Former CIA officer John Kiriakou — who once headed the agency’s counterterrorism operations in Pakistan — said Pakistani officials sent him a letter demanding an apology for his remark that India would defeat Pakistan in a conventional war.Reacting to the letter on the podcast of internet personality Julian Dorey, Kiriakou used blunt, non-parliamentary language as he mocked former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan and his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) for the demand of apology.Kiriakou has recently made a series of striking claims in an interview with ANI news agency, including that the White House had expected “India to strike back after the 2001 and 2008 attacks.” He also recounted how Osama bin Laden escaped from the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan.Kiriakou was speaking about the 2001 Parliament attack in New Delhi, carried out by Pakistan-backed Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the 2008 Mumbai attacks launched by Lashkar-e-Taiba, another Pakistan-nurtured terror outfit. The United States itself had suffered a devastating blow just months before India’s Parliament attack — the 9/11 strikes by Osama bin Laden–led Al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York.Recalling the events at Tora Bora, Kiriakou said American forces had cornered Bin Laden in the mountains as heavy bombing continued. “We knew we had Bin Laden cornered. We told him to come down the mountain,” he said. Bin Laden asked for time until dawn, claiming he needed to evacuate women and children.“But then,” Kiriakou said, “Osama bin Laden dressed as a woman and escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan.”Kiriakou also claimed the US had effectively “purchased” Pakistan’s then-president Pervez Musharraf. He said this after remarking that “the United States loves working with dictators.” According to him, Washington paid “tens of millions of dollars in cash to the Pakistani intelligence service.”Speaking about the attacks on India, he said, “The Indian government would have been perfectly within its rights to respond by striking Pakistan.” He added: “At the White House, we expected the Indians to strike back and they did not.”He then went further, making an explosive assertion about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. “In 2002, I was told, unofficially, that the Pentagon controlled Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,” Kiriakou said.And in a blunt assessment of the military balance between the two neighbours, he stated: “Pakistan cannot win a conventional war against India.”
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