Title: The Scholars: John Kiriakou
Show: UDC-TV
Date: 2015-05-21
URL: https://youtu.be/mfsdrNvEuL8
Duration: 27:00

---

[00:21] I'm E. F. Lavert Miller. Welcome to The Scholars, a television interview series that explores contemporary scholarship. We hope to engage and challenge your thinking on a broad range of topics. You'll meet a diverse group of scholars who are investigating and thinking about a complex and changing world. John Carriacou is the author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. He worked at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1990 to 2004. He's currently an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies. Welcome to The Scholars, John. Thanks very much for having me.

[00:51] You know, I want to go back to what you described in your book, Reluctant Spy, as a key moment in terms of the change of life. November 4th, 1979. What happened on that day? That was the day that Iranian students overtook the American Embassy and took dozens of our diplomats hostage. I never even really thought much about the Middle East. I was 15 years old when it happened. I thought I wanted to be a dentist when I grew up. But the hostage taking in Iran

[01:22] opened up this whole new world for me in the Middle East, and I developed a fascination with the Middle East that I carried through college. I got a degree in Middle Eastern studies, and it really did change the course of my life. You know, when a young person is coming out of college, they went, okay, what's next, okay? Right. You've written a book about, One Never Leaves a CIA, okay? Why did you join the CIA? My family is relatively new in the United States. My father's parents came here in 1931,

[01:54] and my mother's parents in 1934. And my grandparents always instilled in us the idea that we were so lucky to be in this country. We were so fortunate for the opportunities that we had been given for work, for education, most of all, that we needed to give back to the country. And so public service was always a big deal in our house from volunteering when I was young to going into the public sector as an adult.

[02:25] It was always strongly encouraged. Now, you develop skills that I guess people would probably admire. You become an analyst. I mean, what does that mean, and what did you do? That was the best job in the world. It's the best job I've ever had. And in fact, even after I left the CIA, I've compared every subsequent job to that one, and none of them compare. To put it succinctly, you think the big thoughts. You go onto your computer every morning when you get to work

[02:56] and you start reading cable traffic. This is reports from the State Department. And you're a news junkie. I'm a news junkie. And this was the real inside story. So you get State Department reports, you get CIA reports, NSA, lots and lots of press reports. Sometimes cables from the Defense Department or the FBI. And you get to see what happened overnight in the part of the world that you're covering. And once you get all this information, you use your own intelligence to put it all together

[03:29] to write it in a cogent and tight form that the CIA teaches you. And you send those papers to the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense and the National Security Advisor. And when you're 23, 24, 25 years old, there's nothing headier than sending a paper to the White House and then having it come back to you where the President has scribbled comments in the market. Let me scribble some comments right here. So you're taking all this information from here and there and there. My question now is, what is your knowledge of history?

[04:02] You know, that's really a key. And that's why an analytic job at the CIA is not for everybody. Because you really have to be a student of history. You know the old saying that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. It's your job to make sure that the policymaker doesn't repeat it. And so you really have to be a subject matter expert. Let me mention this because I've seen some books that have come out about the CIA. And what happens is sometime in terms of a staff person working one part of the world has moved over to another part of the world and might be making policy

[04:34] with no knowledge of the history of a particular country. Is that still happening? That happens every day in our government. See, this is a problem not specific to the CIA but really all over our foreign policy and national security policy apparatus. You can be the world's greatest expert on a given topic in the CIA. But an elected official who's tasked with making policy can choose to just ignore whatever it is you have to say. Don't forget, a lot of our politicians think

[05:05] that they're always the smartest people in the room. And most of the time, frankly, they're not. Right. It's the person who lost an election. That's right. They're the most arrogant people in the room. And oftentimes, they're not willing to take advice. And the advice, at least that's coming from the CIA's analytic unit, the Directorate of Intelligence, is very well thought out and coordinated advice. Let's talk about another discipline. So I mentioned history. What about being an analyst at CIA?

[05:35] Where does philosophy and ethics come into play, in terms of policy? That's a great question. This was a problem that I had with the CIA from the very beginning. Ethics is not taught at the CIA. It's not stressed. It's not even touched upon. And you really have to fall back on your own personal ethics, your own personal morality, to guide the course of your career. That's less important on the analytic side than it is on the operational side. But this is something that's very sorely lacking in the CIA.

[06:08] You know, when we look at the CIA, and we talked a minute ago about how your life was changed back in 79, what happens to the CIA after 9-11? Oh boy. Absolutely everything changed after 9-11. I had switched from analysis to operations in 1998. So I was already in operations when the September 11th attacks happened. But, you know, Ethel Burke, it's as though we lost our way after September 11th.

[06:40] We were so obsessed with capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and with disrupting a future attack that we threw whatever ethics, whatever morality we had out the window. We instituted a torture program, for example. As a government, we developed a drone program that's used to assassinate people around the world. These are things that we wouldn't have dreamt of doing pre 9-11, but the rules all seemed to change.

[07:13] Well, you know, when people say that, okay, I go back to the speech that George Bush gave to Congress after 9-11. And it seems in that speech, you get this sort of mandate of the world has changed and now we will sit down and work with people that we may not wanna work with, but the world has changed. And we see this as if we become offensive in our foreign policy. We've certainly become police in our foreign policy. We've offended allies. You'll recall during the Bush administration,

[07:44] the talk, I think it was from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about old Europe versus new Europe and that the new Europeans were with us and the old Europeans could lump it if they didn't like it. We became increasingly comfortable in a unipolar world which I think was wrong headed and I think offended other countries that might have been willing to work with us otherwise.

[08:15] And this whole thing, our entire national security structure changed to the point where, well really for most of the Bush administration, I had never seen an administration that worked so hard to not use diplomacy as the Bush administration. I was very confident when President Obama was elected because I thought finally, we're gonna have some realpolitik and we're gonna have people who think about this kind of thing and people who use diplomacy,

[08:46] we're gonna have peace talks. Let's go back to Jimi Carter's administration. Well you might recall, human rights became very important. In fact, that's when the State Department started writing at the annual Human Rights Report was under President Carter. And some people felt that Carter was a weak president. And some people felt that he was compromising in areas that he should not have compromised, Nicaragua being one. How do we look at that now? I think that historians will tell you that Carter was right. I think that historians will say

[09:16] that we grossly underestimated Jimmy Carter as president. The fact that he's the best former president we've ever had aside, he guided very difficult relations with Pakistan from 1977 to 1981. This was a time when the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and we were really reliant on the Pakistani government at a time of its own turmoil to help us craft the policy. It was Jimmy Carter that led that policy.

[09:48] We could easily have gone to war with Iran after the hostage crisis. And while Carter tried to rescue the hostages, it failed of course. But we could easily have invaded that country to try to win the freedom of our hostages or more importantly to punish the Iranian government for taking them in the first place. And we didn't. Well let's look at the big issue here that we might see in terms of the change. And that is we're moving from a cold war mentality into this new war against terrorism. How does the battle against communism now compare to the battle against terrorism?

[10:20] Oh the battle against communism was much, much easier for two reasons. First of all, you knew who your enemy was. And secondly, you knew that you could sit across the table from your enemy and negotiate no matter how difficult the issue was. And that's not the world we live in today. What is the world we live in today? The world we live in today is that we refuse to negotiate even if the other side wants to. It's our policy that we don't. We are much more comfortable using armed drones.

[10:50] And we're more comfortable using combat troops to express our foreign policy. You mentioned Runsville previously. I remember Runsville made a statement a number of years ago that there would be no need to place a US soldier in harm's way because of the emphasis on robotic in terms of drones. And it seems as if we've passed that point. We've passed it to the point where we're murdering even American citizens overseas. American citizens who have not been charged with a crime.

[11:20] American citizens who have not had the right to confront their accusers in a court of law. And in at least two cases, American citizens who were wrongly targeted. And then we don't even issue so much as an apology for those attacks. Let's talk about some definitions here. We hear often the word terrorism being used. How is that defined? I would define terrorism as any act meant to instill terror in a broader audience. And I think that both the Bush and Obama administrations have defined it differently.

[11:51] They would define it as any act in and of itself that poses a threat to the security of the United States. Period. I was reading your book and I got on page 135 and 136. You outlined some of the techniques. I couldn't even get through reading some of them. And seeing this if, for example, let it for the definition that you just gave up with, I wouldn't want to subject anybody to this. No. No, what you're talking about is the torture techniques that we use to get prisoners to.

[12:21] I mentioned like two or three of them. There are three that are really, I think horrific. The one that's garnered the most press is waterboarding. Where a person is laid on a gurney with the feet slightly elevated. His face is covered with some sort of material burlap, cloth, whatever. And then water is poured on his face. It instills a sense of drowning, which is very painful because your body reacts to it. Your body contorts, your abdominal muscles tense up

[12:53] and you really do feel like you're drowning. But there are a couple of others that I always thought were worse than waterboarding. One is what's called the cold cell, where a prison cell is chilled to about 50 degrees. A prisoner is stripped naked. He's thrown in the cell and then ice water is thrown on him every hour or so. We had a prisoner in Afghanistan by the name of Hassan Gul who did not survive that technique and died during the night because of the cold.

[13:24] There's a third one and that is sleep deprivation. And I don't mean keeping a prisoner awake for a night, two nights, even three nights. I'm talking about keeping a prisoner awake for two weeks at a time where they're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so they can't lay down, they can't really even kneel down or crouch down, and they can't hang from the eye bolt because it's so painful after a period of time. We want to describe, I remember this goes back to Norieger and they were playing music constantly. Constantly.

[13:55] Is that would be a form of torture also? I think it is. It's weeks on end with all the lights on and hard rock blasting at you into your cell. You just can't sleep, you can't rest. And what that does is it makes a person hallucinate. In one case, we know that a prisoner lost his mind to the point where he's not able to participate in his own defense. What role does racism play in torture? Oh, I think that racism plays a very large role in torture. You know, there's this famous experiment,

[14:26] the Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of Stanford psychology graduate students were divided into groups. Some were gonna play the role of prisoners and some of prison guards. People started to go crazy after only 36 hours and the experiment was canceled, rather, in its entirety after only six days. And it's because people really did adopt the idea that they were better than others.

[14:57] We see this in American prisons every day and I can tell you that from firsthand experience. Talk about that, what did you do? Sure, I spent two years in prison, 23 months in prison. I was charged with three counts of espionage, one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and one count of making a false statement because I went on ABC News in 2007 and I told the whole country, the whole world, that we were torturing prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy

[15:27] and that the president had signed that policy and was lying to us when he looked into the camera and said, we do not torture, I knew that that was a lie and I said so on national news. You're very active now, you're at the Institute of Apology Study, you're really concerned about prison reform and I was wondering whether when we talk about prison reform, might we be talking about three things. One, the actual lawyers themselves, to the criminal justice system and then the actual conditions in the prison. Oh yes, first of all, our entire prison system

[16:02] is based on racism. Look at disparities in sentencing, just as one quick example. On average, sentences for crimes related to crack are 10 times longer than sentences for crimes related to powdered cocaine. Okay, it's all cocaine, it's all the same drug, but crack is a black man's drug and powdered coke is a white man's drug and so if I'm gonna get two years

[16:34] because I'm selling a little bit of coke on the side, you're gonna get 20 years for selling a little bit of crack on the side. That's just inherent systemic racism. I'll give this president credit, he's trying to do something to correct those disparities but we've got an entire generation of young African-American men who's defining event in the course of their lives. Who's lives are being destroyed. Yeah, it's prison and their lives are destroyed. You do 20 years in prison for having a little bit of crack.

[17:05] How do you rebuild from that? Our cities aren't equipped to help people rebuild from that. And we also, within the prison, we don't hear terms like rehabilitation. Oh, never. There's no such thing as correction. There's no such thing as rehabilitation. Time was as recently as the early 1980s where you could go to prison and get a college education. You could go to prison and learn a skill. You could become a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic or any number of different things, no longer. There's no money for it because we're spending the money

[17:36] on incarcerating these vast numbers of people. There's no money left over for education. What country has the more humane prison system? I was looking at this asset of tragedy in Norway where it seemed as if a person was treated completely different even though the crime was correct. You took the words right out of my mouth. I think Norway probably has the most progressive prison system in the world. Iceland is similarly progressive. These are all countries with no black people. Yeah, right. You're right. They're no people of color. Maybe the occasional Muslim immigrant and that's about it.

[18:09] But in those countries, when you get a sentence of life, what that means is 17 years. So at the end of 17 years, you're gonna be released. But when you're released, you've earned a college degree and you've learned a skill and you've undergone psychiatric or psychological counseling and you're ready to reintegrate into society. Here, you get nothing except a GED. They will assign another prisoner to tutor you so you can get your GED. But let's say you have your GED

[18:40] or you already have a high school education. You get out after doing your time and they've not taught you anything. You've earned no money. I worked a regular job. I worked every day and I made a dollar eight a month. So everybody else is making what I'm making. So you work and work and work and you're in prison for 10 years or 20 years. You're making a buck a month. You can't leave with anything to get your life started. You've not learned a skill. You have no counseling. There's no job training.

[19:10] There's nobody helping to place you in a position. There's no mental health counseling. And so you have a lot of very angry, undereducated, unemployable felons hitting the street. Well, they're gonna end up doing the only thing that they know how to do and that is to go back on the streets and sell drugs to make money to support their families. Let me mention something in terms of you responding to the prisons but also I want to bring it back to terrorism.

[19:42] And that's privatization. Yes. Where you look up that in some of these cases, it is not you as military people doing the torturing, but it's a private contractor. And we also went to the thing where it seems as if there was money made in terms of building prisons. I remember going out to one time to Youngstone, Ohio. One of the worst. And at the same time, if you take away that prison industry, here is a city that because of the economy, it's going bankrupt. That's all they have. So talk about this privatization in prison reform. I've actually, from a small town, very, very near Youngstone.

[20:13] You walk to Youngstone, right in a pinch. Newcastle, Pennsylvania. You're absolutely right about private prisons. This was a grave policy error that we made in the 1980s to allow prisons to be privatized. So we have private companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and they build prisons around the country, the one you mentioned being one of the most prominent in Youngstone, Ohio. But these companies, first of all, don't have an incentive to provide anything to prisoners.

[20:44] No education. What about the profit motor? It's all about the profits. And how do they make their profits? They're paid a certain amount of money per prisoner per year to house both federal and state prisoners. Whatever they don't spend on that prisoner, they get to keep. So they don't want to spend the money on medication or on a doctor to oversee the health of prisoners, despite the fact that diseases like tuberculosis and HIV and... And also the impact on older prisoners.

[21:16] Especially on older prisoners. Right. And hepatitis are rampant. And they don't want to spend the money on education or counseling or training because whatever they don't spend, they can send back to their shareholders or put in their own pockets. And so... Doctor, how do you reform that? How do you break these type of cycles? Honestly, I think there are several things that have to be done. First of all, I don't think we should have private prisons in this country. Nothing good comes out of a private prison. One of my cellmates, I'll just tell you a small anecdote, one of my cellmates spent just two weeks

[21:48] in a private prison in Virginia called the Orange County Transportation Center. 220 male inmates, one toilet, the seat was broken, one TV, and there was a fist fight every hour with the winner determining what show to watch. That's inhumane. That's not the way we should be treating people in our country. But again, it's all about that profit motive. So first of all, I don't think we should have private prisons in this country. Secondly, overcrowding is absolutely criminal. And overcrowding leads to the spread of disease,

[22:19] it leads to violence, and it's just simply too expensive. Let me connect this to something else which we've been talking about. Sure. How does these conditions affect our national security? Wow. Well, I think, and this may be a little bit controversial, but I think that some of the policies that we have in our prisons amount to torture. For example, I think that solitary confinement is a form of torture. There's one man in particular

[22:51] in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana who's been in solitary confinement for 44 years. He has not had human interaction in 44 years. Well, a lot of these folks eventually are gonna get out. And when they get out, they're gonna be crazy and they're gonna be violent. And that destabilizes our communities. And when our communities are destabilized, the country is destabilized. Yeah, when you say that, we've gone through a number of incidents, but in terms of police brutality, when you look at a certain percentage,

[23:21] some of the individuals have suffered some form of mental illness. Absolutely. And I think that's the thing in terms of, you arrive on a scene and someone's acting in a certain way and they're black. Well, what happens, no one knows whether that person lack medication, counseling or whatever, you just see the result. Yeah, and what happens more often than not, unfortunately, is the police just open fire. Right. Let me ask you this when you're getting in our show. Using your skills as an analyst, what human rights and private issues should we be concerned about in the next 10 years? Well, we could write a book about it.

[23:53] I'll come back for another program. Privacy is absolutely critically important right now to the American people. And it's because we've essentially lost our privacy without even so much as a debate. We really had to. Let me ask you this. You work for the CIA. Hey, I mean, weren't you concerned about people's privacy? I mean, you know. Well, the CIA is focused on foreign intelligence collectively. And since the reforms of the church committee in 1975, 76, I wasn't concerned.

[24:24] I am now. I'm talking about privacy of people overseas though. Well, you're right. I want to spy on people overseas. Don't forget, you know, and I say this all the time, that progressives are patriots too. And I wanted to do everything I could to protect the American people. So I want to bring you back to a question I asked you earlier. These philosophical ethical issues. Yes. It's not like gravity is different over there than here. I mean, spying is spying, isn't it? Yes, spying is spying. And certainly, most of our allies spy on us

[24:56] just like we spy on them. So what do you see as being a key issue in the next couple of years, in turn? I think the key issue is our intelligence community organization is spying on us. Spying on American citizens. For example, NSA. Not only is it illegal for NSA to spy on American citizens, but it's in NSA's charter from its creation that it's not permitted to spy on American citizens. Well, we would have had no idea that NSA was spying on us had Ed Snowden not

[25:26] gone public with his revelations. How do you view Snowden? I think Ed Snowden's a national hero. I really do. He is the very definition of a whistleblower, Ethelbert. He revealed evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality. And to me, that makes him a hero, not a criminal. And when we look at how a person should read your book, The Reluctant Spy, should we read it reluctantly? I call myself a reluctant spy for a couple of reasons.

[25:58] One, I enjoyed analysis very much. I was reluctant to get into operations. But I did, and I enjoyed it, and I was good at it. I was reluctant to allow my marriage to break up because of my CIA work. And that's exactly what happened. I go into some detail about that. And I was reluctant to the point of being unwilling to engage in what I believed to be war crimes or crimes against humanity when the CIA began violating

[26:32] the human rights of those that we were capturing. Well, John, I'm glad I captured you for the show, and I'll let you go. But I want to thank you in terms of being my guest here. Thanks for joining me on The Scholars. Thank you for watching. I'm Ethelbert Miller.
