The cache of al-Qaeda documents captured in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin-Laden will soon be released to the public, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Monday.
The government has released several hundred of the files as they were declassified over the past few years, but more than a million, thousands of which contain information about the internal operations of the terrorist group, remained secret. Now, the entire cache, which former Obama adviser Tom Donilon has said would fill “a small college library,” is set to be made public, providing a never-before-seen look into the sprawling terrorist organization.
“There’s some pornography, there’s some copyrighted material,” Pompeo said on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier. “Everything other than those items will be released in the weeks ahead.”
“Once we are sure that there’s not classified material and that there’s not things that we can’t release, I want to make sure the world gets to see them so that we can have lots of hands touching them and making good judgments about how to make sure that we don’t have a 9/11, that we don’t have this kind of risk again.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Pompeo also discussed Iran’s relationship with al-Qaeda and North Korea, the complicated threat of decentralizing terror networks, and the Obama administration’s misleading claims about Tehran’s dalliance with terrorists.
One burning question about the documents has been what they say about how al-Qaeda saw its relationship with Iran, which the Obama administration maintained Tehran feared and loathed. But according to Pompeo, the intelligence community has always seen the two as cooperating.
“They have consistently had a relationship where they’ve been symbiotic,” Pompeo said.
“There’s conflict there too, and from time to time they fight. But Iran has always made a devil’s bargain with al-Qaeda to protect them in many ways, and that protection was always contingent on a deal which said if we protect you, you won’t attack us here in Tehran.”
The Trump administration is currently deliberating whether or not to recertify Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal struck under Obama, which the president pledged to renegotiate on the campaign trail but has twice recertified since his election. Pompeo declined to comment on whether the CIA had evidence of Iran violating the letter of the deal, but painted a grim picture of the Middle East since its implementation.
“The president has made clear his view that he doesn’t think the deal was worth a darn. That’s not proprietary; he’s tweeted it. Most of the members of his administration share that view as well,” Pompeo said. “And then beyond the CJPOA itself, the other malign activity of the Iranians, the activity of the Shia militias in Iraq, their work alongside Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria and in Lebanon—their malign activity all around the world has dramatically increased since this deal was struck.”
Further complicating matters is Iran’s relationship with North Korea’s Kim regime. Pompeo told Baier that U.S. intelligence has a good window into North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, but that discerning their intent “has just proven an incredibly difficult intelligence problem.”
“The North Koreans have a long history of being proliferators and sharing their knowledge, their technology, their capacities around the world,” Pompeo said. “As North Korea continues to improve its ability to do longer-range missiles and to put nuclear weapons on those missiles it is very unlikely if they get that capability that they wouldn’t share it with lots of folks, and Iran would certainly be someone who would be willing to pay them for it.”
Despite these challenges, Pompeo disputed the notion that President Trump is at odds with the intelligence community, which proliferated after the president took aim at them as deep state operatives over intelligence leaks concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I hear it all the time from, frankly, mostly folks in the media,” Pompeo said. “My team knows it’s completely different. When we’ve asked for more authority we’ve been given it. When we’ve asked for more resources we get it…. The leaks are tragic and they’re wrong. They are not only unlawful; they’re immoral. I’m working diligently inside of my building along with my senior leadership team to ensure that they’re not coming from the people who work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
