Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Kiriakou, who had headed the agency's counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, on Friday issued a warning to Islamabad that it would not gain anything positive if it decides to fight a war with India.
Speaking to ANI news agency, Kiriakou said, "Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose. It's as simple as that."
Kiriakou, who spent the entire second half of his career spanning 15 years in counterterrorism operations, called on Pakistan to "stop provoking Indians" as it will only end up in their loss.
"They'll lose. And I'm not talking about nuclear weapons -- I'm talking just about a conventional war. And so there is no benefit to constantly provoking Indians," he said.
Kiriakou said when he was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, he was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
"That Musharraf had turned control over to the United States...But the Pakistanis in the intervening years, and remember, I was there 23 years ago...over the last 23 years, the Pakistanis have come to say that is absolutely not true. The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Pakistani generals are the ones who control it," he said.
Asked about whether this information was shared with India, Kiriakou said he doubts it.
"I doubt that the Americans ever told India that the control of Pakistani nukes also lies with the US because of the vociferousness with which the Pakistanis have publicly maintained that they control their own nuclear weapons. But I can tell you definitively that the State Department was telling both sides -- if you're gonna fight, fight. Keep it short and keep it non-nuclear. If nuclear weapons are introduced, the whole world is going to change. And so I think there was restraint on both sides," Kiriakou said.
The Musharaff factor
Kiriakou claimed that US threw millions of dollars to purchase the former President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, who then let America do whatever they wanted.
"Our relations with the Pakistani government were very, very good. It was General Pervez Musharraf at the time. And look, let's be honest here. The United States loves working with dictators. Because then you don't have to worry about public opinion and you don't have to worry about the media anymore. And so we essentially just purchased Musharraf," he said.
"We gave millions and millions and millions of dollars in aid, whether it was military aid or economic development aid. And we would meet with Musharraf regularly, several times a week. And essentially he would let us do whatever we wanted to do. Yes. But Musharraf also had his own people that he needed to deal with," he added.
Kiriakou said that Musharraf just kept the military 'happy,' and pretended to side with the US on counterterrorism while carrying out terrorist activities against India.
"He had to keep the military happy. And the military didn't care about Al-Qaeda. They cared about India. And so in order to keep the military happy and keep some of the extremists happy, he had to allow them to continue this dual life of pretending to cooperate with the Americans on counterterrorism while committing terror against India," he said.
Kiriakou also expressed his concern regarding the volatile nature of politics in Pakistan.
"I'm worried about continued disagreement in Pakistani politics that has the potential to spill into the streets because the Pakistanis have a tendency to get themselves spun up and people die during demonstrations and there are attacks against political figures and assassinations and the country is not known for its transformative leaders making positive decisions," he said.
'Brink of war'
Kiriakou recounted that the CIA believed India and pakistan would go to war after the 2001 Parliament attack.
"Family members had been evacuated from Islamabad. We believed India and Pakistan would go to war," recalling the height of Operation Parakram following the December 2001 Parliament attack. "The deputy secretary of state came in and shuttled between Delhi and Islamabad and negotiated a settlement where both sides backed off. But we were so busy and focused on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, we never gave two thoughts to India."
Reflecting on the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he said, "I don't think this is Al-Qaeda. I think this is the Pakistani-supported Kashmiri groups. That turned out to be exactly the case. The bigger story was that Pakistan was committing terrorism in India and nobody did anything about it."
He also highlighted India's measured response over the years, saying, "India showed restraint after the Parliament attacks and the Mumbai attacks. At the CIA, we called the Indian policy strategic patience. But India has gotten to the point where they can't risk strategic patience being misunderstood as weakness."
Saudi intervention
Kiriakou also discussed nuclear proliferation and Saudi interference in the AQ Khan episode.
"If we had taken the Israeli approach, we would have just killed him. He was easy enough to find. But he had the support of the Saudi government. The Saudis came to us and said, please leave him alone," he said, calling Washington's inaction a mistake. "We often wondered if it was because the Saudis were also building a nuclear capability," he added.
On U.S.-Saudi relations, he said, "Our foreign policy in Saudi Arabia really is as simple as we buy their oil and they buy our weapons. That's it." He recalled a Saudi guard telling him, "You are hired help. We paid for you to come here and defend us. We are not friends."
Osama bin Laden's capture
In an interesting revelation, Kiriakou said that Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden had escaped from the Tora Bora hills in Afghanistan in the guise of a woman.
"We did not know that the translator for the commander of Central Command was actually an al-Qaeda operative who had infiltrated the US military. And so we knew we had bin Laden cornered. We told him to come down the mountain. And he said through the translator, can you just give us until dawn? We want to evacuate the women and children and then we'll come down and give up. The translator convinced General Franks to approve this idea. What ended up happening was bin Laden dressed as a woman and he escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan," he said.
He said when sun came up at dawn, there was no one in Tora Bora to give up. "They had all escaped. And so we had to move the fight to Pakistan proper."
Kiriakou, who spent 15 years in CIA, in 2007, blew the whistle on the agency's torture program in a nationally televised interview in the United States, claiming that "the CIA was torturing its prisoners."
Kiriakou said charges against him were dropped, but he ended up spending 23 months in prison. He said he has "no regrets, no remorse" and "did the right thing".
(With inputs from ANI)
