Title: How Espionage Works (Former CIA Spy John Kiriakou Interview)
Show: The Independent Riot
Date: 2024-01-19
URL: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1599790
Duration: 59:00

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[00:00] Iraq invades Kuwait. I get into the office around 7 a.m.. As soon as I walk in my boss says don't take your jacket off We're going to the White House. Now. I was 25 years old we get in a car. We go to the White House They usher us in to the friggin oval office. Here's the president the vice president the national security adviser The director of the CIA my boss and me and we sit down I'm a nervous wreck. So the president says this was George HW Bush

[00:32] He says well Now what do we do and everybody turns and looks at me? Welcome to the independent riot podcast your home for free thinkers independent believers and radicals questioning the status quo our goal is to provide you entertaining Intelligent discussion around all of life's most pressing questions without hidden agendas or ulterior motives So if you're too good for the bad too bad for the good and sick of people trying to convince you to join their preferred pyramid scheme this week

[01:08] You found your home now. Here's your host Jim Duncan Welcome back to the independent riot everyone not right not left just trying to be real and we have got the perfect Guest to fulfill that promise for you today. He's probably one of the most Credentialed and fascinating Guests that we've had the luxury to talk to so far on the independent riot if you don't immediately Recognize his name. You're definitely gonna recognize his impact on the world stage

[01:42] because John Kiriaku was a CIA spy He worked at the CIA for 15 years part of that time as an analyst then moved into operations Rose up to being counterterrorism chief in Pakistan Post 9-11 and actually personally led the raid that caught the number three ranking al-Qaeda member abu's a beta that was the biggest

[02:14] terrorist catch post 9-11 Shortly after that though John had a principled stand against the waterboarding Torture techniques that were being used against detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other black sites and Became a whistleblower against the CIA Bringing the full weight of the Obama administration and CIA director John Brennan down on his head Forcing him to serve a two-year prison sentence

[02:47] so John has lived a life that has included being a Middle East expert a valued advisor to wartime sitting in presidents and generals and senators to a CIA spy a counterterrorism chief a whistleblower and a prison inmate and If that wasn't enough he's also been a consultant on many movies and films Talking to everyone from Oliver Stone to consulting for Sasha Barrett and Cohen on the

[03:24] Bruno movie. It's a Fascinating amazing resume and we're in extremely lucky to have John here for a little bit of time to give us insight into Some of the ways that the CIA and the national security apparatus actually works. It's invaluable insight that Really only he and a few other people in the world can probably give to us So if you like the conversation with John today

[03:54] I definitely encourage you to listen to other podcasts he's been on because it's all fascinating But then most important subscribe to his sub-stack which will be linked in the show notes below So you can get his articles and listen to his daily domestic and geopolitical Talk show that he's got every day called political misfits that if you're looking for a daily unbiased independent thinking Briefing of the world events of world events. That's the show to listen to political misfits

[04:30] That'll be linked in the show notes as well. And now without further ado. Let's get into and Conversation I'm extremely excited for with the author speaker spy Turned whistleblower turned inmate turned journalist the amazing storyteller John Kiriakou John thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show um

[05:00] your life is one of the most fascinating Lives I've heard of that The independent riots been kind of going down more and more of a rabbit hole of military industrial complex history of the CIA national security Apparatus all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to get your More your your experience and in insight on that

[05:32] However, then once I started to actually listen to your interviews my god, you have got some fascinating stories They are I started to make notes of things to to ask you about and it just got ridiculous It was like everything from al Qaeda raids to how our rendition teams work planes full of guns and money Consulting with Sasha Baron Cohen on Bruno What happened to abu's the betas eyeball? How we almost invaded our

[06:05] My favorite mackerel as a currency in prison It's we aren't gonna cover all of that although. Yeah, I would love to hear but Maybe for people that are not familiar with your working Career story at the CIA and what happened. Could you kind of give the the overview of that real quick? Yeah, I spent 15 years in the CIA the first half of my career was in analysis specifically on Iraq

[06:36] served overseas as an analyst and then got bored after seven years and Made a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations. I I spoke Arabic and and Greek And so I did my first operational overseas tour in Athens working against Arab terrorist groups and and domestic Greek communist terrorists Went back to headquarters 9-11 hit and then I became the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9-11

[07:08] I left the CIA in 2014 and I briefly went into the private sector for four years then I went into the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the chief investigator But in the interim in late 2007. I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, which I believed was patently illegal and And the Obama administration came down hard on me

[07:39] I fought him off as long as I could but I ended up doing 23 months in prison I would do every day of it again if I had to do it over again and You know, it's funny. I always thought I would end up You know spending my whole career at the CIA or the Foreign Service or Capitol Hill instead I'm in journalism. I'm an activist and It's funny to me that it's the it's the CIA and the Justice Department's determination to go after me

[08:10] That's kind of made me famous. Yeah, I've written eight books and got my own TV show and Every day I do a radio show. It's it's all worked out nicely and It fascinates me the how that must have been for you going from being a career CIA Working at the CIA agent and then Determining on Principle as well as I believe weren't you a little bit concerned that you were gonna be a scapegoat

[08:44] That prompted you to actually on ABC News in front of the entire country State what was going on and implicate the CIA and the president is knowing Yeah, the balls that that takes has got to like I mean, that's a that's amazing Was either balls or it was rocks in my head. Yeah Well, I was gonna ask for more clarity like what does that Your mindset like beef you make up your mind to do it

[09:18] I understand fairly quickly when ABC News contacted you but like are you not Sleeping the entire night before you go on ABC News. Do you know what you're about to do or is it kind of more? It just kind of develops in the moment. Do you realize the ramifications? I guess I didn't realize the ramifications and the reason I didn't realize the ramifications it is that is That pretty much everything I said was already out there, which is why I was not prosecuted in the beginning

[09:49] Okay, I determined that I had not revealed any classified information It's because the International Committee of the Red Cross Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had all issued reports saying exactly what I had said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and the policy likely had been approved by the president. I confirmed all those three things. And so I wasn't saying anything new, but what I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that I was the first current or former CIA officer to confirm all of those allegations.

[10:25] So allegations were out there. But nobody had ever said, yeah, those allegations are true. And that in its, in and of itself was illegal, or what they claim was. That's what the Obama administration contained. The Bush administration elected to not prosecute me because they said that it was not classified. It was out there. Okay. And the Obama administration went back, reopened the case against me. Wow.

[10:55] Prosecuted me. Yeah. And another thing kind of under the big umbrella of trying to get a more, because I think a lot of people hear these stories, but because CIA, the military, national security, it's all obviously a lot of it's murky how it works by design. But then also, yeah, it's just extremely complex. So it like for me, I wonder like, is that, did they reopen it because of a specific person

[11:29] or a couple of people or was it, so it was like it comes down to personal dislike or. Welcome to Washington. Okay. So after my arrest in 2012, my attorneys received 15,000 pages of classified discovery. Okay. In those 15,000 pages, we found a series of memos. It was a memo from John Brennan, who later became the CIA director. At the time was the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. John and I went back to the 80s, right?

[12:01] Okay. We were never friendly. Brennan wrote a memo to Eric Holder, the attorney general, saying, charge him with espionage. Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage. And Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself. They charged me three counts of espionage for that ABC News interview and a subsequent interview I did with the New York Times. And what they did, it's an old prosecutor's trick.

[12:33] They waited until I went bankrupt. And then they came back and said, we'll drop all the charges if you plead guilty to a lesser charge. So what are you going to do? Yeah. I already owed my lawyers $1.1 million. Wow. Yeah. That I'll never be able to repay. I still owe you $880,000. Yeah. So what do you do? I had five kids. You take a deal to make the thing go away. Yeah. So is there in that situation, obviously, like you would as an average American, like

[13:07] I would assume or hope there would be somebody that you could, somebody could rally to your side to basically stem that or, but there's just not when it gets to be when somebody that powerful is pissed off at you because everybody just, I was going to ask, did your former colleagues, people that you were friendly with at the CIA, did they basically just kind of stop answering your phone calls or?

[13:38] That's a good question. Several of them, more than several rallied behind me. A handful of former bosses of mine could not have been any more generous, any more helpful sending checks for my lawyers, helping to take care of my kids. Really great job leads for, you know, for my wife and me. Really, really great. Retired deputy director of the CIA sent me an email.

[14:08] Okay. It was the day of my arrest. And he said, he said, you've chosen a difficult road. I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself. Wow. And I saved it as a souvenir to remind myself, you know, on those down days that I did the right thing. Yeah. And the truth is, you know, you work with people for 15 years. They know who you are in their hearts, rather. And the ones that you were close to are going to remain close to you.

[14:42] And the ones who didn't like or respect you are going to walk. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that doesn't have to be specific to the CIA, that just happens in life. Yeah. There were no surprises. Let me put it that way. Okay. Yeah. I knew who I could count on and who I couldn't. Yeah. I can't even imagine that. The difficulty, yeah, I mean, that just seems surreal, both from a, the shakeup of your personal life, career, everything, but then also because it's on such a national

[15:18] or even global stage that with the implications then also of having to fight or be concerned like that it, the legal problems are going to get worse if you do the wrong thing. So glad you made it through it and yeah, came out better on the other end. Yeah. Absolutely right. So now I've got kind of some dumb questions again in the umbrella of how the CIA and

[15:49] national security state works basically. So dumb that I would just like to ask you some questions like how many people work at the CIA? Ah, that's classified actually. Okay. Yeah. No wonder I can't find it. Yeah. Security secret. Okay. Can you give any, is it like 1000, like 10, well, I'll preface it with this is where I was kind of started wondering is there was something that was released, I think about a year or two years ago about security clearances in the US.

[16:24] And the number was around 4 million, I think. And then it obviously as you go up, I don't completely understand how that works, but the top most level of security, I think it got down to like a million or something. That still seems like a hell of a lot of people that are involved. Yeah. Okay. But most of those, a majority of those people are contractors. Okay. They're private, they're employees of private companies that do classified business mostly

[16:57] with the Pentagon. Okay. Yeah. I was actually going to ask about that as well. Like, I mean how, so obviously that's massive. Is there any ballpark anyone has of an idea of how many of those private contracting firms there are? Yeah. The Washington Post did a piece, I'm going to say, it was a series of pieces, I'm going to say three or four years ago. Okay. In which they said there was something like 2200.

[17:32] Okay. That were, that were permitted by the government to what's called hold or maintain security clearances. For example, if you work for yourself, you're a sole contractor, right? Yeah. And you get a classified contract or you're awarded somehow a classified contract. You have to have some sort of an association with a company that can hold that security clearance. Okay.

[18:02] And you have to hold the clearance. They have to have a security officer who's cleared. They have to have a vaulted space where you can have a classified conversation. Okay. There are different provisos that have to be met before you can actually be granted or accept that contract. Okay. Yeah. And that sort of leads into my next question on, and you might not be able to answer this, of the mechanics of the way this works is, all right, I'm trying to visualize working

[18:36] at the CIA without knowing, do you picture in a huge building, you know, lots of hundreds of people working in, maybe thousands, is it, so do you know, as a person, an analyst or an operations person working at the CIA full time, do you know, or is there anyone that knows everything that's going on? Very few people. You can comment on three hands.

[19:08] Wow. So, you know, the idea of the need to know is very, very important. I don't care how high your clearances are. If you don't have a specific need to know about an operation, you're not going to know. Okay. It wasn't until the end of my career, when I was the deputy director's executive assistant that I finally had access to everything that the CIA was doing. And I'll tell you something crazy.

[19:38] There was one specific compartment. I was read into six or eight compartments above top secret that were, that were very closely held, extraordinarily sensitive operations around the world. And there was a development one day in one of these compartments. I was briefing. the deputy director for operations and all of the associate deputy directors, operations, intelligence, science and technology, administration, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, right?

[20:14] And the staff. And as soon as I started the briefing, I said, there's a fascinating cable in from the place. And those were the only words I got out of my mouth. And the ADDO, the associate deputy director for operations, stopped me and said, wait a minute, not everybody in the room is cleared for that. The deputy directors of the CIA.

[20:45] Yeah. And they weren't cleared for the information. So, and I actually remember because I was listening to you telling the story in detail of capturing Abu Zabeda. And you, it did surprise me towards the end of that story when he was being taken out by the rendition team. You mentioned that, that you weren't even as the person who caught him, you weren't even allowed to know where he was going.

[21:16] No, I need to know. My job was to catch him and turn him over. And that was it. Yeah. Wow. And they stuck to that. And I was like the guy on the rendition team who stopped me that night. Yeah. He said, come on. And I said, who are you? He had a black mask on. I said, who are you? He lifted up his mask and he was my last boss. And I said, where are you taking him? And he said, oh dude, I'm sorry, you don't have a need to know. And I said, yeah, that's cool. And he said, well, who is the guy?

[21:48] And I said, oh man, I'm sorry, you don't have a need to know. Wow. My job was to catch him. Yeah. Turn him over. My job was to take him from point A to point B. It didn't matter what his name was. Wow. Yeah. So what, well, that seems to be, it would be need to know who you're transporting to me. But like, so who determines what that, or is it just like if you were to tell him, then you might be subject to some sort of internal review that determined you did

[22:18] the wrong thing. Yeah. There would be an internal sanction. I would be investigated by the Office of Security. I'd probably be called in before a performance board. Okay. You know, you might be denied promotion for a year or two years for a violation like that. And what is, and again, stupid question, but when people use the term, you're read into a program, is that literally just somebody signing off on something or is it a much

[22:50] bigger? Okay. Bigger than that. So I'll give you an example. On my first day as the ADDO's executive assistant, I walked into the office that morning and I said, so what are we doing? And he says, you know what? I can't tell you. You have to go up to the sixth floor and I knew what office he meant. You have to go up to the sixth floor and you have to be read in first and then come back and we'll talk about it. So I go up to the sixth floor and they had six separate secrecy agreements

[23:23] laid out on a desk. And I had to go through each secrecy agreement and promise to take everything I learned to the grave, never talk about it unless it's specifically declassified. And most of it has been. And then I signed six times each one of the secrecy agreements. And I said, okay, so what's up? And then he said, well, number one, we're going to invader rock and overthrow us that I'm the same. Number two, we're going to do this. Number three, we're going to do that.

[23:54] Number four. Yeah. Wow. So I went back to the office and I said to my boss, I go, we're going to invade Iraq. And he said, I know it's crazy, but yeah, yeah, we're going to invade Iraq. Wow. So is it difficult or do you just develop sort of a extra sense in your brain and communicating? I guess maybe you're even practice that as a CIA field operative that of what

[24:25] you can say and what you can't. Does it sort of get to be second nature where you're not constantly ice? Okay. That's a good question. It does, but it can take years to get to that point. Yeah. Over the course of those years where you're learning what you can say and what you can't say even internally, you get slapped down a couple of times. And you kind of learn the hard way. I was giving a briefing once. I'd been on the job, I'm going to say three years. And I was giving a briefing and I mentioned a location.

[25:00] Now everybody in the briefing is cleared, right? It's an internal briefing, but I mentioned a location. And during the break, one of the senior officers came up to me and she said, you should never have mentioned that location. They didn't have a need to know the location. And she said, it's a security violation. And I said, my God, I'm sorry. It never even occurred to me that the location would be. I mean, everybody's cleared. And she said, I know that you just got here. I was in my three-year probationary period.

[25:31] She said, I know you just got here. I know you didn't do it on purpose. So I won't report you to security. But I mean, here we are 30 years later. Yeah. I still remember all the details of that slapdown. Yeah. Yeah, that seems like at first it would almost be overwhelming of like you would be too paranoid that you're going to say the wrong thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, your polygraph, before you get hired, after three years and then every five years for the rest of your career.

[26:03] And so it's going to come up in the polygraph. Yeah. You've forgotten about it. They're going to ask you an open question. Have you ever exposed classified information to any person not entitled to receive it? And you have to go back and like, yeah, you know what? In a briefing with the Israelis, I may have said this or I accidentally mentioned to the Brits when I was in a liaison meeting, you know, all this stuff floods back. And so you have to try to get through it.

[26:35] Was that a big change going from an analyst? Obviously the jobs you're tasked with are entirely different. But from analysts to operations, was that like a completely different skillset training that you had to go in through forever? No comparison. Okay. As an analyst, you know, in the beginning, I only thought about being an analyst. I kind of considered myself a kind of an intellectual.

[27:07] While I was working on my PhD in international affairs, I had a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies and a master's in policy analysis. An analyst sort of sit in a cubicle every day and think the big thoughts and write the president's daily brief and write policy papers for the president and the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor. And you know, you're the substantive expert on whatever your issue happens to be. My time was Iraq before, during and after the first Gulf War.

[27:43] And you know, it's great. Sometimes you find yourself at a position like August 2, 1990, one of the most important days of my life. Iraq invades Kuwait. I get into the office around 7 a.m. As soon as I walk in, my boss says, don't take your jacket off. We're going to the White House. Now I was 25 years old. We get in a car. We go to the White House. They usher us in to the friggin oval office. The president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the director

[28:14] of the CIA, my boss and me. And we sit down. I'm a nervous wreck. And I remember looking around and thinking, my friends would not believe me. I told them what I was doing right now. So the president says, this was George H. W. Bush. He says, well, now what do we do? And everybody turns and looks at me. And I was at home. Yeah. It was that. It was that crazy.

[28:45] Yeah. It was that crazy. Dick Cheney was the one that sort of led the meeting, which was also crazy. He was the one who at the time Cheney was, what was Cheney? He was Secretary of Defense. Defense. Yeah. Secretary of Defense. He's the one that sort of led the questioning. And it was just, it was one of the most bizarre, like defining events of my career. Now, that's a once in a career kind of thing. Okay.

[29:16] On the other hand, when you go into operations, it's like, it's an entirely different world. Yeah. Whether it's, you know, recruiting spies to steal secrets, which is kind of the basis of operations or running covert operations or actions or planting bugs or videos or liaising with foreign intelligence services or counterterrorism operations or the most sensitive operations of them all, which are

[29:47] counterintelligence operations. And then within each of those categories, everything is compartmentalized. And you might not be able to answer this is. are there different specialists in each of those categories like within operations or do you do all of that as an operation? Oh, no, no. There are definitely specialists. OK. The guy, for example, he was the unlikeliest operations officer.

[30:21] He was kind of a nerd and an intellectual and he had gone to MIT. And I'm like, what are you doing here? Like, why aren't you a professor somewhere or something? I don't think he was a nuclear scientist. You know, when you're trying to infiltrate, let's say, the North Korean nuclear program, you need people who can talk the talk. I don't know what to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll give you an example. In training, we were doing a training exercise.

[30:53] And these training exercises were absolutely real life, right? In fact, I remember going into the field for the first time and being shocked at how real life was exactly like the training. It was remarkable. So I'm in this training exercise and I'm supposed to be at a diplomatic cocktail party overseas. So, you know, we're wearing suits and we're at a restaurant. We had rented this private, you know, back room and everybody's got a cocktail

[31:27] and waiters are walking around with hors d'oeuvres and stuff. It's the real deal. And I walk up to this woman. I say, hello, how are you? Fine, how are you? I said, I'm, you know, John Kiriakou from the American Embassy. I think that we called our country the Republic of Victoria or some. We made up some, some name of some country. So I said, how about you? What do you do for a living? Oh, I work at the port. I said, oh, that's nice. I'm thinking, what do I care about this woman? She's, I'm not interesting to me.

[31:58] Oh, what do you do at the port? Oh, I process this paperwork. Oh, okay. That's interesting. It's actually not, but I'm trying to be nice. Yeah. And then she says something about, oh, I, I almost missed the party because I had to work late. There's a shipment of trichloromethyl ethylene that, that, you know, didn't have the proper paperwork. Okay. Well, what the fuck do I know? I don't know what that is. Yeah. I was like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. And I walked over to the next guy and my instructors went nuts.

[32:31] They were like, don't you know what that is? I said, no, that's the precursor chemical for, you know, cocaine or fentanyl or, well, how am I supposed to know that? Yeah. I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. Yeah. I don't know what the chemical makeup of cocaine is. So we need these experts who can, who can talk in these kinds of details. My boss one time, I, I, I was going after a target overseas and things were going really well.

[33:03] And so I said to the guy, listen, I'd like to introduce you to my boss. We'd like to make a formal relationship. I'm going to have an offer for you that I think is going to make you very happy because he knew who he was dealing with. And he knew it was going to be some money on the back end of it. Yeah. So I flew him to another, to a third country and my boss flew out from Washington and we took a little break during the debriefing. And, and he said to me, have you ever been to Broadway? The target did, the agent did. And I said, yeah, I've been to Broadway a couple of times.

[33:34] I saw, you know, I took, I took my girlfriend to see the Lion King once and I saw rent and stomp and this and that. And he was like, oh, I saw the King Mutiny Court Marshall. I said, oh my gosh, I saw the King Mutiny Court Marshall in London's West End and when it was done, I met Charlton Heston on the street. And we talked about that and laughed. And then he said something about, about this. What the heck was it? Oh, it was, it was a European soccer league, but not the, the

[34:09] Premier League. It was okay. And I said, oh, I have a cousin who was on this team by not the night course. And he, I used to go to the games and blah, blah, blah. And we did this for 30, 40, 50 minutes. And afterwards, my boss pulled me aside and he said, that's why you're good at this. And I said, what? He said, I didn't know what you were talking about. I've never been to Broadway. I don't follow soccer. He said, I don't see any attention to any of that stuff, but I can tell that the agent likes you. He likes around you.

[34:41] I said, no, no, thanks. I said, I have a lot of interests. A lot of stuff makes me happy. Yeah. So is that so like, do you have teams typically like where like almost like mission impossible type? It's actually quite competitive. Okay. You know, you might go into the office one day and somebody, you sit next to says, what are you working on? None of your damn business would I'm working on. Huh? Because I don't want you stealing my target.

[35:13] I met a guy at a party last night and I'm taking him to lunch and you better not take him to lunch. Wow. Yeah. Because that's important. Yeah. So it's almost like a, I mean, I've had sales jobs that were sort of like that. Where do you? Yeah. Journalists are the same way. You know, they jealously guard what they're working on and never reveal their sources. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. In fact, when you're sitting with a group of guys, a group of case officers or operations officers,

[35:48] you'll never say, oh, I'm going to meet with John Smith tonight. You're going to say, I'm going to meet with a B grasshopper to tonight, which would be his code name. Yeah. Because I want them to know the names of your sources. Wow. So, yeah, that's just fascinating. They're all cleared. But then what happens if, you know, I sit next to you and I'm telling you, oh, I'm going to recruit John Smith tonight and then you run to the Russians and tell them.

[36:18] Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. These are the Chinese. Well, that makes a lot more sense than in the, because I always wonder like how likely, well, not how likely, but how possible is it that you could have a foreign agent or something infiltrate the CIA? It seems like it's way more possible than from listening to some of your stories and what you're saying now,

[36:48] the thing that like strikes me is that I get wrong a lot of times is I kind of visualize thinking on these big global stages that there is somehow a more foolproof system that is almost beyond human failings of any individual to protect us and make things work. But then whenever I listen to stories like your stories

[37:18] or fascinating or anyone else, it just always comes back to me. No, this is just a bunch of individuals making right and wrong decisions. And yeah, just a bunch of individuals who are human beings with human vulnerabilities. Yeah. They teach us in training to immediately identify a vulnerability in a person. Now a vulnerability could be obvious like a person is in financial trouble. Okay.

[37:48] Or maybe you really, really love your wife and she has breast cancer. Okay. Yeah. Do you want her to get treated in Romania or do you want her to get treated at the Mayo Clinic? Because I can arrange the Mayo Clinic for you. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. You give me the plans to that new Russian tank. Yeah. Right. And so if you are in the US as somebody that is either high up in governmental power or potentially has valuable

[38:19] information like that or in another, like are there just, are there just intelligence officers all over the place as far as trying to, you know, turn our people verse and the CIA sending people like, I mean, okay. There are even advertisements on buses here in Washington DC advertising the spy museum saying that there are 10,000 foreign spies in Washington DC.

[38:51] Wow. At any given time. There are more spies in Washington than in any other place in the world. Geez. So that's just crazy then if you are somebody that has information of going out to like a bar or restaurant on the bus, you really can't trust anyone. I mean, as I mean, not right away or even potentially. Yeah. I'll give you a real life example. I'll give you a real life example a couple of years.

[39:22] Well, four years ago now just a block from from my radio studio. There's a popular restaurant and it's directly across the street from the White House or it well across the street from the park that's across street from the White House and Ty Cobb, not the baseball player, but a distant relative who was one of the White House councils was having lunch there with another another attorney from the White House and he was like, we're screwed. Trump is going to prison.

[39:54] Here's our strategy. This is what we're going to do. Okay. And he just lays it out full voice. in public in this restaurant. Well, guess what? The restaurant is on the first floor of the office building that holds the New York Times. Wow. And the New York Times Washington bureau chief was sitting at the next table and he wrote every word down and broke this blockbuster story on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Now that could just as easily have been a Russian KGB officer

[40:25] or a Chinese intelligence officer or an Israeli or a Brit or a French or a Cuban or any of the other 240 countries that have intelligence officers in the United States. How many people does China potentially have over here? Like as far as many, many hundred, okay. The Chinese are like the Israelis in that they're not just interested in recruiting people to report on political developments.

[40:57] They're looking for hard sciences, you know. Okay. AI, computer technology, mathematics, chemistry, they're not, they don't so much care what's being said on the periphery of the White House so much as they care what's being said in the manufacturing centers of the military industrial complex. Okay. Or in Silicon Valley. Yep. In his, back several episodes ago

[41:28] I interviewed a guy named Jack Barsky. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He was a KGB agent. That was actually one of the, what they call the illegals that came over. I think he was here in the 80s and came over as a young man and basically lived over here for a couple of decades as, yeah, a Soviet agent. And his story is just fascinating. Like the, again, like even with the,

[42:00] keeping the classified information straight he had to live like an entire double life for. Completely separate lives. Yeah, it's just, it's crazy imagining being that person but then the fact that when you realize that those people are especially in like somewhere like DC pretty much all over the place. It just is, is fascinating. Is it, The Americans? Yep. Yeah. So Joe Weisberg is the creator of that show.

[42:30] He and I worked together in the counterterrorism center. And that's actually one story. Joe's a very good guy, lovely guy. And that job just was not for him. And he said to me one day, he said, hey, I gotta tell you, I resigned. And I said, what? And he said, yeah, this job, it's just not for me. I'm just not good at getting people to commit treason. You know, it's not for me. I said, what are you gonna do? And he said, well, I'm not married. I have no kids.

[43:01] He said, I'm gonna go to Hollywood and find my fortune. And that was the last time I saw him. So he moves to LA. He writes a book. It was a novel that the CIA heavily redacted because it was just too close to real life. Huh. It wasn't a commercial success, but it was brilliantly written, brilliantly written. And then after that, he created the Americans. Yeah. Became rich beyond his wildest dreams,

[43:33] multiple Emmy winner. He's a player in Hollywood. And the reason that that show was so successful is because everything in it was true to life. Everything. It seemed very grounded and realistic. No high-tech gadgets or, yeah, just, yeah. It's all a battle of wits is what it comes down to. The gadget isn't gonna win you, you know, the new agent or the operation. It's what you've got up here that's gonna.

[44:05] This is from that TV show. I can't remember the main actor's name, but I do remember laughing a little bit at his disguises that he would wear. You being in operations, did you ever have to use disguises or? All the time. Really? Okay. All the time. Yeah. There was one. I gotta imagine they're better. They're better quality than his. Oh yeah. There was one. I can't really get into specifics, but there's one.

[44:36] I was chosen. I have to be very careful with this. They wanted to experiment with a disguise. Okay. And I happened to be friendly with one of the disguise experts. Okay. So she said, hey, listen, I wanna fly out. We wanna try this new disguise on. I said, okay. She said, it's gonna take a few days to, you know, get the measurements right. Okay, so my station chief says, yeah, come on, let's give it a try.

[45:07] So she flies out. And it took days to fit this disguise. And then when it was done, it was so brilliant. I walked over to the station chief's office and I walked in and he just looked at me like, he had no idea who I was. And then I was like, Mike. And he said, are you kidding me like that? And I said, it's great, right? It's a great disguise. And he said, let's pull one on the ambassador. The ambassador I was working for was a dick.

[45:39] He's the only ambassador I ever worked for that I genuinely disliked and didn't respect. And so we walked in and the chief says, Mr. Ambassador, I wanted to introduce you to one of our experts in Washington, from Washington. This is Dr. So-and-so. And I said, how do you do, Mr. Ambassador? And he's like, how do you do? Please have a seat. And I sat down and we had a little chat, walked out. We didn't walk out. We walked to the door and I walked like this and I pulled the thing off.

[46:10] And he's like, I don't know how you guys live with yourselves. Yeah. And it was like, yeah. Oh my God, your life is so much more interesting than anyone's, I think. You know what? It's the life of a young man. I'm in my late fifties now. And this is all 30 years ago. I couldn't do this stuff anymore. Yeah, yeah. I would think you would have to have a, yeah, have to have a sort of that invincibility feeling

[46:41] about yourself to do it. Yeah, yeah. Right. You haven't realized you're mortal yet. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's, man, like I said, there is so much that I would love to hear you talk about. Since we're running kind of into the last little portion of what time you've got left though, if we can real quick maybe switch gears and kind of go into big picture.

[47:12] I just wanted to get your take on what's going on with the Middle East, but even bigger than that, like in 2024, how likely are you seeing at this point a broader global war, potentially World War III or something breaking out with the U.S. involved? Is it like on a scale of one to 10, where would you put it as far as, yeah, your knowledge on, is it incredibly dangerous times or?

[47:45] Yeah, we're in perilous times. I would put it, I think, at a six or a seven. Okay. And to me, that's pretty dangerous territory. And I think that there are several places where we should be particularly focused. First of all, I think that the Israelis are going to expand operations and that's going to be in Southern Lebanon. Okay. I think that they're going to want, once they have Gaza in hand, which I think is just a disaster for human rights. Yeah. A disaster.

[48:16] And we can talk about that in a second, but I think once the Israelis complete the, I hate to use this horrible cold word, but the pacification of Gaza. Yeah. I think they're going to turn their attention to his bala again. And I think that the Lebanese are worried about this. Remember, his bala now is a legitimate political party in Lebanon. Okay. It's actually one of the governmental leaders in the Lebanese government. And so, his bala has a lot more to lose now than it did 20 years ago. So that's why we haven't seen whole scale attacks

[48:50] across the border from Lebanon into Israel. There have been these pinprick rocket launches at Israeli bases and at a couple of the Israeli settlements up north. But I think it's going to be the Israelis that are going to be the aggressors there. So that's number one. Number two, where I see the US getting involved is with or against the Houthis in Yemen. Okay. The Houthis are seriously playing with fire right now.

[49:22] They're actually sending like drones and somehow already harassing our ships, right? Drones, cruise missiles and ballistic anti-ship missiles. Okay. But we're recording this on the 10th of January. Yeah. Yesterday on the 9th, they launched 18 suicide drones, two anti-ship cruise missiles and one anti-ship ballistic missile at US and British warships in the Red Sea.

[49:53] We knocked all of them out of the sky. Right? Yeah. Nothing hit a target, but you can't. poke the hornet's nest and not expect to be stung. I understand what the Houthis are doing, and some people might say it's kind of noble or heroic. They're trying to disrupt shipping so that it adversely affects the Israeli economy. The problem is that almost none of the ships they've attacked have anything to do with Israel. Yeah.

[50:24] Right? You can't hijack a ship, pirate a ship on the high seas, force it into port in Aden, and hold as hostage two dozen sailors from the Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, and say, oh, we did it in solidarity with the Palestinian people. What are you talking about? Yeah. And then when the US, it's not just the US. There are six allied countries now that have warships

[50:56] in the Red Sea to protect shipping, and then you launch 18 suicide drones against the US Navy and you don't expect to be retaliated against? Are you out of your minds? And are the Houthis actually representative of the Yemen government, or are they? That's kind of the $64,000 question. OK. And now they control the government. OK. But the control that the Houthis have is largely just the city of Sana'a and northern Yemen.

[51:30] OK. What used to be called Pidri, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen, it's kind of a no-man's land except for the city of Aden. OK. The rest is just, there's an area called the Hadramut, which is, it's funny, Hadramut comes from two Arabic words, Khadr, which means vegetation, and Malt, which means dead or death. Because it's so dry there that it doesn't even have animals.

[52:01] Right? Like desert foxes like you see in Sana'a, there's just nothing can live there. That area is controlled by al-Qaeda. OK. The country's all divided up into these warring factions, but the Houthis control more of it than anybody else does. OK. And what are the diplomatic ties then? Obviously, Hezbollah has strong ties to Iran. OK. So, and that is basically the big concern

[52:35] about escalation, correct, is Iran? At five separate times over the last 20 years, Benjamin Netanyahu has approached four different American presidents and has asked us to bomb Iran. Yeah. And every time we've said no, we don't have a beef with the Iranians to the point where we're ready to start World War III, the Israelis are itching to bomb the Iranians. Now, the Iranians have been smart enough to not attack Israel directly.

[53:06] They do it with proxies, just like they attack us through proxies. Qatar, Hezbollah in Iraq, for example, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, they don't attack us directly. If they were to attack us directly, we would have to retaliate, and they don't want to risk it. Yeah. So it's the Israelis that I don't trust. OK. Didn't you mention in one story that when you were in, actually, as an analyst, I believe,

[53:40] or, well, I can't remember the content. I think it was the first Gulf War that we already, like we were debating and invading Iran at that time? Yeah, that was the Second Iraq War. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah. So it's, yeah, I mean, it's close, yeah. That's not unusual. Every major military on Earth has contingency plans to ensure their enemies.

[54:11] Yeah. And they're updated constantly as technologies change, as diplomatic relations change, as international alliances change. But yeah, we were fully prepared in 2002 to invade Iran. And is it as straightforward as, if, say, Israel invades Lebanon to attack Hezbollah? And then we get brought in to help defend or assist Israel

[54:43] with that effort. When you told the Israelis, you're on your own, if that happened. OK. Yeah. Is it basically a straight path from if Iran gets involved to then Russia? Or is it? Yeah. Is that? OK. That's one of the big unknowns. OK. China is easier to answer. Yeah. China simply do not have a history of foreign interventions. Yeah. You could go into a handful of military interventions,

[55:15] Tibet being the obvious one. But they also fought a border skirmish in 1979 with the Vietnamese. They have fought several border skirmishes with the Indians. But just on the border, right? Yeah. They send navies and armies to the other side of the planet like we do to launch invasions. We do that. So the Chinese are going to stay out of it. They don't want any part of that. The Russians have nothing to lose, frankly. We're trying to overthrow Putin.

[55:46] We're trying to emasculate the Russian military. The Russians may want to get a jab in. And they've got very strong economic ties to Iran, right? Very strong diplomatic and military ties to Syria. Oh, correct. Yeah. Isbala are joined at the hip as well. Yeah. Wow. So I think I heard you on another show mention that you don't see that there being a huge risk of China

[56:16] invading Taiwan because you don't think it's like they don't gain much from doing that. So you don't see. Yeah. So the Middle East would probably be the, by far, the biggest potential risk area in the near future. Yeah. I think so. I'll tell you, I think what makes the situation over Taiwan so much more dangerous is that we involve ourselves. Yeah. We send carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait,

[56:47] for example, or the South China Sea. We're the ones that do military exercises with Taiwan or send high-level delegations after promising the Chinese that we won't. We're the ones that have this policy where we think we're keeping the Chinese off balance. Yeah. And all it does is piss them off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things we're really bad at in this country, and we have been bad at this since the George W. Bush administration, is that we just don't

[57:18] want to let the diplomats do their jobs. I remember saying in the CIA during George W. Bush that they had never seen an administration work so hard to not talk to our enemies as we did during the Bush administration. Well, John, I think it's getting real close to the time you gave us, so I don't want to overstep that. Do you want to? I mean, I'm going to put a link to all your books, to your sub-stack and the radio show political misfits.

[57:49] There anything that you would like to just direct people to? Oh, thanks. I would appreciate it if they would check out my sub-stack because I put everything there so it's all in the same place. Yeah. Everything is easy to find. So just put my name, John Kiriyaku. Yep. And you are one of the most fascinating and knowledgeable people on all of these interesting subjects that I've ever ran across, so I will definitely be paying attention. And if you ever want to come back on to tell any story, I would appreciate it.

[58:24] Thanks a lot. All right. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the Independent Riot podcast, your home for free thinkers, independent believers, and radicals questioning the status quo. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please do us a huge favor and leave a quick, positive review on whatever platform you're using. It's free to you and super easy to leave us a good ranking and really helps spread the word about the podcast to other independent thinking folks.

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