Title: The Real Threat Is Inside: Ex-CIA Officer Exposes America's Hidden Terror Program
Show: IRONCLAD
Date: 2025-05-28
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5_5mB3_Y-8
Duration: 58:39

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[00:00] We sent him to a third country, an extraordinary rendition, and he broke in two days, and spilled everything. I have no idea what they did to him. And when I asked jokingly, one of their officers, he said, "Oh, we gave him a cup of tea and an offer he couldn't refuse." And that that's all he would say. How can I help? How can I be useful in

[00:31] ending needless suffering? Do not be afraid of work that has no end. We have to organize a social movement. We have an opportunity to lead by example versus just talking hot air. I think the more people in this fight, the more we grow. Eventually, it could change. You the people are the ones that can make the change. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Hope

[01:02] you're ready for another episode of Change Agents, an ironcloud original presented by Firecracker Farm. Now, let's dive in. The first question, of course, is going to be, how the hell did you find your way to working for the Central Intelligence Agency? Well, I I had a very nontraditional uh entry into the CIA. Actually, the way I made it into the CIA is actually

[01:32] illegal now uh because of passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. But um I was in grad school. I was in grad school at George Washington University and I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership. Loved this class. Taught by an eminent psychiatrist named Jerry Post, Dr. Gerald Post. and um he assigned us a paper where we had to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our

[02:02] bosses, like a deep psychological dive. I was working at a union at the time called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, second largest union within the AFL CIO next to the Teamsters. And um and my boss was this old school mean like he he had had his back broken by scabs during a during a riot, you know, at a strike and just a mean old man. And I was shadowing him this this week and uh and on Wednesday, halfway

[02:35] through the week, we got into an argument and I called him a racist, which he was. And he got so mad he put up his fists and and I I put up my hands because I thought, "Oh, I went too far this time." I put up my hands and he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." And I said, "What?" And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." And I said, "You know what? You're nuts." And I quit. And I walked out. So I had already accumulated a shitload of of data from my paper. And

[03:08] um I went back home. I wrote the paper, I passed it in and uh and a week later I got the paper back and I got an A, but in the margin Dr. Post had written, "Please see me after class." So I went to see him and I said, "Dr. Post, you wanted to see me." And he said, "Listen," he closes the door. He goes, "Listen, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here, and I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's

[03:38] culture." I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Do you want to be a CIA officer? And I said yes. And you know, the rest was up to me. I had to pass the polygraph. I had to get through the background investigation. You know, they have medical stuff and all kinds of crazy [ __ ] that they make you do. Um, but I but I made it and it was thanks to Jerry Post. He was a spotter. Isn't there wouldn't there be a better way to ask somebody that question as opposed to putting all your cards on the table and

[04:10] just saying I am not a teacher. I am a CIA recruiter. I feel like if you say that to the wrong person, the word might get out if you know what I mean. Yeah. But you know what though? It's similar to recruiting an agent uh when you're an officer in the field where you don't make the pitch unless you are 100% certain they're going to say yes. That's how you protect yourself in the field. You you carry that relationship all the way to the end. Unless, of course, you're trying to to frighten the target,

[04:41] you know, into doing something or not doing something, but you you sort of save the pitch for for when you're certain the answer is going to be yes. Do you think that the school was aware of what he was doing? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This was this was outlawed of course in in 93 with passage of the EEOC, but the agency's gotten around that by Yeah, I was gonna say there's a lot of things that are outlawed. It doesn't necessarily mean they stop. Yeah. So, what they do now, it's it's actually quite funny. It's it's called

[05:12] the uh scholar and residence program. So what they do is let's say let's say you are two years from retirement and they come up to you and they say uh so what are your plans for retirement? You say I think I'm going to go back home to Pittsburgh. They say how about this for an idea. We send you to the University of Pittsburgh where you are the CIA scholar in residence. You teach one class

[05:46] called espionage in Soviet literature and what you really do is you act as a spotter. But because you're overtly CIA, students know, hey, I can go to that professor and the professor can call recruiting and say, "Hey, I've got a good one for you." And you just turn it over to recruiting. So, it's all in the in the in the open. It's not clandestine like it used to be, but you still get the same job done. Interesting. Well, I know we'll talk

[06:17] about uh you know, the delicious center of the Oreo of your career. Let's talk about the other Let's talk about the other wafer. Why did you decide to leave? I wish I could tell you that, you know, I stood on my principles and I told them that wasn't it at all. I had just gotten divorced. I had two little boys. They were nine and six. And you know, kids need their fathers.

[06:48] And so my ex-wife moved back to Ohio. And um I tell you, I my career was really surging at the time. I I had become I had just captured Abu Zubeta and I'd become the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. So this is an important job. He offered me three station chief positions and I said, you know, I'd rather I'd rather go to the United Nations. And he said, oo, that that's really not career enhancing. And I said,

[07:18] I know, but I still have 20 years ahead of me. I can be a station chief, you know, when my kids are old enough. So, I went to the UN and I just decided, this is untenable because we're still at war in Iraq. We're still at war in Afghanistan. We're having to recycle back in. I had to volunteer like they they were requesting volunteers and if they there weren't enough by God they were going to send all of us back. So I volunteered to go back to Iraq again and I said I got remarried. I said to my my wife that this is untenable and so I

[07:51] resigned. I went into the p to the private sector and I drove every other weekend from Washington to Ohio for 11 years and I never missed a weekend. That's awesome. It was important. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I actually have uh been through a divorce as well and my children were at this point six years younger than they are now. So getting into their teens and my daughter was barely just crouching into uh double

[08:23] digits and yeah, that's what you have to do and you have to sacrifice everything else. That's it. You're exactly right. Yeah. So it sounds like I mean I think if people if they Google your name, you're going to find a bunch of things about the agency. One of the main things that comes up though is your whistleblowing on water boarding. Mhm. And I'm curious, although like you said, you didn't stand directly on your morals, and honestly, I think the number of times that that actually happens that cleanly and precisely, that's more of a Hallmark movie type thing. In my own experience,

[08:54] it's You're right. It's shades of slices of an onion. Yeah. They much over time. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I wish life was that uh pristine. It's easier to box it into 44 minutes of TV and 16 minutes of commercials, but it just hasn't been my experience in life. I think you're exactly right. The waterboarding Yeah. The waterboarding aspect specifically, which I will note that they used to do to us for fun and I'm still upset about that. We did the same in training. It was awful. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I also think we got a light

[09:25] version of it. I mean, I have uh I've never witnessed it in person at uh an enhanced interrogation site. Uh they gave us a version, you know, a lighter one at the advanced SEIR schools. It sucked for sure. I mean, you get an understanding of it. What uh what got you to the point where you were willing to openly discuss waterboarding and the enhanced interrogations? Well, you see, this is another one of those situations where I wish I could say that I stood on my principles and I told them and again

[09:56] that wasn't it. I will say that my my transition to the human rights guy, which was my my nickname behind my back uh in the the counterterrorism center uh came incrementally and it started the night that we captured Abazuba. So, a couple of nights later,

[10:26] we we captured so many guys that night, al-Qaeda guys, that we had to bring them to our safe house in shifts in a patty wagon to interrogate them 10 at a time. And so, there was this [ __ ] idiot who worked for me. His dad was a an agency big shot, but but the son never made it through ops training. He just flunked out. So, they made him what's called a sue, a special operations officer, which means that they're like the assistants

[10:56] to the to the ops guys, like, "Hey, fill out my paperwork or put together a surveillance team and make sure I'm not being followed or whatever." You know, they don't actually go out there doing operations. So, this idiot was on loan to me and um he brings a group of prisoners in and they all have hoods on and I said, "Why do they have hoods on? And he said, "We don't want him to see our faces." And I go, "Are you seriously telling me that you

[11:27] have never read the Geneva Convention? Seriously, hooding a prisoner is a war crime. Take the hoods off." And a couple of his guys go to grab the hood. And he goes, "Wait, wait, leave the hoods on." He goes, "I'm going to report you to headquarters." I said, "Oh, I'm already reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime. Take the [ __ ] hoods off." And so they took the hoods off. We reported each other and I got ripper. [Laughter] I'm going to have tell on you. [ __ ] you.

[11:58] I already told on you. Yeah. And I I thought, oh, okay. So, this is how we're going to play. All right. We're just going to pretend these laws don't exist because we're the good guys. And so, like I say, it it was incremental. Like, I can see Listen, I wanted revenge for 9/11 just like everybody else did. I wanted to kill these guys. I told Abu Zuba, I should want to kill you. I don't I should, but

[12:29] I don't. But, you know, we're supposed to be the good guys, and the good guys follow the rule of law, whether we like it or not. And, you know, there was there was even more to that. It was it was in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. On January 11th, 1968, the Washington Post ran a front

[13:00] page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. Robert McNamera was the was the Secretary of Defense. He ordered an investigation that day. The soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at Levvenworth. And then in 2002, like magic, it's all legal. Well, the law never changed. The law was never amended. Congress never voted to repeal it or to amend it. we

[13:33] just decided because we're the good guys, we're going to do this now and we're just going to say it's legal. And that wasn't good enough for me. And so, yeah, starting with the hooding and then going through the torture and water boarding was not the worst. You know, there were others. The cold cell, we we killed people using the cold cell. You know, you chain the guy to an eyebolt in the ceiling, you strip him naked, you you chill the cell down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you throw a bucket of ice water on him every every hour. We

[14:06] killed people with that with that. Add a fan to that situation. That's as cold as you're ever going to get. You're exactly right. Well, the Justice Department, I read the I read the classified uh uh uh what do you call it from the Justice Department, the uh recommendation, but uh they never said we could kill people. Another one was sleep deprivation. I I did a contract with the American Psychological Association um after I got out. It was to we came up with something called the Brookline Protocols, which were the new rules for

[14:37] APA members involved in u in uh national security interrogations. Sleep deprivation. We know from the APA that you begin to lose your mind at day seven with no sleep. You begin to die from organ failure at day nine with no sleep. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days. And people die doing that, too. You're chained to that same eyebolt. You have

[15:08] the the music on loop, you know, at the the volume of 11 and uh and the the military strength lights on you all the time and you die of organ failure. It's like, how's that legal? The Justice Department never said we could start murdering people. So, I objected. how I mean I I have interfaced with the agency mostly from a case officer perspective overseas. Um and one thing I

[15:41] hear from people often they'll say they want to they kind of want to denounce the agency and I always try to remind people that any agency or organization is comprised of people and you're probably better off exercising the cancer as opposed to radiating the whole body. That's right. But but inside of Yeah. inside of the agency when it came to those enhanced interrogation authorizations. I mean, was this is this an open secret? Was this very closely guarded? Oh, it was very very tightly held. In fact, when I was first

[16:12] approached, um I was asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. I was told that only 16 people in the CIA knew that this program existed. 16 people. That's a lot tighter than I would have thought. Yeah, it was very tight. Do you think Well, and there's an aspect of this we have to add as well, too. I mean, there's a rendition program. There's the reality that the United

[16:42] States when they don't want to get their fingernails super dirty, like I don't know what's going over in Egypt or Jordan or other countries that have extra car batteries and uh nipple clamps. Not I mean that's more of a movie more of a movie thing than anything. But yeah, you'd be surprised. Well, and that's and that's the issue. I mean, it's it's funny when people actually start to look for these things. It's not even that well hidden. I remember I the rendition program. I used to uh fly Gulf Streams after I got out

[17:13] of the military. That's cool. There was a Gulf Stream that went up for sale and for whatever reason it got associated with the agency cuz it was one of their birds that they were using for rendition which got me down this rabbit hole of looking more at that rendition program. So the again the information is out there. It's more just a matter of people having access to it. That's what piqu my interest. Do you think it actually ever stopped? Because it's the same thing as you know the agency from my understanding is supposed to be externally oriented but they'll use

[17:46] cutouts they'll use corporations largely formed by ex employees or they'll create a paramilitary arm right the ground branch the air branch the maritime branch all of these things right do you think it ever actually stopped or do they just keep finding taking left and right turns until they can get to the end state that they want and justify it that way I don't think rendition or extraordinary rendition ever stopped. I don't think it it even slowed. Um and certainly Congress has never acted on it. And you know, we should we should

[18:17] point out to your viewers too that there's a difference between a rendition and an extraordinary rendition. If I'm in Pakistan and I catch you and you're from Tunisia and I send you back to Tunisia, that's a rendition. An extraordinary rendition is if I'm in Pakistan and I catch you and you're from Tunisia and I send you to Egypt or Syria or you can dress in a diaper with a suppository to knock you out and you're handcuffed and you wake up in Egypt.

[18:47] Exactly. Now, there's nothing that's specifically illegal there. I mean, you could argue that it's kidnapping, but it's a crime that has that was not committed on US soil and it was done, you know, in the name of the government and it was done to address a clear and present danger. So, I don't think that there was ever even a slowdown in renditions. And I and listen, I don't want to sound like a I don't I don't

[19:18] want to sound like a hypocrite, but and there have certainly been well doumented horrible horrible mistakes with renditions. Yeah. But philosophically, I don't have a problem with renditions. I don't. I have to agree with you on that just based on my again my own experience. I mean, we're you had saw a different side of the coin than I did. I saw more of the the tactical perspective, largely based off of information that would come from sources such as yourself. It's

[19:50] it's as if you're trying to walk on top of a razor blade without getting cut. And I and I don't know if it's possible. And I can sit here and say yes, I saw extreme benefit from it and sometimes the ends justified the means. But I can also say that sometimes the wrong people got wrapped up and I have no idea where they went or what the impact was to their life. And I don't know, maybe that's a a never- ending existential question that you have to ask yourself or that's something you have to confront on your deathbed. Yeah. For the right person, for the right reasons, I can't necessarily say I

[20:21] have an issue with the rendition either. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm going to speak very uh circumspectly, but there there was a guy in whenever I think of renditions, I think of this this case. I I received a cable from headquarters. I was in Pakistan saying that that a really bad guy was going to arrive uh in Karach. So I alerted my liaison uh contacts. I flew down to Karach. We grabbed the guy at the airport and um and we took him back to

[20:54] Islamabad and I began interrogating him. He did everything in the al-Qaeda training manual. He pretended to pass out and he fell off the chair. He pretended to have an excruciating pain in his stomach and we would just sit there and look at him like this like, "Are you done?" And he had his cover story down. Pat, he just kept repeating it over and over. We knew none of it was true because he didn't know that, you know,

[21:26] what we knew from the previous several weeks. And um and finally I said to him, "Look, you're making this really hard. Not for us, cuz I don't give a [ __ ] one way or the other, but for yourself." And he goes, "I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of anything you can do to me." And I said, "I don't expect you to be afraid." I said, "Our partners though, our partners are going to make sure that you're afraid."

[21:58] We sent him to a third country, an extraordinary rendition, and he broke in two days, and spilled everything. I have no idea what they did to him. And when I asked jokingly, one of their officers, he said, "Oh, we gave him a cup of tea and an offer he couldn't refuse." And that that's all he would say. I wonder if his uh penis was in a vice while he was having that cup of tea.

[22:29] Perhaps that was the offer he Exactly. Exactly. Man, that's almost one where it's like, I don't know if I want to ask you this question. Yeah. Yeah. We offered him a cup of tea. It's like, wow. Ladies and gentlemen, you've heard me talk about Firecracker Farm and their hot soul. You probably heard other people talk about it as well. If you haven't tried it yet, let me just tell you, you're missing out on some serious flavor. Their hot salt is delicious, and it really makes pretty much anything

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[29:48] He was brilliant. I saw it on a plane and I was like, "Oh my god, they they hit this on the head." This this was Dick Cheney. They really hit it on the head. The man was president. He was in charge of everything. And that was the deal that he struck with Bush. You know, Bush had this bad habit of asking people to head up, you know, blue ribbon panels or whatever to make a recommendation on personnel and then he would just choose the head of the blue ribbon panel instead of the person that they recommended. He did that with Harriet Meyers for for the Supreme Court and

[30:21] then she ended up having to withdraw. But he did that as well with Dick Cheney. He asked Cheney, "Find me a vice president." Cheney gave him three or four names and then he said, "No, no, I'd rather have you." Well, Mr. uh Governor Bush, if if uh you want me, I want to be char in charge of foreign affairs, defense affairs, intelligence, energy, this one, that one, the other one. Okay. And then that was it. The great scene in the movie. Yeah. Backyard over

[30:51] lunch. Great. I have no doubt that that was true. [ __ ] You don't want to believe that that is how the people who turn the levers of power or move the levers of power are selected. Oh, buddy. Listen, let me tell you. I don't want to believe that's the case. Yeah. Let me let me tell you. I I used to go on the Tucker Carlson show all the time when he was on Fox and um we were talking about John Brennan one time and I took a swipe at Brennan deservedly. I said Brennan was in over

[31:21] his head uh intellectually. Well, I didn't say that to be mean. I said that because I've known John Brennan for 35 years and I'm telling you the man was in over his head intellectually. Well, there are a lot of people like that in government. Just because you're successful at clawing your way to the top on the backs of the people around you doesn't make you the smartest person in the room. It makes you a sociopath, but it doesn't make you the smartest person in the room. And we got that all the time.

[31:55] Yeah. Yeah, I almost think that's the uh the political ladder. It's almost the template for the political ladder. It's not it's not the people who are the most benevolent who are want I don't know. I actually kicked this one around in my head. Is it the sociopath that wants to be a politician or is the system so toxic and polluted that it can turn the most benevolent among us? They see like I can't do anything unless I line on party lines. Uh either way, neither of those are a great answer. No, but but you know what? Very well could be something to that. I

[32:26] worked with a guy I was I was mentor to a young uh uh case officer named Will Herd. So Will was around for I don't know eight or 10 years. He was a good case officer. Um he's half black, half white, which is important because he decided to resign from the agency and run for Congress. and he ran in a Supreme Court mandated majority Hispanic district. It's the 23rd district of Texas. It goes

[32:57] all along the border. Just follows the border. And he won. And he won three times. The Supreme Court made this district so that a Hispanic could get elected. Most likely a Democrat because there are more more registered Democrats than Republicans there. And Will is a moderate Republican and he won three times. And we we joked with him when he first announced. We're like, "Will, Congress is not a step up. You're making a mistake. You don't want to be with

[33:27] these guys." He ran. He won. He starts writing bills on cyber security. Even with Democrats in power, they're getting passed into law. And then after three terms, he quit. And he's like, "This is [ __ ] I can't do this anymore. The system is rigged to fail. And so now he's on the board of Chat GPT and he's the he's on the board of a bunch of things, but Chat GPT is where he's really making his money now. He ran for president for a minute. Uh but that didn't didn't do anything for him. But

[34:00] you know what? The country's is a lesser place because people like Will would rather just walk away knowing that they can't overcome the system that we've given ourselves. Yeah. Or it's evolved into for sure. Yeah. Or it's evolved into. Yeah. That's right. I'm Katarina Schultz. I'm a relentless investigative journalist who spent the last few years embedded in the heart of chaos of the world's most dangerous drug war. Here is

[34:31] a deadline. You might have heard my reporting on borderland narcosis. Now I'm taking you to the front lines. I've built trust on both sides with traffickers, law enforcement, and the very people trapped in between. I'm taking you into the heart of Mexico's cartel war with fast raw updates from the heart of the borderlands. Subscribe now to Borderland Dispatches with me, Katarina Schultz,

[35:03] and don't miss my regular appearances on Borderland Narcosis with Vince Roco Vargas on YouTube at This is Ironclad or wherever you get your podcasts. when uh how swift so you were out of the agency at the time when you did that interview, correct? Yes. How swift was the response and what was it? Ah, that's a great question. Um, so and it's actually kind of a complicated answer. So the very next day after the

[35:34] interview, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me, telling the FBI that I had uh revealed top secret information uh to the public. So the FBI interviewed me from dis interviewed me the FBI investigated me from December of '07 to December of '08 and then they sent my attorneys a declination letter declining to prosecute me because they said that it's illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping the

[36:06] information from the American people. They believed torture was a crime, so it's not a prosecutable offense. It was im improperly classified. My wife and I went out to dinner that night to celebrate. Three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president. John Brennan becomes the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. Like I said a minute ago, John and I always hated each other. John was, you know, his democratic uh uh bonafites uh aside, uh John was was one

[36:40] of the godfathers of the torture program. He was the executive director of the CIA, the third ranking official in the CIA during the pro the program. So, I had no idea that on January 21st of 2009, Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And so, they investigated me for three more years until January of

[37:13] 2012. and they finally charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage for the for the interview with uh with ABC and a subsequent interview I gave to uh the New York Times. Um and then two lesser accounts. One was making a false statement and we were never quite sure exactly what the false statement was supposed to have been, but what they did is they knew I hadn't committed espionage. So they waited until I went bankrupt 10 months later and then they

[37:44] dropped the espionage charges. So I ended up taking Yeah. So I ended up taking a plea to a lesser count. I got 23 months in prison and um and did it actually today today is what? Tuesday that we're recording this. Correct. I I'm in the process of applying this morning for a for a presidential pardon. I have so much wonderful support in the

[38:14] Trump administration. It humbles me. And so I even got down to Mara Lago and I had, you know, 10 seconds with the man. And so I I'm hoping that I can I can push this through. It's amazing to hear those stories of again the government is such I mean hundreds of thousands of employees and one person can direct Yeah. the intensity in power of a US entity like the FBI. How crazy is that?

[38:47] And there's no accident Yeah. There's no accident that they pushed you to the point where you were bankrupt. They put you into a position. And if I if I may, if you if you don't mind humoring me for one second, I want to pull up a uh you know what? I I I have it on my phone. I want to pull up an email that I received not long ago uh that that really put things into perspective for me. Give me one second.

[39:23] And here it is. Dear John, it's so nice to finally speak with you. I've been watching your YouTube interviews and I love all the content and I've been wanting to reach out to you for many years. I'm one of the FBI agents who would like to personally apologize to you for the disgraceful way that the FBI and our government treated you. I worked with both headquarters and the Washington field office team on your case and I know all of the personnel that you're familiar with. That case was directed and driven by seniormost officials. Many

[39:55] mid-level and street level personnel were against it, but nevertheless, we just followed orders. Anyway, I've always felt bad about what we did to you and I feel bad for the way you and your family were treated and I wanted to personally apologize sincerely. And then he signs it. That's the third one that I've gotten since my conviction. The third one. It's a great email. It's a great email. And part of me says, "Awesome for that person sending that." But but another part of me says, "Fuck

[40:26] you. You should have stopped following orders. You're exactly right." Yeah. Yeah. Do you think, you know, you're talking about Brennan and him being one of the architects of the uh enhanced interrogation program? Do you think that they had that thing on the shelf and they were just waiting for a time to institute it or did they create that program post 911? Yeah, they created it immediately post 911. So the way that that senior officials told me was that

[40:56] in October there was a dinner party and all the big mucky mucks from the CIA were at this dinner party and one of the leaders of the CIA's counterterrorism center brought um uh James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two uh contract psychologists to the party and introduced them to George Tennant saying these These guys are both um uh national security uh psychologists. They've come up with a

[41:27] program that you're really going to need to hear about. And so that's how the whole thing started. It started around the 11th or 12th of October 2001. And then by January, they were ready to go. They were just waiting for us to catch the first high-value target. And then in the first week of February 2002, we were told that Abu Zubedo was in Pakistan and I was tasked with capturing him. Took us six weeks, but we we tracked him down. We had no idea that

[41:59] this program was awaiting him. Wow. It's amazing they were able to do that that quickly. Oh man, it was hard. I never worked so hard in my entire life. Oh, I bet. Yeah, that was a that was an odd time for sure. Talk about going from a conceptual job to a very practical job. Oh my god. Going from first sleep under your desk. Oh yeah. You you you sleep under your desk two hours at a time. I would wake up some mornings and just not remember where I was. Like

[42:31] where where am I? Oh yeah, I'm in Queda. Oh, what am I doing in Queta? Oh yeah, that's right. I got to catch this guy today. You know, it's crazy. It's interesting hearing you. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've tried to explain this to my children. The the feeling in the country, and I'll call it 72 to 96 hours from 9/11 after, I have never felt a more connected, congealed society that everybody pretty much put their [ __ ] aside. Everybody. And and you know,

[43:04] hearing you talk about sleeping under your desk. I mean, there were so many people that that gave so much to try to orient our country into at least a protective posture and then an aggressive posture. And I'm curious your thoughts because my thoughts have radically shifted to I've been out of the military since 2010. Did about 10 years of deployments in the post GWAT era and now the whole, you know, the GWAT era, the GWAT veteran era has rounded itself up a little bit. Mhm. And I have conversations with uh friends of mine, many of them who dedicated far

[43:34] more of their life than myself in that direction. And it's interesting to hear our shifting thoughts about how passionate we were when everything first started. And now how we feel about the energy and sacrifices personally and professionally that we put in looking back on it now. And I'm curious just your thoughts looking back on that 20 year period, call it from, you know, 2001 to 2021. What are your thoughts on it now? Where do you think our country is is in a better place? Going from that place of sleeping under your desk to 20 years

[44:06] after that, did we [ __ ] it up even more? We may have. Yeah. I think that if if you're comparing apples to apples, I think we probably are safer today, but it's cost us $2 trillion. Uh and I think where it really began to turn was uh the decision to attack Iraq. You know, I remember my my very first day when when I got back from Pakistan, I I was named um uh chief of counter

[44:39] intelligence for the uh it was called Alex Station. It was the Osama bin Laden unit. So my my job was to try to root out u potential moles, al-Qaeda moles trying to infiltrate uh either the United States or American embassies abroad. And I was only in that job for six weeks. And uh and the deputy director asked that I become his executive assistant. In that job, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around

[45:09] the world. So on my and and there there were three of us. He had three executive assistants each focusing on a different thing. So I was counterterrorism and Iraq. I didn't know I was Iraq at the time. So my first day uh this was in um June June 1st of uh O2. So I uh I go to the office and I said I go like this. I said, "So what are we doing?" And he says, "I can't

[45:40] tell you. You have to go to the sixth floor and sign a whole bunch of secrecy agreements." And I said, ' Okay. So, I go to the sixth floor and uh knock on the guy's door. I knew the guy. I had known him for years. I said, "Hey." He said, "Hey, I've got your secrecy agreements here." So, I signed there was six of them. He had them all laid out on a table. So, I signed all six of them. And I said, "Okay, what's up?" and he says, "Well, next year in February, we're going to attack

[46:13] Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and we're going to open the world's largest air force base so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama bin Laden of his ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques." And I was dumbfounded. And I said, "But but we haven't captured Bin Laden yet." And he said, "Buddy, the decision's already been made. They don't want to

[46:43] hear our opinions." And I said, "Okay." I said, "So what's the background?" And he said, "There are clear battle lines here." He said the pro-invasion groups are OVP, the Office of the Vice President, OSD, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs. I'm sorry, uh the uh National Security Council. He said, "The anti-war group are the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and

[47:14] the State Department." And he said, "But we've been overruled. The decisions been made, and we've got to support the policy. So, I went back to the deputy director's office and he said, 'You sign everything?' And I said, 'Yeah.' And he said, "Pretty crazy, right?" And I said, "Yeah, this is pretty crazy." And then we started gearing up for the Iraq war. Yeah, I feel like that decision, the OVP

[47:46] had a heavy hand in that to go back to the movie that we both watched and enjoyed so much. He really did. And I'll tell you another thing. I've told this story in podcasts a couple of times, but it bears a repeating here. The night before we invaded Iraq, we had a there was a principal committee meeting. So the principal committee is normally chaired by the president, and uh it's got the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, the CIA director. Um they'll invite a handful of other seriously high level people, principles.

[48:19] Um, for whatever reason, Cheney was chairing the meeting this day. So, I was the notetaker for George Tennant. We were in his secure video uh teleconference room. I'm sitting directly behind him taking notes. And that's all my job was to sit silently and take notes. So, Cheney is chairing the meeting. We got all these video screens, right? So it's Cheney, Connie Rice, Rumsfeld, uh General Franks from SenCom,

[48:51] uh Colin Powell was on, a couple guys from the NSC, and us. And uh Cheney says, "General Franks, why don't you start with the order of battle?" And I've said a couple times, I always hate orders of battle because the CIA doesn't give a [ __ ] about the order of battle. you know, this group is here and this one's moving there and with elements of the fourth brigade. I don't care. Yeah. So, I'm just writing it all down. And then Frank says, "If all goes as

[49:24] planned, we can be in Tehran by August." And very discreetly, George reaches reaches in front of him and turns off his microphone. And he turns to me and he says, "Did he say Baghdad or did he say Thrron?" And I said, "He said Tehran." And George says, "Have these people lost their minds?" And then he turns his mic back on and he just sat there. So at the end of the of the

[49:54] meeting, I go back to the office and the deputy director says to me, "How was the principal committee?" And I said, 'D did you know we were going to invade Iran? And he said, 'Are they still talking about that? We're not going to invade Iran. I said, 'Do these people know nothing about history? And he said, "No, they know nothing about history." One of these clowns from the NSC said as as Cheney was wrapping up the meeting, he said, "Tomorrow morning when we cross the border, the Iraqi people are going

[50:25] to throw flowers at us." And I was like, they don't know anything about history. Yeah. Or about the Middle East. As somebody who crossed the border right after that and executed the number one chemio target in Iraq, there were no flowers present at all. Terrible. God. And all you could do is shake.

[50:56] Yeah, you know, you mentioned I I would agree with you. I think at large the US is safer. What do you think about the stability of the rest of the world? I mean, we were so effective at find, fish, find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze that I actually, you know, at first it started off with Taliban, right, which in my opinion at least is a a localized geographic gang at best, you know, probably no, you know, geopolitical. Yeah. Al Qaeda, different story, but we were so like, oh, two or three of you get together, guess what? People with

[51:28] night vision goggles are going to show up. A 500 pounder is going to hit you. That evolved to obviously, you know, a guided missile off of a drone. And even in my own experience, it became much harder. They splintered. You know, al-Qaeda became ISIS and it grew into I think the last report I saw was 60 64 countries, something like that. Yeah. Did we you know what do you think the role of this fine fix finish we were so good at it and also in that too there was there was a lot of loss of life and

[51:58] it's very I don't think you can fight your way out of that ideology because I think in the course of doing so uh people who shouldn't die are going to die and they're going to become radicalized in that approach how do you think our actions specifically the US impacted stability around the rest of the world oh I when it came to just the permeation of terrorism and those type of interconnected I think we destabilized uh a lot of the world uh by forcing this

[52:28] this splinter for example ISIS that's the easiest example ISIS was created because a determination was made that al-Qaeda wasn't radical enough it wasn't violent enough and Baghdaddy created ISIS while in a US military prison in Iraq. So, we almost forced it on them. I remember, oh man, I remember a whole bunch of us standing around a TV watching George W. Bush in I think it

[53:00] was December of 01. It had to be because it was just before I left for Pakistan in which he used the word nation building and everybody groaned like, "Oh, no, not nation. That means we're going to be there for 20 years. nation building. The mission at the beginning was to destroy al-Qaeda and we destroyed al-Qaeda for all intents and purposes. By by 2002, there were 25 known al-Qaeda

[53:31] operatives left in Afghanistan. 25. Yeah. We should have turned it over to the drone corps and just let them finish the job. I really strongly believe that. you know, paralleling over to because again, we're looking a little bit in the rearview mirror, 20 plus years at this point. A lot of our strategy, bomb into oblivion, target into oblivion. I look over at things like Israel and Gaza, and I'm just curious your thoughts. Well, how do you think that plays itself out?

[54:02] Because it's almost I don't want to say it's an exact same template, but it's it's not that different. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm very very worried about Gaza for a couple of reasons. First of all, you got to call this a genocide. It meets the legal definition of genocide quite easily. Uh the forced removal, for example, of a people, even if you don't kill anybody, the forced removal is genocide legally. Um, and then killing civilians where where the Israeli

[54:34] military acknowledges the Palestinian health ministry's numbers of 90% of the of the dead and wounded being civilians. That's genocide. You you you can't do that. But nobody has either the guts or the wherewithal to stop the Israelis from doing it. Um, I think that the way this works out is unless there is a real change, a major change in foreign policy among the Western countries, and I'm including NATO, the EU, the United

[55:07] States. Um, I think the Israelis going to get away with it. I think the goal for the Israelis is the complete removal of Palestinians from Gaza so that Israeli settlers can can resettle the land and develop it. I really believe that's what the case is. And they they expect the Egyptians and the Jordanians to take these Palestinians. The Jordanians have said, "Look, we're already 50% Palestinian. We're not taking any more Palestinians." And the Egyptians have just said, "Oh,

[55:37] no, you're not." The Gulf Arabs hate Palestinians. They always have. That's why even after all this, they're still willing to to discuss normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia, the land of the two holy mosques. It's incredible to me. But they don't give a [ __ ] about Palestinians, you know. And in the Gulf, I I go to the Gulf with some frequency. They're still angry that Yaser Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein in 1990. You know, there's a price to pay

[56:09] for that. So, I I'm I'm worried that it's going to get worse. Yeah. Those cultures have long memories. Longer memories. Well, they've also they've also existed far longer than the US. I mean, I know we're getting ready to celebrate 250. Pretty big deal, you know. Y uh there's some countries that are a culture a little bit older than us. I mean, let's just let's take it with a grain. I mean, 250 is good. Let's add a zero to that and see how we're doing. If we can make it that far, I worry and you know, with that memory, God, I saw this in both

[56:39] Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, people would come in human and, you know, hey, so and so, this is the guy you're looking for. And, you know, we'd go action the target and come to find out three generations ago, a guy whatever stole a goat or something like that. That's a exactly a rough example, but their memory remains. I worry that that in that area of the world, you know, just like Hamas maybe being just absolutely pulverized in Gaza right now, there's a real chance that they are filling the ranks of Hamas

[57:11] though in the long just like the drone program did with us or against us. I can't tell you how many al-Qaeda fighters I interviewed who couldn't find the US on a map. But man, when we droned their village and killed their uncle or their cousin or their sister or whatever, they decided now's now's the time for jihad. Where can people find more of your work? Where can they uh follow along in your journey? Oh, thank you. Um, I publish everything that I do on Substack. So, it's easy.

[57:43] It's John Kuryakustack.com. And I've got a couple of podcasts myself. They're humble, but one is Deep Focus with John Kuryaku. And the other one is called Deprogrammed. And finally, I've got a uh I've got a TV show on an online uh uh channel called Unified TV, UnifyD, and the show is called uh CIA declassified. We take newly declassified original CIA documents and explain historical events using those

[58:18] documents. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you again for listening to Change Agents and Ironclad Original presented by Firecracker Farm. I'll see everybody next week with an all new guest and an all new topic. See you then.
