Title: Remarks by John Kiriakou, former CIA officer
Show: Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry
Date: 2026-06-26
URL: https://youtu.be/ibhnui-G5T4
Duration: 30:00

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[00:15] Well, I'm going to say this. We might have saved the best for last. You know, I had a conversation with this gentleman earlier. It was absolutely as powerful if not more powerful than that, if you can believe it. And this is a guy that just doesn't talk the talk. He walked the walk. He exposed CIA torture. He did time in prison for it, and he continues to speak truth to power. Ex-CIA, John Kiriakou. Thank you so much.

[00:46] >> [applause] >> Thank you, everybody. Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. I I actually had a a prepared speech, which I normally don't do. I just wing it. I figured if I don't know these issues by now, I'm never going to know them. So, but after listening to Congressman Kucinich, uh after watching Senator Johnson yesterday, I'm I I think I can't uh I can't give

[01:19] that speech that I intended to. What I'd like to do is just to stand here and say, "Yeah, I agree." That's kind of the end of the story. I agree. But I'll But I'll agree by by throwing in a couple of anecdotes. For those of you who don't know me, my name is John Kiriakou. I spent almost 15 years in the CIA. Um and then found myself after 9/11 in in a couple of leadership positions. I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan after

[01:50] 9/11. Led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, whom we wrongly believed was the number three in Al-Qaeda. And then went home to become the executive assistant to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations. A position in which I got to see literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world. And I can tell you they are lying about everything. Everything.

[02:21] I mean, just on the surface of things, think about it. They told us there was no torture program. Of course there was a torture program. That was a lie. They told us that there was no archipelago of secret prisons around the world. That was a lie. They told us that there was no program of international renditions or extraordinary renditions where we were kidnapping people who had never been charged with a crime and then sending them to countries that they had no ties to

[02:52] so that they could be tortured. That was a lie. And then they told us "There's nothing happening at Guantanamo. We're just holding people there to await trial in the appropriate federal district courts." That was a lie. Literally everything they said was a lie. Now, listen, I will admit to you I was a true believer for a long time. Even though I was a third generation Democrat, liberal Democrat, we don't use the word liberal anymore, but

[03:22] progressive Democrat, three generations. We had a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt on our TV, which I still have. I can't I can't abide by what the Democratic Party does anymore than I can abide by what the Republican Party does because they're all lying to us. I want to take you back to the months after the 9/11 attacks. We had captured Abu Zubaydah and I was sitting at the foot of his bed. My orders were to not leave his

[03:54] bedside. I was tired, very tired, and so I was afraid I was going to fall asleep. So, I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed. He was in a coma, but I don't know. I was thinking maybe the doctor's al-Qaeda, maybe the nurse is al-Qaeda. I'm going to fall asleep in the chair and they're going to make him escape. So, I tied him up. And then I woke up and I noticed that one of the FBI guys that was in and out had left Abu Zubaydah's diary uh next to the bed. So, when I woke up,

[04:26] I said I said, "What's that?" "Oh, that's the diary. We We confiscated it at the safe house." "But it's in Arabic." He said, "I can't read it." I said, "Oh, pass it over here. I'll check it out." So, I'm looking through the diary and much of it was innocuous. The The CIA and the FBI differ on this and have for 20 23 years. But much of it was doodles. He was He was a very talented artist. Uh some of it was poetry. He would write letters. He was 27 at the

[04:59] time. He would write letters to his 14-year-old self saying uh treat our parents with respect. Don't say terrible things to that girl down the block. You know, have respect for your brothers and sisters, that kind of thing. But then also in the diary were the personal cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes. And I'm looking at this like, "What in the world are these cell phone numbers?" So,

[05:29] I called Islamabad and I said, "Listen, I'm sitting here in the hospital and I'm looking at this diary that we confiscated and I think it's got the cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes." And the analyst that I called said, "You've got to be kidding me." And I said, "No." So, I read him the names and the I violated all kinds of security issues. But anyway, I read him the names and the phone numbers over the phone. He cabled headquarters. They just said, "Thank

[05:59] you." Another couple of months pass. I go back to CIA headquarters. By then, this information had bubbled up to the director, George Tenet. This was one of only two times I ever saw George uh lose his temper. Uh Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, who was the uh the Saudi ambassador to the United States and the son of then, what was he? The minister of whatever, Prince Sultan.

[06:31] Defense, I think it was. George had called Prince Bandar into the office. And George said, "We have this information that these three members of your family are in the personal diary of the number three man in al-Qaeda." And he said, "Bandar, I'm telling you I'm telling you because we're allies. We're going to start killing people, a lot of people. And some of them are going to be named al-Saud."

[07:04] So, Bandar left the meeting. And then over the next couple of weeks, three things happened. One of the princes had bariatric bypass surgery. And he died on the operating room table. Somehow. Another prince was killed in a one-car accident on the Riyadh to Jeddah highway. And then the third prince went camping in the desert like he used to do all the

[07:35] time and died of thirst. Of thirst. Bandar didn't do us any favors by having his cousins killed. He set us back. But, that was the plan. Because those three princes would have had to answer questions as to why in the world their personal cell phone numbers were in Abu Zubaydah's diary. And it wasn't just that.

[08:06] Why was Omar al-Bayoumi at President Bush's Crawford Ranch before 9/11 with Crown Prince Abdullah, and then he excuses himself from the meeting to go outside and call the hijackers. Why was that never investigated? It's because the CIA wouldn't let us investigate it. The CIA wouldn't let the 9/11 Commission investigate it. What kind of commission was the 9/11 Commission if it was not

[08:37] permitted to interview CIA officers? Or if it was not permitted to interview prisoners at Guantanamo? What did they just fill in the blanks by making it up? And it's not just the Saudis that were a problem for us. The Israelis were at least as big a problem. The Saudis aren't so heavy-handed about it as the Israelis are. And I'll give you just one example. When I got back from Pakistan, I was promoted. And I uh I went up to the

[09:10] seventh floor to be the assistant to the Deputy Director, as I said. On my first day on the job, I was so excited. And I went into the Deputy Director's office, and I I went like this, and I said, "So, what are we doing now?" And he said, "I actually can't tell you. You have to go up to the or down to the sixth floor and sign some secrecy agreements, and then we'll talk." I said, "Okay." They were waiting for me in security. They had six secrecy agreements lined up

[09:40] on the table. And I knew the security officer. I said, I I need to sign these uh secrecy agreements. And so, he had them all laid out. I signed each and every one. And a secrecy agreement is such that you promise to never ever talk about this ever for the rest of your life. You take it to the grave unless it's declassified. And for the most part, it's been declassified. So, I signed the six agreements and I said, "So, what's up?"

[10:10] And he goes like this. "Next year, we're going to invade Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And we're going to open the biggest Air Force base in the world so we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques." I was dumbfounded. I've just gotten back from

[10:42] Pakistan where we've all dedicated our lives to finding Osama bin Laden. And all I could think to say was, "We haven't caught bin Laden yet. What do you mean we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein?" And he said, "Stop. The decision's been made. We don't have a say. And the battle lines have been drawn." I said, "What are the battle lines?" He said, "The pro-invasion forces are OVP, the Office of the Vice President,

[11:12] OSD, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council." And he said, "The anti-Iraq war factions, as crazy as this sounds, CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department." And I said, "So, what do we do?" He said, "We do as we're ordered to do. We're going to go to war with Iraq." So, that's what we prepared for from March of 2002 to February of 2003, it

[11:44] was all about getting ready to fight the Iraqis. And for what reason? There was no reason. I never encountered a CIA officer who ever believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated us. There was literally nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein. There was a famous story that Saddam and his vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, went to Mecca to

[12:15] make the minor pilgrimage, the Umrah, in 1988 or '89. Saddam didn't know the prayers because he had never he had never learned the prayers. Izzat Ibrahim was very religious and was kneeling behind him and whispering the prayers quietly to Saddam so Saddam could say them more loudly to make it look like he knew what the hell he was doing. There was nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein. But Dick Cheney said there's a connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq,

[12:47] and that's the reason why we're going to attack. It was just completely made up. Just like the weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had two sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid and Saddam Kamel al-Majid. They were brothers married to Saddam's two daughters, Rana and Raghad. Raghad and Rana. Raghad was the older older one. They defected to Jordan. And they did it in the middle of the night because they were panicked that Saddam's eldest son, Uday, was going to

[13:17] kill them. So, we put a team together. We flew out to Amman, where they had been given refuge. And uh we had this plan that we were going to go in and say, "All right, tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are because we couldn't find them." We figured maybe these guys, you know, have are they're geniuses or something. They found this one patch of dirt that our overhead imagery can't find and maybe, you know, we just missed them or something cuz none of us ever saw any

[13:47] weapons of mass destruction. So, we go to uh to the palace where King Hussein had them hold up. And when we walked in, even before my boss could say anything, Hussein Kamel said, "All right, I need overhead uh imagery of Saddam's palaces. I need air cover. I need secure communications. I need weapons." And my boss said, "Oh, wait a minute. We didn't come here to make you president of Iraq.

[14:18] We came here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are." He said, "There are no weapons of mass destruction." The truth is, we had so scared the out of them in 1989 that they destroyed all the weapons of mass destruction and they buried the the the ruined missiles uh in the in the desert. There were no weapons of mass destruction. That's why the United Nations never found any. That's why we never found any. No country ever Even the Israelis, they have weapons of mass destruction. Okay, show us where. We'll

[14:48] go get them. And then we'll we'll punish them and bomb them or something. We're supposed to take the Israelis' words for it. So, there were none. In the end, we gave Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel nothing. Uh they stayed in exile about 6 months and then they sent word back to Iraq that they wanted to uh beg forgiveness and go back. Uh they were met at the Iraqi-Jordanian border by Saddam's two sons who executed both of them.

[15:19] So, that was the end of it. They never even made it a foot inside Iraq. Now, fast forward a little bit more to the week before we crossed the border into Iraq. I want to tell you two things about that. Number one, my primary role in the Deputy Director's office was to be the morning briefer for all of the Deputy Directors and the Associate Deputy Directors as well as the heads of counterterrorism, counternarcotics, counterproliferation,

[15:50] counterintelligence, and the chief of staff. That was at 7:00, and then at 7:30 I would brief the Director. So, I went into the briefing this morning and I said, "Before I get into the substantive reporting from overnight, we had a message from the Israelis and they said that they want to be in on the on the attack in 3 days." And the Deputy Director said, "Absolutely, positively not." And I said, "I already told them no." Well, it just so happened

[16:22] that in the western Iraqi desert when the Iraqis electrified that part of the country, they built electrical towers with three legs. And 2 days before we attacked Iraq, somebody put explosives on one of the legs for like 100 miles and every tower just started tipping over. And I remember the Deputy Director

[16:52] saying, "Those Israelis. They just don't know when to take no for an answer. Excuse my language." So, they got a little piece of the action. But, it was the Israelis the whole time that were that were telling Well, they were telling the Vice President's office, it was like an echo chamber, "You got to overthrow Saddam." And Cheney's office would say, yes, we have to overthrow Saddam. And the Israelis would say, They're an existential threat. And

[17:23] Cheney would say, yes, they are. We're going to overthrow Saddam. And if the CIA were like, is nobody paying any attention to Iran? Saddam Hussein, whether you like his politics or not, he's the only thing protecting the Gulf Arab countries from Iran. Once he's gone, that's it. They they're done if the Iranians uh decide to do anything about it. The Israelis didn't care because the Israelis had a longer view than we did. The Israeli view was, we're going to help you take out Iraq.

[17:54] And then once it's taken out, we're going to help you take out Iran and Libya and Syria and, you know, everybody. I mean, that was the plan all along. I mean, look what they did Look what they did in Lebanon. You don't have to like Hassan Nasrallah at all or what he stands for or his politics or whatever to acknowledge that what Israel did in Lebanon was a war crime.

[18:26] But they don't care about that. They'll kill This is This is one thing that they do that most other countries in the region don't do as a matter of policy. If they have a target located in a in a block of apartments, let's say, they will blow up the entire city block and kill a thousand people if they think they can get that one guy. That one. Nobody else does that. And then they bombed Qatar last week.

[18:59] Did everybody in the world forget that it's Qatar that's the home to the largest US air base in the world? And the Qataris finally today came to us and said, so what are you guys going to do about this? They bombed us in broad daylight knowing we're US ally knowing that we have the largest American airbase in the world here and you guys just said, "Oh, well, you know what? They didn't inform us." So, sorry.

[19:30] With our own weapons, thank you. With our own weapons. We put up with things from the Israelis that are incomprehensible to anybody who follows these issues. It It's just It's an utter mystery to me why we tolerate this kind of of behavior from anybody. We wouldn't tolerate this from from an enemy, certainly. Why would we tolerate it from a friend? And, you know, I'm going to use friend

[20:01] in air quotes. Forgive me if you've heard me tell these stories. But, I was on the job for, I don't know, 3 months, maybe. This was in early 1990, like March of 1990. And, I was instructed to attend my very first liaison briefing. This is the first briefing I ever did as a young 25-year-old, 20 whatever I was, 24-year-old CIA officer. We're going to brief the Israelis. And, I said, "Okay. It's going to be the first foreign intelligence service that I'm declared to, where they say, 'This

[20:31] is John Kiriakou. He's a CIA officer. He's going to brief you today.'" So, the first thing I was told was "We're not going to brief them here at headquarters." I said, "Oh, okay. Why not?" "The Israelis aren't allowed to come in headquarters." I said, "Why not?" "Because every time they come, they bring us gifts, and the gifts always have listening devices embedded in them." Every time. And, they're packed with batteries. Like, they'll give We have a seal of the CIA. We want to give it to you as a gift. Well, we have seals

[21:03] everywhere in every room. And, this one's packed with batteries that will last for 18 months. So, no, we're not We don't want your gift. Thank you. So, we meet them in an off- campus place. We We call it this the Israel safe house, okay? So, I'm the junior most analyst at this briefing, which meant that I went last. So, everybody else went first. There were like 11 of us. The political analyst, the economic analyst, the military

[21:34] analyst, the oil analyst, the overhead imagery lady came over from the Navy Yard, and everybody did their thing. I was the um Iraq uh leadership analyst, which meant I What I did all day was to do psychological profiles of the Iraqi leadership. So, it comes to me, and I was given the script to follow, and I said, "Hello, my name is John Kiriakou. I'm the Iraq analyst in the Office of Leadership Analysis." And there were two Israelis in the

[22:05] briefing, one Mossad and one Shin Bet. And the Shin Bet guy writes down my name, and he says, "Spell your name." So, I spell it for him. And then he looks up at me over his glasses, and he says, "You are Jewish?" And I said, "I am not recruitable. Don't even think that you can recruit me." I was so angry, I was shaking as I gave the briefing, and I said, "Now I have to go to security and report that I was

[22:36] pitched." And they laughed, and they said, "They've done that to all of us. It's like they can't help themselves." I was furious. My boss, when I got a home When I got back to the office, my boss said, "How did it go?" I said, "I want to strangle that Shin Bet guy." And he said, "I knew it. I knew he was going to pitch you. He pitches all of us." Well, the head of security at the CIA added a little something. In a briefing in which we were being warned about

[23:07] counterintelligence threats, we were told to never ever ever go to this steakhouse on Route 123 that is closest it's the closest restaurant to the CIA. And the reason why we're not allowed to we were not allowed to go there is because the Russians thought that that's like the only place we went. So, anytime you go, it's all KGB agents sitting together waiting for the CIA people to go in and they never went in. We would always go another mile down the

[23:37] road and go to other restaurants. So, um as part of that briefing, he said, "You know, it's not just the Russians we have to worry about." He said, "Israel is ranked as critical threat, the highest threat level, critical threat for counterintelligence." He said, "Many of you have met the Mossad and Shin Bet representatives at the Israeli Embassy here." I had just met them. And he said, "Well, there are 189 undeclared Israeli spies fanned out all

[24:10] across the United States to steal our defense secrets." Now, why? We give them everything. So, why would they be spying on us? Actually, cuz we don't give them everything. We give them only 99% of everything. And they want that last 1%. I'll give you an example. When we developed the F-35, we said to the Israelis, "Hey, we're we have this new thing, this new F-35. It's supposed to be our best plane. It's stealth and it's a bomber and it does all kinds of great tricks." They said,

[24:41] "We want it." We said, "Yes, that's why we're offering it to you. We're going to give you the first F-35. We're going to call it the F-35I for Israel." And they said, uh "Why are you going to make a difference between the F-35 and the F-35I?" And we said, "Because, God forbid, if you're in a dog fight or there's a mechanical malfunction and it crashes, we don't want the Iranians to get it, the Russians, the Chinese, the Syrians. So, what we're going to do is we're going to very slightly degrade the avionics."

[25:15] Well, they didn't like that one bit. And so, they decided to steal the avionics. At the same time, the Emirates came to us and they said, "Hey, we want this F-35." We said, "Great, we're going to give it to you. We're going to call it the F-35E for Emirates. It's going to be exactly the same as the F-35I. So, we're going to slightly degrade the avionics." They said, "Fine, we'll take it." Not the Israelis. They wanted the F-35, period.

[25:46] With no letter afterwards. A couple of years later, I decided I wanted to serve overseas. And um several of my colleagues in the office also wanted to serve overseas at the same time in what was called the analyst overseas program. You'd do a rotation, an actual transfer to the State Department and you serve as a foreign service officer. And so, I went to Bahrain. My friends actually got married and went together to Jerusalem. So, when they arrived

[26:16] the ambassador took them to Mossad and said, "You already know my officers. They've gotten married and they're here declared to you. The wife is going to work on Palestinian political issues and the husband is going to go to the university and learn Arabic." And they said, "Fine." So, the ambassador held a welcome party. They call They call it a hail and farewell party. You say, "Hello, welcome to the new people." and farewell to the people who are transferring out. And when they um got back home from Tel Aviv later that

[26:48] night they saw that all of their living room furniture had been rearranged while they were gone. And they're like, okay, going to be jerks about it. So, they reported it and and the embassy said, yeah, they do that. They'll break into the house and just just so that you know that they can do whatever they want. You There's nothing you can do about it. A year later, they go to another party at the at the ambassador's residence and when they get

[27:19] home, people had taken shits in all of the toilets in their house and left them unflushed. So, they're like, all right, Israelis again. They have to report it. They broke into the house. They took a dump in the house so all every one of the toilets. And they give us these giant houses, right? Cuz you're you have to entertain. So, like for me, my wife and I had our son was like 16 months old. I had like a five-bedroom house. Talking

[27:49] about big houses with lots of toilets. Another year later, it's time to leave and to come back to headquarters and so the ambassador throws a hail and farewell party for them. And then they get back to the house and the dog is under the dining room table and he's whimpering because they had cut his tail off and they wrapped it in gauze and medical tape.

[28:20] Why? You're supposed to be our best friends in the world. Why would they do something like this? It's because they're not our friends. They care only about themselves, quite literally. And if it means spying on us and stealing our secrets and harassing our employees and lying, maybe maybe killing Americans? You know? I was going to I was going to say I

[28:52] apologize I only have 2 minutes left, but I was going to say something in my original planned speech about the dancing Israelis. Of course they were dancing. You bet they were dancing because they knew exactly what 9/11 meant. 9/11 meant that we were going to feel compelled to go overseas and kill as many Muslims as we possibly could. Of course they were dancing in the streets. That's exactly what they wanted to happen. Exactly what they wanted to happen. And it's what happened. But then when it wasn't good enough for us to go kill

[29:24] Afghans or a handful of Al-Qaeda people they engineered Iraq with Dick Cheney and David Addington and Scooter Libby and all of the other war criminals who were working either at the White House or at the Pentagon at the time. And now here we are all these years later, we still don't know the truth about 9/11. We don't know the role that the Israelis played. We don't know the role that the Saudis played because we're not allowed to investigate it. And uh we're supposed to just uh

[29:56] just shake the Israelis' hands and forget about all the past and wish them the best or else you're an anti-Semite. Remember? If you're anti-Netanyahu, by God that means you hate all Jews and we can't have that. And so here we are 24 years after the fact. You know, in my mind 9/11 was like last Tuesday. Um but 24 years have passed. And we're no better off than we were 24 years ago.

[30:27] Not while we have or worse. Not while we have the Israelis hanging around our necks like an anvil. So thank you very much for listening to me. >> [applause]
