California [US], October 25 (HBTV): In a striking revelation, former CIA officer John Kiriakou has claimed that Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan’s Tora Bora hills disguised as a woman.
In an exclusive interview with ANI, Kiriakou, who served in the CIA for 15 years and headed its counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, also revealed that the translator for the commander of the US Central Command at the time was an Al-Qaeda operative who had infiltrated the American military.
‘First, the United States was reactive at the time rather than proactive. We waited for more than a month before we started bombing Afghanistan. We were trying to be deliberate and not let emotion cloud our judgment,’ Kiriakou said.
He added that US forces believed they had Osama bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora in October 2001. ‘We did not know that the translator for the commander of Central Command was actually an al-Qaeda operative. We told bin Laden to come down the mountain, and he said through the translator, "Can you give us until dawn? We want to evacuate the women and children and then we’ll come down." The translator convinced General Franks to approve this idea. What ended up happening was bin Laden dressed as a woman and escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan,’ he said.
According to Kiriakou, when dawn broke, there was no one left to surrender at Tora Bora. ‘They had all escaped. And so we had to move the fight to Pakistan proper,’ he noted.
The US later tracked down bin Laden to Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed by American Special Forces on May 2, 2011.
Referring to Pakistan’s then president, Pervez Musharraf, Kiriakou claimed the US ‘essentially purchased Musharraf,’ allowing Washington to operate freely in Pakistan. ‘The United States loves working with dictators because then you don’t have to worry about public opinion or the media. We gave millions in military and economic aid, and Musharraf would let us do whatever we wanted,’ he said.
Kiriakou added that Musharraf had to maintain support within the Pakistani military, which ‘didn’t care about Al-Qaeda—they cared about India.’ This, he said, allowed Pakistan to continue a ‘dual life of pretending to cooperate with the Americans on counterterrorism while committing terror against India.’
He also recalled that in March 2002, US forces raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Lahore and recovered a copy of the Al-Qaeda training manual, establishing the first analytical link between Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al-Qaeda. ‘It was the first time we could attach the Pakistani government to Al-Qaeda,’ Kiriakou said. However, he noted that the issue was downplayed by the White House because ‘the relationship with Pakistan was considered more important than India-Pakistan matters at that point.’
Kiriakou concluded that Pakistan must realise there is ‘nothing positive’ in continuing hostilities with India, adding that Islamabad would lose any conventional war against New Delhi.