John Kiriakou
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
You can call it the federal bureaucracy.
You can call it whatever you want.
The fact is it exists and it's unelected and it's generally unaccountable to anybody.
And they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.
You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency.
You know, once I turned this down.
And I got this out-of-cycle promotion for the Abu Zubaydah operation.
I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world.
And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site.
And people are saying like, whoa, I didn't sign up for this.
Nobody said we're going to torture people.
And then they come home.
Or there was a secretary who fainted once when she happened to be in the room while Abu Zubaydah was being tortured.
And she curtailed her assignment.
That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, I'm coming home.
I'm not doing this anymore.
That is a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment.
And I remember thinking, so I'm not the only one who thinks this is illegal.
Certainly somebody's going to come out and say something.
The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation.
Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal.
And when that finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, made a statement that still kind of sticks in my mind.
There is no such thing as sleep deprivation.
He said, I have a standup desk in my office.
I don't even have a chair in my office.
And sometimes I'll work 24 hours and then into the next day, 36 hours.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep and they begin to die.
Their organs begin to shut down at day nine.
But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days.
And that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die.
They would have heart failure, you know.
Well by then I had been in the CIA Well by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations after 9-11 I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years and and I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country and
How do they keep them awake?
You chain them to that eye bolt in the ceiling again.
You have these industrial strength lights on them 24 hours a day and like death metal 24 hours on volume 11.
And they just can't sleep because if they collapse, they'll pull their arms out of their sockets.
They're chained to that eye bolt.
And then when people would die...
They would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building, put him in the hole, cover it up and then bring the next guy in.
There was one guy they reported on and headquarters wrote back and said, just put him on ice until we can figure out what to do.
And they literally just put him in a bathtub and filled it with ice and then just decided a couple of days later he started to turn.
We should probably bury this guy.
And the Justice Department never said anything about that.
They're like, oh, listen, you know, you can do these techniques.
And if you kill him, just bury him out back.
And that wasn't the that wasn't the approved operation.
That's that's the worst part of this.
No, none of it was effective.
You know, I say this all the time, Joe.
It's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.
But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations.
They've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in 45 and 46.
These guys know what they're doing.
And so with Abu Zubaydah as an example, we captured Abu Zubaydah.
And normally overseas, the CIA has primacy.
Domestically, the FBI has primacy.
But 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation.
And so we sent Abu Zubaydah out to the secret site and the FBI took over.
The CIA was furious about this.
But there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Soufan who did exactly as he was trained to do.
And he began to engage Abu Zubaydah in a conversation.
And Abu Zubaydah just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.
This went on for weeks, but you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange.
If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever.
And finally he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives.
And I'll give you two examples.
Number one, we had no idea what the Al Qaeda wiring diagram looked like.
We knew it was bin Laden and Zawadi.
And then we just didn't know anything.
what the organization was like, how it was built.
So he explained to us how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized.
Yeah, Mike's a great guy.
So cell A had no idea what cell B was doing.
And Ali said, as an example...
if you want to do an operation in let's say dusseldorf how would you do that and abu zubaydah said well there's this guy muhammad and here's his here's his phone number muhammad lives in dusseldorf and he has a cousin abdullah and abdullah has access to weapons and here's abdullah's email and then abdullah's got a friend rashid they meet at the coffee shop and rashid has has access to explosives
Al Qaeda was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them.
And then we're able to call the Germans and say, hey, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf.
And here's what you need to do.
And then they kick down the door and they grab these guys.
The other thing that he told us, and he laughed, actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
He was talking about Mukhtar, a guy using the nom de guerre Mukhtar.
We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Mukhtar, who was a very bad guy.
In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka operation.
It was supposed to be carried out
in the Philippines and the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States.
It just so happened that one day Mukhtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch.
And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment.
And she sees all this stuff laid out.
And she said, that looks like a terrorist attack being planned.
The cops come and say, oh, this looks like a terrorist attack.
And so my job was to find them and grab them.
We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service.
They come and look at it.
And somebody says, we should probably call the CIA on this.
And so we confiscated everything.
And Bojinka was disrupted.
Thinking nobody's going to come.
Nobody's going to see it.
So we knew there was this guy out there planning this big thing.
And his name was Mukhtar.
Abu Zubaydah laughed at us and said, you don't know who Mukhtar is?
And Abu Zubaydah said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
That's the first time we ever heard that name.
We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And then just hold them or send them to trial was the original idea.
But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together.
And it was thanks to Abu Zubaydah, in turn, thanks to Ali Soufan's treating Abu Zubaydah with respect.
But on August the 1st, George Tenet, 2002, George Tenet went to the White House and he asked the president for reasons that have never been made clear.
He asked the president to turn over primacy to the CIA.
and the CIA director, Robert Mueller, to his credit, he knew exactly what was gonna come.
Not only withdrew FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI personnel from the country that the secret site was in.
And within 12 hours, the CIA began to torture Abu Zubaydah.
And we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right?
He went completely silent and remained silent.
And then the FBI went back to the president and said, look, the CIA is screwing this up.
We were getting all this intelligence from this guy.
Now he won't say anything.
And we're putting him in a coffin.
And we heard that he had this irrational fear of bugs.
box of cockroaches on him in the coffin and close up the coffin and we would open it up every couple days to change his diaper and give him food and he went nuts and so finally the White House turns everything back over to the FBI it takes Ali months to get him to talk again and then he starts talking again and he's given us more and more information about
Al-Qaeda operations in Malaysia and anti-Australia operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al-Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia.
And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing them again and screwed it all up.
Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
I think for a couple of reasons.
I think we should never underestimate the motivating factor of, of a desire for revenge, right?
We had killed Mohammed Atif.
This was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the country.
3000 people died because we hadn't done our jobs.
He doesn't really talk about his work a lot.
So that was one thing.
The other thing is the CIA had entered into an agreement with these two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in October of 2001.
And they said, hey, we've reverse engineered the military's SEER program.
And we think this would be an effective but harsh interrogation technique.
He was the head of what they called military affairs for Al-Qaeda.
And so we were chomping at the bit at the agency to try this thing out without using the word torture.
We paid those guys $108 million to say, oh, we think you should torture people.
Here are the torture techniques.
Just let us know when you want us to start.
$108 million for that.
And so we thought, well, we've already spent the money and we really do want revenge on these guys.
We killed him at Tora Bora.
I think that's what it was.
So how did you get in trouble?
But then there was Abu Zubaydah.
I waited for somebody to say something about torture and nobody did.
And then I got divorced.
My kids moved with my ex-wife to Ohio and they were little, they needed their dad.
So I decided I'm gonna leave the agency, go into the private sector so I can see my boys on the weekends.
And then there was this unknown person that we later killed.
And still I waited for somebody to say something and nobody did.
Now, I wish that I could tell you
that I stood up and I took a stand, and that wasn't it at all.
I got a call in December of 2007.
So now I'm out of the agency three and a half years.
I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News.
And he said that he had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
I said that was absolutely false.
I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.
I said I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or any other prisoner.
And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
Well, I had never spoken to a reporter before.
So we were looking for any of these four or five people.
I didn't know that was a reporter's trick.
So I said, I'll think about it.
In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday.
President Bush gives a press conference and.
The International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners.
Human Rights Watch said CIA is torturing prisoners and Amnesty International said CIA is torturing prisoners.
And then there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole bombing.
So a reporter says, look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners.
What's your response to that?
And the president looks right in the camera and he goes, we do not torture like that.
And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, he is a bald-faced liar.
He's looking the American people right in the eye, and he's lying to us.
And she said, are you surprised?
Well, then on Wednesday, two days later...
He gets another a similar question.
And he said that there is no torture.
And then another two days later, it's Friday.
And he's walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend.
And a reporter shouts another question about torture.
And this time he stops and he turns and he says, well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer.
And I said to my wife, Brian Ross's sources at the White House, and they're going to pin this on me.
so i called brian ross and i said i'll give you your interview and i decided in the whatever it was why did you think they were going to put it on you because they were calling you the human rights guy so that you were going to be a patsy and i was not willing to assume that i assumed yeah because that's just your experience with the organization oh yeah they're going to leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves so i called brian ross i said i'll give you your interview
So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah.
And I decided that whatever he was gonna ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was gonna ask me, I was just gonna tell the truth.
And so he met me at the ABC News studios on DeSales Street in Washington.
And I said three things in that interview.
that changed the course of the rest of my life.
I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official US government policy.
It was not the result of any rogue officer.
And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself.
And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI saying that I had revealed classified information.
The FBI then investigates me from December of 07 to December of 08.
And then they send my attorney a letter called the declination letter declining to prosecute.
They said that they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there because of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross.
But most importantly, torture is a crime.
And it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people.
It took us six weeks to track him down.
My wife and I went out to celebrate that night.
Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan at first CIA director.
But the liberals went crazy because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program.
And we were close a couple of times.
Everybody seems to forget that now.
And we can get into that if you want.
But he then names Brennan the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.
Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new attorney general, and says, talking about me, charge him with espionage.
Close where we would bust down the door and there's like an uneaten, like half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning.
And Holder writes back, we got these memos in discovery.
Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage.
And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage.
They waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the espionage charges.
There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University.
The book is called Three Felonies a Day.
And he says that we are so over-regulated, so over-criminalized in this country that the average American on the average day
Going about his or her normal daily business commits three felonies every single day.
So if they want to get you, they're going to get you.
Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking and he knew we were close.
And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
I've known John Brennan for 35 years.
We never really cared for each other.
To tell you the truth, I thought the guy was in over his head intellectually.
When I first started there, he was a deputy group chief.
He was a GS-15 nobody, journeyman, first line, second line manager.
There are hundreds of them.
And he worked for this really wonderful woman, a great intellect named Martha Kessler.
And Martha was so highly respected.
She had written this book.
I still remember the title called Syria, Fragile Mosaic of Power.
And when you got hired, you got her book and you had to read the book because like, this is what we do.
This is the perfect example of what we do.
One day he went to her and he said, Martha, you know, I've been your deputy for X number of years.
I think I'm ready for promotion into the senior intelligence service.
And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a couple of weeks ago about this.
And then the question is, what do you want to do with him?
Martha said, not only will you never be a member of the senior intelligence service, I don't even want you working for me anymore.
Well, you're not really fired at the CIA.
If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job.
If you can't find another job in six weeks, then they escort you to your car.
They take your badge and, you know, so long.
Well, it's the normal job turnover is in the summertime.
And they told me, hang on to him.
This is the week before Christmas, 1993 or 4, I can't recall now.
And there are no jobs open at Christmas.
So he finally finds one job.
We're going to send out a plane and we'll take it from there.
It is in the PDB staff, the president's daily brief.
And it is as a morning briefer.
Giving the president's daily brief briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing.
Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal.
So that's the National Security Council's director for intelligence programs who happened to be this guy named George Tenet.
And so they immediately hit it off.
Two alpha dogs, cigar smoking, hard drinking.
There used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the White House that sold cigars.
Tenant had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke and his wife would yell at him.
So they would, after the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand there and laugh and talk about chasing women or whatever.
Then Tenet becomes the deputy director of the CIA.
So he brings Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss, deputy director of the office that Martha's working in.
And I wasn't cleared to know what they were going to do with him.
He calls Martha Kessler in and says, now you're fired.
And so she just elected to retire.
being identified by Tenet as the guy.
This guy is going places.
He needs operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years.
I'm going to make him the station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He's never served overseas before, never recruited a spy ever.
Just like the guys on the plane weren't cleared to know who it was we had captured and why they were taking this guy where they were taking him.
Now, all of a sudden, he's the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world.
So he does that for a long time.
By the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9-11 hijackers.
And then he comes back as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA.
So it's director, deputy director, executive director, and then the deputy directors for operations, intelligence, science, technology, administration.
And they're dotted lines.
So he's now one of the five directors.
most senior people in the entire cia he does that for a couple of years and then becomes the executive director by the time i get promoted to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant i'm throwing all these stupid terms out executive assistant to the deputy director for operations i'm meeting with brennan every single day so we're we're doing the iraq war we're doing terrorism and al-qaeda and all this stuff
He didn't like me and I didn't like him.
And then when I became the quote unquote human rights guy, that just kind of sealed it for me.
But I didn't care because I didn't respect him anyhow.
I will say that Jim Pavitt, the deputy director for operations, legendary officer and a really great guy, he hated Brennan more than I did.
And he used to mock Brennan because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, I want to head my own agency.
I want to head my own agency.
And they finally put him in charge of this thing that was temporarily called the T-TIC, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center.
It later became the National Counterterrorism Center.
And they sort of shunted him off there.
And it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in the headquarters building.
It was one of the outlying buildings.
And then he kind of went away.
Yeah, it's all need to know.
But where he really did write for himself
is in 2007, there was this wave of retirements, right?
In fact, when I got onto the plane, three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane.
We're enough now beyond 9-11 that people can begin to retire.
So this huge wave of senior level retirements in 07.
And then once these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign.
Well, as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan decided he was going to have my head.
And so he asked Holder to have the FBI grab me.
And I'll tell you what, they knew they didn't have a case.
So there's a little bit of background.
From 2009 to the end of 2011, I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for John Kerry.
We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane.
It was a terrible job.
Kerry said, oh, I want you to do this and do that.
And we're going to investigate this, investigate that.
And then he would kill all the investigations because he wanted to be secretary of state and he didn't want to piss anybody at the White House off.
So I can't talk about how Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin and all of it is because the CIA said they could.
I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens.
I can't talk about the Dasht-e-Laylee massacre where 2000 Taliban soldiers were suffocated to death in container trucks because the CIA didn't punch holes for them to breathe in the containers.
Then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down.
Can't talk about any of that stuff because you wanna be the Secretary of State.
And right before I left,
I got a call from a Japanese diplomat.
And this is one of the things that I loved about that job is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats.
And what do you think about Israel?
What do you think about China?
And one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on.
What do you think about what's going on in Mexico or Cuba or whatever?
And I get a call from this Japanese diplomat and he invites me to lunch.
We meet at a place on Capitol Hill.
And I remember that lunch very well.
I remember we talked about Israeli elections.
We talked about Turkish elections.
And we talked about the Arab-Israeli peace process.
And at the end of the lunch, he says to me, and I should add, his English was so bad that we had to do the lunch in Arabic.
So he said, what's next for you?
And I said, well, I think I'm going to resign soon.
I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years.
It's been two and a half.
I have five kids and I really need to make some money and put my kids through college.
And I said, what the fuck is wrong with you?
You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch?
Shame on you, cold pitching me like that.
And I got up indignantly and I walked out.
And I walked, and I mean directly without stopping, to the office of the Senate security officer.
And I knocked on the door.
I said, hey, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer.
And I said, who are you?
And he goes, was it that damn Russian again?
And I said, no, it was Japanese.
I said, I know, right?
He goes, well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information.
And he lifts up his mask and he's an old boss of mine.
I said, this didn't have anything to do with trade information.
We didn't even get that far.
He said, okay, do me a favor.
He said, I've got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the Internet.
Write it up as a memo, and I'm going to courier it over to the FBI.
So I sat there, and I wrote the whole thing, blow by blow.
The next day he calls me and he says, two FBI agents are gonna come up and talk to you.
So they come up, I recount the whole lunch and they said, all right, here's what we want you to do.
We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch and then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it.
And I said, because I'm a patriot, I said, you want me to wear a wire?
And they said, no, we're going to be at the next table.
We're going to listen to everything.
And I said, hey, what are you doing here?
I said, but he only speaks Arabic.
We got a guy who speaks Arabic.
I invite him to lunch.
We go to lunch, do the whole thing.
He said, oh, I came to take your prisoner.
But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called and they said, operation came up.
Just write us another memo.
Do the lunch and write us another memo.
So I read another memo.
They asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time.
The fifth time, he says to me, I have great news.
He said, I got my dream job.
I said, where are you taking him?
I've been promoted and I'm going to be the deputy ambassador in Cairo.
And I said, congratulations.
I shook his hand, never saw him again.
So I've written all this to the FBI.
One day in January of 2012, so I've been out of the Senate for about nine months.
And he said, I can't tell you.
And I look at my cell phone.
It says Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I was like, I wonder what that's all about.
And they said, hey, you remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago?
And they said, we've got a similar situation and we need your help.
You don't have a need to know.
And again, because I'm a patriot, I said...
I kick myself now for saying it.
I said, anything for the FBI.
What do you want me to do?
I said, no, that's cool.
They said, come down to the Washington field office Thursday morning at 10.
I go down there the next Thursday and they're waiting for me at the entrance, which I thought was odd.
He said, who is he anyway?
And we go up to a conference room and they said, we're both cleared SITK gamma.
And then there were two compartments above top secret that I was cleared for that they said they were cleared for.
And so if the if the conversation necessitated it, we could go into that area.
I said, oh, dude, I'm sorry.
So, they said, well, before we start, just wanted to ask you, just read your book.
You don't have a need to know.
Hey, what about this that you said in your book?
And I was like, yeah, okay.
Yeah, it was a cool story.
What about this other thing?
I said, it was kind of hard.
He says, yeah, fair enough.
It took me nine months to write the book, 22 months to get it cleared.
Oh, yeah, you got it cleared.
Yeah, of course I got it cleared.
22 months it took me to get it cleared.
I'm thinking, what an odd question.
Then they start asking me about something called the Sam Adams Project.
And I said, I'm sorry, I don't know what that means.
And then the bad cop of the two says, we know you've been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys.
I said, what are you talking about?
And then I said, wait a minute.
Are you investigating me?
And they said, yeah, and we're raiding your house right now as we speak.
And then your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and get his family story.
And I said, thank God.
I said, I want to speak to my attorney right now.
That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me.
And one of the things that I learned, and this became painfully evident when they started arresting January 6th people, was the FBI in Washington likes to make its arrests on Thursdays.
Because there are no federal arraignments on Friday.
So you're in the DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you.
And then they arraign you on Monday.
And then you want to make a deal just so you don't ever have to go inside that prison again.
But because I asked to see my attorney, they let me go.
So I called the attorney as soon as I got out of the office.
Actually, when I was walking out,
One of them went over to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was Peter Strzok.
And Peter Strzok says, tell me he implicated himself.
And the guy said, not really, no, we have to let him go.
Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he's going.
And so I grabbed my cell phone and I left, went to the attorney's office.
They had already called my attorney and said they were charging me with espionage.
I hadn't committed espionage.
They knew I hadn't committed espionage.
And in fact, since then, I'm fast forwarding a lot.
Three FBI agents have reached out to me.
Well, two to my attorneys.
One reached out to me directly to apologize, saying that this came from the top.
They thought it was a BS case.
They were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they could do.
One guy reached out to me through eBay, of all things.
Like to try to cover up the trail.
He's like, listen, I've been losing sleep over this for, excuse me, for the last 13 years.
I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.
It's like, well, I hope you feel better.
My whole life fell apart, but I'm glad you got that off your chest.
So it became a matter of just survival after that.
And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria.
You have to take it seriously.
I was facing 45 years in prison.
And then when the Justice Department
made a request for a proffer meeting.
The proffer meeting is, they'll give you a little idea of what they have against you and then they make an offer.
You can take it or leave it.
And they offered me 45 years.
And I said, I'm not doing 45 minutes.
Athens was a tough place.
I didn't do anything wrong.
And this woman, she became deputy attorney general for the criminal division under Biden.
She said, take this deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.
I went home that night and.
I'm ashamed to even say it.
That night we put the kids to bed and my wife and I were watching TV and she said, come on, let's go to bed.
I said, I can't sleep.
There's no way I'm going to be able to sleep.
And she said, no, come on, let's go to bed.
She knew I was going to go down into the garage, turn the car on and just lay across the backseat.
And she said, no, come on.
You need to try to get some sleep.
She saved me that night.
And one of the senior guys from the Counterterrorism Center came up to me very casually.
And so they waited 10 months before they were even willing to engage in a conversation.
And then they offered 10 years on a Monday.
On Wednesday, they offered eight.
And on Friday, they offered five.
My lead attorney was this legendary guy named Plato Kacheris.
And Plato said, you know, I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years.
And this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time.
He said, usually they offer you 10.
You say, no, the next offers 15.
Then the next offers 20.
I said, why are they coming down in time?
He said, cause they have a shit case and they know it's shit.
And that's why we're going to go to trial and we're going to win this thing.
And he said, oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
They stayed at five and then they came back and they said, three and a half.
And I said, I'm going to trial.
I'm going to win this thing.
Turned out at the time, my best friend, his wife had an uncle who was OJ Simpson's jury consultant.
And she called him for me and she said, hey, my friend John, he's in this situation.
He's like, yeah, I read about this in the papers.
He could use your help.
I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
He came up, didn't charge me a cent.
He came up to Washington.
We got him a security clearance, which was another thing.
We asked for a security clearance.
And then the Justice Department called and said, the White House said Kiriakou's attorneys have enough security clearances.
And I said, who at the White House said we have enough security clearances?
Well, they had to tell us that it was John Brennan.
No more attorneys for Kiriakou.
We're like, it's not up to John Brennan to decide if I have enough attorneys.
They have an unlimited number of attorneys, an unlimited budget.
As it turned out, they spent $6 million to put me in prison.
Was society really better off spending $6 million to put me in a low security prison for 23 months?
And I had never heard that term before.
So in the end, they said, best and final offer, 30 months, you do 23.
Well, I was the only the second American who had ever been charged with this crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
At the time, the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.
The only other person that was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scranage.
She was a CIA secretary in Ghana in the 80s.
And she was having an affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service.
And in the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers in the station and the names of the sources they were running.
I said, enhanced interrogation techniques.
And so the Ghanaians executed these guys.
She got nine months in prison.
And they offer me 45 years for blowing the whistle on the torture program.
My wife and I stayed up all night, literally all night.
And because Sharon's Greenwich had taken a plea, there was literally no case law.
So what we found, we found several things.
We found several articles from the Harvard Law Review saying this law is unconstitutional.
And he goes, we're going to start getting rough with these guys like that.
It violates the first amendment and it is prior restraint, right?
Like it tells you in advance, you can't say X, Y, and Z.
But because there was no case law, you couldn't challenge it in court.
And I said, well, can't we just appeal the charge and maybe all the way up to the Supreme Court?
And they said, yeah, we can do that post-conviction.
And then you're going to be 45 years waiting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing.
So I decided by 6 a.m.
I'm going to turn it down.
And I said, what's that mean?
I believed in my heart.
I hadn't done anything right.
It was a vendetta by John Brennan and Obama, by all accounts.
I had friends, of course, who were still working at the agency and working at the at the CIA or at the White House.
And they said that Obama.
had this Nixonian obsession with national security leaks.
So he describes these 10 techniques.
And it's because that came from Brennan.
Obama was a senator for two years.
He didn't have any experience doing anything.
So he did what John Brennan told him to do.
And Brennan said, you got to crack down on these leaks.
They do nothing but embarrass us.
So I decided I'm going to turn it down.
I send an email to my attorneys.
I was paying half of them, five of them.
And then one of them writes back and says, put on a pot of coffee.
We'll be at the house by seven.
So they come to my house.
The four main ones came to the house.
Plato was the first one in.
I imagine this 80 year old, six foot two, 280 pound mean old man.
And I said, I don't know, man, that sounds like a torture program.
He comes in and I said, good morning, Plato.
And he said, you stupid son of a bitch.
Take the deal like that.
I said, take the deal.
You're the one that told me not to take the deal.
You're the one who told me we're going to go to trial and win this thing.
And he says, I only told you that to keep your spirits up.
And then the second one, his partner, Bob Trout, a sweet guy.
And he said, it's not a torture program.
gentleman, a Southern gentleman.
He says, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal.
And I'm like, now what do I do?
And then the third, who was the guy, Mark McDougal, one of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life.
We got it cleared by the Justice Department and the president signed it.
And the one that I liked and respected the most out of all of them, I liked all of them and respected all of them, but I felt a connection to this guy.
He was a little bit angry and he said, you know what your problem is?
Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice.
It's about mitigating damage.
And I looked at my wife.
She's just like, what are we going to do?
And I got two and a half years in prison, and they made me do every single day of it.
He says, think about it.
In fact, we went to sentencing, and this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court.
And the reason why we didn't go to trial in the end was that the O.J.
I said, yeah, give me an hour.
Simpson jury consultant said, if we were in any other district in America –
I would say, let's go for it.
We're going to win this thing.
But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire jury is going to be people from the CIA, from the FBI, from DOD, from intelligence community contractors.
I need an hour to think about it.
He said, buddy, you don't have a prayer.
So at sentencing, my attorney said, your honor, we request that Mr. Kiriakou be sent to a minimum security work camp.
She says, any objection from the justice department?
I walked out of the cafeteria.
They said, no objection.
She goes, okay, minimum security work camp.
No bars on the windows, no locks on the doors.
You're free to come and go as you please.
You're just on your honor not to abscond.
I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor.
And then most of the guys work, there's a little college in town.
You go sweep the floors or whatever.
So I got to the prison.
And it's weird, the system that we have, Joe.
You just you walk up and you knock on the door and you say, hi, I'm John Kiriak.
I'm here to turn myself in.
And your friends and family just drive away.
And so they said, yeah, you got to go across the street to the actual prison.
They'll process you and then they just bring you back over here.
And I said, OK, so I go across the street.
And I said, I'm John Kiriakou.
I'm here to turn myself in.
And the guy takes me by the arm.
And there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East, knocked on his door, no appointment or anything.
We go outside and we start walking around to the back of the prison.
And I said, no, no, I'm supposed to be at the minimum security camp across the street.
And the guy laughs at me and he goes, not according to my paperwork, you're not.
And I was like, oh my God, take it easy.
Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, make it as difficult as possible.
So I told myself, take it easy.
If you make any ruckus, they're going to put you in solitary.
So I didn't say a word.
It took him about 40 minutes to process me.
Then they walked me to my cell.
The only thing the cop said to me, he says, a word of advice, buddy.
If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression.
Now I'm going to get my ass kicked.
And then I started that whole odyssey.
FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, which is a low security prison, but it's called a low medium.
And then there's a high medium.
So this was a low medium.
It took me five days to get access to a phone.
And I called Mark McDougal, the attorney that I liked so much.
And I said, Mark, they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins.
Well, he said we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then.
And I said, hey, I need some advice.
He said, buddy, I'm sorry.
You're going to have to tough it out.
And so that's what I did.
I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques.
I was frankly very angry when I got out.
I didn't realize how angry I was.
Like people would mention it to me.
Like maybe you should talk to somebody.
Maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option.
There's nothing wrong with me.
I'm ready to fight and march and raise my fist against the Obama administration.
And so I was wrong, of course.
I was so angry that it wasn't even healthy for the people around me.
But I'll tell you, Joe, the hardest thing is you think you can just step back into your life again.
What do you think of that?
And you'll never be able to step back into your life again.
And he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade.
So I thought, okay, well, I'm highly educated.
bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies.
I have a master's degree in legislative policy analysis.
I finished my PhD classwork in international affairs.
I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber.
I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere.
So you couldn't even get a job driving for Uber?
He said, this is a torture program.
But you know what, though?
Well, I was confident that I was right and they were wrong.
Unfortunately, she's now my ex-wife, but she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever gave me.
She said, you have to keep telling your side of the story because eventually they're going to move on to their next victim.
They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program and torture is a slippery slope.
And if you keep talking, your side of the story is going to be the side of record.
And eventually the truth is going to come out.
And sure enough, six weeks before I was released from prison, I called her.
I was allowed to call her every other day for 15 minutes.
So I called her and I said, how was your day?
And she said, it was great.
And she said, because the Senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true.
And I said, that is great.
And she said, John McCain stood up on the floor of the Senate and
and said, if it weren't for John Kiriakou, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name.
And so when I got home, God bless him.
One of the first calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff.
And he said, Senator McCain says, welcome home.
He said, you know how these guys are.
And he wants to know what he can do to be helpful.
And I said, oh my God.
I liked McCain very much from when I was working on Kerry's staff.
Kerry was a little jealous of McCain.
And McCain would go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi Carrie said to me one time Why don't you two get a room or something and I said no I said it's we have this connection over torture I said McCain takes me seriously and I take him seriously and so when I when I spoke to McCain I said these damn Obama people they confiscated my pension and I'm gonna have to work until the day I die.
Somebody's going to be a cowboy.
They're going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner.
They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension and
So he came up with this idea.
It was a great idea to write an amendment.
My attorney wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016.
And it said that every American.
And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation.
convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated.
So, of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to.
So he said, nobody reads these 1500 page bills.
We're going to slip it in there.
And he said, I'm going to be on the conference committee.
We'll get it taken care of.
He got a brain tumor and he wasn't named to the conference committee.
Then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody is going to go to prison.
And so they pulled it back out again and then he died.
And so here I am 10 years later.
The only way that this can be made right is with a presidential pardon.
And that's what I've been working on for years now.
I was offered a job at a small think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies.
And they said, we'll give you an office, but you're gonna have to raise your own salary.
And so it was just like constant GoFundMe.
Do you want to go to prison?
So I did that for a year, I made $20,000 for the year.
And I said, I can't do this, it's untenable.
And so I just decided, look, no company is gonna hire me, right?
I can't go back into government again.
So I'm gonna have to work for myself.
So I I had already written my first book made number number five on the New York Times bestsellers list my second book I wrote longhand from prison.
I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
I ended up winning two literary awards for that book I won the the pen First Amendment award which along with the pen Faulkner the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allan Poe is one of the big four and then I won the forward reviews memoir of the year that year and
As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison.
I thought, I'm going to keep writing books.
I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium for Independent Journalism.
So it's like 200 small town papers around the country.
And, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting.
And then the Greek government.
But I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
I happen to be Greek American.
My grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes.
As soon as I was arrested, like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, what can we do to be helpful?
And I said, you can give me citizenship.
And man, like that, I got Greek citizenship.
I went back downstairs.
And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law.
And then they passed it quickly.
The parliament passed it into law and then the European Union adopted it.
I said, listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this.
So I went to Brussels and I testified there and then they repackaged it.
Now it's the law of the land and all of the European Union.
And then people in the States began taking me more seriously.
I started doing some paid speaking gigs.
I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple of different universities.
And then, you know, after a while,
You can make an OK living.
I'm still going to have to work until the day I die because I have literally nothing saved.
It all went to the attorneys and, you know, hope for the best.
I will say that I was a third generation Democrat.
I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it.
I left the Democratic Party ages ago and.
John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions convinced me that I had done the right thing.
And now I have found common cause with populist Republicans.
You don't have to agree on every issue, right?
You don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe in and everything they stand for.
The funny thing is I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in Al Qaeda.
But I've struck up a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson.
sweetest guy in the world and a great supporter of mine and Judge Napolitano.
It's a love fest every time the two of us get together.
And I realized that, you know, this thing, this political system we have, it's antiquated.
You have to engage with the individual.
Like, I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene on some of these civil liberties issues.
Or Thomas Massey or Bernie Sanders, for that matter.
But I've realized that I've got to I've got to stand up for what's right, not what the DNC happens to think what's right or some politician that I used to think I had respect for thinks is right.
It was a combination of two things.
And I got passed over for promotion.
A couple of nights before I left for prison, the director, the former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who later became the deputy director for operations and was very close to Brennan.
He was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA.
He tweeted at me and he said, don't drop the soap with a laughing emoji.
I gave myself a couple hours to cool off, and then I texted back, and I said, Jose, I'm on the right side of history, and you are not.
And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.
And that gave me such peace.
I knew I could go to prison, survive this just fine, and come out and still make an impact.
And, you know, knock on wood, that's how it's worked out.
You know, and you get to prison.
one of my attorneys said, Hey, I've had, I've collected a list of 600 emails, email addresses from people who want to know how you're doing.
Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send me a letter and I'll send it around to these people.
The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
It took me, you don't realize it, but you're in shock for the first week or two.
And then I started settling into the routine and it was kind of
I mean, it was pretty screwed up.
That first day, 20 minutes after the cop warned me about people coming into my room unannounced, these two guys just walk in boldly, just walk in.
I go, what do you want?
One of them has a swastika on his neck.
It took up his entire neck.
It came up onto his face.
The other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids.
So I go, what do you want?
And the swastika guy says, you the new guy?
And he says, you a fag?
I said, no, I'm not a fag.
I said, no, I didn't have anybody else in my case.
And he says, 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.
And he goes, okay, you could sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria.
And I was like, oh, I guess I'm with the Aryans now.
And then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the Bonanno family.
And then the guy who had given me the advice
And one day he said to me, I would get the New York Times and he would get the New York Post and we would trade at the end of each day.
Let me ask you something, he says.
Why you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria?
I said, I don't know, Pete.
My first day here, they told me to sit with them.
He goes, from today, you're with the Italians.
And they became my closest friends.
I mean, I got a book out of it.
They were absolutely wonderful people.
Honorable, honest, fun, the smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most respect.
saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he promoted me out of cycle.
And once word was out that I was with the Italians, it was hands off.
There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous.
And it was thanks to one guy.
Shout out to Mark Lanzalotti.
And he saw in the New York Times I was going to be assigned to that prison on a Sunday.
I was assigned on Thursday.
And he took it upon himself to go to every one of the Italians to say, there's a CIA guy coming here.
The FBI are cops and rats.
The CIA protected us from the Muslims.
And they're like, oh, okay.
And so it was, you know, welcome.
God, it has to be insanely stressful.
It was like living in the twilight zone.
The stress will kill you.
You see people break down all the time.
So I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough.
And it's not like you're going to be taken out to some medical unit someplace.
You go to solitary and you can live or die down in there.
Oh, so I was telling you.
So I waited about six weeks before I was comfortable enough to write a letter.
So I very arrogantly called it Letter from Loretto because I had such respect for Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail.
And so I said two things in this.
I mean, I talked about the food and I talked about the Italians and...
And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years.
But I said two things.
I said there was this one guard who was really abusive.
She was absolutely horrible.
You know that phrase, rode hard and put away wet?
That was this woman, all tatted out from the neck down and just a nasty, mean old woman.
So I was walking through the hall one day and she said, hey, are you that motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce at mail call?
Just like it's spelled.
She goes, how about if I call you fuck face?
Somebody later told me they're not allowed to talk to us that way.
That's a violation of, you know, code 11.8 subsection, you know, B, whatever.
We earned the same men's group, we went to the same church, and he happens to be both a brigadier general in the army and a CIA psychiatrist.
So I wrote it in the in the letter and I was just like, you know, life in prison.
What am I going to do?
This this woman swears at me.
There's nothing I can do.
The other thing was more important.
I had been there three days and one of my cellmates was an Australian arsonist.
And he said, let me walk you around and introduce you to the guys.
We go to this other housing unit and there's a little tiny guy there who didn't speak any English.
And he said, this is, I forget what his name is, Ahmed or something.
And I said, it's very nice to meet you.
It's very nice to meet you.
Turns out he was there on a terrorism charge.
He was the imam of some mosque in New York and somebody was trying to sell a Stinger missile to somebody.
He translated the document, the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in this terrorism case.
So I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day.
And usually if you're being called into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary.
So I hear my name, Kiriakou, Lieutenant's office, immediately.
Always with immediately.
And they know you can't do it immediately because all the doors are locked.
So I wait for a 10 minute move period.
The bells ring and I go to the Lieutenant's office.
I said, you wanted to see me.
And they have this guy's picture on a computer screen.
And he said to me one day, buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.
I said, I don't know him.
I said, I said, nice to meet you.
What did he say to you?
He said, nice to meet you too.
Well, after you walked out, he called a number in Pakistan and they told him to kill you.
I said, get the fuck out of here.
I could kill this guy with my thumb.
No, no, no, don't do that.
We've been looking for a reason to transfer him out.
So every time I see this guy, I give him the stink eye, right?
And then he gives me the stink eye back.
But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that doesn't make any sense.
He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish.
Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan?
That just didn't make sense.
So I saw him in the yard and I went up to him and he got kind of scared like he was going to try to defend himself.
And I had, you know, six inches and a hundred pounds on this guy.
So I said, I said, wait a minute.
I just want to ask you a question.
Did the cops say anything to you about me?
And I said, yeah, I don't care.
I said, what did they say to you?
And he said, they told me that after we met, you called a number in Washington and they told you to kill me.
And I said, oh, they did, did they?
So I went back to the law library and I looked this up and this was a class D felony.
It was conspiring to commit violence in a federal facility.
And he said, you know that's not a compliment, right?
It's punishable by up to five years in prison.
So I wrote it in my letter and I sent it to my attorney and I didn't give it a second thought.
I didn't know my attorney was friends with Arianna Huffington, who then put it on Huffington Post with this banner headline, millions of hits.
The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me.
And it's in, I mean, it's everywhere from CNN to Playboy to The Economist and Time Magazine when Time Magazine was a thing.
And NPR is calling the prison to interview me.
And the next thing I know, I'm called to the warden's office.
And I said, Steve, they're wrong about this.
Well, that's in an off limits part of the facility.
So the warden calls me in.
He's like, I'm going to send you to solitary right now.
And I thought, you know, is now the time to be.
to be humble before the warden, or should I stake my claim?
And I said, warden, with all due respect, I've gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you?
And I'm right about it.
He said, yeah, we'll see what you say when you've spent some time in solitary.
I said, I've lived in Yemen, in Pakistan.
I'm not afraid of your Loretto, Pennsylvania solitary.
Besides, I said, go ahead and send me to solitary.
One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November.
CNN is going to be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot.
And I just looked at him.
I never went to solitary, not for a minute.
I said, I'm comfortable with the decision that I made.
They did it one other time.
My, one of my attorneys know who orchestrated that.
No, I don't think he was smart enough.
I don't think he cared enough.
It had to come from the agency.
There was one other incident too.
And I just left it at that.
I lived in the same block of cells with an Afghan American pharmacist who had an oxy problem.
And he came up to me one day and he said, hey, the spokesman for the Taliban is here now and he wants to meet you.
I said, the spokesman for the Taliban?
I didn't realize though how much I had pissed them off until later on.
I said, are you talking about that case in New Jersey?
I said, I don't have anything to say to the spokesman of the Taliban.
I don't want to meet him.
And he said, oh, okay, I'll tell him.
So I'm out in the yard one day.
And my attorney had warned me, they're upset at the shortness of your sentence.
They're going to try to set you up and add years on.
So I'm out in the yard and here comes this guy with a beard down to his waist and he's got his hand out to shake my hand.
And I put my hands up.
so as not to touch him.
And I looked just past him and there's a guard in the woods outside the thing with a long distance camera lens.
And he's going click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
And I said, don't you even think about touching me?
And he said, oh, come on, man.
We have a lot in common.
I said, we have nothing in common.
I spent half my career trying to kill people like you.
I said, get away from me.
Don't touch me or you're going to end up unconscious on the ground.
And he walked away and then he got transferred out.
And I said, isn't it interesting that the spokesman for the Taliban was sent to our prison and was only here for four days?
Isn't that interesting?
And then they just gave up.
It wasn't even effective.
But you know what, though, Joe?
When these guys die and they've started to die.
their obituaries it's gonna say that they were among the creators of the CIA's torture program and so they have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and over and over again that it was the right thing to do what I don't understand is wouldn't they want to be effective
And in fact, they ended up abandoning the torture program.
Mitchell and Jessen took their $108 million and they retired to Florida.
And then subsequent CIA directors following George Tenet said, yeah, you know, this didn't work.
We're not going to do it anymore.
I have to laugh just because it's so nuts.
Yes, and I was the only one I'm almost ashamed to tell you that they asked 14 of us if they wanted if we wanted to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques I was the only one who said no
Nobody's been prosecuted.
So I have a letter that...
that Ronald Reagan's former deputy attorney general generously wrote asking the president to pardon me.
They had killed the CIA station chief, two U.S.
Tucker Carlson signed it.
Judge Napolitano signed it.
Doug Deason, who's a friend of the president, signed it.
Sid Miller, who's here in Texas, has signed it.
And the president's former U.S.
attorney in Utah has signed it.
And then... And I sent it to Ed Martin, the U.S.
Other people have said, oh, I would assign that.
So we have a second letter.
Dr. Phil has agreed to sign it.
There are a couple of other people, high level people.
Ken Higgins, who was the head of the president's transition team, has signed it.
And there are a couple of others.
We had really good news yesterday from the CIA director, John Ratcliffe.
And he said that the CIA has no objection if the president were to pardon me.
We have also a nice one sentence statement from Tulsi Gabbard saying that she has no objection to a pardon.
I'm hoping for the best.
You know what they say in business school?
Hope is not a strategy.
But I genuinely don't know what else to do.
I'm told that all of my detractors are either dead or retired.
A friend of mine from the CIA called me the other day to say something very funny that she was sitting in a mandatory security briefing.
And she said one of the slides was just a picture of me.
And it said the insider threat underneath.
And she said everybody started to boo.
And the instructor said, why?
And one of the guys said, he's not an insider threat.
And she said, in the next running of the class, my picture was removed.
And John Brennan lost.
That's really what it's come down to.
I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.
Truly, I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
And, you know, think of it this way.
Also, at the working level.
These FBI agents don't get promoted by not arresting you.
attorneys don't get promoted by not prosecuting you or by giving you a short sentence.
They all see themselves as having the corner office at the law firm someday or running for Congress or for governor.
And they're going to make that career on your back.
Listen, there are well-documented cases where the FBI infiltrates a group and they go to a meeting.
And literally everybody in the meeting is an FBI agent.
This is what the American taxpayer's money goes for.
Have you heard of the Route 82 bridge plot in Cleveland?
There are three morons sitting in a bar getting drunk.
The other guy comes in.
Hey, you know what we should do?
It would be so much fun.
Blow up the Route 82 bridge.
I have some explosives.
They're like, yeah, let's do Route 82 bridge.
Well, the guy with the explosives is an FBI informant.
And they got like 20, 18, and 15 years in prison.
It was the FBI's idea.
defense attachés, just bad guys all around.
They're just sitting in a bar drinking.
Well, how about January 6th?
Yes, which is funny for a couple of reasons.
Yeah, and as it turns out, the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan.
There was no such thing at the time as an interrogation class.
In 2015 and 2016 with Russiagate.
You know, I remember talking to CIA friends of mine saying, you know, they taught us in training that you've got to follow the evidence.
And there's no evidence that any of this happened.
I worked with Christopher Steele on an operation in London.
25 years ago, 26 years ago, there was this fundamental misunderstanding of what an operations officer was supposed to do.
An operations officer goes out and collects intelligence and then sends it back, and that's it.
Then it's up to the analyst to decide, this is great, this is crap, this is not true, this is partially true, whatever.
So he goes out there, talks to whatever low level, terrible sources he happened to have, writes all this nonsense down, sends it back.
The FBI has deep years long interrogation classes.
And they're like, oh, look what Donald Trump did.
He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed.
One guy made this up and Christopher Steele wrote it and sent it back.
That doesn't make it fact.
Wasn't it funded by Hillary Clinton?
Yeah, which is equally wild.
You made another point I wanted to address.
These January 6th people, let's say that some of them
did do whatever, broke the window, or went into the building unauthorized, okay, then that's deserving of a smack on the hand and a strongly worded letter and maybe a thousand dollar fine.
Again, is society really better off
by locking all these people up and spending millions and millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money to do it.
We never had to interrogate anybody.
And in fact, when we started capturing prisoners in Pakistan in January of 2002, I'm like, well, what do you want me to ask him?
Maybe he shouldn't have been a cop.
If he had such significant health problems.
What do you want me to ask him?
Oh, you'll figure it out.
We want to wreck families and wreck people's lives Why would we want to do that also?
You know, I really don't understand.
So I was working with the Pakistani intelligence service.
It appears that that's exactly what happened.
I'll tell you, if I was at a demonstration and all of a sudden the National Guard showed up, I'd say, ah, this isn't for me.
And I said, listen, I'm usually the good cop.
Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle.
Yeah, we're the good guys.
Do you want to be the bad cop?
And he's like, yeah, I'll be the bad cop.
So we bring the prisoner out.
We're sitting there looking at him.
I said, what's your name?
And the chances are he can't afford a decent attorney or he's not notorious enough and newsworthy enough to to get, you know, a list attorneys volunteering pro bono.
So he's stuck with a public defender.
It's going to spend eight hours on the case and he's going to get screwed in the end.
The Pakistani whacks him across the face.
So I say again, what's your name?
Listen, buddy, just give me your name.
And the media are to blame in part as well.
My friend here, he's not in a very good mood.
He's not a very nice guy.
Just tell me what your name is.
I was raised in a family like you were...
Where I was taught that this was the greatest country on earth.
And then they tell you their name.
And that's why we have to weed out the likes of John Brennan.
That's 62 years after the JFK assassination and we're still learning new information.
Information that's been kept from us.
That's exactly what happened.
I had a friend at the agency.
He was one of my first bosses.
And he had started out in this internship program that the agency had.
He had to be working on a master's degree.
That day in the cafeteria, my colleague explained it in great detail.
But anyway, his first assignment was in the Counterintelligence Center, which at the time was being run by James Angleton.
And on his first day, the secretary walked him around and, you know, this is what we do over here and this is what we do over there.
And there was this entire wall of file folders.
And she said, whatever you do, don't look in those folders.
You're not cleared for that.
Well, he said, well, of course, the very first minute that he's left alone, he runs and looks in the folders.
And he said every single one of those folders was on an American citizen.
And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.
And then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, the DFLP.
And a lot of these techniques are not torture.
And you know the statistic.
The Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during the First World War.
Between 1917 and 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the media.
If I grab you by the lapels and say, dog on you and answer my questions, that's not torture.
Under Barack Obama, eight people were charged with espionage for speaking to the media.
So he was the enemy of whistleblowers.
Yeah, well, look at the Dasht-e-Layli massacre that I mentioned earlier.
It was part of his campaign to open an investigation of Dasht-e-Layli.
What happened was at Dasht-e-Layli, Afghanistan, on November the 30th and December the 1st, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up en masse, right?
And the Northern Alliance...
called us and said, what do we do with all these guys?
We don't have room for them.
So we told them, put them in trucks, take them out to the desert and just hold them there until we can divide them up and send them to smaller jails all around the country.
And if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan.
But there were no air holes in the containers.
Or the first one was called the belly slap technique.
And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can.
So Barack Obama said in 2008, if he's elected president, he's going to investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it.
And then there was nothing.
So I said to John Kerry, I said, listen, this is part of the Obama campaign.
Or the intention slap was another way they called it, where I smack you in the belly.
Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing.
And so I went and there are still bones just sticking out of the sand.
There are clothes that have just been laying there in the desert all these years.
All the bodies are still there.
So I come back and I get a call from a kind of a prominent human rights activist.
And he said he wanted to see me, but it had to be private.
So we went to Johns Hopkins University.
There was a classroom that wasn't being used.
We met there and he said, listen, I have a witness who was 12 years old at the time and he was hiding behind a rock and he saw a
It makes a cracking sound.
what happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out?
And he said, but what's new is he says that there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and they were speaking English.
Maybe it leaves a handprint.
I said, okay, that's all I need.
So I wrote a letter to the agency and I asked, you know, for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site at the box up or at the location where the trucks were opened?
It's a little bit embarrassing.
Um, and I had it auto penned, John Kerry, chairman.
Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and he says, Hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter.
I said, I didn't see any response from the agency.
I just checked my mail an hour ago.
And he said, they classified it top secret.
It's down in the vault.
I said, well, what did it say?
And he says, it says, go fuck yourself.
But then it graduated quickly to things like waterboarding, which everybody knows about.
That's how they want to play it.
So I went to Carrie and Carrie says, you know, we're stirring up a hornet's nest here.
And I think we should just let this fade into history.
I was like, again, because you want so badly to be secretary of state again.
It's awful, hideous business.
There are some places that I'm optimistic about.
And actually, there are some developments that may look ugly on the surface that I'm optimistic about.
First of all, this ceasefire, we're recording this on, I guess, today's Thursday, but the ceasefire that was announced this morning, this is huge, huge.
And I think this is not a victory for the Israelis.
But there were techniques that were, in my view, that were worse than waterboarding.
I think that it makes Donald Trump stronger and Benjamin Netanyahu weaker.
Netanyahu's decision to bomb Gutter was too much, just too much.
It could have served to embarrass the president.
What it ended up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position.
So that's a victory for the White House as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, the print correct pronunciation.
But they you're saying like a G. They use a G sound Other Arabs would call it Qatar with a like a K. Uh-huh, but in the Gulf dialect, it's way down here.
Like, for example, there was the cold cell.
The other thing is Iran.
Man, I follow Iran more closely than anybody I know.
You remember, you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much.
When we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China.
And Richard Nixon was the most anti-China person that could possibly have been elected president.
Yet it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and opened diplomatic relations.
And call me crazy, but I think that if there's going to be peace with Iran, Donald Trump's going to make that peace with Iran.
So they strip you naked.
It may not be in the form of a trip to Tehran.
They chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling.
but I could see a trip to Riyadh and have a meeting brokered by Mohammed bin Salman, and maybe we can come to some sort of an agreement on issue number one or issue number two.
So you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything.
And we're seeing it, whether people want to admit it or not.
That's part of the problem because of narratives.
You know, peace between India and Pakistan doesn't fit in the Democratic Party's narrative that Donald Trump is a warmonger.
Ask, you know, the Africans that he's weighed in for.
And we have peace in sub-Saharan Africa now.
Or this agreement today between Hamas and the Israelis.
You know, I think this is the first of several new developments that's going to lead to the end of this conflict.
You can't get comfortable in any way.
Eventually, Netanyahu has a vested interest in making sure that this war lasts as long as possible, because remember, he's still under indictment for corruption.
And they chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Also, one thing that most Americans don't understand is the Israeli political system is such that it is literally impossible for any party to win a working majority in the Knesset.
There are just too many parties and too many individual interests.
So you've got a dozen parties represented.
Benjamin Netanyahu has never won more than 27% of the vote.
It's just that he's the least unpopular of the unpopular politicians.
And it's a crazy way to run a country.
One of the things that the Greeks did, because the Greeks had the same problem.
There are just too many parties, right?
So you win 20% and you become the prime minister.
20%, nobody wants you.
So what they did is they raised the threshold
To which you have to meet to win election to the parliament from 3% to 5%.
So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties.
And then every hour somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you.
But then the party that comes in first, first past the poll, gets an extra 50 seats.
Then you don't have to go into any coalition governments with anybody.
And you can run the country for four years or five years, whatever it happens to be.
That's what the Israelis need to do.
But Netanyahu, longest serving prime minister in Israeli history, wildly unpopular.
And it's funny because he used to be considered a right wing extremist.
And now he's the moderate of the government.
The likes of Itamar Ben-Gavir and Smotrich and these other guys who have come in from the right, they were attacking him to the point where he had to bring their parties into this coalition government just to get him to shut up.
But we killed people with that technique.
I mean, these are people that have felony convictions for anti-Arab hate crimes.
And now they're, you know, minister of national security, minister of finance with responsibility for the West Bank.
It's a terrible, untenable position.
The Justice Department never said we could kill people.
Yeah, there's an ongoing dispute that the Israeli Supreme Court has weighed in on a number of times.
So the minister of justice is appointed, of course, by the prime minister.
But the Supreme Court is independent of the prime minister and the minister of justice.
So the minister of justice says you can't prosecute him while he's prime minister.
And the Supreme Court says, oh, yes, you can, and orders the court then to continue the case.
So if the case is going to be continued, Netanyahu's only viable strategy is delaying tactics.
Appeal after appeal after appeal.
You submit motions on little technical issues.
How many people died with that?
Maybe you get them to focus on Mrs. Netanyahu, who's also under indictment, and you just delay it as long as you can.
But the best argument that he has is I can't focus on my own defense because I have a war to prosecute.
At least two with that technique.
Well, if there's peace, then he's going to have to go on trial.
Oh, you're exactly right.
In fact, in August, we saw the biggest protests in American history.
I'm sorry, in Israeli history, demanding that Netanyahu resign.
And it was all because of corruption.
It's changed over the years.
Some of it had to do with business.
Other accusations had to do with him trying to essentially sell positions in the government.
But I read the accusations when they first came out.
So I don't know why he doesn't just grab the bull by the horns and go for it.
There was later, but in those early days, no.
I think the threat is greater from China.
The Chinese are incredibly patient.
There was a joke in The Onion the other day.
It was a bunch of Chinese guys just sitting around a table.
And it said the Chinese government sits and waits for the United States to self-destruct or continue its self-destruction or something like that.
It's because they know that they can outweigh us.
You know, we have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to be all around the world protecting the weak and those without a voice and being the peacemaker.
Later, we always had a doctor on scene.
You know, we have we have.
190 bases in 144 countries.
We have to do all that.
And the Chinese say, yeah, yeah, you have to.
Spend all your money on that stuff.
In the meantime, we're going to have 350 mile an hour trains and the best highways in the world and the best schools and the best hospitals and the nicest airports.
Like, for example, with Abu Zubaydah, his heart actually stopped during a waterboarding session, and the doctor revived him just so he could be tortured more.
And then all of our extra money, we're going to essentially bribe foreign countries to do things that we want them to do.
So it's a lesson that I think we haven't learned as a country, that there are other ways of winning hearts and minds.
You know, they're very good at these kinds of behind the scenes, like quasi spy like surreptitious actions.
They actively promote crime.
Us arguing, fighting, disagreeing, they promote these societal disruptions that we're also so worried about.
And, you know, we we blame the Russians all the time and certainly the Russians do this kind of thing, too.
But it's the Chinese that have really perfected it.
And I think that most Americans don't realize how much we should be worried about that and trying to counter it.
It's like, you know, didn't the Germans do that?
Brad Parscale is doing it right now on behalf of the Israelis.
Everybody was there because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreou at the time and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks,
He recently won a $6 million contract to train chat GPT to be more pro Israel.
It was in reason magazine a couple of days ago.
Which I think could be very helpful for us.
One of the things that we're bad at is identifying bots and controlling bots once they've been identified.
I'll give you an example.
I write columns all the time and have my own little podcast.
And I said that I was optimistic that a deal seemed to be at hand between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians.
And then immediately I started getting attacked.
And it was by obviously anonymous people.
I can't imagine that these writers are human beings.
One called me virulently anti-Semitic.
Because I said this deal that it appears the president has negotiated was a good idea.
So I'm virulently anti-Semitic.
And then they built on that.
And by the end of it, and nobody else was commenting.
But by the end of it, they said that I was morbidly obese and ugly and stupid, too.
You know, and ChatGPT and these other chatbots are very easy to influence.
When ChatGPT first came out, just for fun, I said, who is John Kiriakou?
And it said, John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, blew the whistle on the torture program, etc.
John Kiriakou graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a master's degree in peace studies from the University of Bruges in Belgium.
I don't even know where the University of Maryland is located specifically.
I know it's called College Park.
I don't know how to get there.
Never been to the University of Maryland.
I didn't know there was a university in Bruges, let alone one that gave me a degree in peace studies.
So I said, John Kiriakou graduated from George Washington University with degrees in this and that.
And it says, you are incorrect.
And I said, no, you are incorrect.
And then it says, no, you are incorrect.
And then I just gave up.
I was afraid it was going to do what it was going to do to me.
No, but it pulls from literally everywhere.
And then, you know, if you make somebody angry, you can be just deleted from chat GPT.
A friend of mine, Pulitzer Prize nominated political cartoonist Ted Rall.
He did the same thing.
Well, Ted Rall, we know, is 15 years at the Los Angeles Times as an award-winning editorial cartoonist.
That's a good question.
It says there is no such person as Ted Rall.
The short answer is yes.
So I wonder who he pissed off.
Not in the very beginning, but they were working with things like truth serum and different drugs like relaxation drugs, gabapentin, you know, stuff like that to sort of get you to open up.
It's just factually incorrect.
Which is really weird.
But I'll tell you, I used chat GPT.
I teach a class in a graduate school class in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in Spain.
And so I was very proud of the course outline that I had written up and I put the whole thing, I just cut and pasted it into chat GPT and I asked it to recommend scholarly journal articles that I could use to supplement, you know, the books that I had recommended.
So for the 14 sessions of the pod, it gave me 14 different links.
Every single one of the links was fake.
Every single one of them.
There were no such links.
There were no such articles.
But remember, too, that the agency got in such trouble in 75 and 76 before the Church Committee and the Pike Committee about MKUltra that as soon as Senator Church said, don't destroy the documents, the director went right back to headquarters and ordered them to destroy everything.
It just made it all up.
Yeah, I do feel that way sometimes.
I'm sure that you do too.
You know the old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
There were times after I got out of prison, the first two years after I got out of prison, that every once in a while, and I'll preface this by saying I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA.
Every once in a while, I would see surveillance.
And I would write down the license number and just call my lawyer.
And then he'd call me a day later and say, it's the FBI.
They're just curious as to what you're up to.
And I'd say, all they have to do is ask.
That's all they have to do.
They don't have to follow me to get pizza with a buddy of mine and rest in.
They're really not good at surveillance.
I'm serious when I say I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
It's a horrible thing.
That's the bottom line right there.
We don't want to corrupt CIA.
We don't want to politicize CIA.
Yesterday, just yesterday, the deputy director of the CIA, Ellis, named himself the acting general counsel.
And people were like, oh, my God, I woke up and I see these podcasts.
Oh, my God, Ellis has taken over the CIA.
So I do a little bit of research.
And by the end of it, I was like, yeah.
I would have done the same thing if I were Ellis.
He's qualified, right?
He's had all the relative jobs, NSA, ODNI, CIA, House Intelligence Committee.
He's done all these jobs.
He wants the Office of the General Counsel to do what it's told to do, to further the mission of the CIA.
And they refused to do it.
You can't criticize that.
But getting back to your point and Mike Baker's point,
And I'm out of the CIA, so I don't know as much as I used to know on a daily basis.
And so only about 20% of the MKUltra documents still exist.
But Americans get only just a little tidbit of what's happening in the world.
We don't read about these emerging threats, for example.
We'll never know about some kind of counterterrorism operation that succeeded, you know, and that saved Americans from a terrorist attack.
We'll just never know because that's the that's the nature of intelligence.
You're not supposed to know.
You know, the likes of Timothy Weiner will write a book about failures, but the successes have to remain secret.
So we don't really know exactly...
It was hard at first, Joe.
I felt really alone in the world.
And then a couple of days after my arrest.
I got an email from a retired deputy director of the CIA, a guy that I had worked for at the very start of my career.
Exactly what it was that was learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't work.
And he said, I saved this as a kind of a souvenir.
He said, you've chosen a difficult path.
I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself.
And that made it, that changed my entire outlook on what I was facing.
That I actually wasn't alone.
And most of my CIA friends, like the people who were truly friends of mine at the CIA, are still friends of mine today.
They had to be discreet about it for a little while, but they never walked away from me.
We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the fog laden air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick.
I'll add to that that the election of Donald Trump.
in kind of an odd way, freed me up to be more vocal because the Obama people and the Biden people were far, far more willing to say, that is speech that we don't like.
That needs to be prosecuted.
And with Donald Trump, and I don't know if he even meant to do this or not, it's like so much more is out there and in the public realm, the public domain.
I think at the end of the day, that's populism.
It's just a different way of looking at government.
It's funny because under populism, the feeling is very strong that they work for us and they answer to us.
And with these mainstream administrations, whether it's Obama, Biden, George W. Bush, it's like, well, the wise men are running the government, so we need to sit by quietly and let them do their important work.
We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts.
You know, when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, the Obama administration passed.
the NDAA in 20, whatever it was.
Where they legalized propagandization of the American people.
This came out of the most innocuous issue.
We had this propaganda station, radio and television, called Radio TV Marti, and it was beamed at Cuba, right?
The only thing the Cubans really care about watching from us is baseball.
So we would broadcast a lot of baseball games.
But the way it was being broadcast from Florida, there was this little strip of land on the Gulf Coast.
in southern florida where they could pick it up but only with like dish network i think is what it was well that's illegal because it's a propaganda station and americans can't watch american propaganda and so rather than like not broadcast it anymore or move the satellite or whatever
But we don't really have fulsome documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.
they decided we'll change the law to make it easier and more and legal to propagandize the American people.
So now the government can produce any propaganda that it wants and foisted on the American people.
It's like, thank you, Barack Obama.
Now I don't even know if the news that I'm reading is real or not.
A lot of people believe that after Ed Snowden's revelations, it would be turned back.
Even if it were just, you know, one part at a time.
And that's just never happened.
Oh, I think that, first of all, 100% yes.
I think that it's natural that it would push further.
It's up to us to push back.
And I don't think the American people have their act together enough.
I went to Cuba last year.
Because they translated my first two books into Spanish and put them in the National Library of Cuba.
And they had this ceremony during the International Book something or other for a bunch of American authors.
And before I went, my editor at Consortium News said, do me a favor.
He said, ever since I was a little kid, I've been an avid radio listener.
After sunset when the signals are stronger, tune in to American radio stations and tell me if the Cubans are jamming them or if you can hear stations.
I said, that's a great idea.
So I had a radio there in my hotel room and I got too many American stations, Miami and Fort Myers and anything you want to hear in Cuba from the United States, you can hear.
They don't jam anything.
And it's baseball, baseball, baseball.
They want to hear every baseball game.
We don't need Radio TV Marti.
You know, I get a kick out of the Washington Post.
Just clobbers Carrie Lake all the time.
Every time she testifies on Capitol Hill about the Voice of America, they're like, no, we need Voice of America.
We need to spend another $50 million.
We don't need to propagandize them.
First of all, have you ever heard of this thing called the internet?
Because that's where almost everybody gets their information.
You want to propagandize people?
Do it on the internet.
Not on some AM radio station that you're beaming off into space in the middle of the night.
They worked with LSD for 20 years at least.
I'm less concerned about the Russians.
I think the president has played this right.
He tried to kind of force the two sides together.
We just have to wait until they slug it out.
And then when it looks like one's going down, then we can step in and try to negotiate something.
But what are you going to do?
You know, I have a lot of friends who are professors of Russian studies, Soviet studies, all this stuff.
And they all say the same thing, that the Russians are winning.
The Ukrainians are losing.
So the policy decision is, do we really want to jump in on the side of the Ukrainians?
There was an operation.
Or do we want to let...
diplomacy, let diplomats do what they're paid to do.
It was a sub-operation of MKUltra where they rented a safe house in San Francisco.
And I always say, sure.
We used to make fun of the Bush administration when I was at the agency because we had never seen an administration work so hard to not speak to our enemies.
We weren't allowed to talk to the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iraqis or the Iranians or the Cubans, the Venezuelans.
Like, my God, who do we talk to?
We're not going to accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talk to the British and the French and the Germans.
So keeping the lines of communication open, I think are very important to settling this.
I think eventually what everybody predicted at the very beginning of the hostilities is going to be the final result.
And that is that the Ukrainians are going to lose territory and the Russians are going to have to agree to probably fast track membership into the European Union for Ukraine.
And not NATO membership, but major non-NATO ally status, the same status that we have for Australia and Japan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Ukraine.
I think that's how it's going to end up.
They recruited a bunch of hookers.
I mean, at this point, they're... What I'm told is that Putin is under great pressure from his military establishment.
That the Russian people don't necessarily want this to continue as much as the Russian military leadership does.
That's what these professors are telling me.
Because they want to destroy Ukraine.
They want to take Kiev.
They want it to collapse.
There are a lot of Russians who don't believe that Ukraine is a legitimate country.
And had them go out and pick up Johns, bring them back to the safe house where they thought they were going to get laid, dose them with LSD, and then interrogate them and try to get them to give up their deepest secrets.
You know, even Crimea.
Crimea was Russian until 1953.
Khrushchev gave it to the Ukrainians as a gift.
And then the Russians took it back in 14.
Yeah, it's just terrible.
For the Ukrainians, at least.
I think it's going to burn itself out eventually.
I'm very worried that the Israelis are going to attack Iran again.
I'm worried that the Israelis aren't going to respect the deal that appears to be in process in Gaza or the West Bank.
I mean, we're not talking about the West Bank.
Where just two weeks ago, a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took all their houses.
You know, what happens next in the West Bank?
Yeah, there are a lot of synagogues in New York, New Jersey, Toronto that have these things called real estate seminars where you can put your name on a list and then they call you and say, hey, a house just opened up over here in this Arab village that's not Arab anymore.
Come and take your house.
And two weeks ago, the village that the Israelis cleared out was one of the last remaining Christian villages.
I think we should believe the Israelis when they tell us that they believe in greater Israel, which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the southern quarter of Lebanon, a strip in southwestern Syria.
And the map that Netanyahu had at the UN the other day included the Sinai Peninsula, for heaven's sake.
What's that all about?
They took the Sinai in the 67 war and gave it back after the Camp David Accords.
So this, yeah, we've, we've, I'm worried about, about Israel.
Yeah, Midnight Climax, exactly.
They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize Israel and usually they'll win Those primaries a pack is very well funded.
It is very very well organized.
It's it's the gold standard of Lobbying organizations.
Nobody's agreed to do this.
I've never understood why a pack doesn't have to register as a foreign agent With the Justice Department when everybody else does why is a pack special that it doesn't have to register and
You know, back in 2008, I guess it was, I won a very small contract to write six op-eds for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.
And it was because I was going to write op-eds that supported American business in Abu Dhabi.
You haven't informed them properly.
So I had to go on FARA.gov, F-A-R-A.gov.
It's the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
And there's a form there.
And I said, yeah, I took, you know, I won this contract.
These are American citizens.
It was like 30 grand to write these six op-eds.
And the source of the income is the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.
And here's my name and my address, my phone number.
You can't just take people off the streets and force LSD down their throats.
So if you're doing something, anything, on behalf of a foreign government, you have to register.
Except if you're AIPAC.
And I just don't understand that.
My very first week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, these lobbyists came in.
It was a parade of lobbyists all the time.
Every day they're coming in asking for something.
So these two guys came in, could not have been any friendlier.
Hi, welcome to Capitol Hill.
It's not my first go round.
I've worked on Capitol Hill before.
Well, we wanted to welcome you with an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land.
I can pay for my own vacations, but I appreciate it.
We'll take you to all the Christian holy sites.
And some of my colleagues went for their all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land, courtesy of APAC.
I was like, yeah, no, thank you.
Well, I'll tell you, I tell this story a lot, but I think it's appropriate here.
I had been at the agency for...
Two and a half months, maybe.
About two and a half months.
And I was told to give my very first liaison briefing.
So this is going to be the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet.
And I was going to be one of about eight analysts.
And I was the most junior.
Well, we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters.
But every time they would come, they'd say, hey, we brought gifts.
And it's all packed full of listening devices and batteries.
And we'd say, you guys, you can't come back here every single time and try to bug our conference rooms.
What'd they say to that?
We're not sure how that happened.
So we're like, yeah, you can't come in here anymore.
So we rent an office Where we meet the Israelis off campus Wow.
Yeah, cuz you just can't trust them.
So that is so crazy We got his briefing and it's just two people.
It's a woman who was the Mossad Officer and an older guy who was the shin bet officer.
So because we were all overt we were giving our true names and
First, the senior political officer gives her briefing and then the econ guy and the military guy and the oil guy and finally comes around to me.
So I said, my name is John Kiriakou and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's current psychology.
And the Shin Bet guy goes like this.
He goes, spell your name.
So I spell it and he writes it down and he's looking at me over his glasses and he goes, you are Jewish?
And I said, I am not recruitable.
Don't even think about trying to recruit me.
Afterwards, I was furious.
I went back to the office.
My boss said, how did it go?
I said, that son of a gun Shin Bet guy tried to recruit me.
Everybody started laughing.
I said, why is that so funny?
And he said, they've done that to every single one of us.
It's like they can't help themselves anymore.
Look at Jonathan Pollard.
Now he's running for the Knesset.
But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal.
And they have such a tiny population.
Manson was a part of it as well.
And just think of what's been destroyed.
What we could have learned.
So it was every man for himself.
I think that is that's the whole story right there in a nutshell.
When I was there, I remember being shocked by some of the old timers who had been there for as long as 40 or 42 years.
There was one in particular.
He was the national intelligence officer for warning.
So he was the one that was supposed to say, you know, I'm worried about what Libya is going to look like 10 years from now.
And then somebody writes a paper about it.
He had been there for 42 years.
He had to get a waiver from the director because he had aged out.
Well, these guys make no secret of their belief that they can outweigh pretty much any president.
Presidents come and go.
And these guys are there forever.
And so if the president wants them to do something that they don't want to do, they just slow roll it.
Just wait until he leaves.
And that's the end of it.
You know, that's why I say I've said this in interviews a lot.
You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to.
You can call it the state.