Title: CIA Whistleblower Exposes the US Security State
Show: Neutrality Studies
Date: 2025-01-26
URL: https://youtu.be/wpTnt74kYus
Duration: 47:00

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[00:00] John kyaku 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

[00:31] but thank you for those very kind words so I mean to me and to many people you are but uh we'll move past that um so I was born in in 2001 which was W right which is like day before yesterday in my mind yeah um but it was it was a very important year and and I think things radically changed that year um there was a sense afterward after 911 of course of this kind of righteous rage that kind of consumed the United States

[01:02] for many years afterward uh throughout the entire time that I was growing up and it enabled all sorts of expansions of power that were implemented in 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 du process and habius Corpus through this extraordinary rendition program and torture program which you exposed the creation of this Mass surveillance State

[01:32] uh and then ultimately this creation of this drone program to extradition assassinate people thanks to the Obama Administration and uh I I just want to ask you about your disclosures what you saw at the time uh and what caused you to come forward uh you really risked everything to confront this permanent power faction uh in Washington so so why did you do that there's no single easy answer I I want to give you just a little bit of background I'm I'm the kind of guy I've always been the

[02:04] 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 and the 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 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

[02:35] dealerships or plays the national anthem at every sporting event countries just don't do that um not to say I'm not patriotic I just don't appreciate it being forced down my throat after 911 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 I said I know right right I I I'm changing my mind with that said my patriotism is based in the rule

[03:07] of law it's based in the Constitution and I naively believed in the immediate aftermath of 911 that everybody's Patriot patriotism was based on the Constitution right that's what makes our country so great is we have this incredible Constitution um I realized I realized by halfway through 2002 into 2003 that I was just wrong that it wasn't about a love and

[03:40] 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 and that's when I first started to 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

[04:11] any circumstances in which they should be taking place and so I got to the point where you I've I've said this in interviews before but I was um I was passed over for promotion just one month after leading the capture of abuaba 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 know

[04:43] you turned down the enhanced interrogation techniques training and the chief of counterterrorism 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 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

[05:15] 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 said you know that's not a compliment right and I said oh it is to me it's a compliment they I'd rather they call me the human rights guy

[05:47] than the torturer or the monster or bloody John kiraku or whatever so you know I realized then that was in like the summer the late summer of 200 too I was going in a different way compared to most of my my colleagues I I just have a question about uh your prosecution and and your punishment for for what you did uh so you were prosecuted for your disclosures by the Obama Administration uh which

[06:17] despite having promised to hold accountable the torturers and the power abusers in the Bush Administration they he really immediately immunized them uh he said we're going to look forward and not back um 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 to be very odd given that no group of people

[06:49] leaks to the Press more than the US Security State uh 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 C can you just discuss that aspect of your prosecution oh sure you know most people don't ask me about that but I think I think this is a very important issue um

[07:20] Washington runs on leaks most of those leaks come from as you correctly pointed out the White House the Pentagon and the CIA uh 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 legal definition of of

[07:51] 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 polic 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 this respect for a

[08:23] 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 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 soap box now but I can't help myself the Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German sabur uh in the early years of the first

[08:56] world war between 197 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 cases Espionage is punishable by

[09:27] death so it's not like you know they're just slapping us down to to get us to stop talking the minimum that you can be that you can get under the Espionage Act is five years the the common punishment is 15 years so this is a very serious very heavy felony now I was charged with Espionage uh for giving an interview to ABC News and a follow-up interview to the New York Times in which I said that

[09:59] the I was torturing its prisoners that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president um 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 con itute a crime because I

[10:31] was exposing a crime so what the Obama Administration did is they secretly reopened the case against me tapped my phones uh collected my emails going back years put teams of FBI surveillance uh surveillance on me and um and came up with something else they came up with an obscure violation of the intelligence identities protection Act of 1981 I'm

[11:01] only the second American ever charged with this crime now this is one of those crimes that they just can kind of hold in a bance and if they want to use it as a weapon against somebody as a cudel 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 uh that the CIA kidnapped and sent back

[11:32] to to Egypt to be tortured I said I don't know anything about Abu Omar other than what I've read in the Washington Post he said well can you inter 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

[12:04] what about the guy that you mentioned on page 145 or whatever of your first book and I he said I think his name is John and I said Oh you mean John Doe I don't know what ever happened to him he probably retired and he's living in Virginia somewhere but I said the I said the the last name the surname so I technically violated the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 now this reporter or or author

[12:36] never made that name public so there was never any danger to this uh this officer but the justice department got me now at the same time within months the CIA director David Petraeus leaked the names of 10 covert operatives to his adulterous girl friend you're uh yeah I was just going to say he had this black book yeah uh he showed her the black book you can't show

[13:08] anybody the black book and then at the same time as well there was a disgruntled former CIA officer in in Bethesda Maryland who exposed the names of seven covert operatives on his anti-ia website the justice department didn't charge either one of them they charged me so it was a political case from the from the very beginning and you know since then well in the immediate aftermath right I right after I had gone to prison I was sentenced to 30 months I did 23 um but two FBI agents wrote to my

[13:42] attorneys and apologized and then just three weeks ago I got an email from from an FBI agent saying that he was sorry for his role in my prosecution that um at the working level nobody wanted this case but that they had been ordered to find something to charge me with by the by the more senior officials well that's 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 who

[14:13] prosecuted you was not the Bush Administration he declined to do so uh he he was a constitutional scholar and there's other people like him too uh who railed against these sorts of civil liberties abuses Mike Johnson comes to mind uh yes when I was working at system update we did an interview with him uh a couple years ago where you know he was on the head of this weaponization committee going after uh all sorts of censorship abuses by uh the FBI and mass data collection and surveillance of political dissidents uh but but suddenly

[14:46] when he became speaker of the house he was the uh tiebreaking vote to approve this 702 surveillance without any reforms uh tsy gabard now too tulsy gabard too in order to get her confirmation it looks like she has to give up her opposition to the 702 surveillance program how is it that the security State because you work 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

[15:16] there anything more than that is is there anything more that the these Security State does to to pressure these politicians to flip yeah the easy answer is yeah all they have to do is say 911 if you don't give us 702 we're going to have another 911 it's going to be on your shoulders that's that's the easy answer but I'll I'll give you two anecdotes uh that I think will give you a more fullsome response um in the history of the FBI they've

[15:47] never had a budget cut and I mean 100 years they've never had a budget cut because especially during the Jay Edgar Hoover tenure which was 48 years he would go before the Appropriations committees every single year 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 first it was the anarchists then it was the Communists then it was the the uh

[16:21] fascists then it was the gangsters from the 30s right then it was the the beatnicks 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 Congress against he was always very successful and the CIA is not blind the CIA saw what Hoover was doing and and said that is a great idea and so every year in secret because the CIA budget the entire intelligence Community budget

[16:52] is 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 do is say these words and they get monstrous budget increases um this is something that they've become very very good at and especially since 911 you know it's not beneath these

[17:25] these CIA officers to go into Clos sessioning these committees and say look you know 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 we see you wouldn't even think of of voting no on our budget I'll give you another example I went to Afghanistan in 2011 with uh John KY I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he was the chairman

[17:57] of the Foreign Relations Committee now John krey had a long and well-known um military career right Silver Star Bron star purple heart I think he had three Bron stars and a purple heart so um we go into this briefing we we had just landed at bogram Airbase we go into this briefing and it it's like 11 generals from one to four stars sitting around the table and carry and um

[18:29] being military guys they have this this deck prepared so it's like slide after slide after slide on PowerPoint you know we're moving here and we're moving there and we beat the Taliban here and then we we saw them there and we killed them we drove them back and it was all [ __ ] we come out of that briefing and Carrie says to me my God we may actually win this thing and I said no we're not going to win this thing I said cars is is the

[19:00] mayor of Cabell that's it the Taliban controls the rest of the country I said this is the same breathing 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 you know this is how you you get Congress to say well you know for me personally I'd like to cut the budget but 9911 and I don't want to be blamed for the next one and then that's the end of the

[19:31] debate I really think uh so much has changed recently and just the views of of these uh Security State agencies has changed uh you know among the left and the right I grew up in a liberal household uh you know opposition to Dick Cheney the neocons the Iraq War Guantanamo Bay abuses that was all uh you know staple of of left liberal discourse at the time and as a result there was Heavy skepticism toward the CIA and the security State um you know unlike when you revealed the torture

[20:03] 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 uh and you could really see this all the time on TV you know John Brennan and you know uh Jim Clapper are always on CNN and MSNBC they're on TV actually more they're paid Consultants yeah they're paid consultants for CNN and MSNBC yeah they're basically in influencers at this point and a Mas off moment really happened this fall it was when camela

[20:33] Harris was campaigning for president she spent the last weeks of her campaign with the chenies talking about how the Cheney family embodies American values like the rule of law and respect for the Constitution that's what the chenies are famous for um and so history's 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 um I was taught that uh that the election the

[21:04] 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 of uh populism and it didn't happen just in

[21:36] one election it was more it was more um paced than it was in 1932 to the point where now you have not just a majority of of Union households but two-thirds of Union households voting for Donald Trump you have this the uh Democratic party supporting and endorsing the National Security State the CIA the FBI NSA DARPA this God aful section 702 of the uh of the fisa act

[22:07] and you have Republicans very conservative Republicans like Thomas Massie for example or or ran 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 for kamla 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

[22:38] nobody read and I said this is not a brag this is something that we should be ashamed of I 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 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 um I don't like it at all because it it gives traditional progressives like me nowhere to go I

[23:11] mean really the only place I can go is is to the green party or maybe to the Libertarians but they have their own wacka do Wing you know as well so what do you do where do you go I 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 like why is there nowhere that that that a progressive can go and feel welcome it's certainly not the Democratic party what what do you think explains this realignment though I'm I'm curious do

[23:42] you think I mean I have my own Theory I think it has to do with uh you know among other things Russia gate when you know Trump had this surprise victory in 2016 that completely shocked the establishment and yes you know John Brennan and others who presented this steel dossier off as uh you know some sort of accurate intelligence uh when it was a total fraud and they based this entire campaign against them and this is when you know they really I think elevated these TV um you know these these intelligence officials into TV

[24:13] stars in the league of Kim Kardashian uh you know these people like John Brandon and Jim Clapper but I'm wondering what what your view is on 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 the Democratic uh with 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 um

[24:46] but it it specifically began to embrace Wall Street and to embrace um a more activist and more militarist foreign policy remember it was 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 uh that was a democratic uh decision that was Democratic policy goal was to was to break up uh Yugoslavia I was serving in Greece at

[25:17] the time Greece is an Orthodox Christian country as was Serbia is Serbia and I mean we almost the Greeks were talking about withdrawing from NATO because of that War so it began really with with Bill Clinton but but then when when n 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

[25:50] was supposed to be the great savior of the left was never left you know there was a great book written by um John hman and and um Mark Halprin uh 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

[26:21] that that's not a brag you're you're killing people who have never been charged with a crime right that's that's not the American way and the second thing he said was um very matter of factly he said I never told I never told anybody I was a liberal it's like the jokes on you American voter H hope and change suckers and that's that's when I came to realize there's a real change underway

[26:52] and I'm not a part of it and um and then with the election of of Donald Trump I mean Hillary Clinton was 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 and Robert Kagan talking about as early as 2014 that they were going to endorse her

[27:24] that that she embodies all the politics that they love and uh conf fronting Russia and being hawkish toward the Middle East and just spreading uh the United States uh hegemony all over the world that's exactly right and Kagan is particularly dangerous in that he advises administrations of both parties you know there's a famous story too about Richard Pearl um Kagan and Richard Pearl and Crystal and all these guys from the Pentagon during the Bush Administration they all worked for

[27:54] 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 Capitol Hill um then they sort of when he died they all sort of broke apart and and most of them went into Republican think tanks but Richard Pearl never changed his party affiliation he's still a Democrat today

[28:25] 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 whether Saddam Hussein had something to do with 911 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

[28:57] moment and just talk about something that happened this week which I think is very relevant to what we're talking about today uh it involves Trump he revoked the security clearance of of 51 intelligence officials who signed on to this famous Hunter Biden laptop letter and I just think it's important 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 um well he testified to a house

[29:27] 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 uh and so basically there was this new New York Post story which had damaging information about Joe Biden his campaign and his family involving corruption in uh Ukraine and his son Hunter sitting on the board of this company barisma uh and the reporting had been done based on Hunter Biden's labt top and immediately

[29:59] these 51 intelligence officials signed this letter claiming that this labtop and the New York Post story were Russian disinformation and it turns out that Michael Morel one of the leading authors of the letter uh when he gave testimony he he said that the Biden Administration under secret or the Biden campaign under secretary uh or now secretary Anthony blink directed him to write this letter um and to organize it and they claimed that this New York Post story was Russian disinformation had all the harm

[30:29] marks of Russian disinformation and they hand-fed this to Natasha B 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 political 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 oldest newspapers in the country was kicked off of that platform and it

[31:02] obviously had consequences on the election um we'll never know how how much um but but what did you make of that event and what do you make of Trump's decision to revoke those security clearances I I just wrote about this yesterday on my substack um and I wrote about it four years ago as well um I believe very strongly that if you are a former CIA officer offer NSA NSC and you've got security clearances you

[31:33] absolutely positively should not be talking to the media period number one so I I thought when Donald Trump was first elected president that he should have revoked their security clearances um it's almost impossible to remain unbiased if you've got a clearance and you have contract with the intelligence community and you have a contract with the media because again you know it's

[32:03] this attitude that well I'm 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 [ __ ] um I know I say this in my substack 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 some of them are good-hearted

[32:35] 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 um but you are absolutely right and you know they Tred 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 Russian disinformation operation now at

[33:05] 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 very disingenuous but this time they were a little too smart for their own good and they got burned you make a very important Point too if I can wrap it up

[33:36] with this um the New York Post was wronged uh by by Twitter and by Facebook and other platforms because you were not permitted to share that story about the hunter bid 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 uh so how

[34:07] should the the intelligence Community feel now about Trump as as I mentioned earlier uh it looks like Tulsi gabard at least in public has uh withdrawn her criticisms of section 702 I don't know if she still has the same skepticism that she still had uh for the security State um she's likely to occupy a very powerful position within it uh so how should the intelligence Community feel now about Trump do you think that he actually represents a threat to them to the so-called deep State as it's called

[34:39] no I don't I don't I don't think anybody could be a threat to the Deep State and get and get elected um I love Telsa Gabbert I think she's great I'm not yet convinced that she has the votes and I'll tell you what I'm really hoping that she slipped 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 on second thought I think

[35:13] 702 is a serious uh breach of our civil liberties and I'm opposed to it now that 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 um John Ratcliffe is is going to be the new CIA director he's probably going to be approved unanimously or almost unanimously uh he's got he was very briefly the act acting Director of National Intelligence in Trump's first

[35:43] term he was a congressman from Texas he was a member of the armed services committee a member of the intelligence committee um 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 or reign in I should say the 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

[36:16] Rubio as the Secretary of State and Pete hegf as the presumptive Secretary of Defense you know nobody's going to dismantle anything in those two departments why would the CIA be any different I I hope 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

[36:48] add ever since he told us there's been some incremental movement especially in the House of Representatives to Reign that in now 702 of course this part of 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 revealed in the New York Times right that's right so every year a

[37:20] handful more people mostly Republicans oppose 702 now Snowden gave us his Revelations what 11 and a half years ago and he he says that this is a defeat that we haven't we haven't you know legalized um safeties for American citizens and that 702 is still a law on the books so he he's he thinks that

[37:51] 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 I actually lied I have one more that you just reminded me of because sure 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 uh did what Biden did not do and refused to do he put pressure on the Israelis uh to negotiate a ceasefire

[38:23] and it brings up the question of of what the relationship between the Trump admin rtion and the foreign government of Israel will be like you or if it be more the same or if it will be different one of the things that Snowden revealed was discussions between the NSA talking about Israel and you know we're always told that they are Ally they're our strategic Ally but the view inside the intelligence Community is actually very different they're they view them in fact as one of our biggest strategic threats on a number of fronts uh so you were in

[38:56] the CIA and i' 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 um the Israelis are not our friends period I can't say that any more strongly the israelies are not our friends in terms of the world of intelligence um you know one of the things that that analysts do at the CIA is they leaz with foreign intelligence

[39:26] 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 officer um all the way up to the heads of foreign Services Prime Ministers presidents in more than one uh case a king um this this idea of sharing intelligence is fundamental to the success of the CIA Israeli intelligence officers are not permitted inside the CIA period

[39:58] they're not permitted because every time they'd come they come with a gift oh we want to bring you this gift and the gift is packed with batteries and and microphones and you know transmitting devices and we had to say look you guys have to stop trying to you know plant bugs under our tables in the conference room every time you come into the building and so now we meet them uh offsite they just can't be trusted uh to come into the building number one number two um the very first foreign liaison

[40:28] briefing I ever did was uh 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 that met uh the the Madre and the um Shin betre to talk about um Iraq and uh 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

[41:00] um I was an over CIA 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 kiraku and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein and what we expect him to do in the next several months and the shinb 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

[41:32] 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 I sat next to a guy for years awesome analyst great great human being and he married a woman in our office right who was also C CIA officer of course so they get assigned to um the American

[42:05] Consulate in Jerusalem now they are overt employees so they 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 uh be working on 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 four

[42:37] 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 um all of their living room furniture had been rearranged all of it so that's just a message from Assad the message is [ __ ] you we know who you are and we can mess with you anytime we want so you know it's not very nice uh it it kind of

[43:10] makes you mad and then you go to the Embassy and you write it up and say hey they these jerks they broke into the house they rearranged all the furniture okay do do Americans ever do this sort of thing to Israelis this reciprocal no this is never never never ever no never it's just a mean-spirited thing to do so then a year passes and they go to uh the Christmas party at the ambassador's residence and they come home and people had taken shits in all of their

[43:40] toilets and and then didn't flush so it's insulting it's mean-spirited and you know you got to think about your safety they 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 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

[44:11] home after the going away party somebody had gone into the house and they cut the TA the tail off of the dog and they wrapped it in gauze and the dog was whimpering and hiding under the kitchen table is is that really necessary we're supposed to be allies let me ask what was the reaction uh from their superiors did anyone complain what yeah and that's what happens um you go and you complain and you say look you know stop doing this

[44:43] 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 and then one other thing um I never went to Israel a single time in my CIA career um I had a choice I was an Arab specialist I spoke Arabic I I was I have a degree in in Middle Eastern studies so I was an arabist so I elected to go instead to the Arab countries um Israel was ranked as critical threat the

[45:13] highest Threat Level critical threat for counterintelligence 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 uh relationship between the CIA and mad I mean they must say oh well there's some Strategic Benefit that we're getting we'll put up with all of this yeah uh Behavior you know toward our officers uh if we're getting something

[45:44] 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 uh tens of billions of dollars that we've put into uh defending Israel from all of the threats that it's basically creating for itself so what what's the benefit from a CIA perspective the benefit is um counterterrorism and advanced technology that's it the rest is all politics all politics and it all plays

[46:16] out on Capitol Hill yeah critical threat for counterterrorism so they're ranked with the Chinese the Russians the Cubans the north Kore Koreans the Iranians and the Israelis pretty crazy that's an interesting group of of countries that you listed there yeah all right well well thank you so much for for joining me today again it was really a privilege uh and honor actually so uh you know I hope to speak to you at some point soon thank you and

[46:48] if you don't mind um uh I want to plug uh this this really fun TV show that I have now called CIA Declassified on un unified television it's two separate shows one we talk with International whistleblowers you know people from around the world who have who have blown the whistle on a variety of different issues and then CIA Declassified is something that's not being done anywhere else we we take these Declassified CIA documents and then we talk about these major historical International developments that they surround things

[47:20] like you know the the 1953 coup in Iran the overthrow of Salvador yende the Kennedy assassin ination um the Berlin Wall things like that and uh and what the CIA was talking about in real time as these things were happening so it's fun and I put everything I do on on substack as well well that's very important work and we hope that everyone goes out and supports it um thank you very much
