful, by the way. Wonderful might be the last word, though, that Abu Zabeda would have used to describe his situation and accommodations. We had captured him on March 28, 2002. On March 31st, after putting him on that airplane, he had been flown to an undisclosed location,

which the media have reported to be Thailand. That was with President Bush's authorization. To the CIA's first secret detention site, It was a place codenamed detention site green. At this stage, the agency had rejected the idea of passing Abu Zabeda to the U.S. military. And they wanted to keep his detention secret from the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross. Why? According to CIA records cited by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the agency began reinterpreting the prohibition on torture immediately upon Abu Zabedas' capture inside the agency.

and the various arms of the executive branch of our government, the National Security Council, the White House, and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in particular. A mental wrestling match was taking place. 9-11 pitted America against stateless terrorists, willing to kill at scale. How big a scale? There were many signs, recovered documents,

even some physical evidence indicating that bin Laden was interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. If he got his hands on a nuclear weapon, would he use it? The bet was, oh, yeah, you're damn right, he would use it. In that environment, did the old ground rules for interrogation make sense anymore? What if harsher treatment, something called enhanced interrogation, could prevent that sort of utter catastrophe? Wouldn't it be worth it?

What if a little rough treatment of a terrorist produced results and a positive outcome? What if enhanced interrogation, whatever that was, saved thousands even millions of lives. Who would complain about that? If you address it up enough, if you frame the question just so, enhanced interrogation almost seems elemental. Why wouldn't you do it?

Well, we'll get to why you wouldn't and why you shouldn't. At one point in the early summer of 2002, the Counterterrorism Center approached several CIA hands, senior people, GS-14s and 15s, with post-9-11 field experience, and they asked them if they were interested in being trained in, quote, enhanced interrogation techniques, unquote. We had some inkling of what those enhanced interrogation techniques would be, what we'd have to do

to another human being, were we to interrogate them in this enhanced way? Well, it bothered me so much that I sought counsel from a top CIA officer, a guy whom I respected enormously and was in a leadership position at the CIA. He understood my concern immediately, and he agreed that those methods might well cross dangerous, moral, and legal lines. I declined to be trained in them. I'm sorry to tell you that of the 14 people who were approached, I was the only one who declined to be trained in them. All of my 13 colleagues accepted the invitation. It's important to put the moment in its proper context and remember what we knew back then and what we didn't know.

Mid-2002 was frantic. We were panicked. Inside the agency, inside the government, we genuinely feared another massive al-Qaeda attack could be biological or chemical. And remember, Osama bin Laden had said that he was preparing an attack that would dwarf 9-11. Uncertainty clouds decision-making, and we were nothing, if not uncertain, about everything. From my colleague's perspective, considering what was being asked of them and what they thought they might need to do their jobs, I actually can't blame them.

The impetus to do this came from much higher up the food chain. The people insisting that a kinder, gentler approach couldn't get the job done, didn't back that assertion up with anything like receipts. And none of those people doing the mental gymnastics were going to be on the front line doing the torturing either. And so began the CIA's foray, the CIA's misadventure, into enhanced interrogation. In the next episode, we'll do a deep dive into those mental gymnastics and how the torture memos that emerged from those gyrations played out in the stone-cold reality of a black

site prison cell. If this story has a heart of darkness, well, we're about to enter it, so beware. Again, we thank you for listening and liking and rating and reviewing. And as always, if you want to hear more of me, please check out Deep Program with Ted Rawl and John Kiriaku. That is Monday through Friday, starting at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. You'll find it on YouTube and Rumble. And please check out deep focus. Also on YouTube, we drop episodes of that podcast about twice a week. Until next time, I'm John Kariaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kriaku and Alan Kriakshund and Alan Kats and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costa and Touchstone production.