Title: John Kiriakou Part III: 9/11, Israeli Spying, CIA Media Manipulation
Show: Harrison Berger
Date: 2025-09-19
URL: https://youtu.be/BFhhPsbO9GU
Duration: 56:00

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[00:00] John, it's it's always a pleasure to speak to you. Thank Thank you so much for coming back. >> It's good to see you again. >> I want to start with this um kind of on a sad note. Charlie Kirk um very prominent conservative activist. He was assassinated. We still don't know what happened yet. Um, but I couldn't help but notice, and everyone else for that matter, too, that the multi-billion dollar funded FBI and its investigative divisions really have

[00:30] no clue what they're doing. And, you know, I had thought that the trade-off for just completely shredding the Bill of Rights, destroying our Fourth Amendment, was so that the NSA and the deep state could prevent or at the very least track down the threats. Um, but they can't really do that, can they? Um, it seems like they're too busy using those kind of authoritarian surveillance tools to crack down on Israel's critics rather than any actual threats to the homeland. I'm wondering if you get that impression as well. >> Very much so, actually. Very much so.

[01:03] Um, I thought that the FBI looked really, really bad uh in this uh Charlie Kirk situation. So all we should say about Charlie Kirk too, it is whether you whether you agree with agreed with a man or not, whether you liked his politics or not, this is an absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances response to a man exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech. I I have to tell you, I was shocked at um at a series of polls that

[01:36] came out earlier this week uh publicized by the Stanford University Center for the Study of Extremism that found that 34% of American college students believe that using violence is justified when you disagree with somebody's speech. That frightens me deeply that a third of college students would think it's okay to just start firing when you don't like what somebody's saying. It's

[02:07] I don't even have words to explain how wrong I think this is. With that said, you know, we saw we saw a cast of characters uh in in the the hours after Charlie Kirk's uh killing where where the only person who really made any sense was the governor of Utah who had the least amount of uh responsibility in the actual investigation. The FBI didn't know what it was doing. F

[02:40] Cash Patel uh said that uh they had the subject in custody and then they released him. Now they have another subject in custody. Ah they released him too. It's like buddy who's advising you first of all just shut your mouth and do your investigation. You don't need to run in front of a camera every time there's development in the case in the immediate aftermath of a crime. Um it's it's clear that we really don't know the facts. You don't know the facts. Your people on the ground don't know the facts. We found the gun. Well, you found

[03:12] a gun. It hasn't been tested yet. You don't know if it's the gun. Little things like that. It was like amateur hour over there at the FBI. Uh you've got the campus police and it apparently never occurred to them that maybe somebody should just to make sure nobody has broken into this building that's been closed since April for renovations to make sure that nobody's climbed to the roof and maybe has a high-powered rifle up there. You know, it just never occurred to anybody. I mentioned on a podcast yesterday, did it occur to nobody at the Utah Valley University

[03:42] Police Department to put a $25 drone up in the air just to take a look at the overhead? My kid has a $25 drone with a with a camera that's better than the one on my phone and it never occurred to a cop to just send a drone up. What do they do all day long by the look at of them, you know, besides eating donuts all day? So yeah, it's like everybody dropped at every step of the way. Now, I think that we all got very lucky when

[04:14] this young man's um either family or family friend turned at least there's that people with a conscience do the right thing and he'll get his day in court. But uh man, this was just wrong in in every aspect. First of all, it should never have happened. And then once it happened, it shouldn't have taken so long to get the right guy into custody. >> Right. Well, I I completely agree with everything you just said, especially the

[04:44] uh kind of disturbing reactions to, you know, his assassination. This is someone who made his whole life and career about open debate. He went to college campuses and debated people who completely disagreed with him um based on his principle that that's how you resolve arguments in America um through open discourse and not through bullets. And uh I I completely agree. It's sad to watch people endorse um you know violence in that way. >> Friends of mine are on social media

[05:15] endorsing violence like unequivocally endorsing violence. It's like have you thought this through at all? So, what you're saying is if somebody disagrees with you, it's okay to shoot you. You know, if if they if they determine that, oh, you're you're uh spewing hate speech because you're liberal or whatever, it's then okay to shoot you. I I just don't understand this this attitude at all. It's just my position. This just seems like an obvious position that most people would want to take that that

[05:46] violence is never right. It's just never right unless it's in active self Right. And I agree with that. Um, and I I'll say something that's concerning as well is on the other side, uh, the very predictable reaction now is to, you know, blame a certain group, whoever their political enemies are, and demand an immediately an immediate crackdown on them. You had Laura Loomer saying that need they need to round up, arrest, and investigate all leftist organizations in

[06:17] America. Donald Trump unfortunately echoed uh exactly what she said in in the speech that he gave the night of Charlie Kirk's assassination uh where they said they're not just going to >> uh go after groups that fund political violence but merely support it through their free speech. Uh and you can only imagine what sorts of groups the very pro-Israel uh Trump administration will go after uh with that. And I'm wondering if that's something that concerns you.

[06:48] It does seem like every single tragedy that we have in the United States, whether it's a Charlie Kirk assassination or 9/11, which I also want to ask you about um in a bit, it's immediately exploited uh to do the sorts of authoritarian uh crackdowns mainly from the security state against uh you know the general population and anti-war denters uh that you is that something that concerns you as well? Yeah, you know, it's it's my experience that, you know, the deep state or

[07:20] elements of the deep state will always always seek to capitalize on a situation like this. Um, Laura Loomer is unhinged. How in the world she has access to the highest levels of government is a mystery to me. This is a woman who is banned for life from from Uber, from Lyft, from Target, from Twitter because she's unable to live in polite society. And somehow she has the ear of the president of the United States. I I

[07:51] normally just just uh dismiss anything Laura Loomer says as the rantings of a crazy person. It pains me that President Trump then repeats some of what she says. It's just absolutely 100% inappropriate. But you know what? I'm not I'm not worried that we're going to start seeing a crackdown on progressive voices just because this is this is that rhetoric that we hear spouted all the time that just kind of falls by the wayside. And no court in

[08:23] America would uphold, as Laura Loomer called for yesterday, um the banning of the Democratic Party. Like seriously, how how do you embarrass yourself every day with a with a new pronouncement of lunacy? I just don't understand it. Uh with that said, federal law enforcement, intelligence, sure, they're going to they're going to make the most out of this. And just like they did with the Patriot Act. Now, here we are 20 what? 24 years after the

[08:55] passage of the Patriot Act. I would have thought that much of it would have been deemed unnecessary by this point and much would have been uh either reformed or or sunsetted in ongoing legislation. It hasn't been. We still have NSA, FBI, CIA, and any number of other federal organizations spying on American citizens and carrying out warrantless wiretapping. You know, no longer does the FBI, for example, have to go to a judge and say, "I want a warrant for this guy's metadata." Um, now all they

[09:28] do is just go to the ISP and and buy it. It's for sale. And so why go to a judge when you can just, you know, pay $1,000 and uh and get everything that Harry's been doing for the last six months. So yeah, we're in a dangerous position dangerous position right now. May I add one other thing, too? And that is that uh that I'm also taken by the uh by the hypocrisy that we've been seeing the last couple of days. I have conservative friends jumping up and down. They're

[09:59] apoplelectic that anybody would support the killing of uh of Charlie Kirk and nobody should. But these are the same people who were laughing at Paul Pelosi and who started this rumor that this was a lover's quarrel between two secretly gay men uh that got out of hand and one tried to beat the other with a hammer. It's like, no, it was an assassination attempt for political reasons, but a lot of my my right won't admit to that.

[10:31] >> Right. That's also absolutely true. Um, and as you said, you know, the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda is no longer there, or actually rather, we're friends with them now in Syria. >> That's right. >> Um, but the the threat's no longer there um at all. But the programs that were invented um to take on those terrorists are not only still around but they've expanded. Uh and it all started really with 911 which I want to ask you about now. It's been nearly a quarter century

[11:01] since the 9/11 attacks and like the JFK assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination and other major events that reshaped this country. The federal government continues to keep some of the most important facts and findings completely classified from the public. More than that, there's been an active effort to conceal and distort aspects of what happened. Sandy Burgerer literally stole and destroy classified 9/11 documents. He never went to prison for it, while whistleblowers who, you know,

[11:33] merely disclosed information in the public interest like yourself did go to prison. My question is, how have your views um on 911 changed over time and which individuals or governments do you believe were responsible? >> Yeah. Wow. That's a good question. Uh yes, my my position has changed over the over time. I still believe that al-Qaeda carried out 9/11, but I believe now that al-Qaeda was allowed to carry out 911,

[12:04] not necessarily by the United States. the Bush administration was foolishly focused on China at the time instead of on uh on terror despite the fact that the likes of George Tennant and Richard Clark, the national security um the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism were shouting to anybody who would listen that al-Qaeda was going to attack us. But then at the same time, what was the role of the Saudi government? Uh, you know, when the 911

[12:35] commission just elects to not investigate the actions of the Saudi government or the actions of individual Saudi intelligence officers, that raises a red flag. When the CIA will not permit CIA officers to to testify before the 911 commission, will not permit members of the 911 commission or their investigators to interview Guantanamo detainees. What do you have to hide? It's a commission. It's a blue ribbon panel appointed by the president of the United States, let them do their

[13:06] investigation. Uh, and it's not just the Saudis, it's the Israelis. You know, if the Israelis have the Iranian government completely infiltrated, they have the Syrian government completely infiltrated and Hezbollah and the Houthis and God knows who else, all the Palestinian factions. You mean to tell me that they knew nothing about al-Qaeda and nothing about al-Qaeda's planning for 9/11? I don't believe it for a second. I think the Israelis had a vested interest in

[13:38] allowing the 9/11 attacks to go forward because they knew that the American response would be to go immediately to war and kill as many Muslims as we possibly could. And that's exactly what happened. And nobody's ever answered for that. So, I want to break that down a little bit piece by piece. And I want to start with one of the most mysterious characters in all of this. It's a man named Ali Muhammad. He worked for Egyptian intelligence, American intelligence. He actually trained at

[14:09] Fort Bragg and he eventually made his way into al-Qaeda's network where he trained with some of the hijackers where and joined the Alkea mosque in Brooklyn. In 1993, he was arrested in Canada by the Royal Canadian Mountain Police. And after calling the FBI, he was very bizarrely released. Uh later that year, his proteges at the Alkea Refugee Network perpetrated the original World Trade Center bombing and investigators later found his own Fort Bragg E manuals

[14:41] in their home. Ali Muhammad himself later participated in the 1998 embassy bombings. He was arrested then and under the George W. Bush administration, he disappeared off the face of the earth. Nobody knows where he is. Uh who is Ali Muhammad? Who did he work for? And where is he now? I don't think any of us really know the answers to any of those questions, you know, and this is this is the danger of not having robust human intelligence

[15:14] uh available to you. Starting in the 1990s, the CIA wrongly began to focus on developing elint electronic intelligence, thinking, well, you know, we've got all this money, we're swimming in money, we should use it to to buy a dedicated satellite or two or five or 10 or whatever it was. And instead of continually training new officers how to recruit spies to steal secrets, we relied more and more on a on electronic intelligence. Well, electronic

[15:45] intelligence is not going to give you the same quality of intelligence that you would get from a guy standing in the room. So, with Muhammad, I can speculate as to what happened because I've seen this happen in other cases um I had seen it when I was in the CIA and that is that um that the CIA handler is being played. Right? The only way if you're in CI operations, the only way to get promoted is to recruit spies to steal secrets. Right now, maybe those secrets are going

[16:15] to save the country. Maybe those secrets have to do with uh Austria's corn harvest, whatever. That's how you get promoted by recruiting spies to steal secrets and then reporting those secrets back to CIA headquarters. And I can't help but to think, I can't help but to conclude that Ali Muhammad was recruited, but not really, that he played his CIA handler to allow the handler to believe that he had recruited him. And in fact, he was probably

[16:47] working as something of a double agent for al-Qaeda. Look at it this way. What would he get personally? What would he get by being a double agent? He would get to learn exactly what it was that the CIA was interested in. What was the CIA focused on? How much did the CIA know about planning 93 attack on the World Trade Center for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa or in the run-up to 9/11? What could he learn?

[17:17] What tactics could he master? Thus, the Fort Bragg documents. and how could he help to facilitate the implementation of the 9/11 attacks? I think we were played. I don't know what ever happened to him. I remember Did you and I have a conversation about him six months ago or so? I I talked to somebody about him. >> Yeah, we talked briefly about it after the Yeah. >> And uh I don't think I don't think anybody I mean outside the CIA knows

[17:48] what happened to him. He's just kind of disappeared. So, it's been reported that Ali Muhammad spoke fluent Hebrew. What explains that? Why would an al-Qaeda operative speak Hebrew? >> See, this comes back to my argument that the Israelis likely had al-Qaeda infiltrated and didn't tell us and denied when we asked them. Um, this is also something else that more sophisticated terrorists will do. The

[18:20] Israelis are well known, for example, for the absolutely perfect, flawless, dialectical, accentless Arabic that they speak. And not only are they trained to speak Arabic like an Arab, they're trained to speak Arabic like a local from certain villages using the same idiomatic uh Arabic, the same local and regional dialects. You would never know that they were Jewish and that they were Mossad or Shinbet. you would think, "Oh,

[18:50] that's Muhammad, the guy from the bakery in, you know, Nablus or whatever." You'd never know it. If anybody's interested in this kind of thing, you should really, really take the time to watch um the Netflix series FA F Auda. Four seasons. You'll never regret it and you'll never look at the Middle East the same way. But it's highly unusual for an Arab to speak Hebrew, fluent Hebrew. Now, you'll you'll encounter, you know, cab drivers, shopkeepers in East

[19:22] Jerusalem that speak good Hebrew, but it's Arabic accented Hebrew. The fact that that Ali Muhammad spoke Hebrew without an accent makes me think that he was an intelligence officer. We now know that the Alex Station, CIA group that had tracked Bin Laden since 1995, kept extremely tight security around his group's file. They limited FBI investigators on numerous occasions, mainly regarding the alleged hijackers,

[19:53] Khaled Al- Midhar and Noaf Al-Hazmi. In the 911 commission report, the failure to share intelligence about those hijackers is treated just as accidental. But that's not really believable. >> No. Listen, I was the chief of the counter inelligence branch in Alex Station. I didn't have access to those files. Uh it was not accidental. There was a policy decision made early on that we will not cooperate with the FBI.

[20:25] Period. and then 911 happened. >> Why why would they do that? Why would why would they break protocol? And I I have just one example I think is a very important one and it's amazing and there's really dozens of these that come to mind. Um, but when monitoring the famous Malaysian summit of al-Qaeda operatives where they devised the planes attack, Alex Station member Tom Wilshshire blocked the effort of an FBI agent to notify his superiors that 9/11

[20:56] hijacker Khaled al- Midhar had a US visa in his passport. He then falsely dispatched the rest of the CIA to to just falsely tell them that uh he had actually shared that information uh with the FBI, which he had absolutely not. Uh even worse than that, Alex Station broke CIA protocol and failed to watch list any of the participants of the meeting in Malaysia, the one where again al-Qaeda devised the attacks on the United States. Why did the Alexstation

[21:28] Group and the CIA just protect uh these 911 hijackers um in this way and shield them from the FBI? I I just don't understand that. Oh, there are several reasons, none of which will make any sense. So, number one, the CIA and the FBI hated each other back to 1947 and the creation of the CIA with passage of the National Security Act of 1947. hated each other to the point where as a matter of policy there was no

[21:59] cooperation. I can't tell you how many times we had a development in a case whether I was working in the counterterrorism center or elsewhere in the building where I was specifically instructed don't tell the FBI. I remember when I first joined the CIA um something came up where an American citizen came up in an investigation I was doing and I was told okay you should probably inform the CIA. I said, "Okay, how do I do that? Do I write a memo to the and they said, "No, there's a CIA officer on the second floor in room whatever 234." I went up

[22:30] there and it's one poor slob sitting in a cubicle and his job was just to kind of sit there like this and wait for somebody in the CIA to decide to cooperate with him that day. That was it. Number one. Number two, the CIA had a very arrogant notion that they could recruit the hijacker hijackers and turn them, double them back against al-Qaeda. That was ludicrous. Of course, really, all they had to do was inform the FBI and pick them up.

[23:01] >> Whose idea was that? >> Oh, that was that came from the top of Alex Station. It was a it was a number of people. I can neither confirm nor deny that Richard Blee was in Alex Station. But >> yeah, I mean, listen, most of these names have been reported um over the years. You'll probably get them right if you do five minutes of reading into it. But yeah, there was this very arrogant

[23:31] leadership at the top of Alex Station deciding, "We're right. The FBI is wrong. We're going to do it our way. We can recruit these guys. We can double them back. Find Bin Laden. Send a rocket to kill him. Don't tell the FBI." >> So, I I guess that would explain, I guess, many years of withholding information. But as as you told me last time and I've heard you say other times before, Kofer Black said the lights are blinking red in August and June and July

[24:05] and that was at the top of the CIA. What explains them continuing to withhold that information even as the warnings got even more severe in the leadup to the attacks? >> So, I'll answer that with an anecdote. in uh 1990 whenever it was 1992 1993 uh a Pakistani man by the name of Mir A Malakanzi uh was in the turning lane getting ready to turn into CIA headquarters. He was

[24:36] the first car in the turning lane. The light turned red. He put the car in park. He got out of it with an AK-47 and started going car to car, killing every man. He skipped the cars with women. when he ran out of bullets, having killed two and wounded seven, he got back in his car, drove to Dallasos airport, and flew to Pakistan on a one-way ticket with no luggage. Okay, so as you can imagine, everything in the CIA came to a halt. Everybody who we

[25:06] could spare started the investigation to find Kanzi and bring him to justice. We located Kanzi after a period of several months in a flea bag hotel in Qua Queta, Pakistan. And so the CIA is not a law enforcement organization. The FBI is. So we located him in the hotel. We told the FBI he's in room 123 of the hotel. We surrounded it. The FBI went in and they grabbed him. Okay. Time magazine was a thing at

[25:38] the time. Everybody read Time Magazine. was the news magazine in the world and they had a picture of Kanzi and the headline on the cover was Miriam Mal Kanzi how the FBI got their man. I cannot tell you how that enraged senior CIA officers because the FBI had their heads up their asses. They had no idea where Kzi was. We found him. We tracked him. We spent millions upon

[26:08] millions of dollars carrying out operations, locate him, and then we just turned them turned him over to the FBI because they had arrest powers. The CIA was not willing to let that happen again. They wanted credit for what they were doing. They believed they could get to Bin Laden through the hijackers because they believed the hijackers were weak and could be recruited. So best to keep the FBI out of it, we turn the hijackers, we double them against the al-Qaeda leadership, we kill the leadership, we save the

[26:40] country. The FBI had nothing to do with it. And that's just not the way it worked out. Clearly, this was a terrible idea. >> I have I have one final um question. It's it's pretty related, I think. Um Kofford Black spent a lot of time in Usuzbekiststan which I guess no one ever talks about that country. Uh Richard Ble too. They were training a lot of security forces over there. There's also of course major oil interests in

[27:11] Usuzbekistan, Tajjikstan, Kystan, all the countries that the CIA was heavily involved in after the break up of the Soviet Union. Pack as well had a major interest in those countries. They wanted to establish forward bases there. Uh and obviously as I mentioned the oil interests kind of overlap. Uh why was COP for Black going over there and and what were the objectives of uh training the security forces in that country? >> That's a good question. A complicated

[27:41] one. Um 911 offered us an opportunity to establish uh intelligence liaison relationships with countries that we would otherwise never have had any reason to talk to like all of the Central Asian stands. Um I can't tell you how many times I heard people say, "Oh, I have to go to Kyrgystan. I have to go to Tajjikstan." And we were like, "What?" To do what? Well, you know, we're going to start liazing with them. Well, by the time

[28:13] began attacking al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, we had forward bases in all of these countries. And when we made it clear to them that we're gearing up to go to war, hot war with the military and hundreds of thousands of people, and we want bases in your countries, and we're willing to pay you cash for them. Everybody agreed. But there was another thing that people don't talk about. I'm sure you've heard of Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Isbekiststan. Craig Murray is

[28:44] in my view a global human rights hero. Craig Murray was the British ambassador to Usbekiststan and he happened to be at a meeting at Usuzbck intelligence service headquarters and he heard a man screaming. So he went to the room where the screams were coming from despite the fact that his, you know, Usuzbck colleague kept telling him, "No, no, don't go there. Don't go there." He opens the door and

[29:14] there was a man being literally bo alive in oil. Boiled alive. Craig said that his skin melted off of his body as they lowered him into the boiling oil and the CIA station chief was standing there watching it happen. So Craig reported this back to the British uh uh foreign ministry, the foreign office, and they told him to come back to London for consultations.

[29:45] So they said, "Look, we can play this one of two ways. You can keep your mouth shut and become British ambassador to Denmark, which I'm sure your wife and kids would absolutely love, or you can keep talking about this, be fired, be prosecuted, and never work again. And he went straight to the papers and told them everything. Now he's become he never worked again. He's a sort of part-time journalist, a

[30:16] commentator. He's constantly being harassed and arrested and detained and grabbed at the airport and passport revoked and all kinds of stuff. But what he did was absolutely heroic. We wouldn't have known that the CIA even had a presence in Usuzbekiststan, let alone one where they're torturing prisoners by boiling them alive in oil along with uh Usuzbek intelligence authorities. But that was one of the reasons why Kofer was going to these countries. It was to establish these kinds of relationships in countries that

[30:48] really didn't have a free press in countries where there were no Americans or other journalists to pick up and report on these stories. Places where we could send prisoners that no one would suspect and then no one would ever hear from the prisoners again. Those were the kinds of relationships that he was cultivating. >> I want to ask you about something that you just mentioned which is these liaison activities. The CIA has a has a long tra uh tradition. Is my microphone on?

[31:18] >> Uhhuh. >> Oh, it is. Sorry. Um, they have a long tradition of liaison activities. Uh, just operations conducted in partnership with foreign intelligence services, militaries, militias, just any organization that's capable of surveillance um or violence. And in practice, the CIA often relied on these relationships because, you know, they do create a degree of separation between the US government and, you know, the often illegal covert activities of the CIA. Uh Iran Contra's a good example in

[31:50] the aftermath of the Church Committee in the 1970s when the CIA was supposedly reigned in under director Stanfield Turner. uh George HW Bush and other operatives turned to outside cutouts like the Bank of Credit and Commerce, arms dealers like Adnan Kosigible, even Israeli intelligence uh to just keep doing what the CIA had always done only further off the books. And I could see why in the short term that you know CIA officers might view those kinds of liaison agreements as useful. But my

[32:22] question is, does anybody inside the uh the agency ever stop to consider the long-term risks of liaison activities that by disclosing your most sensitive operations to a foreign intelligence service, which has its own separate national interest, you're just handing over America's darkest secrets, giving those governments leverage, even potential blackmail material over the United States itself? >> No, they don't consider it. They don't consider it at all. You know,

[32:54] there's this there's this deeply held belief that that we're the good guys and we're the hgeimon and we can do anything we want and when we do something, it's because we're the good guys and we're doing it in the in the cause of of righteousness, you know. So, there's no there's no deep introspection into CIA operations into counterterrorism, for example. they there's never what what they used to call a hotwash to really examine

[33:25] closely the decisions that we took and the results that came out of those decisions. They just never, you know, and another part of the problem is that that people move on every two years or three years. And so oftentimes somebody will come up with an idea, it's implemented, he moves on to something else, somebody comes in and replaces him, the operation continues for years, and in the end you don't even remember whose idea it was in the first place. So it's like there, sure, there's oversight, but there's not really

[33:55] oversight. Besides the fact that Senator Frank Church, who you mentioned a moment ago, Congressman Otis Pike, uh, Senator Daniel Patrick Moahan, Senator Ted Kennedy, they're dead. They're dead and gone. And there's nobody with any guts to really stand up to the CIA on Capitol Hill and say you can't do that. It's illegal. No one has the guts to say that. >> I want to ask you a few questions about Israel um at at the end uh or now

[34:27] actually. Um, so Ben Shapiro, who's very close with the Israeli government, he's actually arguably, I would say, more loyal to it than his own country. Um, he assures us that Israel just completely stopped spying on the United States in the 1980s with the Jonathan Pard affair. Um, >> that's a lie. That's the official Israeli uh answer, but that's a lie. Yes. >> Right. That that's the official Israeli position, and I feel sorry for anyone that's, you know, gullible enough to believe that. Uh, as we've talked about

[34:58] before, Israeli intelligence operations against the United States are extensively documented and just so numerous that our own intelligence agencies consider Israel to be a national security threat on par with Russia and China. Yes, literally it's it's classified as critical threat for counterintelligence which is which critical threat countries uh also include Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba. Yeah. >> Right. Israel.

[35:28] >> And I I want to get into some of the more recent, more prominent examples um of Israeli uh counter intelligence against the United States and what they reveal about, you know, our supposed strategic ally and how it treats its primary sponsor. Starting with an incident in the late 1990s, uh that happened while you were at the CIA. In 1997, the FBI opened an investigation into what they called a senior US government official who they believed

[36:00] was passing highly sensitive information to the Israeli government. The NSA intercepted a secure communication between senior Israeli intelligence officer in Washington and their superior in Tel Aviv that referred to someone that had the code name Mega. Did we ever find out what that was about? And uh no we did not >> I I remember that you know and what's what's funny not funny haha but funny unusual is that this happens few years

[36:32] not necessarily with Israel but with other countries with Pakistan for example or with China or South Korea and by God the FBI drills down to the very foundation and usually an indictment is delivered or somebody loses a security clearance or there's some kind of public fallout. In the case of Mega, there was nothing. We never learned who this person was. We never learned what the information was that was being passed to the Israelis, but it was crystal clear

[37:04] that the Israelis had recruited an American official and the American official was passing highly classified information back to the Israeli government. >> And and what did the CIA think at the time? Was there anyone active on that case? you know, counter intelligence investigations are the most tightly controlled, highly classified cases that exist. Um, the CIA may have been involved in the investigation up to its neck, but they would never have,

[37:35] >> right? Yeah. And mega could have been so many things in the 90s. So many things would remain uh mega like mega oil or or, you know, Jeffrey Epstein's mega group. There's a lot of possibilities. or it could have been computerenerated because most of the the code names are computerenerated. The there's what's called a diagraph. Everything begins with a two-letter diagraph. Like uh for example, if there's a if there's a an agent recruited to I'm making this up to uh you know report on counter

[38:06] prolifer counterp proliferation the diagramraph will be AB and then the computer generates a code name. So if I recruit you to to report on this, you're going to be AB grasshopper, right? It has nothing to do with grasshoppers. It's just the computer spat that word out and so that's your code. >> Let me ask you about the big one. Um, the office of the National Counter Intelligence Executive issued a report in the spring of 2001 on what they

[38:37] called Israeli art students who tried to illegally gain access to a bunch of federal buildings. A bunch of them were arrested and found to have counterfeit visas. A number of them actually lived in Hollywood, Florida on very very close on the same block in fact as Muhammad Ata and some of the other 911 hijackers. >> Um you after that report was issued, federal officials arrested and detained about 140 of the Israelis deported them. Uh after 911 they deported another 60.

[39:08] There was famous Fox News report by Carl Cameron on it. The DEA uh wrote classified memo about the Israelis. 60 pages long. Um, it details all the intelligence collection being conducted by these so-called Israeli art students at Tinker Air Force Base, trespassing at Camp Douglas, dozens of other restricted sites. Uh, some of these intelligence connected Israelis were then seen documenting and videotaping the 9/11

[39:40] terror attacks from New Jersey. That's in the FBI report. >> Uh, who were those Israelis? what are they doing uh in the United States and why were they surveilling and around the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks? >> You know, it's funny that you asked that because this was a topic of conversation at a at a an event that I went to last night. We talked about the dancing uh Israelis who were arrested and held for several months. They falsified visas. But when the when the New York City

[40:11] Police Department first stopped them in a in a white panel van, they kept saying, "No, no, we're friends. You don't want us. You want the Arabs. The Arabs are the enemy. You should focus on the Arabs, not us. We're friends. We're Israeli." Well, they were spies. They were Israeli spies. And this is what the Israelis do. They do the same thing the Russians do, the same thing the Chinese do. The same thing the Cubans do. They infiltrate American society, especially around military bases, especially around

[40:41] US defense contractors, and they just steal everything they can get their hands on. But it also comes back to this point that I made earlier in in this show and last night at this event that I just told you. Um, and that is that the Israelis are not content with us giving them 99% of our weapons and weapons systems. They want all 100% and so they are willing to risk the very relationship that we have to steal that remaining 1%.

[41:14] >> So why why were they released back to Israel? And who who was the person who allowed their release? >> Yeah, they were released back to Israel because they're Israeli. If they had been from any other country, they would probably still be in prison for espionage. But uh that that decision would come But really, it would come from the attorney general after being cleared with uh with the president or the chief of staff, the national security adviser.

[41:44] >> Um I I have another one for you actually that that was very um shortly afterward. There was another major Israeli spy operation that was busted in the 2000s. Uh, it involved the Department of Defense Office of Special Plans that was headed by Paul Wolawitz and Douglas Feith, members of the Neoconservative Project for a New American Century or Pac. They're also authors of the Clean Break Report with Richard Worms on

[42:15] behalf of Benjamin, not Yahoo. Uh that report argued for Israel's dual containment strategy against Iraq and Iran desire to overthrow those governments which they did immediately afterward. Um their office was found to have a major leak that went straight to Israel. What was going on in Paul Wolawitz and Doug Fight's offices? I don't think that Paul Wolfitz and Doug Feith and and OVP David Addington or Scooter Libby or any of those neocons

[42:46] uh took the threat of Israeli counter intelligence seriously. On the contrary, I think they helped to abet uh Israeli counter intelligence operations. These are guys who see who see our relationship with Israel as being so close as to be one. And so if the Israelis are spying on us, well, their argument is we're going to give them the information anyway, and they're just trying that they get everything that we promise we're going

[43:17] to give them. And so I don't think these guys I don't think any of these guys ever believed that the Israelis were any kind of a threat to us, counterintelligence or otherwise. Now, that's silly, of course, because of course they're a threat, and of course they've always spied on us, and of course they continue to spy on us. But I think that they just won't allow themselves to believe that there's a downside to it. There might be an Israeli spy in our government right now. At least uh that's

[43:49] what Steve Bannon about >> CIA director John Ratcliffe. He's one of the largest recipients of Apac cash and he's someone that organization privately refers to as their lifeline in the administration. When it was time to bomb Iran, he personally handed Trump Assad's own cooked up intelligence on the supposed threat of Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons. Um, is Steve Bannon correct to be suspicious? And yes, >> you share his Yeah,

[44:20] >> I do. Yes, I do. You know, when we're vetting these cabinet level positions, they look at every stock trade and every transfer from account A to account B and and did you ever smoke weed and did you ever your wife? Why are we not concerned about possible allegations of espionage? I don't understand it. For me personally, I would never put a position put a person rather in a position of authority if they had taken the kind of money that John Rackcliffe has taken.

[44:52] I wouldn't be able to sleep at night thinking that, you know, perhaps the Israelis have something that's hanging over John Rackcliff's head. You know, look at Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabber didn't take Israeli money. Why Why would John Rackcliffe, right? I have a question about another aspect of Israeli surveillance or I guess it's American surveillance, but really it's Israeli. Uh it's about Palunteer. This was a company that was created as

[45:23] the CIA funded revival of total information awareness. That's the CIA program uh that was first conceived by Iran Contra figures like John point Dexter um who argued that maintaining American power required policing descent as home uh as much as fighting enemies abroad. Kind of like Oliver North said in his Ron Contra um Senate testimony um that you know we didn't lose the war in Vietnam. We we lost it in American cities. Um and in that vein, in the

[45:54] 2000s, Peter Teal, Alex Karp, and Joe Lansdale got billions from the CIA's venture capital firm uh in CQEL and built Palunteer, um which has since worked with nearly every US agency, including the NSA. It filters data from mass surveillance programs like X Keyscore. But Palanteer today isn't only integrated into the American security state. It's also deeply embedded in Israel's. Its leadership is openly fanatical in their Zionism. They boast about supplying Israel with AR targeting

[46:25] tools used in Gaza for their genocide. Uh and when asked about whether they agree with how Israel uses Palunteer's products, their co-founder Peter Teal says that his preference is simply to defer to Israel. Um, Israel and the United States though are two different countries, right? I mean, sometimes their interests align, but often they don't. And so my question is, do you see a national security risk in the fact that the company with the most authoritarian surveillance tools on the planet, an American company, openly says

[46:58] that it defers to a foreign government, Israel? >> Yeah, 100%. And see, in a case like that, there ought to be some sort there ought to be a law that compels congressional oversight. If there's going to be a transfer of technology, especially of technology that's this highly classified and us developed, there should be some sort of congressional notification so that the policy makers and the lawmakers know that this is happening.

[47:30] And you know, it would set up a a a mechanism by which the FBI could later investigate if there's an illegal technology transfer, but we don't have anything like that. The we just give the Israelis everything they want, whether it's government to government or private company to government. >> Let me ask you another shady character who's surprisingly also involved in the surveillance world. Uh it's Trump's largest donor. It's Sheldon Adlesen's

[48:00] widow, Miriam Aden. Uh they operated the Sans Casino together with her uh deceased husband Sheldon Adlesen. Uh with hotels and casinos in Vegas and Macau. >> Aden, like the previous owner of Sans Casino, the gangster Meer Lansky, is a major Zionist and also like Lansky, is probably mobbed up and a criminal. uh his hotels in Macau are notorious for their collaboration with the triads. Well, he was also like Myer Lansky of

[48:32] interest to the American security state who used SANS on at least one occasion and probably many more. Court filings revealed that when the CIA hired a Spanish surveillance company to spy on Julian Assange while he was trapped in London's Ecuador embassy, it was Sans Casino and its security staff led by Israelis who contracted the firm on the CIA's behalf. More than that, the Chinese government has basically banned its officials from ever staying at Sands Casinos in Macau because they say Aden

[49:04] was running a big CIA blackmail operation there. That's what the Chinese government believes. What were Sheldon Adlesen's intelligence connections and why would the CIA turn to someone like Aden to do their operations? >> I don't know the answer to the last part of your question. Um I listen I always believe Sheldon Adlesen was a very dark figure in contemporary intelligence. Um he's the guy who paid out of his own pocket probably illegally uh to move the

[49:38] American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for example. He is as Israeli as Zionist as they come. It just doesn't get any more it didn't get any more Zionist than Sheldon Adlesen. He also gave more than a hundred million dollars to the Trump campaign in 2016 and his widow gave another hundred million dollars to the Trump campaign in 2024. So the there had to be some sort of a quid proquo. People don't do this kind of thing out of the goodness of their

[50:08] hearts. Sheldon Adlesen was getting something for it. And um and I think he probably was some sort of a middleman where he was he was working for the Israelis, but he was probably also working for the CIA. And you know, you give the Israelis information on the United States, but you give the CIA information on China, and that way everybody's happy and you just keep doing it. He had more money than you could count in a lifetime. So that that wasn't the issue. I think the issue was

[50:40] uh power control maybe to a lesser extent patriotism misguided as it might have been patriotism toward Israel. >> Yeah. >> Right. Um you know I have one final question for you. It's about the media. It's something I was wanting to ask last time. Now, Glenn Greenwald always says that the CIA doesn't need Operation Mocking Board uh anymore because that program um is just no longer necessary. All the uh corporate media just for

[51:12] decades has recited CIA propaganda without any pressure or infiltration necessary. They just do it willingly. Um, when you were at the CIA though, were there any journalists, maybe David Ignatius, Carl Bernstein, Jennifer Griffin, uh, that the CIA could just consistently count on to regurgitate their propaganda? Yeah. >> Oh, sure, sure, sure. Um, yeah, Bob Woodward, number one, maybe tied for number one, uh, was Ignatius. I He's essentially the CIA's scribe. But I

[51:44] agree with Glenn Greenwald. The CIA doesn't need Operation Mockingbird anymore. There's no money anymore for investigative journalism. So, what most journalists do is they'll just call the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, have a a statement emailed over, and then they just gist the statement, put it in their own words, and call it an article. So, why why pay to uh to recruit American journalists when they just do what you want for free? You know, there's there's an interesting story about Jason Leupold, who's a just an absolutely

[52:16] fantastic investigative journalist at Bloomberg. Jason has had a long career. He was at the LA Times. He was at Vice. He was all over the place. But he was once called by the by the Bush Pentagon, excuse me, Pentagon spokesman. He was once called a foya terrorist because he had filed more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other person in the world. He broke the Hillary Clinton email scandal, for example, just by filing a foyer request. Well, he told me

[52:48] once that he was bored one night and he didn't really have anything happening. So, he just filled out a FOYA form, sent it to the uh to the CIA asking for all correspondence between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs and all American journalists, everything. And what happens is the CIA never responds. So, um uh Jason had an Jeffrey Light, who's a well-known, he's retired now, but he was a well-known uh

[53:20] Foya attorney. And so on day 61 when the CIA hasn't responded and invariably they had never responded, they sue the CIA. They always win. The judge orders the CIA to release the documents. So this is what happened. Most of what he found was garbage. But two stories came out of that foyer trunch. One was that one was that Ken Delaneian, the the head

[53:52] uh national security reporter for NBC and MSNBC, >> was actually writing articles and sending them to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editors. In incredible, unfathomable. Um, but then he also found a very angry from the CIA to a journalist saying, "So help us God. If you publish that article, you will never be invited to

[54:23] the CIA Christmas party ever again and we will never give you another interview." And no article was ever published. So why pay good money to recruit American journalists when it's illegal? But also, you just bully them into doing whatever you want, >> right? And I, you know, one of the benefits um of independent media, and I'll just say this, thank god um less and less people trust uh corporate media anymore and that there's independent media to replace it. I do worry though,

[54:53] and uh I wonder if you have the same fear as well, that uh the CIA does still kind of find a way to get its message through on independent media. I'm not sure if you've noticed this. I've seen a number of podcasts now uh in my YouTube algorithm. They just come up. They just have, you know, hundreds of thousands and millions of views and it's some guy sometimes from the CIA um just saying why we need to be afraid of Russia and China um or Cuba and Venezuela, which is

[55:24] just the exact message that I would get from a Langly press release. Um what's going on there? Yeah, there there has to be a program to encourage this kind of uh this kind of thing. The CIA is really resourceful. They have a lot of smart people. They understand algorithms. In many cases, they manipulate algorithms. And so what better get your side of the story out than to, you know, control the algorithm

[55:56] and make sure that everybody from, you know, some 16-year-old kid laying in bed at night to you to me gets the CIA point of view. This this is not what YouTube uh, for example, had had expected or anticipated. But the CIA is constantly working on these kinds of things. >> Well, John, it it was great to talk to you today. I really appreciate you taking the time. >> Good to see you again.
