Title: title doesn't name John — confirm subject
Show: Insider
Date: 2026-01-22
URL: https://youtu.be/Pcfwx50zl40
Duration: 57:00

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[00:00] My name is John Kiriakou. I was a field agent for the CIA. I hunted, tracked, and captured terrorists around the world. This is everything I'm authorized to tell you. I'm not allowed to say how many officers or what percentage of CIA officers are dedicated to counterterrorism. After 9/11, the CIA became a paramilitary organization. We started borrowing special forces guys. They would be on loan to the CIA to just fly somewhere, kill somebody, and then fly back for the next Tuesday meeting.

[00:37] The most obvious risk of working as a counterterrorism officer obviously is the risk of death. There were two guys who I worked with in CTC, the counterterrorism center, Helge Boes, and Mike Spann, who were killed in the line of duty. And it wasn't just them. I was the chief of the counter intelligence branch in the Osama bin Laden group. The woman that I sat next to was killed in the line of duty in the host bombing in Afghanistan. The suicide bomber,

[01:07] he blew her and six of our colleagues up. So, death, destruction, but on a on a an equally personal note, your marriage is probably not going to survive an operational tour in the director of intelligence. The stress is just otherworldly. It's the most difficult and dangerous thing you can do as a CIA officer for a variety of reasons. First, when people join terrorist groups, they do that because they are true believers. And in most cases, they hate you or what you stand for

[01:46] more than they love life itself. And so, they are very happy to die for a cause. At the same time, if you're working counterterrorism issues, you generally aren't doing it in London or Paris or Ottawa. You're doing it in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, in Pakistan, unless you were going to carry out an operational act. You had to stay on the compound. It was just simply too dangerous. And so, not only do you have this exceedingly difficult job to do, but you have

[02:21] to blend in and not attract attention to yourself and keep yourself safe at the same time. I'll give you an example. When I was stationed in Athens, Athens was one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans, especially for American CIA officers. 17 November had murdered the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, and a hapless Air Force technical sergeant. This was a very, very lethal group. And so, that was my primary job to work against an incredibly deadly group. And I

[02:56] was the go-to guy on Arab terrorism there because I spoke Arabic. And I drove an armored car, level four armor. I carried two guns. I had a Glock 9mm on my waist and a Smith and Wesson 38 on my ankle. Even kept a buck knife in my back pocket just in case everything turned to that's all I had left. Halfway through my tour, the British embassy received a new defense attache. His name was Steven Saunders. He was a one-star general, brigadier general. Everybody loved him. Everybody

[03:26] liked to be around him, the life of the party. He loved being on camera. So, anytime you're at some event and there's a camera, Steven would run up to the camera and give an interview. Which is, you know, great if you're not in a country that's categorized as critical threat for terrorism. I took delivery of this new BMW 540, fully armored. And so we were at a we were at a cocktail party the day that I got the car and I was standing there with Stephen. He was making fun of me and

[03:58] he says, "You Americans, you're so obsessed with security. It's a NATO country. What are you so afraid of?" And they all chuckled. And I said, "You Brits live in a dream world. If you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance." And we all laughed again. And then a couple of weeks later, I made a mistake that I had never made before. I slept through my alarm. I had to just get on the main road and

[04:30] go straight to the embassy. And it was straight down this direct road called KCS Boulevard. So I get on QCS to go straight down the mountain and get to the embassy. Turn on the radio. I'm listening to some music and this announcer comes on and he says, "Avoid Kifisias Boulevard. There was a terrorist attack at Filothei." I had definitely never heard that, but when he said it, I see this white this white rover in the far left lane. There's blood all over the interior of the

[05:04] windows. And I can see when I get close enough that the driver side window has been shot out and Steven Saunders drives a white rover. It turned out that they had taken him to a hospital that was next door to the British embassy and he died there about 20 minutes later. I mean, we knew who did it. It was revolutionary organization 17 November. Now, 17 November usually would drop a manifesto at the site of the of the assassination or they would mail one to a leftist newspaper. My boss runs into my office and he says, "Did you see the manifesto for the Saunders hit?" He says, "It mentions you."

[05:36] I said, "Come on, not possible." Like seriously, nobody took security as seriously as I did. And he shows it to me and it says in Greek, "We saw the big spy, but he was driving 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 said, "You got to go. We're going to take you to the airport. You're going to go home. We'll pick up your kids. We'll pick up your wife. We'll pack at your house." So we flew out. The night before that happened was the last night I spent in a house with

[06:08] my wife and we were divorced soon after. She's just like, "Yeah, I'm not doing this anymore." Assets are critically important to counterterrorism because as an American CIA officer, I'm not going to be able to infiltrate a group directly. I was one of only a handful of CIA officers who spoke fluent Arabic. Even with my fluent Arabic, I spoke with an accent. So John's not going to be able to put on a thobe and a dishdasha and

[06:43] you know walk into a terrorist training camp and volunteer. That's just not real life. It doesn't happen. And so your job is to recruit someone who is either a member of a terrorist group or can become a member of terrorist group so that you can use his information to disrupt future attacks. There are a million different types of people that you might want to consider recruiting. But if you recruit a bonafide terrorist, someone who is able to get into the group, you're going to meet with him once a month for hours probably, and he's going to give you five, six, 10 different

[07:19] intelligence reports. This is what they're talking about. This is what they're planning. They want to do an attack in, you know, in Bali or whatever. That's the stuff that you want to get. When I was training as a case officer, one of my instructors said to me that he had gone through his entire 30 plus year career in operations and he never ever had a target say no to a recruitment. And I said, "You must be like some kind of a magical wizard of recruitment." And he laughed and he said, "No,

[07:50] when you eventually say, listen, I'm not really, you know, the economic officer here. I'm really a CIA officer." When you drop that cover, you have to be certain that they're not going to run screaming from the room, calling for the police, reporting you to their ambassador. You're going to get arrested, you're going to get expelled, your career is going to come to a halt. You have to be 100% sure. That's where you take them to lunch, you take them to dinner, you spend weekends together, you do day trips, your wives become friends, your kids are playing together to the

[08:25] point where you have figured out by now whether he has a vulnerability. And a vulnerability can mean a lot of different things. Maybe he just really really loves his kids. That can be a vulnerability because then that allows me to say, "I see how much you love your kids. I know you want your kids to go to the best schools. I can literally get your kid into Harvard and I'll pay for it, too, by the way. And he says, "Well, what do you want in exchange?" Well, I want the plans to that

[08:56] new Russian tank. I'd really like to get a peek at it. Another vulnerability would be, you know, maybe the guy's wife has cancer, but you can get her into the Mayo Clinic where she can get the best cancer treatment on the planet. Maybe the guy's a drinker or or a gambler, even better, and he's always short of money because he's maybe embezzling a little bit from the embassy. 95% of recruitments are made for the money. Sometimes it's ideology. Sometimes it's, you know, this desire for excitement. They love James Bond. They want to be a part of it. Sometimes it's for

[09:31] revenge. They hate their boss. They hate their country. They hate their leader. You've got to develop that target to the point where he comes to believe that you are his best friend. To the point where you know in your heart he's willing to commit espionage for you. The resources at the CIA are virtually unlimited. In in exchange though, the information has to be incredible, let's say. but you have access to the location of the leader of al-Qaeda and we're able to break down the door

[10:05] and grab the guy, there's a reward for you of between 10 and $25 million that we will pay in cash, in gold, in diamonds, in land, any way you want to receive it. But the budget is going to be there if the information is good. I made a recruitment one time. I heard from a source a group of members of a terrorist cell were meeting for coffee in the same coffee house every single day 10:00 they'd go for coffee which is a terrible thing to do by way of of trade craft right never

[10:41] never establish a pattern I started going there at 9 9:30 in the morning so sure enough 10 o'clock they came in four or five of them and one of them turned and looked at me I did that for a week. I started the second week. Every day 9:30, I'm sitting there with my Arabic newspaper. And this time, one of them nodded at me. So, I nodded back to him. And then one day, he came in by himself. And he sits down and we start talking and um and I ask him if how's his family? Oh, he said, "My wife

[11:17] is in Cairo with my son and my daughter, and I've never met my son." He really was a a family man. He was religious. He made some bad decisions and ended up in Afghanistan. Then he just wanted to go home. And I said to him, "If that's if that's all you want, you just want to go home." I said, "Well, I can take care of that." To make a long story short, I recruited him. I got him his passport. I gave him some money to get himself established again and put him on a plane and

[11:50] he gave me in return everything I had asked for. Very specific information that we used to actively recruit other al-Qaeda members. I asked him at the end of it, why did you let me recruit you? And he said, I've been here for 5 years and you were the first person who ever asked me about my family. There are no tactics taught to help you ingratiate yourself with potential targets. You either have

[12:25] it in your gut or you don't. So, a normal asset meeting, you go through the mad minute. Were you followed here? Were you followed home last time? Do you have any problems, any concerns during the course of the month? and let's meet one month from tonight, you know, at 8:00 at such and such a hotel. Then you sit down, you have a coffee, how was your month? How are things going? What have you heard? What do you think about this guy? What do you know about him? Do we need to be worried about him? Is he in Is he going to be in charge of the weapons

[12:58] cash? That kind of thing. It's not unusual for a meeting to last two or three hours. I was in a meeting once that lasted eight hours. Could be at a safe house. It can be walking down the beach, anywhere where you're going to be safe and that will be private. There was one source I recruited. It was too dangerous to meet him in the country that I recruited him in. So we would fly to Europe and we would meet in Europe once a month and we would meet like eight hours a day for 3 days and then I would take a train to a different country so it didn't look like we were

[13:34] both flying back from the same city at the same time and it didn't arouse any suspicion. Yeah. Some meetings by necessity are conducted in cars and so sometimes you're going to have to do what's called a CPU, a car pickup. You want to be able to pick the person up at a spot whereas few people as possible are going to see you. Maybe you're doing it in a semi-residential area where he's standing on a corner. You come down an alley instead of a main street. He jumps in the car and you take

[14:05] off. Let's say the meeting is at 2:00. You want to be there between 158 and 202. And if you're there at 158 and he's not there, you do one more run. And if he's not there by 2002, you abort the meeting and you try it again 24 hours later or 72 hours later, whatever your agreement is. You don't want somebody to say, "I wonder why that car keeps driving in a loop, you know, and then they write down your license plate number." You just you don't want to come to anybody's attention.

[14:41] Double agents are indeed real. Double agents are a very very big problem on both sides of the double. I was well into my career and I had a great friend who was a station chief. He called me one day. I was at headquarters and he called me from overseas and he said, "Hey, I was I was hoping you could do me a favor. One of my guys has recruited a double agent. The double doesn't know that we know he's a double. The enemy country has instructed the double to demand to only speak with the

[15:16] station chief. And he said, "I live here. It's too dangerous for me to meet with this guy. Can you fly out here and pretend to be me and handle the double agent?" I said, "Of course." So, I fly out and I meet with the guy. I meet him in some hotel and I give him a big bear hug at first, which is unusually warm in the Middle East, but I needed to pat him down for weapons and he didn't have any weapons. And so I made a big deal of taking off my jacket to show him that I didn't have any weapons. I sat down, we ordered some coffee from room service. He said, "Are you the chief?" I said,

[15:49] "You asked for him. You got him, buddy." "I'm the chief." I would meet with him once a month, and this went on for about six months. We were getting, you know, the take on everything that he was reporting back and what the enemy country was telling him to do. Finally, I'm at headquarters one day. I get a call from a sister agency. And the woman says, "Are you handling this double case?" And I said, "Yeah, listen. He's been instructed to kill you in the next meeting."

[16:19] I said, "Oh, come on." I said, "The guy's afraid of his shadow. He's not going to kill me. I know him well. He's a coward. He's not going to pull a gun and shoot me. But even if he were to pull a gun and shoot me, how about this? Usually he calls me when he's coming into the lobby of the hotel, I'll tell him to come up to the room directly, and when he comes in, I'll prop the door open. When he comes in, I'll grab him, take him down, you guys burst in from the other from the other room, and we get him. They reluctantly agreed with a proviso that I wear a bulletproof vest. I said,

[16:52] "Fine." So, I fly back out and four armed security guys in the lobby and it turns out the bad guys have four armed security people in the lobby and they're all kind of looking at each other sideways like who are these guys? What's that bulge on that guy's waist? That kind of thing. And they're all just kind of standing around staring at each other. So, he calls me the double and I said, "Come up to room whatever it is 6:15." He comes to room 615. I've propped the door

[17:25] open. He comes in. I tackle him. He's trying to get the gun out of his waistband. I have his arm, his hand. My colleagues burst in from the side and I'm just sitting on him. I have him pinned down on the floor and I'm sitting on his chest. In the meantime, he's just like Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar. And so my liaison partners gave him a shot of demerol and knocked him out. We put him on a gurney and covered him up like he was dead and we put him in the service elevator, took him down,

[18:00] put him in a an ambulance and we took him to intelligence service headquarters. He woke up two hours later tied to a chair. I said, "We can do it the easy way. We can do it the hard way. It totally up to you. we know who you are. He was the leader of that country's Hezbollah wing. I said, "We want all the weapons, all of them. We know that you're the keeper of the weapons." He's like, "Fuck you." So, I said to liaison, "We should just break into his house. I mean, there's a there's

[18:36] a good chance all these weapons are just in his house." And they said, "We can't. He's got a he's got a a live-in maid and she doesn't know anything and she never ever leaves the house. And I said, "Okay, well, let's just declare a gas leak in the neighborhood and then we'll evacuate the cul-de-sac and then we'll just go in. Bring a locks and picks team in and just pick the lock." They said, "No, we can't do that. We don't have we don't have gas lines in this country. We use propane. Bring a propane truck. We'll leak the propane. Then we'll just declare the emergency."

[19:08] The fire department comes. They evacuate all of the six houses. We break into his house and we find a safe, like a double size gun safe. It was enormous. The biggest gun safe I've ever seen. The weapons have to be in there. So, we bring the locks and picks team in and they've got, you know, the stethoscope on and they're doing the tumbler and they crack the safe. They open it and it's empty except for this handwritten like childlike handwritten map. So, we get in these two jeeps. We drive south as the map tells us to do. We get out where it tells

[19:42] us to get out. And we found this bunker full to the to the ceiling with every weapon they had, landmines, hand grenades, rocket propelled grenades, everything they had. We completely put Hezbollah out of business in that country. And as it turns out, he's still in prison 25 years later. And SDR is a surveillance detection route. This is something that literally every CIA officer must

[20:17] be trained in. This is what's going to keep you from being assassinated or arrested. And so you leave what's called your kickoff point. It could be home, the office, wherever you happen to be. You'll do one that's maybe two hours. is if you're in a very hostile place, your SDR could be eight hours. You're changing into pre-positioned cars, you're taking the subway, then you're walking, then you get in a different car, maybe you take an Uber for a little bit of it. An SDR comes in four different phases. The kickoff phase, you just go from from your kickoff to point A, and then you

[20:52] do kind of a it's called a stair step. make a right, a left, a right, a left, a right, a left to go to your next stop, which is maybe, you know, it's a fabric store. When you're stair-stepping like that, you can definitely see if you're being followed. If you're being followed, you abort the meeting and you just drive home and you do the whole thing again 24 hours later. If you are not sure you're being followed, you enter what's called the provocative phase

[21:26] where you'll drive halfway up a block, then make a U-turn and drive back. Make a K-turn, drive back, pull into another driveway, make a K-turn. Stuff that doesn't make any sense at all. But that's just to make sure with 100% certainty that you're not being followed. I served overseas with a with a woman who was a legitimate State Department officer. She came into the office one day and she said, "Oh, I was under heavy surveillance last night. I took them on a ride that they'll

[21:57] never forget. I was going 100 miles an hour down the highway and I'm just sitting there listening because what happened was they determined that because she tried so hard to lose them, she must be the CIA officer." And so they never ever surveilled me because I'm going to the wine store and going to the fabric store and then I'm driving home. but they were plenty interested in her. You have to be very very careful not to establish patterns and I almost got myself burned twice. So there was one there was one point where I was flying to Eastern Europe once a month to

[22:31] handle an asset that I had recruited. He was very proud of the village that he had come from. It was high up in the mountains and there was a hunting lodge up there. He said, "Let's go to this hunting lodge. I remember it so fondly from my childhood. And they serve wild boar and they serve bear stew and all kinds of crazy stuff. So I went with him. I ordered a very unusual drink which I shouldn't have but it was something my grandmother used to drink and I remembered it from my childhood and he was talking about his childhood. So I ordered the drink and the waitress brought it to me. The next

[23:05] month I flew up to see him and he said, "Let's go to the hunting lodge again. They have venison this time of the year and it's really amazing. So, we drive to Honey Lodge and I order the drink, the same drink, and the waitress says, "I remember you." And I said, "No, no, I don't think so. I've never been here before." And she said, "Yes, you have. You're the only person who's ever ordered that drink, and I've been here for 10 years." I said, "Oh, that's right. I was here once before."

[23:38] It's like, "Dog gone it." she spotted me. Now, she was just a waitress, but what if she had been an intelligence officer posing as a waitress? Or what if she was a police informant who's going to now rat me out to the local cops that I'm meeting with this, you know, this guy? And so afterwards, I said, "I am so sorry. I blew it. We can never ever go back there again." And we never did. In January of 2002, I was named chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and

[24:14] there was a flood of al-Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan. So I went out and I came up with this idea that instead of trying to catch them in these forbidding mountains, we'll catch five, 10, 20 at a time in the safe houses. So that's the practice that we adopted. And then after I had been in Pakistan about six weeks, we got word that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan. We thought at the time wrongly that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda.

[24:44] If you wanted to be smuggled into Afghanistan to make jihad, he would smuggle you in. And finally, I asked headquarters to send a friend of mine out. He was a a targeting analyst, somebody who pours through millions of bits of data to try to isolate the location of one person. I said, "Buddy, we're on the trail of Abu Zubaydah." And I said, "But he's right ahead of us. We just can't catch him." Like sometimes we'd break down a door and there's a cigarette that's still lit. So I said, "You've got to you got to pin this down for me. We just can't find him." Finally, he came to me and

[25:17] he said, "I can't get it down to any fewer than 14 sites." I said, '14 sites. We've never done more than two raids in a single night before. Like, this doesn't really help. So, I cabled headquarters and I said, "We're going to need a big team." I asked for 36 people. I asked for a pallet of weapons and ammunition and cash and night vision goggles and more battering rams and you name it. And then the next day, a colleague of mine and two Pakistani officers started going

[25:52] from sight to sight to look at all 14 sites. We wanted to make sure we weren't driving into an ambush. Do they know we're coming tonight? Most of these places were little hovels, little one room shacks made of concrete block or corrugated tin. It was miserable. We come out of the back end of the University of Faisalabad and there's this enormous yellow house which corresponds with site 12 and my Pakistani counterpart said I can tell you right now something bad is happening in there. He said it's 100° right now and all their shutters are closed. They have to be broiling in

[26:29] there but they want people to think there's nobody home. We caught dozens and dozens of people crammed into that house. We're going to the last site and the analyst calls me and he says Abu Zubaydah just made a terrible mistake. He accessed his emails from a landline. I said, "Oh my god, and the landline is associated with an address." And he says, "And it's site 13." I still have chills thinking about it. And I said, I we got him. So, we drive to site 13,

[27:04] but it's an empty field. I said, how can this be? We're sure that he's here, but there's no house here. It's just an empty field. And the Pakistani major laughs, and he says, now this happens all the time. He calls a young technical officer, climbs the pole, goes through this head of wires, finds the wire, follows it down the pole, down the alley, and he says, "It's that house right there." We all gathered. It was like 60, 70 of us, Pakistanis, FBI, CIA,

[27:38] we all gathered at the safe house. I stood on the coffee table and I said, "Okay, so rule number one, we have to take him alive." And exactly as the clock strikes two, break down the door, separate the women and children from the men and take all the men to the Faisalabad jail. And so at 2 a.m. I was on the roof of the safe house with my buddy. And I looked at my watch and I said, "O200, here we go." And then we hear gunshots and I said, "That's not good." We jump into our car.

[28:13] We speed over to site 13 and there are three people laying in the street. One is obviously dead. One looks like he's dead or he's going to be dead pretty soon. And the other one is screaming bloody murder. So I said, "What happened?" And this Pakistani policeman says, "We got him. We got your man." and he points at the guy who's like almost dead. I didn't have time to scream

[28:43] at this guy that the order was to take him alive. What happened was Abu Zubaydah, a Syrian bomber, and Abu Zubaydah's bodyguard climbed to the roof of the safe house and were jumping to the roof of the neighboring house to try to escape. And this Pakistani policeman was just picking them off as they were jumping. And he shot Abu Zubaydah three times in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach. So, I said, "This doesn't look anything like our target." We had a six-year-old passport photo. So, I called the analyst. I said, "Listen, I don't know if it's him." He said, "Give me a shot of

[29:14] his eye. I'll run a retinal scan." So, I lifted up his eye. And it was rolled back in his head. All you could see was white. He's bleeding to death. All I get are the whites of his eyes. He said, "Get me his ear. Take a picture of his ear." I didn't know that no two people on Earth have the same ears until that night. They're like fingerprints. So I take a picture of the ear headquarters says it's him. So we pick him up, throw him in the back of this pickup truck, speed to Faisalabad Hospital. So they rush him into surgery. But word got around the al-Qaeda

[29:46] community that we had gotten him. And so they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. We kept diving down. I said to the Pakistani major that I was with, "If they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead." I said, "Can you get a helicopter in here?" 20 minutes later, a helicopter lands in the parking lot. I walk into the to the operating room with like this with my shirt up over my nose. I said, "Doc, wrap it up. We have to go." We put him on the helicopter. Like four of us got onto the helicopter and we flew to

[30:19] a Pakistani military base about 50 miles away. And the doctor there said he had never seen a patient with wounds so severe who lived. But he lived and sure enough it took a little while but Abu Zubaydah started to open up and the information that he gave was actionable. The way we prepared for raids in Pakistan was actually quite simple. I went online with my

[30:50] CIA credit card and I bought everything I needed. I brought battering rams and bulletproof vests, weapons and ammunition and walkie-talkies and you name it. We didn't have gear that I think most people would consider to be sophisticated. We all had 9 mm, just 9 millimeters because they're so reliable. We all had bulletproof vests. A couple of the guys had helmets, not many. Lots and lots and lots of ammunition. And that was pretty much it. We got a tip with an address. We had two CIA

[31:26] officers, two FBI agents, and two Pakistani officials. And we went at two o'clock in the morning. Counted one, two, three, boom, with a battering ram, bust the door down, throw in a flashbang grenade just to scare everybody and make them disoriented. And we grabbed these two kids. They 18, 19 years old. They both burst into tears. And so we got a tip later in the week from a friendly Arab intelligence officer. So we did it again and we caught some serious people the second

[31:59] time. A relatively senior member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and some al-Qaeda like mid-level al-Qaeda fighters. We did it at 2 am because like literally everybody in Pakistan sound asleep at 2 am. It's like they just they just close the country. There's no traffic. There's nobody out there. Everybody's asleep. And so we figured that was our best chance of not getting caught. I did dozens of interrogations when I was in Pakistan and I was always the good cop. It

[32:34] was always easier for me, more natural. And the Pakistanis because it was their country and their rules are different than ours, they could be the bad cop. So the very first interrogation I did was of a Jordanian prisoner. They brought him in and we chained him to an eyebolt in the in the table and I said, "I'm from the American government and I want to ask you some questions." And he says, "Very well." Then I laid out a map of the Afghan Pakistan border and I told him with his finger to show me exactly how he crossed the border. We knew how they were crossing the border. We called them

[33:09] rat lines. We knew where the rat lines were. but he told me the truth and I thought, you know what, this actually works. And so we brought in the next prisoner. Now, there were some that had read the al-Qaeda training manual, not knowing that I had also read it. And so, they're like, you know, they they pretend to pass out and they just fall off the chair and you're just sitting there and then like they're laying on the ground, they open one eye and you're like, get back on the chair. What's the matter with you? And then they get up back and sit on the chair

[33:41] and then they oh they go oh like this stomach pain and you're like buddy I read the al-Qaeda training manual. I know all the different things you're going to try to do. And then they just won't answer any questions. So we send him back to the jail. The ones that were cooperative for the most part ended up being released. Some were held for a while in Pakistan. Then they were expelled, sent back to their home country. But the ones who were uncooperative from Pakistan went to Guantanamo.

[34:15] My conversations with Abu Zubaydah were generally not substantive. After 56 hours, the CIA sent in a private jet with a trauma surgeon from John's Hopkins University Medical Center. He flew out to the base. They picked up Abu Zubaydah and they took him to the first of about a half a dozen secret sites. They took him all over the world just to make sure that the flight couldn't be traced. So he arrived at the secret site and was given six weeks to recover from his gunshot wounds. And so after 6 weeks he was he was well enough to be interrogated. So an FBI agent by the

[34:54] name of Ali Soufan began interrogating him. in that FBI way where you treat people with respect and establish this rapport. Maybe you offer him a cigarette or an orange or a cup of tea or if he's really really helpful, you let him write a letter to his parents or whatever. And sometimes that takes days, weeks, months, whatever. But they always open up. And sure enough, it took a little while a number of weeks, but Abu Zubaydah started to open up and everything

[35:25] that he gave Ali was true and it was actionable. For example, we didn't have any idea what the al-Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. This sounds nuts now, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we didn't know what this al-Qaeda really was. The other thing he told us was even more important. So Abu Zubaydah told us about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We had never heard the name before and we were able to focus all of our counterterrorism assets just to find Khalid Shake

[35:57] Muhammad and we found him. It took us another year but we found him. 911 was still an open, fresh criminal investigation. And so, you know, the FBI needed to be interrogating these prisoners. And the CIA resented that we were overseas and the FBI was in charge of the interrogation because the traditional relationship is that the CIA is always in charge overseas. The CIA insisted that it be them. And so the CIA was not willing to be patient.

[36:38] They picked up Abu Zubaydah and they took him to the first of about a half a dozen secret sites where he underwent merciless torture. And we have nothing to show for it. Torture is the worst possible interrogation technique. It does not work. Yes. Eventually, the prisoner is going to tell you what you want to know or what he thinks you want to hear. But there's so much garbage that's thrown in with that. It's going to take your analysts months to pour through the information to see what's real, what's not real, and by then, you know, the bomb has already gone

[37:13] off or the the operation has already taken place and, you know, you've just cost more American lives. Torture is not appropriate under any circumstances. We caught a guy in Pakistan and we sent him off to be tortured. And I start getting these hair on fire cables from the secret site saying, "Here's an address in Quetta. It's the big al-Qaeda safe house. You have to go raid it." And we bust down the door in the middle of the night and it's just some old lady living in her house.

[37:46] Then we get another hair on fire cable saying there's a weapons cache and it's buried next to this building in Peshawar and here's the address and we go and it's it's a shish kebab restaurant and we've got you know metal detectors and ground penetrating radar and there's nothing buried there at all. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Majority Staff decided to do a complete and comprehensive study on the CIA's torture program, which of course the CIA called

[38:18] enhanced interrogation techniques. They ended up writing a 5,000page report that is so damning and so highly classified that all that was released was a very heavily redacted copy of the 500page executive summary of the report. And so the CIA essentially admits that it came up with a torture program. It paid handsomely for the torture program. It implemented the torture program. When

[38:51] I returned from Pakistan, I was asked by a CTC colleague if I wanted to be, his words, certified in the use of in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard that term before. So I said, "That sounds like a torture program." He said, "It's not a torture program. DOJ approved it and the president signed it." I said, "This is a torture program and I don't want anything to do with it." I was the only one who said no. That conversation about torture bothered me very deeply. And then I got passed over for promotion. I just captured Abu Zubaydah with

[39:24] these two hands. And we still thought at the time he was the number three. And I got passed over for promotion. I went into my boss's office. I was screaming. And he said, "In your promotion panel, the director said that you displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism." I said, "Because I won't torture people." Well, I was also friendly with the deputy director of the CIA and he came up to me. He came up to me one day and he said, he goes like this, "Your name wasn't on the list." I said, "You believe it?" And he promoted me with a stroke of a pen,

[40:00] which was incredibly generous. And then I went on to my next assignment after that. I resigned from the CIA a year later, went into the private sector, and I just, I thought, you know, this torture program is so wrong and so illegal. Somebody's going to say something to the media, and nobody did. And then in December of 2007, ABC News called me. I had never spoken to a journalist before. He had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, "Absolutely

[40:35] untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. I'll give you your interview. And so we met up at ABC News studios in Washington. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was the official policy of the US government. It was not the result of a rogue. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president. I am very sorry to tell you that Abu Zubaydah is still in Guantanamo today. This is a man who has been in American

[41:06] custody now for almost 24 years. He's never been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one. And according to the Senate torture report, quoting the CIA, he will never be freed. And when he dies, he'll be cremated and his ashes thrown into the Caribbean. It's un-American. I've been in touch with his attorneys and they continue to be slightly hopeful that the political tide will

[41:40] eventually change and somebody in the White House is going to do the right thing. I hope that's the case. I think he should have been released many years ago when we first realized that this was not the number three in al-Qaeda, that he had never committed a crime against Americans. He had never joined al-Qaeda. And even if he had founded the House of Martyrs safe house and the Kandahar and Helmand training camps, he's paid for those crimes many times over. He should be released.

[42:18] The CIA reported me to the FBI for revealing classified information. They investigated me for three more years. I had no idea my emails were being intercepted. teams of FBI agents were conducting surveillance on me. And then I was arrested in January of 2012 and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. So, I was facing 45 years in prison. The government offered me 30 months, of which I would do 23. And then the whole thing

[42:51] would go away. My lawyers told me that this could be a blip in my life or it could be the defining event in my life. Make it the blip. My wife and I stayed up all night long and I said, "By God, I haven't done anything wrong. I'm not going to take it." The lawyers were so mad. They came to my house 7:00 in the morning and he said, "You know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. take the deal. And I

[43:22] said, "If I don't take the deal and I'm convicted, what am I realistically looking at?" And he said, "12 to 18 years. Take the deal." And so I took the deal. The the sad irony, I would even call it the sick irony of this whole story, is that I'm the only person who had any connection whatsoever with the CIA's torture program, who went to prison. Not because I tortured anybody, but because I blew the whistle on it. The people who came up with the torture are free and rich, I might add. The

[43:56] people who approved the torture are free and rich. The people who carried out the torture are free. The people who covered up the torture are free. I was the only one who went to prison. And honestly, I wouldn't change anything. I'm on the right side of history, and they are not. I started working for the CIA on January the 7th, 1990. And my first job there was in an

[44:26] office. It was to be an analyst. I got bored with analysis in 1997. And so I decided to make a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations. A counterterrorism ops position opened where they were looking for an officer who spoke either Greek or Arabic. It turned out that I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic. They decided that it was a lot cheaper and a lot easier to take a linguist and teach him operations. So I got the job. Then

[44:58] you start the basic training on how to recruit spies to steal secrets. And you go to training at what's called the farm, which is the CIA's famed training center. The first thing I did was a class that we called crash and bang. It was literally crashing cars through roadblocks or having your instructors shooting at your car with, you know, paint pellets and you rolling out of the passenger door and opening fire on a robot that's firing at you from a van. The bang part was learning how to

[45:33] use weapons. the Glock 9 millimeter semi-automatic handgun, the Smith and Wesson 38 revolver, the Remington pump-action 12 gauge. We fired tens of thousands of rounds and really became experts in these things. It was a lot of fun. And then you go into these other courses, things like defensive driving, counterterrorist driving, surveillance, and surveillance detection. And then I went on to my assignment in Greece. I was halfway into my tour in Athens when I received a cable inviting me

[46:07] to apply for acceptance to a new training course called advanced counterterrorism operations and I jumped at it. So I flew back to the states took six weeks and it was like in-depth high threat high danger counterterrorism operations. Then we started doing things like beacons for example or listening devices or covert video or you know we were just starting with this notion of drones.

[46:42] It was all brand new. The driving portion was more about crashing through roadblocks, crashing through cars. I got injured in that training. I mean this is this is serious. If you're if you're in some island in the southern Philippines and the al-Qaeda people down there are trying to stop you and they've got two cars blocking the road and you've got to crash through, you have to know which part of the car to crash through. For example, if they're just like this, right? The engine's too heavy. You're going to kill yourself if you crash into the engine. So,

[47:15] you crash through the trunk, it pushes the car out of the way, and you are able to drive off. You learn little things like the very first thing I do when I get in my car and I still do it to this day is I lock the doors before I even put the key in the ignition. I lock the doors because in training they have you blindfolded and then they lift the blindfold off and you have three seconds to respond to whatever it is you see in front of you. It might be a roadblock. It might be a guy standing with an AK-47 in front of you, or it might be a guy opening your door

[47:45] very quietly to put a 9 millimeter at your head and say, "Bang, you're dead. You fail." And then you have to do the whole thing over again. So, you learn all these different techniques. They sent us out to Utah and then Nevada and we just drove through the desert over sand dunes and, you know, how not to get stuck. Then we were on a track, you know, 60 miles an hour backwards and spinning around. We learned how to do pit maneuvers, but it's a lot of hands-on stuff. You you're pretty banged up. Everybody had whiplash when we finished. And I had to have

[48:19] my right knee replaced what we do for our country. So they prepared me for everything. In retrospect, nothing could possibly have better prepared me for 9/11 in Pakistan. I had been in Greece for a couple of months and I had bought a 50-inch TV. So, I had the TV on the back seat of my BMW 540, my armored BMW. I noticed that there was a motorcyclist to my right and he was trying very

[48:53] hard to stay in my blind spot. When I slow down, he slows down. When I speed up, he speeds up. I'm a little nervous. So, I unzipped my fanny pack so that my gun was easier to get and I slowed down. He slowed down. I decided to slam on the brakes and try to hit the guy. But he was good. So, I hit the brakes. I swerve to the right. He swerves to the right. I miss him. I speed up. He speeds up. I swerve to hit him a couple of times again and I couldn't hit him. But then

[49:26] it's Athens, which is famous for its traffic. So, we come to this intersection. It's like a major intersection. It's 12 lanes, if you can imagine. And it's just jammed full of traffic. So, I'm stuck. I pull out my gun. I'm starting to kind of panic inside myself, not thinking. I'm in an armored car. Just crash the cars out of out of the way. That's what you're trained to do. But I'm going to like I'm prepared to get out and shoot the guy. He gets off the motorcycle. He

[50:00] reaches into his waistband and he pulls out what looked to me like a 38. It was a smallal-ish gun. It may have been a 22, but it looked like a 38. I saw a path to escape. And so I gunned it. I crashed the motorcycle. The motorcycle just goes flying and I take off up GCS. So I got to the cops and they found the motorcycle. It turned out the license plate had been stolen. Then the question is, was this a an attempted terrorist attack? We went out to literally every

[50:31] single one of our counterterrorism sources. None of them knew anything. And in the end, and it was a weeks long investigation, they determined that it was it was an attempted carjacking. It was a thief who saw this at the time state-of-the-art gigantic TV on the back of a of a BMW. And he thought, I'm going to carjack this guy and take his car and his TV. But it also

[51:02] put me in a frame of mind to be more wary. And so when I got to Pakistan, I was much quicker to act. I really believe that the future of counterterrorism is a combination of human intelligence and drones to infiltrate terrorist groups. Though the drone's not going to collect the information. You know, these bad guys, they exercise electronic discipline. They're not going

[51:33] to say the plans for the next terrorist attack are going to be this, you know, on the phone. You need human beings inside these groups to figure out what exactly they're planning to do. But then when it comes time to confront them, I think we're very quickly getting to a point where you're not going to see CIA officers on the ground with M4s and bulletproof vests and helmets parachuting out of planes. It's going to be drones with Hellfire missiles attached to their undersides.

[52:05] I'm worried about AI vis-a-vis counterterrorism. First of all, it's tough enough as it is to cross borders with six different identities, right? How in the world are CIA officers going to cross borders or get through airports with facial recognition scans and AI, you know, following their every movement around the world. At the same time, AI makes the bad guys smarter. So CIA's got the money and they have access to the right people and the right companies and the right

[52:40] experts to stay up on this. But this is this is going to be an uphill struggle. The international terrorism landscape changes constantly. There are some constants in that landscape like ISIS or any of its variations. And then there are both al-Qaeda and ISIS groups that have popped up individually in northern Pakistan, in India, in the Philippines, all over the place. It's like playing whack-a-ole where just as you destroy one, another one pops up that you have to bash in

[53:15] the head, too. I think we should be choosing our battles carefully. We shouldn't be casting such a wide net. There's something recent that that bothers me greatly and that is the government's decision to expand the definition of a terrorist group. Right? There's a pretty easy definition of terrorism. It is using violence to put forward a political goal. They're adding groups to the terrorism watch list that have never been on the terrorism watch list any before. groups that are

[53:47] loosely associated with what is called Antifa being added to the list is just silly to me. First of all, Antifa is not a group. It's an idea. It doesn't have a headquarters. They don't issue membership cards. They're just loosely affiliated people who are anti-fascist. I would posit that every soldier and seller who participated in D-Day was anti-fascist. They would be Antifa. So, that's just silly to me. To me, that's a mistake because it diverts attention and it diverts finances. We

[54:24] should be focused on the groups that mean us harm, real harm. We should be out there trying to hunt down the people who have taken an oath to kill Americans. So, I'm worried that that it's too easy now to describe people as terrorists. I disagree with President Trump's decision to declare the narco groups in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as terrorist groups. At first, I thought that he did that solely for legalistic reasons because it would it would serve to free up budgets

[54:57] and it would also authorize NSA to begin wiretaps or interceptions of the cartels communications, which is awesome, great. but declaring them terrorist groups other than them allowing the Pentagon to drone their boats, which may or may not be their boats. I think it's misguided. I'm more of a civil libertarian in this respect in that if these people are so dangerous and have

[55:29] committed such terrible crimes against the United States, charge them with a crime. You can't just not like somebody's face so you fly around the world to kill them. We're a nation of laws and we should abide by those laws. So Anwar Al-Aulaqi, for example, the spokesman for al-Qaeda, guy's an American citizen, born and raised in New Mexico, self-radicalizes, joins al-Qaeda as their spokesman. We blew him up with a drone. He had never been charged with any crime. If he was as bad as you say he was, you at the CIA, then have the Justice Department file a charge against him.

[56:07] But you can't just go around the world murdering people whose politics you don't like and still profess to be this beacon of, you know, respect for human rights. I like to consider myself a realist. If I had my way about it, I would tear the CIA down to the bare studs and maybe rebuild it, but as a shell of what it is today. But I know that's not going to happen. And so it's up to the rest of us through our elected officials to make sure that the CIA remain law-abiding or become

[56:38] law-abiding. Besides that, I often encourage young people to apply to the CIA. You can actually affect change from the inside. And I know that's how if there's going to be change, that's how it's going to be. It's going to come from the inside. [Producer] If people want to find more of your work, where can they find you? My first seven books were about the CIA. I have several podcasts. I have one called John Kiriakou's Dead Drop. I have one called Deep Focus with John Kiriakou. That's on YouTube. And then I'm starting a nationwide speaking tour. I had a successful

[57:12] speaking tour around England, Scotland, Wales. So, we're going to do it here in the States. Hi, I'm a producer on authorized account. If you enjoyed this video, then please subscribe and comment with more topics that you'd like us to cover in this series.
