This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

Hi, I'm John Kiriakou.

Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick.

This is another episode in the series What Makes This Spy Tick.

But before we get back into what makes me tick, some thank yous.

Ours really is a mom-and-pop-size shop.

That we're now running with the History Podcast Wolves, like seriously in the top 10.

It's a wonderful company to be in.

So thank you, thank you for helping us get there.

Every last like, share, rating, a review on whatever platform you're listening to us helps. And we really do appreciate it. When we last got together

with terrorists streaming into Pakistan from Al-Qaeda's bombed out base in the mountains at

Torabora, a remarkable piece of intelligence came our way. Al-Qaeda's number

three, whose nom de guerre was Abu Zabeda, had been spotted in Pakistan. He was in country,

and it was up to me to come up with the plan to capture him. There was one immediate problem, though.

I was only vaguely aware of who Abu Zabeda was. But my job was to be the chief of

counterterrorism operations. And this was going to be the biggest counterterrorism operation ever

up to that point. There were several kind of rules that we had to adopt here. First of all,

we could not tell the Pakistanis who the target was.

We like the Pakistanis. We work very closely with the Pakistanis, but we just don't know who we

can trust and who we shouldn't trust. And so we decided to tell the Pakistanis that we had a

target who was a big fish.

He became known as Mr. Fish.

...