Washington [US], October 24 (ANI): Former CIA officer John Kiriakou recounted his years leading counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, highlighting Washington's uneasy alliance with Islamabad, the rise of cross-border terror networks, and India-Pakistan tensions that nearly escalated into war during Operation Parakram in 2002.

In an exclusive interview with ANI, Kiriakou said, '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.'

Kiriakou, who served 15 years in the CIA, first as an analyst and later in counterterrorism, recalled his final overseas posting in 2002 as chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. 'This was the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. My job was to locate al-Qaeda fighters and leaders and to snatch them,' he said, operating across Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, and Quetta. He later became executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.

He revealed deep divisions within Pakistan's intelligence apparatus, saying, 'There really were two parallel ISIs. There was the ISI that I was working with, heroes trained at Sandhurst and by the FBI, and then there was another ISI made up of people with long beards who had created these Kashmiri terrorist groups or Jayshi Mohammed.'

Speaking about early U.S. operations against al-Qaeda, he discussed the capture of Abu Zubaydah, mistakenly believed to be Al-Qaeda's number three, and described a 2002 raid on a Lashkar-e-Tayyiba safe house in Lahore. 'We captured three Lashkar-e-Tayyiba fighters who had with them a copy of the Al Qaeda training manual. It was the very first time that we could attach the Pakistani government to Al-Qaeda.'

On why the U.S. did not act against Pakistan despite such evidence, he noted, 'That was a decision made at the White House. The relationship is bigger than India, Pakistan. We needed the Pakistanis more than they needed us at that point.'

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.'

He also spoke about Saudi Arabia's ties with Pakistan, observing, 'Almost the entire Saudi military is Pakistanis. It's the Pakistanis that protect Saudi Arabia on the ground.'

On Pakistan's domestic instability and nuclear control, he said, 'When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal because Musharraf was afraid of what could happen. But in recent years, Pakistanis have denied this. If Pakistani generals are in control, I would be very worried about who is in charge politically.'

Reflecting on the shifting global balance, Kiriakou concluded, 'We're sitting on an ocean of oil. We don't need the Saudis anymore. They're hedging their bets, improving relations with China and India. We're witnessing a transformation in how the world operates.' (ANI)