Title: Whistleblower details UAP encounter: What is the CIA hiding? | Reality Check
Show: NewsNation
Date: 2026-01-13
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjLINIR3sS0
Duration: 4117

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[00:07] Good day and welcome back to Reality Check. I'm your host, Ross Kulart, and today I've got a guest I've wanted to get on the show for some time, John Kuryaku. Johns, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who served for nearly 15 years in the agency, rising to lead operations in Pakistan after 9/11, including the capture of a very senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Zabida Zabeda. He

[00:38] refused notoriously to participate in the AY's enhanced interrogation program, viewing techniques like waterboarding quite accurately, I think, as torture. In 2007, he became the first US official to blow the whistle on the fact that waterboarding was official CIA policy, a practice. and he blew the whistle on that in a landmark ABC News interview.

[01:10] For that act of conscience, he was prosecuted under the Obama administration, pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information, and served nearly 2 years in federal prison. The only person connected to the CIA torture program ever jailed, while those who authorized or conducted that program faced no charges. Since his release, John's become an awardwinning author of books like The Reluctant Spy, Doing Time

[01:41] Like a Spy, and The CIA Insiders Guides series. He's a sought-after commentator on intelligence, national security, and government transparency. [gasps] And he hosts the Deep Focus podcast, and he co-hosts shows exploring current affairs and current events. Recently, he's spoken openly about UAPs, and we'll be drawing you on that shortly, John, because this program has a special interest in UAPs. But I also want to acknowledge the fact

[02:13] that um you are a whistleblower. You're one of the rarest things. And two years ago, we had the privilege of bringing David Grush, former NGIA officials story to News Nation. And we applauded David's courage, and we applaud yours. We we put our heroes on pedestals in Australia and America. We we honor people in sport. We honor people in the military and in the arts and rock, but we all too often ignore the real heroes, the

[02:45] whistleblowers, and you, sir, are one of them. So, John Kuru Kuryaku, thank you very much for joining us here on Reality Check, and welcome to the show. I'm not going to start asking you about UAPs. I'm going to actually ask you about Venezuela. I'm I'm very very interested to get your take on has Trump made a strategic mistake with taking President Majurro of Venezuela.

[03:15] I'm not sure if it's a strategic mistake, although it is clearly a violation of international law. Uh you you can't just just send a team of special operations forces into a country, snatch a sitting president out of his bed, and render him to New York City to face face trial for his life on charges that may or not be may or may not be real

[03:46] charges. On the other hand, but this is such a complicated issue. There are there are three international law recognizes three ways in which in which one country can attack another like the United States went into Venezuela. One is if the other country in this case Venezuela presents a clear and present danger to the safety and security of Americans or American installations. Number two is if the Venezuelan government had invited the United States

[04:17] to uh move into its territory or third with the permission of the United Nations Security Council. The US had none of those three things. So it's a violation of international law for this operation to have taken place in the first place. With that said, uh it's not a violation of US law. There's a very specific US law dating to 1985 that does allow US special forces to cross borders, snatch people, and bring them back to the United States to face trial. And although very, very

[04:49] risky, I think that the window for a Chinese or Russian response has passed. And so it looks like Trump got what he wanted to get in addition to access to 300 billion barrels of oil, the largest proven oil reserves uh on the planet. So I I was actually going to devil's advocate you because frankly as much as

[05:20] I hate admitting it, this regime change seems to be working right now. Actually, it actually looks pretty good right now if you are Donald Trump. Yes. >> And it does seem to be a disaster for Russia and China, both of whom have been courting Venezuela. >> Yes. >> Uh it's bloody good for America's pro dollar, the uh the US dollar against the the oil barrel. >> That's the key right there. The Chinese have one aircraft carrier. They could

[05:51] have diverted that aircraft carrier at any point over the previous six months to the Caribbean. They didn't do that. And I'll tell you what, in in in 2017, Donald Trump appeared to make a mistake, a strategic mistake in that he fully sanctioned the Venezuelan oil industry. Well, Venezuela's oil is famously dirty. It's famously full of sulfur to the point where you have to inject it with vast amounts of chemicals in order to

[06:22] convert it into home heating oil. It's so dirty it generally can't really be converted into gasoline. It's just too expensive. So he finally issued blanket sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry in 2017 knowing that the only place on earth where that oil could be refined was in Houston, Texas. So if it can't be refined in Houston thanks to sanctions, it can't be refined and then it would collapse. But the Chinese and the Indians both built new uh new oil

[06:55] refineries in order to process the uh the Venezuelan oil. Okay. Well, now now Donald Trump is claiming control over the Venezuelan oil fields and that oil is going to be refined in Houston again. Why aren't the Chinese fighting over their oil? Why aren't the Indians jumping up and down at the United Nations complaining about how they won't have any oil? So, Donald Trump won this one in my view. >> He did. And it's funny because I' I've been waiting to see whether the Russians

[07:27] respond or the Chinese respond. And there's been nothing, not a peep, and he has snookered them. And I I have to give it to President Trump. Um, at the moment, it's looking pretty good. I guess what I wanted to draw you on though was what's the message that this sends to for example China over Taiwan >> uh and perhaps precedence for Putin over for example beheading Galileinski in Ukraine. >> Yes. Yes. There's a mixed message here. On the surface of things, it's the green

[07:59] light to both Xinping and Vladimir Putin. Do what you want in Taiwan. Do what you want in uh in Ukraine. But it's not really that simple. It's not really that clear. First of all, the Chinese do not have a history of imperialism. Sure, they they fight border skirmishes with the Indians. They fight border skirmishes with the Vietnamese every once in a while, but they generally don't attack other countries. In this case, the case of Taiwan,

[08:29] there's a long-standing policy on both sides of the Taiwan Strait that Taiwan is a part of China. It's just temporarily separated and eventually will be rejoined with with China. Even the Taiwanese believe that. So, there's no reason for China to attack Taiwan. >> Do you think Donald Trump strategically thinks that Taiwan should be part of China? Do you think he's bothered to protect it if China does invade Taiwan?

[09:00] >> Honestly, >> I mean, it's the stated it's the stated policy. It's interesting. We have a defense minister here in Australia, previous government, who rashly without consulting the the prime minister or the government made the promise that if um China invaded uh Taiwan, we would go to war against China to help the Americans defeat China and Taiwan. And there's a lot of concern in Australia that we are sort of step step in step with the Americans on a policy that seems almost

[09:30] suicidal in the Pacific in the Northern Pacific and that there are changing hegammones in the Northern Pacific at the moment that mean that we just have to accept that sooner or later China will invade Taiwan. Do you think Trump cares? >> No, I don't. I don't think he cares at all about Taiwan. And I think that the stated American policy of uh defending Taiwan is probably overstated as well. China is a major nuclear power. Are we

[10:02] really prepared to go to war, possibly to nuclear war with China over an island that 95% of Americans can't locate on a map? I don't think so. when push finally comes to shove. And the fact that the Chinese didn't respond in any way to this Venezuela incursion tells me that um that they're perfectly happy to play the long game on Taiwan and just wait for the for Taiwan to come around. Now John about 2003 within a few months

[10:35] I think of the in Iraqi invasion I was sitting with a guy who was with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and we were talking about regime change and he went ras anything's better than Saddam anarchy is better than Saddam and it was the beginning of what ended up essentially being a civil war in Iraq that went on for many many years. Friends of mine were killed, wounded. Uh

[11:06] lots of young men and women gave their lives in a conflict that frankly was an appalling, egregious mistake. I think even even the neocons may eventually admit that sooner or later. But there's not a very good history for America in regime change. We don't think through things through. in Venezuela. Is taking the head of Maduro out of Venezuela actually going to make that much of a change in Venezuela?

[11:38] Isn't America going to have to put boots on the ground in Venezuela to make any kind of enforcement of what it's trying to impose? >> I I think no. And and I'll tell you why. It's for a couple of reasons. Number one, Venezuela is the size of Germany, France, and Austria combined. And it's mostly jungle. We can't put boots on the ground. We'll be annihilated. We can't fight a war like that. >> Exactly. >> It's just not possible. But second, I'm going to go a little bit out on a limb

[12:09] here and say that I think that the CIA has so fully infiltrated the Venezuelan government that it doesn't need boots on the ground. Let's look at it this way. Number one, in August, President Maduro's personal pilot came out and said that the CIA had attempted to recruit him. There was a $50 million bounty on Maduro's head. They offered him $50 million. They they believed that Maduro would probably try to flee at some point, probably for Cuba. And so

[12:41] rather than landing the plane in Cuba, you land it in Florida, make him think it's Cuba. The FBI grabs him and everybody's happy and you collect the 50 million. He told them, "Forget it." And he went to the media and reported it. Well, we know from the New York Times over the weekend that the special forces team that went in, the Delta Force team, knew exactly where to find President Maduro, because they had a highlevel CIA um uh agent, a recruited asset who had

[13:12] infiltrated the president's inner circle and knew the bed that he was in. He had been sleeping in different buildings night after night to protect himself. They knew the bed that he was in. On Saturday, the new president um Dulce Rodriguez was apoplelectic that this had happened. The US had committed this terrible war crime. She was going to fight. She was going to go to the UN. It was going to be war. 48 hours later, she says she's interested in a dialogue with the Trump

[13:44] administration. >> She's seen the writing on the war. Yeah, >> I think so. And and I'll add one other thing, too. There were no casualties on the American side. >> Sure. >> This this small American team killed at least 80 people, including 35 Cubans, and they destroyed the tomb of Hugo Chavez. That was just mean. That was a mean thing to do. I think that the reason why this was so

[14:14] easy to implement and so deadly for the other side is that there were senior officials in the Venezuelan military who were complicit with the CIA, which is the way the CIA would go about an operation like this. You don't just wing it and just go out, you know, the night before with with your instructions on the back of a napkin. This is months and months in process plan planning and and plan B and plan C and plan D if plan A

[14:44] doesn't work. So I think that's what we're seeing in these days after the operation. >> The CIA since the Second World War when it was created after the Second World War hasn't had a lot of success. And I'm I'm a huge fan of Tim Winer's book, Legacy of Ashes, >> as am I, >> which goes through the strategic failures of the CIA. >> But let's acknowledge this. Whatever one says about the legalities of the Venezuela operation, this is quite

[15:17] clearly a huge success for the CIA and it's it's going to stamp the authority of the CIA very much with President Trump and the administration. Is it going to embolden President Trump to use more of that CIA covert action? He's already flagging, for example, his interest in doing something about Mexico, >> Colombia, and of all places, Greenland. [panting] >> Uh, yes, I think so. There are a couple

[15:48] issues at play here. We all watched President Trump's uh press conference on Saturday morning. Where was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence? The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, was there standing right behind the president? Where was the director of national intelligence? Ostensibly, Ratcliff's boss. She was on vacation in Hawaii. So why is it because she's on the way out? She has stood steadfastly against

[16:19] foreign interventions and now we're carrying out foreign interventions. The president clearly said, as you just noted, that he's looking at you, Mexico, and looking at you, Colombia, and we still want Greenland. And I'll tell you what, if if I were the Cubans, I would be petrified right now because the Cubans got their oil from Venezuela. And Venezuela was practically Cuba's only friend in the region. Mexico said that they would they would fill in the the gap for the oil, but are they willing to

[16:51] withstand pressure from the United States to cut the Cubans off? Another another issue is Iran. The day before this operation was carried out, Benjamin Netanyahu visited the president at Mara Lago. What did they talk about? I wrote a piece today that's going to appear in Covert Action magazine saying this this operation wasn't just about Venezuela. It was about Iran, too. Because if the United States is sitting on 300 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, it's

[17:22] essentially taken away whatever leverage the Iranian government had by by closing the straight of Hormuz to affect the price of oil. Do you think that what's going on I mean Trump's indicated that the conflict in Iran is not over? I suspect they want regime change and frankly let's be honest about it. It makes prudent sense to give the Ayatollah a push and see if you can topple the regime. >> Wouldn't Iran be next?

[17:52] >> I would expect Iran would be next. Yes. Cuba's no threat to the United States or to anybody else. I went to Cuba last year. It was an absolutely lovely place. And the joke that goes around is if you really want to overthrow the Cuban government, open the first McDonald's. As soon as that happens, the whole country falls apart. But Iran is different. And and the United States doesn't dare put boots on the ground in Iran. It has 92 million people and it has a government that is relatively

[18:22] relatively popular to the point where its people are not willing to rise up on moss to overthrow the Ayatollas. >> Do you really think so? I I I mean I've I've only had limited experience with Iran, but one thing about Iran that I really notice is >> they are very >> well at least a lot of the people I've spoken to are very strongly pro- West like they crave the western life. [snorts] >> They do. >> They're not interested in the theocracy and they're resentful of a theocracy

[18:54] especially the very young people. Um, I I just wonder whether given the proper push with a bit of covert action from the CIA, frankly, it would be a good thing right now, wouldn't it? If the Ayatollah was overthrown, I noticed the London the London Times is reporting that there's a secret plan if it looks likely that the Ayatollah is under threat that that he'll move to Moscow. Wouldn't it be a good thing, frankly, to give it a push and see whether you can induce a popular revelation revolution in Iran? I think that the reason we

[19:26] haven't seen a popular revolution in Iran is because one has not been possible. The CIA would have done that many, many years ago. The Israelis certainly would have agitated for it over the course of many, many years. But, you know, I'll compare it to Iraq. I've told this story a couple of times, but I I'll repeat it here because it's it's relevant. The night before we launched our attack on Iraq, I was the notetaker in what was called a principles committee meeting. The principal committee is normally chaired by the president. It includes the vice

[19:57] president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser and the CIA director. In this uh event, it also included the um chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the commander of central command, which was the entire Middle East. President Bush was busy with something else that day and so Vice President Cheney chaired the meeting. And at the end of the meeting, well, at the beginning of the meeting,

[20:28] the vice president asked General uh Tommy Franks to give us an order of battle briefing. I always hated order of battle briefings because they're very, very boring to me. I don't care where elements of the first brigade are on the map and elements of the fourth mountain cavalry, whatever, are over here and they're moving. I don't care. Just move your little men where they need to move and I don't need to be briefed on it. But anyway, my job was to sit directly behind George Tennant, the CIA director, and be the notetaker.

[20:59] So Franks is giving the briefing and at the very end of his briefing he says his exact words, "If all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August." [snorts] And director Tennant discreetly turns off his microphone, turns around and says to me, "Did he say Thrron or did he say Baghdad?" I said, "He said Thran." and he said, [laughter] "Have these people lost their mind?"

[21:30] So, at the end of the briefing, one of the notetakers from the National Security Council got up to leave and blurted out excitedly, "When we cross that border tomorrow, they're going to throw flowers at us." And I said to George on the way out of our conference room, I said, "These people know nothing about history and they know nothing about the Middle East." I got back to my office. I worked for the deputy director of the CIA at the time and he said, "How did the briefing go?" And I said, "Did you know we were going to attack Iran?"

[22:02] And he said, "Are they still talking about that? We're not going to attack Iran." He said, "You know how these guys are? They don't know when to stop." And I said, "They don't know anything about history." And he said, "No, of course they don't." Well, that's what we're seeing again, I fear, in Iran today. And do you suspect that's what Netanyahu was talking about with Trump at Mara Lago? >> Yes, I do very much. I think he was talking both about Venezuela and Iran because if we can do one, we can do the other. I I'll tell you another thing. In

[22:34] all the years that I was in government, and after I left the CIA, I was the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In all the years that I was in government, literally every single time an Israeli prime minister came to Washington to meet with a president, whoever happened to be president, he would ask the president, "Please bomb Iran. Please bomb Iran. Please bomb Iran." And every president would say, "We're not going to bomb Iran." Until Donald Trump. Okay. So,

[23:06] this is starting to sound very positive for Donald Trump here, John, because frankly, he did bomb Iran and uh >> there was no fallout. >> Yeah. I mean, this is just going to embolden him, though. Is there a risk? Is there a risk that he's going to overstep? >> Are we in dangerous times? >> Yes, there is a risk of overstepping. And the risk is something that you just said a moment ago. It's boots on the ground. We're not good at what comes after the invasion. It's easy to

[23:37] overthrow a government, right? You send in the first wave of forces, you secure the presidential palace, you secure the main intersections in the capital, you take over the radio and television stations, and you bomb the military bases. That's the easy part. The hard part is what comes next. And we're just not good at it. I mean, even even as as early in the Afghan conflict as 2003, Hamid Carzai was little more than the mayor of Kabell, he didn't control any

[24:08] of the countryside. And we were there for 20 years and then lost it in a matter of minutes once we began to pull out. Look at uh look at Baghdad. Saddam Hussein, as bad a man as he was, and I dedicated much of my CIA career to to fighting Saddam Hussein, as bad as he was, he was the only bull work against Iranian expansionism. The only one with Kuwait aside, he was the only one protecting the rest of the

[24:39] Gulf countries. And so, we're not good at what comes after we overthrow the government. and we're decidedly not good about how to actually withdraw from the country once the fighting's over. >> I want to transition to the story that essentially brought your career at the CIA undone. You were very very heavily involved in the appreh apprehension and early interrogation I think of Abu Zuba.

[25:10] Tell me about this guy. Who was he? >> Right. At the time, we believed that Abu Zuba was the number three inside al-Qaeda. He was not the number three. He was a very bad man. He was al-Qaeda's de facto logistician in that he founded al-Qaeda's House of Martyrs safe house in Pashaw, Pakistan. He established and staffed al-Qaeda's training camps in Kandahar province and Helund province in

[25:41] southern Afghanistan. If you were a jihadi and you wanted to go home, he would get you out of Afghanistan. He would get you a fake passport and a plane ticket and send you home. And vice versa, if you wanted to go to make the fight, but he was never the number three. Nonetheless, we tracked him from February of 2002 until the end of March 2002, and we finally found him in an al-Qaeda safe house in Fisalabad, Pakistan. So, we did a series of raids that night. We we hit 13 sites

[26:12] simultaneously at 2:00 in the morning and he was exactly where we thought he was going to be. What was it like meeting face to face and actually I presume discussing with him his role as a terrorist? I mean, I'm just intrigued by what that moment was like to actually be able to confront somebody who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans or at least complicit in. >> Well, we caught him at at 2:00 in the

[26:43] morning. So, I'll back up to 10:00 p.m. that night. Um, as we were kicking off, literally the last thing I said to the large group of CIA, FBI, ISI, and um, they were called the Punjabi Elite Force uh, officers on site. The literally the last thing I said was, "We have to take him alive. Do not shoot him."

[27:14] And of course >> they did. They shot him three times with an AK-47 in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach to the point where the doctor who performed emergency surgery to save his life came out in the middle of the operation to tell me, "I've never seen wounds this severe where the patient lived. Prepare yourself." And I thought, I'm going to lose my job now. But he lived. He was in a coma for the first 24 hours. He finally came out of it. saw that as I was standing at the

[27:45] foot of his bed wearing a Spongebob Squarepants t-shirt, he panicked and realized, "Oh my god, the Americans have me." His heart rate went so high that they had to shock him to get it back, you know, uh, to normal. And then about six hours later, after I had tied him to the bed by the wrists and the ankles, I was so tired. I had been up over 36 hours. I was afraid I would fall asleep and he would, you know, get up and run away or something. So, I tied him to the bed and he motioned for me to to come

[28:17] next to his bed. So, I I went up next to him and I moved his oxygen mask and I said to him, "Shumech, what is your name?" And he shook his head. So, I repeated it. I said, "Shumech." And he said to me in English, "I will not speak to you in God's language." And I said, "That's okay, Abu Zuba. We know who you are." And then he started crying and he said, "Please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me." And I said, 'Oh no, nobody's going to kill you. We've been looking for you for a long time. He wanted to know what was

[28:49] going to happen to him. And I said, "Honestly, I don't know. I can tell you that you are going to get the best medical care that the American government can possibly provide," which he did. But I said, "I'll tell you another thing. I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues are not nice like I am. You have to cooperate. Now, the interesting thing about this whole story, John, is the popular mythology pushed very much by the Zero Dark 30 film is that torture is what elicited a

[29:23] confession and that that led to the capture of the information about the courier. I think Abu Ahmad al-Qu8 who was the courier who was liazing with bin Laden in Abatamad in Pakistan. >> What's the real story? The real story is isn't it that the FBI actually did some bloody good work and did a really thorough interrogation of Abu A Zabida and actually elicit a lot of this information very early on. >> Yeah. Zero dark 30 was what we called

[29:54] the big lie. I mean, even at the time when they were when they were writing Zero Dark 30, we said it's the big lie. The the the idea that torture led to the location of Osama bin Laden is 100% fiction. What led to the the location of Osama bin Laden was terrific interrogations by Ali Sufan, the FBI agent assigned to uh to uh interrogate Abu Zuba at the secret site and really

[30:27] great analysis carried out by junior analysts in the CIA's directorate of intelligence. You we looked for the courier for years. I'm going to tell you from before 911, we went to Al Jazzer in Doha and we said, you know, when al-Qaeda gives you one of these tapes, whether it's an audio tape or a video tape, how do you take receipt of the tape? And they said, oh, there's this guy Muhammad. Muhammad drops it off. So, we found Muhammad and

[30:58] we said, "Where'd you get the tape?" "Uh, Abdullah gave it to me." So, we find Abdullah. Where'd you get the tape? Uh, Rashid gave it to me. We find Rashid. he's, you know, somewhere in, you know, Afghanistan. Rashid says, "Yeah, Khaled gave it to me, but I don't even know if that's really his name, and I don't have any way of getting in touch with him. He gets in touch with me." So, there were six different We came to learn later. There were six different couriers in that line. We could never go beyond three or four until later. And

[31:28] I'll tell you what finally broke the case. the analyst, this junior analyst at the CIA was able to put Osama bin Laden somewhere in Abu Dhabad. And so she began looking at satellite imagery of Abu Dabad. Now, one of the things about Pakistani homes is they have walls around them because you don't want people driving by your house and looking at your women through the windows. It's a cultural thing. And so most walls are

[31:59] six feet. Some are eight feet if you really have a lot of money. But there was one house that had a 20 foot wall in Abadabad. And so we sent a drone over that house. And the drone saw that every afternoon a very tall man and we knew that Osama bin Laden was very tall, 6' 5 in. He would walk in circles around the backyard. He became known in the CIA as the walking man. So, here's a guy wearing white like uh like Osama bin

[32:32] Laden did walking in circles every day to get exercise. So, what we came up with at the CIA was an idea to recruit a doctor, a Pakistani doctor and to offer polio vaccines in the neighborhood. And so what he would do with each polio vaccine that he would give was that he would discreetly take a small DNA sample as well. Now on 912, the day after the

[33:03] 9/11 attacks, virtually the entire Bin Laden family went to the CIA and said, "What can we do to help you find him?" And we said, "We need DNA samples just in case we blow him up into a million pieces. we we need to be able to take a little scrap of meat and test it and make sure that it's it's him. They all volunteered to give their DNA. So, we were able to use their DNA, compare it to the DNA from the children getting the polio vaccines, and we said those little

[33:34] kids are Osama bin Laden's kids, which means that the tall man, the walking man is Osama bin Laden. That's how we got him. >> And what happened to that doctor? Tell that story, please. >> This is one of the one of the terrible crimes in contemporary intelligence. The doctor was arrested. He was charged with treason in Pakistan and sentenced to life in prison. He rots in that prison still today. When I left the CIA and

[34:07] finally went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was one of only four senior staff members. So I told John Kerry, who was my direct supervisor at the time, I said, "Senator, we've got to go get this doctor, out of prison, right? We need to fly to Pakistan with a delegation led by you and we need to demand the release of this doctor. He is a hero and he should be granted, which the CIA director has the authority to do, he should be granted American citizenship and he wouldn't do it." Now

[34:40] you led operations in Pakistan after 9/11 and you know how prickly and difficult and duplicitous the ISI the Pakistani intelligence service can be [sighs and gasps] frankly they were playing the Yanks weren't they? I mean they were basically doing deals. >> I mean they were lying to you. Sure. >> I mean, the thing that really shocks me is Seymour Hirs did make an allegation, journalist Seymour Hirs did make an allegation that it wasn't a coincidence

[35:12] that Assama bin Laden was in a BABA. Do you give any credence at all to Hir's claims that he was able to prove to his satisfaction that the Pakistanis knew full well where Bin Laden was and that he was being protected? I always believed that the Pakistanis knew that he was there. Sure. Or elements of the ISI. And let me explain because this comes up with some frequency. Um the the Pakistani intelligence

[35:43] officers with whom I worked literally put their lives on the line every single day. And one thing that was always funny to me about them is they were the only ones who wouldn't wear bulletproof vests. I never understood that. But they were very tough guys. all trained at Sandringham in uh in the UK. >> Sandhurst. >> Sandhurst. Sorry. Sorry. Yes. Sandhurst in the UK. Their English was as good as mine. >> Did everything we asked. They wanted they wanted payment for everything and

[36:14] we were swimming in money all at the time. So we happily just threw money at them almost every single day. But there was also another side of ISI. the side where everybody had a long bushy beard, would give you a dirty look when they saw you in the hall, created the Kashmir separatist organizations, you know, armed them and and financed the attacks uh in Mumbai a couple of

[36:45] years later in 2008. So, it's like there were two separate ISIS working in parallel with one another. I have no doubt that the Pakistanis with whom I worked were true believers. They were ready to lay their lives down. I also have no doubt that the other side of ISI absolutely knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in luxury in Ababad. Ababad is the West Point of Pakistan.

[37:16] It's the location of the of the military academy of the country. So, I'm sure that they believed they could keep keep the two tracks separate and they they couldn't. But what does it say about the fact that that's the quality of the ally that America had in that wretched conflict both dealing with Afghanistan and dealing with Pakistan. You had an intelligence service that was nominally an ally that was effectively undermining

[37:47] you and at times funding Taliban groups. Well, welcome to the real world. That's not unique to Pakistan. Um, I the whole region's like that. South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, you know, in the in the Netflix TV series Narcos, just as the DEA is going to swoop in and grab the drug cartel leader, the CIA station chief shows up to screw the whole thing up because he cares about communism, not about drugs.

[38:18] I mean, this is just kind of everyday life uh in in CIA operations. [sighs] >> So, I remember there was an interview in the Guardian of London recently with Alfredo Shure, who was the CIA operative who was allegedly the inspiration for the female character in Zero Dark 30. Yeah, she was very much the inspiration >> and she aggressively asserted in that interview, quote, torture works, >> right?

[38:48] >> What do you say to that? >> Well, she was a torturer. Listen, Alfreda's Alfreda's nickname at the CIA was the red-headed devil for a reason. [sighs] Um, Alfredo was the chief of operations in the Osama bin Laden unit called Alex Station. Her husband, Mike Shyer, uh, created Alexstation. He named it Alex Station because his six-year-old son was named Alec and he thought it would be fun. Um, if there is a a godmother

[39:18] of the torture program, it's Alfredo Bicowski. And I I will say about Alfredo what I say about all CIA leaders who had a hand in the creation and implementation and cover up, frankly, of the torture program. First of all, first of all, everything always becomes public. the the truth always comes out. So you have to be prepared for it. Number two, torture is their legacy. When their obituaries are written, it's

[39:50] going to say that they were instrumental in the creation of an illegal, immoral, and unethical torture program. And so what they are doing, what Alfreda is doing to save their reputations is to repeat the lie over and over and over again that torture worked. Because if you repeat that lie enough, there's a chance that some people may believe it. So I was reading the um Tim Winer book,

[40:23] the latest Tim Winer book, The Mission, which tells the story of the CIA in the most recent period post 911. And he talks about a guy called Jose Rodriguez, who was a hard fellow from uh who'd done a lot of work in South America, a very controversial CIA operative who again is completely unrepentant about the torture program. and he had a a guy who worked under him called Jim Katsano who'd been the head of the operational readiness group at the office of technical security in the

[40:53] CIA and Katsanana got brought into the torture program. [gasps] The book summarizes how over the years the CIA's black sites would hold 119 prisoners. 14 high value detainees were subjected to the harshest interrogations. And Rodriguez told Tim Winer in this book, "Only three detainees were ever waterboarded. Three killers that had American blood on their hands were waterboarded by us. Give me a break."

[41:25] He's clearly unrepentant. >> And what do you say to that? >> Jose was was my boss in the in the counterterrorism center. Jose is a clinical sociopath and that's why that's why he rose to the level to which he rose. He ended up retiring as the deputy director of the CIA for operations. Um Jose was always controversial because he had been credibly accused of sexual harassment multiple times by multiple

[41:56] women in multiple stations. Continued to rise through the ranks. But the whole torture program was Jose's idea to the point where when he retired he and several other torturers wrote a book. It's more of a pamphlet, a booklet rather than a than an actual book, but it it's just trying to justify the torture program. And they wrote it in response to the Senate uh torture report, the the executive summary of

[42:28] which was released to the public. The this matter. [laughter] >> That's it. >> That's the That's the amount of paperwork that was revealed by the Senate. >> That's just the summary of the report. >> The actual report was 5,500 pages long. >> It's a gling book this I mean I've I I trained as a lawyer and it's quite chilling to read people trying to rationalize what fundamentally is torture. I mean, there's no doubt in

[42:59] your mind, is there? That water boarding is tor to torture. >> Of course. Of course, it's torture. And and water boarding was not the worst of what we did to people. See, this is another little trick that Jose tries to use. Well, if waterboarding is the most horrible thing in the world, we only did it to three people and they were all killers with American blood on their hands. Well, first of all, it wasn't the worst. Second of all, you didn't do it to just three. And third, they weren't all killers with American blood on their hands. We know definitively that Abu Zubedo was the wrong guy. Definitively.

[43:31] So, Jose, the night before I went to prison, Jose tweeted at me and he said, "Don't drop the soap, asshole." And I gave myself an hour or two to calm down. And then I responded to him and I said, "Jose, I am on the right side of history and you are not." And that was the last time I had communication with him. He's a monster. We should be afraid of people like Jose Rodriguez.

[44:04] And yet Jim Katsano, who was one of Jose's deputies, he he said he was asked, Tim Winer asked him, "Could the rendition, detention, and interrogation group have carried out its mission without torture?" highly unlikely. Katsana said we had to protect this country and what we did, what we thought was best was to get as much actionable intelligence as we could because we all thought a second attack was coming. If people thought we did something illegal,

[44:35] something immoral, we'll live with it. I'll live with it. >> He'll have to answer to his maker someday. But see, that in and of itself is a lie. The truth is that Ali Sufan, the FBI agent who was the the lead interrogator, did what the FBI has done successfully since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946. He engaged Abu Zuba in a conversation. He established a rapport.

[45:06] He established a relationship with Abu Zuba. It took a couple of weeks for him to open up and instead of a punch in the face or a waterboarding session, you offer an orange, a cup of tea on a really good day, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil to write a letter to your mother. And Abu Zuba opened up and Abu Zuba gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives. I can tell you what it is. First, he explained to us what the al-Qaeda wiring diagram

[45:36] looked like. We didn't know what it looked like. We knew that Osama bin Laden was at the top, Ian Zawahi was the number two, and Muhammad Atf was the number three, but we had killed him in Tora Bora in October of 2001. Otherwise, we didn't know how it was structured, what it looked like. It was Abu Zubeda who explained it to us and he did it because Ali was kind to him. Secondly, we had known since 1996

[46:07] that there was a bad man out there who went by the nomair Mhtar, right? Mhtar had planned something called the Bojinka operation in Manila in 1996. The plan was to hijack as many as 14 747s simultaneously out of Manila airport and fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States. He had laid this out on a table in an apartment in Manila. And then he went

[46:39] out to get lunch. And while he was out at lunch, the cleaning lady let herself in to clean the apartment. and she sees this and she says, "This looks like a terrorist attack. I should call the police." She calls the police. They come to the apartment. The police look at it and say, "This looks like a terrorist attack. We should call the Filipino intelligence service." The intelligence services comes and says, "We should call the CIA." And the CIA confiscated the

[47:09] material. Mkhtar escaped and we never heard from him again. But we knew that he was out there. Ali brought up Mkhtar with Abu Zuba and Abu Zuba laughed and said, "You don't know who Mkhtar is?" And Ali said, "No, who is he?" And Abu Zubeda said, "His name is Khaled Shikh Muhammad." We had never heard the name before. And so we immediately run name traces and realize, "Oh my god, this guy went to college in

[47:40] the United States. Where is he? We don't have any idea. But the hunt was on. Not because Abu Zubeda was tortured, but because he wasn't tortured. And the irony is when they did capture Khaled Shake Muhammad, they did torture him. And it makes it almost impossible to effectively charge him with any kind of criminal offense. >> And that is exactly what I was going to say next. You know, at the CIA, we like to tell ourselves that we were working

[48:10] these 24-hour work days for years, you know, after years because of the 9/11 families, right? We wanted to bring their family members murderers to justice. It was because the of the CIA and their stupid torture program that these men were never brought to justice. Khadeshik Muhammad was was the mastermind of 911. He killed 3,000 Americans in one day. He will

[48:41] never face justice for what he did. He will never meet his accusers in a court of law. He will never be judged by a jury of his peers because the CIA screwed it up. Why doesn't Jose Rodriguez say something about that? >> Let's get into the broader questions about the CIA, John. I mean, President Kennedy, JFK, as you probably know, was so angry with the CIA, Alan Dulles, after the debacles of the um Cuba

[49:13] invasion, the the the murder of certain African leaders, he felt deceived and he he said notoriously he wanted to blow the the CIA into a thousand pieces. Should he have done that? And do you think that his death was part of a CIA conspiracy? >> With the benefit of hindsight, u yes and yes. Uh he knew how dangerous the CIA had become during the Eisenhower administration. He knew what the CIA was

[49:43] capable of. Um and he was smart enough to want to act against it. As you said, he said that he wanted to break it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. And then he was dead three weeks after saying it. Four weeks after saying it. Um, even President Truman, President Truman famously wrote an op-ed the day after Kennedy was killed. The op-ed was published in the morning edition of the Washington Post. And in it, President Truman said that he had been a damn

[50:14] fool, his words, a damn fool for creating the CIA in the first place. Well, guess what? In the afternoon edition of that day's Washington Post, that oped didn't appear. Why? Because the CIA had it removed. So yeah, it appears I mean what with what we know in retrospect with what we know thanks to the release of most, not all of the CIA's Kennedy related documents, um it appears at least that elements of the CIA were involved in the

[50:45] Kennedy assassination. It was not a CIA operation, kill the president, but there were CIA officers who looked to be dirty in that horrible crime. >> I I don't know how much knowledge you have about Oswald, but do you think Oswald was a CIA operative or somebody who was operating under CIA instruction? >> I have steadfastly over the years said no. And now I have to say yes because with the latest what's supposed to be the

[51:16] final release in uh October of last year, the final 15,000 pages, we were finally told after 60 years that James Angel, the deputy director of the CIA for counter intelligence, had ordered CIA officers to recruit Oswald. Now, ostensibly, most likely for cover purposes, uh they were told to put in the files that he was recruited because he had lived in in the Bellar Russian

[51:47] SSR in Minsk, worked in a radio factory there, and he could report on daily life in Belerus. That was all nonsense. Um, we also know that that Oswald went to Mexico City in October of 1963. The CIA pretended that they had no idea he was in Mexico City. And of course, with the release of of these most recent documents, they were on him like white on rice, following his every step in Mexico City as he went repeatedly to the

[52:19] Soviet embassy and tried to redef Soviet Union, they wouldn't have him. So yeah, I think it's clear that Oswald was in the pay of the CIA. Whether or not he was activated against Kennedy, we still don't know. >> But I guess >> what I take away from that though, what I take away from that though is the implications of how easy it is inside the CIA for individual pockets of the CIA to do something like for example set

[52:52] up a torture program, plot to be involved in the assassination of President JFK. I mean essentially a coup d'etat against the sitting president. It it's a good it's a good segue for me into the subject matter that has dominated a lot of what we look at here on reality check which is the extraordinary allegations being made by increasingly reputable people including David Grush who went public with me on television in 2023. the allegation of a covert

[53:24] unidentified anomalous phenomena craft alien craft retrieval and reverse engineering program. Sounds like an absolutely crazy idea, but clearly from what I'm being told, and I've been dragged reluctantly down this rabbit hole since I, as a journalist, set out to actually try and debunk the whole idea of UFOs 7 years ago. I believe the CIA has played an instrumental role in probably the

[53:56] biggest cover up in human history, the cover up of a knowledge of a nonhuman intelligence. And one of the biggest arguments I get back from people who don't understand how intelligence works is if that was the case, Ross, it would have leaked that you can't keep secrets like that. And I noticed earlier in our interview, you did say that secrets have a way of leaking. Things have a way of coming out and and they have on the UAP subject.

[54:27] There have been >> including video. >> Including video. Sure. On my very first day at the CIA, my very first question was, "Where's the UFO stuff?" And my new boss laughed and he said, "That's the first question from all of us." And he says, "It's a military issue. Everything's at the Pentagon. Our job is to to recruit spies to steal secrets and analyze the

[54:58] secrets." Well, the reason why I was interested, I I didn't want to come off as a crackpot, of course, right? I'm I'm highly educated. I've had, you know, positions of authority, you know, with with presidents, and I've met with kings and prime ministers, and I'm I like to think I'm a serious person. But when I was 17 years old, my father and I were driving down a very dark highway through what's called Amish country. The Amish uh are you know what the Amish are? They

[55:30] don't use electricity. >> It was very dark. It was about 10:30 at night. We saw a brilliant flash of light followed by a second flash and then a third flash. And I said, "What is that?" We pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and an orange trapezoid lit up in the sky. Not very high, about 1500 ft. It just hovered there, not making a sound, but glowing orange, like pulsing orange.

[56:03] A man pulled up in a car behind us, got out, and he said, "What is that?" And we said, "We didn't know. It was just hovering there." And then it took off at a rate that just defied the laws of physics. We got back in the car and I said to my father, "What do we do? Should we call the police or something?" And he said, "And tell them what? We saw a flying saucer

[56:34] and it flew away. They're going to think we're crazy people." And so we didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody for years except for my mother, but I know what I saw. I'm It was clear what I saw. With that with that as background, as you might expect in a position at the CIA, you are in regular routine contact with with military officials. At the officer level, I've known probably

[57:06] hundreds or at least a hundred pilots over the years, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps. Literally every single one of them have seen something and they've reported it. Most of it is still in classified reporting channels at the Pentagon, but they've all seen something. One of them, one whom I I respect uh greatly, told me he saw one come out of the water in the Atlantic Ocean off

[57:37] the coast of uh of Norfick, Virginia. and he said that what he studied in terms of physics at the Naval Academy did not prepare him to see what he saw with a spaceship flying out of the water. If the CIA is involved, and I strongly believe it is based on multiple independent witnesses who've told me about what the CIA is involved in, if they are involved in essentially

[58:08] colluding to cover up a knowledge of a nonhuman intelligence engaging with this planet, how hard is it to hide a secret like that inside an institution like the CIA? it in many cases it would be very hard because people just have a tendency to to talk. But if there's one thing that the CIA is actually pretty good at, it's compartmentalization.

[58:38] And you can stovepipe information. You can put a a control on it. So for example, you can call it top secret. You call it top secret and a 100,000 people still have access to the information. If you call it top secret, you know, grasshopper, well, then that's a compartment. Maybe only 10 people have access to that and they report directly to the president. So, it's possible to keep a program like that secret. >> What do you think? I'm inviting you to speculate here. What what do you think

[59:08] is a plausible explanation for why the government's tied itself up in knots in the US to effectively deny any knowledge of a non-human intelligence engaging with the planet? The Pentagon's made a formal statement denying categorically that there is any extraterrestrial, they're very careful about the word extraterrestrial engagement with this planet. They won't use the word non-human intelligence. They won't allow us to use to to to change that word with NHI. So, I think

[59:40] that's a really crucial point. Why would they conceal that? Why not just be open? Why not tell the public the truth? >> Well, I think there are two reasons. And and I'm just speculating. I don't have any inside information. But on the one hand, I think that over the course of many years, they hadn't wanted to cause panic. And I think that they believed that if they were to admit that there was some kind of otherworldly

[1:00:11] there were some kind of other worldly beings that had come to to Earth and maybe crashed and we had some of their technology there would have been panic. Um God knows there was panic in the 1950s. But on the other hand, I wonder if they don't want to expose to the Chinese and to the Russians that there is this technology, we have some of it. We're trying to reverse engineer it, which would then

[1:00:44] give the Chinese the opportunity to try to locate where that reverse engineering is taking place and maybe target some of the people working on the program. The the irony is that's what I'm told is the explanation that that essentially it's being driven by a fear of giving foreign adversaries, potential foreign adversaries like Russia and China any kind of inside information. [gasps] And yet people on the inside in the program, people who purport to have knowledge of this recovered technology, tell me that it's actually counterproductive, that

[1:01:16] what the secrecy is doing is hindering the opportunity for the United States to actually gain an advantage because the excessive secrecy, the excessive compartmentalization is actually now blocking what the Russians and the Chinese are achieving. we have another looming intelligence failure is what I'm being told. >> I actually believe that. Um, and I'll draw a comparison. When I when I first

[1:01:46] joined the CIA, I had been in about a year and I was asked if I wanted to I was writing a paper on the on the Iraqi ballistic missile program. So, I was asked if I wanted to go to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and watch the launch of a Titan missile. it was going to be launched from Vandenberg and it was going to come down uh in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Tahiti. I said, "Sure." So, I fly out to Vandenberg Air Force Base. I'm there a couple of days. The launches are always at night. So, I'm standing there in the

[1:02:17] uh in the viewing area and I'm standing next to this guy and I introduce myself. Hi, I'm John from the CIA. He says, "Hi, I'm Igor." With a heavy accent. I said, "Oh, where you from, Igor?" "I'm from Moscow." I said Moscow. And then one of the scientists, one of the American scientists pulled me aside and said, 'We share all this stuff with the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis. Anybody that wants to participate can participate. I said, I really wish you had told me that because I just outed myself to what's probably a KGB officer, [laughter] but

[1:02:48] thanks for the tip. Well, the same thing happens with the weather satellite um program. We launched those not far from Washington uh on a on a small um island strip in the Atlantic uh the Outer Banks of uh Virginia and it's like the United Nations down there. You go down there and there are two dozen scientists from a dozen different countries participating in the launch of these weather satellites. And it's because we we share all this

[1:03:22] information with each other. It makes the programs safer. It makes them more efficient. It advances them more quickly. It only stands to reason that if there were alien craft that were being reverse engineered, it would make more sense to share the information so that we can make better use of it. You've seen the the Twilight Zone episode from the late 1950s where uh the aliens were sharing things like um how

[1:03:54] to grow crops with no water or how to put up invisible barriers on your border so there there can't be any any more uh uh wars. Now, in the end, the aliens were eating us. They were eating humans. But that's beside the the story. The issue was that technology was used for good. And maybe in real life the technology can be used for good. In advance of this interview, John, I spoke to two people who are wrestling from

[1:04:27] within the legacy alien craft retrieval reverse engineering program with the momentous decision about whether they should become whistleblowers. [snorts] And your life experience is a study >> in frankly the pain, the hurt of becoming a whistleblower. You lost your career. I noticed you'd lost your CIA pension.

[1:04:57] >> You went to jail, lost my freedom, lost my wife, lost my children. I lost literally everything in life that was important to me. But with that said, I would do it again tomorrow. I would do it again tomorrow because there's a greater good here. And the advice that I would give the people with whom you're in contact was do it if you feel it needs to be done, but don't say a word until you have an attorney sitting in the chair

[1:05:29] next to you. >> Excellent advice. And by the way, for any whistleblowers out there, the um there are disclosure groups that offer free legal advice for potential whistleblowers on UAPs, you can get in touch with me, the Disclosure Foundation, and a variety of people who are only too happy to provide free legal advice for anyone who's wrestling with that decision to be a whistleblower. John Kuryaku, there was a moment, I presume, where the bad guys moved in and

[1:06:02] started torturing Abu Zabida. >> And did you ever hear his screams? Were you there when he was being tortured? >> I was not there. They approached uh 14 people to ask if they wanted to be, their words, certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. Uh, I'm sorry to say that I was the only one of the 14 who said no. And so I was immediately cut off. In fact, I had just gotten back from Pakistan and I was

[1:06:32] passed over for promotion. I was livid and I barged into the office of the deputy director of counterterrorism who was an old friend of mine. And I said, "What do I have to do to get promoted around here? I have to catch bin Laden." I said, "I caught Abu Zuba with these two hands." and that's not worthy of a promotion. And he said, "Look, I'll be honest with you." He said, "You didn't want to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques, and the chief said that you displayed a shocking lack of commitment

[1:07:03] to counterterrorism." Well, the deputy director of the CIA was somebody for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East, and he really liked me. and he heard that I had been passed over for promotion, so he promoted me out of cycle. >> But you still got screwed, John. >> I did. I did. >> But you'd do it again. >> I would definitely do it again. Definitely do it again. Well, John

[1:07:36] Kuryaki, I can tell you as a journalist who spends my life talking to people who wrestle with that moral decision about whether to come forward, the example that you've shown is exemplary and I want to thank you for the work that you've done and the moral leadership that you've shown >> and I hope other people watching this are inspired by your example. John Kuryaku, thank you so much for joining reality check. an honor to speak with you. >> The pleasure is all mine. Thanks for the invitation.

[1:08:08] >> And before we go, please don't forget to send in your questions for our weekly question and answer. You can email us at realitych checkck@newsnationow.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for watching. Subscribe below and download our NewsNation app right now on your phone and you will get fact-based, unbiased news for all Americans.
