Title: Secrets, Lies, and the Price of Truth: The CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Part 2
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-04-23
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYK16WJ1WsU
Duration: 55:46

---

[00:00] So when I ask what is ODO, what comes to mind? Well, ODO is a bit of everything. ODO is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say ODU is like a magic bean stock because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. But then again, you could look at ODU in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. I mean whatever your business needs,

[00:31] manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company. So what is ODO? Well, I guess ODO is a bit of everything. ODO is a fertilizer magic beantock building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that ODO is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up now at odo.com. That's odo.com. CIA is not supposed to collect any

[01:03] information at all on American citizens ever. They say that they don't. I want to believe that they don't, but I really don't know. Okay. Thanks so much for joining me. For all you true crime fans out there, a new season of my podcast, Mystery and Murder Analysis by Dr. Phil is out. We have been gone for a little while, but we are back bringing you some

[01:34] really cuttingedge stories. My goal is for every one of these stories to add something to your understanding about some of these monsters that walk among us. The heartbreaking case of Gabby Patito, whose life was tragically cut short by her boyfriend Brian Laundry. How could a pair living so-called perfect lives be hiding such dark secrets? Getting to know Gabby while diving into the psychology of unhealthy relationships. Were there red flags?

[02:05] Mystery and murder analysis by Dr. Phil. His promise of Till death do us part seems pretty chilly. Available on Apple Podcast and YouTube. You guys all remember that story. You don't want to miss this. Now, last week here on the Dr. Phil podcast, I introduced you to CIA torture whistleblower John Keryaku, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now, John shared his incredible journey from his

[02:36] early recruitment by the CIA to his rise within the agency where he navigated the ethical challenges posed by post 911 interrogation techniques. Now, known for his bravery in exposing the CIA's use of torture methods like waterboarding, John became a whistleblower, which led to his indictment under the Espionage Act and ultimately a 23month prison sentence. But I said at the time, one episode

[03:07] simply wasn't enough to cover everything. John's experiences, perspectives, and advocacy left me, and I think all of you wanting more. and we knew we had to have him back to dive deeper. So, in this part two of our conversation, we'll uncover even more of the untold truth behind his story and the aftermath of his whistleblowing. So, we're just going to jump right in. Was there anything when we finished talking

[03:37] that you felt like you wanted to say more about particularly regarding the whistleblowing? Well, there's one aspect of it I think I'd like to talk about just for a just for a moment. Uh we have a whistleblower protection law in this country called the Federal Whistleblower Protection Act. But unfortunately, national security whistleblowers are exempt from its protections. And so if a person who works for, let's say, the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, DEA,

[04:11] uh, one of the congressional um, oversight committees, the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill, if they want to make a revelation, there is no way to make a protected revelation. For example, we're told to go through our chains of command, but if your chain of command is what is violating the law, there's really nowhere to go but the media. And if you go to the media, of course, you risk a criminal charge, you risk bankruptcy, you risk your career,

[04:42] everything. This is something that I feel very strongly about that we need to correct uh up on Capitol Hill. There have to be protections implemented for national security whistleblowers. So, you're saying there's no accountability, no way for anybody that's in those services to reach out for any kind of protection. If you feel like things are happening within the service that are illegal,

[05:13] anti-American, anything at all that you feel like should have oversight, there's nowhere for you to go. There's nowhere for you to go. And I'll give you an example. Thomas Drake uh was a senior member of the senior intelligence service at uh NSA, the National Security Administration uh National Security Agency and um he found solid evidence of um of illegality that is the interception of communications of American citizens without a warrant. So

[05:43] he went to the inspector general. Uh the inspector general was not read into the compartment and so said he just didn't know what Tom was talking about. He then went to the general counsel. The general counsel told him that this was above his pay grade and he should just stop. So then he went to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA of course is a component of the Pentagon. The Pentagon inspector general told NSA, "Hey, you have a rogue employee who came here to complain about a program. didn't get any

[06:16] satisfaction of course there. So he went to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and said NSA is intercepting the communications of American citizens. They charged him with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage, two counts of theft of government property, the property being the information that he had in his brain that he walked out of the building with. um he was facing almost a hundred years in prison and then the night before he

[06:48] was to go to trial they dismissed the charges but that was only after he had lost his pension, lost his savings, lost his wife, who was also an NSA employee and decided to stay with NSA rather than to stay with with Tom. Lost his five children. He ended up working at an Apple store as at the Genius Bar of an Apple store in Bethesda, Maryland. That's what happens when you when you use the internal mechanisms that have been set up for

[07:19] whistleblowing, they just simply don't work. So when you started on your journey, where was the first place you went? I went to my boss and I said, "This is wrong, wrong, wrong." And he said, "Listen, this is way over our pay grades. you need to keep your mouth shut. And I actually did keep my mouth shut for a long time. I resigned from the CIA uh two years after uh after learning of the the torture program thinking that there were so many more

[07:50] people more directly involved with it than I who were objecting. You know, I was seeing this reporting coming back from the secret uh prison. Uh, for example, physicians from the CIA's Office of Medical Services saying, "Whoa, wait a minute. I took a hypocratic oath. I didn't sign up for this to torture somebody." And then and then do CPR on them just so he could be tortured more. And I thought, well, surely so many people are objecting that somebody is going to say something to

[08:21] stop this program. And then nobody did. I'm ashamed to tell you that I let five and a half years pass before I finally said something. Did this continue during that five and a half years? It continued for four of those years until 2006. And then in 2006, they just decided that what they were getting from these these men under torture wasn't amounting to anything. And so they just shut it down. And who made the decision to shut it down?

[08:53] That was an internal CIA decision. So George Tennant had left to the best of my recollection by 2006 and it was uh Porter Goss who finally came in. Porter Goss had been not just a CIA officer but he had then gotten himself elected to Congress, became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, then went to the CIA as the director and said, "Oh, this this is not not what we should be doing." Now, you were convicted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities

[09:24] Protection Act, right? Correct. And that act says you were guilty of doing what? I confirmed the surname of a former CIA colleague to a to a a journalist. You confirmed it, but the name was already given. Correct. Yeah. Then the name was out there. Um, I confirmed it to a journalist, but the journalist never made the name public. And and where my attorneys objected in this whole process

[09:55] was while I was defending myself uh from this charge, the the director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, confirmed the names of 10 covert CIA officers uh to his biographer and girlfriend and was never charged. Why do you think you were so selectively prosecuted? Because as you say, there were others, not just Petraeus, but there were others that Right. Yes. did much more than yourself. So why did they

[10:29] come after you, Hammer and Tong? I had aired the CIA's dirty laundry in public, and that was something that to the CIA was unforgivable. And I had one one enemy in the CIA in particular uh and that was John Brennan who later went on to become the uh deputy national security adviser in President Obama's first term and then CIA director in the second term. When when I was arrested, the Justice Department turned over

[11:00] 15,000 pages of classified discovery and we found three memos in that discovery. One was a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder, the the attorney general at the time, and he said, "Charge him with espionage." And Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." And so that's what they did. And then when I went bankrupt from from attorney's fees,

[11:32] they dropped the espionage charges. When my sleep was off, it felt like I couldn't show up as my best self. That's why I'm so excited to share something that makes a real difference. Beam's Dream Powder. Beam is proudly founded in America and run by people who share our values. hard work and integrity and delivering results. It's a sciencebacked healthy nighttime blend packed with ingredients shown to improve sleep so

[18:15] hear my name being called to the lieutenant's office and I go down there. They have a picture of this prisoner on a computer screen and one of the officers said, "Do you know this this man?" And I said, "I don't really know him. I just met him a couple of days ago." What did you say to him? I said, "It's it's nice to meet you." And what did he say to you? I said he said, "It's nice to meet you, too." And then I shook his hand and I walked away. And they said, "Well, when you walked away, he he made a call to Pakistan and he was told

[18:48] to kill you." I said, "Come on. I could kill this guy with my thumb." And they said, "No, no, don't do that. just stay away from him. I said, "Okay." So, over the next couple of weeks, every time I'd see this guy in the hall, I'd sort of give him the the evil eye and he'd look at me funny. But the more I thought about this, the more it didn't make sense. He was an Iraqi Kurd. Why would he call a number in Pakistan where they don't speak either Arabic or Kurdish? And why would they tell him to

[19:18] kill me? That doesn't make any sense. So, I saw him in the yard and I went up to him and he got a little scared and I said, "No, no, no. I I don't mean you any harm. I just want to ask you, after we met in your cell, did the police say anything about me?" And he said, "Yes, they told me that after we met, you called a Washington number and they told you to kill me." And I said, "Oh, for heaven's sake. Well, they told me you called a Pakistani number and they told you to kill me." and we got a a laugh

[19:50] about how ham-handed this was. But then I went to the to the law library and looked this up and this was actually class D felony. It was conspiracy to uh promote violence in a federal facility. And so I wrote about this saying I've been here, you know, I was there four days and already they're trying to get me to kill a guy or to get a guy to kill me for sport apparently. Well, the blog went crazy because Ariana Huffington picked it up and put it on

[20:20] the Huffington Post. Then Jake Tapper came to the prison to interview me and The Economist came to interview me and uh The Atlantic Magazine and CNN and it was ridiculous. And that was how I sort of staked my position in in prison where I have access to the media. I have a soap box and I'm gonna make the best of it by talking about prison conditions, medical

[20:51] uh facilities in prison and uh and violence that's encouraged by by the guards and the administration. I drove the warden crazy, but it was the right thing to do. I had great access to the media and it ended up being my second book. Why did they not just stop you from talking to the media? That is a great question and it was one that confused me for a little while and then one of the other prisoners said that he had overheard

[21:22] um one of the guards ask the warden, "Why don't you just send this guy to solitary?" And the warden said, "Oh, so I could have CNN standing in next to my car in the parking lot tomorrow?" "No, thank you." So I knew that was it. So long as I didn't overstep. For example, so long as I didn't name their names, I was going to be safe. So, they were afraid to cut you off from the media. Yes, they were afraid. You could send

[21:52] letters out. Did they read your mail? They did. Not at first. At first, they let everything go out. And then a couple of people wrote to me saying, "Hey, your last letter to me was very discreetly cut on the side of the envelope and then resealed with tape." So, I went to the lieutenant's office boldly and I said, "Hey guys, um, I've got a little bit of um, intelligence best practices that I'd

[22:23] like to pass to you. You don't need to slit the side of the envelope open to take the letter. What you do is you put in a long tong and you sort of hook the letter and then you twist the tong so that the letter turns into a little like a pixie stick and you can pull it out of the side of the envelope without acting having to cut it open. I said, "Just so you know, you morons." And then they stopped cutting open my letters. H they

[22:54] don't have the right to read your mail. um they do legally, but uh policy in a low security prison is to not read outgoing mail, only to read incoming mail. And really, it's not even to read the mail so much as it is to check for contraband. So, they don't read outgoing mail usually, but they were reading yours. Correct. You think they stopped reading it or do you think they started using your technique? I I can't believe that they were skilled enough to use my my

[23:24] technique. Let's cut to the chase. Your savings could be in serious trouble. When Elon Musk is out here warning us to brace for temporary hardship, you might want to listen. I trust Preserve Gold to safeguard my accounts and I urge you to do the same. They're the only precious metals company I recommend. Are you going to sit back and hope for the best or take control of your financial future? Text Dr. Phil to

[23:55] 50505 to get your free precious metals guide from Preserve Gold. With gold prices recently breaking records and analysts predicting this trend to continue through 2025, you cannot afford to wait. As a bonus, you can get up to $15,000 with a qualified purchase from Preserve Gold. So don't wait. Text Dr. Phil to 5050. That's D R P H I L to505 today.

[24:27] When it came right down to it, these these guys, these lieutenants and and they were called the the something intelligence service, SIS, oh, security and intelligence service. These were not bad guys. They were just in bad jobs. And I said to them, look, I am no threat to you. I'm no threat to your prison. I want you to know that when I walked through those doors, I did not lose my constitutional right to freedom of of uh speech. But you should really be spending your time on the gang

[24:58] bangers and the pedophiles and the drug dealers cuz your prison's full of them. Don't waste your time on me. Were you harassed in prison? Only by guards. Never ever by prisoners. Never. And that was for a couple of reasons. The guards just have an attitude. There was a there was a wonderful book published by Dr. Peter Moscows. Uh he's a professor of criminal justice at John J College and um the book is called in defense of flogging which is tongue and cheek. He doesn't really defend flogging but he

[25:29] said that the Bureau of Prisons is really little more than a than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable um undereducated rural white men. That's why prisons are in the boondocks because Prisons are the only industry in many parts of the country. And so you're going to get people who washed out of the military or couldn't make it through the uh through the local police academy and they end up there. They're paid hardly anything. Although the benefits are good, they're federal benefits. So

[26:02] you get people I I say this in my second book, you get people who were probably bullied as kids and sort of never got over it. uh and this is their chance to to bully somebody else, somebody who can't defend himself, somebody who can't fight back. You'll be you'll be accused of insolence and you go straight to solitary confinement. So, I had problems only with the guards, not with the the prisoners. And I I do say also in in this second book, Doing Time Like a Spy,

[26:33] that on my first day, one of the guards told me, and this is the only thing he told me as he processed me in. He said, "If someone comes into your cell uninvited, that is an act of aggression." And I said, "Oh, great. I've been here 40 minutes and I'm going to get my butt kicked." So, sure enough, two guys came in. One had a swastika tattooed on his neck. It took up the his entire neck. Um, another one had white power and swastikas on his arms. I

[27:05] jumped up. I put up my my dukes and I said, "What do you want?" And one of them asked me, "Are you the new guy?" I said, "Yeah, so." And he says, "Are you a rat?" I said, "No, I'm not a rat." He said, "Are you gay?" He didn't use the word gay, though. And I said, "No, I'm not gay." He said, "Are you a chomo?" I said, "I don't know what that word means." And he said, "Chomo, child molester." I said, 'No, I'm not a child molester. He said, ' Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria.' I said, 'Oh, great. Now I'm with the

[27:37] Aryans of all things. Uh, there was an Italian, and when I say Italian, I mean named Gambino, Banano, Lucesi, you know, you get the idea. He read in the New York Times that I was going to the prison. He read in the New York Times on Sunday that I was going to arrive at the prison on Thursday. And God bless him, for whatever reason, he took it upon himself to go to every single Italian, including the boss of one family and the acting

[28:07] boss of another to explain to them the difference between a CIA officer and an FBI agent. He said, "FBI agents or cops. CIA officers protected us from the terrorists." And so when I arrived, the Italians were waiting for me and they welcomed me with open arms. And as soon as word got around that I was with the Italians, it was hands off. I never had any problems. Really? Nothing. So where did you sit in the lunchroom? I sat with

[28:38] the Italians, I'm proud to say. Yeah. So you didn't have to sit with the sounds I didn't sit with the Arians. This all sounds so absurd, but this is this is life in prison. I I I also noted in one of my blog posts that it's going into prison is like walking into 1950s America in that there is hard and fast racial segregation. Whites and blacks are completely separated. Uh they they don't eat together. They don't watch TV

[29:10] together. They usually don't even room together. And then the Hispanics are off in their own area. So you have one table that is Aryans. You have one table where half is Italians and half is Native Americans. All the other white tables are just for pedophiles and uh and informants, rats. And then the other 50% of the cafeteria is uh is black. The Hispanics sit in the back. It it was bizarre. It took me weeks to get used to

[29:43] this division of the races. Was there violence in prison? Did you see a lot of violence while you were there? Almost none. There were in the two years I was there, I saw three fights. Two of them were over what to watch on television, which again was just preposterous that people would fight over such a stupid thing. And then once uh one of the Aryans called a white guy a rat and the rat just whipped him, but that was it. You know, most of these people too, they they worked their way

[30:13] down from a a maximum security penitentiary to a medium to a low and they didn't want to go back up to the maximum. So, they were on their best behavior. I think people are interested to know whether or not CIA is engaging in monitoring, investigating, looking at data of American citizens. Yeah, that is such an important question. We know for a fact

[30:44] that both NSA and FBI definitely are and they're doing it in such a a a terrible way. This is something that really requires a legislative fix. Um rather than to go to a judge to ask for a warrant. So rather than having to find probable cause, they now just go to the data providers and buy the data. It's for sale. The metadata is for sale. It's for sale by Facebook and X and and Instagram and everybody. It just has it

[31:14] for sale, so they just buy it. There's no legal prohibition on purchasing it. CIA is not supposed to collect any information at all on American citizens ever. Um, they say that they don't. I want to believe that they don't, but I really don't know. But they can go to Meta and buy what? How would they buy information on an American citizen? Can they buy it in bulk or can they buy it

[31:45] on an individual? How how do they do that? It's far easier and more clearly legal to buy it in bulk. Uh but then they can sort through it and and pull out your data. When you open an account on Facebook, for example, or Instagram or or LinkedIn or any of these social media platforms, as part of the terms and conditions, you agree that you're turning over ownership of the metadata to the company, and then they're free to do with it whatever they want. Now they most normally sell it to companies so

[32:18] that they can target advertising to you so that they can give you uh in your feed advertisements they think that you would react positively to but the government will just take it to see what kind of of uh articles you click on uh what kind of comments you make. And I've said too, well, not not that I'm unique, a lot of people have said, you know, they can figure out whether you're calling your doctor

[32:48] or maybe you belong to a depression support group or an abortion survivors support group or a a clean drug addicts support group or whatever it is. They can put a picture together of you based on your metadata that doesn't really require them to ever have to go to a court and ask for permission to dig into your past. Now, this is a new phenomenon. It's just over the last 20 years and Congress just simply hasn't addressed it. If you were going to go

[33:20] back through your history, what would you do different if you had this to do all over again? Well, there's one very important thing that I would do differently, and that is I would have hired an attorney before blowing the whistle. Before I said a single word in public, I should have had an attorney sitting next to me and advising me. And I didn't. And so, I had to be reactive. You know, to tell you the truth, Human

[33:51] Rights Watch had already said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross had already said the same thing. Amnesty International had said the same thing. So, I didn't think it was that big of a deal for me to go out and confirm it. It became a page one international story. And having to be reactive to that put me at a disadvantage. I wish I had had an attorney with me. What would that

[34:22] attorney have told you that would have changed what you had done? What advice would that attorney have given you now in retrospect that you would have done something differently? The attorney probably would have not told me to do anything substantively differently other than to not accept so many um press requests, media requests. I should have made the disclosure and that should have been the end of it. But instead, I made

[34:54] the disclosure and then gave 50 other uh interviews. And of course, each interviewer wants to build on the original disclosure. And I was bumping up against classified information. I had to be very careful. And so, I'm just giving the same interview over and over and over. And then that kind of made them angry because I wasn't giving them a scoop. And then the criticism began. And oh, it was it was not something a person should try to handle on his or her own. You should have a professional

[35:25] doing it. Would you still have given the original disclosure? Yes. Yes. Without any question. Yes. Somebody had to say something. We were committing a war crime, a crime against humanity. And I understand that, you know, we always believed we were the good guys. I get it. I still think we're the good guys, but we were so traumatized by the 9/11 attacks. We so desired revenge against al-Qaeda and against Osama bin Laden

[35:57] that we just we just couldn't see that line where we needed to stop, where we would lose our sense of being Americans were we to cross it. And you know, another thing that I noticed is once we crossed that line, there was this effort internally to just keep repeating the lie that it was it was legal and it was justified and it was ethical because if you repeat that lie over and over and over again,

[36:28] it becomes your truth. And so I I figured, you know what, I have to say over and over and over again that it's wrong. It's wrong. My my wife at the time gave me this wonderful advice. She said, "You have to keep talking about this because eventually they're going to move on to another issue or onto another person and if you keep talking about it, your side of the story is going to be the side of record." And she was absolutely right. And so I just kept repeating it. But as

[37:00] you said, it was already out there. People were talking about this. Yes. There were all of these international groups that were talking about it and not just the other side. There were credible groups that were talking about what was happening. So why did you feel the need to add to what was already being said because they weren't being listened to? Because there was denial going on. Yeah, there was great denial going on. uh the the CIA just flat out

[37:31] denied there was anything even akin to a torture program. And then President Bush, and this is the reason why I gave the interview, President Bush one day, just a couple of days after Brian Ross called me from ABC News, the president gave a press conference in which he looked right in the camera and said, "We do not torture." And I said to my wife who was a senior CIA officer, I said, "He is just lying to the American people." And then a couple of days later, he's walking out of the South

[38:03] Portico of the White House on his way to the helicopter to fly to Camp David for the weekend, and a reporter shouted a question about torture, and he turned around and said, "Well, if there is torture, it's the result of a rogue CIA officer." And I said to my my wife, Brian Ross' source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on me that if it leaks, they're going to say it was that guy. He was the rogue. Kuryaku was the rogue. So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided that whatever he was going to ask me, I was going to

[38:35] tell the truth. Why did you think they were going to pin it on you? Because the the the program was falling apart. more and more people were coming out and saying, "Yeah, this was a mistake." And, you know, these these human rights organizations reports weren't based on, you know, just a premonition that the CIA was off somewhere uh torturing prisoners. It was based on leaks from the CIA. And I've seen this in the past. I saw it during the the first Gulf War where there's a major screw up and

[39:07] people are killed and they need to pin it on someone and that's what they do. And I thought, "No, no, no, no. I was the only one who objected internally. The only one. I got passed over for promotion because I objected to the torture program. This is going to be my issue. I'm going to tell the truth." Okay. Now, tell me this. We all went through this. We all went through 9/11. I've said many times that I thought one of the most important days in our country's identity was

[39:37] 912 because on 912 we were all Americans. There weren't any Democrats. There weren't any Republicans. On the morning of 912, we were all Americans and everybody came together at that time. It was so tragic, but Americans rallied and came together. Obviously, they want answers from these people. Who did this? And what's going to happen next? What's the next thing that's going to go down?

[40:07] Now, there had to be people in the CIA, in the intelligence community that absolutely knew that the best way to get information was not through torture. This isn't a revelation that has come about after 9/11. I mean this has been known for a long long time. This is not a new

[40:40] revelation. Correct. You're absolutely right. This we've known for generations that torture doesn't work. And when you were trained in CIA about how to do intelligence gathering, the protocols that you were trained in, didn't they say and acknowledge that the way to get information was not through torture? Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up. The answer is a resounding yes. That is what

[41:13] they trained us or how they trained us. I remember being in the uh in the operational training where we're we're doing what's called the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit. You spot somebody, whether it's at a diplomatic cocktail party or at a you know a riot or wherever. You assess his um access to information that you want. You develop him by establishing a friendship or a rapport and then you recruit him to be a a source, an agent for the CIA. Well, I remember asking specifically about the

[41:46] use of threats. Do we threaten anybody? You're going to work for me or I'm going to, you know, pull your teeth out. And they said absolutely never. First of all, it's it's not ethical to do something like that. Secondly, it never works. And you run the risk of him coming to the next meeting with a gun so he can kill you for threatening him. So, no, that never ever works. you you do it by establishing a a bonafide friendship. And I will add too that if there's one

[42:18] thing that the FBI is exceptionally good at, it is establishing that kind of a relationship with a source. Ali Sufan was the FBI agent who interrogated Abu Zubeda at the secret site. He did such an unbelievably great job that Abu Zuba, having been given nothing more than a piece of fruit, a cup of tea, a cigarette, and a piece of paper and a pen to write to his mother, just opened

[42:49] up and gave Ali everything that he asked for. Abu Zabeda gave us several things. He gave us the al-Qaeda wiring diagram, which we actually had never known. We we knew that Osama bin Laden was at the top. I'm Zawahi was the number two and then we didn't have any idea below that how the organization was configured. Abu Zuba laid it out for us. Abu Zuba gave us the um the modus operendi for an al-Qaeda attack. For example, Ali would

[43:20] ask, and I'm just making this up. This is not real information, but this is just what it was like. Ali would say, "Well, if you were going to do an attack in Dusseldorf, how would you do that?" And Abu Zuba said, 'Well, I know I know this man, Muhammad, and here's Muhammad's cell phone number, and Muhammad is a good planner, and he has a cousin named Abdullah, and Abdullah has weapons, and Abdullah has a roommate, uh, and this is the address, and and the roommate is named Rashid, and Rashid has access to explosives. So then we could

[43:51] go to the Germans and say, "Hey, listen. You have a serious problem in Dusseldorf. Here's the information." And they could go and neutralize that al-Qaeda cell. That was thanks to Abu Zuba and it was thanks to Ali Sufan who was able to to extract the information from Abu Zuba using a very gentle touch. Another thing that Abuza told us was the name of of a brutal terrorist known to us only by the nomde. We knew that Mkhtar was a very

[44:22] very bad man and we knew that this Mkhtar had planned something called the Bojinka operation. The Bojinka operation was a plan in Manila, Philippines to hijack 14747s at the same time and to fly them into buildings all up and down the West Coast of the United States. It was foiled accidentally by a housekeeper who went into this apartment being used as an al-Qaeda safe house, recognized what

[44:52] she was looking at as as a a potential terrorist attack. She called the Filipino police. They called the Filipino Intelligence Service. They called the CIA. And the thing was foiled. But we didn't know who Mktar was. And when Ali asked him, he laughed and he said, "You don't know who Mktar is? It's Khaled Shik Muhammad." We had never heard that name before. And Khaled Shik Muhammad turned out to be the bonafide number three in al-Qaeda and

[45:22] the head of al-Qaeda operations. Once we had the name, we could target him. And one year later, we captured him in Rahul Pindi, Pakistan. And that operation was called what? Bojinka. B O J I N K A. Mhm. And when was that supposed to happen? 1996, I believe it was. Wow. See, we knew from 1996 onward that al-Qaeda was planning to use aircraft as

[45:55] weapons, but we just couldn't figure out when and where they were going to do it. How many 747s were they going to use? 14 of them. And how were they going to get them? Apparently, the plan was to have 14 separate teams of hijackers. Now, it was bad enough on 911 that they had four. Can you imagine 14 crashing into buildings in downtown Los Angeles and and San Francisco and San Jose all the way up to Seattle. A disaster of

[46:27] historic proportions. Unbelievable. And it was foiled because a housekeeper recognized something that didn't look right. Exactly. We got lucky. Yeah. Unbelievable. But the question that I was getting to is they trained you. They know because it's knowable that the best way and even the fastest way even if you're urgent, it's like we need this right now. They still know the fastest

[46:57] way to get the best information is not through torture but through relationship building. That's exactly right. Why would they default to torture at that time? And the reason I'm saying this is because we know that when you torture, you almost every time get a piece of information, but it's not quality information. You do get something, but it's almost always not reliable. They will give you

[47:28] something to get you to stop in the moment, and then you go spin your wheels and check this, check that, check the other. The most dangerous lie is that with a kernel of truth, and they'll give you something that has nothing of substance, but it's enough to keep you chasing your tail. You waste time and go spend all this effort and energy and get nowhere. And that is exactly No, you're 100% right. That is the the whole crux

[47:59] of the issue. You have to devote a team of analysts to to pour through this information that was collected under torture. It's going to take analysts months months to get through this information. And in the meantime, that allows the terrorists months to plan their next attack. So, it's it's just terrible. But, you know, we we can't underestimate the the role of of revenge in in the CIA's torture program. There

[48:29] were CIA leaders who had been so proud of their careers, so proud of what they had accomplished over the course of 20, 25, 30 years, thinking, "Oh my god, when my obituary is written, they're going to talk about my role in failing to prevent 9/11." And so there was this this feeling that we had to do literally anything to stop them. And even if it's not to stop them, it's it's to pay them back for what they did. When I finally

[49:01] got assigned to uh Pakistan, uh and this is just, you know, a couple of months after the 9/11 attacks, I went back to my home office um in the CIA's new headquarters building. And um I told my my immediate supervisor, I'm leaving for Pakistan tomorrow, and I don't know how long I'll be gone. It could be six months. It could be a year. I just don't know. And he leaned in and he whispered, "Kill them all." And I remember saying, "Really, John? Are we there

[49:34] already? Kill them all?" But that was that was the the feeling in the halls of the CIA in the in the weeks and months after 9/11. It was payback time and that was really the motivator for a lot of people. So it wasn't necessarily to get information, it was kick their ass. They did what they did. So when you get one of them, kick their ass. Kofheer Black, who was the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, famously told President Bush, and this was covered in

[50:04] practically every p every paper in the world, that when we got done with Osama bin Laden, his head would be on a stick and there would be flies on his eyeballs. And that was the goal for a lot of people. that didn't necessarily make us safer. I mean, that's the thing that I'm concerned about is where was the goal to keep us safer. You're absolutely right, Dr. Phil. It didn't keep us safer. But, you know, the thing the things that would have kept us safer weren't weren't sexy from a policy perspective. One of the things I learned

[50:37] interrogating dozens and dozens of al-Qaeda fighters was that they really had no beef with the United States. The United States was no big deal to them. they were more concerned about putting food on the table. And so I always believed that if we had focused on things like like education and economic development where these people could, you know, learn a trade, a skill of some sort and have a job that would that would pay them a few hundred a

[51:08] month where they could get married and and build a little house and and put food on the table, we wouldn't have many of these problems. Well, it may be that simple. What's next for you? Well, you know, I I'm proud to say that that things have actually worked out uh for me from a a personal perspective. The the road has been a difficult one, a long one. I I won't lie about that. Um you really get to see who your friends are and who your friends are not. and

[51:39] they may surprise you, but um you know, I've been invited to to uh to teach at a variety of universities. I I have a an intelligent studies class at the University of Salamanca in Spain. Uh it's at the graduate school level. I lecture at the University of Southern California each semester in the school of journalism. Um I've got uh two columns, one at Consortium News, one at the Covert Action Magazine. I have two

[52:09] uh podcasts. One is Deep Focus with John Kiryaku. We look at these issues very deeply. The other is called Deprogram. And um and I've got a a little internet-based TV show on unified television called uh CIA Declassified where we take documents, CIA documents that the agency declassifies and usually these documents are 30, 40, 50 years old, but we use them to explain important international events like foreign military coups or

[52:41] assassinations of foreign leaders or the Berlin Wall or the Berlin airlift, things like that. It's It's a lot of fun. And you know, you have a little bit here, a little bit there, and you can put a decent living together. But with that said, what I'm happiest about, what I'm the most proud about is that my children are proud of me. And someday I'm going to be a grandfather. Um, I hope that that for those generations of my family not yet born, they'll be able to look back on who I was and to be proud. That's really what my goal has

[53:13] been. Do you have friends still in the service that you're in contact with? I do actually. One told me recently something that was very funny. She said that uh that she was taking part in a security briefing and my picture was on one of the one of the slides of the briefing and it was entitled the insider threat. And she said, "Everybody started booing." And the instructor said, "What?

[53:44] Why? Why are you booing?" And they said, "He's not an insider threat. He was a legitimate whistleblower." And in the end, he was the one who was right. And she said, "They've removed. They took you off the slide from the security briefing." Yeah. Well, I thank you for plugging back in with me and talking more about this. It's very insightful and I hope we can stay in touch and continue this dialogue. Every time I go deeper, I get more and more questions

[54:15] and thoughts in my head. And I think you've been very educational for everybody that's listening to you. I wish you nothing but the best. I've talked to a number of people that have been in and are now out of the intelligence community since my first conversation with you because I have a lot of friends in that arena. I haven't found one person that had a negative thing to say about you or the role that you've played in all of this. And thank you for the work that you're doing, Dr. Phil, because it's so easy to sweep these issues under the carpet. It's so

[54:47] easy to let them just sort of dissipate with time. So, I appreciate very much that you're talking about these issues. In my mind, these issues are not 20 years old. No, they're they're current. We should be talking about them. Well, they are current. We have to stay on top of these sort of things and we should be the most sophisticated country in the world about this stuff and we should conduct ourselves accordingly. I think we need to be intelligence leaders in this and we haven't always conducted

[55:17] ourselves that way but I think we certainly have the wherewithal to do so and I think we should. I appreciate your cander in all of this and again this won't be our last conversation. You know when I say that I pop back up so I appreciate it. I'm glad. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you so much. We'll talk again soon.
