Title: A former CIA mideast expert's view of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis
Show: Scheer Intelligence
Date: 2021-05-21
URL: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/20358edd-57d7-47aa-a256-9cafda41a576/audio.mp3
Duration: 57:00

---

[00:00] Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Sheer Intelligence, and I've got a return guest, John Kiriakou, and people can look up my previous interview with him and read his books and we'll mention all that, but he's a guy who was in the CIA for 15 years.

[00:35] He very famously was involved in what at the time was the capture of supposedly the highest ranking al-Qaeda figure that had been captured, Abu Zubaydah. He was with him alone and so forth. He's the man who exposed the CIA's torture program very effectively and was punished for that whistleblower act serving time in prison. And he can discuss that a little bit, but we discussed that case exhaustively

[01:06] and people, I'll link to it and this into you. I wanna cut to the chase now because John Kiriakou is someone, I say these sheer intelligence are the intelligence cost of my guests. And basically I tried to find interesting people thrown up by the contradictions or the crazy quilt of American culture, that we have genuine people that I find heroic and honest and so forth, and come in probably out of the culture. In this case, John Kiriakou was studying

[01:38] at George Washington University. I wanna begin there, and but I'll end up with Israel in Gaza and the war on terror. But here was somebody who had a Greek background and familiarity with languages and managed to learn Arabic and was recruited and I'll start the story there. Recruited at George Washington by a fellow named Joe Post. I don't know if we're allowed to mention that. I don't know if he was CIA, but he was your professor. Why don't we begin with that? Your exposure to the Arab world,

[02:10] which ends up with 15 years in the CIA and capture of a top reputed al-Qaeda figure. And I would like to get to the current moment of Palestine and Israel and its relation to the war on terror. So take us back to your, what were you then, a graduate student? I was, I was a graduate student, getting a master's degree in legislative affairs at George Washington University. It was kind of a policy analysis focus because I thought, well, maybe I'll end up on Capitol Hill

[02:41] or I'll end up in the foreign service. You know, I wanted to stay in Washington and I wanted to do something related to policy and preferably foreign policy. Yeah. So I was in this class that was taught by Jerry Post. Jerry was a, he was unique among GW professors because he had a PhD in political science, he had a PhD in psychology, and he also had an MD. So he billed himself as a political psychiatrist.

[03:12] He was actually a practicing psychiatrist on the side. And what I didn't know was that he was the founder of the CIA's political psychology division, which was in the directorate of intelligence, the analytic arm of the CIA. And he thought that I would be a good fit in the CIA in analysis. He made some introductions. But wait, let me just stop you because I don't want to face time in jail myself. You got in trouble because you had this kind of conversation with, what was it, a Baltimore

[03:47] son or a New York Times reporter and you know. No. No, no. It was completely, completely totally different. In 2008, a reporter for ABC News told me that he was writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition. Abu Omar was a radical Egyptian cleric in Milan. And I didn't know anything about the Abu Omar rendition. I told him so. Well, he sent me a list of a dozen names and asked me if I could introduce

[04:17] him to one of these people. I said, I don't know anything about Abu Omar. I don't know any of these people. I can't help you. He sent me another list of a dozen names. And I responded, look, you clearly know this issue far better than I do. I don't know any of these people. Kidnapping wasn't my thing at the CIA. I wasn't involved. I can't help." And then he said, well, in your first book, you mentioned somebody on page 160, whatever. I think his name is, I'll say John.

[04:50] And I said, oh, you're talking about John Smith. I don't know whatever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. I confirmed the last name of this John Smith, and that's what got me in trouble. You were revealing a CIA person. So are we going to get in trouble right now when you tell me that your professor at George Washington, Jerry Post, played this role? No. Oh. Okay.

[05:20] So how can you reassure me on that? Because I'm 85. I don't really want to get involved in, you know, going to prison. Well, Jerry Post was never undercover. Oh. Okay. Jerry Post has written dozens of books. He's appeared in literally hundreds of television shows, documentaries as a CIA, former CIA official. He's never been undercover. This is, yeah, not. So when he was your professor at George Washington, he was known to be a CIA person?

[05:51] Yeah. He had retired from the CIA after 25 years. Well, I'm glad we cleared this up because, you know, it's messed up your life and, you know, what remains in mind, I'd rather not spend entangled with the CIA. I know they favor people when they make movies defending torture, which they did with Zero Dark Thirty and took the screenwriter and director into their confidence and had a movie that defended torture and they didn't go to jail, but people who are critical to the CIA can end up on the wrong end of that, right?

[06:23] Right, right, it happens all the time. Because we did this in the first interview, so let's cut this out. Basically, you're in this program and you're doing work for this guy because this we did discuss in our previous Podcasts, so I want to get now to the middies. So you're there and you're learning what? Arabic or that comes later that that came later. Yeah, so so take us up You get to the attention this guy in your profiling and then

[06:54] When does he make the offer? so he make he makes the offer when I finish the paper and you know he always said that well first of all I always said that I was deeply deeply grateful and indebted to him for making these introductions for me and he always said no no all I did was I made one phone call but you had to get into the CIA on your own which you know was true but he certainly introduced me to the right people so I finally got an offer

[07:30] in December 1989 I started working at the CIA the first Monday in 1990 and I was hired into into the office that Dr. Post had created at the CIA the Office of Leadership Analysis working on the Middle East working on Iraq that's how I got started yeah you want me to go more into it yeah no so you that's what part I'm interested in. So you started working on Iraq and again let's trace this trajectory. I'm

[08:05] trying to understand what's going on in the Mideast right now and rely in some sense on your expertise. So let's talk about your education here and then you go into the CIA. Sure I went into the CIA. I worked on Iraq for three years and then my leadership asked me if I was interested in learning Arabic and I was very interested in learning Arabic. I applied for this position in the Analyst Overseas Program which is an exchange program that we have with the State Department and I was assigned to the American Embassy in Manama Bahrain. I learned to speak Arabic

[08:39] before I left for Bahrain and I always had a facility for languages. I also speak Greek and so I tested conversational effluent in Arabic after a year of study. I went to Bahrain for two years from 1994 to 96. And then with that expertise went back to CIA headquarters and worked on Iraq again for another year and a half. And then I made a very unusual change. I

[09:12] decided to switch from analysis to operations and even then to counterterrorism operations. It it was a very unusual, it's called a gateway in the CIA, a very unusual gateway change, but because I had these two very difficult languages, they determined that it was easier and cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than it would have been to take an operations person and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. I mean, I'm happy to just ramble if that's what you want.

[09:49] No, I'm not asking you to ramble, so this is unusual for most people. We don't learn these languages, we don't go live in these countries. This is the other. Who are these Arabs? Who are these people? So this is your introduction to the Middle East and you're there in Iraq. And there's this place called Israel, which happens to be in the news right now in relation to some other people called the Palestinians. And I'm trying to get a framework for comprehending this because one of the arguments is supposedly is that Israel has been a major target

[10:21] of the Arab terrorists and so forth. And its security is always at risk. And somehow the Palestinians are related to it because they've been occupied ever since the six day war. And I'm trying to get at the heart of this issue. This threat against, yeah. This threat against Israel silliness. From the very beginning of my career at the CIA, I realized that this was nonsense. This was self-inflicted on the part of the Israelis. Because even as early as 1990, right? I was on my first trip to Saudi Arabia.

[10:51] Nobody ever mentioned Israel to me ever. No Saudi that I ever interacted with mentioned Israel. They were obsessed with Iran, and to a lesser extent with Saddam Hussein. But their existential threat was the Iranians. No one ever mentioned Israel. They never had any beef with Israel. And then when you get further afield, like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, none of those countries have any problem with Israel. I laughed when the Trump administration announced this so-called peace deal between

[11:26] in Morocco and Israel, the UAE in Israel, Bahrain in Israel. These are countries that have never been at war with Israel. So why would you even call this a peace treaty when there was never a war? It was an agreement to open diplomatic relations. It was an agreement to create a trade relationship, but this wasn't a peace deal. The reason why the Israelis are always at war is because they run what comes down to an apartheid state

[11:58] and they just oppress the Palestinian people. Now, whether they like it or not, they're gonna have to share that land. And we can certainly have a discussion about a one state solution, a two state solution or whatever, but the fact of the matter is they're going to have to give something to the Palestinians. You cannot have a South Africa style apartheid regime, which is what they have right now, and expect that everything's just gonna be all milk and honey.

[12:29] That's not real life. You say that. I thought that when I was there, I was in Egypt and in Israel at the end of the Six Day War. And certainly Israelis I talked to understood this was not gonna be tenable, whether they really believed. I don't know, but I interviewed people like Lone and Diane and others, but they were still there. And not only still there, but Israel under Netanyahu. And it's very interesting. This is really fascinating what you bring up

[13:01] because the preoccupation with Iran on the part of the Arab governments that are invoked as the enemy is longstanding. And what Netanyahu did and with Trump and tearing up that treaty with Iran to refocus the whole opposition to Iran. And the irony here, I mean, these Palestinians, after all, did not attack Israel. You know, they were occupied by Jordan, by Egypt, and by Syria.

[13:32] That everybody forgets that. These people called the Palestinians and some deny their existence as a people. They certainly were occupied people. And I was there. I was in Gaza. I was in the West Bank and I traveled there right after the war and they had been brutalized, certainly by the Egyptians, so not treated kindly. And even the Jordanians were certainly

[14:02] threatened by the Palestinians. There were plenty of Palestinians living in Jordan proper, let alone in the West Bank and in Syria was no great friend yet somehow peace established with all of them in Egypt quite close with Israel and Jordan and the Palestinians are left in this apartheid situation right and and that is this one of the great ironies of history really that the the use of the victimization that in fact the Palestinians are in the position

[14:36] and historically that Jews were in. They're in the diaspora, a hostile diaspora. They are oppressed in this diaspora. And then ironically, somehow the great crime, which is the greatest crime of modern history, the extermination of the Jewish people happens in a Christian nation, well-educated of Germany and throughout Eastern Europe, somehow gets visited upon the Palestinians as if they're responsible for it all. And then it gets extended into this war on terror,

[15:06] that they're somehow responsible for terrorism financed by Saudi Arabia, sponsored by various emirates and so forth. And then some other Palestinians are the necessary captive in all this. That's really what I want you to ponder. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I realized early on, and granted the times were strange, but Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. And I was one of only two Kuwait analysts in the building at the CIA at the time.

[15:41] And I was one of only nine Iraq analysts. So, you know, as you can imagine, we all had a lot of work to do. But because I was an expert on the Kuwaiti royal family, I was sent to Tayyaf Saudi Arabia to just sort of sit with the royal family and act as liaison between them and the CIA. And within just days of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Yasser Arafat came down on the side of Saddam Hussein. And the Kuwaitis wanted to kill every

[16:20] Palestinian that they could get their hands on. And I remember one of the royals told me, when we take our country back there will be no Palestinians in it. Well that extended, that extended to to Yemenis because the Yemenis came down on the side of Saddam Hussein and there were you know two million Yemenis in Saudi Arabia acting as laborers. There were Palestinians in Bahrain, they were all the bankers, they were all the bankers and teachers in Qatar and so I saw

[16:52] these Palestinians just be expelled. Well it wasn't the Palestinian people who had done anything wrong, it was their idiot leadership that just came into this fight on the side of the loser. That animosity lasted at least a decade and as As a result, the Palestinians had nobody pulling for them that had any money or that had any

[17:26] ability to improve the Palestinians way of life for that next decade. When I was in Saudi Arabia, there was some talk about the Saudis financing a port in Gaza with Israeli acquiescence. Of course, there was talk about the Qataris financing an airport, you know, just something that would allow the Gaza Palestinians to take delivery of food and medicine and the Israelis said not in a million years and then the Saudis and the Qataris said we're not going to give one red

[17:58] scent to the Palestinians they were with Saddam Hussein against us and then this was in the 1990s right this was in the 1990s yeah it was it was a very slow process for that to change it finally Only it never got back to what it was, but once Yasser Arafat died, it made it a little bit easier. But still, there's just no love in the Gulf, among Gulf Arabs for the Palestinians.

[18:29] And the Israelis know that. And that's why the Israelis, once Donald Trump was elected, they knew that this would be easy for them. You have Jared Kushner, who's an Orthodox Jew. You know, we had an Orthodox Jew as the U.S. ambassador to Israel. This was the Israeli's golden opportunity to get everything they wanted. We moved our embassy to Jerusalem just like they wanted. We cut off all aid to the Palestinians just as they wanted. We brought in the Emirates, the Moroccans, the Sudanese, the Bahrainese, just as they wanted.

[19:01] So, you know, why throw the Palestinians any bone at all when you're not being forced to by the United States? Well, this is really important. And ignored, ignored. That the fact that a matter is the Palestinians have been used as a token, as a gambling chip. And that Israel is cognizant of

[19:33] it. They have great intelligence. They know what's going on. And they know that the Palestinians are not a military threat or a terrorist threat, you know, and in fact the great terrorism that's been used to inform our whole war on terror came from the very people who loathed the Palestinians from the Saudis or from the Emirates and so forth and have done nothing for the Palestinians. Yet the war on terror is used, and it wasn't the power... Palestinians that blew up the World Trade Center was 15 of 19 of them were from Saudi Arabia with legitimate

[20:07] Citizenship and the ability to travel. So so you know, I don't want to get You know Prejudice this in any way. Let's examine this as a historical phenomena Let's say we were back at the CIA and you're with your group there of experts on Kuwait and and Iraq and so forth. Let's think about that. Why isn't the leadership telling the president that the fact is the Palestinians are not our enemy and they are not key to the war on terror?

[20:38] Why is that Boston and why doesn't the media know that? Does MSNBC or Fox News know that? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you raised it. One of the things that I learned very, very quickly in my time at the CIA was that There was a deep admiration just among the rank and file for the Palestinian people. Not for the Israelis, but for the Palestinians. On my very first day at the agency, all the new hires were sitting in the bubble,

[21:09] as I mentioned earlier, the auditorium. And you get a briefing from all the big mukti mucks. The director comes and congratulates everybody and swears you in. We had the director of personnel come and talk about payday. The director of security came. Now the director of security gave this fantastic talk that has stuck in my mind all these years. This is 31 years ago. He said that we had to be very careful of and cognizant of counterintelligence threats.

[21:41] So he said, you know, as it comes to counterintelligence, our enemies are not just the usual cast of characters at the time, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cubans. But he said, let me give you another example. The Israeli embassy here in Washington has two declared intelligence officers, one from Mossad and one from Shin Bet. Now declared means they are known to us as intelligence officers. They came here and they said, hi, I'm a Mossad officer.

[22:14] I'm a Shin Bet officer and I'm here to cooperate with you. declared officer. But the Israelis had, according to the FBI, at least 189 undeclared intelligence officers at loose across the country at universities and defense contractors and governmental organizations stealing our secrets to take back to Israel. We had such a difficult counter-intelligence

[22:47] relationship with the Israelis that the Israelis were not allowed in CIA headquarters for liaison meetings. We had to meet them offsite somewhere because they simply could not be trusted to not plant a bug or to try to recruit a CIA officer. So there was this real loathing of the Israelis at the CIA, but respect for the Palestinians. You know, not everybody is heartless. You can see when people are being oppressed. Well, I found in the time that I was working at the State

[23:17] Department that the same thing was true at the State Department. There was great respect for the Palestinian people at State, but where that falls away is when the policy decision moves from State to the White House because the White House is weighing political issues rather than just issues of what's right and what's wrong. They're the ones that have to deal with the attacks, for example. Yeah, let me just interrupt for a second, because this prejudice or awareness and so forth

[23:51] goes right through the whole history of the post-war period, and the people in the State Department or the CIA who are thought to be sympathetic to criticism of Israel were always dismissed as arabists and that was and it's almost one definition if you know the language arabic if you know something about the history of these other people you are assumed to be on their side you're supposed to be anti-semitic even right arabists was almost an equivalent

[24:27] of saying somebody you know these were very respected members of the state department were dismissed as arabists because what they were thought to be blindly prejudiced against israel yes is that not the that's absolutely true absolutely true and then you you get some people like for example ambassador chaz freeman i worked for ambassador freeman in saudi arabia this guy was one of the most brilliant minds i've ever encountered in

[24:58] in my career, highly respected, highly educated, extensively published. And he was named, his last job in government was chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Well, when Barack Obama was elected president, he decided to name Chas Freeman assistant secretary of defense for international security. And the Israelis jumped up and down and they said he's an anti-Semite. Well, he's no more an anti-Semite than I am or you are

[25:31] or anybody else that I ever worked with. Well, after this broadcast, will all be accused of that? We probably will be. Chas Freeman just deserved, or just deserved. Chas Freeman just believed that the Palestinians deserved equality. It literally just came down to that. Well, APAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, I guess it's called, launched this attack on Ambassador Freeman, and in the end

[26:03] of the White House withdrew his nomination as Assistant Secretary of Defense. Yeah, well, so that's the issue. But I want to connect it back. You know a lot about the war on terror. We're going to wrap this up. And you were involved, as I said at the beginning, in the capture of what was then considered the highest, erroneously actually, highest ranking, certainly captive member of al-Qaeda, and so forth. The war on terror has somehow got interconnected with the whole Palestinian issue

[26:35] and justification of keeping the Palestinians in, you know, in a situation of what, apartheid, but imprisonment really in the case of Gaza, I mean you can go anywhere or do anything, open-air prison, that whole issue got consumed by the concern over terrorism. And yet, at the end of the day, you have somebody like Donald Trump and Netanyahu thrilled that a deal has been made with the most right-wing, powerful,

[27:09] richest people in the Arab world to accept Israel's domination, right? Yes, yes. So let's center on that and what remains of this podcast. Where are we now? And how did this happen? And look at this horrible situation that's going on now. And horrible, by the way, to anybody, myself included, who cares about the survival of Jewish people. And by the way, I have never, or I shouldn't say never,

[27:43] but I certainly accepted the idea that there should be a state in which Jewish people can be secure and uncomfortable in Israel and that some sort of two-state solution should be worked out and so forth. It seems to be that's never gonna happen that either you're gonna expel these Palestinian people in some kind of ethnic cleansing or they're gonna be in a position of such abject servitude that they might as well be just officially prisoners. That seems to be what's going on now.

[28:13] You have a lot of expertise. How do you assess the current situation? I have to agree with you. I think the current situation is more politically difficult than previous fights between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because the Palestinians this time truly are alone. You know, even the countries, the Arab countries, that recently opened relations with Israel, They gave public statements in the last few days,

[28:45] kind of gently suggesting that the two sides stop fighting. It's not like anything we've seen previously. And if you look at Saudi Arabia and hope to find some sort of support for the Palestinian side. And when I say Palestinian side, I'm talking about civilians here. You know, just since yesterday, 30 more women and children were killed in Gaza. So this is Friday. What is today's today's Friday? The uh, what is it the

[29:17] 14th? Something like that. Friday. Okay. Um, and the Saudis don't say anything. And I want to add something that happened. Oh, just in the last year and a half or two years, you know, there was, there was a little kerfuffle in the press. It's Friday the 14th. Let me just straighten that out. Okay. There was a little kerfuffle in the press, uh, like I say a year and a half ago, two years ago where Saudi air defenses briefly went down. They just shut off for two hours and the Saudis never made any public statement

[29:51] as to why, what happened that their air defenses went down. Well, what happened was they shut their air defenses off because they came to a deal with the Israelis. The Israelis wanted to overfly Saudi airspace to do a simulated bombing run against Iran. And they wanted to see how quickly they could make it across Saudi Arabia and back. Could they do it before the Iranians would be able to respond? So the Saudis took down their air defenses, the Israelis flew across, then they flew home and then the Saudi air defenses went back up again with the Iranians not even

[30:26] reacting to it because they didn't detect it. That to me is so frightening because it shows me Israeli-Saudi military cooperation that has nothing to do with the Palestinians. I said in the beginning of this interview that the existential threat for the Saudis is Iran. It's not Israel. This proves it. They're not worried about Israel. They're happy to cooperate with Israel. And then where Where does that leave the Palestinians? We knew there was going to be a fight again.

[30:57] There always is. We knew that there were going to be missile launches between Gaza and Israel and vice versa. There was probably going to be ground troops committed in Gaza, which happened yesterday. And where are the rest of the Arab countries? What are they doing? What are they saying? They're not saying anything. So here we are in yet another fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are standing completely alone.

[31:27] Time for a break. And we'll be back in a few minutes. We're back with your intelligence. And I've got a return guest, John Kiriakou, and so let me conclude this because some Some people will say the elephant in the room is, okay, what is John Kiriakou doing now? Because you bring great expertise, you sacrifice for your country, and your country sacrificed you for doing something that the head of the CIA did routinely, and much more serious

[32:06] cases. And of course, there's General Petraeus and others who played loose with national security. You didn't and anything like that. But they will say, why don't you mention that John Kiryako is a what, correspondent or something at Sputnik? No, I've got a little, no, I'm not a correspondent. I've just got a little chat show, opinion show from four to six every day on Sputnik called the backstory. Right. But just as being an Arabist will be used to disqualify, the very fact that you

[32:36] know that you're fluent in this language of the other will hold you suspect. I wanna get it out there because I think what is happening is the marginalization, smearing, red-baiting, whatever you wanna call it, the case of Russia, we're red-baiting and they're not the reds, they're the anti-reds, Putin's an anti. That's right. Reds, right. And I have followed those events going back through Govachev when I actually was there

[33:06] for the LA Times, that's one of the great ironies, Putin as somebody that our side prevailed upon Yeltsin to bring St. Petersburg to Moscow. But nonetheless smearing people who dare challenge the official narrative is the order of the day. And the irony is these are people who don't get invited to MSNBC or Fox News. They don't have a voice. So they finally end up at some small, in this case, a small station, Sputnik, and oh, now

[33:42] you can red bait him, you know, red baiting without reds. Right. So I do want to address that because you basically, you know, you, you, you, you know, I say this is a show about American originals. You're certainly an American original. You somebody who said torture is wrong and it's an un-American and I'm going to expose it. Instead of being given the middle of freedom or what have you, a Nobel Prize for that matter, which certainly would have been possible and legitimate, you spend time in prison.

[34:12] And your life pretty much, you got your pension taken away from you, you got everything. They destroy whistleblowers. We haven't talked about that enough here. But that's what they do. And yet, they don't destroy the people who lied fake news about the value of torture we need it to make us secure. They don't do that. So let's talk about your situation. What happens to whistleblowers? And let's get that out there. There are so many other examples too,

[34:42] besides me, of whistleblowers who were just had their lives as they know it ended. We can talk about Ed Snowden. We can talk about Tom Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Webe, Daniel Hale. my gosh, there's so many of them, reality winner and, and Terry I don't think you mentioned your rare black counterpart in see Jeffery Sterling. Yeah. Yeah. I was okay. Yesterday.

[35:13] Jeff Jeffries, another example that you know, he filed us a racial discrimination suit against the against the CIA and he ended up being accused of of nine counts of espionage. He went to trial because he was so convinced of his of his innocence as was I that he thought well Certainly if I get in front of a jury, they'll realize how ridiculous this is and he was convicted on all counts Because all the CIA has to do is go into a courtroom and say national security

[35:43] That particular courtroom, right isn't it? Yes, the Eastern District of Virginia It's called the espionage court because no national security defendant has ever won a case there So, yeah, you know, Jeffrey got out of prison year and a half ago and still has not found a job. You know, the reason I work at Sputnik is because nobody was beating a path to my door to offer me work. I have five kids, three still at home that I need to put through college.

[36:15] How am I going to do that on food stamps and welfare? And so I got a call one day from Sputnik, the Russian radio news network, and they asked me if I wanted my own show. I said, no, thank you, not interested in working for the Russians. And then eight months passed, and I still hadn't been able to find a job. And I mean, here I am, I finished my PhD coursework at the University of Virginia in international affairs. I have a master's degree in legislative affairs. I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies, 20 years of service at the

[36:49] the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and I'm being rejected by Target and by Safeway and by McDonald's, rejected. Wasn't it Drake from the NSA, Thomas Drake? What's work for the Apple store? Does he still work there? He retired about six months ago, but that was it. He never worked on the court. One of the great practitioners at the NSA, a man who turned out was right in every respect and criticism which he took through the channels and so Edward Snowden said he

[37:23] looked at what happened to people like him and that's why he realized there were no channels. He ends up working at Apple and again the similar problems was you're getting your pension and everything else. It's startling and now they every now they've dusted off a great man Daniel Ellsberg said well that's a good whistleblower. The rest are no good because they whistleblowered against the, oh, moderate Republicans like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who, after all, pursued more cases under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents.

[37:56] So it's insane what's going on. I mean, the idea, we celebrate people who speak truth to power, people like you are destroyed. Let me ask you about the Human Rights Organization, because I've run into some difficulty calling them out recently on the Julian Assange case, what kind of support do you get from human rights organizations? That's a great question. And whistleblowers like yourself, yes. That's a great question, because in the beginning, I thought- By the way, very in favor of whistleblowers

[38:27] elsewhere in the world. Oh, yeah, they're great. Yeah. Not with American whistleblowers. In the beginning, I begged Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to make a statement, you know, supportive, supportive of my whistleblowing, they didn't want any part of it. And then when I finally went to prison, Amnesty International, I got a letter from the president of Amnesty International USA saying, hey, we think we made a mistake, we're sorry,

[38:58] just wanted to know, we're pulling for you. And then they bought me a subscription to the New Yorker in prison, if you can imagine. Then- I actually can't imagine. I cannot imagine. I'm sorry that that the response of amnesty international that you're sitting in prison for for exposing the torture program And which is the real reason you're sitting there and they give you a subscription to the new yorker Yeah, it was outrageous And then um just before I'm amazed you're not crazy. I mean you're visibly crazy. I really am. I mean I can

[39:34] Thank you for that. Honestly people people other people have told me that that they can't believe I'm not angrier. But I don't know why you're still coherent, frankly. No, I mean, your whole life has been ripped apart. Your family life has been destroyed or damaged. You know, people now attack you because you make a living working for, oh, a radio station that will let you chat. and no, you've got to starve to death and dignity.

[40:05] What are we talking about here? It's just insane. You know, just to finish off this Sputnik story, eight months after I turned them down, I went back to them and I said, I said, are you still interested in having me on as a radio host? And they said, yes, the job is yours if you want it. So I said, I want two things. I said, I want the ability to say anything that I want to say. No holds barred. They said, done.

[40:36] And I said, I want the ability to criticize literally anybody that I feel is worthy of criticism, including Vladimir Putin. And they said, done. I said, will you put it in writing in the contract? They said, yes. And they did. And I signed the contract. And I'll tell you what, they have treated me like a king since the day I've arrived there. Nobody has ever told me that I can or can't say something or should or shouldn't say something. I've had utter complete freedom to do

[41:10] these shows in exactly the way I want to do the shows. And on top of that, it's the best health insurance I've ever had in my life. But can we criticize Vladimir Putin now? I mean, his role has not always been great, even in the Middle East. Yeah. And I have as recently as day before yesterday. What did you say? I said that Putin should keep out of of Israel. The he has his his hands tied in Syria. I believe that the Russians are in the right in Syria. But he's actually been negotiating with Netanyahu. He's actually supportive of Netanyahu, isn't it?

[41:42] That's why I thought he should mind his own business. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting paradox here. You know, even in the old Soviet Union, I believe Stalin was one of the first to recognize Israel, the first or the second. Yes, yes, you're exactly right. You're exactly right. Was it the first? It was the first, and we were the second by like 15 minutes. Ah, so there's this whole idea that somehow you can conflate everything. Putin, communist, this or that. It's all garbage. It is. You know, it really is garbage. It's dangerous garbage. And yet it works.

[42:18] I want to remind people listening to this, you know, I don't know, what my role is is a podcaster. I try to be objective, and I do, and I have my own criticisms, for example, of Putin. I think he represents the good czar at best, at best, and I think he supports the Russian Orthodox Church, and he's been terrible on issues of gay rights and personal freedom and so forth. So I'm very clear about that. But but you know somehow it's like when did you stop

[42:53] beating your wife? You have to prove that over and over again. You don't have to prove your objectivity about the US government. You don't at all. No. The New York Times, we haven't even mentioned this. My last podcast was with Major Danny Churis and who served an active duty in Afghanistan about the fake story really. It's turning out to be the fake story of a russian bounty to kill america's you were in afghanistan you know that territory and you know one of the great hoaxes the new york times ran it as straight news based on what

[43:26] cia information yes you know it was crazy with that i mean that really just drives me bananas that i know as an objective journalist i don't want to be driven bananas so tell me how does one defend having a story like that that is handed to you by your government's secret agency, the CIA, and you run it as straight news. These are respected journalists, the three who did that story. They did it in June of last year, that there's a Russian bounty to pay

[43:57] terrorists and then turns out to be criminals rather than political terrorists in Afghanistan to kill Americans, you know, certainly a very serious charge coming from your old agency. Yeah, I can tell you how this happened and it's a very sad story and it says a lot both about the CIA and about the New York Times. Whenever somebody comes in to the CIA with information, it can be a walk-in that is literally

[44:29] somebody who walks in off the street and offers up information or just an unvetted source. So you're meeting with somebody, you're interviewing him, and he throws this bit of information out that the Russians are paying a bounty on American soldiers in Afghanistan. No proof, no vetting, no second source, no nothing. And also obtained under torture. They were detainees' information according to the latest regulation, yeah. Correct. Detainee information.

[45:00] Well, another detainee is going to tell you what he thinks you want to know. that you'll go easy on him, or let him go, or, you know, give him some sort of special consideration. There were a lot of people that you were there, as a CIA person, you know about detainees. Oh, yeah, very much. I was responsible for the capture of many dozens of Al Qaeda fighters and interrogated, you know, all of them. So yeah.

[45:30] Yeah. So what this is, you know, post 9-11, the CIA came up with this really stupid idea called the threat matrix. And what it is, it's published every day, and it's all the threats against the United States, U.S. persons or U.S. installations from around the world. And it's based on raw intelligence, so nothing is vetted, nothing is analyzed, and nothing is proven. So you come up with this list of things and every day you pass it to the White House.

[46:02] Well this information was on the threat matrix. We have a detainee who says the Russians are paying a bounty on American soldiers in Afghanistan. Okay, 99.99% sure that's not true. It's just blurted out by a detainee who's trying to get something for himself. But someone probably at the White House leaked it, and it goes to the New York Times. And the New York Times reports it with a tear on fire, with no confirming information whatsoever,

[46:33] and then it becomes an international incident. And we all know that- Before the election, by the way, this was June of 2000. So you have this big election going on, and it's basically saying that Donald Trump is not being vigorous enough and condemning the Russians and challenging them. So he's an ally of Putin, right? And becomes a big issue in the election. Joe Biden exploits the heck out of it, right? And it turns out to be a most recent revelation in the New York Times in May

[47:10] that it was based on information that they had low to moderate confidence. Exactly. Exactly. So this, this was a problem in our bilateral relations where no problem was necessary. You know, this, this, the Biden people, of course, used it for their own political purposes. Well, all that and shift to, I hardly ever mention him, but a congressman from Los, well, from Pasadena and the environs who really has made this his life's cause. You know,

[47:44] the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. It's like that old movie. You're exactly right. So tell us about that. From the CIA point of view, they've got this information and what? How do they leak it? How does it get to the New York Times? Well, these leaks rarely come from the CIA because everybody at the CIA is polygraphed and they're asked specifically about unauthorized contact with the media. So nobody wants to lose his career over that. But people at the State Department are not polygraphed. Most people at DOD are not polygraphed, and certainly nobody at the White House is polygraphed.

[48:18] And what happens is, you know, the CIA analysts write this stuff up. They send it over to the White House with the President's Daily Brief every morning, and then we don't know what happens to it once it gets to the White House. So it seems to me that somebody in that chain from CIA to the White House leaked it to the leaked it to the New York Times. There had to be somebody, maybe a career officer at the White House, who was anti-Trump and wanted to throw a wrench into relations with the Russians,

[48:51] they leaked it to the New York Times. I will add that the New York Times National Security sources are excellent and they're deep and they're all across government. Yeah. But it was specifically, well, go ahead, tell me more, but it seemed to me it was connected with stopping a peace offering from Trump in Afghanistan. I think so. You know, that's a really

[49:22] important part here, which by the way, Biden has now said, okay, we are going to get out, finally America's longest war, a war that you participated in very actively. But can this be a total fabrication? Oh, sure it could. It could be a complete fabrication. Sure. And there's no way to know because the origin of the information is never made public. Right? Sources and methods. You can't talk about it. But they have said, just to be clear, the reason we're discussing

[49:54] this now is I forget the date March 6 or whatever the New York Times had story in which they quote and they offer a memo or an email that came from a CIA source admitting that they had low to moderate confidence in the story and also the chief military officer of the whole region said that he had no confidence in it or very low confidence in it and investigated it. So this is, you know, I don't want to let this one sit. I think this is really

[50:30] a case study that has to be done. How does this happen? Aside from everything else, we happen to be talking about a Russian government that is in possession of almost half of the nuclear armaments in the world, you know, and has delivery systems and so forth. This is not the fantasy about Iraq's or Iran's weapons of mass destruction, this is the real deal. And you're playing with fire. You're accusing these people of the most heinous crime, by the way, crimes that governments, including the old Soviet

[51:04] Union and maybe Putin's Russia and the United States and others have committed. They have gotten people killed, who they thought had to be killed. But nonetheless, it's a very serious charge to make in a battle zone that they are offering bounties to kill Americans. Yeah, you wouldn't want any Americans that would have been killed. Yeah, your attention wouldn't it? It sure would. But you know, I think that once it was leaked, the CIA felt compelled to come out and say that they had

[51:37] little to no confidence in the information. That was their of pointing the finger at the White House and saying that the leak came from the White House. They're compelled by, you know, presidential order to report literally all information, whether it's reliable or not, as part of that threat matrix. And so this was the CIA saying, hey, don't look at us, we're only following orders. That's very interesting. So you're saying by my law, the CIA has to turn over even raw, unproven

[52:12] suspicions, right? Absolutely. Yes. And so then it's in the days after 9 11. So then it's up. What were rulings? Where those do you have? Well, no, it was it was a presidential order. Uh huh. Yeah. And so that means then that political operatives in the White House can sort through this. Oh, yes. or disaffected people. That's a danger, yes. And then they just leak it to the New York Times, and the New York Times doesn't feel any responsibility evidently to challenge that.

[52:44] With this latest report of low to moderate confidence in it, the New York Times didn't have a real me a couple or a real criticism evaluation. They just said, well, you know, it's how it works. So how it works, let's conclude this, because that's really a fascinating discussion, somebody who was on the inside like yourself. And, you know, one of the arguments against imperial adventures is that you really can't have a function. This was the argument of the founders. You can't really have a functioning representative government if you're in these foreign

[53:16] adventures, because lying becomes second nature. And really, looking back at your career, looking looking back at where we are, how can the American public effectively engage in a debate that alone control over these foreign policy adventures, whether it's selling all these arms to Israel, or whether it's overthrowing governments elsewhere, or whatever? Seriously, what could an adult

[53:47] do to be an act as an adult as a voter? To tell you the truth, there's very little that an individual could do, but collectively I think that we have to demand that our elected officials represent our beliefs and exert their own oversight over organizations like the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department.

[54:17] We have to ride these elected individuals so that they understand exactly how we feel about the issues of today. That's a great slogan to tell when you're invited to some elementary school or something high school and tell them, but honestly, I want to end a very specific case, and I've done podcasts about that as well. What we know about the CIA, your old agency, and its involvement in the torture program and so forth. We only know by accident that Dianne Feinstein as head of the T Senate Committee

[54:54] was willing to back her staff and particular staff member who heroically investigated the CIA and the CIA tried to destroy this person and seized their files and everything else and he almost ended up in the same position that you got in. Isn't that the reality? What What we really know about the torture program and the CIA and its effectiveness, its need for our security and everything else, we know by accident.

[55:24] And most of that report is still held withheld from us. Yes. Isn't that the reality? More than 90% is withheld, yes. So we don't know. In a free society built on the idea of suspicion of your own government, separation powers, individual freedom. What our government did in the torture program under your old agency, which by the way the torture started and you point out in your own writing, the useful

[55:55] information was obtained by former FBI agents before torture was used. The torture program never had the efficiency that the people people claim for it but nonetheless this revelation of what the CIA did in this torture program we know even that report then thanks to Diane Feinstein sticking by her staff we got what 10 percent of it and we really don't know that's right

[56:28] that's right and that's it depressing as it is for this edition of sheer intelligence I want to thank John Kiriako for being such a brave and useful citizen. Christopher Ho at KCRW posts these shows at this station that gets the word out. I want to thank them. Natasha Hakimi does the introduction. Lucy Berbio does the transcription. Joshua Shear is the executive producer of Shear Intelligence and a special shout out

[56:59] to the JWK Foundation, which provides some funding for this show in the memory of Gene Stein, a terrific journalist and a sharp critic of the excesses and other failures of American armed policy. See you next week with another edition of Sheer Intelligence.
