We've all heard the radio ads about the IRS. They tell you to be afraid and they try to frighten you into calling. I'm here to tell you that tax relief advocates is different. If you owe money to the IRS, whether it's $5,000, $50,000, or $500,000, TRA has a solution to your tax problem. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in your car, at work, or with your kids, no matter where you are.
Visit TRA.com. Don't lose hope. TRA could reduce or even eliminate what you owe to the IRS. Their passion is taxes and helping individuals and businesses fix their IRS problems. They have over a thousand five-star Google reviews and an A-plus with the Better Business Bureau.
You don't need to be afraid of the IRS any longer. Generous tax relief programs are now available that can give you a fresh start.
So don't wait. Simply visit TRA.com. That's TRA.com or call 800-583-5675. Once again, that's 800-583-5555. Tax Relief Advocates, Real Solutions for Real People.
Hi Bud, I'm Brian Kilmead. Welcome back as we look at 9-11 25 years later. As you know, I was on the air on Fox and Friends at that time, but the coverage was extensive from air on in on radio and on TV. And joining us now, a man who lived it before, after, and of course during John Kiriaku, former CIA officer, best-selling author, and whistleblower. 9-11 means something different to everyone.
What about you as an intelligence officer? Oh, it was, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Brian. It's good to see you again. 9-11 was transformative. It was one of the worst days in the history of the country.
It was one of the worst days in my life. I remember having to evacuate the CIA after being repeatedly told that we all had to evacuate. Nobody would budge. And then the CIA police officers finally came into the counterterrorism center and shouted, if everybody doesn't evacuate, you'll be arrested. And so we all evacuated and I remember driving on the George Washington Parkway to get to my house or my apartment, which is right near the Pentagon, and seeing the Pentagon burning.
And I remember shouting to myself, how could this possibly happen? But we all knew we had to snap into into gear and start fighting back. But you, as a CIA guy, I know John Scott was on the air, and I think within 45 minutes says this seems like something of bin Laden. You know, we had the interviews with Bin Laden. He declared war on us.
We remember about the coal bombing and finding him in Sudan and all these things and letting him getting getting out of getting kicked out of Saudi Arabia. We knew about his background. Remember his interview with John Miller. But did you think right away this had to be al-Qaeda, this had to be Bin Laden? 100%.
For me, it started on July the 6th. I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers at the CIA. We did this literally every day. You bring them in. It's a group of four or five mid-level, senior-level foreign intelligence officers.
You do a day of briefings. They get a photo op with the director. You exchange gifts. You take them to dinner. And then you do it with another group the next day.
So on July the 6th, 2001, I was entertaining this group from the Middle East and I had scheduled a briefing for them with a junior. Counterterrorism analyst who was handling Al-Qaeda. But instead of the junior analyst walking into the room, Kofer Black walks into the room, the director of counterterrorism, along with the chief of operations for the ALEC station, the Osama bin Laden unit. And I jumped up and I said, Oh, gentlemen, I said, This is Kofer Black. Mr.
Black is the director of counterterrorism. Kofer sat down, looks these guys right in the eye, and he says, Something terrible is going to happen. And we also knew on the Daily Brief, President Bush was told Al-Qaeda determined to attack. America inside the U.S. Related?
100% related. And you know one of the things we've forgotten over the years is in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, Bin Laden issued a statement saying that Al Qaeda was planning another attack that would dwarf 9-11. And so we had to take this seriously. We had to drop everything else that we were doing around the world and destroy al-Qaeda.
So it's just really important for everyone to remember what led up to 9-11, what happened after 9-11 with a guy like John Kiriaku, whose career revolved around it leading up to and afterwards. And now we have this revelation that KSM can't be charged with anything he said and his confession because they say he was tortured. It was tortured out of him.
So that's how this story never goes away. More with John Kiriaku in just a moment. You're listening to a special edition of The Brian Kill Meet Show or leading up to Labor Day. We've all heard the radio ads about the IRS. They tell you to be afraid and they try to frighten you into calling.
I'm here to tell you that tax relief advocates is different. If you owe money to the IRS, whether it's $5,000, $50,000, or $500,000, TRA has a solution to your tax problem. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in your car, at work, or with your kids, no matter where you are, visit TRA.com. Don't lose hope. TRA could reduce or even eliminate what you owe to the IRS.
Their passion is taxes and helping individuals and businesses fix their IRS problems. They have over a thousand five-star Google reviews and an A-plus with the Better Business Bureau. You don't need to be afraid of the IRS any longer. Generous tax relief programs are now available that can give you a fresh start.
So don't wait. Simply visit TRA.com. That's TRA.com or call 800-583-5675. Once again, That's 800-583-5675. Tax Relief Advocates: Real Solutions for Real People.
Do you think that there was a the CIA as a whole And the White House as a whole and the previous White House as a whole wasn't taking them as serious, wouldn't think they were able to pull off something like this? For the most part, I can tell you that they were taking things seriously at the CIA, but I've said many times over the years that. This was not just the greatest intelligence failure in American history. This was an American failure. And what I mean is the CIA was asleep at the switch.
The State Department issued the visas. Whatever the TSA precursor organization was, it was several different organizations, failed at the X-ray machines. Congress didn't appropriate enough money for counterterrorism. It was a failure at every turn. And it took this terrible, terrible event to kick people into gear.
Which is weird because there was a lot of Al-Qaeda attacks. Remember the embassy bombings in 99? And then, you know, Cole. Cole was 2000, was still being investigated. But he was taking credit for all of it.
That's right. He was taking credit for all of it. And I'll go even further. When I first started at the CIA in January of 1990, I worked in a group that no longer exists called the Office of Leadership Analysis. And the Office of Leadership Analysis had an internal classified magazine because to get promoted, you had to get published.
And if you were working on a country or an issue that just wasn't important enough to command attention at the White House, DOD, or state, you could publish in this internal magazine. And the guy that I sat next to was covering Saudi terrorism. And he wrote an article in which he called Osama bin Laden the most dangerous man in the world. And I said, who is this guy, Osama bin Laden? I said, are you just overstating it just to make sure that you get a good place in the magazine?
And he said, no. He said, nobody's paying attention to this guy, but this guy is going to cause us big problems. And it took another 11 years, but he was right.
So when it comes when it comes time for us to attack back.
Some the conventional wisdom is That Bin Laden miscalculated, they never thought we would respond like this because basically Bill Clinton did almost nothing leading up to that, right? And we hesitated on taking him out. And then when we had the opportunity to take him out, Bill Clinton said that. That the argument could not yet be made that he posed a clear and present danger to the United States, to American citizens, or American installations, which, of course, was ridiculous. But he also argued that Executive Order 12333 prohibited him legally from taking.
Um action. And now, in retrospect, we see how ridiculous that was. If we had taken him out when we had the chance, twice, once in Sudan. And once in the Doha Airport Transit Lounge, When he was just sitting there waiting for a connecting flight to Kabul. there wouldn't have been a nine eleven, and the whole world would be a different place.
No doubt about it. Wait, this is the first time I'm hearing of that. I don't think I've even forgotten that. I don't think I've ever heard that. He was waiting in an airport?
Yeah, he was here with us. He left Sudan on a commercial airliner on his way to Kabul. The CIA got word that he was in Doha. We reported it to the White House. The White House went to the gutteries and said, grab him for us.
And the guttery said, okay, where's your warrant? And the Clinton administration said, We don't have a warrant. We've never charged him with a crime. They said, We just can't snatch some guy off the street. Just because you don't like his politics.
If you've charged him with a crime. And of course we could have by then. If you've charged him with a crime, we can grab him.
Well, we had no crime with which to charge him. And so the Qataris let him catch that flight, and he went on to Kabul, and the rest is history. See, I also heard that his plane landed in Iran. He never got off, but they did check the plane. He landed and he kept going.
And that's what people have assumed there's been some type of Iranian linkage. And also, they held on to his family for a while and his sons What's Iran's role in all this? Do you have any idea? I know she is SUNY, and that would lead one to believe there wouldn't be this great adherence. But the whole enemy of your enemy is mine?
The whole 9-11, post-9-11 era put the Iranians in a very difficult position because they hate us. But they also hated the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Remember, the Taliban, just before 9-11, had snatched 14 Iranian diplomats off the street and had executed them in violation of all kinds of international diplomatic conventions.
So the Iranians hated both sides. When we started bombing Afghanistan, Two of Bin Laden's sons Their wives and their children ran to Iran for safe haven. The Iranians didn't know what to do. They didn't want to anger us and risk us bombing them. And so, what they did is they put them in houses, they locked them in there, and called it house arrest.
And the bin Laden sons ended up staying in Iran for years.
Now, we went repeatedly to the Iranians through intermediaries and we told them, Turn the bin Laden sons over to us. And the Iranians said, No, we're not getting in the middle of this. Unbelievable.
So when we the one other thing that we like to by the way Um John, you you talked about time to get on the offensive then.
So, when it's time to get on the offensive, we have to go to Pakistan because we know Al-Qaeda's got this population, this terrorist population. Uh in Afghanistan. And it was time that you were able to get and basically you guys have wiped out you eventually would wipe out all al-Qaeda's top henchmen. Mohammed Atef perhaps first, their version of the defense. Minister Zawahiri, the last.
Right after the transition in Afghanistan back to the Taliban. But in between, maybe the first big hit was Abu Zubaida. Can you bring us through that? Sure. It was March of 2002.
I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan. We were working very closely with Pakistan's intelligence service called the ISI, and we received word from a sister intelligence agency here in the United States that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan. We believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda. That turned out to not be true. He wasn't the number three.
He was a bad guy. He acted as something of a logistician for Al-Qaeda. If you wanted to sneak into Afghanistan to make jihad against the Americans, Abu Zubaydah would get you in. If you were tired of jihad and you wanted to go home, he would get you out. He would get you a ticket, a fake passport, and get you out.
He founded the House of Martyrs, the Al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had founded and staffed the two Al-Qaeda training camps in southern Afghanistan.
So very bad guy. And in late March of of 2002 after hunting him relentlessly For six weeks, we finally found him in an al-Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. We grabbed him. We rendered him to a secret prison. And he's still in American custody.
He's now at Guantanamo. He's been at Guantanamo since 2006. Yeah, did he talk? He did talk. Quite uh effusively, yes.
And was he helpful? Immensely helpful. Remember, Brian, that at the time 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation. And so normally the CIA has primacy overseas. In this case, the FBI had primacy because it was still an ongoing criminal investigation.
So when Abu Zubeda got to his first secret prison, Um The FBI took over in the form of FBI agent Ali Sufan, a naturalized American and a very highly skilled and well-trained interrogator. It took About six weeks for Abu Subaydah to recover from the gunshot wounds that he received during the capture. But then Ali began to interrogate him. And Ali used a very light touch. You treat him with respect, you offer him a cup of tea, you offer him an orange.
And over the course of weeks, Abu Subaydah started to talk, and he told us several things that were immensely important and resulted in. our ability to save American lives. He told us first, About the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram. We knew that bin Laden was number one, Zawahiri was number two, and then we didn't know what the organization looked like after that. We knew that it was compartmentalized, stovepiped, but we didn't really know how one cell could communicate with another cell or how any cell could communicate with bin Laden if it had to.
And so he explained all of that to us. And just as an example, Mm-hmm. I asked him a question. I'm I'm going to fictionalize it here because it's still classified but But Eile would say: if you were going to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf. How would you do that?
And Abu Zubaydah answered, well, there's this guy, Muhammad. in Dusseldorf and here's his cell phone number and Muhammad has a friend Abdallah And Abdullah has weapons, and here's Abdullah's email address. And Abdullah's cousin is Rashid, and Rashid can get explosives or timers.
So then we could go to the Germans and say, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's the information. And then they do the raid, and they break up the cell, and everybody's under arrest.
So that was the first thing he gave us. The second thing that Abu Zubaydah told Ali Sufan. Was that uh well let me back up we knew from the mid-1990s that there was a very bad very dangerous man out there who was using the nom de guerre um muchhtar M-U-K-H-T-A-R. He had tried to carry out something that became known as the Bojinka plot. It was a plan to hijack.
14. Boeing 747s from the Philippines and fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States. That plot was foiled accidentally when a cleaning lady stumbled on the written plans and called the police.
So we knew that this very bad guy was out there. We didn't know what his real name is. Is that Ramzi bin al-Shib? It was it was KSM. And we had never heard the name Khalid Sheikh Muhammad before.
Abu Zubaydah actually laughed when... Ali Sufan asked him, do you know who Muqdar is? He said, Of course I know who Muqdar is. You don't know? No, we don't.
His name is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. We had never heard the name before. But once we had the name and we could track down a past for him. We could target him, and then about 16 months after we caught Abu Zubaydah, we got KSM in a safe house in Rawlpindi, Pakistan. All right, hope you enjoyed this interview and we come back with special focus on 9-11.
Has our intelligence apparatus changed for the better? It certainly doesn't look like it did before 9-11. What about now? We'll discuss it all with John Kiriaku. We've all heard the radio ads about the IRS.
They tell you to be afraid and they try to frighten you into calling. I'm here to tell you that tax relief advocates is different. If you owe money to the IRS, whether it's $5,000, $50,000, or $500,000, TRA has a solution to your tax problem. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in your car, at work, or with your kids, no matter where you are. Visit TRA.com.
Don't lose hope. TRA could reduce or even eliminate what you owe to the IRS. Their passion is taxes and helping individuals and businesses fix their IRS problems. They have over a thousand five-star Google reviews and an A-plus with the Better Business Bureau. You don't need to be afraid of the IRS any longer.
Generous tax relief programs are now available that can give you a A fresh start.
So don't wait. Simply visit tra.com. That's TRA.com. Or call 800-583-5675. Once again, that's 800-583-5675.
Tax Relief Advocates, Real Solutions for Real People. I thought it would be good with 25 years since the 9-11 attacks. I talked to John Kiriako, as you know. He's a CIA guy who is all over 9-11, dismantling Al-Qaeda. And I don't think enough credit has been given to people like him to take down and stop the next attack and take down the terrorist attack and stop them forever.
And think about the tatters which Al-Qaeda is in now.
Meanwhile, he wanted to talk about the 9-11 attacks, how it impacted the CIA, and what happened since. Let's listen.
So, John, looking back, there was no Director of National Intelligence. There was a sense that the FBI, CIA, The DIA, nobody was talking to each other.
So they created the DNI.
So, what has changed about the CIA and our intelligence acquisition? and operations since 9-11 and is it and what part of that is for the better? I don't mean to take a pot shot, but the period when John Brennan was the director, I think was a setback for the CIA because Brennan was very focused on tech. And on personnel reorganization. The job of the CIA in its simplest form is to recruit spies to steal secrets.
Period. You can spend billions and billions of dollars on tech, but what you need at the end of the day is somebody inside the room with the terrorist where the plot is being hatched. To report back. That's how we break up these groups. That's how we kill the leadership and save American lives.
And so, with the advent of the DNI, the idea in the beginning, Brian, I think was a good one. But like Any bureaucracy, it just has continued to grow and grow and grow and grow. When the DNI, when the first DNI was named, it was John Negroponte, the former career ambassador. There were 14 employees in the office of the DNI.
Now it's something like 20,000 employees. The job of the DNI in the beginning was simply to coordinate budgets and policy. You don't need 20,000 people to coordinate a budget.
So I think that what has saved the CIA In the interim, is the fact that there have been Directors. who have focused on human intelligence And on recruiting spies to steal secrets and to infiltrate the groups that mean us harm.
So, yeah, and the DNI doesn't have a budget and things like that. But for the CIA, also, do you think George tenants? Stay was was a good one. You know, I'm of two minds, actually, on George Tennant. Um, on the one hand, George was really, really great for morale.
Everybody liked George. He, he. projected this air of confidence and toughness and strength. But then at the end of the day. You know, the buck has to stop somewhere for the CIA's intelligence failures.
And in the end, President Bush decided that there needed to be an adult in the room, and that George, as DCI director of central intelligence, a position that no longer exists, he couldn't do the job of being both CIA director. and the overall director of all the other intelligence services in government. And that's why we ended up with a DNI. Understood. As you look at the CIA today, I understand the CIA really feels as though.
They need to be left alone. That they're doing a great job, that they get it, they don't want to be oversaw, and for the most part, don't really answer to the DNI. Right. What do you know? But these people are all your friends, former colleagues.
So what do you think? One of the things that they're most worried about, Brian, is that whoever happens to be the DNI at any given time is going to start allowing station chiefs to be appointed from organizations not the CIA. And you might end up with an FBI agent as the CI station chief or an NSA translator as the CI station chief. And if that happens, God forbid, there's going to be a mass resignation from the CIA. I think that the CIA really does need to be left alone.
I think that this outside interference from DNI, whether it's over the budget or over analytic strategy or HR or whatever, they need to back off and let the CIA do what its officers are trained to do. Because when they are left alone, provided with appropriate congressional oversight when they're left alone The country's a safer place.
So I just think, number one, you guys don't get an island, ladies, don't get enough credit for taking Al-Qaeda apart. of putting that puzzle together and taking out generations of their leadership to the point where I think they totally underestimated America's reaction. And a lot couldn't wasn't raw eighty second airborne. A lot of it had just to be intelligence and stuff that you'll never get credit for. But overall, John, as I leave you here, are we safer today?
than we were 25 years ago. I actually think we are safer. Al-Qaeda no longer exists. For all intents and purposes, ISIS no longer exists. Failed states like Somalia and Yemen are contained.
And, you know, we're always going to have sort of an existential issue with the likes of Russia or China or counter-proliferation. But yeah, I think we're safer today than we were 25 years ago. Thanks to guys like you. John Kiriaku, thanks so much. Appreciate your reflections 25 years later.
Thank you so much, Brian. Hopefully that's good.
