How Osama bin Laden escaped Afghanistan disguised as a woman? Ex-CIA officer reveals SHOCKING details, says Al Qaeda founder was helped by…

Osama bin Laden, the dreaded terrorist leader and founder of the Al-Qaeda terror group, managed to escape from the Tora Bora hills in Afghanistan disguised as a woman, a former CIA officer has revealed.

How Osama bin Laden escaped Afghanistan?

In a interview with news agency ANI, John Kiriakou, a decorated CIA officer who served as the agency’s counterterrorism chief in Pakistan, made stunning revelations about Osama bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan when the notorious Al-Qaeda founder was being hunted by the United States after terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Kiriakou noted that following the 9/11 attacks, the US was more “reactive than proactive”, to the point where the even the CIA failed to realise that a 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. We believed in October of 2001 that we had Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership cornered at Tora Bora,” the ex-CIA officer was quoted as saying.

“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 revealed.

At dawn, Kiriakou said, the US forces realized that bin Laden had escape and Tora Bora caves were empty, “so we had to move the fight to Pakistan proper.”

Later, Osama bin Laden was tracked down by US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to Abbottabad city in north Pakistan, and was eliminated by the US Special Forces team at his safe house on May 2, 2011.

US had ‘purchased’ Musharraf

John Kiriakou said US relations with Pakistan at the time, were “very, very good”, and Washington had “essentially just purchased” then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who would “essentially let us do whatever we wanted to do”.

“And so we essentially just purchased Musharraf. 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,” the former CIA officer said.

Why India(BHARAT)n concerns were put on backburner?

Kiriakou said the Pakistani military leadership did not care about Al Qaeda, but about India(BHARAT), and in order to keep the military and extremists happy, Musharraf  “had to allow them to continue this dual life of pretending to cooperate with the Americans on counterterrorism while committing terror against India(BHARAT)”.

Kiriakou said the United States was focused on Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and there was not much attention to India(BHARAT)n concerns.

“And I’ll tell you another thing. Just a couple of months later in March of 2002, we raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Lahore.  And in that house, we captured three Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters who had with them a copy of the Al Qaeda training manual. And it was the first time, analytically, that we were able to connect Lashkar-e-Taiba with Al-Qaeda. The very first time. I remember receiving a cable from the deputy director of the CIA for intelligence congratulating us on finding this training manual, saying it was the very first time that we could attach the Pakistani government to Al–Qaeda,” he said.

Asked about the issue not being highlighted, he said that the decision was made at the White House. “And the decision was that that the relationship is bigger than India(BHARAT), Pakistan. At least temporarily. The relationship, we needed the Pakistanis actually more than they needed us at that point. We were happy to throw money at them. That’s what they responded to. But we really needed them to let us base our drones in Balochistan, for example,” he said.