Title: Foresight with Ken Weaver--John Kiriakou, Whistleblower
Show: Salem Access TV - Public
Date: 2019-03-14
URL: https://youtu.be/YcTHv1zLD7M
Duration: 47:00

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[00:04] [Music] welcome to foresight my guest is john kiriakou he's the author of three books of which you can see behind us john comes to us at a very difficult time in our country john if anything exemplifies what we seem to be lacking not only in our politicians but in our media in our schools sometimes

[00:36] in our just general daily process of life and that is honesty patriotism in dealing with very very difficult subjects i asked john to be here today to enlighten us a little bit about the three books that he's already written but i mostly asked him to be able to speak of who he is and what constitutes a person who would put himself in his life and

[01:07] his loved ones at jeopardy and that is not what we normally think of people doing but there are those out there there are those people both men and women who do that who jeopardize everything for truth and honesty john welcome to the show thanks very much for having me it is indeed a pleasure so as we were saying earlier what i'd like you to do is just to pick your first book which i believe is the reluctant spy

[01:38] and sort of give us a a tracy of of what the story is about sure and we'll just go through each one like that and then we'll get to more fun things afterwards sounds good uh the first book uh is the reluctance by my secret life in the cia's war on terror i was in the cia from january of 1990 until mid 2004 the first half of my career was in analysis middle eastern analysis focused almost solely on iraq before most americans had ever heard of

[02:09] iraq and the second half of my career was in counter-terrorism operations at first and it's kind of quaint now but first targeting european communist terrorist groups and then of course like everybody else in the intelligence community moving on to al qaeda and other sunni extremist groups i left the cia in 2004 and went into the private sector after i left the cia i waited for somebody

[02:40] anybody to reveal the existence of the torture program which i believed to be illegal immoral unethical certainly and nobody said anything and you didn't just come to that conclusion that it was a more illegal i mean there were already written pages of why that was not a legal thing to do oh very clearly written pages what is it nuremberg that's right from nuremberg in 1946 congress passed a law

[03:12] called the federal torture act and it banned specifically the the kinds of techniques that we were using against al qaeda prisoners in january of 1946 we executed japanese soldiers who had waterboarded american prisoners of war okay in january of 1968 the washington post ran a front page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding a vietnamese north

[03:43] vietnamese prisoner the day that that photo was published the secretary of defense robert mcnamara ordered an investigation that soldier was arrested he was charged with torture convicted and sentenced to 20 years at leavenworth well the law never changed we changed right so why was waterboarding an executable offense in 1946 punishable by 20 years at hard labor in 1968 and then suddenly

[04:15] as if by magic perfectly legal in 2002 i knew it wasn't legal in robert mcnamara the the one who was responsible for the vietnam war who would later write a book that's right begging for giving forgiveness for that yes you're exactly right uh a notorious figure in modern american history but even he knew that this was a bridge too far it was just too illegal too obviously and clearly illegal well the bush administration decided

[04:46] that it wasn't illegal and that we were going to use it and we were going to use it with frequency which we did it was finally again made illegal with passage of the mccain-feinstein amendment in the summer of 2015. and that the the issue aside from being a humanitarian fault was i think mccain was attitude was because he had gone through the torture himself that what we would be doing was we would

[05:17] say well this is okay so if we thought it was okay then other people would do the same thing precisely precisely you know we like to present ourselves to other countries as a shining beacon of human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and we're not so we either that's a hard truth will be yeah very hard truth we either will be or we won't be right one of the complaints i had when i was at the cia surrounded the state department's annual

[05:48] human rights report congress mandated in 1978 that every american embassy in the world write a human rights report every year on the country that is hosting us right so in every country where we have diplomatic relations around the world we write a human rights report and that report goes to congress annually so imagine you're the state department human rights officer which i was for two years in bahrain 1995 and 96 and

[06:18] you go into the minister of interior's office and you tell him your excellency you cannot just pick up a 15 year old boy and torture him to death and then call his parents the next day to come and pick up the body that's an extra judicial killing it's a violation of the law and you can't do it and i have to put it in the human rights report and then 15 minutes later a cia officer comes in to meet with a minister and he says don't pay any attention to what that state department guy said we want you to open a secret prison for us so we can bring prisoners here and torture

[06:50] them and nobody will know about it it completely undercuts our international moral authority so when we go to other countries and and we say you need to respect human rights they laugh at us because they know that we don't respect human rights you know respect begets respect and it damages the country right right so either we're going to observe and respect international law or we're not but we can't do both being

[07:21] respecting the international laws of which we are responsible for having written i said earlier today in a in a talk at hamilton hall that we were the drafters yeah of the united nations convention against torture yeah and then we say well we don't like this u.n convention against torture because it won't let us do what we want to do we wrote the law right it's kind of like the treaties back in the 17th that's right the indian treaties that's right yeah so what i found fascinating in within the realm of the first book was what you had

[07:52] to go through in order to get into the cia one of the things that i thought was was fascinating was at that time very few other agents spoke arabic they couldn't even and still very few speakers but you so but so you took it upon yourself to learn the language yes and so you're you're trilingual right you you speak greek you speak english and you speak arabic yes so that you know when people saw you coming down said yeah we need him well when i made the decision to switch over from analysis to

[08:23] operations i saw a job advertised in athens it was a counter-terrorism officer job and it said um either greek or english i'm sorry either greek or arabic uh preferred not mandatory right either greek or arabic preferred so i found out who was responsible for hiring and i made an appointment i went down to see him and i said listen i'm an analyst and i don't know the first thing about operations but i speak greek and arabic fluently both of them

[08:54] he said get out of here and i said no really no you don't really right well and as it turned out i was one of only two people in the entire cia who had those two languages and one the other one was a language teacher so i said i know i'm not qualified for this job but i'd like to throw my hat in he said listen it's way easier and way cheaper for me to hire a linguist and teach him operations than it is for me to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak greek and arabic and so

[09:24] i got the job so i wonder i wonder if that that persists today where there are still so few people who understand the language they go through these fits and starts where we need to go out and hire as many arabic speakers as we can but then many arabic speakers are either first generation americans or they are refugees who became americans and so they have trouble with the polygraph or with a background exam and they end up not getting hired so what has happened at the cia is now a

[09:55] plurality of the arabic speakers are arab christians mostly lebanese coptic egyptians who have the language don't have the counter-intelligence problems that might be associated with someone from those countries they get hired but then they have this innate bias against muslims in their own country and so it's kind of hard to use them operationally because they're hard to control exactly so you're

[10:25] the evening upon the capture go tell this is the part where i i was you know i couldn't put the book down i mean okay all right so uh so give us a little bit about the build up i mean i know you you you were you were you were like you were in charge of the money yes you were the one who went out and said okay well in order to go through this whole thing we need to have a building where we can work out of them we may need two buildings so you go out and you survey the place and get everything down and then and then you you make that part

[10:57] of it happen yes and of course the other part of the story that i love is when you get lost on the way back because for the life of me i couldn't find the hotel yeah i mean you know amongst all the seriousness of what you're going through all right where's the mcdonald's that we can see i forgot about that actually i'll tell that i forgot all about it uh in january of 2002 i was named chief of counterterrorism operations in pakistan big job this was an opportunity to prove myself

[11:28] to serve the country and to and to exact justice against the people who had killed so many americans on 9 11. so i went to islamabad pakistan which is the capital and took up my job at the embassy there when i first arrived on my first day the senior cia officer in country told me that what he wanted me to do was to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-qaeda safe house

[12:00] i i had no idea how to take down an al-qaeda safe house i went back to the office with a legal pad and i wrote safehouse takedown and i thought okay so if i were going to take down a safe house what would i what would i do well i would i would want it to be dark because i wouldn't want anybody to see me and so i wrote at the top of the page o200 figuring everybody's asleep by two o'clock in the morning and then i thought well i need battering rams so we're going to order some battering rooms from

[12:31] a catalog it's a police supply catalog www.galls.com you can buy anything you want so we ordered a few cases of battering rams and i thought well we break down the door we separate the men from the women and children and then we take the men to jail and we can interrogate them either jail or a safe house so we tried it one night we had a tip with an address and we broke down the door at two o'clock and there was a 19 year old tunisian kid

[13:01] in there just started crying asked if he could call his mom and we said no you can't and we took him to uh the jail in rawalpindi and interrogated him there and we sent him to guantanamo and i thought wow well that was easy enough so we said well let's try it again and an egyptian intelligence officer handed me a slip of paper with an address on it so i said okay we'll try it again we broke down the door at 2 am two guys from egyptian islamic jihad

[13:33] were in there we grabbed them interrogated them put them on a plane to guantanamo i said well this job's easy but then i got a call one weekend that abu zubato was somewhere in pakistan and that we had to catch him we had to take him alive abu zubaydah was the number three in al qaeda he was the director of logistics for al qaeda so if you needed a fake passport if you needed a safe house if you needed to get back to your home country or to sneak into afghanistan abu zubaydah was your guy

[14:03] he founded both of al qaeda's training centers training camps in southern afghanistan and kandahar province and he also founded the al-qaeda safe house in peshawar pakistan called the house of martyrs so this is a bad man a bad guy but you can't just say he's somewhere in pakistan go catch him because pakistan is the size of texas and it has more than 200 million people in it and we knew from our nsa friends that he was constantly moving between

[14:35] cities constantly sure and so we were hot on his trail but we were always a day or two or three behind later on when we finally captured him we also captured his diary and he knew that we were on him that's why he was moving so frequently and he would write these passages i just made it out ahead of the americans they got to the house the next day thanks to god i will continue to fight and on and on and on sounds like cat and

[15:06] mouse that's exactly what it was it was cat and mouse so clearly my ideas to capture him were not working and so i asked headquarters to send me a targeting analyst a targeting analyst is an unusual character at the cia most analysts sit in these cubicles they think the big thoughts they're experts on these obscure issues or or on a country they write papers for the president the vice president the secretaries of state

[15:37] and defense the national security adviser a targeting analyst is completely different he would take thousands tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of information and pour through them a lot of its metadata to try to figure out a person's location now why do you want to know these locations you want to capture this guy you want to kill the guy you want to fire a rocket from a drone at the guy whatever

[16:08] you have to locate this one person now everybody makes mistakes bin laden finally made a mistake right abuza beta certainly made mistakes they all make mistakes and in the meantime you're recruiting human assets in the area in in that that click of people an asset being someone who could give you information that's right uh we call those people agents we call ourselves officers so you're recruiting agents to report back to you that you know muhammad abdullah is over

[16:40] here in this house and abdul rashid is over here at this house and then you can kick down the door and take them so we chased up his debate all over the place the analyst finally came he worked tirelessly 18 hours a day just writing on this giant piece of paper writing information from the metadata that helped us to narrow the possible locations foreign he finally came to me and said i can't narrow it down to to fewer than 14

[17:12] possible locations but we had never done more than two raids before in a night ever we had never hit certainly 14 places simultaneously at 2 o'clock in the morning so i asked headquarters to send me a plane full of people pallets of weapons communications gear walkie-talkies another building yeah two million dollars in cash that i bought two buildings with uh just everything we needed more battering rams and they came

[17:42] and so we decided we were gonna divide up into teams i bought two safe houses one in place alabad one in a nearby city that i'm not allowed to name that uh was two hours east yes they let me say it's a giant city two is out two hours east and there's only one city two hours east so anyway yeah stupid rules so so on march the 22nd 2002 we hit 14 sites simultaneously

[18:13] i'm not allowed to say the number of al-qaeda fighters that we caught it was many dozens and in one of those houses was abu zubaydah his bodyguard and a an al-qaeda bomb maker in another house we caught both of the commanders of the two al-qaeda training camps and um abu zubaydah was shot trying to escape he was jumping from the roof of his safe house to the roof of the neighboring house a pakistani policeman shot him with an ak-47 hit him in the

[18:43] thigh the groin in the stomach nearly killed him we rushed him to a hospital uh it was a gruesome scene but they were able to save his life yeah let's let's jump ahead a little bit if we could yeah because we sort of know what is eventually going to happen to some degree so now i want to bring it back to the when you get back here yes and all the things all the great things all the great time that you you had spent trying to figure this whole thing out and finally did figure it all out but now that that's passed yes and now

[19:16] things are about to happen right that right we know should not have happened to you i got back to headquarters may the 6th 2002 and i was in the cafeteria one day and a senior officer from the cia's counterterrorism center which was my home office approached me very very casually and he said oh hey i'm glad i ran into you hey do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i had never heard that term before and i said what does that mean

[19:46] and he said we're going to start getting rough with these guys very excitedly i said what's that mean and he told me these 10 techniques that had been approved by both the justice department and the white house that were going to be used on al-qaeda prisoners i said man that sounds like a torture program to me and he said no no justice said it's okay the president signed off i said i don't know i i went and actually sought the con the council of a senior very very senior cia officer and he agreed with me this is a slippery

[20:17] slope you don't want any part of it of the 14 people they asked i was the only one who said no originally it was two of us and then the other one changed his mind and went through the training i became known as the human rights guy at the cia which was not a compliment and was not career enhancing right but i had a real ethical problem with with a torture program as i said when we first started our conversation we have laws that govern this kind of thing and torture is simply illegal

[20:50] and so i declined now because we had caught abu zubaydah even with that declination i was promoted and i became the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations so i had access to literally every cable that was being produced by every cia officer around the world and you you do nothing in your class but go up up up as you travel into into the ranks of the cia 12 exceptional performance awards a sustained superior performance award

[21:20] uh two meritorious human unit commendations i got the medal for bravery i got the counterterrorism service medal so i wasn't some shmo and that's the part i want you to talk about yeah that's that's because you're not some shmo because you do carry a lot of weight not only not only from a humanitarian point of view but from your just general knowledge of right and wrong and that's that's very very important well see this is one of the things about the cia that you've hit on that i think

[21:51] is really crucial there is literally no training in ethics right you have to have your own moral code when you go into the cia and you have to know right and wrong because they're not going to teach it to you and you are continually confronted with these moral quandaries these dilemmas operationally and you have to decide should i do a or should i do b a is ugly but it's going to get the job done b is a personal affront to me

[22:22] so what do i do and nobody's going to tell you you should do a or you should do b you have to do it yourself right right and that's a personal choice it is it is and there are consequences to those choices and i and i and i think that another thing i have i haven't heard you speak about at all uh oren's not mentioned in the book to any great degree it was your upbringing right and what what it was like to be a little john curiago and and without naming places or street addresses or anything like that but just the fact that you grew up in a very

[22:53] organized very loving i did background i was very fortunate right my grandparents all four of my grandparents emigrated from the greek island of rhodes um primarily as as economic refugees rhodes had been under ottoman domination control for almost 500 years they turned it over to the italians in 1917 and the italians occupied the island until 1947. so my grandparents all left and and were so grateful to this country

[23:26] for giving them an opportunity to make something not just for themselves but for their children my dad and his sister were the first people in their family ever to to go to college ever and uh and so the american experience was very very important to my grandparents i mentioned earlier in the talk at hamilton hall that that to hear my grandfather tell the story franklin roosevelt was waiting for him at ellis island to give him a job

[23:56] and to give him citizenship and of course he wasn't but until the day he died in 1978 there was a framed picture of franklin roosevelt on the on the tv he was very serious about this and so i came from a strongly nuclear family strongly greek american church every sunday greek school tuesdays and thursdays you know the greek dances and parties and such in the summer time but at the same time a love of the united states and a desire

[24:28] to pay the country back for what it had already given us my father served in the military of course during the korean war and um and i only considered public service only it never even occurred to me to go into the private sector because all my all through my childhood i was told we have to pay the country back we have to pay the country back and so that's why i joined the cia i told my parents when i was nine that i wanted to join the cia [Laughter] yeah that was the the one

[25:00] the biggest part of that book what was seeing in hearing your your you grow up and you going to school and being like the top of your class and graduating top year class and how uh one of the professors took you aside at the end of graduation and said hey listen i have an offer there's some information that you might be interested in right which was when he was actually undercover as a professor

[25:31] which is now illegal by the way we have the equal employment opportunity act now in this country since 1993 but he was undercover as a professor looking for people who might fit into the cia's culture and he thought i would fit in and so it's up to you to pass the tests and the polygraph the background investigation all that but he certainly got the ball rolling i'll be forever indebted to him but he was right i was a good fit

[26:02] so sort of a double-edged sword though it was certainly a double-edged sword yeah and you know the funny thing too he told me an absolutely fascinating story one time and it made me think that i was a lot more like him than i had realized and i think he saw it in me before i ever saw it in him he was the founder of of a unit inside the cia that did uh psychological and psychiatric examinations by long distance mostly of foreign leaders and he was getting ready to go on

[26:33] vacation one time in 1971 and his boss came up to him and said i want you to do a psychological profile before you leave and handed him a file and the file was on daniel ellsberg well it's illegal for the cia to do anything with an american or against an american and he said you want me to do a psychological evaluation on an american citizen he said not a chance and he handed it back we should stay too for those who people who aren't aware of who daniel is daniel ellsberg released the

[27:05] pentagon papers in 1971 that showed that not only were we losing the vietnam war but our generals knew that we were losing the vietnam war for almost a decade and had been lying to the president perhaps one of the most important whistleblowers of our time he's the godfather of all modern national security whistleblowers i i have nothing but deep love and respect for dan ellsberg he's been a a great source of support for me so um so he went on vacation

[27:36] and when he came back he gets a subpoena and the subpoenas for this congressional committee and they want to know why did you do this psychological evaluation of daniel ellsberg he said i didn't it turned out his boss did it and wrote his name on it so he stood up and he ended up testifying before the watergate committee saying this is wrong i knew it was wrong i refused to do it and they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway so sometimes you just have to stand up and call it like it is

[28:07] some things you know one of the things about the cia is cia culture is such that they want you to believe that everything is a shade of gray and that's just simply not true some things are black and white they're right and wrong and for me torture was just simply wrong so all that has been exposed several years go by you're i'll allow i'll leave that to you to describe because i know you know the exact dates in august and in 2008 into

[28:38] 2009. yep so everything seemed to be fine when you're out you get out and then suddenly one day everything falls apart which time uh yes just prior to you being yes sent i i left the cia in 2004 and i gave an interview to abc news in 2007 in which i blew the whistle on the torture program i was investigated by the fbi for a full year from december of 07 to december of

[29:09] 08. they determined that i had not committed a crime they closed the case i had no idea that three weeks later when barack obama became president and john brennan became the deputy national security adviser that john an old colleague of mine asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me no idea they tapped my phones they intercepted my emails they put groups of fbi agents on my house on my

[29:41] car and then they set you up and then they set me up they tried they tried to set me up at first yeah at the time i was working for john kerry on the senate foreign relations committee i was the senior investigator and uh the great thing about that job is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time and it's a great opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions about what's happening around the world mostly in the middle east for me so i get a call from the number three at

[30:12] the japanese embassy and he invites me to lunch i said i'd be delighted we meet at this little cafe on capitol hill and uh i remember the lunch we talked about israeli elections and turkish elections and we talked about the middle east peace process and at the end of it he said to me so what's next for you and i said actually i think i'm going to resign soon i told senator kerry i'd give him two years it's been two and a half i have five children i need to make some money so that i can put them through college and he said no don't do that

[30:44] if you give me information i can give you money and i said what's wrong with you yeah did he not realize who he was speaking to yeah well i i can't believe that you would make a pitch like that i said shame on you yeah yeah i got up and i walked out and i went directly to the office of the senate security officer and i said i was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer oh boy he says we'll sit at this stand-alone computer write it up as a memo i'll send it to the fbi so long story short

[31:15] the one who was who was trying to turn you was not someone who was doing that at all but rather a member of there was no japanese diplomat right i met with him five times at the fbi's insistence it turned out that he was an fbi agent undercover trying to get me to commit espionage so that they could prosecute me and send me to prison for the rest of my life on an espionage charge a real espionage charge now espionage is one of the gravest crimes with which an american can be charged and sometimes

[31:46] carries the death penalty private slavic yes precisely yeah yes who was someone who was i believe world war ii was it world war ii world war ii he was charged with espionage and he was i think the only man executed he was uh shot by firing squad right by a firing squad but i had told you yeah i hadn't committed espionage and they knew it so they were trying to set me up well we ended up getting in discovery we got memos from john brennan to eric holder saying charge him with espionage and

[32:19] holder writes back and says my people don't think he committed espionage and then brennan wrote back and said charge him anyway and make him defend himself and that's exactly what they did i was charged finally with five felonies including three counts of espionage um those espionage charges were all thrown out i hadn't committed espionage but i was ruined financially and what they do they they're they're very smart about the way they do this and this isn't unique to john kiriakou they do this

[32:49] all over america and this is why the government according to propublica has a 98.2 conviction rate right because what they do is something called charge stacking where they'll charge you with five 10 20 felonies and they'll wait until you go bankrupt and then they come back and they say okay we'll drop all the charges but one if you take a plea well what do you do nobody ever wins in court ever right and so you're looking at 45 years in prison or

[33:21] two years in prison which one's it gonna be and if you go to trial and lose you get 45 years and you still owe your lawyers three million dollars yeah so what do you do you take the plea everybody takes the plea because it becomes an economic decision right another thing they do is something called venue shopping they'll charge you in the federal district that you are most likely to get the harshest sentence in and so that's what they did with me they moved you to a spot where yeah the eastern district of virginia it's called the espionage court and it's where no

[33:53] no national security defendant has ever won a case ever so i was there jeffrey sterling the cia whistleblower was there ed snowden was charged there and we just learned in the last month or so that julian assange has been charged there as well no some rather high profile people i guess i'd say so so again to jump ahead a little bit you were you went for the for the short term yes

[34:24] so you went for is it 23 months 23 months 23 months so so now you're about to be incarcerated you have a family yes you have a wife you have a child one or two five at that time at that time five yes yeah with my youngest my youngest was a year old right yeah it was tough so yeah um i thought being here was going to be pressure i can't imagine what it must have been like to get to this nightmare it was a

[34:55] nightmare it had to be it had to be not a single day goes by that you don't think of killing yourself oh jeez because what's the alternative yeah you know when i first went to meet with the justice department with my attorneys um this woman one of the attorneys at justice said take a plea mr kiriakou and you might live to meet your grandchildren right and i said i did nothing wrong and i'm not taking a plea they started at 35 years take a plea we'll let you do 35.

[35:27] and then they came down almost instantly to 10 and i said i'm not doing 10 minutes i didn't do anything wrong then they went to eight and then five and then my lead attorney a legendary figure named plato cacheras said i've been an attorney in washington for 54 years he said and i have never seen them come down in time and i said why are they doing that because usually they'll offer you 10 and if you say no they come back at 12 or

[35:58] 15. right yeah i said why are they coming down yeah and he said i don't want to swear but he said you have a they they have a crappy case and they know it's crappy and i said let's fight him he said oh we're going to trial you didn't do anything wrong and so we went right up to trial but then they had an in-camera meeting that's a private meeting secret with the judge to which my attorneys were not permitted and when the judge came out of chambers

[36:29] she denied all 75 of my motions to declassify documents that were necessary for me to defend myself and so i literally had no defense as we were walking out of the courtroom i said to my attorney what just happened and he said we just lost the case that's what happened and i said what do we do now now we take a plea and so they started the negotiations the the government wouldn't come down below three and a half years and i said fine you know what

[37:00] i'm going to trial and i'm going to testify on my own behalf and i might accidentally talk about some of the hideous war crimes and crimes against humanity that i have witnessed over the course of 15 years in the middle east and they said okay okay two and a half you do 23 months so i took it so 23 months for someone who had never been in jail before no i had never been in any kind of trouble in my life ever with anyone

[37:32] safe to say right now to just to sort of turn the subject around a little bit that you know that there are so many people behind you oh yeah hopefully i didn't know that at the time yeah well how could you yeah yeah you you can't possibly feel any more alone and they come out of the walls so your your life in prison was was not without excitement and and learning there was some drama and learning and you're right yeah learning wow talk about her perspective geez oh man i i never gave

[38:03] the prison system two seconds of thought ever in my life i never knew anyone that went to prison right so my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp and the prosecution agreed and the thing about a minimum security camp is there are no bars on the windows there's no fence the door is unlocked you work in town usually as a janitor at the local university or whatever and you're free to come and go as you please but you're on your honor not to run away to abscond

[38:33] so what you do is you just drive up to the prison one day and knock on the door and turn yourself in so i did i went to the prison with my cousin and his son-in-law a documentary filmmaker and two of my attorneys and i knock on the door said hi i'm john kiriakou i'm here to turn myself in okay they said come through the metal detector i did and then they start leading me around to the back of the actual prison with the guard towers and the concertina

[39:03] wire right and i said no no i'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he said not according to my paperwork you're not so so that was it so i want to i want to jump ahead in that too because it's 23 months and i don't really i want to get get a lot of that in um so let's just go to halfway through you know yeah you've now you've you've already established yourself in the prison people know who you are yes and you have respect when you're there because they they know

[39:35] what you did yes a rumor got started that i was an assassin for the cia which was preposterous but i never i never corrected that and that was something that got started among the the aryans and they called me the muslim killer but then at the same time two guys from the nation of islam which in prison is not a religion it's a gang came up to me and handed me a newspaper article where louis farrakhan said that i was a

[40:06] hero of the muslim people right because i was a human rights advocate so the aryans thought i was killing muslims the muslims thought i was saving muslims and i just kept my mouth shut and then only once did a neo-nazi approach me and he said hey is it true that you were a hitman for the cia and you were killing muslims and i had prepared myself for the question i knew it would come eventually and very dramatically i said listen it was war time and we all did things we weren't proud of

[40:37] so i didn't say no i didn't say yes he thought that was a cool answer and you know one of the things the cia taught me early on was was to form strategic alliances right and so the aryans were okay with what i did because i was not a rat the italians adopted me because i hated the fbi as much as they did and as it turned out four of my initial cell mates were members of mexican drug gangs and one of them asked me if i was educated i said i was

[41:08] he asked me if i would write his appeal well he's not going to win an appeal first of all he's an illegal immigrant who got caught with you know eight tons of cocaine or whatever it was he's doing life without parole and so he's not going to get out but i said sure i'll write your appeal you don't have to be a rocket scientist to write a legal appeal so i wrote it and he was denied but he told all the other mexican gang members that i was a good guy because i did it and i didn't charge him anything right and so i never had any trouble with anybody yeah

[41:39] not really which is really remarkable it was remarkable so there does come an end to that it does coming in and you are released eventually yes a little bit about that about how that period was like stepping out for the first time it was surprisingly emotional you know i've had ptsd a couple of times in the past i had ptsd coming out of greece uh because there was an assassination attempt against me and they nearly got me they got my next door neighbor

[42:09] instead uh the british defense attache so i i did struggle with ptsd for a while interestingly enough i had none coming out of pakistan i don't know if i was just too busy or too excited or whatever it was but i felt perfectly fine coming out of afghanistan coming out of prison was uh i still have prison dreams it's the same dream it's a variation of the same dream almost every night i have boot camp dreams like that see it's the same thing and how many

[42:40] years has it been since you've been in boot camp 40. you see but it sticks with you and so it was tougher coming out than i thought it was you know i i said at the time you think that you can just come out and step back into your life again and you can't your life is never going to be the same well first of all your your life have been decimated by the government by taking your your retirement be taking money by your housing everything yep so you basically had nothing to come out literally nothing right

[43:11] the parents of a friend of mine both physicians offered me a job in their medical practice they just sort of made up a job just so i had something and then i went to work for a progressive think tank in washington called the institute for policy studies they had a massive layoff after a year because you know liberal groups they don't have any money and so they laid off 14 of us that lasted a year so it was tough i i wrote books i lecture mostly universities around the country i do a lot of lectures in europe now

[43:41] um i have two syndicated newspaper columns i have a radio show but it's hard you have to patch things together little by little cash flow gummy that's the hardest part and then you know my my wife too was just a rock solid the greatest supporter i could ever hope for and then once i got to the point where i was okay she said you're okay you're on your feet i said i'm on my feet i feel good things are moving in the right direction she said okay

[44:12] i want a divorce i met this guy over here and she took off five kids five kids that i got custody of that makes total sense to me and so that progresses to a second wife that was my second one oh that was your second one see my first wife and this is another uniquely cia thing my first wife was a ballet teacher and she knew i worked for the cia and that was it she didn't know anything else right so we're overseas

[44:44] i come home from work how was work great what'd you do nothing well who'd you talk to nobody and then one of my seven cell phones would ring at night at midnight and i would speak in arabic and then leave and not come back for a day and then she would want to know what's her name all right right and so 14 years of marriage down the drain only because i couldn't tell her what i did for a living so i married a cia officer

[45:16] right and uh which happens yeah which is encouraged because you're both cleared and so you can talk about work right yeah there there's a cia softball league uh there's the quilting club there's a choir i mean there's any club that you could possibly want they have sure because everybody's clear they want to keep everybody yes and so you can talk about work and not fear accidentally revealing a secret right um it's a lot of pressure it is

[45:48] the cia has the highest divorce rate of anywhere in the us government it's 80 percent wow mm-hmm and i think i'm asking about another wife do you so are you are you currently no okay yeah i think it's just not for me yeah i've been married 29 years all together and i just can't get it older now 25 22 14 12 and 7. yeah wow yeah

[46:21] well i think we've come to that time where i can say to you thank you thank you so much i appreciate being here my pleasure and sharing your life with us it's my pleasure thanks for having me thank you john thanks a lot and here we are again back at the end of a story there are many of them and there will always be many and hopefully the position that john has taken will bring him happiness

[46:53] and hopefully prosperity thank you for joining us i'm ken weaver from foresight until next time [Music]

[47:28] you
