Title: Ex-CIA John Kiriakou-waterlogged whistleblower S3Ep4
Show: Heidi Weber
Date: 2021-03-10
URL: https://youtu.be/J82Ry2N8jbM
Duration: 48:00

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[00:03] my name is heidi weber and i'm a whistleblower i'm credited with being one of the first women whistleblowers in the higher education industry to go through a long legal battle and survive a seven day jury trial that experience changed my life and i'm on a mission to show america just how hard that battle is after my story aired on cbs i decided that i wanted to create a podcast that would focus on the journey of a whistleblower the process the daily struggles and all the amazing people that surround them that help them along the way we take an inside look into what

[00:33] whistleblowers go through each day and getting rid of all the negativity that surrounds that word so that we can get down to some real facts and genuine information that way we can hold the corrupt forces accountable and help others find their voice too join us because this one's definitely no tea party

[07:23] which was a little more than four years after my my uh interview i was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage so did you know this was coming did you have a feeling nope no idea whatsoever no clue married five kids yep living a normal suburban life so you probably have a different take on uh

[07:55] the whole espionage you know felonies you know everything i i feel very snowden yeah i do i i feel very strongly about what's happening with regard to the espionage act you know there's background to this the espionage act was written in 1917 it was passed into law in 1917 specifically to combat german saboteurs during the first world war between 1917 and barack obama's presidency 2009 three americans were charged with

[08:25] espionage for speaking to the press just in the eight years of obama's presidency eight people nearly three times the number of all presidents combined were charged with espionage for speaking to the press barack obama and john brennan had a nixonian obsession with national security leaks and they were bound and determined to make examples of all of us but that's what happened yeah i think you know people don't really get that and i'm

[08:56] i'm i'm a left leaner a moderate to left leaner and i gotta tell you i think most people don't understand how hard president obama was on whistleblowers in general and i don't understand why i really don't do you have any insight into that i don't you know i remember in 2011 this is about nine months before i was arrested and charged a friend of mine who was working in the white house um said that for the very first time he had seen obama

[09:26] flip out he lost his temper and just flipped out like a crazy person and he was screaming about uh a national security leak he was screaming that how angry he was that people at the cia couldn't keep their mouth shut and he said man i've never seen anything like this he said i've worked for three presidents and i've never seen one flip out like a crazy person like this and the whole time john brennan is there just nodding like yes mr president yes

[09:58] and that was the first inkling that i had that there was going to be a problem not necessarily for me but there was going to be a problem in national security so how long you know so they took you in five felonies which you still have you have not gotten pardoned from those have you no well i was found guilty of one i hadn't committed espionage it was clear that i hadn't committed none of these people have committed espionage that are being charged with espionage so those those uh uh counts were dropped

[10:29] and i was also charged with one count of making a false statement my lawyers were never really clear as to exactly what the false statement was supposed to be that was sort of a throwaway charge and then i was found guilty of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 i confirmed the name of a former colleague to a journalist who never made the name public and that was my conviction that's just it's it's scary it's scary number one

[10:59] that we are persecuted especially you yes gosh i can't even it's nightmarish it is it is you know and it what it does to your personal psyche is is unbelievable i mean you could you could have the strongest confidence in the world and still you know be shaken i can't even imagine going to prison so so you went to prison unfortunately i was facing 45 years and i ended up getting 23 months oh my gosh how scared

[11:30] how scary was that you know the the day of my arrest i i fully intended to commit suicide i did it was only the strength of my of my then wife um who stopped me she said to me she she said something that that stuck with me all these years and it's actually been a motivator for me ever since she said look they have consistently underestimated your resolve you are stronger than they think you are you can fight this and that's what kept

[12:02] me going you know once i got my bearings which took me about four months and i hired an a-list like dream team of washington lawyers and they said the same thing we're gonna fight this you didn't commit espionage uh you know this is the very definition of whistleblowing they said that this case this case is the very definition of whistleblowing the legal definition is bringing to light and any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the

[12:33] public health or public safety and so i i went for it and you know one interesting thing too uh what the day of my arrest they told me take a plea and i'm gonna get um well first i was facing 45 years in my the day of my arrest they offered me a guilty plea and i do 10 years and i said i'm not doing 10 minutes so that was on a monday on wednesday they offered me eight years and on friday they offered me five years

[13:06] and my lead attorney said you know i've been a lawyer in washington for 52 years and i've never seen them come down in time usually they offer you 10 you say no the next offer is 15. he said but they're coming down and i said well why are they coming down and he said because they have a [ __ ] case and they know it's [ __ ] so i said so what do we do he said we go to trial and then they came down to three and a half and then

[13:38] to two and a half and i ended up taking the deal so the media was on your case this entire time right i mean this was very public it seems like it was all over everywhere yeah it was how much did that add to everything i mean especially with their family i can't even imagine this well you know yeah it my wife was uh furious about it i mean i i was on the front page of the new york times twice i was on i was in the new yorker magazine an entire expose the front page

[14:10] of the post i was on tv all the time and she hated it uh what was surprising to me in that whole experience with the press was that the press by and large at the beginning was not supportive of me and that was shocking to me some of them some outlets were ironically fox news was fox news from the beginning called me um cia whistleblower john kiriakou

[14:42] cnn started by calling me cia leaker john kiriyaku and then halfway through yeah halfway through they changed it to cia whistleblower john kiriakou and i had one lawyer who only focused on the media nothing but the media and getting them to identify me as a whistleblower and not a leaker msnbc never called me a whistleblower right because msnbc was in bed with obama and so and so they never ever called me

[15:13] a whistleblower i was always a leaker you are pretty leaky john that's that's that's one of my favorite terms that makes me laugh i think that is the most ridiculous thing ever ridiculous so when you were in prison what did you do how did you make the time go by that's a good question um on my very first day in prison i received a postcard from a woman in ringgold georgia whom i had never met and i thought

[15:46] wow that was such a kind thing to do she sent me this postcard saying keep your chin up you didn't do anything wrong you have a lot of support out here and i've decided that very first day that if somebody was going to take time out of their day to write to me i was going to respond i ended up writing 7 000 letters to 675 different people oh geez um yeah there were some days

[16:17] that i would get as many as 60 or 70 letters uh it drove the guards completely crazy they hated it but i i answered literally every letter i ever received and then at the same time i i spent whatever additional free time i had to write a book called uh doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison that did very well and it won uh one of the big four uh literary awards i won the penn first amendment award which along with the

[16:48] penn faulkner the pulitzer and the edgar allen poe are the big four so it ended up doing doing well for me so that kind of you know made your time go by a little bit faster so did you meet anybody interesting while you're in there you know you're not supposed to make friends in prison as they say that's right i made one true friend in prison and i was friendly with with with the group well it was the italians

[17:21] the the italians right named gambino yeah but but these italians were named gambino bonanno lucasy yeah you get the idea but uh yeah being greek was was half the battle hating the fbi as much as they do was the other half of the battle and so we ended up being uh friendly to the point where i'm still in regular touch with my one true friend and of these other italians and i mean

[17:51] these were like serious high level you know capo level and above um they've actually invited me to several parties i i went to new year's eve party in atlantic city everything was comped um we've stayed in touch that's great yes and i make no apologies for it and you shouldn't nope they were good guys friends are friends it's all in how somebody treats you that's true that's right that's right so how did

[24:37] communications and national security and there's practically nothing that we can do about it thanks to the patriot act right i mean it's gonna take a mass i you know i really don't i don't know how we're ever gonna fix this and there's nowhere for us to go like there was back 200 years ago you know it's pretty scary um i think eventually you know all things nothing stands forever and our forefathers knew that as well um and that's why we need whistleblowers we're literally whistleblowers our last

[25:08] protection they are the the people totally agree totally completely agree and i you know i want to tell your your viewers too that whistleblowing certainly in like your own experience whistleblowing certainly is not relegated to national security i mean whistleblowing is or ought to be literally everywhere in our society whether it's education or banking or agriculture or labor or anywhere that there's wrongdoing and illegality

[25:41] it's up to us to call it out absolutely you know when i was uh finding stories for whistleblower for cbs whistleblower the second season after i was on the first one um the stories that i was coming across and i still get it i feel like i'm the whistleblower whisperer because they still get old of me these people from random areas and i'm shocked at how many different industries i mean it's not just healthcare fraud or pharmaceutical or environmental like erin brockovich um it's

[26:11] it's education like in my case there are several of those um even things as you know restaurant service manager things like that so right right i think you know what's good you know we're trying to play it up but i think the reality is still that whistleblowers are in the minority i mean we are an elite group um the ones of us that do get our day in court or do get heard or you know on the media for some reason um there are how many thousands that

[26:43] have an actual case that don't ever get a day in court they get nothing zero yes yes that's sad that it's truly sad yes it really is um so you said earlier something about you're not a fan of the fbi tell me about that why what happened there just because the investigation into you and everything that was going on no uh no not no not because of the investigation into me when i was

[27:13] i was the chief investigator for the senate foreign relations committee after i left the cia and one day you know one of the great things about a job like that is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time and you talk about the issues of the day things that are going on around the world i just loved it i loved it it was one of the highlights of the job and so one day i get a call from a japanese diplomat and he invites me to lunch which was

[27:44] totally normal i i would go out two or three times a week with foreign diplomats so we met at a at a restaurant on capitol hill and uh and i remember that lunch very well i remember what we talked about we talked about turkish elections we talked about talked about israeli elections and the arab arab-israeli peace process and um near the end of the lunch he said to me so what's next for you and i said well i actually think i'm going to resign soon i told senator kerry i was

[28:14] working for john kerry at the time i said i told senator kerry i'd give him two years and it's been two and a half and i have five kids i need to start thinking about you know saving money for college and very excitedly he said no don't do that if you give me information i can give you money why and i said i said what's the matter with you cold pitching me like that i said do you have any idea how many times i've made that pitch in my life shame on you and i went directly directly without stopping i went from

[28:46] that lunch to the office of the senate security officer and i said i was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer he uh asked me the story i told him what happened he told me to sit there at a computer in his office and write it up as a memo for the fbi so i did i wrote it up i sent it to the fbi the next day two young fbi agents came to interview me so i repeated what had happened and they said all right here's what we want you to do

[29:17] we want you to call him back invite him to lunch try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and what he's willing to pay for it and i said because i'm a patriot do you want me to wear a wire and they said no we'll be at the next table to listen in just go ahead and invite him to lunch i said okay so i call i invite him to lunch he accepts the day of the lunch one of the fbi agents calls me and said that something had come up and they wouldn't be there but

[29:47] for me to go forward with a lunch and just write them up another memo so i did and they asked me to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time my gosh wow so i did and after every one of these lunches i would write an incredibly detailed memo and send it to the fbi in the final lunch he said that he had been promoted and that he was going to be transferred into his dream job he was the number three in washington

[30:18] he was going to become the number two in cairo so um and i should add that his english was so bad that our lunches were done in arabic we would speak arabic because he was an arabist and that is important later after that lunch i never saw him again a year later i'm i'm under arrest and the reason why i was under arrest

[30:48] is the fbi called me and said hey remember that thing that you have you helped us with a year ago with the guy and i said sure and they said well we have a similar situation and we need your help and my exact words were anything for the fbi wow so they said we want you to come down and talk to us well they arrested me when i got down there to talk to them so i'm arrested

[31:19] we receive discovery from the justice department and in discovery we learn that there never was any japanese diplomat he was an fbi agent undercover pretending to be a japanese diplomat and he was trying to get me to commit espionage he was trying to get me to either accept money or to provide classified information but i kept reporting it back to the fbi

[31:51] in detail and so finally he wrote a memo to his boss who happened to be peter strzok at the fbi and he said recommend ending this operation he's clearly not going to take the bait so i said to my lawyer why would they do this why would they set me up like this and he said because they knew that they didn't have a case you didn't commit espionage and so they dropped all those charges

[32:23] that's why i hate the fbi i'm a patriotic american and they were trying to send me to prison for the rest of my natural life so they could get promoted that's why i hate the fbi yeah that's entrapment to the hilt i mean you bet it is and that's how the fbi makes all of its cases through entrapment yes that's pretty scary you know i just had i just interviewed jane turner you know her right yes yeah she's awesome great she uh lives here

[32:53] in the twin cities and so she came over and we were having a chat and i i'm just and i had interviewed colleen rowley who lives i was just gonna say you should talk to colleen rally she's in saint paul and she is another bona fide american hero yeah she is she is both of them are and yes i'm just blown away by the amount of corruption it's incredible the corruption inside the federal government inside the fbi the cia nsa you know americans would be up in arms

[33:25] if they knew the level of corruption inside the national security apparatus yeah and i worry about that too we have no freedom of the press either obviously we were talking about that earlier um you know all of our press is polarized either one or the other when you and i both know that there is no left or right they're all owned by the same people it's a it's called controlled opposition it's called controlled opposition and so there is no one that is a true conservative there's no one that's a

[33:55] true liberal i mean everybody has you know kind of different stances on some of the things in the middle so um this whole left versus right you know what team are you on it's false it irritates me you know and they do it on purpose because the house divided cannot stand you know one of these days john we're all gonna rise up and we're all gonna be on board and change it all but yes it'll come one of these days so your kids how old are your kids now after all this

[34:27] is over let's see now they are 27 24 16 14 and 9. so what do they think about all this um they're proud of me which is the most important thing to me uh it's something that has weighed on me over the years but they're they're proud of me i did the right thing and you know my older boys were in well one was in college and one was in high school when i was arrested and um my oldest was at ohio state

[34:59] and my second was in high school and professors or a professor and a couple of teachers approached the two of them and said um your dad did the right thing he did something that was heroic don't worry about it if you know somebody says something to you your dad's a traitor or whatever and nobody ever criticized me to to my kids their friends rallied around them you know they never ever had any any problems in fact when i was arrested my three younger

[35:31] well one was a baby but the other two were in a small private school here in falls church virginia and um when i was arrested the uh founders of the school paid their tuition for the next semester the second semester and then the next year a group of parents took up a collection and paid their tuition for the whole time that i was in prison so thank god i mean i had i had really wonderful support i was very fortunate in that there were

[36:01] there were people out there who who actually you know did their research and looked into what had happened and realized that i had been wronged and they they rally to our support to our defense i think it's quite obvious you know i think you know online is very different than in the real world yeah i think our generation yours and mine you know we were raised before cell phones even much less the internet and everything else so um i think our communication style is a

[36:32] little bit different than like our kids uh per se um and how they perceive things um and the older generation the baby boomers who are above us they're they're the way they get information is even more different so kids nowadays like my daughters they get information a hundred different ways from saturday so they always have a good tap on what's going on because they're getting it from all these different feeds instead of just one news station one you know whatever

[37:02] so so what's what are you doing right now what's new for you what's what's going on in your life other than your books and yeah i've got uh let's see i've published four books so far i have another i'm on under contract to produce another three i think that they'll be they'll be all out by a year from now it's a series called the cia insider's guide i have the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis

[37:33] the cia insider's guide to surveillance and surveillance detection the cia insider's guide to disappearing and living off the grid that we were just talking about and the cia insider's guide to lying and lie detection and i've got a radio show every day here in the washington area from four to six i have the afternoon drive i have a syndicated newspaper column that runs in 220 small town papers around the country and you know i speak at colleges universities book clubs

[38:05] whoever's interested in hearing the story tour going again and we can just go out and speak count me in i know i could use the money jane jane said that too she said that would be so great that would be fun yeah yes it would be the things we could teach all those kids that's right speaking of being in the cia when you were over there what impression did the people give you the people that that were living in that just well we're going to end on a note or talking yeah let me

[38:36] i'll put it this way uh i was friendly with a cia psychiatrist i'm still friendly with him and he told me one time that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies they don't like to hire sociopaths because sociopaths have no conscience and they blow right through a polygraph exam but they're impossible to control and it's because they're unable to feel guilt for any reason people who have sociopathic tendencies

[39:08] do feel guilt but are happy to work in legal moral or ethical gray areas they're happy to break the law right i was happy to break the law when i was working at the cia because we were the good guys at least that's what i was led to believe but the problem is it's impossible to weed out sociopaths because they're sociopaths right and and they can slip through that that polygraph exam and so you end up with an organization uh full of of people who would just as

[39:40] soon cut your throat as uh you know shake your hand and sit and have lunch with you that's what i came to learn you know you walk down the hall and everybody that you look at has more than likely killed someone or in many cases killed many people right and uh you know that that weighs on you after a while so do you think we have mistakenly built this military complex yes yes oh i mean we were

[40:10] we were warned about it in in 1960 by by president uh eisenhower uh john kennedy said just two weeks before his assassination that the cia should be broken into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind uh we had to have the church committee in pike committee hearings in 1975 because the cia was a rogue organization running around the world assassinating world leaders so yeah it's it's far too big far too powerful and it gets away literally with murder right yeah i think you know i

[40:42] i talked to a lot of whistleblowers from ireland uh australia south america and we're kind of the [ __ ] of the world not you know for no other reason there's no other way to say that we're the bullies of the world we are it's true um the world looks at us that way and the funny thing is we're in our little cocoon here you know in the united states and we don't know this we don't realize what the rest of the world looks at us like well you know gallup the gallup organization does an international poll every year

[41:12] in which they ask people in almost every country in the world what country is the greatest danger to world peace and there are a couple of anomalies like for india it's pakistan for pakistan it's india for north korea it's south korea and for south korea it's north korea and for iran it's israel and for israel it's iran and every other country in the world says that the greatest threat to world peace is the united states yeah i believe it 100 believe it and the average person doesn't get it

[41:43] they don't see that here we are bickering over our little you know things so what do you think about the whole capital riot yeah thoughts about that you were right there so yeah and and we still have tanks and armored personnel carriers in the streets uh you you can't get to capitol hill it's just completely sealed off um i hope and expect that the people arrested so far are going to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law you know the irony in

[42:14] all this is last july or june last june donald trump signed an executive order in the midst of the black lives matter uprising saying that anybody who damages federal property should be liable for 10 years in a federal prison well guess what happened all these trump people who claim that they were told by trump to go take back the capital damaged federal property and so they're looking at at least at 10 years apiece

[42:44] and i hope they get it because uh you know anarchy whether from the right or from the left is not the answer here right i don't think we're to that point yet not enough people are hurting yet um not yet no revolution was ever started peacefully unfortunately um and but i think you know as i say people aren't hurting enough yet nobody's paying attention yet nobody's listening to what we're saying and what we're doing

[43:17] i think you know there are i'm kind of on the fence about that i you know of course absolutely they should not be destroying property or hurting other people absolutely without a doubt um the riots here after george floyd was murdered last summer in minneapolis were devastating i mean it was it just it it looks like a war zone still down there i believe but um there is something about freedom of assembly and freedom of speech and i think those

[43:47] people have a right to say or believe whatever they like totally agree with it or not they do not have a right to destroy or hurt others so i couldn't agree more lost their lives that their family you know you know i just feel bad for those people too i we have great we're like this our super power is empathy i think don't you think it's like whistleblower i like to agree with that yes right well so

[44:18] anything else you want to talk about i you know no thanks thanks for the opportunity i i was i was pleasantly surprised to hear from you this morning so thanks for that i think this is a an important issue that that more and more people need to have access to you know what um while i have you on here i was gonna ask you one more question what do you think about ted cruz our buddy yeah total complete bozo hypocrite hypocrite in so many different ways you know he voted against uh federal aid

[44:49] to to the victims of hurricane katrina against federal aid to the victims of of hurricane sandy uh he voted against aid to the victims of the california wildfires and then he's the first one to beg for federal aid for texas uh texas uh they brag about how they don't have any federal regulation uh for their electrical grid that the grid's not connected to the national grid and then because there's no regulation they totally screwed up and instead of staying in texas to help

[45:22] his constituents he runs off to mexico yeah so i have zero zero respect for ted cruz i'm not even really sure ted cruz is an american to tell you the truth i mean his parents were naturalized and he was he was born in canada so oh yeah he was born in canada so you know the courts have never made a ruling on whether or not he's even eligible to uh to run for president he's such an idiot i mean he's a total idiot he looks like he got

[45:53] caught with his hand in the cookie jars what the deal is yup that's right um he could care less about those people in texas he's he's he doesn't care grandstanding yeah i was really uh i was laughing because they had him on they had him backed into a corner earlier today and i was kind of yeah yeah there's no defense for this behavior there's no defense and did you see the statement from john boehner the former republican speaker of the house he said that he said that ted cruz is satan personified

[46:23] that that he can get along with anybody but ted cruz is the meanest son of a [ __ ] he's ever encountered he said and that's from a member of his own party right yeah you know i kind of this whole i i don't know what to make about the parties right now i really don't because it's almost like they're flipping again you know what i mean i like it there's a lot of dis there i don't know what it is you know you know back in the 20s i think it was the 20s or 30s when you know roosevelt we kind of flipped that's where the democrats yeah the the

[46:54] 1932 32 watershed election and i think that we're kind of doing that again because i you know i don't know a better republican than hillary i really don't i think she's she's probably the best republican there is and agreed and joe you know i won't go and joe as you know joe's joe but yeah and trump i he was a democrat for 26 years so i i don't know what it's kind of like a mix-up going up i don't know what's going on

[47:24] so yeah well thank you so much for being my guest i hope that's my pleasure good to see you again thank you radio show tell us again where we can find you yep the show is called the backstory it's on 105.5 fm and 1390 am in the washington area from 4 to 6 pm and i will put a link on there too and we'll just we'll talk again soon when we're on tour together great looking forward to it good idea take care see you bye bye bye

[47:59] thanks for listening today i need to put a disclaimer out there i'm not an attorney so if you have any legal questions or you're searching for legal advice you need to contact one of them and it just so happens that on my website at whistleblowerrevolution.com there's a whole page of amazing whistleblower attorneys all across the united states that you can get a hold of to answer those questions if you're just searching for regular information about the show upcoming episodes or you have a question for me directly please again go to whistleblowerrevolution.com thanks again

[48:29] and please join us on the battlefield next week [Music] you
