Title: Addy Adds Official - Publi
Show: Addy Adds Official
Date: 2022-04-01
URL: https://youtu.be/0wyH1-MSOaw
Duration: 42:00

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[00:05] [Music] what's up folks this is addy ads and this is public intelligence we have an awesome guest this afternoon we have john kiriakou cia torture whistleblower former intelligence officer for the central intelligence agency and now a best-selling author and speaker and he's also a uh a writer as well and we're going to talk about the outlets he he has written for his awards as well he won the 2016 sam

[00:37] adam award for i think his courage in whistleblowing and he also spent two years at loretto which is a a federal prison in pennsylvania so we're going to talk about that as well but i want to thank you for coming on the show john and i just tell you again it was a pleasure to meet you in person in d.c thank you pleasure is mine happy to be here of course uh and i wanted to ask you how you thought the conference went uh it was a couple weeks ago now but you had i think the best speech there oh thank you

[01:07] yeah i think that seemed to be the consensus but yeah how did you think it went i i loved the conference you know it's it's an unusual kind of conference because most of these things the the washington institute the middle east institute uh they have a very strong pro-israel bias to them and and this one doesn't this one is far more pro-palestinian and talked about issues that

[01:38] you really don't talk about at these other issues at these other conferences and and the the cast of of speakers and even the guests you know there were some remarkable guests at this thing it just made it just made it such a a worthwhile way to spend a couple of days and then getting to meet you know roger waters was thrilling yeah yeah definitely i agree sir it was it was great to meet both you guys and

[02:10] you know getting to meet new authors and new material uh new uh online outlets uh as well but i wanted to ask if we could take it back a little bit yeah i learned you were actually a teacher at one point in time in my research for this interview i wanted to ask you how long you taught for and why you why you decided to start and stop teaching and then what it is you taught sure my mom and dad were both public school teachers uh my dad for he was mostly a principal but

[02:42] for 44 years uh and and about um 38 of those years were as a principal my mom was a an elementary school teacher for 20 years and when i was in grad school i was going to school full-time and having a part-time job just wasn't enough to to pay the expenses so i got a job teaching american history and an american government at a a small private school on dupont circle here in washington

[03:14] that was called the emerson preparatory institute and at the time this was in the late 1980s it was it was primarily for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts and so it was very like specifically tailored to people who also had to you know think about scheduling treatment and therapy and stuff like that so i only did it for two years because um like i say i was in grad school at the time and um and it was two years well spent it was a

[03:46] great experience it really was and you taught was it history uh-huh american history and american government okay and if you didn't make the decision to go into the cia would it uh you know what is another career path you think you might have taken honestly i really really wanted to go to uh to film school i wanted to make uh documentaries yeah i wanted to make documentaries and i know that there's no money in documentaries there never is but um

[04:16] but it always fascinated me and it's funny now i've been in man i'm not exaggerating 25 30 documentaries one of them was nominated for an emmy um one was nominated for an oscar it's uh it's worked out kind of nicely yeah so in in a sense you you achieve that goal uh anyways although you are kind of you're in front of the camera behind it right behind it yeah and but i wanted telling stories in that respect and a good documentary can

[04:46] really tell a good story do you have some favorites uh that you can share with us or documentaries that have uh really influenced you one that i saw recently that was just incredible was um searching for sugar man have you ever heard of that one i haven't no it was it was nominated for an academy award back in i think 2016 and it was about this uh this folk singer who um came out with an album that nobody

[05:18] really listened to although he was really good and um and then came out with a second album that even fewer people listened to and then he just sort of disappeared but what he didn't know was that someone had smuggled these albums into apartheid era south africa and he ended up selling more albums in south africa than the beatles and elvis and uh and nobody ever told him one of the record label executives just stole the money

[05:48] and so nobody knew was he still alive uh where did he live and the documentary filmmakers decided to try to find him and they found him in detroit he's a plumber and um lives in this ramshackled falling down house uh but he ended up going to south africa when they told him that he was the most popular folk singer in the country he ended up

[06:18] selling out 20 dates and uh has gone back a couple of times it was a it was a wonderful story of you know the little guy finally winning yeah yeah sure wow that's great i might have to check that one out and that came out in 2016 you said so probably it's still on i saw it on amazon not too long ago really terrific okay okay excellent uh and as far as the the cia goes what do you think is uh not even just one thing but what are

[06:50] what's an understanding at least a basic understanding that the layman should have about the cia and and how it works because i think a lot of people don't they don't even know the difference between the cia and the fbi for example yeah yeah a lot of people don't know the difference between the ci and the fbi um you know the in the easiest terms the cia's job is very very simple it's to recruit spies to steal secrets period that's all they're supposed to do and then on the analytic side of course the analysts

[07:21] evaluate those secrets to provide the policy maker with the best informed uh background to allow the policy maker to actually make the policy uh that's not really the way things have turned out the cia does a lot of things that are illegal or unethical or inappropriate um they do that because there's no legal pushback they do it because the oversight

[07:52] committees in the house and senate don't stop them and um and so they've ended up sort of encroaching on on the fbi's mission not to say that the fbi hasn't done exactly the same thing you know and uh and has encroached on the cia's mission but either way it's it's wrong it's likely unconstitutional and it should be reigned in and it

[08:22] hasn't been i think at the most basic level that's something americans should understand it is illegal for the cia or nsa for that matter to collect information on american citizens yet they do it every single day and that's just wrong and what are your thoughts on the other famous whistleblowers because you're you are among the most famous and the first uh official cia agent to to confirm torture on record

[08:53] as we know uh do you have relationships with them uh do you read their books uh did you guys know each other before uh yeah what is that like yes yes and yes um you know it's funny we have like a little club you know for lack of a better word um we're all in touch we get together for dinner we hang out at conferences we call each other we read each other's books we're in each other's books

[09:24] um and i i couldn't have gotten through my own experience without the support of these guys the the most important for me have been tom drake from nsa uh jessalyn radak from the justice department and daniel ellsberg of the pentagon papers fame they've become just wonderful very close friends to a very slightly lesser extent uh bill binney from nsa and kirk wiebe um

[16:09] neighborhood so you pull in you get out you buy a diet coke you get in the car and then you get off the main roads and start using what are called black roads black roads are like little neighborhood cut throughs not highways not major roads that way you can see who's going to follow you into that neighborhood and then you do that using black roads to your second cover stop stop now the second cover stop maybe

[16:42] you're taking your clothes to the dry cleaners or you stop at a wine shop or you stop at home depot and buy a light bulb or something right and then you can see if people go inside the establishment with you to see if you're you know to see what you're doing in there then the third phase is called the aggressive phase you you make use of this technique called uh stair stepping where you go one block make a right one block make a left one block make a right

[17:12] one block make a left like a stair step okay and you can see who's making these turns with you also you're you're keeping in mind you know i saw that blue pickup truck an hour ago on the other side of town or i remember that minivan because it had this bumper sticker on it so think to yourself have i seen these places or have i seen these these vehicles rather before the the definition of surveillance is multiple sightings at time and distance

[17:43] where you see the same vehicles or the same people at different places at different times during the course of the day then the fourth um phase to your final destination is called the provocative phase this is where you're driving and it doesn't make any sense you're you're pulling into people's driveways to make a u-turn or you make an illegal u-turn or you go around the block like all the way around the block and end up where you started that's just to shake

[18:14] somebody loose if you've missed someone earlier in the in the route you can shake them loose and see um you know finally definitively if you're being followed but normally i would say just go about your normal business you know your neighborhood better than they do so it would make sense for you to take these black roads and cut throughs and shortcuts through neighborhoods but just don't do something that just simply doesn't make sense because it's going to be alerting to them you want them to to conclude

[18:45] that what you've been doing while they've been following you is totally normal behavior so you're not interesting to them and they're going to drop off and they're going to follow somebody else but if you like i say you drive 10 miles across town to go to a 7-11 and buy a diet pepsi and then drive all the way back home yeah that's not normal nobody does that right right wow and when again does that uh book come out uh they just delayed it believe it or not

[19:16] because of the supply chain disruption there's no paper to print the books on so it's it's going to be may 25th now that's pretty rare for a writer with a book deal to get a delay isn't it yeah and they've delayed it three times now it was oh wow february wow there's no paper that's amazing that's amazing yeah that was like one of the first things i saw shooting up in terms of inflation was the you know the the wood paper lumber uh and that's much but as a writer that must be

[19:46] kind of nice to get that extension it's a little well yeah because i i also have to send everything i write to the cia's publications review board and they have to clear it and make sure i'm not saying anything classified i found it interesting that you you said that they don't care what you say on air but just as long as you don't write it is that correct yeah usually um because their argument is if you say something on the air it could have been edited to

[20:18] make it sound like it was something different from what you said so you're kind of covered for that i do know a couple of guys a couple of former cia officers who if they know they're going on the air will write something out and submit it for clearance and then stick to their talking points that makes for a terrible interview it makes for a very boring and very stilted interview but if you write something you have to send it to the publication's review board for clearance for the rest of your life wow wow yeah and likewise you have a

[20:49] it's like a lifetime secrecy class too yeah even though they they came they came after you with everything and but the kids yeah and and the frustrating thing is you know you look at people who who did far worse than i did i was prosecuted for confirming the last name of a former cia colleague to a reporter who never made the name public never and then you've got david petraeus who confirmed the names of 10 covert

[21:19] operatives to his adulterous girlfriend and got 18 months of unsupervised probation or i won't say his name because he's never been charged with a crime there was a disgruntled former cia officer in bethesda maryland who made a website and named named 17 cia officers who had wronged him during the course of his career half of them were undercover and he was never

[21:51] charged with a crime never and i said to my lawyer at the time this was in 2012. how how do they let him get away with something like that they come down on me like a ton of bricks and they let him just have this website where he's outing people my lawyer said because he didn't blow the whistle on the cia's torture program that's what this is about and that was true i i thought it was kind of tragic how you said the initial i think it was you said 12 or 13 guys in the room that you

[22:22] were with there was actually one other guy who said no at first yes and then he and then he turned he turned into the dark side yeah i thought that was really sad it was like a really small anecdote but i was like oh so you weren't completely alone for a little bit for a little bit how did you you know and you know maybe you want to talk about uh cool you do write about it in your book you mentioned your your wife's uh you know support really was perhaps the biggest uh thing that got you through uh and you

[22:52] mentioned the the whistleblowers as well uh but your own cia training and experience but regardless as well prepared as you were i'd have to imagine that was a really like stressful uh experience those first you know few weeks yeah um you know at my sentencing uh my lawyers asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp and at a minimum security camp they're they're across the street from maine prisons at a minimum security camp there

[23:23] are no fences the doors are unlocked there are no bars on the windows you're free to come and go as you please so long as you're you know you're sort of on your honor not to abscond you uh probably will end up working in town you know there was a university in town people were janitors there um so my attorneys asked her to send me to this work camp and the prosecutors had no objection so she says okay i order that

[23:54] you serve your sentence at the minimum security work camp at loreto pennsylvania and what you do as odd as it might sound when you when you surrender to start a prison sentence you just drive up to the prison and knock on the door and say hi i'm john kiriakou i'm here to turn myself in so i did that and they said oh you got to go across the street to the main prison first and then they'll process you there and then they bring you back over here i said okay so um

[24:27] so i went across the street knocked on the door i'm john kiriakou here to turn myself in and um and they they you know put you through a metal detector and they x-ray your jacket and whatever and then the cop starts to lead me around to the back of the actual prison and i said no no i'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he he chuckled and he said not according to my paperwork you're not

[24:57] and i told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do if you raise a ruckus they're going to put you in solitary so i didn't say a word it took them about 40 minutes to process me you know they they take your picture they put it on a little badge and you have to wear this badge and they gave me you know a prison uniform and a towel and a roll of toilet paper and

[25:29] sheets so they take me to a bunk and the guy says to me welcome home and he just walks away well it took me four days to get access to a phone and i called my lawyers and i said hey they put me in the actual prison with the drug kingpins and the mafia dons i said what do i do and my lead attorney said oh man he said we could file a motion but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll

[25:59] be home by then he said i'm sorry buddy you're gonna have to tough it out so i thought well i'm trained for this kind of thing i've certainly lived in way worse places around the world than loreto pennsylvania so you know i thought i'm just gonna fall back on my cia training and i'm gonna make sure i stay at the top of the social heap and keep myself safe i actually wrote a book about it my second book um and it won two literary awards oddly enough um it's called climb like a

[26:31] spy my seat my um how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison and i have these 20 life lessons that the cia taught me you know admit nothing deny everything make counter accusations uh let others do your dirty work um your mind can take more physical punishment than your body thinks it can stuff like that so 20 these life lessons and i use examples for each one on how i was able

[27:03] to you know negotiate this this maze in prison for for two years i'm really loving reading your your book right now doing time like a spy thank you yeah i'm i'm traveling right now so i'm just doing it on the ebook but i'm looking forward to get the paper back and then your your new one as well that's that's that's awesome at segwayed my question perfectly well you know what it's i have three of them coming out at the on the same day so i have oh wow the cia insider's guide to surveillance and surveillance detection the cia insider's

[27:36] guide to lying and lie detection and the cia insider's guide to disappearing and living off the grid hey i'll tell you something funny too about that last one yeah um i was on i was on this uh podcast like a right-wing extremist guy but he's a nice guy right i i disagree with him but i like him he's a nice guy so he said oh would you come on my podcast i said sure so we went to a commercial break and he asked me so what are you working on and

[28:06] i said oh i just finished these three books and i told them and the last one i said was the insider's guide to uh disappearing and living off the grid and he goes john that book has right-wing extremism written all over it we have to do a zoom lecture and for a hundred dollars everybody gets a copy of the book you'll make a fortune i said hey that's a good idea so maybe i'll try it wow yeah that's a great idea uh yeah yeah and if you want to talk a bit about either of those because i think uh you

[28:38] know a deception book is like lying book right i think that that'd be really interesting to to read about yeah there's a lot out there i have a really great relationship with um sky horse publishing they've published my last five books and um they they told me recently it was the most fascinating thing that they found a book it was a manual a cia manual that was published in 1955 on how to pick locks

[29:09] and it's in the public domain because it's so old and so they just reissued it with a new cover and much to their shock it made number 10 on the new york times best sellers list wow so they asked me if i would um if i would scour the internet find whatever declassified cia manuals are out there and then maybe i could write a new introduction for each one and they can re-release them so i'm looking at them right now i have one two

[29:39] three four i have five that i found on everything from how to make a a key mold out of mud if you're in the woods to um let's see the the field explosive guide the cia writing style guide uh how to recruit um spies to steal secrets there there are a lot of them wow wow that's that's amazing the big one is the cia torture guide called kubar from the 1950s it's nasty

[30:14] it's nasty and it takes lessons from you know the the communist chinese from the belgians and the congo at the turn of the 20th century from the vietnamese when they were fighting the french it the nastiest regimes in the world and it brings all of their torture techniques into one guide and that's what the cia was using in the 50s and 60s lord wow that's uh yeah that's it's really really dark and that's public domain the yeah public

[30:45] domain it people call it kubar it's not kubar it's k-u-b b-a-r-r k-u is a digraph that it means a lot in the cia people wouldn't understand it but k-u-bar is the code is the code word that was used for the early torture program okay and that was like you said mid 20th century or yeah mid 20th century yeah they published it in like 52 or 55 and then it came out again in the early

[31:16] 70s okay okay wow and i would like to ask you uh about your writing process so what is that like uh how does that um how does that manifest for you what do you find works for you oh that's a that's a great question you know it's funny i i've given hundreds upon hundreds of interviews and nobody's ever asked me that before um i write a lot and in part it's because i have trouble sleeping and i figured there's no sense in laying in bed

[31:46] feeling sorry for myself when i can be writing something and making four hundred dollars you know so uh so i'll come down at two o'clock in the morning i'll write 800 words i'll send it to some you know newspaper and then i go back to bed uh when it comes to books books are different i write in spurts like for example most of the books that i've written have been commissioned where the publisher will call me and say hey i need sixty thousand words on xyz

[32:19] and so i'll sit and it usually takes me about nine months and i'll you know write a book there was one book my third book on abu zubaydah where the publisher called and said i need a book in 30 days and i laughed i said it's not possible and he said we really really need this book in 30 days so they sent me a check and i i said to my my wife um i'm going to sit at the computer every day and i am not going to get up until i've written 2 000 words

[32:49] and so i started the day after thanksgiving and i finished the book the day before christmas but that's the fastest i ever wrote one i'm writing one now like for myself honestly i think that in the end it's going to be one of my most popular books but i'm writing the definitive guide to washington dc's historic cemeteries it's something that i've always been interested in there are some incredible stories out there that are just begging to be told and uh honest to god the last couple of

[33:20] weeks there there were two days this past sunday and the week previous saturday where i sat down and i wrote 10 000 words each one of those two days so i'm going i'm writing this book so quickly that i'm actually behind now on the photography you know i've i've got to take pictures of all these grave sites i've got to take pictures of

[33:53] the cemetery entrances i have to look through historic pictures of the people who i'm writing about it's i'm writing so fast that that i've just gotten ahead of the rest of the book do you yeah go ahead john i gotta i wrote a i wrote a 3 000 word piece for um sheer post for robert shearer the other day he's a former pulitzer prize-winning journalist he's a professor now at usc and he commissioned a 3 000 word piece

[34:23] on the abu zubaida capture so i wrote it and i sent it to him i i'm very proud of the way i write i require very little in the way of editing and um i want to get there one day john i'm just going to keep reading your books i'm just going to keep reading your books you know the best advice i ever had i wrote the first draft of my first book and i gave it to my wife and asked her to read it and when she finished it i said what do you think and

[34:53] she said honestly i think it's terrible and i said really she said yeah she said it's so boring and so dry it looks like a government report and i said i can't believe what i'm hearing and she said honey i have listened to you tell these stories a thousand times you should write them exactly as you tell them and it utterly changed my writing style just that advice so instead of writing in the way the cia

[35:24] trained me to write which really was like a boring government report you know to not have one extra word one unnecessary word because the president doesn't have time to to focus on your extra words right sure so i completely changed my writing style and i started writing as if i were telling a story and so that that first book made number five on the new york times bestsellers list

[35:54] doing time like a spy one forward reviews memoir of the year and it won the pen first amendment award one of the big four with the pulitzer the pen faulconer and the edgar allan poe um i won that in 2016. it was great advice and so that's that's what i try to do i try to be a storyteller so anyway i wrote this three thousand word piece on about the beta's capture and i got a call this is about a week ago i got a call from a guy and he said you don't know me but i'm um i'm bernie

[36:25] sanders uh literary agent and i said oh how interesting i said i love bernie sanders and he said i just read your piece at sheer post on abu zubaydah would you be interested in turning it into a book and i said wow writing 3000 words on torture is one thing but writing 60 000 words on torture is an entirely different thing and he said i can sort of guide you through the chapters you know what i want you to address but he said i think we can go back to random house penguin saint martin's you know

[36:58] one of the big ones and i said yeah i said that sounds good i think i'm gonna do yeah wow fantastic congratulations john i'm looking forward to that one as well thank you and i wanted to to bring up the the pen amendment award uh which you you won uh and along with uh sibel edmonds who i wanted to bring up because of this this idea i had with my first book of uh of public intelligence being open source media combined with whistleblowers yeah that kind of uh

[37:30] distinguishes it from open source intelligence was which doesn't mean someone like yourself or miss edmonds so i i kind of see that as the the solution to the media problem uh that would be a good one you know the soviets used to call that mosaic intelligence oh yeah that you can take open source intelligence and information from whistleblowers put it together in a mosaic and even if you don't have all the pieces of the puzzle you can at least see what the puzzle is i love that i love that metaphor that's

[38:01] great yeah yeah i think that's um so it wasn't i just used a different term i knew it wasn't a uh you know an original idea i was like somebody else must have thought of this yeah but i'm not sure anybody's actually written about it i think that would be very interesting yeah yeah i'll send you my next edition john for free uh yeah of course sorry now i'll include you in it uh as well uh and you know other people that i've met along the way because that's that's something too is pretty much everyone in the book i've either interviewed or had another

[38:33] interaction with but yeah what is your uh you know idea for a solution to this because the media is a huge problem i think the corporate media certainly with getting people to understand even basic things let alone you know cia skullduggery yeah good question i think the bottom line is that you have to be utterly diligent in your own analysis of the information and i'll give you an easy and current example

[39:04] so um a friend of mine called me the other day she's ethnic ukrainian but an american citizen and she said can you believe that we've killed seven russian generals already it's incredible it's going to turn the whole war around and i said yeah i saw that i saw that report but what's the sourcing what do you mean i said we gotta look at the sourcing who says we've that the ukrainians have

[39:35] killed seven generals well as it turns out the ukrainians say it so i mean who are these generals where are their votes right what are their commands you can't just kill a general and then the russians say oh well general's dead well they're going to appoint somebody else and they're going to make an announcement right or somebody in washington is going to leak it you can't just say that you read this article and it said that the ukrainians killed seven generals so it's it's fact it's just

[40:05] done it's fact so you know we've got to look at everything with a very careful analytic eye one of the things that i do as soon as i wake up in the morning you know as soon as i get out of the shower i go straight to the computer and i read everything from the far left to the far right and everything in between i read the new york times the washington post the la times but then i go to you know the huffington post and fox news and everything the drudge report you've got

[40:38] to see what all sides are saying because oftentimes they're saying things that that are nothing like what the others are saying i tend to uh give a lot of weight to things that come out of think tanks but only after investigating to see who's financing the think tanks okay do you have any trusted think tanks or or other outlets that you're like you know i usually want to see what they're saying and they're usually on the ball it's easier to tell you which ones i

[41:09] have a problem with sure sure i bet yeah i have a problem with the center for strategic and international studies at georgetown university because they're financed by the biggest arms manufacturers and defense contractors in america so there's never ever any criticism of u.s foreign policy or defense policy never and that's just not acceptable on the left the brookings institute is fantastic on the right

[41:39] the american enterprise institute is good but it's very very neocon if you want more traditional conservative it's the heritage foundation but they tend to do more on domestic policy than on foreign policy um the the hoover institute is good on foreign policy but it's also pretty neocon one of my go-to's is the reason foundation and reason magazine they're terrific so you know read read all of it and um and then come to your own

[42:10] conclusions definitely and that's a that's a great uh i think note to end on i want to be respectful of your time john where can people find your work uh where can they support how can they do that thank you very much well i um i write at consortiumnews.com at covertactionmagazine.com at um the sheer or sheerpost.com and uh i've got my own site at john kiriakou.com and i'm on twitter and

[42:40] facebook and all the usual places excellent excellent thank you so much john for joining me i hope you enjoyed this again and thank you to the audience for joining us as well stay frosty folks and we will see everybody next time
