Title: “Your job is to break the law”John Kiriakou CIA Whistleblower
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-04-27
URL: https://youtu.be/kyFexPbZlzk
Duration: 10:00

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[00:00] But the issue here is that there are no rules. Remember, your job while overseas is to break the law. Your job is to convince people to commit espionage for you. Your job is to get people to give you classified information or protected information. It's not to to it's not to disrupt human trafficking. But you have to go into this situation with your own set of moral values. You have to know what the right thing to do is because

[00:30] headquarters isn't going to tell you. They're not going to say, "Oh, remember uh employee rule number 305 says you can't provide child prostitutes." You have to know in your heart what's right and what's wrong. But that's up to you. That's up to the individual. So, if you've got somebody that just doesn't have a real good moral compass, they just don't find true north on their compass and they want that information, they're going to do whatever they need to do to get it. That's exactly right. And sometimes

[01:02] there are there are employees who can't turn it off. You know, every 10 years or so, you'll see in the Washington Post or the New York Times that a CIA employee almost always an operations officer has been arrested for sexual assault or for embezzlement or something like that because they just don't have a moral compass. I remember one of my uh station chiefs telling me early on in my career, "Never lie to security, finance, or medical. They're the three offices that could ruin your life."

[01:33] Well, it's actually more than that. Never lie to yourself. Never lie to your station chief, right? You've got to bounce ideas off of somebody to give you a second opinion. Because if somehow you wake up one morning and you think it's all right to put a roofy in in a woman's drink at a cocktail party and assault her afterwards, which has happened, then you need somebody to to check your thought process. You kind of have the

[02:06] same process. Whether you're recruiting somebody for the agency or you're recruiting somebody that's an enemy asset, you kind of follow the same procedure, right? Yes. You spot them, you assess them, you assess their vulnerabilities, you develop a relationship, and then you ultimately recruit them. It's the same procedure whether you're doing it for the agency or you're recruiting some terrorist that you want to give you secrets. That's exactly right.

[02:36] That's exactly right. When you say assess their vulnerabilities, what are you looking for? Vulnerabilities are probably the most important. And they're not necessarily as awful as they might seem. A vulnerability may be that a person, you know, is a drunk or is a drug addict or or hates his boss and is is angry for being uh passed over for promotion. But more commonly, a vulnerability is this guy really loves his children and he doesn't make very

[03:07] much money. And at the CIA, we can get your child enrolled in any university in America, quite literally any university in America, and the CIA will pay for it. So if you want your child to go to Harvard or Stanford or one guy asked Strayer College, we'll do it. Um, another vulnerability is uh somebody who just really loves the United States.

[03:37] I recruited a an agent one time who would not take a single dollar from me and didn't want any favors like a college education for his children or grandchildren. He just loved the United States and he enjoyed the excitement, the clandestinity of uh of meeting um and then you know sometimes you'll get somebody whose spouse has cancer or some dread disease and by God you can get them into the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic and and they'll give

[04:09] you anything that you want so long as you can you can provide medical care. So that's what you're assessing in that in that development. uh stage or the assessment and development stage. What can I give this person that is going to make him want to give me what I want? And how do you get them into the university? How do you get them into say Harvard or University of Texas or wherever? How does the CIA do that? The CIA has agreements with

[04:41] uh just well every university almost every university in America uh with every you know Fortune 1000 or Fortune 1500 uh company in America and you know university administrators and corporate leaders they're they're patriots as well and they want to do whatever they can to be helpful. I I'll give you another example. I I recruited a guy who was absolutely crazy for the Chicago Bulls and I got him a basketball autographed

[05:13] by Michael Jordan. I just bought it at at the, you know, the NBA store online and had it shipped out to me. And I told him, "Listen, you know, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows Michael Jordan. And we told Michael Jordan all about you." and he autographed this basketball and I put it in this acrylic box. He couldn't give me the information I wanted fast enough and he didn't take any money for it. It was just because I was so thoughtful, he said that I gave

[05:45] him this basketball because I knew how much he loved the Chicago Bulls. So, you find what their currency is, what they're interested in, and then you find a way to get it to them. That's exactly right. And money is not a particular barrier when you're going after somebody that the agency values. No, no. I I'm smiling because we used to have this saying that intelligence is a cash business and cash is not a problem. uh you know during during the

[06:16] Afghanistan war in the very early days of the Afghanistan war we were literally throwing money out of the side of helicopters and it led to this joke at the agency that you can't buy an Afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one and that's what the agency did. So, if they get a million dollars to rent a warlord and it's cash, how do you know they didn't rent them for 750 and keep 250? That is a great question. And I

[06:48] will tell you, over the course of my entire career, I never saw or heard of anybody taking a single dollar. Again, we're doing this out of a sense of patriotism and duty. Now, when you're meeting with a with a source and you give him his monthly pay, which of course is always in cash, he signs a receipt and the receipt, it's perfectly fine if he signs Mickey Mouse. He never signs his real name. You tell him just pick a name, stick with that name, and

[07:19] uh you know, that's what he signs every month. Uh but you're going to be polygraphed on this, too. And they're going to ask you, have you ever misappropriated uh funds? I think the question is, have you ever misappropriated more than $20? That's what they asked me on the polygraph. And by God, you have to be able to say no. And you have to be able to say it with a clear conscience. So, they do check. Oh, yeah. In fact, Dr. Phil, I remember uh when we had a colleague of mine and I were setting out to um to drive to

[07:49] Fiselabad, Pakistan. This was about two weeks before we captured Abu Zubeda. And we had um $2 million in cash in the van with us in two duffel bags. And my colleague said, "You know, I could never understand why people would cheat on their on their accounting paperwork for for 20 bucks or 30 bucks. What would possess you to cheat the the CIA out of 20 bucks? If you're going to steal, steal millions." And we looked at each other and laughed. And I said, "Yeah, I

[08:21] I wouldn't even steal the millions." and he said, "No, neither would I." Yeah. It' be a little hard to pass a polygraph on that, right? That's right. But it's not unfathomable for a highlevel source. I know in Zero Dark 30 they have a scene in there and they're trying to get a source to come up with a phone number and he wants a Lamborghini. So, they just get him a Lamborghini in the middle of the night. That's not far-fetched. No. No. That's actually easy. You just

[08:51] take a big sack of money over to the Lamborghini dealership by the airport and next thing you know, you've got a Lamborghini. Yes. He's happy and you got the phone number you want or the information you want and moving on. Exactly. Right. All it's all in the name of the of the successful operation. All of it. Yeah. I remember just after 911, uh I I went up to Ambassador Black and I said, "Kofheer, I wanted to talk to you if you have a minute. I have an idea for an operation." And before I could get the words out of my mouth, he put his

[09:21] hands up and he said, "Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all." And that that continued for years after the 9/11 attacks. Really? And where did that money come from? Congress couldn't appropriate it fast enough. Um, we were we were receiving multibillion dollar supplemental appropriations. So we had our our fixed budget that that the oversight committees had or the

[09:51] appropriations committee had appropriated and the oversight committees had authorized and then literally the day after 9/11 we got something like 160% supplemental uh appropriation and then got another one again at the end of the year. We really couldn't spend it all.
