Title: How CIA's \"Rogue\" Agent Survived Prison (probe vs 2022 ep)
Show: Danny Jones Podcast
Date: 2022-05-23
URL: https://youtu.be/mP17LjLLXhk
Duration: 58:00

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[00:01] and then they come back to us and they're like you know there are like 50 million people named khalid al-masri this is not the guy you're looking for and they release him but when he comes out of egypt he's got a beard down to his waist he's holding a copy of the quran and he told a reporter all he wants to do now is kill americans because that's what we did to him right we do this kind of thing all the time well didn't we sort of create bin laden's ideology against america i'm

[00:31] glad that you put it that way the answer to that question is yes we did we didn't create bin laden there's this there's this misconception that bin laden was one of the afghan mujahideen that we had funded during the war against the soviets he wasn't he didn't arrive in um in afghanistan until after the soviets had departed but in terms of that ideology absolutely yes we created that group what we did is we had such an obsession with communism

[01:03] well into the late 80s that it was you know the policy was to defeat the russians at all costs right and one of the things that we did to defeat the russians was to provide stinger missiles to the afghan mujahideen and it was the missile that that turned the war around because all of a sudden you know from a shoulder launcher you can take down a russian plane a russian helicopter we just decimated the russian military that way and what we did is we we radicalized

[01:36] these guys and then the russians are gone and they're still radical and then what do we do then we have september 11th right jesus um do you think that i mean obviously i know your stance on you know all these crazy these [ __ ] torture techniques that we used to use like waterboarding and and all of these things but do you think that waterboarding has ever been an effective technique no never never

[02:07] never it's meant to punish not not to collect information i'll tell you you know how i feel about the fbi it's hard for me to compliment the fbi but if there's one thing that the fbi is good at it's interrogation they've been doing it since the nuremberg trials right in 45-46 and what they do it's not sexy and it's not something you see in the movies but they establish a rapport with a subject they're kind to the subject

[02:39] instead of beating him and electrocuting him and you know throwing ice water on him they offer him a cigarette or an orange or a date or you know paper to write to his parents or whatever and over the course of time and usually it's only a few weeks the subject will open up and provide information see this is this is the post script to the abazo beta uh capture story abso beta was sent to the secret site and because i'm going to say it for the

[03:10] third time because 911 was an open criminal investigation the primacy was given to the fbi that drove the cia crazy we wanted primacy this was our operation but the fbi specifically an fbi agent by the name of ali soufan began to interrogate abu zabeda and what he did is we waited until he was recovered from the gunshots and um and ali sat across a table from him and talked

[03:41] and like i say he'd offer him a cigarette offer him an apple or a cup of tea or something and over the course of weeks abuza beta began to speak now abzobeda told us two things that were absolutely critically important number one we didn't have any idea what the al qaeda wiring diagram looked like no idea we knew bin laden was the boss and zoihedi was the underboss for lack of a better term and that was it we didn't know anything else

[04:12] we knew that there's al qaeda you know in rome there's al qaeda in jakarta al qaeda and mexico city but we didn't we didn't know who or how or how they reported back to bin laden we didn't know anything so ali said and i'm just going to use this as an example if you're going to do an attack in dusseldorf how would you do that and abuse beta said well i know this guy muhammad and here's his phone number

[04:44] he's in dusseldorf and muhammad's got a friend abdullah and here's abdullah's phone number abdullah has access to weapons and i was talking to abdullah one time and he told me about this guy rashid and here's rashid's number and russia knows explosives he can build bombs so we can call the germans and say hey you have a problem in dusseldorf and here are the guys you need to raid and then they raid the the apartments and they grab these guys so we we didn't know any of that stuff until abu zubaydah started telling ali soofan

[05:15] wow the other thing that abu zubaydah told us about and this was one of the most important things that we learned through the course of the so-called war on terror we knew that there was a very bad guy out there who went by the nom daguerre mukhtar right we knew this was a bad bad guy who in 1996 had conceptualized this operation called the bojinka plan have you ever heard of

[05:46] boogie no so this was a plan to hijack 14 747s leaving from manila airport and fly all 14 of them into buildings up and down the west coast of the united states it was accidentally broken up by the philippine police and all we knew was that the mastermind was this guy mukhtar and he had escaped

[06:16] so we knew and this was like a this was a teaching point at the cia like we really lucked out with this one because we didn't know anything about it but the philippine filipino police stumbled on it the guy got away but here's the plan we know that al qaeda is going to use airliners as weapons right so we knew that in 1996 they wanted to use planes as weapons but we didn't know who muktar was

[06:47] so ali's like you keep talking about this muktar who is he and abu veda smiles and he said you don't know mukhtar and he said well we know that there is a guy muktar and that he's a bad guy he's the operational leader of al qaeda and he said sure who is he he goes khalid sheikh muhammad we never heard that name before we didn't have any idea who khalid muhammad was but you know what two months later he's

[07:17] in custody and what we did when we when we captured him we captured him in an al-qaeda safe house in rawalpindi um we walked him past abu zubaydah's cell so that they could see each other and abu zubaydah immediately burst into tears why did he burst into tears because he was a true believer and it was his information that allowed us to capture khalid muhammad wow

[07:48] he ratted him out wow that's so [ __ ] wild so [ __ ] wild um after you went to after you let's go back or let's jump jump forward in time when uh you originally went on what was it abc yeah and you spoke out against the the torture program what was like the sequence of events to

[08:18] you getting from going from there to being actually prosecuted and getting sent to prison right so you know i wish i could say that that my intention that day was was purely patriotic it actually wasn't i got a call from brian ross at abc news and he said that he had a source

[08:49] who said that i had tortured abu zabeda i said that was absolutely untrue i said i was the only person who was kind to abu zubaydah i've never laid a hand on abu zubaydah or on any other prisoner i said your source is either mistaken or he's a liar well he says you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself which i had i had never spoken to an inter to a journalist before i i didn't know that was an old reporter's trick oh he was just lying uh he said that that's what he had heard

[09:21] so he did have a real source yeah so i said i'll think about it well a couple of days later the president's giving a a press conference one of the reporters asked him about torture what about these reports that the cia is torturing people and he looks in the camera and he says we do not torture like that and is this bush bush i was sitting on the couch watching this

[09:51] with my wife and i looked at her and i said he is a bald-faced liar he's looking the american people in the eye and he's lying to us a couple of days after that it's a friday and he's walking from the south portico of the white house to the helicopter to go to camp david and a reporter shouts a question about torture again and he stops and he turns and he says well if there is torture it's a rogue cia officer

[10:22] and i looked at my wife and i said they're gonna try to pin this on me because they were mad that i was the only one who spoke out they're gonna pin this on me oh this is after you went on abc he said this no this is before two days before okay so the guy from abc called you the journalist called you said this and then you saw the president yes on tv so i realized brian ross was telling me the truth that he did have a source who said that i had tortured up as a beta because that was the plan

[10:53] they were going to say look everybody knows that we're torturing prisoners let's pin it on this [ __ ] he's the one who would never shut up about it so i said to my wife you were the humanitarian and i was the human rights guy so i called brian ross i said i'll give you your interview and i decided in the days leading up to that interview that whatever he asked me i was going to tell the truth and so i said three things in that interview that just completely changed the course of the rest of my life i said that the cia was torturing its

[11:25] prisoners i said that torture was official u.s government policy it was not the result of a rogue and i said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself the president's a liar and so whoa as you can imagine within 24 hours the cia filed what's called a crimes report against me with the justice department saying that i had revealed classified information my attorney i hired an attorney of

[11:57] course and my attorney said you got him on speed dial the second you walked out of that studio you can't classify a crime so you can't classify a crime yeah they said he released classified information torture's illegal and so by virtue of its illegality it's unclassified yeah but is it illegal if it's not in our country it's how do you define if it's illegal no the law is crystal clear it can't be done by an american or any person acting on behalf of an american

[12:29] that's what the law says okay yeah so the fbi investigated me for a year from december of 2007 until december of 2008 and in december of 2008 they sent my lawyer a letter called a declination letter saying that they were declining to prosecute me and then one of the fbi agents said this was the worst kept secret in washington everybody knew the cia was torturing its prisoners like everybody at the fbi talked about it and when they started torturing obazo beta every fbi officer at the secret

[13:01] site left the country they didn't want to be in the same country while it was happening that's how wrong they knew it was so they dropped the charges my wife and i went out to dinner that night to celebrate three weeks later barack obama becomes president and john brennan becomes well first he was named cia director but then um they withdrew the nomination he became the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism well john and i

[13:31] have always hated each other and he was one of the founders of the torture program so barack obama becomes president january the 20th 2009 john brennan asks the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me and they investigated me for three more years until january of 2012. i had no idea that my phones were tapped i had no idea that my emails were being

[14:01] intercepted i had no idea that it was being followed by teams of fbi agents and then on january 12 2012 i was arrested charged with three counts of espionage one count of violating the uh what was it called the intelligence identities protection act of 1982 and one count of making a false

[14:31] statement we were never clear on what the false statement was supposed to have been um in the end i hadn't committed espionage just like tom drake hadn't committed espionage and ed snowden hasn't committed espionage and julian assange hasn't committed espionage so in my case they dropped all three of those charges i took a plea to violating the intelligence identities protection act and they dropped the false statements charge so i had been facing 45 years in prison

[15:04] and i ended up getting 23 months wow and i'll tell you i turned down the 23 months they made their best and final offer right 30 months you do 23. my wife and i stayed up literally all night talking about what we should do and i'm like i'm innocent i can't take a plea to something that i didn't do and i had this idea that you know once i get in front of a jury they're going to realize how ridiculous this is they're going to realize that i was targeted because of my position on human rights

[15:34] and so i emailed my lawyers it was six o'clock in the morning and i said we've been up all night we decided i'm going to turn down the best and final one of the attorneys calls me back immediately and he says put on a pot of coffee we're on our way over so i had 11 lawyers so three of them come and i mean these are like a list nationally known the greatest criminal defense attorneys in washington a thousand dollars an hour 10 years ago so

[16:05] they get to the house and they each had sort of different roles one was sort of the the day-to-day guy one was this southern gentleman in the two thousand dollar suit who was nice to everybody and then one was just an ass kicker right and i i liked and trusted him the most so they're saying look john you're making a big mistake here and i said i'm innocent well be that as it may you know you really should think about this deal and then the ass kicker

[16:35] pulls me aside he gets right in my face and he says 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 i thought see he knows better than i do i can't win i my best friend's wife keep this it's linear my best friend's wife has an uncle who was o.j simpson's jury consultant

[17:08] and it wasn't just oj he did michael patrick smith patrick michael smith whatever his name was the kennedy kid um that got charged with rape he did george zimmerman he did does all these big big cases so because he's the uncle of my best friend's wife he agreed to help me for free so we get him top secret security clearance from justice he comes up he he reads all 15 000 pages of classified

[17:38] documents in my case with this big meeting i couldn't even meet with my attorneys at their office we had to meet at the justice department's conference room because it was classified wow yeah awful so he said to me look if we were in any other district in america i'd say let's go for it we're going to win but the eastern district of virginia the espionage court your jury is going to be made up of people from the cia the pentagon the fbi

[18:09] the department of homeland security and a dozen different intelligence contractors you don't have a prayer take the deal so i took the deal i said to the lead attorney afterwards if if i hadn't taken the deal realistically what was i looking at and he said 12 to 18 years wow yeah [ __ ] man it's a joke that everybody in

[18:40] prison is innocent one of the things that i learned is there are a lot of innocent people in prison oh yeah oh yeah a lot yeah that's one of the big things about um i've had a couple lawyers on here or one in fact a friend of mine who's a lawyer who represents a lot of people that get go on death row and he said one of the biggest issues um the biggest problems with death row whether regardless of what your moral stance is on it is that they get it wrong a lot a lot yes it's been proven yeah like how many

[19:12] hundreds of people have been exonerated thanks to dna evidence right it's [ __ ] unbelievable how often it happens this lead attorney that i told you about the mean one um he's so rich and has been an attorney for so long that he doesn't anymore take like new cases he has people working for him to do that what he does is he only does death penalty appeals that's it really uh-huh because he said he wants to you know public service and give back and all this stuff

[19:44] he's done 13 death penalty appeals and he's won all 13 of them you should see his office what's his name uh mark mcdougall mark mcdougall guy's a giant you go into his sounds like a really good attorney yeah yeah really really great attorney at aiken gump and strauss one of the most important law firms in the world wow you go into his office and it's like a museum of awards from every civil liberties organization in america you know from the end of naacp to the brennan center for justice and that's

[20:15] incredible for all these these appeals that he's won the guy's a genius what was it like being a guy like yourself who's been overseas seeing all this stuff been in these gun fights captured terrorists and then and then going into prison like yeah what was that like for you in the beginning then how did you adapt it was so shocking i actually wrote a book about it that won two literary awards i i wrote doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison um

[20:46] at sentencing my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp um minimum security there are no bars on the windows they don't lock the door you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to abscond most everybody works in town there's a little college in town and so the prosecution had no objection so she you know orders that i go to uh minimum security work camp and the funny thing is too

[21:16] you know you see on on uh law and order for example when somebody's guilty um right there in the courtroom they they take them away in cuffs and yeah right that's that's not how they do i mean they if you're a really bad guy they do but what they do is they say okay on you're going to get a letter from the bureau of prisons and the letter is going to tell you the day and the time that you have to turn yourself in so they they sent me a letter and they said come to the prison on february 28th no later than 11 am

[21:47] and turn yourself in so i get in the car with two of my attorneys my cousin his son and a documentary film crew and we drive up to the prison and it's weird you just knock on the door and you're like hi i'm john kiriakou i'm here to turn myself in and the guy's like i went to the camp and the guy's like you got to go across the street to the prison they process you there and then they walk you back over here i said okay so i go across the street to the actual prison it's got to be so hard it you're

[22:19] in shock so it's like your your brain won't even really process it you're doing it but you're not processing it you're not thinking about it right maybe we should go uh go get some mcdonald's first we did that did you yeah i said let's go to mcdonald's that's so funny that's what i just randomly thought of yeah we all went to mcdonald's and so i i go to the prison across the street camps are always across the street from a higher security prison or penitentiary so when there's a riot the guys at the camp can go across

[22:52] to the prison and do the cooking and the laundry and the you know mopping while everybody's on lockdown right so i go across the street to the prison i said i'm john kiriakou here to turn myself in the guy's like okay just walk through the metal detector and i walked through the metal detector and then he said okay let's uh let's go we we walk out and instead of going across street to the camp he starts leading me around to the back of the prison and i said no no i'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he goes

[23:24] not according to my paperwork you're not and i said what do you mean he said you're going to prison my friend like with the guard towers and the razor wire yeah the double fences and the razor wire and i told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do if you raise a stink they're gonna put you in solitary so i didn't say anything so he takes me to this processing area

[23:55] um and they they give you a uniform and a sheet and a pillow and a roll of toilet paper and a bath towel right this little stack of stuff right and they take your picture for a badge and the guy just says follow me i'm sitting there for 40 minutes finally the guy says follow me and he takes me to a cell and he says that bunk's yours

[24:25] and then as he's walking out he turns around he says by the way if anybody walks into your cell uninvited that's an act of aggression and he walks away i'm like what the [ __ ] is that supposed to mean i've been here 40 minutes now i'm gonna get my ass kicked right so i'm sitting there and i'm thinking you have lived in far worse places than loreto pennsylvania right like there's nobody in this prison more dangerous than the people i've been

[24:56] working with and i'm including my former colleagues in that so i thought you're trained for this you can handle this just do what the cia trained you to do sure enough two guys walk in just walk in and i jumped up out of my seat and i put my fists up and i go what the [ __ ] do you want right i'm trying to be as tough as i can one of them says take it easy now the one had this enormous swastika tattooed

[25:28] on his neck it took up the entire front of his neck right wow and the other one had [ __ ] you tattooed on his eyelids so every time he blinked it said [ __ ] you so i'm standing there with my fists up he goes are you the new are you the new guy and i go yeah and he goes are you a [ __ ] and i go no he goes are you a rat and i said no i'm not a rat i didn't have anybody else in my case and he goes are you a chomo

[25:58] i go i don't know what that word means he goes chomo child molester i go no i'm not a [ __ ] child molester and he goes okay you can sit with the aryans in the cafeteria and i go oh okay thanks and i'm thinking okay so i'm with the aryans now great so they walk out not too long after this black guy walks in and i mean this

[26:29] guy was just 200 pounds of knotted rippling muscle right and he's holding a newspaper so he walks in and he's huge he walks in and i jump up again i go what do you want and he goes take it easy and very gently he hands me the paper and it's the nation of islam newspaper and you know in prison the nation of islam isn't a religion so much as it's a a gang right there's an article about me on the front

[27:00] of this newspaper and louis farrakhan of all freaking people calls me a hero of the muslim people for standing up for muslim human rights so he says i just wanted to tell you you're not going to have any trouble with us and i said okay appreciate it so he walks away um it turned out that four of my five cellmates were members of um mexican drug cartels like all of them nortenos burachos

[27:31] mexican mafia these were bad bad dudes one of them says to me one day are you educated and i said yeah he said could you write my appeal i said i'm not a lawyer he goes yeah but you said you're educated i said yeah sure i'll write your appeal how hard could it be half the lawyers i know are you know dopes anyway yeah so i wrote his appeal he was totally guilty he wasn't going to get out but everybody writes an appeal so um he told all the other mexicans

[28:04] that i wrote his appeal and that i didn't charge him anything it never even occurred to me to charge him anything the currency in prison is bags of uh mackerel right a batgirl yeah okay like one of these silver foil bags of mackerel you know you see the tuna in the grocery store like a bag of tuna yeah but mackerel costs one dollar at the commissary so everything is in you buy i can't believe i'm surprised they actually have mackerel yeah it's disgusting

[28:34] smells just too high heaven yeah but uh anyway so the mexicans left me alone and then finally and this sort of set the tone for the rest of my time in prison um my brother my brother called me right before i left for prison and i he said listen you're going to you're going to fci loretto i got to tell you he goes there's a guy there that you really need to stay away from his name is

[29:05] i'm not going to say his name um he's the boss of the gambino family right and you know the gambinos are one of the five families this guy was in on 18 murder charges right he's the one who replaced john gotti when gotti was pinched so he's like stay away from me he's a very bad dangerous guy well when i got there i would see him walking around the yard he was he was

[29:35] tiny he was like five foot four but surrounded by these gigantic bodyguards like half a dozen of them so i'm sitting in my cell one day i'm reading the newspaper and i see movement out of the corner of my eye so i turn and look and it's one of the bodyguards we used to call him stupid tony because his eyes were crossed it's awful so it's stupid tony and he goes he goes hey was he actually stupid yeah he was really stupid yeah yeah guy was going

[30:06] nowhere in life he goes hey the boss wants to see you and i go he wants to see me and he goes yeah let's go like that so i jump up thinking [ __ ] like i've avoided this guy for four months and now he's summoning me so we go all the way to the other side of the prison we go to his room and it's full of guys hangers on wannabes

[30:37] the guy the boss is sitting in a chair there's another guy on his knees clipping the boss's toenails utterly disgusting and then when he finishes the boss gets up brushes his teeth there's a little sink there he brushes his teeth and he spits and the spit goes all around the sink right well right behind him there's a guy sleeping on the top bunk of the bed and he punches the bed and he goes hey get up clean his [ __ ] up he says

[31:09] the guy says you got it boss he jumps out of bed cleans up all the spit well i'm standing in the doorway this whole time so i go excuse me did you want to see me he goes sit down so i go and sit down and i'm like practically shaking i'm so nervous and he goes you the cia guy and i said i am you write a book i said i did your book do good i said actually i did very well i made

[31:40] number five on the new york times best sellers list and he goes you're gonna write my book and i said oh is that what this is what do you have in mind he goes i'm gonna tell you stories and you're gonna write my book i said okay well let's think about this for a minute you know i said most of the books of this genre uh are written by rats and i said

[32:12] they spend the first half of the book talking about all the cool things they did and the second half of the book they try to justify why they turned rat and i said you're definitely not a rat and you probably shouldn't talk about the cool things you've done and he looks at me and he nods and he goes hadn't thought of that never mind but from that day i was invited to every italian dinner they had a crooked guard on payroll he

[32:42] would bring us pork loin and wine for the marsala sauce and fresh mushrooms and tomatoes and all the pasta we needed from the kitchen and i gained 30 pounds in prison holy [ __ ] i gained 30 pounds in prison and then we actually stayed in touch afterwards um is he still in there no he's out which leads me to another story i had been out for

[33:14] three years and around 7 30 one evening my doorbell rings and my youngest i have five kids but my youngest was little at the time he was like four busy guy yeah i can't keep my hands to my mind so he runs the door and he opens the door before i can get there and i hear this sugary sweet voice and he goes hi is your daddy home and i thought you [ __ ] so i go to the door and i said may i

[33:45] help you i was like actively rude and it's not my nature to be rude the guy goes hi mr kiriakou i'm special agent uh smith with the fbi and this is my colleague special agent jones and i said you guys have balls coming here you know i'm represented by council and he goes oh no mr kiriakou it's not about your case um you see uh it's about another issue we know that when you were at loretto you were friends with uh peter the

[34:15] rabbit i said so well you know pete got out he's home now i said yeah good for pete well uh mr kiriakou um we have reason to believe that he's that pete's taken over leadership of the gambino crime family and i go and you want me to rat out a five family's boss get off my property and i closed the door i called my attorney

[34:46] he called me back 20 minutes later and he's like i don't know what they were thinking but they're not going to bother you again jesus christ man that's [ __ ] terrifying because even if you don't rat them out yeah these guys will probably use your name exactly to get this guy exactly and that not only implicates you imitate your whole family he called me oh i'm gonna say three three it is it's exactly the mob boss guy yeah the mob boss he called me three years ago and he said

[35:16] hey he goes anthony's out anthony was this guy he was also a gambino yeah that we really liked i liked anthony he was the last one of our group of friends to be released and uh anthony was also the last one to be transferred to our prison from a maximum security penitentiary to a medium to a low okay so i was sitting at the baseball field uh in out in the yard sitting with him when he first arrived

[35:47] and poor anthony i mean he was dumb he was nice but dumb as a stone and i said to him so anthony um you mind if i ask you uh how much time you have he goes i got 20. i go 20 years and he goes yeah i got a long one i said oh man i'm sorry to hear that you mind if i ask you what did you what did you do and he goes my crime was organized in nature

[36:20] i said right i got it he goes yeah my victim found himself uh [Music] on fire i said right yeah 20 years jesus christ and he's out now he's out now so is it part of like a conspiracy case or a rodriko case yeah they were all all of them in on rico cases all of them oh my god yeah yeah rico is real that shit's crazy so anthony got out any

[36:53] and the boss called me and he's like hey we're all getting together in atlantic city all expenses paid i said cool you went i went great fbi is there with their cameras they're all giving them the finger and stuff really and then you know i i wanted to like i'd never been to atlantic city before even though it's two hours away from my house i'd never been and i've always heard just terrible things about it so i wanted to go out and explore a little bit so we all pile into these cars and

[37:23] they're like now we're going to go you got a gps put this address in your gps i said okay i put it in we go it's it's some run down beat up house i said what is this supposed to be this is anthony scarfo's house he was the boss okay so what the [ __ ] are we doing here we're gonna pay respects i said you guys are like the most boring travel companions in the world i want to go what are they going to do to pay respects we're just sitting out

[37:53] there oogling at it [Music] that's so weird man i you know i've had a couple you know people who went to prison under rico charges being involved with the gambino crime family and and uh different italian you know mafia groups and one thing that's consistent that they all say to me is that there's this culture of being like of anti-rat culture like you can't be right yeah and they're all rats they're all rats they're all rats all of

[38:25] them it was crazy i'll tell you another thing that was odd it's all about honor and respect right so on the one hand uh we're all standing in the in one of their cells one day we had dinner right everybody's sitting around with these giant bowls heaping bowls of pasta [Music] and one of the low-level guys walks in and he's got like his arms are full of candy bars so he starts handing out these candy bars hershey's bars and snickers bars

[38:57] and the boss says where the [ __ ] do you get this and he said uh i broke into a chomo's locker and i took all of his [ __ ] and the boss gets up he goes you put all this [ __ ] back and you tell him you're sorry and everybody stops and looks and the guy goes but he's a chomo they're the lowest of the lowest right he goes if you're going to shake down ochomo you do it to his face and you say chomo open your locker and give me all your [ __ ] you don't do it behind his back

[39:28] right now give him all his [ __ ] back and he did so after you did 24 months in prison what was it like getting out of prison oh you know getting out was much more stressful than anybody will tell you home confinement house arrest is far worse than prison i'd rather have just stayed in prison because with home confinement you literally cannot leave the four walls of your house if you step outside on the front stoop or on the back porch

[40:00] you're violated you go back to prison again and so you go stir crazy you can't do anything and they've got these restrictions on you they call you 24 hours a day to make sure that you're that you're there you haven't run off or you didn't go out right partying or whatever constant drug tests i'm like you guys i've never even smoked weed in my life i'm happy to waste as much as your of your time and the government's money as possible but this kind of pisses me off now isn't that so stupid

[40:31] that a lot of people who get arrested and go to prison for non-drug related charges they get it's all about drug testing ridiculous so it's it's far more stressful uh coming out of prison see you think you can step back into your life again and and you can't that's just not possible it'll never be possible your life will never be the same i'm never going to work for the government again and you know after i left the cia i went to the i was the the chief investigator on the senate foreign relations

[41:01] committee the highest profile most prestigious committee on all of capitol hill i'm i'm never going to do work like that again never so stripped you of your of your entire pension yeah they took my pension i'm gonna have to work till the day i die unless i get a presidential pardon which is unlikely now are you still like being shackled down hard by these restrictions no um in fact i i was supposed to have three years of restrictions after i got home and they lifted them after two oh okay

[41:32] yeah well that's nice they definitely don't make it easy when you get out to get back on your feet and get a job no in fact i had an offer to be a senior fellow at a think tank in washington uh the institute for policy studies it's the oldest uh progressive think tank in washington and they wanted me to do prison reform and sentencing reform issues and the bureau of prisons denied me they denied me permission to take the job and i said listen you guys are up my ass about getting a job i

[42:02] finally get a good job and you tell me that i can't do it they said it would be inappropriate for you to comment on prison reform issues and i said you know what wow i'm gonna take the job and if you violate me i'll let you talk to the washington post about why you violated me and i took the job and they backed off no [ __ ] i got into two incidents with them one was on that job and those people treated me like a king at the institute for policy studies the other thing was

[42:36] they make you take these classes mandatory classes if you don't take the class you go back to prison okay mandatory how to write a resume i know how to write a resume how to balance a checkbook thank you i know how to balance a checkbook suicide prevention i go don't you think you should give that before you go to prison instead of when you get home so it was all these stupid um

[43:08] uh how to kick your drug and alcohol habit i don't have a drug and alcohol habit so i didn't i never signed up for these classes i get a call from them one day they said kiriakou get in here immediately so they wouldn't let me drive so i had to take i had to walk to the metro which was you know 20 minutes then i'd take the metro to capitol hill then i have to get on a bus and then take the bus to alabama avenue and take another bus to the to the

[43:38] halfway house and then walk three more blocks through the most dangerous block in the most dangerous neighborhood in washington took me two hours to go seven and a half miles right as the crow flies so i go there and it's everybody it's the head of the halfway house the deputy director the case manager a representative from the bureau of prisons regional office in baltimore right they're all around this conference room table and i go in i sit down and one of them says kiriakou we are this close to violating you you're going to

[44:10] go right back to prison i go why what did i do he goes you haven't taken a single one of the mandatory classes and i'm so proud of my response i still chuckle when i think about it i go in all seriousness i go did you ever see that episode of the simpsons where homer has to take a parenting class and he goes to the parenting class he's a little bit late so when he walks in the instructor's saying put a garbage can lid on the garbage can

[44:41] people i can't stress that enough is that what you're going to teach me in your class to put a garbage can lid on the garbage can or how to write a resume or how to balance a checkbook because i don't need your classes he goes step outside so i step outside i'm out there for like 45 minutes i go back in he goes all right you don't have to take any of the classes and i said thank you and another thing i want to drive

[45:11] it took me two hours to get here today seven and a half miles i said you guys are on my back all the time about getting a job and then you make me come here three times a week and it kills two hours getting here and two hours getting home and then you can't understand why i don't have a job so i want my driver's license back and i want permission to drive okay you can have permission to drive i said thank you and i left like you morons you know it's it's one size fits all for

[45:42] these dopes it's so dumb we have the dumbest freaking criminal justice system i think i think we have the most people in prison per capita than any other country by far we have four percent of the world's population and 25 of the world's prison population yeah it's ridiculous ridiculous now are you doing a podcast now or are you doing you're doing some sort of daily show yeah i've got a daily radio show a radio show a terrestrial show in washington um

[46:15] it's uh every day from 12 to two okay and i've got three syndicated columns now one for consortium news one for covert action magazine and one for the sheer post at the university of southern california and then i started something that i'm i'm really pleased with it's a new social media platform called pan quake and pan quake is is unlike any other social media platform you've ever heard of

[46:45] uh first of all it's utterly completely transparent even the code is transparent so there are no algorithms there's nothing that's going to steer you to one line of thought or to another or to follow this guy or to not follow that guy utterly completely open it is based in iceland so freedom of speech is of the utmost importance and uh you know frankly the fbi doesn't

[47:17] have any subpoena authority or seizure authority in iceland so that makes it nicer too it's blockchain based and um it's completely and totally financed by um crowdfunding small donations five ten fifty bucks they've repeatedly turned down major money investors repeatedly including one who's a household name and so um yeah it it's something i'm proud to be is it similar to twitter or

[47:47] instagram or twitter yes i'm smiling because it we try not to say the word twitter oh okay just because it's heresy there are yeah are there our big competition the the big gorilla 800-pound gorilla yeah um but yeah it's it's twitter without the algorithms and with transparency okay yeah that's very fascinating it's panquake.com okay yeah the uh didn't something happen recently with consortium yes news what

[48:18] happened with them yeah so um paypal froze consortium that's what it was that's what it was and not only did they freeze the account they seized the 9 300 we had in the account on payday no less um they wouldn't tell us why and so the the uh executive editor joe lauria was able to get through to a human being at uh paypal he's like why did you guys do this oh you've all you violated our terms of agreement

[48:48] he's like what what violation well there was no violation and they finally admitted that there was nobody who complained they just did this on their own and finally they admitted that we weren't anti-russia enough in our editorials you weren't anti-russia enough can you imagine that who said this paypal paypal yep so we um all of us who write for for consortium news wrote about this and published in

[49:20] other outlets to try to spread the word as as widely as we could and you know we've got i'm on the board of consortium news we've got people like chris hedges who's a pulitzer prize winner we have an academy award-nominated documentary producer we've got like legit people these aren't nuts lunatics you know who dabble in cue anon these are legitimate people respected in their fields and so uh we we put out the word that not only did they did they uh freeze the account but they seized all of our money

[49:50] and we said we're going to join this uh class action suit that's already been filed against uh paypal in the northern district of california and as soon as we said that we were going to join the class-action suit they released all of our money back to us wow but they told us that we're permanently banned from paypal that's so [ __ ] bonkers man that's crazy that's so bonkers you weren't anti-russian enough yeah and you know one of the reasons why i love writing for consortium news i

[50:21] actually work for the russians right i my show is with the sputnik network but one of the things that i insisted when they offered me this job was language in my contract saying that i can talk about any issue that i want to talk about and i can criticize any person that i want to criticize including vladimir putin and on the that was your agreement with sputnik with sputnik and for people who don't know explain what sputnik is sputnik is the russian government's official radio network okay so it's like uh voice of america

[50:52] okay for us okay so on the day of the russian invasion the way i opened my show is i said i unreservedly condemn the russian invasion of ukraine i believe this is a violation of international law it's a violation of human rights and i urge the russian military to withdraw immediately that's how i open the show and i have guests on that criticize the russians i have guests on that criticize the ukrainians and when i write including for consortium news i say

[51:23] i unreservedly oppose the russian invasion of ukraine but i understand why they did it right two different things you know war is a bad thing right we should let the diplomats do their jobs and and try to prevent war every time that we can but i understand why the russians felt they needed to cross the border that doesn't mean i like it or agree with it it's just that i understand it right and they were like oh no no and they and sputnik aired all airs all this stuff even if it goes

[51:54] against the government's narrative yeah because everything that you hear anywhere is that that's not what it's like in russia right everything in russia is tailored to what the government wants you to hear it's all propaganda cnn did a story about my show a couple of weeks ago and they said that i was weakening democracy can you imagine you were weakening in the united states because i'm a former cia officer i should be standing up for my country not working for the russians and i said yeah i said to this nick whatever's name was the reporter i said are you gonna

[52:24] put food on my table are you gonna put my kids through college yeah where was cnn when i got out of prison and i needed a helping hand so don't tell me about weakening democracy well that's weird because cnn hires i think more ex-pentagon officials exactly any other any other company they pay the last four cia officials are either at or cia directors are at either cnn or msnbc right yeah what is what do you think about that about all these ex-pentagon officials cia lists scandalous where's the where's the separation

[52:55] you know it's like cnn msnbc and fox same thing they're all just adjuncts of the national security state it's crazy that's so wild so [ __ ] wild well man i don't know i don't know what the answer is but that seems bonkers that that's the world we live in yes it's been a real learning lesson and where so where can people listen to your daily show again uh almost nowhere we've been banned from

[53:27] youtube itunes i heart radio spreaker spotify and tune in what yeah you've been banned from i'm modified i'm weakening democracy how the frick did you get banned from every single platform so the only way to listen to it now is at sputniknews.com we went from 38 000 daily listeners to 500. no [ __ ] way yep that's crazy totally [ __ ] wise 38 to

[53:58] 500 which is what they wanted to do oh my they don't want anybody who has an alternative viewpoint otherwise democracy might get weakened because what are you saying what what are you saying to weaken democracy what specifically are they pointing to i can tell you um every thursday i have a 30-minute segment called criminal injustice and i have a journalist who focuses on criminal justice issues and a guy who's the head of a group called um the human rights defense

[54:28] center they publish prison legal news and criminal legal news magazines and so we talk every week for 30 minutes about crooked judges crooked prosecutors the death penalty cops getting arrested for you know raping prisoners and selling drugs and stuff like that wow and i get it all out of the washington post the new york times but that's weakening democracy holy [ __ ] [Music]

[54:59] well this episode's definitely going to get banned from youtube [Laughter] oh my god you know a funny thing too is everybody at the station on twitter they got this tag that says russian russian sponsored media right i have 50 000 twitter followers and i don't i don't have a tag i don't know why knock on wood i don't want one i'm not russian sponsored media explain this tag this tag is implemented by twitter yeah there's a there's so

[55:29] twitter put a flag on these accounts that says it's a russian every single one of my colleagues i'm gonna show you oops maybe he can pull it up on the tv on the screen sure what's one of the colleagues names uh lee stranahan lee stranahan on twitter yeah lee stranahan okay i gotta see this yeah because i know that russia i know that uh i know that twitter implemented um tags on posts that are created by automated bots right i had this guy out here the other day who uh he has a bot that poses

[56:01] russian state-affiliated media so he didn't put that on there no sir twitter did about a week after the russians invaded ukraine well click on that what does that go to oh i didn't even know you could click on it about government and state-affiliated media account labels on twitter labels on state-affiliated accounts provide additional context about accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of government state affiliate still state affiliated media entities and individuals associated with those

[56:33] entities the label appears on the profile page of a relevant twitter account wow look and they put the flag these labels include a small icon of a flag to signal the account's status oh man that's pretty [ __ ] crazy i never knew about this terrible i never knew about this go back to his uh profile again russian state affiliated media with the russian flag now did he put so they he

[57:05] didn't put the [ __ ] russian flag now twitter put the russian flag because you know one of the weird things about people on twitter is like i always become suspicious of somebody on twitter when they have the [ __ ] american flag emoji next to their name right right you think they're some sort of like either they're right wing or they're just some sort of [ __ ] antagonist on twitter yes who's just trying to get attention you know what i mean yes like a provocateur agreed agreed that's [ __ ] bananas

[57:38] i don't know how i feel about that yeah i don't like it i didn't know that was a thing i wonder what elon will do about that if he gets twitter yeah good question good question jesus and that's another thing about elon is he is a lot of his businesses are relying on federal grants and federal money a lot he didn't become the world's richest man by accident right the american government spacex launches all these government military satellites into space i know that tesla is is super reliant on federal funding

[58:09] yep but nobody i haven't heard anything about that i mean i don't not that i don't think it would be a bad thing for elon to buy twitter but it's just an interesting i hope he i hope he cleans the place up i really do wow artist john thank you again where can people follow you again where can people find your books uh the books are all on amazon okay um i'm at john kiriakou.com k-i-r-i-a-k-o-u just the way it sounds um twitter facebook all the usual places

[58:40] awesome well thank you again for spending your time and coming down here i i very much appreciate it and i really enjoyed this conversation thank you [Music] you
