John Kiriakou
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
You were the target in actual fact.
Yes, I did.
And my solution...
in my deluded state was to then divorce her and marry a CIA officer.
So that's what I did.
Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations.
Wow.
It was the biggest job I ever had in my life.
Yeah.
Primarily in Islamabad, but wherever we needed to do the raid, we went and did the raid.
I saw the four corners of Pakistan and everything in between.
And there were a lot of moving parts at the time.
You know, it wasn't just us operating in a bubble and trying to, you know, destroy Al Qaeda.
At the same time, the White House is working with the CIA to come up with what became a torture program, a rendition program, an archipelago of secret prisons all around the world.
And none of us had any idea that this was happening.
The first inkling that I got that something was up
was when the Pakistanis came to me one day, we had had several weeks, several very successful weeks of counterterrorism raids where we're just breaking down the door of al-Qaeda safe houses with battering rams and just grabbing everybody.
And the Paks came to me one day and said, listen,
The jail is full.
You've got to do something with all these guys.