Title: Art and documentary
Show: Art and documentary
Date: 2023-03-28
URL: https://youtu.be/tzTHekWvcic
Duration: 51:00

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[00:00] my pleasure we appreciate that thank you please have a seat thank you very much thank you very much for having us happy to do today before you decided to join the CIA can you describe the the Zeitgeist of this time and uh what inspired you at that time it's easier for me to tell you what inspired me really it was my grandfather I come from an immigrant family my grandparents all four of my grandparents came from the Greek island of Rhodes and

[00:31] uh arrived here in the early 1930s my grandfather my father's father to hear him tell the story you know Franklin Roosevelt was personally waiting for him at Ellis Island to give him citizenship and a job and a future and um and so he was very very patriotic uh and very solidly Democratic he was a huge Roosevelt supporter we even had a picture a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on our television until the

[01:02] day he died and so he always he always instilled in me this notion that the country was so good to us when we needed a helping hand that we needed to give something back and so when I was in college I really only considered public service I didn't consider anything else business or private companies nothing only public service the Zeitgeist at the time it's funny that you ask you know all the interviews I've given and I've given thousands of

[01:34] interviews nobody's ever asked me that before um you know I'm almost a little bit ashamed to tell you that that I sort of bought into the whole neo-liberal um you know American exceptionalism USA number one when I was in college we were picking off little countries like Grenada and Panama and I don't know it just seemed like we were a Force for good Jimmy

[02:06] Carter had started the annual human rights report in 1977 and so I thought maybe I'll join the Foreign Service I'll go to the state department and see the world and I really wanted to travel and see the world and then in graduate school I had a professor who wasn't really a professor he was he was a CIA officer undercover as a professor and he was looking for people who might fit into the cia's culture he liked my writing style and so he asked

[02:37] me if I wanted to be in the CIA I said yes and I was in I could you summarize your experience in the cultural terrorism at the CIA sure I joined the cia's counter-terrorism center in 1998 specializing in something that's it's quaint now uh it was a Greek uh communist terrorism which believe it or not was actually a problem for us back in the day uh but I spoke Arabic and my my bachelor's

[03:09] degree was in Middle Eastern studies I had a specialty in Islamic theology I spoke Arabic fluently but I also speak Greek fluently and as it turned out they were looking for someone who spoke either Greek or Arabic as it turned out I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic and so they put me in counterterrorism I did two years in Athens working not just against Greek groups which no longer exist but against the likes of Abu nidal

[03:41] and the popular front for the liberation of Palestine the Libyan intelligence service the Iraqi intelligence service things like that tell me how did the Soviet Union's existence inform the focus and priorities of the CIA during this period on my very first day at the CIA all the new hires go into What's called the bubble it's it's a large Auditorium just outside the old headquarters building and uh you get a briefing by the

[04:12] director and the deputy director and the head of security and the head of medical the head of Finance everybody comes to just tell you what they do and what to expect in your CIA career and I will never forget the director of security he was a he was a tough old man at least in my memory he was old um and he looked at us all of us young we were all in our early 20s and he says the greatest threat facing the United States today is the threat of Soviet

[04:44] communism well this was January 1990 the Berlin Wall had just come down three weeks earlier and I remember thinking wow can't believe I'm gonna work against Soviet communism because it's kind of a Jen's bone thing that's exactly what it was it was a James Bond kind of thing um no of course that turned out to be ridiculous and he was living in the past uh what it ended up becoming was a fight against Global proliferation mostly of

[05:14] nuclear weapons but also of chemical and radiological biological weapons um but even he didn't realize that the world had changed because it had just changed like three weeks earlier so um in the end my assignment was to work on Iraq uh which I complained about because nothing ever happened in Iraq ever it was the same it was the same cabinet since 1968. we would go sometimes an entire

[05:44] day without receiving a single report on Iraq from anywhere in the world and so I complained I said listen I'm sitting here like you know playing with myself all day long I got to do something else and my boss said you're brand new just learn the writing style learn what we do and then we'll put you on something more interesting like Romania he said and I thought oh okay Romania is interesting they just killed Jose and you know well nine months later just as I start

[06:16] to feel like I know what I'm talking about Iraq invades Kuwait and one of the senior analysts pulled me aside and said I don't think you realize the importance of what just happened he said it's not unusual for countries that we covered to go to war with each other it's very unusual for countries that we cover to go to war with us and so the very next day I was sitting in the Oval Office with the president the vice president the

[06:47] Secretary of State the Secretary of Defense the National Security adviser and the director of the CIA and the president said so tell me what I need to know and everybody turns and looks at me I was 24 years old and I thought oh if my friends could see this they wouldn't even believe it but I realized now this is like this yeah this is fun this is going to work for me and so for the next eight years it was all Iraq all the time

[07:19] right would you say that you were a bit naive before Oh yes yeah oh I was very very naive not just when I joined the CIA but through most of my CIA career I was very naive you know in the 1990s when Bill Clinton became president he ordered the CIA to do something called a cull c-u-l-l and what he meant was he wanted the CIA to go through literally every one of its files and if any recruited Source had a problem in his

[07:51] background with human rights he was to be fired and the CIA actually fired about a third of their sources all around the world and I remember thinking wow they're really serious about human rights this is great because I'm sorry this is great because that was always an issue that was important to me um and that only lasted until September 11 2001. yeah so that maybe that's the the perfect

[08:22] moment to talk about Patriot Act um so 9 11 arrived and maybe like a month after say it was a month so so did that tell me that was plan in advance not 9 11 thing no I don't know about it actually it wasn't planned in advance and you know how you can tell it was so badly written it was so broadly written that individuals all across the country had to begin filing lawsuits on the grounds that was unconstitutionally

[08:52] broad so what they did and they did the same thing at the CIA they just said we'll ask for everything and we'll let the courts decide what we can't have well the courts decided that they could actually have everything everything you want NSA to spy on Americans done you want NSA to intercept every text message every phone call every email of everybody in the United States and hold it for 500 years done here's an extra 10 billion dollars to build the new facilities that you're going to need you want to spy on

[09:24] American peace groups go ahead do it infiltrate them the FBI now is all over the place um literally anything that the intelligence Community or inner or national federal law enforcement wanted they got it and every once in a while thanks to Ed Snowden who revealed this to us every once in a while though there will be a debate in Congress but so far the Patriot Act has not been weakened it's it's renewed year after year after year don't forget that 9 11 was 18 years ago

[09:57] so for 18 years we've been trying to get our September 10th country back and we've failed John now I know that you've been talking about that a lot but I'd love to know how you ended up in prison so in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks I was named chief of CIA counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan big job as you might imagine I had been there for not long uh slightly less than two months and we got word that Abu

[10:30] zubaida was somewhere in Pakistan we believed at the time that Abu zabeta was the number three in Al Qaeda and so we sought out to track him and it took us six weeks but we found him and we did we launched a series of raids 14 simultaneous raids on 14 separate sites uh one night at two o'clock in the morning and we caught him so to make a very long story very short when I returned to CIA headquarters later in the spring I was asked if I wanted to be

[11:00] certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard that term before this was mid-may 2002. so I said what does that mean enhanced interrogation techniques and this co-worker who had asked me became very animated and he said we're going to start getting rough with these guys I said what does that mean and so he described these 10 techniques I said that sounds like a torture program he said no it's not torture we

[11:32] got approval from the justice department and the president said we could do it and I said I don't know I think I have a a moral problem with this give me an hour to think about it so I went I sought the the advice of a senior officer a very senior officer for whom I had worked in the Middle East about a decade earlier I said what do you think of this this enhanced interrogation they just asked me if I wanted to be trained in it and he said look let's call a spade a spade this is a torture program they can call it

[12:03] whatever they want they can use whatever euphemism they want this is a torture program and torture is a slippery slope and you know how these guys are somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner and when that happens there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison do you want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison it turned out I was the only person who went to prison but I said no I don't want to go to prison I went back downstairs I said this is a torture program and I don't want any part of it

[12:36] and then that was May and then on the 1st of August 2002. they began torturing Abu zubeda and other prisoners um in the end they actually murdered two prisoners that we know of there were several other suicides that just don't make any sense um I just assumed that they were also killed during interrogations and I kept waiting for somebody to say something but nobody said anything so I left the CIA in the spring of 2004

[13:10] and I went into the private sector and I I put the CIA behind me still waiting for somebody to say something finally five and a half years after that initial conversation in December of 2007 a very important like nationally known reporter for ABC News called me and said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu zubaida I said that was absolutely untrue I was the only person who was kind to Abu zubaida I said I

[13:40] never laid a hand on him or any other prisoner your source is either mistaken or he's a liar well he said and I didn't know this was an old reporter's trick you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself I said I'll think about it in the next couple of days President Bush gave a press conference this is George W bush and in that press conference he said he looks right in the camera and he said we do not torture I knew that was a lie and I said to my

[14:13] wife we were sitting on the couch together watching this press conference and I said he is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying right to our faces and then a couple of days later he's walking from the back of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend and a reporter shouted a question about torture and he turned and he said well if there is torture it's the result of a rogue CIA officer and I turned to my wife and I said Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on me I

[14:44] said I'm going to go public and so I called Brian Ross and I said I'll give you your interview and I decided that no matter what he asked me I was just going to tell the truth I had waited five and a half years for somebody to say something nobody was going to ever say anything and I thought well I will and so I did within 24 hours the FBI began investigating me no surprise but a year later in December of 2008 they sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter declining to prosecute me they

[15:15] said I had not committed a crime four weeks later Barack Obama becomes president right hope and change right I believe that lie too for a long time I had no idea that the Obama Administration asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me and so for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were being intercepted and FBI agents were following me everywhere I went and

[15:45] finally in January of 2012 I was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage I hadn't committed Espionage having a conversation with the New York Times or with the ABC News is not espionage um I was facing 45 years in prison it's a death sentence and finally the government offered me 10 years I said I'm not doing 10 minutes I didn't do anything wrong they came back a couple days later with eight years and

[16:16] then two days after that five years and my attorney my lead attorney I had 11 lawyers if you can imagine all charging me 750 an hour my lead attorney said sorry ah my daughter they came down to five years and I rejected it and my lead attorney said you know I've been practicing law here for 53 years and I've never seen them come down in time and I said why would they do that

[16:46] because usually they'll offer you 10 years you say no they come back with 15 years if you say no to that then 20 years but they kept coming down I said why would they do that and he said because they have a case and they know it's he said we're going to trial so that was our position for a very long time finally they came back with three and a half years and we countered with one year and they said no take the three and a

[17:18] half or we're going for the whole 45. and I said I will testify on my own behalf at trial and I may have to talk about some of the Hideous crimes against humanity and war crimes that I have witnessed in 15 years in the CIA so they came back and said all right two and a half you do 23 months I actually uh turned it down crazy as it sounds now but this is a

[17:50] commentary on the American judicial system this was best in final offer 23 months and so my wife and I stayed up all night long literally all night long talking about it researching online because only one other person had ever been charged with this ever in the history of the country and there was no case law because she was an actual spy for a foreign intelligence service so I wrote to my lawyers at six o'clock in the morning I said I decided to turn it down and an hour later two of them emailed me

[18:23] and said we're on our way to your house so two of them came over and I said we were up all night we discussed it we're going to turn it down I said very foolishly as soon as I get in front of a jury they're going to realize how ridiculous this is I'm a patriot I'm not a criminal and then the lawyer that I liked and respected the most pulled me aside and said you know what your problem is your problem is you think this is about Justice and it's not about Justice it's about mitigating damage take the deal

[18:57] and I took the deal I asked him realistically if I go to trial and I lose what am I looking at and he said realistically 12 to 18 years so I took the deal the thing is one of the techniques there are two techniques that the government uses one is called venue shopping where they will charge you in the federal district where you are most likely to be convicted and most likely to receive the maximum sentence that's the eastern district of Virginia because it's right here and so and so a

[19:29] jury would be made up of people from the CIA the FBI the Pentagon intelligence Community contractors you don't have a prayer the other thing is called charge stacking which they also did to me let's say they think they can get you on one charge they'll charge you with 5 10 20 felonies they'll wait until you go bankrupt and then they come back and say all right if you take a plea to one count we'll dismiss all the other charges so what do you do propublica came out

[19:59] with a study in November 2012 in which they found that the federal government wins 98.2 percent of its cases almost all of which are a result of plea bargaining because of charge stacking and venue shopping so if you know you have a 1.8 percent chance of winning do you roll the dice and get 18 years I had five kids so I took the deal in jail food 23 months and because I

[20:30] wrote those letters from Loretto they didn't give me one single day off not a single day everybody else is getting out early six months in the halfway house home confinement I sat in that cell for every last day of the 23 months do you think everyone in their own way should be a whistleblower oh I think everybody should be a whistleblower or at least consider being a whistleblower remember there's a legal definition of whistleblowing it's bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse

[21:01] illegality or threats to the public health or Public Safety the government tells us all the time if you see something say something there it is you created a work and this desk is fascism could you tell me a little bit the story about yes that sure perfect peace I'll start off by saying I'm the least artistic person I've ever known I have no artistic ability at all okay so anyway I was in prison and before I left for prison my attorney told me that she had a very small mailing list of 600 people who had

[21:33] emailed her during the course of my case saying that they wanted to know how I was doing in prison so she said when you get comfortable send me a letter I'll type it and I'll send it to these 600 people so I said okay I was there I got to prison February 28th 2013. and then the first week of May I felt confident enough to sit down and write a letter not really thinking that what I was writing was I was exposing

[22:06] wrongdoing on the part of the guards I just thought all guards were I didn't know they were actually breaking the law by being so I wrote it and I named their names too I sent it out to my lawyer and then a couple of nights later one of the guards came up to me and said you're famous and not in a good way and I said what's that supposed to mean and she took me to the little guard booth and she turned the computer around and there I was my picture Banner

[22:39] headline on The Huffington Post I didn't know my lawyer was friends with Ariana Huffington and so she sent Ariana the the letter that I called letter from Loretto and it went crazy from there CNN Fox MSNBC uh The Economist Playboy the Atlantic Monthly I got more interview requests than I could handle and so I decided I'm gonna make this a series right the guards were so scared at the

[23:13] Press reaction I told the guard one time don't with me unless you want to see yourself on CNN tomorrow morning and he backed off and I thought hey I have a little bit of power here so I called it letters from Loreto because I wanted to emulate Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail and so I would do a letter whenever one struck me whenever I saw something I didn't like whenever I wanted to write about a certain issue whether it was the

[23:44] food or violence or whatever in one of the guards committed suicide near the end of my uh of my sentence I wrote about that uh and um and they hated it and interestingly enough they thought that I was smuggling them out somehow one of the guards told me that they had been talking about me in the warden's office and they concluded that I had a secret cell phone hidden somewhere and I was dictating the letters on the cell phone that's how I

[24:15] got them out well the truth was I would write them in plain view I would put them in an envelope and put them in the mailbox that was it all they had to do was look to look at the mailbox yeah so I wrote something like 16 of them I think and they became a book called doing time like a spy which won a nice literary award here one one of the big four literary awards the pen First Amendment award but um to get to the artwork

[24:47] they were Furious that I was writing these letters and so a friendly guard warned me they're going to try to take your desk off the wall and so I paid another prisoner a bag of tuna fish to strip the screws and sure enough two hours later the guards came with the drill and they're trying to drill the desk off the wall and it wouldn't come so they finally walked away and I took a legal pad and I wrote this desk kills fascism and I stuck it to the desk and

[25:18] then a couple of hours after that when they were walking around to count the prisoners that they do five seven times a day I forget he tore it off and crumpled it up and he threw it at me which is really what I wanted him to do then I flattened it out and I mailed it back to myself and then I I took a couple of art classes I found that I actually kind of had a knack for it a little bit and and I made a screen print of the of the page I made a hundred copies

[25:49] and I'm selling them to pay my attorneys when were these Arenas first given attention by the CIA and why were they considered so important in the first place yes the CIA became very interested in art in the early 1950s and it was all part of the the Cold War you know the the battle between the superpowers uh and and it's funny the Russians we know that the Russians were very worried about abstract art

[26:20] because they thought that there were messages embedded political commentaries that were implied well the CIA was kind of the same way they wanted there to be embedded messages and political commentaries they also respected the Soviets use of uh realist art they call it Soviet realism and so uh the CIA began I don't want to use the word targeting maybe I will use the word targeting artists who specialized in that uh genre

[26:53] right the Cubans did it the Eastern Europeans did it the Russians always did it the Chinese came to do it a little bit later in the decade and so you know the CIA thought that that was a a great place to meet Nationals of those countries maybe to infiltrate that world to um to recruit sources you know the Mantra at the CIA is that our job is very simple it's to recruit spies to steal secrets that's it that's

[27:25] what we do recruit spies to steal Secrets but you have to be inventive and able to do that successfully nobody's going to think to recruit an artist why would you well because artists have access to very important people in society and so what better way to start yeah yeah you you told me just before we we start shooting uh that I never thought of that but it's true during a cocktail party this is the best way for just talking it's the best way

[27:57] a boss of mine in the counter-terrorism center once paid me a great compliment we were I had been developing a very sensitive Source it was he was so sensitive that we couldn't meet in his country so every time we needed to meet I would fly to Europe somewhere and we would meet in a hotel and his information proved to be perfect every time and so my boss said I want to meet him and so we flew out to Central Europe and um

[28:28] you know before you get down to business you're sitting talking and we were talking about art and theater and books and film and whatever and afterwards my boss said you know he said I've been a CI officer for 30 years and I don't think I've ever seen anybody speak so in depth on so many different issues as you did today I said oh thank you I said you know I'm actually interested in these issues I like art and theater and film and books

[28:59] and etc etc I like it it's not a job to me it's fun well that's how this Source was he was he was very um wealthy and important and well connected to the highest levels of people in his government and he liked me and really that's the job the job is to get you to believe that we are such close friends you like me so much that

[29:30] you're willing to commit treason for me which is a death penalty offense but you do it because you really really like me what were the earliest intervention into the wheels of art and culture that you may be aware of I'm aware I am in the 1950s to cultivate artists within what became known as the Washington colorist school so um the CIA actually began collecting art

[30:00] from artists of the Washington color School the Art today is worth millions and millions of dollars and it hangs all over the walls of the hallways of the cia's new headquarters building uh but the people who created that art were important Society figures in Washington in the 1950s they all congregated in Georgetown for example famously books have been written about this well who did they congregate with who did they have dinner with those evenings that they were talking about art the

[30:32] Russian Ambassador the Chinese Ambassador the French Ambassador whatever visiting dignitaries happened to be in famous International businessmen or men of intrigue right you know in the James Bond movies that James always runs into the CIA officer that happens every day in real life we always see each other and we say hello good to see you and then you go your way and he goes his way well I mean we're working the same parties and those parties are full of artists and and

[31:04] important Society figures especially in the 1950s when the whole point was communism it seems that still with Russia it's still a kind of fight right yeah but it's different it's far less ideal ideological now far less philosophical yeah it's much more pragmatic yeah yeah that's why neoliberals are so up in arms about about Russia right now the Russians are no threat to us no none

[31:34] none whatsoever and there are a hundred different ways that we should be cooperating with the Russians terrorism drugs proliferation poverty human rights all different kinds of things but we don't right because we need an enemy and the Russians are the bad guys that's just the way it's always been is that amaze me actually the CIA took its lead from from the Soviet Union uh when they chose

[32:04] abstract art as the vehicle uh to to deliver the message and it was because the Soviets were so worried by abstract art they didn't understand it they thought it was perverse in some way it was somehow a threat to communist ideology and the CIA thought that was great that's a that's a a oh shoot I'm having a mental blank hold on one second let me think of what what was the word we used to use that's good one millimeter now abstract expressionism no vulnerability so they loved that to them

[32:37] that was a vulnerability within the Soviet system and so they sought to exploit it which is what they were paid to do that was their job and the more money that they put in the more they believed they were succeeding and it wasn't just abstract art back then too it was also the translation of classic Uh Russian literature there was literature for for example Dostoyevsky that was published well before the the Bolshevik Revolution That Was Then banned in the Soviet Union well the CIA

[33:08] would translate it into Russian and then smuggle it into the Soviet Union and just they would hand it out for free it was the same thing with art I mean you can't hand the art out for free but you can certainly hand out flyers and photos and articles about the art in Russian or Romanian or Bulgarian or whatever and it was actually a successful operation in that it got under the skin of the of the Soviet government and they had to react and respond to it why abstract art because it promotes

[33:38] individualism you took the word right out of my mouth yeah abstract art is about individualism not about collectivism you know we're all familiar with that Soviet art of the the perfect handsome Russian soldier and the beautiful Russian female Russian soldier looking off into the sky with the hammer and sickle over here and their rifles yeah it's great everybody's seen it everybody knows it um but abstract expressionism was confusing to them it was decadent it was

[34:10] dangerous it was very American and uh and they weren't sure how to uh deal with it there's also a a a historicism to the form of abstract art there's so much it's almost a deliberateness and it's lack of concrete meaning in a way so true so true I I worked for an ambassador in Bahrain for two years and he was a great great fan of abstract expressionism and he had quite a large piece um installed in the in the official

[34:42] residence we have a program here in the United States called the Arden embassies program and so through the state Department's office of artistic Affairs any Ambassador anywhere in the world can request a piece of art from the Smithsonian institution real art right worth millions upon millions of dollars this piece of art that he had was so ugly that I I hated even to look at it and for whatever reason he knew I subscribed to art news magazine at the

[35:12] time so he would always seat me at the dining room table so that I had a view of the art right in front of my face and it was awful it was just these four panels I'll never forget it painted gold and then there was a red splotch down here on the first one in the middle on the second one at the top on the third one and back at the bottom again and the fourth one and it meant nothing to me one night the uh the king came to dinner right so we had this big bash it was two

[35:43] dozen people and his Majesty's at one side and the ambassadors at the other side and we're all sitting there you know afraid to say anything and the Ambassador said how do you like my my art it's abstract expressionism and the King said David he said I hate it I hate it he said it's ugly and it means nothing to me now I had been looking at this thing for two years it meant nothing to me and he said no your majesty he said it's the day

[36:14] it's Sunrise midday evening and midnight and I thought to myself how in the world do you get that out of this ugly gold and red panel but then you know after thinking about it he was he was right now it was funny to us that the king thought it was ugly and the Ambassador thought it was great but imagine being Joseph Stalin looking at it and thinking there's a message in there somewhere and I don't like it one bit

[36:45] and I know there's a message because the Americans are putting this thing all over the place so it was an effective propaganda tool I wonder if the CIA still uses cultural propaganda the CIA doesn't have to use cultural propaganda anymore uh Hollywood does it for them and certainly there are connections between the CIA and Hollywood Studios there always have been not just the CIA but also the FBI you know there were no FBI shows on American television that weren't made without the cooperation of J Edgar Hoover's FBI and

[37:16] so every show on American TV that mentioned the FBI was a pro-fbi show well the cia's office of public affairs has a branch embedded within it here at CIA headquarters whose job it is solely to work with with Hollywood film studios so every depiction of the CIA is a positive depiction so you know these big blockbuster movies that are made and that go overseas that are frequently banned in China for example they're all cleared by the CIA look at the film Zero

[37:49] Dark 30 for example this is kind of an egregious example of this issue Catherine Bigelow was the director and producer Mark bull was the writer they're both Academy Award winners very important figures in Hollywood well they wanted to do zero dark 30. zero dark 30 I thought was scandalous because it perpetuated a lie and the lie was that the torture program led to the location of Osama bin Laden that was a lie the

[38:20] torture program had nothing whatsoever to do with the location of Osama bin Laden really great analysis is what caught Osama bin Laden but Bigelow and bull were invited to come to CIA headquarters where they were treated to a classified briefing that took place over a classified mock-up of the bin Laden compound that's a violation of the Espionage Act after that was done and Bin Laden was was killed they were invited back to hear a speech by then CIA director Leon

[38:52] Panetta in the bubble that I talked about earlier that that big theater just outside the original headquarters building in the speech Leon Panetta revealed classified information 120 lines of classified information we now know including the classified name of the Navy SEAL who actually killed Bin Laden that's also a violation of the Espionage Act but what did Catherine Bigelow and Mark bull do they went back to Hollywood they made this CIA propaganda film it

[39:24] went all around the world it made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office and now you have people really believing that the cia's torture program resulted in the capture of Osama bin Laden that's what we need to be more fearful of now it's not placing abstract art and Museum shows around the world it's this active propagandization of not just the American people but the rest of the world I've been told that yourself to work for the CIA as an advisor right for one year for one year yes could you

[39:55] tell me about that uh I did it as I did it on a lark so there was a there's an employee database where they they post notices like uh this section of the parking lot is going to be closed for repaving or this entrance is closed because the president's coming or things like that just normal administrative things and one day there was a memo saying that there is a vacancy on the CIA art Advisory Board I didn't even know there was a CIA art Advisory Board although I did admire the art for you

[40:27] know the six years previous that I had been at the CIA and so um I applied and I said I know a little bit about art I have three Andy Warhols as you can see around here and and I have a Fernando botero and you know they're not posters they're all signed and numbered lithographs and such I I love this stuff I've got some prominent Greek artists um art is important to me and uh and sure enough I was appointed and I I thought that it was going to be you know art

[40:59] acquisition or conservation or whatever and it wasn't we met four times and all we ever discussed is what to hang where uh they were in the process of of building a new CIA Museum on the on the first floor of the new headquarters building and so we had to move the art out of that area during construction and put it in different halls and it was underwhelming but it was important to me that that there be art

[41:31] at the CIA if you go to the White House if you go like I said earlier to American embassies around the world that participate in the art and embassies program there's world class art and it's there for anybody who wants to look at it and I thought the CIA should have great art too as the concept of soft power yeah soft power is critically important especially when you want to be the one and only superpower in the world

[42:01] um you've heard the phrase the carrot and the stick soft power really is the carrot in a way it's not a threat of of a bombing strike or a drone attack or sanctions at the United Nations it's the influence of American culture it's the the propagation of American ideas or ideals just because we're bigger and stronger and more popular than you are and so

[42:31] it's become a very important part of American foreign policy but especially since the end of the Vietnam War and it's because also the world has gotten so much smaller with the internet and streaming services for example it's much easier for somebody in Siberia to log on to Netflix for example and watch you know American westerns or or for somebody in Cuba to watch every season

[43:02] of friends let's say well that has propaganda value in that you come to identify with the things that you're watching you know there's kind of a famous story that in the late 1980s when there were pro-democracy riots taking place in Seoul South Korea the North Koreans capitalized on this by by showing real footage news footage of the demonstrations on North Korean television well North Koreans were

[43:33] speechless when they saw it not because there were demonstrations or riots they couldn't believe how well-dressed everybody was how well-fed they were what beautiful cars they were driving and it backfired on the North Koreans that's kind of a reverse example of what soft power is we can say look at our great movies you know wouldn't you like to be like us you can be like us you just have to love us and respect us and that actually works what was the concern

[44:03] of the CIA when you left when I left it was all about terrorism I'll give you I'll give you a small anecdote in the couple of weeks after the 9 11 attacks everybody in the building had to drop whatever he or she was doing and focus on terrorism well I was already focused on terrorism I was in the CIS counterterrorism office and I had um been recently promoted so I went up to Ambassador Cofer black the head of

[44:34] counterterrorism with an idea I said kofer I have an idea for an operation I want to pass by you he put up his hands he said whatever it is just do it I have so much money I can't possibly spend it all and that was it and that wasn't just me because he liked me that was anybody just do it everybody in the building was coming up with ideas for operations against terrorism is the CIA is still actively involved today in promoting works of art yes the CIA as an

[45:07] organization is very involved in promoting these kinds of works even though they're not necessarily made by the CIA this isn't some kind of a clandestine program let's say to make a movie or make a documentary and try to get it distributed they don't waste their time doing things like that they have such good close relations with Hollywood Studios I wonder what is the ideology of the CIA the ideology is is nationalism it's as simple as that because if you are an American nationalist let's say an American

[45:37] exceptionalist everything else is going to fall into line it's that easy do you have any knowledge on how the Art Market fits into the Global Financial system I'm I'm told uh by by people with first-hand experience whether it's at the FBI or the treasury Department that uh the only two ways that you can launder money these days you know in in this era of everything being um electronically recorded is through ART and real estate uh real estate's a

[46:09] little bit tougher you set up an LLC maybe the LLC is based in the Isle of Man or in Liechtenstein or the Caymans or whatever but there's no record of who buys and sells art anywhere and so there's no record of whether or not art is bought and sold with cash a what art dealer what art gallerist wouldn't want to sell a million dollar piece even if it's in cash and then he or she has to worry about how to launder the cash that's what they do and so this is a problem that I know

[46:40] that the FBI has been facing for a long time I had a conversation about this in 2002 or 2003 that they just couldn't get a handle on transactions that were taking place in the art community thank you I have now some general questions John do you think there is such a things as truth and Justice in art in the past I would have told you no today I'm going to tell you yes and I'll tell you why

[47:10] um so I've become acquainted with AI weiwei the Chinese activist and artist what a what a good and decent man this guy is uh six weeks before the end of my prison sentence I started receiving these postcards in the mail they were just simple postcards blank on one side and on the other side it was a photograph of an eagle soaring through the air and on the other side there might be a picture drawn or a heart or you are not

[47:41] forgotten or something most of them were unsigned and finally another prisoner came up to me and said hey buddy you're in a magazine uh it was the the week it's a competitor of Time Magazine I didn't know I was in this magazine but it was an article about an exhibit that way way had created that had been placed at Alcatraz the notorious prison in San Francisco Bay and what he did was he he took photographs of 189

[48:12] political prisoners or prisoners of conscience from around the world from 23 different countries and he made portraits out of Legos and the portraits appeared all over the floor throughout Alcatraz and then in individual cells especially in solitary confinement there were other installations ceramic flowers for example thousands of ceramic flowers I have one upstairs that he gave me and um the reason he did this was twofold one

[48:44] when he was five years old his father was arrested by Chinese authorities and charged with Espionage for writing a poem that one interpretation was advocated democracy so the entire family after his father was arrested the entire family was forced to move to far northeastern China sort of the Chinese version of of Siberia and he was interned in a camp there so one day someone sent him a postcard

[49:18] and said you are not forgotten and it so improved his morale that it led him to begin writing poetry again even though he was being held in this prison camp and way way always said that his father talked about it through his life about what that postcard meant to him because he really did think he was forgotten I can tell you I you know I always worried that I was forgotten you know you're inside you're in prison your life comes to a complete standstill

[49:50] but the real world keeps moving on outside you know my best friend in prison um his sentence was commuted by President Obama and he was released but he had been in for 17 years he had never seen a cell phone before let alone an ATM machine or use the internet or anything so you come to a stop the world keeps moving and I ended up receiving well over 2 000 of these postcards and then the day that I got out of prison

[50:20] was the last day of the exhibit and weiwei's gallerist walked around with an iPad and showed me the whole the whole thing well that was 2015. and we're still talking about it now at the end of 2019 because that exhibit went everywhere and it was purchased by the Smithsonian institution as crazy as it sounds are reports portraits now are all hanging in the Smithsonian institution in The hirschhorn Gallery of Art and there's a documentary that's been

[50:53] made about the conceptualization and the development and finally the installation of this program uh the response from Europe is far far greater than the response from the United States and I've always said this that the Europeans are light years ahead of the United States in terms of respect for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and transparency not the Brits the Brits are just like we are

[51:23] but everybody else is far ahead and so if I think outside the United States yes I think truth and Justice and transparency and freedom will eventually Prevail it'll take us longer here
