Title: I Believed America Could Do No Wrong (RAI)
Show: Reality Asserts Itself (Paul Jay)
Date: 2023-04-24
URL: https://youtu.be/T25WBmQsOho
Duration: 16:00

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[00:01] [Music] welcome to the real news network i'm paul jay welcome to reality asserts itself john keriaku is in his house waiting for another 40 days before he's free to walk out the front door he's under house arrest after spending 23 months in jail john kariakou was born on august 9 1964. he's a former cia analyst and case officer a former senior investigator for

[00:31] the senate foreign relations committee and a former counter-terrorism consultant for abc news he was the first u.s government official to confirm in december 2007 that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-qaeda prisoners which he described as torture on october 22nd 2012 karyaku pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow cia officer that connected the covert operative to a specific operation he was the first person to pass classified information to a reporter although the reporter did not publish

[01:01] the name of the operative he was sentenced to 30 months in prison on january 25th 2013 and he served his term from february 28 2013 until the 3rd of february 2015 at a low security federal correctional facility in loreto pennsylvania when john joined the cia in 1990 he was 25 years old he was a true believer in americanism american exceptionalism as some people call it and now he's not and that's what this interview is about and now john joins us thank you very much thanks for having me

[01:33] so we're going to do a many segments of this interview because you've lived a lot of different lives in the cia um and i think just to establish the ground rules some of what we're going to ask john is classified and i'm going to not not not ask him i'm going to ask him whatever we feel like asking him and then he's going to figure out if there's times he has to say well i can't say that because it's classified and then he'll parse what he can say but just to let you know that's going to happen once in a while

[02:04] but probably not at the beginning because i don't think any of you growing up is classified no so in the beginning we want to talk about how you become americanized and how much that's part of your personal identity so your your parents are greek yes you're of greek origin yes and and when does your family come to the united states my mother's parents came i should say my father's parents came in february 1931 and my mother's parents followed three years later

[02:35] growing up to hear my grandfather tell the story franklin roosevelt personally allowed him in the country got him a job in a steel mill in canonsburg pennsylvania and by god we were going to be democrats for the rest of our lives to repay the kindness that franklin roosevelt showed in fact into the 1970s until my grandfather's death in 1978 he had a framed photo of franklin roosevelt sitting on top of the television set so i always grew up with a feeling that i had to repay the

[03:07] kindness that the country had shown my family that we had a debt to the democratic party specifically to franklin roosevelt and that public service was something to which i should aspire and what did your father and mother do my dad was an elementary school principal for 42 years and my mother was a third grade teacher and they sort of internalized all this fdr and america adoration oh yes yeah very much so very much so even as a even as a child

[03:40] i was active politically because my parents were even as an eight-year-old a nine-year-old i was a it was even earlier than that an eight-year-old i was a volunteer on the mcgovern campaign stuffing envelopes and such and then even when i went to college the first thing i did literally on my first day in college was to join the college democrats and after roosevelt we have truman did that loyalty transfer on president to president in other words did you grow up with the narrative that dropping the bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki

[04:10] was somehow for the greater good i remember a relative of mine saying truman taught the japs a thing or two uh and i i'll add too that there was at least as much love for harry truman as there was for franklin roosevelt in our family because it was truman that saved greece from communism and my grandparents were very grateful for that and where you know much of greece was pro-communist so where did your father coming in the 30s

[04:42] where did they get their anti-communism from well my grandfather was a voracious consumer of news which was hard to do in the early 1940s but but still he he consumed as much news about greece as he could whether it was from life magazine or time magazine copies of which i still have as a matter of fact that mention greece or letters to and from relatives in greece he really stayed up on what was going on he was also a member of two

[05:12] greek american organizations the american hellenic educational and progressive association a hepa and gapa the greek american progressive association both well i should say kappa was really a liberal group but it it supported using greek the greek language in the home and ahepa was more pan-political but encouraged newly arrived greeks to assimilate and to become americans and to speak english in the home my

[05:42] grandfather was a member of both organizations because because roosevelt worked with the soviet union against hitler for many years roosevelt's vice president wallace right if he if he had been able to stay on his vice president he got dumped by the party that's right in favor of truman uh was very much for working with the soviet soviet union was against this kind of beginning of a cold war so like moving from roosevelt to truman it's not a natural progression in terms of especially when it comes to greece because when you say save greece from communism it was by installing dictators in greece

[06:13] it was not like some democracy they came but there was there was even some disagreement in the home my grandmother was very conservative and although she was a democrat she became a democrat once she became a citizen she was a lifelong royalist where when it came to greek politics but are they from she was she from the working class oh yes very much so very much so her mother died at a young age and her father believed that his three daughters should have a trade have an education my grandmother was the only one of her sisters that went to school and became a teacher and then a

[06:44] translator for the italian occupation government she taught italian soldiers to speak greek her sisters were a dressmaker uh and uh and her youngest sister ended up owning a a gas station and a butcher shop so there was always there was always this uh drive to succeed even though they were women that my great-grandfather had instilled so so in the narrative of your families when it comes to greece and that the installation of a

[07:14] dictatorship somehow was a good thing and somehow that's for democracy it depended on the dictatorship my grandparents were really worried about communism in greece in the 1940s because the communists were killing a lot of innocent people they would go into villages to recruit men and any man that didn't want to go back up into the mountains to fight for the greeks was killed and oftentimes the the wives and children were killed as well well i'm i'm not going to argue with you about it but i've interviewed greek communists who fought the nazis and then but afterwards and you get quite a different story

[07:45] sure oh of course you do and and still these three generations later you're still going to get arguments on both sides yeah but at any rate this is part of your formation yeah america fights for the greater good and as i've said on the real news a few times that it's sort of like we do bad things but for the for good reasons right i believed that for many years decades i don't believe that anymore so when we get to you in the high school so you're born

[08:15] in 64 vietnam war is ending as you kind of start becoming much more conscious of politics as you head into college what's your vision of the world and your place in it what you might be doing i considered myself at the time to be what was then called a social democrat liberal on social issues economic issues and then pretty hawkish on foreign policy and defense i remember there being in retrospect a very funny debate

[08:47] within the college democrats at gw over the invasion of grenada should we issue a statement should we issue a statement condemning the invasion of grenada these are like six college freshmen and sophomores debating whether we should issue a statement like anybody cared and i remember opposing a statement because i supported the invasion of grenada i don't recall why uh but i did i felt i i guess that it was it showed a robust foreign policy and it showed that we were willing to go out

[09:18] and protect our citizens and we needed a win yeah we needed a win it had been a while since since we had had a win um but all through college i was pretty hawkish on on foreign policies you were also excuse me in a little bit weird way very interested in politics and leaders didn't you at some point write a letter to the shah and you got a signed right right what was that all about i think i was 14 or 15. i wrote a letter to the shah of iran i wrote to tell them that i was i was

[09:48] disgusted by the way our government had treated him that once we had made a decision we should have stuck with the decision and the decision had been to allow him to come to the united states for treatment of his cancer and when the heat got a little more than the president could handle the shah was unceremoniously thrown out and ended up in panama and then later the bahamas so i wrote him a letter saying it's terrible the way you were treated and he actually wrote me a letter back saying you're right it's terrible the way i've been treated here's an

[10:19] autographed picture he probably didn't get many letters like that no i sure didn't what motivated you i don't know i was just so interested in foreign affairs that it just seemed like a natural thing to do i followed the iran hostage crisis day by day by day for example and even though nightline was on very late at night for a you know 14 year old or 15 year old i stayed up every single night and watched ted koppel on nightline because originally nightline was to give us a

[10:50] daily update of events in iran you know they have a day count that's right so many days more and that's right and so i was just fascinated by it and i remember telling my father we were in the car together and my dad for whatever reason always wanted me to become a dentist and i remember telling him dad i really don't want to be a dentist and he said well what do you want to do and i said i think i want to join the foreign service and i was 14. i was 14 i guess at the time and he said well whatever

[11:22] you want to do just do it well and you wrote margaret thatcher i did but your choice of leaders are all they were very conservative very conservative they were very conservative i got it i got an autographed picture from azer weissman the uh at the time the defense minister of israel these are people that today i wouldn't dream of writing a letter of support to but but back then i was pretty hawkish was there anyone influencing you in this direction or was kind of just your own no no it was just it was my own thing it was my own interest

[11:52] so you go to college and what do you study middle eastern studies why i don't know i i was fascinated with the middle east a couple of people um asked me if i was interested in hellenic studies i could have i could have studied at georgetown or or i mean there are several different places that you can study hellenic studies good schools and i said no i was more interested in the middle east and then my dad in an attempt to get me to stay close to home said well you know the university of pittsburgh has a great eastern european

[12:24] studies program and i said i don't care about eastern european studies i don't care about the soviet union i truly didn't i only cared about the middle east and there were three schools in the country at the time that had middle eastern studies programs george washington rutgers and brigham young and george washington was the easy choice now as you you know into the late 70s in the early 80s you know you're coming to consciousness you know political you're interested in foreign affairs how does

[12:55] as the revelations of what really happened in vietnam and what a lie mostly lies that war was based on you know there's there's quotes from senior johnson officials near the end of the war that that if 70 percent of the reason we're in vietnam is just to prove how strong we are it's now become 100 of the reason for being in vietnam and you hear that under nixon but that it became just about proving to the world we can't lose a war meaning tens of thousands of lives i mean really millions of lies

[13:26] including you know maybe perhaps at least three million vietnamese right cambodians and and thousands of american soldiers does that not in some way start to shake your americanism not at first in fact and i haven't thought about this in years but i remember an argument that i got into with a friend of mine in the college democrats over vietnam and i said that i had opposed the war not had opposed i opposed the war i thought it was immoral i thought it

[13:57] was illegal but if i had been drafted i would have gone and he said if he had been drafted he would have gone to canada and we had a real argument about that and he said to me how can you oppose a war and then go fight in it and i said because my country asked me to um i wouldn't give that same answer today but as an 18 year old that's what i believed but you did think it was immoral and illegal i did because a lot of the leaders you're writing to and so on i mean they would have

[14:27] in fact i introduced george mcgovern when he announced his candidacy for president in uh september of 1984. yeah i saw that and in his in in my speech of introduction i said that he was one of the few senators to stand up to the illegal and immoral war in vietnam that seemed a little contradictory with all the other positions you were doing i was a kid supporting granada 19 at the time yeah still figuring it out still figuring it out we used to go to the white house uh at night when you could walk right up to the gate and shout

[14:57] can i swear on this program and shout you reagan you know based on something we had seen on the news that night and but you're supposed to be the invasion of great differences yeah i know right so you reagan at the fence and then i'd go back to the college democrats and say you know guys i gotta go with reagan on this one [Laughter] but still the underlying thing is america can really do no wrong maybe mistakes

[15:27] maybe errors that's exactly how i felt sure we made mistakes certainly but our hearts were in the right place i really believed that that we were that you know shining city on a hill back then and for many years later really until september 11th i believe that well we're going to get to that in the continuation of our series of interview with john we're going to ask him how he got recruited into the cia please join us for the next in our

[15:58] series of interviews on reality asserts itself on the real news network [Music]

[16:38] you
