Title: PARDON HIM ALREADY! John Kiriakou
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-09-04
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXSeAgvz3Yk
Duration: 24:28

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[00:00] John, thank you so much for joining me today. &gt;&gt; Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Phil. Such a pleasure for me. &gt;&gt; Well, you have been a busy guy in your profession. A couple of quotes that I want to attribute to you and you can own them or not. I want to be sure I'm right. One is you said, "I exposed the CIA and went to prison for it." Is that something you said?

[00:30] &gt;&gt; Uh, it is. &gt;&gt; You said there are some things we should not do even in the name of national security. Is that something you said? &gt;&gt; Indeed, it is. &gt;&gt; All right. This is something that you took very seriously in your life. Why did you go into the CIA? Were you recruited? I was recruited in graduate school, but to tell you the truth, I was only considering uh jobs in public service. I'm the grandson of four

[01:00] uh uh grandparents who immigrated to this country from Greece. And in our household while I was growing up, uh it was instilled in all of us really that that we owed this country such a great debt of thanks for giving us a new life in this wonderful country that we needed to pay that debt back. And so my parents were elementary school teachers in the public school system and they instilled

[01:30] in us the notion that we should go into public service as well. So, you went into public service, but you didn't sit around in the sandbox as a kid envisioning yourself being a CIA agent. &gt;&gt; Actually, I did uh when I was nine, I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. And they bought me uh walkietalkies for for Christmas that year. I remember Yeah. And then when I was 16, I said specifically, I I

[02:00] remember telling my father that not only did I want to be a spy, but I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. And so I um I went to George Washington University and got a an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies. Uh, I stayed at GW for a master's degree in legislative affairs, but with a concentration in foreign policy analysis, thinking if I can't get into the CIA, I'll go to Capitol Hill or I'll go to the foreign service. And then, as it turned out, my

[02:30] graduate school advisor uh, who gave me an A on a paper, it was a psychology exam, asked me to, he wrote in the in the margin of the paper, please see me after class. So, I went to see him and he said, "Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer?" And I jumped at the chance and the next thing I knew, I had

[03:00] my right hand in the air and I was swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. &gt;&gt; Wow. So, he was he was kind of taking a chance because he was undercover. So, he was actually, let's talk about that for a minute because I have an issue with some of what's going on in the elite universities of the United States right now. And I'm wondering if &gt;&gt; we're sending our kids to get educated

[03:30] &gt;&gt; or indoctrinated. What do you say about that? &gt;&gt; Right. that is going to be a fight that we are going to have to fight from here on out. I will say that the way that I was uh uh recruited into the CIA is no longer legal. With passage in 1993 of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, you can't do this old boy network. But what they do now is they just do it out in public. The CIA created this this uh program called the Scholar and Residence

[04:00] Program. So if you've done your 25 or 30 years, you're planning to retire, they'll send you back to your alma mater for two or three years, you can teach some meaningless class like a friend of mine went back to Indiana University and taught uh espionage in Soviet literature and uh and students will just go up to him after class and say, "Hey, I'd love to get into the CIA." And he makes a recommendation. So rather than do it to

[04:30] do it behind closed doors like they did it with me, they just do it out in the open now. &gt;&gt; Okay. So we actually do have professors in universities now that aren't necessarily who they seem to be. &gt;&gt; Correct. They are actually operatives, CIA operatives or maybe from other agencies that are there to indoctrinate, to

[05:00] recruit. What What are they there for? Why are they in those roles? &gt;&gt; Oh, it's a combination of the two. They're always looking for people with hard foreign languages or people who have an aptitude for difficult foreign languages. They're looking for people who are patriotic on their face, patriotic, and if they think that you can fit into that culture, and it's it's deeper than just, you know, fitting into the culture. I I've said u in many podcasts that a CIA psychiatrist once

[05:30] told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Because, of course, sociopaths have no conscience. They blow right through a polygraph exam, but they're impossible to control. People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience. They do react to the polygraph, but at the same time, they're happy to operate in these moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. I I remember when I was when I was going

[06:00] through the interview process, um there were four or five of us there and uh and the instructor said, "Let's say you're a CIA officer and you get a cable from headquarters telling you to uh recruit the Indonesian economic secretary because you need some Indonesian economic information." And you cultivate this relationship for a year. you become friends, your wives become friends, you vacation together, but you you come to

[06:30] realize that he's not recruitable. What do you do? And a guy put his hand up in the air and said, "Well, you double down. You do it another 6 months." A woman raised her hand and said, "Uh, maybe you can work it through the wives." And I'm looking around looking at these people. I put my hand up and I said, "You break into the embassy and you steal it." And the instructor said, "That's exactly what you do." Well, I came to learn that's a sociopathic tendency. &gt;&gt; Do you have sociopathic tendencies? &gt;&gt; Probably. Uh, I was perfectly happy to

[07:00] break into people's homes or offices overseas and plant bugs or plant cameras. I was perfectly happy to convince people that I was their best friend to the point where they were wi willing to commit espionage for me or in some cases treason because I believed we were the good guys and I was doing this uh for the safety and security of of Americans and American installations.

[07:30] And so I never gave it a second thought beyond the fact that we were the good guys. You've heard me say it before. Real change starts with real understanding. And that's why I've had Dr. Daniel Aemon on my show many times over the years. At Aean Clinics, they do something different. They look at your brain. With nearly 300,000 brain scans from patients in over 155 countries, they take the

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[08:30] So you say the CIA hires people with sociopathic tendencies and you say sociopaths have concise answers and pass polygraph tests. Sociopaths are impossible to control. They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they only hire

[09:00] sociopathic narcissists. The CI operatives look for narcissistic individuals because they're so arrogant. They conclude, of course, the CIA would want to recruit me because I'm so important that they cannot do their jobs without me. &gt;&gt; Oh my goodness. You see that every single day of your career. You are surrounded by the smartest, the most accomplished,

[09:30] uh the the best educated, at least all in their own minds, people. Uh it it becomes comical after a while. Yeah. You actually don't see that so much in analysis. It's in operations where everybody wants to be James Bond. And in some cases, they actually achieve that. You know, there there is always a handful of senior officers that all the rest of us wanted to be like. People who had many recruitments, people who had uh multiple chief of station assignments.

[10:00] That's that's what everybody was aspiring to. And and you get it by what they used to call, not jokingly, shameless self-promotion. &gt;&gt; Yeah. Now, were you that way? Is that why they picked you? Was it languages? Why did they pick you? Were you a sociopathic narcissist? &gt;&gt; In retrospect, I I probably had those sociopathic tendencies, but they picked me. I I actually spent the first half of my career in analysis. They picked me because because I had uh Arabic language. Um and

[10:30] because I I was very serious about academia. I was very serious about analysis and study. And I I was fascinated by Arab culture and Arab history. I read Arab poetry. I studied Islam uh under one of the most important uh Islamic scholars in the western world. I I was just fascinated with that culture and I wanted to live there and really get to understand people and so I

[11:00] went to the directorate of intelligence, the analytic uh branch and succeeded not necessarily because I was so great but because I was really lucky. Just as I got to a point where I felt like I knew what I was doing, Iraq invaded Kuwait on August the 2nd, 1990. I was the only Iraq leadership analyst. And I remember walking in that morning and saying uh to my boss, "Big day ahead of us today." And he said, "Don't take your jacket

[11:30] off. We're going to the Oval Office." I was 25 years old. And I walk in and it's the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, the CIA director, my boss, and me. And we all sit down. The president looks around and he says, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turned and looked at me. And I remember thinking to myself, my friends from high school would never believe it in a million years if I told them what I was doing right now. &gt;&gt; So I I got lucky there. &gt;&gt; You were more than just lucky. Look, you

[12:00] received 10 exceptional performance award. The sustained superior performance award, the counterterrorism service medal, the state department's meritorious honor award among others. What kind of things did you do to earn those kind of accolades? &gt;&gt; I found myself very often in situations where you have to think quickly, where bullets are flying, where people's lives

[12:30] are at risk. And um and there were a couple of there were a couple of very difficult recruitments uh that that I made. You know, in retrospect, part of that was because I was young and foolish. And you know, when you're young, you think you're going to live forever and you're untouchable. And so, I would take risks that today as a 60-year-old man, I I'm appalled that I made a decision to take some of these risks. &gt;&gt; Give me an example. Um, I remember going

[13:00] into the heavily communist anarchist neighborhood of Athens, Greece to pitch a bonafide terrorist. And I was the only member of the team not wearing a bulletproof vest. And my boss asked me, "Why in the world did you not put your vest on?" I said, "Because it shows underneath our shirts, and I don't want to freak the guy out." I said, 'I genuinely want to recruit this guy. I

[13:30] don't want him to run away and to be afraid or to see that we're wearing vests and pull out a gun and take a shot. I'm willing to I'm willing to give it a chance. Besides, I had a gun on my waist and a fanny pack. I had another gun on my ankle in an ankle holster. I thought, well, you know, if I'm going to go down, I'm going to go down shooting, but I'm going to give this recruitment an actual chance. And I recruited him. This was a a group that no that the CIA had never infiltrated before, but I took it slowly. I did the research and uh and

[14:00] found success. &gt;&gt; Right. And that's a chance you wouldn't take today. &gt;&gt; No, it's not a chance I would take today. I kick myself. &gt;&gt; Well, you have five children now, right? So, &gt;&gt; I have five children, right? And I think they would be quite upset with me. &gt;&gt; Yeah. You look at it a little differently when you have kids. They reward you for that kind of thing. But you say that when you go into the CIA, there is no class on morality. They don't sit down and go over ethics with you. They look for results, not how you get them.

[14:30] That's exactly right. And that was something that bothered me for a very long time. Although I never had to really do anything about it until the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. That's when things changed, not just for me, but it changed for the agency. and it changed in a big and permanent way. &gt;&gt; They started playing a different kind of ball. They started playing hard ball. They started being more desperate to get information. Is that the shift? &gt;&gt; That's right. Before 9/11, we had

[15:00] literally zero uh penetrations of al-Qaeda. In fact, several months before 911, I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern uh intelligence officers at headquarters. This was something that we did literally every single day. We would have these delegations of visitors from our partners around the world. We would give them a day full of briefings. We would exchange gifts, take them up to the director's office for a photo op, and then we take them out to a nice dinner afterwards. We would do this with different groups every single day. And

[15:30] so I had scheduled an al-Qaeda briefing for this delegation. This was July the 6th, 2001. I still remember the date. And I asked the junior al-Qaeda analyst just come in, give these guys just the basic briefing. Instead of the junior analyst coming, the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Ambassador Kofer Black, showed up with the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden unit. And I I stood up and I said, "Oh, gentlemen." I said, "This is

[16:00] Ambassador Kofer Black. He's the director of of uh counterterrorism." and and Kofer sat down and said, "Something terrible is going to happen. We don't know what it is. We don't know where it'll be, but we know it's going to be an attack on a massive scale." He said, "We're hearing code words for an enormous attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey. There's going to be a great football match. There's going to be a a huge wedding. We're hearing al-Qaeda camp

[16:30] commanders on the phone with their students and they're crying and telling their students, "I'll see you in paradise." He said, "I'm begging you if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda. Please help us." And at the end of the day, I went to his office to thank him for taking the time to come and speak to these men. And I said, "Keofer, I have to ask you, I don't work on al-Qaeda. Were you saying that for their benefit or were you serious? And he said, "Oh, I

[17:00] was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen." And then sure enough, 9/11 came and it played out in front of us. &gt;&gt; This meeting was for what purpose? Why was he there giving this information? because we were so desperate to to penetrate al-Qaeda and we had no uh no operations or cases that were entrained to lead us to a penetration. And he believed that an attack was nearly upon

[17:30] us that he thought, well, I'm going to throw a Hail Mary and just ask these random Middle Eastern intelligence officers if they have anybody inside al-Qaeda that we don't know about. Maybe they can help us. And they couldn't. Nobody could. &gt;&gt; They didn't know or they weren't willing. &gt;&gt; They didn't know. Al-Qaeda really wasn't their problem. Uh al-Qaeda had no no problem, no beef with with this service. you know, we caught so many al-Qaeda

[18:00] people in these operations in Pakistan that I headed after 9/11 that and they all told the same story that that they actually made it quite plain for me. Um, at at the the grunt level, I'm talking about the 18year-olds, the 19year-olds, &gt;&gt; right? &gt;&gt; They all told basically the same story. They were they were illiterate. They lived in isolated villages in their home countries and they wanted to get married. But what man would want his daughter to marry someone who can't read

[18:30] and write, who has no job prospects, no skills of any kind? So the local imam went to them and said, "You don't want to stay in this village. You should go to Afghanistan and make jihad against the Americans, and we'll give you $300 a month, and if you're martyed, we'll give your parents $500 as a martyrdom bonus." Well, they couldn't find the United States on a map. But $300 is better than no dollars. And so they made their way to Afghanistan to fight the Americans at

[19:00] a higher level. The camp commanders, the al-Qaeda leadership, it really all started well for two reasons. One, because we established military bases in Saudi Arabia. That's what Osama bin Laden objected to personally. But for many of the other al-Qaeda leaders, it was because we we were so staunchly pro- Israel in our foreign policy that they saw this as a way to get back at us to to pay us back for turning our backs in

[19:30] their view on on poor Arabs. &gt;&gt; That's a different take than a lot of people hear. So this was a retaliation and these al Qaeda that were going into Afghanistan to fight, they had no beef with America, they were just going there for the job. &gt;&gt; They were just going there for the job. In fact, when I first arrived in Pakistan in January of 2002, the very first counterterrorist raid that I led on a on what we believed to be an

[20:00] al-Qaeda safe house led us to capture two 18-year-olds from Tunisia. And as soon as we broke down the door, they both burst into tears. And one of them asked if he could call his mom. And I remember turning to a colleague of mine and saying, "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we've been so afraid of. These are children." And so I just kind of filed it. We would do raid after raid after raid. And

[20:30] sometimes we would catch more important people. Like I said, camp commanders uh were the the first significant captures that we had made. But these guys, like I say, illiterate, had no idea what the United States was about, where it was located, couldn't name who the president was. This was just a way to earn some money. &gt;&gt; Yeah. And when you recruited some of these terrorist informants, they had to

[21:00] be high enough up that they knew something to be of value, right? &gt;&gt; Yes. Correct. &gt;&gt; These weren't the 18-year-old grunts. These were people that were high enough up to do some planning and that sort of thing. Did you have any guidelines with how you recruited them, what you could do and not do? &gt;&gt; No. And that that is one of the things that I like to lecture about at colleges and universities. There were no guidelines. I mean certainly there would be financial guidelines. 95% of the

[21:30] recruitments that a CIA operations officer makes are for money. It's all about the money. And it can be $1,000 a month. It can be $20,000 a month. It can be a lump sum for $10 million. We can pay it in diamonds or gold or any way that you want to receive it. But there was no guideline as to what to do ethically or morally. One of the examples that I use in in speeches when I go to universities is I say let's say

[22:00] you are a CIA operations officer and you've recruited a bonafide terrorist a member of ISIS or Hezbollah or al-Qaeda it doesn't matter what it is and this man has given you actionable intelligence that you have used to disrupt attacks and to save American lives and then you fly out to the Middle East one month to meet him and he says to you. I've given you everything that you've wanted. Tonight, you're going to

[22:30] do something for me. You're going to go out and you're going to get me a prostitute. And if you don't, I'm not going to talk to you anymore. So, I say, "Give me a show of hands. How many of you would get give him the prostitute?" And usually about 80% put their hands up in the air. And I say, "Yeah, in real life, you probably would get him the prostitute. It's not very nice. It's a kind of a dirty business, but this is the this is the job that we've chosen for ourselves. But what if he asks you

[23:00] for a child prostitute? And people get nervous. They'll look around. About 10% will put their hand up and I say, "Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. It's a child for God's sake." But the issue here is that there are no rules. Remember, your job while overseas is to break the law. Your job is to convince people to commit espionage for you. Your job is to get people to give

[23:30] you classified information or protected information. It's not to to it's not to disrupt human trafficking. But you have to go into this situation with your own set of moral values. You have to know what the right thing to do is because headquarters isn't going to tell you. They're not going to say, "Oh, remember uh employee rule number 305 says you can't provide child prostitutes." You have to know in your heart what's right and what's wrong.

[24:00] &gt;&gt; But that's up to you. That's up to the individual. So, if you've got somebody that just doesn't have a real good moral compass, they just don't find true north on their compass and they want that information, they're going to do whatever they need to do to get it. &gt;&gt; That's exactly right.
