Title: How I Became a CIA Whistleblower
Show: TEDx Talks
Date: 2018-06-05
URL: https://youtu.be/fX2YMB6dWJw
Duration: 11:00

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[00:13] So, I want to start by saying that I'd like to talk to you about ethics and intelligence operations or even the the lack of ethics and intelligence operations. I was very fortunate to have spent 15 years at the CIA and the second half of my career was in counter-terrorism operations. Very tough, but fun. The most fun I ever had in my life. Went to 65 countries, really felt like I was making an impact for the for the United States. Uh September 11th

[00:44] changed all that. It became deadly serious on September 11th and was frankly a lot less fun. But like everybody else in the building on September 11th, I volunteered repeatedly to go to Afghanistan to fight or do whatever was required of me. And finally I was sent to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counter-terrorism operations there. About 6 weeks after I arrived, we got word from CIA headquarters that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan and

[01:15] we had to catch him. We thought at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda. He was a very big fish. Well, Pakistan is the size of Texas and it has almost 200 million people in it. So, to say he's somewhere in Pakistan, go catch him, it's total non-starter. I came up with a couple of really bad ideas. They resulted in nothing. It was a waste of time. And finally I told CIA headquarters I needed a targeting analyst. A targeting analyst is someone who pours through vast amounts of data

[01:46] and is able to pinpoint the location of a target. And so a targeting analyst came, worked for another 2 weeks, and finally told me that he just simply could not pinpoint Abu Zubaydah's location to fewer than 14 sites. We had never hit more than two sites in one night before. And so I asked headquarters to send a large team. We ended up flying in three dozen people, half CIA, half FBI. We paired them with Pakistani military officers.

[02:18] And on the night of March 22nd, 2002, we broke down the doors of 14 safe houses simultaneously. I'm not allowed to say how many people we caught that night, but I can tell you it was many dozens of Al-Qaeda fighters. He was shot three times while trying to escape. A Pakistani policeman shot him in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach. And we rushed him to a hospital in Faisalabad to try to save him. But word had gotten around the Al-Qaeda community that we had gotten him. And so

[02:48] Al-Qaeda fighters began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. I said to my Pakistani colleague, "If they realize that we're unarmed, we're dead. Can you get a helicopter in here?" 20 minutes later a helicopter landed. We loaded him onto the helicopter and we flew to a Pakistani military base. He was unconscious for another 24 hours. But my instructions that came directly from the director of the CIA, George Tenet, were 24/7 CIA eyes on. I was not to leave his

[03:20] bedside. And so I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed because I was afraid frankly that that was going to fall asleep and he was going to escape. Uh he was really in no condition to escape. He was tied like this and he had an oxygen mask on. And finally he woke up after 24 hours and he motioned for me to come over to his bedside. And I moved his oxygen mask and I said to him in Arabic, "What is your name? Shu ismak?" And he shook his head. And I repeated it, "Shu ismak?" And he said to me in English, "I will not speak to you in

[03:50] God's language." I said, "That's okay, Abu Zubaydah. We know who you are." He said, "Please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me." And I said, "Nobody's going to kill you. We've been looking for you for a long time." I said, "You're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide, but I'm going to give you a piece of advice. I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not as nice as I am. So, if there's one thing that you do,

[04:20] it's that you have to cooperate." And he said, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate." I said, "Suit yourself." Another 24 hours later a private jet flew in. Three FBI agents and I loaded him onto the plane. We strapped his gurney down on the luggage rack in the back. And I whispered to him, "Remember, you have to cooperate." And the plane took off. I never saw him again. 2 months

[04:51] later I was back at CIA headquarters. I was in the cafeteria getting lunch and a senior officer in the counter-terrorism center approached me and said, "Hey, I'm glad I ran into you. Uh do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" I had never heard that that term before. And so I asked him what he meant. And he explained what these 10 different techniques were. And I said, "Man, that sounds like a torture program. Are you crazy?" And he said, "Well, it's not torture because we had it approved by the White House." I said, "I I'm not interested.

[05:24] What's the matter with you people?" I said, "It's illegal. It's immoral. It's unethical. Count me out." I'm sorry to tell you that of the 14 people that they approached, that I was the only one who said no. Uh and that's a very sad thing when you think about it. So, that was in May of 2002. On the 1st of August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was tortured. Uh waterboarding was supposed to be the ultimate punishment as part of this torture program. In fact, the CIA started by waterboarding him. And he

[05:56] water he was waterboarded 83 times and never gave any actionable intelligence that saved American lives. The waterboarding was a complete failure. Well, I left the CIA 2 years later and I kept my mouth shut. I kept it shut until December of 2007. And finally I decided because President Bush kept saying over and over again, "There is no torture. There is no torture. There is no torture." I knew that was a lie. And so I went on ABC News and I said three things. I said, "The CIA is

[06:26] torturing its prisoners." I said that torture is official US government policy. It is not the result of a rogue as the president had been saying. And finally I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the president himself. As you can imagine, the FBI began investigating me like 5 seconds later. They investigated me for a year from December of 2007 until December of 2008 and in December of 2008 they determined that I had not committed a crime.

[06:58] What I didn't know was that 3 weeks later when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the CIA asked him to secretly reopen the case against me. And so for the next 3 years I had no idea that my emails were being intercepted, my phone calls were being intercepted, and that there were three different FBI surveillance teams following me all the time. And in January of 2012, I was finally charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage. Now, espionage is a death penalty case.

[07:30] And I hadn't committed espionage. You know, talking to ABC News and the New York Times is not espionage especially when you're exposing a crime. But I was charged with these crimes and was facing 45 years in prison. To make a long story short, it becomes an economic decision. I had five kids at home. I had a $1.1 million legal bill. And the government came back and said, "Take 30 months and the whole thing goes away." Like I said, it's an economic decision. So, I took the 30 months and I went to

[08:01] prison. By the time I got home, the Senate torture report had been released and it proved that everything I said was true. And then in the summer of 2015 when Congress passed the McCain-Feinstein Amendment, which formally and permanently banned torture, Senator John McCain said that my revelations were the inspiration for that law. So, 23 months in prison, it was worth it because torture is finally illegal in this country. Now,

[08:31] that's a uh Thank you. I I never thought I remember because we already had the the Federal Torture Act of 1946 and we had the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the Senate and has the force of law. Uh and I I asked rhetorically, "Why in 1946 did we execute Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war?" It was a death penalty offense to

[09:03] waterboard someone in 1946. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that that photo was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in a military prison. So, why was torture illegal in 1946 and illegal in 1968, but somehow magically

[09:33] legal in 2002? The law never changed. We changed. So, what can we do to make sure that this doesn't happen again? I can stand here and tell you we need to write and blog and speak and protest and blah blah blah. None of that works. It makes us feel better, but it doesn't work. What we have to do is two things. We have to ride our elected officials to make sure that they do what we tell them to do. And if they don't, we vote them out of office. And we have to be staunch about it.

[10:05] The second thing The second thing is I'm a realist. I know that the CIA is not going away. It's not going to be broken up and scattered to the wind like John Kennedy wanted to do. It's here to stay. So, what happens? Young people like you join the CIA. Change it from the inside. Once you've been in there 10 years, you're going to be surprised because you're going to be in a position of authority and you can change it and then it'll stay changed. So, thanks for listening to me.

[10:38] Very best of luck. Thank you.
