Title: Ex-CIA Spy John Kiriakou: Hunting Terrorists, Torture, Guantanamo Bay......and Going to JAIL
Show: Eyes Wide Open (Conor Ryan)
Date: 2025-01-19
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RkpK67B9mQ
Duration: 1:22:11

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[00:00] we needed to find and kill Osama Bin Laden as quickly as we possibly could I needed 36 people I needed millions of dollars in cash I needed guns ammunition um secure Communications night vision goggles stun grenade that I was made a told FBI agent Ali sufan during an interrogation that MTAR he actually laughed when he said it he said you don't know who MTAR is um shanon airport in the west of there was rumors

[00:31] that it was used as a staging post for rendition are you aware of anything I was arrested and charged with three counts of Espionage the President says well now what do we do and everybody turns and looks at me Life in principle never ceases to hold the meaning for each and every person [Music]

[01:42] John Kaku thank you so much for joining me I can't tell you how I am how excited I am to get an opportunity to speak to you thank you so much for having me it's a pleasure my pleasure um okay let's start from the beginning there's two things I want to know first of all what characteristics and attributes that you have that made you interesting to the CIA and how were you recruited I think there were several things in

[02:12] retrospect um I had an advanced degree and I was young I finished graduate school when I was 24 years old um I spoke a relatively difficult foreign language Greek at the time and um and I I mean it sounds kind of silly to say it but I had a passion for for uh Public Service I only considered jobs in public service and so I thought oh one of these days I'll end up on Capitol Hill or in the Foreign Service

[02:43] and then when I was in Graduate School uh my advisor who happened to be a psychiatrist a very well-known really an eminent psychiatrist Dr Gerald post um he's the one that recruited me into the C CIA he he was a CIA officer under cover as a uh as a university professor and uh he recruited me to work in the office that he had created at the CIA the office of leadership analysis so that's how I got in I and I got there at

[03:16] the age of uh 25 I was young and eager um I had a degree in Middle Eastern studies and a master's degree in legislative affairs but my focus was on foreign policy and analysis so I was a I was a good fit for that what what attributes um were you particularly exceptionally intelligent were you mathematical were you analytical like I when I think about a CIA operative I think of somebody of exceptional

[03:46] intelligence you you would have to be I I'm I'm I guess more intelligent than the norm I suppose but I remember taking a a battery of of exams and then being shown my results and among people in the CIA I was slightly smarter than the average CIA officer when I transferred to operations I tested much smarter than the average operations officer but among analysts I was you know I was just to

[04:17] the right of the of the norm so you're in the CIA it's the 19 late 80s 1990s uh you're uh you you have a meteoric rise yeah it was very quick um and you were posted you were doing you were studying Saddam Hussein if I remember correctly correct reporting in the administration reporting to HW yes um you know this was the this was the nice thing about the office of leadership analysis which no longer

[04:48] exists by the way is that this was a this was a an organization an office that was mandated by the White House and that's why it was created because the president the vice president the National Security adviser wanted psychological insights into the people that they were either dealing with or opposing as in the case of Saddam Hussein or let's say the Iranian uh religious leadership and so um most of what we wrote went directly to the

[05:20] principles the the president the vice president the National Security adviser the secretaries of state and defense their deputies and then just a small handful with people on the National Security Council it was a very small audience that we were targeting um so the gulf Gulf War I breaks out um and you have to go you had to go to the White House at one stage didn't you right what happened you know on on June 30th 1990 a colleague of mine

[05:54] wrote a paper saying that he believed Saddam Hussein was going to invade kuwa wa he got real push back on this paper internally because everybody else believed that Saddam would cross the border into Kuwait and just take a very thin very narrow strip of land along the border that um that included the southernmost tip of the Rhea oil field now the Ruma oil

[06:24] field was 90 something per in Iraq and just the southern most bit of it crossed the border into Kuwait while the kuwaitis were slant Drilling and they were stealing the oil they slant drilled underneath the border and they were essentially stealing Iraqi oil that was the Iraqis reason for going in so everybody believed most everybody believed that Saddam would cross the border two kilometers take that little strip and that would be the end of it

[06:57] and um that's not what my colleague predicted so what we ended up doing was just a couple of days before The Invasion we asked the US defense atache in Baghdad to drive south to the Border just drive get in the car and drive and then drive back to Baghdad and just type us a cable and tell us what he saw and what he saw was literally the entire Iraqi military moving south to the Border well if you're going to take

[07:28] two kilometers of Sandy Wasteland you're not going to send your entire military to the Border well that that was clear that he was that made it clear to us that he was going to invade all of Kuwait which he did so what you referred to a moment ago um that Invasion took place on August the 2nd 1990 honestly I'm not overstating it but that was a day that changed my life because I

[07:59] was 25 years old I got to the office early and just as I arrived my boss said don't take off your jacket we're going to the White House I had never been to the White House other than as a tourist and so we got in a car the driver took us to the White House we were escorted into the Oval Office it was the president the vice president the National Security adviser the director of the CIA my boss and me

[08:31] and that was it so when the president sits down in his you know Wing back chair that is famous on television um the vice president sat in the other Wing back my boss and I sat on a couch and the President says well now what do we do and everybody turns and looks at me and it shook me for a moment and then I got my bearings and I said well here's what we're up against and

[09:02] everything that I had prepared in those previous you know four and a half weeks came out it was exciting and it was scary but it made a name for me and I was lucky too in the respect I was lucky in a couple of respects I was lucky because that Invasion took place right at the point where I felt like I knew what I was doing um and I was just it was blind luck that when I

[09:34] was hired I was put on the Iraq desk and when I when I very gently complained at one point that you know sometimes I would go a whole day and not a single cable would come in I would just kind of sit there all day like well now what do I do because nothing ever happened in Iraq it was the same cabinet since since the 1968 Revolution um our Embassy had like four

[10:04] people in it the newspapers didn't cover Iraq NSA the Pentagon didn't really have any interest in Iraq and so Al even being formed at this stage no Al-Qaeda came five years later Al-Qaeda came in response to the American response to the invasion of Kuwait the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait Al-Qaeda came about because the US sent so many troops and so many planes to

[10:36] Saudi Arabia that we essentially occupied all of Saudi Arabia's military bases and Osama Bin Laden said that he wanted to force the US military out of what he called the land of the two holy mosques Mecca and Medina and so he began by using propaganda saying that female soldiers were driving in violation of Saudi law that American soldiers were having sex in Mecca right in front of the Holy cabba that women were walking

[11:08] around the military bases topless or naked none of this silliness was true uh but it resonated with Saudi citizens especially with the very religious ones and Al-Qaeda was born around 1984 1985 They carried out their first attack that was called the OPM sang bombing um OPM sang was a joint military base between the US Army and the Saudi National Guard sang Saudi Arabian National Guard and

[11:40] um to the best of my recollection it killed five people none of them were Americans they were all Third Country Nationals I think most of them were Indians that happened to be working at the base but this shook us because this this is where I mean I did all of my grocery shopping at at OPM sang there were hundreds of Americans there at any given time um there was a movie theater and a bowling alley and you know a mess hall and you could just go spend the day I we would go do dry cleaning and

[12:10] grocery shopping and whatever so for them to have been able to infiltrate it and set off a number of bombs that killed you know killed five and wounded dozens was was shaking to us this was 1994 1995 time period that was in '95 yeah happened to be in Bahrain when it took place and I I couldn't believe that it it was a domestic Saudi terrorist group but that's how it started the Saudis cracked down hard on it and they

[12:41] arrested almost two dozen men they all made identical Confessions on Saudi television which of course you know told me that they were that they were coerced and uh and they were almost immediately beheaded but uh Bin Laden got away um fled to Sudan and then later on from Sudan to Afghanistan and the rest is history and the history is so so before 911 in July and we'll skip forward here

[13:14] you notified you were in the CIA you you came across information that indicated Al-Qaeda were planning something big Dick Clark the former head of the defense defense secretary in the Clinton Administration also was trying to get through to the Bush Administration and he was indicating something similar a couple of months later we have 91 and the rest of course it changed the entire history of the world the whole world if I was an American I mean and of course Americans

[13:46] were Furious and Clinton has spoken about this and why were the CIA and why was the Bush Administration not paying more attention to Al yeah literally volumes of books have been written on this and I'm not sure even with those books if we will ever come to a national consensus I can tell you what I saw um I wish I could take credit for saying that you know that an attack was going to happen that that came from George Tennant who was the CIA director at the time kofer black who was the cia's um

[14:19] counter terrorism Center Director and Dick Clark as you mentioned dick dick had a number of different jobs um in senior level jobs in government he spent the entirety of the Clinton Administration as the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council um he maintained that job very briefly under George W bush and then was just pushed out they didn't like him and it's because dick was a truth tell um

[14:50] but they saw dick as a troublemaker the the George W bush people were not interested in terrorism in fact condalisa right told George and dick that they were overestimating the threat to the United States that the real threat to the United States was China and that we needed to focus on China not on these Arabs who don't even have a country right well George and Dick were the ones who were right and W and

[15:21] condesa rice were the ones who were wrong now with that said this was the biggest intelligence failure in America americ history and I don't when I say intelligence I don't mean just a CIA failure I mean CIA FBI NSA State Department defense department everybody failed the Congressional oversight committees failed everybody failed so there's plenty of blame to go around but in my view the biggest failure was the failure of the CIA and the FBI to

[15:53] cooperate with one another on these cases for example the CIA knew that the hijackers were in the United States they didn't tell the FBI because they thought they could recruit some of these hijackers to in to inform on AMA Bin Laden they didn't know that an attack was imminent but they knew that these dangerous guys were in the United States they didn't tell they know they were in Flight School John no they didn't know they were in flight school and that's a major FBI failure because

[16:25] the F the FBI didn't tell the the CIA hey we have information that these very specific people these named people are threats to the United States we can't find them well the CIA knew where they were were hide not hiding where they were living you know San Diego Florida Florida yeah um we didn't know they were in flight school but that's what I mean when I say failure there was this breakdown in communication if the two organizations had had worked together they could have

[16:56] developed this information like did it not to anybody at any level even the clerk at the flight school that these guys were very specific in that they told their instructors we want to learn how to take off and fly but we don't want to learn how to land well I got my pilot's license Landing is the hardest part but it's the most important part so if somebody were to come up to me and say I want to learn how to fly but I don't care about learning how to land

[17:27] that would be very alerting to me and if these guys happen to be foreign Nationals you know with expired visas in some cases my first call would be to the FBI and nobody thought to do that I remember traveling around the United States I was all over the place flew in and out in and back from there was no security no there was no Homeland Security there was nothing um there was a lack of days I mean it has changed

[17:57] dramatically since that time period of course um but I I sometimes I wonder are we doing hindsight bias here looking back um but then again when you think about in 1992 the Twin Towers there was an attack on the Twin Towers as well so it's not completely Fantastical to to wonder you know um well and I'll tell you another thing um before 911 this was 1997 um I would was instructed to

[18:30] support an operation a uh a domestic operation and I was instructed to work with the FBI I think I can say it was in New York so two FBI agents when I arrived I just took the train up to New York two FBI agents picked me up and they said they wanted to give me a tour of New York I said oh no no I I've been to New York a thousand million times my brother lives here I said I I don't need a tour they said now we're going to give you a special tour and I remember driving up

[19:02] First Avenue and they pointed at this unmarked storefront that you would pass a thousand times and never pay any attention to it said see that storefront that's the headquarters for the Hezbollah cell in New York and they're planning a giant attack I said well what the hell are you guys doing why don't you bust down the door and grab them he said no no we're waiting for them to sort of hang themselves I never heard of any arrests ever made

[19:32] in New York of Hezbollah operatives now if you can identify the actual location where these guys are meeting and presumably conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack don't you think you might want to do something about it well you might bug the place even like I mean at least bug it exactly or recruit somebody to penetrate it so so 911 happens where were you on 911 I was in CIA headquarters and that

[20:03] was that was kind of an important day for me even before the attacks because kofer black and I again kofer is the was the director of the counterterrorism center kofer and I had an had an appointment with Ki rice at nine o'clock to go over something that's very quaint at this point so the government printing office the GPO it's up on Capitol Hill it prints all government reports the government printing office was going to

[20:33] print imminently a historic a historical volume called foreign policy of the United States 1947 to 1969 Greece turkey Cyprus okay it's no longer in print and of the thousands of cables Declassified cables that were included in that book were the names of

[21:05] three Cooperators with the CIA who were still alive so we were going to go ask coni rice if she would order that the three mentions of those names be redacted that was it because we didn't want you know somebody to put two and two together together and say Hey you know these guys oh one's still alive three are still alive whatever they're all dead now and I mean this you're in it's it's the 1940s the 1950s so enough

[21:37] time has passed it doesn't matter anymore but we had an appointment to ask her to to just redact these three names so I walked over to cofer's office to tell him that the car was waiting to pick us up at the West entrance and 2001 was before we had the ability to watch TV on our computers that came a year later so several of us had little TVs on our desks cofer's secretary had a

[22:08] little TV so I walked up to the secretary and I saw she had the news on and she's watching one of the World Trade Center Towers burning and I said what happened to the World Trade Center and she said a plane flew into it and I said you know because I'm very smart right I said you know that happened once before in the 1930s a bomber flew into the Empire State Building but it was very foggy and rainy that day and it's so clear today how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade

[22:40] Center like what are you stupid and as soon as the words came out of my mouth the second plane hit and neither one of us said anything and then she turned to me and she said did you see that or did I imagine it and I ran back to my office and I said guys two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center I think we're under attack and we all ran back up to Ker's office now there were there were TVs mounted just below the ceiling um above

[23:12] his office and to picture his office it's an enormous room private offices all around the perimeter for the big shots and then the rest of us were all in cubicles so there were maybe 150 of us in these cubicles everybody then gathered in front of the TVs including kofer and all of the other seniors and we're all just and I I mean it's you know CNN and BBC and MSNBC and Russian television and this one and that

[23:43] one and the French and the Turks and everybody is covering this now and we're standing there in silence finally someone behind me shouts can somebody please lead and kofer sort of snap spped out of his stuper and he says you go to the director's office and and tell him such and such you go to security and tell them this you go to the deputy director for operations finally a Spoke came a SPO a

[24:15] special protective officer it's the CIA police force came into the office and he says everybody evacuate under the the director's orders everybody out nobody budged and then finally someone said yeah the I I should add in the interim the Pentagon was hit we knew that there was still a plane in the air and then somebody said we should probably assume that that next plane is coming for us and then the spoke came back into the office and said if you don't evacuate

[24:47] now everybody will be placed under arrest and so we all evacuated well it took me two and a half hours to get out of the part lot just to get onto the George Washington Parkway and then I only got halfway home and it was it was chaos like you see maybe in World War Z so I just abandoned my car on the highway and I walked the rest of the way

[25:17] my girlfriend who later became my wife was um on the top floor at CIA headquarters she ended up coming to my place I don't know a half an hour later we we went to the the roof of the building and we watched the Pentagon burn and then we walked around trying to donate blood but there was a 24-hour long line and finally I said this is ridiculous we have to go back to work and so we walked back to my car and I I

[25:47] drove across the grassy median and then went back to CIA headquarters and then I just stayed there for the next four days I slept under my desk we we took a bolt cutter and cut the the chain and lock on the cafeteria door and we we cooked all the food and just laid it out on folding tables in the hallway and I mean there were hundreds of us maybe a thousand of us that that just worked 24 hours a day but you know at this stage okay so it's all hands on deck there's going to be a

[26:18] huge amount of attention and focus on you and what you're doing there be people at very high levels trying to figure out okay what do we do now um and what what what what you did for the first few weeks the Americans did very little in terms of organizing it seems and focusing on say for example Afghanistan that came later it looks like it came later yeah we sent the team into Afghanistan within three or four

[26:48] days okay yeah uh it was it was a small team of about a dozen guys uh led by a legendary CIA officer by the name of of Gary shron and they parachuted into Northern Afghanistan they met up with the Northern Alliance uh and bought horses uh we also dropped um weapons uh by helicopter and so they they armed themselves and then along with the Northern Alliance began

[27:22] um began operations I guess is the best way to say it against the Taliban but the idea was we needed to find and kill Osama Bin Laden as quickly as we possibly could but he was very well hidden and the story now is quite well known um he he didn't see Gary shon's team as a real threat not so long as the Taliban were protecting him it was when the US

[27:53] Air Force began bombing Afghanistan in October about three and a half weeks after 911 that's when Al-Qaeda began to scatter for the most part the leadership went to torab Bor we knew that they were in Tabora and we began bombing it mercilessly but then the commander of Central Command made a just a terrible terrible mistake we had surrounded almost surrounded the

[28:24] mountain where Osama Bin Laden Iman zahi and the rest of the AL Al-Qaeda leadership were Hol Up we had killed Muhammad um at who was the the military commander of al-Qaeda we killed him in a in a bomb a bombing raid in uh Cabell but we knew that Bin Laden his family zaahi his family and all those others at the top of the food chain were in torab Bora we had a source who was acting as

[28:56] as a centcom translator uh act as the goet and we told them that we were going to attack and we were going to kill everybody unless they gave up and they said in response they would give up at dawn if we would allow free passage of the women and children and sencom agreed to that hello everyone uh apologies for the brief Interruption quick request could

[29:26] everybody who had has been watching the content and found the content enjoyable and perhaps is enjoying this conversation could you hit the Subscribe button it makes such a difference to the channel it really helps when trying to entice new guests to the platform we're more likely to receive a favorable response the higher the numbers are to everyone that has subscribed so far thank you so much I appreciate each and every one of you and now back to the conversation with John I hope you're finding it as fascinating to to watch as

[29:59] I found it to record thank you so much instead what happened was they used that night which was about eight hours of ceasefire to escape into Pakistan and so when Dawn broke nobody came down the mountain because there was nobody on the mountain to come down they had all escaped and and then the hunt began but the orders were very clear were we were to we were to capture as many Al-Qaeda

[30:32] Fighters and Al-Qaeda leaders as we possibly could uh Bin Laden and zaii it didn't matter if they were taken Dead or Alive were you in Pakistan at this stage or were you I got to I got to Pakistan the first week of January of uh 2002 and you wanted to get into yeah want to get into Afghanistan but boy did I was one of only 16 Arabic speakers at the CIA which is just mind-boggling when

[31:03] you think of it I mean fluent Arabic speakers there weren't many of us and so I volunteered repeatedly to go to Afghanistan now I had run into a colleague of mine another legendary figure by the name of Billy W Billy and I had done an operation together in uh in the Middle East just two months earlier and then Billy disappeared and so I ran into him in the hallway in October and I said hey Billy where you

[31:33] been and he looked around and he he whispers to me Afghanistan and I said really what are you doing in Afghanistan and he said I've been killing people what do you think I've been doing and it was then that it dawned on me they didn't need linguists they didn't need translators they're not interviewing people they're just killing them so I went back to the deputy director of the counterterrorism center who was a friend of mine and I saidif you don't

[32:04] send me to Afghanistan right now I'm G to resign and I'm G to go straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not going to look back and so they sent me to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations there and you know that was very fortuitous because for the most part operations against Al-Qaeda had ceased in Afghanistan we had killed everybody who we hadn't driven across the border into Pakistan and then the

[32:35] first thing that I did when I got to Pakistan like literally on my first day I made a recommendation to the chief there that we pull our officers off the border and just allow Al-Qaeda to enter Pakistan because I said look you know that they're scared and they're going to make a mistake and as soon as they make a mistake we have them right they have nowhere to go they don't speak any of the languages there they don't speak uru

[33:06] pashu Cindi Punjabi they speak Arabic they stick out like a sore Thum they stick out like a sore Thum you have um uh for the Pakistani authorities would be more willing to cooperate than the AF than the Taliban right oh heavens you know you hear a lot about the pakistanis I thoroughly enjoyed working with the pakistanis I always say that the Pakistani intelligence service is essentially two separate organizations isi is two separate organizations the

[33:38] half that I worked with were all educated at um at Sandhurst they were all that's the British Military Academy for British Military Academy correct um many of them most of them had done military training courses at bases around the United States they ALS spoke fluent English and they were Fearless the other half were the guys with the long beards who had created the Taliban um who were supportive of the

[34:11] Taliban and of Kashmir separatist groups terrorist groups and didn't want anything to do with the United States I never dealt with any of those people I dealt with the the counterterrorism proest people and then when you are when you are offering them pallets of money to do what you want receptive and very receptive so you come up with a plan to you you can't get Bin Laden um but you go

[34:44] after Zu zua right and you get him he was the very first high value Target that we that we searched for and he's number three in Yeah we believed he was he wasn't in the end was khed shik Muhammad was he number two was that the way KH sh Muhammad was number three was number three okay see we had never heard of KH shik muhamed it wasn't until we captured abua and I'm getting ahead the story but I think this is important it wasn't until we captured

[35:15] abua that we realized several things number one he was not the number three in al-Qaeda number two he had never joined Al-Qaeda he was a bad man he had founded the al-Qaeda house in pesha Pakistan called the house of Martyrs he had founded and managed al-qaeda's two training camps in kahar uh he was a logistician for Al-Qaeda he would get you a a fake passport a ticket home he would smuggle you into Afghanistan to

[35:46] make Jihad but he was not the number three in al-Qaeda he had nothing to do with the planning of 911 now on the other hand we knew and we had known since the 199 90s that there was this very bad guy named MTAR we knew that MTAR was a Nar we had no idea what this person's name was and the reason we knew about this person was that in 1996 listen to how crazy this is in

[36:17] 1996 a housekeeper went into a rented apartment to do the normal weekly house cleaning and what she saw was plans laid out on a table indicating that a terrorist or a terrorist group intended to hijack 14 747 jumbo Jets from Manila Airport and fly them into buildings up

[36:48] and down the west coast of the United States it was called the bojinka plot she wasn't stupid she recognized that this was the plans for a crime so she called the Manila police the Manila police came and said oo this looks big they called the Philippine intelligence service they went to the apartment and said uhoh we better call the Americans and then the Americans came

[37:20] and you know took the information it's being plotted by this person MTAR MTAR realized Iz he had been blown so he just disappeared it was months after the capture of Abu zua that Abu zua told FBI agent Ali safan during an interrogation that MTAR he actually laughed when he said it he said you don't know who MTAR is and Ali said no we know the name MTAR but we

[37:51] don't know who that is and he laughed and he said I'll give you the name it's khed muham Med we had never heard of this person before but then when we started to investigate we realized oh my God he went to school in North Carolina and he's smart and he has access to money and then we realized what we were up against it took us another year to find him and to capture him we found him in a safe house in R pindy Pakistan and we've had him ever since

[38:25] you had him in guantan Bay where there there are over 700 people that have been held and almost almost no convictions we'll get to that in a second um tell me about the operation it's an extraordinary operation that you were that you were in charge of that you engineered essentially designed to capture zua um and you got him um and he was yeah you tell the story what how did how did that happen John right so we got uh we received notice from a sister

[38:58] agency that abua was exact words somewhere in Pakistan Pakistan has 250 million people and they said well he's moving back and forth between lore and faisalabad well lore has 12 million people and fisat has 7 million people so what do you mean go catch him but go catch him how the country is the size of Texas and there's no technology like we have today I mean

[39:30] there's are they even using mobile phones cell phones at that stage barely yeah they're all they're all just flip phones and that's when you could go into any kiosk and buy a phone make one call and throw it in the trash so um all we knew is that he was just going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth between FIS labad and lore so we tried several different things I won't bore you with the failures but we just couldn't couldn't get it any closer and you know it's funny once we finally

[40:00] caught him we also retrieved his diary and he knew we were on his tail sometimes we were three days behind sometimes one time we were an hour behind where there was still food on the table and it was still warm so we were close but never quite close enough finally I I sent a cable to headquarters and I said I I just can't think of any more ideas to catch him I just can't think of anything can you

[40:30] send this friend of mine to Pakistan he was a a targeting analyst now analysts are very different from targeting analysts analysts sit and think the big thoughts and write papers that they're for the president but nobody really reads them for the most part you know what's going to happen five years from now in you know Taiwan or in the egyp economy nobody mro geopolitics Big Ideas Big Ideas you know

[41:03] somebody at the state Department's going to read them and say oh that's interesting or whatever targeting analysts pour through literally millions of pieces of data to try to geolocate somebody so that we can either kill him or capture him so this friend of mine flew out from headquarters and it wasn't until he landed that I was able to tell him why he was required there and I said this is big man this is

[41:35] going to make or break our careers we've got to catch this guy and he said okay I'll get started he took a piece of Butcher Block paper about the size of a small American billboard a roadside advertisement and he wrote Abu zubeda in the center put a circle around it and then around that he wrote down all of the all of the phone numbers the email addresses that had been in touch with Abu Zeda or the the physical addresses

[42:07] of people or places that had been in touch with abuaba and then he did a secondary and then a tertiary ring and made connections between all these different assets I I've said before it it was pretty to look at after he was done it looked like a spiderweb or like a work of art really but he he finally came to me and he said look I can't get it to fewer than 13 sites 13 possibilities he's moving

[42:39] constantly I said well gez we've never hit more than two sites before in a night we would do our our our raids at two o'clock in the morning with a team made up of CIA FBI and isi officers and and sometimes a handful of local police although the pakistanis never knew who the targets were we we would just say look you know take our word for it it's a it's a bad guy um because we we couldn't risk them you know bragging about it in their

[43:09] headquarters and then one of the long beards hears it and then tips off the bad guy and either they're waiting to Ambush us or they've already escaped so I said well gez we're gonna have to hit all 13 sites simultaneously so I I wrote a cable to headquarters I told them what I needed I needed 30 people I needed millions of dollars in cash I needed guns ammunition um secure Communications night vision goggles stun grenades you

[43:39] name it they chartered aing 7337 loaded everything on it landed at lore airport two days later we unloaded everything I had purchased two safe houses we put everything in the safe houses um and we briefed everybody so that they knew see we couldn't tell anybody what the operation was until they actually arrived because we just couldn't risk loose lips sinking the ship right

[44:12] so I gathered everybody CIA FBI isi and something called the Punjab Elite Force it was a SWAT team special weapons and tactics counterterrorism team that belonged to the state of Punjab in central Pakistan and I I stood on the I stood on a coffee table with everybody gathered around me and I said at the risk of sounding melodramatic we're gonna have to synchronize our watches like in the

[44:44] movies and we did check and I said here's the plan those of you going to FIS labad we had to Charter a bus there were so many of us those of you going to if I leat are going to get get on the bus at 10:30 this was at 10 p.m. um and you're going to go to the safe house everybody else is going to remain here at this safe house at 01:30 you're going to make sure you have all your weapons all your ammunition and

[45:16] your secure Communications which were encrypted walkie-talkies um by 0140 leave the safe house house 0155 be at the Target 0158 make sure you have clear line of sight with the Target and exactly as the clock strikes two break down the door separate the women and children from the men grab all the

[45:46] men and take them into custody then the FBI comes in and takes thousands of pictures of everything and then we take it from there now earlier in the day a colleague of mine and I went with three pakistanis to look at all 13 sites because we wanted to make sure we weren't being set up there was going to be a gunfight it was going to be an IED on the side of the road it was a setup

[46:17] we wanted to make sure that we had Ingress and egress it was all going to be safe one of the sites was a py phone at a shishkabob stand so clearly there's Al-Qaeda living in the Neighborhood Senior enough to be on the phone with Abu zubeda but you can't raid a closed shishkabob stand at two o'clock in the morning so we cut that from the list that took us down to

[46:47] 12 while we were driving around most most of the other places were mud Huts corrugated tin roofs just Hobs but while we were driving around um the analyst called me from Islam Abad and he said listen I just got a call from a friendly Western intelligence service and they said that they had a walk-in come in today a walk-in is

[47:18] somebody who literally just walks in off the street and saysi have intelligence that I want to give to your intelligence service 99% of the time they're either lunatics they are what are called intelligence pedlers they're going to take $100 from you then they're going to go to the British Embassy then the French Embassy then the Israeli Embassy and that's how they make a living or their probes their hostile intelligence Services just looking to see are your

[47:49] doors armored are your windows you know bomb resistant how many of your people have guns where are the security cameras so if they decide to attack your Embassy they know where the vulnerabilities are 99% fall into those three categories 1% are the real deal so I said well he said that the walkin says that there is a huge group of al-Qaeda fighters in a big yellow house and I

[48:21] said I want to talk to the walk-in and he said I already asked they said it's impossible and he can't be reconed which told me that there was no walk-in that it was it was an intercept that they didn't want to tell us about they believed that the information was important enough to pass to the Americans but they didn't want us to know that they had a tap on somebody's phone that's fine we didn't

[48:51] care so the analyst calls me again about two hours later well first of all we're driving through the campus of the University of feisel laad and when we came out the back gate of it we came to the to the Target site and it was an enormous yellow house and I said I said that's that's the site that's the site that the walk-in told us about and the Pakistani lison officer said I can tell you there's something

[49:23] bad is going on in that house I said how do you figure he said said it's 105° today and all of the shutters are closed they have to be broiling in there they just must not want anybody to know that that they're in there and I said we we have to put a especially an especially big team on that house we ended up catching now I can't say I'm not allowed to say exactly how many we caught dozens of people inside that house then he

[49:53] calls me the analyst calls me a second time and he said zua just made a terrible mistake he downloaded his um his Hotmail emails from a landline he accessed his Hotmail emails with a landline and I said oh my God I I knew he would make a mistake this is what we had been waiting for for months and I said give me the address so he gives me the address and

[50:25] it corresponds to the final Target site and I I I remember I have chills all these years just thinking about it telling the story I turned to my colleague and I said we got him so we drive to the address and it's an empty field it's just an empty undeveloped field I said how could this possibly be we're sure that the call came from this location and the Pakistani major kind of laughed and he said no no he said this

[50:57] is quite common in Pakistan he said when a plot of land is legally divided the phone company assigns it a telephone line even if there's nothing built there so when something eventually is built there you just turn the line on but what happens is people will climb the telephone pole they'll splice their own telephone line into the the uh empty lots telephone line so they can make

[51:27] calls and the bill goes to the owner of the vacant lot and I said so so he's here somewhere how do we figure out what house is stealing the line he calls a tech officer a young Pakistani technical officer the kid looked like he was 18 years old he climbs the telephone pole goes through this Medusa's head of wires he literally follows it fist over fist down the

[51:58] telephone pole down the Alley we're following him and he says it's that house right there and that's where we got him so the all of those operations took place at exact had to take place at exactly the same time was it was it about one o'clock in the morning I think or two o'clock in the morning yeah two o'clock in the morning I I I remember going to the roof of the safe house I looked at my watch and I said 0200 here we go M and as soon as I said it we could hear this sound in

[52:29] the distance the sound of metal on metal like boink boink boink and I said that's not good that's gun this colleague of mine and I and then we heard gunshots and I said oh that's really not good so I got on the walkie-talkie and I knew which site was the closest and I said site 13 what's going on over there and he shouts shots fired shots fired they're firing back at us and I was like oh my God we jumped into the car we sped over there as quickly as

[53:01] we could and it was a scene of chaos there was one man just laying dead in the street like obviously dead his eyes were open there was another man who looked like he was dead or he was almost dead and then there was a third who was just screaming bloody murder with a gunshot wound straight through the center of his femur and I shouted at the pakistanis I said' damn it I said take them alive our orders were to take them alive but this

[53:33] stupid Pakistani policeman with an AK-47 just started shooting them as they're jumping from the roof of the safe house to the roof of the neighboring house to escape the dead man was a Syrian bomb maker the second person shot may or may not have been abua we didn't know at that point the third was Abu zaba's bodyguard also Syrian so so I said who who is this guy the

[54:04] Pakistani said to me we got him we got your man I said which one is he this one was the one who was almost dead I said that that doesn't look anything like AB AA we had this we had this like six-year-old passport photo of a very handsome young man with a close closely cropped beard and mustache um this guy was fat clean shaven crazy hair going all over the place I said that that doesn't look anything like

[54:36] abua so my my colleague said what do you want to do I said I don't know what the [ __ ] to do so I I called the analyst I said look we may have gotten him but I I don't know if this is the guy and he said get me a shot of his of his um his eye I'll run a retinal scan so I kneel down over him and I shouted um ifun open your eyes nothing so I pulled I pulled his

[55:06] eyelids up but his eyes were rolled back in his head and I said I said look he's he's dying he's bleeding to death I can't I can't get a shot of his eyes he was shot in the thigh the groin in the stomach with this AK-47 so he said get me a picture of his ear and I didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints so I took a picture of his ear remember 2002 phones didn't have cameras so I took a picture of his ear I plugged my phone

[55:39] into the camera and I was able to transmit the picture through the phone back to the analyst he sent the picture to headquarters they ran the ear scan and then they said it's him headquarters in the United States yeah so this took some time you might imagine it took 15 20 minutes in the meantime we're trying to stanch the the bleeding and it was just nightmarish they came back they said it's him we picked him up we threw him in the back of this filthy Toyota pickup truck that we just commandeered

[56:09] from some poor guy happen to be driving through the neighborhood in the middle of the night and we drove him to filabot hospital which was a rough place the story is too long to really get into the details but they tried as best they could to try to get the bleeding to stop he was I mean just as fast as they could pump the blood into him it was just leaking right out of him uh but Al-Qaeda got word that we had gotten it and they started driving by the hospital and just

[56:39] opening fire on the hospital so I said to the Pakistani major if they realize how lightly armed we are we're we're dead can you get a helicopter in here and he said yeah I think so so he makes a call about 20 minutes later this helicopter lands in the park parking lot I just walked right into the operating room I put my shirt up and I said doc wrap it up we have to go they sewed him closed as quickly as they could we put him on the helicopter we flew him to a

[57:10] Pakistani military base about 50 miles away they rushed him into surgery there and then at one point the doctor came out and he said look I've never seen wounds this severe where the patient lived you should tell your people to be prepared for his death so I called the analyst I said you should tell headquarters they don't think he's going to live the night and then he did and I sat with him

[57:40] for the next 56 hours 56 hours um I've never been so tired in my life um so you keep this guy alive you mean you know this you know who this guy is at this stage there supposed to be one of the most events of your life you know how big this is not just for your career but for for the United States I knew it was lifechanging yeah it was lifechanging and for the United States I mean you know the analyst told me that when the station chief called Headquarters he

[58:12] called the director of the CIA directly and the entire CIA leadership was in the in the room and George Tennant the CIA director said they got it him and the whole place erupted into cheers and then he immediately called the president so I mean people were I mean everybody in you know the intelligence community in in Washington was waiting for the

[58:43] call so you got we got Abu zubeda um rendition happens now right so we're we're taking him back to Guantanamo or he went to Guantanamo in I think it was 2004 but for two years he was moved from Secret prison to secret prison all around the world subjected to merciless torture and um and by CIA oper operatives by CIA you know it's even

[59:14] worse than that by CIA contractors right yeah Contra be local kind of Syrian or Sudanese or any these were two sociopathic American psychologists by the name uh names of um James Mitchell and Bruce jessen who had pitched to the CIA director a torture program that they called enhanced interrogation techniques um they also described it as learned helplessness that you utterly break him

[59:47] psychologically and then he'll tell you everything you want to know the problem is that torture simply doesn't work besides the fact that it's immoral unethical and illegal it doesn't work they will tell you anything that they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them and then you have to assign a team of analysts to take the next six months to go through this information to figure out what was

[1:00:17] nonsense and what was actionable and the stuff that's actionable by the time you get to it is so old that it's not actionable anymore you know especially when it comes to counterterrorism time is of the essence and you have to move on it quickly otherwise once it gets stale either the operation has taken place or it's been moved or it's been cancelled or the target has just scattered to the wind so there there was no we knew in 2001 2002 2003 that there was no utility

[1:00:48] whatsoever in torture and techniques so the only thing that would explain it is some kind of sadism yes you know people underestimate the motivation of Revenge after 911 3,000 Americans were killed on one day because we were asleep at the switch and so you know this this was that one opportunity this is how it was viewed at the senior levels this one opportunity to redeem ourselves right to

[1:01:20] not just disrupt the next attack but to kill or capture the entire Al-Qaeda leadership and you know as as you said you look into the abyss and the abyss is looking right back at you yeah you know I I say all the time too and I mean this very very seriously the CIA leaders who conceived of the torture program implemented the torture program

[1:01:51] defended the torture program continue to support the torture program even knowing deep down that it didn't work because when they die their obituaries are going to say that they were the creators and the leaders and the implementers of torture and if they keep repeating the LIE over and over and over again that it helped keep Americans safe then that's a way to try to ensure their own legacy I'm here to tell you

[1:02:24] that they're lying to us it wasn't effective it wasn't helpful and if anything it made anti-American terrorism worse in 2007 you went on ABC um a few years later you left the CIA shortly afterwards in around 2004 205 and you priv private Enterprise something happens 2007 arrives you do a an interview with ABC with Brian Ross is it where you decide now you must have been your wife was also in the C CIA at this stage you must

[1:02:56] have had this multiple conversations with your wife this is what I'm going to do and you must both together must have known that oh my god when when you do this because you you draw a direct line between torture and the United States President yes I did in fact the president said the next day his exact words I don't know this man I don't know this man's motivation I don't know why this man threw me under the bus the truth is he had been lying to

[1:03:26] the American people you know I I did not initially accept Brian Ross's invitation um but what happened that week was uh there was a press conference a presidential press conference and there had been reports from the uh International Committee of the Red Cross Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International all saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners and so a reporter asked President Bush about these reports and he looked right in the camera and he said we do not

[1:03:59] torture and I remember telling my wife we were sitting there on the couch watching this and I said he is a bald-faced liar he is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to them but you know that's Washington four days later it was a Friday and he was walking from the south Portico of the White House to the helicopter to fly to Camp d David for the weekend and a reporter shouted a question about torture and he paused and

[1:04:30] he turned and said well if there is torture it's because of a rogue CIA officer and I said to my wife they're G to try to pin this on me so I called Brian Ross and I said I'll do your interview and I decided that no matter what he asked me I was going to tell the truth so what I ended up saying was the CIA was torturing its prisoners that t was official US government policy and the policy had been personally approved

[1:05:01] by the president and then and the entire weight of the US government fell on my head yeah when you're in those crosshairs um they say the process is the punishment so they're goingon to bankrupt you financially so it's gonna they did yeah you know the irony though the irony is that the bush justice department uh investigated me for a full year from December of 2007 to December of 2008 and then they determined that I had not committed a crime they sent a declination letter to my attorney saying

[1:05:33] that um I had not revealed classified information because torture is a crime and it is illegal to classify a criminal act so I was off scott free my wife and I were so excited we actually went to dinner that night to celebrate four weeks later Barack Obama became president and John Brennan who was one of the fathers one of the founders of the torture program uh became Obama's

[1:06:05] Chief um uh intelligence adviser he became the deputy National Security adviser for counterterrorism and then he went on to be the CIA director John and I never liked each other and he and I were on completely opposite sides of this torture issue I had no idea that as soon as he entered the White House John asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me and so for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were being intercepted

[1:06:36] and teams of FBI agents were following me everywhere I went and then finally in January of 2012 this is more than four years after I blew the whistle I was arrested and charged with three counts of Espionage one count of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 a very obscure law and making a false statement we were never really sure what the false statement was supposed to have

[1:07:08] been um but what they did as you just alluded to is they waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the Espionage charges now remember too Espionage can be a death penalty charge um they were offering me 45 years in prison if I would plead guilty I said I'm not going to do 45 minutes in prison I said you guys are the criminals here not me and you know you're right the process

[1:07:39] is the punishment it it wrecked everything I socially my my friends my former colleagues even family members walked away your wife was still in the CIA at this stage was she or had she left yes sir she was fired on the day of my arrest only because she was married to me yes there's no HR process here you're out the door out the CIA is an usual organization in that out of the entire US Government CIA officers serve at the

[1:08:10] pleasure of the president um we don't get the same Civil Service protections that everybody else in government gets if the president doesn't like your face you're out and there's nothing you can do and the president didn't like me well John Brandon didn't like you either um it seems I mean the the the fact that they were torturing people like they said if they can pin it on a rogue um then they don't have to take Collective account I I that's right I had a friend in the CIA who we go to the same church

[1:08:43] we're in the same men's group he just happens to be a brigadier general in the Army and a psychiatrist at the CIA and he said to me one day you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back and I said I know I've heard them he said you know that's not a compliment right and I said Steve I'm on the right side of history and they are not people might people watching and watching your story might say the only

[1:09:14] the impetus to act was when you realize it wasn't necessarily moral or ideological stand you were taking even though clearly you were very uncomfortable with the whole torture thing it was when you realized you were in the crossair yes that that's when you jumped and moved um because you knew you were in big trouble here and I wanted to save myself um still you know I kept waiting for somebody to say something because after the absera capture I I got a big

[1:09:44] promotion I became the deputy I became the deputy director's executive assistant and so in that job I got to see literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world well there were dozens of cables coming back from the secret site saying this is illegal I'm resigning or I'm curtailing my assignment I'm coming back to headquarters I can't believe we're torturing this man this is this is unethical this violates my hypocritic oath so I wasn't the only person who

[1:10:15] thought this was a criminal act and I thought surely somebody is going to say something and then nobody said anything so in the interim I I had done research I'm not an attorney so I started researching the law and the law was crystal clear that this whole program was illegal I felt confident that I was on the right side of this you the process was the punishment in your case I remember you you did mention the fact that at one point you

[1:10:46] thought you were sitting inside your wife watching television at one point you thought about going into the garage putting the key in the ignition oh yeah and saying okay guys I'm out of here yeah I did um so it must have been torturous reputationally you know they say um one of the one will story in his book the status game has highlighted that one of the the what makes people take their own lives men in particular is a sudden un catastrophic loss of

[1:11:17] status right so as well as all of this happening you have this massive catastrophic reputational GL Global your your your your community see you as a traitor potentially you have the the the American justice system all over you you're paying $750 an hour to to lawyers that you can't how can anybody afford that and there were 11 of them and yeah do you I still owe them I

[1:11:49] still owe them $1,150,000 that they will never see never so were they were they were they doing this work pro bono John or what was the how did you of of the 11 six were pro bono um the remaining five um I still owe $1.15 million um but with that said they told me early on look this case is far bigger than John kiraku this is a a case that involves constitutional

[1:12:21] protections it's a case that involves the rule of law it's a case that involves the war on whistleblowers you know between 1917 and and 2009 three Americans were charged with Espionage for speaking to the Press just under John Brennan and Barack Obama nine of us were charged with Espionage for speaking to the Press that's more that's that's three times all previous presidents combined so there's a real transparency problem in government why do you why do you think the Obama Administration was

[1:12:53] so determined as opposed to the bush ad surely the Bush Administration would want to to get you you'd think as crazy as it sounds the Bush Administration was more concerned about the rule of law um and I'm telling you this as a third generation Democrat I'm no longer a Democrat I'm independent independent um I I hate everybody equally and um but what it was was that there was two factors John Brennan had an obsession

[1:13:23] with National Security leaks and number two Barack Obama uh was so inexperienced to be president that he just did on National Security issues he just did whatever Brennan told him to do guy was a senator for two years yeah yeah I was Intelligence experience at all nothing yeah um so you eventually you you you take the plea you do the two years in jail you come out what is your status now are you

[1:13:53] considered a convicted can you get a can you work like how does how does it affect your your your ability your powers of recovery how did you recover from all of this honestly I have to thank my my wife now my ex-wife unfortunately the the the pressure that this puts on families it's it's insurmountable but she said look she said you have to embrace this you can't run from it or pretend it didn't happen you have to embrace it you didn't do anything wrong

[1:14:25] you have to be the the torture whistleblower whether you want to or not and she was right you know I couldn't get a job stocking shelves at a grocery store working at Target working at a gas station I applied for a job as a baggage handler at the airport no one would touch me so I decided to just make my own work I started writing and I write

[1:14:55] constantly now I I'm working on my ninth book um my first made the New York Times bestsellers list my second one two literary awards including one of the big four um I write a column for covert Action magazine I read a column for a Consortium news at the time I also had a column at reader supported news I do op-eds for the Los Angeles Times I lecture at different universities University of Southern California the University of Salam Mona and Spain I'm starting a global speaking tour in

[1:15:28] Ireland in two weeks so I just made my own path and little by little people begin coming around to the point where in 2016 I was nominated by a Swedish parliamentarian for the Nobel Peace Prize um I was invited by the commandant of the uh Military Academy at West Point to speak to the Freshman Class about ethics and intelligence operations um I've had three FBI agents

[1:16:00] most recently two weeks ago three FBI agents who were on my case um apologize to me and say that it was a political case and that they were forced to do it and that they were sorry that they hadn't spoken out so you know I I'm comfortable with who I am I don't know if the if the torturers are but I know I am um and you're coming to Ireland in two week a couple of questions I wanted would be remiss of me not to ask you um

[1:16:32] Shannon Airport in the west of Ireland there was rumors that it was used as a staging post for rendition are you aware of anything to do with shanon I heard those same rumors um we didn't do it while we didn't use Shannon while I was there so I have no Insight information but I can tell you that I also know several very very good investigative journalists who have taken years to go through flight data that's publicly available just very few people have the wherewithal to put it together and they are 100% confident that Shannon has been

[1:17:05] used uh for rendition plates yes what's your perspective on Edward Snowden American hero or American oh I I think Snowden is a Bonafide hero the American people would never have known that the American government in violation of the law was spying on us not only do we have a law in black and white that the US government is not permitted to spy on Americans it is a part of nsa's Charter its founding

[1:17:37] Charter that it may not spy on Americans and now a majority of its work is spying on Americans we wouldn't have had any idea that that was the case had it not been for Ed Snowden has Ed Snowden changed anything no he's he's just illuminated he's shine light into the place that's SE yeah the the change hasn't come and and specifically the change that you're talking about is called section 702 of the um foreign intelligence surveillance act now every

[1:18:08] two years when that section is renewed permitting warrantless wiretapping of American citizens there are more votes against it in Congress I'm confident that eventually we're going to get to the point where NSA won't be able to spy on us anymore we're not there yet but we'll get there wow that's a big bold statement that would be a massive um positive impact um it would and you

[1:18:41] know the funny thing too is and I'll preface this this by saying I disagree with 95% of everything that Donald Trump stands for but Donald Trump is right about warrantless wiretapping and section 702 and NSA spying on Americans because NSA spied on him you know it was the Clinton Administration that authorized NSA to spy on Donald Trump and the Trump campaign in 2016 and

[1:19:11] that's just not right that's shocking yeah um that has been well documented and it's indisputable right or was there a court case around that or yeah and and the justice department said no we didn't spy on him it's that there were some people around him that we thought maybe were doing illegal thing no no if you suspect the man of a crime and panel a grand jury and investigate the crime you don't go to a secret office in the justice

[1:19:42] department and say we want you to tap Donald Trump's phones don't tell anybody yeah that's you can't do that that's not the American way last question um I think I know what you'll say but if you could change anything if you could go back and looking back at your life um would you do the Brian Ross interview again yes but and this is something I tell every wouldbe whistleblower who asks me for

[1:20:14] advice hire a lawyer first before you speak a single word hire a lawyer skilled in National Security Law and make sure he is sitting next to you when you do the interview I had to be reactive which was a terrible terrible mistake other whistleblowers should be proactive John kiraku thank you so much it's been a a pleasure and fascinating

[1:20:46] to meet you your story is extraordinary and um I wish you every success in rebuilding and recovering thanks so much and posterity let how it it will be how you will be remembered for your services to the United States and and for for revealing um a shocking episode in its history thank you so much may I make one plug I'm excited to begin a speaking to her it's going to be uh a 100 event Global speaking tour but we're starting in Ireland in two weeks and then moving on

[1:21:16] to 40 dates in uh in England Scotland and Wales um if you go to Tigers Lane Studios which is a London based production company uh the schedule is there there's still some tickets available and I would love to see everybody yeah I'm going to put a link to I check the tickets are tickets are available it's in the Crown Plaza in North Dublin and you're you're going to be in Belfast as well I'll put a link to it in the description box there are still some tickets available that can be grabbed and uh I think everybody yeah should should go and meet and see it

[1:21:46] would be a lot of fun thanks so much pleas great to meet you love you to meet you too thank you John [Music]
