Title: “I exposed the CIA and went to prison” John Kiriakou
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-04-27
URL: https://youtu.be/QB6eyGtAD1c
Duration: 10:00

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[00:00] You have been a busy guy in your profession. A couple of quotes that I want to attribute to you and you can own them or not. I want to be sure I'm right. One is you said I exposed the CIA and went to prison for it. That something you said. Uh it is. You said there are some things we should not do even in the name of national security. Is that something you said? Indeed it is. All right. This is something that

[00:32] you took very seriously in your life. Why did you go into the CIA? Were you recruited? I was recruited in graduate school, but to tell you the truth, I was only considering uh jobs in public service. I'm the grandson of four uh uh grandparents who immigrated to this country from Greece. And in our household while I was growing up, uh it was instilled in all of us really that that we owed this country such a great

[01:05] debt of thanks for giving us a new life in this wonderful country that we needed to pay that debt back. And so my parents were elementary school teachers in the public school system and they instilled in us the notion that we should go into public service as well. So, you went into public service, but you didn't sit around in the sandbox as a kid envisioning yourself being a CIA agent. Actually, I did uh when I was nine, I

[01:37] told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. And they bought me uh walkie-talkies for for Christmas that year. I remember. Yeah. And then when I was 16, I said specifically, I I remember telling my father that not only did I want to be a spy, but I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. And so I um I went to George Washington University and got a an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies. Uh, I stayed at GW for a master's degree in legislative

[02:08] affairs, but with a concentration in foreign policy analysis, thinking if I can't get into the CIA, I'll go to Capitol Hill or I'll go to the foreign service. And then, as it turned out, my graduate school advisor uh, who gave me an A on a paper, it was a psychology exam, asked me to, he wrote in the in the margin of the paper, please see me after class. So I went to see him and he said, 'Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA

[02:38] officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer? And I jumped at the chance and the next thing I knew, I had my right hand in the air and I was swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. Wow. So he was he was kind of taking a chance because he was undercover. So, he was actually Let's talk about that for a minute because I have an issue with some of what's going on in

[03:11] the elite universities of the United States right now. And I'm wondering if we're sending our kids to get educated or indoctrinated. What do you say about that? Right. that is going to be a fight that we are going to have to fight from here on out. I will say that the way that I was uh uh recruited into the CIA is no longer legal. With passage in 1993 of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act,

[03:41] you can't do this old boy network. But what they do now is they just do it out in public. The CIA created this this uh program called the Scholar and Residence Program. So if you've done your 25 or 30 years, you're planning to retire, they'll send you back to your alma mater for 2 or 3 years, you can teach some meaningless class like a friend of mine went back to Indiana University and taught uh espionage in Soviet literature and uh and students will just go up to him

[04:13] after class and say, "Hey, I'd love to get into the CIA." And he makes a recommendation. So rather than do it to do it behind closed doors like they did it with me, they just do it out in the open now. Okay. So we actually do have professors in universities now that aren't necessarily who they seem to be. Correct. They are actually operatives, CIA operatives or maybe from other agencies

[04:44] that are there to indoctrinate, to recruit. What What are they there for? Why are they in those roles? Oh, it's a combination of the two. They're always looking for people with hard foreign languages or people who have an aptitude for difficult foreign languages. They're looking for people who are patriotic on their face, patriotic, and if they think that you can fit into that culture, and it's it's deeper than just, you know, fitting into the culture. I I've said uh

[05:16] in many podcasts that a CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Because, of course, sociopaths have no conscience. They blow right through a polygraph exam, but they're impossible to control. People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience. They do react to the polygraph, but at the same time, they're happy to operate in these moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. I I

[05:47] remember when I was when I was going through the interview process, um there were four or five of us there and uh and the instructor said, "Let's say you're a CIA officer and you get a cable from headquarters telling you to uh recruit the Indonesian economic secretary because you need some Indonesian economic information." And you cultivate this relationship for a year. you become friends, your wives become friends, you vacation together, but you you come to

[06:19] realize that he's not recruitable. What do you do? And a guy put his hand up in the air and said, "Well, you double down. You do it another 6 months." A woman raised her hand and said, "Uh, maybe you can work it through the wives." And I'm looking around looking at these people. I put my hand up and I said, "You break into the embassy and you steal it." And the instructor said, "That's exactly what you do." Well, I came to learn that's a sociopathic tendency. Do you have sociopathic tendencies? Probably. Uh, I was

[06:49] perfectly happy to break into people's homes or offices overseas and plant bugs or plant cameras. I was perfectly happy to convince people that I was their best friend to the point where they were wi willing to commit espionage for me or in some cases treason because I believed we were the good guys and I was doing this uh for the safety and security of of Americans and American installations. And so I never gave it a second thought

[07:22] beyond the fact that we were the good guys. So you say the CIA hires people with sociopathic tendencies and you say sociopaths have concise answers and pass polygraph tests. Sociopaths are impossible to control. They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience. And they only hire sociopathic narcissists. The CI operatives look for narcissistic individuals because they're so arrogant.

[07:53] They conclude, "Of course, the CIA would want to recruit me because I'm so important that they cannot do their jobs without me." Oh my goodness. You see that every single day of your career. You are surrounded by the smartest, the most accomplished, uh the the best educated, at least all in their own minds people. Uh it it becomes comical after a while. Yeah. You actually don't see that so much in

[08:24] analysis. It's in operations where everybody wants to be James Bond. And in some cases, they actually achieve that. You know, there there is always a handful of senior officers that all the rest of us wanted to be like, people who had many recruitments, people who had uh multiple chief of station assignments. That's that's what everybody was aspiring to. And and you get it by what they used to call, not jokingly, shameless self-promotion. Yeah. Now,

[08:54] were you that way? Is that why they picked you? Was it languages? Why did they pick you? Were you a sociopathic narcissist? In retrospect, I I probably had those sociopathic tendencies, but they picked me. I I actually spent the first half of my career in analysis. They picked me because because I had uh Arabic language um and because I I was very serious about academia. I was very serious about analysis and study and I I was fascinated by Arab culture and Arab

[09:26] history. I read Arab poetry. I studied Islam uh under one of the most important uh Islamic scholars in the western world. I I was just fascinated with that culture and I wanted to live there and really get to understand people and so I went to the directorate of intelligence, the analytic uh branch and succeeded not necessarily because I was so great but because I was really lucky. Just as I got to a point where I felt like I knew

[09:57] what I was doing, Iraq invaded Kuwait on August the 2nd, 1990. I was the only Iraq leadership analyst. And I remember walking in that morning and saying uh to my boss, "Big day ahead of us today." And he said, "Don't take your jacket off. We're going to the Oval Office." I was 25 years old. And I walk in and it's the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, the CIA director, my boss, and me. And we all sit down. The president looks around and

[10:28] he says, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turned and looked at me. And I remember thinking to myself, my friends from high school would never believe it in a million years if I told them what I was doing right now. So I I got lucky there.
