Title: Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou Breaks Down Spy Movies
Show: GQ
Date: 2026-05-19
URL: https://youtu.be/WRJzaHMj2IY
Duration: 37:00

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[00:00] CIA people love, love, love to go watch CIA movies. Not because they love necessarily the CIA movies, but they love to criticize them. Hi, I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer. Today we're going to break down scenes from spy movies. This is the breakdown. The Man from [music] U.N.C.L.E. >> We'll leave you two to get acquainted.

[00:30] All right. You're my hostage now. >> I laugh because that's true. We always overdo it. I worked for a station chief one time who [clears throat] had never been an operations officer. She had been a paper pusher. And they made her the chief of a big station. There was some nuclear scientist in town. She sent an all-hands

[01:01] email around the station saying, "Everybody's got to go try to recruit this nuclear scientist. Figure out what hotel he was staying in." And we went to the the bar. Cuz where are you going to go? You can't just like ask what room he's in and go up to his room and invite yourself in. So, we're all sitting in bar. First of all, this nuclear scientist was from a Muslim country. And so, he's not going to be in the bar of all places. And as it turned out, every single seat at every single table in the bar was occupied by a CIA officer. And then when we decided, "This guy's not going to

[01:32] come in here for a drink." Literally everybody in the bar got up at the same time and walked out. And the whole thing was a failure and an embarrassment. >> What would motivate you to become the CIA's most effective agents? I concluded it must be to counteract the humiliation of knowing your balls are at the end of a very long leash held by a very short man. >> Yeah, I know that this movie was a comedy and it was a lot of fun. But, that's also an accurate portrayal of uh of a hostile operational meeting. We've all been in

[02:04] meetings like that where you're trying to intellectually one-up each other. Maybe you'd like to recruit him. He'd certainly like to recruit you. If you're going to make a threat, you have to be able to follow through on that threat. But, these kinds of meetings, yes, literally happen every single day. >> [music] >> The Night Manager. >> If you're content, I suggest we process the second half of the payment. >> I'm entirely content. >> Good. >> Please check. >> [music] >> Thank you.

[02:35] >> Pause here. This to me looks like a like a clandestine transfer, goods for money. Could be anything. Could be anything from equipment to weapons to drugs. Uh but, this is normally how something like this would happen. Let's skip ahead. >> [music] >> Jesus.

[03:11] I want my money back, Mr. Roper. >> And don't you hate when that happens? In real life, no, there would never be a a situation like that. It's It's In real life, it's very anticlimactic. Where you're going to exchange money for the product, whatever the product happens to be. Usually, the payment is the easiest part of about a relationship with the source. The source is perfectly happy to give up whatever information he or she has, perfectly happy to put his hand out and take the payment. And nine

[03:42] times out of 10, it's cash. And it's a monthly retainer. So, there's really no excitement involved in in making the payment. Uh usually, it's just pro forma. And you ask them to sign a receipt and they could sign Bugs Bunny if they want but just so long as there's a receipt that's signed and you have to deal with the accountants back at headquarters. You know, I was once told by a boss, you never want to mess with medical, security or finance because not only can they ruin your career,

[04:13] they can get you locked up and so you want all the paperwork to be in order especially when there's money involved. >> [music] >> Spy Kids >> I'll take you to the safe house. >> My parents can't be spies. They're not cool enough. >> That's cool. >> Pause here. There are certainly safe houses all over the world. Every every intelligence service in the world utilizes safe houses. Sometimes jointly. There was even a scene in the in the movie Munich

[04:44] where the Israelis and the Jordanians were in the same safe house although the Jordanians had no idea that their counterparts there were Israelis. But yeah, there are absolutely safe houses. Infrastructures like this. No, there are no Batcaves or hidden layers. The military is a different situation of course. They have hidden facilities all over the planet but for the CIA No. Let's fast forward. Unfortunately, there are no high speed submersibles. There are submersibles. There's one

[05:15] that's even on display at the CIA headquarters from from the Cold War. You know, little one man submarines that you can now buy in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Not for use today. Not unless you're a member of drug cartel. Skyfall >> [music] >> I'd like to start with some simple word associations. Just tell me the first word that pops into your head. For example, I might say day and you might say wasted. Agent. Provocateur.

[05:45] Woman. Provocatrice. Heart. Target. >> Pause here. Bond is undergoing a psych evaluation in this in this scene. Something that every intelligence officer has to go through. You have to be sane in order to go overseas and carry out these operations. Just after the 9/11 attacks when when one of the CIA counterterrorism center branch chiefs approached me and asked me if I would go overseas for a short-term mission. And I said, "Yeah, sure." I said, "Why don't you ask Dave

[06:16] to go? He covers this issue." And the chief said, "Dave Dave went nuts. He didn't pass the the psych eval evaluation." So, I saw Dave. I said, "Hey Dave, I'm going to go to this country and do this operation. I we should probably huddle and you can brief me on it." I said, "Sorry to hear you went nuts." And he said, "Yeah, what are you going to do? It'll pass. I'll be okay. I'll be back up and at them in in 6 months." I was like, "Okay, whatever." I mean, I don't know how nuts he was. He was clearly too nuts to go overseas.

[06:46] Everybody does these psych evaluations. You have them pre-employment. You have one 3 years after you're hired and then every 5 years for the rest of your life unless you do something overseas that requires maybe a little bit of intermediate intervention. Like maybe you beat the hell out of somebody at a traffic stop or make a particularly inexplicable stupid decision in an operation. You're going to have to get with the shrinks and and work it out with them. Let's fast forward.

[07:17] >> 007 Ticket to Shanghai. Documentation and passport. Thank you. And this. Walther PPK/S 9 mm short. There's a microdermal sensor in the grip. Encoded [music] to your palm print so only you can fire it. Less of a random killing machine, more of a personal statement. >> The location of this meetup appears to

[07:49] be the Tate Gallery. Never, ever, under any circumstances would such a meeting take place in public because you constantly run the risk of surveillance, cameras, microphones. You run the risk of some random tourist who happens to be walking by hearing the conversation. You would never have that conversation in any public place. Even out in the open in a park, you run the risk of of parabolics, for example. This conversation would always take place in

[08:21] a vaulted area inside MI6 headquarters. >> Standard issue radio transmitter. >> That looked like kind of a big transmitter compared to what I've seen uh in the past. The transmitters can get very small to the point where they're they're more like chips, about the size of a of a penny, but they are not switchable on and off. They're always transmitting, always sending out a ping. In some extreme cases, you can even have them implanted. You know, you have it

[08:52] implanted in your shoulder or in your butt crack or wherever it is that somebody's not going to notice it. But yeah, you're going to want a transmitter in case you're kidnapped. In the 1980s, the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was kidnapped and tortured mercilessly to death. He had a transmitter. It was embedded in his belt buckle, and the very first thing the kidnappers did was they took his belt off and they left it in the parking garage where he was kidnapped. Yeah, the tech is out there. It's just a question

[09:23] of implementing it. Tenet. >> [music] >> Pause here. It's almost unheard of for a CIA officer to directly infiltrate a group, especially a terrorist group. And it's for a variety of reasons. You don't look the role, you don't speak the language, or if you do speak the language, you speak it with an accent, usually an American accent. So, what is normally

[09:53] done is you recruit a person who's either already in the group or is able to penetrate the group. And then you carry out your operations through that person, through that cutout. So, to switch badges on a uniform, that's nothing that I've ever ever heard of. Let's fast forward. >> We live in a twilight world. We live in a twilight world. And there are no friends at dusk. You've been made. The siege is a blind for them

[10:24] to vanish you. >> What we saw there was an exchange of bonafides. That's something that is very, very important and is taught practically on the first day of operational training. If you are undercover or under deep cover, and no one knows or even suspects that you're an intelligence officer, and another intelligence officer has to make contact with you, there's going to be an exchange of bonafides. So, if I break into the room, I kick down the door, you turn and look, and I have to say "The

[10:54] rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain." And then you respond with "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy." We both know that we're on the same team. But if one side or the other doesn't know the bonafides, then anything goes. It was never, ever my experience that people would panic and not remember the bonafides. It's so drilled into you in training. You almost can't forget. And

[11:24] in addition, you have to remember that people hired by intelligence services, any intelligence service, especially in an operational position, you have to be somebody who has sociopathic tendencies, right? You have to be very cool undercover. There's kind of a famous story of the astronaut Neil Armstrong uh taking over from Buzz Aldrin as they're landing the Apollo module on the on the surface of the moon. Buzz Aldrin's heart

[11:54] was racing and he was afraid that he would crash it into the surface of the moon. And instead, Neil Armstrong took over and NASA detected that as he was getting closer to the surface of the moon, his heartbeat actually slowed down. That's not normal, but that's the kind of person that an intelligence service would want to recruit. Somebody who not just is cool undercover, but is is cool under pressure and becomes even more cool under extreme pressure. The Bourne Ultimatum >> Get some rest, [music] man.

[12:25] You look tired. He's looking right at her. >> [music] >> This is a realistic scene. It's not often that you're going to be so close to a person that you're going to be able to see them while you're talking to them, but it does happen. One of the things that they utilized here that's very effective in real life operations is out of the way places for static surveillance. So, most people when they think they might be under surveillance or are concerned that they could be under surveillance, they're looking behind them. They're not looking up in

[12:57] the second, third, 10th floor thinking, you know, there's somebody with binoculars up there. But frequently, there are. And not just one person, there's one person every block. A person from five blocks back will run around and assume a second static position. That actually is common and it's a part of training. Let's fast forward. >> Where are you now? >> I'm sitting in my office. >> I doubt that. >> And why would you doubt that?

[13:28] >> If you were in your office right now, we'd be having this conversation face to face. >> Breaking into offices was one of the funnest things I ever did. I enjoyed doing that very much. You know, sometimes you just want to get through the filing cabinet. Sometimes it's longer term, you want to plant a bug or a camera, although cameras were unusual. But, yeah, breaking into an office, sure, people do that ALL THE TIME. >> [music]

[14:03] >> YEAH, WILSON, CHECK MY OFFICE. >> REQUESTING picture of my office. >> [music] >> DAMN >> WHAT'S GOING ON? >> WE NEED BUILDING SECURITY UP HERE. >> HE'S GOT EVERYTHING. >> God damn it. At CIA headquarters, we work in vaulted areas. So, the entire vault, the entire office is considered a vault. With the entire office being a vault, you can just leave stuff out all night long, 24 hours, not a problem.

[14:34] Working in a satellite office, working in a station, whether it's domestic or foreign, nothing is considered to be an open vault like it is at headquarters. And so, if there's nobody in the office, literally everything has to be locked up. You remove your hard drive from the computer, you put that in the safe. All your paper files, and you try to keep paper to an absolute minimum. That's all kept in the safe. And the safe is one of these like really heavy-duty steel multiple reinforcement kind of, you know, classified safe. Not like this that you can just, you know, pick it and

[15:06] steal files. >> [music] >> Agent Cody Banks. >> Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece is white as snow. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. >> Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish. >> How many pieces do you wish? >> This is what happens when you design a codebook at summer camp. >> One of the things that that struck me was the way Frankie Muniz smiles all the time. He's so excited to be a part of

[15:38] this operation. And that's exactly how we were. Uh the first time I ever went to the Oval Office and there's the president, the vice president, the National Security Advisor, and the CIA Director. I'm 25 years old and they are there to listen to me and what I have to say. I couldn't stop smiling and I couldn't stop thinking my buddies from high school would never believe in a million years what I was doing right now. There most certainly is a world where children are recruited to be

[16:09] intelligence officers. Not in the United States, not anywhere in Western Europe even or the Western world, but the Russians have long had a program where children are recruited as part of what are called or what is called the illegals program. In my own neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia just two years ago, a group of illegals was broken up by the FBI. They were all arrested, charged with espionage, and then traded for American spies. Kind of like the old Bridge of Spies idea from the Cold War.

[16:40] They just sit for years until their expertise is needed. There was a television series on Netflix called The Americans. It was 100% true to life in following a family in the illegals program. And toward the end of the series, the children were finally activated. They were something like 16, 17 years old. But we wouldn't do it in the United States. At the same time, the Russians absolutely do.

[17:10] >> Mission Impossible. >> [music] [music] >> The dirty little secret of intelligence operations is that almost all of the tech that's used is just purchased on

[17:41] Amazon. It's easier, it's faster, and it's far cheaper just to buy something that has already been invented and manufactured than to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. Let's fast forward. This is just so unrealistic. It's very cool, and it's very cool to see it, you know, implemented, but in real life this stuff just doesn't exist. You couldn't buy

[18:12] that on Amazon. You might be able to get a green screen for 20 bucks, but that's about as close as you're going to come. What would happen in real life is you would spend 6 months working to recruit the guard or recruit somebody close to the guard so that you could get whatever it is done that you needed to get done. 24 I have a big beef with 24.

[18:46] Yeah, the silent helicopter gets you every time. It's a good thing nobody could hear that helicopter from 50 ft away. You know, there are a lot of shows, especially on regular broadcast television, that just don't work. There was one called Covert Affairs. Oh my god, it was the worst CIA show I've ever seen in my life, where this analyst just walks into the Oval Office and says, "Madam President, I need to take out a hit on someone." It's like, first of all, you're under arrest for just barging into the Oval Office. Who Who do

[19:17] you think you are, just walking into the Oval Office like you own the place? Secondly, you've just committed a felony because according to Executive Order 12333, you can't order hits on anybody. I hated that show. Another one, NCIS. I'm sorry, I know a lot of people love NCIS, but NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. You can't be with your guns out housing project in LA. You only have jurisdiction on Navy bases and on ships, not in the LA housing projects with your gun up in the air

[19:49] again to shoot somebody in the face. It's the same thing with this. They're at like the Rose Bowl or something having a shootout in the Rose Bowl. Come on, everybody's under arrest. You've all committed felonies. >> [music] >> Burn Notice. >> If you're going to put prints on a gun, sticking it into somebody's hand isn't going to do it. Any decent lawyer can explain prints on a gun. But try explaining prints on the inside of the trigger assembly. >> Oop. I happen to be sitting next to the guy

[20:22] who created and was the showrunner for Burn Notice on a plane. We were all going from Washington to LA. I never talk to anybody on planes, but I was sitting next to this guy, his name is Matt Nix, an absolutely brilliant and gifted writer and showrunner. We struck up a conversation and I happen to be a fan of Burn Notice. So, I said, "What do you do for a living?" He said, "I created a show." I said, "Oh, is it something I might have heard of?" And he said, "Well, maybe. It's It's the number one show on basic cable. It's called

[20:52] Burn Notice." I said, "Oh my god, I love Burn Notice. I've watched every single episode. In fact, I ran the credits in slow motion just to see who your script advisor was." And I I see one. And he said, "Oh, I've been obsessed with the CIA since I was a kid. So, I've read every book and I don't have a script advisor." By the time we landed in LA, I was the script advisor for season 6. And Matt and I are still friends. So, some sometimes

[21:23] writers take this so seriously that they make it 100% accurate. >> [music] >> Zero Dark Thirty. >> If you thought there was some secret cell somewhere working Al-Qaeda, then I want you to know that you're wrong. This is it. There's no working group coming to the rescue. There's nobody else hidden away on some

[21:53] other floor. >> I was the chief of one of the branches inside the Counterterrorism Center. I worked with her. >> Just us. >> She was actually my immediate boss. This scene is accurate. Yes. And you have to understand the frustration, too. 9/11 happened because we failed. 9/11 was the worst intelligence failure in American history. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on one day because we didn't

[22:24] do our jobs. I'm surprised that his language was as clean as it was. I will say though about this film. Zero Dark Thirty was a CIA propaganda film. There was so much that was wrong with this film in that the CIA Deputy Director and the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations gave Kathryn Bigelow, the director, and Mark Boal, the writer, a classified briefing over a classified mock-up of the Osama

[22:55] bin Laden house where bin Laden was found and killed. That was violation of the Espionage Act. The Director of the CIA Leon Panetta at the time invited Boal and Bigelow to CIA headquarters for an attaboy speech in which he revealed the names of the SEAL Team 6 members who killed Bin Laden. That was a violation of the Espionage Act. He later said that he didn't realize they were in the audience. So, no harm, no foul. When it was revealed that they were in the audience

[23:26] the CIA's office of security went back through his speech and ended up redacting 27 lines of additionally classified information. That was a violation of the Espionage Act. But, the worst part of this movie was that it perpetuated the lie that the torture program led to Osama bin Laden's location. It did not. If anything, the torture program delayed the finding of Osama bin Laden. What led to Osama bin Laden's location was really

[23:58] great analysis, not the lie that this movie would have us believe. >> When he wants to make a call, he leaves the house, walks [music] a few blocks, and switches on the phone. We need to keep canvassing the neighborhood until we find him. >> We got a shooter. >> Pause here.

[24:29] >> Yeah, that's right out of CIA counterterrorism training. Virtually on your first day of CIA counterterrorism training, you are put in this situation where you're in a car you're cut off, shooters cut you off, you have a second to decide if you should run them over and kill them, or reverse and as the CIA teaches you, get off the X, or get out of the kill zone. Somebody that close I'd run them right over. And then I'd back over them if I had to.

[25:01] But yeah, that that is completely real life. We've lost a lot of people over the years in situations like that. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan >> Former Director Miller warned this committee on several occasions about the threat that President Udo presented. >> Ideas that the acting director and I do not share. >> And yet, you cannot prove that we weren't involved. Doesn't that concern you? >> No, sir. It terrifies [music] me. >> Very powerful.

[25:32] And in a perfect world that's true. We know though, of course, that the CIA has been weaponized repeatedly over the years by Democrats and Republicans both. In a perfect world, the CIA would exist only to serve and protect the American people. But the CIA has a way of pushing the envelope and just waiting for government to push back. And that's not a reliable strategy because it will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we

[26:03] have a torture program and a secret prison program and an illegal renditions program and weaponization where they take down their domestic enemies. The reason why this happens is because we don't have oversight like you're seeing in this clip. We don't have members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Intelligence who are willing to stand up. Instead, and I regret to that I have to even say this, instead what we have on Capitol Hill are members of both parties who are nothing more than cheerleaders for the CIA. So,

[26:35] to see a hearing like this where the CIA is actively challenging the Deputy Director doesn't happen in real life. It should. It should happen every day. But it doesn't. >> [music] >> Argo >> It's roadblocks. >> I mean, wait till the weather clears up then >> the six bikes, provide them with maps to the Turkish border. >> We have intelligence they can ride bicycles or we're prepared to send in somebody to teach them. >> Or you could just send in training wheels and meet them at the border with

[27:06] Gatorade. >> Tony. >> It's 300 miles to the Turkish border. They need a support team following them with a tire pump. >> We were just asked to sharpshoot this. State is handling the op. >> I'm sorry, who is this? >> Tony's an ex-fil specialist. He got a lot of the Shah's people out after the fall. >> Sir, if these people can read or add, pretty soon they're going to figure out they're six short of a full deck. It's winter. You can't afford to wait around till spring so it's nice enough to take a bike ride. The only way out of that city is the airport. >> This is absolutely accurate. Tony Mendez

[27:38] is a giant in the history of the CIA. His wife is a giant in the history of the CIA and this is one of the greatest operations that the CIA has ever carried out in its history. It was Tony Mendez who saved the hostages who had taken refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Argo was a crazy idea but it was once described to me as the least likely to fail of all the crazy ideas. And so they went with it. The original

[28:10] idea to use bicycles was a terrible idea because as he pointed out it was winter time and nobody rides bicycles in the winter time especially when you're going north into the mountains where it's even colder and with more snow. The idea that that Tony came up with was to create a fake sci-fi movie to be filmed in Iran in the midst of the revolution and that sounds like a nutty idea too but it actually worked. These meetings are the kinds of meetings where you can just say the craziest thing and if

[28:41] people deem it to be even remotely possible, they'll give it real consideration. With that said, usually the the operations with the fewest moving parts are the ones that are most likely to succeed. >> [music] >> The good shepherd. First of all, certainly [music] books like that exist. They're called CDs or concealment devices. There are some CDs [music] that you're just assigned. Like,

[29:13] here are some CDs for you. Use them for whatever you want to use them for. Some are big enough you can put a gun in. So, yeah, absolutely they exist and every [music] CIA officer has access to them. The part where he's looking at the copy of Ulysses is a little a little bit Hollywood fabulist in that he's looking for an anomaly in the placement of the book. And it was placed just ever so slightly differently from all of the other books. It looks like, you know, this is a collection of of really classic um pieces of literature,

[29:45] but the binding was different. It was newer on Ulysses and it was just sitting up ever so slightly higher than the other books. And so, it looked like somebody had been handling that book. When he took it off the shelf, he was looking for an anomaly in the hard cover just to see if something had been glued or maybe there was something inside. He could tell that there was. Frankly, it wasn't a very good concealment device if you can feel it with your finger, but he could feel it with his finger and then he knew to go into it. >> I just wanted to hear something from you that was true.

[30:25] He was careless. >> FBI, you're under arrest. Stand up. >> It's not outside the realm of possibility that he would have confronted somebody directly like that. And unfortunately, you know, over the last 30 years, this has happened a number of times. The traitor Aldrich Ames, the traitor Robert Hanssen. One was a CIA counterintelligence officer, the other was the chief of FBI counterintelligence. And here they were both working for the Russians. Can you imagine? The chief of CIA

[30:56] counterintelligence and FBI counterintelligence both working for the Russians. So, it happens every once in a while. On the other side of that, we talked earlier about the Russian illegals program. I know an illegal, a former illegal. Uh he was trained in East Germany, sent here as a sleeper. He settled in Brooklyn, lived in Brooklyn for 20 years, uh did what he was supposed to do, just get a job as a normal American would, didn't speak with any kind of an accent, but he fell in love with a

[31:27] woman. And they got married, and they had a little girl. And he told me as soon as he saw that baby for the very first time, he knew he could never go back. One day, he was activated, and he didn't respond to the activation. And so, he's on the subway one day, right here in New York. And he said the subway didn't have very many people on it, but this guy walked right up to him, grabbed the strap, leaned over, and said, "You know that if you don't go home, I'm going to have to kill you."

[31:57] And he said, rather than go to his destination, he went directly to the FBI's New York field office. And he said, "I am a KGB sleeper. I've been activated, and I don't want to go home." And now he lives here in New York with his wife. His daughter's in her 20s. The Russians never tried to kill him, but, you know, sometimes things like this happen. >> [music] >> Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Robert Redford was in Captain America? >> What are you doing? >> She's disabling security protocols and dumping all the secrets onto the

[32:28] internet. >> Including Hydra's. >> And Shield's. >> If you do this, none of your past is going to remain hidden. >> Are you sure you're ready for the world to see you as you really are? >> Are you? >> Ed Snowden kind of did it. Joshua Schulte kind of did it. There are catches in place now to make sure that information is compartmentalized to the point that nobody else can do it. I would offer up my own personal opinion that what Ed Snowden did was was heroic and

[33:00] was bonafide whistleblowing. What he released was the fact that NSA and CIA were spying on us, on Americans. In today's day and age, you can't go to just one computer system and just download the crown jewels of the CIA or the broader intelligence community. It's just not possible. Nobody has that kind of access. Nobody. When I got out of prison, I served 23 months in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program. When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek Ambassador's residence. And I went there to the dinner and I saw a

[33:31] member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And he walked over to me and he said, "Hey, welcome home. Congratulations." And I said, "Senator, I I have to be honest with you. I expected more from you. I expected some support." And he got angry and he said, "Look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance." And I said, "Oh, you're afraid of them. I thought you were the overseer." They're all like that now. They're just cheerleaders. >> [music] >> Kingsman

[34:09] Let's skip ahead. The training is tough, but it's not that tough. >> [music] [laughter] >> Uh, no.

[34:41] No, listen, training was a challenge. I learned skills that I never even imagined existed. I was proud of what I ended up doing in in training, but there was nothing like that. But, you're never going to find yourself in a position like this where you're going to need to Listen, you need to think on your feet, certainly. I'll give you one example. We were in We were in driving training and we had to drive a car through this kind of no man's land that was supposed to be in like the Middle East or Africa

[35:14] or something like that, Central Asia. And the instructors remotely shut off my engine. And then my car just went dead. I was like, "What the heck? The car just went dead. Like the battery maybe or whatever." And then somebody opens fire on me with paint balls. So, they're hitting the car. I take my seat belt off. I crawl across, get out on the other side. I'm laying flat on the ground. I pull out my gun. I look to see where the shots are coming from. And it's actually a robot that's in a van.

[35:46] The the side sliding door of the van is open and the robot is firing these paint balls at me. So, I'm shooting back at the robot and I can't get a clean shot at it. I pop up just a little bit. I shoot out my own windows and then I'm able to shoot the robot and disable it. And the instructors come out and they said, "Damn it, Kiriakou. That was the last decent car we had." I said, "I couldn't get a clean shot. You're the one who told me get off the X, get out of the kill zone. I couldn't shoot the robot from the angle that I was. You should have cut my engine off later or

[36:17] earlier or something. What do you want me to do?" That's training. This is Hollywood. Thanks for having me, GQ. We'll do this again. In the meantime, check out my podcast, John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, on Apple Podcasts.
