Title: Ask Ex-CIA Agent and Whistleblower John Kiriakou Anything
Show: Seymizzle Podcast
Date: 2025-10-16
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/67e8620c/podcast/play/109738431/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-9-16%2F1a173e13-76bf-e2cd-7faa-c93b9e9fd1df.mp3
Duration: 124:00

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[03:46] Hi everyone. We'll be getting started here in a little bit. We've got some coordination we have to do and I really appreciate everyone's patience. We just brought in John as you can see and I think Cherie you'll probably be leading the discussion, right? Hi everyone. Yes, we will be. So we'll be on shortly just trying to get a few people coordinated. Hang 10. Hi everyone. Welcome to the space. Thank you for coming on. So today is going

[04:19] to be an interesting day. We have John Kiriakou who was a CIA agent who was a whistleblower and he's the one that exposed the fact that the CIA was using advanced torture techniques including waterboarding which is a technique where they make someone believe that they're about to drown and they do this repeatedly and there is a small risk of death as a result of that but

[04:52] we'll get into that later. He also has written many, many books. He served time because of exposure of this torture technique and we're honored to have him here. Thank you so much John for coming to this space. Oh the pleasure is on mine. Thanks very much for having me. I hope I did you some justice with that introduction. Perhaps you could do one better. No, I appreciated very much. I was with the CIA for 15 years. The first half of my career was

[05:25] as an analyst almost exclusively on Iraq. The second half was in counterterrorism operations. I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan after the 9-11 attacks and then a little later on after I left the CIA I was the senior investigator at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee here in Washington. He was the whistle on the CIA's torture program as you said and went to prison for for two years. And here we today we're going to discuss a lot

[05:57] any pretty much anything you want to ask for the next hour or two. Not just about I mean they could probably ask you about political things. Is there anything any kind of scope you would like to keep the questions out or no no I'm happy to talk about anything people want to raise. Okay well it's going to be first in first serve for the moment. Of course people with bigger accounts which are you know familiar to spaces will be brought up so if you you know if

[06:32] I guess my co-host as well might want to DM some of the folks who are requesting see what they want to say but let's show we begin with the hands then unless there's something else that Sean and Cherie that you wanted to add. I just wanted to cover something very quickly so that folks are familiar with who I am. I don't want to assume too much. My name is Sean O'Brien. I founded something called Yale Privacy Lab at Yale University. I've been helping folks be more private more secure and potentially even anonymous in some cases and have been working with John

[07:07] for quite a while now so we're working together on some cool stuff. If you want to check that stuff out we're at ivcyber.com but most importantly you can check out John's travels. We've done some pretty cool stuff. He's a well-rounded individual. We want to ask him the big questions about the CIA but he really means it when he says he'll answer any questions so feel free to have at it. What about you Cherie? Anything you want to add? Miss Dior. Cherie is Cherie. Be there.

[07:46] She's probably doing stuff in the background. Okay so that's okay then. Let us go to hands. I'm going to start with Heidi. Heidi used to work for the U.S. and the Syrian embassy in Washington DC before the fall of Syria recently so we'll go to Heidi first then. Hello John. Yeah I'm a little bit familiar with some of your works. Your book The Relectant Spy Chasing Down in Ka'idah. I wish you would have chased down Ahmed Sharaz Jolani would have saved us

[08:20] a whole lot of headaches in Syria. That would have been nice but one of your quotes yeah like really really and you see what's going on now is the last Mohican standing with a backbone of the axis of resistance but one of your quotes is I don't think there should be a CIA because it supports for evil and and I want to tell you and I want to commend you on your Arabic. Where did you learn your Arabic? You speak Arabic very well by the way. Thank you very much. Thank you. Actually the CIA taught me Arabic. Yeah I did so. I got a degree I got a bachelor's degree

[08:58] in college in Middle Eastern Studies but I actually took the easy way out. I already spoke Greek at home and Greek was one of the approved languages for a Middle Eastern Studies degree and so I just chickened out and and improved my Greek. But then when I went to the CIA after grad school I worked for three years and then I applied for a position with the State Department in Bahrain for two years as an economic officer and they asked me if I wanted to take an extra year

[09:29] and and go to Arabic training. I said absolutely yes. So I went to the CIA's language school and and it was hard. I remember telling my instructors at the end of it I feel like you guys owe me a master's degree because I never worked this hard in grad school. Yeah but it was 11 and a half months nine hours a day Arabic Arabic Arabic and nothing but Arabic and I ended up doing really well. Went to Bahrain. I even acted as the the ambassador's translator there and you know one of the highlights of my my tour in Bahrain it was just a silly little thing

[10:04] an ego booster. The only cabinet member who didn't speak flawless fluent English was the minister of of al-Qaaf and Islamic affairs and and so I went with ambassador David Ransom to be his translator when he first made a courtesy call on this minister and on the way out the minister complimented my Arabic and that really I still think about it that was 30 years ago and it was just yeah I heard you speak Arabic and I'm like yeah you must have went to the CIA school because

[10:36] when I left Washington DC it was around it was around 2010 I remember in George Washington University it was a prerequisite to take Arabic classes like you yeah yeah it was so real quick there's just a couple of things I just wanted to say and then I'll give it to someone else I don't want to hog up the mic too much but since you've learned Arabic I'm wondering also if you also read the Quran and in the state that we're in of course it's like an upside down world about spy agencies and we've all heard that all three letter eight all the three letter agencies

[11:06] lead to Masad in the Quran there's Surah Hujarat which is the private rooms or the chambers and of 4912 oh you who have believed avoid much suspicions indeed some suspicion is sin and to not spy or back by one another so spying is a big no no in Islam even though now Iran has has caught over 700 individuals uh uh working for Masad in Iran during the Israeli conflict so I just kind of wanted to throw that out there because of your Arabic speaking and

[11:38] of course I'm sure that you've had to have read the Quran in order to do your operations yeah what you did overseas so yeah spying is a big no no so just real two quick questions and because I know people want to ask you you were mentored by gusts of Arcanos the mentor Tarzan Wilson's war right? Avrakatis yep right gust Avrakatis that's right he was your mentor and you guys were talking about how you killed many russians and I was just wondering within that what was the betrayal that we did towards Putin and what is it that gust caught you that you still

[12:12] carry until today that's one and then the next one would be about 911 and how did you receive the warning those two questions and that's it right right uh well let me start by by saying that yes I did uh study the Quran when I was in college I was at George Washington University from from 1982 to 86 for for undergrad and then 86 to 88 for grad and this was right after the Iranian revolution in 70 79 and so there were a lot of Iranians um at school and the school was able

[12:48] to hire Sayed Hossein Nasr who was the Shah's last chief of staff but was an eminent um scholar of Shia Islam so I studied under him I think he's now he's still alive he's now at uh I believe it's Temple University in Philadelphia um so yeah I I did study the Quran um gust Avrakatis gust kind of adopted me for a couple of reasons one were both Greek Orthodox two were both from western Pennsylvania I grew up less than 20 miles from where where gust grew up he was in

[13:23] ala quipa Pennsylvania and I was in Newcastle Pennsylvania and we just kind of hit it off we agreed on almost nothing politically he was the Russian killer I mean that was his reputation it was his idea to send stinger missiles to the Afghan Mujahideen uh during the war against the Soviets and um you know the the big difference between gust in real life and and gust being played by Philip C. Moore Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's war is that gust was the real gust was

[13:57] far more violent far more willing to fight right there in the in the office and had a far more foul mouth than the movie would have yeah he pushed against the wall right oh yeah he shoved against the wall I said old man you better get your hands off me or you're gonna regret it and then we went to lunch like nothing ever happened that was just how he was um I learned a lot from gust and I tell you I think the lesson that was most important

[14:33] was a personal one I was going through a divorce in 2000 and I was taking it really hard and gust had the same situation where his wife stepped out on him when he was stationed in Athens and he was going through a divorce and so he he bucked me up I will say too that operationally one of the one of the best operations I ever did and I can't get into details but it was an

[15:05] approach to it to a tier one country uh a tier one being like one of the one of the greatest enemies that the United States has gust gave me this idea to just kind of walk right up to the guy's house and it ended up being one of the best recruitments I ever made in my life I would have never thought of it on my own but gust did it in the 70s and worked it worked and so he said hey you know there's something you might want to try and he laid it out

[15:37] made me a star I really missed the guy that's great and what was the betrayal the US betrayal towards Putin you know we promised we promised Putin three separate times and I don't mean just we the royal we I mean sitting presidents of the United States promised Putin three separate times that NATO would not extend to Russia's borders we set it straight out three separate

[16:08] times and what happened we extended right to right to Russia's borders and so there we were again promising uh promising Putin that Ukraine would never be a member of NATO and then sure enough we start talking about Ukraine being a member of NATO and finally Putin had had enough and launched the the invasion listen if we're going to be supporters of peace or if we're going to be

[16:38] peace activists we have to oppose all wars right so I'm not saying that I endorse I support the Russian invasion of Ukraine it's been a terrible conflict but I understand why the Russians launched it and one last question I promise I'm really glad I was the first one to ask you the questions 911 you said was the greatest intelligence failure how how were we warned before it had happened

[17:11] we had a great deal well you know what let me answer that in two in two parts so leading up to the to the actual attacks we had a great deal of of intelligence indicating that something terrible was going to happen and it was going to be on a massive scale we were intercepting for example camp commanders talking to their students in kandahar and helman provinces in afghanistan they were crying on the phone and saying i'll see you in paradise they were they

[17:41] were using code words for a massive attack like the the honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey there's going to be a huge wedding there's going to be a great football match these were all codes for an attack that's sort of the easy answer the more difficult answer is we've only learned over the last couple of years that the CIA knew that the hijackers were in the united states and they never told the FBI because the CIA thought they had a shot at actually

[18:13] recruiting these guys and turning them against al-qaeda which was fantasy at the same time the FBI knew the names knew the identities of the hijackers and never told the CIA thinking well it's not the CIA's business until we can make an arrest from from the founding of the CIA in 1947 until 2009 the FBI and CIA computer systems weren't even compatible with

[18:46] one another so you couldn't send a message from one agency to the other you couldn't share intelligence from one agency to the other they just weren't set up that way and so it was only recently in the last 16 years that we finally got past this this institutional hatred that the FBI and the CIA had for one another thank you so much could everybody in the space just share the space I'm going to put I'm going to put a tweet up in the nest but we can retweet

[19:23] that tweet and we can also just share the space and so we can get more numbers in here we currently have 427 listeners shall we show and shall we go to the next hands yeah I think so really quickly though I just want to say John is too kind and not a very good self promoter so that's what my role at the moment is here we do need to we do need to share the space certainly and make sure we get that out there we also just put a big write-up in this newsletter bits on tape

[19:57] b-i-t-s-o-n-t-a-p-e dot com John and I'll be rolling that into like a cybersecurity podcast it's not quite there yet but there's a beautiful write-up on our travels in Salamanca Spain which was a lot of fun and if you guys can check that out that would be great just on that note can you tell us if I might jump in okay hold on sure you wanted to hear about Spain sure well John why don't you give us a little bit of its the context there for

[20:32] really how Salamanca is because you've been there twice now I think John I may have he may have been accidentally muted is yep there there I am the University of Salamanca is one of the most special educational institutions in the world it's actually older than Spain if you can imagine the university was founded in in 1207 and and has been continuously operating ever since

[21:03] it's really a magnificent university so I've got a couple of ties to the University of Salamanca I'm a professor there in the graduate program of intelligence studies where I teach in intelligence an introduction to intelligence studies course as well as a course on the history of terrorism but at the same time the the dean of that program and I are good friends we decided to try our hand at establishing a consulting firm we we brought in people like Sean who's a

[21:37] professor at Yale University Law School we have professor a professor from Chile one from here in the United States and a former assistant secretary of state who just joined the firm today and what we try to do is to provide cost effective political risk analysis to companies to firms banks mutual funds everybody that needs a deep view of what's happening either around the world or very specifically about a certain area and it's going well so far we've only

[22:13] established this in the past year and we just completed our first contract we're moving quickly into a second and we're expanding we have offices both in Salamanca and here in Washington DC so far so good well thank you guys shall we oh you know what I didn't even say I'm sorry I didn't even say what the name of it is it's called a geo risk Sean what are we calling it we just so it's geo risk solutions they're working with us at Ivy cyber just go to the newsletter and

[22:43] you'll read all about it but geo risk solutions yeah yeah yeah and we've been doing some pretty cool stuff where we traveled with a secure laptop slash tablet that's really awesome full disc encrypted open source software auditable etc etc for the techies that kind of stuff I'm happy to answer I don't want to take too much time on it but please check it out and I just want to see I see official D to the Dre is in the listeners will bring you up as soon as we're going to get one question and then we'll have a space for you to come up official please stay with

[23:18] us don't go away David if you're there I see you guys down there thank you for coming in thank you for your support so shall we go to the hands Sean yeah let's go to hands okay so shall we go to truth sure thank you thanks for all in this space and yeah definitely retweeted I just did so John I was reading a little bit about your work and I guess it did definitely involve rendition as

[23:48] well and you're probably familiar very familiar with Alvin Cron guarder was the executive director of the CIA while you were there and he's also a long time sure yeah exactly he's there for 30 plus years while he was at Alex Brown that's my question is this right between the CIA and Mossad if you're able to answer this who's really calling the shots the CIA is a missile because I feel the way Cron guard operated he was doing things more in favor of well another entity over say American interests so are you able to comment between the two who's really the shot caller

[24:23] or do they just work together and actually you know abide by or adhere to American interests for CIA and Israeli interests from Assad thank you well thank you for that question today the truth and please forgive my language in advance I think that historically the CIA has been Mossad's bitch that's really what it comes down to where over the course of my career and certainly subsequently from what we've seen either leaked to the media or released to the media we get nothing out of that liaison relationship and the Israelis get everything out of that liaison relationship my

[24:59] own personal experience with with the Israelis was very difficult I've said on podcast a number of times the very first time I ever engaged with the Israeli government I had been on the job for only about eight weeks and I was assigned to do a liaison briefing this was a briefing of the Mossad and Shin Bet representatives here in Washington now we we never met with the Israelis inside CIA headquarters they were not permitted to come into CIA headquarters they used to be

[25:31] but every time they would come they would bring gifts with listening devices embedded inside and finally we're like guys what are you doing you know we x-ray these things every time you bring something and they always have listening devices embedded in them and batteries so you're not allowed in the CIA headquarters anymore so we had to rent a space outside you know in in Virginia and that's where we would meet with these guys so anyway I'm on the job eight weeks and it's eight or ten of us analysts we're giving this comprehensive briefing on Iraq

[26:09] and so because I was the junior most analyst I went last and all my colleagues went you know before me finally it comes my turn to give a briefing and because I was an overt employee at the time meaning I was not undercover I used my real name which was the way we did it so I said my name is John Kiriakou and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein's state of mind and the Mossad representative looked at me over the top of his glasses and said spell your name

[26:43] so I spelled my name and then he says to me in front of all my colleagues you are Jewish and I looked at him I was furious that he would even say something like that and I said I am not recruitable don't even think about it I was so angry but I went on with the uh with the briefing and I got back to the office my boss said how did it go and I said you believe these bastards and I told him what had happened and he laughed he said they do that to

[27:14] all of us in the meantime just a couple of years later when I went to Bahrain with the State Department one of my close colleagues and his wife went to Jerusalem in the same program where you do this two-year rotation to the State Department in order for a CIA officer to be promoted into the senior intelligence service you have to have done a rotation in another directorate and you have to have done a rotation in a policy position so this met our the criteria

[27:44] for our policy rotations so we both go to the State Department now they're both declared to the Israelis and so no secrets here you you go and say these are my people the station chief says to the Israelis these are my people you know them the one is going to be doing State Department work the other one's going to learn Arabic at the university no secrets but they had three awful experiences there where they went to a party at the ambassador's residence

[28:15] shortly after they arrived and when they got home somebody had rearranged all their living room furniture and so you're like okay all right we get it you can break into our house anytime you want we know you're watching us okay they're just being dicks about it so they go to the ambassador's Christmas party several months later and when they get home people had taken shits in all of their toilets in their house three different toilets

[28:51] just somebody people multiple people had taken dumps in all their toilets so again you feel violated this is totally unnecessary this kind of harassment and then right before they left the ambassador had a going away party for them and so when they got home from the going away party their dog was whimpering under the dining room table the Israelis had broken into the house they cut the dog's tail off

[29:21] and then they wrapped it in gauze and medical tape so the these are supposed to be our friends and this harassment is just something that happens absolutely constantly okay that's one side to make matters worse all these years after 9 11 more and more information is coming to light that the Israelis had advanced notice of the attacks you know we didn't have the CIA didn't have any

[29:52] any sources inside al Qaeda we were trying to recruit sources inside al Qaeda but we didn't have any but it appears that the Israelis knew these attacks were coming and they never said anything to us why because 9 11 was the best thing that ever happened to Israel the US launched a war on on Afghanistan and on Iraq and by extension on Libya and Syria and Somalia and killed

[30:23] what a million two million Muslims if you're an Israeli politician or senior political figure then they're doing they're doing your job for you so I never understood what we got out of that that relationship but the Israelis certainly get a lot out of us thank you so much sorry go ahead oh I mean I can listen to your stories I'm subtle damn craly reading reading Gideon Spice

[30:54] for the second it's just such it's one of the best books I've ever written on the level of dirt duplicity corruption that Mossad engaging to use the CIA and other agencies as well for their own benefit and how much tech they've stolen from America I mean just the likes of Rafi Aiden and Ari Ben Minash Victor Strausky those are just the guys we know about there's so many others we don't know about that's right that's right how many how many hundreds are there right now as we're speaking how many hundreds are there embedded in American

[31:25] defense contractors or in university labs all around America we don't have any idea but it's got to be hundreds so so we're gonna go around to the hands although I can't guys you might want to put your hands up again I think we might be glitching getting more we're getting more sad attacked so do show your hands again right now I saw destiny had her hands up but right now I only see show time so go ahead show time and if you ask you ask your question you might be dropped so we

[31:57] can get more people in here to ask other questions go ahead show time yeah I appreciate I'll be quick thank you guys for holding wonderful space thank you John according to the book thank you you're welcome according to the book the the book of honor by Ted Gu the secret lives and deaths of ci operatives the right the first there's a there's a monument in the cia office our four fallen cia agents and the first one is anonymous correct and apparently this man was

[32:27] stationed in China in in Tibet and in Xinjiang died in Tibet and also I've read that the largest clearing or liquidation of cia assets took place in China I don't if that's correct but it seems like China has a very enduring special place in the cia I just wonder if you could talk about talk about that cia in China thank you you know what while we're talking about it I am going to find a couple of paragraphs that I wrote about the case that you're talking about you're

[33:03] absolutely right first of all but his his name was declassified relatively recently like in the last two years and uh if you hold on one second I'm going to find it here um the the first here it is the first cia officer to die in the line of duty was posted in China and it was kind of an odd thing the the nationalist Chinese government fell rather quickly let me find it here I wrote myself

[33:36] and outlined because I wanted to do a podcast about this uh here it is his name was Hugh Francis Redmond he was a member of the special activities division sady which which still exists today he had been a member of the os s that's the cia's predecessor organization the office of strategic services and he was sent to Shanghai in 1946 under deep cover as a as an get this as an ice cream

[34:06] machine salesman his job was to drive around Shanghai pretending to sell ice cream so he could spy on Chinese communists and transmit the information back to cia headquarters but when the communists took control of china 1951 he was ordered to evacuate in the meantime while he was in Shanghai he married a russian woman and so he and his wife were ordered to get on a ship

[34:40] for san francisco but before they could get on to the ship the communists caught him and they arrested him his wife and a bunch of white russians uh so not the red russians the the communists but the white ones that were the mensheviks i guess they were called so the cia believed that it was his wife that ratted him out because the wife was almost immediately released and redmond wasn't released so once he was arrested they took him and and the mensheviks to this dungeon

[35:16] and they tortured all of them he was kept in a tiny cell no toilet he was given rice and chicken blood every single day for as a meal solitary torture starvation terrible conditions and um and every day they would beat him and interrogate him they knocked out literally every one of his teeth and in in the time that he was arrested he lost like 60 pounds so

[35:46] he was in um he was in this chinese prison for four years and four years later the mensheviks were released uh he was not released and it turned out that the mensheviks had confessed and he was the only one that refused to confess during interrogation in 1970 19 years after his capture uh the chinese sent us a diplomatic note saying that he was dead and they said

[36:22] that he had committed suicide uh we asked for the body back the chinese refused and they cremated him and so uh his family i actually talked to his nephew bill uh macanen macanely and the nephew said that the family never believed that he had committed suicide and indeed there's no proof whatsoever that he had committed suicide um they never even told us that he died until he he was already dead and cremated for three months and so until um just a

[36:56] few years ago the cia denied that he was ever a cia employee uh they they maintained his cover that he was an ice cream machine salesman and then finally they decided to uh to have a ceremony at the cia's wall of honor which is in the uh the lobby of the old headquarters building and they admitted that he was the first cia employee to uh to die in the line of duty

[37:28] good question okay thank you so much okay so we're going to go to kamal he's been here first with us uh so we're going to try to go first come first serve and then if you do get uh dropped off you're asking your question please stay listener we might bring you up again if we can okay go ahead kamal hey john um been following you for a while uh watched a lot of your interviews um i'm going to pivot um and yeah you're welcome i'm actually from pakistan so um the i've heard

[38:01] all of your stories from fast laba than everybody else right but my question is kind of different in terms of pivoting it's more focused on the current conflicts uh more so between uh india and pakistan and uh what happened afterwards with israel and iran who do you think based on your perspective that who do you think got out better in all of these uh in these two conflicts that we've encountered in this year so far oh that's a that's a good question you know i listen i'm i'm

[38:36] gonna admit my my own personal bias right off the bat i loved every second that i lived in pakistan i loved it i loved the people i love the food i love the history and the culture i just loved it i even dreamt about it after i had returned to the united states so i'm biased and i'm also biased in favor of pakistan on the cashmere issue india is far larger far well fear and in my own personal view more belligerent excuse me more belligerent than pakistan is

[39:10] um the fact that they went right to the brink again just like they did back in 2002 is a testament to the fact that the pakistanis don't back down despite the deck being stacked against them so i would say that you know the indians accomplished nothing in this last go-around and the pakistanis lost nothing so i would say and it's just kind of a little you know an economy of scale so to speak i would say the pakistanis came out slightly ahead

[39:45] they didn't lose anything that's for sure and and the indians you know proved again that try as they might they just can't cow the uh the pakistanis on iran and israel i think this is probably going to be a largely unpopular position but i think the iranian came out ahead the iranians came out ahead for for several reasons uh number one was they proved that the iron dome isn't so infallible as the israelis wanted everybody to

[40:18] believe right even when they were sending these slow motion drones where you know they sent them just to save face and and the the iranians say okay we're sending a hundred drones and they're going to be there in six hours so you better watch out and then the israelis you know shoot them down seven of those drones got through they got through despite the fact that the israelis were told in advance hours in advance that they were coming so i think the

[40:51] iranians showed that the iron dome isn't so great another thing that the iranians showed was that they can go missile to missile toe to toe with the israelis and where the israelis where the israelis historically have not been shy about you know blowing up an entire city block of apartment buildings to get one one person that they're targeting the iranians

[41:25] were far more selective in their targets specifically hitting defense and economic sites so that was actually impressive to me that's why the that's why there was such a huge difference in the number of killed and wounded on each side it's not that the iranians didn't launch as many rockets it's that the iranians specifically targeted defense and economic sites and and the the israelis target residences that's how they took out all those generals

[41:59] and and nuclear scientists if if there's a general they want to target and he's living in an apartment building they blow up the whole building or they blow up the whole block if they think that they can get him and in the meantime they kill 300 people that's that's an israeli policy um i also believe that the israelis were essentially out of missiles i think that's why we had such a such an easy ceasefire i don't think it's that the israelis accomplished

[42:29] what they wanted to accomplish i think they just ran out of missiles and so to save face they allowed the americans to negotiate this uh this ceasefire absolutely and thank you for answering that john uh just as a reminder um we those of us in pakistan will know about you we actually look forward to maybe encountering you one of these days in islam about the whole of karachi so if you're ever around please on us or karahi's on us if you want to come that's pretty much it

[43:01] thank you for the opportunity thank you guys hey let's make it happen sorry show and go ahead sorry sorry no please i'm gonna say let's make it happen one of the reasons we're making sure all of you get to have this wonderful hour with uh john is because he's going to be doing a lot more of this sort of thing we're going to be doing seminars we're going to be doing workshops we're going to try to work in some of the technical stuff that i've been working on with him you know we do digital self-defense workshops john has written two books on surveillance and

[43:34] anti-surveillance that we're going to be digging through all of that can happen so please reach out if you have ideas for speaker engagements and also if you can please go to the website ivcyber.com ivycyber.com we are now booking exclusive seminars where you can sit in a room like this but with way less people so you get much more access to john and uh if those are successful which we think they will be see if you're filling up fast we'll be able to keep doing this so thank you very much yeah listen guys if you don't get a chance to ask john your questions

[44:11] today we will be holding a um like a stream on my youtube channel tomorrow and you can sign up for one of these workshops where you can ask and have interaction with john kiriyaku yourself i am about to post the information into the nest shortly um have we lost john it seems like he's dropped maybe am i i'm not seeing him but destiny is up next that does seem to be the case yes it's just a small technical difficulty um but we have destiny up next um then richard

[44:48] tyler than jay and official welcome welcome uh so we're just waiting on i see you david in this in the in the speakers we see all of the requests we're going to try to get to all of your questions and we will be bringing back john kiriyaku but before before that i will um write in the comments how you can uh ask uh have one-on-one or is it is it one-on-one shown correct me if i'm wrong

[45:19] there's small groups we can't split them up that much but um they're going to be somewhere around 20 to 30 people um and it's going to be john basically uh describing some of the work he's done around surveillance and anti-surveillance we're calling it the c i p p o v just like this um twitter space the idea is he's been on both sides of it right so um he knows the techniques that are used on the inside um and then he's also been hunted jailed and harassed frankly um by the three-letter agencies um so he's back on now isn't he so we're going to make sure he oh yeah i see

[45:55] him yes let's make sure he's in the requests we're gonna have to drop uh sorry if you know so someone was taking up his spot okay so we're gonna go to destiny next and then richard and i see your hands guys we will get to you i promise you okay just stay with us share the space yeah there we are can you hear me we can hear you loud and clear you're gonna great

[46:26] shall we go to destiny yeah thank you theory and girl and john big fan um i have a pretty simple question for you since you spent a lot of time in the c i a during the early years of in cutel um could you explain a little further about uh in cutels depth yeah in cutel thanks for bringing this up this is something that's just you know how this is legal i have no idea so in the

[46:57] immediate aftermath of 9 11 the c i a set up a uh what what amounts to a a venture capital fund called in cutel and they thought they were being so cutesy with the name it's it's intel with you know for intelligence with the letter q in the middle of it as an homage to to q from the james bond movies it's so stupid but anyway what they did is they set up this venture capital fund uh to invest in what they believed was was cutting edge uh technology so they they invested

[47:37] very very early on for example in palantir helping to make palantir this multi billion dollar you know fortune 1000 concern with the idea being that palantir and companies like it that the c i a invests in are going to provide technology that nobody else in the world has access to now i have no idea if that actually worked out but we're not talking small money anymore

[48:10] where the c i a put something like a million and a half in palantir in the early days now they're putting tens of millions of dollars and they're investing it all over the the military industrial complex in in tech startups the c i a has very very close relationships with silicon valley not just the big boys like like x and meta and you know everybody else but with these little startups that you and i have never heard of because they're they're in on the ground floor and they have plenty of money to back it up

[48:48] okay so thank you thank you john i wanted to say thank you real quick and i appreciate that thank you stay with us destiny um we're going to get to the rest of the hand and then we're going to swap we see a lot of requests we will you guys will get to us ask your questions i believe richard was next yeah thanks syrian girl and john i appreciate you touching on palantir and and just between you and me nobody else is listening totally uh who really created uh palantir's algorithms was it alice carbon peter teal or was it gillman louis and uh

[49:21] chris darby just between you and me that's that's a good question i i don't know the answer i i can't i can't even venture it yes but uh but they're gonna they're gonna fight about it from now till the end of time i don't see how it benefits the american people but i originally i originally came across you and uh you were one of the um you know so-called whistle blowers that immediately resonated with me because of the interview that i saw that you had done

[49:52] where somebody had asked you about the russians coming to you and you had said well if i do this podcast and you're gonna pay me do i have the ability to uh speak negatively in any way i want about the russian government so long as it's true and they said yes sure and you said can i get that in writing so uh i think that's a huge missed opportunity for a lot of these podcasters especially coming from the intelligence community that that the american people wants

[50:23] that so badly yearns for that so thank you for for what you're doing thank you thank you oh i feel very strongly about that i'm glad you brought that up you know as bad as things can get i'm sorry i apologize for interrupting you but as bad as things can get between the united states and russia or the united states in any country there are always always areas that remain in which we can cooperate with one another counter terrorism counter narcotics counter

[50:53] proliferation right we've seen what the chetchins have done to to the russians over the years if we had intelligence on some chetchen operation we should be passing it to the russians even if we're in a state of near conflict even if we don't have a russian ambassador in the united states because we refuse to a credit one there are still ways that we can cooperate and we should be cooperating and i think that attitude of cooperation i just want to break in real

[51:23] quickly here because it's so important to underscore this you know everybody talks cyber security but they're talking about cyber war right con and i the folks we work with we're very very serious about making sure that we're we have that internationalization we're really thinking about this in a holistic way we don't want to be you know fighting wars for anybody and we want folks all over the map to be talking that's why we're kind of an odd motley crew here right a mix of folks from all kinds of different institutions and uh john because his message has

[51:56] been so strong on this issue has been blacklisted frankly often right so you know i talk to people all the time and say hey you know we got john kirak who he knows all this stuff you should really talk to him he's amazing he's a great speaker and the first thing they do is the whole rush of rush of rush of thing right so um i appreciate you bringing that up it's good to front it and just let people know that john does not i can't tell him what to say the russians can't tell him what to say he's going to say what he actually means so in the nest you guys are

[52:26] going to see um the advertising for the seminar that you guys can if you're in listeners and you still have questions and you're you know you don't get a chance to ask them today you'll have more of a chance to do so if you sign up to this seminar you'll have a more a close knit not one on one but much smaller group uh access to john to ask your questions uh so please check it out and please like follow the ivy cyber i think that is a project that shone and john are working on and you're going to want to uh keep tabs on that um so we have we'll go to the hands listen tyler i

[53:03] don't see can i ask my question oh you haven't asked your question yet no i was just thank you yes sir rush okay yes you can thank you yeah i apologize um but my question centers around since you mentioned silicon valley and truth teller to ask that question about the cia's relationship with masada and and according to you being must massage bitch for by and large part the the toilet shit is just unnerving to me um and so i would imagine that david barnia is

[53:36] more likely the head of the cia at this point but my my question revolves around the nsa's aspect with the same relationship it has with unit 8200 and palantir because i'm i'm curious as to your thoughts about the soviet infiltration of silicon valley as it relates to our intelligence sharing and really the merging of our signals intelligence and them using ink you tell specifically using american tax dollars to fund startup companies

[54:07] of former unit 8200 officers like talon and palo alto networks and and and massage assets like irwin jakem so i'm curious as to your thoughts on that yeah again i i just don't know how this is legal for the cia to be doing something like this it first of all it's illegal to make a profit right and so you're either governmental or you're non-governmental and cia obviously is governmental they can't make a profit they can't make investments legally they they can't

[54:41] they can't uh help companies build i i get that they want to to control new technologies but i think it's one of these programs where where they're just doing it and congress looks the other way you know one of the things that i learned on capitol hill too when i was on the senate foreign relations committee is these committees are supposed to be what are called the oversight committees but the cia has what i don't know 20 30 000 35 000 employees i have no

[55:14] idea and you've got 25 people on capitol hill that are supposed to oversee all that and oversee every program it's just not possible and so the cia ends up doing whatever it wants to do one of my bosses told me early on in my career that it's always better to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission and so they just do whatever they want to do and if they get slapped down for it later then they just say oh we're so sorry and then that that's the end of

[55:50] it but yeah this this this palantir thing and i'm going to call it a palantir thing because that was the first the most obvious investment frankly we don't know about many of the other investments i think this is a very dangerous thing if if there's going to be u.s government investment then then make it official u.s government investment don't make it a secret program from the cia where there's no oversight and no accounting and no explanation to the american taxpayer what's happening with their money it's it's unethical certainly and i believe it's illegal

[56:25] i would say frankly also there's some double dipping there because they go through the university system also so um that's a lot of complexity around it and thank you so much so let's go to the show and who is next do you know no i don't have maybe the moderator thank you though i'm terrible at it it's all right i think we'll go to official next i see um like tyler you don't have your hand up anymore uh oh yeah he does tyler does sorry it's i can't seem to see it official

[57:01] tyler and then jay and then destiny and then me all right we'll go with that go ahead you see my hands young girl because i had it for a while i did yeah yeah yeah actually um karen had his hand up before me okay then we'll go to karim first and then official and then tyler and whatever Heidi said um go ahead oh karim all right thanks thanks hi john um i read your book recently actually

[57:31] just i think a couple a couple of weeks ago or a week ago thank you it's uh the cia insider's guide to iran's crisis oh yeah and it was part of my research because i was doing some research and i was using your book as a as a view from an insider and i wanted to ask you something very specific in your book you mentioned a sad chemical attack near Damascus in august 2013 what information

[58:06] do you have on that what's your opinion on that i would i would love the your your prospect because you you mentioned it but you don't dive into it so i was just curious you know thanks for that i i wrote that before the um the united nations whistleblowers came forward and said that they did not believe that that was a syrian government chemical attack that they believed it came from islamic state so thanks for allowing me to to correct it the conventional wisdom and this is

[58:37] you know just according to to media reporting was that uh that bashar al-asad had had launched this chemical attack on his own people it was to stem and uprising it was to put people in place like his father had done in hama so many so many years earlier and i think now that that was just untrue i think that they're at least according to these united nations whistleblowers there there was no evidence that this was a syrian government attack that it it most likely was

[59:08] a product of of the islamic state you know what i just wanted to add two things on that first of all the opc w actually um arrived on the day of the attack in Damascus right on the very day that they arrived somebody did this attack so they knew that they were like they were planning for the arrival and guess who invited the opc w the syrian government invited them why to investigate so that we're talking about that big attack in 2013 in Damascus but they were invited

[59:44] to investigate another smaller attack that happened against a government held area where the government themselves invited the opc w which is so naive at the time i thought it was also highly would know about this too but we'll still continue with the hands um please guys check out no before before we continue syrian girl i had a follow-up question because john also talks about gas used by Saddam with with the us green light and that's very interesting to me because it gives us a an

[1:00:16] important perspective that you gave i don't know if you changed it about no you run actually developing at at a later stage of that war capabilities to uh to use chemical attacks in retaliation because iraq was really doing a number on the Kurds like we were talking about aerial bombings with with gas and all that and nobody of course spoke about it especially the us but you say something very interesting to me you say that common a uh forbidden haram did

[1:00:48] he made a fat wine which he said no no disease uh go goes against our islamic uh teachings and he went against basically uh all his generals who were trying to uh to to push these these initiative and he also spoke in the same way about the development of of nuclear weapons so what i wanted to ask you do you believe that it's it's still today this this because common a still the same person you think he's still is still breaking the the possibility he's still in your

[1:01:23] opinion the main reason why iran hasn't developed a nuclear weapon yet that's yeah i think that is i think that is the case that great question i think that is the case that the the iranians have been consistent in at least since 2003 that they do not have and do not seek nuclear weapons um now we in the west run the danger of in a way forcing the iranians to

[1:01:54] develop nuclear weapons because we're constantly picking picking picking at them all the time how many times can the mosad as infiltrate iran and assassinate their scientists or assassinate their generals or work with the americans to bomb their sites how many times is this going to happen before ayatollah khamenei finally says okay listen i didn't want to do this but in order to protect the country i have to allow the the development of a weapon purely

[1:02:30] for defensive purposes you know something to offset israel's nuclear weapons i i can't help but to think that that's that's where we're headed that we're forcing the iranians into this but you know if you look at the cia national intelligence estimates and there have been at least three since 2003 they all conclude that the iranians do not have and are not seeking nuclear weapons thank you for that john hey guys we've got to make sure we keep it to like one question we really

[1:03:05] appreciate all the engagement here it's been great we're going to try to do more of these but we want to make sure we keep it to one question and um john likes to give a lot of context as you can tell um so you know let's just make sure we can we can you know 20 25 minutes at the most more here i think we can have john for so and we've got five or six speakers okay so i think we're up to official official tyler j and then destiny go ahead official thank you so it's a pleasure being here thank you john that's an honor to be

[1:03:40] speaking to you pleasure watching for yeah watching for probably over like well over a decade you know from rt you know the whistleblowers thank you it's really really good to actually speak to you so my question my two questions i'll keep it quick um they said only one you said only one so i'll pick one uh well do you is there a possibility do you think or could you like maybe uh not foresee but you know just you know kind of you know uh a bold prediction i should say uh iran and russia they haven't basically forced in israel and america and turkey you know and hcs and isis 2.0 essentially

[1:04:14] overstretching their hand you know and overstepping their boundaries and essentially forcing the hand of russia and iran to kind of come back in and i think syria could be the the reason why world war three actually begins you know what i i have to agree with you the israelis how the israelis in the turks did it the way they did it is still a mystery to me but they handled this syria thing absolutely brilliantly one day bashar alas that is the president seven days later he's fleeing for his life with a plain load of you know of wealth

[1:04:52] and then that's the end of it it was like the perfect storm for both the turks and the israelis and then the israelis let loose on hezbollah and then they fight the iranians all while fighting hamas and just slaughtering palestinian civilians it's it's just incredible to me how they did it and i'm not sure how they did it um i'm glad you said something about russia and iran russia and iran have traditionally had very close relations but the russians also

[1:05:24] have always been relatively close to the israelis close enough that that the israelis listen to russian concerns they have high level diplomatic representation at the ambassadorial level and there are a lot of russian jews that emigrated from russia to israel just since the the 1990s it's completely changed the complexion of of the israeli body politic but it seems to me that at least over the last couple of years the russians really aren't interested in getting

[1:05:56] involved in this fight they're interested in bringing iran under their nuclear umbrella which i think we all expected would happen they're interested in improving um trade relations as the iranians are with the chinese and the indians that's worked out very well for them and i think they were also helped by by a blunder that donald trump made it was a mistake to pull out of the jcpoa and it was a mistake not just for the obvious reasons that that you know there's

[1:06:27] no uh inspection regime then that we can rely on it was also a mistake because the united states has a law it's a secondary boycott law saying that if a country does business carries out trade with iran that country has to have sanctions imposed on it but when the jcpoa was approved all of our allies open trade relations with the iranians so we arbitrarily unilaterally withdraw and then

[1:07:00] we tell the british the french the germans the japanese you can't trade with iran anymore and they told us to go fly kite they're like no you just told us under obama that we could trade with the iranians just because you changed your mind because you changed your administration doesn't mean that we have to cut off relations with iran and so they all continue to trade well now we're left out in the cold what the iranians really really need from us if we had trade

[1:07:31] relations are airplane spare parts and spare parts for um for the oil industry and dredging equipment but if they can't get it they're going to buy it from the chinese and so i think that withdrawing from the jcpoa made us weaker and it made the russians stronger because the russians have always been there for the iranians thank you so much john please everybody share the space don't forget to share the space we want to get as many people as possible if you want to keep up

[1:08:03] with um john kiriaku's travels check out on the nest we have bits on tape which is a project that shone and john are working on so you might want to give that account a follow as well i b cyber security is another one they're holding seminars where you can ask their questions and tomorrow i'm going to hold a live stream with john on my youtube which we will share so how do you see you are the one who knew who was next go ahead and let us know okay tyler j and then destiny and then me and then ride so go ahead tyler great thank you first thanks

[1:08:41] so much for hosting this uh syrian girl and uh and the co-host i've uh been privileged to get to know john uh personally over the last i say five to six years i was aware of him before uh in what was done to him and i have to say if even a portion a large portion of the intelligence community had the principal integrity and uh good heart of john kiriaku this world would be a far more peaceful place thank you got it and and you know it it can't i wanted to bring up the fact of that

[1:09:14] you know uh one of the speakers mentioned john's not a great self-promoter but i wanted to jump in because um you know he he what he went through at the hands of the vile subversive criminal john brennan and others uh vindictively that you know essentially imprisoned him uh and did so much damage to him that it's unspeakable i mean it's it really is is an affront to justice what was done to john and uh john absolutely should and deserves and will if there is a god get a pardon

[1:09:49] from president trump for for this this heinous uh uh railroading that was done to him he lost his pension and uh john i wanted to ask you what what the audience can do and your fans many fans of which i'm one um can do to support your effort to get a pardon and to finally have your pension restored and see some level of justice and what was done to you uh thank you so much for that tyler you know i'm honored to call tyler a friend and i i really appreciate the comment i appreciate

[1:10:20] you being here and doing this you know i think even all these years after uh the obama administration i think the truth will come out about john brennan john brennan is not just a vile human being john brennan is an an enemy of the american people i i don't even know how else to say that i was trying to put a softer edge on it but i i don't even know how to do that when the truth comes out about the

[1:10:51] role that john brennan played in 9 11 the role john brennan played in trying to uh to crush the the trump uh 2016 candidacy before it even got started i i can only foresee criminal charges finally coming out against john brennan the man is a menace and he's dangerous uh to our government and i say that as as a person who used to be a third generation democrat i am absolutely

[1:11:23] positively not a democrat uh anymore but uh what can people do thank you for that first let me give you some background i have some incredible support people like you tyler people like like it's it's kind of funny tucker carlson and judge depolitano and alan dirshowitz and dr phil and a billionaire producer who's now the head of the make america great again foundation

[1:11:56] the former u.s attorney in utah the former u.s attorney in utah said this about my case he said the kiriyaku case was the template for the democratic party's policy of lawfare that ought to scare the shit out of everybody because what it means is if they don't like you they can ruin your life and there's nothing you can do to protect yourself nothing and that's got to stop so i'm i'm asking president trump to to pardon me these these important uh

[1:12:34] trump supporters are asking him to pardon me um if you feel so moved a quick email to the white house i think uh can do nothing but help so i appreciate that very much and the reason why i really need to pardon it it's actually several fold number one the justice department confiscated my federal pension i had 20 years of proud federal service and without a pension the pension that i paid into i'm gonna have to work until the day i die and i have five kids to think

[1:13:05] about number two is um because i'm a convicted national security felon uh there are restrictions on my travel i'm not permitted to go to the uk canada australia new zealand and i'm harassed every time i come back uh into the united states from overseas and frankly i want my gun back i lost my my second amendment rights for life unless i i get a pardon so those are the reasons why i

[1:13:38] i really need one thank you tyler okay thank you so much um there is katrina katarina i see you in the request we will bring you up hang in there i know you you came up and then you dropped we're going to go to david wutton um just because i know him um just because i know and uh then we'll stop him with you katarina just quickly before we do that um if you guys have burning questions please add it into the comments and we'll get um mariam and john to you know jump on and

[1:14:11] get it across the last room tomorrow if you don't have a time today so make sure you just keep posting in the comments guys thanks thank you surey yes i'm going to post you guys the live stream we're going to hold the youtube channel that we're going to hold it on so go ahead david wutton okay um i just had one question for uh your mic is no good david it is um sorry you're just breaking up a little more searched your maybe we'll go come back to you i'll bring you back

[1:14:50] up in a minute okay i promise you got all right just fix up your internet and your mic okay i think arayid was next yes hi everyone thanks for the space thanks john uh respect and admiration i think the first time i saw a video of you was more than 10 12 years ago and i remember thinking for myself shit man this guy looks like a true nice guy and and these people are evil

[1:15:24] and so it's good to see that uh you know you're you're doing well now my question is purely as a Lebanese um that lives in Lebanon is that all right so what basically what i understand is that the cia is an information gathering thing but also it is very clear to me over the years and reading and researching that there is an other element that's called the operation or black ops or or you know covert ops and stuff um my two part question is that first of all

[1:15:59] is there does there remain any congressional or any oversight over that agency in terms of its black ops one two um and i don't want to ask you a question to get you in trouble but i i cannot but see that there's a big element of the cia that has gone rogue and is there a way to get it back into into proper you know oversight checks and balances questions and and uh you

[1:16:31] know like congressional control over that that tool that is disrupting you know a lot of places in the world and one of them is is my country thank you oh what what a great question and very important question um you know historically the cia was supposed to be was supposed to be an organization whose mission was very simply to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets so that the policymaker could make the best informed policy um that changed during

[1:17:04] the vietnam war and then it sort of went back to that after the the church and pike committee hearings in 1975 but immediately after 9 11 the cia became a paramilitary organization and it has remained as a paramilitary organization ever since um i think that's a grave mistake because it shouldn't be up to the up to the cia to just jet around the world murder people and then go back home to get the name and location of the next person they're supposed to murder right if if you have people who

[1:17:41] pose a clear and present danger to the united states or to american citizens or installations then by god indict them indict them and bring them to justice but just coming up with a kill list every tuesday morning at the white house and then passing it to the cia's uh special activities division so they can fly around and just murder people that's not intelligence to me that's just murder so i i honestly don't see it reverting back to the way it was and that's why

[1:18:13] that's why i'm on record is saying i just don't think that there should be a cia there's already vast redundancy in the u.s government for example the state department has a bureau called the bureau of intelligence and research they do exactly the same analysis that the cia's director of intelligence does the pentagon has something called defense human services defense human intelligence services is what it stands for they do exactly what the cia's directorate of operations does the pentagon

[1:18:44] has um darpa for example and there's nsa and that's what the cia's directorate of science and technology does and then you bring in the other you know 17 intelligence services that we have all around government and you've got you know double and triple and quadruple layers of intelligence uh operations it's unnecessary and then you you look at capitol hill your your initial question about the oversight of of uh deep cover black ops there is almost no oversight if the

[1:19:20] cia determines that something is so sensitive that really nobody can know about it they give it only to what's called the gang of four or the gang of eight so the gang of four is the chairman and vice chairman of the senate's uh select committee on intelligence and the chairman and vice chairman of the house permanent select committee on intelligence that's four um the gang of eight is the top two republicans and democrats on each of those committees so you can be a member of the intelligence committee and still have no idea what the cia is doing because even though

[1:19:57] you are one of the overseers you are not cleared for the information that's not oversight that's gangsterism and so i i fear that you know here we are 24 almost 24 years after the 9 11 attacks and it's still a paramilitary organization i just fear it's never going to change back again okay thanks a lot one more quick thing i know you you didn't use you said one question but just quickly uh any idea or comment about something called the talpiott program that's an israeli

[1:20:31] program thank you thanks a lot for the opportunity oh i apologize that i i don't know about that program yeah everybody keeps asking me about talflot and i've heard about this eight years ago and i'm like i still don't know what talflot is something to do with the internet sorry right we'll bring you back up so we'll go to jay now hey good morning everyone um thanks for hosting the space syrian girl um you know thanks for everything you've done for the country john um you know really appreciate someone with that kind of courage and i agree with tyler

[1:21:03] yeah we need more people with that kind of courage you know in the intelligence agency specifically but um really quick before i ask my question um are you familiar with the story around the five-star trust and how it was used to uh launder money from jarg um jarg trafficking operations have you ever heard of that before i have heard of it and yeah and my own personal belief is there there's likely something to it okay perfect so my question about that is if you look at one of the key figures um in that scenario um the gentleman who actually set up the trust

[1:21:39] he was a a free mason and for those who have never heard of it um it was essentially money laundering operation to clean up um money they made off selling drugs to us soldiers in vietnam and uh my question is you know when it comes to influence and who's really benefiting from and you know controlling the cia um designers definitely get a lot of deserved attention nowadays however if you go back to kennedy's speech at the wall door hotel um he did actually

[1:22:11] mention secret societies as a a big problem in the country um you know as in your experience working in those intelligence agencies have you noticed um any influence from people who are involved um in any of those organizations and uh do you think that there are forces you know behind zionism that are kind of weaponizing it to achieve their goals because folks have been fighting over that land since the days of the templars the night's templars yeah seriously a lot of senior cia um officers are free masons uh they are you know eastern elite liberal

[1:22:55] graduates of i.b league schools uh they are oddly enough members of opus day we've gone through periods where like almost everybody at the top happens to be member of opus day and and goes to the same church in uh in great falls virginia which i thought was very very strange i don't think it's so official or formal maybe is a better word as it is um as it is uh

[1:23:28] how do i explain this it's almost accidental i think i never got the impression that that people that were members of these organizations were sort of plotting something together so much as they were there looking out for one for one another gust ever potis and i talked about this one time and i said to him because he was an old timer by the time he and i became friends he had been in the agency since the early 70s and um and i said gust how in the world did somebody like you

[1:24:02] who is greek not not a wasp who went to the university of pittsburgh not to yell who was not a member of fraternity uh fraternity let alone skull and bones how in the world did you ever make it to the top and he said through hard work and sharp elbows and that was it so it wasn't that like it had to be a mason to make it to the top for example what it was was the guys at the

[1:24:33] top happened to be masons because the masons all look out for one another that was my experience got you in whoops i'm so sorry i dropped him in the middle but i just was very curious actually um just sharing your help mic and a bit okay so you said that they would bring opus day in as recruits i find that really interesting because i've heard no no not not that they brought opus day in as recruits it's that these senior people happen to be opus day

[1:25:05] so what i heard also was that the Mormons in australia were desirable were desirable oh my god there are more Mormons than you can shake a stick at for for two very very clear reasons number one they speak every funky language that exists around the world because they all went on these missions right to recruit people into Mormonism or convert them i suppose so you don't have to train these guys to speak pashto or ordu or

[1:25:38] Punjabi or chinese or whatever they already speak those languages and second because Mormons usually live such clean lives they don't smoke they don't drink they don't swear they don't even eat chocolate for god's sake um they they just blow right through the polygraph exam and so both the cia and the fbi are just full of Mormons another thing too is Brigham young university which is a very heavily Mormon university in utah has one of the finest language

[1:26:09] schools in the world and so rather than take a year out of your productivity and and teach you some hard language you enter the cia already having the hard language because you learned it at Brigham young the place is full that's very interesting very interesting uh so sure you wanted to say something you were hotmiking but i interrupted you and i'm good as you asked so in the next guys if you're with us please if you we're you know gonna have john on on my youtube

[1:26:44] channel you will be able to ask him questions once again if you didn't get to ask your question today we'll bring you back um but please please if you can retweet the uh um twitter account in sorry the tweet in the nest first person to retweets gets brought up here to ask a question okay i'm gonna watch you guys first first retweet gets the uh this question actually you know what i can't tell if you're the first retweet so you're gonna have to ask a question

[1:27:16] and just write first or something and i'll i'll uh rate it by recent replies so and i'm gonna check if you retweet it as well i'm gonna check if you retweeted so we're gonna be really dodgy over here so thank you so much um so i think uh i think jaywalk or vash vash was next with destiny and then vash and then me and then jaywalk me and then jaywalk uh but we have ahmad in here yeah and then we're not bringing up any more speakers just like we're gonna bring up one by one

[1:27:49] yeah so that i don't get confused about the number of hands about the number of hands sorry guys we're only gonna do uh one question eight so if you already had a question ask please put your hands down thanks okay so uh i think katerina hi everyone what an honor to be speaking to um john and syrian girl um been following your work for years um john i'm a fellow greek uh very different background though because i was living in greece and so my question is regarding greece in in the

[1:28:23] region um you've probably noticed since you were an ex uh cia agent stationed in greece in a very very important year it's decades um throughout decades i believe because you were on and off um i was wondering if you've noticed the uh very close relationship greece has developed with israel um until until 1990 you probably know that um there was no greece was not recognized in israel and we had very close ties with assyria um uh with bashar al-asad's uh bashar al-asad's dad um

[1:29:01] we we had incredibly good relation with the arab world we were able to play we we were playing an incredible role in the region um libya the entire arab world um the the whole you know gaddafi was one of the first ones to visit greece and pissed the the land anyway i was wondering if we let's come back to today's today's world um so and given greece's closer and closer relationship with israel and i believe uh you were here just a few weeks ago for a conference regarding

[1:29:37] intelligence uh and and security in in greece um i was wondering what what do you think greece's role should be in the region and how how much do you think israel or even mosad you know since this is your field of expertise and experience like your whole experience um what do you what do you think the role uh is what what's the role what is the role it plays in greece today oh thank you for that you know there's there's nothing i love more in the world than greece really

[1:30:12] i'm so so proud to have gotten my greek citizenship i i even went back to greece in 2019 to vote for the first time in my grandfather's middle school in our ancestral village um i gotta tell you it has been painful to me to watch the greek government turn away from the arab cause and embrace the israelis and they did it i think for a couple of reasons neither of which are valid i think um one is as soon as turkey's very close relations with israel turned and they became um

[1:30:50] they became maybe not enemies so much as uh they they took uh opposite positions on many of these issues the the greeks jumped in and changed their position 180 degrees so where the the turks were always pro israeli and the greeks were always pro arab they flipped and not for any good reason the greeks did it for financial reasons and if you look at at real estate prices it happens and on a personal note this is something i follow very closely because i fantasize about buying a

[1:31:23] place in greece and and retiring there if you look at the prices prices have tripled in the last 10 years why because israelis are buying up all the real estate it's outrageous so in part it's because of the status of the turkey's relationship with uh with israel on the other hand it's financial because the sypriots have discovered gas this massive they're sitting on an on an ocean of

[1:31:54] liquefied natural gas a little finger of which extends into israeli territorial waters or really into palestinian territorial waters off the coast of gaza and the greeks believe that if they work with the israelis they can make tons of money and that's really what it comes down to there's even now a uh there's a an orthodox jewish hotel in kolonaki which is like the beverly hills of athens

[1:32:24] that caters only to orthodox jews it has a kosher a kosher kitchen and whatever it is that they need it's at this hotel i never saw such a thing before but i think that over the long term this is a big mistake to just walk away from the arabs especially when so many arabs especially the palestinians and the and the lebanese need european help as much as they do today i think it's scandalous uh thank you so much john uh i just think that there's more to it and next time i

[1:33:00] would love to be able to talk with you further especially in what concerns the greek-turkish relationships and what israel's role is in the divide and conquer uh allow me to say uh um you know behind the scenes come you should sign up you should sign up for uh the uh um tomorrow we're going to have him on my youtube channel he should come up katrina and you should also sign up for the uh you know exclusive one-on-one not one-on-one like group small group uh discussion you'll find

[1:33:36] information into in the nest um and please retweet so we have only a few more hands left uh so we will uh get to uh first of all i apologize uh we'll go to varsh and then ahmad and then jaywalk and then steven i actually varsh and jaywalk then ahmad then steven steven was the guy that actually did what i asked in which he retweeted and commented he was the first one first and first serve so um

[1:34:06] if you guys wanted to be that do retweet what's in the nest we've got three tweets up there um and we'll talk again about this shortly so go ahead of varsh and then uh jaywalk and then ahmad and then steven thank you very much shearing girl and john thank you for coming into into the space to answer our questions i really appreciate it um i recently uh read a book by michael parenti it's called the face of imperialism which basically um displays the horrific

[1:34:42] actions by uh the american empire uh specifically with the cia and all of the coups and um things they've done around the world such as nicaragua guatemala venezuela my beloved country of iran operation ajax the shaw and the the book was mostly based on um he used his words based on declassified documents right so my question to you is how many and if you had an

[1:35:14] educated guess how many documents are out there that are still classified that we don't even know about of the cia's actions around the world that's a great question i actually have written about this the number is several billion with a b several billion documents you know this is another this is another beef i have with uh with the cia and with the broader federal government we have a law in this country that that calls for mandatory declassification when a document

[1:35:46] is 35 years old the law says that it has to be declassified unless it would expose sources and methods or sensitive liaison relationships or operations that are still underway okay so i'm telling you 95 plus of those documents should be declassified and have not been and the only reason they haven't been is that the cia made a strategic

[1:36:19] decision to just not hire people to do the declassification um and it's worse in other in other um in other governmental organizations one of the things that i researched was the national archives the national archives is also one of the repositories for for classified documents going back you know to the to the origins of of classification do you know how long the weight is if you file a freedom of information act request with the national archives the wait

[1:36:51] time currently is 600 years 600 years to get a freedom of information act request uh answered well at the at the cia it's it might as well be the same thing and i'll give you an example personal example i wanted to write uh an article about a guy from the 1950s who was a popular science fiction um writer of the period and there were always rumors that he was secretly a cia officer

[1:37:24] he was under some kind of deep cover this is like 1952 to 1958 and then he committed suicide so i um i filed a freedom of information act request with the cia and they sent me back a um a letter saying uh the law says we have to respond to you within 90 days but we're not going to be able to make it in 90 days because we don't have enough manpower okay that was 15 years ago and i'm still waiting for the response so you're right all this shit is supposed to be

[1:38:00] declassified and almost none of it is and there's no good reason no legitimate reason no legal reason for it not to be we're talking about billions of documents that is insane thank you so much for your answer john uh and really quickly 10 seconds if you can answer this do you foresee any cia involvement in uh a place such as burkina faso because of what ibrahim char is doing there

[1:38:33] oh it's it's possible i will tell you that in all the years i was at the cia uh they cared very very little about africa and especially about west africa but now that there is a very healthy al-qaeda presence or islamic state presence um and couple that with you know the drug trade i would say yeah probably i would i would guess that there's going to be there's going to be cia involvement and special forces involvement and and i'll add to that the american people are not

[1:39:06] going to have any idea because it's not going to be reported thank you so we'll go to jay walk and then ahmad and then steven um and then uh yeah let's go for that first then we'll thank you sir and girl i'll drop down as a listener thank you so much thank you go ahead thanks varsh go ahead jay walk hey john thanks for taking my uh question so my question's pretty thematic uh we're familiar with

[1:39:38] the concert of europe right after the polyonic wars okay that failed and so we got world war one right yes and then we got league of nations to answer for that well league of nations failed to stop world war two so we got the united nations right exactly right and all we hear right now is trump talking about we're gonna get out of nato we're gonna get out of the un uh i feel like the central source of events right now is trump's statement that iran and israel don't know what the

[1:40:15] fuck they're doing yeah now i posted a video in the comments about and i'm gonna pronounce it wrong vladimir zernofsky and in that video from 20 years ago what he stated is exactly what's playing out right now i believe what israel thought they were doing when they attacked iran i believe they thought they were starting the next world war and they thought trump would get sucked into it and had he been you know an ounce less of the man he is he probably would have uh bought into it

[1:40:49] and now even in that video uh zernofsky even in that video he says that oil will rise to over 300 a barrel this will weaken china which will isolate russia and so it looks like the plan is to completely isolate you know or um not even like a true balkanization but just part by part isolate each part of the country to regime change each part make a compliant a nato compliant east

[1:41:21] and i think it's so suicidal it's so insane that trump stepped in whoa whoa whoa and i was talking about getting out of uneddo do you think that this just like we want contrary europe to league nations united nations do you think this is just another buildup to replace like you said they don't really steer anything they're just trying to help each other out so it do you think it's just them trying to help each other out and there's going to be like a new united nations emerge out of this and then we still might see some regime change out of your honor and trying to anyone thank you thank you go ahead joel um well i have to agree with you in that and i said this

[1:42:00] the other day in an interview that i did literally every time benjamin netanyahu came to the united states over the last 20 plus years 25 years literally every single time he would ask us to bomb iran and regardless of of who was president at the time the president always said no this is your fight it's not fight not our fight we don't need to bomb iran uh we're not going to do it until donald trump and netanyahu somehow convinced trump that this was this was the way to go it

[1:42:36] wasn't the way to go now trump probably thought it would force the iranians to the negotiating table well they were already at the negotiating table instead i think it set us back with that said i don't think that it'll lead to another uh international body because the united states controls essentially uh the united nations and my last my last tour at the cia was at the united nations and i was just appalled at how literally nothing ever got done it's just a bunch of people

[1:43:09] just speaking into the wind nobody's paying any attention but at the end of the day it is a western dominated um tool by which the united states can control international foreign policy along with the british and the and the french so i think that it would be easier for them just to maintain the status quo than to start something new from scratch now with that said i was talking to um a russian diplomat recently and he said that the russians are exploring ways to allow the

[1:43:48] general assembly to make implementable decisions where they wouldn't have to go to the security council for for permission to do things for example if the if let's say uh indonesia wants to do something to help the palestinians the rules now are that they have to go to the security council the us is going to vote no and the veto just kills it instead under what would be this russian

[1:44:20] plan indonesia could go to the general assembly and if 90 of the countries vote yes then they override the the uh the uh security council and they would be able to help the palestinians i actually think that's a good idea you know why should the us be the ones to veto everything it doesn't make any sense and instead the result is that people are are dying you know these are lives on the line yeah it looks like there's no status quo for the west right now we have

[1:44:56] germany and france basically acting alone you know and to trump chagrin right trumps like what the hell are you guys doing you're doing all this by yourselves we need a new status quo wouldn't that be nifty if this new international just a reformation like not just a new body from scratch like a reformation if you guys aren't going to take a lead if y'all are gonna go away from the status quo of what say league of nations and all of these groups they just walk a general direction right they're not a general direction right they're not exactly right sorry about

[1:45:29] that we're going to have to move to our next speaker we just got to wrap this up a little bit so please keep your question short so i believe we have amidst our next hello sir uh salam alaykum hello Syrian girl hello sir i was it's a real opportunity to ask your question sorry sorry interview on the subject a subject of uh sheikh and amir abdallah bin fahad and how honest you were in describing his uh narcissistic behavior and how it was uh i wish my father was alive to hear you but i'd like i would like to ask you a

[1:46:07] very aggressive question i hope you forgive me because i want to see how far the glove has come off since seeing how you described one of the royals um has the cia ever has that has ever had knowledge or has knowledge of gulf royals using black magic underground torture facilities or even secret prisons and has kept quiet oh black magic i don't know but underground

[1:46:39] facilities and torture absolutely yes 100 yes yes 100 yes can you be indeed can you be in detail i probably would risk going to prison again if i went into detail but okay but you know what that's thank you for my pleasure this is exactly why the united states sought the help of of those countries uh because they didn't have for example parliaments to answer to uh they didn't have

[1:47:13] unnecessarily uh free press to answer to the cia would go in and say can you open up the secret prison for us they would say yes we can and the cia says here's whatever ten million dollars let's say and everybody's happy thank you so much sorry that we're sorry that we're having to keep things quick as we mentioned um you can ask all your questions again tomorrow make

[1:47:43] sure you drop your questions in the comments today share widely share the live tomorrows so we can get to answering your questions and don't forget you guys asked how you can support john jump on get a spot um in one of his workshops and you can ask him the in detail ones he's probably not going to be answering today in public okay so make sure you get a spot all right uh next we have our winner steven so jump on in well thank you very much for um allowing me to speak i don't often win cube prizes but i really do try and i'm eternally grateful to y'all for

[1:48:20] for giving me the chance to ask such a motivational question it's heavily leaned like like we're doing dallas and i'm there but okay here it goes in regards to support for our aim rather than israel watch the intelligences opinion on smaller nations offering support in regards to kutah ties within the economical powers of the west for example how much dampening on international news in regards to scotland if such prestige such as the bbc became quite lively as it was rumored back in cork and then there and the problem states like them now at yemen weight they are offering

[1:48:54] support against israel so how would the smaller nations and militias be treated for showing such public support in terms of an international intelligence sphere and a news sphere in european given that we've had such destruction across the middle east in regards to the war and that's my first question my second question is and we're more pitted padded to it as an operator how does it feel come in second to all the silvers and the goals of this world who just like

[1:49:24] to to make such claims thank you thank you can oh thank you um see now i have to i have to work hard to be nice um uh to people who i don't necessarily respect um you know to answer your second question first there are there are a lot of people out there who are phony um in the military they call

[1:49:56] it stolen valor i don't know what it is but um let me give you a quick story i used to go on tucker carlson show on fox news all the time a dozen dozen and a half times whatever it was and we struck up kind of a friendship well one one day i was in the fox news green room and there was a guy in there and um and he says to me are you going on uh tucker and i said yeah are you and he said yeah um he said what are you talking about i said oh i'm i'm former cia so i'm gonna talk about

[1:50:29] whatever it was i think it was john brennan actually and i said how about you he said oh yeah i'm former cia too and i was like oh okay so the very first thing that you ask somebody who is former cia what directorate were you in and he says oh i was in ops it's like okay normally you wouldn't use the term ops when you answer that question you would say i was in the d.o the directorate of operations but you would say the d.o but that's okay if he wants to say ops

[1:50:59] so i said um so so where in the d.o were you i was in ctc the counterterrorism center and he says i was doing black ops wet work i did all that shit okay literally no cia officer on earth would give an answer like that that is straight out of a bad movie so i went on the air and then we went to commercial and i said to tucker during the commercial hey the guy that's coming on after me i think he's fake and he said what do you mean and i

[1:51:34] said he doesn't know the agency lingo he's using movie lingo i think he's fake so the guy goes on he's talking about you know the cool things that he allegedly did well six months pass and sure enough i see the guy in the washington post he's been arrested and he's been charged with of all things mortgage fraud because he was going through life telling everybody that he was deep cover cia special operations wet work you know covert whatever and he did that at a bank he wanted to buy a house

[1:52:13] and he said look i'd love to give you my pay stubs but uh just between us some deep cover special you know answer to the president special ops wet work black ops and they gave him the mortgage and then he couldn't make the payments because he didn't have a job he was just a phony and he ended up getting like six years in prison it was ridiculous but you get that all the time when i was working at the loyton tush after i left uh after i left the cia

[1:52:43] every time we had somebody applied to the to the firm who claimed cia experience they would ask me to take the person to dinner and i'm telling you fully 50 percent of the people who had cia on their resumes had never stepped afoot inside the cia it was all made up so you get that a lot forgive me what was the first question again excuse me partner it was um what's the intelligence's opinion on the smaller nations when they offer support

[1:53:17] yeah uh yeah that's that's that's an important question very timely i happened to be in ireland uh a month or two ago when the irish decided to recognize palestine now ireland is a small country it's not a member of nato and normally the united states wouldn't pay any attention to it other than it happens to be a place where where people like to launder money so we work closely with the irish on anti-money laundering operations but otherwise we don't really pay

[1:53:49] much attention to to ireland but the irish have a long history with british imperialism and so they they try to to be on the side of the of the little guy and in today's world that's the palestinian people and so they decided to recognize palestine friends of mine at the agency told me that they didn't care one way or the other but the state department was apoplectic

[1:54:19] that they would throw a wrench into the international situation and recognize palestine nobody so much cared that it was that it was ireland specifically that recognized palestine but what they were afraid was that this was the this was the first hole in the in the dyke and that other countries were going to follow suit sure enough spain announced that they're exploring uh diplomatic relations with uh with the palestinians the italians are exploring it

[1:54:49] there are half a dozen other european countries i think that's the future and there's nothing that the cia or even the state department can do to stop it okay so we're getting to the law speakers now um destiny and then myself go ahead destiny thank you so much for giving me a second question i really appreciate it um john i'm sure that you're familiar with robert david steel who was a cia agent who i very much looked into for a long time what are your thoughts on

[1:55:20] the manner of his death during covet um yeah i i knew robert and uh to tell you the truth i think that uh i think he died of covet he was he was an old man he had ongoing um health issues he knew that he was at risk well he wasn't that old i guess he was what 70 i suppose and um i

[1:55:50] think it got him i have a cousin who was sort of in the same boat with with robert in that it was early in covet uh he wasn't vaccinated he had a heart condition wasn't feeling well one day on a friday came home from work thought he could sleep it off through the weekend and um and died 10 days later of uh of uh covet um another thing about about robert and i was on

[1:56:21] his podcast a couple of times he's a sweet he was a sweet guy but he he found a little niche for himself in in the world of conspiracies and the funny thing was he didn't believe most of these conspiracies but they got him clicks and they got him listeners and so and so he would grab onto them and and run and i thought that wasn't really an intellectually honest way to make a living well thank you so much mystery sorry your mic go ahead

[1:56:54] go ahead sherry that wraps us up to the last question yeah so i think i'm gonna have to hand that one over to you to ask you yeah yeah thank you so much i'll just have to um yes so guys please while you're listening check out what's in the nest and retweet it please where you can come back here on code go to my youtube we're gonna have a live stream and you can pose your questions again um so my question to john is this i understand that you uh were

[1:57:29] whistleblower for uh the uh torture technique in guantanabe which was waterboarding and uh you know the person who was the first individual who was waterboarded whose name i will bring up momentarily uh perhaps you you will you will be able to just let me know what it was um he's still in guantanabe right now abu zubeida right right oh yeah yeah he's still in guantanamo yes indeed so my sorry go ahead john well my question is this go ahead you know in syria

[1:58:06] the founder of al-qaeda in syria who openly states he was responsible for multiple suicide bombings beheadings etc etc is getting handshakes by donald trump he's he's become the president international recognition training by mi6 uh so how do you figure how and how do you think that certain agents feel about the fact that this relatively unknown guy is now been 20 years

[1:58:38] without charge in guantanamo but literally the founder of al-qaeda in syria has become the president is getting all the accolades is it simply that you know it's just after you kill a certain number of people that you become like one of the boys like what do you think about this yeah isn't that perverse um but yeah that's that's kind of the the world we live in um this is a guy who joined um the islamic state also known as isis uh because al-qaeda wasn't

[1:59:11] radical enough this is a guy who who encouraged uh followers to carry out suicide bombings against civilians women children hospitals uh religious minorities uh you know syria frankly is something that i just don't understand in terms of of us policy i i used to be a vocal a vocal advocate of as close relations as possible with the asad

[1:59:43] regime not because i love bashar al-asad i didn't not because he wasn't a bad guy of course he was a bad guy but bashar al-asad was the only thing standing between between minority religious minority communities and complete annihilation and now he's gone and now we have isis that's in charge of uh of syria i don't see what the upshot is for the united states or for any western

[2:00:15] country and uh i just can't help but to think that this is yet another blunder in american foreign policy where that we're gonna end up regretting later you know it i americans americans in the foreign policy community will tell you well manachem begon blew up the king david hotel and he ended up winning the nobel peace prize it's like yeah and you don't think it's a little premature to call this guy a nobel peace prize uh uh potential i think this is very dangerous i think

[2:00:48] it's bad policy and i think it's it's gonna be i think we're looking at at some frightening years for minorities in in syria thank you it highly told me that i took the words right out of her mouth so she that was the question she was gonna ask as well um so miss shuri go ahead miss shuri all right i think i'm gonna have to call time guys sorry hate on me but i really want to say thank you to everyone who's joined us today and i really do want to stress don't think that we

[2:01:21] couldn't answer your questions to stop right there please keep adding them to the comments everyone will look over them tomorrow we'll pick the ones that we can answer for the live stream so make sure you tune in for that so please share the youtube link right there in the nest share it widely add all your comments any questions that you didn't get to ask today make sure you do that tomorrow and as we mentioned if you want more time with john jump in and support him you guys asked how to support john so make sure you get a seat in his workshop because they're going for limited time only so you guys get to get your small group

[2:01:54] session do that and yeah so hope to see everyone tomorrow um so i'm going to say goodbye on behalf of sean so you couldn't be here i just had to drop off um and look it's been fantastic hearing this i'm probably one of the few people who's not in the political sphere i'm on the tech side so work with these guys it's been absolutely fantastic love all of uh john's stories that he has to tell so he's got so many more to see if i know that he's dying to share with you guys and to syrian girl moran thank you thank you for hosting it's been an absolute pleasure so i'll

[2:02:26] let you guys all say goodbye and yeah a good evening well good morning to you guys over there thank you miss sherry um i just uh one one more thing sorry you might be hopmiking there for a second yes so thanks guys thanks for coming to my space thank you so much for your support and your questions please if you can as a parting gift uh do retweet my uh like tweet about uh our stream tomorrow in that one you'll be able to you know in in live streams you'll be able to post your

[2:02:57] questions and there'll be like a like a you know a hot question thing not just in the comments you'll be able to like pay a small dollar you can fling a dime our way and uh ask your questions on that stream tomorrow um please retweet that and i've also put into the nest once again if you want more information about that seminar uh you know you have iv ivy cyber people are going to want to know what the um what it's about just click on that link you'll see seminar cia pov

[2:03:31] with john kiriyaku uh and you'll be able to register and ask your questions there thank you so much again for my co-hosts for all your help and thank you john kiriyaku you've been an amazing guest and i've been honored to have you on okay bye bye everyone
