Transcript of #661 - John Kiriakou New

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Get tickets now. Today's guest is an author, uh, he's a speaker, he's a former CIA officer who's also known for being a whistleblower in the CIA's use of torture. He has a new book coming out called The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques. Today's guest is Mr. John Kiriakou.

Yeah, I applied for a presidential pardon.

You applied for a presidential pardon? Yeah, yeah.

In fact, I brought a couple of letters. I hope you don't—

as long as you don't meet me. If I sign them, it's not going to help anything. I'm just telling you that.

Oh, okay. I was going to ask if you thought it would be helpful. I got—

did you really? Oh yeah. Oh, okay, dang, I was joking.

Oh no, no, no. I'm talking to Tulsi Gabbard on Friday. Did I tell you that?

Oh nice, her husband just went into surgery today, I saw. Yeah, poor guy.

I was messaging with her yesterday.

She's great. Yeah, Tulsi Gabbard, she seems, there's just something about her that seems genuine to me.

And that's why they tried to destroy her.

Is that what you think is going on with her right now?

I really do. That's why the Democrats tried to destroy her, I really do.

But even right now, I mean, she's just taken a leave. I know it's for her husband's health. Yeah.

Oh yeah, headed into surgery this morning. Oh, is that what it says? Yeah, she tweeted, or she Instagrammed it.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think, 'cause she's kind of like, and she just took a break. She took a complete break from politics. Yeah.

You remember when she was running as a Democrat, every time she would inch up in the polls, the DNC would change the rules for participating in the next debate. So they would do it just 1 or 2 percentage points out of her reach every single time. Because they were threatened by her message.

She just wouldn't get with their program. She's always seemed very, um, like she has her own—

Oh, she was definitely independent. Independent.

That's what it is. She's always seemed very independent. Well, they did the same thing with Bernie Sanders.

It was like— They did exactly the same thing with Bernie Sanders.

So I guess what my question would be like, you know, and I probably— I don't know, I can't remember if I asked Bernie this or not, but why would you stay in a party that you know at a certain point is not that's cheating you.

Yes. You know, the Democrats did something in, um, after the 1972 election, which I think people don't pay anywhere near enough attention to. Nobody at the DNC wanted George McGovern to be the 1972 nominee. He was the most popular at the time, especially among young people, but he was, um, he was the weakest nationwide, and he ended up losing 49 states. But, you know, it's a party of the people, right? If the people want George McGovern as the nominee, then George McGovern should be the nominee.

And they didn't let him become the nominee?

No, they let him become the nominee, and then as soon as he lost the race, they instituted this, this thing called superdelegates. So if you are a member of the House, member of the Senate, a governor, a lieutenant governor, a state party director, state committee chairman, you're automatically made a delegate to the convention. Well, there are like 1,500 of them. And so you end up with situations like West Virginia and Wyoming where Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton in both states and Hillary Clinton wins literally every delegate from those states.

Mm-hmm. Wow. Like, how's that fair? So wait, explain that to me a little bit better because I want to get on this. And George McGovern was a major reason Democrats later created superdelegates. After McGovern's 1972 nomination and landslide general election loss, Party leaders wanted a way to give more influence to experienced officials and reduce the chance that a highly activist primary electorate would produce another nominee they saw as too extreme. So you're saying the people believed in this guy? Oh yeah. Even though he lost, the people believed in him, but the party and whoever that is, uh, didn't want it to be like just like a populist vote. They didn't want just the people to have the choice.

They wanted to go back to the days with the smoke-filled back rooms, with the party bosses choosing who's going to be the nominee.

And if they put more on the shoulders of just the del— the superdelegates, then they could control fewer. It was fewer people they had to control.

Exactly. Wow. Exactly. I am proud to say, in 1983, I was a sophomore in college. I was the speakers committee chairman. I was the whole committee of the George Washington University College Democrats in the days when I was a Democrat. And I saw a little blurb in the Washington Post saying, "Hey, remember George McGovern? He's thinking of running for president again." So I wrote him a letter. I said, "Hey, I read that you're thinking of running for president again. We have a fantastic theater here at the school. We can do all the legwork, ready-made volunteers." My phone rings a few days later, wakes me up, and it's George McGovern. Yeah. And he says, "Can I see that theater?" I said, "Of course." So he comes over to school, And we walk over to the theater. Nobody recognized him. And he said, "Yeah, the theater's perfect." And there's like a cutout for cameras and it was perfect. So he says, "Don't tell anybody, but I am gonna run for president again." And this is after the '72 loss. Yeah, this is 11 years after the '72 loss. Reagan is president. Okay. So we put out a press release, major announcement by Senator George McGovern on such and such a date, George Washington University in the Marvin Theater.

And, uh, and packed the place, and it was on the news. Um, and here's what a sweet guy he was. He did the announcement and brought important people with him, like, uh, Mo Udall. Remember Mo Udall? He ran for president in '76. He was a congressman from Arizona. And, uh, there he is. And then, um, Cliff Robertson, the Academy Award-winning actor, and his wife Dina Merrill.

Yeah, they both came. So he brought some— he brought his own— Enlisters! He brought his own influencers.

Yeah, and Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Robert Kennedy Sr.'s press secretary, was Senator McGovern's press secretary. You must have been geeked, huh? Oh, I was— I mean, it was incredible. And then he makes the announcement, he shakes everybody's hand, and he invites me back to his apartment, and his wife made tuna sandwiches. Nice. Just the loveliest people. He ended up, crazy as it sounds, coming in third. Walter Mondale won, Gary Hart came in second, and McGovern came in third.

And that was for the Democratic Party? Yeah.

Wow. And they kept saying, "Drop out, George. Drop out, George. Drop out, George," because he was pulling young people.

I remember Jesse Jackson when he ran, he was very close, right? Wasn't he the populist choice, kind of?

Yes, he was the populist choice, 1984 and 1988. He was, very much so.

And because I remember we had, I think we had a sign for him, like, you know, our family was always like, you know, pretty, you know, liberal and hopeful and new ideas, right? That's how mine was. Yeah, but like, but not, but not like ethereal at the same time, not like unrealistic, right? Not unrealistic, but we were hopeful, you know what I'm saying? Um, But yeah, didn't Jesse Jackson— and did they just not service him, or what happened with Jesse Jackson?

Yeah, they let him kind of self-destruct. See, it says here he won 11 contests. He did very, very well in '88, but he was never a Democratic Party insider. Got it. The insiders were not going to let him have that nomination. That's what they do. And the Republicans don't have such a system.

You don't think so?

No, they don't have superdelegates, which means then an insurgent candidate like a Donald Trump can win a nomination.

I see, but it's less likely to happen in the Democratic Party? Much less likely because of superdelegates. Wow, I didn't realize that only one party had those. Al Franken— because, hold on, before we move forward on Al Franken, so, but didn't Jesse Jackson win a few like in a row? Like he was— yeah, he was on a roll. He was all— he was building momentum. Uh-huh.

And they were like, yeah, we're gonna put the brakes on this.

And when they say we are gonna put the brakes on this, who is the we? Is it just—

it's the, it's the state Committee chairmen who make up the Democratic National Committee.

Got it. But it's just the insiders. It's like the, the money talking, whoever those like— it's the smoky backroom.

This congresswoman from Florida, her name escapes me, three names, but anyway, she was the head of— what was it? No, she was the head of the DNC in 20— Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Thank you very much. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Gave Hillary Clinton's campaign all the debate questions before the debate. I remember that. But Bernie didn't get the questions. Crazy. It's crazy.

It's fixed. Yeah. I think we all know what happened at this point.

Yeah. The fix was in.

But the fix was in. But it starts to make you feel like, okay, that the regular person, like what you really want, even the idea of that, it used to feel real. Yes. And it doesn't feel real anymore.

Yes.

And that I think is one of the scariest things happening in America right now. Yes, I agree. It used to feel hopeful and now it feels, will we survive? It feels there's something else. It's not a hope. I don't even know if it's somewhat of a fear, but it's more of an uncertainty. But America used to feel like this hopeful thing. Like we're building this thing that's gonna— Yeah, right. That means something that we're gonna pass on to our children. That's right. And that could possibly stand the test of time. And when something like that, you believe in something like that, it makes your day-to-day interactions and your interaction with your country, and it makes that all more meaningful to you. So you show up for it differently. We're sitting here with John Kiriakou. Mm-hmm. Kiriakou, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for the invitation.

I love the show.

I've seen so many clips of you recalling stories from your time in the CIA. Yeah. Is having a good memory a requirement for the job? Oh yeah.

Is it really? Oh my gosh, yes. Is it a requirement? It's actively encouraged. I had a station chief one time who gave me the biggest compliment.

You had a what one time?

A station chief. Okay. So I was doing an operation in the Middle East, but I was doing it from headquarters. The station chief called me, we were friends from our training days, and he said, "Listen, we recruited a double agent out here. He's insisting on meeting with the chief, but it's just too dangerous for me to meet with him 'cause he doesn't know that we know he's working for the bad guys." Got it. "Can you come out here every month and meet with him and pretend to be me?" And I said, "Sure." So I did. To make a long story short, I would do the meeting and then go straight to the airport and fly back to Washington. There was a midnight flight. And I would write the cable, the reporting cable from headquarters instead of writing it from the station and then sending it to headquarters. I'd write it from headquarters, send it to the station. And the great compliment he gave me was, he said, "Your memory is so good. You remember so many details that when I read the cables, I feel like I'm in the room watching it go down." And I said, "That is exactly what I'm going for." Yeah, I've always been proud of, of being able to do that.

But it wasn't a requirement when you— I guess I don't know if you audition for the CIA, but how do you—

Yeah, you kind of do. Yeah.

What's that process like? How do you get— Extensive.

Is it? It's changed from when I joined. When I joined, I was in graduate school at George Washington University, and I was taking a class called The Psychology of Leadership. And the class was about why foreign leaders make the decisions that they make. One of the examples that sticks in my mind is the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. Why was it in Yalta of all places?

I'm not familiar with it. Bringing up the Yalta Conference, uh, the World War II— yeah, um, the Yalta Conference was a World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, UK, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post-war reorganization of Germany and Europe.

Okay. Yeah. So Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—

they all met in Yalta.

They all met in Yalta, which is really, really hard to get to. And you can't just, you know, get in a plane and fly over the war. The war's still going on, right? So Roosevelt took a train to Norfolk, Virginia, then took a boat to Malta, which took like a week. Right? Back in those days.

Which is obviously a psyop, 'cause it rhymes with Yalta. Right?

And then he had to go to Cairo, and then Iran, and then from Iran to Yalta. He was sick. He died a month later. Wow. So, the reason why it was in Yalta is because Stalin had a spy in the White House, and the spy told him, "Roosevelt is sick." And so, Stalin wanted him to be as weak as possible When they arrived, or when the American side arrived, Roosevelt was exhausted and he wanted to go to sleep. And he said Stalin insisted that the talks begin immediately. Wow. And so just to be able to go to bed, Roosevelt gave up Poland. Mm. Look, I'll throw in Poland.

Let's talk tomorrow. Exactly. Oh. Yeah, dude, look, sometimes, yeah, sometimes, bro, you show up and you're like, yeah, you just can't do it. Yeah. Or you just say, look, yes, take that. That's fine. I got, you know what I'm saying? I gotta brush my teeth and lay down for a few minutes. It's crazy the things you will give up when you first get somewhere just to get to your room and unpack. Amen. To urinate. Oh, so I'm in this class and just to be clear, so they made him go all that way just 'cause they knew it would weaken him. Yeah, there it is. So they created a path that would just like, yeah, that would add to him 'cause they had a spinal cord. Yeah. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 12th, 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia, just 2 months after the operation. To conference, while the grueling 7,000-mile trip to the Soviet Union combined with his severe underlying cardiovascular conditions took a significant toll on his already failing health.

Wow. You see what a well-placed spy can do for you?

That's strategy right there.

That is strategy. That's the big leagues right there. That's the big leagues. So I'm in this class and the professor, Dr. Gerald Post, eminent psychiatrist, tells us to shadow our bosses for a week, just watch our bosses, spend each day with them, and then do a psychological profile on our bosses.

And this is when you're at George Washington University, you're a student. Right, I was in grad school.

There's Jerry. And what a great man he was. He died of COVID the poor guy. So he was murdered. Right, right. Carry on. I'm working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the time. And I worked for this guy who was a mean, like angry, old school union organizer, right? Mm-hmm. I was a little bit afraid of him, to tell you the truth. Big, strong, mean guy. And halfway through the week, we got into an argument and I called him a racist, which he was. Yeah. And he got so mad, he set a stance and he put up his fist like this. And I put up my hands thinking, dang it, I went too far this time. And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." Hmm. And I said, "What?" And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." I said, "You know what? You're nuts." And I quit and I walked out. So I went back and I banged out my paper. I said he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And I footnoted the whole thing. It wasn't just Jon venting on him.

But with a possibly decent wiener on him.

You're right, apparently.

You gotta put apparently. Apparently.

And so I get the paper back a week later. Dr. Post gave me an A, and then in the margin he wrote, "Please see me after class." So I go up to him. I said, "Dr. Post, you wanted to see me?" He says, "Come to my office." The classroom was like on the 6th floor and the office was on the 4th, so I went down there. 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." I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit in. Would you like to join the CIA? And I said, "Oh, yes, I would." And so the rest, though, is up to you. He— it was kind of a long story, I'll skip it, but he made a couple of calls that got me deep into the process.

Got it. So Mr. Post was your professor. Yes. And you also had this job where you were Where the guy was the racist guy. Yeah, that was at a union.

So I was using that union job to put myself through grad school. Got it. And then I quit and I walked out. I said, the guy's dangerous. And I guess the way I wrote the paper made him think that the analysis was concise, it was to the point, and I backed it up with the facts. So I go through these weird— he sent me across the river to Roslyn, Virginia, Arlington, Virginia. It's a little neighborhood right across the Potomac from Washington. Hold one second.

So he was a CIA operative, this professor? Yes. Now, when someone's a CIA operative but also a professor, are they an actual professor that then gets hired? That's a great question.

Like, which is first? That's a great question. It's usually that they're a CIA operative first and then they get hired as a professor. What he did is illegal today. Got it. So in 1993, Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the EEOC, which made made this illegal. So, um, now it's very like not sexy. You just go to www.cia.gov and click apply, right? Different.

It's different. It's a little easier.

Back then it was, you know, all white guys from Ivy League schools for the most part, and, uh, now it's different.

It was exciting. It was exciting. Oh, I bet it was. I bet it was one of the most exciting things.

I, I used to park my car out in the North 40 and then take like 20 minutes to walk all the way around the compound so I could walk in the main door across the giant seal and see the Wall of Honor and the flags. And I felt like I wanted to cry. Yeah. You know, I was so proud to be there.

Felt like you were part of something. I really did. I can imagine that you feel like you're part of something. Like, what did you feel like you were part of?

Well, you know, I came from this very liberal household, and I remember my mom and dad getting into an argument one time. It was the Pennsylvania primary of 1976. And my mom vote— my dad voted for Frank Church, who had created the Church Committee that completely reorganized the CIA and stripped it of its power to carry out assassinations and things like that. And my mom voted for Birch Bayh, who was a senator from Indiana. And my dad said, "Birch Bayh? Why'd you vote for him?" And she said, "He's so good looking." And my dad's like, "What? Church is the guy doing all the work." And I remember being fascinated by this argument that they were having. So when Dr. Post approached me, I called a friend of mine that I was in class with who was married to a guy at the CIA. And I said, "Listen, I'm not a naïf. I know the CIA's history, it's pretty ugly. Do I wanna be involved in an organization like this? I wanna go into public service. I want to see the world. She said, let's have dinner. So the three of us get together for dinner.

And he's like, the bad old days of the CIA are gone.

The bad old days, he said.

Yeah, the bad old days of the CIA are gone. He said, '75 with the Church Committee in the Senate, the Pike Committee in the House changed everything. No more assassinations, no more overthrowing governments, which was true for a little while. A little while. Because 4 years later, Ronald Reagan becomes president, and next thing you know, we're doing Iran-Contra and we're bombing different countries, and everything just went back to the way it was. But there was like this golden period. My friends are going to yell at me for saying that. There was this period where the CIA was a really awesome place to work. Got it.

And so when you're walking into that, when you're taking me back to that moment where you're walking in, did you feel like I'm a part of something that's important to America, or I'm a part of just an intriguing life and this is exciting? Did you feel like, I'm like Clark Kent? Like, and there's no wrong answer. This is all just like curiosity. Oh, sure.

The first 7 and a half years that I was there, I was an analyst. Actually in the office that Dr. Post had founded, the Political Psychology Division. And I really felt like I was a part of something big, you know? I was only on the job 8 months, and it was just as I started to feel like I really knew what I was doing. I was the leadership analyst, the psychological analyst on Iraq. And the reason I was given Iraq was because, not my words, these were the words of my leadership, "Nothing ever happens there. It's the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution." Nothing ever happens. So learn the writing style, learn the tradecraft, and you can move on to something interesting like Romania, they told me. I said, "Great." So I'm—

My friend just played ball in Romania, actually. It's a great place, Romania.

I love it. Oh yeah, it's great.

I gotta get over there. My buddy Patrick McCafferty, he just finished playing ball over there. Anyway, carry on. I love it.

So just as I get to the point where I really feel like I know what I'm doing, Iraq invades Kuwait, August 2nd, 1990. I walk into the office early, like before 7:00, and my boss says— Yeah, shit's popping now.

You got to show up.

I couldn't wait to get into the office that day. My boss says, don't take your jacket off. We're going to go to the White House. I'd never been in the White House before. And so we go to the White House. There's this Marine standing there. He walks us into the West Wing, and we go into the anteroom. Of the Oval Office, and then the secretary takes us in, and here's the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, and the CIA director. And so you just kind of stand there, you wait to be told what to do. There are two nice chairs like this. The president's in that one, the vice president's in this one. There's a couch here. My boss and I sat on that. There are two, like, more uncomfortable chairs over here for the CIA director and the national security advisor. And we sit down and the president goes, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turns and looks at me and I'm looking at them. And then it took me a second and I'm like, "Oh, well, as you know, Mr. President, Iraqi troops crossed the border at 4 o'clock this morning and the Kuwaiti royal family, ruling family, fled to Saudi Arabia, blah, blah, blah, blah." But I remember thinking my friends would never believe in a million years what I was doing right now.

Wow. They would never believe it. And I was 20—

I was 25 years old. And it happened overnight that you were kind of suddenly having an influence, like you right there. They're like, they're looking to me for information.

That actually was kind of a recurring theme in my career. I was just very, very lucky. Got it. A lot of times.

So when you're walking into, into the building, when you take that long way and you pass like the flags and walk over the seal, it's just like, I'm a part of something. Yeah, you really feel it. Do you think that's the same CIA that we have today?

No, no. 9/11 changed everything and it changed it permanently in a bunch of different ways. Not just— have you ever heard of Executive Order 12333? I haven't. 12333 was signed by Gerald Ford, um, and it was— it came in the aftermath of the Church and Pike Committees. And, um, yeah, that is the responsibilities and guidelines for the U.S. Intelligence community.

Okay, Executive Order 1233 establishes the goals, responsibilities, and guidelines for the U.S. intelligence community. Got it.

Number one, you can't kill people anymore, right?

Well, this was after the Church Commission, right?

Exactly. They said you got to stop killing people. And we had these, like, you know, we're putting explosives in Fidel Castro's cigar and putting poison on the steering wheel of his car and stupid stuff. And so 12333—

Real Tom and Jerry shit.

Yeah, exactly. You can't do that stuff anymore. And then it's been amended over the years. Well, after 9/11, Bush is just like, just kill everybody you want. Wow. And so we set up these offices, one whole office called the Special Activities Division. And then there's, in the Counterterrorism Center where I was working, there was one called the Special Activities group. And their job, very simply, was just to, you know, send teams around the world, kill people, come back, get the list for the next week, go out there, kill them, come back, get another list, kill those guys. It was like, uh, nobody's trying to collect intelligence anymore. Things changed overnight.

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Do you think—

there's a lot of like conspiracies about 9/11, right?

And I'm sure you've had, um, I take a lot of shit about the conspiracies.

Yeah, you do? I do.

I take a lot of shit because I don't believe in them. You don't? No.

So from your experience, because you were there when it happened, you were in the CIA when it occurred. To where we are now. Has your point of view changed at all since then?

Yeah, my point of view actually has changed. So I don't think I deserve a lot of the credit— of a lot of the— sorry, the criticism that I get. I'm going to start on July 6th, 2001.

Okay. So— and I'm not familiar with the criticism either. Okay, I'm glad.

I'll explain it to you then, because I get all the time, the Jews did it, the Saudis did it. Literally, the space aliens did it, the Israeli government did it, the Bush family did it. You know, it's like, come on, people. Nano thermite paint? There's no such thing as nano thermite paint that they painted in 1972 to make the buildings blow up.

Come on, you guys. That to me sounds very— that sounds ridiculous. Yeah, it's ridiculous. But what doesn't sound ridiculous is somebody having long-term strategy, like you were saying a little while ago, that people play a longer game, right?

And we're not good at that generally.

Oh yeah, I don't think that we are. We're, we're like a country when everything now, you know, and we're kind of a newer country as well. So it's like, and we got everything fast anyway. And when you get something fast, you don't really have a ton of respect for it in some ways. That's right, that's right. And it's tough for me to say that because we all just live like one life term, but I think some of that could be infectious over like a society over time. Um, I never even thought about it before that it's like, yeah, when you get something easy, you kind of used to something coming easy. That's it. And so, uh, but I do believe that other countries, uh, could have strategy against us. And also, and I believe that there were. And what it changed for us as a people, like, would it change, like, um, for how we look out of our own eyes, for how we walk out of— like, uh, I remember on 9/11, I walked out of a building. I was staying with some friends. I walked outside, and, um, there was just some, like, construction going on, and it'd been going on for a while, and they were, like, redoing these, like, uh, this stone walkway.

I was in Charleston, South Carolina, and they had these bulldozers and stuff out there. And like, people had been excited about the construction. Like, it was like, um, because the streets are cobblestone, it's really beautiful. And suddenly that day, everybody was like, are these— like, are they demolishing something? Like, suddenly this had a whole different energy of like, oh, like, this is the rubble. Like, there was a connection with like what you just seen on television to suddenly like something that was being done that was positive. Structurally was now suddenly looked at like there was a lot of fear around it. And I know that's a ridiculous small thing, but that, but that's normal.

That happened at the time, right?

And it's just, it's just how much of a small thing in your head, like, okay, I just seen this and now everything is scary. That's what I'm trying to say, right? Everything is scary.

That's exactly right. The whole country was traumatized. It was our Pearl Harbor, the Pearl Harbor of our generation.

And it changed, and it changed how you would operate. It changed, um, It changed just like every— it adjusted so many things. Go on though.

So July 6th, 2001, I'm hosting a group of intelligence officers from a Middle Eastern country. This is something we did literally every single day, usually multiple times a day. And what we do is we set up a day of briefings. They get a photo op with the director, you know, shaking hands. We exchange gifts and we take them out to a fancy dinner at night. So these guys, they were all mid-level, like majors and lieutenant colonels. So it's a lot of bullshit.

Yeah, a lot of it.

A lot, yes. So I set up a day of briefings, and I went to see this kid, young guy, 20s, that was covering Al Qaeda. And I said, "Can you come and just talk to these guys about Al Qaeda for an hour?" He said yes. So it came time for his briefing, but instead of him coming, the director of counterterrorism comes, Kofra Black. Kofer Black, later Ambassador Kofer Black, and he comes—

From which country? Oh, from the US.

Yeah, yeah, he was our director. So he showed up. Kofer shows up with the director of operations from the Osama bin Laden unit, and I jumped up. I was like, "Oh, gentlemen," I said, "this is Kofer Black. He's the director of counterterrorism for the entire American intelligence community." And you were working in counterterrorism at the time? Yeah. Got it. And so he came in and sat down, and he was very, very serious. He said, "Something terrible is going to happen. We don't know exactly when or exactly where, but we know it's going to be an attack on a scale that we've never seen before." He said, "We're picking up chatter from the al-Qaeda training camps where camp commanders are on the phone with their students, and they're crying and telling them, 'I'll see you in paradise.'" We're hearing code words for a massive attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey, or there's going to be a huge wedding or a huge football game. And he said, we know that they're planning an enormous attack. We just don't know when or where. And he said, I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us.

They just sat there and looked at him. Nothing. So at the end of the day, I was not working on al-Qaeda at the time. Weeks later, became the chief of counterintelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit. And so I went to his office at the end of the day before I took those guys to dinner, and I said, "Kofor, I gotta tell you, you shocked me with that briefing today. Was that just for them or were you serious?" He said, "Oh, I was deadly serious. Something terrible is gonna happen." And then on September 11th, there it was. He and I were supposed to go to the White House that morning. We had a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at the time, on an issue that's so stupid now, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you what it is. It was about a book that was being printed by the Government Printing Office, this minor governmental agency called Greece, Turkey, Cyprus. No, no, it was called Foreign Affairs of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949 to 1967. Literally nobody's gonna read this book.

Nobody, I was gonna tell you that, nobody's gonna read it.

Literally nobody. Yeah. And it's like 1,000 pages long. That's money laundering. And it had the names of 3 CIA sources who were still alive. And we've got this obscure law in the United States that if the government outs a CIA source, we have to offer the source citizenship. These guys are like 100, 98, and 97 years old. They're not gonna, they don't care. Right. Nobody's gonna read the book anyway. So we were gonna go down there and ask her, just pull those pages out of the book. Nobody's gonna miss it. Nobody's gonna read it anyhow. Just pull the pages out or redact the names or whatever. But I went up to tell him that the car was ready and the secretary's got a little TV on her desk and the World Trade Center's on fire. I said, what happened to the World Trade Center? She said, a plane flew into it. And I go, 'cause I'm a genius, I said, you know, that happened once before in 1930. A bomber flew into the Empire State Building, but it was like pouring rain and fog. I said, it's so crystal clear today, how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?

And just as I spoke the words, the second plane hit. And then she turned and she said, did you see that, or did I imagine it? And it's like, oh, everything's gonna go to shit now.

And at this point, you're already working in counterterrorism, yeah?

Well, I was already in counterterrorism, but I was working on a group See, again, I'm embarrassed to even say I was working in a group that was targeting European communist terrorists like Carlos the Jackal, who nobody remembers now. He was the Osama bin Laden of the '70s. Nobody remembers who in the world he was. Really? Yeah, Carlos the Jackal. Bring him up.

There he is. Whoa, he looks suave, huh?

He was Venezuelan, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. Mm. Listen to the balls this guy had. OPEC had an oil ministers' meeting. Right? So the ministers—

for those who don't know what OPEC is, it's the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. So, um, it's basically like your oil kind of, uh, commission monopoly, right?

Yeah, yeah, monopoly. The, uh, what do you call it, the, uh, cartel. It's an oil cartel affair. So he and his gang of terrorists raided the OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna, Austria, and kidnapped every single minister of oil. They killed 3 people, says there. Oh yeah. He demanded a plane, flew everybody to Libya, took his billion dollars ransom that they gave him, and then let everybody go. Wow.

So he was just trying to get a bag, really, huh?

Oh yeah, and he was good at it. And then he was so good at it, he set up terrorist training camps in Libya and Lebanon, and he trained the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, he trained Greece's revolutionary organization, 17 November, the Red Brigades, the Action Directe.

Why did he feel so convicted to do this sort of behavior?

He was a true believing communist and he just wanted to bring down the West. Uh-huh.

Interesting. Yeah. But take me back. So it's like you guys hear that something's going to happen.

Something terrible is going to happen.

But what do you do at that point?

Well, see, that's the key. What do you do? We didn't know what to do. So we're going to the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the this one, then that one. And they're like, we don't know what's going on. Well, as it turned out, that wasn't true. Almost all the hijackers, was it 16 or 17 of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, right? And we know that the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Al Saud, his wife transferred $50,000 from her personal bank account to the hijackers. What are we supposed to make of that?

Yeah, sometimes you gotta get your girl to Venmo if you gotta, you know what I'm saying?

Seriously, you know, the only time I ever saw George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time, the only time I ever saw George completely lose his shit was in a meeting with Prince Bandar. He said, "If we don't start getting help from the Saudi government," 'on this case, we're gonna start killing people, a lot of people, and some of them are gonna be named al-Saud.' I go out to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations there in January of '02. So it's still fresh, we're bombing Tora Bora, all these al-Qaeda people are trying to get out of Afghanistan, cross into Pakistan, and my job was then to catch them when they came into Pakistan.

But bombing what? We're bombing which country? Afghanistan. We're bombing Afghanistan, right? But there was— why were we looking for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?

That's where they were living, all of them. They launched 9/11 from Afghanistan. Got it. At least theoretically, the ideas came when they were in Afghanistan.

Because in the American, like, population, it always felt like we never went after Saudi Arabia. That's what it felt like. Yeah.

And we should have. But if you— didn't you know that? We did not. We suspected But we didn't have— there was no smoking gun. So that's what I'm getting to. We catch Abu Zubaydah, Zayn al-Abideen Muhammad Hussein. Abu Zubaydah, who we believed at the time—

I thought you were having a stroke for a second. No, no, no, it's his name. No, I'm just joking. That was a joke. The profession, I know.

The profession of faith. La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah.

I've been around people that are stroking out, and if you don't tap in with them, they'll just keep going. Oh, geez. You know? And they never buy a vowel. And then they just fucking tap out, you know? Oh, that's terrible. So you guys were doing this guy—

So we're looking for him. Oh, bro. And we catch him.

This dude is a fucking mumble rapper, I think. Go on. He—

we were on him for 6 weeks, we chased him. Some days we'd bust down the door and there's like a warm meal and a half-lit cigarette still on the table. We're like, "Dang it, with 15 minutes we could have gotten him." Some days we were a day or 2 behind. So he knew we were after him. He knew we were chasing him all over the frigging country, and we catch him in late March 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. So we also confiscated his diary. This led to a huge fight between the FBI and the CIA. Huge. And the CIA was right and the FBI was wrong. But the fight was— well, we'd captured his diary.

So I'm sitting there— Dude, that sounds so suspect that he has a diary.

It was more than a diary though, but even though, you know what I'm saying, like as a regular person— Oh no, it didn't have terrorism stuff in it, right?

But even then, first of all, who the fuck has a— See, but look, he does have an iPad sketcher. Yeah.

Oh, he drew a lot as well. It's, it's all drawings.

All of it. Oh, okay.

Yeah, all of it's drawings, and most of them are classified top secret. But the CIA wouldn't allow them to be released. Got it. 'Cause they were mostly about the torture that was done to him. Understood. So anyway, we catch the diary and I call headquarters and I said, listen, we got his diary and there's some fascinating shit in here. Like what? And I said, well, for one, there are the cell phone numbers of 3 Saudi princes. Like, what's up with that? So they were like, put it in writing. So I write this cable back and I was like, we found these 3 princes, here are their cell phone numbers. George calls in the Saudi ambassador, The president calls the king, "What kind of country you running over there?" So we said, "We want those 3 princes. We want 'em, like right now." Next thing you know, one goes into the hospital for bariatric surgery, 'cause they're all fat, and he dies on the operating table. The other one is driving from Riyadh to Jeddah on the Riyadh to Jeddah highway. He's in a 1-car accident and is killed in the accident. The third one goes camping in the desert, which is a very popular pastime, and dies of thirst.

Yeah, so we couldn't interrogate any of them.

Who do you think was— you think that Saudi Arabia did that?

100%. Right. Do you think we ever got to the bottom of 9/11?

Do you think—

no, you don't. No. And I'm going to say something that's very unpopular. I think that the Israelis, while not involved in 9/11, absolutely positively had advance warning of 9/11. They had sources inside of al-Qaeda, and they purposely did not tell us the details because they knew what was going to happen. They knew that we would attack Afghanistan and we would attack Iraq and we would kill 2 million Muslims. And I mean, these dancing Israelis, they've never answered for this. I'm still mad about the dancing Israelis.

I've heard about the dancing Israelis. Bring it up. So you're saying that you believe that they knew?

I think they knew in advance and didn't warn us.

But they didn't warn us because we would then— we would do their dirty work for them. We would take out issues with their surrounding guys.

You know, there are videos making the rounds now of Benjamin Netanyahu over the years, over the last 20-plus years, testifying before Congress and saying You know, if we just took out Saddam Hussein, we would be peace in the Middle East. If we just took out Muammar Gaddafi, there would be— I guarantee you, he says, there would be peace in the Middle East.

And we do it all.

We take out Iran and we're gonna have peace in the Middle East.

It's starting to get a little bit more like—

I think so, a little sus. Yeah. So, um, the Iraqis have electrical towers like we have everywhere, but ours have 4 legs and the Iraqis have 3 legs. So just a few days before we attacked Iraq, at that time, I'm the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations at the CIA. So it's a serious, the most serious job I ever had in my life. So you have access to a lot. Literally everything. Wow. And the Israelis come to us and they said, listen, you guys are going to attack Iraq in a couple of days. We want in. We said, absolutely not. We put this coalition together with all these Arab countries. "As soon as you guys jump in, all the Arabs are gonna drop out. Just let us do it." Next thing you know, every one of these electrical towers just begins to topple over, like 150 miles worth in the Western Desert, because somebody put explosives on just one of the three legs. And I remember my boss saying, "These damn Israelis, they just can't leave well enough alone. They just don't ever give up." do as they're told.

Um, let me look at this. The Dancing Israelis— and we're talking about the Israeli government, we're not talking about Israeli people.

I'm, I'm far less worried about the Dancing Israelis than, than I am about the Israelis who were arrested on 9/11. Okay, it was—

there was a— but just so I, just so I can say the claim, because I don't know, I've never even spoken about this. The Dancing Israelis is a 9/11-related conspiracy trope based on the arrest of 5 Israeli men in New Jersey on September 11th, 2001. Um, and this is, uh, according to Perplexity. And it was some guys, I think they were on a building top and they were kind of dancing like around, high-fiving each other. Yeah, a bread truck or something, as the, uh, as you can see the towers in the distance. Um, yeah, New Jersey woman reported 5 men near a van overlooking Manhattan who appeared to be celebrating and taking photos as the Twin Towers burned. Police later stopped a suspicious van and detained 5 Israeli citizens. Um, They had items like box cutters and multiple passports, which conspiracy theorists later fixated on, but box cutters are normal tools for a moving delivery job.

They were happy because they knew exactly what was going to happen, that we would have to enter the war, we would attack Afghanistan, we would probably then, you know, take a permanent position in the region, which is exactly what happened. That's why they were dancing. They were happy. 9/11 is a good thing for Israel. Yeah, it got us militarily engaged over the long term.

But you don't think that they were involved in the setting up of it? I don't. Yeah.

No, no, no. There's— and there's never been any evidence to suggest that they were involved in any way.

Yeah, I have no idea. No.

But there was another thing too. And this is a bigger issue. It's that the Israelis spy on the United States. They've always spied on the United States.

Do we spy on them also? No.

And that's written in stone at the CIA. We do not spy on Israel, but they openly spy on us. They're all over the country stealing defense secrets.

Do we spy on other countries?

Yeah, we spy on almost every— Why can't we spy on them? It's a political decision that's been made. Yeah, a political decision in the White House, on Capitol Hill.

Sometimes it just feels like our country is just kind of owned by Israel and they just don't say that. Do you think that that's true? Do you think that's fictional?

Well, I don't think it's so clear-cut. I think, I think the truth is that the Israelis have inordinate political influence in the United States, especially in our elections.

Yeah, well, they just had that election with Thomas Massie that, um, exactly, that, that's the best example that got overtaken. What happened with that election? Let's bring it up. I mean, I know that Thomas lost, but it was, it was the largest.

Yeah, $35 million was spent.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other pro-Israel interest groups have uncorked over $9 million in a bid to unseat Republican Representative Thomas Massie on Tuesday, which they did. In a competitive primary that has shattered spending records, prominent pro-Israel GOP donors have funneled millions more into a super PAC stood up by President Donald Trump's political operation that has spent nearly $7 million on the race. Overall ad spending has topped $32 million, making it the most expensive House primary on record per tracking firm AdImpact. Wow, for a job that pays $180,000 a year. So what are the long-term benefits of them getting this position, or was it just about getting Massey out?

It was getting Massey. The thing about AIPAC is if you are not 100% pro-Israel, they will primary you. They'll primary you with somebody who is 100% pro-Israel. And sometimes, you know, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Where— What does that mean? Where you've got, for example, there was an incumbent Democrat in New Jersey who voted pro-Israel 90% of the time. They ran a primary opponent against him, um, and, uh, who was 100% pro-Israel, and he lost. But so did she. And the one that won was the one that's pro-Palestinian.

Ah, I see. So sometimes by taking out— by aiming for one, you might let another through.

You end up hurting your own cause.

Got it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think— I mean, I can understand people's angst with this sort of thing. I mean, the biggest thing is just like, if Israel's involved in a genocide, right? They're genociding people. It's almost like, why would you let Nazi Germany invest in your people who are going to be running congressmen or senators in your country? It's crazy. I don't see how there's not a law. Like, why isn't there a law if a country's doing like a Holocaust or like a genocide that they're not allowed to invest in, that they're not allowed to have a lobby in, in, in our elections. See, was there ever a law about that?

No. And, and they would lose their shit over the use of the word genocide. You used it, I use it. It's a genocide.

We've been using it on here for years.

Oh yeah, it meets all the international legal requirements of genocide.

Yeah, well, I think the UN has voted that it is. Yeah. Um, I don't know if the vote passed because I think there was maybe some groups that were that wouldn't agree to it.

Um, well, it didn't pass the Security Council, but it passed by 90-something percent in the General Assembly. Yeah, but I just—

I don't understand why that seems fair. And also, I'm amazed that— I don't understand why people that made like movies and wrote books about the Holocaust, why they don't speak up and say, hey, yeah, this is the same thing that I wrote about. You know what I'm saying? You can show picture to picture that makes it exactly—

killing is wrong. It's wrong no matter who's doing the killing or who's being killed. It's just wrong.

But I don't see why some of those people don't speak up. I know.

Well, there is an increasingly large number of Jewish Americans who are speaking out. There's a big group called Jewish Voices for Peace. The Orthodox Jewish community in New York has been very vocal. Just this week, there was— There was a protest going on, wasn't there? The annual Israel Day. Parade, and a lot of the Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn showed up with Palestinian and Iranian flags, and it caused violence.

Yeah, I guess I just don't understand why. What is America afraid of? What have you seen in the CIA? Because you hear a lot that the Israeli influence has taken over our CIA and our FBI. Do you think that that's true or not?

Well, I can't speak to the FBI, and my CIA information is dated. I left the CIA more than 20 years ago. But when I was there, we kept the Israelis at arm's length, like seriously so. Um, the very first intelligence liaison, intelligence briefing I ever gave was to the Israelis. I had been only on the job 6 weeks, and my boss said, listen, you're going to give a liaison briefing It's gonna be a whole big group of people, so you're gonna be the last one to talk 'cause you're the most junior, but you need to know some of the ground rules. He said, "We do not meet with the Israelis in the building. We used to, but every time they'd come, they'd bring us gifts, and the gifts are always packed with listening devices and batteries." Is that true? Yes, 100% true.

Would you guys find him? How do you even know that that's true?

Because you have to X-ray everything that comes in. Comes into the building. You can't just wantonly walk in off the street with, you know, boxes of gifts and say, here, this is for you.

And what'd they do, just sew a couple Palestinian ears from the rubble?

And they're like, oh, oh, oh, we're just joking.

Oh, it's like joking stuff. Yeah, it's not joking, right? So that happened during your time. Was that with other countries too? So I'm sure there's other countries that like—

oh, there are other countries we don't even have liaison with. Got it. But with the Israelis, we had to, we had to rent a place and we would meet with them in the place. On my very first day at the CIA, you meet in the auditorium called the Bubble, and the head of HR comes out, and the director comes and says, "Welcome to the CIA," and then the head of security. It's just a parade of important people come to welcome you. So, the head of security said, he said a couple things. One was funny. He said, "The gravest threat facing America today is the threat of Soviet communism." And I said to the guy next to me, Does this guy not read the papers? There is no Soviet Union anymore. Anyway, he went on to say that the Israelis have two declared intelligence officers in the United States, one Mossad and one Shin Bet. So CIA and FBI equivalents. They're at the Israeli embassy in Washington. But the FBI has identified 187 additional undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread out all over America stealing secrets from defense contractors. So the lesson was, don't ever talk about work outside the building.

Don't ever eat at the restaurants in McLean, Virginia, because they're all Russian KGB— and back then it was the KGB— and Israeli Mossad agents eating there to hear what the CIA people are saying after work.

Wow. Yeah. It sounds exciting, though, at least.

It's kind of exciting.

I bet it was like a real whodunit back then. I loved it.

I really did. I loved it until I didn't love it. After 9/11, everybody went nuts and just wanted to kill everyone. I was getting ready to go to Pakistan, and so I stopped by the office on my way to the airport just to say goodbye, because Kofor said on 9/11, he stood up on his desk.

Kofor Black, you said?

Kofor Black, yeah. He stood up on his desk and he said, "Today we're at war. All of us are going to have to do our part. Not all of us are going to be able to come home." So he said, "If you want to walk now, walk, and nobody will think less of you." Nobody budged. So I stopped by the office because I wanted to say goodbye. I don't know, am I going to get shot? Am I going to get blown up? Am I going to get killed? I don't know.

So I just want to say goodbye. Say goodbye to Kofor?

No, to Kofor, to my boss, excuse me, and to the people I was working with. But why would you have gotten shot? I was the chief of counterterrorism operations. That's the job I'm going out to. I'm busting down doors 3 nights a week. And I worked for this guy, lovely, lovely guy, nice suits, just a really, like, very professorial. And he gives me a hug and he leans in and he says, "Kill them all." And I said, "Really? Have we gotten there already?" Wow. And he says, "Kill them all." And then I went to the airport. I was like, am I the only guy who thinks we should do this by the book? Apparently I was. That's it. That's crazy, man. It was ugly. You should see some of the pictures I have on my phone. Those make your hair stand up.

I don't know. I'm already— there's already a lot of stuff I'm not allowed to look at. Um, I have blockers on my phone, so, uh, yeah, I'm just gonna donate my eyes to charity, I think, soon. Um, this—

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You know, the, the dirty little secret was literally not one single CIA officer was trained in interrogation techniques. Wow. So I— as soon as we started catching these guys, I mean, I'd only been there about a week We started catching them, and my boss is like, interrogate him. I'm like, I don't know how to interrogate people. I can interview them.

And would he even wear sneakers? What do you even put on to do something like that?

Yeah, I wore sneakers most days, uh, polo shirt, jeans.

Bro, you can't interrogate somebody in a polo shirt.

That's all I brought with me, that and sweatshirts, because it was cold when I arrived.

You got to put on a Chicago Bears jersey or something.

Oh my God, it was so weird. See, in one of the early raids, we had also confiscated the Al Qaeda training manual. Well, I—

Do you still have one of those or not?

No, no, no. I turned everything in. But you know what? It might be online. It might be out there now. I want one. So I was— I spoke and read Arabic. And so we're going through the training manual and I'm translating it to the guys in my branch as I'm reading it. Well, everything that was in the manual, these prisoners would do as we would catch them. So I say, "What's your name?" The guy goes, "Oh, oh," like he's having a ruptured appendix. "Oh, what's your name?" And he pretends to faint and falls off the chair, and then he just kind of opens one eye to look at you. I'm like, "Get the fuck up and get back in the chair. What's your name?" And then, like, do you hit him? Do you not hit him? Do you grab him by the shirt and shake? I mean, I didn't know what the rules were.

There were no rules. And so what kind of environment— I mean, what did you end up having to do? Like, what do you do in those sort of situations? Like, well, are you responsible to garner information? Do you even feel like the people you're catching have real information?

The shit sounds kind of vague. Everybody has something. It's called the mosaic concept, where everybody's got a little tile in his brain, and if you collect enough tiles, you can put the whole picture together. So, I mean, some of it sounds comical now. I would say to the Pakistani Lieutenant Colonel that I was working with on a daily basis, I'd say, "You want to be the good cop today? I'll be the bad cop. Or you want to be the bad cop again? I'll be the good cop." And then we decide in advance. Then I go in, you know, we start talking to these guys. The first guy we captured, he was Jordanian, and they bring him in, he's shackled at the ankles, shackled at the waist, And then they undo the waist shackle and they chain him to an eye bolt in the table. So you have to know the answers to all the questions that you're asking, right? So I'm like, what's your name? He tells me his name. Where did you come from? I came from Tora Bora. And what happened in Tora Bora? The Americans began bombing us. And then where did you go?

He said, I tried to escape, so I went into a cave, and then the Americans bombed the cave, and the guy had blood squirted out of his ears and he had brain damage and finally made it across the border. I lay out a map. Tell me exactly how you got across the border. We knew what the rat lines were. And he told the truth. This is the way we came through this pass. Everything he told me was true. And so I said to him, he said, what's going to happen to me? And I said, honestly, I don't know. You're probably going to spend some time in jail here, and then we're going to send you to Jordan. And I don't know what the Jordanian "Jordanians are going to do to you." Because he was Jordanian. Yeah. So I said to him, "But let me ask you something. I know that what you told me was true. Why did you tell me the truth?" And he goes, "I'm your prisoner. What good would it do me to lie to you?" He said, "I know how these things work. I know that you knew the answers to these questions.

It doesn't help me in any way to lie to you." Mm-hmm. And then I said, "Okay, thank you." And then he says, let me ask you something now. He said, I assume you're Christian. And I said, yes. And he says, I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam and I'll be your godfather. I said, well, thank you very much. And what is that?

It's almost like the Boy Scouts or something. I mean, he'd be like, there's a scout leader, kind of like, like he'll like, yeah, be like your sponsor. Yeah.

Like my sponsor. He's going to convert me to Islam and I'm going to stay Muslim.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And I said, "Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. And I wish you the best." And I remember saying to a colleague of mine, "My God, if everyone goes like that, it's gonna be incredible." The next raid we did, we bust down the door, 2 o'clock in the morning, and it's 2 kids, they're 19 years old from Tunisia, and they both just burst into tears. And so we cuff 'em, and one kid is just heaving, sobbing, and the other one is begging me to let him call his mother. And I'm like, "No, I'm sorry, you can't call your mother." What'd they do? They were Arabs without passports or visas in an Al-Qaeda safe house, and that was good enough for me. Got it. So we got to the point where we had literally filled the Rawalpindi jail in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. It's this gigantic city that's kind of attached to Islamabad. Islamabad's the capital, but it's very, very small. Rawalpindi is where the military is located, and it's like 5, 6, 7 million people there. So, uh, Rawalpindi Jail, there it is. That's it. My God, I haven't, I haven't been to the Rawalpindi Jail in 24 years.

I never tell you what, I don't remember it looking that good either. I've never been. Well, yeah, thank your lucky stars. Really? Yeah, it's not good. So So the PAX called me and they said, "Look, we've literally filled the jail. You gotta do something with these guys." I said, "Okay." So I call headquarters. I said, "The PAX are telling me that the jail's full. What do you wanna do with them?" They said, "Put them on a C-12 and send them to Guantanamo." I said, "Guantanamo, Cuba? Why would we send them to Cuba?" And they said, "We came up with this idea. We're gonna send everybody to Cuba, and then we're gonna divide them up." "after we figure out what federal district court to charge them with." 'Cause 9/11 was an open criminal investigation at the time, and the crimes were committed in the Eastern District of Massachusetts, hijacking, the Western District of Pennsylvania, hijacking, the Eastern District of Virginia, the Pentagon, and the Southern District of New York. I said, "That's a great idea." So we just started loading these guys on an endless parade of C-12 transport planes. And sent them to Guantanamo. And then somebody in Dick Cheney's office, probably David Addington, although he's never admitted it, somebody said, "You know what?

These guys don't have any rights in Cuba. Why don't we just leave them there, like, forever?" Mm. And here we are, 24 years later.

Some of them are still there? And they're still there. Most of them, you think?

34 of them. At the height, we had like 770, I think, was when it was at its most full.

I went there one time as a— to perform as a comedian. Yeah, went down there and was performing for some of the troops there and stuff. You got to see some of the, uh, just the way you would fly in it, see it in the distance. Oh yeah, when you— the way you would fly in at night, uh, they would fly in like this kind of crazy pattern. And yeah, they do. And it was lit up, it almost looked like a big wedding ring in the distance because they had like just these bright, bright lights, um, on the fences surrounding the, uh, the base. And so you come in like at this crazy kind of pattern, and, uh, and you kind of had to go around.

We went, right? I think you can't cross Cuban airspace. I think we have to go around. Yeah. And come up from the south.

We went from somewhere in Florida and went around. Yeah, it was pretty intense. I mean, it was definitely— it was interesting, uh, and then we got to go right up by the— by the detainee centers. And I think we even saw some guys playing volleyball and stuff. But, um, were there tortures where people lost their lives? Were you— that you were involved in?

Not that I was involved in, thank God.

There were, you know, but like, at what point do you call like one office getting out of hand? Like, have you been in one that was getting out of hand?

No, because when we were catching guys, we had not yet implemented the torture program. So the torture program was, was conceived and approved in October of 2001. Okay. I got to Pakistan in January of 2002, and we're like, what do we do with these guys? The FBI is there with us. You can't hit them or you can't do anything to them. If they don't talk, then okay, we just send them to Guantanamo.

And because you ended up coming out and talking, speaking out about torture that was happening. Right. But how would they let you do that if you weren't aware of it firsthand, though?

Well, because remember, I became the executive assistant to the deputy director.

Oh, she would see the reports coming back. You see all the cables coming back in?

Yeah, exactly. Huh.

Was some of it pretty intense, do you feel like? Oh, it was bad.

You know, I— most, most of the news outlets that I talk to, they make the biggest deal out of waterboarding. There's waterboarding right there. Um, I think that there were, there were techniques that were worse than waterboarding. Sleep deprivation, yeah, is one. Um, And in terms of causing death, the cold cell, you see sensory deprivation, that was also a terrible one. What is that like? Sensory deprivation, they put you in like an isolation tank and you're surrounded by water and you literally go crazy from the silence.

So you're in like one of those, kind of one of those places you can go pay to do and it's like quiet in there?

But instead of being in there for an hour or 2 hours, you're in there for 3 weeks.

Is there— are they playing music or— No, it's, it's complete silence and darkness.

Complete and total, like you're dead.

Wow. Yeah. I think Aaron Rodgers does that.

I think that's nuts. But there were a couple that were worse than, than waterboarding. The cold cell, we strip the prisoner naked, you chain him to an eye bolt in the ceiling so he can't lay or sit or get comfortable. Can you keep your underpants on? No, no, no, no. 'Cause the idea is to humiliate them. Remember, in their religion, nakedness is shameful. Yeah. Right? And nakedness in front of a woman. And we would have women interrogators strip them naked just to humiliate them. Yeah. You see this rectal feeding. Rectal feeding? Yeah, what we did is we forced tubes up their asses and then with a pump, pumped hummus up there just to insult their culture. No way.

Who was coming up with these ideas? I'm sure these—

There were two contract psychologists at the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

Is that true? They came up with these plans? Yeah.

And we paid them $108 million of the taxpayers' money for it.

Wow. But when you look at, were these people criminals? I see, this is what's—

Well, that's the thing. That's the thing, Theo. They've never been charged with a crime. Right. So charging with— if these guys are as bad as we say they are, Charge them with a crime. If they're as bad as we say they are, find them guilty, sentence them to death, and execute them.

We won't even charge people in our country who are committing a crime a crime. No. So I think that it's like, that's like a problem that's been across the board, is like, what is the crime? Charge somebody with a crime. Yeah, it's not happening in our own country, but because this is so wild to hear about, because it's like, you know, it's really, it's interesting, like, just as a person, right? You're like like, okay, did these guys do something really bad to kill people in our country, right? Were they doing really harmful stuff? Are they like— and they were, right?

Yeah, but, but they confessed through torture, so none of it's admissible.

None of it, right? Okay, so, but then it's like, yeah, it's like, how do you solve something like that, you know, with more crime?

Well, there was a, there was a deal that was made during the Biden administration So it was like the top 3 or 4, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Omar al-Baluchi, Ramzi bin Hashib, and somebody else. They agreed to plead guilty to terrorism. And what they got in exchange was life without parole and a promise not to send them to supermax in Colorado because they said they couldn't deal with the cold. They wanted to stay in Cuba because it's warm. So life without parole. And Biden's, uh, Secretary of Defense, um, vacated the deal, and he says, you can't make a deal like that, I have to make that deal because I'm the Secretary of Defense. And it went through the courts, and then the Biden administration— there it is right there—

the Biden administration Department of Defense, um, and who were these 4 guys? They were the men accused of—

Khalid Sheik Mohammed Wali bin Ittash, Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

They were accused of plotting the September 11th terrorist attacks, right? The Biden administration Department of Defense reached plea agreements with, uh, three prominent al-Qaeda figures whom you just mentioned, accused of plotting the September 11th terrorist attacks. However, following intense political and public backlash, the administration moved to block the agreement, and the courts later threw it out. So what happened to the guys? They're just still in—

they're just still there. You see right there the terms they, they agreed plead guilty to murdering 2,976 people in exchange for life without parole. Okay, so the deal was thrown out. So now what do they have? Why is it they have life without parole?

They— that's the deal, right? Same thing.

It's the same thing. They're never going to be released.

But why didn't we— what was the reason why? Oh, because the reaction from people.

It was, it was really reaction from the Biden admin— from the Biden Defense Department.

Well, it says 9/11 families too. I guess they—

Well, the 9/11 families just want to chop everybody's head off. And I understand. I get it. I really do. It makes sense. I get it. But that's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. We're a country of laws. We can't just pretend that we're a country of laws except when the laws aren't convenient for us.

But if you kill enough people, it seems like you would face the death penalty.

Yes, but you have to blame the CIA for that. If the CIA hadn't tortured these guys, they would all be— have been escaped. It's all inadmissible. Got it. They confessed everything, understood? It was all under torture. And so you can't do anything with it. Now there's no evidence against them. None.

What a— I can't even imagine what it's like to be some of those families and like, and just the drawn out of all of that.

And just been 24 years, 25 years in September.

Let's get a little bit more current. Did you— oh, did you see that they just had the— like they have those flotillas that are going to Gaza. Did you see that the prime minister of Ireland's sister was on one of them?

I'll tell you, the Irish hate the Israelis and the Israelis hate the Irish.

Has that always been the case, you think?

No, only in the last 8 or 10 years.

Let me see this. Gaza aid flotilla activist home after torture ship nightmare. Scroll a little. Irish activists have claimed they were kidnapped and beaten by Israeli forces after their aid flotilla to Gaza was intercepted in international waters. Margaret Connolly, the sister of President Connolly, was among the emotional arrivals at Dublin Airport on Saturday. They wanted us to suffer, she said. None of them could look us in the eye. What a dehumanizing thing to do to men and women aged from 22 to 75. It's just wild. Imagine if like Obama's sister Or can you imagine? Can't even imagine. I want to interview Greta Thunberg. That would be fun. It'd be cool, huh? Yeah, I just would like to get to see what she's like, you know. I never been around her. I just see— you just see like bits and clips of people, right? Um, so it'd be pretty fascinating. The Irish detainees were among hundreds of participants from other countries who were also detained when the latest iteration of the global Samud flotilla was stopped by Israeli forces in international waters. And a lot of these groups were trying to get there to bring aid to the people in Gaza.

And then also, I think, to just document what was going on there. They've had the largest killing of journalists in the history of time.

Yeah, of the world.

In the history of the world.

Yeah. How are people not outraged?

Have you heard of— I don't know if people have any feelings anymore. I don't know what's going on.

Have you heard of Shireen Abu Akleh?

No, I couldn't even hear that. I don't even know how to, you know. I couldn't do it if I— yeah.

Shireen Abu Akleh was an American citizen, and she was the top journalist on Al Jazeera. So, bring her up. Shireen Abu Akleh. Abu Akleh. So, again, American citizen. She goes to Israel, and she's covering the fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I think it was in the West Bank. There she is. Yeah, in the West Bank. So she's wearing a bulletproof vest that says "Press," and she's wearing a helmet that says "Press," and she's taking cover behind a tree, and an Israeli sniper shot her in the face and killed her. Killed her instantly. So her funeral is held a couple days later in a Greek Orthodox church in the West Bank. The IDF raids the church, beats the pallbearers, and they dropped the coffin. You're lying. Isn't that awful?

Let me see. The manner of her death and the subsequent violent disruption of her funeral drew widespread international condemnation of Israel. During her funeral procession, the Israel Police attacked the pallbearers at the St. Joseph's Hospital in East Jerusalem with batons and stun grenades. The hospital itself was also stormed by Israeli police officers who assaulted patients and threw stun grenades.

An American citizen. Unbelievable. And we didn't say anything. We didn't say anything.

Not a word. Well, most of our media won't say a lot of stuff about this. No. What do you think's going on? It feels like this is almost like, it almost feels like the Twilight Zone.

Does that make any sense to you? Yes, very much.

Well, as someone who's seen a lot of psyops and things that go on, what's going on here? Like, does Israel have like an end goal? Like, I have a lot of Jewish friends that are great people and stuff like that, right?

One of my best friends is an IDF Special Forces veteran.

No way. Yeah. How does he feel about this sort of thing?

He's ashamed. He's ashamed. He's like, we didn't used to be like this.

I just don't under— like, is there some goal of Israel that's a bigger goal, do you think? Do you think so?

Well, the goal might be in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. It integrates for the first time ever the Israeli and American militaries. So they become like one military.

It's like, who, who thought of that? Oh, my friend Ro Khanna actually is putting together— wow. He's trying to put together a bill, I think, to challenge this. I'm not good, and I don't know if the term is a bill. I'm not sure. So I'm more of an emotional guy than I am—

I like and respect Ro Khanna. I hope he runs for president.

He's a neat guy. We had him on here and it was cool. I think he's a really interesting guy. I think he's brave. I like the stuff that he's brave enough to do.

See, and I say the same thing about Tucker Carlson. Oh yeah. I think Tucker, I'll tell you something about Tucker is the Tucker that you see on the screen, That's Tucker in real life.

I agree. He's, he's the sweetest guy.

He means exactly what he says. He doesn't hold anything back. Totally honest.

Well, I think it's like you're just a human being who lives in a country, right? And you're supposed to have these like things of what means something. And then you start to see all this stuff that you're like, well, this goes against everything that I've learned. Exactly. This goes against like, especially like you grow up, like you see like every other book at the airport is about the Holocaust for my entire life. So it's like every time you get on a You're grabbing one and you're learning about it and you're like, you see these things that are wrong or that are like, you know, and then you see this thing happening like, well, how is this? And then if you mention like, and people act like, I don't know, it's almost like you feel like you're being just gaslit and then your media won't cover a lot of it. That's right. So I don't know what's going on. I don't know.

And I don't know what's going on. I was on the Piers Morgan Show not too long ago. I go on every couple of months.

And I never been on his show.

What's that guy like? Oh, he's a good guy too. And I have to admit— Is he pretty tall or not? I haven't met him in person, actually. Only on Zoom.

I always wondered how tall he was. Somebody said he was like 5'5", dude.

What? Yeah. That would surprise me. 6'1"? 6'1"? Oh, okay, that makes more sense.

Maybe the exchange rate on him or something.

Yeah, it's the exchange rate. So I was on his show and I was with Scott Horton, who's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. And Alan Dershowitz and Danny Ayalon, General Danny Ayalon, former Israeli general. And there we are. Hey, there we are. So, so when you're on with Dershowitz, Dershowitz never shuts his mouth. That's it. That was what I was going to say.

Let me see. Former CIA agent John Kiriakou believes—

Oh no, that wasn't it. That's Jeffrey Epstein. No, it was about Hamas in Gaza. And he asked me, because I had said the least on this episode, and he said, do you believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization? And I said, yes, if the point was on October 7th was to attack civilians, the definition of terrorism is the act of using violence to instill terror in a civilian population. So that's the definition of terrorism. So yes. Hamas is a terrorist organization. He said, uh, do you believe October 7th was a terrorist attack? And I said yes. He said, then what are you doing on this show? I was supposed to be in the, like, anti-Israel, I guess, or whatever. And I said, Piers, you can't have as a policy just kill everybody. Women, children, the elderly, wipe out every hospital, every school, every apartment block. That's genocide. Yeah. Somebody's gotta say it.

Yeah, I mean, it's scary. And then, and then, and then to think, how would our country be okay right now with us joining military forces with a group that's doing that? I'm sure not okay.

And yet then you have to ask, what about these people like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham? Lindsey Graham said the other day, a week ago, that until I breathe my last breath, I will stand with Israel. Why? Why?

Oh, that dude's just the Newt Rockne of fucking bullshit.

Oh my God. And Cruz is just as bad. And these clowns from Florida that wear IDF uniforms onto the floor of the House, they should be arrested. I didn't even see that. It was Congressman Fine. You're fine. But you're like an 8.

You're supposed to have like a read on these types of things. Like, what do you think's going on? I think it's AIPAC's money.

I think it's two things. It's AIPAC's money, millions upon millions and millions of dollars in American politics. So they have an inordinate influence on our political system. And AIPAC is the only group of its kind that does not have to register as a foreign agent. Right. You know, I've made a point on a couple of podcasts. Back in 2008, I got a very small contract, just, I don't know, $5,000, $6,000 to write 4 op-eds in support of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce. So I wrote these op-eds. Oh, you should do business in Abu Dhabi. It's really business friendly. They love Americans. Everybody makes money. All right, send. I had to register as a foreign agent because I was publishing in support of a foreign entity. Interesting. What the heck is AIPAC doing 24/7? How come they don't have to register as foreign agents?

Yeah, I think it seems like we have our our government officials are afraid to stand up to them. I don't know why.

They're very afraid. And then you have these morons like Chuck Grassley.

But why do you think they're afraid?

They don't want to be primaried.

Like, even if you get primaried, but like, you would— eventually somebody will win, right?

You're like, yes, but who among them has the courage to be the first? I mean, Massey stood up. Massey took it. I saw him about a week before the election.

But he can't be the only person in there.

Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she didn't have the guts. She quit. She quit halfway through.

What do you think they're compromising these people? Like, what are they saying to them? Are they saying like something bad is going to happen? Like, what do you suggest?

You will never work in politics ever again. We will hound you. What do you have for the rest of your career?

Then if you lose, then what do you have? Anything? You have nothing to lose.

That's what you and I say. You and I would stand up.

Yeah. Bring up the thing about the— just the government, just like the government's being interacted— those two are that, right? Uh, the House Armed Services Committee has unveiled its proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, which would see a record-shattering $1.15 trillion spent on the US military over the next fiscal year. Among the bill's many provisions is Section 224, entitled the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. Uh, the provision would bring the US and Israel into an unprecedented partnership covering technology sharing the co-production of weapons systems and bilateral research and development across multiple domains of warfare, including biotech, autonomous systems, AI, cyber warfare, and more. Well, this could just mean that we are, uh, we're employing technology that they have, right? Is there any more specifics about this?

Closer than that.

I'll tell you what, if— and I'm not saying it isn't. Look, it definitely scares me. I mean, I don't want to be involved with a country country that's doing something like that. And I don't think that's crazy for me to say that either.

Even if it's just this, um, that means they're not going to have to steal the 2% of defense technology that we don't give them. I'll give you an example. When I was still there, we were developing the F-35. So they came to us, they said, we want the F-35, we want to be the first ones to have the F-35. We said, great, we're going to have— we're going to give you the F-35, we're going to call it the F-35I for Israel. And it's gonna have just a barely slightly degraded, um, avionics system just in case, God forbid, you know, it doesn't get shot down and then the Chinese and the Russians get it and then they can steal the avionics. They said, no, not good enough. We want the, we want the F-35, the same one that you guys fly. In the meantime, the Emirates came to us and they said, we want the F-35. We said, great, we're going to give you the F-35E. We're going to call it for Emirates, and it's gonna have just a slightly degraded avionics package. Same thing we're giving the Israelis. They said, fine, we'll take it. The Israelis then tasked their spies with stealing whatever the downgrade was in the avionics so that they could re-upgrade it once they took delivery of the F-35.

Well, now we're just going to share everything with them. We'll just give them the F-35.

But can you fault a country? It's kind of interesting because I think if you think that we're playing like that, I guess I always felt like we were out of the colonization era.

I know, I'm with you. And, and I know what you're getting at.

And so it's like you can't fault a country really for just trying to survive.

I don't, right?

And I'm not saying you are. No, no, I'm thinking out loud. Let me finish this sentence real quick. Sure, sure. Sorry, John. But yeah, you can't— like, you know, if a country's just trying to survive and they're good at it and better at it than others, then it's like that has to be respected in some senses for sure. Agreed.

I don't fault the Israelis for doing this. If I were the Prime Minister of Israel, I would do the same thing when it comes to acquiring defense technology. I fault the US government, and it makes not one whit of difference if there's a Democrat in the White House or a Republican in the White House. We don't stand up to the Israelis. Yeah. You know, I will say Reagan did. In the so-called Year of the Spy when Jonathan Pollard was— no, actually it wasn't Reagan by then. It was Clinton, wasn't it? Clinton stood up and said, "We're gonna prosecute this guy Pollard." He got 30 years and he did every single day of the 30 years. Mm-hmm. Peaked in '84.

Jonathan Pollard.

So when was he arrested? '85. Okay, so it was Reagan. It was Reagan. He did every single day of the 30 years. And then when he got out of prison, Miriam Adelson— or not Miriam Adelson, her husband, it was, what's his name, Adelson, the king of Las Vegas— sent his private jet. The jet took Pollard to Israel. Netanyahu met him at the airport. He kissed the ground. And in an interview— Sheldon Adelson— in an interview, He urged American Jews to take up arms against the American government. And then Huckabee meets with him and welcomes him into the American embassy. I would have shot him if he had come into the American embassy and I were the ambassador. Yeah, I just don't understand.

I think it makes it like, I don't know, I think a lot of people are looking for guidance right now. I think you're right. If you're a regular person who we're just trying to get through the week, we want to believe in our country, we get scared that our taxes are going towards towards like violent things and evil things. That's the thing. It starts to feel like there's something evil going on.

Yeah, and it's not like we're right and everybody else in the rest of the world is wrong. You know, you look at these votes—

I don't know if I'm right about anything.

You look at these votes at the UN General Assembly and it's everybody in the world voting yes, and voting no is the United States. I'm serious about this, 'cause I served at the UN. It's the United States, Israel, Costa Rica, and Palau, a little island with 30,000 people in the Pacific. That's it. And the whole rest of the world is voting the other way.

You've talked a lot, like, you've worked in counterterrorism. Is it weird? Like, terrorism's such an interesting term because it's like, at a certain point, it feels like we're chasing the tail of the dog we let loose, kind of. Does that make any sense even?

Yeah, I like that. I might steal that.

Yeah, steal it. I don't even know exactly what it means, but, um, you know, they just had a— they— I saw something the other day. It was like, uh, $300 billion to rebuild, um, parts of— I don't think it's Iran, but I think it's Libya. Can you look that up? $300 billion to rebuild parts of Libya that we— that we just— that we just blew up. Yeah, yeah. So right here It says a truce, $300 billion investment plan in Hormuz. What's in the deal draft that can end US-Iran war? US and Iran mediators are now engaged in high-stakes negotiations aimed at ending the conflict despite a fragile ceasefire in the place and months of turmoil in the Middle East. The possible truce plan includes key bargaining points between the two sides, including a $300 billion investment package, uh, and the crucial Strait of Hormuz issue, making the agreement extremely close watched for. However, one of the biggest developments emerging from the discussions is a proposed multi-billion dollar reconstruction and investment package that could fundamentally reshape Iran's economy if a final deal is reached. So it's just— why? It's like we just went there and got involved in this.

I don't know if this is a taxpayer thing. God, I hope not. But just the whole thing is like, uh, I don't know, you start to feel so defeated sometimes. Isn't that the truth? And you start to feel like your vote isn't going to do anything. Yes, that's the scary part. And then part of this feels like a long-term psyop, like it's a slow weakening of the values. Like, okay, let's put things in this society over time that'll like, you know, tear apart the American family and like that'll like poison people. And let's— do you think they're like— there's big psyops like that going on? Like, let's put COVID out there so that, uh, people are separate from each other and, um, and that people can't go to meetings and meet up. And so you start to deteriorate the value of human connection. And let's make food so that it's just poisoning people and that it's, you know, that it's just gonna, you know, it's gonna make people sicker. Let's make healthcare so it's not, there's no real way besides extreme stress that you have to go through if you even have to make a claim.

Like, you know, do you think that some of that is just corporate greed and stuff? Or do you think some of that's a longer-term psyop by like bigger powers out there?

I don't think it's a part of a bigger psyop. Okay, good. But I do believe firmly that it's mostly corporate greed. You just reminded me of something I— excuse me— I saw recently. And it was this experiment that, I don't know, somebody did. I saw it on YouTube where they put a— They put a homemade hamburger on the ground, and they put a McDonald's Quarter Pounder on the ground, and then they photographed it over the course of days and then weeks and then months. Bugs come, ants come, they go to the hamburger, they tear the bun down. Mostly they went for the meat, but they end up— a week later, it's just a spot on the sidewalk. Even bugs won't touch a McDonald's hamburger. And then months later, it looks like it just came out of the package. Yeah. And Europeans can't understand how we eat like that. Yeah. Their laws are different. McDonald's can't do that in European countries.

Yeah. Let's look at the ingredients right here. The difference between McDonald's Europe and McDonald's America.

10+ ingredients versus 4 ingredients.

Wow, so the US has 10+ ingredients, and yeah, Europe has 4 ingredients. In the US: potatoes, vegetable oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor, wheat and milk derivatives, dextrose, sodium acid, phis— pyro— pyrophosphate, and salt. Pyrophosphate. Pyrophosphate, thank you. And then Europe has potatoes, non-hydrogenated oil, rape seed or sunflower, and dextrose.

And look below that: contains hydrogenated oils, beef flavoring, and TBHQ, which are banned/restricted in EU. Haha!

These are for the French fries. It says contains hydrogenated oils, beef flavoring, TBHQ, and then it says for Europe that those are— those exactly things are banned and restricted in the EU. Um, what about the burger? Yeah, what does it say? The US beef is 100% pure beef. The additives— several hundred additives. Several hundred additives prohibited in EU. And, uh, let me see. Europe says 100% beef from British Irish farmers, no hormone-treated beef. And then, uh, the additives are stricter quality control and fewer additives.

Look at the Big Mac sauce. The special sauce on the Big Mac contains HFCS, xanthan gum, propylene glycol, alginate, and caramel color. What the fuck? Why?

I just like— it's at some point you have to be like, well, what happened? You know? And while the Europe Big Mac sauce contains simpler ingredients list and 40 fewer calories, it says The differences are EU food regulations are much stricter, uh, customer preferences and local supply chains vary, um, and the U.S. fries would likely be illegal to sell in Europe due to ingredient restrictions.

Have you ever seen what's in the McRib? I'll tell you what, I've— I loved those McRibs.

Well, the Black community goes bonkers when they come back.

I know that. Rush to McDonald's for McRib, but then when you see what's in it, you're like, oh my God.

Well, yeah, dude. Anybody thinking it has anything to do with a fucking animal to make rib. But at a certain point, we are also guilty. We are.

It's like, yeah, yeah, it's our own laziness. It is. And we give in and we just go do it.

That's a big part of it. So that's what's interesting too right now. It's like there's a real test of like, what do I, you know, how much do I want to stand up for myself? And but then also, how much can I? Some people are trapped financially by certain abilities and restrictions. Yeah, so it's just kind of interesting and it's tough. Um, and I don't want to get all super dour. Um, what, uh, do you feel like there are a lot of, uh, foreign agents in America right now?

Oh yeah, in fact, there's an advertisement that you see on the sides of busses around Washington saying that— and, and it's the, the advertisement is to visit the Spy Museum. That there are between 10,000 and 15,000 foreign intelligence officers in Washington, D.C. In Washington, D.C.? More than anywhere else on the planet.

Wow. Do you think that's real?

There's a spy on this bus.

Oh, that's what that advertisement says? Oh, it's part of the—

Thank you, Edward Snowden. It's part of the advertising campaign.

Yeah. And is the campaign to— to what, to hire more of them?

No, no, to get people to go to the Spy Museum.

Oh, it's to get them to go to the Spy Museum. Dude, I've been in the Spy Museum before. It's awesome. It's great. Spy Museum's so good.

Yeah, it's really great. I agree.

Times were different back in the day when it was like you'd like be like using a secret pen or like you'd have a homing pigeon with like a little backpack on.

No, now it's all so crazy sophisticated. I was just telling somebody the other day about the CIA trained cats to wander onto the Soviet embassy compound with collars that had listening devices on them, just to see what the Russians were saying when they come out of the embassy. But that didn't work 'cause you can't train the cats. So they trained pigeons and they put little listening devices around their little pigeon feet and they would land on the windowsills. But the thing is that the Russians had double-pane glass and they were piping music in between the two panes of glass, so the pigeons couldn't hear anything.

No way. What a game. Like, what a game of like, uh, espionage. So much fun. That's so— see, that kind of stuff is so exciting. Now it feels like, um, I don't know, it feels like we're entering sometimes like a surveillance state.

Or we are, we are. It's not like the old days. You know, one of the best recruitments I ever made, Theo, I was doing surveillance on this guy for a week. I thought, you know, this guy would be an interesting target. He doesn't have— he doesn't make much money.

Um, oh, you were doing surveillance on a guy? On a guy. And what does that mean, you're doing surveillance? You're like, you're wandering around in the distance?

Yes, that's exactly what it means. Yeah, you're just wandering around the distance, watch him every day, see where he goes, what he does, where he hangs out, who he talks to. His, his wife had left him, but I noticed he walked his dog every morning at 6:30. Dang. Every morning he'd leave the house at 6:30 and he would walk across the park, the dog would do his business, and then he'd walk back. So I asked in the office, I said, "Hey, does anybody have a dog?" And one of the women's like, "Yeah, I have a dog." I said, "Can I borrow your dog for a week?" She says, "For what?" I said, "I wanna accidentally bump into this guy, and while he's walking his dog, I wanna walk your dog, and then I meet him and I'm gonna say hello, and then the next day I'm gonna say hello again, then the third day I'm gonna invite him to lunch and whatever." It was the best recruitment I ever made in my entire career. And we bonded over the dogs, and it wasn't even my dog. At the end of the week, I just gave her a dog back.

And did you learn something from the guy?

Oh my God, this guy was like every case officer's dream recruitment. And what recruitment means, somebody that you're just, you're get trying to gain intel from the person, you, you pitch him, you say, look, I'm with the CIA. Oh, you're paid?

You told him that?

Oh yeah, I'm with the CIA. I know who you are. I know what you do. And I'm willing to pay you very handsomely to give it to me. And he's like, how handsomely is handsome? And I gave him a number.

What's that number? Ballpark?

Well, this is 25 years ago, and then it was $5,000 a month. It would probably be $20,000 a month now. And good money. And he wanted all of his expenses. I said, what expenses do you think you're going to have? Yeah.

What, dog shots for the dog?

I know, right? So, oh, he nickel and dimed me the expenses. And my boss would always say, just give it to him, just give it to him, because the information was so great. So we had this— Information about what? His country. Oh, he worked in the embassy. Got it. Of his country. And I gave him a disposable cell phone. And back then you had to buy these little cards at the convenience store and you scratch them off and you put the number in your phone and it gives you units. Oh yeah, I remember that. And, um, so the phone was only supposed to be used to call me. He used it for everything. He'd give me like $800 phone bills at the end of the month, and I'm like, come on, man, come on, that's awesome.

$5 grand already. That dude's a freaking snake.

I love that. Yeah, my boss, just, just pay it, just pay it. Acoustic Kitty. Oh my gosh. Oh, it's an—

oh, Acoustic Kitty was a Central Intelligence Agency project launched by the the Directorate of Science and Technology in the 1960s. It was intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull— dear God— and a thin wire into its fur. This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger—

it sees a bird—

had to be addressed in another operation. $20 million. $20 million, dude. And that's your Somali fraud right there. The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately. However, this was disputed. Uh, the equipment was taken out of the cat. The cat was re-sewn for a second time and lived a long and happy life afterwards. That sounds like a cover-up. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a cat that has call waiting, you know.

That's fucking insane, dude. I worked with this one guy who was going to a denied area. A denied area is a place where CIA people just can't go, right? But he looked kind of ethnic and he could fit into you know, whatever the culture. And so I said, buddy, aren't you afraid of like being kidnapped and then we just never see you again? And he said, yeah, they offered to implant a chip, a beacon, a ping in my butt crack, he says. And I said, nah, leave my butt crack alone.

Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, that's fair. I think that should be our national anthem. Um, how weary do people have to be of, uh, being spied upon today? Do you think, like, there's a lot of these new, like, data center projects and stuff like that that's going on with that? Um, first let's talk, yeah, real quick about the data centers. What do you think is really going on? Because if you look at this, the size of these places, like, we don't need that much data. Like, we're already using our phones, we already have, like, um, televisions. Like, you know, there's already, like, a lot of stuff being stored board on servers. How are we jumping to a level where we need that? That's what I want to know.

Oh, I have to agree. Besides the fact that they use massive amounts of water, and oddly enough, they're located in a lot of states that don't have a ton of water, like Texas. Yeah. Or you go out to, uh, Loudoun County, Virginia. Okay, we have enough water, but Loudoun County, Virginia, you drive for miles and miles and they're just these never-ending gigantic complexes of data centers.

The proposed Stratos project in Utah is a massive 40,000— there's no water in Utah—

a 40,000-acre AI data center campus, um, 2.5 times larger than Manhattan.

Yeah, I wonder how long the actual data— how big—

and, and just the data center requires more than double the current energy consumption of the entire state of Utah.

Yeah, come on. I mean, that's unbelievable. What do you think's really going on there? Do you have any intel about it?

You have to assume that this is intel related because look at the companies that are involved. We're talking about Palantir and Nvidia and Abraxas and all these big companies that either took CIA investments to get started as seed money or are staffed by retired senior CIA officers. They're not doing it for their health.

Why is the CIA now spying on our own people?

Oh yeah, that's what Ed Snowden warned us about. Yeah, without Ed Snowden's revelations, we wouldn't have any idea that NSA and CIA were spying on Americans, which is not just illegal, it's a part of NSA's charter that it may not spy on Americans. And this place in Utah, um, he and Julian Assange told us about Utah. This new compound in Utah that NSA has built has enough memory storage space for every phone call, every email, and every text message from every American for the next 500 years. Wow. Why? Just that building?

Uh-huh. Then why do they need all these buildings?

Yeah, why? They're everywhere. What are they collecting?

I'm not sure. And that's the thing, it's like, what— it must be It's got to be all of our information. What would you do right now? Is there any way that people can protect themselves? Do you know? It's almost impossible now.

I wrote a series of books during COVID for Skyhorse Publishing: The CIA Insider's Guides to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection, uh, Lying and Lie Detection, and Disappearing and Living Off the Grid. They put them together and they're republishing them in the next month, I guess, um, as one volume. CIA Skills, Tactics, and— The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques. There we go. But when it comes to protecting yourself from, from, you know, the data state, you got to go Eric Rudolph or Unabomber and just own no technology at all. It's the only way to protect yourself. Otherwise, you're going to be scooped up in all this. Now, the odd thing is according to Ed Snowden, uh, NSA, CIA, other governmental organizations are scooping up all this data and they're just holding it. Why? Why are they holding it? Now, time was really until the immediate post-9/11, uh, period where if the government wanted your information, they had to go to a federal judge and say, we want Theo Vaughn's information and this is the reason we want it. And the judge had to say, okay, that's a legitimate reason, I'll sign the warrant. Pfft.

Now they just write something called a national security letter, they give it to your provider, and they say, give us everything you have on Theo Vaughn. And they just turn it over. Or they go to these new data centers and just put your name in, your information, and everything pops up. They don't even, you don't have any legal protections. They just take whatever they want.

And that's legal now?

They can do that? And it's legal now.

How'd that become legal?

In the National Defense Act of 2016. National Defense Authorization Act of 2016. Wow. Yeah. Which also— this is a pet peeve of mine that nobody knows about— it also, for the first time in American history, allowed the American government to propagandize the American people. It was always illegal for our government to propagandize us. What does it mean? Well, for example, the Voice of America, that's our government's propaganda news outlet. We beam it overseas so everybody gets the official US point of view. Okay, back in the '80s, the Reagan administration came up with these two broadcasters called Radio Martí and TV Martí to beam at Cuba. Cuba. The Cubans try to jam them all the time, but what they mostly are used for is to broadcast baseball games in Spanish, which the Cubans love. Got it. I flew down to Cuba to do a study. I did a study for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when I was the chief investigator there, and nobody watches TV Martí. You can only actually get it in the waiting room of the US consulate. Got it. So if you're there to apply for a visa, you can watch a soap opera in Spanish that's American propaganda.

Nobody cares. Radio— people like listening to baseball. So Dish Network, when it began, when it began selling services in Florida, found that there was this just narrow swath along the shore on the, on the West Coast of Florida where you could pick up TV Martí. That's illegal. You can't propagandize the American people. Got it. As Americans, we're not allowed to watch our own government's propaganda. So instead of telling Dish Network, well, you're going to have to like move your satellite or do something or pixelate it or whatever, said no, no, no, we'll change the law. And so in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, The Obama administration said, "No, no, we can propagandize Americans now." Wow. And so now radio, TV are no problem.

Wow. Yeah. But I mean, we're always propagandized. I mean, people put out propaganda all the time.

Yeah. I went to Yemen in 2011 when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, my 5th trip to Yemen. Every time I'd go to Yemen, it's worse than the previous time. So I have a meeting with the defense attaché, And he was so proud of this thing that he was doing, this psyop. I hate that word, psyop. I said, "Sure, what's your psyop?" And he goes, "We're funding a radio station here modeled on NPR, and it plays American jazz, and then it has a call-in show so young Yemeni guys can call in and talk about the jazz." I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" That's a terrible idea. Nobody's gonna listen to that. And nobody did, and they shut it down after a year. But that's, that's what we're doing.

But what was the goal of it even?

To make people pro-American, because they would be like, "Oh, Americans have jazz." Oh, I see. "So I'm gonna be pro-American now." It's like, what are you thinking? You sit there and think—

That sounds like money laundering. Yeah, seriously. That's what it sounds like. Um, how do I know I can believe you about anything, kinda? People ask you that all the time?

Oh yeah, people ask me all the time.

Um, because who would believe anybody that is ex-CIA? Who would even— you know what I'm saying?

Oh, that's such a thing with me. You know, generally I don't read the chats anywhere, right? Everybody I talk to at your level— you, Tucker Carlson, you know, Patrick Bet-David, Rogan, whomever— they never read the chats. Sometimes I can't help it and I'll scan them. The only time I ever respond is when people say, "Once CIA, always CIA." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Moron. You thought all of that all up on your own, huh?

That's true, that's true.

So I said to one guy, I said, "You know what? Let me call Ed Snowden and the sons of Philip Agee and Ray McGovern and tell them that you think they're all still in the CIA." So I went to prison for telling the truth. And that's a good point. I would do it again in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. Nobody else has gone to prison for ratting out the CIA and its illegal, you know, programs. I was proud to do it.

That's a good answer. Thank you. It's a really good answer. If you really— look, here it is, and I can say this— if you really went to jail and everything, then it's a great answer. And if you did it, I believe you. I believe you. But also, there's a little part of me that's like, if he didn't, then that's fucking even colder that he's making it up and living it.

That's the most CIA shit. That would be pretty intense.

But that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah. No, nobody in the world hates me as much as my ex-wife does.

From spending all that time in the CIA or in jail? At least jail you have a good excuse.

But she came every month with the kids and visited me in jail for 2 years. Yeah.

And so why does she hate you then?

Oh no, that's, that's all— yeah, post story, post— yeah, I'm actually prohibited by court order from answering that question. Well, that's—

I think that's amazing that she did that and brought your kids to do it.

She was great. She was great. A lot of wives—

I mean, I think that's— I can't even imagine. It's a tough thing for families, especially if you had young children. Um, kudos to her for that. Yeah. Um, was being in prison kind of fun?

Um, fun? No, I— no, I wouldn't say fun. What was kind of cool about it?

I've always wanted to go to jail.

There's this old saying that you don't go to jail to make friends. And I made some lifelong friends in jail, mostly named Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno.

Yeah. Genovese. So a lot of good storytellers in there, I bet.

Listen, those guys were so honorable. I learned so much from those guys in just 23 months. Wow. Lessons I'll carry with me forever. Real honor. It's funny, the Italians were the smallest— they call them gangs in prison. The Italians weren't a gang. I'll use the word gang just for the purpose of this response. They were the smallest gang in the prison, yet commanded the highest level of respect. Really?

More than the Blacks and the Latinos?

The Blacks and Latinos were always at each other's throats. And they had, like, for example, it was Crips and Bloods. And there was this uneasy peace between them, just because it's not worth upsetting the apple cart. And everybody goes to solitary and then gets spread out all over the country. For the Latinos, it was far more complicated because it was Burachos, Norteños, Latin Kings, MS-13, Mexican Mafia, and then the individual cartels. So, overall, there's one gigantic Hispanic prison gang called called Pisces, and then within Pisces are all the different divisions. Gosh. Yeah. And the Pisces— if you were Hispanic, you were automatically in Pisces whether you liked it or not, and you had to work out every single day. Oh, that's pretty good. For the coming race war with the Blacks, right? And the whites are like, uh, we have nothing to do with this.

Yeah, I just wanted— I would just want to do it just to get in shape. Yeah, yeah.

Sometimes you need motivation. We had Aryan Brotherhood.

What's that? What are they doing? What are they up to?

You know, Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is far more violent than Aryan Brotherhood, and they're not— it says right there, they're not connected. I never met anybody from the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Aryan Brotherhood at a low-security prison just wants to sort of, you know, go along to get along. Yeah. Yeah. You stay out of my way, I'll stay out of yours. My very first day in prison, my very first hour in prison, when the guard dropped me off in my cell, the only thing he said to me, the whole time I was checking in and getting processed, was, "If somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression." And I said, "Great, thank you. I've been here 40 minutes. I'm gonna get my ass kicked now." Sure enough, as soon as he left, these two guys walked into my cell, just walked right in. One of them had a swastika that took up his entire neck and then came up onto his face and the other one had "Fuck you" tattooed on his eyelids.

Oh yeah, that check.

I mean, that's— yeah. And so I jump up, I go, "What do you want?" Because I thought, you know, if I'm going down, I'm taking one of them down with me at least. "What do you want?" And the, the one with the swastika, he says, "You the new guy?" I go, "Yeah, so?" This is like a—

this sounds like a story from like the 1940s.

Yeah, awful. I said in my second book. Prison is a combination of 7th Grade, The Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution. And it's set in the 1950s. That's hilarious. So I go, what do you want? He goes, you the new guy? I said, yeah, so? And he goes— I'm standing there like this— he goes, you a fuck? And I go, no, I'm not a fuck. He says— and they were bummed out— you a rat? No, no, no gays allowed. You a rat? I said, no, I'm not a rat. You a chomo? I go, I don't know what that word means. He goes, chomo, child molester. I said, no, I'm not a child molester. That's good. And then he says, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I was like, oh, well, yeah, I guess I'm with the Aryans now. But then a couple of months later, Simple Rules, I was across the hall from a captain in the Bonanno family, and he said to me one day, he goes, let me ask you a question. Why do you sit with those Nazi retards every day? And I said, I don't know.

I said, my first day here, they just told me sit with them. And he goes, from today you are with the Italians. I said, it's about time.

That was it. Yeah, took you long enough.

You got drafted. Yeah, but they were the best.

Yeah, but a lot of good stories, dude. Any good story come to mind from somebody, like a good story you heard in, uh, in prison? Yeah, there's one.

I'm actually— you're going to think less of me and I don't care.

That's fine. I could tell you some stuff that would probably make it even.

There was a guy in my housing unit who was a serial killer. He was called Truck because he drove long-distance trucks from the East Coast to the West Coast, and he would pick up prostitutes at truck stops and he would rape them and murder them, drive them a couple of hundred miles down the highway and then dump the bodies out. The cops estimated that he killed 14. It was probably more than that. But he strangled one and she survived. And she was able to give the cops the license number. Now this was in the days before DNA training, DNA testing. So this guy—

Before DNA testing? Yeah, this was in the '70s. Oh, he'd been in for a long time.

He was doing life. Got it. So for reasons that were never clear to me, this guy constantly sought my approval. He was full of shit. He would come up, he had the worst breath because he had just these blackened rotten nubs where his— that used to be his teeth. And he was saying—

That makes my fucking dick soft, dude. Oh, it was awful, awful.

He goes, "You CIA?" And I said, "Yeah, I used to be." He goes, "I did work for the CIA. I ran a shrimp boat full of weapons to Angola." I go, "Get the fuck out of here." I didn't know he was a serial killer. I go, "Get the fuck out of here." "Shrimp boat to Angola. Have you ever been on a shrimp boat?" And I walked away. People are looking at me like, "Are you crazy? Do you know who that is?" Well, I didn't know who it was. So instead of making him mad, it just made him more actively seek my approval. So I'm a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Oh yeah. And he would say, "Hey, Jon, the Steelers are the featured game of the week. I saved you a seat in the TV room." I'm like, "Ah, thanks, Truck." Like, "Okay." "John, I know you listen to classic rock. There's a new classic rock station, 1600 AM. You should check it out." I'm like, "Okay, thanks, Truck." In the meantime, there's this guy we called Cat in the Hat, 'cause he had this oddly elongated head, like a birth defect, kind of giant Cat in the Hat head.

And he comes up to me one day and he said, "Hey, I heard you had an empty bunk in your cell. I want to move into your cell. I heard it's a good cell." And I said, "Well, not so fast, buddy." I said, we don't allow any pedophiles in our cell and no rats. I said, what's your crime? He goes, murder for hire and no fucks.

I don't even care about that.

Yeah, but the other guy— I can't speak for the other guys.

Yeah, I was trying to like— I was trying to be a part of the group, you know, but go on, go on.

So, uh, so he says, uh, I— in murder for hire. I said, I don't think I like that any better than the pedophiles or the rats. What were the circumstances? And he said, I owed the mob a lot of money, $100,000 in gambling. I couldn't pay it, so I took out a life insurance policy on my business partner, and I hired a hitman to kill him. And the hitman got caught. I said, let me think about it. Well, think about it. I went straight to the law library and I looked up his case, and that wasn't it at all. It was true. He owed the mob $100,000. He took out the life insurance policy. He hired the hitman. He got caught, 'cause of course he's gonna get caught. Where's the first place the cops are gonna go? Where the money went. And he ratted out the hitman so that he wouldn't get the federal death penalty. Instead, he got 20 years. Ugh. So I said, "No rats in the room." So he was mad at me. Anyway, one day, Jake Tapper comes up to the prison to interview me, and I get called down to the lieutenant's office.

Normally, if you're called down to the lieutenant's office, it's to go to solitary. If you come back, usually it's 'cause you ratted somebody out. Well, I went down there to sign the waiver so I could give Jake Tapper the interview. So I'm sitting in the TV room next to Truck. Truck was very, very sensitive about being called a chomo 'cause that girl that he strangled was 16, which technically made him a chomo. Right? Right? So Truck's sitting here, I'm sitting here. Right here is Cat in the Hat. With his back toward me. He's on the computer. There's like this internal internet— not internet, internal email system. He doesn't see me. I'm sitting 18 inches away from him. And then he says to the guy next to him, "Do you hear? Kiriakou got called down to the lieutenant's office." He goes, "That guy's a fucking rat. He went down there to rat us out." And I just sat there watching the game. And then Truck says, "That fucking guy just called you a rat." And I said, "An hour ago, I heard him call you a chomo," which was a total lie. I just made it up.

He didn't say a single word. He just stood up, walked over here, and beat this guy almost to death. They had to land a helicopter in the yard to life flight Cat in the Hat to Pittsburgh. They gave Truck 5 more years. Cat Scan in the Hat, huh? Yeah, it's Cat Scan in the Hat. See, how come I didn't think of that? Because I'm not a comedian. I should have put that in my book.

I don't know. Is there any real value in me thinking of that? That's a good question.

I don't know. 6 weeks later, Cat in the Hat is finally released from the hospital. He comes, he's all fucked up still, and he's like this. Somebody had told him what had happened. He goes, I wanted to say I'm sorry for calling you a rat. I should never have said that. And everybody stops to look to see what I'm going to say. Well, what am I going to say? Ah, forget it. It's all water under the bridge. I go, listen, look at me. Look at me. And he lifts his head up. And I said, so help me God, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead and they won't even find you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So everybody's like, ah. The CIA guy's tough after all. But I said in the book, one of my rules that I learned at the CIA, let others do your dirty work. And then I get called down to the lieutenant's office again because as he's beating him, I sat back down and I'm watching the game. Everybody else runs. As soon as there's a fight, everybody just runs like cockroaches. That's insane though, man.

Right? So I'm watching the game. Kiriakou, lieutenant's office immediately. They always do it the same way. They're caricatures of themselves. So I go down there and one of the lieutenants, there are two of them, and he says, so tell us about this fight. I go, what fight? What fight? You're going to be a smart guy now. I said, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The fight. We had 4 cameras showing you saying something to that crazy person. And then he got up and beat the other guy. I said, "I was watching the Steelers game. I don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, you're not gonna tell us about the fight?" I said, "You know what? Maybe I will tell you about the fight. Maybe it was you that started the fight. Did you ever think of that? Maybe it wasn't me. I was an innocent bystander. Maybe you put them up to fight each other. I think I might make a complaint against you." He goes, "Get the fuck out of my office!" And I wrote in my book, rule number 1: Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations. And as I was walking out, I just said, "Exactly." Dang, bro, I don't even know what to think anymore.

You know, I figured—

Sometimes that's where you get people to that point. You're like this, you know—

They pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. And at sentencing, the judge sentenced me to a minimum security work camp. And the CIA was furious that I got such a light sentence and I was going to a minimum security camp. So the CIA intervened to send me to a media— sorry, a low-security prison, which is an actual prison with the double walls. They were furious. The CIA was? When I was first charged, I mean, this is a potential death penalty case. 3 counts of espionage for talking to ABC News and The New York Times.

Because you were talking to them about torture, right? Mm-hmm. What cases specifically were you talking to them about?

Abu Zubaydah. And they were furious because nobody had ever confirmed that there was a torture program. And I said it was illegal. Besides being immoral and unethical, it's illegal. You want to torture people? God bless, but you got to change the law first. We're a nation of laws.

Which countries do you think had the toughest torture programs over the years?

Or do you even know? Over the years, let's go back 100 years. The Chinese, the Vietnamese, and the Belgians. The Belgians, if you can imagine the horrors that they perpetrated in Congo of epic proportions. Yeah. The Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the United States.

Is it weird, like, because we talk about the term terrorism now, but it's like, it definitely feels like when we talked about it a few, a little bit earlier, it's like, it feels sometimes it's like, how much is America like a terrorist state in the world? And I hate to say that because this is the country that we live in. Yeah. But it's like, I think at a certain point, if you use it, you know, I don't know, I don't know, you know, it's got to be hard to figure that out, but it's like, um You know, it's like, when do you use like fear tactics and, and that sort of thing to make sure that everything's okay, you know? Um, yeah, I don't know. It's like, do you— here's my question: do you think it's possible for America to get to a place, uh, where we're an actual peacekeeper, or do you think it's possible to keep peace without terror? It make any sense or not? Yeah, that's a hard question.

Good. You know, and, and I think my answer has changed over the years. I believed for a very long time that we were the good guys. I was a true believer. That's why I worked there. We were the good guys. And we still—

I think as people we still are. As people, as citizens, we still are. Agreed, agreed.

We still are. Somebody commented on a Facebook post that I made the other day, like, uh, I heard you say that 'The United States is the best country in the world. You should be ashamed of yourself.' I was like, 'I believe that the United States is the best country in the world. That's why I live here.' Yeah. I could go live in some other country if I wanted to, but this is the best country in the world. We have problems. Every country has problems. But the reason why I'm as active and as vocal as I am is because I want to change the things that I disagree with. I don't think we should be a nation that tortures people or murders people without trial. If somebody is a clear and present danger, which is the language that's used in the amendment to 12333, okay, clear and present danger, they're getting ready to deliver the dirty bomb or whatever, okay. Sometimes we have to work in the shadows, awful, but it's a fact of life. But if you just send teams around the world to kill people whose politics you don't like, people who have never been charged with a crime, then shame on us.

That's not what the founding fathers gave us. So if you want to torture people, you gotta change the law. Ronald Reagan said, "We were a shining city on a hill," right? We're a beacon of hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties. That's the country I want to be. Same.

That's what most people want to be. Exactly. Do you think we can get back to that place, or what do you think?

I think it's possible. You do? I think it's gonna take a very long time, but I think it's possible. And I think we have to start by trying to snap out of this mindset that we have to be the world's policeman. Yeah. Like, why? I have relatives in Greece and friends all over Europe, and they ask me the same question all the time. Why are you guys doing this? Like, did we really need to overthrow Libya? Uh, Gaddafi rather, in Libya?

I think a lot of people don't know what's going on. They just want their families to be okay. They don't want data centers. A lot of people do not want AI. They don't give a shit about it. It's not going to benefit them.

I'm genuinely frightened.

Oh, the Pope is frightened. I'm trying to get the Pope to come in. I offered that I would go to the Vatican and talk with the Pope. I just want to— wonderful. I want to learn about what he thinks.

Yeah. Um, the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church just issued an encyclical 100% supporting everything the Pope said on this. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, it would be a blessing to get to talk with him and just learn. I just want to be able to share a message, be a part of, not me share, but just be like, just part of the telephone game of helping or being a part of the message getting out if I can. Yeah. Because I do think it's important. We don't want that. Nobody wants it. 30 people want it. 100 people want it with a lot of power. Exactly. We don't want it. Exactly. Yes. Nobody wants it.

Nobody wants it. Yeah, there it is right there.

Nobody wants it. Yeah, I read about this. I've read part of the Pope's, but I haven't seen this new one. This is from the Orthodox Church?

Yeah, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop. It's Elpidophoros, his name, endorsing everything the Pope said about AI.

You have a new podcast. Thanks, Sean, for hanging out. Sorry if I haven't had the best questions at certain points.

No, your questions were great and they cut right to the heart of things.

Trying to get my brain back on track a little bit. It's just been like a long month. But, um, before you do leave, I know you have a podcast that you're starting your own finally. Thank you. Finally. Thank you. You've been on all of them, so you have to start your own.

And it's called The Briefing Room.

Yeah, John Kiriakou's Briefing Room. John Kiriakou's Briefing Room.

We're gonna launch it in about 4 weeks. If you go to Real John Kiriakou on YouTube, it'll pop up saying coming soon. Please, please, please subscribe. And I have another one too called John Kiriakou's Dead Drop that's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's just story after story after story, and it's been actually very popular. Been very lucky. We've gone up to number 5 in the history category.

Worldwide. Oh, it's exciting.

Really? Yeah, very exciting. Yeah, it's an exciting time.

I mean, that's one thing that we also have to remember is like, sure, things seem this way and that way, but also it isn't ex— like, if you can see excitement as like being of all things and not just things that seem positive, but things that could seem, um, to be decided, then there is a lot of excitement And so that's like a nice way to think about things. Agreed. And this is your book, The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques. Is there a basic one you can give us out of the book, man, that's just something that you can notice about people?

Yeah, the one— the part that I'm proudest of in this book is the section on surveillance and surveillance detection. I took it so seriously that I actually became a surveillance instructor at the CIA for the last 2 years that I was at headquarters. I'll tell you something that happened to me when I was in Pakistan. I was always very, very, very careful about my own personal security. And I noticed one day, I was staying at a guest house, a little 14-room guest house. And I noticed one day there's a guy on a motorcycle. He's trying really hard to stay in my blind spot. And the only reason I even noticed him was he had a red motorcycle helmet on, and nobody in Pakistan wore motorcycle helmets. I don't even know where you would buy a motorcycle helmet. So I was like, "Huh, that's funny." I speed up, he speeds up. I slow down, he slows down. I change lanes, he changes lanes. I'm like, "Oh, this isn't good." I get to the entrance to the diplomatic quarter, which was the part of town where all the embassies were, and he breaks off. Well, I work like 14, 15, 16 hours every single day.

I get to work when it's dark, I leave work when it's dark. And so I pull out of the diplomatic quarter and the guy's on me again. And I was like, "Oh, this is definitely not good." I was worried about it all night. So the next morning I get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and I'm taking a different route to work every day. I'm leaving at a different time every day. My routes to work don't make any sense, just to make sure I'm not being followed. And now twice I am being followed. So there's a definition of surveillance at the CIA. It's multiple sightings at time and distance. So you see the person more than once at different times of the day and at different places. So we have a database. So I put in the database when I first arrived, I think I'm under surveillance. It's a motorcycle. Here's the license number. This is a description of the guy. He's wearing a red helmet. Next day, I get up at 5 o'clock in the morning. I just open the door a crack. I look up and down the street. I don't see anybody.

So they had assigned us these, like, poles, these retracting poles with a mirror on the bottom. So I look under my car. I don't see any explosives or tracking devices or anything. So you got to be careful, you know? So I get in the car, I go like 2 blocks, and the guy's on me again. So I finally get to the office, and I waited for the security officer to come in. And I said, listen, I'm under surveillance. I'm 100% sure I'm under surveillance. I told him about the 3 sightings. He's like, ooh, this isn't good. I said, I know. He said, we have to wait until the chief comes in. So finally the chief comes in around 7:00, and I said, I'm under surveillance, 100% certain. So I explained to him the 3 different sightings, and he's like, well, You know what you have to do. And I said, I know. He goes, you never popped your cherry that way, did you?

Let's shoot somebody.

And I said, nope, never needed to. He's like, well, we're going to have teams out there. Don't worry. We're going to have guys all around you. You're not going to be alone. I'm like, okay, all right. I was very worried. So I get back to my office. My office, it was me. I was the only staff officer and 6 retirees who had all been in the senior intelligence service every Every one of the 6 had either been the chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations. One had been the assistant deputy director of the CIA, but they all came back after 9/11 for patriotic reasons. But if you're a contractor, you can't be the chief. So they all worked for me, right? And word got around, they're like, "Don't worry, buddy. We're all gonna be out there. Don't worry about a thing." I'm like, "I'm very worried." That afternoon, I have a meeting at a safe house that we shared with the Pakistani Intelligence Service. We interrogated a prisoner. And I get up to leave, and I don't know what possessed me to stop. And I turned and I said, "General Mohammed, are you following me?" And he says, "No, why?" I said, "Because I'm under surveillance.

I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance, and I'm going to kill the guy this afternoon." And he's like, "No, it's not us." I never saw him again. So weeks later, we heard that a bunch of them were sitting around the table and one of them said, "The new guy, Kiriakou, he's a nice guy." And everybody's like, "Yeah, he's a very nice guy." And then one of them said, "You know what? Nobody's that nice. He's probably being nice just to trick us." into a sense of complacency. "We don't know what he's doing when he's not here. He's probably spying on us." Mm-hmm. I wasn't. But they put the worst surveillance officer in the entire Pakistani intelligence service on me. So instead of 2 blocks back, he's right there in my blind spot. And it was only because I stopped before I got to the door that afternoon and asked General Mohammed, if they were following me. That's the only reason that guy's not in the ground today. I was going to kill him that afternoon. Were you? Oh yes, I was. Dang, John about to pop off, bruh. Because I was convinced he was going to kill me.

That big guy. That's crazy, bro. Dang, dude. I think everybody wants to shoot somebody, but they don't let you.

I worked with a guy, great friend, go to the same church, we're in the same men's group.

They don't let you.

And he's a psychiatrist. Sorry, you made me laugh. He's a psychiatrist. And he said to me, I find it fascinating that you don't have PTSD. And I said, is that good or bad? He said, from a psychiatric point of view? And I said, yeah. He goes, not good. I said, I wasn't afraid of those people, Steve. I was not afraid of them.

Yeah, it is interesting, man. The things that we hold, what's going on inside of us. How it comes out, what gets figured out, you know.

You just never know. You never know what's going to bother you. You never know what's going to stick in your mind and bother you and fester for years. It happens.

Yeah, the stories, man. And about just making a story, you know, I mean, you seem like a kind of guy that likes to make a story, you know.

I like telling these stories, and people say—

and living a story though. Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh, listen, I'm an adrenaline junkie. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have these stories in my past. I'd be like, oh my God. My first wife, she's like, I wanna move back to Ohio and I want you to sell car insurance with my cousin Dean. I said, I would rather cut my throat than move to Ohio and sell insurance with your cousin Dean.

I'd rather join the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Seriously. Seriously. And you did. And I did. So I think, look, insurance next time. Yeah, next life. Tell your son I said what's up, that you mentioned on the way in. Thank you, Max. Max, tell him I said what's up. And, uh, is Kyriakou— is it Greek? Greek. Greek. I was thinking about that. Um, you have the new book, you have the new podcast. Thank you so much for your time, brother.

Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.

It's great to meet you. You too, man. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks.

Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found. I can feel it in my bones, but it's gonna take a little—