Title: Real News — Reality Asserts Itself
Show: Reality Asserts Itself (Paul Jay)
Date: 2023-04-24
URL: https://youtu.be/CeOjkWALQBs
Duration: 22:00

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[00:01] [Music] welcome back to the real news network this is reality asserts itself and i'm paul jay we're continuing our series of interviews with john kiriakou who joins us again in the studio thanks for joining us thanks for having me so one more time john's a former cia analyst and then became a case officer and he's author of the book the reluctant spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror he spent about 23 months in jail and is now under

[00:32] house arrest for another 40 odd days for being the only person convicted to having anything to do with the torture program in the united states and no he wasn't convicted for torturing anybody he was convicted for whistleblowing when john joined the cia in 1990 he was 25 years old how do you get recruited by the cia in grad school i took a class called leadership very simply it was taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of dr gerald post

[01:05] dr post is one of the country's leading thinkers in the area of terrorist psychology so in this class one of our assignments was to shadow our bosses and write a psychological profile of that boss at the time i was working at the united food and commercial workers international union in washington long history of labor involvement in my family and i wrote a paper and i

[01:37] said that i believed my boss was a sociopath and that he was potentially dangerous and i offered evidence to show why i thought he was potentially dangerous so i got an a on this paper and in the margin dr post wrote i've never done this before but i urge you to resign from this job i too believe that your boss is a sociopath so i quit and got another job in the meantime he asked me to stay after class one day

[02:07] and he said do you have any uh job lined up after graduation and i said uh dr post not only do i not have a job i don't even have any prospects for a job and i'm getting married a couple of weeks after graduation so he said have you ever given any thought to the cia and i said no not really you think you'd be interested i said sure i have nothing else going on and so he uh took me back to his office

[02:39] went through his rolodex in the days when everybody had a rolodex and as he was going through the rolodex i remember seeing um one card that said ollie north home and it had a number and i thought who is this guy that he has oliver north's home phone number and his rolodex and this is pretty much in the in the midst of iran contra or just after the end of iran contra so he he calls a number and says uh bob are you free i have a good one

[03:09] and uh hung up the phone and said you need to go to roslyn uh the rosalind metro station in arlington virginia go to this address and ask for bob so i got on the subway took it one stop uh to roslyn and i went to this completely nondescript building that no longer exists and went up to the sixth floor and i buzzed a buzzer and a uniformed cop of some sort

[03:40] came out and said are you here for bob i said i am so he lets me into a little atrium and there's another door that has a big spin lock on it and a cipher like a bank vault so he buzzes that door and it opens and a woman pops her head out just her head and she says are you here for bob i said i'm here for bob so she lets me in and a minute later this huge six foot five 350 pound guy comes out and with his hand out says

[04:13] hi i'm bob are you john i said i am come on in here john i talked to him for a few minutes and he said what i want you to do is saturday morning at eight o'clock be at the george washington university medical center auditorium you're going to take some tests i said okay so that saturday morning i went into town and went to the uh the medical school auditorium there were 200 people there at least

[04:44] and the proctors handed out these stacks of papers so one was a big map of the world but it was just blank all the countries were divided but it was blank and you had to write in the name of every country and i say in my book i was always a map nut so i just scribbled in the names of all the countries and uh and the next one was a current events test multiple choice crazy easy like you didn't even have to subscribe to a newspaper at the time

[05:14] if you had just walked by the box holding the washington post and looked at the top half of the front page you could have done well on this test it was very easy i finished that quickly and then the third test was very long several thousand questions the questions were all yes or no and i also mentioned this in the book as an example one of the questions was i like boxing and the truth is i didn't really care one way or the other about boxing mike tyson was prominent at the time and

[05:45] i liked mike tyson so i thought well i don't really care about boxing but if mike tyson's fighting i'll usually stop and watch it so i put yes but then like 234 questions later it says i like boxing and i thought geez what did i say the first time i can't remember i think i said yes i think i put yes and then another 400 questions later it says i like boxing and i was like geez oh man so you see

[06:16] what they're doing they're looking for patterns so i did it i finished it i finished it first of anybody and i sat there for a while and looked around and nobody else is getting up so i thought ah i'm done so i got up i handed it to the proctor and i walked out my wife picks me up and she says how'd you do i said i have no idea i have no idea how i did i said the questions were so weird i'm not sure what they were looking for a week or so later i get a call from bob he says you blew the doors off that

[06:48] that test i want you to go to another equally nondescript building in vienna virginia take some more tests were any of the questions on the test political what do you think of this we don't think of that nothing like that it's all attitudinal all attitudinal uh the the current events test was was so simple it was i i remember one of the questions was the prime minister of greece is a andreas papandreou b mao zetang or d youth ant so come on you know

[07:21] i just blew right through it okay when you're thinking about joining the cia first of all it doesn't sound like you thought too much about it i didn't think at all about it but did it not occur to you to think about the church committee for example that that you must have been aware you're a savvy guy oh yeah this the church committee just for people that don't know i mean the church committee that investigated terrible misdeeds assassination attempts something terrible terrible things the church committee revealed and afterwards there were many investigative pieces in newspapers

[07:52] and magazines and the cia had done bad stuff bad stuff that didn't ring for you do i want to be part of this i knew i knew a guy in college whose father worked at the cia and i asked him if he would have coffee with me one day and i asked him questions and then there was a uh woman i knew in grad school whose boyfriend worked at the cia and i did the same thing with him we had dinner one night and they told me that yes the church committee had revealed terrible crimes but by god the cia had

[08:24] cleaned up its act and it's a great place to work and you're going to love it because everything is good and everything is clean now and everything's by the book and i said great that sounds like a place for me and who can say no to bob that's right who could say no to bob all right so you go to another nondescript building and another another bob no i met there by three three individuals a psychologist a psychiatrist and an

[08:55] anthropologist and they interview me and they're asking me questions like describe your relationship with your mother and i said well i have a terrific mother you know she's always been supportive we've always gotten along and they look at each other and not uh describe your relationship with your father or was your father the disciplinarian in the family and then finally they asked me a question that that still sticks with me have you ever betrayed a friendship and

[09:26] i said oh my god i hope not i don't think so i said let me think about it they said no no that's the answer we were looking for i said okay when that was done they took hair blood urine sent me on my way and then a week later bob calls and said you aced those tests so we're going to send you for um interviews so he set up a day's worth of interviews at cia

[09:56] headquarters and a couple of weeks after that i got an offer in the mail now you wrote in your book i i believe that that they like to look for people with did you call trending towards social path well a cia psychiatrist told me one time that the cia looks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths because sociopaths have no consciences but people with sociopathic tendencies

[10:27] are comfortable operating in moral and legal gray areas so do you think they found that in you i think they probably did because at that time when they asked me the question they they offered a a scenario they said you know that mr x has something in his house that you need whether it's a file or whatever you need it and you work on him to recruit him so that eventually he turns that file over to you

[10:57] but he's not recruitable and in the end when you ask him for the file he tells you no what do you do i said i break into the house and take the file seemed like a perfectly logical answer to me because they were but you understood they were asking oh of course think like a cia absolutely i mean did you you believe that or you were feeding them something you thought they wanted to hear no i believed that if if mr x was a russian scientist let's say i would absolutely break into his house and take it

[11:28] right we're the good guys they're the bad guys so sure i believed it so you're hired you go through orientation and you're writing the book that one of the people that's giving you the orientation i'm quoting the director of the office of security made the biggest impression on you saying something has stayed something has stayed with you all these years that he said the greatest threat facing america today is the threat of soviet communism and you didn't take you didn't think so i thought that was absurd this is

[12:00] january of 1990 right the berlin wall is down the soviet union is breaking up and eastern europe is turning democratic and this old man is standing there telling us that the greatest threat we face is soviet communism i thought it was ridiculous and i wondered if it was just for show if it was to make us feel like wow we're really part of something now but as the years passed i think i've come to the conclusion that that he believed it that he was one of

[12:30] those old-timers who just couldn't change with the times just the culture was too embedded what did you think was the greatest threat and and were you joining because you thought there was a threat or you were joining us of something interesting to do no i thought it would be interesting and frankly i was looking forward to the travel that's really what uh what was most exciting for me you know i i really didn't think there was any any large transnational threat at the time except maybe terrorism uh and i had my own thoughts on on

[13:00] terrorism i i believe that the real threat was nationalist terrorism or communist terrorism whether it was the pflp dflp pfl pgc some of the greek groups the red brigades the action direct you know those were the groups that were killing americans overseas hezbollah although that was religious and not uh not nationalist that's where i thought the real threats were coming not the former soviet union and that's what it was at that point it was already

[13:31] the former soviet union right so you get in and very quickly you're sent to kuwait well i was given i was given kuwait as a what they called a training account i was told you know kuwait has this very interesting democratic movement people demonstrate every once in a while they're experimenting with a democratically elected parliament so learn kuwait learn how to write in the cia's analytics style and then you

[14:02] can move on to something really interesting like romania that's what the guy told me so i thought dog got it i'm going to be stuck with this country where nothing ever happens i'm never going to get promoted this is still you're still in arlington or you're actually in kuwait no i'm in arlington still so i did kuwait for four months and then in april of 1990 i also picked up iraq and at the time in the cia you could count on two hands the number

[14:33] of people that covered iraq and i mean in everything analysis operations everything press you name it again i was told that iraq is a good training company nothing ever changes there it's the same cabinet since 1968 right no changes nothing happens no trouble no problems i said okay now just to be clear for everybody you're in the analysis section not the operation section no we had very

[15:04] poor relations with iraq at the time so our embassy was very very small it was something like four or five people there wasn't really much reporting coming out of it i'd read the iraqi papers every day or translations of the iraqi papers that weren't in english and i was really more focused on on iraq and then on august 2nd 1990 iraq invaded kuwait i should say it was more focused on kuwait so iraq invaded kuwait the night before the invasion we predicted

[15:35] that the iraqis would of course cross the border and i had a softball game that night the cia has its own softball league that way if you say something classified it's okay because everybody's a cia employee right so i had a softball game that night and one of the older guys came up to me and said i don't think how i don't think you understand how important this iraq kuwait thing is he said it's

[16:05] one thing for our countries to go to war with each other the countries that we cover it's an entirely different thing for the country we covered to go to war with us he said you have a chance here to really become somebody so pay close attention and do your analysis and how much pressure was there on you next iraq war style to shape and modify your analysis in favor of saddam's totally the bad guy

[16:36] our hands are clean yeah you mean in 2003 no no no i'm talking back like this when you're analyzing like for example yeah prior to the first gulf war it later came out how much there was like this infant that was supposedly infants being tortured story was apparently a fraud there's a pretty good documentation the american ambassador uh to iraq let saddam no no that's not true but i was there that night she got a bum rap on that that was ambassador april glaspie right

[17:07] april glaspie was instructed by the secretary of state who was james baker at the time to go to see saddam and to tell saddam that the united states will not take a position on arab arab border disputes that's all she said i don't think ever any more than that's ever been said right that she said the interpretation's been well that we will not interfere after the fact the press said that saddam's interpretation was that that was a green light but her instructions were not to

[17:38] give him the green light i understand i i i as i've always heard the story what you said is what she said yeah but there was never a suggestion that we would intervene quite the opposite this is your business between you and kuwait and we're going to stay out of it that was nobody nobody expected him to take the entire country frankly we expected that iraqi troops would move across the border and that they would take that narrow strip on the kuwaiti side that included the southern tip of the ramella oil field that's what everybody expected to happen

[18:09] because frankly the truth of the matter is the kuwaitis were drilling horizontally so they were drilling in their little tip of the ramayla oil field underneath the iraqi border and they were stealing the oil iraq stealing iraqi oil stealing iraqi oil and so and you knew that at the time everybody did and it was in the papers and everything so everybody including including us believed that the iraqis would move across the border take the oil field and that would be the end of it in fact within 24 hours they took the entire country and then just began

[18:40] murdering everybody the uh but some of the murder stories were exaggerated this murder of infants yeah i never understood why the kuwaitis felt compelled to exaggerate those stories because there were so many despicable crimes against humanity that iraqi soldiers were committing in kuwait there was no reason to lie about them i remember when when the girl that you're speaking about testified before congress i remember watching that at the c.i.a and saying i know that girl isn't she

[19:10] just the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter that's so nassar's daughter so i mean it only took but a day or two to break the story that this whole thing was a setup right and frankly the kuwaitis the kuwaitis were guilty of of um of of lying and trying to propagandize the situation but so was their public relations firm i don't think the quadies came up with that on their own and when you say everyone expected to come in and just take the oil field then it's not that much of a stretch for

[19:42] saddam said well i have a green light to take the oil field at the time i would have said that that was insane i can see how he may have believed that he had a green light but ambassador glasby certainly did not believe she was giving him a green light because the overall suggestion is that u.s policymakers wanted saddam to go give him some rope to hang himself because they want an excuse to to have the first war i never believed that because saddam was the only thing

[20:13] that we had standing between iran and the small gulf countries we needed saddam and the iranians to just kill each other for decades well that's the same argument about the next saddam war except they didn't stop the invasion right so one can wonder yeah well that just goes to show you what a stupid policy we had in 2003 to to provoke this war with the iraqis because now we've created a regional hegemon in uh in iran

[20:44] we took out an entire an entire sect of iraq and and we've we've disenfranchised sunnis we've taken their positions we've taken them out of government and out of the military and you have an entirely shia military in iraq now that is that is in some ways supportive of uh of iran's theocracy and in other ways uh accepting of it we're gonna carry on with your story uh

[21:14] from kuwait further in the next segment of our interview please join us for the continuation of reality asserts itself with john kiriakou on the real news network [Music]

[22:00] you
