Transcript of Former CIA Officer & Torture Program Whistleblower | John Kiriakou

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Hey everyone, welcome to episode 309 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And our guest on tonight's show is retired CIA officer John Kiriakou. He spent time at the agency working the Iraq desk, working in Greece, and then had some legal problems that we'll talk about in a little bit. And we're excited to have him here on the show and really talk about all of this and maybe get a different perspective on some of these topics than what we usually hear. Welcome to the show. Appreciate you joining us on a Friday evening. Let's jump right into it, man. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing, how you grew up, and what your path was towards federal service.

Right. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour north of Pittsburgh in Amish country. And my mom and dad were both elementary educators. My dad was a principal, my mom a teacher. And, you know, in a little community like that, that is also very ethnic, heavily Italian, Greek, church was a big deal because not just for religious reasons, of course, but also for cultural reasons. And so we went to Greek school, we spoke Greek at home. My grandparents, all 4 of my grandparents lived within you know, 30 minutes drive. And so, you know, it was kind of an idyllic upbringing. But with that said, I was always interested in espionage. I don't know why. When I was 9, my folks gave me a set of walkie-talkies for Christmas, and I was hooked. And more importantly and more seriously, because Because I was part of an immigrant family, all 4 of my grandparents having come from the Greek island of Rhodes. Public service was, was always critically important because my grandparents instilled in all of us this idea that, that we really should be so grateful for what the United States had given, had given them, that we should seek to pay it back.

And so, you know, I went to— I left Newcastle when I— the week after I turned 18, I went to school in Washington at George Washington University, got a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and an MA in Legislative Affairs, and only looked for openings in public service.

Just out of curiosity, John, did your folks have any history in Greece with, you know, World War II and all the activities that went on there back in the day?

No, that's a good question. The quick answer is no, because the Greek economy and the stability of the Greek state were both so perilous between 1920 and 1930. There was this active Greek government policy where they were encouraging young men to leave. They couldn't feed them, they couldn't employ them. the idea was just tell them, get out, get out of the— go to the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, just get out. And so my grandparents did. They left in between the 2 wars. So they were, they were a little too young to fight in World War I, and they were too old to fight in World War II. They just hit that sweet spot, and they were able to, to emigrate. Well, let's see, my dad's Parents were 20 when my grandfather came, and my grandmother was 24 when she came. And on my mom's side, my grandparents were like 22 and 18 when they came.

And you must have been raised on some of those stories about, you know, being an immigrant's difficult. I mean, there's no getting around it.

No, there's no getting around it. And, you know, my dad's father, Growing up, my dad's father was like my best friend, right? He's been dead since 1978, and not a single day goes by that I don't think about him. In fact, today is his death anniversary, November 15th, 1978. And, you know, he would sit me down and show me his tattoo, and it, it was a tattoo of a big eagle, and it, in its talons, it, it had an American flag and a Greek flag. And he would make me promise never to get a tattoo. Because he got one and he got He got hepatitis, and he was one of 18 children. And talk about not being able to feed your family or clothe them. He left school in the 3rd grade or the Greek equivalent of the 3rd grade while it was still under Ottoman occupation and really never looked back. He left in 1920, went to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania to work in the mill. Saved his money for 10 years, went back, bought some property, married my grandmother, changed his mind, got right back on the boat, and returned to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania in 1930 and never returned to Greece.

Wow. And so, yeah, I mean, he was proud to say that America was his country now and there was no reason to go back, not even to see any of his remaining siblings.

It's so wild. I mean, it's literally a different world.

Yeah, it really is. Can you imagine spending 4 weeks on a ship by yourself?

Yeah. Yeah.

At 19 years old in the beginning, not speaking a word of the language and knowing you're probably never going to see your parents ever again.

Yeah,

it's rough.

Yeah. And so you went to, you say, George Washington University. Majored in Middle Eastern Studies. And you said you had an early interest in espionage.

Right. I was in grad school and I was working a bunch of different jobs at the time to put myself through grad school. I worked on campus as an RA in one of the dorms, and then I worked at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union on K Street, the international headquarters. And so, I was taking this class called The Psychology of Leadership, and it was taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of Gerald Post, Dr. Jerry Post, who until he died was on TV all the time. He was in dozens of documentaries. He wrote more than a dozen books. And was really one of the country's acknowledged experts on long-distance psychological evaluations. So he gave us this, this assignment for class where we had to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our bosses. And I worked at the union for an old-school union organizer, mean, tough, Kind of a scary guy. He had actually had his back broken during a strike. Scabs beat him and they broke his back. He was just a mean son of a gun. And I was shadowing him for this, this week.

And, uh, and we got into an argument halfway through the week and I called him a racist, which he was. And, um, he got so angry, he— his face got red and he balled up his fists. And I remember putting my hands up like, oh, like I went too far this time. And he says to me, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, what? And he goes, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, you know what? You're nuts. And I quit and I walked out. I went back to the dorm.

You didn't compare to see who was really bigger?

Yeah, I know, right? Unbelievable, this guy. I actually Googled him recently. He's still around. He lives in New York. I hope he's watching.

Good for him.

Because I remember what he said. Yeah. So I went back, I wrote my paper, and I said I believed he was a sociopath with violent and possibly psychopathic tendencies. And I sent the paper in, and a week later I got it back and I got an A. And Professor post, wrote in the margin, please see me after class. So, um, I went up to him after class and, and he said, come down to my office. And so I went down to his office, he closed the door, and he says, look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to join the CIA? And the truth was, I kind of always wanted to join the CIA, but I was getting married in 6 weeks and I just didn't have a job.

Yeah.

And said— so I said, yeah, sure. Yeah, I'd like to join the CIA.

That's a really—

you know, it was a whole process.

That's just— I just want to interrupt for a moment just to point out that, like, that's a very interesting way that you were recruited. I don't think the agency would recruit like that today where they have somebody who's spotting and assessing, right?

Yeah, it's a felony now, actually, since Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1993. They can't do that anymore. It's far, far less sexy, but you have to go to www.cia.gov and click apply.

Yeah, it's a better story to get called into the basement of your professor.

Yeah. Do you think that that Yeah. Uh, help the, the change in the rules of how they're able to recruit hurts or helps the agency or both?

Oh, it helps. Most definitely it helps because when I joined, you know, it was just a giant gaggle of, of white guys. That was it. I mean, you know, it wasn't until '93 that they said, you know, we don't have any women or minorities working here. We should probably do something about that. But otherwise, it was just the old boy network, you know, and a bunch of, a bunch of eggheads from the Ivy League that were running the place.

Yeah.

So, it, it, EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Act, made the agency a better place.

Yeah,

definitely.

But, but with less cool stories about how people got recruited.

Yes, exactly right. See, now they do it, they do it in this odd, unofficial way. So, they set up this program called the Scholar-in-Residence Program. if you're, if you're like 2, 3, 4 years away from retirement, they'll send you back to your alma mater at full salary to, you know, teach classes. Like a friend of mine went back to Indiana University and taught a class called Espionage in Russian Literature, for example. And it's all BS, but what they do is— You know, look for people who might fit into the CIA culture and say, hey, I think you really, really ought to apply. So that's how they do it. It's kind of the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. So from that point, I mean, you're getting married, you have a line on a job, on an actual, hey, a pensioned federal job, which I'm sure would've made your parents very happy. What was the next step for you going through that recruitment and then presumably at the farm going— or you started off as an analyst, right?

I started off as an analyst. Yeah. So it was a while. I mean, I did the analytic training at the farm, of course, but that's just sort of sitting at a desk all day long. But the process, the hiring process was onerous. It took about— I had a lot of relatives still in Greece. In fact, one stupid cousin who was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Greece, and that set me back months. Oh, I gotcha. So, yeah, it took about 18 months before I finally— well, not 18. It took about 16 months before I finally got hired. But, you know, you have to go through the polygraph and the background investigation and a ton of tests, and they take your hair and your piss and your blood and It's it's very invasive and very time consuming. But I ended up passing everything, got hired into Dr. Post's an office that Dr. Post had created called the Office of Leadership Analysis, and and started off as the as the analyst, the leadership analyst for Iraq. I was I was Saddam Hussein's. intelligence community biographer. And then I worked with the psychologists and the psychiatrists to write psychological profiles of Saddam and his sons and the members of his cabinet and military leadership.

What year was this?

Worked out pretty darn nicely because I'll tell you what, I actually complained about the job because we would go days at a time with not a single cable. coming in. And I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs. And my boss said to me, you know, don't lose hope. Iraq has had the same cabinet, the same leadership since 1968. But if you, if you work hard and you learn the writing style, you can transfer on to something more interesting like Romania, he said. So Just as I got to the point where I felt like I knew it as quickly as I could, I, I ran into the office and my boss was there and he said, um, don't take off your jacket. Uh, we're, we're going to the White House. And so I had only been to the White House as a tourist, right? So we go to the White House, um, we're escorted into the Oval Office, and it was the president, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Director of the CIA, my boss, and me. And I remember sitting on the couch and thinking, my buddies from high school would not believe in a million years that this was happening.

It's funny that you were in this—

Hold on, guys, real quick. I'm so sorry, but our stream seems to be frozen right now. We are not— It

keeps cutting in and out.

It's been out for a minute now.

Back up, but we're having—

Okay, I apologize.

I just, I was gonna say, it's interesting that you were in this, like, in your mind at least, an obscure office somewhere in the agency, and suddenly you have this meteoric rise as it becomes so relevant that you're in the Oval Office.

Oh my God. And I had just written this paper. I probably shouldn't say the guy's name that I wrote the paper about. But the night of the invasion, the Iraqi government released a press release saying that this guy was going to be the new governor of occupied Kuwait. It turned out to not be true. They were sort of hoping they could bully him into it. But I had just published this paper a few days before. And so, so I went to the White House with the paper in hand. And the president looked at it. It was George H.W. Bush at the time. He's looking at the paper and then he tosses it onto the coffee table and he says, great. So now what do we do? And then everybody turned and looked at me. I was 20. I was 25 years old. Wow. At the time, I didn't know what to do. But, you know, I did the best I could. And And it made the first half of my career. It was ridiculous.

Yeah. And what was kind of your role through the Gulf War? Because it sounds like you, on the analytical side, you became kind of like one of the go-to guys.

Yeah, I was very fortunate. I spent the first several weeks on the task force, the analytic task force that was up in the CIA Operations Center. And then I was sent to Saudi Arabia to be one of the liaison officers with the Kuwaiti royal family. They were exiled in the the Saudi city of Taif, just outside of Mecca. And so I went there and then I would report back. I remember reporting back that I think the Emir is cracking up. All he does is tend his roses and cry. And so then the president would pick up the phone and call the Emir and say, don't worry, we're going to liberate Kuwait. You're going to be the Emir again. And It was all very exciting, very heady stuff. A couple of the guys, a couple of the old timers told me, appreciate this because this is never going to happen again in your career. They were wrong, but it was one of those twice in a career kind of events.

That's fascinating to see all of that unfold and to kind of have a front seat view for it.

Crazy. I remember we would get these cables that were marked critic, C-R-I-T-I-C, critic. It's the highest level of emergency. Yeah, it's a crisis. So it's like routine. Geez, I forget now. I forget what the next one up from routine was then. Routine, priority, immediate, flash, and then critic. Critic means they're coming over the walls.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So we would get these critic cables from NSA, and it would say, Scud missile has been detected as being launched from such and such coordinates. And real quickly, I'd look at my Iraq map, and if it was launched from western Iraq, that meant it was going to Israel. And if it was launched from southern Iraq, it would be going to Saudi Arabia. So I'd say, Scud launch, and everybody would jump up. And we had one TV on a TV stand back then, and CNN, we'd put CNN on and we would wait. And it was like 10 minutes later, they'd say, breaking news, there's a Scud missile coming to Jerusalem, or whatever. So it was all very exciting. And then you get these calls, can you come up to the director's conference room? We need you to brief the— What the Prime Minister of Belgium or, or the King of Lesotho. I briefed the King of like—

Lesotho?

Tahiti once.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. And then, you know, you go do the briefing and then you go back and sit at your computer and eat a tuna fish sandwich and just start writing again.

And after the Gulf War, in this sort of timeframe here, was there something that came after or was this when you started thinking about the Directorate of Operations?

Well, I got, I got very bored. Well, let me back up.

Sure.

Near the end of the, of the Gulf War, people were telling me, look, you know, this is, this is the point where you move on to your next assignment, right? You can basically do whatever you want. And, and so choose wisely. And I wanted to go overseas. So I did a rotation. I applied for and was granted a rotation to the State Department. And I went to Bahrain, a little tiny country in the Persian Gulf. And, um, I spent 2 years there as the economic officer in the American Embassy, unfortunately doing Iraq sanctions issues. So I've had it, you know, up to here with Iraq. I got back in '96, and then they put me back on Iraq again.

Mm-hmm.

And then finally, in, uh, late '97, the national intelligence officer, the highest-ranking intelligence analyst in the intelligence community, came to me and said, I want you to write a national intelligence estimate. Now, everybody wants to write an NIE because that's how you get the big promotion to the more senior levels. And I said, okay, what do you want me to write about? And he said, I want it to be called Iraq, Poland, Saddam's next 12 months. So I wrote it and I said 3 things. I made 3 analytic conclusions. I said Saddam could threaten the Kurds. He could threaten the Shia. He could threaten Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And I sent it in. Now, in these coordination sessions, members of all 18 intelligence agencies in the American government come. And then what you do is you all sit around and you say— or the national intelligence officer says, okay, first sentence. And he reads the first sentence. Does anybody object? And of course, everybody objects because they were the ones that wanted to write the paper in the first place. So then you have to hash out acceptable language for everybody for the first sentence.

Then you go to the second sentence. And usually this takes weeks to get through a national intelligence estimate. So we coordinated mine in 4 hours.

Wow.

And the national intelligence officer, the NIO, came to me afterwards and he said, that was the fastest coordination session I have ever gone through. And I said, Ben, I'm ashamed of this paper. All we needed to do was take last year's NIE and just change the date. There's no new analysis in this paper.

Yeah.

So I, I decided during that experience, I got to get out of here. I want to do something interesting, important, instead of just sitting in a cubicle and thinking the big thoughts all day long. And so A job opened up in Athens, and interestingly enough, it said they were looking for an officer. It was a counterterrorism job handled by the Counterterrorism Center, and they were looking for an officer who spoke either Greek or Arabic. And as it turned out, I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic.

Wow.

So I went down to CTC, the Counterterrorism Center, And I found the hiring officer who was a senior former, uh, station chief. And I said, I'd love to apply for this job, but I'll be honest with you, I don't have any operational experience at all, but I'm fluent in both Greek and Arabic. And he said, are you kidding me? And I said, no. He said, are you willing to be tested? I said, I just tested a couple weeks ago, but if you want me to test again, I will. But it turned out that his secretary was Greek, so she came out, started speaking to me in Greek. I answered her in Greek, and she says, he gets the thumbs up from me. And my Arabic tests were very fresh, and he said, look, it's going to take some convincing because, you know, we, we kind of wanted a seasoned ops guy, but it's a lot easier and it's a lot cheaper for me to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. Right.

Yeah.

And so I got the job and I went to Athens.

How common or uncommon is it for somebody to go from analysis to operations?

It was very, very unusual. There's something called a— well, you know what? I won't say what it's called. But anyway, there's this committee, this process that you have to go through. to move from one directorate to another. And to go from analysis to ops was highly unusual pre-9/11. It's, it's more common now. But, um, I had to get permissions, like, all the way up to the Deputy Director for Operations.

Wow.

To make that. And it worked out for me. I had a knack for recruiting people, as it turned out.

Did, uh, you have to go back to the farm and go through, like, the, the human training?

Yeah, so that's when I went back to the farm for the operational training. And, you know, if you're like hired out of grad school or whatever and you go straight into ops, you're going to do a pretty good solid 18 months at the farm. But I didn't need all those, well, what they call CIA 101 assignments. You know, they'll put you 6 months on the Iran desk and 6 months on the nuclear desk and 6 weeks rather. 6 weeks, 6 weeks, 6 weeks on Russia. I didn't need to do that because I, I was already mid-career and I, I knew how the agency worked. So I went straight into the ops training. And funny thing, you know, the first, the first phase of that training, which lasted, I don't know, 4 months, I guess, the first phase was, um, weapons training. And, uh, it was about a dozen of us. And I go down to the farm and, uh, The instructor says in the very first session, who here doesn't own a gun? And I, I raised my hand. I happen to be sitting in the front row. I raised my hand and I turned around to look, and it turned out I was the only person with my hand up.

And he says, you don't own a gun? And I said, well, truth be told, I've never actually touched a real gun. And he's like, oh, for God's sake. All right, all right. We're going to start from the very beginning. And so he pulled me aside. Everybody else got their guns. I got a bright orange, you know, rubber gun. And I had that for the first couple of days. And then they gave me my real gun. And at the end of the class, I ended up testing first in accuracy. I had a knack for it to the point where one of my instructors recommended that I check out competitive shooting, which I did with a beautiful— there's nothing like a pump-action 12-gauge in your hand. And it's just so satisfying. In fact, the instructor said, why is the pump-action 12-gauge the best gun? And one guy raised his hands, he says, well, because you can use different kinds of shot depending on your target and blah, blah, blah. He says, correct, why else? Some other guy says something else. Correct, why else? Nobody had any answers. He says, because it makes this bitching sound. He goes, chah.

I thought, yeah, that's why I like the 12. I like it a lot.

It's interesting you talk about that experience because the interesting thing about teaching marksmanship is that when people come to it without a lot of ego attachment, Especially men tend to come to it like, this is something I should know how to do as a man. And there's all this pressure you put on yourself. But when somebody— you find this, you know, teaching women sometimes because they don't have that, they don't have that hangup. Right. They just learn the technique. They just learn how to do— they just learn the fundamentals of marksmanship and are able to just go and do it. And I wonder if that's why you didn't do well or why you did do well on the testing.

Oh, I think, I think you're probably right. I didn't have any bad habits that they needed to break. That's a, that's a big part of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then after that— well, I'm sorry to interrupt.

No, no, no, go ahead, please.

We had things like we had a bomb-making class at a separate facility farther south. And, you know, you start off with a Molotov cocktail, and at the end of the week, the final exam is you have to build a bomb. of one of the designs that they taught you during the week, and then you have to blow up a car. And, you know, that's just fun.

Yeah.

Who wouldn't want to try something like that for a week? Yeah. And then it was counterterrorist driving and then advanced counterterrorist driving, which was out in the desert in Nevada. And then you go into what they call the asset acquisition cycle, which is spot, assess, develop, recruit. You know, convincing people to commit espionage for you, or in some cases to commit treason for you. And, and then it gets even more advanced from there. So it was, it was fun. I mean, I never considered it to be work. It was great. You work crazy hours, but you're having such a good time that you don't even really consider it to be work.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then you hit the ground in Athens. counterterrorism position. Tell us what your job there and what you were doing day to day.

Yeah. So generically speaking, it was to recruit spies to steal secrets, plain and simple, just like that. Specifically though, it was deeper. There were 2 groups that were active in Greece at the time. One, the most dangerous, the most lethal, was Revolutionary Organization 17 November. The other was one called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. They both actively targeted Americans, and 17 November had murdered not just the CIA station chief, but 2 defense attachés and, and an American technical sergeant, some hapless poor guy who was just doing his laundry one day, and they just went in and executed him in the laundry room of his apartment building. So it was those 2 organizations, but because I spoke Arabic, I was also looking at, you know, Abu Nidal and the Libyans and the PFLP and the DFLP and whoever happened to be passing through Athens. And Athens was a major crossroads for, for Arab terrorist groups. So it was, it was very busy. My very first day, I had only been in the office for like an hour. And we had, uh, what's called a walk-in, somebody who just literally walks into an American embassy and says, I have information I want to pass to the CIA.

99%— that's not true, not 99%, say 96% are lunatics, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then the rest are, um, either what we call intelligence peddlers, Where they'll have a little kernel of actual information that you might want. So they give it to you and you give them $100 or $500 or $20 or whatever it is. And then they'll go to the British Embassy and then the French Embassy and the Russian Embassy. And then, you know, in some of these countries, that's a month's salary right there. So the others, besides the real McCoys, and they're fewer than 1 in 100, There are what are called probes. Probes frighten us the most because they come and say, oh, I have information I want to give to the CIA. In fact, they're there to look to see where the security cameras are.

Right.

Whether the, whether the door is armored, how many of the guards are armed, who's wearing you know, entry badges with photographs on them, whatever intelligence they can collect about the hardline on the outer perimeter and the second perimeter of the embassy, because they're actually working for the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, Mm-hmm. whomever, in case someday they decide they want to attack that embassy. They hope that they've identified A weak point.

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John, so my follow-up question is because, you know, you talk about the the physical security and the challenges to that, but also agency officers are in alias or at least undercover when they're at an embassy. Right. So if they have somebody go in and say, I want to talk, I have information, and then an agency personnel meets them, they can basically, when somebody walks out of the embassy, basically say, That's the person who I met with.

Yeah, that's a good point. So what you do in a case like that— well, what you do everywhere around the world is first you have a State Department security officer, regional security officer, meet with this person and try to get a feel for whether or not, you know, they're the real deal or a probe or a nut or whatever. You also try to keep what's called the walk-in room outside of the embassy's hard line.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, the larger embassies have— they might have a, a little 7-Eleven type store on the grounds, or they've got a little bar where everybody congregates after work or whatever. Put it out there with those things. Put it out in the parking lot.

Right.

So they can't get through the hard line. Otherwise, if it is a CIA officer meeting with the walk-in, you almost always do it in disguise. And the disguises are so sophisticated that you look nothing like yourself, and nobody can tell that it's a disguise.

It's like the glasses with the nose and the mustache.

I'll tell you what, I— yeah, right, exactly. I had a disguise that was a bald head with a comb-over, and the only seam was right here on the bridge of the nose. And I didn't wear glasses at the time, but they gave me a pair of glasses with just clear lenses. So you couldn't see that seam.

Uh-huh.

And the comb-over, they used real human hair. They matched it perfectly to the color of my skin. And I actually, when I got the disguise, the station chief said, we got to go see the ambassador. So we walked into the ambassador's office and the chief said, Mr. Ambassador, I wanted to introduce you to one of our experts. He's just flown in from Washington. And the ambassador got up and said, oh, it's so nice to meet you. Welcome to Greece. And I said, thank you. Now, mind you, I would see the ambassador like every single day, multiple times a day. And he says to me, so what are you here to talk about? And I said, well, I'm not sure. And I pulled the glasses down and I grabbed the seam and pulled the disguise off. And he was like, oh my God. And I said, it's good, right?

Yeah. Mission— that's a Mission: Impossible moment.

We, we had John Mendez She was a former chief of disguise talking about it and how they worked with Hollywood. That's episode 270 for those of you who— it's a great episode, but it's fascinating what they're able to do.

Those guys, going back to the beginning of that, on the day that I was sworn in, you stand up, you put your right hand in the air, you swear to uphold the Constitution. There was a cartoonist on my left and a beautician on my right, and the cartoonist became a master forger and the beautician became a disguise expert.

So cool.

And so she was the one that made the bald head for me. I mean, these are people that didn't go to Harvard. They went to the Fairfax County School of Beauty.

Yeah.

And the cartoonist was just a self-taught you know, cartoonist. But you never know the expertise that people can bring to these positions. These, these disguise people were not just brilliant at their work, they were genuinely accomplished artists. I would consider this to be a form of art. Yeah, they were so good at it.

Yeah. John, the— something I'd love to ask you about that I think you would have a really unique perspective is about sort of the history and what you walked into, what you were dealing with, with Greek terrorism, terrorist organizations in Greece. As someone who is ethnically Greek, speaks the language, you're also a trained analyst and a case officer. I mean, really, when you drill down into it, what was 17 November? What was this threat that you were trying to counter?

Yeah, man, I became obsessed with 17 November. And it wasn't just me, it was everybody who worked on the issue. So the Greek government, the democratically elected Greek government, was overthrown in 1967 and was replaced by a military dictatorship that lasted until 1974. The dictatorship collapsed on itself in 1974. And then the country, you know, became democratic again. It had a democratic election, the former president returned and was elected again. And they recreated parliament. And, you know, on paper, everybody lived happily ever after. But, but there was this, there was this opposition movement that formed among students in Paris in 1967, and it became more and more radical to the point where it then broke up into different factions. One of those factions became a group called the One May Movement. One, ME, we believe eventually morphed into 17 November. The other was one called TOM, the 20 October Movement, and it morphed into Popular Revolutionary Struggle called ELA. Its Greek acronym is ELA, E-L-A. So ELA saw as its mission the murder of Greek policemen because the police were were working hand in glove with the junta and with the torturers and the fascists.

And so they went around blowing up police vans and, and shooting police recruits and things like that. 17 November wanted to kill everybody that they deemed responsible for the overthrow of the government, and that was officials of the American government, The British government, the French and German governments, the Turkish government. They killed the ambassador and the deputy ambassador, and then fascists who owned newspapers during the junta, the former ministers from the junta, and then anybody who pissed them off, like tax authorities. Right. The government announces a tax increase and then they blow up the tax authority. Or they, they, they fired an anti-tank rocket at the Minister of Finance because he made fun of them in a TV interview, uh, or they killed the Minister of Communication because he happened to be the Prime Minister's son-in-law and was friendly with the Communist Party.

Wow.

So it became— yeah, it became irrational.

Yeah.

And then this, this culminated in their final action. And, and this is, this is one of the reasons why this became so important in my life. Um, in, uh, in January of 2000, uh, the British defense attaché was replaced, and the new defense attaché, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders, he moved in to the house catty-corner from mine. Our, our backyards touched each other diagonally. And Steven was an awesome guy. Fun, loud, great sense of humor, the life of every party we went to. We were at a dinner party one night, and I had just gotten a fully armored BMW 540 that the agency bought for me to use. It was the first 540 that was in Greece. We couldn't even insure it. We had to insure it through a company in Germany. But I needed that big engine. to carry all that armor, right? Armor. And so we're at this dinner party and, and Stephen is, Stephen is jokingly making fun of me. And he says, you Americans, you're so paranoid. This is an EU country. It's a NATO country. What are you so afraid of with your armored cars and your bulletproof vests? And I said, you Brits live in a dream world if you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance to kill you.

Believe me, if they get the chance, they're going to kill you. Hahaha. We all laughed. 2 weeks later, I slept through my alarm, which I had never done. Now, you guys know, Having been, you know, in, in the positions that you've been in, you cannot establish a pattern, right? You've got to, you've gotta leave your house every day at a different time. You've gotta take a different route to work every day because you can't establish a pattern. That's how they're gonna kill you.

Right.

Because if you know that you, that you cross through this intersection every day at 8:30, then by God, they're gonna be at that intersection at 8:30 and they're gonna blow up your car. So I took a different route to work every day. I left at a different time every day, never establishing a pattern. But I slept through my alarm this one day in April, April of 2000. And I thought, oh my God, I don't have time to do a surveillance detection route. I'm going to have to just get on the road and just go straight to the embassy. Well, the embassy was exactly 10 miles from my house. Just straight down the main road called Kifissias Avenue to the embassy. So, I mean, we're talking about like 6 lanes and then a lane on each side of like service roadway. So we're talking about an 8-lane major road, but it's got Jersey barriers. So once you're on, you're on, you're committed, you can't get off. I get on Kifissias. And it's a parking lot like Cairo or Bangkok. And I was like, oh my God. I mean, traffic's epic in Athens, but not like that.

That's ridiculous. So, I did something that I never ever did. I put on the radio. I never wanted to be distracted because they would come up to you on the side of your car on a motorcycle and just open fire. And I wanted to not be Distracted. I wanted to constantly scan my side view mirrors, make sure they're not coming up on me. And, um, and I would never play the radio. That day I played the radio. So the guy comes on and he says, avoid Kifissias Avenue, uh, because there's a traffic incident at Filothé. Filothé was about the halfway point. And I said, ah, crap, 5 miles of this. So I'm inching down the mountain, and then a half an hour later, 20 minutes later, he comes on. He says, avoid Kifissias Avenue, there's a criminal incident at Filothet. And I thought, geez, I've never heard that before. A criminal incident at 9 o'clock in the morning? What kind of criminal incident could there be? And as I'm continuing to inch down the mountain, he comes back on and he says, avoid Kifissias Avenue, there was a terrorist attack. in Philothe. And I thought, wow, I never heard that before.

Well, I get near enough to the incident that I see this white Rover, you know, British Rover, um, and it's got police tape around it, and there's blood just splashed all over the, the back windscreen. Well, I noticed that the license plate says Y-B-H. Our license plates— Athens was so dangerous that we were not allowed to have diplomatic license plates, so we had just regular old license plates. But the Greeks, in their infinite wisdom, gave everybody in the American Embassy license plates that began with the letters Y-H-B.

Mm-hmm.

And I thought, oh my God, this is Y-B-H. Some innocent Greek, they thought some innocent Greek was an American and they, and they killed him. And then I remembered, wait a minute, the British Embassy is YBH and that's Stephen Saunders' car. Oh. So as I get around it, the driver's side window and the passenger side window are blown out and there's just blood everywhere. So I called the station and I said, hey, I'm on Kifissias right now. And I think Stephen Saunders was just assassinated. And he said, what are you seeing? And I explained. And he says, hang on, I'm going to call the British Embassy. So he calls the British Embassy, and this poor woman, she says, I'm sorry, Stephen's not in quite yet. May I take a message for him? Wow. And he said, no, you're not understanding. One of my officers on Kyivisias, by Steven's car, there's blood everywhere, and he thinks that Steven was assassinated. So they called the nearest hospital, which was the Red Cross Hospital, and he was there. A taxi driver pulled him out of the car. The first shot— he was shot with an anti-tank round.

Oh.

And the first shot completely blew off his right hand. And then they shot him 3 times in the chest with what was called the Welch .45 because it was used to kill our station chief, Dick Welch. And then it was used in most of the subsequent murders after that. That gun was never recovered. And so a taxi driver put him in the taxi and got him to Red Cross Hospital, but he died 45 minutes later. And then his wife did a very heroic thing. Later that day, she gave an interview to the Greek media and she said, this was not an attack on my husband. This was not an attack for political reasons. This was a criminal act and it was an attack against every Greek. This is how little respect this organization has for the Greek nation and for the Greek people. And she did it with such dignity. that it actually changed Greek public opinion. Because for 27 years, the Greeks were like, ah, they're not killing us, or the Greeks that they're killing kind of deserved it, or they're killing Americans or Turks, so we don't really care. Well, beginning then, they cared.

That's amazing.

And it turned everything around.

There was, if I recall correctly, Jon, 17 November sent a letter claiming responsibility for the assassination. But if, again, if I recall correctly, they also identified you in the letter.

Yeah, that was a shock to me. What 17 November normally did was they would drop a manifesto at the scene of the assassination. Usually, not always. Sometimes they would mail it to a Greek newspaper. Sometimes they would put it in a garbage can and then call a Greek newspaper and tell them where they could find it. So they did not drop a manifesto that day. They waited until August. So from April to August, you know, we're doing the investigation, working with the Greeks and the British and trying to do the investigation. And, and I get in one day and the chief comes in in a, in a panic and he says, Did you see the manifesto? And I said, no, I didn't realize that there was a manifesto. And he says, they mention you. And I said, what do you mean they mention me? And he shows it to me. And they said in Greek, idameton megalokataskopos, we saw the big spy.

Right.

But we knew that he was armed, he was in an armored car and that he was armed. So we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders.

Wow.

And I said, how could they possibly have found me? I said, I am so careful about my security. I can't believe they found me. We ended up concluding that they were actually looking for Saunders because he was so out there. He was on TV all the time. He's at every party. He's giving interviews to every newspaper. And while they were looking for him, they saw my armored car. with a YHB license plate and said, hey, that must be CIA. Who would be driving an armored car? So I said, well, now what? And the chief said, you got to go. And I said, where? He said, home, like right now. I said, you mean home, Washington? I said, my kids are in school right now. I can't, I can't just up and leave. He said, we're going to, we're going to pick up your kids at school. We're going to send another car to pick up your wife. We'll pack out your house, but you got to go now. And so they drove me to the airport. They sent an armored car to pick up my kids. They sent another armored car to pick up my wife.

We all met up at the airport and we were on the 12:00 Delta flight back to New York. And it was 2 more years before I ever went back to Greece again.

Wow.

John, I got to I mean, this is going back in time. So I understand 17 November fighting the junta makes a certain amount of sense and we can kind of relate. It's a dictatorship. 1974, the junta dissolves, but 17 November is still around. And now we fast forward to the year 2000 and here they are whacking a British defense attaché and menacing you. I mean, you didn't know it at the time. Yeah. And the intelligence that they had implies an intimate knowledge of your security protocols and where you are and when. So, I mean, my question is, what is 17 November really?

Well, that's such a good question. We used to debate this amongst ourselves all the time, and we used to sort of halfway joke that, um, that 17 November, it had to be like a bunch of 70-year-old guys on, on, um, motorcycles.

Like the Bader-Meinhof gang.

Yeah, like the, like the Bader-Meinhof gang. And so it turned out that that was actually kind of the case for some of them. They were, they were, you know, senior citizens, true believers, but they would recruit like really trustworthy people, people that they could, they could rely on to keep their secret. And several cycled out. A couple more would cycle in. But the core of the organization was there since '70, you know, '74, '75. The first killing was the CIA station chief, Richard Welch. And, you know, Dick Welch, this was a really sad story because Dick Welch had just arrived in Greece. He was— he had only been in Greece about 6 weeks, and he was a real philhellene. He had studied ancient Greek in college. He had done archaeological digs. He spoke modern Greek, and he had just arrived. And he went to the ambassador's Christmas party, December 23rd, 1975. He and his wife and their driver went back to, to his house after the party. And, you know, those were the days before the electric gates. So the driver had to stop the car, get out to open the gate. And when he did that—

They shot him.

There were 4 people in a car parked across the street, 3 men and a woman. 2 of the men got out and shouted his name, Richard Welch, get out of the car. And he got out of the car. So did Mrs. Welch. The driver ran for his life, and he got out of the car and they said, Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you've been sentenced to death. And then they shot him 3 times with the .45. The Greeks were so backward at the time that they couldn't find the getaway car. And so one of the shooters called the police and said, you morons, The car is parked at— and then he gave them an address. And so then they went and got the car. But not only were they never able to catch anybody, they were never even able to identify anybody. We had— I'm not exaggerating when I tell you we had 1,200 suspects. There ended up being 9 members of 17 November, and we were right on 3 of them.

Wow.

That's how secretive this group is.

So, presumably from what you're telling me, you were eventually, or the Greek government or the CIA was able to unmask this organization down the line. Who did these guys turn out to be?

Well, yeah. I wish we could take credit. And the Greeks actually get more credit than we do, and they deserve more credit. One member of 17 November, Savvas Xiros, was carrying a bomb in the city of Piraeus that he was going to put underneath the limousine of a Greek shipowner. And the bomb went off in his hands and it blew his hands off. And so as he was laying there on the ground bleeding to death, he decided to make a deathbed confession. And he said, I'm 17 November. Here's the location of the safe house. Here's the location of the guns and the weapons and the rockets. And these are the other members of the organization. And then he lived. Wow. He survived. Yeah. So it turned out we were right about the leader of 17 November, a guy named Alexandros Yiotopoulos. We were— we did not know the actual, uh, hitman. Um, his nickname was the Black Hand because everything he touched died. And then the, the core of 17 November was 3 sons of a priest from Thessaloniki. Yeah. You know, talk about, you know, daddy issues. Um, and then there were a couple that Cycled in and out.

One was a labor leader, one was a 6th grade teacher, one was a mechanic, but they were all wrapped up. The Greeks ended up getting all of them.

Exactly.

The only things that they didn't find, they didn't find the Welch .45, and they didn't find the typewriter, the old-school manual typewriter that they would write the manifestos on.

These guys obviously had good tradecraft, good OPSEC.

Oh yeah.

Where— who amongst them was trained, or where do you think they got their training from?

Yeah, also a good question. So the answer, I think, is something you're going to be fascinated by. They were never trained by anybody. They got their weapons from Carlos the Jackal. And— but we were never able to put them in any of the the Libyan training camps where everybody else was trained. Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades and Action Directe and IRA and PFLP, PFLP-GC. The Greeks were never— The Japanese. But 17 November, it was all done in-house. Now, the interesting thing was in 1968, The Uruguayan defense attaché in Paris was assassinated. And for the life of them, nobody could figure out who did it or why in the world anybody would want to assassinate the Uruguayan defense attaché in Paris. It turned out that was 17 November's first hit. And they did it as a practice hit to see if they could get away with it. And to see what lessons they could learn in the getaway. And it worked. The element of surprise, untraceable weapons. You hit somebody who has no idea that he's even at risk of being hit, and you get away with it. And so they did.

It's amazing. I mean, it's—

So there's organic learning in the field.

Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to believe, though, because It's— there are so many ways to leave traces. There are so many. Like, it's hard to believe that nobody taught them anything.

Yeah. Well, you know, in this day and age, too, 1975 is not 2024, right? With forensics and DNA now, I can't imagine that something like this would be successful. And, you know, when I was stationed in Greece, they made some serious mistakes. besides multiple shootouts with the cops, and the cops were such bumbling fools that 17 November got away, they launched a rocket attack on the home of the German ambassador. And for some reason, the rocket misfired when the guy put it up on his shoulder. It misfired and it cut his neck. And so he bled pretty profusely on the sidewalk. So I ran out there with a colleague of mine, And, and members of the Greek police. And there was this blood all over the sidewalk. And I said, we got to test the blood. We got to test the DNA. They were like, yeah, but then how are we going to do that? It's on concrete. It's— I said, take the whole fucking sidewalk. So we, we went, like, literally, we went to the Greek version of Home Depot and bought sledgehammers, and we, we broke up the sidewalk and carried it away.

We put it in a diplomatic pouch. We sent it back to Washington. The, the agency gave it to, uh, the FBI Quantico. They ran a DNA, uh, test and there was no match in any system. Interpol, the Greeks, the Americans, no match. But at least we had the DNA.

Right. For later.

And it turned out, well, we learned, we learned 2 and a half years later that was Sebas Xydos's DNA. The German ambassador had said something in some interview that he didn't like. So, we fired a rocket at the guy's house.

It's wild. Normally, we save questions to the end of the show, but I just saw one pop up that has to do with this. How did these random Greeks get hooked up with Carlos the Jackal? I mean, this is before the internet, or like, this is like, how does that happen?

Oh yeah, way, way before the internet. You know, that's a terrific question too. Was that from one of your viewers?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. That's a terrific question. I, um, it, it took me almost a year of asking permission to interview Carlos in prison in, uh, in Paris. And so what I did at first, once I got all the permissions, you know, in the headquarters chain of command, I, I reached out to his wife. We found her living in some little town in Germany, and I, I went and I said, look, you know, I know you're out of the game. She and Carlos had a daughter together. I know you're out of the game. I know that you're, you know, trying to make a life for yourself. We're not interested in making any trouble for Carlos. You know, he's serving life without parole for killing a whole bunch of French policemen. Um, I said, we want the Greeks. We promised Mrs. Welch in 1975 that we wouldn't rest until we found her husband's killers. I said, I want to talk to Carlos, and I want to know who he's dealt with, what Greeks he's dealt with over the years. So she actually got in touch with Carlos for me. And then, you know, you got to, you got to send a formal request to the French, and then they're jerks about it.

And then you have to keep asking over and over again. And, and then finally the French said yes. So I flew, I flew to Paris and went with a French to the prison. And, and Carlos comes into the room and he's just a little tiny old man now. I mean, this— and this was 24 years ago.

Yeah.

So even 24 years ago, he was a little tiny. And I told him, you know, who I was and why I was there. And I had spoken to Magdalena, his wife, Magdalena Kopp. And we were interested in the Greeks. And he smiled and he said, go fuck yourself. So we never learned what the nexus was between Carlos and the Greeks.

Yeah.

We had multiple sources tell us that it was Carlos that provided the weapon. But we never could figure out the genesis of that relationship.

It's very interesting, though, because again, when you think of how isolated the world was before the internet, you can't just look up a classified ad for Carlos the Jackal, right? You can't look him up in the phone book.

Yeah, that came together somehow. No, indeed.

Yeah.

So this is— we've been talking about the timeframe of 2000, and then 9/11 happens. And what is sort of the next step in your CIA career after that?

Right. Well, 9/11, it's funny to me. I teach a grad school class at the University of Salamanca in Spain. I just got back from Spain a few weeks ago. It's called The History of Terrorism. So we spent a lot, a lot of time, uh, on, on these issues in these groups and, you know, 3 full days on Carlos the Jackal. And, um, and then we transitioned to 9/11. And I'm talking to these students and grad school students. I'm talking to them like, you know, 9/11 is as fresh in their minds as it is in mine. Because in my mind, 9/11 happened last Tuesday.

Right, right, right.

And one of them raised her hand and she said, Professor, you realize that all of us were born after 9/11, right? And I said, oh my God, no, I didn't realize that. Oh my God. Okay, we're going to start from the beginning. So on the morning of 9/11, I was in CTC, the Counterterrorism Center. And I was— I had a 9 o'clock appointment, 9:30 appointment with Condoleezza Rice. She was the national security adviser at the time. And I was going with Koffer Black, who was the director of CTC. And we were going for a very quaint reason. The government printing office was preparing to publish a book called Foreign Relations, an installment of a book, of a series of books called Foreign Relations of the United States: Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1947 to 1969. This book is like 1,000 pages long, and it's every cable sent or received by those embassies between 1947 and 1969.

Wow.

But 3 of those cables buried in those 1,000 pages mentioned sources, clandestine sources who were still alive. And so rather than resettle them in the United States for their own safety, and you give them $1 million and give them different names, we were going to ask Condi if she would just take the cables out. Right. Nobody's going to miss them. Nobody's even going to read this book. Right.

Right.

Except a couple of eggheads working on their PhDs. So I got a call from the driver saying that the car was ready to take us to the White House. And I go over to Kofor's office and his secretary, you know, her desk was right outside his office. And in those days, we couldn't watch TV on our computers. So she had a little TV on her desk and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire. And I said, well, what happened to the World Trade Center? And she said, a, a plane flew into it. And because I'm stupid, I said, I said, huh, you know, that happened once before in 1932. A plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really rainy and foggy then. And it's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?

Yeah.

And then as soon as I said that, the second plane hit.

Yeah.

And then she, she turns to me like this and she says, Did you see that, or did I imagine it? And then, to make a long story short, like everybody else in the building, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan to do whatever was required of, of me. And they kept passing me over, and I kept volunteering over and over and over again. And finally, I went to the deputy director's office. He was an old friend of mine. And I said, I said, If you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I'm not looking back. And he goes, all right, all right, take it easy. Can you go to Pakistan? I said, yes. When? He said, tomorrow. I said, yes. What do you want me to do there? He said, I want you to be chief of counterterrorism ops. I said, done. So I called my girlfriend. She later became my wife. She worked a few floors above me. And, um, I said, I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow. She said, how long? I said, I don't know, 6 months, 12 months, I don't know.

She said, okay, I'll meet you at your apartment, I'll help you pack. And then the next day I flew to Pakistan, and, and that, that tour changed the, the course of the rest of my life.

So what, what time frame was that? Uh, that was, uh, that was January

of

2002. Okay. And what was Pakistan, the station at Pakistan like at that time? And I don't know the timeframes, but I know at one point in time, people had an issue with the ambassador in Pakistan because he was sort of a fan of Pakistan in terms of doing ops. What was it like for you walking into that situation?

Oh, it was, it was the Wild West. You know, everybody, pretty much everybody had been evacuated. So the only people who were there were CIA.

Okay.

And FBI. Yeah. And the ambassador, actually, the ambassador was replaced halfway through my time there because there was a terrorist attack on, on a Christian church next door to the embassy. And, and 7 people were killed, including 2 2 embassy officers. And the ambassador just kind of, kind of cracked and, and went home.

Wow.

Just went back. Yeah, they withdrew her. She went home and she was replaced by another ambassador. But I mean, everybody knew the mission. There was no diplomacy that was going to take place. This was all about killing al-Qaeda. Period. That was it. That was the mission. And then at the same time, you know, I've always told this story that has always struck me as funny. There was a very, very junior officer who was working for me. She had never served overseas before. And, and the embassy has an absolutely enormous cafeteria that on the weekends is converted into a nightclub. And they have, they have like Filipino cover bands that come and, and you can drink and they've got a disco ball going. And that way you never have to leave the, the compound. And so we go down there and this cafeteria can hold, you know, 300 people. And we went right at 12 noon and we were the only 2 people in the cafeteria. And she looks around and she goes, where is everybody? And I said, They've been evacuated. And she goes, everybody? And I said, yes. She goes, why? And I said, don't you read the papers?

Pakistan's gonna have a nuclear war with India like any minute now. And she goes, what are you talking about? I said, did you notice that big helicopter that's in the parking lot? Yes. I go, it's here to rescue us. We're the last ones left. She's like, oh my God, I got to focus on something other than al-Qaeda. And they go, yeah, because we don't have enough to worry about right now. The Indians are going to nuke us because they're pissed off about something. And we just, you know, took it from there. You just deal with

it. Yeah.

They ended up, of course, you know, not nuking each other and we could focus on al-Qaeda. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on and you have to be as single-minded as you possibly can.

You know, Pakistan is such an interesting story to me because everybody— like, the war happened in Afghanistan, but a large number of the people we were fighting in Afghanistan were armed, trained, living in Pakistan, and yet we couldn't take the war to them there. Did you hear me?

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. This is something that most Americans, I think, don't understand. The word Taliban is the plural of the word talib, and talib in both Arabic and Pashto means student, right? So in 1994, Pakistani trucks that were crossing Afghanistan on their way to sell their goods in Iran were being hijacked by bandits. And so Benazir Bhutto said, we need some kind of security for these trucks. We should take these, these, you know, Taliban who are studying in our schools, and we should put them on the trucks to protect the trucks. We'll give them an AK-47. They just sit there, ride— riding, literally riding shotgun and protect the trucks. And that started to work. And so they came up with this idea, well, instead of having them sitting in the trucks, we should put them in the villages along the truck route, right through Kandahar Province, Helmand Province, those traditionally Pashtun regions of Afghanistan. So once they were placed in those villages, they took over the villages and recruited other people to join the Taliban. All of a sudden, they're overthrowing the Afghan government and, you know, installing themselves. So it was the Pakistanis and the Pakistani intelligence service that created the Taliban, which then in turn began to train and to to arm groups that were opposed to the Pakistani government because it wasn't radical enough.

Right.

It was this Frankenstein monster that the Pakistanis created. And, you know, people ask me all the time, were you able to trust the Pakistani intelligence service? And I always give the same answer. In my mind, there were 2 Pakistani intelligence services. There was the guys that I worked with, in counterterrorism. They were all educated at Sandhurst in the UK, and they would lay down their lives for us. And then there were the guys that created the Taliban with the long beards, giving you the stink eye when you're walking down the hall of their, of their headquarters and, you know, probably plotting your assassination.

The real regime.

And so, yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So it was a challenge keeping the honest people honest.

Yeah. And it's like, and one of the things about the Taliban and that brand, it's not even its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism, right? Because it's merged with this ancient Pashtunwali, this ancient tribal culture that brings these old, old ways together with Islam and this very fundamental belief in Islam. And it's a Stone Age— not Stone Age, but it's an ancient— Kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's an ancient cult in a way, merging those two.

Very much so. Very much so. And that's why even years after taking over that government, they only had diplomatic relations with 3 countries. With Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. You know, that's why they blew up the, uh, this, the giant Buddhas, because they were, they were carved in, you know, man's image. And that's a sin.

Yeah. Up in Bamiyan, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Up in Bamiyan. Exactly.

So start to, start to talk us a little bit through like the tail end of your CIA career and exit from the agency.

Well, I, you know, I, I led the, uh, the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March of 2002, and we, we believed wrongly at the time that he was the number 3 in al-Qaeda. And, um, when I went back to headquarters, man, I, I was a star, and, uh, I was very quickly promoted and, uh, and named the, uh, executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And, uh, in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. You're read into every compartment, which is not a good thing. You know, there, there are some things I just wish I had never— I had never learned about what, what some of my colleagues were up to. Well, it was then that we decided to implement this torture program that they called enhanced interrogation techniques. I was strongly opposed to it, and I was actually approached and asked if I wanted to be trained in it so I could go out to the field and begin, you know, torturing these guys. I said I had a moral and ethical problem with it, besides the fact that I believed very strongly that it was illegal.

And so I declined. They, they asked 14 people if we wanted to go through the training, and I regret to say I was the only one who declined. So, um, I left in 20— let's see, 2004. I left for the, uh, private sector.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, and, you know, between 2002 and 2004, I, I kept waiting for somebody to say something about this torture program. We're getting cables back where people are resigning. Because of the torture. One secretary that, that watched a torture session fainted. We were getting cables from doctors in the Office of Medical Services saying, I'm curtailing my assignment. I'm coming home. This is a violation of my Hippocratic oath. It's not something that I signed up for. And I thought, surely somebody is going to say something publicly to stop this abomination. And, and nobody did. And then in December of 2007, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. He said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.

Mm-hmm.

And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I had no idea that that was an old reporter's trick. I had never spoken to a reporter before. Mm-hmm. Well, to make a very long story very short, I gave him an interview in December of 2007 in which I said, number one, that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. Number two, torture was official U.S. government policy. It was not the result of a rogue CIA officer, which is something that President Bush had said. And I said that the CIA, um, This, I'm sorry, I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the president. It was under his signature. And all hell broke loose. Within 24 hours, the CIA asked the FBI to investigate me. And the FBI did exactly that from December of '07 to December of '08. And then they sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me. They said that they had done the investigation and that I had not— they had determined I had not committed a crime.

What can I— can I ask you real quick, what did they— what was their impetus like? What did they ask you or ask the FBI to investigate you for? What was just anything that you did? They're just supposed to dig through your life or what?

No, it was for the illegal disclosure of classified information under the Espionage Act.

Okay.

Yeah. But the thing is, is, you know, Human Rights Watch, uh, had written a paper saying the CIA is torturing its prisoners. Amnesty International did the same thing. And the International Committee of the Red Cross, same thing. This was the worst-kept secret in Washington. Everybody knew that the CIA had a torture program. Everybody knew. Everybody knew that they had secret prisons. Somebody leaked that in 2000— I don't know what, '05 or '06 or something. So the FBI said, no, it's not a violation. And besides, it's actually against the law to classify a criminal act, right? Yes. If something is a crime, you can't classify it for the purpose of keeping it from the American people. And torture is a crime. I don't care what John Yoo and Jay Bybee say or Dick Cheney. Torture is a crime. If you want to torture somebody, Okay. Change the law. But the law was crystal clear. So a month later, Barack Obama becomes president. He initially names John Brennan as the CIA director. The liberals were up in arms and that nomination was withdrawn. So he then named Brennan the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John Brennan and I always hated each other.

And so Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And I had no idea I was being investigated for the next 3 years. They had taps on my phones.

Wow.

They intercepted my emails. They would put these teams of FBI agents to follow me. They followed us into church, into Target, to my kids' school, out to restaurants. And then in January of 2012, I was charged with 3 counts of espionage coming out of the, the ABC News interview and a subsequent interview I gave to The New York Times in which I just said exactly the same thing. Um, they charged me with a count of making a false statement, which we were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been. And then they charged me with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. And so, you know what they do? It's a, it's a tried and true strategy. They, they charge stack. They, they throw all these different charges at you. Then they wait until you go bankrupt from legal fees, which I quickly did. And then they come back and they offer to drop all the charges but one if you take a plea. Plea. So I was looking at 45 years. Had I gone to trial, according to my attorneys, I was realistically looking at 12 to 18 years.

Or I can take their deal and do 23 months. And so, you know, when, when according to ProPublica, the government wins 98.2% of its cases and you have 5 kids

Right.

What do you do?

Right, right.

All those dice knowing you have a 1.8%, chance of winning or you take the deal.

So what do you think was John Brennan's beef with you that he encouraged this investigation?

He was public about it. He, he was public about it. I aired the agency's dirty laundry and I should have kept my big mouth shut.

Gotcha.

Do you think that— I mean, obviously, you think that Obama would have some level of control over that. Do you think that Obama Was neutral about it, agreed with it?

No, no. Obama had a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks. And I got that from people who were, you know, directly working directly face to face with Obama. He was obsessed with national security leaks, unlike anything they had seen since Richard Nixon. And so, you know, between the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917 and 2009, 3 people were charged with espionage for speaking to the media. Just under Obama, 8 people were charged with espionage for speaking to the media, almost 3 times all previous presidents combined.

Yeah, they came after James Clapper.

And that was in large part thanks to John Brennan.

But, but wasn't— I mean, wasn't Obama responsible for releasing the names of the people involved like the brick factory and everything like that? Like, yeah, like what was—

And just like Leon Panetta was responsible for exposing the names of the, of the, the Special Forces guys who killed Osama bin Laden, just like David Petraeus was responsible for exposing the names of 10 covert operatives to his adulterous girlfriend. And all of that is perfectly fine,

right?

But if you embarrass the agency, then there's a price to pay.

Yeah. You didn't have enough stars on your lapel to protect you.

Oh my God. I say that all the time.

Yeah.

If I had 4 shiny stars right here.

Yeah.

No, everything would've been different.

It's wild that he has— that you say that Obama has this obsession with it, but then he released names of the people who are acting at the behest of the government. doing the job the government asked them to do. And then all these, all these people have to like move and hide and have security teams on them because they released the name.

I've seen it myself in my own work where, you know, somebody high-ranking, maybe General McRaven, can get away with saying things publicly. But, you know, if you're a Specialist E-4 in the Army—

Oh yeah, you're done.

And you say the exact same thing that he said. Yeah. You're done. Yeah, you're finished.

Yeah,

absolutely true. Absolutely true. That's— I mean, that's how Washington works. And you guys know the old saying from Harry Truman, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. You can't rely on anybody else.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, so you take the plea bargain and now you're going to— is it federal prison?

Oh, yeah. Federal prison.

Yeah. Tell us about that experience.

Well, you know, I wrote another book about that experience. It was called Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. I never had any intention at all of writing a book. But in sentencing, my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp. And minimum security, there are no bars on the windows. The doors doors aren't locked. There are no fences or anything. You're free to come and go as you please. You're on your honor not to run away. And most, most of those guys work in town. There's a little university in town. You go, you know, sweep the floors or whatever. And the judge asked the Justice Department if they had any objection, and they said no. So she sentenced me to, to this minimum security work camp. Well, when I got there, It's odd. You just drive up to the prison and you knock on the door and you say, you know, I'm here to turn myself in. So the guy says to me, oh, you got to go across the street to the prison, the actual prison. They'll process you and then they'll bring you back over here.

I said, okay. So I go across the street, I knock on that door. I said, I'm John Kiriakou. I'm here to turn myself in. And the guy takes me— he starts taking me around to the back of the actual prison. And I said, no, no, I'm supposed to be at the, at the camp across the street. And he kind of chortles. He goes, huh, not according to my paperwork, you're not. And I was like, oh my God, take it easy. There's nothing you can do. If you raise a stink, they're just going to put you in solitary. I didn't say a word. So they processed me, and the whole time I'm telling myself, you can do this. You've lived in far worse places than Loretto, Pennsylvania. You can do this. My— the, the guard who processed me took me to my cell, and the only thing he said to me in this whole thing, this whole experience was if somebody comes into your room uninvited, that's an act of aggression. I was like, great, I've been here 40 minutes, I'm gonna get my ass kicked. So we get to the cell and he just says, home sweet home, and he walks away.

So I didn't know what to do. So I, I, I took a nap actually, and I think it was because I was in shock. But I wake up, I don't know, half hour later, and I'm sitting in this plastic chair. Every cell gets a plastic chair. And, um, and these 2 guys just walk right into my cell. One had this swastika that took up his entire neck that came up onto his face. And the other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids. So every time he blinked,

So 2 other white-collar liminal— white-collar.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In Club Fed.

Yeah.

Which there is no such thing as Club Fed, by the way. So I jump up, I put up my fist. I'm like, what do you want? Because I thought, man, if I'm going down, I'm taking somebody with me. So one of them says, take it easy. Are you the new guy? I go, yeah. He goes, are you a fag? I said, no, I'm not a fag. He goes, are you a rat? I said, no, I didn't have anybody in my case. I'm not a rat. He goes, are you a chomo? I go, I don't know what that word means. He goes like this. He goes, chomo, child molester. I said, no, I'm not a child molester. He goes, okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I was like, oh, okay, thinking, great, now I'm with the Aryans now.

Right.

It was very stressful. A couple of days later, this Black guy walks into my cell, and this guy is like £200 of knotted muscle, this perfect human specimen. And he's got a newspaper in his hands. And of course, I jump up again. I'm like, what do you want? And he gingerly hands me this newspaper and I see that it's the— it's called the National— the National Call, I think is what it was. It was— it was the newspaper of the Nation of Islam. And he says, are you the CIA guy? And I said, yeah. And still I'm like this. I go, yeah. And he says, Reverend Farrakhan says you're a hero of the Muslim people.

Oh my God.

I just wanted to tell you that. You're not going to have any problems with us. I said, oh, okay. He never spoke to me again because they don't speak to the white devil, but he just wanted to say, you know, that I wasn't going to have a problem. So 4 of my 5 cellmates were members of different Mexican cartels. Burachos Norteños, MS-13, I forget what. And one of them said to me, are you educated? And I said, yeah. And he said, would you write my appeal? And I said, well, I'm not a lawyer. Yeah, but you said you're educated. I said, yeah, okay. How hard could it possibly be to write an appeal? I go, give me your case papers. Let me ask you a couple questions. Are you guilty? And he goes, yeah, I'm guilty. He had bullet hole scars in him from the shootout with the DEA. So I wrote this, I wrote this appeal, and the appeal was denied, of course. But he told all the other cartel guys that, that I was honest and that I didn't charge him. So, so the Mexicans left me alone. And then finally, I was directly across the hall from, from the number 3 in the, in the Banano prime family.

And, uh, oh, I would get the New York Times every day. He would get the New York Post, and we would trade after, after we, uh, finished our papers. And he said to me one day, um, let me ask you something. He says, why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria? And I said, I don't know, my first day here they, they told me to sit with them. And then very dramatically he goes, from today You're with the Italians. And so I, I was with the Italians after that. You know, there was one guy— my brother, my brother rented an apartment from Carlo Gambino's sister for 9 years in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Mm-hmm.

And so he called me right before I left prison and he said, listen, there's a very bad guy in this prison. You need to stay away from him. And he told me who it was. I, I probably shouldn't say his name, but, um, he was the actual boss of one of the families, one of the 5 Families.

Yeah, the Bananos are one of the 5 Families.

And, and the Bananos were really kind to me. I, I, in fact, I talked to one of them 3, 3 hours ago. So, um, I stayed away from this guy, and you'd see him walking around You know, every once in a while. And he's completely encircled by these 6 bodyguards, hangers-on. So I'm sitting in my cell one day and I'm reading the Times, and I see this movement out of my peripheral— from my peripheral vision. I turn and it's a guy we used to call Stupid Tony because his eyes were crossed, right? So I turn and I said, hey. And he goes, the boss wants to see you. And I said, he wants to see me? I've actively avoided this guy.

Yeah.

He goes, let's go. I was like, oh my God. So I get up and I follow him to the extreme opposite end of the prison. We go into the guy's room and it's full of people. So he's sitting in one of the plastic chairs and another guy's on his knees and he's clipping the boss's toenails. And I'm just standing in the doorway. Finally, when his toenails are done, he gets up, he brushes his teeth, he spits into the sink, and he— the spit gets all over the rim of the basin. There's a guy right behind him sleeping in a bunk bed, and he punches the bunk bed and he gets— he goes, hey, get up, clean this shit up. The guy jumps out of the bed, cleans it up. Finally, I go, I said, uh, excuse me, did you want to see me? He goes, come in, sit down. I go in and sit down. He goes, you're the CIA guy? I said, I am. You write a book? I said, I did. Your book do good? I said, actually, I did very well. I made number 5 on the New York Times bestsellers list.

And he goes like this, he goes, You're going to write my book. And I said, oh, okay. He goes, I'm going to tell you stories and you're going to write my book. I said, all right, let's think about this for a minute. I said, books of this genre are usually written by rats, and they spend the first half of the book talking about all the cool things they've done. And the second half of the book they spend trying to justify why they turned rat. And I said, you're definitely not a rat, and you probably shouldn't talk about the cool things you've done. Silence among these dozen guys around me. And he, he looks like this. He goes, hadn't thought of that. Never mind. But from that day on, I was invited to every Italian dinner, every Italian party. We walked the track in the yard together. I gained £35 in prison because they had a crooked guard on payroll, and he would bring in the pork loin and the wine for the Marsala sauce and the fresh tomatoes and mushrooms and pasta. And chicken. And every night was this banquet of restaurant-quality Italian food.

And so I didn't have to worry about anything.

I'm curious how the dynamics were. You sit with the Aryans at first, and those must have been great conversations. And actually, I'm joking because I'm sure you had normal conversations with those guys too, because there had to be a layer of normalcy there. But you're sitting with the Aryans. How did they react when you started sitting with the boss that invited you over? Was there tension?

Yeah. There were 2 or 3 guys who said, oh, you think you're better than we are. And I'm like, no, no, no. I said, listen, I'm Greek, they're Italian, we both hate the FBI the same amount. I'm just going to hang with them. And, and for, you know, 95% of them, that, that was cool. They didn't care.

So you, you hadn't gotten your swastika tattoos just yet?

Say that again.

I'm just saying you hadn't gotten your swastika tattoos just yet.

I know, right? Like, and, and they would pressure me, like, at least get like a string of barbed wire around your bicep. I'm like, no, I don't want to look like you guys. I'm not getting a barbed I don't want any souvenir of this place.

Right, right. Yeah, that's funny. But you said that like 90, like 70, like most of them were cool with it. How did you avoid— how did you avoid issues with the guys that weren't cool with it? Or, and not just with the Aryans, but with anybody. Obviously there are people who are outside those groups or whatever.

Yeah, also a good question. So every— there are— everybody has to be a member of a group or a gang. You can't survive if you're by yourself.

Okay.

And so you've got the Aryans, you have the Italians, you have the Blacks who were divided between the Crips and the Bloods and their affiliates. And then you have the Hispanics, which are you know, a dozen different groups. Even the child molesters have their own, what's called a shot caller. So there's one shot caller for every one of these groups or gangs. And if you have a problem with somebody from another race or another group, you go to your shot caller and he'll go to the other guy's shot caller and they negotiate a settlement. That way they reduce the level of violence.

Mm-hmm.

Well, the Italians were the smallest group in the prison, but they were the most highly respected. And so they had kind of an easy relationship with the Aryans. And then the Blacks, the Hispanics, and everybody else just kind of left the Italians alone because the Italians had a very long arm. You know, you piss somebody off in prison, all it takes is a phone call to to somebody back in Queens, and, and you're going to have a heap of problems on your, on your chest.

The Italians know how to run a racket. There's no denying it.

I'll tell you what. I was there for about a month. And this, this boss that I told you about was in the visiting room one day when my wife and kids came to see me. And we were sitting in the same row. So you could put 2 prisoners in one row of about a dozen chairs and then family members directly across from them. So I'm there with my wife and kids, and, and your kids are allowed to sit on your lap, but you, you can't have any physical contact with your spouse other than a kiss when they arrive and a kiss when they leave. And I mean a peck on the cheek kind of kiss. So I'm there with my kids. My wife is across from me. The boss is, you know, 3, 4 seats down, and there are 3 old gray-haired men sitting across from him. And they're just sitting there and they're not saying anything. And then finally the boss says to the first one, you talked to Paulo? And the old man says, I talked to Paulo. He sends his regards. And then there's like 5 minutes of silence. And then he says to the second guy— Yeah, he says, he says the second guy, You take care of the thing?

And the guy goes, I took care of the thing. It's not going to be a problem. 5 more minutes of silence, and then he says, uh, you see Tony? He goes, I saw Tony. He said not to worry. And then they all stood up and they hugged and they kissed each other on the cheek and they left.

Yeah.

And my wife says, what did we just see? And I said, I think that was a mafia sit-down.

But— Yeah, I have a pebble in my shoe.

They were perfectly— yeah, exactly. They're perfectly able to conduct whatever business they need to conduct out in the open without any fear of, you know, the cops intervening or anybody causing any kind of problem for them. I was like, I was impressed, to tell you the truth.

What kind of tradecraft could the agency learn from prison?

Oh, man. Thank you. And we did not plant that question.

No.

So in, in this book that I, that I wrote coming out of prison, Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, I actually won 2 literary awards for this. I won I won the PEN First Amendment Award, which is one of the big 4, along with the PEN/Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe. And I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year. So I started writing this book as a joke, right? How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. And I start off with 20 life lessons that I learned at the CIA that got me through prison. And when I say I started off as a joke, You know, we used to have these coffee mugs for sale in the CIA gift shop that said, admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations.

Right.

Right. Okay. Put that as one of the 20 life lessons. But there were others like, let others do your dirty work. Don't trust anybody. Don't be afraid to take a punch. You know, stuff like that. And there were 20 of these. And then I would give examples, like real-life examples, for each one of these 20 life lessons. And then it became actually quite a serious book. Well, the CIA taught me the skills that I needed to keep myself safe and to remain at the top of the social heap in prison. And then conversely, the CIA can learn a lot about human motivation. by studying prisoners. You know, I said an hour ago that, that my job in Greece, like the job of any CIA case officer, is very simply to recruit spies to steal secrets.

Mm-hmm.

But there's an awful lot of psychological manipulation that comes with that. Well, you can learn volumes worth of information and lessons by doing that in prison.

It's amazing. And I apologize. Generally, we read people's books before they come on the show. I was not aware of your book. I'm going to buy it and read it after the fact, but it sounds amazing.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, it sounds amazing.

Thank you. Oh,

I

appreciate it very much.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting to consider prison like the ultimate testing ground for not necessarily running sources for information, but there's definitely a lot in common there, right? Like how to get along. Like everything is a cold butt.

A lot.

Yeah.

And you live and die in prison based on the quality of the intelligence that you're able to gather. I mean, really, that's what it comes down to. I go into detail in the book about how this pedophile tried to put a hit on me. Uh, in, in prison. And it was because my relationships with the Black, uh, groups were so good that they tipped me off. And so I was able to set the pedophile up to go down, uh, which he did hard. Something I was quite proud of.

And could you— I— can you talk about that? Do you want to talk about that, or is that probably better not to.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Oh, no, sure, sure. So this guy, it's kind of a long story, but he set me up and 2 of the black guys came up and said, hey, John, you know, this pedophile, he was an attorney from Philadelphia who had buggered a 12-year-old boy for 5 years, from 12 to 17. He He was furious because I wouldn't allow him to move into my cell. I said, no, my cell is a pedophile-free zone. No pedophiles. So, um, he offered these guys $500 to, to beat me to a bloody pulp. And rather than take the $500, they came and warned me. And so I said, well, I gotta, I gotta figure a way to take this guy down. And so I was able to use my CIA skills to recruit another prisoner to plant a shank in the guy's locker. And then an anonymous tipster told the cops, hey, that pedo has a shank in his locker. They went and got him. They arrested him. They charged him with having contraband, and they transferred him to a medium-security prison. Another level higher.

It's, it's amazing.

Done and done, as we used to say.

I, I don't understand. I don't understand how pedos have any influence, can survive, can— I, I don't understand that because, I mean, the stories are that like they are, are PNG in prisons.

Yes,

I would like

to do that. Yeah, pedos are not allowed to sit. Yeah, they're not allowed to sit in the day room, in the TV room. They're not even allowed to stay in their own cells during the day. They have to get out or they're going to get a beatdown. Um, there was one incident when I was there where you could buy olive oil in the, in the commissary, and one guy, um, poured a bottle of olive oil into a bowl put it into the communal microwave and then poured it onto a pedophile's face while he was taking a nap. Boiling olive oil.

Wow.

Put it onto his face because the day before, the pedo had been sitting in the guy's chair in the day room. And he's like, you know the rules, no pedophiles in the day room. So he burned his face off.

Yeah.

So, yeah, pedophiles are at the very bottom of the John, you did about 2 years in federal prison, get out.

Talk to us about your reintegration into American society as a reformed citizen. I mean, what was that experience like?

You know what? It was far more difficult than I expected it to be. So many people think, especially people who've been incarcerated on white-collar crimes, we think we can just step right back into our lives again and everything's going to be fine. not the case at all. And so, you know, I couldn't get a job. Mm-hmm. There, there was a, there was a think tank here in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies, that threw me a bone, but it was minimum wage.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, I got rejected at, you know, Safeway and Target and Walmart, and I got rejected everywhere. And so, I just decided that I was going to have to embrace this. In fact, my, my now ex-wife was extraordinarily supportive, and she gave me really great advice. She told me, you have to embrace this. You didn't do anything wrong.

Right.

And so you have to get out there and tell your story over and over and over again so people understand your perspective. She said, the Justice Department's going to move on to their next victim, which they did. It was Ed Snowden in June of 2013. She said, but you have to grab this by the horns. And she was right. And so that's what I've done. And, you know, I've been able to make a decent living ever since. And to tell you the truth, my children are proud of me. And I like the person that I am. I can sleep at night.

Mm-hmm.

I know deep down that I'm on the right side of history on this torture issue. So I just don't care anymore.

So were you angry? Did you have to let that anger go with the system, the hypocrisy in the system?

Yeah, because it sounds like, just to add on to that, when we started the interview, it sounds like you really enjoyed your time at the CIA. Yeah.

And you did a great job. You were recognized for your performance. I did.

I had a knack for it. Yeah, I enjoyed myself. I loved the travel. The work was interesting. And to answer your question, yes, I was I was very angry. I was, I was especially angry at the hypocrisy. Mm-hmm. You know, the torturers were never prosecuted. The leakers, like, you know, so many former CIA directors, including John Brennan, were never, were never prosecuted. And so it took me a long time to get over that, that anger. And, you know, I think the way that I, the way that I was able to get over it in the end was just by writing Constantly. I've had a column at Consortium News for years. I had a column at Reader Supported News before that. I have a regular column in Covert Action magazine. I've written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, many times for The Los Angeles Times. I've written 8 books. I'm working on my 9th right now. And so it's, it's almost It's almost a form of therapy to be able to recount these stories. And then I've met, I've met people like, for example, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. I don't know if you've ever heard that name before, or maybe you've heard of the movie The Mauritanian.

He was the Mauritanian. This was a guy who was absolutely, utterly innocent of any crime. Yet we snatched him in Mauritania and took him to Guantanamo and tortured him and kept him there for 14 years. And then said, oh, wrong guy, and let him go. And, um, I talked to Muhammadu regularly, and this is a guy who's like, you know, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, like, uh, no hard feelings, you know, this is just the way life is sometimes, it's not fair. And I'm like, I don't understand how you can, you can come to a conclusion like that. They 14 years of torture at Guantanamo, and, and you say no problem? And he said, what am I going to do? He said, they're not going to be guilty. They're not going to feel guilty. So I should dwell on what happened to me and make myself depressed? I'm not going to do that. And so he's, he's gotten over it, and, and he's, he's a model for for forgiveness. You know, I wasn't joking when I told him that he reminded me of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, because I never met anybody who was so comfortable in his own skin and with his own personal history as Muhammadu.

Can, can I ask you, you know, because there are obviously different levels of enhanced interrogation and—

Sure.

And, you know, and you equate it to torture. And I've been on record on the show before of saying there are certain forms of enhanced interrogation like sleep debt that I 100% support for these short-term things of getting somebody down. Sure. I'm just curious to hear your opinion where— what the dividing line is and what you feel is right and wrong. And look, I will say that building rapport with somebody over the long term is the 100% right way and best way to gain information.

Yeah, the FBI is especially good at that. But I agree with you that most of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA used against prisoners, um, in the early 2000s were not torture. Like grabbing somebody by the lapels and saying, doggone you, you better answer my question. That's not torture. Or giving somebody a slap on the belly where it leaves a handprint and makes a cracking sound. That's not torture. Um, in most cases, sleep deprivation, as you said, is not torture. In the CIA's case, it was because the CIA— look, we know from the American Psychological Association, the APA, that people begin to lose their minds at day 7 with no sleep.

Right.

They begin to, to die at day 9. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for up to 12 days. And we murdered people with it.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's— yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always sort of had the idea that if somebody leaves the exact same person that they— if they leave the, you know, the bit of— or the whatever, um, the same person the same way they came in, right? No marks, no, you know, whatever, that it probably doesn't hit that— no psychological damage. It probably doesn't hit that torture But

I would agree with that. Yes, I would agree with that. But you know, when you authorize a technique, for example, called walling, where they roll up a towel, they put the towel around your neck, and then they slam you into a plywood wall, because plywood has a little bit of give and the towel protects your neck from whiplash. But then they don't use the towel.

Right.

And the wall is Made of concrete and not plywood, and then you end up with irreversible brain damage to the point where you can't, you can't participate in your own defense. Well, that's, that's torture.

Yeah. Yeah. I even think the idea of walling sounds a little extreme to what, like, in my mind.

Yeah, I agree.

You know, even that.

I agree with you.

Anyway, it's just interesting because it's I think that, you know, they're like, for me, I've been an apologist for enhanced interrogation, but, but in the sense of enhanced interrogation was, you know, making somebody cold, making them hungry, making them sleep deprived over a 24-hour period. Not

right.

Not harming them.

Right.

You know, not—

Right.

Nothing that like a frat guy Or, or a young Ranger wouldn't go through, through in a hazing period, really.

You're exactly right. I could not agree more.

You know?

Yes.

But even Walling, like I said, even with the towel seems a little extreme to me.

I agree. And, you know, there are legal considerations, too. We, we have something called the Federal Torture Act of 1946. which specifically outlawed exactly those harshest techniques that we used in, in beginning in 2002. Right. And we executed Japanese soldiers during, after World War II, Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. Mm-hmm. I also say when I give these talks at universities. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front-page photograph.

...of Iraq. Can I ask, and since you did work Saddam Hussein and all that, there were all these ideas that we went into Iraq because of oil or because he had tried to assassinate Bush Senior or all these things. But, but we've also had people on the show who have said there were like, I don't want to say deep state because that, that, you know, it's such a loaded term, but there were like careerists that had been through several administrations that had had their eye on Iraq during the Clinton administration, that Iraq was always like something people wanted.

Oh, yes, absolutely true. I, I was intimately involved in the planning for the Iraq War, uh, as, as the executive assistant. And, um, you know, the bottom line was the White House didn't care if there were weapons of mass destruction. That, that was a lovely fig leaf to have, but whether there were or there weren't, the invasion was going forward. You know, I say in my, in my first book, um, on my first day as the executive assistant. I went into the office. I had just gotten back from Pakistan. So I went into the office and I said to the deputy director, I go, so what are we doing? And he says, I actually can't tell you until you sign your secrecy agreement. Oh, wow. So go down to the 6th floor. Security's got some agreements for you to sign. So I went down there and I walked in. They had 6 secrecy agreements laid out for me. me, and I signed each one of the 6, and I said, so what's up? And the guy goes, well, next year we're going to invade Iraq, we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and we're going to create the world's largest Air Force base so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia.

and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we were polluting the land of the 2 holy mosques.

Wow.

And I was so stunned.

Oh my God.

I said, I've never heard that before.

We haven't. We haven't. Oh yeah. I said, but we haven't caught bin Laden yet. And he said, buddy, the battle lines have already been drawn and the decision's been made. He said, The pro-invasion groups are OVP, Office of the Vice President, OSD, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and NSC. He said the anti-invasion are State Department, CIA, and Joint Chiefs. But we don't get to make those decisions.

Wow.

I have to say—

I'm going back downstairs.

John, just to interrupt for a moment, I mean, I have heard it over and over again from CIA people, to the point that there's no way that I could ever believe that all of them are lying to me, that this was a political decision that was made at the White House level and it was mandated and pushed down to all of the subsequent organizations that you mentioned.

That is 100% correct. And this was a decision made by Dick Cheney and imposed on everybody in the community.

That— and, and what did— so was Dick Cheney pushing it down and then info was getting pushed to Bush to just— because Bush seems like an unwavering—

That, that was a big controversy. That was a big controversy because the CIA is sending these intelligence reports to, to not just the White House, but to the whole community saying, we can't find any weapons of mass destruction. And so what Cheney did was he mandated the creation of an intelligence unit inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and they recruited—

The military.

A guy by the name of— Ah, right. Kelleher.

Yep.

And his minions to just manufacture false intelligence saying there's WMD all over Iraq and the only thing we can do to stop it is to invade the country. And then we're like, we're not seeing any of this intel. Where is this stuff coming from? So we want to talk to these sources. We want to polygraph these sources. Nope, not available. And so the decision was made. There was nothing anybody could do about it.

So was Iraq a real estate deal facilitated by Cheney to basically put the world's largest Air Force base in there and deny them, you know, the South, and to deny the Saudis?

I believe that was it. I think that there is some truth to the desire for revenge against Saddam for trying to kill George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. And certainly the Israelis were begging us to overthrow Saddam Hussein at every opportunity. In every meeting in Washington, they would beg us to attack Iraq, just like they've been begging us to attack Iran for the last 20 years.

And what, what boggles my, like, imagination, though, is that Iraq was our, our foil. We, we armed them, we funded them. They were our foil to Iran, and nobody ever sat down and said, what are the second-order and third-order effects of taking out Saddam?

Yeah. Anybody who's ever read a newspaper would be able to say, look, Iraq is the only thing that protects the Arabian Peninsula from the Iranians. We don't have to be friends with Saddam Hussein, We just need for there to be— you know, I hate to sound like a fascist, but we, we needed from a policy perspective for there to be a Sunni strongman running the country. Sure. You know, democracy, yes. Equal rights for all ethnic minorities or ethnic groups, definitely. But you can't have an Iraqi government that is subservient to Tehran. And that's what we ended up with. And it was because the policy was a terrible policy.

So, John, speeding forward to after you were released from prison, I have to ask you about your association with the Russian media and Sputnik News or Radio. How did that come about? What was your thought process behind it? How did all of that

Well, in March of 2017, I got a call from the Washington bureau chief of Sputnik News, and he says, hey, we'd be interested in talking to you about a radio show. And I said, oh, thanks. I'm not interested, but I appreciate the offer. Oh, well, at least take a meeting. So I went, I took a meeting, and I said, again, I appreciate, you know, what you're, what you're offering, but I'm not interested in working for the Russian government. And then, um, I still couldn't find a job. And they came back to me 6 months later and they said, hey, you know, we thought we'd try again. We'd like to offer you your own show. And I said, well, If I were to do a show on a Russian network, I would want the freedom to say anything I wanted and to criticize anybody I wanted, including Vladimir Putin. And the guy said, done. And I said, yeah, you willing to put that in writing? You put it in the contract? And he said, yes. And he did. And so I took the job. I did it from August of 2017 until last month. Mm-hmm. And then the Biden administration forced them out of business with, with sanctions.

But I'll tell you, on the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I opened my show by saying, I unreservedly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I urge all Russian forces to leave Ukraine immediately.

Wow.

And then we started the show, and I never— nobody ever objected. Nobody ever said anything or dressed me down or anything. They were very good to me. And, and I was able to, to say anything I wanted for all those years. 7 years.

What, what did you say through those 7 years? I mean, I mean, you spoke to your criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, but beyond that, What was the content of those shows?

It was, it was a combination of, of U.S. politics and international affairs. So, you know, we would cover in ridiculous detail, just because I'm obsessed with politics, we would cover American politics. I did a lot on criminal justice issues. In fact, get this, this still pisses me off after all these years. I did a 30-minute segment every Thursday called Criminal Injustice, and I had 2 people. One was a criminal justice journalist, and the other was the head of a of a think tank that works on criminal justice issues. And every Thursday we would talk for 30 minutes about what has happened in the area of criminal justice around the country: crooked cops, crooked judges, you know, death penalty cases being overturned because the Poor guy was innocent, that kind of thing. So one day we're talking about this judge in Pennsylvania. You might remember this case who had taken bribes from a private prison company to give juveniles—

Yeah.

Long sentences, and he would take a kickback. So we're talking about this. The next day, The Washington Post has an article about, you know, Russian propaganda that is alive and well in the United States. And they said that they had listened to my show. And that I was— and this is the exact quote from the article— I was weakening our democracy by talking about these issues. Okay. Not the crooked judge was weakening our democracy. I was weakening our democracy, that we should not be talking about these issues. And I was like, man, these people just don't get it. These mainstream people, they just don't

get it. This is a difficult topic because I think The Russian government recruits people like you that have some legitimate, or I mean, it's a question of perception, have some grievances with the United States government.

Oftentimes.

And allows them and promotes them to criticize the United States government. And of course, I completely agree that there is a space and it's important to criticize our government. And many of the ones you've brought up during this interview are completely valid and important. Um, but is there an issue where you're working with the Russian government where their goal is explicitly to harm the United States of America?

I can see how a lot of people would come to that conclusion. I concede that. But at the same time, I'm not welcome on CNN or on MSNBC. I'm welcome on Fox every time they want me to criticize the CIA. But, you know, nobody was beating a path to my door to offer me gainful employment. And I have kids to put through college. I put food on the table. So, you know, I had to think about what was best for me. And I I think that's what I did.

Here's the thing. If you're telling the truth and that truth helps the bad guys, that's a problem for the United States, not for— like, that's an issue if what is truly happening in the United States is valid propaganda. Yeah, right. That, that is an issue.

Yeah.

If, if the, the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians were to hire you and all you do is tell the truth about real things that are happening in America, those things are real. That's an issue that America should look at and deal with. Why do we— That's true. Why do we have these factual things that are propaganda victories for our enemies? If there is a judge— Yeah, thank you. And there was. If there is a judge who is doing this and we have this private prison system and he has He is abusing children, right? He is abusing children to make money and to make these prisons money. And an enemy of our country can hire somebody to say that, to report the truth? That's our problem. That is not the person who reports the truth.

See, that's exactly how I felt. And people ask me, You know, how could you work for the Russians? Well, you know, I wish I didn't work for the Russians or I hadn't. I wish I hadn't worked for the Russians.

Right.

I would love to have my own show on, you know, name a network. But that, that just wasn't real life.

And the other problem is, is that on many of these mainstream networks, they, they don't, they don't like— they're, they're very much a part of the system, right? They don't want you reporting on a judge who is sending kids to jail to make money for both him and the jails. They, they're, they're, they want to talk politics. They want to talk, you know, um, whether it's left or right, you know, um, oh, I'm just, I'm very angry right now. Uh, like,

yeah, no, but you're not wrong.

Yeah, it's, it's anything that if somebody tells the truth and it's a benefit to our enemy, That's our problem. That's not the enemy. That's not the person who tells the truth. That's our problem.

100% agree. Yep. Agree 100%. You know,

it's— so when— and it's another thing that I have, a big issue I have is prison reform. If somebody does their time, they've done their time unless they're a threat to other people. If they're like a child molester or a rapist or whatever else where they might be a threat. to people. If you have a felony and you've done your time, you've done your time. You should never have to reveal that to anybody, answer to anybody. That's it.

Clean slate.

Exactly. Exactly. You shouldn't have to pay for the rest of your life because that's what the jail sentence was. That's what the prison sentence was.

And that's why we're happy to talk to you on this show, Jon, because I mean, we can relitigate this ad nauseam, but the reality is you were sentenced and you served your debt to society and now you're out and you should have the opportunity to reintegrate into society. But so you said that your relationship with Sputnik ended about like a month ago. I mean, tell us about where you're at now. You said you're working on another book. I mean, where is John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou has turned into an entrepreneur, I'll say. Um, so I, I'm trying to cast a wide net. Like I say, you know, nobody's beaten a path to my door, so I have to make my own way. Plus the fact that the government confiscated my pension and I had 20 years of proud government service, so I got to work till the day I die. Unless, you know, some president at some point deems to, to give me a pardon. So, so I have a column, as I said, with Consortium News. I have a column with COVID Action Magazine. I'm in the process of developing a podcast with my 2 of my former colleagues from Sputnik. One is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. And I'm on the board of a tech startup that's actually turning into something. We have 27 employees now, and those shares that I thought were worthless are actually turning into something. And books. I tell you the truth, I have a lot of trouble sleeping, and so I'll just get up in the middle of the night and and bang out 1,000 words. I'm working on my 9th book. My 8th book was something completely different.

I called my publisher and I said, listen, I wrote a book, and I know that you don't really do things like this, but it's called Remains of the Day: The Ultimate Guide to Washington, D.C.'s Historic Cemeteries. And he's like, ooh, yeah, we don't really do that, but go ahead and send it to me and, and I'll read it. So I sent it to him. He calls me 2 weeks later. He said, this is the best book you've ever written.

Wow.

In fact, he said, the editorial board liked it so much they want to commission 3 more: the Mafia Graves of New York City, the Historic Cemeteries of Chicago, and the Country Western Graves of Nashville.

Oh, that's cool.

So I got started on that.

Interesting.

And we'll just see what it turns into.

Where can people find you, whether on social media or websites or go to buy your books? What is the right place for people to go?

Oh, thank you for that. The best place is Substack. Everything I write, I put on Substack, and it's just under John Kiriakou. Um, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, and, um, uh, what else? Uh, oh yeah, you know what? I've got a new TV show. It's an internet-based show, uh, at a place called Unified, uh, Television. U-N-I-F-Y-D. It's called CIA Declassified. And, uh, what we do is we take declassified CIA documents and use them to explain historical events like the Berlin, uh, airlift or the overthrow of the Iranian government or, you know, the Chile, uh, coup in 1973, um, the Kennedy assassination, stuff like that. Um, but everything, everything goes on Substack. That's probably the best place to find me.

Cool. That sounds really cool though, uh, especially with the FOIA reading room. Like, the FOIA reading room is like Wikipedia. You can just go down so many rabbit holes there, it's incredible.

Oh my gosh, I love it. I do it myself. You start reading about Air America and the next thing you know, you're getting a PhD in the subject.

Well, here's an interesting fact for Stargate and all that stuff. Did you know that there were remote viewers for Eagle Claw?

Yes. It's funny, we did an episode about that.

Really?

Oh, cool.

And I, I didn't— when it was suggested to me, I said, oh, come on, all that stuff is— it's all silliness and nonsense. And then I started reading the documents and I thought, oh crap, no, I was wrong about this.

It's wild. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. I spent like days going through down, down that.

Oh my God. And MKUltra, you know, there were, there were like 5 sub-operations under MKUltra.

Yeah.

Like how this stuff happened in the United States of America.

Yeah.

It's Chris.

Stunning to me.

And what's wild, we only know about MKUltra because of testimonies and because they found stuff in, you know, in some remote location that had been like forgotten about, but they burned it. We don't even know. We don't know like 9/10 of what MKUltra was about.

Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. Like, what about this part of MKUltra where they decided to, um, to use fog machines to, uh, to disperse Germs in San Francisco to see who got sick. And 11 people came down with this rare form of UTI. And they're like, oh, okay, that works.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's amazing. I could geek out about that stuff for hours. So, I'm going to put on my game face here and get to viewer questions. Um, Sully, thank you very much. Looking back, what would you do differently regards working in the CIA/whistleblowing? Does the CIA do more good than bad in the world?

That's a tough one. The, the easy part of that question is I'll tell you exactly what I would do differently, and that is hire an attorney before you blow the whistle. I cannot say that any more clearly. Don't say anything until your attorney is sitting next to you. I hired my attorney after blowing the whistle, and I had to be reactive instead of proactive. Um, does the CIA do more bad than good? I unfortunately, I think yes. And I've got a really great friend, he's probably my best friend, who's a former Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and we've been talking about a book on that issue specifically. And his position is that the CIA has gotten literally every major world event wrong since it was created in 1947. It missed everything from the Berlin Airlift, uh, or the Berlin— the creation of the Berlin Wall, to the Suez Crisis, to everything during the Vietnam War, all the way up, you know, through 9/11. Um, they just get everything wrong. And then they get tangled up in things like MKUltra or Iran-Contra, and then fall flat on their faces on 9/11, do we really need this organization?

I think probably not.

I, I'll have— I have a question in the term, in the sense of, because you worked it, you were good at it, you had friends who did it. It seems to me, and, you know, having all the interviews that we had, that at the micro level, at the case officer, agent, analysis level. They do a very good job. You guys do phenomenal work, and they're some of America's most talented. Very smart people. It seems that where a lot of the failures come in is when you start getting up into policy and decision, like, the management issues. And not pointing the finger at, like, just generic SIS people, But at actual leadership at the higher level. Is that accurate in your opinion or no?

Absolutely accurate. Absolutely. Once you pollute intelligence with politics or once you mix intelligence with policy, it all just goes down the drain. And then you have all those smart people working for a needless war or a failed policy or

Safi Suleyman, thank you very much. What would you say to those responsible for sending you to prison? Do you hate them?

Oh, that's a good question too. And I'm proud to say the answer is no. I really do view it as water under the bridge. Like Muhammad Utslahi said, I would only harm myself if, if I focused on it. And so, you know, like I said, I like the person that I am, and my children respect me, and they know the truth of what happens. My ex-wife was right. My side of the story is the side of record. And so I'm comfortable with all of that.

What, what's your opinion in terms of, you know, Trump had classified documents at his house. Biden had classified documents at his house. Hillary, you know, removed the headers, the classified headers from, you know, from stuff, stuff that any of us would go to jail for. Like, what do you think is the answer to these double standards that we have? And it's like Jack mentioned earlier, if you have enough stars or a high enough SIS level, you can say whatever you want and you're not going to jail. Like, what do you think the answer to that is?

It's called prosecutorial discretion. I think the answer is that the Espionage Act has to be scrapped in its current form and it has to be rewritten because the Espionage Act says nothing about any affirmative defense or about criminal intent. If you had the intent to provide classified information to a person not entitled to receive it, you should be prosecuted. If you did not have an intent, or if you did it for legitimate legal reasons, or if there was no provable harm to the national security, you should not be prosecuted. And another thing that I think should be in parallel with this, is according to George W. Bush's classification czar, um, something like 75% of classified documents are improperly classified. They should not be classified. We overclassify everything in government. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, if I send my wife an email saying, hey, do you want to meet for lunch? And it's classified secret because everything at the CIA is classified secret. at a minimum. And then she says, yeah, let's meet at noon. I'll meet you in front of the, you know, deli. And she classifies that secret. And then I call my sister and say, oh, hey, my wife and I had lunch at the deli in the CIA cafeteria today.

Have I committed espionage? Those documents were classified.

Right.

So, you know, There's got to be, there's got to be a limit. There's got to be an end.

Right.

And there's no end. It's unwieldy. It's out of control.

Right.

And it's abused by senior officials.

Yeah.

Certainly needs to be updated since pre-World War I.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they've done the mandatory declassification. I don't know what that act is. Yeah. Where they have to look at it every 10 years. At least that's a step in the right direction. But, but they—

Yeah, but then they don't staff those offices.

Right.

I wrote an op-ed a year ago or so about declassification at the National Archives. Did you know that there's a queue to declassify documents at National Archives that's 600 years long?

That's insane.

That at the current pace, yeah, at the current pace, it's going to take them 600 years to declassify the classified documents.

Yeah.

So it's great that we have these laws for mandatory declassification. But then, right, you have to actually staff the offices where they're going to do the reading and do the redactions.

Yeah.

And they don't bother.

And now, now so many of our federal agencies are using classification just not because it's a matter of national security. It's just because they don't want to release things that are embarrassing.

Yeah.

You know, they'll redact stuff just so they don't get embarrassed. It's like, that's not classified.

I was talking to one of the guys at the National Security Archives. That's the repository at George Washington University that gets all these classified documents. And I said, you know, Trump promised in '16 and Biden promised in '20 that they would, they would release all of the remaining JFK assassination documents. Yeah. And both of them didn't. You know, they neglected to do it. They decided not to do it. And I said, what do you think is in those documents? I said, I'm going to guess that it's information on surveillance activities in Mexico City in 1963. Yeah, I think— He said, I think that's exactly what it is. And I said, so the big secret is that the CIA was surveilling communists in Mexico City In 1963. Who cares?

Right.

Who cares what they were doing?

The FBI was surveilling college professors in 1963. So who? We know. We know. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Sully. Appreciate it. What was the best thing about being in the CIA? And if your kids want to join the CIA, would you object?

Um, would I object? Probably, yeah. I probably would, because I know, I know what these people are like, and, and they're, they're, they're sociopaths. The whole organization is made up of sociopaths. That's how people rise to the top, on the backs of everybody else. And they would just as soon kill you as shake your hand. So yeah, I would not want my children to join the CIA.

Do you think that that is part of— I don't want to say sociopaths, having sociopathic tendencies, because guys in SOF have them too. But the difference between special operations and the CIA. In special operations, you have to be good at working in a team. Like, you have to be able to get along. In the CIA, you have to be able to recruit, but it is a very individual effort, and sometimes it's a very competitive effort because of that individualism. Do you think that the people who are selected are selected for those qualities, or do you think that the people who succeed succeed because they have those qualities?

I think, I think both, uh, points are true. Um, the, the problem with, you know, the CIA is, as you just said a moment ago correctly, um, the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths, because sociopaths are impossible to control.

And, and special operations, special operations have that same thing.

Or people who are psychopaths are literally incapable of integrating into these organizations.

Right. So, you have to have an ability to detach a certain amount in these types of jobs.

That's right. That's right. But just as you would see in any Fortune 500 company, there are going to be sociopaths who slip through the process and who rise to the top because it's the sociopaths who rise to the top. Mm-hmm. You know, that's just, that's just a fact of, of corporate life. It's not unique to the CIA in any way.

Right, right. Because they don't have boundaries. Yeah, exactly. Sully, thank you very much. Would Jack and Dave have been whistleblowers if they knew what John did? Is there a big stigma from the Rangers, Green Berets towards whistleblowers?

There's a huge stigma. And I wrote about in my own book about the JSOC black site in Mosul. And some of the contractors that worked there encouraged us to torture prisoners. And I told the privates in my squad, absolutely not. You should not be participating in that. That's not your job. Yeah. This was post-Abu Ghraib too.

Yeah.

I was like, hell no. Absolutely. You should not be participating in that.

Do you think that in—

But I didn't blow the whistle.

Yeah. I think that being a whistleblower, I think it really depends on— it takes a lot of courage to be a whistleblower, and especially when you're part of a group of people and an organization that you love. Because you were not— even if it's not you or anybody that you do know and love that's participating in this thing, you are giving up a lot when you do that. And so I think for me, like in your situation, because it was sort of after the fact, you had already left the agency, You didn't technically blow the whistle while you were there and whatnot. No. You went on with good faith to defend yourself. You got caught up in the thing that— well, not Jack because he's media savvy, but me or anybody else like me would do is I'm just here to speak my truth. And all of a sudden it's like, But to actually blow the whistle on something going on, it really depends for me what it would be that was going on, how heinous it was, how widespread it was. I don't know if I have that much courage, to be honest with you.

I really don't.

It's a tough situation. The cost is great. The cost is great.

Yeah. And again, it's not just the personal cost in terms of can I say something about it? It's about being completely alienated from your community.

Yeah.

So, um, yeah, I don't know. That's a good question, Sully. Thanks. Um, I, I'll just say that the whistleblowers have a lot of courage. Um, Sully, uh, thank you. Unfortunately, paid comments I put in yesterday disappeared, so I have to read some. I'm sorry, man. Sorry about that. Uh, Sully, uh, what would you say to those responsible for sending you to prison Oh, no, we already got— we already asked that. Oh, I guess your questions did show up, man. Yeah, yeah, it did. Okay, so I guess they didn't show up in the live chat, but they were sitting there. Default Name, thank you very much. You have talked about how driving was your favorite part of training. What part of that training do you continue to use in daily situations?

Oh, driving every single day. Everybody that drives with me complains that I drive like a crazy person. I like to think that I drive like a very self-aware, defensive driver.

John, how many people on average would you say you pit a day?

Oh my God, that was like the funnest part of the funnest course was pitting.

Yeah,

I never heard of it until they, they told us, you know, how to do it.

Yeah,

but oh man. And I always wondered, so why does the car just sort of shut itself off when you pit it? I don't know. And then the blinkers come on automatically. Who designed that?

Yeah, um, for people who might not know, pitting is the move you see on every movie Where the car behind comes up and hits the car on, you know, the car in front on the side and causes them to spin out. But there's a very specific technique to do that, and you have to know the technique. And if you want to learn that technique, join the CIA and go through their driving course. Yeah. Or probably search YouTube. Yeah. You know, you mentioned like the weapons handling and, you know, and a lot of things. That I don't know that the farm does that for— because it goes through these phases where sometimes it's a special operations or a military paramilitary module that's automatic, or sometimes people have to go back for with the guns and the driving. That's not always part of the standard farm experience. Is that correct?

That's right. That's right. Those— many of those classes are done as sort of special, special runnings depending on where you're going. Like, if you're going to go to Brussels, for example, you're not going to get the driving courses,

right?

But if you're going to go to, you know, Kinshasa or, you know, anywhere in the Middle East, pretty much you're going to get it.

So did you go to those extra modules because you were going to Pakistan?

No, I got them because I was going to Athens.

Oh, Athens. Oh, that's right. That's right. I'm sorry about that.

We spent more money on security in Athens than we spent anywhere in the world at that time. That's how dangerous 17 November was.

That's fascinating. And it's fascinating what you said about MI6 too, or about the Brits, because when I was in Iraq, I met a guy from MI6 and he was not allowed by British law to carry a weapon in Iraq.

That's right.

It was insane.

Yeah, that's insane. I carried a 9mm on my waist, a .38 on my ankle, and I had 3 extra magazines in a tearaway fanny pack. And we always— all of us used to say, if, if they're going to take us down, we're taking as many of them as we can with us.

Yeah. Um, Road Beef, thank you very much for the very generous donation. If possible, let me read this before I say it because, okay. If possible, I would love to hear John's thoughts as to what distinguishes him from other famous whistleblowers like Assange or Snowden. Maybe it's a question of moral motivators versus notoriety motivators. Curious your view.

That's kind of a tough one. Well, Snowden's the easier example of the two. I think what Snowden revealed was absolutely heroic. We would have no idea that our government was spying on us had he not told us. This is a violation of US law. It's a violation of the NSA charter, and they don't care. And we wouldn't have any idea had Snowden not said something. Julian is a, is a tougher— Julian's a tougher case. You know, I'm on record as being a strong supporter of Julian Assange's. Julian's very difficult to get along with. But personalities aside, he revealed crimes.

Mm-hmm.

Right. He revealed war crimes being committed in Iraq. He revealed crimes having been committed by Hillary Clinton. And, you know, the Democrats can jump up and down all they want and say that it was Julian Assange that gave us Trump. No, it was Hillary Clinton that gave us Donald Trump. You can't blame Julian Assange because he told the truth. So, you know, it's, it's like comparing apples and oranges, really. It's tough. It's tough to put whistleblowers side by side because each situation is so— unique and uniquely different. I will say that among national security, um, whistleblowers, we're all friends, right? We all stay in touch. And, you know, the case of people like Tom Drake from NSA and Jeffrey Sterling and Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe and Jesselyn Radack, we're all pals and we have dinner together and we do stuff together. Um, that's unusual. among whistleblowers.

But isn't there something to be said here that for sure Ed Snowden blew the whistle on something about metadata that there are very legitimate concerns about this information being collected on American citizens, but he also divulged a ton of classified and special access programs to the Russians? and Chinese.

Yeah, that, that I, I have to agree with you. Um, just like, you know, there were elements of Vault 7 that should have remained classified and compartmentalized. Yeah. You know, I want my country's intelligence service to be looking at the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans at all. in a very highly technical fashion.

Right.

I want them to be able to do something like that. You know, somebody said to me, I gave a speech in Berlin and somebody said, oh my God, did you see that the CIA was intercepting Angela Merkel's cell phone? And I said,

that's their job.

That's what I want the CIA to be doing. I want them to intercept Angela Merkel's cell phone.

Right.

Right? We shouldn't be talking about that stuff. So yeah, you have legitimate concerns there.

Yeah. To piggyback with Jack, for me, I see Snowden as a traitor. And the reason I see that is because of how and why and what he released, as opposed to focusing on one thing. And going like this, they're collecting this metadata and going through the whistleblower channels.

Right,

right. Which he did not do. Right. What Tom Drake did.

Right. Instead of going through the whistleblower channels, and then when he couldn't, like if he couldn't get the whistleblower channels or if he was facing repercussions, to then go to the media or whatever. But to just take a thumb drive of everything classified that I can. Everything.

Yeah.

To me, that's, that's not whistleblowing. That's just being a traitor. And Assange, to me, he's just in his, you know, I don't think of him as a journalist, but he's not the person with the access. If he's, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. If he's a guy like plenty of people who work for the New York Times, the WaPo, you know, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, whatever, they've had people from the government, tell them things, and they've written articles about it. That's what Assange does, only en masse, right? In a way.

Yes.

So

to me, yeah, he's a publisher.

He should have the exact same immunity that it's not his fault people, you know, that people give him information.

Yeah. Well, he can't be prosecuted for it. Right. Yeah. His sources could potentially be prosecuted.

Exactly.

100%.

You know, like journalists should have immunity from what, you know, people give them. That's freedom of speech, and we should respect that. And people should keep their mouths shut unless it's— unless it's, it's a legitimate whistleblower situation where our government is committing crimes or abusing its power.

Yeah,

um,

agreed.

Just, um, let's see here. Um, Chief Justice Keith, thank you very much. John, I love your work. Just wondering what happened to the VODs, the video on demand, or saved livestreams of Political Misfits. Also, what's the coolest souvenir or thing of sentiment from your time in the service?

That's a great question. I'm sorry to say that with sanctions against Russian media, every social media platform, YouTube, Spreaker, Spotify, iTunes, everybody just deleted all of our shows. They're just— they're gone forever. I hate to say it. That's— yeah, that's—

Out of curiosity, uh, how do the— how do the sanctions, um, how do the sanctions pair with the First Amendment?

I know, right? So they did this in a very, very smart way. They never really sanctioned us. What they did is they sanctioned the Russian banks where we had our checking accounts. And so the act of receiving a paycheck was now or is now considered to be money laundering. So there's just no way we can, we can have the show, you know, every day if we want, but we can't get paid for it.

Well, I mean, would you guys restart the show on your own independently on YouTube?

Not that show. No, it's time to move on from the Russians.

No, no, I don't mean the Russians. I don't mean anything to do with the Russians. I mean you and the people who were on Political Misfits. Like you guys doing your own show on YouTube sponsored by you, like we do this show. Yeah, you have an audience, right?

In fact, we had a meeting about it today. We hope to have something up and running in the next couple of weeks. Yeah. And in terms of my favorite souvenir, I recruited a guy. I recruited a guy who, man, I have to be careful.

A guy in a country somewhere at some time.

Yeah. Yeah. I recruited this guy in Eastern Europe and he turned out to be the real deal. And I recruited him after 2 different station chiefs told me not to waste my time. And I did it, and he gave me the golden goose. And so when I left, he gave me an antique dagger, and he said in his culture, when men were close like brothers, they exchanged daggers. And he wanted to give me this dagger. I actually gave him a Rolex. I didn't know anything about this dagger thing.

Right.

But, but I treasure that dagger. It's in my nightstand. It's, it's in a leather sheath. It's got to be at least 100 years old. And, uh, it's probably not worth anything, but I love it.

That's awesome. Um, M. Corbin, thank you very much for the very generous donation. What changes, if any, would you make to the current operations of the CIA in analyzing the adversarial landscape facing the nation? And also, how do you avoid stepping on your massive manhood in the morning when getting out of the bed?

Thank you for that. You know, I've written a couple of times about US-Russian relations. And, um, yeah, I, I was always a Middle East guy. I, I don't know anything about Russia. I don't really care about Russia. I'm not really interested in Russia. But having been at the agency for as long as I was, and then on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff after that, um, I, I at least developed a couple of opinions. And what I would change about the agency is that the agency blindly follows whoever happens to be at the White House. At a micro level, and they shouldn't. I've always maintained that even in a time of war, the CIA and the various Russian intelligence services could still cooperate on intelligence sharing if they wanted to in 3 very specific areas: counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and counterproliferation. Um, there's no reason why we shouldn't be exchanging information on those areas because they're threats to both of our countries, and we both have sources that we could use to trade the information. And we don't. You know, the Russians are bad, or the Americans are bad, and so nothing gets traded.

Um, RS, thank you very much. Uh, your favorite improvised prison weapon and, uh, your favorite dish prepared by the wise guys?

Oh man, well, the, the, the, the boiling olive oil was something I— so logical, but I would never have thought of it.

Yeah.

Um, my, my best friend in prison— you know, you don't go to prison to make friends, right? But I made one friend who's like a brother to me. And he, he could make a gourmet Italian meal with a garbage bucket, a plastic bag, some water, and a live electrical wire. And I remember him making, God, this fettuccine Alfredo that had boneless, skinless chicken breast and Where he got the basil. Well, I know where he got the basil, but anyway, I said to him, I was eating it, I was sitting on his bunk and I was eating it, and I said, buddy, I would pay $30 for this in an Italian restaurant. You have a gift. And he, he laughed. I said, no, I'm, I'm serious, you have a gift. And then the next day it would be, you know, he made strombolis one time. I was like, where'd you get all this stuff? Fresh dough in a prison?

Yeah.

£35, man. I gained £35 and I enjoyed every bite of it.

Are, in your experience, because I know you weren't in a maximum security, but are the prisons just basically— I mean, are they just wide open to corruption?

Oh, Boy, are they. And, you know, it's, it's the guards that are the corrupt ones. You know, when, when you see a guard backing his pickup truck up to the commissary and stealing a pallet of Pop-Tarts that he can then, you know, sell on wherever it is he's selling it at the local flea market or whatever. Yeah. Or a pallet of batteries that's worth thousands of dollars. Yeah. Or they use the profits They're supposed to use the profits from the commissary to buy things like, you know, tennis balls and tennis rackets or softballs or soccer balls or whatever. And instead they, they build a guards-only gym and then buy, you know, elliptical machines and treadmills. Yeah, that's corrupt.

And yeah, is that— was that a— was that a for-profit prison or a government run prison.

It was government-run. The for-profit ones are far worse.

Yeah, it's crazy. Criminal and prison reform are 2 things that our country should, should absolutely be embarrassed about.

Yeah, we should be. Yes, indeed. And, you know, the only way to make a profit is to cut costs.

Right.

And the only way you can cut costs is to feed prisoners animal-grade food. instead of human-grade food and to not give anybody medication. And that's exactly what they do.

Well, the other way to make profit is to make sure more people are imprisoned.

Right.

Exactly right.

Which our government is, regardless of what administration, our government is always happy to do.

Exactly right.

I mean, Trump did the First Step program, which was at least a step in the right direction, but it didn't just go so much further. Um, uh, Cat, uh, CA, thank you very much. Uh, or this Canadian, I don't know, with no name Canadian, $5. Thank you, um, for your foreign money that I don't even know if it works here. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, hey Team House, once again thanks for another great episode. Quick question for John, can we finally see the SpongeBob shirt?

Yes, you know, I, I think it's in— I, I got divorced in 2018, and I packed all my stuff up, and much of it is in boxes in my garage. But yes, I will dig out the SpongeBob shirt. Yes, I promise.

We must see it. Andrew Dunbar, thank you very much. How the hell did 3 rando grease get hooked up with Carlos Jaco? We asked that earlier. Scott G, thank you very much. What were the weirdest pitches the information peddlers would give to end with you or anyone paying for their info and why?

Oh yeah, I had a, I had a, I had a guy come into the American Embassy in Athens, um, with a totally straight face tell me that 17 November was being headed by Queen Elizabeth and that the, uh, lead hitman was Jacques Cousteau.

Sounds legit.

Wow.

Sounds legit, man.

And he wanted to be paid. On the spot.

I'd pay him. I believe it.

I mean, you could have given him donuts and told him they're like $20 bills.

I was so mad because policy is that you have to write this crap up no matter what. I wasted 2 hours doing this silliness.

That's amazing. Alexandre de Salles, thank you very much. No question, just cheers from Brazil. Come visit us sometime.

Thank you. Thank you.

Gabriel Arantes, thank you very much. John, why did Brennan not catch more flack?

Ooh, that's a great question, man. Brennan made a name for himself in a very funny way. In— there was a, there was a raft, a raft of, of retirements, senior-level retirements in 2008. And just about everybody split down the middle. Half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary campaign. And Brennan was literally the only guy that went to the Obama campaign. And then Obama won. And so Brennan set himself up for greatness. He told everybody in Washington who would listen that after he was CIA director, he wanted to be Secretary of Defense. And instead, he went to MSNBC and got a $6 million book advance and, you know, has lived happily ever after. So I think because he was so close to Obama, like he was Obama's— he was the guy in, in the, in the intelligence community for Obama, even before he went to the CIA, that he was able to protect himself. that way.

He made himself— he was invaluable. Yeah.

Yeah. And remember, Obama had literally zero experience in intelligence. Nothing. He was a senator for 2 years.

Right.

He knew nothing about intelligence.

Right. It's very interesting. It's— and it's kind of scary in terms of like how the amount of hubris that there is now in In all the— in the federal— in the FBI and the CIA, or with— not amongst the actual people, but with the leadership and things like that, you know?

Yes. Isn't that the truth?

You know, that if you criticize them, you're anti-American and things like that.

Yes. Yes,

exactly. Andrew Dunbar, thank you very much. Should the government find a way That intelligence community vets who have run afoul of the law don't make similar choices regarding, uh, RT, uh, i.e., saving pensions, employment. It's not like the CIA doesn't know how to slip some bills.

Oh, that's confusing.

Yeah. Should the government find a way that intelligence community vets who have run afoul of the law regarding RT, like, Uh, Andrew, I don't— I'm sorry, man, I don't understand. Do you understand the question?

No, I, I think I, I think I get it. If, if you are, if you are convicted of a national security crime, um, you automatically lose your federal pension. And that was an add-on that was done in the early 1980s. So yeah, I mean, the easy thing is to, is to repeal that. It's just And it's never been challenged. I'm wondering if it's unconstitutional.

Is this something that you've thought about challenging, finding a good attorney and challenging since you have standing?

I do. Well, I don't actually, because when you take a plea, you have to waive your rights

to

any future appeal.

And when you— so when you take a Appeal just for that, or appeal in terms of anything? Um, anything.

And not only, not only do you have to waive your right to appeal, you have to waive your right to, to FOIA yourself for the rest of your life.

How is that constitutional?

So I'm not—

Yeah, that's a little weird.

I know, right?

Yeah.

I'm, I'm not allowed to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see what it was they you know, were talking about.

Yeah,

about me or, you know, planning or I'm not allowed to know any of that.

I feel like you have standing to take all of that to the Supreme Court because like, yeah, because your, your rights are being infringed on.

Yeah. Civil. Yeah. There's some civil rights issues.

Yeah. It feels like a civil rights issue. But M. Corbin, thank you very much. Oh, let's see here. M. Corbin, thank you very much. I will send Jack recent audio from William Colby on MKUltra. Yeah,

thank you.

That sounds awesome. Proud Masculine, thank you very much. Super interesting, great story. Andrew Dunbar, thank you very much. What is the quality of ad hoc embassy discos in Pakistan as nightlife? Any good? Or with Marine guards, there is a kind of a sausage party.

Yeah, actually it was a sausage party. And it's one of those kind of things with, with the, with the Filipino cover band.

Yeah.

So it was not, not my scene at all.

But let's be honest, Filipino cover bands kick ass.

They're all over the Middle East.

Yeah.

Remember the Vietnam dude that talked about the COVID for, uh, was it Submalelo? Yeah, like Mellow Submarine.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but yeah, yeah. But no, Filipinos are like phenomenal singer, like great cover bands.

Yeah, yeah, they are.

It's true. I think one of the best blues bands I ever saw was like in— was it Bishkek? I don't remember, but like they were just at a bar called the Golden Bull. It was amazing. Sassan Omen, thank you very much. I have educated colleagues who believe the CIA smuggled cocaine and killed the president. Is this not a concern? Poor public trust with concerns of it being exploited by foreign services. Is this—

killed— sorry, killed the president of the United States?

Yeah, I have educated colleagues. Oh, I have— okay, he hasn't. I have educated colleagues who believe the CIA smuggled cocaine and killed the president. Is this not a concern? Poor public trust with concern.

Sounds concerning.

Yeah. So

that's a good point, though, too. Yeah. Yeah. You would think that people would be more concerned than they actually are that we've got an organization that periodically over the years has gone rogue.

Yes. So I think, I think his question was the flip side of that. Oh,

that people believe that stuff.

That people believe, will believe anything about the CIA. And look, we all know the CIA has gone off the rails before, but by and large, I feel as though the CIA acts at the behest of the president, right? That it's generally not just some rogue organization out there. So what— is it a problem that people have a lot of conspiracy theories about the CIA too?

Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. I mentioned when I got out of prison, I was hired by the American Psychological Association to help them write a new set of rules that would govern APA members' participation in national security custodial interrogations called the Brookline Protocols. And we were at lunch one day, and it's, it's me and 11 shrinks,

right?

Mm-hmm. I was the only one who wasn't a psychologist or psychiatrist. And I said, hey, guys, I have a question for you. I said, not A single day goes by that I don't get at least one email from somebody saying that the CIA is beaming waves at their head and it's some kind of directed energy weapon and they're stealing their thoughts and, you know, whatever. There's a chip in the back of their head.

I feel like the CIA is trying to steal my penis whenever I go to sleep. Maybe that's paranoia, but I

Yeah.

So, so— They, they laughed when I said it. And then one of them said, this is a very common kind of, like, entry-level mental illness.

Uh-huh.

And he said, it's easily explainable. A lot of times when people feel overwhelmed by life, their brains default to the easiest explanation. And the explanation is that there's some kind of malevolent force out there that's doing something to them to ruin their lives. And what easier malevolent force could there be than an intelligence service that operates in secret?

Right.

And so that's why the CIA gets blamed for everything that happens.

Right. Right. And people see it, and not just Americans, but foreigners too, which sometimes is beneficial.

People who should know better.

Yeah, but sometimes they see it as like this omnipotent, omnipresent force that always knows everything.

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's not.

Right. Taylor, thank you very much. Looking forward to the book dropping. Came in late. What was John's background that led him into the agency? Taylor, I'm going to— instead of having him answer this because we're really over time, I'm going to have you just go back and watch the very beginning. We did go over

it.

And did you ever think about life? Do you ever think about a life if you did not become a whistleblower?

Oh, I'd have tons of money and I'd be retired comfortably right now. Yes, I think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know what,

though? In an experience like this, you also get to see who in your life you can trust and who you can't. And sometimes the answer surprises you.

So out of curiosity, if Trump were to pardon you, would you get your retirement and back pay, everything?

Yes, sir. Immediately.

Okay. We know that there are influential people who occasionally watch this show. So we are putting out a call.

Yes, sir.

To get this in front of Trump, that the man went on TV to defend himself against accusations. The, the, the, the, the whole torture program, it was already publicly like out there. People knew, it had been talked about. You weren't the one who broke this. You weren't working for the agency when this happened. Somebody get this in front of either Biden before he leaves or President Trump when he comes in. Make this happen, please. That's, that's our ask.

Please. Thank you for that.

Uh, John, I got a question. You did try to get a pardon, right, during the last Trump administration? I, I— that story is a wild one. I'd love to hear about that, like, real quick if you could.

Oh yeah, I, I had great support from Tucker Carlson. I went on Tucker's show a dozen Times, and he plastered— it was my picture and Assange's picture. And he says, Trump should pardon Assange and Kiriakou. And I, man, I came close. And Tucker called— Tucker called me one day. It was, it was the last day of the Trump presidency. He called me and he says, are you sitting down? And I said, uh-oh, now what? And Tucker says he's going to pardon Lil Wayne. And I said, what? He goes, Lil fucking Wayne. He's going to pardon Lil Wayne. You got to come on the show tonight. So I go back on the show and I'm like, Mr. President, please, you know, you got to pardon me. Well, it turned out I learned later also from Tucker that he intended to pardon me and Assange. and Snowden, and that he had gotten a call. Trump had gotten a call from Mitch McConnell and said, if you pardon Assange or Snowden— Mitch McConnell had never heard of me. If you pardon Trump— I'm sorry, if you pardon Assange or Snowden, you will lose the Republican caucus in the Senate, and they cannot protect you from conviction from the, uh, from the, uh, impeachment.

Right.

So the whole thing just died.

Well, what's interesting is that— and probably it was tough because you were working for Sputnik, so it played into the whole Russia, Russia, Russia collusion bullshit. And hopefully— I mean, Trump He knows he's going to get persecuted regardless. He's already been subject to the lawfare. He'll be subject to the lawfare again. I think that he personally, hopefully this time, doesn't care and just gives you what you deserve.

Yes. Thank you. I hope so. I'm going to try. With these appointments he's made this past week, I feel like things are looking pretty good. So yeah, we'll see.

Yeah. Proud Maskin, thank you very much. John, big fan. Thoughts on Trump taking office?

Big one.

You know, I'm actually far more optimistic now than I was 8 years ago. 8 years ago, so much was unknown and he was untested in government. And, you know, it was always funny to me that he, he would name all these people like, like General Mattis, for example. Mad Dog Mattis. He's my favorite general. And then, you know, 2 years later, he's an idiot. He's retarded. He's this, he's that. Same with Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state. He's a moron. When he had been, you know, he's going to be the greatest secretary of state in history. I feel like Trump really has learned. how government works. And, and that's why instead of appointments like Rex Tillerson, where everybody's like, who? We're getting lots of governors and members of Congress and serious businessmen like hedge fund managers, people who actually know what they're doing.

Right.

So we can, you know, You don't have to agree with Donald Trump on all the issues. You can certainly have policy differences. But I'm cautiously optimistic about the leadership of this government going into this next term.

You sound as though you grew up relatively liberal in your ideas, and I just mean liberal. Yeah. You know, the— and, you know, in the '60s and the '70s, especially in the '70s, liberals were like the anti-system, you know, like fuck the man, you know, and whatnot. And conservatives were very much like the government, right? Law and, you know, and it feels as though we've done this switch, right? We've had this reversal.

Oh yeah.

Oh,

I think that scholars will study the 2016 election for precisely that reason. There's been a watershed change in American politics.

We've just gotten out of a 20-year war, and for liberals to worship these generals who failed to win this war

is

amazing to me in a lot of ways. Because 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I would've thought that a general— I would've seen a general say something, I thought, well, he's a general, he knows what he's talking about. And now I'm like, right, Jack? I mean, now it's sort of like, well, he was a general during the G-WOT. Well, like, what did he accomplish?

Yeah,

that's right.

So, John, I told you that we would go about 2 hours and we were at like 3 hours and 15 minutes. I appreciate your stamina and your commitment to this.

Sorry to keep—

final thought. If there's anything that I failed to mention, anything we have not asked during this interview that you would like to bring up, go for it.

Oh, thanks. I just want to thank you guys for such a great and in-depth and well-informed conversation. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate

it. We really appreciate your patience with us. Like I said, we've gone along and most of that is me and my rambling. And again, where can people find you one more time?

Oh, at Substack. I'm John Kiriakou on Substack, but I'm also on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

And we will have links down in the description of the podcast that you guys can click on and find John.

Thank you for that.

And please let us know, like, whenever you have new projects starting, we'll blast it out. Just send us a message or whatever. Yeah.

And we will be back on Tuesday with Gene Yu. D, he's in studio, right? He will be here, here in New York.

What?

We're going to have Gene here.

Hopefully he'll get us pizza.

So we'll talk to him on Tuesday. John, thank you so much for spending your Friday evening with us. I appreciate it, man.

Thank you. Good to see you both.

All right. Uh, so we'll see all of you guys on Tuesday.