Title: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Confronts the Deep State,
Show: Harrison Berger
Date: 2025-06-25
URL: https://youtu.be/8-8pQrcfQ8U
Duration: 47:00

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[00:00] John Kiryaku is an American hero. He took great risks when he made his disclosures in 2007 in service of his country and the rule of law. But rather than being rewarded for his bravery, he was punished for it. You can find all of his excellent work on Unified TV, including his popular series Whistleblowers and CIA Declassified. And he is my guest today. John, thank you so much for being here. It's a real privilege to speak to you. Thank you, Harry. I'm not a hero, though, but thank you for those very kind words.

[00:35] So, I mean, to me, and to many people you are, but we'll move past that. So I was born in 2001, which was- Wow, right. Which is like day before yesterday in my mind. Yeah. But it was a very important year and I think things radically changed that year. There was a sense afterward, after 9-11, of course, of this kind of righteous rage that kind of consumed the United States for many years afterward throughout the entire time that I was growing up. And it enabled all sorts of expansions of power that were implemented in

[01:10] secret at first by the Bush administration and then later by the Obama administration, which expanded on those powers. And it was behind this wall of secrecy that all sorts of abuses occurred. The destruction of due process and habeas corpus through this extraordinary rendition program and torture program, which you exposed, the creation of this mass surveillance state, and then ultimately this creation of this drone program to extraditionally assassinate people, thanks to the Obama administration.

[01:40] And I just want to ask you about your disclosures, what you saw at the time, and what caused you to come forward? You really risked everything to confront this permanent power faction in Washington. So why did you do that? There's no single easy answer. I want to give you just a little bit of background. I'm the kind of guy, I've always been the kind of guy who, for example, when I go to the post office to buy stamps, I tell them, nothing patriotic. I'm tired of the flag stamps

[02:13] and the July 4th firework stamps give me something with like a flower on it or something, right? Because I feel like patriotism is forced down our throats. We express patriotism here unlike any other country in the world. And I've been all over the world. Nobody does it like we do. Nobody has giant flags at car dealerships or plays the national anthem at every sporting event. Countries just don't do that. Not to say I'm not patriotic. I just don't appreciate it

[02:46] being forced down my throat. After 9-11, I actually went to Walmart and bought flag stickers to put in the windows of my car. And even my dad said, wow, even you with the flag stickers. So I said, I know, right? I'm changing my mind. With that said, my patriotism is based in the rule of law. It's based in the Constitution. And I naively believed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 that everybody's patriotism was based on the Constitution,

[03:22] right? That's what makes our country so great is we have this incredible Constitution. I realized by halfway through 2002 into 2003 that I was just wrong. That it wasn't about a love and respect for the Constitution. The CIA, the people at the CIA with whom I was working or for whom I was working, were more interested in revenge than they were in upholding the rule of law.

[03:55] And that's when I first started to turn at the agency. There were things taking place that, in my view, were so patently illegal, besides being immoral and unethical, that I didn't think there were any circumstances in which they should be taking place. And so I got to the point where, I've said this in interviews before, but I was passed over for promotion just one month

[04:26] after leading the capture of Abu Zubaydah. And I went into my boss's office. He was a friend of mine. And I said, what do I need to do to get promoted around here? I need to catch bin Laden? Is that the only way to get promoted around here? And then he told me, look, you turn down the enhanced interrogation techniques training. And the chief of counter terrorism, Jose Rodriguez, said in my promotion panel that I displayed his words. I displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism because I wouldn't torture anybody.

[05:01] I ended up getting promoted anyway, but I should have never been denied because carrying out a torture program should not be a prerequisite for career advancement. Later on, a friend of mine, a friend in like four or five different ways, we were working in counterterrorism together. We go to the same church. We're in the same men's group. He's both a brigadier general in the army and a psychiatrist. He said to me, you know, they call you the human rights guy behind your back. And I said, yeah, I know. And he

[05:36] said, you know, that's not a compliment, right? And I said, oh, it is to me. It's a compliment. I'd rather they call me the human rights guy than the torturer or the monster or bloody John Kiriakou or whatever. So, you know, I realized then that was in like the summer, the late summer of 2002, I was going in a different way compared to most of my colleagues. I just have a question about your prosecution and your punishment for what you did.

[06:12] So you were prosecuted for your disclosures by the Obama administration, which despite having promised to hold accountable the torturers and the power abusers in the Bush administration, he really immediately immunized them. He said we're going to look forward and not back as soon as he was elected. And he instead went after journalistic sources like yourself. And he actually set a record for the number of sources that he prosecuted. And I always found the prosecution against these types of sources like yourself for the crime of leaking information to the press

[06:45] to be very odd, given that no group of people leaks to the press more than the U.S. security state. And that was actually one of the revolutions in the 2014 torture report where CIA officials were seen bragging about, you know, whenever you see senior officials say in a New York Times or Washington Post report, it means it's coming from the CIA's office of public affairs. Can you just discuss that aspect of your prosecution? Oh, sure. You know, most people don't ask me about that. But I think this is a very important

[07:18] issue. Washington runs on leaks. Most of those leaks come from, as you correctly pointed out, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. Anytime you see, according to, you know, national security officials, senior officials, White House officials, whatever, intelligence community sources, those are those are leaks that have been approved up the chain of command. They're not legal. Because remember, the simple definition, the

[07:50] legal definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. Well, if the information hasn't been properly declassified, that is a violation of the espionage act. But it's authorized because it's in support of the policy or it's been leaked in order to gauge public opinion. Very common. And when I say very common, I mean literally every single day. The Obama administration was particularly bad in

[08:22] this respect for a couple of reasons. First, they promised to not just be better than the Bush administration, but to reverse a lot of those damaging policies that we saw under the Bush administration. They didn't. They just continued the policies of the Bush administration. And in many cases like drones, they made it worse. Now here, I'm going to get on my soapbox now, but I can't help myself. The espionage act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs

[08:53] in the early years of the First World War. Between 1917 and 2009, Barack Obama's inauguration, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. Just under Obama, there were nine of us, three times the number of all previous presidents combined. Nine of us were prosecuted under the espionage act for speaking with the press. Now in some

[09:24] cases, espionage is punishable by death. So it's not like, you know, they're just slapping us down to get us to stop talking. The minimum that you can get under the espionage act is five years. The common punishment is 15 years. So this is a very serious, very heavy felony. Now, I was charged with espionage for giving an interview to ABC News and a follow-up

[09:56] interview to the New York Times, in which I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. But it is a felony to classify a crime. And this is why I wasn't initially charged because the FBI determined that the torture program was a crime. And so my revelations of the torture program could not constitute a crime because I was exposing

[10:31] a crime. So what the Obama administration did is they secretly reopened the case against me, tapped my phones, collected my emails going back years, put teams of FBI surveillance for surveillance on me, and came up with something else. They came up with an obscure violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981, only the second American ever charged with this

[11:03] crime. Now, this is one of those crimes that they just can kind of hold in abeyance, and if they want to use it as a weapon to get somebody as a cudgel, they can. So the reason I was charged with this crime is because an author sent me an email and said, he's writing a book about the Abu Omar rendition. This was an Egyptian cleric in Milan that the CIA kidnapped and sent back to Egypt to be tortured. I said, I don't know anything about Abu Omar other than what I've

[11:37] read in the Washington Post. He said, well, can you introduce me to any of these 12 people? I said, I don't know any of these people. Then he sends me a second email and he says, can you introduce me to any of these 12 people? And I said, look, kidnapping wasn't my thing at the CIA. I didn't work with the kidnapping people. I don't know who these people are. I said, you obviously know this information, this story far better than I do. Then he says, what about the guy that you mentioned on page 145 or whatever of your first book? He said,

[12:14] I think his name is John. And I said, oh, you mean John Doe? I don't know whatever happened to him. He probably retired and he's living in Virginia somewhere. But I said the last name, the surname. So I technically violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. Now, this reporter or author never made that name public. So there was never any danger to this officer. But the Justice Department got me. Now, at the same time within months,

[12:50] the CIA director, David Petraeus, leaked the names of 10 covert operatives to his adulterous girlfriend. Yeah, I was just going to say he had this black book. Yeah, he showed her the black book. You can't show anybody the black book. And then at the same time as well, there was a disgruntled former CIA officer in Bethesda, Maryland, who exposed the names of seven covert operatives on his anti CIA website. The Justice Department didn't charge

[13:25] either one of them. They charged me. So it was a political case from the very beginning. And you know, since then, we're in the immediate aftermath right after I had gone to prison. I was sentenced to 30 months. I did 23. But two FBI agents wrote to my attorneys and apologized. And then just three weeks ago, I got an email from an FBI agent saying that he was sorry for his role in my prosecution that at the working level, nobody wanted this case,

[13:57] but that they had been ordered to find something to charge me with by the more senior officials. Well, that actually brings up another question that I was going to ask you later, but I might as well ask you now. I mean, Obama came in and he was really the one who prosecuted you was not the Bush administration. They declined to do so. He was a constitutional scholar. And there's other people like him, too, who railed against these sorts of civil liberties abuses. Mike Johnson comes to mind. Yes. When I was working at System Update,

[14:29] we did an interview with him a couple years ago where, you know, he was on the head of this Weaponization Committee going after all sorts of censorship abuses by the FBI and mass data collection and surveillance of political dissidents. But suddenly when he became Speaker of the House, he was the tie breaking vote to approve this 702 surveillance without any reforms. Tulsi Gabbard now, too, Tulsi Gabbard, too, in order to get her confirmation, it looks

[14:59] like she has to give up her opposition to the 702 surveillance program. How is it that the security state, because you worked in it for a long time, how are they able to put this pressure on people? I mean, I know they take you into the skiff and explain all the dangers, but is there anything more than that? Is there anything more that the security state does to pressure these politicians to flip? Yeah, the easy answer is, yeah, all they have to do is say 9-11. If you don't give a 702,

[15:32] we're going to have another 9-11, it's going to be on your shoulders. That's the easy answer. But I'll give you two anecdotes that I think will give you a more fulsome response. In the history of the FBI, they've never had a budget cut. And I mean, 100 years, they've never had a budget cut. Because especially during the J. Edgar Hoover tenure, which was 48 years, he would go before the appropriations committees every single year.

[16:04] And he would talk about the catastrophes that were going to take place if they had a budget cut. First, it was the communists, right? Then it was, or first it was the anarchists, then it was the communists, then it was the fascists, then it was the gangsters from the 30s, right? Then it was the beatniks and the drug people, then it was the anti-war protesters, then it was the African Americans. There was always some enemy that he needed to rally

[16:37] Congress against. He was always very successful. And the CIA is not blind. The CIA saw what Hoover was doing and said, that is a great idea. And so every year, in secret, because the CIA budget, the entire intelligence community budget is classified, they would go before the appropriations committees and say, communism, communism until 2001. And since then, it's been terrorism. And now it's Chinese, Russians. They don't even have to explain themselves. All they have to

[17:09] do is say these words and they get monstrous budget increases. This is something that they've become very, very good at. And especially since 9-11, it's not beneath these CIA officers to go into closed session in these committees and say, look, 3,000 people were killed on one day in 2001. You want that to happen again? If you knew what we knew, if you could see the reporting that

[17:41] we see, you wouldn't even think of voting no on our budget. I'll give you another example. I went to Afghanistan in 2011 with John Kerry. I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Now John Kerry had a long and well-known military career, right? Silver star, bronze star, purple heart. I think he had three bronze stars and a purple heart. So we go into this briefing. We had just landed

[18:17] at Bagram Air Base. We go into this briefing and it's like 11 generals from one to four stars sitting around the table and Kerry and being military guys, they have this deck prepared. So it's like slide after slide after slide on PowerPoint. We're moving here and we're moving there and we beat the Taliban here and then we saw them there and we killed them and we drove them back and it was all bullshit. We come out of that briefing and Kerry says to me,

[18:50] my God, we may actually win this thing. And I said, no, we're not going to win this thing. I said, Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. That's it. The Taliban controls the rest of the country. I said, this is the same briefing they've been giving since 2002. We're not going to win, but this is how you keep interest on Capitol Hill. This is how you keep your budgets high. This is how you get Congress to say, well, for me personally, I'd like to cut the budget,

[19:23] but 9-11 and I don't want to be blamed for the next one. And then that's the end of the debate. I really think so much has changed recently and just the views of these security state agencies has changed among the left and the right. I grew up in a liberal household, opposition to Dick Cheney, the Neocons, the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay abuses, that was all a staple of left liberal discourse at the time. And as a result,

[19:57] there was heavy skepticism toward the CIA and the security state. Unlike when you revealed the torture program in 2007, though, polls show now consistently that liberals adore the security state. And it's the political right actually that is skeptical of it. And you could really see this all the time on TV. John Brennan and Jim Clapper are always on CNN and MSNBC. They're on TV actually more than the Kardashians. They're paid consultants. Yeah, they're paid consultants for CNN and MSNBC. Yeah, they're basically influencers at this point.

[20:29] And a mask off moment really happened this fall. It was when Kamala Harris was campaigning for president. She spent the last weeks of her campaign with the Cheneys talking about how the Cheney family embodies American values like the rule of law and respect for the Constitution. That's what the Cheneys are famous for. And so history has kind of been memory-hold, and there's been this kind of radical realignment on all these issues involving the security state. Why do you think this is? When I was in college, I was taught that the election,

[21:04] the presidential election of 1932 was a watershed election, watershed in that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party flipped sides, right? The Republicans had been the party of Lincoln, the party of liberalism, and the Democrats had been the Southerners, the conservatives, the anti-labor party that flipped in 1932. I think that it's flipped back again, not all the way, but in terms of populism. And it didn't happen just in one election.

[21:36] It was more paced than it was in 1932, to the point where now you have not just a majority of union households, but two-thirds of union households voting for Donald Trump. You have the Democratic Party supporting and endorsing the national security state, the CIA, the FBI, NSA, DARPA, this god-awful Section 702 of the FISA Act. And you have Republicans,

[22:08] very conservative Republicans, like Thomas Massie, for example, or Rand Paul saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, we're just voluntarily giving up our civil liberties here. Is this really something that we want to do? Why are no Democrats asking that question? And then you make a very good point. I decided not to vote for Kamala Harris when she actively sought and then received the endorsement of the Cheney family. I actually sent an email to the campaign that I'm sure nobody read. And I said, this is not a brag. This is something

[22:42] that we should be ashamed of. I would be ashamed to have the support of Dick Cheney. I think Dick Cheney is a monster. And so I think that we're in the midst of this odd political realignment. I've seen a handful of op-eds talking about it, but mostly from the labor perspective. I don't like it at all because it gives traditional progressives like me nowhere to go. I mean, really the only place I can go is to the Green Party or maybe to the Libertarians,

[23:15] but they have their own wackadoo wing as well. So what do you do? Where do you go? I'm at the point where I made a joke to a friend of mine the other day. I'm an equal opportunity hater. I hate everybody. Why is there nowhere that a progressive can go and feel welcome? It's certainly not the Democratic Party. What do you think explains this realignment, though? I'm curious. I have my own theory. I think it has to do with, among other things,

[23:46] Russiagate, when Trump had the surprise victory in 2016 that completely shocked the establishment. And John Brennan and others who presented this Steele dossier off as some sort of accurate intelligence when it was a total fraud. And they based this entire campaign against them. And this is when they really, I think, elevated these TV, these intelligence officials into TV stars in the League of Kim Kardashian. These people like John Brennan and Jim Clapper.

[24:18] But I'm wondering what your view is on this. When did this realignment take place? I think it began very slowly in 1993 with the inauguration of Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton was a part of this thing that the Democratic DS something, whatever it was. But anyways, it was an attempt to move the Democratic Party to the center, even though it's always been a right of center party. But it specifically began

[24:48] to embrace Wall Street and to embrace a more activist and more militarist foreign policy. Remember, it was Bill Clinton that attacked Yugoslavia. We had no beef with Yugoslavia. And not only did we attack it, but we occupied it and then broke it up into, what, a half a dozen different countries or so. That was a Democratic decision. That was a Democratic policy goal was to break up Yugoslavia. I was serving in Greece at the time. Greece is an Orthodox Christian country, as was Serbia. Is Serbia? And I mean,

[25:24] we almost, the Greeks were talking about withdrawing from NATO because of that war. So it began really with Bill Clinton. But then when Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House, he pushed the Republican Party farther to the right, which in turn pushed the Democrats farther to the right. And the whole thing just kind of became a skew. And then Barack Obama, who was supposed to be the great savior of the left was never left. You know, there was

[25:55] a great book written by John Holloman and Mark Halperin about the 2012 election. It was a follow on to their book about the 2008 election. And there were two things that Obama said that were just stunning to me, quoted in that book. One, he was talking about the drone program. And he said, I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people. Well, again, that's not a brag. You're killing people who've never been charged with a crime,

[26:26] right? That's, that's not the American way. And the second thing he said was, very matter of fact, he said, I never told, I never told anybody I was a liberal. It's like the jokes on you, American voter, ha, hope and change suckers. And that's, that's when I came to realize there's a real change underway, and I'm not a part of it. And, and then with the election of, of Donald Trump, I mean, Hillary Clinton was

[27:00] as conservative, as neoconservative a candidate as the Democrats could possibly have nominated. Not only was she in the Obama mold, but she was very much in line with her husband, and maybe even more militarist than her husband. You were gonna say something. You had Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan talking about as early as 2014 that they were going to endorse her that she embodies all the politics that they love and confronting Russia and being hawkish toward the Middle East and just spreading the United States

[27:34] hegemony all over the world. That's exactly right. And Kagan is particularly dangerous in that he advises these administrations of both parties. You know, there's a famous story too about Richard Pearl. Kagan and Richard Pearl and Crystal and all these guys from Pentagon during the Bush administration, they all worked for Senator Scoop Jackson in the 1970s in the 1980s. Scoop Jackson was a very conservative, very militarist Democrat from Washington state, and he ran for president in 1976. He was one of the most ardent Zionists on

[28:09] Capitol Hill. Then they sort of, when he died, they all sort of broke apart and most of them went into Republican think tanks. But Richard Pearl never changed his party affiliation. He's still a Democrat today. Well, there's this famous story that on the 12th of September, 2001, he went to the White House and he told Vice President Cheney, you know we have to attack Iraq, right? And that's when the whole idea was planted, that seed was planted, that

[28:41] whether Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11 or not was irrelevant. This was our chance to take him out. And the Democrats embraced that same policy. I want to switch gears for a moment and just talk about something that happened this week, which I think is very relevant to what we're talking about today. It involves Trump. He revoked the security clearance of 51 intelligence officials who signed on to this famous Hunter Biden laptop letter. And I just think it's important

[29:14] to review what happened here. And I'll go by Michael Morel's testimony, who I imagine you worked with in counterterrorism at the CIA. The whole time I was at the CIA. Well, he testified to a House committee last year and he explained the origins of this letter, which 51 intelligence officials signed, which turned out to be disinformation. All the claims that they made were, in fact, disinformation. And so basically there was this New York Post story which had damaging information about Joe Biden, his campaign and his family involving corruption and Ukraine

[29:50] and his son Hunter sitting on the board of this company, Burisma. And the reporting had been done based on Hunter Biden's laptop. And immediately these 51 intelligence officials signed this letter claiming that this laptop and the New York Post story were Russian disinformation. And it turns out that Michael Morel, one of the leading authors of the letter, when he gave testimony, he said that the Biden administration under secretary or the Biden campaign under secretary or now secretary, Anthony Blinken directed him to write this letter

[30:23] and to organize it. And they claimed that this New York Post story was Russian disinformation, had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and they hand fed this to Natasha Bertrand, who is one of their loyal stenographers who published it in Politico. And it was very consequential because Joe Biden would then reference it at the next debate. And they used this Politico story by Natasha Bertrand based on this letter to censor the New York Post on Facebook and Twitter. You could not share this letter. And the New York Post, one of the

[30:57] oldest newspapers in the country, was kicked off of that platform. And it obviously had consequences on the election. We'll never know how much. But what did you make of that event? And what do you make of Trump's decision to revoke those security claims? Right. I just wrote about this yesterday on my sub-stack. And I wrote about it four years ago as well. I believe very strongly that if you are a former CIA officer, NSA,

[31:30] NSC, and you've got security clearances, you absolutely positively should not be talking to the media. Period. Number one. So I thought when Donald Trump was first elected president that he should have revoked their security clearances. It's almost impossible to remain unbiased if you've got a clearance and you have contracts with the intelligence community

[32:00] and you have a contract with the media. Because again, it's this attitude that, well, I'm special. I have access to information you don't have access to. But boy, if you could see what I see, you would know that I'm telling the truth. I have the inside track. That's all bullshit. I say this in my sub-stack too. I know literally every single one of the 51 signatories personally. I know every single one of them. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them are morons.

[32:32] Some of them are good-hearted, patriotic, faithful people. Some are self-serving idiots who want nothing more than to make millions and millions of dollars because of their past experience. So it's a whole mix of people. But you are absolutely right. And you know, they try to cover themselves. If you read that letter carefully, they don't say ever the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. They said it bears all the hallmarks of a

[33:03] Russian disinformation operation. Now at the CIA, I went through the same analytic training that they went through. And they teach us to use qualifiers like that so that they can say, well, if you say, hey, you said that this Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. They said, no, no, no. We say it looked like it could be Russian disinformation. It's very disingenuous. But this time they were a little too smart for their own good and they got burned. You make

[33:33] a very important point too if I can wrap it up with this. The New York Post was wronged by Twitter and by Facebook and other platforms because you were not permitted to share that story about the Hunter Biden laptop. You were not permitted because these 51 intelligence community geniuses said that it was Russian disinformation. And what is that but propaganda? Just very quickly, this will be my last question actually. So how should the

[34:08] intelligence community feel now about Trump? As I mentioned earlier, it looks like Tulsi Gabbard at least in public has withdrawn her criticisms of Section 702. I don't know if she still has the same skepticism that she still had for the security state. She's likely to occupy a very powerful position within it. So how should the intelligence community feel now about Trump? Did you think that he actually represents a threat to them, to the so-called deep state as it's called? No, I don't think anybody could be a threat to

[34:42] the deep state and get elected. I love Tulsi Gabbard. I think she's great. I'm not I'm not yet convinced that she has the votes and I'll tell you what, I'm really hoping that she flipped on 702 just to convince enough Republicans to support her nomination so that she can clear the confirmation process. And then once she becomes the DNI say, oh, you know what, on second thought, I think 702 is a serious breach of our civil liberties

[35:16] and I'm opposed to it. Now that would be great, but I've been in Washington long enough to know that people do what they do usually in self-interest or out of self-interest. John Ratcliffe is going to be the new CIA director. He's probably going to be approved unanimously or almost unanimously. He's got he was very briefly the acting director of national intelligence in Trump's first term. He was a congressman from Texas. He was a member of the armed services committee, a member of the intelligence committee.

[35:50] There's no indication that he's a CIA rebel or that he's going to dismantle, you know, the deep state or he's going to harness the or reign in, I should say, the CIA. There's no indication of that at all. There's an indication that he's a Trump loyalist, which is great. But when you've got when you've got foreign policy hawks, like Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State and Pete Hegseth as the presumptive Secretary of Defense, you know, nobody's going to dismantle

[36:26] anything in those two departments. Why would the CIA be any different? I hope that Congress finally comes around on some of these issues. And I will say that ever since Ed Snowden told us that the that the government was spying on us in violation of US law and in violation of NSA's charter, I might add, ever since he told us, there's been some incremental movement, especially in the House of Representatives, to rein that in. Now 702, of course, is part of

[36:58] the FISA Act. The FISA Act was passed in, I think it was October, October of 2001. And every year, is that right? Well, they retro they passed it to retroactively legalize the illegal spying, the legal unconstitutional spying that they were doing in the New York Times. Right. That's right. So every year, a handful more people, mostly Republicans, oppose 702. Now,

[37:30] Snowden gave us his revelations, what, 11 and a half years ago. And he says that this is a defeat, that we haven't, we haven't legalized safeties for American citizens, and that 702 is still a law in the books. So he thinks that that's a defeat. I'm maybe a little bit more optimistic that eventually we'll get there, but it's been over a decade. You know, when I said I had one final question for you,

[38:03] actually lied, I have one more that you just reminded me of, because there was something very interesting in those Snowden revelations that I don't think gets discussed enough, but I think is very relevant today because Trump did what Biden did not do, refused to do. He put pressure on the Israelis to negotiate a ceasefire. And it brings up the question of what the relationship between the Trump administration and the foreign government of Israel will be like, and it will be more the same, or if it will be different. One of the things that Snowden

[38:35] revealed was discussions between the NSA talking about Israel. And you know, we're always told that there are ally, there are strategic ally, but the view inside the intelligence community is actually very different. They view them, in fact, as one of our biggest strategic threats on a number of fronts. So you were in the CIA, and I've heard you speak about this a little bit before, but can you just give some context for this? What was it that you saw when you were there?

[39:06] The Israelis are not our friends, period. I can't say that any more strongly. The Israelis are not our friends in terms of the world of intelligence. You know, one of the things that that analysts do at the CIA is they liaise with foreign intelligence services all the time, all the time. Not a week went by through my entire career that I wasn't briefing or debriefing some foreign intelligence

[39:37] officer. All the way up to the heads of foreign services, prime ministers, presidents, in more than one case, a king. This idea of sharing intelligence is fundamental to the success of the CIA. Israeli intelligence officers are not permitted inside the CIA, period. They're not permitted because every time they come, they come with a gift. Oh, we want to bring you this gift, and the gift is packed with batteries and microphones and transmitting devices.

[40:09] And we had to say, look, you guys have to stop trying to plant bugs under our tables in the conference room every time you come into the building. And so now we meet them off-site. They just can't be trusted to come into the building. Number one. Number two, um, the very first foreign liaison briefing I ever did was for the Israelis. I had only been at the CIA about four months, and I was part of a group of about a dozen analysts that met

[40:40] the Mossad rep and the Shin Bet rep to talk about Iraq and the possibility that Iraq might invade Kuwait. This is in 1990. And so because I was the junior most analyst, I was the last one to speak, and everybody went around the table one at a time. And I was an over-CI employee, so I used my true name as I was instructed to do. So finally it came to my turn, and I said, I'm John Kiriakou, and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein and what we expect

[41:14] him to do in the next several months. And the Shin Bet officer looked up at me over his glasses like this, and he says to me, you are Jewish. And I said, I am not recruitable. Don't even think about it. And I gave the briefing. And afterwards I was furious. And one of my colleagues laughed, and he said, they have done that to every single one of us, every one of us. My third point.

[41:48] I sat next to a guy for years, awesome analyst, great human being, and he married a woman in our office, right? He was also a CIA officer, of course. So they get assigned to the American consulate in Jerusalem. Now they are overt employees. So they go to the Israelis and they say, we're with the CIA. We're not here to work against you. She's going to be working on

[42:20] Palestinian issues. And I'm going to study Arabic at the university. Okay, that's literally the honest of God's truth. There's nothing covert, there's nothing, nothing that should have raised Israeli hackles. So they had been there for months. They get invited to the ambassador's Christmas party in Tel Aviv at the embassy. They go to the embassy. They come back home, Jerusalem, which is like 30, 40 minute drive. And all of their living room furniture had

[42:54] been rearranged. All of it. So that's just a message from Assad. The message is, fuck you. We know who you are. And we can mess with you anytime we want. So it's not very nice. It kind of makes you mad. And then you go to the embassy and you write it up and say, hey, these jerks, they broke into the house. They rearranged all the furniture. Okay, do Americans ever do this sort of thing to Israelis? Is this reciprocal? No, this is never, never, never, ever. No, never. It's just a mean spirited thing to do.

[43:28] So then a year passes and they go to the Christmas party at the ambassador's residence and they come home and people had taken shits in all of their toilets and then didn't flush. So it's insulting. It's mean spirited. And you know, you got to think about your safety. They easily broke into your house. They took dumps all over the place. You know, they have keys apparently, or they can pick the lock easily. Did they plant

[43:58] cameras, listening devices? Probably. You don't know. And then at the very end of their two-year tour, the ambassador throws a going away party for them. When they go home after the going away party, somebody had gone into the house and they cut the tail off of the dog and they wrapped it in gauze and the dog was whimpering and hiding under the kitchen table. Is that really necessary? We're supposed to be allies.

[44:30] Let me ask, what was the reaction from their superiors? Did anyone complain? Yeah, and that's what happens. You go and you complain and you say, look, you know, stop doing this. Stop doing this because then we're going to have to do something in response. And they're like, all right, all right, stop doing it. But this is one other thing. I never went to Israel a single time in my CIA career. I had a choice. I was an Arab specialist. I spoke Arabic. I have a degree in Middle Eastern

[45:02] studies. So I was an Arabist. So I elected to go instead to the Arab countries. Israel was ranked as critical threat, the highest threat level, critical threat for counter-intelligence. So if you didn't absolutely have to go to Israel, you didn't go to Israel. It's just not worth the trouble. Well, what's the what's the logic then of the relationship between the CIA and Mossad? I mean, they must say, oh, well, there's some strategic benefit that we're

[45:36] getting where we'll put up with all of this behavior, you know, toward our officers. If we're getting something in return, what are we getting in return? I mean, I don't see it though, because looking right now, we're spending all sorts of resources, tens of billions of dollars that we've put into defending Israel from all of the threats that it's basically creating for itself. What's the benefit? From a CIA perspective, the benefit is counterterrorism

[46:07] and advanced technology. That's it. The rest is all politics. All politics and it all plays out on Capitol Hill. Yeah, critical threat for counterterrorism. So they're ranked with the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the North Koreans, the Iranians and the Israelis. Pretty crazy. That's an interesting group of countries that you listed there.

[46:38] Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Again, it was really a privilege and honor actually. I appreciate it. I hope to speak to you at some point soon. Thank you. And if you don't mind, I want to plug this really fun TV show that I have now called CIA Declassified. It's on unified television. It's huge separate shows. One, we talk with international whistleblowers, people from around the world who have blown the whistle on a variety of different issues. And then CIA Declassified is something that's

[47:09] not being done anywhere else. We take these declassified CIA documents and then we talk about these major historical international developments that they surround, things like the 1953 coup in Iran, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the Kennedy assassination, the Berlin Wall, things like that. And what the CIA was talking about in real time is these things were happening. So it's fun. And I put everything I do on Substack as well.

[47:40] Well, that's very important work. And we hope that everyone goes out and supports it. Thank you very much.
