Title: Jailing the Messenger The CIA's Torture Whistleblower
Show: Primary Sources
Date: 2021-09-08
URL: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798604/episodes/9155620-jailing-the-messenger-the-cia-s-torture-whistleblower-feat-john-kiriakou.mp3
Duration: 73:00

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[00:00] The Central Intelligence Agency and its history of covert operations is dark. It includes toppling democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran, and Chile, working with death squads and dictators, mining the harbors of Nicaragua, and funding groups like the Contras, who deliberately attacked civilian targets like adult literacy centers and health care clinics in order to overthrow the Sandinista government. One of the most controversial chapters in this CIA's history remains its post-911 program of renditions and tortures.

[00:33] Individuals were abducted and subjected to shocking torture, sometimes not even people with any nexus to terrorism. Well, urgently, CIA assets and U.S. client states have engaged in torture in the past, with this program, the CIA, and its contractors carried out the torture itself. And these were not rogue agents acting. These techniques were approved by the president himself. It was systematic. When the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee tried to exercise its oversight powers and investigate the torture,

[01:05] the CIA spied on their staffers. Much of that report remains classified by the executive branch over the objection of U.S. senators. Obama refused to prosecute CIA war criminals, saying we had to look forward, not backwards. But his administration did oversee the prosecution with one individual, with a connection to the Bush-era torture program. That person was whistleblower John Carriacou, who went on ABC News to confirm to the nation that the U.S. had engaged in waterboarding. Under the Bush administration, when this happened,

[01:37] the FBI investigated, but ultimately did not prosecute Carriacou. But Obama's policy of looking forwards, not backwards, applied only to torturers. It did not apply to whistleblowers, and his administration brought indictments against John Carriacou, including three counts under the Espionage Act. To date, John remains the only person to have gone to prison in connection with the illegal torture program, and he is our guest today on Primary Sources. I am Chip Gibbons, Policy Director of Defending Rights in Descent,

[02:09] an organization which defends your right to know and your freedom to act. Defending Rights in Descent, as part of that mission, produces this podcast, which explores the problems faced by whistleblowers and other truth-tellers who expose civil liberties and human rights abuses committed under the guise of U.S. national security. In a minute, I'm going to bring you John Carriacou. But first, I want to encourage you to subscribe to the Primary Sources podcast, wherever you're listening to it now, or visit us on the web at primarysourcespodcast.org. This way, you'll never miss an episode.

[03:11] Today, we are talking to a CIA whistleblower, John Carriacou. John is a former CIA analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant. He is the author of the book The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life and the CIA's Warrant Era. He was the first person to publicly confirm

[03:42] that the CIA was engaged in waterboarding. To this day, he remains the only person to go to prison in connection with the CIA torture program. To be clear, John was never trained in, authorized, or engaged in waterboarding. He was imprisoned for blowing the whistle. John, thank you so much for joining us on Primary Sources. Happy to be here, Chip. Thanks for having me. I want to start at the beginning. How did you come to work at the CIA? I was in graduate school at George Washington University, working on a master's degree in

[04:14] legislative affairs. I thought maybe I would make my career on Capitol Hill. I was taking a class called the Psychology of Leadership, in which we were studying how foreign leaders made decisions. We were tasked by the professor, who was an eminent psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Gerald Post. He had a PhD in political science, a PhD in psychology, and an MD. He tasked us with shadowing our bosses for a week and then

[04:45] writing a psychological profile on them. I was working at a labor union at the time, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. My boss was one of these old-school, tough guy union organizers. He was rough, he was mean, and I was a little bit afraid of him. Well, halfway through the week, we got into an argument and I called him a racist, which he was. And he balled up his fists and said a stance, and I put up my hands to defend myself,

[05:17] and he says to me, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, what? I said, you're crazy, and I quit. And I walked out. So I wrote this in the paper, and I used other examples, and I said that I thought he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And so a week later, I got the paper back from Dr. Post, and he gave me an A, and he wrote in the margin, please see me after class. So I went after class to his office, and I said, you wanted to see me. And he said, look, I'm not really a professor

[05:50] here. I am the CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would be a good CIA officer. Are you interested? And I really didn't have anything else going on. Always wanted to see the world. I was going to get married in like six weeks and had no job. So next thing I knew, I was in the CIA. And what's it like when you first start working there? Wow. It was, you know, I would park my car out in the North 40 and I would walk all the way around the compound

[06:24] so I could come in the main entrance and walk across the seal and see the Wall of Honor and, you know, the flags and the portraits of the directors. It was so exciting. I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. And that lasted for many years where I literally could not wait to get to work in the morning. I would go in on Saturdays just because it was so much fun. You know, I couldn't wait to see what was going on in the world that wasn't being covered in the newspapers. And what year is this? I joined January 1990.

[06:56] And you've mentioned before some of your public talks that early on, I believe it was your boss or some other mentor gives you advice about not doing anything you wouldn't want to read on the front page of the Washington Post. Is that right? Yeah, that was my very first week on the job. And it really did stick with me. And another thing that stuck with me from that week was the oath. You know, we all stood up and we put our right hands in the air and we swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. And I took that oath very seriously. So we talked a bit about your initial reactions

[07:29] to the say, what's your life like at the CIA before 9-11? 4-9-11 was a lot of fun. Not just because the work was interesting to me. I had a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. And of course, I was working on the Middle East. But, you know, during the Clinton administration, President Clinton was very serious about human rights. And he ordered something called a cull, where the CIA was mandated with going through its files and firing literally every recruited asset, every source who had a human rights problem in his or her

[08:03] background. During the Reagan and HW Bush administrations, the CIA was recruiting people who had murdered nuns in Central America or who had, you know, been on death squads or tortured indigenous people. And we got rid of all of those people. And in the beginning, you know, I wasn't sure if I should take that seriously. And then I actually watched it unfold. And I thought, wow, they're really serious about this. That was laudable. And that policy

[08:34] remained until 9-11. And the other thing Clinton does that I will give him credit for, loathe to give Bill Clinton credit, but I will do so. In this case, he by executive order orders such a classification of a lot of information about U.S. activities in Central and South America, I believe, Chile, Argentina. I don't recall Guatemala as one of them or not. But thanks to these executive orders, they declassify huge swaths of some of the worst U.S. policies in Latin America. How do people in the agency react to that? I'm curious.

[09:08] You know, it's sort of an administrative thing that happens every once in a while. So people don't really pay any attention. And the ones that do just do as they're told. That information can now be found at the National Security Archives at George Washington University and also online at the Clinton Presidential Library. So now it's available for scholars, any scholars who want to study what used to be classified. But you raise a very important point here, Chip. And that's the over declassification. I'm sorry, it's the over classification of information.

[09:42] We have billions and billions of pages of classified documents that ought not be classified. And while we have a mandatory declassification law in the United States after 30 years, it's not automatic. A human being has to actually go through it to make sure that the operations are not still ongoing and that the sources are dead. Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff they classify is outrageous. I'm working on a book right now on the FBI. So I'm getting a bunch of files and they sent me something and in response to

[10:16] my FOIA request, it was declassified. You could see the date like June 17th, 2021, declassified. And it had previously been classified under the Foreign Counterintelligence Authority. So very, very serious, right? Not a single redaction. I showed this to someone that used to work in intelligence. They were surprised they released without a single redaction. A group of anti-war protesters went to a federal building and protested the Gulf War. And this was classified for 20, 30 years. It is entirety as foreign counterintelligence because some of the protesters,

[10:49] this is in the 90s, not in the Hoover era, may have been members of the Communist Party. Thus it counted as Soviet active measures in the United States. And this is 90s, right? We know that sort of thing went on in the 50s and the 40s and the 60s. But it's just like, this is a real great use of classification authorities. Well, you know, when I joined the CIA, I also had to put my right hand in the air and swear that I had never been a member of the Communist Party or of any organization associated with the Communist Party. And I laughed and I said, seriously? And the guy's like, yeah, it's just never been updated.

[11:21] You're also in your sort of pre-911 time, you're in Greece for a while. I was. I was in Greece from 1998 to 2000. I got bored after seven years in analysis. And I made a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations. And because I was literally the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic, I was sent to Greece to work on counterterrorism issues from 1998 to 2000, which became kind of hairy for me. Yeah. Many people may not think of Greece as a particular hotspot, but they have killed CIA

[11:55] officers in Greece. Yeah. Before 2002, there was a group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November, a stridently anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Turkey. And it was violently Stalinist in its ideology. It was finally broken in March of 2002, but it started off by murdering the CIA station chief in Athens in December 1975 and killed two U.S. defense attachés,

[12:28] a U.S. Air Force technical sergeant, the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the British defense attaché. I mean, they ended up killing 28 people over the years, and not only had they not been caught, none of them had ever even been identified. And so that was my job to work against them. Did you ever fear for your life when you were in Greece? Yeah, I did. We spent more money on security in Athens than we spent in Beirut, and you know how Beirut was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

[13:00] I was not there, but I've heard. So I was very, very careful with my personal safety. And then near the end of my tour, a British military officer, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders, moved in caddy corner from me, and we became friendly. And he was jokingly mocking me at a dinner party one night. He was making fun of my car. I had a fully armored BMW 540, and he said, you Americans, you're so paranoid about security. He said, this is a NATO country. It's an EU country.

[13:36] What are you so afraid of? And everybody chuckled. And I said, you Brits live in a dream world, if you think because they have palm trees in pretty beaches, they're not going to kill you if they have an opportunity. If they can get to you, they're going to kill you. And everybody laughed. And two weeks later, they killed him. Wow. And they killed him right in the street on the way to the British Embassy. Well, I was behind him by about a quarter of a mile. When I inched my way up to his car, I recognized his car. There was blood everywhere. And after he had been shot,

[14:08] they shot him with an anti-tank round. They blew his right hand off and then shot him three times in the chest and the stomach with a 45. A cab driver pulled him out and put him in his cab and rushed him to a hospital. But he died just a few minutes after he got there. As if that wasn't bad enough, what 17 November used to do is they used to throw a manifesto at the site of their hits. And they threw a manifesto. And they said, ida meto negalo catascopos. We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and he was wearing

[14:43] a weapon. And my boss called me and he said, this manifesto, this is about you. And I said, nonsense. I said, I've been so careful with my security. I would leave my house a different time every day. I would take a different route to work every day, but they were looking to kill me that day. And it said in the manifesto, we decided to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. And so they killed Steve Saunders instead. So two hours later, man, I was at the airport and security was picking up my

[15:16] family at the house and brought them to the airport. And we got the first Delta flight back to New York. Where are you on September 11, 2001? I had an appointment that morning with Condi Rice. I was supposed to go to the White House with Cofer Black, who was the head of the CIS Counterterrorism Center. It's very quaint now, but the government printing office was going to publish a volume of cables from 1947 to 1969. And several of those cables mentioned sources

[15:50] of ours who were still alive. And so we wanted to ask Condi to hold off on printing the cables. So I got a call that my car was ready to take us to the White House. I walked over to Cofer's office to tell him that we were ready. And his secretary had a TV on her desk and it was on. And the World Trade Center was burning. I said, what happened to the World Trade Center? And she said a plane flew into it. And I said, because I was clueless, I said, that happened once before. In 1930, a plane flew into the Empire State Building,

[16:23] but it was really foggy and rainy that day. And it's so clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center? And as soon as I said it, the second plane hit the second tower. And then she turns to me. She was sitting. She turns to me and she says, did you see that or did I imagine it? And I ran back to my office and I said, guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under attack. So everybody went into the big bullpen where Cofer's office was. There were probably 150

[16:54] cubicles and desks in there. And it was just silence. We had TVs on every network. And then finally someone shouted, well, somebody please lead. And it was like snapped Cofer out of out of his shock at you, go to security, you go to the director's office, you go here, go there. And we all just stood there and watched it. And then the Pentagon was hit. And then there were these rumors that a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. And then finally a security officer came in and shouted, everybody evacuate right now.

[17:28] And nobody moved. 20 minutes later, he comes back and he says, if you don't evacuate, you'll be arrested. So we're like, okay, everybody evacuates. It took me two hours to get out of the CIA parking lot, if you can imagine. I got about halfway home. I lived in Arlington, Virginia in courthouse, it's called at the time. And I couldn't get anywhere near my apartment because they closed off all the roads. People were streaming out of Washington. So I just abandoned my car on the George Washington Parkway and I walked the rest of

[18:02] the way. My then girlfriend, she became my wife, met up with me at my place. We walked around looking for someplace to give blood and couldn't find any place because the lines were so long. And finally I said, this is ridiculous. We need to get back to work. So we walked back to my car. We drove back to headquarters. She was also a CIA officer. And then I didn't leave for the next four days. I just slept under my desk and worked pretty much 24 hours a day. And what becomes your job at the CIA after 9-11?

[18:32] In the immediate aftermath, hours, days, even weeks, it was all name traces. Every officer, every CIA officer around the world was sending in name trace requests. Who is Muhammad Abdullah? Who is Rashid Muhammad? Because people were ratting each other out. People were volunteering to help. So we were investigating everybody. And then we started sending teams over to Afghanistan. And I went to the deputy director of counterterrorism and I said,

[19:04] look, my Arabic is outstanding. You've got to send me. And I volunteered three times. And three times they blew me off. Well, I ran into an old buddy of mine. He was a contractor. He's the second most wounded soldier in American history, Billy Wah. He has 17 purple hearts. He just died two years ago. Yeah. Fought in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, all the way to Panama. So I ran into Billy in the hall. And I said, hey, man, where have you been?

[19:38] And he kind of looks around and he says, Afghanistan. I said, really? What are you doing in Afghanistan? This is October of 2001. And he says, I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing? And I said, that's why they haven't sent me. They didn't need a translator. They weren't interrogating anybody. They were just killing them. And so finally I went into the deputy director's office with this totally idle threat. And I said, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am going straight to Exxon with my Arabic.

[20:09] And I am never looking back. And he said, all right, all right, take it easy. Can you go to Pakistan? I said, yes, when tomorrow? I said, yes. What do you want me to do? He said, I want you to be chief of counterterrorism operations. I said, done. I'm going to go home right now and pack. And so I did. I called my girlfriend. I said, hey, I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow. I don't know when I'm going to come back. She said, okay, I'll meet you at your apartment. I'll help you pack. And she did. She took me to the airport and I went to Pakistan. And this brings us to Abu Zubedah. Who did the CIA think he was? I believe some of

[20:43] who they initially thought he was has been called into question. Oh, it's been proven incorrect. Yes, correct. We explained to listeners who might not have been alive 20 years ago when he was captured. You know, and it's funny. In my mind, this was all yesterday. It's hard to. I have to remind myself that 20 years have passed, which is crazy to me. Abu Zubedah, we thought at the time was the number three in al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden and Ayman as a Wahdi. Abu Zubedah was not the number three in al-Qaeda.

[21:15] He was actually never a member of al-Qaeda. He was a very bad guy, a very bad and dangerous man. He was the one who had founded, established al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan. He founded the House of Martyrs al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan. And he was a logistics guy. So if you wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight, you talked to Abu Zubedah. If you were tired of the fight and you wanted to go home, Abu Zubedah could get you a fake passport, tickets, smuggle you, whatever. You needed money.

[21:49] You saw Abu Zubedah. You needed some kind of assistance for your family. You saw Abu Zubedah. So his name kept coming up. And even Time Magazine had identified him as the number three in al-Qaeda. So he was a major target for us. I had been in Pakistan two weeks. So I was just getting used to my routine. And the routine was 18 hour workdays. You go in when it's dark. You leave when it's dark. You just look for al-Qaeda fighters all day long, come up with a plan. This was hard work. And I had a staff of nine retired senior

[22:23] intelligence service officers. One was the former associate deputy director of the CIA. They were all patriots. They all volunteered to come back and they were assigned to Pakistan. But because they had green contractor badges and not blue employee badges, they couldn't have a leadership position. So I was the boss, even though all of them had, I figured one time they had like 260 years of experience combined and had all been in the senior intelligence service. So I got a call early one Friday. The weekend in Pakistan

[22:57] is Friday and Saturday. And I didn't get the call on a Friday. I got the call on a Saturday because Saturday was the only day I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping in. You had to go to work seven days a week anyway. So at least I'd sleep till eight on Saturdays. Well, I get this call at like six o'clock Saturday morning, come to the office immediately. So I get showered, get dressed, rushed to the office. Everybody's there. The station chief, the deputy, the FBI legal attache, his deputy, the chief of operations and me, six of us were meeting in the chief's

[23:28] office. And he said, we got a cable overnight from our friends at the fort in Maryland. And they say that Abu Zubaydah is somewhere in Pakistan. And our orders are to take him alive. And everybody looks at me. And I said, what do you mean somewhere in Pakistan? I said, Pakistan's the size of Texas. It got 120 million people here. What do you mean? Go catch him. Look seriously. And he said, you got to come up with a plan. So this is a very long story. And I'm going to make it very, very short. I came up with several different plans, all of which were failures.

[24:03] And so finally I said, I need a targeting analyst. The targeting analyst is unlike the kind of analyst I was. The kind of analyst I was, you think the big thoughts, you write these papers, you send them to the White House, nobody ever reads them. And then you tell your friends how important you are. Targeting analysts pour through sometimes millions of pieces of data to try to locate somebody somewhere in the world. Maybe there's an email, maybe there's a telephone intercept, maybe there's like two seconds of a conversation that NSA pulled out of the air somehow,

[24:37] and it enables you to pinpoint a location with the result being that you either capture or kill that person. So our orders were to capture him. So I called this targeting analyst, who was a friend of mine, and I told him, I need for you to come to Pakistan like right now. He got there maybe 24 hours later. I picked him up at four o'clock in the morning. We went to the office at seven and I told him what we needed. We've got to find Abu Zubeda and we have to take him alive. So he started going through the data.

[25:09] It took him about two weeks. And finally he said to me, I cannot pinpoint this to any fewer than 14 possible locations. I said 14. We had never done more than two raids before in a single night where you break down the door at two in the morning and you grab everybody. We're going to have to hit 14 places simultaneously. So I sent a cable to headquarters and I said, I need a 737. I need 36 guys, half CIA, half FBI, because 9-11 was

[25:41] still an open criminal investigation. So the FBI technically had the lead when it came to the investigation part. We had the lead when it came to the kicking down the door and grabbing people part. I needed pallets of weapons and ammunition. I needed night vision goggles and secure communications and battering rams and walkie-talkies and you name it. They loaded it all on to an unmarked 737 and it arrived 36 hours later. So we bought two safe houses.

[26:12] All of our targets were in Faisalabad and Lahore. And on the night of March 22, 2002, we hit all 14 sites simultaneously and in one of them on the second floor. The first floor was full of Al Qaeda fighters. They knew that there were VIPs on the second floor, but they didn't know who it was because there was a door that was kept locked and the only person who went up there was the T-boy who delivered food and tea. And so we started breaking down the door with a battering ram, Abu Zubaydah, a Syrian bomber, and Abu Zubaydah's bodyguard all fled to the roof

[26:48] and they tried to jump to the roof of the next door building. The bomber was first, a Pakistani policeman who I had specifically told, don't shoot, shot. Shoot, of course. Yeah. And he killed the Syrian bomber with one shot, dead before he hit the ground. The photographs are grisly. Abu Zubaydah jumped second and was shot in the stomach, the groin and the thigh. And then the bodyguard jumped third and he was shot right through the femur, nearly lost his leg. So we rushed Abu Zubaydah to a local hospital,

[27:24] one of the worst places on earth that I've ever been. Word got around the Al Qaeda community that we had gotten them and they began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. Wow. So I said to the Pakistani major that I was with, if they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead. We can't make it out of here alive. Can you get a helicopter to land in the parking lot? He said, I think so. So 20 minutes later, a helicopter lands in the parking lot and I went into the operating room like this and I said, doc, wrap it up. We have to go. They sewed them closed as fast as they could.

[27:58] We loaded them on the helicopter and we flew to a Pakistani military base about 50 miles away. He was in a coma for the first 24 hours. But the analyst called me and he said he had spoken to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA. And George said his exact words were 24, 7 CIA eyes on, do not leave his bedside. Well, I had already been up for 24 hours, plus 24 hours that Abu Zubaydah was in the coma. And I was afraid I'd fall asleep and he would like wake up and run away or the doctor maybe

[28:29] was Al Qaeda and the doctor would break him out. So I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed, wrists and ankles. And then finally after 24 hours, he began to stir. And I was wearing a SpongeBob square pants t-shirt that my kids had bought me because it was the only clean shirt I had. And one of the FBI guys brought it over for me. And as soon as he opened his eyes, tied to the bed like that, he opened his eyes and he saw SpongeBob. His heart just went crazy and he coded. And so they had to come in and shock him. And they gave him some

[29:01] demoral and he was out again. Finally, he woke up again, I don't know, five, six hours later. And he like this, he motioned for me to come next to him. So I moved his oxygen mask and I said, what is your name? And he shook his head. So I said, again, and he said in English, I will not speak to you in God's language. And I said, that's okay, Abu Zubaydah, we know who you are. And he started crying. And he said, please, brother, kill me, take the pillow and kill me. And I said, we've been looking for you for a long time. Nobody's going to kill

[29:32] you. I said, you're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide. Later on, he was very, very worried, as you can imagine. Later on, he asked what was going to happen to him. And I said, I honestly don't know, but I'm going to give you some advice. I said, I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. And if there's one thing that you have to do, it's that you have to

[30:03] cooperate. And he said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate. And I said, suit yourself. So over the next, I was with him for 56 hours. I never left his bedside for 56 hours. He cried a lot. He said he would never know the touch of a woman. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. I said, look, you, you aren't the victim here. There were 50,000 people in those towers. What did you think we would do? Did you not think we would try to find you and kill you and kill Bin Laden?

[30:35] You're lucky to be alive right now. That's why I'm telling you, you have to cooperate. The rest of your life can be easy or it can be terrible. It's up to you. Finally, the CIA sent in a private jet and three FBI agents, and I carried them out on a gurney. He asked me to hold his hand. So I'm holding the gurney with one hand and holding his hand with my other. And we maneuvered him onto the plane. We put him on the luggage rack in the back of the plane and tied him down. And I leaned over and I said, remember, you have to cooperate.

[31:08] And he squeezed my hand. And I said, good luck. And then I never saw him again. So we later learned that Abu Zabadeh was waterboarded 83 times. When did you first learn the CIA was engaged in waterboarding and these sort of other torture techniques update? Yes. Euphemistically called enhanced interrogation. I knew that it was coming because when I got back to headquarters in May of 2002, I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I had a moral and ethical problem

[31:42] with them. I had a legal problem with them. Besides being immoral and unethical, to me, they were clearly illegal. We have very clear laws and our signatories to international treaties that ban this kind of behavior. So I declined. And I'm sorry to say that of the 14 people who were asked to go into training, I was the only one who said no. That was very disappointing to me. So I knew that it was coming. And then on August 1st, 2002, the CIA began to torture Abu Zabadeh. Now, there's a very important lie involved here.

[32:16] This is another very long story that I'm going to make very short. The CIA had two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They were the ones who came up with the torture program and sold it to CIA leadership as something that they had studied and they had invented and they had proven was successful and was workable. Especially it was learned helplessness, right? That was their cycle. Learned helplessness. And you know what? Chip, after 20 years, that's still a chilling term to me. I still get chills just when I hear it. I remember when I was in law school, we read, this is an aside Peter Singer's book on animal

[32:51] rights. He goes into like, well, you think animal testing is okay because it's for important drugs, like life-saving drugs. He goes, no, most of it are these people testing learned helplessness. And he explained the experiments. They were doing animals and they're horrifying. And he tells some sort of a story where a visiting scientist comes in and looks at what they're doing in a psych lab and says, what are you trying to do to these monkeys? And he says, well, we're trying to induce psychopathology and this could be a made up story. I don't know.

[33:21] And the visiting scientist says, well, I think you have enough psychopathology in this lab already. I knew about the torture program and it wasn't until years later, I made that connection between these horrifying experiments on torturing animals was sort of paved the way for torturing people. I believe that. Mitchell and Jessen were paid $108 million for introducing this torture system to the CIA. And what was happening was at the secret prison, the FBI was interrogating

[33:54] Abuzabeta the way the FBI does it. They establish a rapport. They establish a relationship. Here's an orange. Here's a cigarette. Would you like to write a letter to your mother? And the subject opens up. It takes time, but it works. And it's worked since the Nuremberg trials, right? Which is when they introduced this system. Mitchell and Jessen wanted to prove that their method was better and that it would lead to quicker results. So the FBI was withdrawn from the secret site. Mitchell and Jessen took over and they immediately

[34:27] began torturing Abuzabeta. Now, here's where the big lie comes in. Mitchell and Jessen started torturing Abuzabeta and he immediately clammed up, just stopped talking. They almost killed him. He had to be revived after being waterboarded. They drowned him and he had to be revived. So what they did is they waterboarded him 83 times and then they wrote a cable to headquarters saying we waterboarded him once. He cracked and here's what he said. Now, he hadn't said anything, but what they knew was that the FBI computer system and the CIA computer system were not

[35:03] integrated. So FBI personnel could not read CIA cables and CIA personnel could not read FBI cables. So they took everything that the FBI had reported on Abuzabeta, what he had said from the FBI interrogations. They put it into a CIA cable and said, here's what he said after we waterboarded him one time and they sent it in and people were like, oh my god, it actually works. This waterboarding works. We did it one time and he gave us this wealth of intelligence. Well, none of that was true. The information was stolen from the FBI. He had given it

[35:35] over the previous three months to Ali Sufan and they had completely failed in the waterboarding experiment. Besides the fact that waterboarding was supposed to be the last and harshest technique where they started with waterboarding. I'm not even going to ask if the spore ever held accountable because I know the answer to that question, but just lying like that. They're living happily ever after in their multi-million dollar beach houses in Florida. So when did you leave the CIA and what did you do after that?

[36:07] I left the CIA in March of 2004 and I went to Deloitte and Touche, which is one of the big four professional services firms. They had set up a competitive intelligence practice to spy on their competitors, try to figure out their pricing models, how discounts were determined, all very, very boring stuff, but amazing money. Amazing money. And I was tired of being shot at and people trying to kill me and plant bombs under my car and I was tired of it. Plus the fact that

[36:39] I had two kids that were now living with my ex-wife in Ohio. I wanted to get married again. I wanted to have more kids. And so I was assigned at the United Nations my last tour and I had to go to headquarters for a meeting and somebody had taped a flyer up on the wall in the elevator lobby for a class that was being offered and the class was entitled Raising Your Children in a War Zone. And I decided right there as I'm standing there that I was going to quit. And so I applied for this job at Deloitte. They gobbled me up after two weeks of interviews and I resigned.

[37:14] And at some point you work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, right? Yeah. That came after my whistleblowing. I had a good career at Deloitte. I was there for four years and then one day Brian Ross called me from ABC News and he said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubedah. I said that was absolutely untrue, that I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubedah. And he said, and this was an old reporter's trick that I didn't know because I had never spoken to a reporter before, but he said, well, you're welcome

[37:44] to come on the show and defend yourself. I said, I'll think about it. Well, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Brian Ross's source was at the White House and they were going to try to pin this on me because word was leaking out that there was this torture program. ICRC had written about it. Human Rights Watch had written about it. Amnesty International. So I checked with my partner at Deloitte and he said, go ahead and go on the show. Don't mention Deloitte and don't mention any Deloitte clients. That was easy.

[38:14] So I went on the show and I said three things. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy. It was not the result of a rogue and that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. And you also said you felt like the policy shouldn't be secret because you think we should debate as a society. That is exactly right. That is exactly right. First of all, it's illegal in this country to classify a crime. If something is a criminal act by nature, it can't be classified. Right? In my view, torture was clearly illegal. And so to classify

[38:51] the program itself was illegal. It was my position that the American people owned the information, that the American people had a right to know what their government was doing in their name. And so I felt comfortable coming out with the information. And how does the CIA react to you doing this? The CIA, within 24 hours, filed what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI. They said that I had leaked classified information. The FBI investigated me for a full year from December of 2007 until December of 2008

[39:24] and then determined that I had not committed a crime. They closed the case. Three weeks later, Barack Obama became president and John Brennan, an old nemesis of mine, became the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. I did not know that Brennan then asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And so for three years, they investigated me. They tapped my phones. They intercepted my emails. They put surveillance teams on me periodically to follow me. And then finally in January of 2012, I was arrested.

[39:59] I was looking at the government accountability projects page on you. And they mentioned that as you kept talking to the media, the CIA kept filing more crimes reports that after the initial one, they filed at least six more. So they filed at least seven crimes reports on you. Funny. It's not funny. I mean, obviously, it's horrible that they did this to you. When did you first realize the FBI was investigating you? Because you've told this story several times. And every time I hear it, I am aghast anew and offended on your account again. And even though I know it's coming, it's just it's like it's an awful story.

[40:34] It's a horrible story. It is. I get this knot in my stomach even all these years later, almost a decade later. Well, after Deloitte, I went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John Kerry hired me to be the senior investigator there. And I just couldn't seem to get my security clearance processed. Everybody else is getting their security clearances. And they kept telling me, oh, yours is delayed, yours is delayed. Okay, that should have been a major red flag for me. One of the things that I loved about that job was I got to have lunch with foreign

[41:06] diplomats all the time, about once a week, twice a week, maybe. And, you know, you talk about current events, and they go back and they write a cable, and then you go back and you write a memo, you send it around. So I got an invitation from a Japanese diplomat to have lunch and we got together on Capitol Hill and talked. I remember the conversation. We talked about Israeli elections, Turkish elections, and the Arab-Israeli peace process. And at the end of the conversation, he says to me, so what's next for you? And I said, well,

[41:37] I think I'm going to resign soon. I promised Senator Kerry that I'd give him two years and it's been two and a half. And by then I had five children. And I said, I got to make some money and put my kids through college. So he says, no, no, don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money. And I said, shame on you. What's the matter with you? Do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch? I said, I have to report this. I got up and I went directly to the office of the Senate Security Officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign

[42:11] intelligence officer. He told me to write it up as a memo. He sent it to the FBI. And the next day, two FBI agents came over to the Senate to interview me. And they said, here's what we want you to do. We want you to call them back and invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to pay for it. We'll be at the next table. I said, okay, well, they called me the day of the lunch to say something had come up. They couldn't be there, but just to write them another memo. So I took the guy to lunch. I got the information. I wrote a memo. They asked me to do it a

[42:44] second time and a third time and a fourth time, which I did. And every time I wrote them a memo. A year later, fast forward a year, I've just been arrested, charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for speaking to ABC News and the New York Times. And we get 15,000 pages of discovery. And in discovery, we find several very interesting things. First, there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent undercover,

[43:15] trying to get me to commit real espionage, money for information. But I kept reporting the contact back to the FBI. We finally found a memo in discovery saying, we should end this operation. He's clearly not going to take the bait. They said he keeps reporting the contact back to us. So they ended the operation. And then the Japanese diplomat said he got transferred to Cairo. He shook my hand. I never saw him again. Well, he's an FBI agent. The other memos that we found in

[43:47] discovery were a memo from John Brennan to the Justice Department saying, charge him with espionage. And then Eric Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage. And John Brennan wrote charge him anyway and make him defend himself. And they did. And then when I went bankrupt, they dropped the charges. That's what they do. There's also during this same time, a parallel investigation that sometimes some of the media reports get sort of interwoven with yours. And I think it's worth bringing up that

[44:20] the ACLU starts its John Adams project to represent individuals held at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Obviously, it's a reference to John Adams, who defended one of the British redcoats who fired on the crowds. Looking at the defense, he gave the soldier in light of sort of recent events. It's interesting because he draws on the multiracial nature of the crowd. Anyone would have been afraid of a motley crew of black men and sailors, which is an interesting thing to think about now. But I'll table that for a minute. So in order to raise the issue

[44:51] of their client's torture before these military commissions, they have to get their clients to identify the torture. They use a photo lineup, a private investigator, various techniques to get their identities. And then the attorneys file, and I really want to stress, a classified motion under SEAL for discovery that lists the name of the CIA torturers or alleged torturers. And the CIA is so outraged they file a crimes report. And Eric Holder, Obama's attorney general, tasked Patrick Fitzgerald, who is, of course, of the Valerie Plame fame, to criminally investigate

[45:26] at the request of the CIA, the ACLU and these Guantanamo Bay lawyers. Only time in the ACLU's history they've ever been a subject of a criminal investigation. How does this sort of factor into what happens to you? This played a major role in what ended up happening to me. So as you said, the Guantanamo defense lawyers presented the judge in the Guantanamo hearings with a list of names. The judge recognized that the names were classified because they were

[45:58] either active duty or recently active duty CIA officers alleged to be involved in the torture program. So he asked the FBI to investigate. The FBI asked the Guantanamo defense attorneys where they got the names. They got the names from an investigator for Human Rights Watch by the name of John Sifton. They went to Sifton and asked where he got the names. Instead of saying no comment, Sifton said, I got the names from Matthew Cole. Matthew Cole at the time was a

[46:30] journalist with ABC News. And Matthew Cole had sent me a list of a dozen names and said, hey, I'm writing a book. Can you help me get an interview with any of these dozen people? I said, I don't know who these people are. He sent me a second list of a dozen names. And again, I said, I don't know any of these people. You obviously know this issue far better than I do. I can't help you. And he said, what about the guy that you reference on page 100 and whatever of your book? I think his name is, I'll say John. And I said, and this is my crime,

[47:02] oh, you're talking about John Doe. I don't know whatever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. I had confirmed the last name of one of the people. So they went, the FBI went to Cole and said, where did you get the name? Cole ratted me out to the FBI. And then later testified against me in the grand jury. As it turned out, Cole was on the Guantanamo defense attorney's payroll. He was moonlighting from ABC and never told ABC

[47:33] that he was doing this. He was presenting himself as a journalist working on a story. He was not. Brian Ross told me later that that day, the day of my arrest, Cole went to Brian and said, I think I really screwed up. And he told Brian what he had done. Brian called the vice president for news. The vice president for news called security and they escorted him out of the building and took his badge. And he was fired. But that didn't stop him from ratting me out.

[48:03] Later on, he went to the intercept where he ratted out reality winner and Terry Albury and God knows who else. But yeah, this was people who I had heretofore respected and admired people like John Sifton. John Sifton's legendary in the human rights community. But he very willingly and readily worked with the FBI to prosecute me. So what are the charges they bring against you? Could you go into them a little bit? Yeah. They brought three charges of espionage, two for speaking with the New York Times and

[48:35] one for the ABC News interview. One count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981 for confirming the last name, which was never made public, by the way. No one ever got the last name. And one count of making a false statement. And we were never exactly clear as to what the false statement was supposed to have been. It was with the classification of you for your book. Yeah. I read through the indictment. I always read through the indictment before doing these interviews. It was a confusing claim.

[49:10] So what ends up happening in your... Yeah. On the day of my arrest, we have a proffer meeting and there was this woman there from the Justice Department and she kept saying, 45 years, Mr. Kiriakou, 45 years. Take a plea and you might live to meet your grandchildren. Well, I've gone up against some pretty tough people, so I'm not going to let this woman intimidate me. Plus I'm represented by literally the greatest legal minds in Washington, right? Seriously. Legends in the Washington legal community.

[49:42] So Patrick Fitzgerald offered 10 years. Take a plea to an espionage charge and do 10 years. I said, I didn't commit espionage. I mean, it's literally as simple as that. I didn't commit espionage. That was a Monday. Two days later, Wednesday, they came down to eight years. And then on Friday, they came down to five years. And my lead attorney, Plato Kacheris, again, a legendary figure who's represented Monica Lewinsky and Aldrich Ames and former attorney general John Mitchell through Watergate and going back to the fifties.

[50:17] He said to me, I have been an attorney for 52 years and I have never seen them come down in time like this. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, it means they have a shit case and they know it's shit and we're going to trial, he says. That made me feel much better. Well, they were stuck at five years for the next 10 months. They didn't budge. In the meantime, four months after that proffer meeting, Fitzgerald resigns, which we also took to be very good news for us. And then finally, we have a meeting in

[50:51] October of 2012 and they said, five years, take it or leave it. If you leave it, we're going for the full 45 years. So I said, I didn't do anything wrong. And my attorneys want to go to trial. And if we go to trial, I'm going to testify on my own behalf. And I am going to talk about some of the hideous crimes against humanity and war crimes that I witnessed in 15 years at the CIA. Then they came back and they said,

[51:22] three years, right? We said, we'll take one. We'll do one year. And then they said, best and final offer, two and a half years you do two. So I had 24 hours to think about it. My wife and I stayed up all night long. They were going to drop the espionage charges, drop the false statements charge because they were all weak. I mean, the only thing that I had actually done is I did confirm the last name of that former colleague. I hadn't committed espionage. I hadn't made any false statement. So I was only the second American ever charged

[51:53] with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The only other person was a woman in the 1980s who she was a CIA secretary sleeping with a member of the Ghanaian Intelligence Service. And she gave to him all of the names of the CIA's assets, which the Ghanaians then rounded up and executed. So there's a big difference between her case and my case. And she got six months. So I called my attorneys. I didn't call them. I emailed my attorneys at six in the morning. I said, my wife and I were up all night and I decided I didn't

[52:25] do anything wrong and I'm going to trial. Plato Kacheris emails me back and he says, you stupid son of a bitch take the deal. And then, which was like the normal way that Plato spoke. So then one of the other attorneys says, put on a pot of coffee. We're on our way to your house. Two of the other leads came over. One was the, he's the director of the white collar crime practice at Aiken Gump and Strauss, arguably one of the most important law firms in the world. And the other was Bob Trout of Trout Kacheris. So they came to the house and they were angry with me.

[53:00] And Mark McDougal from Aiken Gump said something that it's just stuck in my mind all these years. He got right in my face and he said, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think about, you think this is about justice and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And then the other attorney said, John, if you were my brother, I would beg you to take this deal. He said, this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life. Make it the blip. And so I took the deal. I also knew that ProPublica had

[53:35] just come out with a study saying that the federal government wins 98.2% of its cases. They do charge stacking. They do venue shopping. They drive you to bankruptcy. They spent $6 million prosecuting me, $6 million. I still owe my lawyers $880,000 that they'll never see. I'll never have that kind of money. So I knew that my chances of winning were fewer than two in a hundred. And the other thing was I said to the lawyers, if we go to trial and

[54:09] we lose, realistically, what am I looking at? And they said 12 to 18 years. Take the deal. So I took the deal. What was your time in prison like? Well, I wrote a book about it actually called Doing Time Like a Spy, How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. It was more difficult than I had expected because at sentencing, my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp and she agreed and the prosecution agreed. And then when I got to the minimum security work camp, they kind of laughed at me and sent me across the street to the actual prison

[54:42] with the concertina wire and double fences and guard towers with the guys with sniper rifles. So it took me five days to get access to a phone and I called the lawyers and I said, hey, they put me in the actual prison with the mafia dons and the pedophiles and the drug kingpins. What do I do? And the lawyer said, oh my God, he said, well, we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing on it and you'll be home by then. I'm sorry, buddy. You're just going to have to tough it out. And so I decided that day that I was

[55:17] trained for this. I was trained for a lot worse than this and that I was going to use my CIA skills to remain safe and remain at the top of the social heap. And so that's what I did. You've also spoken before about your cellmate, Jim, and the sort of the treatment he endured. Could you talk a little bit about that because you've mentioned a couple of times that throughout your time in prison, you came to that torture wasn't just something that the U.S. was doing. It was happening in America's prisons. This poor son of a gun, he was,

[55:50] where do you even start? He was homeless. He had done some time on a federal sexual procurement charge where he was a carny. He worked at a traveling carnival. This is exactly why I don't allow my children to go to carnivals or county fairs. They're all dangerous, people, and most of them are pedophiles. So he was a carny and his boss saw some girl that he wanted to sleep with and he told Jim, hey, you hook me up with that girl over there. So Jim went

[56:21] over and got this girl and gave her some money and the boss ended up having sex with her. Well, here she was 16 years old. So the boss was charged with a federal child sex crime and Jim was charged with procurement for lack of a better term. So he did, I think he did like four years and they released him, but he's homeless. He's got a lifelong drug problem and he ended up living in a cardboard box under a bridge in Pittsburgh. And he told me that he had purposely violated

[56:57] his probation because winter was coming and he just didn't want to live in the box through winter. That it was better to be in prison where he could at least have a bed and some heating and medical care and food. And that's what he did. Well, it came time to get released because you violate probation, you get like 90 days, right? Well, it's still cold out. So then he attacks a guard and we're like, what are you thinking, man? What's the matter with you? And he said, no, if I attack the guard, I get another 60 days in solitary. That way,

[57:30] when I get out, it's going to be April and it'll be warm. And that's what we've come to in this country. Solitary confinement, the United Nations has declared the US use of solitary confinement as a form of torture and they recommend no more than 15 days that a person be held in solitary for no more than 15 consecutive days. You get one shower a week, you get one phone call a month and you literally cannot leave your six by 10 foot cube or whatever it is for the duration of the solitary confinement or your muscles waste away. And because the prisons

[58:03] are so overcrowded, you're not really solitary. There's a guy sleeping on the floor. Sometimes you have to have a fist fight over who gets the bed. People get killed that way. And the guards don't care. They just let you scrap it out. The stronger guy wins the weaker guy sleeps on the floor. And this happens in every prison all across America. And in the meantime, that 15-day guideline is laughed at. We have people in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 40 years. There was a guy in Louisiana, 44 years in solitary confinement

[58:37] without any human contact. Well, those kinds of people can't function in society. You've stripped them of their humanity. You've taken their ability to live in society away. And I used to see it with my own eyes when I was in prison. While you're in prison, you send an open letter to Edward Snowden. What did you say in this letter? Yeah, I was in prison six months when Ed Snowden went public with his revelations. And I felt like I knew what he was going through. I knew why he did what he did. He did it for the public good. And I wanted to show my support, but I wanted to show support

[59:10] in a tangible way. I didn't want to just say, Hey, Ed, you know, we're with you, man. I wanted to help. So I wrote two letters as a matter of fact. One was an open letter and one was a private letter. And I told him not to make the mistakes that I made, get the best lawyers money can buy, get my lawyers, I recommended to him, which he ended up doing. I said, don't talk to anybody. You have to just assume that everybody is spying for the FBI. And that happened to me in prison. We can get to that if you want. And I said,

[59:43] cultivate your support on Capitol Hill. More people support you than you realize. They're just afraid to say something. And then privately, I sort of laid things out point by point by point. And I sent them to a CIA friend of mine. And he got the private letter to Snowden. And then Ed's dad came to visit me in prison. And as did this CIA friend of mine, and we were able to pass messages back and forth. We made sure not to put anything in writing beyond my very first letter. But, you know, I knew exactly what the guy was

[1:00:16] going through. And I wanted to help. That's incredible. And you've been very outspoken for other whistleblowers as well. I know you and I were both at Daniel Hale's sentencing. Yes. The drone whistleblower. I was very, very pleased to see in the Washington Post this morning that- Ilan Omar. Ilan Omar is asking President Biden to pardon Daniel. Did the Post publish that already? Yes. Yes. I knew in advance they were going to do that. I didn't know it's coming out. Yeah. We can talk about that sometime off air. So Gina Haspel is involved in this torture.

[1:00:49] And Trump- Heavily. Heavily. And Trump nominates her to be the CIA director. During this time, a number of groups like defending rights in the Senate and others are meeting with members of Congress, asking them not to confirm her nomination. It actually seems like there's going to be a number of Republicans, including some surprising ones who are going to vote against her. But these sort of so-called moderate Democrats like Clara McCauskel all come public, say we're going to vote for Gina Haspel. So that scares off the Republicans. And we end up with a war criminal of the CIA director, though probably not the first time. But you wrote

[1:01:24] something really powerful in the Washington Post about Gina Haspel and her nomination. You wrote, the message this sends to the CIA workforce is simple. Engage in war crimes and crimes in humanity, and you'll get promoted. You know, the CIA tried to redact that sentence. Really? I had to fight them on it. Because of the pre-publication review? Uh-huh. I sent it in for pre-publication review. They hated the whole op-ed, of course. I'm sure they did. I mean, I've read it. I liked it, but I can imagine

[1:01:55] what the people who are filing crime reports and you for going on ABC News and the ACLU lawyers for like doing basic defense work, I could imagine what they saw when they read that. Yeah, they said that. I said, listen, you're only allowed to redact classified information. And John Kiriak's opinion that Gina Haspel is a war criminal is not classified. If they're saying that's classified, that's almost an acknowledgement that it's true. It's an admission. Yeah, it's an admission. That Gina Haspel is a war, wow. Yeah, I worked for Gina Haspel when she was the number three in the counterterrorism center.

[1:02:28] She was a protégé of Jose Rodriguez, who is one of the most notorious operations officers to serve at the CIA in its modern history. I believed that Jose was a war criminal. In addition to being a sexual harasser and constantly in trouble because he can't keep his hands to himself, and what do they do? They just keep promoting him and promoting him and promoting him. And so when he becomes the head of counterterrorism, he makes Gina chief of staff number three in the office. Then he becomes the deputy director for

[1:03:03] operations. And Gina becomes, well, Gina became the chief of very, very large and important overseas station. And then it looks like she's going to retire. She becomes the, what was she? The deputy director, I guess. And then Trump makes her director. The morning that my op-ed ran in the Washington Post, I got a call from Rand Paul, and he says, can you come to my office and strategize with us about how we can block this woman? I said, I'll be there in 20 minutes. So I rushed to Capitol Hill. He's got this whole

[1:03:39] team of people. They're counting votes, who's yes, who's no, who's maybe, who can we lobby. And then he ends up voting yes. It was shocking to me. But like you said, it was the Democrats that did that. I, Rand Paul is one of the Republicans whose office I met with, not the surprising one. The surprising one was, well, I won't say. And they were so gung-ho about it. And it was really very disappointing. Disappointing isn't even the right word for it. I mean, you're giving your authority, you're giving your approval of a war criminal. That's beyond disappointment. You know, that's not like you don't have your favorite ice cream at

[1:04:12] the store. That's well beyond that. So this is a podcast about whistleblowers. But I would be remiss if I, and I know we're getting short on time and you've already gone over what I've asked you to do, so I'm cognizant of that. But I would be remiss if I do not ask you about your meeting with that distinguished member of the bar, Rudy Giuliani. And what he and his associate told you about a pardon. Very distinguished jurist, Rudy Giuliani, right? Rudy Giuliani. I wanted to punch him in the nose, but that's a whole different issue.

[1:04:44] You're not the only one in this country. You know, Chip, my arrest and conviction had a way of freeing me politically. I used to be kind of your run-of-the-mill Democrat, even if I was on the left wing of the Democratic Party. I left the Democratic Party in 2012, and I sort of bounced between the Greens and the Libertarians. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? And so I've reserved very harsh criticism for

[1:05:14] Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and John Brennan. And that sort of drew the attention of Fox News. And so I started going on Fox News in 2000, I guess it was 16 or 17, and struck up a friendship with Tucker Carlson. I've been on Tucker's show, I don't know, nine or 10 times, because they want me to beat up on Obama and Holder. And I'm happy to do it, right? Because they wronged me. Not to say I agree with these guys on anything else, but on these whistleblowing

[1:05:50] issues, they've always been supportive of me. Interestingly enough, MSNBC still refers to me as CIA leaker John Kiriakou. CNN started calling me CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. The week that I went to prison, it took my attorneys, especially Jaisalyn Radak, a full year to get them to stop calling me a leaker and stop and start calling me a whistleblower. Fox, from the day of my arrest, called me a whistleblower, and I don't know why. So for that, I'm grateful. So I had been talking to Tucker about a pardon and about

[1:06:24] getting directly in front of Donald Trump and pleading my case. And Tucker was immensely helpful. One of my appearances on his show led to a face-to-face meeting with Jared Kushner, which didn't go anywhere. Trump tweeted my name and something that I had said on Tucker's show. I thought maybe that was going to help. Nothing helped. So finally, I say, look, I'd really love to meet with Giuliani. So I get in touch with Giuliani's Major Domo,

[1:06:56] who's a former partner at Hydric and Struggles. And he knew who I was. I said, look, I really need a pardon. A pardon gets me my federal pension back, and I really need it. And so he said, well, as it stands, we're going to be in Washington next week. Why don't we get together at the Trump Hotel? I said, great. Maybe we can meet for dinner or whatever. He said, no. He said, Giuliani really loves Scotch, meaning he drinks it like by the bottle, like I drink Diet Coke. And so it's better to meet before two o'clock, meaning he's usually

[1:07:32] too drunk by two and you can't do any business. So we met for lunch at the Trump Hotel in Washington. And we're sitting there. It's like four or five of us. And they're laughing and talking and people are coming up and shaking his hand and asking him for a picture and an autograph. And then finally, I said, so there's the issue of my pardon. And he says, I got to hit the head and he gets up and walks away. And I said, what the heck just happened? And his number two says, Rudy

[1:08:05] never talks money. You got to talk money with me. And then I'll talk with him. I said, all right, whatever. He said, so Rudy's going to want two million bucks. And I said, two million bucks. Are you crazy? I said, first of all, I don't have two million bucks. Secondly, why would I spend two million dollars to recover a $700,000 pension? That doesn't make any sense at all. And so Rudy came back and sat down and kept drinking. And I said, thank you for your time. And that was the end of it. So I went to a book party about a month later, and there was another whistleblower

[1:08:41] there. And he said, how are things going toward your pardon? I said, oh, listen to this, man. I said, I had drinks with Giuliani a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to sock the guy in the face. So I told him the story. And he said, well, that's illegal, what Giuliani did. I said, yeah, well, you know what? I've been in Washington 39 years. That's how Washington works. So my friend, unbeknownst to me, called the FBI and reported Giuliani to the FBI. And the FBI didn't care. They weren't interested. And he was so angry that they weren't interested that he called

[1:09:12] Mike Schmidt at the New York Times and told him the whole story. So Mike Schmidt calls me. And he said, hey, listen, a friend of yours called me and told me that you had this lunch with Giuliani. I said, oh, crap. And I just happened to be in my attorney's office when Mike Schmidt called me. He said, I'd really love it if you could go on the record. And I said, you know what? Talk to my attorney. So here's my attorney. So he talks to my attorney. And we decide, no, I have nothing to lose. I'm not going to get this pardon. So I'm going to go on the record. And I was one of very few people who went on. There were 100 people that were off the record, but I went on the record and it was on the front

[1:09:45] page of the New York Times. I went to work. I went to work and my co-host Brian Becker is like, can't you stay out of the papers front page of the New York Times? I said, I know, I know. What can I do? Sometimes I like to just throw a grenade into the middle of the room. I remember when that story came out and you're looking at it like, oh, wait, is that fat John Carriac? You know, I can't be John. It has to be someone else. And it's just like, oh my God. So I guess I have two final questions for you. And then I'm going to let you go because

[1:10:18] you've already given us more than we told you we would have you for. Do you have any regrets about any of this? Looking back on going forward with the information about torture, they put you in jail, they bankrupted you, they spotted you, they hounded you. Do you ever regret your choice to go forward? No. The easy answer is no. Never. I've never, ever doubted myself. I've never second guessed myself. And the only advice that I give other whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers, something that I would do differently is to hire my attorneys

[1:10:48] before blowing the whistle. That's the only mistake I made. That's very good advice. And when Jess Lynn was on our program, that was the advice she gave to. Ah, very good. Yes. You know, I do regret focusing so much on myself and less on my family. That took a toll after a while. But by God, if you're thinking of blowing the whistle, especially on a national security issue, hire an attorney first. It's interesting. They do all these terrible things to whistleblowers. And whenever you ask them that question, they always say, no, I have no regrets.

[1:11:20] And you know, one of the reasons the prosecutors wanted such a ridiculous sentence in the Daniel Hale case was as a deterrent. And you and I were both there when he got up and gave that very moving speech. And he mentioned, I don't think any sentence is going to be a deterrent because Americans are always going to follow their conscience. They're always going to be people when they see torture or children blowing up with drones or illegal surveillance who will come forward. There's not really a deterrent in a case like this because we do have people like you, like Daniel, like Tom Drake, who follow their conscience.

[1:11:54] And I guess my final question is we're talking in August. This is prerecorded. This is going to come out sometime in September. September 11th will be the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks. September the 14th will be the anniversary of Congress voting on the AUMF. October 7th, I think anniversary of troops in Afghanistan. October 26th anniversary of the Patriot Act. 20th anniversary then January, 20th anniversary of First People Guantanamo. So we're coming up to 20 years of the war on torture. We invaded Iraq. We invaded Afghanistan.

[1:12:30] We have military operations. And who knows how many countries I don't think the people in Congress who are supposed to be overseeing it knows that. We've had warrantless surveillance. We've had surveillance with warrants. We've conflated dissent with terrorism. We've tortured people. We've carried out war crimes. We've done extradition executions. As someone whose background is in counterterrorism, has 20 years of all this made us any safer or any better as a country? No. I think it's weakened us as a country. We may not have

[1:13:01] people planning to hijack planes right now and fly them into buildings. But look what we've done to civil liberties in our country. I think that we're weaker as a country, weaker as a society today compared to 20 years ago. If there were two things that Osama bin Laden set out to do, one was to damage the US economy at which he succeeded. And the other was to have Americans turn on each other and for us to lose our civil liberties. And he succeeded in that too. So no, despite the fact that we spend a trillion dollars a year on our defense budget, despite the

[1:13:36] fact that we spend more money than the next eight largest countries combined, I don't think we're safer now than we were 20 years ago. Not at all. John, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
