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John Kiriakou is a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and the first U.S. official to confirm the agency's torture of detainees. Punished for being a whistleblower, he served nearly 2 years in a federal prison. www.johnkiriakou.com
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Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience trained by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day so you were saying you put replace Mike Baker yeah Mike's a great
guy he was a good
officer he was he doesn't really talk about his work a lot maybe it's because a
lot of years have
passed but he was the real deal I replaced him in Athens and he had done a lot
of preliminary legwork
in Athens Athens was a tough place at the time the American government spent
more money on security
in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world including Beirut why there
it was a combination
of two things there were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly
dangerous one was
called revolutionary organization 17 November they'd killed the CIA station
chief to US defense
attache's just bad guys all around the other was called popular revolutionary
struggle and then on
top of that you had Abu Nidal the Libyans the PFLP the PFLP GC the DFLP
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 we'll leave you alone oh
boy yeah but killing
Americans wasn't part of the deal so it was every man for himself Wow your
story is pretty nuts man
Yeah it's and your story of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison
for something that was
Come what they were doing what you reported on was completely illegal and you
were completely honest about it
And it was essentially about the US torture program right tell us how this all
started like how long had you been
Involved in the CIA
Well by then I had been in the CIA
Well by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counter-terrorism operations
after 9/11
I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years and
And I was responsible for all counter-terrorism operations in the country
Al-Qaeda was was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were
bombing the daylights out of them
And so my job was to find them and grab them and then just hold them or send
them to trial was the original idea
And we were planning at the time for our first big name capture right bin Laden
I'm in his wifey
We had killed Mohammed Atif. He was the head of what they called military
affairs for al-qaeda
We killed him at Tora Bora, but then there was Abu Zubaydah and then there was
this unknown person that we later
Learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So we were looking for any of these four or
five people and then there were there were others those responsible for the
embassy bombings in
Africa the USS coal bombing
So it just so happened that in February of 2002 we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah
and
And we captured him it took us six weeks to track him down and we were close a
couple of times
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
Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking and he
knew we were close
so we finally got him and then the question is what do you want to do with him
and
They they told me hang on to him. We're gonna send out a plane and we'll take
it from there
so
They did and I wasn't cleared to know
What they were gonna do with him just like the guys on the plane weren't
cleared to know who it was we had captured and and
Why they were taking this guy where they were taking him
But um that is that all just need to know yeah, it's all need to know in fact
when I got onto the plane
We three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the
plane
We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane
then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down and
One of the guys on the plane he was dressed completely in black with a black
hood on and he says John and I said who are you and he lifts up his
Mask, and he's an old boss of mine
And I said hey, what are you doing here? He said oh, I came to take your
prisoner
I said where are you taking him and he said I can't tell you you don't have a
need to know I said no, that's cool
He said who is he anyway? I said oh dude. I'm sorry. You don't have a need to
know he says yeah fair enough fair enough
Okay, safe travels and then you know your job is to take him from point A to
point B not to become his friend and you know
Get his family story just like my job is to catch him and hand him over the
next guy and it's none of my business where he's going
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 and one of the
senior guys from the counterterrorism center came up to me
Very casually and he said oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you
I meant to ask you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation
techniques?
And I had never heard that term before this is May of 2002. I said enhanced
interrogation techniques
What's that mean? And he goes we're gonna start getting rough with these guys
like that. I said, what's that mean?
So he describes these 10 techniques and I said, I don't know man. That sounds
like a torture program
And he said it's not a torture program. We got it cleared by the Justice
Department and the president signed it
He says think about it. I said yeah, give me an hour. I need an hour to think
about it
I walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor, which is the
executive floor 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 and I said hey, I need some
advice
I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation
techniques. What do you think of that?
And he said first of all, let's call a spade a spade. He said this is a torture
program
They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program and
torture is a slippery slope
He said, you know how these guys are
Somebody's gonna be a cowboy they're gonna go overboard and they're gonna kill
a prisoner
And when that happens there's gonna be a congressional investigation
Then there's gonna be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's gonna
go to prison
Do you want to go to prison? I said no, I don't want to go to prison as it
turned out
I was the only person who went to prison, but I said no, I don't want to go to
prison
I went back downstairs. I said listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with
this
I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it
The funny thing is I had just captured Abu Zubaydah who we believed was the
number three in al-qaeda
And I got passed over for promotion and the reason I got passed over they said
was because I turned down the training
The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had
displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism
And then the guy who had given me the advice
Saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he promoted me out of cycle
So I realized then I was up against something that was going to be tough and
then there was a psychiatrist at the agency
Whom I had known for years. We we are in 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
And he said to me one day
Buddy, you know, they call you the human rights guy behind your back
And I said, yeah, I don't care and he said, you know, that's not a compliment,
right? And I said, Steve
They're wrong about this and I'm right about it. I
I said I'm I'm comfortable with the decision that I made and I just left it at
that
I didn't realize though how much I had pissed them off
Until later on so all you had done
Essentially was stand up for your beliefs your morals your ethics in the law
and you said
I don't want to participate in anything that I know to be illegal. That was the
start
Listen, I wish you're standing out against the group and I was the only one I'm
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
Now this doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to use them
You were just going to be trained and they were they were to use
And then but you would be required to use these techniques
So if you were not trained in them, then what would happen would that preclude
you from ever being involved in any sort of a
Questioning interrogation
Yes, which is funny for a couple of reasons number one there was no such thing
at the time as an interrogation class
Right the FBI has deep years long interrogation classes
We never had to interrogate anybody and in fact when we started capturing
prisoners in in Pakistan in January of 2002
I'm like well, what do you want me to ask him? I cabled headquarters. We caught
this guy. What do you want me to ask him?
Oh, you'll figure it out. Just go with it. I'm like, okay. So I was working
with the Pakistani intelligence service and I said
Listen, I'm usually the good cop. 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? He's like screw you the Pakistani wax him across the face
So I say again, what's your name? Listen, buddy. Just give me your name. 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. Come on. And then
they tell you their name
Standard. Yeah
so
What exactly did you know what enhanced interrogation techniques they were
gonna implement?
Oh, yeah, that day in the cafeteria
My colleague explained it in great detail and a lot of these techniques are not
torture, right?
If I grab you by the lapels and say doggone you and answer my questions, that's
not torture or
The the first one was called the belly slap
Or the attention slap was another way they called it where I smack you in the
belly makes a cracking sound
Maybe it leaves a handprint. It's a little bit embarrassing. That's not torture
But then it graduated quickly to things like waterboarding which everybody
knows about but there were techniques that were that were in my view that were
worse than waterboarding like for example
There was the cold cell so they strip you naked they chain you to an eye bolt
in the ceiling so you can't
You can't you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything you can't get comfortable
in any way and
They they chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and then every hour somebody
comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you
Oh
But we killed people with that technique the Justice Department never said we
could kill people and
When we would kill them done with that at least two with that technique that
that just from hypothermia and there wasn't a protocol in place to stop them
from dying
No, there was later
But in those early days no later
We always had a doctor on scene like for example that was a beta his heart
actually stopped during a waterboarding session and the doctor revived him
Just so he could be tortured more it's like you know didn't the Germans do that
come on now now we're doing it
That's not cool. Is there any other way that like I know that MK ultra
Experimented with a lot of drugs and a lot of different techniques involved in
whether it was trying to find the truth out of people or getting people to
commit acts
Was did they ever implement something where they would give someone something
that's a good question the short answer is yes?
Not in the very beginning, but they were working with things like truth serum
and and different drugs like relaxation drugs
Gabapentin, you know stuff like that to sort of get get you to open up
But remember to that the agency got in such trouble in
75 and 76 before the the church committee and the Pike committee about MK ultra
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 and so only about 20% of the MK ultra documents still exist
So we don't really know exactly
exactly what it was that was learned in that program like what worked and what
didn't work we hear these stories about you know
Dosing the the fog laden
Air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick
We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed
the bread and everybody in the village went nuts
but we don't really have
Foul some documentation that we could have used
Operationally while interrogating prisoners so just to avoid prosecution they
figured out a way
Yeah, that's crazy. And so then whatever they did learn is lost
Yeah, it's lost if there was something whether it's MDMA or right LSD or
whatever they give people
They worked with LSD for 20 years at least at least 20 years, you know, they
they there was an operation
it was a sub operation of MK ultra where
They rented a safe house in San Francisco
They recruited a bunch of hookers and
Had them go out and pick up John's bring them back to the to the safe house
Where they thought they were gonna get laid dose them with LSD and then
interrogate them and try to get them to give up their deepest secrets
It's yeah, we had climax. Yeah midnight climax. Exactly. It's like what?
Nobody's agreed to do this. You you haven't informed them properly. These are
American citizens
You can't just take people off the streets and and force LSD down there through
they were running the Haight-Ashbury free clinic
Yeah, until right after a month after chaos by Tom O'Neill came out. Yeah, you're
exactly right. Yeah
yeah, my mom my
Wife's mom went there. She used to she was a hippie in San Francisco
She went to the Haight-Ashbury free clinic. Oh, it was run by the CIA
Which is so crazy and it's totally connected to Manson and the man. Oh, yeah,
man. Exactly. Yeah, exactly
Yeah, Manson was a part of it as well
It's so nuts and they wouldn't have even known about that until they found a stash
of documents that connected it all together
And just think of what's been destroyed right what we could have learned.
Exactly. We only know a small fraction of what was done
So is it a case of just
They're they're not elected. They're put into power presidents come and go and
over the course of their career
20 years plus they just have so much power and so much ability to get things
done that they just bypass the law
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 gonna 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 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 him 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
There is a deep state
You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to you can call it
the state 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
So
You find out about this torture program you won't participate
So that puts you on the outs and when do you know that this is going to be like
a significant problem in your career?
You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency, you know,
once I I turned this down
And I got this out-of-cycle promotion for the Abu Zubaydah operation
I was 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 gonna torture people I quit 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 her assignment. That means she sends a cable 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 this is illegal
Certainly somebody's gonna come out and say something and nobody did this
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Like what are the techniques that they were using that were like causing her to
faint?
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 was the secretary of defense at the
time made a statement
That that still kind of sticks in my mind. He said there is no such thing as
Sleep deprivation. He said I have a stand-up 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 7 with no sleep and they begin to
die their organs begin to shut down at day 9
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, 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
And they just can't sleep because if they if they collapse they'll pull their
arms out of their sockets
They're chained that to that eye bolt
Jeez, it was bad. And then when people would die
They would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building
Put them in the hole cover it up and then bring the next guy in
No report no nothing nothing there was one guy they reported on and
headquarters wrote back and said just put them on ice until
We can figure out what to do and they let literally just put them in a bathtub
and filled it with ice and then just decided a couple days later
He started to turn we should probably bury this guy
Yeah, it was ugly and 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
Yeah, and that wasn't the that wasn't the approved
Operation was any of it effective like was there any actionable information?
That's that's the worst part of this it it know 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 its 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 Zawahiri and then we
just didn't know
What what the organization was was like how it was built so he explained to us
how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped
Compartmentalized so cell a had no idea what cell B was doing and
and
Ali said as an example if
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
He has a cousin Abdallah and Abdallah has access to weapons and here's Abdullah's
email and then Abdallah's got a friend Rashid
They meet at the coffee shop and Russia has has access to explosives 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 kicked down the door and they grabbed these guys that saved lives
The other thing that he told us and he he laughed actually
Because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about
He was talking about Muhtar a guy using the nom de guerre Muhtar
We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there
Who called himself Muhtar 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 Muhtar working on his plan his
Metabolical 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
She calls the cops the cops come and say oh, this looks like a terrorist attack
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 well crazy. It's crazy a cleaning lady. You never know you just never
know
It's just crazy that he would leave the plans. Yeah, you know, right thinking
nobody's nobody's gonna come nobody's gonna see it
And then he ran off so we knew there was this guy out there planning this big
thing and his name was Muhtar
Abu Zubaydah laughed at us and said you don't know who Muhtar is and
Ali said no 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
We're about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 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 Sufans treating Abu Zubaydah
with respect
But on August the first
George tenet to 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
He did that and the CIA director Robert Muller 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. He went completely
silent and
Remained silent and then the FBI went back to the president 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 we heard that he
had this irrational fear of bugs
So we we pour a 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 now. Why would they do that? I don't understand if you're
getting information
Why would they decide to ramp it up and torture? I think for a couple of
reasons I think we should never underestimate the motivating
factor of of a desire for revenge
Right, this was the worst
intelligence failure in the history of the country
3,000 people died because we hadn't done our jobs
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 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 a hundred and eight million dollars to say oh, we think you
should torture people
Here's here are the torture techniques. Just let us know when you want us to
start
hundred and eight million dollars for that and so
we thought well, we've already spent the money and
We really do want revenge on these guys. So what the hell? Let's just let's
just go for it. I think that's what it was Wow
So
How did you get in trouble? I?
I waited for somebody to say something
About torture and nobody did and then I got divorced my 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
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 and that wasn't it at all I
Got a call in December of
2007 so now I 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 up was a beta. 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 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 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
So 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
um
He gets another a similar question and he said that there is no torture. I knew
he was lying 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 torture shout a torture 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 gonna pin this on me
So I called Brian Ross and I said I'll give you your interview and I decided in
the whatever
Was why did you think they're gonna pin it on you because that's the only one
said human rights guy?
Yeah, you were gonna be a patsy. Mm-hmm
And I was not assumed that I assumed yeah, because that's just your experience
with the organization. Oh, yeah
They're gonna leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves. So I called
Brian Ross
I said I'll give you your interview 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 DeSale Street in Washington and
And 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
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
So no charges my wife and I went out to celebrate that night. We went to dinner
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
Everybody seems to forget that now and we can get into that if you want, but um
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 and
Holder writes back. We got these memos in discovery
When I went to trial
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
Oh God, that's so gross. That's Washington. It's just so hard to believe that
The United States of America government works like that. I believe it. I
believe it. Oh, yeah
It's hard to swallow. 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 gonna get you and there's nothing you can do
to protect yourself
So what was Brennan's beef with you
was it just because of the fact that you did that interview or
Was there underlying?
Tension we were never pals. 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
He when I first started there. He was a deputy group chief. He was a GS 15
nobody journeyman
You know first line second line manager. No big deal. 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
So he was her deputy 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
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. You're fired
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
good luck
Well, it's the normal job turnover is in the summertime. This is the week
before Christmas
Ninety three or four. I can't recall now and
There are no jobs open at Christmas
So he finally finds one job
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. So that's the
National Security Council's
director for intelligence programs who happened to be this guy named George
Tennant and
So they immediately hit it off to alpha dogs
Cigar smoking hard drink and there used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th
and Pennsylvania Avenue
Adjacent to the White House that sold cigars
Tennant 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
you know
Talk about chasing women or whatever
Totally hit it off
Then Tennant becomes the deputy director of the CIA. So he brings
He brings
Brennan back with him and makes him
Martha Kessler's boss
Deputy director of the office that Martha's working in he calls Martha Kessler
in and says now you're fired
And so she just elected to retire
Well, he ended up
Being identified by tenant as the guy like this is my guy
He this guy's going places he needs operational experience because he's been an
analyst and an analytic manager all these years
I'm gonna make him the station chief in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. He's an analyst
He's never served overseas before never recruited a spy ever
It wasn't his job now all of a sudden
He's the the station chief and 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
Right, so it's director deputy director executive director and then the deputy
directors for operations intelligence
Science technology administration and they're they're dotted lines. So he's now
one of the five
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
Yeah, that just kind of sealed it for me, but I didn't care because I didn't
respect him anyhow
I I will say that that Jim Pabbit the deputy 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 TTIC the transnational terrorism information
center
It later became the national counterterrorism center
um
Any they sure sort of shunted him off there and it was a nothing analytic
Organization not even in the in the headquarters building. It was out one of
the outlying buildings and then he kind of went away
but
where he really did right for himself is
In 2007 there was this there was this wave of retirements right 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
And he saved himself
Wow, so
How did you wind up going to prison?
Well as soon as Barack Obama became president John Brennan decided
He was gonna have my head
And so he asked
Holder to have the FBI
Grab me
And I'll tell you what they 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. It was a terrible job
Kerry said
Oh, I want you to do this and do that and we're gonna investigate this
investigate that and then he would kill all the investigations
Because he wanted to be secretary of state and you don'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 can't talk about the dashti lehli 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 in the containers
Can't talk about any of that stuff because you want to be the secretary of
state
so I left in 2011
and
Right before I left
I got a call from a japanese diplomat and this is one of the things that I I
loved about that job
Is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats think who's doing what and
what do you think about israel?
What do you think about china?
What do you think about what's going on in you know, mexico or cuba or whatever?
And um, I get a call from this japanese diplomat and he invites me to lunch. I
said great. We meet at a place on capitol hill
And um, I 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 carey. 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 he
goes. Oh, no
Don't do that
If you give me information
I can give you money
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 I knocked on the door. I went in I said hey
I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer
And he goes was it that damn russian again, and I said no, it was japanese
He goes japanese. I said I know right
He goes well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information
I said this didn't have anything to do with trade information. I don't think I
don't know 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 going to come up and
talk to you
And I said okay, so they come up. I recount the whole
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
I said, but he only speaks arabic. That's okay. We got a guy who speaks arabic.
Don't worry
I said, all right, so I call him. I invite him to lunch. We go to lunch
Do the whole thing but before the lunch right before the lunch they called and
they said
Operation came up
Just write us another another memo do the lunch and write us another memo. I
said fine
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'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
The fbi calls and I look at myself and it says federal bureau of investigation
I was like, I wonder what that's all about
So I answer and they said hey, you remember that thing you helped us out with
A year ago and I said yeah
And they said we've got a similar situation and we need your help and again
because i'm a patriot. I said
Anything for the fbi. I kick myself now for saying it. I said anything for the
fbi. What do you want me to do?
They said come down to the washington field office thursday morning at 10. I
said done
I go down there the next thursday
And they're waiting for me at the entrance which I thought was odd
And we go up to a conference room and they said we're both cleared si tk gamma
and then there were two
compartments above top secret
That I was cleared for that. They said they were cleared for
And it so if the if the conversation necessitated it we could go into that area
So
They said well before before we start just wanted to ask you just read your
book. It was great. I loved it
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? Yeah
I had fun. I said it was kind of hard. You know, 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 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 6 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 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 strock
And peter strock says tell me he implicated himself
And the guy said not really no
We have to let him go
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 uh
The trail he's like this and i've 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 blah
blah blah
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 um
It became
A matter of of just survival
After that, you know, you have to take it seriously. I was facing 45 years in
prison
and then when the justice department
um
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
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
Oh, my god. Oh, it was I went home that night and
I went home i'm i'm ashamed to even say it that night. We 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. I 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 back seat
And she said no, come on. You need to try to get some sleep
And she saved me that night
but 45 years
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 because 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
I said great well
They stay 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
He came up didn't charge me a cent
He came up to washington we got him a security clearance
And uh which was another thing
We asked for a security clearance
And then uh the uh the uh justice department called and said the white house
said kiriyaku'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 kiriyaku
Fisher cut bait
We're like it's not up to john brennan to decide if i have enough attorneys
Yeah, they have an unlimited number of attorneys an unlimited budget
As it turned out they spent six million dollars to put me in prison
Was society really better off?
Spending six million dollars to put me in a low security prison for for 23
months
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
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 and so the ghanaans
Executed these guys. Oh my god
She got nine months in prison
Nine months
And they offer me 45 years
For blowing the whistle on the torture program. So
My wife and I stayed up all night literally all night and because sharon scranage
had taken a plea
There was literally no case law
So what we found we found several things
Um, we found several articles from the harvard law review saying this law is unconstitutional
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 can't you couldn't challenge it in court
and I said well, can't we just appeal
appeal the charge
And maybe you know 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. We can't do that
so, um
So I decided by 6 a.m
I'm going to turn it down
I believed in my heart. I hadn't done anything right. This was political. 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
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, um
I decided i'm going to turn it down 6 a.m
I send an email to my attorneys. I had 11 attorneys
I was paying half of them five of them
and um
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 like
Eighty-year-old six foot two 280 pound mean old man
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
Oh, god, and then the second one his partner bob trout a sweet
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 is the guy mark mcdougall one of the best attorneys i've ever encountered
in my life
And 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 but I felt a connection to this guy he pulls me aside
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 take the deal
And I looked at my wife
She's just like
What are we going to do?
So I took the deal
And I got two and a half years in prison
And they made me do every single day of it. In fact, we went to sentencing
And um, this was in the eastern district of virginia the the espionage court
and the reason why
We didn't go to trial in the end was that the the oj simpson
Uh jury consultant said if we were
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. He said buddy. You don't have
a prayer. Take the deal
Yeah
It was bad
So it's sentencing my attorney said your honor
We request that mr
Kiriak could be sent to a minimum security work camp
She says any objection from the justice department. 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
And 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
Three months later
And uh, it's 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 i'm john kiriak. I'm here to turn myself in
That's all you do and your friends and family just drive away
and so
They said yeah, uh, 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,
okay, so I'll go across the street
And I said i'm i'm john kiriakum here to turn myself in and uh
And the guy takes me by the arm 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 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. We later learned
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 gonna put you in
solitary don't say a word
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
And I said great thanks i'm here 40 minutes now i'm gonna get my ass kicked i
appreciate it
And then i started that whole odyssey and so what kind of prison were you in i
was in
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 mcdougall the 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 i said what do i
do
He says oh my god 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 he
said buddy i'm sorry you're gonna have to tough it out
And so that's what i did wow
So you have this long career working for the government they put you away
And what is it like for you
to feel so betrayed
and
to get out
And what do you what do you do when you get out?
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
And i was like why there's nothing wrong with me
You know i'm ready to fight and march and you know
Raise my fist against the obama administration
And so um i was wrong of course
I was i was
so angry that 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
And you'll never be able to step back into your life
So i thought okay well i'm i'm highly educated
I have a bachelor's degree in middle eastern studies
I have a master's degree in legislative policy analysis. I finished my phd case
classwork in
in international affairs
I got rejected by mcdonald's
By safeway by target by uber we don't hire
felons
I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere and you're broke and i was broke bankrupt
So you couldn't even get a job driving for uber
Uber turned me down
Yeah, it's crazy
It's crazy, but you know what though?
What did you do?
Well, I was confident
That I was right and they were wrong and my my wife
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
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
Before I uh was released from prison. I called her
I was 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 I said really great
Why was why was it so 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 said if it weren't for john kiriaku
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. I the one of the first calls I received
was from john mccain's chief of staff
And he said senator mccain says welcome home and he wants to know what he can
do to be helpful
And I said oh my god. I said tell him I said thank you
I liked mccain very much from when I was working on carrie's staff. carrie was
a little jealous of mccain
Um 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 they drove me into bankruptcy
and took my pension
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
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 he said nobody reads these
1500 page bills we're gonna slip it in there and he said i'm gonna be on the
conference committee
We'll get it taken care of
And then he got sick he got a brain tumor
And he wasn't named to the conference committee 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
So what have you what did you do for money?
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's I did that for a year
I made twenty thousand dollars 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
And 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 ended up winning two literary
awards for that book
I won the the penn first amendment award
Which along with the penn faulkner the pulitzer
And the edgar allen poe is one of the big four and then I won the forward
reviews memoir of the year
That year. I thought i'm gonna 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 i'm 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
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
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 okay living
I'm still gonna have to work until the day I die because I have literally
nothing saved it all went to the attorneys
And uh, you know hope for the best. I will say
That I was a third generation democrat. I left the democratic party ages ago
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 know, 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
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 that the two of us get together
And I realized that
You know this thing this this political system we have
It's
Antiquated it doesn't work. You have to you have to engage with the individual
Like I never thought that I would be agreeing with marjorie taylor green on
some of these these civil liberties issues
Right or thomas massey
Or bernie sanders for that matter
But i've realized that
Yeah, i've i've got a 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
You know think I had respect for thinks is right
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 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
It's it's ugly 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. I said okay
great
It took me you 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 jump up. I put my fist up. 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 the swastika guy says you the new guy? I said yeah, so
And he says you a fag
I said no, i'm not a fag
He said you a rat
I said no, I didn't have anybody else in my case. I'm not a rat
He says you would 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 arians in the cafeteria
And I was like, oh, hmm. I guess i'm with the arians now
grand
Yeah
And then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the banano family
And one day he said to me
I
I would get the new york times and and he would get the new york post and we
would trade at the end of each day
He asked me
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 my first day here
They told me to sit with them. He goes from today
You're with the italians
And I said awesome and they became my closest friends
I mean, I got a book out of it. They were absolutely wonderful
honorable
honest
fun
The smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most
respect
And once word was out that I was with the italians, it was hands off
And it was thanks to one guy shout out to mark lanzalotti
Mark was from philly 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. He's
not an fbi agent
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
No problems
God, it has to be insanely stressful
It was like it was like living in the twilight zone the stress the stress will
kill you
It's incredible you see people break down all the time
They just lose it
And it's not like you're gonna you know be taken out to some medical unit
someplace
You go to solitary and you can live or die down in there
Yeah, oh, so I was telling you so I
I waited about six weeks before I was comfortable enough to to write a letter
So I 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
But I said two things. I said, um, 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 that was this woman all tatted out from you know the neck down
and just a nasty mean old
Awful awful person
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 and I go
Kiriaku
Just like it's spelled. She goes, how about if I call you fuck face?
Like that. So I said classy and I walked away
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
So I wrote it in the um in the letter and I was just like, you know life in
prison
What am I gonna do this this woman swears at me? There's nothing I can do
The other thing was more important. I
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. I said, okay
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
He's from iraq. And I said and I shut up be my dick. It's very nice to meet you
And he says, I said yeah, great. You're from iraq. I was in iraq. 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 and he translated
The 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 lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary
So I hear my name kiriyaku
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 the bells ring and I go to the
lieutenant's office. I said you wanted to see me
And they have the this guy's picture on a on a computer screen. You know this
guy
I said, I don't know him. I met him yesterday
What'd you say to him?
I said I said nice to meet you
What did he say to you?
He said nice to meet you, too
Oh, yeah
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, don't do that. We've been looking for a reason to to transfer him out
I'm like, okay, 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's kurdish
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 he said, yeah, 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
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 ariana 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 from cnn to playboy to the economist and and time
magazine when time magazine was a thing and
npr's calling the prison to interview me
And the next thing I know i'm called to the warden's office. Well, that's in an
off-limits part of the facility
So the warden calls me in he's like
I'm gonna 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?
Give me some credit
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
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
Wow
Jeez
So they're trying to set you guys up
Trying to get you guys at each other's throat and hopefully
Yeah
One of you will do something
They did it one other time
My one of my attorneys
Do you know who orchestrated that?
No
Do you think it was the warden himself?
No
I don't think he was smart enough
I don't think he cared enough
It had to come from the agency
Oh my god
There was one other incident too
I lived in the same block of cells with a with an afghan american pharmacist
who had an oxy problem
Nice guy
And he came up to me one day and he said hey
Um the spokesman for the taliban is here now and he wants to meet you
I said the spokesman for the taliban
I said are you talking about that case in new jersey?
And he said yeah
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 they're upset at the shortness of your sentence
So be very careful 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 look 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
And i said don't you even think about touching me
And he said oh come on man come on 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
Wow
This kind of stuff is so hard to believe
It's america
You don't want to believe this about america
You want to believe we're the good guys
Yeah
And you want to believe that we would never turn on our own like that over
something that's
Just
Yeah
But they do
But the crazy thing is it's like
The cia torture program
Wasn't even effective
No
That's the thing
It wasn't even effective
But you know what though joe
When these guys die and they've started to die
In their obituaries
It's going to 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
You would think that that's
If they were clear-headed yes
That's the only thing that makes the least sense to me like
I
Idealistically i like to think of the people that are in charge of the cia of
having a very important role in national security
And if you're in a position where you have a very important role in national
security it's
It's imperative to do what is most effective
And if torture is not
Most effective
Then don't do it
Then you would abandon torture and use those coercion tactics that the other
guy was using
Yeah, that's right
And in fact
They ended up abandoning the torture program
Yeah
Mitchell and jesson took their 108 million dollars and they retired to florida
And uh, and then subsequent cia directors following george tenet said yeah, you
know this didn't work
We're not going to do it anymore
God
I mean
I I have to laugh just because it's so nuts. What else can you do?
It's beyond nuts
It's disgusting
And it's just amazing that they could get away with that yeah, and they have
Nobody's been prosecuted nobody
Does trump know about all this stuff?
About my stuff? Yeah
Like have you ever tried to get a pardon out of him? I i've tried um
I let me rephrase. I am trying so I have a letter that uh
That ronald reagan's former deputy attorney general generously wrote
Asking the president to pardon me 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
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 uh, to ed martin the u.s pardon attorney
And then other people have said oh, I would assign that
So we have a second letter dr. Phil
Has agreed to sign it um
There are a couple of other people high level people ken higgian who was the
head of the president's uh 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
That that's a big deal. That's great news
We we have also a nice one sentence statement from tulsi gabbard saying that
she has no objection to a pardon
So, I don't know man. I'm hoping for the best
You know what they say in business school. Hope is not a strategy
but um
I genuinely don't know what else to do
Now you're doing all these
Conversations you did the conversation with tucker. You did his show
You're now doing my show. You've done a bunch of other shows
Do you have any concern that in exposing
More of what has been done to you that it somehow limits your possibility of
being pardoned
Because you're exposing so many people that may still be working there
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 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 why are you booing and one of the guys said
He's not an insider threat
He's a whistleblower
And she said in the next running of the class my picture was removed
So I won
I won and john brennan lost
That's really what it's come down to
It's so hard to hear these stories it's terrible it's so hard to imagine that
Our government could be so disgusting oh my god. 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
Right the the assistant u.s. Attorneys don't get promoted by not prosecuting
you or by giving you a short
Sentence right right they all see themselves as
You know having the corner office at the law firm someday or running for
congress or for the governor
And they're going to make that career on your back. That's the problem right
because
There's a lot of cases where people are setting people up and you know
I was talking to a friend of mine about this one case where there was a
I'm sure you remember it there was a 19 year old. Um
I think he was
probably at the very least intellectually challenged guy and they tricked him
into uh, they
Radicalized him gave him a fake bomb gave him a cell phone. Do you know exactly
what you're talking about?
And then yeah swept in and got him and
He wasn't planning on doing anything. No, it was they talked him into doing the
whole thing. He wasn't a bright person
and
They got an arrest because of that so it adds to their career. That's it like
when when I was having a conversation about this
We brought up the uh, the governor that they were planning on kidnapping. Yeah,
governor whitmer. Yeah
Michigan. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that 12 of the 14 people were working with the fbi.
Yeah, which is just
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
Like what is that? Is this a joke?
This is what the american taxpayers money goes for you remember have you heard
of the route 82 bridge plot in cleveland?
No, there are three morons sitting in a bar
Getting drunk. Oh, I did hear about this. The other guy comes in. Hey, you know
what we should do?
It would be so much fun blow up the road route 82 bridge
I have some explosives and these guys are drunk. They're like, yeah, let's do
route 82 bridge
Well, the guy with the explosives is an fbi informant. He set them all up and
they got like
2018 and 15 years in prison
It was the fbi's idea
Not their idea. They're just sitting in a bar drinking. Well, how about january
6? How about january 6?
This is there you go. I was trying to explain to jim gaffigan
One day jim gaffigan was talking about what they did in january 6. I go. Do you
understand that there were paid?
People that were working for the federal government
There were employees of the federal government that were on that lawn trying to
convince people to go in and he was very incredulous
He he did he did not believe it and I said there are agent provocateurs
Yes, that are
That is their job to try to get you to do something illegal
Exactly, so they can build their careers by making these arrests
Not just that but demonize the president the former president percent to a much
larger extent
To charge him with insurrection to say that he was plotting to overthrow the
government
Yeah, and as it turns out the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow
the government was john brennan
How was he plotting over to the government in 2015 and 2016 with russia gate?
Oh, right, right, 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
steel 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 a 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 and they're like, oh
Look what donald trump did
He hired prostitutes to pee on barack obama's bed. No, he didn't
one guy
made this up
And christopher steel wrote it and sent it back that doesn't make it fact
Wasn't it funded by the hillary clinton? It sure was
Yes, it was
Yeah
Which is
Equally wild you made another point. I wanted to address these january 6 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
And a strongly worded letter and maybe a thousand dollar fine. Don't do that
again
30 years in prison
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?
Of course not. No, of course not
But it also just divides us even it does and it also very much distorted the
narrative with people like jim gaffigan
Who's a friend of mine?
Who's a very left-leaning comedian?
and
He had it in his mind
That these people went and they all they also have this thing where they say a
cop was murdered
Right, that's not true. I hate that. They say it over and over again. That's
not true
One cop died after the fact of a heart attack
It you could say maybe it was because of the stress of january 6th
Perhaps maybe maybe not maybe not maybe he shouldn't have been a cop
Yeah, I mean if you can get such significant health problems, right?
Like that's not normal to just die of a heart attack because of a very
stressful day
Mm-hmm. That's but that's it this idea that they killed cops that keep that
narrative keeps coming out
It was an insurrection they murdered cops. They broke into the white house.
They were looking for nancy pelosi
They were gonna kill her like okay
Are you sure because there's a lot of this story? That's bullshit now?
It turns out at one point in time they were saying it was 20 fbi agents now the
latest number is
270 that's right. Yeah, that's huge. That's a lot of people
It's a lot of people that are encouraging people to break in
And there's many instances of these suspected people that are on camera a lot
of them wearing face masks
There's one of them where guys
removing the broken glass from the window and encouraging people to go in and
another guy gets in his face and goes
Do not do that and then he pushes that guy fuck you and the other guy backs off
um
How is that not
Being investigated as a serious crime and like that that's a serious
It's a violation of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place if the
fbi was on that loan on that lawn
I would hope what they would be doing is informing people
Entering into this building is a felony breaking these windows
Getting into this building is
You do not want to do this if you want to peacefully protest do that
But i'm telling you this will fuck with you for the rest of your life and most
likely ruin it
I think you're a hundred percent right
That's what I would hope from law enforcement
I wouldn't hope that they would be trying to set people up and from
A civil society right
You know do we we want to set people up to go to prison we want to wreck
families and wreck people's lives
Why would we want to do that also?
What was there did they turn down the idea of bringing in the national guard?
You know, I I really don't understand
It appears. Yes, it appears that that's exactly what happened also
Significantly deterred people from committing these crimes. That's right that
they were encouraged to do
I'll tell you if I was at a demonstration and all of a sudden the national
guard showed up. I'd say I just believe this isn't for me
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think most people would do that as well. You're right
It's crazy
It's just so gross that yeah, there are legal system
Gets used against political opponents in that way in such a devious and just a
sinister way
Harry truman once famously said if you want a friend in washington get a dog
Yeah, yeah
God, what a gross business
It's just sad because I also am a patriot and I want to think of us as better
than that. Yeah, we're the good guys
And I don't think it's necessarily the fault of these individuals
I think this system really sucks
And I think you work for that system and just like all these congress people
that wind up insider trading
Everybody else is doing it. It's the culture you get wrapped up in it. Just
like bad cops
You know, you get assigned to a precinct that's filled with corrupt cops and
you have to do things to stay with them
They're your blood brothers and you're all in this together
And so you wind up doing some criminal activities that you think are just
everybody does it is what we do
Yep, and you're an fbi agent. Well, we got to set this guy up. Okay. Let's set
him up. This is what we do
Hey, if he doesn't do it, he's not committing a crime. We got nothing on him.
Okay
And then you just convince him to do it and he's a fucking idiot
And so he does it and he hits that cell phone and now you're arresting him and
he's like what yeah
And he's so dumb. He barely knows what happened
And the chances are he can't afford a decent attorney right or he's not
Notorious enough and newsworthy enough to to get you know
A-list attorneys volunteering pro bono, right? 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
And there's also the narrative that's very difficult to shake
So if you get accused of some sort of a heinous crime
The narrative for most people that are casual viewers of that story is that you're
a terrorist
Yeah
Or you're a guy who's going to kidnap the governor or you're a guy who is an
insurrectionist
Who's trying to overthrow the government on january 6th?
And then you watch the footage that they wouldn't release during the trials and
you see them getting a guided tour
The guided tour through like their the security guards are walking them into
the senate like what the fuck?
What is this?
Like what is and why is no one outraged and why is it only one side that's
outraged god if I was a
if I was a
Democrat congressman or a senator or if I was any sort of a politician on the
other side
I'd be like do you know how disgusting this is?
This is you're you're using this to go after donald trump of all things
And instead of just better political opposition exactly
And the media are to blame in part as well. Well, they're bought and paid for
absolutely
I mean 100 percent the the media in this country is a complete and total
failure
The only thing that's real media in this country are independent journalists.
That's right
And there's a mostly people who worked for
large media corporations and either were fired or
Had to leave because their own ethics and morals and eventually branched out on
their own and now
They're in grave danger. Yeah, you know, and they're worried about being prosecuted
or set up. I couldn't agree more killed
Yeah, it's super sketchy because that's we like to think of ourselves as better
We're this is the shining example for the rest of the world. This is the
Experiment and self-government that the whole world follows this lead
And when you see that not just tolerated but standard
Yeah, it hurts
It really does
I was raised in a family like you were
Where I was taught that this was the greatest country on earth bar none
I still think it is and I do too
And that's why we have to weed out
The likes of John Brennan
God
But it seems like there's a lot of people like that. Yeah that are deeply
rooted
Yes, and this is what you were talking about too that
Presidents come and go but those people that's the real power
You know this car this term the deep state a lot of people that you know
There's a lot of people that don't like to entertain any kind of conspiracies
because they think it's like a fool's journey
But you're really foolish if you don't
Believe in conspiracies. Yeah, because just how many of them have to be proven
true
Before you go, maybe I should reassess my
Position on these things that's 62 years after the jfk assassination. We're
still learning new information. Yeah
Information that's been kept from us and still being kept there's still a lot
of it
I mean they were supposed to that was the one of the more disappointing things
about this administration like immediately right off the jump
We're supposed to get all the cia files all the jfk files. We're supposed to
know exactly what happened to him
We know
Very little very little new information has been released that
Illuminates any aspects of that case. Yeah, it's a shame. Yeah, it's it's
terrible because most likely
At least some part of our government was involved in assassinating the
president and
No one went to jail. No, nothing happened and in fact people succeeded and thrived
after that
Sad truth. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I mean it goes back. There's so
many cases like with the i've had conversations with people that like
They you know, they don't want to be fools, right?
So that's a lot of the people that don't want to believe in conspiracies like
Most of it can be explained away by incompetence or coincidence and it's not
like that's not even true
It's not even most of it. It's some things can be explained some things. I had
a friend at the agency
He was one of my first bosses and he had started out in
In this like internship program that the agency had the the
Matt it was a you had to be working on a master's degree
But anyway, his first assignment was in the counterintelligence center, which
at the time was being run by james angleton
and um
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
Oh god
Yeah
The crazy thing too in a lot of people's eyes is the difference between
What they thought of what what the narrative is of the obama administration in
terms of like whistleblowers and
Like what the hope was, you know, it's hope and change. Oh hope and change 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
Under barack obama eight people were charged with espionage for speaking to the
media
So he was the enemy of whistleblowers not only that that was part of his
campaign
Yeah, part of his campaign right was protection of whistleblowers. Absolutely.
It was in the hope and change website
Yeah, well look at the dash t-lay-li massacre that I mentioned earlier
It was part of his campaign
To open an investigation of dash t-lay-li what happened was at
At dash t-lay-li afghanistan
On november the 30th and december the 1st
2001
2000 taliban soldiers gave up on mass 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. There was no food. There was no
water and
Of the 2000
14 survived
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
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 what's left of them. Really?
Yeah, it's it's grizzly
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
What happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out? I said, okay
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
I said, okay, that's all I need so I wrote a letter to the agency
And I I asked you know for clarification were any cia personnel on site at the
box up or at the
At the location where the trucks were opened
um
And I had it auto penned john carey 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 top secret. I said, well, what did it say?
And he says it says go fuck yourself
I said great. 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
God what a gross business. It's awful hideous
What is it like from for you on the outside now watching?
What's going on in the world?
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
I think that
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 served 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 for the white house as far as i'm concerned. Can i
stop you real quick?
Yeah, the correct pronunciation. How did you say it gutter?
You said gutter. Uh-huh. It's uh, it's back here. It's called a cough, but so i've
heard cutter. Yeah, it's not cutter
But yeah, they you're saying like a g they use a g sound
Other arabs would call it cutter with a like a k uh-huh, but in the gulf
dialect. It's way down here
Qatar Qatar Qatar uh-huh, okay
The other thing is iran man. I follow iran
More closely than anybody. I know you remember you're 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 chinese and open
diplomatic relations
and
I've
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
It may not be in the form of a trip to tehran
But I could see a trip to riad and have a meeting brokered
by
by muhammad bin salman
And maybe we can come to some sort of an agreement on on issue number one or
issue number two
Well, it seems to be a part of what he wants to accomplish in these four years
Is that he wants to go down as having made significant change in the world in a
positive direction and and we're seeing it
Whether whether people want to admit it or not that's part of the problem
because of narratives. That's it
You know peace between india and pakistan doesn't doesn't fit in the democratic
party's narrative that donald trump is a warmonger
He's not 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 and uh 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
What is your take on?
Netanyahu's position because
If war is over
Netanyahu will no longer be running israel is that correct?
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
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, right?
There are just too many parties and too many individual interests
So you've got you know a dozen parties represented benjamin netanyahu has never
Won more than 27 of the vote wow he's very unpopular
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's just too many parties, right?
So you win 20 percent and you become the prime minister 20 nobody wants you
Right, so what they did is they they raised the threshold
To which you have to which you have to meet to to win election to the
parliament from three percent to five percent
So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties
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 or whatever it happens
to be
That's what the israelis need to do but 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 really mm-hmm the likes of itamar
ben gavir and uh and uh
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
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
What's that wow it's a terrible
untenable
position
Haven't they decided to go ahead and prosecute him even while he's in office?
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 make
You submit emotions on little technical issues?
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
Well, if there's peace
Then he's gonna have to go on trial
Wow
Which incentivizes him to stay at war, which is so crazy isn't it though?
Strange situation. Well, a lot of people aren't aware that there was hundreds
of thousands of people protesting in the streets before october 7th
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
and what is the
Specific corruption that he's being accused of you know, it's changed over the
years
Some of it had to do with business others had to do other accusations had to do
with him
trying to
essentially sell positions in the government
But yeah, I read the accusations when they first came out. They weren't strong
They're defensible
So I I don't know why he doesn't just grab the bull by the horns and and go for
it
Wow
So out of all the issues that we face internationally
Do you think that the israel palestine is the most significant one?
I don't actually I think the threat is greater from china
The chinese are incredibly
patient
Um, there was a there was a joke in the onion the other day
It was a bunch of chinese guys just sitting around the 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 they can outweigh us
You know, we we we
Have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to be all around the
world
Uh protecting the weak and those without a voice and being the peacemaker
You know, we have we have
A hundred and ninety bases and 144 countries
We have to do all that and the chinese say yeah, yeah, you have to go ahead
spend all your money on that stuff
in the meantime, we're gonna 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
And then all of our extra money. We're gonna 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
Of winning hearts and minds
Well, it's also they're actively engaged in
Making sure that people are arguing online
Yeah, you know, they're very good at these kinds of behind the scenes like
quasi
Spy like surreptitious actions
They actively promote
Us
Arguing fighting disagreeing they promote these societal disruptions that we're
all so 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
Well, what could be done to counter it?
Because a lot of it is what's going on in social media is echo chambers
People exist in these echo chambers are completely addicted to their
smartphones
They're on the algorithm all day long. They're checking things and getting ramped
up by things
And they're being told
Various narratives whatever it is and there was a story recently about
Um china getting caught using chat gpt for various different services where
they were using bots
And you know, so they had done it automated through chat gpt
Brad parscale is doing it right now on behalf of the israelis
He recently won a six million dollar contract to train chat gpt to be more pro
israel
It was in reason magazine a couple of days ago
Well, you also have the recent purchase of tick tock
Absolutely a lot going on which I think it 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've I write columns all the time and have my own little podcast and
And I said that I was optimistic that a deal seemed to be at hand
You know between israel and the gaza palestinians
And then immediately I started getting attacked and it was it was by obviously
anonymous
Writers I can't imagine that these writers are human beings they had to be bots
One called me virulently
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 um
I was morbidly obese and ugly and stupid too
It's like what the fuck is that that does sound chinese
Oh
Morbidly obese ugly and stupid too uh-huh you don't even look a little fat no
No, I i'm 6'1 190. I feel like i'm okay
You look great
That's so funny
That's kind of hilarious though
But if you just say things enough people are going to believe it that it's
effective
But at least it moves a narrative into a certain direction you know and chat gpt
and these other chat bots are very easy to um
To influence when chat gpt first came out just for fun
I said who is john kiriyaku and it said john kiriyaku is a former cia officer
blew the whistle on the torture program
Etc
John kiriyaku 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 kiriyaku 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
Why didn't you just say i'm actually john kiriyaku you fucking afraid it was
what it was gonna do to me
But I mean did you ask it where are you getting your information from no, but
it pulls from literally everywhere, right?
So there's a narrative out there. Yeah, somehow or another that there's
universities that you never attended, right?
huh, yeah
Yeah, and then you know if you make somebody angry you can be just deleted from
chat gpt
uh a friend of mine
Pulitzer prize nominated political cartoonist ted rawl
He did the same thing who is ted rawl
well ted rawl we know is
15 years at the los angeles times as an award-winning editorial cartoonist. It
says there is no such person as ted rawl
Hmm
So I wonder who he pissed off
Have you tried subsequently?
No
Let's see what perplexity says. Okay pull up
That's what we use that's one of our sponsors
Let's see who is john kiriyaku. Let's see if they get it wrong too because if
that's
The case that means somebody probably planted this incorrect information out
there into it
Which is like how and why like what would be the purpose of doing that what?
Especially something that's not even derogatory. No, it's just it's just factually
incorrect. Yeah
About your education. They gave you different places that you went to school,
which is weird
Like that doesn't even make sense. No, like what would
What would be the benefit of that?
I have no idea
No answer
But just to ask it who is john kiriyaku. Let's see what it says
Who is john kiriyaku? Okay?
American whistleblower author journalist former intelligence officer all that
stuff's true personal background
CIA 1990 all this is accurate. Yeah, all of that is that whistle blowing and
legal case
recognition and advocacy
Remain active and speaking out against torture and advocating for government
transparency and ethical intelligence policies all that's true. Yep, so
Perplexity all of that's gets it absolutely correct
Absolutely, correct. So ask a follow-up. What is his education history? There
it is. Ah graduated from newcastle high school
Washington university all this is accurate. Oh, that's all that's correct. Okay
So it seems like whatever it was was just in chat GPT. Yes, which is really
weird
I'm using perplexity from now on. What do you think it could have been like
what would be the benefit of giving?
Incorrect information about your education in chat GPT. I don't know. I don't
know, 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 in spain
and so
I was very proud of the 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 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
Whoa, every single one of them there were no such links. There were no such
articles. It just made it all up
Is it possible that chat GPT is like it has a mandate to fuck with you?
You know what I mean?
It's possible
Because imagine if you weren't doing your due diligence
Right
And you just incorporated those links and they're like, oh my god, Kiriakou is
a fraud. These aren't even real articles. Yeah
Bullshit, right? That's crazy like so too. Do you you must be paranoid? I mean
you have to be right?
I'm paranoid. You have to be I mean, but you you must be
Because of what's happened to you when you see something like that you must be
like what the fuck
It's almost like they're just always trying to get you. Yeah
Yeah, I do feel that way somewhat 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. Yeah
There were times when I 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 um
And I would write down the license number and just call my lawyer and then he'd
call me
You know a day later and say it's the fbi they're just curious as to what you're
up to
Oh god, 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
You know see them following you. They're really not good at surveillance
Which is horrible because that's our job right
god john
You've been through a quite an odyssey. It's awful
It really is awful. I i'm serious when I say I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It's
a horrible thing
but it's it's also awful because
You've done so much good
For your country
I've tried that's what's crazy. And that's I look I'm you know, I criticize
Intelligence agencies and everybody else for doing wrong things, but I think
they're important. Very important. I do too
When people say we need to dismantle the cia and dismantle like what are you
talking about?
You know like mike baker
I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas like if you talk to
someone who's actually worked in the field
They will give you an understanding of all the bad things that are happening in
the world that we have to keep tabs on like
Don't say we should not pay attention. That is fucking crazy talk. You just don't
want to corrupt cia
That's right. That's it. That's that's the bottom line right there. We don't
want to corrupt cia. We don't want to politicized cia
Yes, I'll give you another example 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,
the 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 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
And so he took over
You can't criticize that. Yeah, that seems like a
If he's a just man, that seems like a good response
But I don't know I don't know enough about that world to comment on honestly,
but getting back to your point
and mike baker's point
You know
And i'm out of the cia. So I I don't know as much as I used to know on a daily
basis
but
But americans get only just a little
a little
tidbit
Of what's happening in the world like 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, right?
You're not supposed to know right, you know the likes of timothy weiner will
write a book about
failures
But the successes have to remain secret
Wow d like what is it like
Having been a public servant having worked for the government and having done
All these things that are so critical and important for national security and
then to have that machine turn on you
Do your time in prison and come out and now being someone who talks about it
all yeah
It was hard at first joe. I won't lie to you
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
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
Whoa, 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
Well, that's great. They had to be discreet about it for a little while
But they never walked away from me. Well, that's great. Mm-hmm
Oh
You're a strong man. Yeah, you know, I know how you gone through all this
Um come out on the other side as a person who comments on the state of the
intelligence agencies
You know, I'll add to that
That the election of donald trump
In 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
Why do you think that is?
You know, I think
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
Their important work
And that's how things like the patriot act gets snuck in
Exactly right
That's a great point
Yes
And and and the ndaa
And the ndaa
We're not going to use that
Right
We don't use that on don't worry
You know
When I was when I was in the 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
Right
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 that 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
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
Thank you. That is so insane
That is so insane that that's the origin of it
wow
Yeah
Lazy bastards
Well lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity
Because this is an opportunity to push something through that
Could be beneficial if you want to
Push propaganda on the american people and up until now it's been illegal. That's
right
Is there ever been any talk of turning that back?
No, a lot of people believed 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. No
No, where's where's the outrage?
No, where is the outrage and he's got to hide in russia
Yep
Crazy
Depressing
Do you think it could possibly push further in that direction?
Oh, I think that that
First of all 100% yes, I think that it's natural that it would push it would
push further
It's up to us to to push back
And I don't think the american people have their act together
Enough well, we're too divided. Yeah, that's part of we really are
But something like the nda should be a nonpartisan issue everyone should be
looking at that and go this is crazy
Something like using propaganda against american citizens like what's the pros
and what's the cons right?
I want two columns
I want you to write down all the things that are going to be negatively
affected by propaganda on american citizens
All the ways that could be used corruptly and then all the positives we're
going to get out of it
Oh, we can lie to cuba. Fuck you. That's not enough. No, it's not enough
I went to cuba last year
Because they 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
So I went 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
He said tune in after 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
Every time she testifies on capitol hill about the voice of america
They're like now we need voice of america. We need to spend another 50 million
dollars to why
We don't need to propagandize them have first of all
Have you ever heard of this thing called the internet?
Right 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 must be doing that anyway. They must be
I should hope so I should hope so I mean these bots that we're worried about
from china a bunch of them have to also be from america
I would assume some agency. Yeah
Which is just like and then as ai gets more and more powerful
It's the race like who's in charge of that. Yeah, like how does that go and
what happens when everything gets automated?
And what happens when everyone gets on universal basic income and then they're
relying entirely on the government, right?
Yeah, good point and this is maybe a decade away. It's coming. Yeah
Um, is there anything else you're concerned about before we wrap this up that
you want to talk about i'm less concerned about the russians
Um, I think the president has played this right. He he tried to
Kind of force the two sides together. He got pushed back. He did what he could
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? Is that really the only solution at this point?
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?
Or do we want to let
Diplomacy let diplomats do what they're paid to do and I always say sure
We used to make fun of the bush administration was that when I was at the
agency because we had never seen an administration work
So hard to not speak to our enemies
Right, 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
I
Just can't imagine
Why they would want to keep it going
I mean at this point there what i'm told is that putin is under great pressure
from his military establishment
That 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 and why do they want to continue it
because they want to destroy ukraine
They want to take kiev they they want it to to collapse
You know, there are a lot of russians who don't believe that ukraine is a
legitimate
country
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
And so they feel the same way about kiev
It's just so horrible to see like 60 year old men getting conscripted
Right off the street and yeah kidnapped just sent right to the front of the
line right to the wood chipper
Yeah, it's just terrible and we don't even know the real numbers now casualties.
No, we don't it's got to be huge
for the ukrainians at least
So you're not concerned about that you think that's going to work itself out as
tragic as it is
I think it's going to burn itself out eventually
I'm i'm very worried that the israelis are going to attack iran again
I'm i'm worried that the israelis aren't going to respect the 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 we're 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 from new jersey?
Yeah, there are a lot of uh synagogues in new york new jersey
Toronto that have these things called called real estate seminars
Where you can put your name on a list and then they call you and say hey
House just opened up over here in this arab village. That's not arab anymore
come and take your house
And the two weeks ago the village that the israelis cleared out was one of the
last remaining christian villages
Drives me crazy
So
What do you think their overall strategy is they eventually want to just take
over?
Oh, I think we should we should believe the israelis when they tell us
That that they believe in greater israel which includes
the west bank the gaza strip
the southern quarter of lebanon
a strip in in south uh western syria and
I mean 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, what are you worried about israel's influence on american politics
because that's one of the things that's coming to light over
the last couple of years since the invasion where people are paying more and
more attention to israel and then also seeing what happens
When you criticize israel
They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize israel and
usually they'll win
Those primaries apac is very well funded. It is very very well organized. It's
it's the gold standard
of of lobbying organizations
I've never understood why apac doesn't have to register as a foreign agent
With the justice department when everybody else does
Why why is apac special that it doesn't have to register?
You know back in 2008 I guess it was I want a very small contract to write
It was like 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
right
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
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
Enter done. I registered
So if you're doing something anything
On behalf of a foreign government
You have to register
Except if you're apac
And I just don't understand that
That seems so insane
And whenever you see like just dozens of senators and congress people going
over to israeli like
Oh, oh man
My very first week in the senate foreign relations committee staff
These lobbyists came in we had 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 the capitol hill
I said oh, thanks. It's not my first go-round. I've worked on capitol before
Well, we wanted to welcome you with a an all-expenses paid trip to the holy
land
I said, I said, thanks. No, I can pay for my own vacations, but I appreciate it
Oh, nonsense. We'll take you to all the christian holy sites. Thank you. I've
been
I don't want to go and
Some of my colleagues went
For their all-expenses paid trip to the holy land
Courtesy of a pack
I was like, yeah, no, thank you. Not interested. Yeah, and that's just the
beginning of it
That's nothing compared to helping out your campaigns
Well, i'll tell you I I tell this story a lot, but I think it's I think it's
appropriate here
I had been at the agency for
Two and a half months maybe
Two about two and a half months and I was uh told to give my very first liaison
briefing
So this is going to be uh, the israeli mossad and shin bet
And uh, I was going to be one of about eight analysts and I was the most junior
so I would go last
Well, we don't allow the israelis into cia headquarters
We used to but every time they would come they'd say hey, we brought gifts.
Here's a gift for you
And it's all packed full of listening devices and batteries every one of them
every one of them
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? Oh?
Sorry, well, 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, because you just can't trust them. So that is so crazy
We go to this 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 kiriyaku 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
It's crazy how effective it is though. Oh, yeah, look at jonathan pollard now.
He's running for the knesset
bastard
It's just crazy how much influence one country has
Yeah, it really is on a much bigger country much bigger and they have such a
tiny
Population. I know what is it like nine million people? Yeah
Pretty gangster
It's pretty gangster kudos kudos to them. It's like chicago taking over the
world. That's that's right
Right and saying we're gonna do things our way not even chicago chicago might
have more people
Fuck
Wow well listen, John, I really appreciate your time and uh, thank you and
And thank you for your story. Thank you so much for having me. This was a real
treat for me
And it's a horrible thing that they did to you, but uh, it's i'm so glad you're
out so we can get your insight
Thank you very much. Appreciate you very much. Pleasure. Thanks all mine. All
right. Bye everybody
you