Title: Ep. 5264 – John Kiriakou on What Could Have Prevented 9/
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2020-05-25
URL: https://youtu.be/XhjFW9ey15U
Duration: 57:00

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[00:10] all right y'all welcome to scott horton's show i am the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan and i've recorded more than 5 000 interviews going back to 2003 all of which are available at scotthorton.org you can also sign up for the podcast fee full archive is also available at youtube.com scotthorton show all right guys on the line is john

[00:42] kiriyaku a former cia officer and host of loud and clear on the sputnik network and um he is the author of the books doing time like a spy and the reluctant spy and uh oh also the cia guide to surveillance and uh his latest with the great gareth porter the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis from cia coup to the brink of war and

[01:12] uh yeah hey welcome back to the show how are you doing thanks doing well thanks appreciate you having me yeah good times uh happy to have you here so um so i gotta find uh which tab to click on here we go uh i'm sorry i didn't even see it all i know is that a friend mentioned that you had made a comment that was interesting enough to build on for an interview i think about this recent michael isikoff story in yahoo news that in

[01:43] court filing fbi accidentally maybe wink wink nudge nudge accidentally reveals name of saudi official suspected of directing support for the 911 hijackers so uh first of all i guess uh did i hear it right you had a comment about this and then first of all i guess tell us the story if you can take us through the reporting here and then uh let us know what you think it all means sure the the surviving family members of the

[02:15] 9 11 victims have have filed numerous lawsuits against the saudi government and other entities uh stemming from the 9 11 attacks and this has been dragging on for a decade and a half now there are a lot of classified documents involved in this related to the fbi's investigation both pre and post 911 so this was this was just kind of a standard turnover of documents that was supposed

[02:46] to be made with no fanfare at all the documents are heavily redacted but lo and behold one of the redactions was missed and the redaction that was missed exposes the name of a saudi diplomat for the very first time who was a middle man between the saudi government and the 9 11 hijackers his name was musa'ed al-jarrah musa al-jarrah was the representative in the saudi embassy in washington of the saudi ministry of alkaf

[03:19] and islamic affairs alkaf means religious donations religious programming religious charity that kind of thing i think that the actual translation of al kaph it's the plural of wakaf which means charity so um so for the very first time we we get this name musa and what musa did was he uh provided uh money from allegedly the saudi embassy perhaps

[03:51] even from the wife of the saudi ambassador to the united states at the time prince bandar bin sultan good friend of president george h.w bush provided it to a cutout that is a middleman in los angeles who in turn used the money to uh procure an apartment for two of the 911 hijackers so this is the first time in a public venue the first time in an unclassified fashion that we've seen a direct connection

[04:23] between the saudi government and the 911 hijackers i think the comment that you're referring to is i said the other day in an interview that i don't think this leak was an accident there are literally two dozen different people who pour over these documents with a sharpie to make sure that no classified information is released especially names and i think frankly that there are a lot of people at the working level in the fbi where the document originated

[04:54] that are just tired of our government whether it's led by a democrat or a republican covering for the saudis the saudis were involved in 9 11. we all know they were involved in 9 11. now we have actual proof that they were the american people have a right to know that and especially the the families of the 9 11 victims have a right to know that and the saudis need to be called to account all right now do you write about this in the reluctant spy i'm trying to remember to tell you the

[05:25] truth um every mention that i made of saudi arabia and the reluctant spy was redacted and so it's not in there none of it is okay now um there's been so much great work on uh the 28 pages that's from the original congressional joint committee investigation of the september 11th attacks and the 28 pages were redacted for so long and they're finally released what two years ago and i've heard it said by a lot of

[05:56] different folks in fact someone just recently said to me that uh they think my wife larissa alexandrovna that her article about the 28 pages at antiwar.com is still the single best one to explain you know i agree what it all means and and in context with what we already knew and and so what puzzle pieces are being filled in and this kind of thing and so you know essentially the narrative is that the essentially saudi intelligence officers were helping to pay for these

[06:28] guys uh helping them to survive when they first got to california this would be the flight 77 hijackers the san diego cell um and with the others too i'm not exactly sure the different extent of the different accusations but essentially paying their way into flight school and all of these kinds of things but i wanted to bring up uh a counterpoint to that which is our friend phil giraldi who um you know he doesn't pull punches you know phil terrific writer and a great cia officer yeah well and a phd right

[07:01] and and um and a vociferous critic when he feels like criticizing but he said you know what i kind of not feeling it on the 28 pages i think that you know if you look at it in a bad light it looks pretty bad but if you look at it in context this is the kind of thing that the saudi embassy and saudi government officials inside the u.s do for saudi immigrants or you know students or whoever temporary

[07:31] um you know green card holders or whoever saudi nationals who come to the united states that they do this kind of thing all the time and if you look at it in the broader context there's you know hardly anything that really stands out from standard operating procedure what do you think about that uh there's something to be said for that uh but at the same time though you know the the saudis have thousands and thousands of students here there there's literally no oversight there was an incident about a year ago for example

[08:02] where uh two saudi students uh flew into the united states they were supposed to be on their way to a small mining college in montana and when they landed at jfk in new york uh they just walked out of the airport and nobody ever saw them again well you know it's up to the saudi embassy to keep track of their students we don't have the manpower or the wherewithal to to track every single student from saudi arabia or any other country who has uh an education visa to come to

[08:32] the united states sure i i can see what phil is saying that this is just what the saudis do which is true but it's also incumbent upon the saudis to keep track of their people and to make sure that they follow the law so you can't say well sure uh there were these guys these saudis in 1999 they did a dry run on an america west uh flight it was a dry run for the 911 attacks but it's not the saudi embassy's fault that

[09:04] these guys were getting money from the embassy because the embassy didn't know what they were up to well you know they should know what they're up to if they're financing these people another thing about the saudi embassy too and um at the very least this is irresponsible at the very worst it's a danger to american national security is that the saudis um and specifically at the time musayad al-jadha being the representative of the ministry ministry of uh of islamic affairs

[09:36] they finance islamic centers and mosques all over the country we have several major mosques here in the washington area built by the saudi government oftentimes they're named after whoever happens to be ruling saudi arabia at any given time there's a there's a big one the king fahd mosque in california for example and it's not just here it's all over the place i mentioned the other day on my own show that that the largest place of worship in guatemala is is a saudi mosque that was built right in the center of guatemala city

[10:07] and across latin america the fastest growing religion is islam that's thanks to the saudis another thing that the saudis do is they supply all of the qurans to the u.s bureau of prisons so these qurans are translated into english and what they do is you open up a quran on one side as the actual quran the text of the quran on the other side is commentary telling you what these words mean and how you're supposed to interpret them

[10:37] well that commentary is saudi and being saudi it's fundamentalist some would say even radical the saudi the saudi government would tell you that it's a fundamentalist uh muslim country that they're the guardians of the two holy mosques that's the the king's official title is protector of the two holy mosques so um you know they serve to radicalize people in u.s prisons and jails so when they get out they're self-radicalized they gravitate toward these these saudi um built mosques and

[11:08] saudi-built islamic centers and you know you've got automatically made followers so the saudis like to dabble in this kind of radicalization and then they're shocked shocked i tell you when something bad happens so i just don't trust them and i don't i don't trust their admonition that that they're innocent in the whole 28 pages or that they're innocent in uh in the transfer of money to 911 hijackers i just don't buy it

[11:38] but now so you were an analyst before you were a field officer there so if this was your group of analysts at the cia and you were looking at all of this as the investigation you would say that even without the audio of the phone calls that you know as a professional cia conspiracy kook you would judge with high confidence that they were helping these guys with a purpose and that purpose then must have been to successfully carry out this attack is that correct

[12:09] i would think yes not necessarily that this was a plot hatched by the saudi king and the saudi crown prince and the saudi defense minister at all but what the saudis do is they donate billions and billions of dollars through the ministry of islamic affairs uh to organizations purport to that purport to be ngos like the uh the world muslim organization or the organization for muslim youth and

[12:43] there's no accountability for that money a lot of these groups are based in jeddah or mecca or medina and the money just goes out well the saudi intelligence service uses those same organizations to launch operations and i think that if there was cooperation between the saudi government and the 911 hijackers and i believe that there was i believe it was probably done through the ministry of islamic affairs

[13:13] and the saudi uh intelligence service without perhaps direct knowledge and direct involvement of the highest levels of the saudi government well you know it makes sense to me that the saudis you know particularly the government at the intelligence services and whoever allowing all of this money and participating and delivering this money in some cases to al qaeda as protection money to just keep it outside the kingdom pal and that kind of thing and yet and and you know by all means

[13:45] laundering money through whammy or whatever all of that but providing direct assistance to actual hijackers in the us is a little bit more specific than paying protection money at a hotel in france you know so it sure is um and look and we're talking about prince bandar who's no dummy who's running saudi intelligence here and all roads seem to lead back to him and so sure but it sounds like you're saying that

[14:15] that their support would stop short of them you know knowing that there was an actual attack on the u.s at the end of the road even though knowing that they are real ass al-qaeda guys in this country you know i mean buying them flight lessons my gut says guilty and then my head says we would have to be living in the twilight zone if if bandar himself

[14:46] who was supposed to be so close to american leaders that he was nicknamed bandar bush here in washington i i can't imagine bandar being behind this attack but then all the truthers listening to this are saying that we're just being you know deliberately obtuse and naive and that obviously this was all a plot to allow one through and to even help it so that they could go to iraq and the rest

[15:17] and it's it's possible it's possible um i i think we don't have all of the intelligence and i'm sure that the fbi does they haven't released it but yeah i'd love to see it because it's entirely possible so my thing about that was this was that so how would that work right um you know bandar would have had to have had explicit permission from dick cheney that you promise you're not going to nuke riyadh now if i do this right and then yeah no please go ahead and at the same time

[15:48] then bandar would have to have the confidence that no general down at the pentagon is going to cross the river and shoot dick cheney in the head for the highest treason for orchestrating this plot and take his place right right which if i was and then nuke riyadh right like if i was prince bandar i would be concerned about that right i mean you're gonna fly a plane into the pentagon huh that's pretty brave mr head of uh saudi arabian intelligence so i just don't and you

[16:20] know it's funny because i was a truther before it happened and i quit being one shortly after it happened because it just all the different narratives behind all of that they just don't gel together you know they don't yell together and there are so many moving parts that if there were such a conspiracy everything would have had to have gone perfectly you know and i know that most people are idiots at least when when you're in this world of intelligence where there are so many different people involved there's going to be one bonehead who

[16:52] screws something up and things aren't going to work that's why you always have to have a plan b and a plan c and a plan d and this makes it look like they're they're all geniuses and i'll tell you something else and i think i've probably mentioned this on the show in the past i still remember the date this was july 6 2001. i was working in the cia counterterrorism center i was in charge of a group that trained middle east uh intelligence uh services in counterterrorism operations and we would do a lot of liaison

[20:00] harbor event necessarily it's that they wanted to go to baghdad and they viewed kopher black and the rest of the cia guys saying that the problem is osama in afghanistan as a giant diversion from the figuring out a way to start a war with iraq and so that was the neocons argument every time was oh shut up about that osama bin laden stuff it's it's saddam hussein is the real problem and osama just works for him anyway and this kind of deal right i'll go

[20:30] further than that i was uh my last job at headquarters was uh i was the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations and uh we were getting ready this was just two or three days before the iraq war started um i was the note taker in a secure video teleconference and it was a principles meeting so it was being chaired by the vice president conde rice was there george tenet was our representative colin powell was on the commander of centcom was on the head of nsa it was

[21:02] all the big muckety mucks that everybody who was who was a principal was on this call and so we're sitting there i'm sitting directly behind george and i'm taking notes and uh the vice president asked the commander of centcom to give us a briefing so he started this thing off by saying that uh we're gonna cross the border in two days uh you know this division's moving here and elements of the this core moving up this way and it was all military

[21:32] mumbo jumbo and then he said if all goes according to plan we can be in tehran by august and george leaned forward and he turned off his microphone and he turned around and said to me did he say baghdad or did he say tehran and i said he said tehran and george said have these people lost their minds and what was the date of this again this was two days before we invaded iraq okay yeah and then he he very casually

[22:04] turned back around turned his microphone back on and just sat there so i think that the plan all along you remember the famous story that that richard pearl just a day or two after the 9 11 attacks went to the white house and said we have to attack saddam hussein he didn't care about osama bin laden or al qaeda this was how we attack saddam hussein and that was just step one with step two being to overthrow the iranian government hey guys scott horton here for mike swanson's great book the war state

[22:35] it's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after world war ii during the administrations of harry truman dwight eisenhower and jack kennedy it's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on america's road to world empire the war state by mike swanson find in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org hey y'all mike swanson is a successful wall street trader with an austrian school understanding of the markets

[23:05] and therefore he has great advice to share with you check out mike's work and sign up for his list at wallstreetwindow.com and that's what you'll get a window into all of mike's trades he'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why i know you'll learn and earn a lot wall streetwindow.com that's wallstreetwindow.com back to these hijackers inside the country you know for someone who was predicting this attack for a long time before it ever even happened

[23:35] the day that it happened i says well look you got what at least 20 real ass suicide terrorist hijackers inside the country for some extended period of time how could this be possible that the fbi wouldn't know exactly who they were and be following every step that they take and then the official explanation for that is because the cia refused to show them all the information about this cell in

[24:05] fact let me go ahead and recommend this for people if they haven't seen it and i don't know about you but um there was this great little clip of uh it's by alex gibney the documentarian oh yeah he's great yeah so he's interviewing lawrence wright that wrote the looming tower and he's interviewing doug miller and uh ali soufan from the fbi from their side of the story about the the cia not being fair and sharing with them before the attack and ali sufan says he was in

[24:36] yemen investigating the coal attack on the on september 11th and then when once the attack took place they called him and said you better come down to the embassy he's the fbi agent and the cia says okay come here we have something to show you and they open up the manila envelope and there is the malaysia meeting where the uss cole attack that he is investigating was planned and so is september 11th and so here's two halves of the same big plot

[25:06] and he says and he can just read it you know decode it with a glance that this is what happened today is that what the cia hadn't shared with us um you know is what what unfolded there and then i i wanted to mention this guy ray noeleski and he was the major producer of 911 press for truth which is a really great documentary that my wife helped work on as well um and also he did the rich blee podcasts one and two and these are about

[25:38] rich blee was a guy at the alex station the cia alex station there and just to boil all of this down i what ray said to me and i went out to dinner with him at one point and and asked him about all of this and and he said his best explanation and that richard clark also believed was that alex station thought that they were going to be able to recruit the san diego cell and have then uh you know undercover double agents inside al qaeda and that either they didn't ever recruit them at all or they

[26:09] recruited them but really they were triple agents not double and ended up betraying them and that that was why they didn't share the information with the fbi then again michael shoyer who married the lady who in the fbi's version wouldn't let them share the data he says that's all bs the cia gave the fbi everything they're all in one big counter-terrorism center together there and if the fbi's email system didn't work as of circa the summer of 2001 that's their fault so i don't know no that's not true um he's being

[26:41] disingenuous look one of the things i think people need to understand is the depth of hatred between the cia and the fbi we freaking hated each other to the point where we wouldn't even work together we wouldn't even cooperate with one another not necessarily on a on a man-to-man basis i actually liked the fbi agents that i worked with in pakistan but institutionally the cia and the fbi hated each other going back to the founding of the cia the the worst part of this is that the

[27:12] cia database and the fbi database were not compatible so while there were people from the fbi sitting in the cia's counterterrorism center not many two or three at the time of the 9 11 attacks there was no way to share information from one agency to the other nor was there a political will to share information from one agency to the other it only came after the 9 11 attacks when the american people finally had had enough and president bush ordered us to

[27:43] integrate our uh computer databases that was it it's it was a petty it was a petty bureaucratic fight that resulted in 9 11. now mike sawyer is not telling the truth when it comes to uh to the southern california cell uh there was talk of trying to recruit those guys it they weren't recruitable it just and we didn't really try hard to recruit them this is an alex station wouldn't have had the talent to recruit some guys like that anyway right that would have been

[28:14] somebody else's job certainly not yeah that would have been somebody else's job um i i don't want to get into the details because they're probably still classified but yeah that would that would not have been alex station's um mission they could have might have done it anyway i mean i think this is part of the theory that they were out over their skis getting involved in something they shouldn't have these women analysts at alex station who had no business trying to recruit anybody yeah women analysts who had no operational expertise or experience whatsoever yeah

[28:46] i don't want that but i just meant that was who happened to be running the thing yeah they just happened to be all women yeah uh yeah they thought they were smarter than everybody else and we ended up with 9 11. all right now um so what about on september 11th and shortly after the word around the office i mean i know there's compartmentalization and all of that kind of thing but would you really have us all believe that you guys were essentially taken by surprise as you said new something's coming but no more specific than that well i can

[29:18] tell you that even in alex station i i was absorbed into alex station on on september 12th um even in alex station we knew that it was going to be massive nobody believed they had the balls to pull it off inside the united states the conventional wisdom was it was going to be another multiple embassy attack probably somewhere in in africa but we thought well if they're really if they're really going to try to take us by surprise it'll be somewhere we don't expect like east asia but everybody expected an embassy attack

[29:51] not on u.s soil um well i'll go ahead and bring this anecdote up i keep thinking of it so i might as well say it i met a guy i was just cab driver at the time and i met these guys and you know i did not verify their credentials or whatever but they all uh they sure seemed to be who they said they were uh three guys who were you know military intelligence and what they said was essentially what you said that we knew that something was going to

[30:21] happen but we didn't know enough to stop it although you know in this guy's telling of it which again it just seemed credible to me at the time but take that with a pinch of salt or whatever but um that uh oh they knew it was going to be inside the united states but they just didn't know which guys from which airports or any of those kind of details that they could have intercepted them but um that they didn't know that it was going to be here i i don't believe that just because if we knew that it was gonna be in the

[30:52] united states remember we had the information as far back as 1996 that that al qaeda wanted to use planes as missiles right from the bojinka uh operation in the philippines so we knew that they wanted to use planes but if we had known it was going to be somewhere in the united states all of the faa would have been on high alert the national guard would have been called out now if the cia and the fbi had been cooperating and had been sharing the intelligence that they had collected

[31:23] i think we would have come to the conclusion that it was going to be inside the united states and to me that's what makes this not just an intelligence failure not just really the most important intelligence failure in american history but one that reaches a level of criminality this just isn't it's not just a bureaucratic pissing match it's a criminal action in my view yeah well and you know so back to the saudi angle here too i mean if you know presuming some kind of

[31:55] actual coordination with american officials to allow it to happen you know forgetting all of that and just looking at again not just protection money paid but money paid by whichever saudi princelings and or saudi intelligence to al-qaeda terrorists who are extremely dangerous to american assets in this country or elsewhere around the world they're supposed to be our friends we're sure theirs and yet um what a terrible risk they're taking to uh

[32:28] they would be taking to help al qaeda get away with yeah even an africa embassy attack against american targets and that could get america an american invasion of saudi you think you don't like our bases there now bombing iraq at the invitation of your king wait till we occupy your country in vengeance against you letting your princelings attack us so what would be the interest of the again protection money is one thing but actually helping them

[32:59] attack their ally like this seems like an especially you know an insanely risky move for somebody like bandar it seems like he would have at least when it comes to attacking the americans an extremely uh strict um deal with the with the al-qaeda guys right he's paying protection money to protect the kingdom that should apply to us too right i don't know you would think yeah you know one of the things that i learned early on in my career at the cia was that the saudis are not our friends

[33:31] not even a little bit but aren't they scared i guess they're not scared either they know that they got so many people in their pocket that they can attack washington d they can attack the pentagon and not get carpet bombed imagine that i don't know it's kind of a crazy conclusion but yeah i mean i think that's what it comes down to yeah we'll just send them to iraq that'll divert everybody away from the uh the money behind this thing and and all of the rest of that i told the story on my show

[34:04] yesterday or the day before about my my first trip to saudi arabia it was in the immediate aftermath of the iraqi invasion of kuwait so i went out to provide analytic support and i was so excited because i was a young guy i was i guess i was 25 at the time i had never been to the middle east before and so this was my first official cia trip so i go to saudi arabia and i was immediately struck by how rude the saudis were to us like actively hostile and um

[34:36] finally i confronted one of the saudi guards outside the u.s embassy and i said what's your problem man and he looked at me right in the eye and he said we are not friends you are hired help we paid for you to come here and to protect the oil fields we will never be friends and i mean i felt stung and i walked away and i realized he's right he's right you go to any other country in the gulf you go to the kuwait or

[35:06] bahrain or the emirates or oman or gutter and people fall all over you they want to be so friendly and nice and come to my house for dinner and let's go camping in the desert for the weekend the saudis wouldn't give you the time of the day and they're all like that well imagine george washington inviting the french to stay after helping to keep the british away and that they get to have military bases here and attack our canadian friends across the border for a decade and all this craziness

[35:38] and how would we feel about that yes you're right uh and that's the deal right like i guess we you can't do the counterfactual but what if we only ever occupied saudi arabia with civilians in white button-up shirts with handshakes instead of military forces and in fact you know mass murdering the people on the other side of the imaginary line in the case of iraq war one and iraq war one and a half all through the 1990s there that's right yeah you're absolutely

[36:10] right in fact in in those early days right after uh operation uh would they call it at first desert shield uh before we actually attacked the iraqis uh the al-qaeda got a lot of really great uh pr benefit propaganda benefit by spreading rumors that we had female soldiers driving which we did we had uh female soldiers uh taking showers with male soldiers on the military bases that we were occupying that there were soldiers

[36:41] um having sex in front of the holy kaaba in in mecca that stuff wasn't true of course but but people believed it people believed it and they became sympathetic to al-qaeda i remember once a senior cia officer talking about democracy that he wished the state department would stop talking about democracy he said i don't want democracy if there was democracy in saudi arabia osama bin laden would be the president of that country we don't want democracy and man that

[37:12] just laid it bare right there yeah well and then you look at muhammad bin salman's reforms and it's like hey everybody r rated movies is at the highest order that this is the freedom and the reform that we're bringing you is just licentiousness essentially rather than actual property rights and markets you know so you know giving liberty a very bad name in a very conservative society like that um and and immediately right getting on the plane and going straight to tel aviv

[37:43] and bending the need a bit of netanyahu and i mean you know what i mean like this guy mbs could be bin laden's propaganda dream come true right like i'm sure that there's a podcast by i'm in all zawahiri called c i told you so look at this guy you know absolutely man um so now um but you know what so we got into some of the truther stuff a little bit earlier but so i wanted to go back to the way i had set that up about in the days after this at cia headquarters

[38:16] no one was saying man i think cheney deliberately let that happen somehow or anything along those lines at all or i think the boss did no i never ever heard that inside cia headquarters never you know i remember there was a lot of crying people walking around crying i say in my own book they forced us to evacuate on 9 11. i ended up abandoning my car on the gw parkway because i couldn't get i couldn't get all the way home all the

[38:47] roads were closed and hundreds of thousands of people were just walking uh on the highways to to try to get home that day and finally i said to my girlfriend who became my wife was also a cia officer i said after about six hours this is ridiculous we need to get back to work so we walked back to my car drove back to headquarters and i didn't leave for another four days i just slept under my desk with my jacket balled up as a pillow and i'd sleep an hour two hours at a time and everybody did that we actually got a bolt cutter

[39:17] and we we cut the the chain and the uh and the lock off the cafeteria door and we took ten thousand dollars worth of food from the marriott which had the catering contract and cooked it up ourselves and just had this the these folding tables in the hall outside the counterterrorism center where people could graze afterwards we had to write the marriott a check for ten thousand dollars and apologize to them yeah we looted the place we truly did we just looted it we took everything but um no i never heard any of those

[39:48] like not even not even people speculating not even the more um uh suspicious uh colleagues of mine nobody talked about it being and what about pointing fingers at each other this was somebody's fault and i think my understanding is that sawyer had been banished to the library and was not running alex station at the time but so was anybody mad at anybody or just just like they told us on tv hey hey this is nobody's fault now you know the the funny thing is that

[40:20] we all thought has blamed the fbi right and they did that they blamed the fbi without a doubt but they they couldn't pretend that that we didn't fall asleep at the switch too and so we we all believed that at the highest levels heads were going to roll tenet had to had to be out and pavett had to be out and that just never happened heads didn't roll john mclaughlin had to go nobody nobody went if anything these guys became somehow seen as

[40:50] as heroes in the public uh but uh yeah how about michael hayden you exactly nobody ever cut his head off either no no no and he fell asleep at the switch at both nsa and you know there's a whole book about that the shadow factory by james bamford have you ever read that right absolutely fantastic one of the that's one of the best books that's ever been written on intelligence man it really is great and what they say in there is that the fbi and the cia hated the nsa just

[41:22] as much as each other and vice versa too we used to laugh at the nsa yeah i can't tell you how many people would show up as new employees at the cia and i'd say um so are you just out of grad school or where you come from no i'm coming from nsa it's like everybody at nsa was trying to transfer to the cia it was ridiculous and yeah so why because it was such an amateur hour under michael hayden over there at nsa truly it was amateur nobody liked working for hayden he was a he was an egomaniac yeah well

[41:53] you know that book actually begins with him telling bamford well you see if osama bin laden himself walked across the bridge from canada i would have to stop surveilling him at that point which is absolutely not the law right i mean bin laden we have a reasonable suspicion that he is tied to a foreign terrorist group that's all you need to monitor for the nsa not just the fbi but for the nsa to continue to monitor him inside the country as long as they want we all know that

[42:24] that was the law before september 11th not after when they changed with the patriot act and so forth so i don't know if he was really running his agency that way or if he was just making excuses or what but the biggest story that and i think shoyer told me this story himself is where i got this from if i remember right um was that the cia tried to get oh and i guess this is in the book too um uh that the cia tried to get um the intercepts from the yemen

[42:54] switchboard house where honey honduras father-in-law the flight 77 hijacker san diego selkite his father-in-law ran the switchboard house where they would field the calls between afghanistan and europe and the u.s and so forth and the nsa would not share the intercepts with the cia even though the director of the cia at that time was also the director of central intelligence which meant the boss over nsa as well like the current national intelligence director job is and so george tenet had every authority

[43:24] in the world to represent his own home team at cia and say to nsa give me the damned intercepts i'm not asking you that's an order give them to me now and that tenant wouldn't do that and so instead the cia had to build their own listening station on madagascar and for however many million dollars um and that then they could still only intercept half of the call they couldn't hear the guys in afghanistan they could only hear what the people on the other side of the call were saying and this was

[43:56] this major detriment uh and so you know it sounds like making cheap excuses but essentially all these guys might as well be a bunch of deputy sheriffs right like there's no reason to think that they would be talented or intelligent or caring or have anything but the most superficial kind of knowledge about what's going on or why it should matter why they don't have a profit and loss motive in fact the more they fail the better they do as you just pointed out and so you know

[44:28] it sounds like really the default would be of course they fail it would be a miracle if they scored a touchdown on something like this and i'll give you another example too when i was in pakistan i was the chief of cia counterterrorism operations and i was working very closely with the fbi obviously because 911 was still an open criminal investigation and finally the president had ordered us to work together so we decided to um we decided to raid the taliban embassy the taliban still had an embassy it was

[45:00] in peshawar pakistan not an islamabad and we drove up there with a small team of guys there were six of us and uh we knew that the taliban would lock the door around five o'clock and they would just go home so we waited until sunset we picked the lock we went in and we stole literally everything we stole all of their files the filing cabinets we stole their computers we stole everything we packed it literally to the ceiling

[45:30] of two vans that we requisitioned from the american embassy and then the rest of the night we just drove it all back to islamabad so we unloaded it all into the uh into the embassy we put it in the hallway where the fbi offices were located and then i went home and not home but back to my guest house to get a couple of hours of sleep finally i go back into the embassy late morning and one of the fbi agents comes up to me and he says hey i think we've got a problem i said yeah what kind of a problem

[46:00] he says wait till you see what we confiscated in some of their hard copy files you got to come down and take a look at this i go down there and in one of the files we had stolen it was a collection of telephone bills and in pakistan for whatever reason the phone bills are written in english right not in urdu or pashtu or any of those other languages they're all in english and what these bills showed was that there were hundreds of telephone calls from the taliban embassy in peshawar to

[46:32] numbers all over the united states buffalo new york kansas city atlanta georgia colorado california hundreds and hundreds of calls so i sent a cable to cia headquarters to the counterterrorism center and i said be advised this is what we found i documented the calls and i said you know we're deeply troubled by this i get a cable back a couple of hours later saying good catch give it all to the fbi

[47:03] uh give the originals to the fbi copies to us and copies to the pakistanis because this was still an open criminal investigation so i did that i gave all the originals to the fbi uh the fbi agent i was dealing with boxed it up and sent it back to washington okay six months later i come back to headquarters i transition into a new job i happen to be at the mall one day with my wife just walking around the mall i run into this fbi agent i said hey whatever happened to those

[47:34] numbers that we found in the taliban embassy and he said uh you know i'm embarrassed to even tell you uh they never even opened the box the box was sitting in this office for months and then they just sent it out to a storage facility in greenbelt maryland and i said you know that that may have been the smoking gun for 9 11. he said i know man he said i i screamed until i couldn't scream anymore nobody would pay any attention to me another year passes and i run into the guy who was the head fbi agent

[48:06] in pakistan he had transferred back to the united states and i asked him the same question whatever happened to those telephone numbers that we confiscated and he said buddy have you ever seen the movie um uh harrison ford yeah but yeah raider's the lost ark i said ah come on now he said yeah it's like the closing scene and raiders the lost ark they put it on a shelf in in some storage facility out in maryland and nobody ever saw it again and we still don't know what was in those phone bills yeah well and you know

[48:38] and this goes back to the thing the overall thing about cia and fbi where the fbi is trying to prosecute these guys and so everything that they get they lock up behind a grand jury yes and so then the cia can't have it but the cia presumably is in the middle of giving bill clinton 10 different chances to kill osama bin laden they need they're not trying to arrest and prosecute the guy they're trying to have him dead and we there's a huge conflict there i don't

[49:08] know if you've ever seen this but i want to go ahead and play it just because in a dark way it's kind of hilarious and in the aftermath of all of this but this is a very short clip of uh michael shoyer testifying before congress under oath about his true feelings for john o'neill the head of fbi counterterrorism sir i think i also said that the only thing good thing that happened to america on 11 september was that the building fell on him sir

[49:41] so there you go the only good thing that happened on september 11th was the building fell on john o'neill who was the new head of security at the world trade center i tell you there there was not a more unpopular person in cia headquarters than john o'neill i remember i remember hearing on september 11th that that he had died and i remember a lot of people just kind of shrugging their shoulders man that's really something else that whole story which you know part of his story well this comes from front lines so who

[50:11] knows what kind of propaganda but um in their special about john o'neill they talked about how he got kobar towers right and that he tried to tell louis free it was al qaeda that did this the bin ladenites that did this while the saudis were trying very hard to convince louis free and the rest of the americans it was john brennan at the time that it was iran and iranian-backed saudi hezbollah what did it for apparently no reason at all yes yeah absolutely right

[50:43] and uh and now shoyer was good on that one too he said he agreed that it was bin laden and not hezbollah saudi hezbollah that did that as well yes it never made sense to me that saudi hezbollah was responsible for that i was there at the time uh the uh the explosion from kobar towers shattered all the windows in the front of my house i i thought my house was under attack yeah it was a massive massive bomb and um and so it never made any sense to me that it was saudi hezbollah because they

[51:14] didn't have those kinds of explosives you know the the the pit that the bomb made in the ground was 35 feet deep it was so deep that water from the persian gulf was seeping into it and hezbollah just didn't have that kind of firepower but al qaeda sure did and the motive and of course bin laden himself took credit for the attack which they ignored yeah you never heard it you never heard anything about that but he did indeed take credit for it

[51:45] yeah and gareth porter by the way your co-author uh has done probably the best work on that two or three articles on the kobar towers there um on that attack but you know the secretary of defense uh perry at the time also said it was bin laden that did it but uh louis free was determined the head of the fbi was determined to go along with the saudis and blame it on iran indeed yeah and you know by the way i don't know about the counterfactual maybe it wouldn't have made that much difference but what if it had been

[52:15] very clear that it was right-wing radical religious nuts in saudi arabia who did it and their choice of target was explicit and clear they were killing american airmen who were based in saudi so that they could regularly bomb iraq and enforce the blockade against iraq now once you introduce iran into the story now you just have mud why would iran want to blow up the cobar towers it makes no sense and so the story just

[52:46] kind of evaporated but what if they had told the truth and they had taken the death of those 19 airmen as all the september 11th you need to understand that these people want our troops to hell off of their holy peninsula and actually there was an earlier incident in 1995 i just happened to be in saudi arabia when this happened too this was the attack on opm sang the saudi national guard it was a u.s base where we trained the saudi national guard in riyadh and the saudis arrested a whole cell of people i don't remember what it

[53:17] was a half a dozen a dozen um all saudi nationals uh they beat confessions out of them those confessions were televised and then they beheaded all of them and i remember that the official response from us was like okay well the saudis got them they beheaded them they're not going to be a problem for us anymore but that was al qaeda it was this group that we just had never heard of we had heard of this guy osama bin laden and we knew that he was a bad guy and he was dangerous but the word al-qaeda the base it meant nothing to us in 1995 but we could have and should

[53:49] have acted then and we didn't yeah well never even mind uh you know and and it depends on exactly how you want to categorize it but i think it's fair to say that the new york cell of egyptian islamic jihad was essentially you know they were already merging islamic jihad with bin laden's group at that time and for the very same cited reasons they had killed rabbi kahane in 1990 and had tried to bomb the world trade center in 1993 oh there was a failed

[54:19] attack at a hotel i guess the radisson or something in aden in yemen in 1992 and that was the first time that at least the fbi had connected bin laden's name uh to these attacks and then um i'm probably skipping a couple the national guard and kobar towers and the africa embassies of course right and all that um so you know in fact go back to the first world trade center bombing if they'd only parked that truck a few feet to the right or the left or

[54:50] whichever it was near that retaining wall then they very well could have succeeded in knocking one tower over into the other uh which would have you know destroyed them both instantaneously and probably killed 50 000 people you know there's a month and a week into the bill clinton administration and that's right the fact that the fbi the atf and the fbi uh started their terror war against the branch davidians the next day seemed to distract them a little bit from the fact that somebody just launched an attempted murder on 50 000

[55:21] people in new york yeah yeah that's right they kind of just let that slide right it was just a thing that happened yeah six people died no big deal but man only by the hairs of your chinny chin chin there's a famous story um that uh once ramsey ahmed youssef was uh was arrested for the first bombing of the world trade center uh he was under arrest and he was uh on a on an fbi jet with john o'neill they were taking him to a prison and as they flew past the world

[55:52] trade center o'neil said to him it's still standing and ramsey ahmed youssef responded it wouldn't be if i had had another five thousand dollars and you know we should have listened back then and we didn't yeah yeah okay you guys that is john kiriakou the reluctant spy great book my secret life in the cia's war on terrorism uh doing time like a spy and of course the latest with the great gareth porter the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis

[56:25] from cia coup to the brink of war thank you again john thanks it's always a pleasure the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

[56:59] you
