Title: John Kiriakou: Exposing Epstein, Mossad, CIA Torture & the Blackmail Playbook
Show: Truth Hurts Show
Date: 2025-10-02
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0kiHYQC6SXM
Duration: 2:26:38

---

[00:00] So, John, was Jeffrey Epstein part of the US government or a foreign government that they used for blackmailing people? >> Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad access agent. Do you think we'll ever see the list? That's really the question. The Israelis, they are not permitted in CIA headquarters because every time they would come, they would give us gifts. And the gifts always had listening devices embedded in them with batteries. The CIA is made up of thousands of people who will break every law, lie to

[00:30] the congressional overseers, overthrow governments, murder innocents, knowing that they could get away with it. >> What traits are they looking for? >> They are looking for people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. So, there are enhanced interrogation techniques, but then you get into things like strip the guy naked, chain him to an eyebolt in the ceiling, chill the cell to 50° Fahrenheit, and then throw a bucket of ice water on him every hour. We prisoners with that technique.

[01:02] >> Talking to you, the truth is really important to you. >> Oh my god. There's nothing as important as the truth. Nothing. Even when it's a hideous truth. [Music] So, John, was Jeffrey Epstein part of the US government or a foreign government that they used for blackmailing people?

[01:32] >> I I'll start off by saying I have no proof of my position. Uh but I feel very very confident that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad, what we would call an access agent. Um an access agent is somebody who gives a a foreign intelligence service or any intelligence service access to targets that they otherwise wouldn't have access to. For example, if you are a foreign intelligence service and you want to

[02:03] know what Bill Clinton says about an issue or Prince Andrew or Bill Gates or anybody else that went to Epstein Island, you're not going to be able to recruit Bill Clinton. He's not recruitable or Bill Gates. So, you do the next best thing. You recruit someone who has regular easy access to them. And then if there's a little blackmail thrown in at the same time, it makes the quality of your of your information that much better. Otherwise, why would

[02:34] Jeffrey Epstein have audio and video in every literally every single room of his house, including the bathrooms? Why? For what? Who does that? >> Nobody. >> And another thing is, where did his money come from? I mean, there were these allegations in Vanity Fair that he was in some sort of gay relationship with Les Wexner, the Ohio billionaire. Um, and Less Wexner gave millions and millions of dollars to be his tax advisor. Less Wexner says that that's not true. Less Wexner's wife says that

[03:05] that's not true. So, that money had to come from somewhere. I believe that he was working for the Israelis. Do you think he's still alive? >> No, I don't. I think he's dead. Do you think we'll ever see the list? Uh, that's really the question. You know, the black books are out there. One of them was offered for sale at Alexander Auctions. It's a Maryland auction house, and it did not meet its reserve price of $100,000 about six

[03:36] weeks ago. So, the books are out there. The names in the books are out there, but not all those names necessarily, you know, were doing anything illegal or inappropriate. The lists lists, you know, in a perfect world, sure, yes, the Justice Department would make them available or an enterprising investigative journalist would file a Freedom of Information Act request and he would make them or she would make them available. But we haven't gotten

[04:06] there yet. I I I really do believe maybe naively that eventually we will see those lists, but I don't think >> not anytime in the future. >> Not anytime soon. >> John, throughout your career at the CIA, did you ever come close to getting assassinated or getting taught? >> Oh, twice. Close. Close. Uh the first time was in um in Athens in 2000. I was I was stationed in Athens as the counterterrorism

[04:37] um center representative and I was there specifically to work against a group called revolutionary organization 17 November. We called it 17 November 17N. Um there were others popular revolutionary struggle and then all the Arabs had a presence there. the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine, the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Nidal, the Libyans, everybody was

[05:08] there, bombs going off all the time. But specifically, we were there for 17 November because they had murdered the CIA station chief, two uh DoD defense ataches. Uh they had shot and killed uh a US Air Force tech sergeant. Poor guy was just doing his laundry in the basement of his apartment building. They blew his brains out. Um, they killed the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador. They killed the uh the minister of communications, the minister

[05:39] of finance, the governor of the central bank, the the prime minister's son-in-law. Very, very deadly group. So, I was very, very careful about my own security. I was I took surveillance and surveillance detection so seriously that the CIA made me a surveillance instructor after I got back from uh well after I got back from Pakistan a couple of years later. But anyway, this was a group that was so deadly they had

[06:10] murdered 28 people. They had wounded hundreds. And not only had they never been caught, we were never able to identify a single one of them. They would do these they would do these assassinations in broad daylight in front of 2,000 people and nobody saw a thing because they were so petrified of being the next victim. And even the Greek media called them the phantom organization because nobody ever saw anything. So as a CIA officer, I drove a fully

[06:43] armored BMW 540. It was the first 540 in Greece. As a matter of fact, we we couldn't even insure it because there were no other 540s. We had to insure it through a company in Germany and and I was always heavily armed. We all were. I had a 9mm and a tear away fanny pack on my waist. I had a 38 snubnse on my ankle. And then just in case things really went to [ __ ] I had a buck knife in my back pocket. So every day, and this is what we're all trained to do, every day you leave your

[07:15] house at a different time and you take a different route to work every single day because as soon as you establish a pattern, they know where to be standing to kill you as you go through that intersection. So the British embassy in uh oh I guess it was February or March of 2000 got a new defense attache Steven Saunders and Steven moved in next door to me. Our our backyards abudded

[07:47] and he was just such a lovely guy. He was the life of the party. We used to joke that he was a media [ __ ] because anytime anybody had a camera, he would run right up to it and, you know, laughing and drinking and he was at every party and he's on TV all the time and he's being interviewed in the papers all the time. He's everywhere. So in early April of 2000, we're at a dinner party and I was standing with Steve and with the French defense ates and the American defense attaches

[08:20] and he was making fun of me because I had just gotten my BMW. And he said, "You Americans are so paranoid about security." He goes, "This is an EU country. It's a NATO country. what are you so afraid of? And they all chuckle. And I said, you Brits live in a dream world. If you think that because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if

[08:51] they have the chance. If they have the chance, they're going to kill you. We all laughed again. Two weeks later, I did something that I had never done before. I slept through my alarm. And I woke up and I looked at the clock and I was like, "Oh my god, I slept in." Which meant I didn't have time to do this two-hour surveillance detection route. I just had to get on the main road, go straight to the embassy. Now, I lived in a northern suburb called Geisia. And the main boulevard is like, let me think, 12

[09:22] lanes. Goes directly from the northern suburbs directly to the American Embassy and then to the British embassy. No turns straight down the mountain and it changes names when once you hit the Athens city limit it it becomes uh uh let's see Queen Sophia Street. I said damn it I I have to get on on the road and just go straight in. So I get in the car. I get on QVCs. It's a parking lot.

[09:52] And I I was like great. Now what am I going to say when I get there two hours late? Right. And the thing with GVCS is it had these concrete jersey barriers. So once you were on, you were on. >> You're not getting back off. >> Can't get back off. >> So I'm inching, like literally inching. And then I did something else that I never did. I turned the radio on because in training they tell us never ever play the radio because you don't want to be distracted. You know, you're humming some song looking this into space and the assassin's coming up on your side,

[10:24] you know, with a an armor-piercing, you know, round or something. So I turn the radio on and the the DJ is saying uh avoid Kicas Boulevard. There was a traffic incident at Felith. Felith is the halfway point between Kisia and the embassy. I was like dang it five miles I have of this. So I'm inching down the mountain and then a half an hour later he says avoid

[10:54] GCS Boulevard. There was a criminal incident at Felith and I thought, "Huh, I never heard that before. I wonder what kind of criminal incident at nine o'clock in the morning would jam up traffic like this." And still inching down the mountain. Another half hour passes and the guy says, "Avoid GCS Boulevard. There was a terrorist attack at Filoth." Well, I definitely had never heard that before. And he says it just as I'm approaching this white rover in

[11:24] the left lane and the cops are putting tape around it and I saw the license plate. Now Athens was so it well was back then so dangerous for Americans. We spent more money on security in Athens than we did in Beirut. That's how dangerous it was because of this group. So we didn't have diplomatic license plates. It was too dangerous. It would it would allow them to more easily identify us as Americans. But the Greeks, in their infinite wisdom,

[11:56] gave literally everybody in the American embassy license plates that began with YHB. Everybody. It was worse than a diplomatic plate >> cuz you knew. >> Yeah. My mine was YHB1 1442. I still remember it after 25 years. My wife was YHB 1367. So I look at this license plate on this rover and it's YBH and four numbers. And I thought, "Oh no, they killed some poor Greek thinking that it was one of us." And then I remember, "No, the British embassy is YBH

[12:27] and Steve Saunders drives a white rover." So I called the station and my boss says, "Where are you?" I said, "I'm stuck on f on uh KCS Boulevard, but I think Steven Saunders was just assassinated." He said, "Why? What do you see?" And I I told him, you know, it's the white rover. I said, "It's just soaked. The interior's soaked in blood." and the driver side windows shot out and he said, "Okay, get here as quickly as you can." So, just as I get past the car, of course, traffic opens up. I run into the station. Everybody's waiting

[12:57] for me. So, I told him what happened. My boss picks up the phone. He calls the British embassy and this the British the MI6 secretary answers and uh and he says, "We think Steven Saunders was just assassinated." And it's like she didn't like it didn't register or or she misheard. And she says, "I'm sorry. Steven's not in yet today." And he said, "No, you're not listening to me. We think Steven was just assassinated." And she says, "Oh, oh my god, we'll call you right back." And then she called us back 20 minutes later and she said he had

[13:28] just died at the Red Cross hospital, which ironically is next door to the British Embassy. So several months passed. Now what 17 November used to do is they would drop a manifesto. This was a this was a an incredibly violent Marxist Leninist um group. They would drop a manifesto at the site of the hit or they would put a manifesto in a garbage can somewhere in the neighborhood and then call a leftist newspaper to tell them where the the garbage can was that they could go retrieve it. But they didn't leave a

[14:00] manifesto with him. They had done that once or twice before, but it was unusual. That was in April. On August 16th, I go into the office and my boss runs into my office and he says, "Did you see the manifesto?" And I said, "There was no manifesto." He said, "No, they dropped it today." And I said, "No, I didn't hear anything about it. I didn't, you know, run my radio in the car normally." And he said, "They mention

[14:31] you in the manifesto." I said, "What? Not possible." I said, 'I am more careful than anybody in this office with my security. And he hands me the manifesto and it says in Greek mealas, we saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew he was armed. So we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. And he says, "You got to go." I said, "Where?" He says, "Home." Like now. I said, "I just dropped my kids off at school. I can't

[15:03] just go." He said, "We'll get your kids. We'll get your wife. We'll pack your house out. You got to go to the airport now." So, they put me in another armored car. They took me to the airport. They picked up my wife, picked up my kids. They get to the airport and my wife says, "I want a divorce. I can't do this anymore." And that was the last day that we, you know, lived together as husband and wife. But they didn't get me. They got Steven. His wife was, man, she was

[15:34] really a something special. You know, normally the family members of people assassinated by 17 November, they'd go on TV and they'd be like crying and, you know, tearing their garments and, you know, why can't the government do anything? And she went in into a TV st studio as sober as we are now and she said, "This was not just a crime against my husband. This was a crime against all of the Greek people. How long are you

[16:07] going to allow these criminals to terrorize you?" They didn't do this for political reasons. They did it because they're criminals. And two years later, one of them was in Pereus with a brown paper bag with a bomb in it, walking to the headquarters of one of Greece's big shipping magnets. He was going to put it under his limousine and assassinate him. And the bomb went off. It blew off both of his hands and blew

[16:38] out his right eye. And as he was bleeding to death, a cop ran over to him to try to, you know, stem the flow of the blood. And the guy confessed to everything. I'm 17 November. The other members are my two brothers. Dimitris Kontinas is the main assassin. Uh, Mikalis, his name escapes me now, was the founder. Confessed to everything and then he lived. They saved his life at the hospital. And so they were able to get every last one

[17:10] of them. And they found the weapons cache. They found everything. They found the old typewriter where they used to write the manifestos. Everybody, the two main leaders um got 1,765 years in prison, which in Greece means 20 years. But but be 17 if you behave. But the US government has put such pressure on the Greek government that

[17:41] you know we we've we have not said this. So John's not saying that this is our position. We have allowed them to believe that if these guys are ever released from prison, they're going to get a bullet in the brain as soon as they walk through the door. And so they're they're all still in prison. Is it easier for the CIA to actually put a bullet to the right now? >> Not in a NATO European Union country. It'll never happen. >> No. >> So, you mentioned you were heavily armed

[18:12] out there. I was always under the impression CIA agents, it had no weapons. >> Yeah. If you're working in, you know, Likenstein or Germany or Japan, no, you're not ever ever going to be armed. But I was not just a counterterrorism center officer. Um, I was also assigned in some of the most dangerous volatile places in the world. Pakistan, I was chief of CIA ops in or counterterrorism ops in Pakistan, Afghanistan, um, all all through the Persian Gulf. Um,

[18:43] Athens. So, we weren't just armed, we were like heavily armed. In fact, we were never supposed to be unarmed. And I I mentioned before we started kind of as a joke, but it wasn't a joke. I'm I'm an Orthodox Christian, Greek Orthodox, and being in Greece, you know, there's a church every 50 feet, right? So, there's no excuse to not go to church. And I'd go into church on Sunday morning with my family, and the first thing I'd say is, "Please God, forgive me for bringing weapons into church." >> Plural. >> You don't want to shoot anybody in the

[19:14] church. >> More than one was always on you. >> Yeah. But also, John, it's kind of weird that you would drive the only BMW in Greece if you want to be covert. No, but you know what we did? I raised that as soon as it arrived. I'm like, a 540? I've never seen a 540 before. They were like, "Yeah, it's first one in Greece." I said, "I can't drive this if it says 540 on it." They drove it directly back to the dealership and with a hair dryer, they heated the numbers and pulled them off. So, it didn't have any numbers on

[19:44] it. It just looked like any other BMW. Oh, >> okay. >> Yeah. So, it blended, right? That makes more sense. Yeah. >> So, they at least tint the windows for you? >> No. No. No. Oh, so fishbowl bulletproof. >> Bulletproof. And I mean the windows were like this thick. A cousin of mine uh who lived in Athens asked me if I'd give him a ride one time. I happened to be in Pereus and he was a tugboat captain of all things. So uh I said, "Sure, sure. Hop in." And he he puts the window down. I had forgotten to put the lock on. So he puts the window down and it goes down halfway and it's that thick. And he puts his fingers on it like this. And he

[20:15] turns to me and he says, "What do you do for a living?" And I said, "Yorgo, don't don't ask me any questions." And then he just rolled the window back up and he sat there the rest of the trip home. >> You said there was two times. >> The second one was worse. Yeah. Yeah. I had I had a friend um in the Middle East. He actually introduced me to my wife and uh he called me one day. I was at headquarters. I had just come back from Athens and um and he said, "Hey,

[20:46] I've I've got a little bit of a predicament I I hope you can help me with." I said, "Sure." He said, "Uh, he said, 'We've recruited a guy who's a double agent, but he doesn't know that we know that he's a double agent, and he's been instructed to meet only with a station chief, and it's too dangerous for me to meet with him. Can you fly out here every month and pretend to be me and handle this double agent?" I said,

[21:16] "Sure." I wasn't doing anything else. I was like training Middle Eastern um intelligence services and how to do counterterrorism operations, but it was boring and pro- fora. So um because I had been evacuated from Athens, all the good jobs had already been taken. So they stuck me in one just to sort of, you know, fill the time until something else opened up. So I started flying out to the Middle East every month and I'd meet this guy. Um, I was, let me think, I was 36 years old. So, this guy had to

[21:47] be probably 20 years older than I was. And, um, and in the first meeting, it was in a hotel. Um, I shook his hand and I gave him a big bear hug, really just to pat him down and see if he was wearing a wire or if he had a gun. And, um, I had a gun on my ankle, but I didn't have one in a fanny pack or in a shoulder holster. So I took my jacket off which he later told his hand his handlers he's unarmed and I was like perfect that he thinks

[22:18] I'm coming here unarmed. So I put my jacket on the bed and I introduced myself. I said you wanted to see the chief. I'm the chief and I'm going to tell you I'm taking this very seriously. You are the only person that I'm handling. So I'm only doing it because you insisted on it. We're going to do some fun things together. But first thing today we're going to talk about security. So, if I get caught meeting with you, nobody cares. I'm going to get expelled. I'm going to go home. I'll get an award. It's not going to make any

[22:49] difference. If you get caught, you're going to go to prison for the rest of your life. So, I said, you're going to do every time we meet something called a surveillance detection route, and I'm going to show you how to how to come up with one. So, you start at your house and then you go to a shop and you buy, you know, a light bulb and then you take some cutthroughs through a neighborhood and you go to another shop and then you buy a newspaper, whatever. And then you do some crazy kind of stuff and you go

[23:20] to a third shop and buy something. And then if you're not being followed just to make sure then you do stuff like you go the wrong way down the oneway street or you keep making U-turns in the street or whatever just to make sure you're clean, right? And then you also do that after our meetings. Now on the way to the meeting, your surveillance detection route should be at least 2 hours. Make sure that you're not being followed. And then when we're done, it should be at least an hour. Got it? And he said, "Got it. I'll do it." So the next time we

[23:52] met, I said, "Did you do the surveillance detection route?" He said, "I did." [ __ ] We had three teams of guys on him. He got in his car at his house, drove straight to the hotel, never saw the six guys in three cars that we had on him. So I said, "Okay, where did you stop?" He said, "Well, I stopped at the at the coffee shop and I had a coffee and then I went over here and then he was all made up. He wasn't stopping anywhere." I said, "Okay, that's great. So, what I want you to do is I want you to rent a post office box.

[24:24] So, I'm giving you my telephone number. If you need anything, I want you to call and say, I'm making this part up. You know, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plane. And I'm going to say Marzy dots and dozy and little lambs eat ivy. And that means meet me at the Marriott coffee shop at 10:00 tomorrow night. Okay. He says, "Got it." I said, "All right. Now, in the event that we lose telephone contact, I'll be able to leave a message for you in the post

[24:55] office box. So, check the post office box once a week." He's like, "Okay." This guy was working for a foreign country that I can say is arguably one of our greatest and most dangerous enemies in the world. Okay. So what he's doing after the meetings is he's driving directly to that country's embassy and he's meeting with their station chief and then the station chief gets on the phone and reports on an open telephone

[25:26] line everything that happened in the meeting back to their capital. So we've got him dead to rights. We're doing this for months and I had something that at the time was called a triband cell phone. Uh they don't make them anymore but because they don't need to. What what it was was it was a local number in that country but it would ring anywhere in the world. So he called me once and I was in Washington and he said, "Hey, I have something. Can you meet me for dinner tonight?" And I said,

[25:57] "Oh, I I can't. I have a diplomatic event tonight, but I can meet you tomorrow night." And then I went straight to Dallas airport and flew straight to the Middle East. Got there just in the nick of time to do the meeting and then literally I was in that country for 3 hours and then I caught the 12:00 midnight flight back to London to connect to Washington. So, I'm in the office one day in in headquarters and I get this panicked call from a sister

[26:29] agency in Maryland and they said, "Listen, are you handling this double agent?" And I said, "Yeah." And the analyst said, "He was just instructed to kill you in the next meeting." I said, "Get the [ __ ] out of here." I said, "This guy's afraid of his own shadow. He's 20 years older than I am. He's gray and fat and slow. He's not going to kill me in the next meeting. Well, they released the report saying he's been

[26:59] instructed to murder an FBI or CIA officer, rather. So, the FBI calls and they said he's he's committed crimes against the United States. We can snatch him. And I said, "No, no, no." I said, "Listen, this is going to be decided at a pay grade above mine, so I'll get back to you guys." Well, all the big shots huddle in this meeting. They're like, "We got to end the operation now." And I said, I said, "Please hear me out. The guy really is afraid of a shadow. He's not going to

[27:31] he's not going to shoot me. How about this for an idea?" I said, "We do the next meeting in the Marriott. Every Marriott in the world is exactly the same. You walk into the room, there's the bathroom right there. Right. So, we get adjoining rooms. I'll prop the door open and he'll knock. I'll tell him come in. I grab him. You guys bust in from the other room and we got him. And they're like,

[28:02] "Okay, but you're going to be armed, too." I said, "Of course I'm going to be on." So I fly back out there and I'm getting reports. We had a gigantic security and surveillance team. It was like 14 guys cuz they're watching him. They're posted in the lobby. They're watching the bad guys and the bad guys get in their car and they drive to the Marriott. So this is a major production. So I get a call. He's walking into the into the lobby and uh I said, "Okay, I'm

[28:34] ready for him." So he calls me and he says, "I'm here." I said, "Where?" He said, "I'm in the lobby." I said, "Okay, come up uh uh to the the sixth floor. I'm in room 604." And then my colleagues call and they said, "They got a team in here. There are seven of them there. There were seven of us. There's seven of the bad guys and they're all armed and they're just standing around." Now imagine there are only 14 people in the lobby of the Marriott. They're all intelligence officers and they're all armed and preparing for a shootout in

[29:05] the Marriott. So he comes up and he knocks on the door and I said, "Come in." He walks in and I just tackle him and my colleagues and our liazison partners bust in from the adjoining room. I'm sitting on him on his chest and I have him pinned down and he's on the floor and he's looking at me and I said to him, "Did you really think that I am so [ __ ] stupid that I didn't know that

[29:37] you came here to kill me today? Do you think I am such an amateur that I didn't know you've been a double agent since the day we met? I'm offended." I told him and he goes, "Allah abar. Allah abar. I said, "Oh, Allah is not going to be able to help you now." So, what our liaison partners did, this wasn't really a part of the plan, but what the liazison partners did was one of them pulled out a syringe and just jams it in his thigh and it turned out

[30:09] to be demoral and he was out out like a light. Well, listen. Dirty little secret of the hotel industry. People die in hotels all the time. And so there's a freight elevator and you just take the dead body down in the freight elevator. So we called an ambulance. We put him with a sheet like he was dead. We took him down in the freight elevator. We put him in the ambulance. We got in our cars and we took off. In the meantime, the bad guys start talking amongst themselves like, "Where is he? He's been

[30:40] up there for a long time. Haven't heard any gunshots. Why hasn't he checked in? He's not answering his phone. Something's happened. What's going on?" And then our guys just all leave. We left the bad guys in the in the lobby. He wakes up like 4 hours later and we have them tied to a chair. I was invited to a wedding that night. The crown prince's son was getting married and I was so honored that they liked me enough that they invite me to the wedding. So he's tied to the chair. He's like, "I [ __ ] your mother. I [ __ ] your sister."

[31:13] And our friends are just whailing on him. This was pre- 911, so we never laid a hand on him. So I go, "Guys, I got to go to this wedding, so we need to start wrapping this up." So I said to the guy, I said, "Look, this is your only chance. Seriously, it's your only chance. We know who you are. We know who you represent, and we want to know where the weapons are." He said, "I'll never tell you where the weapons are." I said, "Okay, suit yourself." There we start whailing on him again, punching him, black eye,

[31:45] bloody mouth. I go to the wedding, had a grand old time. I go back over to the intelligence service headquarters and I said, "So, where do we stand?" They said, "He won't he won't say a word. He just won't talk." So, I said, "The weapons could be in his house, obviously. Why don't we just I'll call the locks and picks team and we'll just, you know, pick the lock and go in the house. They said, "Can't do it. He's got a Filipino maid. She never leaves

[32:15] the house." And I said, "Okay." I said, "All right, let's let's declare an environmental emergency. We'll say there's a gas leak and we have to evacuate." He lived in a culde-sac. We'll evacuate the whole culde-sac. They said, "We don't have piped gas here. We use propane." I'm like, "My god, you guys. Do I have to think of everything? Bring a pro a propane truck, a tanker truck. It has this big wheel. I do the wheel like this. Propane's gushing out. I'm like, "Okay, now we have an environmental disaster. Call the [ __ ]

[32:47] fire department." And then they evacuated all of the There were six houses in the culde-sac. So, the locks and picks guy comes and we pick the lock and he's got this big safe, like a gun safe, but a nice one, a big one. It took it took a good half hour to get into the gun safe and and it was empty except and this is like a like a cartoon. It had a little piece of paper with a handdrawn map with an X and it's like the weapons are here at the X.

[33:22] Seriously. >> Was it drawn in crayon? >> Yeah, it might as well have been. So, we all get in our cars. We drive to this >> X. There's a town out the X is outside this town down south. It's a it's an oil town. Like nobody would want to live there unless you're working in the oil fields. So we go as far as the road will take us and then we park and then we have the map and we're like following in 150 m

[33:52] and then you turn right, you go to the palm tree and make a left and then there's a big rock and you make a right and 50 m and there it is. And what it was was an abandoned bunker from an earlier armed conflict. And it was their entire weapons cache. >> You're talking like a giant room. >> A giant room. Like a twocar garage filled to the roof with weapons and grenades and mines and you name it. It was >> we took everything.

[34:24] I ran into one of my colleagues on that on that operation. I'm going to say 200 10 11. I said, "Whatever happened to the guy?" And they said, "Oh, he's he's still in prison. He's never ever getting out of prison." And I said, "And they never figured out what happened, did they?" And he said, "Nope." But I can tell you that Hezbollah does

[34:54] not exist in that country anymore. >> Sounds like Iraq. You probably can't confirm and you shouldn't, but just >> they they didn't have a crown prince. >> Oh, you're right. You're right. So, >> I'm not playing this game back. >> Yeah. um after September 11 because I know you were still in the agency right post September 11. What was the environment pre September 11 and then post September 11 with counterterrorism and then what did you end up doing after? >> Right. There was a there was a big and

[35:25] noticeable divide between people working on al-Qaeda and everybody else. Everybody else is just going about their normal business like you know there's nothing happening in the world. people working on al-Qaeda were panicstricken. I I tell this story a lot. I I told it in my first book, but it's important in this context. July the 6th, 2001, I I remember it like it was yesterday. I told you I was I was in this position where I was training Middle Eastern intelligence services in counterterrorism operations. And so we

[35:58] had this delegation of, you know, four mid-level guys, majors and lieutenant colonels. And uh totally normal liaison visit. They come in the morning. We have a day of briefings. We take them upstairs to meet the director. They shake his hand. They get a little photo op. We exchange gifts. I drop them off at the hotel and I tell them, "Rest up. I'll be back in three hours." And I take them to Ruth's Chris steakhouse. And then the next day, you do it with a different intelligence service and a different one again the next day after that. So that day uh July the 6th 2001

[36:32] I had booked a a 30 minute briefing with this junior like 25 yearear-old kid on al-Qaeda. So the time came for the briefing and instead of this young kid in comes Kofheer Black, the director of counterterrorism and a woman who was not affectionately known as the red-headed devil who was portrayed in uh Zero Dark 30. So

[37:05] they come in together and I was so surprised I stood up and I said, "Oh uh" I said, "Gentlemen, this is Kofheblack. He's the director of the counterterrorism center here at the CIA. And this is the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden unit. I was shocked, like speechless. And they sat down and Kofheer looks at these guys and just goes right into it. He says, "Something terrible is going to happen. We don't know where or when, but we know it'll be an attack on an unprecedented scale." He

[37:39] said, "We're picking up chatter from the al-Qaeda training camps where where the instructors are on the phone with their students and they're crying and saying, "I'll see you in paradise." We're hearing code words for a massive attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey or there's going to be an enormous wedding or a great football match is coming. They're all codes for an attack, but we don't know

[38:09] where or when it's going to be. He said, "I'm begging you. If you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us." And they just sat there looking at him. And I was like, "Seriously?" So, he got up, shook their hands, we finished the day, I uh sent them back to the hotel, and then I went to Cover's office to thank him. I said, "Kofheer, wanted to thank you for spending the time with these guys, but I got to ask you, I don't work on

[38:40] al-Qaeda. Were you saying that for their benefit or were you serious?" And he said, "Oh, I'm deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen." And then September 11th, it's kind of a quaint story now, but on on the morning of September 11th, Kofer and I had a meeting scheduled with Condi Rice. She was the national security adviser at the time, and it was over the stupidest reason. The government printing office, this obscure little government agency that prints all the official reports,

[39:10] was going to print a report that literally nobody would ever read called Foreign Policy of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949 to 1967. Nobody's ever going to read that. But there is a law in the United States that says that if an official of the United States outs the identity of a recruited asset, we h

[39:44] we have to offer that asset protection, which means American citizenship, a house, money to get started. Well, there were still three guys like in their 90s that would have been outed with publication of these declassified documents. It just never occurred to anybody that someone would still be alive whom the American embassy was meeting in the 40s. Right? So, we had this meeting with Connie to ask her just to pull those cables out of the out of

[40:15] the book. Right? We're not asking her to make up different names. just pull the cables out. Nobody's going to know. They're nobody's going to know the difference. So, the driver called me and said he was ready to pick us up and he's outside the west uh entrance. So, I walked over to Kofheer's office to say, "The driver's here." And his secretary had a little TV on her on her desk. Back in those days, you couldn't watch TV on your computer,

[40:46] right? So, she had this little tiny TV. and one of the one of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire. I said, "What happened to the World Trade Center?" And she said, "A plane flew into it." And I always say, because I'm a genius, I said, "You know what? That happened once before in 1931. A plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really foggy and pouring down rain." I said, "It's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?" And as soon as the words came out of my mouth, the second plane hit.

[41:17] And she turned to me and she said, "Did you see that or did I imagine it?" And I ran back to my office and I said, "Guys, two planes just flew into both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under attack. I think this is what Kofheer was talking about." So we all run into what what was then called the bullpen. the the main office back then of the counterterrorism center was this enormous room where there were private offices all around the perimeter of the room and then everybody else sat in

[41:50] cubicles. Well, there were so many cubicles that we had to name the pathways. So, it was like Bin Laden Boulevard, Hezbollah Highway, right? And we named one after George Tannet and one after a previous head of counterterrorism. So you could say if you're meeting somebody, I'm at the intersection of Winston Wy Way and Hezbollah Highway and they would know where to find you. So we all run up there. There were these TVs that were mounted on from the ceiling and each TV was on different

[42:22] networks. It was like CNN, Fox, MSNBC, BBC, uh Canal Plus, The Russians, you know, everybody had a TV. dead silence in the office. We're watching the World Trade Center burn and then somebody behind me shouts, "Will someone please lead?" And it was like slapping Kofheer in the face. He's like, "Right, you go to the director's office and tell him X. You go to

[42:52] security and tell him something else. You go to operations and you know, whatever." And we all continued to just stand there and watch it. And then the Pentagon gets hit. And then somebody says, "We should probably assume that the next plane is meant for us." We didn't know the White House, the capital, us. Those are the three logical targets. Nobody budged. So, one of the cops came in. We The CIA has its own police force called the uh the SPO, the Special Protective Office,

[43:24] Special Protective Officers. And so, he came in. He says, "Everybody evacuate." Nobody moved. He came back in 45 minutes later and said, "If you don't evacuate, you'll be placed under arrest." So, everybody evacuated. But imagine, you know, whatever 10, 15, 20,000 people all leaving the parking lot at exactly the same time. It took me 2 hours to get out of my parking space. Might as well have just stayed in the building. >> I could have walked home. I only lived

[43:54] at seven miles from the from the headquarters. So finally I got into the George Washington Parkway. I got about halfway to my apartment and um and it was gridlock. So I just abandoned my car on the side of the highway. I walked the last three and a half miles. And I'll tell you it I I could see the Pentagon burning from from my car. And I remember saying out loud, "How could this happen? How could we allow this to happen?" And my then girlfriend called me. She

[44:26] was on the sixth floor of headquarters. She later became my wife. And uh she said, "Where are you?" I said, "I I just abandoned my car on the GW Parkway. Where are you?" She said, "I'm just getting out of headquarters." I said, "You're not going to be able to make it past the halfway point. Just meet me at my house or my apartment." So, she finally met me at my apartment. We we went to the roof and just watched the Pentagon burn for a couple of hours. And then I said, "We should try to give blood or something." Well, there there were lines to give blood that that were blocks long. And then finally I said,

[44:56] "This is ridiculous. We we should get back to work." So we walked back to my car. I drove over the the grassy median, went back to headquarters, and then I didn't leave for the next four days. We I I just balled up my jacket and slept under the desk, and we took a bolt cutters and and cut the chains on the cafeteria. We had to write the Marriott again because they had the food uh concession. We had to write the Marriotta check for $10,000. We stole all their food and we cooked it and we put it on folding tables in the hallway

[45:27] so people could just graze as they were working. But everybody worked. And then like everybody else in the building the very next day I went into the deputy director's office. I said, "You've got to send me to Afghanistan. I'm one of the only fluent Arabic speakers in the office. You have to send me." Uh, relax. Okay, relax. Relax. Take it easy. We're not really sure what's going on yet. All right. I went three times over the next six weeks. You've got to send me to Afghanistan. Finally, I ran into a guy that I knew, an

[45:58] old-timer. He was in his 70s then. Billy Wah, legendary special forces guy. 17 Purple Hearts, one short of the national record. Even his license plate, it said 17 hits, and it was a Purple Heart license plate. Very cool, legendary guy. So, I run into him. We had just done an operation together in the Middle East and we got back like two or three days before 911. So I ran into him and I said, "Billy, where you been?" And he goes, "Been in

[46:29] Afghanistan." I go, "You have? What are you doing there?" He looks at me, he goes, "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?" I said, "That's why they haven't sent me." Cuz I was always the good cop and they didn't need translators. They're not interrogating anybody. They're just blowing their brains out. So I was like, "Okay, okay." So I I said, "I'm going to try one more time." I went back into the deputy director's office and I said, "You have to send me to Afghanistan, and

[47:01] if you don't, I'm going to quit and I'm going to go straight to Exxon with my Arabic and make triple what I make here, and I'm not looking back." He's like, "All right, take it easy. Can you go to Pakistan?" I said, "Yes. When? tomorrow? Yes. What do you want me to do? He said, "I want you to be chief of counterterrorism operations." I said, "Good." So, I I called my girlfriend. I said, "I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow." She said, "Okay, how long?" I said, "I don't know, 6 months, 9 months, a year, I don't know." She says, "Okay,

[47:31] I'll meet you at your place. I'll help you pack." And then she drove me to the airport the next morning and I went to Pakistan. >> When you went to Pakistan, do you go in under a cover or do you go in as a CIA coming in? >> That That's a good question. Normally you would be John the import export officer from the state department. Um I went in like oh people say on the plane what do you do for a living? None of your [ __ ] business what I do for a living. Even the guy at the airport he

[48:03] says where are you headed? And I said Islamabad. And he goes thank you for your service. I said don't tell anybody. So yeah, I mean listen, if if you I actually reported this to to the office of central cover um because it was a problem with cover. State pe State Department people are not allowed to fly business class. Well, after 911, the CIA had a literally unlimited budget. So we were all flying business class. So the State Department people are back in the

[48:34] cattle class. The CIA guys are in the business class. So how do you explain that? How do you justify that? >> To the government or to who? >> If somebody says, "Wait a minute. The ambassador is back there in the back, but you're up here in the front." You can only say, "Oh, I got a free upgrade so many times." Well, I I had to fly to uh I won't say where I was fly. I had to fly to this country in Eastern Europe for an operation. And as a matter of practice, I never ever talk to people on

[49:05] planes. Never. I'll put in earbuds or read or whatever. And I'm sitting next to this guy. I had a connection to Milan. So I I get on the plane to Milan and this big fat Italian guy. He's like, "What do you do for a living?" I said, "Oh, um I'm in import export." "Oh, that sounds mysterious." I said, "No, it's it's not." "Well, what do you and export?" I said, "Whatever makes the most money. It changes all the time. It could be little widgets or, you know, dresses or whatever." "Oh, how long have

[49:35] you been doing that?" I said, "Oh, yeah, long time. about 10 years now, 12 years. Uh, where are you based? And I go, listen, if you don't mind, I have some work to do on my uh on my iPad here. Well, that sounds mysterious. I go, all right, look, I smuggle women and cigarettes from Eastern Europe. Are you happy now? He goes, I don't think I approve. I said, I didn't ask for your approval. How about shut the [ __ ] up? and he sat there like

[50:06] this the rest of the flight. Never even looked at me the rest of the flight. But sometimes that's what you have to do because people just won't stop. And I didn't know is he an Italian uh intelligence officer? Is he a KGB officer who maybe recognized me from some earlier thing and got the seat next to me? I don't know. Whoever he is, I don't want to talk to this guy. So flew to Pakistan and and did my thing. >> What color password do you use?

[50:37] >> Black. >> You use a black. >> Way to go. >> Yeah. By pass. >> I saved all of them as souvenirs. >> What the [ __ ] is a black password? >> Diplomatic. >> That's the one that gets you. >> I want one of those. >> They're pretty sweet. >> And you literally just >> straight through. And there's no questions asked, right? You just leave them alone. >> Wait, I do have a question. Did you fly armed? >> No, never. Okay. >> Never ever. >> So, you had to pick up wherever you were going. >> Yes. And sometimes you'll have to fly from country A to

[51:08] country B and you send a cable in advance and you say, I'm arriving at, you know, 210. I need a fully loaded 9 millimeter handgun. I need a a criate passport and I need, you know, whatever else. And it's it's ready for you. >> Is it like the movies? Does it go to a random locker >> sometimes? >> Yeah. If it's not too crazy sensitive, you can go into the embassy and do it. >> Otherwise, you know, you meet in the back of a Pizza Hut or something.

[51:38] >> Did you ever wear any costumes or masks? >> In fact, I'm proud to say I got an award once because I'll back up. The day of my hire, my very first day at the CIA, I'm in the big auditorium called the bubble. and you're so excited. You can't believe that you're actually in the CIA, you know? It's it's just it it's something that you never forget. So, there's a woman on my right and there's a guy on my left and we're all the same age. We're all brand new. It's our first day.

[52:09] So, I said to the woman on my right, "What are you going to do here?" And she said, "Well, the only degree I have is not really a degree. I went to the Falls Church Virginia Academy of Beauty." And I said, "Seriously?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "What are you going to do?" She said, "They're going to train me as a master disguise maker." And I said, "That's cool. I would have never thought of that." The guy, Sean, next to me, we were friends the whole time we were at the CIA. Shake his hand. What do you do, Sean? He said, "Craziest thing,

[52:40] they recruited me." I said, "Yeah, that's how it was with me, too." I said, "Why'd they recruit you?" He said, "I did a two panel cartoon in every issue of my college newspaper." And I said, "So what do they want you to do here?" He said, "They're going to train me to be a master forger." >> Wow. >> And he was he became like legendary. So 12 years later, this woman flies out to Pakistan and I'm

[53:12] like, "Hey, what are you doing here?" And she says, "I'm here for you." She said they decided that because of the position you're in, they wanted to experiment with a bald-headed mask with a combo. She was there for six weeks to get the color of the bald head exactly the same as my skin tone. >> That's a long time. >> Six weeks. And then she put those hairs in one hair at a time. She was there

[53:42] like into the night every night. And every day I'd go look at the at the the we call it a mask. It's not really a mask. And the only seam it had was right here. I didn't wear glasses yet at the time. And so we got glasses with just clear glass. So it covered up the seam, but it looked like a guy with a bad coma on. In fact, the station chief when he saw it, he's like, "Oh my god." He said, "It's it's fantastic." And I go, "Right.

[54:12] I don't even recognize myself. He goes, "Let's go to the ambassador's office." So, we go into the ambassador's office and the chief says, "Uh, ambassador, I just wanted to introduce you to one of our uh one of our experts. He came out here." She goes, "In these conditions, like we're we're at war. You have a guy flying out." So, I go like this and I pulled it off and I looked at her and she's like, "Oh my god." I said, "It's great, right?" She's like, "Honest to god, I would

[54:43] never have known it was you." >> Did you get to keep it? >> No. >> What about your voice? Do they have something to change your voice? >> No. That you have to just kind of wing. >> What about earplugs? Do they have like special ear plugs where it works like you see in the movies? >> Like a two-way radio. >> Not not by the time I left. I would say probably at this point, but not not when I left. >> Fast forward a few years forward. when you were with uh John K's office, >> you went to Afghanistan to the poppy fields, >> right? >> And what was

[55:14] >> right, you know, after I blew the whistle on the torture program, as you might expect, it was a little bit tough to find a a well-paying job. And then one day in early 2009, January of 2009, John Kerry called me and he said, "I'm going to become the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I'm going to reconstitute the investigations office, which had been done away with in 1972. And he said, I want you to come on as the senior investigator. So I went up to his office. We sat and talked for an

[55:44] hour. And I said, I'll take it. So he told me disingenuously that I had cart blanch to do anything I wanted, to investigate anything I wanted. It was exactly the opposite. That was true. But what did I know? This this is an important guy. He was the Democratic nominee for president. He's the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most recognized faces in the world. And he's telling me I can do anything I want. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to go to Afghanistan

[56:14] and I'm going to investigate the production of heroin Poppy." So I planned it all out. I flew to Baghdad. I'm sorry. I flew to to uh Kabell, took a helicopter then to Bram Air Base. This was the only time in my career that I ever pulled rank on someone. It's just not my nature to to be, you know, that guy. But um I got to Bram, they were not at all happy to see me. And I said, I

[56:45] need to fly to Kandahar and then to Lashkar, which is the capital of Helman Province. Helman Province is like the center of the world for the production of heroin. And they're like, "Nah, it's too dangerous. we can't do it. And I said, "No, I'm I'm doing it. We're doing it. Let's go." No, you know, we risk, you know, they have missiles. They're going to shoot the helicopter. I said, "No, listen. I outrank you and I'm telling you, you're going to fly me to

[57:15] Kandahar and Lashkar." So, we got into a helicopter and they were dicks about it, too. Like, they did this this spiral landing, which you do when people are trying to shoot Stinger missiles at you. There were no Stinger missiles down there, >> so they were trying to make me throw up is what it was, >> but I have a strong stomach, so I'm like, you know, whatever. We land the helicopter and uh I met with a bunch of um a bunch of both Afghans and Americans in Kandahar, and then we flew to Lashkar. So in Lashkar, there was

[57:49] something called a PRT, uh provisional re reconstruction something. It's a state department thing. So, you get a bunch of State Department and USA ID people and they're going to dig water wells and they're going to build an electrical facility and whatever. So, I I was friends with the State Department representative there and he knew why I was coming. So, he set up um a translator and a security team from the base and I said, "Let's just drive into the poppy fields and see who we can

[58:21] find." So, we drive out into the poppy fields, and I mean, as far as you can see, literally, it's nothing but heroin poppy. It's all you can see. As recently as the late 1970s, Afghanistan was a net food exporter. It used to actually have too much food and it would sell it to uh Pakistan. Well, now it's just all heroin poppy and kids have no shoes and people are starving to death. But my god, they have all the heroin poppy you could possibly want. So we go go out into the

[58:53] fields and sure enough, there's a farmer out there. So we stopped and I said, "I'm I'm from the Congress and I wanted to talk to him about his poppy crop." And he's like, "Okay." So again, I have a translator, so communication wasn't a problem. And I said very naively, I said, "Why do you grow poppy when instead you could grow crops with two growing seasons like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates?" And he goes like this. "The Americans told

[59:26] me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted." I said, "What Americans told you you could grow poppy?" And the security guy grabs me and he says, "Meeting over." And physically pulls me back to the jeep. We go back to the PRT and I get back in the helicopter. We fly back to Bram. So from Bram I went to Kbble. Cobble back to Washington.

[59:56] So I get there. I get to Washington and I I said to Carrie, "You're not going to believe what I found." And I I told him the whole story. He's like, "Wow, that's that's pretty powerful. You're going to get some push back." I said, "Oh, I know. I know who's going to push back." So, I wrote the paper and I sent it to a buddy of mine at DEA. He was at this at this DEA like secret DEA facility out in the sticks in Virginia. And he reads it and he calls me and he says, "Buddy, you know you're never going to get this

[1:00:27] published, right?" And I said, "Why?" and he said, "Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin. Almost all of it goes to Russia and Iran. And we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It weakens their cultures." It's exactly what the Chinese are doing to us with fentinel today. But he said, "They're never going to let you blow the whistle on on Poppy." And sure enough, Carrie

[1:00:59] comes to my office that after it was all said and done, he's like, "Uh, listen, I think it's not a good idea to publish this this paper." And I thought, "Man, they got to you easy." And it wasn't just with Poppy. There was another thing. I got a call one day from a human rights activist, pretty well known in Washington, human, serious human right, not one of these people that screams on the street corner, like a serious intellectual. And he says,"I need to see you. It's got to be secret." And I said, ' Okay. I

[1:01:32] said, 'Where do you want to meet?' He said, "Uh, there's an empty classroom. It's like room 204 at John's Hopkins. I'll meet you there in an hour." I said, "Okay." So, I go over there, go into John's Hopkins, find the classroom, and he says, "Listen, have you ever heard of the Dash Deilele massacre?" And I said, "Of course." On November 30th and December 1st of 2001 in the northern Afghan city of Dash delei, the entire Taliban contingent

[1:02:04] gave up. 2,000 people gave up to the Northern Alliance. So the Northern Alliance calls us and says 2,000 Taliban gave up. What what do we do with them? And we said, "Let's truck them out into the desert and we'll just hold them there until we can divide them up into smaller groups and put them in jails all around Afghanistan." Because there there wasn't a prison in the country big enough to hold 2,000 people. So the Northern Alliance boxed them up.

[1:02:35] We called it the box up, the dashley box up. They put them in these containers on trucks with no air holes, no food, and no water. 2,000 men. One of the 14 who lived said that when they opened the trucks, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. Well, General Abdul Rasheed Dostam, who was

[1:03:07] anti-Taliban, then pro Taliban, then anti-Taliban again, then pro Taliban again. He's the one who ordered them into these trucks. And we were certain that he did it specifically to murder them. He knew that they couldn't breathe in those trucks. He knew that there was no water in those trucks. So, the reason he was telling me this is he said that he had a witness who was 12 years old at the time and was hiding behind a rock when the bodies started

[1:03:40] falling out of the truck. And there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and speaking English. So he says to me, "Who's going to be wearing blue jeans and black shirts and speaking English in Dash Deilele, Afghanistan on December the 1st, 2001?" I said, "Well, obviously." I said, "I'll write them a letter and ask for clarification." And the only reason I felt somewhat bold on this issue was

[1:04:10] that it actually came up in the 2008 campaign and Barack Obama said that if elected, he would get to the bottom of the Dash Deilele massacre. So I fly back out to Afghanistan. I go to Dash Deilele. You go to the site of of the of the the massacre and there are like human bones just all over the ground. Clothing that's tattered cuz by then it was, you know, eight years old. So, I

[1:04:41] wrote a letter that Carrie signed to the CIA and I said, "We want clarification on what happened in Dashy Ley on November the 30th and December the 1st, 2001." And I had these like 10 questions and I sent it signed John Kerry, chairman. Six weeks pass and a colleague of mine comes into my office and he goes, "Hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter uh on d'achle." I said, "I

[1:05:14] just checked my mail an hour ago. I didn't see any response." He said, "They classified it top secret." Well, I only had a secret clearance at the time. So, I said, "What did it say?" He says, "It said, "Go [ __ ] yourself." I said, "That's how they want to play it." So, I go to Carrie and I said, "This is unacceptable." and he says,"I think we should probably kill this investigation." I said, 'Senator, come on. Every time I I'm on to something, you tell me to to kill it. Well, you know, we don't want to make things hard

[1:05:44] for the White House. That wasn't the truth. That wasn't what he was thinking of. He was thinking that I can't make any waves at all because I so desperately want to be Secretary of State. There were only two times that I ever gave Carrie unsolicited advice. He gave a speech in which he called Bashar al-Assad my dear friend several times. Every Lebanese in Washington called me. The Lebanese ambassador called me and he's like, "What the

[1:06:14] fuck?" So I said, "Senator, you've got to stop calling Bashar al-Assad my dear friend." He goes, "Well, we are friends. We we rode motorcycles together down to the Golden Heights." I said, "I understand that, but be that as it may, he's a genocidal maniac and every Lebanese in Washington is calling me and they're furious with you." He's like, "All right, all right. I'll back off." The other time was he asked me to write him a speech. Um, and one thing I learned about Carrie is he thinks that he is smarter than everybody else in the

[1:06:45] room. And so, he never sticks to the speech. He always goes off topic. And it's never smart. and it's never appropriate. So, I write this speech, he's delivering it at the at the um sorry, not the Smithsonian, the um Brookings Institute and then he goes off off speech and I was like, "Fuck." And he says, "You know, I was supposed to be the Secretary of State, not Hillary Clinton." And I'm in the audience and I'm going like this.

[1:07:17] But Obama, you know, he's playing politics and he had to throw a bone to Hillary. And I'm going like this. And after it was all done, I was like, "Senator, it it really doesn't look good. It sounds like sour grapes. Like you thought you were really great and then the president thought you weren't really as great as you thought you were and gave it to somebody else." Well, that's that's not how it was. I said, "I know that's not how it was, but that's how it sounds. You got to stop telling people in public that you were supposed to be the Secretary of State." And so he

[1:07:48] backed off. But anyway, um he told me to kill the investigation, which I did. And then finally in 2010, the Democrats lost I think it was four Senate seats and we had our budget slashed. And my boss said, my immediate boss, the staff director, he said, 'You know, the budget is going to be tough for us. I said, I know, I know. I said, 'Don't throw me out into the street. Let me line something up first and then I'll just resign. So, that's what I ended up

[1:08:21] doing. Um, but it was clear to me that Carrie was absolutely not going to do anything at all to embarrass Barack Obama. Nothing. And then as a postcript after I got arrested, I wrote him an email to his uh to his personal email account and I said, "You got to help me out here. You know that this is wrong." I said, "I have five kids." I said, "Can you please just talk to the president and ask him to commute

[1:08:51] my sentence? The the the conviction would stand. DOJ saves face, but I would get to work and provide for my family." Two days later, he wrote back and all he said was, "Please do not ever attempt to contact me again." And it was because he wanted to be Secretary of State. That's all he lived for. >> Seems like in politics it's just about like everyone for themselves. >> Oh my god. And everything is

[1:09:22] I should say nothing is as it appears. The day that he called me to interview me for that job, it was in his Senate office. and his office was in the uh in the Russell Senate office building which is the original the the big historic you know neocclassical beautiful gorgeous historic building. Interestingly enough his office was immediately next door to John McCain's which was kind of important. So I go into the office I had never met him before. I go into the office and the first thing you notice,

[1:09:54] you know, these are 20 foot ceilings, gigantic. Literally from the floor to the ceiling are framed pictures of Carrie with every leader in the world from Gorbachev to the Daly Lama to Netanyahu to the Queen Elizabeth, everybody. It's very impressive. It's like an altar to yourself, which is not cool, but it was very impressive to me. But more importantly, in my view, as soon as you walk in, there's a little credenza right here that most people

[1:10:24] would just walk right past, not paying attention to it. But there were three things on the credenza that really stuck with me. The first was a framed picture of Carrie with John Lennon. Very cool. And they're like, you know, giving each other noogies. Very cool. Who wouldn't want a picture like that, right? On the other side was a picture of Carrie with Peter, Paul, and Mary, the folk group. And he was close to all of them. He Mary Travers died while I was on staff and um and Carrie gave the eulogy at her funeral. Very touching. But in the middle was a shadow box and in the

[1:10:56] shadow box it had his silver star, his three bronze stars and his purple heart. But there's a famous story about Carrie. It's the story that made him famous. when he came back from Vietnam to protest the Vietnam War, he threw those medals over the White House fence and then he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee later that afternoon and famously said, "Who wants to be the last man to die for a lie?"

[1:11:30] But there are the medals right there. So after the meeting was over, the staff director said, "So how did it go?" Staff director was an awesome guy. I liked him a He was a member of the Kennedy family, which struck me as kind of funny. But I said, "It went great." He offered me the job and I told him I'd take it. But I said, "Tell me that the shadow box with the medals." I said, "What's up with that?" Like, "Everybody in America knows he threw his medals over the White House fence." He goes, "Come on." He goes, "Those medals were the most important things in his life. He went to the PX

[1:12:01] that morning and bought copies of the medals and threw those over the White House fence." I said as soon as he did it, he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor of, you know, Massachusetts and then became a star, was in Congress two years later in the Senate right after that. He's like, that was all all a big lie. >> So, what you see on TV with the politicians, >> they're all dogs, every last one, except John Kerry, and I'm telling you this as as a progressive who is to the left of the Democratic party. John McCain was

[1:12:33] one of the most one of the most wonderful, kind, selfless patriots I've ever encountered in my life. You don't have to dis you don't have to agree with him, I should say, on the issues to respect him for the person he was. You know, the reason why I said it was important that his office was next door to Carrie's is every time Carrie and I would come out of the office and McCain would come out, he would go out of his way to come up and shake my hand and say, "How are you doing, John?" And I'd

[1:13:04] say, "I'm doing great, Senator. How are you doing?" And then finally Carrie says, "Why don't you and McCain get a room or something?" And I said, "No, it's it's because he was tortured and I put my whole career on the line to call out torture." I said, "He's really he's really a good guy." And then the week that I got out of prison, I got a call from his um 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, "He can get me my pension back." I said, "Obama took my

[1:13:35] pension." So what we ended up doing is my attorney worked with McCain staff to to write an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. And all the amendment said was all Americans who have been convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981 between October 1st and October 31st of 2012 shall hereby have their pensions

[1:14:05] reinstated. Well, of course, I'm the only person in the world that that describes, but before we could get it in, he got brain cancer and then he died and so we could never get it into the NDAA. But he was a good man. He was the only He was the only guy on Capitol Hill who really went to the mat for me. My congressman from Virginia, uh, Jim Moran, he he was a great guy, too. And he put his reputation on the line for me. And then there were a couple other like Lloyd Dogget, a Democrat from Texas

[1:14:37] who got up on the floor of the House and said, you know, release John Kuryaku. But McCain really put his money where his mouth was. >> So, I've got some questions that I've asked our audience to prepare for you. >> Are you ready for some >> questions from the audience? >> All right. So, the first one is, what's one truth about the CIA that you wish every American understood, but most will not? I have a reputation as being something of a CIA dissident.

[1:15:09] Um, I don't see myself as a dissident. So, I'm going to say one truth is the CIA is made up of tens of thousands of brilliant, patriotic people who want to do nothing more than to protect the country. Okay, that's truth number one. Truth number two is it is also made up of thousands of people who will break every law, lie to the congressional overseers,

[1:15:40] overthrow governments, murder innocents knowing that they could get away with it. And so on the one hand, you've got people who really, really want to do the right thing. And on the other hand, you have a band of bloodthirsty murderers who need to be brought under control. What's the most dangerous lie the US government is still telling the public? >> In my very first week on the job, it was a week of briefings, right? Got to meet the director, the deputy directors, the head of personnel, the head of security,

[1:16:12] the head of this, the head of that. the head of security came to talk about um counter intelligence and he said for example there's a steakhouse right down the road from uh from the agency. He's like don't ever eat there. The KGB thinks we all eat there. So 7 days a week the place is just jammed to the gills with KGB agents. So we don't eat there. Go another couple of miles. There are plenty of restaurants farther down the road.

[1:16:42] Well, it's not just the KGB that we have to worry about or the Chinese or the the Cubans or whatever. He said the Israeli embassy has two declared intelligence officers. Declared meaning they're known, they're officially known to the CIA, one from Assad, one from Shinbet. The FBI, again, this is 35 years ago, the FBI has been able to identify, he said, 187 undeclared Mossad agents spread all

[1:17:13] around the United States to steal secrets from our defense contractors. Now, we give the Israelis 99% of the technology that we have. They're trying to steal that last hund, that last 1%. I'll give you an example. the F-35, right? We went to the Israelis. We said, "Look, we're developing this new fighter called the F-35. It's going to be the best fighter." They said, "We want it. We want the first ones." We said, "Great. We'll give them to you. We're going to call yours the F-35I. I I

[1:17:45] for Israel, and what we're going to do is we're going to very slightly degrade the avionics. So, God forbid if one of them gets shot down, the Iranians or the Russians or the Chinese can't, you know, get the avionics." They said, "No, we want the F-35." We said, "No, we're not going to give it to you." In the meantime, at around the same time, the United Arab Emirates came to us and said, "Hey, we heard about this F-35. We want the F-35." We said, "Great, we'll give it to you. We're going to call it the F-35E for Emirates. We're going to

[1:18:16] slightly degrade the avionics, so God forbid if it gets shot down." The Iranians don't get it. They said, "Fine, we'll take it." Well, the Israelis are in Northrup Grumman and Loheed Martin and Boeing and every other defense contractor in America trying to steal every one of our defense secrets to upgrade the avionics to have at least what we have and more. The Israelis are not our friends, period. A a story that

[1:18:48] I tell frequently uh in podcasts is my very first liaison briefing. I was brand new analyst. I had been around for just a few months and my boss said, "Hey, you're going to brief the Israelis with a whole team of Iraq analysts. I was the most junior, so I went last." So we we normally do liazison briefings in a conference room at headquarters, not the Israelis. They are not permitted in CIA headquarters because every time they would come, they would give us gifts.

[1:19:18] And the gifts always had listening devices embedded in them with batteries. And we're like, "You guys have to stop doing this." They're like, "Oh, we brought you a seal of the CIA. You should hang it in the director's office." And it's all full of listening devices. So, we're like, "You guys can't come here anymore." So, we had to rent a safe house. And we meet with the Israelis in this safe house. So, you know this story. We go around the we go around the table and it's the Mossad guy and or MSAD woman it was at the time and

[1:19:49] Shinbet guy and because I was an overt employee at the time I used my real name which I was supposed to do. We all did. None of us were undercover. So that would go around the table political uh briefing, economic briefing, military briefing, oil briefing, you know this one, that one it came to me. I was uh the Iraq leadership analyst. So I said, "My name is John Kuryaku and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's uh

[1:20:19] psychological state." And the guy looks at me over his glasses and he goes, "You are Jewish." And I said, "I am not recruitable. Don't even think about it." We got back, I was furious. We got back to the office and everybody was laughing. They were like, "They do that to every one of us. They're so crude and so heavy-handed. And my boss said, "Did they pitch you?" And I said, "Yeah, right to my face in front of everybody. Now I got to go to security and write a report." Which I

[1:20:50] did. But this is what they do. They're happy to recruit as many Americans in positions of authority as they possibly can because they don't really give a [ __ ] about the the relationship. They know that politically they have they have us by the balls. And so we're not going to change our foreign policy toward Israel. No matter what they do to us, we're never going to change. I mean, just look at what's happening today. If you are not 1,000%

[1:21:22] pro-Israel, and not even really pro-Israel, that's really kind of a misnomer. Pro- Netanyahu, then you will be primar in most cases you will lose. and they'll find somebody who's pro- Netanyahu to replace you in Congress. It's unacceptable. >> How do we change it? >> Ah, see, that's really the hard question. There's really no easy way to change it. I'll tell you there there is actually, but it'll never happen. You force Apac

[1:21:54] to register as a foreign agent just like everybody else does. Like every single lobbying firm or lobbyist in Washington who has anything even vaguely to do with a foreign country has to register under FAR, the the Foreign Agents Registration Act except Apac. >> What would that change? >> Well, then they would have to report everything that they're doing in government and risk a felony conviction if they fail to report. Plus, if you are

[1:22:26] a foreign representative or a foreign entity, you cannot donate to an American political campaign. And right now, I mean, the Israelis own Capitol Hill because they they donate millions and millions of dollars to uh to friendly candidates through Apac. Remember, Apac is called the American Israel political a public affairs committee. public affairs, not political action, not

[1:22:56] lobbying. It's public affairs. They're like, "Well, we're just we're just trying to educate people on what Israel is like." Like, "Oh, that's you're going to stick with that story area." Okay. We hear torture. We hear enhanced interrogations. We have no idea what that means, right? >> I could just imagine what is it like pulling the fingernails that you see on TV. What is the torture? What is the enhanced interrogation? >> In most cases, it's not so crude. So, there are enhanced interrogation

[1:23:28] techniques and then there's all the other [ __ ] that they did that they didn't have approval for that they just figured we're going to do it and nobody's going to do anything about it. So, enhanced interrogation techniques as they were approved by the Justice Department were mostly not something that I would call torture. Like if I grab you by the shirt and I say, "Damn you, answer my questions." That's not torture. If uh the the next the next most serious one was called the belly slap, right? It makes a cracking sound, makes a handprint, a little bit

[1:23:58] humiliating. That's not torture. >> But are you like naked, chained up? >> Not yet. That comes >> keyword. Yeah. >> Yeah. A smack across the face. That's not very nice, but it's probably not torture. But then you get into things like strip the guy naked, chain him to an eyebolt in the ceiling and make it so he can't kneel or sit or lay or get comfortable in any way. Chill the cell to 50° Fahrenheit and then throw a

[1:24:29] bucket of ice water on him every hour. We murdered uh prisoners with that technique. It's called the cold cell. Sleep deprivation is another one. Uh Don Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense at the time. He famously said that he didn't believe that there was such a thing called sleep deprivation because he said, "Look at me. I have a standup desk in my office. I don't even have a a chair and I'll stand there and work for 24 hours, sometimes longer than 24 hours." That's not what we were talking

[1:24:59] about. What we're talking about is being stripped naked and chained to that eyebolt so you can't get comfortable knowing that the American Psychological Association has done studies showing that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. They begin to die from organ failure at day nine. But the CIA was was authorized to keep patients patients to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days. Well, we

[1:25:32] murdered prisoners doing that. The Justice Department never said we could murder people. They said we could use these techniques which are not torture. They're enhanced parts of the interrogation. Well, that was just silly. But then there were other things, especially with Abu Zubveda. things that we did to Abu Ba that were never authorized by anybody. We learned during an interrogation that Abu Zuba had an irrational fear of bugs. And so we put him in a coffin with a diaper. We poured a box of cockroaches

[1:26:05] on him and then closed the coffin and just listened to him scream. We would open the coffin long enough every few days to give him water and food and change his diaper and then seal it back up again. >> The [ __ ] is that? >> Why wouldn't he just talk? >> He was talking. He was talking. >> These people would talk and still be to >> Yes, that was the issue. And listen, I told Abu Beta right after

[1:26:36] we caught him. I said, "I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience." I said, "My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. So, if you only do one thing, it's that you have to cooperate. You have to answer their questions." And he said, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate." I said, "Well, suit yourself." Then, when the CIA plane came in to take him, he was petrified, crying. Three FBI

[1:27:07] agents and I carried his gurnie out to the plane. I was I was carrying the gurnie with one hand and holding his hand with the other. He was balling and we we put him on the plane. We tied him down on the luggage rack at the back of the plane and I leaned over and I said, "Remember, you have to cooperate." And he smiled at me and I said, "Good luck." And then took off. Well, then he he ends up a week later at the secret site and um he was very very severely wounded during the capture and so they

[1:27:40] allowed him six weeks to just get his wounds to heal. Well, there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan, ethnically Egyptian, American FBI agent, fluent in Arabic. Ali began to interrogate him. Now, listen, I hate the FBI. I do. But there are no better interrogators in America than the FBI. They've been doing it since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946. They know exactly what they're doing. And the way they succeed is they

[1:28:10] establish a rapport with a prisoner, right? You don't rape him or beat him or starve him or electrocute him. You sit across the table from him. And sure, he's got handcuffs on. He's chained to the table, but you offer him a cup of coffee or an orange or a cigarette or if he's really helping you out, a piece of paper and a pencil to write to his parents. And eventually, sometimes it

[1:28:42] takes days, weeks, months, who knows? Eventually, he's going to open up. And Abu Zuba really opened up and gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives. But the CIA and especially the two CIA contractors, the two psychologists who came up with the program, they wanted to see how it worked. And so George Tennant, the CIA director, went to President Bush on July the 31st of 2002

[1:29:13] and said, "Please turn the prisoner over to us." And Bush, because he didn't know what the frag was going on in in the world, did that. And so Ali Sufan was pulled back. In fact, Robert Mueller was the FBI director at the time. He knew exactly what the CIA was going to start doing. And so, not only did he pull his people out, he pulled all FBI personnel out of the country that the secret prison was in. He didn't even want his people to be in the same country while

[1:29:44] the CIA was torturing its prisoners. And so, they immediately began torturing Obeda on August the 2nd, 2002. and he went silent. So they tortured him for about six weeks and then the FBI came back. He was furious and it took Ali more than a month to get him talking again. And he's like, "Why did you guys do that to me? I was telling you everything you wanted to know." And he said, "That that wasn't that wasn't us. That was these other guys from a different organization."

[1:30:16] Ali continued to interrogate him for another couple of months and then the contractors came back uh James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two the two contract psychologists and just started torturing him even more mercilessly. They waterboarded him 83 times. They actually killed him at one point. His heart stopped beating and they had to revive him with CPR so they could torture him more. And then after that, he never told us anything.

[1:30:47] >> Do you think I know the FBI, the CIA had MK Ultra with the mind control techniques. Do you think they're doing anything similar to that or are they that? >> That's a very good question, and it's impossible to come up with a definitive answer, but let me give you some background first. MK Ultra was a program that started in the early 1950s, and it started by accident. We had a source who turned out to be a fabricator saying,

[1:31:17] "The Russians are doing mind control experiments." And we were like, "Oh my god, we're going to be behind the Russians. All right, we got to do our own mind control experiments. The Russians are doing ESP experiments." We said, "Oh my god, we have to hire all this the psychics in America and try and get them to do mind control." So we came up with this thing that was called MK Ultra and it was composed of several different sub operations MK chipwit for example. So we were doing

[1:31:49] things like what would happen if we gave people LSD and they didn't know it. Let's try that. See what happens. Well who should we do it to? Let's do it to our own people. Just see what happens. Well I'll tell you what happens. They start jumping out of windows and off of roofs of buildings and committing suicide. They're like, "That didn't work." Okay, why don't we hire prostitutes? This is true. We'll hire prostitutes in San Francisco. We'll have them pick up

[1:32:20] John's. We'll bring the John's back to a safe house that we control. We'll dose them with LSD. will tie them up and interrogate them and see if they'll tell us their deepest secrets. No, they just went nuts. That's all that happened. And then we release them and then they're just wandering the streets of San Francisco nuts. Then they said, "How about if we come up with a germ and we spread the germ all around San Francisco and see if people get sick?" So they

[1:32:53] came up with this germ. They waited until a really foggy day when the air is very heavy and it sits on the ground, right? Because what's fog? It's a cloud that sits on the ground. And within days, 11 people went to hospital emergency rooms with this rare strain of upper respiratory infection. We're like, "Hey, now we can do that in Havana, in Moscow, in East Berlin."

[1:33:23] But none of this led to, you know, reading minds or manurion candidates or none of it worked. But it was brutal. And we made people insane. We made people commit suicide. We split families. And this was monstrous. Well, it it became public in 1975 in in the Church and Pike Committee hearings on Capitol Hill. So, it lasted from 1952 to 1975. and and chairman uh Church, senior

[1:33:56] senator from Idaho, specifically ordered the CIA director not to destroy the documents related to MK Ultra. He immediately went back to headquarters and destroyed 80% of the documents. So, we only have a little historical understanding of what happened with MK Ultra. Everything else was was shredded. People ask me all the time, is there MK Ultra today? Honestly, I have no idea. It's not called MK Ultra, but it's

[1:34:26] impossible to know what the CIA is doing on these mind control issues. Now, they're doing other things technologically that we know thanks to Wikileaks and Josh Schulty and the uh Vault 7 revelations. We know that they can take remote control of your car and make you drive off a bridge. >> Any car. >> Any car. any car that has a computer in it, which is every car, unless you're driving a, you know, 57 Chevy or something. >> Uh, we know that they can take any smart

[1:34:57] TV, any smart TV, and turn the speaker into a microphone so that it broadcasts what's being said in the room even while the TV is off. Another thing that they did was they infected computers domestically which is illegal but then in the code they embedded lines of code written in either Farsy or Cerrillic. >> That's marble right project marble. >> Correct. >> So they could point say it wasn't us it was the Russians Iranians they did it. Look the code. They forgot to translate

[1:35:29] these lines of code. They're still in Russian and Farsy. No it was it was us. So, we don't really know what they are doing. And I and I'll I'll say this. I'm going to caveat this by saying I've been out of the CIA for 21 years now. That is a lifetime technologically speaking. It's a different world today than it was when I left the CIA. God knows what they can do that we haven't found out yet. It's impossible to say. What traits are they looking for? They

[1:35:59] are looking for people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Right? Sociopaths have no conscience. They're unable to feel guilt. You don't want a sociopath because sometimes they can't stop themselves and they will feel utterly remorseless after having killed somebody. And as a result, they blow through the polygraph because they don't have a conscience. People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but are also willing to work

[1:36:30] in these legal and moral and ethical gray areas. And I'll give you an example. In the um in the interview process, I was with like two other guys and a woman and the instructor is giving us this oral exam and he said, "Let's say you are a case officer overseas and you get a cable from headquarters telling you that they need the latest economic data from Indonesia. You then go to meet the Indonesian economic

[1:37:02] officer and you take him to lunch and you have a great time and you take him to dinner. You have another great time. You introduce the wives. They hit it off. You spend time, you know, go on vacation for the weekend. Your kids are playing together. Everything's going perfectly. But you do this for six months and then you realize this guy's really not recruitable. There's really nothing that he needs from you and there's no weakness that he has. He's not a drunk. He's not a gambler. He's not a an [ __ ] who, you know, has fallen a foul

[1:37:33] of his boss. He's just a guy, but headquarters really needs the data. So, what do you do? And the guy raises his hand. He says, "You double down and you do it for another six months. Spend more money on the guy." And um and the woman says, "Maybe you get the wives more involved. get the wives to get closer and then you can work it through the wife. And I'm listening to all this like what? So I raise my hand. I go, "You break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it." He goes, "That's exactly what you do. You break into the

[1:38:05] Indonesian embassy and you steal it. Don't waste another six months on this guy. He's not going to give you anything." That's a sociopathic tendency. A normal person wouldn't voluntarily say, "I'm going to break into the Indonesian embassy and steal their documents." I would, maybe you wouldn't, but that's what a sociopathic tendency is. >> What other questions do they ask you? Like qualifying questions. >> Describe your relationship with your mother. Like, what's the right answer there? I said, yeah. I said, my my mom

[1:38:38] and I are close. She was nurturing and kind and supportive. And was your father the disciplinarian in the family? And I said, "No, actually, my dad's a big, strong guy, and I think he was always probably afraid that he would scare us or hurt us or something." So, no, he was never. He was always kind of a sweetheart. "Have you ever betrayed a friendship?" And I said, "Ooh, I don't think so. Let me think about it for a minute." They go, "No, no." That's the response we were looking for. I said, "Okay." They

[1:39:10] said, 'We need for you to go in the next room and give us some hair, some blood, and some piss. I said, ' Okay.' So, there's a nurse in there. She plucked out my hairs and took my blood and I pissed in a cup. And I went home. My wife goes, "How'd it go?" I said, "I have no idea. I have no idea if I gave the right answers or crazy wrong answers. I have no idea what they were looking for." And then they hired me >> because I guess they were the right answers. Did you take any tests like written tests?

[1:39:41] >> Thoughts? >> I aced those, man. That that was the first thing you do. So, they gave me they gave me three written tests. Um, one was current events. It was like laughingly easy. >> Was it multiple choice? >> Multiple choice. A, B, C, and D. Fill in the little oval. Embarrassing. Like any anybody who you don't even have to read the watch to post. If you just glance at the headline as you're walking past the newspaper box, you're going to you're going to be fine. Then the second one was um it was a map

[1:40:12] of the world. You had to unfold this big map of the world and none of the countries were labeled and you had to write in the names of all the countries. I was always a nut for maps when I was a kid. So that was easy. That was like a little trepidacious about West Africa, but it was easy otherwise. And then the third one was tough. It was thousands of questions and you have to say agree or disagree, right? So, it's like I wish I could conduct a symphony orchestra.

[1:46:53] and um we were all in a van outside. There were like 10 of us in this van and I volunteered to go first. So I went in. They said, "Okay, sit on the bed and then react." I said, "Okay." Okay. So, I'm sitting on the bed and somebody knocks on the door and I said, "Just a minute." And I stood up to answer the door and the door flies open and they both start speaking to me in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. One of them's holding a a vacuum cleaner. So, I

[1:47:26] go, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I didn't order I didn't order housekeeping." And then he drops the vacuum cleaner and goes bang bang bang. And he got me with paintballs. And I go, "Fuck." And he says, "You should have shot us as soon as we open the door." And I said, "Honest to God, it's a lesson I will never forget." And they said, "Take your shirt off, drop it here, and don't tell anybody else in the van what happened." So I go back to the van and everybody's like, "Well," and I

[1:47:57] just said, "It's not good, but I can't talk about it." And one by one they each came back and all 10 of us failed. But it was a lesson I will never forget. So anytime I detected trouble, the first thing I did was I unzipped my fanny pack just so I could grab the gun and just start shooting every time. I never had to shoot, but I was ready every time

[1:48:28] because of that exercise. Once you shoot, you got to just leave the country as fast as possible. >> And they taught us if you are going to draw the weapon, you have to kill the guy. We're not going to wave it around and say, "Hey, get back in your car." You know, no. Two shots both to the kill zone from the chest up to the neck or the head, right? Two shots and then we have to get you out as fast as we possibly can. If Hollywood made a movie about your life, which moment would be

[1:48:58] the climax? >> The cl the climax of horse coming just before the deny mole. Okay. I'd say walking out of prison in 2015. I was utterly completely and totally unrepentant. I I I was out of prison for like two days. I gave an interview to the BBC and this guy, you know, the BBC, they always try to bait you, right? because they love this slugfest. And the guy's like, "Well, you're not you're not apologetic at all. You're not

[1:49:29] repentant at all." And I said, "No, I'm not at all. I would do it again tomorrow if I had the opportunity." I was like, "Oh, okay." I was like, "Okay, next question then." What? You want me to apologize? No. Let the torturers and the murderers apologize. They're the ones that should apologize to the American people. So, I left it there. >> You also wrote a book about 20 skills that the CIA taught you to survive in prison. >> Right. It was it was called um Doing

[1:50:01] Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. >> Yeah. >> I started off the book as a joke, >> right? These were 20 life skills, life rules that they taught us. Some of them were tongue andcheek like admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations. We even had coffee cups that said that. But I mean, it's serious. And I actually employed that in prison. Um, not with prisoners, but with

[1:50:31] these morons who were the the guards, like these mental defectives. You know, to be a prison guard in in the United States, you only need to have a GED or be working on your GED and no felony convictions. That's it. I say in the book that one of the things that struck me early on was that the guards have to do mail call every day at four o'clock, but usually they didn't. They had a prisoner do mail call. Why? Because the guards couldn't read.

[1:51:02] They just simply couldn't read. >> This is in federal prison. They couldn't read. >> Uhhuh. >> Oh boy. >> Here you are playing chess and they don't even know what checkers is. >> Yeah. You know, I was standing in the day room one day. There there's a prison email system. So, it's not internet, but it's it's you write an email like to your wife and it goes to some prison office and they read it and they say it's okay and then they send it to your wife. So, I'm standing at the computer one day and these two guys start duking it out, which happened every few months.

[1:51:34] What are they duking it out over? Whether to watch Love and Hip Hop Atlanta or 101st in Park. I'm totally serious. They're duking it out like blood flying and I'm just sitting there. They're l literally three feet away from me. I'm doing my email. Well, on the camera on the security cameras, they can see in what was called SIS, the special investigations, whatever service or these two morons who

[1:52:05] just did investigations down there. So, they see that I'm standing there. Well, and the thing is is in prison, if there's a fight, everybody scatters. You run back to your cell. Why? Because you do not want to be implicated in a fight. You'll go straight to solitary and you'll probably be there for 6 months. And then if you're lucky, they'll only transfer you to another prison. They're not going to punish you further. But I'm like, "Fuck you. I'm not doing anything. I'm finishing my email." So, as soon as the fight ends, I hear Kiryaku,

[1:52:36] lieutenant's office, immediately. I was like, "You dopes." So, I walk down to the lieutenant's office and I go, "What? Why don't you tell us about the fight?" I go, "What fight? Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter accusations." I go, "What fight?" "Oh, you're going to be a wise guy." I go, "I don't know what you're talking about." What fight? the fight that was three feet away from you in the day room. I said, "There was a fight?"

[1:53:08] Very funny. We saw you on the camera just standing there. I go, "I don't know what you're talking about." I don't think there was a fight. Actually, I think I would have noticed if there was a fight. Oh, there was a fight. I go, "Yeah, I think maybe you were fighting. How do you like that? Why don't you tell me about the fight since you seem to know so [ __ ] much about it. And they were like, "Get the [ __ ] out of my office." And I was like, "Exactly." And then I went back and everybody's like, "You didn't go to solitary." I

[1:53:39] said, "They're too [ __ ] stupid to send me to solitary." I said to the warden one time, he goes, "You keep [ __ ] around like this. We're going to send you to solitary." I said, "Warden, with all due respect, I have gone nose tonose with al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you? Please give me a little credit. I said, I'm not afraid of your solitary. And then they never bothered me again. >> Which tactic was this? Intimidation.

[1:54:10] >> Intimidation. There was one that I was very proud. There were two that I was very proud of. Um, one was let others do your dirty work. So, I got called to the lieutenants office one time because NPR wanted to do an interview and I had to sign a a waiver. So they say, "Kiryaku, lieutenants office." And usually when you get called to the lieutenant's office, you're going to solitary. I was the only one who would get called down there and come back 15 minutes later like it was nothing. So um they called me the lieutenant's office. They said,

[1:54:41] "NP called and they want to interview you. You have to sign this release." So I signed it. I go back up. In the meantime, in my housing unit, there was this guy. He was a serial killer. We used to call him truck because he had been a long-distance truck driver. And what he did was he would stop at truck stops and he would get prostitutes and he would have sex with them, but he wouldn't pay them. He would strangle them instead. And then he would take their dead bodies in the truck with him and just throw them out of the truck in random places around the western United States.

[1:55:12] Well, one of these girls he strangled, but he didn't kill her. She lived and she was able to identify him and he got caught. They couldn't prove, this is the days before DNA, they couldn't prove that he was the killer, but they could prove that he had raped and attempted to kill this this 16-year-old girl. So, he got 20 years. He gets out, he does the whole 20. He gets out and the cops knew, like, they really knew he was the serial killer. So, they set him up and they would harass him and go to his house and demand to do an inspection of the house.

[1:55:44] And so he got tired of being harassed and he took a swing at one of the whatever they are, marshals, I guess, and he got another 20. So he was in the second 20 when I was there. For reasons that I will never understand, this guy constantly sought my approval. I don't know why. And to tell you the honest to God's truth, I was afraid of him. He was nuts. He he roommed with a child molester and he hated this child

[1:56:14] molester so so much. Not for any particular reason other than that he was a child molester that he went to the commissary one day and bought olive oil which was on the list of stuff you could buy. He bought olive oil. He heated it up in the microwave until it was boiling. >> Oh [ __ ] >> And then he poured it on the guy's face. Right. It disfigured him permanently. This kind of person this guy truck was. So, I didn't know any of this when I first arrived. And this guy comes up to me, truck, he says, "So, you're a CIA?"

[1:56:46] I go, "Yeah." He goes, "I was CIA." I go, "I find that hard to believe. Every CIA guy I knew had teeth." >> Was he like, "Dude, you don't want to do that with him. He's nuts." I'm like, "Whatever." He's like, "I ran a shrimp boat full of weapons to the Angolan rebels." I go, "A shrimp boat? Are you nuts?" I said, "You wouldn't make it five miles in a shrimp boat. They tip over. You're going to cross the Atlantic

[1:57:18] Ocean." I go, "What the [ __ ] are you talking about?" And people were like, "You can't talk to him like that. He's not. So kill you." But what it did is it made him want my approval even more. So, he would say stuff like, "Uh, hey John, uh, there's a new classic rock station, 1600 a.m. I know you like classic rock. You should check it out." I'm like, "Thanks, Truck." "Hey, John, the Steelers game starts at 1. Uh, I saved you a seat in the day room." I'm like, "Oh, thanks, Truck."

[1:57:50] So, one day I'm sitting in the day room. He's sitting next to me and this guy who I hated was at the computers and we called this guy Cat in the Hat because he had this oddly elongated head. So he looked just like the Cat in the Hat. Well, Cat in the Hat wanted to move into my room at one point into my cell. We had a free bed. So we had a rule. No child molesters, right? We're all good. We called good guys in our room. Like my

[1:58:21] bunkmate was the mayor of Cleveland, for example. fantastic, awesome guy. Crooked as the day is long, but he was a natural-born politician. I loved him. Frank Russo, God bless him. He's dead now. He had a heart attack during COVID. So, um, and a bunch of drug dealers and and a mortgage fraudster. So, um, so Cat in the Hat says, "Hey, I see you have a a bed in there. I I I wanted to move in." I said, "Well, you got to be interviewed by everybody in the in the room." So, he comes to the room for his

[1:58:52] interview. This is all very formal, very serious, you know, in context. I said, 'What's your crime? And he says, 'Murder for hire.' And I go, oo, I don't think I like that any better than child molestation. I said, what what were the circumstances of murder for hire? And he says, uh, I used to gamble and I owed the mafia hundred grand. I couldn't pay it back, so I took out a $100,000 life insurance policy on my business partner and uh and I hired a hitman uh to kill him. I said, ' And you got caught? Yeah,

[1:59:25] like in a in a minute. They caught him in a minute. So he agreed to rat out the hitman. Well, it turns out the hitman then died of a heart attack while awaiting trial. So Cat in the Hat had the benefit of the deal because he did agree to testify against the the hitman. They gave him 20 years. Once you get to 10, you can come to a lower security prison. And I said, I vote no. Not only are you a murderer, you're a rat. I said, 'I don't want any

[1:59:55] [ __ ] rats in my room. Everybody else is like, forget it. So this guy hated me, but he knew I was close to the Italians. Very close to the Italians. So I'm sitting there next to truck and this [ __ ] guy is like three feet away from me, doesn't know I'm sitting right behind him. And he says to the guy next to him, "Did you hear that [ __ ] Kiryaku got called to the lieutenant's office?" He goes, "You know why? That guy's a [ __ ] rat." And Truck says to me, "Did you hear that [ __ ] guy? He just called you a rat. I

[2:00:27] mean, if you call somebody a rat, blood's going to be spilled." And I said, "Yeah." I said, "An hour ago, I heard him call you a child molester, which I totally made up." Without saying a single word, Truck got up and beat him almost to death. He was in the hospital for six weeks. >> Damn. >> Truck caught another charge. They added five more years to the 40 that he already had. And then Cat in the Hat after he got out of the hospital was put

[2:00:58] in solitary for another couple of months. And then somebody told him what I had done. And I ran into him in the housing unit in it and I said, "Hey, I got to tell you something. If I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead. You understand me?" And he goes, "Yes." And then that was the end of it. Let others do your dirty work. There was

[2:01:28] this one [ __ ] guy. Let me tell you this Italian guy, he was engaged to an A-list Hollywood star, right? She broke up with him because he was a con man. This guy never stopped talking. I was in People magazine again last week. I was in Variety. I don't know. Nobody cares if you're in People magazine. And then he was a degenerate gambler. So he's borrowing from this guy to pay his debt to that guy and then borrowing from this guy to pay that guy. and he's always

[2:08:14] he blinks it says [ __ ] you. So I jump up. I go, "What do you want?" Right? And one of them goes, "Take it easy." The Nazi guy, "Take it easy." He goes, I'm standing there like this. He goes, "Are you the new guy?" I go, "Yeah." He goes, "Are you a fag?" I said, "No, I'm not a [ __ ] Are you a rat?" I said, "No, I'm not a rat. I didn't have anybody else in my case." And he goes, "You a cho?" I go, "I don't know what that means." He goes, he goes, "Chomo, child molester." I

[2:08:44] said, "No, I'm not a [ __ ] child molester." He goes, "Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." And I go, "Oh, okay." And I'm thinking, "So, I'm with the Aryans now. Great. I've watched Oz. I know how this plays out. So, three, four days later, this black guy comes in. This like totally rippling muscle, like the most perfect example of a human being I've ever seen in my life. And I jump up and I'm thinking, I'm not going

[2:09:16] to last two minutes with this guy. I go, "What do you want?" He's got a newspaper, this little newspaper, and he very gingerly hands it to me and he says, "Are you the CIA man?" And I go, "Yeah." And he says,"Reverend Farrakhan says,"You're a hero of the Muslim people." I said, 'Oh.' And I look at the newspaper and it's like, Farrakhan says, "Kiryaku, hero of the Muslim people." Cuz I was anti-torrture. And he said, "I just want to tell you you're not going to have any problems with us." I said, "Okay, thank you." And

[2:09:47] he walks out. Never spoke to him again. They don't talk to the white devil. Like they'll tell you, "I don't talk to the white devil." So there's no conversation, no relationship there. Four members, four of my cellmates were members of um of Mexican cartels. And so one of them said to me one day, "Are you educated?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Would you write my appeal?" I said, "I'm not a lawyer." "Yeah, but you're educated." I go, "Yeah." I said, "Sure. I'm probably smarter than half the

[2:10:17] lawyers out there. Sure, I'll write your appeal. Give me your paperwork. I'll figure it out." This guy was as guilty as the day is long. had like 20 tons of cocaine in a warehouse and he opens fire on the DEA and they open fire on him. He even showed me his bullet wound scars. Like he's guilty guilty. So I write the appeal. The appeals denied, but he told all the other Mexicans that I wrote the appeal and I didn't charge him anything. He like he offered me the currency is bags of uh mackerel because they cost

[2:10:48] exactly $1 or books of stamps because at the time they cost $8. And I said, "No, no. I I got people on the outside. They they take care of me. I don't need any money." So he told all the Mexicans, and they were like, "Okay, well, he's he's okay then." So directly across the hall from me was the number three in the Banano family, um, Senior Cabo. And I used to give him my New York Times. He'd give me his New York Post. We'd watch football together. And he said to me one day, "Let me ask you a question. Why do

[2:11:20] you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria? And I said, I don't know. My first day they told me to sit with them. He goes, from today you're with the Italians. And I said, great. >> You said you met with them outside of prison two weeks ago. Are you getting followed by the feds? >> This is what I say to the feds. >> This they follow you. >> They stopped. I got out in 2015. They stopped by 2017. >> They spent two years. >> Yeah. A buddy of mine from the CIA called me one day and he said, "Hey, you

[2:11:51] want to you want to go out for a pizza?" I said, "Yeah, I'd love to see you." He lived in Restston, Virginia, which is it was far. It was about 15 miles from my place. So, listen, I was a surveillance instructor at the CIA. So, immediately I see there are three cars on me. How How quick? >> Oh, within three blocks. Listen, a [ __ ] snow plow is not going to follow me through my neighborhood like this. >> A snowplow is following you. snow plow on the front. I'm like, "Seriously, you guys, you morons. This is how the FBI

[2:12:22] is. They have their heads up their asses half the time." So, I I go to the pizza place and um and I go in, I see my buddy, big hug, and I said I said, "Did you spot surveillance on the way over here?" He said, "Absolutely not." I said, "Well, I sure did." And he's like, "Are they still doing that?" And I said, "Yes." So, we sat and ate our pizza and I drove home and I'm like, "Fuck you guys for wasting your whole day of the taxpayers's money." >> How did you spot it? How do you spot the

[2:12:54] surveillance >> when you first pull out? Nine times out of 10, you're going to pull out from your house, right? Unless you're, you know, at your office, but most of the time in the morning, you're at you're at the house. So, if I'm going to go to rest in, I'm going to need to take a highway for the most part to get to rest in. But to get to the highway, I have to go through my neighborhood. And so, it's going to be about two miles to get to the highway. Well, I know all the shortcuts, so I'm not going straight to the highway. And these idiots don't know I'm going to get a pizza and rested.

[2:13:26] They're like, "Oh, he's going to go leak secrets to someone." So, they're on me. And they don't want to risk losing me because they know I'm trained in counter surveillance. And so it's like a Volkswagen Jetta, a freaking snow plow, which I'll never forget, and then some other car, I don't remember what it was. And so I just drag them like this all the way to Boston. >> The longer way, >> the longer way. And then I get on the highway and I go to Reston. And I I dragged all three of them with me all

[2:13:57] the way to Reston. >> Like nice nice tap on their spend the taxpayers money. >> Did you tap on their window when you left the pizza place? Yeah, I did that once in in 2012. In the summer of 2012, George Washington University hired me to do a surveillance and surveillance detection course. >> That's when you went to school, too, right? >> Yeah. So, I had a dozen students and on our very first day, I broke down what a surveillance detection route is and how you put one together. So, I said, "What

[2:14:28] we're going to do to start off is we're going to walk through what would normally be a 2-hour surveillance detection route. It's going to take us about an hour and a half because we're not going to actually stop at the stops." So, we leave from the dormatory. We go up 20th Street to a bookstore, a combination bookstore cafe in uh Dupont Circle. The reason I like this bookstore cafe is because you can buy a book, have a coffee, and there's a back door. So, you

[2:14:59] go in the front door, you do your thing, you leave the back door, it puts you in a neighborhood, then you loop around to see who comes through the building with you, and then I want to go to Georgetown from there. Well, the only way to get to Georgetown is across what's called the Pea Street Bridge because there's Rock Creek that separates Dupont Circle from Georgetown. It's it's a chasm. So, the bridge is like 500 feet above the creek. Well, the only way to get from one neighborhood to the other is across this

[2:15:30] little bridge. So, if you're under surveillance, they have to follow you over the bridge. So, I said to these kids, they're all like 18, they've just started college. I said, "This is gonna sound crazy, but I believe we are actually under surveillance." I said, "I don't know if you guys noticed, but there's a woman and a man who followed us into the cafe and out the back and they looped around

[2:16:02] and came to the bridge. Now, we've crossed the bridge and there's a woman sitting alone in a car reading a newspaper, which never ever happens in real life, only in the movies. So, I said, "What you would do is you would jot down descriptions of the two who are on foot and jot down the license plate number of this one and the description of her and a description of the car." Just then, my cell phone rings and it's my lawyer. He said, "I just got a strange call from the FBI. They said

[2:16:32] that you are acting very suspiciously as if you are doing a surveillance detection route. And I said, tell these retards at the FBI that I am doing a surveillance detection route and that a group of 18-year-olds on their first surveillance outing caught them. the vaunted FBI that they're so great at what they do. A bunch of 18-year-old kids spotted their surveillance. So, I said, "Tell them I'm

[2:17:03] teaching a surveillance class and to mind their business." And so, they broke off. >> You got recruited out of George Washington. >> My my uh grad school adviser was actually undercover as a grad school adviser. He was a CIA officer acting as what was then called a spotter looking for people who would fit into the CIA culture and he thought I would fit in. >> What did he notice about you? >> Uh he had assigned us a paper uh where we had to shadow our bosses and

[2:17:35] write a psychological profile of our bosses. I was working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the time. And my boss was this mean, foul, old school union organizer. I was actually a little bit afraid of him. And halfway through the week, we got into an argument, quite a bad argument, and I called him a racist, which he was. He was just a disgusting human being. And he got so mad, he baldled up his fist and he set his stance. And I put my hands up like, "Dang, I went too far

[2:18:06] this time." I put my hands up and he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." And I said, "What?" He goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." I said, "You know what? You're nuts." And I quit and I walked out. So I went back to my dorm. I wrote my paper. I said, "He's a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies." And I footnoted the daylights out of it. And you know, this this shrink said that and this shrink said this, and he fits the pattern. So I got the um paper back. back a week later, I got an A and the professor

[2:18:37] wrote in the margin, "Please see me after class." And so I went to see him and he's like, "Look, I'm not really a professor here and I think you would make a good CIA officer. What do you say?" And I said, "Yeah, talking to you today, even before the show and during the show, one thing that resonated with me or just I can kind of pick up from our conversations is the truth is really important to you." >> Oh my god, there's nothing as important as the truth. Nothing. even when it's a hideous truth. Right? Listen, it it's my

[2:19:08] own experience. I'm 61 now. I'm not a kid anymore, but it's my experience in life that the truth always comes out. So, own it. Listen, you and I can disagree on torture, right? Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes torture. But if you make a decision that you want to do these different things to people, then own it. Don't pretend that it's not happening. Own it because the truth's

[2:19:39] going to come out. I said way back in 2012 when I was arrested, I said the reason why the pro-torrture people at the CIA are doubling down on torture is because they know deep down that they're wrong. Right? We all know deep in our gut the difference between right and wrong. And they know that when they die and their orbituaries are written, it's going to say that they were torturers. And so they think that if they repeat

[2:20:10] the lie over and over and over again that the American people will finally come over to their their line of thinking. And that's just not going to be the case because Americans know that it's wrong. What was the moment in your career that you just knew that you had to come out with the information knowing the consequences you're going to face? >> Well, to tell you the truth, I really believed for a long time that somebody else would come out and say something, right? Because there were a lot of people listen in that position where I told you I had access to everything. I'm

[2:20:41] seeing the reporting cables from the secret prisons and it's like the secretary walked in while we were torturing this guy and she fainted and now she wants to come home. That's a career-ending move. It's called a curtailment. You're curtailing your assignment. You will never be promoted again if you curtail an assignment. We had doctors saying, "I quit. I took a hypocratic oath to first do no harm. And you want me to revive this guy just so you can torture him more? I quit. So I

[2:21:14] thought, well, I'm obviously not the only person who opposes torture. One of these people, one of them is going to pick up the phone and call the Washington Post. And then none of them did. And then finally in 2007, Brian Ross from ABC News called me. I'd never met him before. He said, "I have a source who says you tortured Abu Zuba." I said, "Absolutely not true. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zuba."

[2:21:45] Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. He said, I said, "I'll think about it." And I wasn't going to do it. But then later that week, the president, George W. Bush, gave a press conference in which he looked right in the camera and he goes, "We do not torture." I said to my wife, "He's a bald-faced liar. He is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to every one of us." And then two more days later, it was a Friday, he was walking, he came out of

[2:22:16] the South Portico of the White House and he was walking to the to the helicopter, Marine One, to go to Camp David for the weekend. and a reporter shouted a question about torture and he stopped and he said, "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer and I said to my wife, Brian Ross' source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on me." So, I called him and I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided, you know what? In for a penny, in for a pound. Whatever

[2:22:48] he asks me, I'm just going to tell the truth. And that's exactly what I did. >> On your website, you have one phrase that caught my attention, and that says, "Truth matters. What is the one thing you wish people understood about you?" >> I mean, I I could give you kind of a flippant answer. I'll give you both a real answer and a flippant answer. There is literally nothing that I hate more that when I read in the comment section of a podcast that I've done, once CIA,

[2:23:20] always CIA, that is the most intellectually lazy and [ __ ] moronic thing a person could possibly say. I used to respond to that by saying, "Oh, okay. I'll tell Ed Snowden and Ray McGovern and the sons of Philip Agy that you think they're still in the CIA, you [ __ ] I hate that. That's not really what matters. What matters is in the CIA's culture,

[2:23:52] they train us to believe that everything in life is a shade of gray. And that's just not true. Some things are black and white. they're right or wrong. And like I said to you earlier, we know in in our guts what's right and what's wrong. The question then is do we do what's right? Even if there's a personal cost and I would say we have to do what's right. Let me let me give you another example. I I use this example

[2:24:24] and this is not a real life example. I made this up but I I give this example at college campuses when I speak. Let's say that you are a CIA case officer and you've recruited an agent who is a bonafide terrorist, an honest to god penetration of a major terrorist organization, and you meet with him once a month in a in a hotel somewhere in the Middle East, doesn't matter where. Everything this guy has given you has

[2:24:55] proved to be true. He's saved American lives. So you fly out one month to meet with him and he says to you everything I've given you has been true. So tonight you're going to do something for me. You're going to go out and get me a prostitute. And if you don't, I'm not talking to you anymore. So I said, "Give me a show of hands. How many would get him the prostitute?" And usually about 80% will put their hands up. And I

[2:25:28] say, "Yeah, you would. It's ugly. It's dirty. It's gross. But yeah, you'd get him the prostitute. What if he tells you he wants a child prostitute?" And usually people kind of look around and then about 10% kind of gingerly put their hands up and I say, "Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances." See, but this is the this is the problem. There's no class at the CIA in ethics.

[2:25:59] There's not going to be somebody at headquarters to say, "Now, now, John, you don't get him the child prostitute. That's the wrong thing to do." That that person doesn't exist. You have to know in your heart what's right and wrong. So, you go into this job with your own set of moral values. They're not going to teach it to you. And sometimes everybody in your chain of command is doing the wrong thing. That's when you have to stand up. So the truth always

[2:26:29] matters and the truth will always come out. Be on the right side of it. That's what I'd like people to know.
