Title: How To Survive The CIA: Pardon, Prison & Surveillance Part 2 | EP561
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-09-09
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOU2nBDfYA
Duration: 24:26

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[00:00] We have a whistleblower protection law in this country called the Federal Whistleblower Protection Act. But unfortunately, national security whistleblowers are exempt from its protections. And so if a person who works for let's say the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, DEA, uh one of the congressional um oversight committees, the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill, if they want to make a revelation,

[00:30] there is no way to make a protected revelation. For example, we're told to go through our chains of command, but if your chain of command is what is violating the law, there's really nowhere to go but the media. And if you go to the media, of course, you risk a criminal charge, you risk bankruptcy, you risk your career, everything. This is something that I feel very strongly about that we need to correct uh up on Capitol Hill. There

[01:00] have to be protections implemented for national security whistleblowers. So, you're saying there's no accountability, no way for anybody that's in those services to reach out for any kind of protection. If you feel like things are happening within the service that are illegal, anti-American, anything at all that you feel like should have oversight, there's

[01:30] nowhere for you to go. &gt;&gt; There's nowhere for you to go. And I'll give you an example. Thomas Drake uh was a senior member of the senior intelligence service at uh NSA, the National Security Administration uh National Security Agency and um he found solid evidence of um of illegality that is the interception of communications of American citizens without a warrant. So he went to the inspector general. uh the inspector general was not read into the

[02:00] compartment and so said it he just didn't know what Tom was talking about. He then went to the general counsel. The general counsel told him that this was above his pay grade and he should just stop. So then he went to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA of course is a component of the Pentagon. The Pentagon inspector general told NSA, "Hey, you have a rogue employee who came here to complain about a program. didn't get any satisfaction of course there. So he went to the House Permanent Select

[02:30] Committee on Intelligence and said NSA is intercepting the communications of American citizens. They charged him with nine felonies including seven counts of espionage, two counts of theft of government property. The property being the information that he had in his brain that he walked out of the building with. um he was facing almost a hundred years in prison and then the night before he was to go to trial they dismissed the

[03:00] charges but that was only after he had lost his pension, lost his savings, lost his wife, who was also an NSA employee and decided to stay with NSA rather than to stay with with Tom. Lost his five children. He ended up working at an Apple store as at the Genius Bar of an Apple store in Bethesda, Maryland. That's what happens when you when you use the internal mechanisms that have

[03:30] been set up for whistleblowing, they just simply don't work. &gt;&gt; So, when you started on your journey, where was the first place you went? &gt;&gt; I went to my boss and I said, "This is wrong, wrong, wrong." And he said, "Listen, this is way over our pay grades. you need to keep your mouth shut. And I actually did keep my mouth shut for a long time. I resigned from the CIA uh two years after uh after learning of the the torture program,

[04:00] thinking that there were so many more people more directly involved with it than I who were objecting. You know, I was seeing this reporting coming back from the secret uh prison. Uh, for example, physicians from the CIA's Office of Medical Services saying, "Whoa, wait a minute. I took a hypocratic oath. I didn't sign up for this to torture somebody." And then and then do CPR on them just so he could be tortured more. And I thought, well, surely so many people are objecting that

[04:30] somebody is going to say something to stop this program. And then nobody did. I'm ashamed to tell you that I let five and a half years pass before I finally said something. &gt;&gt; Did this continue during that five and a half years? &gt;&gt; It continued for four of those years until 2006. And then in 2006, they just decided that what they were getting from these these men under torture wasn't amounting to anything.

[05:00] And so they just shut it down. &gt;&gt; And who made the decision to shut it down? That was an internal CIA decision. So George Tennant had left to the best of my recollection by 2006 and it was uh Porter Goss who finally came in. Porter Goss had been not just a CIA officer but he had then gotten himself elected to Congress, became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, then went to the CIA as the director and said, "Oh, this this is not not what we should be

[05:30] doing." Now, you were convicted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, right? &gt;&gt; Correct. &gt;&gt; And that act says you were guilty of doing what? &gt;&gt; I confirmed the surname of a former CIA colleague to a to a a journalist. &gt;&gt; You confirmed it, but the name was already given. Correct. &gt;&gt; Yeah. Then the name was out there. Um, I confirmed it to a journalist, but the

[06:00] journalist never made the name public. And and where my attorneys objected in this whole process was while I was defending myself uh from this charge, the the director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, confirmed the names of 10 covert CIA officers uh to his biographer and girlfriend and was never charged. Why do you think you were so selectively prosecuted? Because as you say, there were others,

[06:30] not just Petraeus, but there were others that &gt;&gt; Right. Yes. &gt;&gt; did much more than yourself. So why did they come after you, Hammer and Tong? &gt;&gt; I had aired the CIA's dirty laundry in public and that was something that to the CIA was unforgivable. And I had one one enemy in the CIA in particular uh and that was John Brennan who later went on to become the uh deputy national

[07:00] security adviser in President Obama's first term and then CIA director in the second term. When when I was arrested, the Justice Department turned over 15,000 pages of classified discovery, and we found three memos in that discovery. One was a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder, the the attorney general at the time, and he said, "Charge him with espionage." And Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't

[07:30] think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." And so that's what they did. And then when I went bankrupt from from attorneys fees, they dropped the espionage charges. &gt;&gt; You've heard me say it before, real change starts with real understanding. And that's why I've had Dr. Daniel Aemon on my show many times over the years. At

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[08:30] or go to ammanclinics.com/drill and take the first step. Call 8665806569 Let's see if I've got this right. You were convicted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, right? &gt;&gt; That's right. &gt;&gt; Did you plead guilty or were you

[09:00] convicted? &gt;&gt; Oh, I pled guilty. Most definitely. I asked my attorneys. I was going to plead not guilty. And when I say going to plead not guilty, I mean the the Justice Department had made a a best and final offer of 30 months. I do 23 months or we go to trial. My my wife and I stayed up all night long the night before uh just going through whatever information we could about this Intelligence identities

[09:30] protection act. And because nobody had ever challenged it at trial, there was there was no precedent. There were several articles in the Harvard uh law journal saying that it was unconstitutional. And so I decided to fight. So, I emailed my attorneys at six o'clock in the morning and I said, "Let's go to trial. We're going to fight." And they emailed, one of them emailed me back and said, "Put on a pot of coffee while we're on the way over." So, they came to the house at 7. The oldest of my attorneys,

[10:00] the most experienced, he had been an attorney in Washington for 52 years, was what the Washington Post called a legal titan, got right up in my face and said, "You stupid sobb. Take the deal." I said, 'Well, wait a minute. You're the one who told me that we were going to fight and that I should go to trial. The second of the four attorneys that came that day, a a true southern gentleman, he said, "Listen, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this

[10:30] deal." And I said, "But I I don't believe that I've done anything wrong." And then the third one, the one who I liked and respected the most said to me in a in a very perturbed fashion, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice. And it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And so I said, "All right, if I

[11:00] don't take the deal, what am I realistically looking at?" And they said 12 to 18 years. And I said, 'All right, I have five kids at home. I'll take the deal. And and that third attorney said, "This could be a blip in your life or it could be the defining event of your life. Make it the blip." And so I took the deal. &gt;&gt; Did you do the right thing? &gt;&gt; In retrospect, yes, I did. It's so much

[11:30] easier to fight these injustices from the comfort of your own home than from a a prison cell. Uh, you know, I I I wrote regularly when I was in prison. I I didn't intend to. Um, one of my attorneys said, "When you feel comfortable, once you get to prison, send me a letter and I'll circulate it to these 600 people who had signed up for a mailing list just to see how I was doing." So I waited about six weeks and

[12:00] when I finally got my seal legs I I wrote something that I very arrogantly called letter from Lorettto because I wanted to model it on Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. So I called it letter from Lorettto and I said two things. I said two strange things happened to me. Well, one wasn't strange. One was this I talked about an abusive uh just awful female prison guard. But the other thing I said is one of the other prisoners was walking

[12:30] me around one day and he introduced me to an Iraqi prisoner and so I saidalamu alaykum may peace be upon you and he responded and upon you peace and he asked me where did you learn to speak Arabic and I said oh I worked for the CIA now I speak Arabic I love Arab culture and history and poetry etc. And then we shook hands and I said, "It was nice to meet you." And I walked away. The two days later, I get called into the lieutenant's office

[13:00] and I was told, "You never want to get called into the lieutenant's office because the likelihood is that you're going to be sent to solitary confinement because you've done something." So, I hear my name being called to the lieutenant's office. And I go down there. They have a picture of this prisoner on a computer screen. And one of the officers said, "Do you know this this man?" And I said, "I don't really know him. I just met him a couple of days ago." What did you say to him? I said, "It's it's nice to meet you." And what did he say to you? I said, he said,

[13:30] "It's nice to meet you, too." And then I shook his hand and I walked away. And they said, "Well, when you walked away, he he made a call to Pakistan and he was told to kill you." I said, "Come on, I could kill this guy with my thumb." And they said, "No, no, don't do that. just stay away from him. I said, "Okay." So, over the next couple of weeks, every time I'd see this guy in the hall, I'd sort of give him the the evil eye and he'd look at me funny. But the more I

[14:00] thought about this, the more it didn't make sense. He was an Iraqi Kurd. Why would he call a number in Pakistan where they don't speak either Arabic or Kurdish? And why would they tell him to kill me? That doesn't make any sense. So, I saw him in the yard and I went up to him and he got a little scared and I said, "No, no, no. I I don't mean you any harm. I just want to ask you, after we met in your cell, did the police say anything about me?" And he said, "Yes, they told

[14:30] me that after we met, you called a Washington number and they told you to kill me." And I said, "Oh, for heaven's sake. Well, they told me you called a Pakistani number and they told you to kill me." and we got a a laugh about how ham-handed this was. But then I went to the to the law library and looked this up and this was actually class D felony. It was conspiracy to uh promote violence in a federal facility. And so I wrote about this saying I've been here, you

[15:00] know, I was there four days and already they're trying to get me to kill a guy or to get a guy to kill me for sport apparently. Well, the blog went crazy because Ariana Huffington picked it up and put it on the Huffington Post. Then Jake Tapper came to the prison to interview me and The Economist came to interview me and uh The Atlantic Magazine and CNN and it was ridiculous.

[15:30] And that was how I sort of staked my position in in prison where I have access to the media. I have a soapbox and I'm gonna make the best of it by talking about prison conditions, medical uh facilities in prison and uh and violence that's encouraged by by the guards and the administration. I drove the warden crazy, but it was the right thing to do. I had great access to the

[16:00] media and it ended up being my second book. &gt;&gt; Why did they not just stop you from talking to the media? That is a great question and it was one that confused me for a little while. And then one of the other prisoners said that he had overheard um one of the guards ask the warden, "Why don't you just send this guy to solitary?" And the warden said, "Oh, so I could have CNN standing in next to my car in the parking lot tomorrow? No,

[16:30] thank you." So I knew that was it. So long as I didn't overstep. For example, so long as I didn't name their names, I was going to be safe. &gt;&gt; So, they were afraid to cut you off from the media. &gt;&gt; Yes, they were afraid. &gt;&gt; You can send letters out. Did they read your mail? &gt;&gt; They did. Not at first. At first, they let everything go out. And then a couple of people wrote to me saying, "Hey, your

[17:00] last letter to me was very discreetly cut on the side of the envelope and then resealed with tape." So, I went to the lieutenant's office boldly and I said, "Hey guys, um, I've got a little bit of um, intelligence best practices that I'd like to pass to you. You don't need to slit the side of the envelope open to take the letter. What you do is you put in a long tong and you sort of hook the letter and then

[17:30] you twist the tong so that the letter turns into a little like a pixie stick and you can pull it out of the side of the envelope without acting having to cut it open. I said, "Just so you know, you morons." And then they stopped cutting open my letters. &gt;&gt; They don't have the right to read your mail. Um they do legally, but uh policy in a low security prison is to not read outgoing mail, only to read incoming

[18:00] mail. And really, it's not even to read the mail so much as it is to check for contraband. &gt;&gt; So, they don't read outgoing mail usually, but they were reading yours. &gt;&gt; Correct. &gt;&gt; You think they stopped reading it, or do you think they started using your technique? I I can't believe that they were skilled enough to use my my technique. When it came right down to it, these these guys, these lieutenants and and they were called the the something intelligence service, SIS, oh,

[18:30] security and intelligence service. These were not bad guys. They were just in bad jobs. And I said to them, look, I am no threat to you. I'm no threat to your prison. I want you to know that when I walked through those doors, I did not lose my constitutional right to freedom of of uh speech. But you should really be spending your time on the gang bangers and the pedophiles and the drug dealers cuz your prison's full of them. Don't waste your time on me. &gt;&gt; Were you harassed in prison?

[19:00] &gt;&gt; Only by guards. Never ever by prisoners. Never. And and that was for a couple of reasons. The guards just have an attitude. There was a there was a wonderful book published by Dr. Peter Moscows. Uh he's a professor of criminal justice at John J College and um the book is called in defense of flogging which is tongue andcheek. He doesn't really defend flogging but he said that the bureau of prisons is really little more than a than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable

[19:30] um undereducated rural white men. That's why prisons are in the boondocks because prisons are the only industry in many parts of the country. And so you're going to get people who washed out of the military or couldn't make it through the uh through the local police academy and they end up there. They're paid hardly anything, although the benefits are good. They're federal benefits. So, you get people I I say this in my second book, you get people who were probably

[20:00] bullied as kids and sort of never got over it. Uh, and this is their chance to to bully somebody else, somebody who can't defend himself, somebody who can't fight back. You'll be you'll be accused of insolence and you go straight to solitary confinement. So, I had problems only with the guards, not with the the prisoners. And I I do say also in in this second book, Doing Time Like a Spy, that on my first day, one of the guards told me, and this is

[20:30] the only thing he told me as he processed me in, he said, "If someone comes into your cell uninvited, that is an act of aggression." And I said, "Oh, great. I've been here 40 minutes and I'm going to get my butt kicked." So, sure enough, two guys came in. One had a swastika tattooed on his neck. took up the his entire neck. Um, another one had white power and swastikas on his arms. I jumped up. I put up my my dukes and I

[21:00] said, "What do you want?" And one of them asked me, "Are you the new guy?" I said, "Yeah." So, and he says, "Are you a rat?" I said, "No, I'm not a rat." He said, "Are you gay?" He didn't use the word gay, though. And I said, "No, I'm not gay." He said, "Are you a chomo?" I said, "I don't know what that word means." And he said, "Chomo, child molester." I said, 'N no, I'm not a child molester.' He said, ' Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. I said, 'Oh, great. Now I'm

[21:30] with the Aryans of all things. Uh, there was an Italian, and when I say Italian, I mean named Gambino, Banano, Lucazi, you know, you get the idea. He read in the New York Times that I was going to the prison. He read it in the New York Times on Sunday that I was going to arrive at the prison on Thursday. And God bless him, for whatever reason, he took it upon himself to go to every single Italian, including the boss of one family and the acting

[22:00] boss of another to explain to them the difference between a CIA officer and an FBI agent. He said, "FBI agents or cops. CIA officers protected us from the terrorists." And so when I arrived, the Italians were waiting for me and they welcomed me with open arms. And as soon as word got around that I was with the Italians, it was hands off. I never had any problems. &gt;&gt; Really? &gt;&gt; Nothing. &gt;&gt; So where did you sit in the lunchroom?

[22:30] &gt;&gt; I sat with the Italians, I'm proud to say. &gt;&gt; Yeah. So you didn't have to sit with the &gt;&gt; sounds I didn't sit with the Arians. This all sounds so absurd, but this is this is life in prison. I I I also noted in one of my blog posts that it's going into prison is like walking into 1950s America in that there is hard and fast racial segregation. Whites and blacks are completely separated. Uh they they don't eat

[23:00] together. They don't watch TV together. They usually don't even room together. And then the Hispanics are off in their own area. So you have one table that is Aryans. You have one table where half is Italians and half is Native Americans. All the other white tables are just for pedophiles and uh and informants, rats. And then the other 50% of the cafeteria is uh is black. The Hispanics sit in the

[23:30] back. It it was bizarre. It took me weeks to get used to this division of the races. Was there violence in prison? Did you see a lot of violence while you were there? &gt;&gt; Almost none. There were in the two years I was there, I saw three fights. Two of them were over what to watch on television, which again was just preposterous that people would fight over such a stupid thing. And then once uh one of the Aryans called a white guy a rat and the rat just whipped him, but

[24:00] that was it. You know, most of these people too, they they work their way down from a a maximum security penitentiary to a medium to a low, and they didn't want to go back up to the maximum. So, they were on their best behavior.
