New Delhi: In a key revelation, former CIA Officer John Kiriakou has said that Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who was the most wanted terrorist for the United States after terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had escaped from Tora Bora hills in the guise of a woman.
In an exclusive interview with ANI, Kiriakou, who was in the CIA for 15 years and was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, also said they did not know that the translator for the commander of Central Command was actually an "Al Qaeda operative who had infiltrated the US military".
"First, the United States was reactive at the time rather than proactive. You remember, we waited for more than a month before we started bombing Afghanistan. We were trying to be deliberate. We were trying to not let emotion cloud our judgment. And we waited a month until we had proper buildup in the region. And then we began attacking known Al-Qaeda sites. Again, mostly in the Pashto areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan. We believed in October of 2001 that we had Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership cornered at Tora Bora," he said.
"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 added.
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