Title: John Kiriakou - CIA Spy Recounts Insane Covert Operations and Assassination Attempts (Part 1)
Show: Dalton Fischer Podcast
Date: 2023-11-12
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P1kOwRMd3o8
Duration: 2:51:50

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[00:00] the role of a case officer is very very simple it's to recruit spies to steal Secrets period now I have a personality where I can manipulate people like that I can turn it on and off when you create that relationship with an asset is it real or is it fake ah we recruited this guy and he's actually a double agent for one of our

[00:32] greatest enemies in the world then I get a call from my buddy and he says they just gave him orders to kill you in the next meeting so he triggers a meeting he said I'm here I said come up to the eighth floor it was the top floor and I said let's go up to the roof he goes I don't think I want to go up to the roof and I said why you think I'm going to throw you off the roof [Music]

[01:03] all right John kiraku welcome man thanks for having me yeah it's a it's a real pleasure it's good to see you thanks good to see you too it's been a while yeah um it has and and I'm glad you're here so so John for people that may not fre familiar with your story you spent 15 years in the CIA as an analyst as a case officer or a spy and later as uh cia's chief of counterterrorism in Pakistan where you led the raid that captured the infamous abua and later after your CIA career you

[01:37] blew the whistle on the US's enhanced interrogation program or the torture program and you went to prison for just short of two years and connection with that um so man I was telling you downstairs you uh like I said you have a fascinating story but I feel like you've lived several lives in one and I can't wait to dig into it so thanks for coming up I'm very happy to do it yeah um and here I got you uh just as a little thank you for making the drivez thank you couple things you want that's so kind of you thanks you didn't have to do that oh

[02:08] wow hey all right it's a level one disguise right there right thank you there's a couple other things in there too oh thank you man I I oh yeah wow don't don't tell me you went all the way to a Storia Queens to you get this stuff there's a there's a Greek store in around the corner in uh kennworth in Jersey minutes I asked the Greek body I said hey I got a friend coming over um what what are a couple things and there's one more thing in there that you'll get a laugh out of oh

[02:39] awesome oh I didn't see it oh yeah oh yeah we should talk about that yeah thank you much absolutely man um for people listening it's a mug that says go home and get your shine box so I know you love Good Fellas if there's one thing I learned and I I won't I promise I won't get ahead of us um it's whenever the Italians say you believe this guy you're in

[03:10] trouble that's going to be a problem yeah you don't ever want them to say that about you you believe this guy yeah yeah man thank you so much for this Absolutely I'll wear this every day yeah so again I appreciate you making the drive up and uh yeah I've been excited for this for a while so thank you um yeah we we'll keep it in we'll keep it in chronological order um so let's start at at your childhood where'd you grow up right I grew up in a little town in Western Pennsylvania called

[03:41] Newcastle Pennsylvania um wonderful place to grow up it's it's about an hour north of Pittsburgh in Amish Country and um it's not such a nice place anymore you know when DEA and ATF open a field office in your hometown of 18,000 people you got a problem uh but it was it was great when I was growing up we had 50,000 people back then you know there was stuff to do places to go but it was just a a a nice peaceful fun you know Town small town America my

[04:15] parents were Public School teachers my dad was a was an elementary school principal I have a brother and a sister and um had kind of an idic childhood I'm the oldest of three yeah what kind of stuff did you like to do as a kid um I was nuts for baseball almost as nuts for football but I liked I liked exploring a lot um there were some really big cemeteries near our house and I used to go down there and

[04:47] hunt for salamanders under rocks and stuff and um I got to the point where I'd go down there and it wasn't really the salamanders anymore that I was looking for it was just you know interesting people you look for names that you recognize you know the the founders of the town and the the name on the steel mill and the name on the coal mine and the name on the hospital and you know stuff like that and then every once in a while we we'd get to go to the big city Pittsburgh my dad would take us to a a

[05:19] pirates game or a Steelers game and uh that was always a big deal because it really was a big city they had a zoo they had a museum and I kind of got the travel bug one of the things that was the most important to me though growing up was um this makes me sound like such a nerd but was shortwave radio when I was 9 years old my dad took me to an auction and he bid 50 cents on a box of junk I still remember it and so he got the box for 50 cents and it had a

[05:50] broken shortwave radio in it and so he was able to fix it and he gave it to me and I turned it on one night you know that you can get the signals once the sun goes down and I got the BBC in London I got Radio Moscow and Russia or the Soviet Union back then and just stuff from all over the world Cuba and Ecuador and China and all different kinds of places and I I was I was hooked hooked it got to the point where well

[06:22] that was when I was nine by the time I was 14 my dad had constructed a 40 foot Tower um with a shortwave antenna on the top of it and ran the wires into my bedroom I had saved and saved and saved my paper root money and I bought a I bought a $1,000 shortwave base unit I mean $1,000 in 1978 it was a lot of money it was like buying a car you know and um yeah I I was able to listen to I'd

[06:54] get up at 3 4:00 in the morning just hoping that the atmosphere conditions were perfect that I could get that station in Mongolia that I hadn't I actually was able to with radio Mongolia and uh yeah I was I was hooked but it it gave me the travel bug and so I I knew early on I was going to leave Newcastle Pennsylvania I wasn't going to go back I wanted to live overseas I wanted to go to school in Washington because that's where the action was and um and I was able to do

[07:26] all of it yeah mhm so you went to GW went to GW it was the only school I applied to it was uh two blocks from the White House and um it was one of only three schools in the country at the time that had a degree program in Middle Eastern studies when I was 15 the Iranian uh the Iranian government collapsed and Iranian students took uh American hostages American diplomats hostage and so I was fascinated by this thing we're on the brink of war with

[07:57] Iran and I was coming up to draft AG so they they reinstituted draft registration that not the draft but you had to register I I think you still do um so I was interested and so when I went to GW uh I majored in Middle Eastern studies and um you know studied Islam which was my it was the focus of my major Islamic theology uh studied Arabic uh studied oil oil and oil

[08:32] economics and then uh yeah the rest kind of the path presented itself I guess is the way the best way I could say it yeah it did and so how did uh how did you end up get into the agency well I when I finished undergrad I just kind of felt in my heart like I wasn't adult enough to start my life does that make sense yeah yeah I I felt like I needed to go to grad school because I just wasn't ready

[09:02] to go out there and so I stayed at GW and I was working on a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis and so I was taken this class called the psychology of leadership with an eminent psychiatrist by the name of uh Dr Gerald post post was very unusual in that he called himself a political psychiatrist he had a PhD in political science a PhD in Psychology and an

[09:33] MD and so he um he was teaching this class and the reason why this class was so interesting the psychology of leadership is that it tried to look at how governments manipulate other world leaders into doing what they want them to do for example uh you of course you've heard of the yelta conference near the end of World War II so Dr post asked us and I

[10:07] remember this all these years later I mean this was 3 what 38 years ago 36 years ago whatever it is um Dr post asked us why was that Conference held in yelta of all places nobody had any idea and he said the answer was actually quite simple because Stalin knew that Roosevelt was sick right his spies in the United States had said something's wrong with

[10:38] Roosevelt he's ill he looks like he's dying so rather than have the conference in Cuba or Iran which is where it was supposed to be originally it was supposed to be in Teran it was in Yalta because Stalin insisted that it be held there and and Roosevelt had to fly all the way around the war so he had to go from Washington to Morocco Morocco to subsaharan Africa to Teran and then North to yelta it took

[11:09] Days by the time he got to Russia he was exhausted and sick and all he wanted to do was go to sleep but Stalin insisted that they begin the talks immediately so just to be able to get to bed Roosevelt gave up Poland and so for the next 45 years Poland was Communist it didn't have to be but Roosevelt was exhausted and he

[11:40] needed to sleep he said that is how you manipulate somebody's psychology so toward the end of this class he uh the professor gave us an assignment where we had to Shadow our bosses uh for a week and then write a psychological analysis of our bosses I was working for a guy at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at their International headquarters in Washington and I was a little bit afraid of this guy he was a mean tough old school Union organizer

[12:15] right he had had his back broken by scabs and some some strike in the 70s in in New York he was working for the international ladies garment workers union and um he was just a mean mean old union guy so I'm shadowing him following him watching what he does I mean I knew it all of it anyway because I worked for him normally but this week we were joined at the hip and halfway

[12:45] through the week on Wednesday we got into an argument and I called him a racist which he was he was so angry his face got all red he clenches his teeth and he balls up his fists right and I thought to myself ah I went too far and I put up my hands to protect myself because I thought here it comes and he's going to knock me out this is how strong and tough he was I put up my hands and he goes my penis is bigger than

[13:16] yours and I said what and he goes my penis is bigger than yours and I said you know what you're nuts and I quit and I walked out and I quit that is not what I was expecting to hear so I went back to my dorm I was an RA in the dorm which is one of the ways I was paying my way through college and um and I wrote my psychological evaluation and I said he's a sociopath

[13:47] with Psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies and I did all these examples culminating in what had just happened so I passed in the paper a week later I get it back I have an A he puts an A in the top and then in the margin underneath the a he wrote please see me after class this is Dr post Dr post please see me after class so after class I went up to him and I said Dr post you wanted to see me he said yeah

[14:18] come down to my office the office was in the same building the class was in the What's called the Gilman library but they have they have classrooms at the top floor and then little teeny tiny professor's office you know how professor's offices are so on the lower floors they have the professor's offices I I go down to the to his office and he closes the door and he says listen I'm not really a professor here I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here

[14:49] and I'm here to find people who would fit into the cia's culture I think you would fit into the cia's culture would you like to join the CIA the truth is I had played with the idea a couple of times over the years but never I had never given it serious thought but I was getting married in six weeks and I didn't have any job I didn't have any hope for a job and I didn't know what I was going

[15:19] to do so I said sure why not so he picked up the phone and he called a number and I'll tell you I remember being very impressed as he was doing this because those are the days where people had rolodexes do you know what a Rolodex is yeah so used I'm not that young unfortunately you used to write somebody's name and phone number on a little card and the card fit into a

[15:50] wheel and you would roll the wheel and look up the number and as he was going through the roll I saw one of the cards said Oliver North home and I was like Oliver North Oliver North had just been acquitted of a whole bunch of crimes for engineering the arms for hostages uh saale to Iran this was a major national Scandal and I was like wow he knows Oliver North turned out he worked very

[16:23] very closely with ol Oliver North so anyway he calls this number and and he says Bob it's Jerry I've got a good one for you you have a few minutes and then he hung up the phone and he says go to this address and ask for Bob and he hands me the address well the address is one subway stop away in Rosland Virginia so I get on the subway I go there I'm there in 15

[16:53] minutes and um I go to the address and it's this you know normal office tower that roslin's famous for and uh I go up to whatever it was I think it was the sixth floor and um and there's no like there's no name on the door nothing it's just a just a door so I knock on the door and this guy opens the door just to crack and he says are you here for Bob and I said yes so

[17:26] he lets me in and it's a little like a little 6x6 foot Atrium but the second door has a big spin dial lock on it like a bank right so he does the dial and uh there's a woman on the other side and she said are you here for Bob and I said I am so she lets me in and I'm sitting there and then Bob comes out I still to this day I have no idea if

[17:57] his name really was Bob Bob yeah and that's the only name I ever knew him by but he was like a 6'6 320b loud smiling you know good old guy John I'm Bob how the hell are you and he shakes my hand come on in so he says Jerry says you're a good guy I said well I appreciate it I said he's an amazing Professor he's a great guy and he says John let me ask you

[18:29] something Have you ever betrayed a friendship and I was like oh uh I I don't think so I I hope not he said okay that's okay listen I want you to do a couple of things for me he says uh I want you to go to this address there are going to be some people there waiting for you and I said like right now and he says yeah right now I said okay' he said then I want you to call me

[19:00] or better yet I'll call you I said okay so I go home I get in my car I drive out to this equally nondescript building in Vienna Virginia one-story flat building that you would drive past a thousand times you would never notice it so I ring the bell this guy lets me in you John and I said yeah come on in so I go there and there's a table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other and in the three chairs are three

[19:33] people who never identified themselves by name but they identified themselves as being a psychologist a psychiatrist and an anthropologist so I sit down no hello how are you nothing I just sit down I said hello they all just kind of looked at me and then one of them says describe your relationship with your mother mother and I go oh I said yeah uh my mom

[20:04] and I are close she's a school teacher and uh you know she's terrific mother and very nurturing and you know took good care of all three of us and you know what do you say and then they're like okay describe your relationship with your father so I did I said my dad's a good guy he's kind of introverted my mom was the extrovert of the family was your father the disciplinarian and I said no actually my dad's a big strong guy and I think he was probably always afraid he would hurt

[20:36] us or something so no my dad my dad's a very gentle uh Soul um then they asked me that question again have you ever betrayed a friendship and I said I don't think so let me think about it for a second and then the Anthropologist says no no that's the answer we were looking for and then one of them says you're going to need to go into the next room and you need to give us some piss some blood and

[21:06] some hair I go okay so I went and gave him some piss some blood and some hair and then I left I went home I called my fiance she goes how did it go I said I have no idea they asked me these three weird questions it took 15 minutes then they took my pee my blood and and pulled some of my hairs out I get a call like four weeks later from Bob he goes you blew the doors off

[21:38] that meeting I go Bob I it was like from Bizarro world I I didn't understand what they wanted they wouldn't explain anything he said you aced it he said um now we want you to uh to go to headquarters you're going to have a meeting at headquarters so I said okay so I go to CIA headquarters and I went to like four

[22:10] different offices they asked me a thousand million questions and uh and I leave by then I've gotten married I go home she's like how did it go I said I don't have any idea there's no feedback there's no reaction from anybody body there's no response nothing then Bob calls he goes you aced it man you aced it I go Bob there's no feedback he goes no you don't

[22:40] need any feedback he said they want you in your raw State I said okay so what next he goes look they're going to give you a polygraph exam and if you pass it you're in I was a nervous fraking wreck about the polygraph I had never taken a polygraph exam so they scheduled the polygraph and I was very fortunate in that first polygraph because I had a very

[23:11] respectful uh young African-American woman and so um she hooks me up and it it's it's funny they they put a cuff on you like they're taking your blood pressure and then they put these electrodes on your fingertips then they put a a belt around you to measure your breathing then they put electrodes on your ankle and there was one other that they did like was it on my temple I

[23:43] don't remember anymore so you have to sit there like this and you can't move you just have to be as still as possible and you have to answer all the questions yes or no cuz the thing doesn't detect anything else it just detects bodily reactions increases in your heart rate or respiration sweating it's very very sensitive to sweating so I called Dr Post in advance and I I said listen any advice you could give me I would really really appreciate

[24:14] this because I've gotten so far in the process I really want this to happen so he said I can't really give you any Insider tips he said but I'll tell you something as a psycholog or as a Psy psychiatrist he said you're going to be in a room that has nothing on the walls it's just a white room with a window and of course they're going to be looking at you from the other side of the window as the polygrapher is doing the exam he

[24:44] said there's bound to be a speck on the wall he said focus on the speck think about nothing but the speck he said now they're going to ask you some very disturb in questions questions that may make you upset he said just answer the question yes or no don't think about it if they say have you ever killed anybody say no don't think about what it might feel like to kill

[25:15] somebody just say no and focus on the spec I sit down in the thing she wires me up and it takes a good 20 minutes to wire you up to this polygraph machine and I sit there and as soon as I I sit and I'm wired up I look and sure enough there's a speck like straight ahead of me so I'm looking at the spec and they start asking you questions have you ever committed a violent felony no have you ever um used a weapon in a crime

[25:46] no uh and then they get you know into more mundane things uh are you financially responsible yes um have you ever shoplifted anything no have you ever taken anything from the office worth more than $20 no um have you ever had sex with a man and she just threw that one at me like a grenade so I go no which was true um but I could feel

[26:19] my heart going like this like she's trying to trip me up and she says let's take a little break you're sweating profusely I can tell that you're nervous I said yeah you kind of threw that question out there like a grenade into the middle of the room she said it's a standard question I said I understand so I just kind of sat there for a couple of minutes and got my heart rate to slow down and um then she said I'll be honest with you you are reacting to one of the

[26:51] questions which was I was not reacting to one of the questions but this is I came to learn later in my career that this is a a turd that they throw at you to see how you respond to it I said okay and so she says I'm gonna um I'm going to consult with my boss and then I'm going to come in and we're going to go back over the question that you're reacting to I was like great so she leaves and you know that they're right there on the other side of the window or

[27:22] of the mirror you can't see them but you know that they're there so she comes back in and she says you're reacting to the question about credit card usage I go what and she says yes um are you irresponsible with your credit cards I go no I I don't have any balance on my credit cards I pay my credit cards in full every month I'm still laughing about it all these years later this is 20 this is 25 years ago no it's 35 years ago 35 years

[27:55] ago so she asked me again the credit card question and I I answered no and then she's like okay we're done so she starts unhooking me and I said how did I do and she said we're not allowed to say and she winked at me and I was like oh my God I can't believe I passed so I went home and I said to my wife I think I passed and then Bob called and he says

[28:27] they're fighting over you at headquarters Love Bob Bob was great it turned out that Bob was the director of HR for the entire CIA I would never ever have even met someone so important as this guy had it not been for Jerry post Jerry post God bless him who just died of covid a year ago um but man Jerry was was good to me really good to me

[28:58] even later in life he was even better to me yeah so um so I got multiple offers uh from the agency and um I decided not to go into operations right away because I was a Middle East specialist and so uh sorry to cut you off before we get into that um I want I want to stay on the interview process just funny they uh they walk away and you're probably sitting there thinking please don't be the question about having sex with a man that that's exactly what I thought cuz you know I

[29:30] didn't mind getting cut from the process but then my my buddy's going to say hey so what what was it that screwed you up and I'd be like ah they asked me if I had sex with a man and I said no and they didn't believe me and so that I was worried right so when she said it was the credit cards I was like oh my God okay so um what were some of the other questions that you mentioned word disturbing that stands out and why what

[30:01] is the point of them asking those sorts of questions like what are they trying to select for that's a good question so I didn't know for a long time what the purpose of any of these questions was 10 years later I happened to uh be transferred overseas and one of my colleagues uh was a former polygrapher and I asked him that question what was the point of all these weird questions and he said I'm I can best

[30:33] answer your question with some anecdotes he says he goes look I've been a polygrapher for 25 years and over the course of 25 years I've had people applicants mostly admit to every crime you can imagine including murder because they think ah this is the CIA I'm going to do some wet work they're going to be impressed that I killed this guy in Syracuse and I buried his body under the train tracks right they're not impressed they're calling

[31:04] the FBI before you can leave the building and then the FBI is going to come and take you away which is exactly what happened so he said it's the the purpose is to Rattle you he said one of the things that we do and he said you may remember this we we always start off by saying we're not looking for Perfect People we're looking for honest people so just answer the questions truthfully and if there's something that you did in your past admit to it and we'll get

[31:35] through it that's they're not going to help you get through it they're going to call the FBI and they're going to report your confession that you just made to a Federal Officer so if you've done something if you've committed a felony don't apply for a job at the CIA and then confess it to the polygrapher that's not going to work for you so he told me that you know there was a guy who admitted to a murder in

[32:05] Syracuse and they got him walking out of the polygrapher uh polygrapher office uh he said there was another guy there was a guy that was a a janitor of all things because you know even the janitors need to have security clearances you're in the CIA we have classified stuff hanging up on the walls everywhere you turn your head and so uh you get a pre-employment polygraph you get one after three years that's your probationary period and then every five years for the rest of your

[32:35] career so he said this was a normal fiveyear they call it a reinvestigation poly now the in the pre-public pre um uh hire sorry and in the threeyear they ask you what are called lifestyle questions that is are you gay are you buy are you leather are you crazy are you a pervert you know do you like to beat prostitutes they ask you all that stuff after the

[33:05] three years they don't ask you any of that stuff anymore because by then they figure you know we know each other well enough that you're going to be okay um so he he said because they don't ask those lifestyle questions anymore he would always throw an extra question in at the end open-ended is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important 99% of the people say no some people say what do you

[33:37] mean he said well to this janitor things like murder rape robbery beastiality and the guy says what was that last one and my friend says I knew I had him he goes beastiality the guy says what's that mean and my friend says it's actually very common he says everybody does it it's having sex

[34:08] with an animal and the guy says I may have done that couple three times and my friend says okay well like I said everybody does it but just so we can get past it for the purpose of the polygraph um in what cases would you have sex with with an animal the guy says well sometimes when I have a fight with my wife to get back at her I go to the barn and I bugger the

[34:39] horse because it's her horse he said he gets up on a step stool and he gets the horse and he's like okay and you've done this more than once he said I may have done it a couple three times so he said needless to say they escorted him out of headquarters and took his badge and said don't ever come back yes but I never had to deal with anything like that I I used to in fact for my fiveyear I were I had been in like eight

[35:10] years at that point and I mentioned to one of my co-workers I said oh I got to drive out to Vienna I have uh I got my polygraph and so um his polygraph had taken two days because he was stuck on this question have you ever had unauthorized contact with a foreign intelligence service it's an important one it's an important one so my polygraph took 40 minutes because I never did anything and uh I come back and he had

[35:44] gone to lunch when I was getting ready to leave for the polygraph he came back from lunch and I'm sitting at the desk and he goes dude I thought you had a polygraph you better get going I said no no I did it I'm back he goes come on I said said no I didn't he said I was on for 2 days and they made me cry he says I said I I don't talk to libyans at cocktail parties which was his problem I said I I've I've never done anything I'm

[36:15] clean and so that was it I never ever had a problem with a polygraph so um was Dr post a case officer no Dr post was a legitimate psychiatrist so he was at the CIA as a psychiatrist and then in the 1970s he said you know we can do so much more as psychiatrists what he was doing there was was to treat case officers who went

[36:47] crazy well there aren't that many that go crazy really and so he said what we can do is we can create this unit that does longdistance psychiatric evaluations of foreign leaders so when they come to the United States we can say oh president so and so is an alcoholic so get him liquored up and that's when you want to start the trade talks right

[37:19] or there was one foreign leader an Allied leader who President Clinton was very friendly with and we knew that this foreign leader uh loved to play chess and he loved loved Lov to eat sausage all kinds of sausage so we all huddled together like okay he's coming for an official visit what do we do and one of Dr post people said we stuff him full of sausage until

[37:50] he can't eat any more sausage he can't hold any sausage and then Clinton invites him to play chess the sausage is going to make him drowsy and when he gets drowsy he gets chatty to keep himself awake and then we'll give Clinton a list of sensitive questions to ask so we can learn some stuff that we otherwise haven't learned so that's what Jerry post did he created this group

[38:21] called the political psychology Division and their job was just to look at foreign leaders and their mental States now 99% of those you're never going to meet you know and it's actually in practice it's actually unethical for a psychologist or a psychiat psychiatrist to make uh a a determination on someone's mental state without an actual in-person uh uh examination but you know this

[38:54] isn't a perfect world yeah so I'd call over there and say hey I need 500 words on Saddam Hussein or I need 500 words on D Xiao ping and then they would do their psychiatric evaluation in 500 Words and I would include it in my bigger piece and then it would go to the president the vice president secretary of state Secretary of Defense and the National Security adviser that's what Jerry did it's a lasting Legacy at the CIA it's still there that's super

[39:27] interesting and the reason I asked is I'm thinking about um like what other I'm just thinking about in terms of you know CIA employees being under official cover doing jobs within the United States how many of those people are there that I can't say um you know in the 1980s uh CIA director Bill Casey this was during the Reagan Administration CIA Bill Casey decided to create a domestic

[40:01] um division called uh the National Resources Division and NR division does not do traditional spying it's illegal for the CIA to spy on us soil but Casey you know the the notorious criminal that he was was actually right on about National Resources Division he said look we've got we've got patriotic businessmen and corporate leaders all over America who are doing business in China and the

[40:33] Soviet Union and Cuba at the time and all these these countries that are called denied areas denied to us where we're not allowed to have a presence there we're not allowed to conduct Espionage there it's too risky it's too dangerous he said let's just hire a group of case officers to interview Business Leaders right we'll just go and say hi we're from the CIA here's our business card we know you're a patriotic American can we

[41:04] ask you some questions about your recent trip and uh they always say yes and so that's that's what this domestic division does there are offices All Over America you'd never know they were there um there's nothing clandestine that's happening it's all on the up and up and they produce an insane amount of intelligence that's fascinating um so yeah as you briefly mentioned before so you finish the

[41:37] interview and application process you get accepted to the agency yep um your first job is as an analyst yes um we'll talk about Iraq later so we'll come back to that but so let's talk about um becoming a case officer um what is the farm the farm uh used to be this top secret facility that we have uh now everybody knows what the farm is the farm is the cia's uh clandestine training facility it's in it's

[42:08] in Virginia it's in Virginia and uh it's where almost all of your operational training is going to take place everything from counterterrorist driving to all of your weapons qualifications to Airborne where they they train you how to jump out of a plane and how to use a parachute um then

[42:39] they they do the the nuts and bolts um how to recruit spies to steal Secrets exercises you know there are other facilities too uh things like um bomb training um specialized stuff out in the desert out west but most of it 80% of it is at the farm so you go they've got they've got dorms I guess you could call

[43:12] them dorms um and uh classrooms and tracks and shooting ranges and anything you need I mean the thing is like thousands of Acres so anything you need to do you can do with the farm what was your favorite thing that you did there you know everybody loved shooting the most uh I it it was the driving for me it was the driving for me my God I

[43:43] got so much out of that class I still use it I still use what I learned all these years later um we did things like the the course was colloquially known as crash and bang so you crash cars and you shoot guns and you know and then you do cool stuff like one one night we did well we did we did night shooting a lot but we we did like rocket launchers like where else are you going to do rocket launchers grenade launchers and blow

[44:13] up and blow cars up and that was so much fun but for me the driving was better because they put you in these scenarios where I got to be careful I don't go into too much detail but you got a blindfold on okay you're in the driver's seat and you're driving like a mile an hour with a blindfold on and they're steering for you and they say okay I'm going to take the blindfold off and you have two

[44:46] seconds to react okay so they take the blindfold off and just as they take the blindfold off you notice in your peripheral vision there's a guy with an AK-47 who's trying to open your door and then there are two guys in front of you and they're they have their cars in a V but which way is it is it a v like this or is it a v like this so if it's a v like this you got to gun it and crash right through if it's a v like this you're just going to wedge

[45:18] yourself and they're going to blow your brains out so you have to put it in reverse before this guy shoots you with a paintball uh um and you got to go reverse you know 50 60 70 miles an hour they teach you how to hit the brakes neutral spin around drive without ever coming to a stop and you take off and they they call it getting off the X so you do this three times and you

[45:52] know you it up one time you're dead that's it you're dead so I was good at that my response time was very quick it was under a second and and it's little stuff that that people forget that get you killed you forget to lock your door always always always lock the door always I mean even now the the risk of being carjacked at a red light or stop

[46:23] sign or something is is is real that lock may buy you an extra second or two seconds which is really all you need to get off the dime so I was good at that and then they marry the two guns and cars so you go through these very elaborate complicated exercises where they they have a device

[46:53] on all the cars where they can kill the engine remotely so you're just driving down the track mining your own business and your car dies and so you you drive over you you you drift over to the side now we're using all live ammo here by the way um and so really yeah you pull over and you hear a gunshot now they haven't shot directly at you they shot in the air so you hear The Gunshot so you have to you have to

[47:23] crouch down so that they can't get you through the you have live ammo they don't uh they can't get you through the windshield and then you put it in park you crawl across the the seat get out the passenger side lay on the ground you've got your gun and you have to look to see where the shooting's coming from well the the shooting is coming from these robots that they have they're they're automated

[47:53] and they've got little Targets on them black and white rings so the thing is shooting at you it's shooting blanks and you're on the ground and you have to you know bang bang and then you hear a shot over there bang bang but sometimes you can't quite get it because the robots turn to the side or the the targets turn to the side so on your belly you have to go to the back of the car and then get it from that angle well there was one there was one point that I just couldn't

[48:24] get a clear shot what it was across the way there was a van and the the sliding door of the van had opened and the robot was in the van and the robots firing at me and I just can't get a clean shot so I pop up and I shoot out my own Windows they give you these beater Ford Tauruses I shoot out my own windows and I go bang bang and I get it so they they sound this air horn which means you know weapons down so you

[48:54] holster your weapon and the guy the instructor comes out he goes well you passed but damn it Kaku you just cost me $900 in broken windshields I said I couldn't get a clean shot I'm sorry we did this one exercise it was at night we drew straws to see who would go first and I went first so all you know in this scenario is you are in a flea bag Hotel in in El

[49:29] Salvador good luck so it's just a a table and a chair and and it it looks like a flea bag Hotel I mean it's like a Hollywood set I mean they they this is real life they make it look like it really is going to look in real life so you're sitting there not really sure what to expect and there's a knock on the door and you say who is it and then the door opens and it's these

[49:59] two guys and one of them is holding a a a vacuum cleaner and they're saying housekeeping seor housekeeping and I go I don't need housekeeping I don't need housekeeping and then the guy the second guy behind him pulls out a gun he goes bang bang he shoots me with two paint pellets I go I said I never saw that coming and one of the instruct says if you're in a hole motel in a

[50:31] hole country and two people just walk into your room kill them and he's like don't tell anybody else what the exercise is so I go back out to the van we're all sitting in the van waiting our turn and I got these two paint things here and one of them just says and I said yeah I can't talk about it all eight of us failed fail all eight of us failed that was such an important lesson

[51:03] I never ever forgot it and so anytime I felt threatened or anytime I felt you know what in this situation I'm in right now I can see a point 10 seconds down the road where I might feel threatened I would draw my weapon just in case it happened twice just in case then we went through something you've I'm sure Seen On TV it's a shooting gallery so you've got your you've got

[51:35] your gun out and the instructor is right behind you and he's got his hand on your shoulder and a guy pops up in a window and he's got a a machine gun and you go bang bang and he plops down and then a woman pops up holding a baby over here and you know you have to make sure not to shoot her if you shoot her you f I have chills thinking about it taking me back I haven't talked about this in decades and so um crazy as it sounds

[52:06] like got 100% I was like a freaking Marksman and the funny thing is on the very first day of of the weapons training um like I say there were eight of us and the instructor said anybody here not own a gun and I I raised my hand and I kind of looked around and I was the only guy that had his hand up he he goes you don't own a gun and I said truth be told I've never actually touched a real gun and he goes oh my God okay we're gonna have to start from the

[52:38] very beginning and I ended up testing first in the class to the point where one of the instructors said you should give some thought to competitive shooting wow and so I did and I ended up like winning trophies in ski I just had a knack for it I had a very steady hand and um it served me well wow mhm that's so interesting about the scenarios they set up like you said at the motel and with the blindfold is it a matter of like how

[53:11] fast can you process information and make decisions with the available information is that kind of what they're exactly what it is and not just in the shooting but in the driving too you know you might have seen on on one of these oldtime cop shows like Adam 12 for example i' seen this on atam 12 um you're you're speeding toward three red lights right there there are three lanes you're in the middle Lane red red red and one second before you get to the

[53:43] red lights one of them turns green and you have to Swerve as fast as you can to the green light and if you go through the lane with the red light you fail and if you fail you can't go overseas and and so it was the same thing with the driving man I aced the counterterrorism driving I aced it to the point where um they came up to me afterwards and said when are you leaving for for overseas and I said oh I still have two more months and they said we want you to take the advanced driving class it's out

[54:14] in the Nevada desert he said that's real counterterrorism driving and so I went out there and it was like driving over sand dunes and what do you do if you get stuck in the sand and it was it was good stuff I learned a lot so when you're when you're going through this and you mentioned a couple times like if you up once you're done done so you're thinking to yourself this is something I really want yeah for my life and there's a lot of pressure especially you never fired a gun before

[54:46] and you're taking shooting test how did you and I'll expand this question throughout your career but how did you compartmentalize stress and dealing with it in that course and through the rest of your that's a very important question um it would be a lie to say that I was as good at comp compartmentalizing the stress as I thought I was we all think we're so smart and so good and so Advanced and so much better than everybody else and we're not we're human beings my first

[55:17] wife uh was not a CIA officer she was a ballet teacher and I couldn't tell her anything and so I thought I was compartmentalizing this very nicely and I'd go home and she'd say how was work and I'd say great what' you do nothing did you talk to anybody interested nope well how'd you spend your day the office none of that was true but she

[55:49] wasn't cleared for the information and so it got to the point where I'd go home and she'd say which dude work today he nothing what was her name and I'd say Joanne I'm not cheating on you I'm seriously not cheating on you yeah then why'd you leave at midnight and not come home until 6 I was working uh-huh at 3:00 in the morning uhhuh I'd say yeah I was you're

[56:23] just GNA have to take my word for it so that doesn't last very long yeah it's uh I would imagine not easy on marriages and that's probably why the agency encourages um like inter agency relationships yeah because you're both cleared and you can both talk about it so when I went to when I went to Pakistan I was um dating a senior Cia officer we ended up getting married and the day I was leaving Pakistan just

[56:53] as an example um I was supposed to head straight home and we were going to uh get on a plane and fly to Santa Fe New Mexico for a vacation decompressed from Pakistan and uh and have a good time so here I am two hours before leaving the embassy and I get a cable from headquarters and it says don't return instead go to this other country we want

[57:24] you to break into an apartment and plant a bug and I was like damn it I really needed that vacation we just caught upu zua I'm all stressed out so I called her and I said listen I have really bad news and she said no no I saw the cable go do your break-in we'll go to Santa Fe some other time and so I went and broke into this house and planted a bug and a month later then we went to Santa Fe

[57:57] I'll be right back yeah um so let's uh let's set the stage for your first case officer job um what is the role of a case officer or spy yeah uh the role of a case officer is very very simple it's to recruit spies to steal Secrets period that's it now it's more complicated than that in the actual implementation of the job but the the the goal is really that simple so

[58:29] you know people have this romantic view that you're going to infiltrate a terrorist group no you're not most of those guys have blonde hair and blue eyes and don't speak a word of Arabic you're not infiltrating anybody but you're going to find somebody who can infiltrate uh a terrorist group so there's something called the asset acquisition cycle this is the very first thing that they teach you when you go into case officer training the asset

[59:00] acquisition cycle is spot assess develop recruit you have to spot someone who is going to be what they call operationally interesting um for example you are a nice guy I like hanging out with you but you're not operationally interesting to me because you don't have access to classified information and you don't have access to a terrorist group so we may go out and have a beer

[59:32] but I'm not going to actively seek to recruit you and to make you a CIA asset now we also we we also call assets agents I wasn't a CIA agent I was a CIA officer and the person I recruited is the agent so um spot assess develop recruit in a perfect world I'm going to go to a diplomatic cocktail party and I'm going to spot a Russian a Chinese a Cuban an Iranian a North Korean etc etc

[1:00:07] and then I'm going to say hey how about lunch and I'm going to take you to lunch and I'm going to pay of course because I have a budget that is literally unlimited literally and then I'm going to take you to dinner and then I'm going to invite you and your wife to dinner with my wife and me and then our wives are going to become friends and you're going to mention to me that you like fishing and so I'm going to Charter a boat and I'm

[1:00:38] going to take you deep sea fishing and we're going to have a blast and then your wife is going to say how much she enjoys living in that City because the skyline's so beautiful so I'm going to rent a helicopter and we're going to go on a sunset helicopter tour of the skyline and then our kids are going to become friends and we're going to get to the point in between 9 and 18 months where you consider me to be your best friend

[1:01:10] we're best friends now I have a personality where I can manipulate people like that I can turn it on and off and I'm not proud of that it's just the way my brain is wired some guys can't turn it off and that's why they have five marriages and they you know go to prostitutes and they steal from people and you know

[1:01:42] whatever I did it because I believed we were the good guys and I was doing it in service to my country so after 9 months I'm also going to be looking for what we call vulnerabilities now a vulnerability may be that you really really love your kids now because you love your kids so much you want your kids to go to the best university well not only can I get your kid into the best university and just name the University Stanford Harvard you know

[1:02:14] Millersville State College I don't care pick it we'll get him in but I'll pay for it if you give me two hours in your code room or you give me the plans to that new Russian tank right yeah or a soil sample from your nuclear power plant I'll do whatever you want but I can only have that conversation if you are my best friend now let me back up to the application

[1:02:44] process for a moment when we were going through the application process a bunch of us in the room the interviewer said let's go over a scenario Ario let's say and remember none of us have been hired yet let's say you're a CIA officer overseas and you get a cable from headquarters saying that they need for you to get let's say the latest Indonesian trade

[1:03:15] numbers what do you do everybody agreed we invite the Indonesian economic officer to lunch okay that's how you start and then you invite him to dinner and then you invite him to dinner with his wife and your wife just like I laid out but after nine months you determine that this guy is not recruitable he doesn't have any vulnerabilities he doesn't need any money he doesn't have any kids he's perfectly happy in his

[1:03:47] life there's no hook for you to recruit him what do you do one guy raised his hand and he said you double down even if it takes another year you just keep working him maybe something will come up one guy raised his hand said maybe you bring your wife into it which is a big no no unless she's CIA and she gets approved from headquarters bring your wife into it maybe the wife can talk to his wife and I'm looking around like it seemed obvious to me I raised my

[1:04:19] hand I said you break into his Embassy and steal it he goes that's exactly what you do that's exactly what you do you write to headquarters you say send out a locks and pick team we're going to break into the embassy at 2:00 in the morning we're going to take down the security cameras we're going to steal the document get back out turn the cameras back on nobody has any idea we were there and I thought I I could do that I have kind of

[1:04:49] a knack for that sure and then you know that was another thing you have to be able to think very very quickly on your feet um I had to do a break-in one time uh we believed that there was a woman who was a member of a terrorist group and we believed that she had one of the weapons in her apartment so I flew out to this country and

[1:05:22] um and I was working with the host country uh intelligence service it was a joint operation so everything was on the up and up I'm assuming you can't say where that was no and so I fly in my people pick me up they take me to the intelligence Service headquarters for the briefing so I meet their team and they said here's the scenario she lives in this luxury apartment building there are two apartments on every floor so it's this tall

[1:05:52] skinny apartment building Condo building so she's on the sixth floor she's the apartment on the left so there's a and b I said so who's in B they said don't worry about it it's a government employee married to a lawyer and they're both at work I said okay great this will be easy so they say the target every single day she leaves her apartment at 10:00 she buys a newspaper and she goes to a coffee shop he said

[1:06:24] we're going to have a team on to make sure that she doesn't leave the coffee shop early she usually stays there an hour or two if she leaves early we'll call and abort the operation I said perfect this is going to be piece of cake so we get to the apartment building we didn't want to take the elevator because the elevator makes a sound so I go with a lock picker and um we walk up the six flights and uh just like they said

[1:06:57] there's Apartment A and Apartment B so the lock picker puts his little tool into the lock and he starts doing this to Jimmy it he's got these these tools that look like like uh very thick needles right so we doing this and I hear a voice in in apartment B and I was like that's that's got to be a

[1:07:29] mistake apartment B's at work and I hear a baby cry like a newborn baby I was like oh my God she just had a baby and they didn't know it and she's on maternity leave I'm thinking to myself the guy is doing the lock like as silently as possible and I hear a woman's voice say in Arabic I think there's someone outside

[1:08:00] in the hall and I go stop so he stops he's just Frozen and then the husband says I don't hear anything in the hall I go and he starts doing it and then she says no I think I hear something out there I go stop and he stops and we're Frozen and the husband says you're imagining things there's nothing out there go he starts doing

[1:08:32] this and she says I definitely hear something and she opens the door and just as she opens the door I turn to block him and she says who are you and I said hi I said I go an Muhammad Ahmed I'm Muhammad Ahmed I said said I'm looking for my my aunt um Miriam Ahmed and she goes there's no Miriam

[1:09:03] Ahmed here I said is this you know 123 Main Street and she's like no this is 125 Main Street one 123's next door I said oh I'm so sorry and she said Okay and she looks at me funny and I said congratulations on your baby she's holding the baby she's like thank you and she goes back in and closes the door and I go go and it click and we went into the apartment I was like man that was the

[1:09:34] closest call I ever had so we never found the weapon we never found anything in there of interest and then we we waited until they were going about their business again and then we as quietly as possible left and afterwards we we met up it's called a hot wash you go over the entire operation we went back to the headquarters I was like you guys like seriously up they were both the whole family was in that apartment yeah that was a close one wow

[1:10:05] that's a great story um I have so many questions on that so one of the things you said is about her morning routine she went to the coffee shop every morning and that's what's called pattern of Life yep um do you still mix yours up like how is that I'm sure you were taught that in surveillance detection at the farm and you know through the trade craft schools how does that impact your life today do you still mix up your pattern of life and do all that I do for

[1:10:37] a couple of reasons first of all later on in my career I became a surveillance and surveillance detection instructor um so I'd work my normal job during the day and then at night um I was part of an instructor's team that would train new officers in surveillance and surveillance to protection so I took it very very seriously and I write at length in my first book about how how seriously I took surveillance uh when I was stationed in Athens and even

[1:11:07] still um I almost bought it and my next door neighbor instead was assassinated so you've got to be very diligent very serious about your personal safety and especially about surveillance and surveillance detection um after I left the agency I maintained those skills I wrote another book called the CIA Insider guide to surveillance and surveillance detection I taught a a university level

[1:11:38] class at George Washington University on surveillance and surveillance detection and then I noticed right off the bat that the FBI is following me right so yeah you never know who's going to be following you it could be a private an eye cuz your spouse doesn't trust you it could be a carjacker or a Mugger or the FBI or you know the local cops or whatever you just never know it's more common than you might think so it's only

[1:12:10] very recently and I mean like in the last year that I don't leave my house at a different time every day I just don't care anymore nobody's interested in me anymore you know so now I have a pattern and for almost my entire adult life I never established a pattern never it's too dangerous too risky interesting um and another thing you said about having a knack for creating these

[1:12:43] friendships um when I think about like intrinsic likeability I heard another uh case Officer Jim Lawler in an interview he said Jim's a good guy yeah he seems like it I would I would love to have him on um he said when he was taking a he was taking somebody out to dinner that he was trying to recruit as an asset and the guy said to him you know Jim when I talk to you I feel like my brain is just in a warm bubble bath see and when I met

[1:13:13] you I thought to myself you know what like I like John I like him a lot that's how I judge people would I like to have a beer with this guy yeah yes I would so when you create that relationship with an asset is it real or is it fake ah another good question um in about 50% of the cases it's real so of the people that I recruited over the course of my career um half of them were genuine bad

[1:13:48] guys genuine terrorists murderers Psychopaths and it was a it was a transactional relationship money for information the other half were guys that I genuinely liked and they genuinely liked me and after I went public now I a lot of these recruitments a lot of these

[1:14:19] operations I was doing an alias not using my real real name and and and there were two who saw me on TV after I went public two who I had recruited in Alias who reached out to me and said hey remember me wow and I'm like how could I possibly forget you and and one of them still sends me Christmas cards crazy so yeah it's it you're you're not

[1:14:52] all sociopaths you know know some of these people you really genuinely like I I had one asset who cried when I left when I left the country he actually cried yeah good guy good guy you know he was he was I don't want to get too far down into the weeds but when he was initially recruited he was recruited only with special permission of the director because he was considered to be a

[1:15:22] terrorist he wasn't a terrorist he had friends who were terrorists but he these friends were friends from like Elementary School from childhood you know how they say in Irish neighborhoods of Boston you either grow up to be a cop or a mobster it was the same thing right he grew up to be I won't say what he was but he grew up to be a normal law biting Citizen and all of his childhood friends were were terrorists and

[1:15:53] so he was initially recruited I didn't recruit him he was initially recruited by a specialized counterterrorism officer who flew out just for the recruitment because it was deemed to be too dangerous for me to do it and then once he was recruited and polygraphed he turned him over to me well I realized yeah this guy has access to some of the most dangerous people in this country but he's a genuinely good guy and so not only did I handle him for

[1:16:25] the two years that I was in this country but even when I transferred back to headquarters I would continue to fly out once a month to handle him and I was able to get his paperwork transferred from the terrorist designation to the equivalent of the the good guy designation and then um and then when I finally said listen I decided to resign and I'm going to go into the private sector I'm going to move back to the

[1:16:56] states he just burst into tears yeah crazy is espionage an art or science oh it's very much an art very much an art I sat next to a guy in Arabic class I admired this guy so much we were contemporaries same age but he was a goodlooking well-built smart [Music] case officer his father had been a

[1:17:27] senior Cia case officer and this colleague of mine had a knack for Arabic his Arabic like how he learned Arabic as quickly as he did it was amazing to me I I just admired his smarts and he was fun to be around and I said to him one time you know what man I would let you recruit me I said you've won me over you really have a knack for for this so we finished Arabic I went to the country I was going

[1:17:59] to he went to the country he was going to and then he cables me and he said hey you're going to be in my neck of the woods anytime soon and I said not necessarily but there's a three-day weekend coming up how about if I come out and uh and we'll hang out and have a couple of beers and he said great and I thought that's kind of odd but okay so I fly out to his country he picks me up at the airport and I I was like so

[1:18:31] how's it going and this big tear just drops from his eye and I'm looking at him like and he goes I'm not cut out for this job I go what do you mean you're not cut out for this job you were the best of all of us in the training he said I can't do it I can't convince people to Comm treason for me I can't do it my gut just won't let me do it he said I feel so guilty I'm

[1:19:02] manipulating them I'm lying to them they think that we're friends and they're not my friends he said I can't do it but my dad was a superstar of the CIA he said I can't let my dad down I go what are you going to do he goes how many people have you recruited I said two so far he goes I haven't done any I'm going to get passed over for promotion and if I don't get any in the next 6 months they're going to curtail my assignment and they're going to send

[1:19:33] me back to headquarters for more training he said I can't do it I said dude you got to nip this in the bud then don't drag it out if it's not for you it's not for you he said but I don't want another job in the agency I don't want to be a paper pusher I don't want to be an analyst I said you should quit and do whatever makes you happy he became a veterinarian yeah he said that's what would make him happy he had a three-legged dog and he was always

[1:20:04] bringing taking in these Strays I'm like your house looks like a freaking managerie man but that's what that's the only thing that made him happy became a veterinarian and his dad was not disappointed in him it's for you it's not for you no problem but it it's it's an art either you're cut out for it or you're not and if you're not that's perfectly cool I worked with another guy his dad was his dad had been the deputy director of the CIA for operations that's the

[1:20:35] highest ranking spy the highest ranking spy it the boss of all spies in all divisions this guy had a congenital heart defect and he had uh he had open heart surgery as a as an infant so he had this Wicked scar right down the middle of his chest and he couldn't pass the medical exam because you have to be in I mean you're jumping out of planes and you know shooting people and it's you got to be in good shape and so

[1:21:09] um his dad got him a waiver because all he was every day I want to be a case officer I want to be a case officer I want to be a case officer okay all right your dad's the boss so his dad's like case officer he goes through the training arrogant son of a gun arrogant and his last name was was um was unique so it's not like everybody's got this name like oh is your dad yeah it's my dad so we were going out to this

[1:21:40] assignment we ended up going to the same the same country and he just fell flat on his face he just couldn't pull the couldn't pull the trigger like he would say I think I'm getting them to the point where they're going to be ready for the pitch and I said to him one day buddy I'm reading your outgoing cables they were ready for the pitch six months ago they're like recruiting themselves

[1:22:13] and offering them up to you and themselves up to you all you have to do is ask the question oh I don't know what if they say no they could blow my cupboard yeah that's the risk we we run they'll blow your cover and then you get thrown out of the country so be a big boy and make the pitch he ended up saying this job's not for me went back to headquarters pushing paper nepotism at the CIA there was there was another case

[1:22:43] officer a woman smart she had gone to Yale as an undergrad and then she went to Michigan for a a master's degree in uh in international Affairs um spoke beautiful farsy and the station Chief came to me one day and said you know this woman in your branch she's just not working out I go really I'm so surprised she inherited several agents um but she writes no

[1:23:16] intelligence and I said wow I said it was always my personal view that if you do an operational meeting you're taking the risk of doing an operational meeting so you're doing a three-hour surveillance detection route before the meeting right to make sure you're not being followed you do the meeting for two hours and then you do another 2hour route home to make sure you're not being being followed that's a commitment and it's dangerous and then you get back to the head to the uh the embassy and you're

[1:23:47] like H I got nothing to report they didn't say anything interesting okay first of all you're lying second of all if you weren't lying and they didn't say anything interesting you need to fire them because that $2,000 a month or 5,000 or $10,000 a month we're paying them we can pay to somebody else who is giving us intelligence so the station Chief said do me a favor and go with her on her next operational meeting and explain to her what

[1:24:18] intelligence is so I said to her beforehand I said listen the chief said I should go with you she said yeah yeah I heard and I said we're you're going to do the uh the interview and I'll take notes and then after it's all over we'll go over what is reportable intelligence and I said but I'll tell you my own bias is if you come out of an operational meeting without one at least one intelligence reporting cable you

[1:24:49] have failed that's a failure so we go we do the meeting fascinating agent not someone I would have focused on but fascinating nonetheless nonetheless and um we finish the meeting we all Shake Hands the agent leaves I go what did you think and she goes I really didn't get anything out of that I said I got five intelligence reports out of that meeting she says how so I started going over my

[1:25:20] notes he said this that's going to be be interesting to the such and such division he said that I think the counternarcotics center would like to know that then he said this this and the other thing and I said all you have to know is how headquarters works and what the different divisions and groups are in headquarters and then you tailor your questions to their issues everybody has what's called an OD an operating

[1:25:51] directive it goes from tier zero to tier five tier zero is they're coming over the walls of the embassy reported immediately okay so that's terrorism Russia North Korean nuclear program let's say I'm making this up um tier one is stuff that you need to pretty much drop everything and collect on this tier two is stuff that's important but don't you know go crazy tier three is if you

[1:26:23] happen to develop it in the course of your interview report it that's what all of this stuff was tier four is like ah an analyst had a question but don't kill yourself tier five is nobody really gives a anymore so don't don't bother well all of this stuff was tier two and tier three and she just wasn't getting it and so after I left the agency I ran into her at the mall one time and I said how are things going she said I'm not a case officer anymore she said that job

[1:26:54] just wasn't for me I just didn't know it was important so she said she had transferred to Liaison uh and what liaison does is when we have visiting dignitaries come She lays out the the buffet and you know takes them to dinner whatever not something I would have wanted to do so last thing on on this before we move into Greece when when you're talking about finding vulnerabilities and assets

[1:27:25] there's you know Revenge ideology mentioned greed uhhuh money yep what's the best for John greed greed's the best even people who you suspect might be willing to do it for ideology are doing it for the money in my entire CIA career I only had one agent who I recruited who refused to take any

[1:27:57] money he did it just cuz he liked me and then in the end I said listen you you got to let me do something for you you got to let me get you a Rolex or something he's like no he I make $20,000 a year I'm going to walk around with a Rolex I said you got to let me do something he said listen my grandson really wants to go to school in the United States I said done and he said no no I don't want you to pay pay for it um his English isn't

[1:28:28] perfect and I'm not sure he would get through the application process but he really wants to go to the University of Oklahoma and I go really I can get him into Harvard Yale Stanford Dartmouth name it he said he wants to go to the University of Oklahoma I said okay done that was it got him in we have a whole office that just does

[1:28:58] that yeah that's a good one yeah so um your first case officer job you go to Greece M which was probably nice for you yeah it was great um what were you doing over there I was uh very specifically assigned to uh disrupt uh a terrorist group called revolutionary organization 17 November was the deadliest terrorist group in the history of Greece they had murdered uh

[1:29:29] 28 people including the CIA station Chief uh two American defense attaches and a poor hapless Air Force technical Sergeant doing his laundry in the basement laundry room of his apartment building um they were incredibly lethal and SU successful and um and extraordinarily dangerous to all Americans in Greece

[1:30:01] Greece was ranked as what's called critical threat for terrorism in those days critical is the highest level threat uh we spent more money on security in Athens than we spent in Beirut at the time and what year was this by the way 1998 to 2000 um the Greeks ended up cracking in the group in 2002 it no longer exists uh but uh that was one incredibly tough job and to make it tougher we

[1:30:33] weren't able to ident to identify a single member of the group they were so good at masking their identities we had suspects we had 500 suspects and the group only ended up having but a dozen people in it um but there were other groups there was one called Popular revolutionary struggle there was one called um revolutionary nuclei there was uh sons of the anarchic something or

[1:31:04] other I forget they were mostly Anarchist groups but popular revolutionary struggle and um and revolutionary organization 17 November were legitimate terrorist groups well funded well financed we suspected they were getting their weapons from Carlos the jackal uh and probably the libyans at the time um that turned out to be kind of true they got some weapons

[1:31:35] from the libyans and uh popular revolutionary struggle did get their weapons from Carlos The Jackal but not 17 November it was totally domestic yeah so you mentioned before the attempt on your life and Greece can you tell that story yeah so so surveillance was of the utmost

[1:32:07] Import in in Greece because like I said we were never able to identify these guys and they were shooting and in some cases killing Embassy employees um they killed and permanently dis they killed our station Chief they permanently disabled our DEA rep they killed two of our defense atet um they tried to kill a state department officer I mean they they were on us all the time and so I was really really careful about my own security I was heavily

[1:32:39] armed all the time what did you carry I had carried a 9mm um Glock on my in a fanny pack on my waist and a a snubnose 38 revolver on my ankle and then just in case I kept a I kept a a a buck knife in my back pocket I carried two extra magazines in my fanny pack it was a ter waste it was quick action you know I even remember going to church with my wife and and kids one

[1:33:10] Sunday and asking God to forgive me for taking all these weapons into church but I was literally never without them so I'm at a party one night uh this was in March of 2 I met a diplomatic cocktail party and and a a guy had just moved in Caddy corner from me our backyards touched caddy corner he was a brigadier general British he was the new British defense attache by the name of Steven

[1:33:41] Saunders and Steve was a great guy just funny and fun and gregarious and outgoing the life of the part kind of guy and his wife was lovely and they had two teenage daughters so he was making fun of me in a joking way because I drove a fully armored BMW 540 it was the first 540 in Greece we needed that big engine to

[1:34:13] carry all the weight of that armor even the windows were that thick I'm not exaggerating it was the first 540 in gree we couldn't even ensure it we had to ensure it through a company in Germany right so he was making fun of my car and he said you Americans you're so paranoid about security he goes this is an EU country it's a NATO country what are you so afraid of and everybody Chuckles and I said you Brits live in a

[1:34:46] dream world if you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if they get the chance take my word for it I said if they do get the chance they're going to kill you and we all laughed two weeks later I slept in by accident and what I would do every day is I'd get up at a different time and take a different route to work so I never established a pattern

[1:35:17] and that way it's impossible to do surveillance on me so sometimes it would take 20 minutes to get to work sometimes it would take two hours to get to work and all of us did this so we all knew you're going to be in eventually we're all working 12 and 14 hour days anyway so it's not like you're not going to put in your eight hours so we're just driving like crazy people you know all over the the the city but I slept in and I was like damn it it's like

[1:35:49] 10:00 which means I got to get on the main road which I never did well I lived exactly 10 miles from the embassy and it was a straight shot on Kei CS Boulevard straight shot down the mountain from my house to the Embassy no turns no nothing the problem with that is there were concrete Jersey barriers the whole way so I can't get off so once you're on you're committed

[1:36:20] so I was like dang it I just got to take the most direct way I'm just going to get on see us and just go straight so I get on it's a parking lot it's like Cairo or Bangkok I'm like what in the world at 10:00 in the morning so I put on the radio which I also never did because I didn't want to be distracted you have to constantly constantly scan your side view mirrors constantly because 17 November would come up on a motorcycle two guys on a motorcycle a a driver and the shooter in

[1:36:52] the back and they' put two in your head and then just take off and nobody no one ever got a glimpse of them so I'm constantly scanning the the side view mirrors and the rearview mirror and I put on the radio because I'm just sitting there and they say on the radio avoid GS Avenue because there was a traffic incident at filo well filo is like at the halfway point I'm like dang I got five miles of this

[1:37:24] I thought well I'm committed I can't get off so I'm just sitting there inching my way down the mountain six feet at a time and then on the radio half an hour later they said avoid GS Avenue uh there's been a criminal incident at filo I said a criminal incident and I've never heard that before must be a bank robbery or something so I'm inching my way down finally as I'm getting to the jam up

[1:37:55] they come back on and they say avoid F avoid CS Avenue there was a terrorist attack at filo and as soon as they said terrorist attack I can see a red I'm sorry a a white Rover you know the British Rover and there's police tape around it the side uh window is shot out and there's just blood spatter all over the back

[1:38:26] windshield and I noticed the license plate says ybh and then four numbers well Greece was so dangerous that the American Embassy didn't get diplomatic plates it was too alerting so we got just regular normal license plates but the Greeks in their Infinite Wisdom gave everybody in the American Embassy plates that began with yhb mhm and I thought oh that poor son of a gun some Greek they thought they mixed up

[1:38:59] yhb and ybh and they killed some innocent Greek and then I thought no wait a minute ybh is the British Embassy they don't have diplomatic plates either and that Rover belongs to Steve Saunders so I get on the phone and I called the station and I said listen I'm stuck in traffic on qcs and I think somebody just hit Steve Saunders and my boss said what do you what do you see and I said there's so

[1:39:32] much blood in this car he couldn't have lived so I I described what I was seeing and then I get around his car and they call me back they said we just called the British Embassy and they were wondering where he was because he wasn't at work so it turned out they pulled up alongside the driver shot him with the same 45 that they did all of their hits with all 28 hits but the the passenger

[1:40:05] on the back pulled out some kind of a long gun and shot him with an armor piercing round that blew his right hand completely off his right hand was on the floor of the passenger side Jesus so they killed him instantly so a taxi driver and a a guy in in a car next to him pulled him out of the car put him in the taxi and rushed him to the Red Cross hospital so

[1:40:35] the Brits called all the hospitals and the Red Cross said yes we have this man in a British military uniform uh but he's dead he was dead he came in Dead on Arrival so they called me back they said he's dead so I said it's it's chaos out here I got to the Embassy and my boss said don't take your jacket off we're going to go to the to the service meaning the the host intelligence service so we pick up the

[1:41:06] Brits and we go over there and of course I had never met the Brits and they had never met me because I'm doing my thing and they're doing their thing and you know never the two shall meet so I'm like hi I'm John I'm sorry for your loss hi I'm Ian hi I'm you know Nigel whatever and we go over to the Greeks the Greeks are like H sorry and I said this is the 28th victim like how many more is it going to take before you guys are serious about this oh sorry but we're committed to

[1:41:39] working with you to cracking this group and so we got orders from headquarters that we were to open the files in their entirety to the Brits and um that started a that started a three-year relationship that I had with the Brits on counterterrorism I was a regular in London like all the time all the time and then the the Greeks just broke the group

[1:42:10] accidentally in 2002 um one of the terrorist terrorists was carrying a bomb in a paper bag that he was going to put under the car of a Greek ship owner in parus and the bomb went went off prematurely and it blew his hands off and it blew his right eye out and so he thought he was dying and he confessed to everything and gave up the location of the of the guns and the bombs and the safe house and the names of all the other members and then he

[1:42:42] lived and so the Greeks got everybody damn yeah so that must have uh hit a little close to home huh boy it sure did to make matters worse and the reason why this was so important to me um was uh a couple of months passed and you know one of the things that 17 November did was they would always either throw a Manifesto down at the site of the hit or mail a Manifesto to one of the left-wing

[1:43:14] newspapers and um and so what they did was they waited for several months and then they mailed their Manifesto to the Lefty paper and it said asopos we saw the big spy but he was in an armored car and we knew he was armed so we elected to carry out the the Revolutionary sentence on the war criminal

[1:43:45] Saunders so my boss calls me and he says have you seen the news I said no I'm in the car what news and he says they were going to hit you the day that they hit Saunders I said no I'm so careful about my my personal security he said no they refer to you in the manifesto I said what Manifesto he said they just sent it to gimini not no it wasn't it wasn't

[1:44:15] gim the left this paper so I get in and I'm reading it everybody's like gathered around me and my boss says you got to go like right now I said my wife is at home my kids are at school he said we'll pick them up so one car took me to the airport I called my wife I said I don't have time to explain but a car is coming to get you and then go to the school and get the kids and I'm going to meet you at

[1:44:46] the airport and I had told her like 2 years earlier if something terrible should happen happen somebody's going to come and pick you up so just go with it I couldn't tell her anything else so they took me to the airport they picked up my wife they picked up my kids at the school they go to the airport we were on the 12:00 Delta flight back to New York and then the embassy sent a team to my house to just pack everything in boxes and ship it back and that was

[1:45:16] it and you know months later I had some pictures developed um my mom and dad had come out to visit us um when Steve was killed like the week after Steve was killed and um I took a picture of my mom she's on her knee and she's holding my two sons they were little at the time they were like three and six and so I'm on my knee at taking a picture of them and there's a red car in

[1:45:49] the background and there's a guy sitting in the car and he's looking right in the camera and I thought boy that's just so odd and so I cabled it out saying hey I know it's all after the fact but can you run this plate and it turned out that the plate was stolen so I said how in the world the only thing we were able to conclude

[1:46:20] we've never been able to figure it out but what we concluded was um they were looking at him because he was so public he was giving interviews to newspapers and he's on TV at these diplomatic parties and so they went looking for him and while and our houses were right next to each other and then they saw yhb and they were like ahuh and that car is

[1:46:50] armored that can only mean CIA yeah yeah that was the first of two yeah incidents yeah we'll go we'll get into the second one for sure um you mentioned that uh you were that one of one of the events that you just talked about you mentioned that you were looking in your side view mirrors and you mentioned before that that you did pull your gun at a couple points in your career and I think um there was something that

[1:47:22] happened in Greece where there was a guy in a motorcycle that followed you and that kind of prompted you doing those things what's that story yeah this this is one of these incidents that leads to PTSD um when I my family and I first arrived in Athens uh the embassy put us up in a in an apartment uh because they hadn't yet gotten a house I I went sort of out of cycle most people go summer to Summer

[1:47:52] and I arrived a couple of months in so uh they needed to go out and find a house so we're in this apartment and then they finally find us a house and um and we're moving all our stuff up to the house uh the the embassy has a truck for most of our boxes and then my wife was in a car and I was in my armored car and I had just bought a TV at the PX it was a big one it took up the whole back seat

[1:48:23] not big like we have today but you know it is 25 years ago so it was pretty big I took up the whole seat so I'm driving up the same gias Avenue and there's a there's a motorcyclist and he's trying really hard to stay in my blind spot and I thought that's kind of odd so I speed up and he speeds up I slow down he slows down I move over a lane he moves over a lane my wife calls me she's in the car ahead

[1:48:55] of me and she says do you see this guy and I said yeah I'm starting to get nervous and she said you don't think it's 17 November and I said they can't possibly be on me yet I said I don't know I don't know what this guy is doing and she said are you nervous I said yeah nervous enough that I think I'm going to hit him I'm going to I'm going to try to hit him and she said okay so I hung up and I sped up and he sped up and then I slammed my brakes as hard as I could and

[1:49:26] I swerved right to hit him and I barely missed him so we did this a couple of times and then there's this enormous intersection at the headquarters of the Greek uh what's it called the helenic tele commmunications organization it's the AT&T of Greece this is a major Cross Roads so it's it's like it's like eight lanes and it's all red lights and it's

[1:49:57] all jammed up so I I've got to stop I I can't get away I can't plow through you know eight cars in front of me so I was like okay you're trained for this so um I pull my gun out I I put the car in park first I pull the gun out I get out and I said I said what do you want you son of a and he goes like this he smiles at me and he goes I'm not afraid of your

[1:50:29] gun and I thought oh my God like that's not the response that you're trained to expect so I thought okay I either have to kill him or get off the X as they say well just then as I'm as I'm holding the gun on him and these other cars are like right everybody else the other cars so I've got the gun on him the light turns green enough cars pull

[1:51:00] over I get back in the car put it in drive I take off he pulls out a gun he gets one shot off and it just barely Nicks my bumper like just a mark on the bumper so I get my phone I call the Embassy Security meets me there the chief arrives at my house my wife is there just before I

[1:51:31] am um we had private security at the embassy too wacken Hut at the time or however you say it in Dutch or Danish or whatever Swedish whatever it is we always called it wack aut so they put a they put a 24-hour guard on my house um we went to the service there was no license plate on the motorcycle we went to the service they couldn't help we we figured afterwards that this was a carjacking that um he saw the

[1:52:02] TV uh he was going to follow me to wherever it was I was going to go and he was going to take the car we think that there was no plate on the motorcycle because it was probably stolen which was quite common back then and that it was just a crime of opportunity I just was unlucky that day yeah so how many people did you recruit while you're in Greece if you can say I probably can't say Okay less than five

[1:52:34] no can you tell a story or two of um recruitments maybe you know you can whitewash the names and stuff but something that stands out there was one you know working on 17 November it had a very rich and deep history and so I was going back through files going back to the night that our station Chief dick Welch was assassinated in 1975 December 23rd 1975 um dick and his wife had gone to

[1:53:07] the ambassador's Christmas party and then they left the Christmas party December 23rd they drove back to the house in a close in very high-end suburb called Piko and those were the days before autumn itic Gates so their driver pulls up to the gate and he puts the car in park and he gets out to open the gate when he did that two people got out of a car parked across the street two people remained in

[1:53:38] the car a woman and a male driver two other men got out both of them had guns one was a 45 that has become known as The Welch 45 it's been used in it was was used in every hit that 177 November ever carried out and a 38 revolver and one of the um men shouts Richard Welch get out of the car the driver runs for his life dick gets out

[1:54:09] with his wife she gets out she was very stoic and very strong and our only witness they've got the guns on him and one of them says Richard Welch you have been convicted of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death and shoots him three times in the chest they calmly get back in the car and drive away so Mrs Welch of course screams runs

[1:54:40] inside calls the embassy it's chaos reading those old historic cables was so revelatory the first cable was something called a flash flash means wake everybody up no matter what time of the night and call the director because he's going to need to brief the president it's the highest well there's one Higher called a critic but flash is almost as high as it

[1:55:12] goes so um the the whole contents of the cable were um uh Chief Welch uh shot and killed in front of Home in Piko that was it headquarters writes back it had to be the Russians had to be the Russians but we always had an agreement with the Russians that we don't kill their people and they don't kill our people and on

[1:55:43] their own valtion the Russians came to us the very next morning and said we had nothing to do with it and we'll help you in any way that we can I'm going to make this long story very short to answer your question there was a man walking his dog that night um he happened to be the defense atache of an enemy

[1:56:13] country and he saw the getaway car but because he was from an enemy country nobody ever bothered to talk to him enemy to the US or to Greece to the US so I thought I wonder if this guy's still alive he'd probably be in his 80s by now I'm going to look for him so I send cables out to everybody right name traces FBI foreign

[1:56:46] governments anybody know this guy where I could find him so I found him and he was in his 80s retired um so I sent a cable to the chief our chief in that country I said hey you know here's the story you know dick Welch we're still working on the case all these years later 25 years later um I'd like to come and talk to this guy and he said oh look we don't have any interest or any

[1:57:17] money to work on a a 27y old case or 2 5-year-old case we're not interested I said okay how about if we pay for it and I'll just fly in and just see what I can find he said so long as you pay for it you're welcome to come and do your thing so I fly in it was like snow past my my knees I I remember trudging across this freaking field it's like 9:00 at

[1:57:48] night it's dark so I I go and um and he's not there it was his apartment but his wife was there and I I don't speak their language but I started to speak to her in Greek and she's like you speak Greek she says in Greek in very broken Greek and I saides do you still speak Greek she said I lived in Greece many years ago I said yes yes I'm

[1:58:19] looking for your husband I wanted to talk to him about G and she said oh he's he's working he's he's a security guard at a bank he's like the night Watchman at a bank so she told me where I could find him so I go to this bank it's freaking nighttime right and I'm banging on the door and this 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting

[1:58:50] night watchman's uniform comes and answers the door and he's like yes and I said his name and he's like yes I said I'm John kiraku from the CIA and I'm here to change your life that's what I said to him and he smiles and he says my friend I've waited 30 years for this day and he says please come

[1:59:20] in yeah was my first recruitment ever ever use your real name too absolutely why because he was no threat to me it's an 8 something year old man when you can you use your real name because you you want them to to trust you and you know maybe he's going to call the Embassy tomorrow to make sure that I'm not KGB Israeli mosad Iranian You Know M ois yeah interesting he was a lovely old

[1:59:53] man lovely old man and he would always insist that we would have a drink no no no we'll talk about business after we have a drink like okay I'll tell you one funny thing that happened he said to me our next meeting let's do it in my hometown I said okay where's that he said it's about 2 hours East of here it's in the mountains it's very beautiful there's a lodge a very beautiful Lodge I would like to take you and have dinner I would never never let

[2:00:25] him pay for anything but I said great let's do that so I ran a car and I meet him out there at this Lodge and it was stunning like out of a movie at the top of this mountain all you see is mountains all around and the waitress comes up and uh she asked me what I would like to drink and I said I'll have an U o and orange juice My grandmother used to drink

[2:00:55] them you don't normally mix uzo with orange juice you mix it with water or some people might mix it with Coke I always I like the freshness of the taste so who an orange juice and then they had wild boar which I had never had before so I had a wild boar steak steak I still remember had such a great time I said to him let's do this again sometime so a couple months pass and he says hey

[2:01:25] you want to meet at the lodge again I said Ure so I rent a car drive out there again and um the waitress comes and says what do you have and I said how about an uzo and orange juice and she goes I remember you you're an American you're the only person who's ever ordered that drink and I was like I can never come here again I'll tell you a more appropriate

[2:01:57] story about cover and the necessity for maintaining cover um the most important event in in the Diplomatic year of any Embassy is a presidential visit okay when when the president of the United States comes you drop everything and it doesn't make any difference if you're some highflying CIA guy or the department of Agriculture rep who sits in the basement everybody has to work so we get this cable from the White

[2:02:30] House Bill Clinton's coming everybody's got to have a job so the Ambassador signed me my job and it was to take notes in the president's meeting with the leader of the opposition who later became prime minister that was a good assignment plus I was an accomplished writer I I had seven years in analysis and now I've written nine books I I I write well and the Ambassador liked my writing

[2:03:03] style so um he gave me that assignment so we're at the Intercontinental Hotel and it's President Clinton Secretary of State Albright National Security adviser Sandy Berger the Ambassador and me the the leader of the opposition his adviser who became Minister of Foreign Affairs another adviser who became minister of defense and their notaker so it's nine of

[2:03:33] us so we have this whole it's it's called the presidential suite at the top floor of the of the intercon and we have an entire table that's just full of food just giant Buffet of fruits and cold cuts and whatever so I'm standing and the Greek notetaker is standing the president is sitting with the prime minister or he became prime minister a couple months later and then the AIDS are on either side and the funny thing too you know Clinton was just like the

[2:04:05] nicest guy in the world he would have been a terrific case officer so he says to uh the the opposition leader uh can I get you something to eat we got all this food here coffee tea he's like no no no the minister no no nothing nothing nothing nothing he comes to me he goes like this would you like something to eat and I go oh no thank you Mr

[2:04:36] President I'm fine and he goes oh are you with me I said yes sir I'm with you sorry I thought you were Greek I said I kind of am but not really I'm with you so the meeting was not substantive the meaning was we love you you love us this is the birthplace of democracy we're a democracy so we love you and you

[2:05:09] love us and you buy our weapons and we have lots of Greek people and then they got up and they shook hands and they hugged and that was the end of the meeting and I'm like how am I going to write that but that's what I ended up writing nothing substantive so we go out into the hall and Clinton and burger walk out first the Greeks have departed so Clinton and burger walk out first then Albright and the Ambassador walk out and then I walk out so my job is to keep my

[2:05:41] mouth shut and to stand there until somebody tells me what to do so I'm standing against the wall just standing like this and burger and Clinton finish their conversation so Burger walks over to Albright and the Ambassador so Clinton's standing there closer than I am to you we were only 3 feet away from each other and just as Burger walks away the elevator at the end of the hall opens and Hillary and Chelsea get off and Hillary's got this this puss on her

[2:06:13] face like this so I'm looking at her and she walks right up to us and one thing about Bill and he hates silence he's always got to be talking and josing and joking and laughing and and she's just looking at him like this and he says boy we sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning didn't we Hill she just stares at him so he repeats himself we sure had a good time

[2:06:45] at the paron this morning didn't we Hill and he she says Jesus Christ Bill it rained all day I'll be in the room and she walks past us and I'm looking at him and I know he could tell just from my eyes like you poor bastard so he looks at me and he goes let's get the out of here and he walks to the elevator so I walk with him to the elevator and then Burger Albright and

[2:07:16] the Ambassador come and the Secret Service and we went to the basement and he gave this big speech to the American business women's Association okay A month later my favorite agent triggers a meeting he said I need to see you I said okay and he says let's meet up at the intercon and I said okay I love the intercon they have a delicious Greek salad there so we go to the

[2:07:47] intercon and this agent was always strictly business I would always I mean no matter who the agent was I would always say what can I get you would you like some dinner would you like me to order a pot of coffee what can I get from room service remember my budget is unlimited whatever these guys want whatever their hearts desire I want to make the guy happy so what can I get you he's like no no no no actually you know he said I never get anything let's let's order a pot of coffee I said great I could use a coffee so I call room service and I said

[2:08:22] um I said uh can I order a pot of coffee for two please guy say sure so um I should add I'm under alias in this meeting which becomes important so the the room service guy comes up knocks on the door I open the door please come in he said you have a pot of coffee I said yes thank you so much the agent is sitting there like this he was always very relaxed and he was a chains smoke he would light one off the other so he's

[2:08:53] smoking like this like he owns the place he was also like 30 years older than me or 35 he smoking and the waiter says to me have I met you and I said no and the guy smoking he goes yeah I have you were the notetaker in Bill Clinton's meeting with the lead of the opposition and I was

[2:09:26] like and I said right you were the waiter you catered the buffet excuse me and he goes right he goes but you live in Athens why are you in the hotel and I was like uh and the agent says some nephew I have I come all the way from Chicago he makes me stay in a hotel

[2:09:56] smoking and he's like oh well welcome to Athens he says to the to the agent who's lived his entire life in Athens and uh and I said good to see you again he's like yeah good to see you and he left and the agent as he's smoking he goes we can never meet in this hotel again I said clearly and he goes and you need to come up with a cover story I was like damn lesson learned man what a

[2:10:28] gangster that guy oh he was Hardcore he was Hardcore he was one of these guys that you know I'm glad I didn't know him when he was young because he probably would have shot me yeah yeah did you teach those guys tradecraft at all you have to okay yeah it's I'm glad you brought that up because this same agent I came to love this guy and I said listen we're gonna have to do some

[2:10:59] operational testing so do you do a surveillance detection route he goes of course I am what am I he says I said no listen I know I know you've been doing this for a long time but you got to do surveillance detection he said I do do surveillance detection I said okay just so I know that you do so I write to headquarters and I said hey can you send a team out I just want to see if he's telling me the truth about doing the surveillance

[2:11:30] detection route they send this team out which was a totally normal thing with these teams just go everywhere just to do this kind of thing and at the end of it they called me I was waiting for him to come up to the hotel room and they said he did a a surveillance detection route that was so ridiculously good we couldn't keep up with him because it would have blown our cover I said excellent excellent so when he came in I said how'd things go they call it the

[2:12:00] mad minute um were you followed uh are you in fear for your safety uh how much time do you have to meet and we need to book our next meeting right now you do that all in the first 60 seconds in case you're disrupted so he's like I said were you followed he goes no but I did a kick-ass surveillance detection route and I said good good good see keeps you safe wow that's

[2:12:31] awesome um can you say what he did to trigger the meeting he was I asked him if he had access to a Target and he said not today but I could her if I wanted to I said get out of here he goes she's been flirting with me for 40

[2:13:03] years I said well she has something that I want can you get close enough to her to get it and he said yeah I said then get it so he triggered the meeting to say he her and she gave him everything that I had asked for and he wanted to give it to me wow I said you're a dog you know that you're like an animal I said you're an old man you're you're older than my father I told him and you're banging women to get information from them he's

[2:13:34] like this is the life we've chosen for ourselves I said okay all right no need to get dramatic about it now I love this guy I love him I Googled him a few years ago and and he died he died about 10 years ago I was sorry to see but he was a genuinely good guy yeah so to that point um what is the role of sex and Espionage well the written rule and

[2:14:04] there's the written rule and the unwritten rule the written rule is verboten you never ever sleep with an agent or with a Target the unwritten rule is when you sleep with the agent or the target you have to report it to headquarters and then they make a determination as to whether or not you can continue to sleep with them um you we had one guy when I was when I was the deputy director's executive assistant you know I had access to literally every every Cable in

[2:14:37] the world that the CIA was producing so I was read into every compartment and there was one of our guys out there young guy good-look go-getter and he's like uh I was targeting this woman and she has access to the prime minister's office and one thing led to the other and so it's like well what what do we do so we said are are you into her or was

[2:15:08] it just one of these things where you had too much to drink he goes I'm I'm into her and I think she's into me and we were like okay you can continue to see her but she's no longer a Target you're going to have to find somebody else he ended up marrying her wow yeah he had to resign I mean if you're going to marry a Brit or Australian or Canadian okay you got to you got to report it but most countries you have to offer your resignation and then headquarters decides whether to accept the resignation or not and that country she

[2:15:41] was from they accepted the resignation that's so interesting to me about kind of the lines blurring in the situations right like cuz you're a human right there's attraction you know yeah but it goes back to the point about is it a real relationship or is is it a fake one well I'll tell you a funny story when I was a brand new case officer with zero experience I was assigned to work with this liaison officer who was the ugliest

[2:16:14] woman I had ever met in my life it was like it was like a joke you know like somebody took pieces of clay and as a joke you know made this face so I've just arrived I just met her and the chief says well she was really uh friendly to you in the meeting I said I said oh yeah I said she mentioned she has an interest in

[2:16:45] American expressionist art and I actually know a little bit about American expressionism child Hassam and you know the early 20th late 19th century American expressionists and he said uh listen uh I want you to her and I go what I go you saw what she looks like he goes yeah but you know this would be a real feather in your cap I want you to go ahead and

[2:17:16] her and I go man I I'm married and he goes yeah but it's it's for the country and I go oh okay I'll do it I'll do it for the country and he goes no you're not going to do it for the country I'm kidding we don't them and I go well how am I supposed to know I've never done this before he goes I can't believe you were going to her did you see her

[2:17:48] face I was like don't do that to me I don't know any better yet whatever it takes that's awesome um is there any other either recruitments or pitches that stand out from your time in Greece that you can share yeah there was one

[2:18:21] so I was in a very dangerous country active Al-Qaeda presence very dangerous and we got word that a lot of alqa Fighters were congregating at this one coffee shop so I let my beard grow out and it they used to call me the Archbishop in the embassy cuz it was

[2:18:51] like this and while my hair was still dark my beard was all gray so I started going to this coffee shop and not saying anything to anybody I would sit with an Arabic newspaper and just read and these guys would come in clearly Al-Qaeda because if you're in this country you speak in Arabic yeah you're Al-Qaeda there's no reason for you to be in this country otherwise so I never said a word never made eye

[2:19:23] contact nothing but I'm there every single day having a cup of coffee reading an Arabic newspaper finally one of these guys as they're walking past my table to go to their table one of these guys nods at me so I nod back at him and then a couple days later they're coming in again and he nods and I said Salam alayum and he says and he sits down and then another week passes and I

[2:19:57] said Salam he says I said what is your name mm I said where you from I speak with the Lebanese accent cuz my instructor was Lebanese nice to meet you he goes and sits so now I know his name so I can run a name Trace see exactly

[2:20:28] who this guy is and he's he's a guy that we want to get to know so one day he came in by himself and I said uh I said sit with me please so he sits and he said you live around here I said yeah I live around the corner you live around here he said yeah I said what are you doing in this country you're you're Egyptian he said ah I came for Jihad I said of course of course I said

[2:20:59] I work for an NGO orphans we we take care of Orphans oh good good refugees I said yes yes it's a big problem yes yes I said you came for Jihad he said yes and I said you're not in Afghanistan he said no I'm thinking it's time to go home I been there for 5 years now I think I'd like to go home and uh we would have these kinds of

[2:21:31] conversations so it came time for the pitch we have a security team set up like completely surrounding us so I said to him yeah mm I'm not really who I said I was I don't work for an NGO I wasn't honest with you and I want to apologize for that he's like I said I'm actually American I said and more than

[2:22:04] that I work for the CIA and he's like I said you're not running screaming from the room he said I'm listening I said okay what I want from you is ABC d and e and I said I will make you rich Beyond Your Wildest

[2:22:34] Dreams he said okay I said we can never meet here again I said I'm going to get us an apartment and we'll meet at the apartment so we did and then it came time for me to leave so I turned him over to my placement and I said Mahmud I got to ask you you were a True Believer why did you agree to let me recruit you and he said because I was here for 5 years and you were the only

[2:23:05] person who ever asked me about my family that was it yeah they didn't care about him he was just a body with a gun they didn't care otherwise damn um what about what about the one where you dressed up as a college kid yeah that was so much fun oh my God that was the one that I enjoyed the

[2:23:38] most like I say I was younger back then my hair had no gray in it I was thin and uh we got word that the intelligence service station chief of an enemy country was coming for his new assignment and uh how do you get to him right I mean he's not going to be at the cocktail party sipping a

[2:24:10] martini so uh I had a mentor at the CIA by the name of gust avatus gust is famous Charlie Wilson's War I mean books have been written about gust he was like a father figure to me he was very controversial inside and outside the agency killed a lot of Russians a lot Metals promotions couldn't get along with anybody everybody hated gust and gust

[2:24:41] hated everybody but he was a sweetheart deep down you just had to know how to deal with him like one time we were working in the 17 November task force together and I mentioned offhandedly that 17 November's second victim the chief of the helenic National Police his name was malos that malos was a torturer during the Hun and Gus grabbed me by the lapels and slammed me up against the wall and he goes myos was my friend and I said you better get your hands

[2:25:13] off of me old man or I'm going to make you sorry and he finally let me go and I go what the wrong with with you I said malos was a torturer I'm sorry if he was your friend I'm sorry he got shot in the head but he was a torturer and keep your hands to yourself next time and afterwards he's like I really respect you for the way you reacted so anyway we were friends so I called gust and I said gust I got a little pickle here I said this

[2:25:45] station Chief is coming and we don't have a way to get to him and uh how do you think I should play this because I I want to cold pitch him even if it just means frightening him so that he goes underground so Gus said let me tell you something I did back in the day in the 50s so I wish I could take credit for this but this was not my original idea but it worked like a charm so on Gus's

[2:26:16] suggestion I got a book bag and filled it with books so it was heavy and bulky I found the guy's address which was not hard and I found his car which had a diplomatic license plate on it so I went up to the car and with my book bag I broke off the side view mirror and then I picked up the mirror I went to the next door neighbor's house a Greek lady and I said is that your your car over there I just broke

[2:26:47] the mirror off no no she says it belongs to the guy next door I don't know who he is is so I did that for cover reasons so I go next door knock on the door the guy answers and I start speaking to him in Greek and I knew he didn't speak Greek and so he says in English he says no no I don't speak Greek and I said oh I'm sorry I said in English uh I said you speak English I I'm sorry I I was walking down the street and I I've got

[2:27:18] my books here and and I I accidentally hit your mirror and I broke it off and the lady next door told me that it was your car and I wanted to come and say I was sorry excuse me sorry and and I want to pay for it and he's like ah damn it now I have to take it into the shop I said I'm so sorry it's it's totally my fault I was just being clumsy and I'm standing there at the door he's inside I'm outside but in in Arab

[2:27:50] culture an Arab can never turn down a request for Hospitality so I said to him may I trouble you for a glass of water and he's like wait here he says so he goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water in the meantime his little daughter looked to be four years old is playing on the floor so I let myself in and I get on my knees and I say to her in Arabic sh SMI

[2:28:21] sh M what is your name and she says oh my name is whatever and I said uh how old are you I'm for and I said what are you playing in Arabic this is all in Arabic so he comes back in and he's standing there listening to this which of course I did on purpose and he says to me what exactly do you want so I stood up and I said listen I'm not going to waste your time you're a professional I'm a

[2:28:52] professional this is my card with my real name I'm from the CIA in Washington your guy is going down he's going to die you can die with him or you can be on the side of the good guys and you have until 10:00 tomorrow morning to make that decision and I walked out and as I walked out I said I'll be sitting next to my phone that's my direct line so I went back every everybody's like how'd it go I said I don't know

[2:29:23] we'll see so we're all sitting there looking at our watches the next morning right at 10:00 the phone rings and he says what do you propose I said meet me in the lobby of the Hilton hotel in 2 hours and come alone and come unarmed so we had six security guys we were at CIA people were at every

[2:29:53] table around there's a little cafe in the lobby and I wanted it to be in as public a place as possible so that if you know all hell were to break loose I might have a a little bit of safety safety in numbers safety in the you know public environment cops walking around security guards so the guy uh uh made a

[2:30:23] demand I made a counter offer and finally I said to him look you're you're not in a position of strength to negotiate here I'm I'm telling you what it is that you're going to do I'm not here to offer you know riches we can get to that conversation at some point in the future but right now you have to prove your bonafides to

[2:30:54] me and this is what you're going to do at the end of the day he did literally everything that we wanted him to do we did make him Rich he survived he's a successful businessman now thanks to your taxpayer dollars and we were able to shut down any threat that that Embassy would have posed and it would have posed a real threat to

[2:31:25] Americans wow yeah that was a good one that's a ballsy pitch man he was scared shitless and like I say he was a professional so he knew that every one of these white guys that's sitting at every table around him is armed to the teeth and is working with me yeah it's like you said before when when the guy on the motorcycle when you put the gun on his face and he said I'm not afraid of your gun it's the same concept you walk into his house and

[2:31:55] start playing with his daughter yeah he says like what kind of person is just going to walk in here and do that the psychopath just came into my house and now knows my child wow yeah that's a good one man that is a good one I was proud of that one yeah yeah I got promoted for that promoted to uh GS 13 or 14 I don't remember anymore and

[2:32:25] those are that's like the inter agency ranking system right okay what would that be the equivalent of in the military uh Lieutenant Colonel nice mhm yeah that's a good one so last thing on the Greece timeline the second assassination attempt this is right after you left Greece right yeah what's this story you know out of all the things that I ever did at the agency I think this is the one thing that I'm the most proud of

[2:32:57] it wasn't the abua operation although I was proud of abua I'm ashamed for our country as to what ended up happening after abuaba and we'll get into that in detail yeah but but the second assassination attempt I was so proud of myself because by then I was a seasoned case officer I knew exactly what I was doing and I was good at it how many years had you been working as a case officer at this time by then this is what 2000

[2:33:28] 200 so two years and one uh yeah three years doing high-risk stuff like I didn't become a case officer and then go to London or Rome right I went into the mouth of the Beast with 17 November so I get a cable from a buddy of mine who's the chief of a station in the Middle East and he said buddy he goes I got a case we're working on here it's a double

[2:33:59] agent and it's just too dangerous for me or for any of my people to handle we need somebody who doesn't live here you think he'd like to do it I said heck yeah I was divorced I had nothing to lose could use the overtime you know was looking to buy a house why not so I fly out there and and all these guys are my friends right we were all in training together or in Arabic together or whatever we're all friends so in fact this is the guy that

[2:34:31] introduced me to my second wife yeah so I go so what what gives and he says well we recruited this guy and he works for an American defense contractor as an engineer but he doesn't know that we know that he's actually a double agent for one of our greatest enemies in the

[2:35:02] world W I think they wouldn't let me say the country in the book one of our most serious enemies in the world so he thinks he's working for us but we know that the bad guys have tasked him him with identifying the station chief for an assassination so he said can you pretend to be me I said sure I said we're going to have to like

[2:35:34] be really serious about security but yeah I can do this so he said Remember the guy has no idea that we know that he's a double I had never worked a double agent case before I had only learned about double agent cases in training like oh this is very rare but in case this happens you know here's what you do and you know all that so so he triggers a meeting or the the

[2:36:05] original Handler triggers the meeting and um the guy comes and I said hi my name's Nick you wanted to meet the chief you met him hi nice to meet you Nick am I going to be dealing with you from now on I said yes we we believe that you're important enough that uh that I'll handle you directly and he's like okay that's what I that's what I wanted and I said okay well in this in this introductory meeting let's just go over

[2:36:36] the basic stuff we'll go over security and surveillance surveillance detection and a Communications uh uh strategy so I had what he didn't know was at the time called a triband cell phone cell phones were still very new and this triband cell phone um it was a it was a local number in that country but it would ring no matter where I was in the world revolutionary idea at the time you

[2:37:09] didn't have to put in 20 digits it was just a local number so he thought that I was there all the time in fact I'm in Washington uh but if he needed me the phone would ring so I said here's my number so you have my direct number call me if you need anything if you need to meet you need to trigger a meeting we'll come up with a plan in the meantime let's do this on such and such a date at such and such a hotel and what I want you to do is plan out your surveillance detection routes

[2:37:39] make sure that they're very sophisticated and I want you to go rent a post office box so in the event of an emergency where we can't reach each other by phone you can send a message to the post office box I'll go retrieve it and I'll know where the next meeting should be held okay so we shake hands he shakes hands with the outgoing guy great now he's dealing with the station

[2:38:09] Chief instead of doing a surveillance detection R route he drove directly to the enemy Embassy directly now if he had done a surveillance detection route he may have seen that we had four cars with eight officers on him never noticed a thing then they reported back to their Capital he's in with the chief he did it he's in with the chief so we're able to

[2:38:41] track their Communications so I go back out a month later he rented the the post office box then I go back out a month after that and he did this thing for me and he did that thing for me and we're establishing a rapport so I do this for like six or eight months and then I get a call from my buddy who's the actual Chief and he said listen we're going to have to kill this operation I said what why it's going

[2:39:14] well he said no um they just gave him orders to kill you in the next meeting I said come on man I said he's afraid of his own shadow he's not going to he's not going to kill me and he said we we have to we have to kill the operation and I said no no rash decisions let's do a conference call so I got all the headquarters Mucky mucks together and the station guys and I said listen

[2:39:44] listen let's do the next meeting at the Marriott because every Marriott everywhere in the world is exactly the same you come in the door and the bathroom is right there on your right so we get two adjoining rooms that are connected by a door I'll be in the bathroom and when he knocks on the door I'll say come in I'll have it propped open with the lock the secure lock you know how they do he comes in I grab him

[2:40:16] you guys and liaison come in from the other room and we get him they're like uh it's risky I said come on guys what do we do for a living here this guy's a Bonafide terrorist he's ordered to kill me then he's going to kill you and he's going to kill you next and he's going to kill you after that we going to stop these guys or not okay let's do it so I get to the

[2:40:48] hotel and and I'm waiting and I got to the hotel hours early hours which was the plan and we've got our guys in the lobby and one of them calls me from the lobby and he said bad news he goes the bad guys are here in the lobby and they've got at least three teams I said I didn't expect that the idea being if he chickens out

[2:41:18] and doesn't shoot me they're going to shoot me as I'm trying to escape it's like dog G it we didn't consider that we didn't think they'd have the guts to do it we we just thought that they wanted a degree of separation I said okay so we can't use the front door so we have to use the back door and they're like okay he's he's coming in right now and just as he's coming in he calls me and I never would tell him directly what room were in I

[2:41:50] would say come up to the fourth floor or come up to the fifth floor and then he would come up to the fifth floor and I'd say I'm in room 211 or 8:15 meet me in 5 minutes and then I would take the elevator and he would take the stairs so that way he didn't drag surveillance with him and then they try to kill me so he calls me he said I'm here I said come up to the to the eighth floor

[2:42:20] it was the top floor come up to the eighth floor and um and he goes okay so he comes up to the eighth floor and I go walk with me over to the stairs so we walk over the stairs and we go into the stairwell and I said let's go up to the roof he's like what I said let's go up to the roof he goes I don't I don't think I want to go up to

[2:42:51] the roof I said yeah come on let's go he said I'm uncomfortable going up to the roof and I said why you think I'm going to throw you off the roof come on let's go we'll talk up there it's a nice day he goes I don't want to go to the roof I said get up on the roof he said you're scaring me I said and you're pissing me off get up on on the roof I don't think I like this I don't

[2:43:23] like it I don't like it I go what's your problem I thought we're friends you told me last time you were my brother what do you think I'm going to do to you up there I I don't want to I don't want to go up there I go get up on the roof so one step at a time he gets up to the roof I said now stay here for 5 minutes and meet me in room 5:15 and I said you worry me

[2:43:54] sometimes so I go back down five minutes later he knocks on 5:15 I said come in he comes in I come out of the bathroom I tackle him our liaison partners and our security guys bust in from the side room I have him pinned down and he's like Allah abbar Allah abbar and he says I'll kill you and I said I said do you

[2:44:26] think I'm so stupid that I didn't know you came here to kill me tonight do you think I'm so unprofessional that I don't know that you're a double agent I said you're the stupid one you're the stupid one because your life is over now over allahar he kept saying I saide keep telling your yourself that see how far that gets you but remember the bad guys

[2:44:59] are in the lobby and they're looking at their watches like where is he we haven't heard anything So the plan we had come up with was our liaison liazon Partners give him a shot of demoral and it knocks him out well the truth is people die in hotels every single day so we put him on a gurnie we covered him up like a dead body we took him out the back and put him in the

[2:45:30] ambulance and we drove in an ambulance from the back door the cargo whatever the garbage door to their intelligence Service headquarters and when he came to he was tied to a chair so I said now it's my turn you idiot I said your life is over so now I'm going to ask you a question

[2:46:01] that's going to determine how the rest of your life is going to be spent we know who you are we know who you work for and we know that you're in charge of the arms cash so I want to know where are the weapons he's like F you I will never tell you it's like that's the wrong answer he would never tell us so we all huddled they put him in a cell

[2:46:33] and we all huddled together and I said listen I have an idea we know where he lives and we know that he has he has a safe in the hotel he he had referenced the safe a couple times I said I wonder if the arms are in the safe and they were like okay but how do we get into the hotel uh get into the house I said let's just just break in and they were like no can't do it he's got a live-in Filipino made can't do it and I said okay let's declare a an environmental emergency a gas leak we'll say there's a

[2:47:04] gas leak and then we'll Evacuate the neighborhood he lived in a culde saacs there were like Eight houses and they're like no can't do it we don't have underground gas lines here we use propane I said oh my God okay okay get a freaking 18wheeler of propane we'll spill the pro propane on the street and then we'll declare an emergency they're like that we could do so this 18-wheeler comes to the house we're all at the house by then there's

[2:47:35] this giant wheel and I go like this with the Giant Wheel and I spill all this propane on the ground and then we call 115 which is their version of 911 and we said oh there's a big propane spill we need the fire department so the fire department comes and they evacuate all the houses and then we break into his house and the safe is like this big that was it like it's not big enough for anything like the safe in my bedroom is bigger than this this is more like a

[2:48:06] strong box than a safe so we had the locks and pick guy and he cracks it and uh all it has in it is a a slip of paper it was a a map like a kids map and it had an X he had written this X on the map and I go what are the chances that this is the weapons cash and they were like well this is all we have so let's go for it so we all got in these

[2:48:38] jeeps and we followed the map to a town that was about an hour south and then past the town we went out into the um the desert and we're following the map you know 100 Paces and 50 paces and 30 paces and there is an abandoned bunker with all the weapons and it

[2:49:10] wasn't just weapons it was mines and grenades and rocket launchers and that group no longer exists we put the entire group out of business that night yeah and then years later I ran into the chief and I go whatever happened to that guy and he said oh dude he says life without parole means life without

[2:49:42] parole yeah yep oh that's awesome that's awesome I was so proud of that one so proud CU you know so much of what we did at the CIA was just nonsense work it was spinning your wheels coming up with stupid ideas that would never work wasting time and money on agents that could never be recruited you know bad analysis bad tradecraft getting caught in surveillance so when you when you get a victory every once in a while it's it's

[2:50:13] good yeah it's a nice W yeah um so let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll get to 911 sounds good two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center I think we're under attack I need $10 million weapons ammunition when he asked you to hold his hand is there some sort of empathy in war that comes out that nobody discusses great

[2:50:46] question I just got approached and asked if I wanted to be certified in these enhanced interrogation techniques 92 other tapes that are said to show Abu zubeda and abdal nashir being waterboarded were destroyed and he got up from his desk and he whispered in my ear kill them all what's up guys thank you so much for taking the time to watch the interview um as you could probably tell this is a brand new channel so if you got anything

[2:51:17] out of this at all please like the video leave me a comment tell me what you thought tell me who you'd like to see on the show um I see every like I read every comment and I appreciate all of it especially in the beginning because as you know that kind of support goes a long way on these platforms so most importantly I have some awesome guests coming up in the future for interviews um so please subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of them but again thank you for your time appreciate the support and

[2:51:48] hope to see against soon
