Title: The Sharin Hour 1/11/16: JOHN KIRIAKOU, ex-C.I.A.
Show: The Sharin Hour
Date: 2016-01-12
URL: https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/22412845/shm9734890107.mp3
Duration: 60:00

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[00:00] It's six-ish on Sunday night. Welcome to the Sharon hour with me Sharon James on Laguna's one and only listener supported member supported public FM radio station KX935. I have a very special interview tonight. An ex CIA agent. He was head of counterterrorism in Pakistan after 9-11. He has written a book called The Reluctant Spy, my secret life in the CIA's war on terror.

[00:30] His name is John Kiriaku. I met him in Los Angeles at the Penn Literary Gala where he won a special prize. He had to race back home, so my interview with him is over the telephone. He's back in Washington, but I hope it's clear. He's very forthcoming. He's going to tell us about the inner workings of the CIA along with a couple of James Bond style adventures during the course of his career there. Here then is my interview with John Kiriaku. I guess my first question is what inspired you to be a spy?

[01:07] Well, I kind of went about it in an odd way in that I really didn't set out to be a spy. What happened was, it's actually kind of a funny story, I was in graduate school at George Washington University and I had a professor who was teaching a class called the Psychology of Leadership and this was a fascinating class, right? We were learning about how psychology and in some cases mental illness played a role

[01:38] in decision-making among world leaders through history. So as part of the This professor assigned us a writing project, and what we had to do was to shadow our bosses for a week and write a paper about them, not just a paper but a psychological analysis. So I was working for a labor union at the time, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. In what capacity, John? I was just an intern working for a polling unit that they had where they would take

[02:08] where they would take public opinion polls for other unions, other ASL-CIO member unions. So this guy was a sociopath. He was violent. And I wrote a paper after it ran in with him, saying that he was a sociopath, and that I believe he had psychopathic tendencies. And I gave some examples. So I turned in the paper, and a week later, I got it back, and I had gotten an A. But the professor wrote in the margin, he said, I've never done this before, but I urge you to quit this job. I agree with your assessment that he's a sociopath, and possibly a psychopath, and I think you should quit.

[02:41] Please see me after class. I went to the paper, and I went to see him after class, and he sat me down in his office. And he said, look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm actually undercover as a professor. I'm a senior CIA officer, acting at what's called a spotter, looking for graduate students who I believe would be a good fit at the CIA. Would you be interested in working at the CIA? Fantastic. I had never thought about it and I had no job and I had no prospects for a job and I was

[03:11] going to graduate soon and get married right after that and I said sure I wouldn't mind working for the CIA and he started the whole process, the testing and the background investigation and the polygraph and the medical stuff and several months later I found myself in the CIA. You're tuned to The Sharon Now with me Sharon James on Laguna's One and Only KX 93.5. My guest tonight is a fascinating man, John Kiriakou. He's ex-CIA, has written a book called The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror.

[03:48] He was head of counter-terrorism in Pakistan after 9-11. He started off in analysis, more of a disk job, found that ultimately not exciting enough, and took the tests to become an agent in the field. I want to ask what those tests were actually. Well, there were two rounds of tests. The first round of tests was easy for me. It was three fold. One, there was a very long multiple choice test on current events. And frankly,

[04:20] it was so easy i remember telling friends that you don't even have to read the newspaper every day if you just look at the headline or look at the front page every day without actually reading anything you're still going to do well on this test and i even wrote in my book i remember one of the questions was was the prime minister of grief is a andres papadreo he landed brezhnev c maltsikong or d youth band i mean seriously even if you didn't know you could assume which Which one was the Greek name and which was the Asian name?

[04:51] Exactly, it was that easy. The second test in that round was, it was a large, fold-out map of the world, and all the countries were blank, and we had to fill in the names of all the countries. I would have failed that immediately because my geography is terrible, so. God. Today the truth, countries change names all the time, the country gets carved out all the time. It can be confusing. And then the third one was very long. was several thousand questions and they weren't even really questions as much as they were statements and you had to say agree or disagree and I remembered that

[05:26] one of them was I liked boxing and that the truth is I really didn't care about boxing one way or the other but you have to say yes or no and I thought well I suppose if I'm clicking through the channels and Mike Tyson's fighting Texas is big at the time, I suppose I'll say yes, I think. But then like 285 questions later it says I like boxing and I'm like oh no, what did I say the first time? I can't remember. I think I said

[05:59] yes, I may have said no, and then another 415 questions later it says I like boxing. So I saw what they were trying to do. It was a psychological exam and they just wanted to see if you were consistent and if you were trying to tell them what you thought they wanted to hear. You're listening to the Sharon hour on Lagunas KX 93.5. I'm Sharon James. My guest tonight is ex-CIA agent John Kiryaku telling us about when he first joined the CIA, recruited by a professor

[06:31] at his college and given this incredibly lengthy written test. And I ended up getting a call a couple of weeks later from somebody in personnel and they said that I had blown the doors off these exams so I went on to round two and round two was I had to go to this nondescript building in Virginia and when I arrived I was met by a psychologist a psychiatrist and an anthropologist they were all sitting on one side of the table and I was sitting on the other and I sat down and they asked me questions like can you describe your relationship with your mother

[07:06] And was your father the disciplinarian of the family? And one that really struck me was, have you ever betrayed a friendship? And I, you know, what are the right answers to those questions? I had no idea. Then they told me that they needed to take some hair, blood, and urine, and they sent me on my way, and then I got another call a couple weeks later saying I had aced all those tests. And then I was sent to the CIA headquarters for interviews. I did well in the interviews. And then ironically, I was hired Now, have you ever betrayed a friendship? What did you answer?

[07:50] I said, oh my gosh, no, I don't think so. I said, let me think about it for a minute. And they said, no, no, that's the answer we were looking for. Wow, I mean that's interesting because I would think being a spy the difficult thing is there are going to be lots of Betrayals you have to have that capacity lots of betrayals because in operations That's the nature of the job right then a season's case officer will tell you that those are not true Friendship that you don't allow yourself to become truly friends with somebody you want that person to think that your friends

[08:25] He wants that person to commit espionage for you, or in some cases treason for you. But that doesn't mean that you allow yourself, in your own heart, to really become friends with him. You see, that I would... It's very cynical. Yeah. It sounds awful. Well, here's why it sounds weird, and here's what goes through my head, that if you have the capacity for duplicity, you would think that would span all areas of your life. You are able to compartmentalize, right?

[08:57] Yeah, in many cases it does. Now, a lot of CIA case officers find themselves in legal trouble afterwards, and not for things like whistleblowing, but for things like fraud, for example. I actually served in prison with a former CIA officer who was in prison on multiple counts of fraud, and it's because you lie and trick and cheat and steal for a living for 25 years, that's 30 years. get used to a certain lifestyle and a lot of guys are not able to turn that off. And similarly, the divorce rate at the CIA is sky high, higher than any other governmental

[09:33] organization. And it's because, you know, people are lying and, and cheating every day all day, and then they don't know how to turn it off when they go home at night. And they end up lying to their wives and cheating on their wives until marriages fail. So how does one turn it off? You have to have a strong constitution. You have to be able to turn it off. Now, in my case, I was able to turn it off, but my first wife never believed me when I said that I was going out in the middle of the night because I had to work. She couldn't tell her anything more than the fact that I had to work,

[10:06] and so she left me and my first marriage fell apart. My second wife was a CIA officer, so when I told her I was going to work, she understood. She knew I was telling the truth You're tuned to the Sharon hour on Lagunas KX 93.5. I'm Sharon James and my guest tonight is John Kiriakou, ex CIA agent, also head of counter terrorism in Pakistan after 9-11, also ABC correspondent on terrorism issues.

[10:40] He was recruited into the CIA from college. He had many excellent qualifications including speaking fluent Arabic and Greek. And then he took a very comprehensive test that he's been telling us about. It included one particular question that stuck in my head as we talked. I was wondering on the yes, no answers on your test. Do you think that that was because they wanted you to be unequivocal as well? Well, I think so.

[11:10] I've said this a lot. The CIA likes to think that most issues are black and white, right or wrong, when it comes to internal policies. When it comes to CIA operations, they like to tell you that everything is a shade of gray. And that's where I differed with the CIA's leadership because when it came to the issue of torture, I believe that torture wasn't black and white, it was not a shade of gray. Now a CIA psychiatrist told me once that the CIA looks to hire people with sociopathic not sociopaths. Sociopaths are unable to feel empathy, and they can pass polygraphs very easily, but they can't be trusted.

[11:49] But people with sociopathic tendencies are people who are comfortable working in moral and legal grey areas. So if you're ordered to fly to a foreign country and let's say break into a house, or break into an office and steal a file, or recruit somebody to convince him to give you his country's secrets. You can't lay in bed at night and beat yourself up over the immorality of doing such a thing. You just have to do it. And so that's the kind of person that they look for.

[12:19] But doing it for a cause, I presume, and which you think is not the sociopathic. We all believed we were the good guys. And for me, that changed after September 11th, of course, and I've been quite public about that. But yeah, I always believed we were the good guys. So I had no trouble doing my job. Can you, can you ever empathize with your adversary thinking that they're thinking they're the good guys or can you not let yourself go there? You know, there are always at least two sides to a story, certainly, and sure, sure, you

[12:54] can allow yourself to believe that others are the good guys too, but you're not asking people to commit espionage for you for ideological purposes 99% of the time you're usually asking to do it for money I mean there are a lot of different motivators for people who end up working on a CIA payroll but most of the time I'm gonna say 95% of the time it's money do it for money so that's like basically mercenary right sure you deal with a lot of scumbags in this job now

[13:26] there are others who will do it for ideology. You know, they love the United States and they want to help. There are some who do it for revenge. Maybe they were passed over for a job and they want to exact revenge on their employer or on their government. And they're starting to do it. You should have the thrill of doing it. I met one guy in particular who would take ridiculous chances and he wouldn't take any money from me, but he did it just because he wrote this wrote billion it's interesting i hadn't really even thought about this financial aspect

[14:00] of it it always that's really the most important part of the financial aspect if you are let's say i'm just making this up if you're an iranian nuclear scientist right or a north korean nuclear scientist and you're willing to allow yourself to be recruited by a cia officer and you have access to a CIA officer because you're traveling overseas. Oh my god, the money, the money that could come your way is more than you could ever imagine. Interesting. The mercenary aspect wasn't

[14:31] something that immediately sprung to mind in terms of international espionage. I don't know about you listener. You're tuned to The Sharon Hour with me Sharon James on Laguna's KX93.5. Tonight, I'm talking to a fascinating man, ex-CIA, head of counterterrorism post 9-11 in Pakistan, and ABC correspondent on terrorism issues, John Kiriakou. So, you say there are a lot of scumbags, but there also, I guess, there are kind of dedicated, loyal patriotic people too, right, in the CIA?

[15:10] Oh yeah, I still believe that the CIA is largely made up of thousands of patriotic, smart, good people. People who want nothing more than to serve the American people and to ensure the safety and security of the country. With that said, I've also been very public about my belief that the CIA's leadership is so sempathic and in many cases dangerous. I think they violate international standards of human rights.

[15:40] I think they violate international law when it comes to things like torture or world war. Yes, the torture thing. I've read your book, which is wonderful by the way. I love that you mention that as a leading nation that other nations look up to, we as a so-called civilized society should have the highest standards when it comes to our behavior in times of war as well as in times of peace, obviously. We really need to be that beacon of hope that the rest of the world wants us to be.

[16:11] We need to be examples for other countries. We point and print a couple of times that not only do we have a torture law in this country called the Federal Torture Act which bans torture and which actually goes to the trouble of defining torture and banning it And not only are we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but we actually wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture. So then for us to go out and do exactly what we've been urging other countries to not do

[16:44] over the last decades really does damage the U.S. standing in the world. Yeah, but here you have, as you say, a bunch of, if not sociopaths, people with sociopathic Tendencies acting behind closed doors. How do we get around that? You know, I think that the only way that we can get around that and we see this cyclically in American politics is we have to ride our elected officials in Congress and we have to demand proper oversight of the CIA

[17:17] and its sister intelligence agencies. You know, this happened in the 70s with the church committee. It happened again in the 90s with human rights. And the pendulum has swung the extreme opposite after September 11th, and it's not yet swung back. You're right. We need real congressional leadership to swing it back and to reclaim the moral high ground. Um, so much self-serving stuff is done in the name of 9-11 that has nothing to do with 9-11. It claims me greatly, you're right, that a lot of self-serving stuff has happened since 9-11.

[17:51] For example, this is what bothers me the most is Americans have given up so many of their civil liberties this 9-11 without so much as a debate in Congress, it's as though either people don't care or they don't even realize what they've lost. That bothers me very much. I think it's because they feel disenfranchised that they have no voice to speak up for them. I mean, what are they going to do? Take to the streets and say, we're not going to take it anymore? I could agree in part, but I would disagree in part in that I think a lot of Americans have been duped both by the Bush administration and by the equally horrible Obama administration

[18:26] that we need to give up our civil rights in order to protect the country and I think that's just not true. A quick reminder here that you're tuned to The Sharon Hour on Lagunas KX 93.5. I'm Sharon James and my guest tonight is ex-CIA agent and author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. His name is John Kiryaku. He's also been a terrorism consultant for ABC news and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's senior investigator with a focus on the Middle

[19:02] East and international terrorism and piracy and counter-narcotic concerns. He has a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Legislative Affairs, speaks fluent Arabic and Greek, which has been very helpful in his career. He has also been a recruiter of foreign agents getting them to spy on behalf of the United States, and in his time he's been a whistleblower and imprisoned for such. He is one of the first government officials to confirm that waterboarding

[19:33] was used as a means of torture against Al Qaeda prisoners. And when I met John when he spoke at the recent pen dinner when he was given his award, he was quite vocal about the fact that we the people are systematically also being spied on by our own government without due process. something that really bothers me. Tell our listeners what you mentioned about every email, every phone call, being warehoused somewhere. Yeah we didn't know until Ed Snowden went public and told us

[20:04] that NSA, the National Security Agency, has built a new facility, a storage facility in Utah that can store metadata on every phone call, every text message, and every email sent by every American and received by every American for the next 500 years. Now, is that what we want NSA to be doing? And not just NSA, but of the other intelligence services, to be spying on us, to be spying on American citizens, or do we want them to be targeting

[20:37] our enemies overseas? I'm glad there's an NSA. I think as a First World country, we need an NSA. But that NSA needs to be focused outward, which is the way it was before 9-11. I don't want NSA spying on me. And does it do this by rote, John, or will it just do it in the instance of somebody of interest? It does it by rote with the idea being that if there is an event or if there is an incident or an investigation, it can go back after the fact, pour through the metadata as

[21:09] further the investigation. But, you know, we've got a constitution in this country and I'd like to know where the due process is in that scenario because I'm not seeing it. And that's what scares me totally. There doesn't seem to be due process anymore. There really doesn't. And that is the thing that frightens me most about life on this planet. That you can just kind of get sucked up into this vortex of somebody profiling you in a wrong way and... Right! And the next Next thing you know, you're on the terrorism watch list, or you're on the no-fly list, and you have no idea how you got there, and there's no mechanism for getting off.

[21:43] I know. Let me tell you, tough luck. So what do we do? Any suggestions? Well, there are a couple of very heroic people. There was an article in the New York Times just this week about a man who owns and runs a small telecommunications company. And just after September 11th, he received something called the National Security Letter from the FBI. The FBI uses these new inventions called National Security Letters in lieu of warrants.

[22:13] So a National Security Letter is something that they just write and they say, you give us all your information, rather than to go to court and show probable cause and that's the judge to issue a warrant. This is unique to the post 9-11-11. So they went to this telecommunications company with a National Security Letter and they demanded metadata on this man's customers and subscribers, and he refused to provide it. In fact, he sued the FBI. Well, back in 2006, the court ruled, in its first ruling, that he was allowed to say, publicly,

[22:45] that he had been issued a national security letter. And it was just last week, after 14 years, that the court said that he was right to refuse the FBI access to the data with the national security letters that Americans have a right to do process and so we've got to sue and we have to fight and we have to protest and we have to write op-eds and editorials and we have to call our congressmen and demand that the constitution be respected that we are not going to get into this national security state that we've created

[23:18] You're listening to the Sharon now, with me Sharon James, on Laguna's one and only listener supported member supported public FM radio station KX 93.5. My guest tonight is ex CIA agent, Junkiriyaku. He has written a book called The Reluctant Spy, my secret life in the CIA's war on terror. He has been a whistleblower, publicly critical of some of the CIA's MOs, particularly when

[23:52] it involves civil rights. He spoke about them at the Penn Literary Gala Dinner, and I snapped him up for an interview on this show. Now, forgive me if this sounds moronic, but tell us the difference between the FBI and the CIA and how they operate. Sure, the FBI is a law enforcement organization. It's the federal government's law enforcement organization, and FBI agents have arrest powers. They also have primacy in the United States and in American territories.

[24:24] The CIA is an intelligence collection and analysis organization. It has no arrest powers, and it has primacy as far as U.S. government concerns. Overseas, not domestically. The CIA is not allowed to spy on American citizens, and it's not allowed to spy in the United States without authorization from the president. Okay, so it's the FBI that's collecting our data, not the CIA, right? Well, it's the FBI and the NSA. The NSA, this is the thing.

[24:54] When I first joined the CIA, I was told that we were all told that the NSA was forbidden by law from spying on Americans. And if NSA were to accidentally intercept the communications of an American, heads would roll, and Congress had to be notified, and the information was purged from the system, and then they had to write a report to the president saying, we accidentally intercepted the communications of an American citizen. Right?

[25:24] Okay. Now it's like that's all NSA does is spy on American citizens. They weren't able to twist the Patriot Act after its passage in October of 2001 to make it legal to spy on Americans. That's not the fully challenged inquiry yet, and certainly the Supreme Court has not heard such a case. But until it does, NSA is spying on each and every one of them. Wow. And is this to any particular nefarious purpose, or is it just because it's nice collecting everyone's data? Is it a marketing ploy?

[25:55] Now, they say it's in the name of national security and with a goal being to disrupt any future attacks. But look at history. Everything that the CIA has told the American people, virtually since its creation, has been a lie. I mean, NSA did not even exist until the 1970s. So do we believe them when they say that there's no nefarious purpose? Do we believe them when they say that they're going to protect the data? I don't believe them. I know them. And they're liars.

[26:25] Is the NFA a fairly new organisation or has that been going as long as FBI and CIA? FBI was created in the 1920s and NFA and CIA were created in 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act. I remind you here that you're tuned to The Sharon Hour with me Sharon James on Laguna's one and only listener supported, member supported, public FM radio station KX 935. My guest tonight is ex-CIA agent, John Kuriyaku.

[26:56] He was head of counterintelligence in Pakistan post 9-11. He has written a book, The Reluctant Spy, on his experience in the CIA. He's been a whistleblower. He was one of the first government employees to verify the use of waterboarding, was in fact used as a torture technique when interrogating al-Qaeda terrorists. And his impressions of the operations of the CIA are not always favourable. Well, let's go to the more fun aspect of the CIA.

[27:28] The James Bond aspect. Do you think that aspect brings a lot of recruits? Oh, very much so. For all its folks, the job is very, very exciting. You know, over the 14 and a half years that I spent at the CIA, I visited 65 countries. I had several overseas tours. tour. They spent a total of about five years overseas. It's just a very exciting and very fulfilling job. Scary too, I would think, lots of times. Scary, I mean, I had two attempts on my life over the years and that's not unusual for a CIA officer,

[28:01] especially one involved in counterterrorism. So there's certainly risk involved. Certainly CIA officers are killed in the line of duty all the time. But what you do is you go through intensive training, you learn surveillance and surveillance protection. things like counter-terrorist driving and how to use a multitude of weapons and try to keep yourself safe while you're doing your job. Can you tell us a little about that training and also tell us exactly what your position was? You were head of counter-intelligence in Pakistan after 9-11?

[28:32] I was in a head of T.I.U. counter-terrorism operation in Pakistan after September 11th and then I went on to meet the head of counter-intelligence in the Assamuddin Laden unit and I was the executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA. So I had some theater level jobs, a lot of fun. It was really exciting and I felt like we really were working to protect the American people. But I had very serious disagreements with the CIA's leadership when it came to the torture issue. Quite right. What was the most frightening

[29:04] experience and what was the most fun experience? The most frightening experience, I was the target of a terrorist group in Athens in the summer of 2000. I didn't even realize that they were planning a move against me. My marriage was breaking up at the time and I must not have been paying as close attention to my review mirror as I should have been. But I was driving an armored car and I was armed and they knew that I was driving an armored car and that I was armed and so they killed my next door neighbor, next door neighbor, Stephen Saunders, who was the British defense attache at the time.

[29:39] And what this group did was when they killed Stephen, they dropped the manifesto at the site of the hit. And they said, in Greek, we had seen the big spy referring to me, but we knew that he was armed and he was driving an armored car. And so we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence from the war criminal Saunders. And, of course, my bosses panicked and headquarters panicked, and I was sent home to Washington that very same day. And I kicked myself.

[30:10] For months afterwards, I couldn't believe I'd been so sloppy. I was too mired in my own problems to pay attention to my safety, and they almost got me that day. Well, you couldn't have known, could you? You know, not only was I trained in counter-surveillance and surveillance detection, but I was an instructor in surveillance and surveillance detection in the agency. I should have seen them surveilling me. Just a reminder here that you're tuned to the Sharon Owl and me Sharon James on Laguna's

[30:40] 1 and only KX93.5. My guest tonight is ex CIA agent John Kiriaku, ABC correspondent on terrorism matters, himself head of counter-terrorism in Pakistan post 9-11, an expert on Middle East matters. He speaks fluent Arabic as well as Greek. He was originally recruited into the CIA from college into a position that was mainly analysis, which was more of a

[31:12] desk job. He has talked about the test he underwent to see if he'd make a suitable recruit for the CIA and the strange and numerous questions he had to answer, but then when he moved into the field he obviously had to undergo more strenuous and physical tests. Now what is that training? What do you undergo for that training? I mean it's everything from how to recruit spies to steal secrets to counter-terrorist driving, to weapons, to explosives, jumping out of

[31:48] airplanes, bed drops, secret writing and messaging, how to operate plant-best in radios. You name it. Everything you've seen in the movies, they really do teach us how to do. How do you recruit spies? I know you talk about in your book trying to recruit a known terrorist, so do you look for a sociopath, you look for the terrorist or do you look for the loyal patriotic guy or who do you look for? You know, I can't really give you a straight answer. You're essentially looking for everybody.

[32:19] The key is you have to find a person with access. You're not going to directly put a CIA officer in inside Al-Qaeda, but you can recruit an Arab who can convincingly join Al-Qaeda or allow Al-Qaeda to recruit him and then he can act as a double agent for you. So, there's this thing called the asset acquisition cycle, it's spot-assessed-developed-recruit and that's really what you do, you spot someone who might be recruitable, you assess his access to the information that you want, you develop him meaning you establish a relationship with him, establish a rapport, build a friendship and then you recruit him.

[33:01] And are these people that you would be friends with or these are fake friends? Well, that's a great question. You know what? In all honesty, about half of the people that I recruited over the years in another life, I would love to be friends with them. They were good people. But you couldn't afford to be. You can't. You can't because what you're going to do is at the end of your tour you're going to turn them over to your replacement and that he's going to be their best friend. You also said you underwent a special operations course where you had to kill and skin a rabbit

[33:34] and do that stuff. I want to talk a little bit about that special operation. That was all part of the basic operations training. A lot of it is survival. So you're given like a string, a paper clip, a pen, and a knife. And then they just sort of drop you in a swamp. In this case it was the Great Disney Swamp in Virginia. And you've got to swim to an island in the swamp and there's a message they're waiting for you or a person even they're waiting for you.

[34:05] You don't know what it's going to be until you get there. No matter what it is, it's going to have your instructions for what you do next. But in some cases they just leave you out there overnight in the swamp and either you go hungry or you kill and skin and cook a rabbit or fish. You'd You'd be surprised what swans and swamps besides copperhead snakes and things like that, but it's rough and then just when you're exhausted, they load you onto an airplane and you have to jump out of the back of it with a parachute and land and find your instructions down below wherever you land and make it to your next meeting on time.

[34:43] Did you skin a rabbit? You know what, I caught the rabbit and I elected just to go hungry. Yeah, I couldn't do it. I don't really like rabbits anyway. But you like rabbits? Yeah, I like rabbits. We have a family of them in our backyards, but that's about as far as I go. You know I love, but it's really not funny. Seems like this rabbit test was also given to the military, pre-Vietnam. This story is one told by Jane Fonda in her memoir about a marine

[35:13] sergeant suffering from PTSD recounting his last day at Camp Pendleton before being sent off to the Vietnam War. He described to her the parallel military version of the rabbit lesson wherein the staff NCO comes out with a rabbit, introduces it, everyone gets to fall in love with it, and then he breaks its neck in front of them, skins it, disembowels it, and throws the guts at them. That was his last lesson and memory before leaving for Vietnam. You're tuned to the

[35:46] Sharon now with me Sharon James on Lagunas KX 93.5 talking tonight to ex CIA agent and author of the book The Reluctant Spy John Kiriakou. Tell us about that raid of the Taliban Embassy that you did.

[36:16] September 11th attacks and the Taliban still has an embassy in operating embassy in Tashala Pakistan it's like they were shoving our faces in it so I said to my boss at the time I'd like to go into that embassy and I want to feel absolutely everything that they have that's not bolted to the floor and he kind of laughed and I said I'm serious I want to do it and so I got permission from headquarters and we repositioned a couple of large fans We went up to the Taliban embassy in the middle of the night and broke in and stole literally

[36:50] everything that wasn't bolted to the floor, files and computers and weapons. We even took some of their office furniture and then, after sunrise, the Taliban spokesman happened to arrive for work, we told the Pakistanis to arrest him, they did, and we took our hall back to Islamabad and began going through the intelligence. Did you find anything of note in there? We found one thing that was very dramatic that I wrote about in my book. We found a file folder full of telephone bills,

[37:22] and the telephone bills showed hundreds of phone calls to numbers all around the United States, Kansas City, Buffalo, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, just all over the United States. And then those calls ended abruptly on September 10th, 2001. and then they began again slowly around September 16th so I informed the headquarters that we had found this and I thought obviously it was very significant so CIA said good catch

[37:53] it's an FBI issue so give the originals to the FBI. So I boxed up the originals I turned them over to the FBI and I went about my business. When I got back home to headquarters several months later I ran into an FBI agent an FBI agent with whom I had worked in Pakistan. And I said, hey, what ever happened with those Taliban and Fondos? And he said, oh, we haven't gone through them yet because we're having trouble identifying a Pashto translator. I said, a Pashto translator? Those Fondos were in English.

[38:24] That's how I knew what they were. I don't speak Pashto. Oh, he says, oh, our mistake. Colonel, okay, I thought, yeah, your mistake. These are presumably all Taliban recruits littered around America. They could have been legitimate consular calls, but I think more likely that they were, yeah, I mean, possible Taliban recruits, possible sleeper cells, possible terrorists just waiting to be activated. You don't know until you investigate. They didn't investigate. So another year and a half passes, and I resigned from the CIA, and I'm at the mall

[39:00] all one day just shopping with my wife and I ran into another FBI agent from Peckstead and I said hey whatever happened to those collarbone soap bills and he said oh boy he said it's just like the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark they boxed them up and they sent them to a storage facility in suburban Maryland he said human eyes will never see them again so here we are all these years later worried about San Bernardino worried about Paris and we You may have Taliban sympathisers living all over the United States.

[39:33] Wow. SBI really dropped the ball on that. And here they are collecting all our data. Exactly. They're not the terrorists. Why did you resign from the CIA? Was it ever torture? You know, I think I'm probably one of the very few people in the United States who, when I say that I'm resigning to spend more time with my children, I actually meant that I was resigning to spend more time with my children. I had gotten divorced and my ex-wife and my two sons, our two sons, moved back to Ohio to be near her parents and they were little at the time.

[40:07] They were seven and four and they need their dad nearby. And I knew I was going to have to go back to Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or any number of terrible places and I just decided that it wasn't worth it. It was better to be with my sons than it was to be in the CIA. And so I applied for a position in a private firm. It wasn't a big form of global accounting firm. Delighted to and got a job that allowed me to work mostly over the internet.

[40:38] And so I could spend every other weekend with my sons. I'm proud to say that in 11 years I never missed a single weekend with them. You are tuned to The Sharon Now on Laguna's One and Only, listener supported, member supported, public FM radio station KX935. I'm Sharon James and my guest tonight is ex-CIA agent, author of the book My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, John Kiriaku.

[41:09] You mentioned people you admire in the book and I'd like you to say what you think it takes to become a top-notch intelligence officer, worthy of admiration, if you will. This is only my opinion, of course. You've got to be a strong extrovert. You have to be very comfortable with people, but some of you really aren't very familiar. You really have to thrive in the presence of other people, and you have to have a personality where people

[41:41] want to be around you. You have to be nice. You can't be bossy. You can't be mean. You can't be arrogant. You have to be a nice guy. You also have to have a facility for foreign languages because you have to be adaptable. And you have to have, this is again my own opinion, you have to have a moral compass and a sense of right and wrong. And you have to have the guts to stand up and say when you think something's wrong. That just doesn't make you a good intelligence officer. or it makes you a leader as well. But you're talking about somebody that would really stand out.

[42:14] So wouldn't you, if you were undercover, wouldn't you have to sort of blend in with the furniture? Well, you are. I mean, depending what your cover is, your cover can be any number of different things, government agencies or otherwise. And you're doing your cover job during the day and in the evenings, you're doing your CIA job, which oftentimes takes you well into the middle of the night. And you just have to get used to working two, four-hour-a-week jobs at the same time. It's hard, but it's very rewarding. It seems to me there are a lot of CIA officers in ACADEM.

[42:47] Is that true? Is it just a perception? I don't think that's true. A lot of the big universities will have CIA officers in residence, but they're advertised as such. So they wouldn't be covert in university. Because the rule of the CIA officer is to, like I said, recruit spies to steal secrets. and the college students don't have fun. Quick interruption here to remind you that you're tuned to the Sharon hour on Lagunas KX 93.5. My guest tonight is John Kiriakou. He was recruited into the CIA fresh from college.

[43:20] It's a life that's both exciting and terrifying as reported in his wonderful book, The Reluctant Spy. My secret life in the CIA's war on terror. John is fluent in Arabic and Greek and during his time in the CIA was active in counter-terrorism, both in the Middle East and in Greece. Do you want to tell us the Richard Welch story? Yeah, the reason why I was so interested in Greek terrorism and the reason why I went to Greece was to work on the murder case of Richard Welch. Vic Welch was the CIA's station chief in Assam in 1975

[43:56] and on December 23rd, 1975, he attended a Christmas party at the ambassador's residence. his wife and driver had left the party and had come back to their own home. It was the old days, you know, 1975 where there were no automatic gates. So the driver parked the car and got out of the car to open the gate and then drive the car onto the driveway. When he got out of the car, so three men and a woman got out of a car that was parked across the street. One of them shouted Welch's name. So both Mr. and Mrs. Welch

[44:30] got out of the car and one of the Greeks said, Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death. And then shot him four times in the chest with a.45 caliber semi-automatic handgun and killed him instantly. That was the first assassination by a group that became known as revolutionary organization 17 November. And what had he done? John, had he done anything? No, in fact, he had just arrived in Greece. He was a great friend to the Greek people. He had a degree in the classics. He was fluent in ancient Greek.

[45:05] He was educated in archaeology and antiquities. He really loved Greece and he loved Greece. He had just arrived in the position. He hadn't done anything. So was it the position or did they have a particular personal grudge against him? No, it wasn't against him. It was against the CIA. You see, Greece was under a military dictatorship, quite a brutal one from 1967 to 1974. The military dictatorship fell in 1974, and Constantine, kind of my least, a great statesman

[45:35] of modern Greek history, returned to Greece from Paris and became prime minister and then held free elections, and democracy returned to the country, but 17 November, which was a very hardcore Stalinist organization, interestingly enough, decided on its own to seek revenge against what they described as enemies of Greek people. And that was Americans, British, French, Turks, and anybody associated with El Rizzo. Miss Paper Publishers, Economists, Bankers, anybody associated with the prior regime.

[46:10] And especially the prior regime's leadership. So they killed Welch first, and then a few months later they killed a man who had been the chief of the Greek National Police during the dictatorship. They continued killing people, 28 in all, until 2002, when the group was finally cracked. And through all those years, they did most of their assassinations with the same gun that they used to kill Dick Welch. Wow. So what was the outcome? Well, in 2002, one of the members of 17 November was carrying a bomb in a paper bag.

[46:44] He was carrying the bomb to the port of Piraeus where he intended to kill a major ship owner. The bomb went off in his hands and when the ambulance arrived, he believed he was dying and so he confessed to everything. And he told the ambulance attendant and the police the location of 17 November's secret weapons cache, the names of all the other members of 17 November, he gave him everything. And then he lived. The Greeks actually saved his life. He blew his hands off and he blew his right eye out.

[47:15] But he actually lived. the greek police raided all these different sites they arrested just about everybody if not everybody in 17 november accept the lookout in the welch assassination it was a woman and nobody was ever able to identify her pretty much everybody else was arrested including the two shooters of welch and the driver of the getaway car so where does this man live now the guy with no hands you Do you think he would be easy to find? We're serving 1,650 years in putting on us prison in Western Athens.

[47:50] And the woman, we don't know where she is. No, we don't know even who she is. We have some suspects, but we were never able to prove anything. Quick reminder here that you're tuned to the Sharoner on Laguna's KX93.5. I'm Sharon James. My guest tonight is a very interesting man, John Kiriaku, an ex-CIA agent, agent, head of counter-terrorism in Pakistan following 9-11, ABC correspondent on terrorism. He has written a book called The Reluctance Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

[48:27] and it's full of interesting information, intrigue and stories. I love that story about the guy, Carlos the Jackal, that you found in the vegetable market. You want to tell us that? Carlos was a very, very famous terrorist in the 1970s. Also a communist, he was actually a Leninist rather than a Stalinist. But he was quite violent and launched just spectacular attacks across Europe in the 1970s.

[48:58] So it was Carlos we were able to determine that was supplying another Greek terrorist group group called Popular Revolutionary Struggle, or ELA, with this weapon. And we were able to track the weapons from Carlos and his sources in the Middle East through Europe down to Greece. And that's how the Greeks got many other weapons. And then he was spotted. Carlos was hiding. And I had a friend from the CIA's counterterrorism center who just happened to be the vegetable

[49:30] market in cartoon and he saw who he thought was Carlos the Jackal so he went back to the senior CIA officer country and said I think I saw Carlos the Jackal in the vegetable market today and the chief said oh come on don't be ridiculous we're in the Sudan he just saw some random white guy and he said know I'm sure this is Carlos the Jackal. So they put a surveillance team down in the vegetable market

[50:02] and they waited a week or two and sure enough they saw the guy again and it was indeed Carlos the Jackal. So they set up a kind of a scam to catch him and without going into too many sensitive details they were able to get him to a dentist's office and the dentist put him under in order to fix his teeth. You know, they don't really use novocaine in many other parts of the world. They use gas, put it to sleep. And while he was asleep, we took him, we turned him over to the French government, and the French flew him from cartoon to Paris. He woke up in Paris, it shackled, and he's been serving a life sentence for multiple murders ever since.

[50:44] Oh my God. Never go to the dentist if you're involved in espionage. Did they know that he was in Khartoum? Did they have any idea that that was where he was hiding out? No, no idea at all. I mean, he thought maybe he's in Libya, maybe he's in Iraq, maybe he's in Venezuela. Nobody really knew. And then there he was, buying his own vegetables in the market in Khartoum. Unbelievable. That's a great story. Now listen, tell me your trajectory, because you mentioned that you were in Athens at the time. So tell me what your career trajectory was.

[51:15] Sure. I left Athens in the summer of 2000. I went back to headquarters to work first on 17 November from the headquarters side and then after September 11th I volunteered repeatedly to go to Afghanistan. My Arabic was very good at the time and I thought I was a natural to go to Afghanistan. Instead they sent me to Pakistan as the Chief of Counterterrorism operation. So I was there through much of 2002 and then I returned in the summer and went to the summit with Rodney Group. I was there very briefly and then was promoted and

[51:47] named the executive assistant deputy director. And in that capacity, we worked on the Iraq War, which was just a debacle from the very beginning. And the crazy thing is that there was a real fight in government over the Iraq War. There was a very clearly drawn line between the two sides. The CIA thought the Iraq War was insanity, as did the State department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nobody wanted to fight this war, nobody wanted to launch it in the first place. But on the other side was the National Security Council

[52:20] headed by Consulisa Rice, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, OSD, that was Donald Rumsfeld, and OVP, the Office of the Vice President, Dick Chady. They're the ones who made the decision and there was to be no discussion. And so we went to war with the Rock for no good reason. Yeah, well, you're listening to ex-CIA agent John Kiriaku on this, my shariner with me, Sharon James, one and only listener supported member supported public FM radio station KX935.

[52:52] John Kiriaku has written a book called The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on terror and in case you're interested in a career in the CIA, I asked John to spell out his trajectory from joining with all the various psychological and physical tests that entailed, as described earlier in this show, to the day he left, somewhat disenchanted with the organization's MO.

[53:23] I joined the CIA in 1990 on the analytics side and I worked on Iraq for three years. Then I went into a year of full-time Arabic training and then I went overseas for two years to Bahrain on the State Department's location. Went back to CIA headquarters in 96, worked Iraq again until 98. Then I went through the operational training then to Athens until 2000, headquarters until 2002, Pakistan headquarters and then I had a domestic assignment and I resigned from that domestic

[53:57] assignment. Okay and that's when you left the CIA yes. Yeah I left the CIA in March of 2004. So you went really from an office job into a field job after you've done your training course. In the in the directorate of intelligence the analysts essentially sit in cubicles 365 days a year, take the big thoughts, write papers to the president, the vice president, the secretary of state and defense, the national security advisor, and that just got profoundly boring to me. After a number of years, I just I couldn't see spending

[54:30] another 25 years doing that. So you volunteered yourself for the operational course? I volunteered and the move from intelligence to operations was very unusual but And it turned out I was the only person in the CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic. And they were looking for somebody who spoke either Greek or Arabic, not realising that they had somebody who spoke both. When I volunteered, they gave me the job and I switched operations. And just going back to the tests, it sounds like you aced it because of your candor.

[55:02] So is candor anything that they look for in recruits? I think so, especially in operations. I've always been very candid. I find that to be the way to go, you know. Honesty is the best policy. And I think that they liked that, and I think that the test is very highly on the extrovert chart. And they thought that that, along with the recommendation from my professor, meant that I would be successful there. And indeed I was. I had a very good career. And for anyone wanting to go into it, do you have any words of advice?

[55:34] Yeah. Learn hard languages. Really hard ones. They're not taking people anymore who have, you know, French, German, Italian and Spanish. You need Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Punjabi, Tajik, Uzbek, Chinese, Korean and Russian. Wow. And that's the top, I mean, in India and in Pakistan, there are so many different languages, right? And very different. Yeah, there are dozens of languages in South Asia and we just haven't mastered them.

[56:04] and how do you know which language you're dealing with if you're interrogating somebody and they're pretending not to understand, for instance? Well, you know, that's also a good question. Normally you know something about the person you're talking to. If he's an Arab, we have lots of Arabic speakers. If he's Pakistani, you can borrow somebody from the Pakistani police or military to interrogate him. But there were a couple times in my experience where we would just kind of sit there and look likely each other. We captured six guys who looked vaguely Chinese or Asian or whatever,

[56:39] Central Asian, Northern Asian. I didn't know. None of us knew. And they didn't respond to Arabic. They didn't respond to Farsi. They didn't respond to any of the languages that we had in the station. And it turned out that they were readers. They were from Western China. They're Muslims from Western China. And they spoke their own unique language. They spoke a little bit of Chinese. And finally we were able to identify an officer who spoke Chinese. He came up to Pakistan to interview them and we didn't really want to keep them or hold them. We just kind

[57:10] of scooped them up. The Pakistanis didn't want them because they were there illegally. So we asked the Chinese, well, do you want them? The Chinese said no, we don't want them. And these poor bakers ended up going to Guantanamo. It's because no country wanted them. Which is another shocker of Guantanamo. We haven't even gotten into that, but gosh. Oh dear, well John, this has been absolutely wonderful. I could go on forever. Thank you for taking the time. It's been a delightful conversation. And I thank you for this wonderful book. When you say reluctant spy, do you want to go into that quickly?

[57:41] Yeah, I was reluctant I suppose for a couple of reasons. I loved the job but I was reluctant to just watch my first marriage fall apart. I was certainly reluctant to allow myself to be included in the use of these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I refused, frankly. I was reluctant to leave, but it was the best for me and the best for my family, and I had a good career, but it was time to move on. How do you live a normal life after having such as heightened one? It's hard to. I'm not sure that my wife and I will ever really have normal lives.

[58:12] Now is your wife still in the CIA? No, she left the CIA in 2012. Was it difficult while she was in a new route? Yeah, it was frankly, and I still have a lot of friends in the CIA people I stay in touch with. I mostly missed the travel. The travel was truly incredible. I think a lot of people who go to war feel the same. You know, a lot of soldiers, people in the military, much as it scared them and was awful. It was also, again, such a heightened experience. And a collegial one too. That's the biggest thing.

[58:42] Well, indeed it is. Well, I'm afraid we've come to the end of my sharing hour for tonight on Laguna's KX93.5. I'm Sharon James, and you can re-listen to this show on podcast also at kx935.com slash shows slash The Sharon Are, that's Sharing Without The G, our With The H. My guest John Kayaku's book is The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, and I will join you again

[59:12] unterrified next Sunday night at 6.

[59:42] In the redwood forest, in the Gulf stream waters, this land was made for you and me.
