My next guest is a former CIA analyst and targeter who now currently works for the US Department of Defense. Now, originally, my goal with this episode was to expound on the Benghazi episode with Mark Geiss and unpack some of the things that went on behind the scenes, where the ball was dropped, and to talk about what the terrorists behind that attack are doing now. Now, we actually got a lot more than that in this episode, and some questions that are arising, especially very recently with the things going on in Israel have been answered. One of those questions is, are terrorists coming up through our Southern border? Well, here's the answer. Yes. I know that's a shocker to some of you, but Sarah, my next guest who's been tracking these guys for many years, is now tracking them coming up through our Southern border. That's what happens when you leave a border wide open to a country who has a lot of enemies. Now we're going to have to deal with this at some point. But if you get anything out of this episode, please like, comment, and subscribe. Head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Please leave us a review. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to point something out. Why is mainstream media not talking to people like my next guest? Think about that. Nobody is more relevant on this topic than her. She's tracking these guys coming up through our border. Anyways, those of you that have been taking our content, thank you. We see the reels you're making. If you want, you can download tons of free content. Link is in the description. Post it everywhere, monetize it, make money. All we ask is that you tag the Sean Ryan show. Anyways, patron, I love you, ladies and gentlemen. Without further ado, please welcome, Sarah Adams, former CIA analyst and targeter to the Sean Ryan show. Love you all. Cheers. Sarah Adams, welcome to the Sean Ryan show.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So we've been batting back and forth for, I think, a little over a year now. And then I wanted to get Mark in here before I got your interview. We had Mark in last... We released this episode last week about Binghazi. And I really wanted to get into some of the stuff that the Obama administration had to do with the teams that could have gone in and helped. And you know a lot more about that than Mark, so I think you're the perfect person to fill in the gaps there. And then on top of that, we got a whole bunch of other stuff to talk about, current-day stuff, some of your career at the agency. But let me give you a quick introduction. So Sarah Adams, author of Binghazi, Know thy enemy, former CIA officer, Libyan crisis before, during, and after the 9/11 attacks, Counterterrorism Analyst and Targeter for the CIA, Senior Advisor on the Select Committee. They're the targeted party on Binghazi. So just for the audience real quick, can you go over the difference between an analyst at CIA and a targeter?

Yeah. The most simple thing is an analyst, their day-to-day job is to answer the questions policymakers give. So maybe a congressman will ask the CIA, What is happening with the oil facilities in Libya, for example? And they'll pull all the info together, the CI collected, write it up, and answer that question. Obviously, they're most known for answering questions to the President. The targeter was created, it's a newer position. It was created around the time I joined the agency, and it was to bridge the gap between case officers and analysts. So it was supposed to be like an operational node that took the best from analysts, took the best from targeters, and helped move operations forward. So the focus of it is to move operations forward.

Okay. So I got a couple of questions. We have a subscription network on patron, and that's basically what enables me to do this job. Okay. And so this was a pretty good question from one of our patrons. What was the moment that made you realize that the government was going to lie about what happened in Benghzi? How did this make you feel? Was this a revelation to you? Or had you seen similar things like this happen before Benghzi?

Sure. There's two big lies, obviously, to do with Benghzi. There was the one of the fake protest narrative, and then the one of the fake that the GRS responded immediately. So the GRS was our Global Response staff. So that's what Auth was that was on your show previously, and they're the ones who went to aid the ambassador after the attack happened. That one I pretty much knew in real time they were covering it up because the team lead for the GRAS in Trippley whispered it to me when I arrived back in Trippley after the attacks. And I was like, Okay, this is already a hush-hush thing. He told me it outside. I already had the indication that the CIA was going to cover that piece up. The protest narrative, it was about a week after the attacks. We got the two consulate surveillance videos in. So it was the video from the state compound and then the video from the CIA compound. And we obviously saw there was no protests, which nobody in-country thought there's a protest anyway. No one in Libya believed there's a protest, nobody in town reported a protest. But when we watched the videos, there wasn't a protest.

We called headquarters and they said, Well, we're not going to change the narrative until you bring us the videos. And so they said, Oh, you need to carry them back over. We actually found a way to digitally send them. So we sent them within 24 hours, and they never changed the narrative.

They didn't.

No. So that's when I realized, okay, the narrative is what they want. They don't actually care if there's facts, whether there's a protest or not.

How did that make.

You feel? I was pretty angry. And luckily, our chief of station at the time, he agreed there was no protest because there wasn't one. It's so strange. In country, we didn't argue about a protest, right? Nobody thought there was a protest. It was a weird DC thing. We didn't sit around arguing about a protest. We were doing our jobs. We were trying to find the attackers, trying to figure out who was involved. So he would write to CIA, would write all those reports about the protests, and he would send the cents. Chief of station, Triplee, does not agree with his priests, so there was not a protest. So that's really all we could do from the field, as you know, because the field sometimes gets overruled by what headquarters thinks is the truth.

Yeah. You've been following... You still continue to follow a lot of these guys that were involved in the attack, and we're going to get into some of that and what the outcome was with some of them. I mean, has there been any justice at all?

There's been a little bit of justice. There was some of our attackers killed in US drone strikes. Only one of them was targeted for who he was, but he wasn't targeted to do with Benghazi, he was targeted to do with ISIS. The other ones, they targeted the wrong group or they got lucky and got our guy. The French did kill the top three North African Al Qaeda members of our attacks. So we got a little bit of justice from them. And then the Libyan National Army killed the mastermind of the CIA annex piece of the attack. And the good part is he killed him in a mortar strike. So we appreciate that.

Nice. Good. Eye for an eye, right?

Hey, take him out that way. There's no other way you could have taken him out, honestly.

Yeah, no kidding. Well, hey, before we get too into the weeds and dive in, everybody always gets.

A gift. Thank you.

So there you go.

Okay. Very nice. Ed, you're going to sell coffee too, because I had to confirm with you that there was nothing with pot in any of these things. Yeah, no.

No.

Pot. There's some.

Weird rumors. Everybody thinks- Wait, you gave me.

Performance mushrooms? I probably can't do this.

Oh, no, this is good stuff. Okay, okay. These are legal mushrooms. But have you heard a lot of the benefits from mushrooms that have been going on in the veteran community?

No, I have been.

Hearing a lot. So I did a psychedelic treatment. I got a ton of benefits from it.

Yeah, a ton of Blackwater people have been doing this.

Yeah. It's huge. It's really getting out there. And so that got me into looking into the benefits of functional mushrooms and all that stuff from Laird's Superfood. They have the finest ingredients. Okay. Perfect. And yeah, so mix that with your coffee.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going to first sure, Delachac, I can have mushrooms, and then I'm going to mix it with my coffee.

You are good to- Okay. Let's go with.

That, I promise.

Okay, thank you. But it's all about brain health here, so that's why I give that out. But all right, so let's get into it. You ready?

Yep.

All right. So let's talk about how you got into the agency. What year did you go?

I joined in 2006, and I have the most boring route ever into the agency. I applied online. It works, people. It was the night before I defended my thesis in college, and my thesis was on the cashmere region of India and Pakistan. And I was like, Why did I do a thesis on this? Where am I going to get a job? I had never thought of CIA even a day before then, but it was the only place I could think of would you apply? So that night I applied to the CIA, and then the rest is history.

Did you see him at a recruiting event or anything?

I seriously was like... The next day I had to defend my thesis. So I had all my notes, and I don't really like to prepare for things, as you probably learned in the last day here. So I was just not wanting to get things ready for the next day. And so my brain was wandering off. And then I was like, What am I going to do for a job? And then I was like, Who works Cashmere? And the only thing I could think of was the CIA. So I went online and applied that night. And yeah, that's how my life works. That's how I lived my whole life. So don't be surprised by this. This wasn't just because I was in my 20s.

How long did it take them to get back with you?

My first interview was the first week of December. It was super quick. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was five weeks.

Right on. Yeah. It's funny. I get people asking me all the time online, How do I get in there? How do I get into the CIA? And it's like, Well, did you look at the employment section on the website? That might be a good start. They all think it's like everybody gets recruited.

I know. It's like you have to put an.

Application in. Did you put the application in online? No, they have a website? They do have a website.

And it's proven.

It works. You might not work that well over there if you haven't figured that out yet. But anyway, so I would like to talk about 2008 in Mumbai. So we're talking about some drone strikes that happened. Can you go into some of that stuff? That was your first station, correct?

No. So I was actually at headquarters when Mumbai happened. Oh, okay. So I had gone overseas at that point. I had been to Pakistan, but I was actually home in the States when Mumbai happened. And this is mentioned briefly in my book, and that's why it comes up. So when Mumbai happened, it was really interesting. As you can imagine, Congress reaches out to the CIA and they say, What are you going to do about this big event?

Hold on. Let's go back. What was the event.

In Mumbai? So in Mumbai, there was a terrorist attack by Lashkari-Tayiba. That's a Pakistan-based terrorist group. They did it at a few different locations in Mumbai, which is the second largest city in India. And they did it at a hotel. It killed a very large number of people. And so, as you can imagine, the CIA at the time had a lot of stuff going on in Pakistan since that was the focus of the global war on terror at the time. And so there was a lot of pressure then going back on CIA Hey, what are you going to do about these attackers? Because the Indians were saying it all emanated from Pakistan, and you're in Pakistan, and that's your focus. What are you going to do going forward on this? I was on the team that covered, I think I was the actually only person on that terrorist group at the time. The Pakistan terrorist groups just don't get a lot of focus.

Why is that?

I don't know. I think it's because they don't all do things with Al Qaeda. Okay. So if they then eventually join up with Al Qaeda, so there's a really famous one named Ilias Cashmere. And he was a bad guy, equally bad his whole career. But then at one point he said, I'm going to start doing my attacks with Al Qaeda. Then he became a talk target, and then I don't think he even lived a year. You know, because he then moved over to that realm, and al-Qaeda was our focus. Oh, God. It's like al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, maybe TTP, maybe Taliban, and then the Pakistan tear groups were not even on the list. Okay. Yeah. So they just weren't prioritized at all. So what happened is Congress then came to CIA and said, Do something about it. And in my shop, my boss had decided to actually just choose a random terrace camp and say it was Last Green Taiba and have us carry a drone strike on it. So what she did, so the one negative is, and this is what I don't like when stuff gets released out into the public and there's redactions and then they assume it's stuff, right?

There's a lot of garbage that comes in the CA, as you can imagine. So we get a lot of reports on locations and it's not the right group, and then we run it down and we find out the right group. So there was garbage reporting that they were at that place, but they never were, right? We ran it down and we weren't. But what she wanted me to do is write up a report with the garbage reporting to justify the strike on the location. So I refused to. And then I said, I'll write up a report. So I wrote a whole report on why every piece of that information was wrong that they'd ever use that location, and I submitted it to her. So I submitted it to her on a Friday. So the next week, I went to a week of training. So most CIA trainings are offsite. So I was offsite in a different part of town. And it was the end of that next week, and I go out to my phone. We don't have phones in the office, and I have a message and it's like, You need to see what's being sent around.

And I go and she went to another person on her team. She actually went to a DOD, Detail-E, because she thought she could get the Department of Defense person to lie because the CIA person pushed back on her, unfortunately. And she wrote it up for a nomination to do a strike on the location knowing all the facts were wrong because I had already sent out a week before to the team. And so then I think I saw it Thursday night. Friday morning I sent it to all the leaders. I was in the Counterterrorism Center, and so I sent it to all the leaders across our four branches and then the two bosses above them. And luckily, my senior boss, he's pretty famous. He was the main analyst boss on the Osama bin Laden raid. So he's in the movie and stuff for Zero Dark Thirty. He luckily said, Okay, I'm going to assign someone to investigate this. And so he luckily investigated it, and then they shot it down and they didn't do the strike. So that was really good. What was really bad, though, is I didn't go high enough, and I learned that at that point.

So I complained to my bosses, They did the right thing, which you want them to do. But I never gave it to the IG or anything. And maybe a couple of years later, I found out she was one of our bosses in our Yemen drone shop. Right? I mean, that's very dangerous. She was willing to lie about a location in Pakistan to appease a congressperson asking us to do something. And unfortunately, if you don't say something about those people, they get promoted up. I mean, that's a big problem in the government, anywhere you've seen.

There was a ton of drone strikes in Yemen.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And you have to nominate those. You don't just come in like, Let's hit this location today. So that's what we were doing at that time, right? We were giving the nomination to then approve it so then the CIA would do it.

Makes you wonder how many of those drone strikes were legit.

Oh, yeah. I have a lot of questions about Yemen, at least under her watch.

Yeah, no kidding. How long was she in Yemen doing.

That for? I mean, usually rotate for two or three years to a job at CIA.

So what is the point of... What does she get out of this? I mean-So she makes what? Congress happy?

I know. What is the point? I honestly didn't understand the.

Point of it. I guess she did get a promotion. Was that the point?

Yeah, but she was in CA long enough to where she was going to get a promotion anyway. I know that sounds depressing, but you know in the government, you go to a point and they move you to the next level, unfortunately, even if you're good or not. So yeah, I really don't get it. I feel like every time, though, I've seen somebody do the wrong thing, there's not a logical reason, right? Because a normal person wouldn't do that, right? It's like a irrational actor. How do you get to the level? Because you wouldn't have thought of doing it. I mean, maybe it's just a thought, Well, they're terrorists anyway. But there's still laws, right? I mean, we still need to have some justification, obviously.

How many times do you think that was going on?

Just in-Luckily, I don't think it happened a lot in Pakistan because a lot of things were nominated out of my office, and there was really good people there who did the right thing. But it did make me nervous she decided to go to the DOD person because the DOD does a lot of drone strikes. And it's like, It's odd she picked... We had a big team, like 12, 14, and people. I was like, It's odd she picked the one department defense person that she thought would put it out. That made me concerned.

Yeah, picking on the most junior, vulnerable.

And does that mean like, yeah, because DOD does it? Yeah.

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The thing is, you always have to have good people that step up and do the right thing. And if you don't have those people, then no one's ever going to do it. And that's a really big problem in the government. And then those people get into these awkward situations, right? I was in a really tough spot after that. She was going to write me up. She actually did a lot of things against me. She canceled aTDY, I had to a war zone, which made me look really bad. Even the write-up, she started the write-up for me, and then I ended up getting a positive review from the President's briefer on something I said, and she said, Oh, I can't do it now because you got this review. But yeah, it actually affected my career for a short time because she was then using it against me for the next probably year or so. And then finally I got out from her office. But that's the thing in the CIA, a lot of people don't understand is there's not really a human resources department. The only person who can guide your career is your current boss, and that's it.

So they're the one who helps you get to another job. So they tell that person, Yeah, take her. She's great. And they help promote you. Or they say, Don't take her. They help you get into the training courses you need. Or they say, don't let her into that training course. And so all those personalities can really affect your career. As you can imagine, you can get really held back up for things.

Yeah. Let's talk about Pakistan. When you were informed of the Coast bombing in December 2009, Kent-Chapman attack, it was a double-agent suicide bomber. Seven CIA personnel killed. I had friends.

Killed in that. Yeah, I know. You too.

Do you know a lot about what went on there?

Yeah. The crazy part is, well, the day I found out that you're first bringing up, I was in another city in Pakistan, and I flew in and I just came into the office. I knew nothing, right? Because it's not like we share things, as you know, over your cell phones when you're in the CIA. So I go into the office and my boss calls me in and I was like, Oh, gosh, I'm in trouble. I was always getting in trouble for going over his head on something. So I'm like, What did I do? Well, I was down for a week. So he calls me in and I'm like, Oh, gosh. I'm getting ready to defend myself. And he's like, Hey, just you know... And then he told me it happened. So the thing was, is they'd been planning that for a while, and it was actually supposed to be in a shower. It was the asset who chose to move it to Coast, which obviously already is a warning sign, right? So if you think about it, it was actually the people in Pakistan planning it the entire time, and then the last minute it shifted over to Afghanistan, and then the Afghanistan CIA personnel got involved.

So they joined at the end of the whole planning, right? So it was going to be in Pakistan and it moved. So basically what happened, it was a ruse. It was Al Qaeda and TTP, which a lot of people ignore TTP. Even this last year, it's been so powerful. It's always been an ally with Al-Qaeda. Al-qaeda uses them in joint attacks, and people ignore that fact. So the two groups got together and said, Hey, we're going to make this ruse. We're going to do a double agent and ended up being a double Jordanian agent, who then the Jordanians gave to the CIA. So he's like a triple agent. And we're going to use him. We're going to basically tell them he's a doctor that is doing something for Zawir-Hiri and is going to go need to see Zawir-Hiri. So Dr. Ivanal Zawir-Hiri was the head of Al Qaeda at the time. So as you can imagine... Well, he was a deputy, sorry, a deputy. So you can imagine this is the number two most important terrorist in the CIA. And now we got an agent that basically says, Oh, I'm a doctor that has to go see him for a medical thing.

So it was a huge deal. It was probably the biggest operation at the time in the CIA. And then, unfortunately, the whole plan was for him to commit a suicide attack against the CIA during his meeting, and that's what he did. And that's how we lost the seven officers. But it's something to keep in mind, though. A lot of people lose sight of the fact that Zawir Heary is an operational planner. He gets sold all the time as like, Oh, he was like a doctor and he's like a religious scholar. That guy was involved in planning 9/11. He was involved in the planning Coast. He led Benghazi, and he gets ignored all the time. And to be honest, until I see Al Qaeda eulogize him, I'm having a hard time believing he's dead because he does ruses. He plays games. He knows how to mess with us, and he's dangerous.

Yeah. So where is he?

What do you think? Well, supposedly last summer we killed him in a drone strike in Kabul. What seems to have happened is... And all this really lines up. So he was staying at a house owned by Siraj Hadin Haqqani, and Siraj Hadin Haqqani and the Haqqanis have long been suspected of probably being the people who housed Zawir-Hiri the whole time he was in Wazyristan, as you can imagine, because they had such a power base there. Anyway, he goes to Kabul, reportedly, and he's in this house of Haqqanis, and then the CIA struck it and he was killed then. But now it's been 14 months and Al Qaeda has yet to eulogize him officially.

Interesting. Where do you think he might be?

I don't know. I think he's still likely dead. It's very odd that they haven't eulogized him. And they also never fake eulogize people. So I'm just like, Well, I don't think a fake one's going to come up, but why isn't the real one.

Come up? Well, how long does it usually take for them to eulogize somebody?

They usually do it before they name the next leader. They have not publicly named who the next leader is, even though they've chosen who the de facto leader is. But the weird part is the leader is also this strange de facto. So it's like Saif Al-Adl. But they're like, Well, he leads the military side of Al Qaeda. And then Bin Laden's son is still alive. So the US reported him being killed in 2019. So Hamza bin Laden, the heir to Osama bin Laden is alive in Afghanistan too, but he doesn't want to be the leader of Al Qaeda. So it's unclear what role he's playing. So Al Qaeda hasn't actually made clear this is our Amir, which is interesting.

So hold on. We reported Bin Laden's son was killed in 2019. Correct. When did we or you find out that he was still alive?

Last September, his brother came to Afghanistan to visit him.

How do you know that?

Because his brother came to Afghanistan to visit him.

Got you. All right. I'll stop asking questions.

We'll.

Have that conversation off camera. Okay. Now I got to read... Hold on. Now I got to just readjust my thoughts because I would love to dive into that. But let's go to January 2010, led the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani-Braider. Did I say that correct?

Yes. So again, if you've seen my book, this is known. This is a proliferator, as everyone now knows, he basically made the whole peace deal that turned Afghanistan over to the Taliban. So back in 2009, I started targeting him, and we captured him in 2018. The really interesting part is he had really good offset to where I wanted to capture him, but I was like, I don't think... Even if he got on the phone, he was on for like a minute. And I even had a senior boss or the deputy chief of station one time stop me in one of our big meetings that we had weekly. And he said, Sarah, why are you still briefing this? You're never going to get Mullah Berator on a phone. He said it in front of the whole station, right? And it's like, I knew I probably would have. And as you know how life is. So it's funny, the people who collect signals intelligence, even the guy that was supposed to do it for us did not believe my phones were braiders. And he actually was refusing to collect on them. And then a mire of all people from the Bin Laden raid, stepped in and was like, You need to collect.

I don't give a damn what you think. We're the CIA. She was really funny and she defended me. But I don't think he actually collected it. So how it works in the CIA is you always do side things. So I had someone in another location collecting the phones from me. So I was in another city in Pakistan and coming back to Islamabad, and that person calls me. And she said, You won't believe it. Breda's phone is up, but it's been up your whole flight. And I said, That doesn't make any sense. She's like, Yeah, it hasn't turned off. And I said, How weird. And I said, Keep me in the loop. I'm going to see if we can get a capture going. And so I went to the leaders in Islamabad, and the crazy part was... Did you ever hear about the COS conference? I didn't. Okay. There's this time of the year, hopefully the time changes every year, that they all get together and have a big meeting. So we had no leaders. Our top three were gone. And then the leader, the chief of base from where he was located was gone. So the only boss there was our chief of liaison at the time.

And so I went and said, Hey, I need to get a team to go capture Burner. He's like, Let me think about it. I was like, Oh, my gosh. So I didn't even go back and ask him. So I went down to where the team sit and I said, Hey, I need two guys to go to Karachi. And they said, Yeah, we got two in the horror. We'll move them from that. And then I booked a flight and I went straight down there. So I'm traveling, right? And I'm checking in with this girl, and she's like, The phone is still on. And I was like, No way. At first we assumed he lived in Karachi, which he ended up doing, and that's where a capture was, but the phone is in Kueta. So I said, Okay, let's just capture him in Queta. If the phone is up in Kueta. Why would we wait till he comes to Karachi? So I called the boss in Queta, and did you ever see Gone in 60 seconds? And he had Eleanor. So it was the car he never could get, and something always went wrong with it. So our boss in Queta had a terrace like that.

He was a deputy shadow governor for Helmond. He was the shadow governor for a really famous Taliban commander named Mulanay and Barish. I think his name was Taha Shah. And he was in town that day. And this guy tried to get Taha Shah every time he was in town. We probably should do see how much money we've wasted on capturing this guy because we failed every time. So of course, I call him, he's like, Taha Shah is in town. And I said, Dude, I'm saying, Barae to her. And he's like, I don't think it's really Barae to her. He's like, I'm going to go for Taha Shah, and then I'll go for Barae to if we don't get shot. So they spent the first half of the day going for the guy he's never been able to get, and they didn't get him. And then Barae to move. So then my friend's like, He's driving. He's going home to Karachi? And I'm like, Yes. So at this time, I've already decided. I said, This is his kid. There's no way, Beraday. Road to another city with his phone and road back. So I said, His kid has a phone.

Now we can only capture him at home because you don't want to pick some kid up at a restaurant or something. So we waited till the phone went back, and then it went back to the exact neighborhood we thought he lived in. And then we did the capture operation. So we just got really lucky. His kids stole old phone out of the closet and brought on a trip with his dad.

And this is the co-founder of the Taliban.

Yeah, he was number two at the time of the Taliban, but he is one of the founders. Yeah.

How old was he?

Maybe 55. It's really hard to tell. But I think he was probably about 55.

So how long... What is the process like when you want to do a strike or a capture?

Well, luckily, because he was number two of the Taliban, we had approvals to capture him. So we'd already gone to lawyers and got the top 10 of the Taliban. So that's what we had at the time. We had a list of 10 Taliban people we were allowed to capture. So I didn't have to go ask any permissions to capture him. So then usually you go to your COS and get approval. When my COS was gone, chief.

Of station. Coo is Chief of Station. That would be the head agency officer in charge of the entire country.

Yeah. So I would go to him, especially at that high of a capture, and ask his permission, but he wasn't there. And the number two wasn't there, number three wasn't there, and number four wasn't going to give me an answer. So then I just went straight to where Breder lived, and then that COO was gone, and she was replaced by a friend of mine. And so he's like, Let's do it. So we really got no approvals because nobody was in-country. So that's how we got Breder.

How long does it normally take? Let's say they're not on the top 10 list.

If they're not on the top 10 list, you actually have to go to the CIA lawyers and get approvals, and that could take months. Months. If you've never got approval to go after a guy, yeah.

What are your strikes? Usually, are they captures? Are they drone strikes? Are they sending in teams?

Depends on what you're working. I was working Taliban, so we didn't really have lethal approvals on Taliban. Maybe we had a Mulah Omar. So we had to capture Taliban because remember, the government still called them a political group. They weren't a terrorist organization. So we weren't really allowed to put Taliban under a drone strike, but we really couldn't anyway. They were in Quedda, Karachi, Pashaw, or it wasn't like they were in Waziristan. Al Qaeda, most of those targets, obviously the attempt was drone strikes because of the location of the country they were in. But if they're in the subtle areas, obviously like a horror or something, you'd have to capture them. Okay.

So as a targeter, you're attached to a certain group? Correct. Okay.

Or it can depend. So you can be attached to a group, you can be attached to a region, you can be attached to a city. So at that time, my job was the top three of the Taliban and then anything in Karachi. So it could be Al Qaeda, it could be Shia groups. It didn't matter. It could be organized crime. So I did any targeting in Karachi. Okay. Okay.

What does it feel like when you get these guys?

It was pretty exciting. The interesting part was that no one believed I really got him. So we got his photo, and of course, they sent it first to a CIA asset that I always said was crap. Over in Afghanistan, he didn't ID the photo. So everyone's like, It's not him. I said, No, it's him. That source is crap, and you need to finally fire him. And then we finally got it into sources that did actually know him and weren't feeding us garbage because, as you know, a lot of sources in Afghanistan fed us a bunch of garbage, got paid for it, and then they worked for three other intelligence agencies. So yeah, it was good to get him. In retrospect, though, I realized right away that they wanted him... I wanted to get him because he was number two the Taliban, and he was the lead operational commander of the Taliban. So in my head, he's the lead ops guy. So every US soldier dying in Afghanistan, it's on his shoulders. That's the way I viewed him as a target. When we got him in a room and we started getting questions from what the CIA wanted from him, that's when I actually learned that the President at the time, President Obama, had appointed the special convoy, and his name was Richard Holbrook, and his goal was to do Taliban reconciliation.

And their main focus, and they had made some assessment, and the only way they could reconcile with the Taliban was to use Mulabirator. So we sit down with him and want to collect info to go target other Taliban members, because that's what I do. I go after the bad guys, and I find out all my questions are, Who would you be okay with coming to meet with you about peace? We would list off names of countries. Would you be okay if Japan came, the Brits came, all this strange stuff? And I was like, Oh, my gosh, they only want this guy for reconciliation. And that became... That's when I saw, We're going to make a deal with the Taliban, and we're going to give part of the government back to the Taliban. I didn't think it was going to be what today was. So if I went back in time, I never would have captured him because he is the reason the whole country fell.

Are you serious?

I swear.

To God. So this plan, this goes way back.

Oh, yeah. And they had the plan before I captured him. The day we captured him, our chief brought us in the office in Islambad. We flew back up from Karachi, and he brought me and then the other guy who are going to be the lead debrifers, and he gave us a heads up. He said, FYI. He said, This is the number one focus in the White House. They want to bring out this whole brook guy. They want to take it over from Islamabad station. They don't even want you guys debriefing him. So he fought for us to debrief him, but they pulled everything. They sent a psychiatrist out to watch our session to make sure we had rapport with him. I kid you not. They made sure his detainee debrifers had rapport with him. They were already kissing his butt right after we caught him. So yeah, and so he ended up getting released, and then he was the key US intermediary with the Taliban to make the peace deal. And I tell you, this guy... I really liked most terrorists I met. I know that sounds really bad because when you're on a human-to-human level and you're just talking to him, this guy was smart.

He was charismatic. He was probably a genius because he was locked up. But he could remember he told you something five days ago. He knew exactly when he told you stuff. He could defend anything. So if you said, Hey, the Taliban did X, he would give you a really good justification why, and you'd be like, Oh, yeah, that actually makes sense. So I see the logic. -can you give me an example? One of the things is right after the fall. So the US went in after 9/11, and they beat the Taliban in five weeks. I mean, it was amazing. Raw, raw USA. They really kicked ass. They toppled the Taliban. So the Taliban basically all went home. So Mullah Brader, in my theory, first took Mullah Omar and he hit him. So he hit him in a ruse gun, and Mullah Omar, I don't think ever left there. Braider went home to the home his dad owns. And they were like, We lost. We're done. Well, as you know, Bin Laden crossed Tora Bora into Pakistan. So our war now on Al Qaeda was over and it was like, Oh, gosh, we moved this whole war machine to Afghanistan.

We beat the Taliban and Bin Laden is gone. What are we going to do? So they decided we're going to go target the old Taliban leaders, even though we just beat the Taliban. So they made a hit list of the senior Taliban leaders, and then they came and bom Beradre's house. So at that point, he said, screw this. I'm going on offense. You beat us and then you come back here months later and you bomb my house and they actually injured his dad, so that didn't help. And then that's when he triggered over and said, Okay, game's on. Taliban's back. You didn't win. And that's when he went full back in. No kidding. Right? So when he tells that story, I'm like, Heck, yeah. You come and bought my dad. I'm in. So he would always have a good story like that. So I can see how he would meet with US policymakers and be very persuasive, especially because, remember, they didn't view the Taliban as a terrorist group. They still view them as a political group, even though they kidnap people, murder people, torture people, they rape women, they rape children. They still call them a political organization of bullshit.

We're funding them again.

Now, right? I think we said $40 million a week.

$40 million a week goes to Taliban. I believe so. Yes. -who are taking our allies, lining them up like dogs, and shooting them in the back of the head.

And we're funding that. And that's what you hope they do. I mean, I've got videos that are very, very painful deaths.

What.

Deaths? Torture deaths, some really bad beheading deaths of our allies.

These are all the guys we used to work with over there.

Yeah, a lot of the people who worked with them get the video sent to them during or after. It's a taunt. They were taunting when the airport was still open. When people were trying to get the airport as refugees, you remember the US military, they were there, but they couldn't respond in any way to the situation going on. So to taunt them, the Taliban would grab a woman and shoot her in the head. They would burn a child alive in front of the military because they knew they couldn't act.

Yeah, I interviewed... Do you know Tyler Vargas.

Andrews, by chance? Yes. We haven't met in person, but I'm in the Moral Compass Federation, and he's in the Federation with us.

Oh, man, what an amazing human being he is. But yeah, he was describing some of the stuff that he saw. And then I worked over there for a long time too, and we probably ran into each other without knowing it. But I had people sending me videos and cell phone clips of what they were doing. Many of you are very familiar with the struggles that veterans and military members face on a daily basis. We talk about it all the time. The struggles with addiction, the suicide epidemic, the broken homes, the divorce rate, and the list goes on. What I want to tell you about is a veteran-owned company, just happens to be a sponsor, that is actually trying to make a real difference in military members and veterans' lives. And that company is PurTalk. Our veterans gave everything to protect our nation, and PurTalk understands the sacrifices they've made. They've set an ambitious goal to eliminate $10 million in military debt by Veterans Day. But they can't do it alone. They need our help. When you switch to PurTalk's lightning-fast, 5G network, they'll donate a portion of every new order to this noble cause. You can make a real difference just by choosing superior cell phone service.

And PurTalk's plans started just 20 bucks a month offering unlimited talk, text, more data, and a mobile hotspot. Just go to puretalk. Com/ryan and make the switch. Let's rally together and show our unwavering support to our veterans. Visit puretalk. Com/ryan and switch to PurTalk today. It's the right move and it's the American way. I wish I could post it on here. I wish I could embed it into this interview just to show people what's happening over there. What does it look like to see an infant burned alive to taunt? What does it look like to see the people that you used to work with lined up in the mud and just shot in the back of the head just going down the line? They don't put that on the news. These people need to see that.

Yeah, they don't put it on the news. And they also didn't give any help to these poor people who had to stand there and watch that. Our serviceman, the trauma they had to stand there and watch and endure, they actually came back here, and a lot of them were told, We don't want to hear you talk about Afghanistan. Yeah. It's funny you bring it up because we were talking about India, and the bomber that Tyler had his eyes on was captured in India.

Did he?

Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah. So in 2017, ISIS deployed him to do an attack in New Delhi, India. And he went over there with the ruse of being an engineer student and started college. And then he was casing a few locations like the New Delhi Airport, the mall, and the Indians or the CIA. I was not the CIA at the time. One of them infiltrated the network of ISIS he was in and found out who he was. And they did a capture of him in India, and then they sent him to Bagram. So he was in Bagram from 2017 until July first, when we snuck out in the middle of the night, July first, 2021. We left in the middle of the night, didn't tell the commander of Bagram. We were leaving. He comes in the morning and the Taliban and terrorists are breaking all the prisoners out. That's when he got to prison. So we had him in custody for all those years. And the crazy part is I found out who the bomber was even before it was in the press because my guy who gives me ISA stuff for Libya sent me the photo in the middle of the night, and I get a photo from him and it's got a little bit of Arab text, and then he wrote in Arabic something.

So I get up and I translate it. And I've honestly had not slept in a week at that point because I just got people into the Kabul airport. And I was like, Oh, gosh, but it's Libya. I thought it was a Libyan terrorist. And so I was all getting up for it. And it said, and this man's important, you need to look into him. And so I translate the name on the picture and it says Logari. And so I write back, Why are you sending me an Afghan? It's like it's still not even dawning on me that he's sending me somebody to do with the attacks. And so he writes back, and again, look at him. I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I try searching the name and I'm not getting anything on the name, and it dawns on me. I said, Was he involved in the Kabul airport attack? And he said, Yeah. I didn't know he was a suicide bomber at that second. And I thought maybe he was the planner. Because usually you don't know the bomber, they just take some low-level guy. But that's how I found out.

And then maybe within the next day it hit the press who he was. But yeah, so Damn.

It's crazy. Damn.

Well, what do you want to talk about first? Do you want to talk about... I want to go into the Afghan withdrawal.

Go anything you want to.

I don't care.

I want to go into Benghzi. I'll drink some water.

Let's take a quick break. Okay. When we come back, I think we'll pick up. Since we're on the subject, let's go into the withdrawal. All right, Sarah, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into the Afghan withdrawal. I've covered this with Scott Manne before, who I know you know Scott. I've covered it with Tyler Andrew Vargas. I'm sorry, Tyler Vargas Andrews. But I'd love to hear it. I'm really interested in getting all the dirt on this. Anything you have to add on top of everything we've already covered, I want to hear it.

I think one of the things I could add on top of what they've covered is the fact that it always gets lost that this was State Department run, right? The really interesting part is, right? Do you hear anybody ever say, We need to hold State Department accountable for the horrible Neo, right? Or even military is like, Hey, we were just following the state NEO rules. And then being CIA and all, even towards the end of the withdrawal, they took over the CIA's gate. The CIA was probably the only real government organization moving people out, taking our allies out, making it happen and doing the right thing. State Department took over their gate because they didn't like what they were doing and that they were bringing people in. And so even when I finally got a family to that gate after the suicide bombing, it was a State Department person running the CIA gate. No kidding. Yeah. So they were basically preventing the CIA from bringing their own people in.

Why do you think we didn't want to save our own people?

I think we, as CIA, wanted to save our own people. I think the government just wanted to get out of Afghanistan and actually thought they were going to get away with it. I think they just wanted to leave and be done. They never expected 20 years of veterans or intel officers that worked in the country or even just NGOs who had supported the country were going to go back in and save their allies. We got in their way in a bad way. And that's what ruined their narrative, right? Because they were going to say, Hey, we left 100 Americans behind. But now you had all these volunteer groups with large lists of people able to tally up their Americans and say, Hey, we went across all the groups, and it looks like 8,000 Americans are left behind. Us government, how are you getting away with saying we only left 100 Americans behind? So it was actually the volunteers who at least told the truth and held the government to account. But of course, the government is not dumb. You know what they did? They made like a coalition to get the other people to be quiet.

So task force pineapple that Scott was from was one of the louder ones, obviously, talking about the issues. And so they wanted to diffuse that. And they created this thing called Afghan EVAC. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I haven't. So it was basically going to be it is a partnership between the government and all these NGOs. Of course, not all of us are a part of it. And More Accomplished Federation is the rogue entity to the side. If I'm in something, it's like the rogue entity to the side, just FYI. Because it's like, Hey, we don't want to play with this game. Afghan EVAS just talks what State Department wants in the talk, and it keeps people quiet. You have to sign tons of NDAs. When I first joined in, I think after the third NDA, I was like, What the F? I'm out of this group. But yeah, it is to keep the volunteer groups in line to make them minimally happy. So it's a cover. Yeah, as they drag out the EVAC, it is a cover to drag out the EVAC 100 %. And all these groups just fall in line with it.

And even two years later, at first I thought, Oh, I hope they know that they're being played. But two years later, they still do their monthly meetings, and people still talk about it like it's really saving people.

Can you go over some of what's happening there now? You still have a really good footprint in Afghanistan as far as what's happening. Yeah. And so I've talked to some of the Northern Alliance guys, and they're talking... I had always had a feeling that China played a role in this. A lot of people think I'm crazy, but we have the green energy thing, right? Everybody's moving. This administration is really pushing green energy. Well, green energy comes from China. It's not energy independence. China was there in Afghanistan the minute we pulled out. I know you know a little bit about this. Very rich lithium mines in Afghanistan. Lithium is what we need to make the batteries that power the green energy. China's taking it. I mean, anybody can piece this together and they go, Oh, well, maybe there's something to that. Do you think there's anything to that?

Well, yeah. I really hope people have known this the entire time because it would blow my mind if people negotiate with the Taliban, didn't know this. But in 2009, Mula Berator, who again is the person who negotiated the peace deal, his job for the Taliban was he was the liaison from the Taliban to the government of China, and he would go to China and meet with the Chinese government. At the time, it was obviously, as you can imagine, just keeping a relationship going. The Chinese really wanted, Hey, Taliban, if you collect any info on the Uyghurs, on the Uyghurs, pass it to us. So it's really interesting. People don't realize that the Taliban are reporting on other Muslims to China. So everyone acting like, Oh, yeah, they're going to be some big counterterrorism force. The people of China are doing abuses against the Taliban have been supporting that for a very, very long time besides what they're doing in their own country. And then Taliban, of course, would ask for stuff like help us get weapons or funds for weapons. So it was that relationship. But the Taliban-China relationship has been stronger than the US-Talban relationship, at least since 2009, for sure.

So of course, the China would be the main party they link up with when they go to. And China now I think, is the first and only country that has assigned an official ambassador to the Taliban government.

They're the first ones?

I think.

They're the first ones, yeah. Are they the only ones.

Thus far? Yeah. Everyone else has these weird envoys, but I believe that's the first designated ambassadors position.

I was talking to these Northern Alliance guys, and they were saying there are Chinese officials everywhere over there, building massive hotels right outside of these lithium deposits. I mean, huge, multimillion dollar structures.

Which you.

Don't see those very often over there in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan.

Yeah. I mean, and it's smart of them. Obviously, it goes along with the Belt Road initiative. Like I said, they already had... They don't have to go make a relationship, right? The guy they brokered with now, I don't know what he is now, number three in the government, but he also plays a huge part in the economics piece of this current government anyway. So he's already positioned anyway to hook China up, which was his closest ally before he was captured.

Can you talk a little bit about the Northern Alliance and what's going on with them right now?

Yeah, I could talk a little bit about the Northern Alliance. The thing is, obviously, as you know, there's pockets of resistance, right? The Northern Alliance is the most famous because obviously that goes back to Ahmad Shah Massoud, and he was the key US ally before 9/11. The really interesting thing is, and we talk about it in our book, is he was assassinated, of course. Well, the individual who provided the two Tunisian suicide bombers to him provided attackers to Zawahiri for the Maghzi attacks too. The guy's still in play. And I like to try to tell people this is still all connected, right? I know Masud's son comes up as a connection. It's like, no, even the same are still in the circle as when Ahmad Shah and Masud was in power. And I feel the Northern resistance is trying to tell that to people, right? These are still the same attackers. We're here fighting international terrorists. There's a lot of misinformation in the US that what's happening in Afghanistan is like a domestic war or a tribal war. And it's like, no, those are foreign terrorists. They're fighting Al Qaeda. At this point, so many terrorists are pouring in to Afghanistan as well.

And the really interesting part is Al Qaeda has adapted. They learned something, I think, from Benghzi. So when Al Qaeda went into Libya after Gaddafi, they decided, Hey, it's better for us to take the local commanders and make them the Al Qaeda leaders instead of bringing in a foreigner. Because you bring in an Egyptian into Benghazi, it doesn't always go well, right? Because the locals are like, Oh, Egyptians. So they decided we're going to appoint the locals. Now Al Qaeda is doing that in Afghanistan. So for each province that Al Qaeda is making commanders for, a lot of them are taking Taliban members and making them the Al Qaeda commander. So the two things that works for the Al-Qaeda, right? The US will just say they're Taliban when they're Al-Qaeda, and they already have the support because they're the Taliban, right? So you're not bringing in some outside force and being like, Follow me, I'm Al Qaeda. You're saying, Hey, you already found the Taliban guy. He now works for Al Qaeda. And that's what they did in Benghazi. And the two that they chose in Benghazi, they were involved in our attacks. And like I said, they're doing it in Afghanistan now, but for every province, right?

So it's like 100 Benghazis. It almost feels like.

Man, they're smart.

They are. It's genius because there's always been a little ruffling, especially you bring in Egyptians, is always the best example. And then there's a little headbutting.

Man. Can you talk a little bit about what the resistance is, who it is, who they're fighting? Just more of a snapshot of what's going on.

Over there. Yeah. I'm not an expert on the resistance. There's different pockets, so there's the Tajiks, right? And that's the ones we all know, the Northern Alliance. And then there's the Sadats, like Sami Sadat. There's the ones who were basically maybe their Special Forces in their military or in the Ministry of Defense of the real Afghan government, and they have a resistance and pockets of resistance and different leaders, right? And a lot of them are a costume, but they don't have to be, right? So as we go along, all these different pockets are going to need to go under.

An umbrella. They're going to need to unite.

Exactly. Because that's what the terrorists do, right? Even if you look over in Pakistan, I don't know if you remember when TTP was formed, but the only purpose of forming TTP was to make the terrorists stronger by putting them all together. So they took Bytul and Masud's group, Abdul and Masud's, Gubahadars, and Fakir Muhammad's. And they said, Okay, you all go under the structure. So Al Qaeda is like, That's genius. And Bin Laden said, I want to start doing that. I want to do it in Libya. He didn't do it when he wanted to do, but Ansel-Asharia-Benghazi started doing it, and then later on they followed Bin Laden's plan, and they actually made another organization that did follow Bin Laden's plan and reported to Al Qaeda. But when Ansel-Asharia-Benghazie was set up, and that was one of the attackers in our group, they said, Any group, you can join us. And so I think this confuses a lot of people. So they'll be a guy at our attacks. He's Ansel-Asharia-Benghazie and he's AQIM because it's an umbrella organization. You can be any terrorist group under the Ansel-Asharia banner. And Al Qaeda is getting really smart about that.

They're actually having meetings with international terrorists to discuss how can we make more of these umbrella organizations and wrap us under it. Even the are involved in those discussions. One of our terrorists that we found recently that had been in Gitmo, he's still in Libya, he's having those discussions with the Haqqanis about, Hey, how do we view all of this together? Don't make it Afghanistan. Don't make it Libya. Make this a global terrorism front. Those conversations are happening.

Wow.

And the thing is they wanted to do this in Libya, and they failed. So Libya was supposed to become where all the training camps were, and then they would deploy all the terrorists out from those training camps to all the future jihads. First it was Syria, but then wherever it would become. So they've now shifted that to Afghanistan. So Afghanistan now they're going to put, I don't know what the exact thing is, but basically at least one training camp in each province. And so they're going to train all the foreign terrorists in Afghanistan, and then they're going to deploy them from Afghanistan to the different groups. And the really interesting part is the terrorist who moved all of our attackers that left our attacks out of Libya after the attacks, he's sitting in Kabul. So basically, Al Qaeda's best terrorist facilitator is in Kabul because that's their plan.

Wow. Why do you think so many foreign terrorists are converging in on Afghanistan?

Because it's safe.

Because we're not there.

Yeah. So even one of our most recent ones, I'm assuming he's a high value target in Libya. He was a very high target value when we were in Pakistan. He now goes to Afghanistan. There's no more drone strikes. He can live a lot safer. So of course, they're going to move there. And remember, that's not where the training camp infrastructure is going to be, and they want to support that.

Do you think China is going to aid them in future or attacks on us?

I think they're for sure going to turn a blind eye. I think they're going to ride this for as long as they can. I don't think China is stupid. I'm not sure if China thinks Taliban is going to be ruling 10 years from now, but I think China is like, Let's position ourselves for whatever that fallout is going to look like. I think that's more what China.

Is thinking. Do you think China is going to be ruling over there in 10 years?

I'm not entirely sure.

They already are, it sounds like. But...

Man.

So what is Taliban's relationship with the US now? Are we...

According to an op-ed in The Washington Post today, the CIA shares intelligence with the Taliban, so we have an official intelligence-sharing relationship with the Taliban.

I just... I can't believe... It doesn't even seem real. No. Does it?

I can barely take it every single day. Especially with just how many al-Qaeda members are currently in Afghanistan. The thing is, we know Benghazi was covered up that Al-Qaeda led the attack, right? People shouldn't have allowed it to happen. They did. Now, should we have learned our lesson? We cannot let the US government cover up Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I'm sorry. I feel like people are like, We've done this for 20 years. No. We're going to say something. We're going to report it if you don't or if the press doesn't. I do think people need to step up now. We have so many experts on Afghanistan. We have so many allies in Afghanistan. We can pull out all the information ourselves. If the government is not going to do the right thing, then everybody who has contacts in Afghanistan needs to be putting the information out.

Where do you think... They're doing all this training and stuff in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and all these international terrorists. Do you think they're going to start coming up through our Southern borders?

They've already started.

Do you know that for a fact?

Yes.

How do you know that?

I know that because I was told several different times about group pockets of terrorists, like 6/8. There was one larger one, maybe 25-50. I think it was 50, that procured passports from the Afghan government with the sole purpose of coming to our Southern border. One was ISIS. There was only a group of eight. The ISIS terrace got the passports, they went to Iran. Their goal was Iran, Turkey, turkey, Brazilian visa, and then come up through the Darian Pass. I forget it was 25 or 50. Sorry. That was Haqqani Network. Their goal was... Obviously, they're Haqqani Network. They run the Ministry of Interior, so they all got the passports. Their goal was Turkey to Brazil. The key is Brazil. And then Al-Qaeda has also sent attackers on the same routes.

Why is Brazil a key?

Because it's easy to get a humanitarian Brazil visa, and then there's no real security to stop you from leaving. So then you just now go illegally up through the Darien Pass. Okay. The Darian Pass is the focus. The Darian Pass is where they're all going through. The Darian Pass is your choke point.

Where is that?

It's like in Panama.

Okay.

And it's super dangerous. If 10 Afghans go in, maybe six come out.

Really? Why is that?

There is murders, rapes, robberies, animal attacks. I seriously know someone who told me that the Afghan died by a large wild cat, like a cougar or whatever is the local one there. So yeah, diseases, even if they get through and then get picked up by the Panamanians, there's a lot of torture.

And abuse. So hold on. Why is it so dangerous there? This is a section of Panama?

I think because so many criminals maybe are.

Going through it. It's just extreme poverty.

I think it's just like it's the jungle, right? It's like a real Wild Wild West. So that's where everybody's targeting to travel through. So it's not exactly Brazil. Brazil is just the easiest part to get through this pipeline up.

Got.

You. Yeah.

It's the easiest country to infiltrate. Brazil is, yes. For the beginning of their journey. How many terrorists? Do you know approximately how many terrorists we've caught trying to cross the Southern border? I wouldn't imagine it's very many. It seems like the Southern border is pretty.

Wide open. I don't know, because last year I thought there was 20 in a month or something. I feel like maybe in this year it was like 100 or so. I don't know the exact number. I know we're missing a lot.

Yeah. I mean, these are only who we've caught.

And-and who we have biometrics for, right? Because if we don't have their biometrics in our system, how do we know where they're tariffs? We don't even know what they are. And remember, if they're coming as an Afghan on a fake Taliban passport, it doesn't have the biometrics we had anyway. It doesn't have the name we have watched listed. It doesn't even probably have the ethnicity. If you're a Pakistani and you went and got a passport from the Taliban, they assume you're an Afghan.

That's a good point. Have we interrogated anybody that they have caught.

Crossing the border? I'm assuming. I just don't have access to that. But they are detention facilities, if that's what you're asking.

Are you aware of any of the motivations?

I just have not seen any debriefings, and luckily, I have not known a terrorist that's come over, thank heavens. Okay.

All right. Well, is there anything else that we want to cover when it comes to the Afghan with Jira?

I think we're good unless you had something.

All right, let's move into some more of your career. You were involved in the first operational acts after the UBL raid, capture of Jonas Al-Maritany.

Yeah. So that was an interesting time because as you remember, obviously they got Bin Laden, and then they're like, Oh, no, the Pakistanis might arrest all these Americans who were involved, and they sent a ton of people home, right? And then Pakistan is like, Oh, good, we're going to stop issuing visas. I don't know why nobody factored that in. And then like, Oh, shoot, we don't have enough staff in Pakistan because now we can't get visas because Pakistan retaliation stopped issuing visas. So they went to the targeting community and said, Who still has visas? And a long, long time ago, the Pakistanis issued tenure, and then it went to five year and then it went just your trip. So I had a five year. There was one girl that was now part-time CA. She married like a J. Sock Officer. So she wasn't at headquarters anymore. She had a tenure. And then Maya, who caught Bin Laden, had a tenure. The funny part is the three of us volunteered. So they sent all those staff officers home from Islamabad. And Maya, who all of ISI knew got Bin Laden, she volunteered to go back to Pakistan.

So they're all whims, right? Because she was like, I'll go back. So they didn't take her. Unfortunately, she's a little bit of a tough character. I like her, but the boss, the female boss, didn't want to have her come back. So me and the other two girl, me and the other girl went. So I go out there and it is like a ghost town and they're doing nothing. There's no work going on. And we get information that Younus Mauritani, so he was the Al Qaeda external operations commander. So he's now like KSM, but 10 guys died since, right? So he's not as smart as College Jake Muhammad, who did 9/11. He's like the C-Team. So he's like, This is not who we got. So he was in charge of any external plotting for Koral-Kai out of Pakistan. And we got information that he was going to leave Pakistan to go to Africa, and my assumptions, maybe Libya at the time, just because of the year, it was 2011. And then he was going to plan a tax in Europe from Africa. It was him and his cell they were going to move out of Pakistan.

So we got this. And I said, Oh, good. Let's go ask Pakistan to detain them. And everyone laughed at me. They're like, We don't do operations with Pakistan anymore. I said, Well, are we going to ask? And they're like, We don't even talk. So I go over to our chief of liaison at the time, which every chief of liaison in my story is bad, but they're not all bad, but this is sorry. Sorry, CIA. So I go to chief of liaison and I say, Hey, can you call ISI and see if we can go capture UNIS?

Real quick. Isi is the Pakistanis version of CIA.

Yeah, Inter-Services Intelligence. They have a bunch of different directorates. The CIA works with their Counterterrorism directorate. So that's who we're talking to when we talk to them as a partner, if that makes sense. Okay. So I go over, I said, Call ISI so we can go capture Younus. And he goes, I don't talk to ISI. And I said, But you're the chief of the liaison, and your only job is liaison with ISI. And he goes, Yeah. And I said, Can I have their number? He's like, I don't have their phone number. He goes, I'm only here to play tennis. And I thought I misheard that. I seriously thought I misheard that. So I said, You don't have a number, you can't call them. And he's like, No. And he honestly grabs a tennis racquet and leaves the meeting, the discussion with me with a tennis jacket. He seriously went in the middle of the day to play a tennis jacket. When I was asking him if we could go capture the external operations planner for Al Qaeda. So anyway.

This is our US government.

I.

Honestly-this is how it is. Everybody needs to hear this. Yeah. Everybody needs to hear this.

So he went to play tennis. So I go back into the targeting shop, and everyone's like, How did it go? Making fun of me. And I said, Yeah, the jerk doesn't have an ISI number. So I said, But we do. And we had this old notebook in front of the phone, and it never got changed. You probably need to go throw that notebook away. And so I was like, The phone number is in this notebook. I know it because I've called from it. And I went through the notebook and I found ISI's phone number. It's the ISI the targeters talk to, notthe eye side of the ISI the chief of station talks to you, but I don't care. So I called it and the guy knew me. And I'm like, Hey, it's Sarah Adams. I'm back in country. We want to meet. He's like, Come on over. So we went over. It was me and one of the permanent targeters in the station because I was just a TD wire. And we go over and they have us go meet, I guess, in the room the Chief of station goes to because it's never where I met before.

And it's like this big room with maps all over. And it's really funny because we always printed maps for I-S-I and I never know what we did with them, and I go to them, This is where all our maps went. I thought you were doing operations with them. So the room was all these maps, and it was a very senior ISAID guy who I assume was probably the head of the CT directorate. Again, I never met at that directorate, so I didn't know who he was. And we start the conversation and I tell them about Jonas. And at the time, he had four or five terrace traveling with him. And then the guy, he listens and he's like, We'd be interested, but we're really upset about Bin Laden, and he goes through the spiel. And then he goes like, Hey, if you handshake with me that you'll tell us if you're going to go get Iman Al-Zari-Hiri in Pakistan, we'll do it. Because I just thought he would say, You did this with Bin Laden. We're not going to work with you. That's why I think the whole conversation is going. And he asked for a handshake.

Well, luckily, I'm not going to just handshake people. I'm not a liar, right? So luckily, I knew we were nowhere near getting Zawahiri. So I said, Hey, I know we're not about to capture Zawahiri in Pakistan. And I shook his hand, which was so funny because I had no authority to shake his hand, and he said, Okay. And then we started planning for the operation. It was one meeting with ISI to get them to restart capture operations.

That was it. Man, and you triggered it.

Yeah, and in the US didn't even try it.

Because old boys over there playing tennis.

Yeah, old boy. Yeah, it was a whole other issue. But yeah, we got Younus. And then the funny part is it actually became a big thing because we went over to start meeting to plan for Younus, and then Press came out that the head of Al Qaeda and Karachi, who I knew really well because I used to be the Karachi targeter, was captured. So I go over, I said, Hey, this guy was captured. And he's like, Oh, yeah, he's here. I said, Can we meet him? He's like, Of course. So we started debriefing Al Qaeda's head of Karachi just because we luckily were meeting with ISI again and he was in their building. And then so, Unis and team go to Southern Pakistan. And I kid you not, their plan is to get on a boat. I'm not saying a ship, a boat to Africa. So a couple of the guys are like, You got to be kidding me. This plan is crazy. And they jet and they go back to Zareestand and they ditch Unis. And so all we have is that some guy named Dowd is going to move him around. This is a part I want to explain why you always collect information.

So a guy named Daoud is going to move him. And so I said, Let's just pick a Daoud. We need a starting point in Queta. We had no capture team because they stopped captured. So we talked Cobble and descending like a person and their tool, and they came over. I'm like, Okay, I'll be your capture team. So we had a capture team from Cobble. I said, Let's pick Daoud by Danny. So he was basically KSM's brother-in-law, and he had just been released a few months ago. I said, Hey, we know he's in Queta. He's important enough to where he would facilitate him. I said, I know I saw in the past during CIA's debriefing program, people mapped out his house. So we dug it all up and found the house. And then we went and asked the AQ guy that we're now randomly meeting, Hey, did you know Daou? Did you ever go to his house? He's like, Yeah, I've been to his house. We're like, Does his family still live there? Because that was so old, right? The US probably mapped it out in 2002. And he said, Yeah, he still lives there. And then we acted like we didn't know where it was and we made a map it.

And it was the exact same location. And then we went and got imagery and sat in front of him and his eyes got all big because his description wasn't good at all. But he was like, How did they find this house from my description? Because he was like, It was down a street and there was a school bus. Anyway, so we stage and start at that location. Unus was three blocks from there. I doubt that Daoud was involved. We took a guess and he was that close to the location that we were able to capture him. Wow. Is that crazy? And it's all because long time ago, CIA's amazing debriefing program that people always give a hard time about when it was the greatest collection of counterterrorism information ever, an old piece of info from 2002 or 2003 helped us do a starting point.

Man, that is amazing.

Yeah. And then I do have a funny story. I dated a cashmere for five years, and it was like getting a one-on-one into ISI. By the time I got to Pakistan and I worked with ISI, they were the exact same. So everything they did, I knew. I always knew all their games. I could communicate with them perfectly because I dated someone difficult just like them for five years. So we get Jonas and we capture him in the south, as you know, and we're all in Islamabad. So they say, Oh, it's going to take us a week to get him up there. It's Eid this week. You can come the week after and start detaining, debriefing. So we go back up and of course, our station is like, We got to confirm they really have Unus. Headquarters wants a confirmation. So I said, I'm just going to show up and be dumb. And they're like, What? So the first day of Eid, it was a Monday, I talked one of the other station targeters and I said, Yeah, we're going to drive over there. We're going to pretend we have a meeting, and we're going to see if UNICE is there.

And he's like, This is never going to work. We're going to get in so much trouble. And we went. We went and pulled up to the building, and no one was working. There was one guy in the guard tower, and he goes like this. I'm like, Let us in. And so we get in the I-S-I compound. We park. No one's anywhere because everyone's off. We walk in the main doors and there's a reception area. No one's working the reception area. And I look at him and I knew he was dreading what I was going to say. I said, We're going down the detainee room. So we go down where they do the detainee briefings, and we walk in the room where the CCT video cameras are on, and I turn on all the TVs. Younus is on the TV. A minder walks in the room and shuts the TV off. And then a couple of minutes later, an ISI officer that knows this comes out, he's like, What are you guys doing here? And I was like, Oh, didn't we have a meeting today? He's like, No, we told you it's next week. And I was like, Oh, my gosh.

I always get stuff confused. And so we left and we went back and we said, Hey, we saw Younus on camera. He's on Islamabad. And the funny part is the next week when we went there, I asked that Colonel, I said, What was Younus like? And he's like, Oh, I haven't spoke to him yet. So the minder never told him that we even saw Younus on camera. So... Wow. Yeah. So they spent that whole week debriefing him and pretending he wasn't even in the city yet.

Damn. What was that like when he got back to station?

He told him. Everyone was so excited that it was really Younus. He's really unique looking. So when we saw on the camera, it was 100 % him. So I think everyone was really excited that, yes, we got the right guy. Because there was still a lot of nervousness. Is I-Sai really going to do with this? Are they going to let the guy go? Are they really going to do this operation with us? But yeah, it was all three of who we wanted to get. We got all three.

Man, that's amazing. Yeah. Great work.

Well, I mean, wasn't me all you had to do is ask him a question.

Yeah, well, it was you. But let's move into Trippley next on The Sean Ryan Show.

People are so lost that it is this big thing, and it's all connected, right? They want to ignore that and they want to make Binghazi this little thing on the side that randomly happened when it's a piece of the whole pie.

They want to compartmentalize everything. Exactly. What was the narrative about this? There was some cartoon that was made. The Los Angeles Times says the producer of an anti-Islam movie that sparked violent protests across the Middle East is behind bars. Nukula Nukula was arrested Thursday.

Jake Sullivan made the video narrative, right? And then they all jumped on board, right? So Obama did a statement. Hillary Clinton did a statement. Obama, as everybody knows, got on a plane to Vegas to go see Beyonce and Jay Z. It's like, why did he not cancel that trip and stay and make sure his orders are followed up on, right?

So Obama, this is while the attack's happening?

Yeah, he flew to Vegas while the.

Attacks are happening. So we have an embassy and a CIA annex under attack, and the President of the United States is flying to Vegas to meet with Beyonce. Yeah. Do you hear that, everybody?