Title: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on Renditions to El Salvatore and the Coming Gov
Show: Colonial Outcasts
Date: 2025-04-18
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/ef9dcb38/podcast/play/101469685/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-3-18%2F2cbe9767-4317-72e4-140f-56aaf21e6ab2.mp3
Duration: 40:00

---

[00:01] I have put this program in place for a reason and that is to better protect the American people. And when we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we're going to detain them. And you bet we're going to question them because the American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence, so we can help them, help protect them. That's our job.

[00:32] So that was archived footage from the Oval Office of former President Bush referring to two secret memos in 2005 that authorized extreme interrogation tactics against terrorist suspects. As you can see, U.S. policy has been evolving to where we are for quite some time. Hello and welcome to Colonial Outcast, the anti-imperialist podcast that your problematic uncle who still believes that the global war on terror was done for all the right reasons

[01:03] will hate. I also just landed in LA two hours ago and my webcam is busted. The audio is crazy and the internet might cut out. So apologies for the trash quality of my video. Look, we aren't shadow banned on audio platforms, but we are getting massively suppressed on YouTube and we'll probably eventually get deplatformed. So you can join our Patreon as a free member if that happens and still get access to all regular video episodes for free. Anyways, Mint Press News is going to be cutting segments from this interview to post on their own platform because we have got a very special guest this week and we're just going to jump

[01:36] right in. So today we are joined by John Kiriakou, CIA whistleblower and former intelligence analyst and operations officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. He was integral in exposing the CIA's enhanced interrogation program in 2007 and did some time for it. I believe he is now an author, books linked in the description and host of CIA declassified season two, which is now streaming on Unifid TV. I'm going to clarify the pronunciation of that in a second, also in the description.

[02:08] You have a busy schedule, so thank you so much for coming on. Here's your, my pleasure. And is this UNFYD TV or UNIFYD unified? Yeah. Oh my, I don't know how I missed that. That's okay. Everybody does. It's been a long week unified. I don't know. I just went back to like some stupid like military jargon term, how I would pronounce it like Unifid. Wow. Totally missed that one. No worries. So anyways, for the audience, a rough outline, the legacy of the Iraq war, U.S.

[02:43] relation and whistleblowing, U.S. Israel relations and the current internal administration drama about the Iran nuclear deal, which has been a drama, well, since the revolution. Yes. And the expansion of the Guantanamo Bay and Seacott Prison in El Salvador. As the kids say, it's giving extraordinary rendition from the global war on terror. So again, let's just get right into it. And I personally want to start off with this question because I spent the most form of years of my life in Joint Special Operations Command in the 75th Ranger

[03:17] Regiment. And when I started to branch more into like human intelligence collection and got plugged into the kinetic strike targeting cycle of drone strikes in Afghanistan officially. Of course, I knew we were dropping people who shouldn't have been dropped. And I was a field interrogator for a while and we knew other interrogators that were still like pretty brutal. I never believed in negative incentives. It's just not who I was personally, you know, and there were some reforms after the torture report came out, but basically it was basically just don't use

[03:50] waterboarding or threatened to use dogs and don't get caught. My question that I always like to ask, like, when you put the wheels in motion to blow the whistle on human rights abuses by U.S. clandestine services, why did you do it or what did you hope to achieve and put yourself at such personal risk? Like, I've just met so many guys who either didn't care or were resentful that they couldn't go even further. So sure.

[04:21] You know, one of the reasons why I did it was, well, let me back up. I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. When I returned to CIA headquarters in May of 2002, I was asked if I wanted to be trained in what they called the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard that term before. I didn't know what it meant. And the way it was explained to me in my mind was clearly torture.

[04:52] And I was well read enough to know that we have the Federal Torture Act of 1946. We have the United Nations Convention against torture. We have other laws that that very clearly delineate what we are allowed to do in national security custodial interrogations. I declined the training. I was the only one of the 14 people who were approached who declined to be involved.

[05:26] At the same time, I was promoted because I had led the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in al-Qaeda at the time and who was the first person to be subject to torture. So I got promoted to be the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, I was able to see for one year, I was able to see literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world. It was 100% crystal clear to me that there were a lot of people inside

[06:01] the CIA who were opposed to the torture program. People were writing cables back to headquarters from the secret site saying, whoa, this is not what I signed up for. I'm not going to do this. I want to come home. That's called a curtailment or you curtail your overseas assignment. It's a career ending decision to just say, send me home. I'm not doing this. There were people who resigned from the secret site. There were nurses who fainted while watching the torture sessions.

[06:34] There were doctors from the Office of Medical Services who would write, wait a minute, wait a minute. I took an oath to do no harm and you want me to be there to revive this guy after you kill him so that you can torture him more? I'm not doing that. So I thought, well, certainly somebody is going to say something. After my tour on the executive floor was done, I went to the United Nations for my final tour and then I resigned from the CIA and I went

[07:04] into the private sector, still thinking somebody's going to say something and nobody did. And then finally in 2007, I said something to ABC News. My only regret was that I left five and a half years on the table. I learned about the torture in May of 2002. It started on August the 2nd, 2002 and I didn't say anything until December the 11th, 2007.

[07:34] And I wish I had said something sooner. Did more than most. What was the the source of, I don't know, your desire to do that because I've not known people opposed to the torture program just for very practical, real, politic reasons. It doesn't work, right? It doesn't work. And if it ever comes out, it degrades U.S. soft power globally. Yeah, it very much does. The reason why I felt so strongly about it is as soon as I like the

[08:04] moment that I heard about it, my response to the senior officer who approached me was that sounds like a torture program. Torture is illegal. And he said, no, it's not a torture program. The president signed off on it and the Justice Department signed off on it. It's perfectly legal. And I said, I don't know, man, let me think about it. So besides asking a senior officer for his opinion and his opinion was quite strongly in opposition to the program, I started to do my

[08:36] own research and what I found was, and this was very convincing to me, was that in 1945 and 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. That was a death penalty crime to waterboard somebody. And we executed several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding. On January the 11th, 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page

[09:07] photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The day that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, he was convicted of torture, and he was sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at Leavenworth. Besides that, not only is the US a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It's the author of the United Nations Convention Against

[09:41] Torture. So if waterboarding somebody was a death penalty offense or worthy of 20 years at hard labor, and not only did we feel so strongly about the law here in the United States, but we made it international law by writing the UN Convention. How could it just magically be be legal in 2002? Just poof by magic. Congress never passed any amendment to the law. Congress never changed the law. We changed. It's like when

[10:13] Bill Clinton, you know, disagreed with what the what the definition of is is. You can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist, or pretend that you somehow have the authority to ignore it because you don't like it. And so that's why I felt so strongly about it. And that's why I felt that the American people had to write had a right to know about it. Yeah, and decide for themselves. You know, I think we've kind of seen the disintegration of any any pretense that any sort

[10:47] of law of land warfare or international law really exists when it comes to the United States. I mean, one of the most telling things about like selling the saying the quiet part out loud was when the head prosecutor of the ICC was told, and he went on record saying that he was approached by a Western official saying that the ICC was for warlords in Africa and thugs like Putin. And that kind of definitely sums it up. And now, what we've seen and what I've always been frustrated about is like American voters generally only care about

[11:18] domestic issues and not really foreign policy because, you know, geopolitics is difficult. A lot of people weren't educated and that kind of stuff. But when we break laws overseas, and this is just like, longstanding collodial theory, whatever laws we break overseas and the colonies boomerangs back towards like the Imperial Corps, or whatever you want to call it. So now we're seeing that. And I think a good tie in I was going to talk about this at the end. But another thing that was

[11:50] started under the Clinton administration, I believe was, and I'm seeing kind of like a corollary with the ICE detentions and the constitutional crisis of the Supreme Court, a federal judge is saying turn the planes around and the White House is like, we're not turning the planes around. We're going to get them out of the country so fast that you can't stop us. And then once they're out of the country, they're gone because it's basically easier to take people away from the law than take the law away from people. And this reminds me of extraordinary rendition.

[12:22] You know, this really is the definition of an extraordinary rendition. Well, I'll let you decide, it could be just a rendition. Either way, it's illegal. There's no due process here, right? This this guy in from Maryland that has been said to El Salvador was not given due process. He's never been charged with a crime. He's never been even accused of a crime. And it's funny, if you look at the at the Washington Post at the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, they say, Oh my God, there's this guy in Maryland

[12:52] and he was scooped up and he was sent to El Salvador. If you look at Fox or the New York Post or even the Wall Street Journal, they talk about MS 13 gangbanger sent to prison in in El Salvador. Well, the fact of the matter is that he was essentially kidnapped and sent to El Salvador. That's what a rendition is. So you know, let's call the spade a spade here. The guy was rendered to El Salvador. And another thing that's funny to me is, you know, you see these clips from the Oval Office of, of, you know,

[13:25] Trump reading the riot act, you know, to, to Lodomers Zelensky, or to other world leaders. And then he just cowers in the face of the power and the authority of the president of El Salvador. It doesn't make any sense to me. And not only that, you know, the president of El Salvador gives the middle finger to everybody and says, No, we're not going to let him go. And we're not letting Senator Chris Van Hollen meet with him. And we're not letting Van Hollen take him home. And, and nobody's going to meet

[13:56] with him. And he's not going to be released. And then we have the president say, actually, we would like to finance the building of four or five more of these 30,000 unit, you know, super prisons. Well, what the heck is that? So is the plan that we just are doing away with, with due process? Do Americans or US persons, people who have valid green cards, do they just no longer have civil rights and civil liberties? Because it sure looks like that's the road

[14:28] we're taking. As someone with a background in intelligence, you know, who's gone after high value targets like yourself. It doesn't seem because they're choosing guys 75% of whom it seems like do not have critical criminal records or even like gang tattoos. So it seems from an outsider that these they're picking these battles because there are illegal immigrants who are criminals who they have committed crimes. But they're not going after them. They're going after these guys who have

[15:00] legal protections that are very sympathetic figures like working father. It looks to me as someone who, you know, did that kind of like, like night raids for five years. It looks like they don't have the intelligence architecture or collection to actually have any of these guys. You are absolutely right. You are absolutely right. If they had the intelligence, they would get the guys that Donald Trump

[15:32] famously called in 2016 the bad hombres scoop them up, not the restaurant tour who's married to an American woman in Indianapolis and has run a successful steakhouse for 30 years. Why are you throwing him out? Or the 19 year old kid from Venezuela who the agent says like, I don't think this is him and then a superior said take him anyways. Yeah, exactly. Or the kid in Vermont where they come and say,

[16:04] Hey, come to the INS office in Vermont, you could take your citizenship test. And they've got masks and hoods and and camo uniforms, and they scoop them up and put them on a plane and throw them out. Or the Turkish PhD candidate, whose only crime is that she wrote an op-ed critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. But instead of crime, I just don't understand what the point is, other than to squelch dissent, show unflinching support for Israeli war crimes,

[16:40] and and try to exhibit this fake toughness. I wanted to to that end, I kind of wanted to ask you about the deployment of of the word terrorist. Yeah. And because I don't have any experience like even like looking at like the cartels from an intelligence perspective. They have kind of used we're kind of seeing a fusing of two avenues of approach, in my opinion, we see the deployment of the word terrorist, terrorist sympathizers about the pro Palestine

[17:13] stuff. You know, there we're supporting a, you know, either because people think it's a national liberation movement. You know, you're hit with the word terrorist. And of course, that's been normalized through over the past 20 odd years. But now we're seeing like Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States call these gang members foreign terrorists and they've designated certain cartels in Mexico, foreign terrorist

[17:45] organizations. How do you see that like, so it seems like they're using the mechanism of deportation along with the deployment of like the pro Palestine movement to like meld it all together into this anti dissent apparatus. And I was just wondering, like, what strikes you as significant as like naming gangs as terrorist organizations? And like, what consequences that could have going forward? There was a very bureaucratic reason to do that, which I'll

[18:17] get into in just a second. But you know, there's a, there's quite a simple definition of terrorism that we used to use at the CIA. And it was, it was any, any action in support of political change that uses violence to terrorize a civilian population. Very simple. So Carlos, the jackal is a terrorist. But you know, some national liberation movement that does not target civilians isn't is not a terrorist group. Now, the

[18:49] reason why Donald Trump and the State Department used the terrorism designation on the drug cartels, it was purely bureaucratic, because then it allows the CIA to budget money in order to help in this fight against the cartels. It also gives them legal authorities to use drones against the cartels. So just a week or two weeks after Trump announced this change, Rubio Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State was asked if

[19:23] the CIA would be using drones in the fight against the cartels. And he said flat out, no. So why bother making the designation? It was just to allow the transfer of money from the CIA to other operational entities to use in the in this fight against the cartels. When I was at the CIA, coming in speaking Spanish was pretty much a career ender, unless you

[19:58] wanted to do political issues on the ground in Latin America. Okay, if you join the directorate of operations, you speak Spanish and you want to spend your career, you know, in a half a dozen countries around Latin America. Okay, good on you. If you had any interest at all in drugs, it was a career ender. Because nobody gives a shit about drugs at the CIA. I'm sure you've seen the show Narcos on on Netflix. And just as they're

[20:31] going in to grab, you know, Pablo Escobar or the gentleman of Cali or whomever, the CIA station chief moves in and just screws up the whole operation. Well, that was true. And it's because the CIA never cared about drugs. They cared about communism back at that time. They cared about terrorism a little bit later. They care about proliferation. They don't care about drugs. Well, they still don't care about drugs. So

[21:02] there's not going to be this big move inside the CIA to focus on the cartels. This was purely a bureaucratic budgetary and paperwork exercise to allow the free transfer of money. Yeah. And I would say that I just might get some questions and the comments like what about the the Contra with Nicaragua, like creating a slush fund for Iran and stuff like that. But beyond

[21:33] that you would kind of proves that kind of proves the point because the idea was that the CIA allowed the drugs into the United States. The drugs made their way to Los Angeles and then the crack epidemic was born. If it were the other way, it would have been the CIA trying to stop the flow of cocaine from Central America to Los Angeles. Yeah. So they're they're kind of a outward facing entity. So yeah, I thought the whole thing was bureaucratic. But do you foresee because I try to not be reactionary when it

[22:05] comes to these things. And I try to not talk people down because like last summer, people were like freaking out and asked me a lot of questions about these National Guard deployments to Syria. And I was like, guys, it's just a National Guard rotation. Like it was scheduled for a long time. I don't get worried until I see active duty air for active duty orders for like the 101st Airborne and a Marine Expeditionary Force and and a carrier battle group. Yeah, always watch the carrier battle groups because if we

[22:37] start redirecting carrier battle groups, we're serious about going to war. Right. And so yeah, I do think just just to wrap up the El Salvador section, I think it's just going to work its way up to anyone who descends unless there's some sort of check on it. And I think that's their intention. I think so too. I think they're going to force the issue all the way to the Supreme Court. And even then, I'm not sure that the administration can be trusted to abide by a Supreme Court ruling. But I agree, you know, normally, when

[23:11] people are building their empires within government, they push and push and push the envelope until the courts push them back. I think that we're seeing that again now, but maybe at a higher level. Right, I would say his his first administration had a lot of overturn in terms of like his inner circle. But it seems like everyone is like on page in terms of like the overriding ideology. Yes, there's some, and we're going to get into Iran now, some conflict with like, Mike Walls,

[23:44] National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio being Iran Hawks and then J.D. Vance, as we could see in Signalgate being way more like, let's actually do a deal, maybe a civilian nuclear program could be on the table, which is freaking the hardliners in Israel out. But you said watch this the carrier battle groups. And of course, there were two, there were two in the region under the Biden administration, but they are sending one another a second carrier battle

[24:14] group, a sensibly into the Persian Gulf that combined with the massing of air assets and half our fleet of B2 stealth bombers, nuclear capable, but also capable of dropping 30,000 pound massive ordinance penetrators, presumably for underground nuclear hard sites, bunker busters. Yep. Yes. But bigger ones. I think they're, I'm not really sure about the history, but I think they were developed for like collapsing caves in Torah Bora. Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly

[24:46] Oh, it is. Yeah. Okay. I remember when we were experimenting with those during the Afghanistan war, we captured a guy. He had come out of the, he had come out of the caves in Torah Bora and crossed the border when we caught him at the border. And he said that the Americans I'll never forget the word that he used that the Americans had detonated a hideous bomb. He called it hideous in the cave. And when he came out, he was the only person who

[25:16] lived first of all, and blood had squirted out of his ears. And he never regained his hearing. But that's when we were trying to develop these, these bunker busters, presumably for use, you know, later on against underground Iranian sites. Yeah, because Israel doesn't have the capabilities to do that. But we do. So my question is, well, we're seeing a carrier battle group go a second one, ostensibly to

[25:50] like isolate Yemen, and maybe do like naval patrol operations to stop like the supply flow of like avionics and electronics from Tehran to the Houthis or whatever. But it is kind of alarming. And there's this internal drama about the around nuclear deal within the administration itself. I don't know what's your read, because from my perspective, and like even hawkish think tanks like the Saban Institute of foreign relations in the Brookings

[26:22] Institute said, like, there's not really anything we can do or achieve militarily. So I don't know what's your read on it? You know, I'm actually of two minds on this on this issue. There's the pessimistic analysis and the optimistic analysis, the pessimistic analysis is that everything you said is correct. Right? We've got our stealth bombers in Diego Garcia, we have an enormous Air Force presence at Al-Rashid Air Base in in Qatar. The fifth lead is

[26:52] headquartered in Bahrain. We've got two carrier battle groups. There's one that's not too terribly far away that we could bring in the event of hostilities. We also learned a couple of days ago, that Benjamin Netanyahu, when he met with Trump on Saturday, specifically asked the United States to attack Iran. Now, Netanyahu has done that in every meeting with every president since George H. W. Bush. And he always is told now. But if there's anybody who's

[27:24] going to go along with that kind of thing, it would be Donald Trump. So on Saturday, Netanyahu specifically asked, please bomb Iran. And to his credit, Trump authorized these talks that took place in Muscat. So on the pessimistic side, yeah, we're gearing up to go to war. On the optimistic side, we used to say in the 70s that only Nixon could go to China. Right? Richard Nixon was the biggest China hawk that

[27:58] existed in government. He wanted to nuke the Chinese. And only, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which are always like the last ones that want to go to war, held him back. Right? No, we shouldn't nuke China. And it turned out he went to China and Mao feted him. And then Den Xiaoping, the vice premier came here, and we feted him. And we gave them, you know, a Lincoln Continental and two buffaloes, and they gave us the pandas. So that's how it all

[28:29] got started. Only Nixon could go to China. Well, you know what? Maybe only Trump can go to Iran. And the reason I say that is because it's been pretty well reported that Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He was infuriated that that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize before he ever lifted a finger as president of the United States and then didn't deserve it because he killed far more people than George W. Bush ever killed. But maybe Trump

[29:01] sees maybe Trump is looking back at the first term and saying, I kind of I kind of squandered it with the North Koreans. Nothing ever happened there, even though it was very promising at the beginning. Maybe I can work something out with the Iranians and he says to himself, I'm on record as hating the Iranians so much, I killed their most beloved general as he was landing at the airport in Baghdad on a peace mission for heaven's sake. Well, I was surprised

[29:32] that the Iranians agreed to talk to him in Muscat. And you remember, last week, the White House said that these negotiations would be direct. Face to face, the Iranians said, oh, no, they won't. The Omani foreign minister is going to shuttle between two conference rooms. Well, in fact, both things were true. The foreign minister did shuttle between the two conference rooms. And at the end, both sides met together with a foreign minister. They shook hands and they agreed to meet again on Saturday in Rome. Well, this is how fruitful

[30:06] negotiations begin. Now there have been very serious changes in the US position. All of a sudden, the US has lifted its objection to Iranian development of a delivery system. This has to be panicking the Israelis, right? Let's say the Iranians have a bomb, which the CIA says they don't. Even if they had a bomb, they have no way to deliver it to Israel. They can't launch it. They don't have the mechanism for it,

[30:37] but they're beginning to build the mechanism for it. The US removed their objection to this development. And number two, it looks like the US is lifting its objection to the production of enriched uranium to be used in power generation. You know, the US position was no nuclear program, period, or we're going to bomb you into the Stone Age. That's not the

[31:08] position right now. Donald Trump's position has changed pretty dramatically. And it seems to me that this might be the real basis for negotiations. Yeah, the thing is, though, it seems like he's very volatile because he's very volatile. That's that's what scares me. Yeah, because the thing is like, yes, he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, but I just I just feel like instinctively like what it's starting to look like kind of is Obama's JCPOA, which

[31:40] Trump slashed. Yeah, I just feel like all it will take is like one of his his advisors to be like, Mr. President, this looks like Obama's exact deal. Do you want to like actually complete Obama's legacy? And then I'll be like, Nope, shut it all down. Yes, it could be something that simple. You know, the sad thing too is that the JCPOA was actually working. It was the same. It was the same setup that the United Nations had negotiated with Saddam Hussein, you know, through UN Security

[32:12] Council Resolution 986, where there were international inspectors that were allowed to go to the nuclear sites. The nuclear sites were sealed with lead seals. And there were CCTV cameras everywhere. It was the same deal in Iran. And it was actually working. But Donald Trump hated that Barack Obama negotiated it. And that's why he pulled us out. Yeah, I guess only time will tell. Again, I try not to be reactionary. But you know, another

[32:45] fleet of B2 bombers was staged out of Australia to kind of like intimidate, I guess China over the straight of Taiwan in 2022, also naval assets removed there. You know, the US does, you know, yeah, we rattle the sabers a lot. Yeah, so hopefully it's just that I mean, I am cautiously hopeful about the nuclear deal too. But in our last segment before we have to wrap, Israel seems kind of less and less like our greatest

[33:19] our greatest ally and more of like, like a cunning adversary. I was just wondering my own experience like dealing with or my friend, I never worked directly with Israeli special operations forces, but like some of my buddy in the special forces group, and one of my former squad leaders who went into Delta Force said they were almost intolerable to work with. So what was your experience in the clandestine services? They were intolerable to work with. Yes. And you know what? I'll tell you a story just to

[33:49] give you an idea. I'll tell you two stories. My very first briefing when I was a brand spanking new CIA officer, 35 years ago, January, was for the local Mossad and Shin Bet representatives. The briefing was on Iraq, and it included all of the Iraq analysts in the

[34:20] building, CIA headquarters. We do not brief the Israelis at CIA headquarters. The Israelis are not permitted in the building because when they were permitted in the building, every time they come, they would give us a gift that invariably had a bug inside of it and packed with batteries. And we're like, all right, you guys can't come here anymore. So we meet, we meet the Israelis at this offsite location in northern Virginia. And because I was the junior most analyst, I went last. So we went

[34:54] around the conference room table. It was about like eight or 10 of us, eight of us, I guess it was, from the most senior analysts to me, the most junior. And when they got to me, I used my real name because I was not undercover. So I said, my name is John Kiriakou, and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi cabinet. And the Shin Bet guy says, please spell your name. So I spelled it. And then he looks up at me over his glasses and he goes, you are Jewish. And I said, I am not

[35:29] recruitable. Don't even think about it. He asked me in front of all my colleagues, I'm my Jewish, so he can target me for recruitment. Number one, number two, several years later, I transferred into a state department position. It was an honest to God state department rotation. I became the the economic officer at the American Embassy in Manama Bahrain. But there was a married couple

[36:00] in my office and they went, the wife went into the same position at the American Embassy in, well, it was the American consulate then in Jerusalem. So her husband, because she was the lead, her husband went to the University of Tel Aviv to learn Arabic. Because they were declared like I was to the Israelis, you know, the station chief would say, these are my two officers, you know them, they're CIA.

[36:31] The wife is on rotation to the state department. The husband is going to just study at the university. So they're not here for anything untoward. Well, they were invited to a party one night and at the ambassador's residence. And then when they got back to Jerusalem, they walked in the house and saw that all of their living room furniture had been rearranged. Just a message from Mossad, we can come in here anytime we want and we can do whatever we want. And there's nothing you can do

[37:02] about it. At Christmas time, they went to a party at the ambassador's residence. And when they got home, people had taken shits in all their toilets, right? They have three bedrooms, three bathroom house, and people had taken shits in each one of their toilets and just left it there. Again, this nice message from the Mossad, we know who you are. There's nothing you can do to stop us.

[37:34] Finally, at the end of their two-year tour, they go to a going away party that the ambassador had for them. They go back to their house. Somebody had cut the dog's tail off and then wrapped it in gauze and medical tape. Like, why would you do something like that? Why harass this couple that is doing literally nothing to you, that is known to you, has been declared to you. Why would you fuck with them like that? But this is what the Israelis do. That's how they work.

[38:05] Yeah, I mean, it seems like they have a cultural obsession with dominance, obviously. And so, yeah, even a couple of my friends were foreign area officers in the military throughout West Asia. And one of the classes you go through, it's like, who does the most, around globally, who does the most adversarial collection on US military officers? It's not Russia. No, it's not China. Yeah.

[38:37] No. Israel was right, was raided at the CIA as critical threat for counterintelligence. So it was it was Israel, Russia, China, Cuba and Iran and North Korea. Those were the critical threat countries. Yeah, it's bad, really bad. Yeah. And of course, the disconnect between the intelligence services and the politicians who give a political talking point must be very grating to

[39:07] the people who serve in those institutions. And the funny thing too is, you know, at the State Department among foreign service officers, it's no secret what the Israelis do. There was no love of the Israelis inside the State Department. But you're right, the pressure comes from the policy community, comes from Capitol Hill, from the White House and Capitol Hill at the State Department, and especially at the CIA, you don't need to take those political issues into consideration. But you

[39:38] you have to carry out the foreign policy of the United States, whether you like it or not. Yeah, it just reminds me just kind of like wrap this up when I first started like branching more into like an intelligence role within my unit, kind of like my mentor was like, you know what, despite what they're saying in Washington or anything like this, if we pull out, the entire government will collapse in two weeks. And that was in 2011. And nothing changed.

[40:08] But again, I guess we're just going to keep putting money and resources into it. So yeah, that was also a very frustrating foreign policy. But anyways, thank you so much for coming on. And you got a heart out. Yeah. So John Kiriakou, yeah, he's he's got a new series on a Unify TV dot com link in descriptions. And also he's written a number of books on CIA whistleblowing, etc. Really appreciate your time. And my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[40:39] All right. And thank you all for watching. We will be back next week. Cheers, y'all. Have a good weekend.
