Title: CIA Officer John Kiriakou Rates 9 Counterterrorism Scenes In
Show: Insider
Date: 2024-12-17
URL: https://youtu.be/XXrxAMIULBo
Duration: 24:00

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[00:00] Uh, that's that's how it played out. There was never any intent to take Bin Laden alive. My name is John Kiryaku. I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer and after the 9/11 attacks, I became the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan where I led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of dozens of al-Qaeda fighters. I went on to be the chief investigator at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today, we'll be looking at counterterrorism scenes in movies and TV and judging how real they are.

[00:36] Yeah, literally none of that is true to life. But that's that's what makes you love James Bond. First of all, I'll say almost no officers carried weapons. You have to be in a in a post that is rated as high or critical threat for uh terrorism. Uh, the only posts where I ever carried a gun were Athens and uh and Pakistan. Um, otherwise I was I was always unarmed. And you're not going to walk into

[01:06] Parliament just opening fire. That's just it's just not real life. You got me. Now here's your prize. Love it. that as part of this film was absolutely believable. In this James Bond movie, Raul is considered to be what's called a lonewolf terrorist. Somebody who's not a member of an organized group. He acts alone. Those are more prevalent than you

[01:36] might think. And the person who comes to mind most immediately is Carlos the Jackal. This is a guy who successfully kidnapped, get this, all at once, every single oil minister in OPEC. But for all intents and purposes, Carlos was a lone wolf. Attacking public transport is quite easy. Transportation is probably the weak link in our infrastructure. In Tokyo, there was an attack some years ago uh by uh Amrikio, terrorist group.

[02:10] It was more of a cult really that that adopted terrorism as a as a uh policy uh where they they spread poison gas through the ventilation system and killed a whole bunch of people. So although we've not seen something like this happen, uh it is possible that it could. Well, may I give it a couple of different ratings? So shooting up parliament uh no sorry one but threat to transportation while it's not you know

[02:40] crazy action-packed like we saw with you know uh Raul blows a hole in the the ceiling that's not going to happen but that threat is real. So I'd say seven or eight good evening Mr. Hunt the weapons you recovered in Bellarus were confirmed to be VX nerve gas capable of devastating a major city. So, at the beginning of this clip, Ethan Hunt was told that he's looking for nerve gas, right? That's true. I mean, every major intelligence service hunt for chemical,

[03:11] biological, and nuclear weapons. $50 million to let Benji go. They come one step closer. Shoot me. Stop. Yeah. You know, there there are elements of reality in that. Sometimes part of the job, especially in counterterrorism, is that you have to put yourself in dangerous positions like that. Well, there was there was one situation where I was I was handling a double agent. He didn't know that I knew he was a double agent. And he didn't

[03:43] know that I knew that he had been instructed to shoot me in our final meeting. So, we had prepared a team just like you saw here in the clip to protect me. It's not as sexy as this is with a beautiful woman sitting there next to you, you know, with a gun in your ribs to do you the favor of killing you. Um, you know, and the the technology isn't on your contact lens. Uh, but the idea is correct. on realism. I'd give it like

[04:14] a four because the danger of that of that final meeting, sure, is accurate. It's a little cooler than it is in real life and the rest of it's just Hollywood. Attack at Camp Chapman was a catastrophe for the CIA. I actually worked with several of those people. There was a source who had been offered up to us by a a third country intelligence service. he got right into the center of the base. It was a failure at every step of the way. There were

[04:45] there were almost immediate improvements uh after this happened. So, suicide attacks happen. Um they're not supposed to happen at that grand scale, but it's always a danger consistent with all counterterrorism raids, especially counterterrorism raids related to al-Qaeda. First of all, they're all at night, usually in the middle of the night. Uh in Pakistan, we only did our raids after 2 am or at or after 2 am because you want people to be asleep.

[05:17] You want them to be caught unawares. That's what they did in this case. Now, they came in to the bin Laden compound with all accounts uh that's that's how it played out. There was never any intent to take Bin Laden alive. There are similarities in the real life raid that the movie got wrong and they got it wrong on purpose. In the moon rate analysis, a targeting analyst is going to pour through sometimes millions of pieces of data.

[05:48] Put this thing together where you can say we've narrowed it down to this neighborhood in Abadabad, Pakistan. The one thing that bothers me the most is when Hollywood perpetuates the myth that torture prevented acts of terrorism or disrupted acts of terrorism. And to me, that myth is dangerous in that it affects public opinion. This was a film that the CIA made a policy decision on that it was going to cooperate fully to

[06:19] the point where senior CIA officers gave them inappropriately classified briefings over a classified mockup of the Bin Laden compound. Okay, that's that's chargeable under the Espionage Act. The CIA just turned it over. Why? Because it made the CIA look good. This clip as a clip, the clip that we just watched, I would give it a nine because it is pretty much the way things played out.

[06:50] But no, it wasn't the torture that gave up Osama bin Laden. My name is Ali Sufan. I'm with the FBI. There's only one interrogation technique that works. Rapport building. Another person that you saw in the clip was Ali Sufan. Ali uh Ali and I worked together both in Yemen and in uh in Pakistan. Ali Sufan went to the secret site and Ali did what the FBI has been doing. He established a rapport with his prisoner

[07:21] and after about six weeks of this rapport development with Ali, he finally opened up and he gave us actionable information. We stop the music when he starts talking, then he can sleep. Learned helplessness. So, briefly in this clip, you see one of those contract psychologists, um, James Mitchell, explaining to Ali Sufan what his goal is. His goal is

[07:53] learned helplessness. That's the goal. The goal is to completely break him psychologically. Now they did that by using what they called enhanced interrogation techniques. Some of them were very very minor and mild. It sort of worsened to things like sleep deprivation. We saw that in the clip with the loud music and you saw Abubeta hanging by his uh wrists uh with handcuffs. So he can't kneel or sit or lay or get comfortable in any way.

[08:25] One, two, three. Where is the next attack? Waterboarding, which most Americans now know about, and was supposed to be the worst. And it's pretty darn bad. We waterboarded each other in training just to see what it's like. It's awful. Sleep deprivation and the cold cell actually killed more people where, you know, it's already 50°. You're you're so cold, you're naked, and then you have this ice water thrown on you, and your body just stops working. you go into into uh into shock

[09:00] and just die. You can put whatever euphemism you want on it. You can call it enhanced interrogation tech. I don't care what you call it. What we did to some of those people was just illegal. Just to be transparent, I was the script adviser on that film and um it was written by a friend of mine. Everything in that film was true. Everything was based on the Senate

[09:30] torture report. In this clip, we see Adam Driver, who is portraying the Senate Intelligence Committee's lead investigator on the CIA's torture program. What was released was not the Senate torture report. It was a very heavily redacted copy of the executive summary of the torch report. The torch report itself was 5,000 pages long. The executive summary was 500. They waterboarded him 183 times. Everything

[10:01] they got from him was either a lie or something they already had. Well, now what we saw in this clip was Adam Driver uh briefing Senator Diane Feinstein. this who at the time was the senior republic senior Democratic senator from California and chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee on his findings his findings were that Khalik Muhammad who was the mastermind of the 911 attacks was waterboarded 187 times Abeda was waterboarded 83

[10:32] times neither one of them gave up any actionable intelligence uh during torture I objected to the CIA's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques which I believe to be torture. And I went public with that information in December of 2007. I resigned from the CIA to go into the private sector. All this time, by the way, I'm waiting for somebody to come out and say something. And nobody said anything. As a result, I was prosecuted and served 30 months in prison. But I'm

[11:05] glad I did. Somebody had to do it. And in the end, I think it made the country a safer place. This clip and the movie, the report as a whole is a 10. A strong 10. We got lucky jacking with NATO satellite. And that's the location right there. Yeah. Cinnamon. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times we droned weddings or funerals and then we'd have to say, "Oh, sorry. Here's a million dollars. Our

[11:37] apologies." So that is unfortunately true. Uh what's not true, it wouldn't be up to an individual case officer to order an air strike. She could call the head of CTC and recommend the air strike and he says go for it. Members of the Pakistani Taliban vowed retaliation for the alleged attack. Ham Hakani has been martyed. Yeah, this kind of thing happens all the time. So in this clip, this member of the Pakistani Taliban named Hakani uh was was the

[12:08] target. The Hakani network is a real network, a real terrorist network uh right on the Afghan Pakistani border. They're really Afghans. But anyway, be that as it may, we learn later on in this season that Hakani was not at the site and had lived. That is also something that's quite common. You know, rarely rarely does the American government admit to a mistake. There was a mistake in Afghanistan just days before we we pulled out where we killed this, you know, highv value target who

[12:40] was loading missiles into the trunk of his car. He was actually not only not a high-value target, he was an employee of the American government and we just blew him up with a with a with a missile from a drone and then said, "Ah, sorry, our bad." Who added that Mr. Hakani was attending a wedding at the time of the attack and that over 40 members of his family were also killed. And then you end up killing civilians virtually every single time, which is another problem. The

[13:11] National Security Council, um the Department of Defense and indirectly the CIA say that they do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties. That's just simply not true. First, uh, the entire intelligence community is unrepentant when it comes to civilian casualties. They see it as, you know, part of the price of the so-called war on terror. Uh, that is uh it's a violation of international law, of course, and it's also inhumane. There's a very

[13:43] courageous drone whistleblower by the name of uh Daniel Hail. He was operating a drone remotely and he fired and he killed a 9-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl and that's when he said he couldn't be a part of this [Applause] anymore. Anybody who's involved in counterterrorism or who has served in the Middle East or uh South Asia for, you know, more than one tour has been involved in something like that. Um I've

[14:14] been evacuated many times. Yeah, I'd call this an eight. Um, with these Hollywood problems that we mentioned, um, the actual day-to-day in Homeland was pretty pretty right on. Oh my god. Yeah, I remember that like it was yesterday. What we're seeing in this clip is just one one aspect of

[14:45] what was a very well-coordinated long-term attack in Mumbai. More than 100 people were killed. I was working for ABC News when that took place. Uh I was I was a counterterrorism consultant at ABC News and I decided to flip through the channels to see what everybody was saying about this attack. I go to CNN, it's al-Qaeda. go to Fox, it's al-Qaeda. MSNBC, it's al-Qaeda. And I said to my

[15:15] wife, al-Qaeda has no beef with the Indians. Why would they do something like this? So, I went to ABC and I I get miked up and go on and they asked me my initial impressions and I said, I don't think this is al-Qaeda. I think this is a Kashmir separatist group. It turned out it was a Kashmir separatist group. We learned later, like a year later, that they had carried out these attacks with training from al-Qaeda. The Indians, frankly, were caught flatfooted. Certainly, they have

[15:46] experience with with terrorism in Kashmir, and this is a an issue, an ongoing violent issue between the Indians and the Pakistanis in the north of the country. But in Mumbai, they had never experienced anything like this before. I want you please go this way. Yeah, the hotel staff uh this is really the story here. They were absolutely heroic in their uh quick thinking to save probably hundreds of hotel guests.

[16:18] They were able to to get them out of the hotel. Yeah, this movie was right on. I I'd give it a nine or a 10. This was an excellent movie. We've recently discovered a large Alleim safe house and training cell here in Aman. I would need your help with surveillance, sir. So, this this was entirely true to life. So, intelligence um liaison cooperation happens every day in every capital in every country around

[16:49] the world. Um it benefits everybody to have a liazison relationship even with a country that you might be enemies with. That's what we saw here in this clip. Leonardo DiCaprio went to the Jordanian uh intelligence uh service and said uh we need a uh we need a source inside al-Qaeda. Gave uh his Jordanian counterpart uh the file. Counterterrorism is an easy one, right?

[17:20] Just about everybody's going to cooperate on counterterrorism. Well, first of all, the Jordanian Intelligence Service is one of the best intelligence services in the world. They are very sophisticated and they are very good friends to us, great partners. I've known him since he was a teenager. Now he's alqaeda. A white guy with blonde hair and blue eyes is not going to infiltrate al-Qaeda. But that guy will. And then

[17:51] another myth that comes out of Hollywood is that the CIA is able to directly infiltrate foreign terrorist groups. That's just simply not true. Half of the people at the CIA who speak Arabic have blonde hair and blue eyes, are African-American, speak Arabic with uh an an American accent. You're not going to infiltrate a terrorist group that way. What you have to do is to recruit access agents who can do it on your behalf. All we need is to establish that he is there. Mhm. Hopefully a buzz of

[18:23] messages will then pass among jihadist networks. You have a go. Can you imagine writing a cable to headquarters and saying, "I have an idea for an operation. Let's blow up the American embassy." It's like, "No, no, you can implement a false flag operation." A false flag operation is when you do something and either blame it on someone else or allow someone else to take

[18:53] credit for it. But no, not not like we saw in the clip. The account of the relationship is is so good. I I'd give it an eight. The only reason I wouldn't give it a nine or 10 is because that the bombing of this American facility is just so nuts that Sorry. But yeah, the rest of it right on me. That was such a great movie. So Munich tells the story, the true story of the

[19:23] attack against the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in the 1972 Olympics. This was an attack carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group called uh Black September. And um they they killed every single Israeli athlete. Every single one. Where's the explosion? It should have exploded by now. So, what we saw in that clip was was the Israeli team killing one of the terrorists responsible for the 1972 uh

[19:55] Olympic massacre. Um, and the Palestinians escaped. Well, the Israeli government set out to hunt them down one by one all over the world and killed every single one of them but one. There was one who, you know, died of old age, but uh but they got every single one of the others. It was not one Israeli team that, you know, went all around the world. It was multiple Israeli teams over the course of years. On realism, yeah, I'd give it a seven because the the the core the

[20:25] structure of the film was completely based in fact. They sexied it up a little bit. It was essentially [Music] real. Yes. So this is based on a hijacking that took place in the 1990s uh of an Indian airflight 814 uh and it was it was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan. Now that's important

[20:56] because Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban. It was the stronghold of the Taliban. So to land in Kandahar the hijackers really believed that they would get everything that they wanted because they were mujahedin, right? They were freedom fighters, strugglers, and uh and they they didn't get everything they wanted. You saw in the beginning of the clip, they wanted $200 million in cash. They wanted dozens of of people released. They ended up getting three released, one of whom was rearrested.

[21:33] This is an unusual clip because we don't really see um members of the Taliban, let alone senior of the Taliban actually in action or at work. As awful as the Taliban were as an organization, in in an odd, perverted way, they took this idea of Muslim hospitality seriously, you've got a plane load of hostages who've been hijacked and flown from India to Afghanistan,

[22:05] and you can't execute them because they're now the guests of the Taliban. And one of the things that I think most Americans don't understand, and I was just as guilty of it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is that the Taliban didn't, you know, come down from the sky and just impose themselves. These are the the fathers, the brothers, the sons of Afghan families. On the other side, the Taliban couldn't understand why we were so angry with them in 2001. They

[22:36] hadn't attacked the United States. real disconnect. This was all true. I remember when this played out. I was living in the Middle East. U this is a 10. I think the most convincing CIA related film that I've seen is The Recruit. Um the first half was 100% accurate to the point where we all stayed to watch the credits to see who their adviser was. not apppropo, but what we were talking about a second ago, the show 24 was wildly popular and Kefir

[23:08] Sutherland did a fantastic job, but none of that was believable. There was one scene I'll never forget where he's on the metro in Washington and he jumps out of the metro into the Arlington Cemetery station and he's got his gun out and he's going like this. And I thought, "Oh my god, are you kidding me? You've just committed like three felonies. Thanks for watching and if you like this, why not click on the next

[23:38] video?
