[00:00] Welcome to Radio Who, what, why. I'm Jeff Shman. I think it's safe to say that every institution of government today is in chaos. Departments are understaffed. The State Department is hollowed out. Cabinet secretaries are either apologizing for themselves or the president, or they're traveling the world trying to reassure allies and adversaries. But few government institutions are in the kind of direct conflict, almost open hostility with the administration as the intelligence community and the CIA. From his botched
[06:45] really the original mission of the CIA, which was really pretty much analytical and intelligence gathering. That's right. The I I say this all the time. It It's actually quite simple what the CIA is supposed to do. The CIA is supposed to recruit spies to steal secrets and then analyze those secrets to pass the analysis to policymakers so that they can make the best informed policy. And now that's actually very little of what the CIA does. Now there are these
[07:16] paramilitary units that are parachuting or helicoptering into remote locations to kill people or to kidnap people. Uh we know just recently from Wikileaks that there's now this huge uh cyber espionage uh uh directorate or division, whatever it is, uh that's that's targeting the iPhone and and the Android phone and the Samsung smart TV and and even our cars, the computers in our cars. That's not the CIA that I joined
[07:48] and I don't think that's the CIA that Congress had in mind when it created the organization. How much was this and all of this activity the creation of the CIA itself and how much was molded by whatever administration was in power? Well, I I think that the CIA really wasn't necessarily molded administration to administration except for a couple of exceptions. Uh the CIA went a little
[08:20] well the CIA went a lot over the top during the Johnson administration let's say um but more in more modern times um I have to be careful how I say this because I don't want to put point too many fingers and get myself in trouble again. I I'll say it this way. In in my lifetime in my career the CIA was really not a political or politicized organization. I had no idea the political affiliation or inclinations of
[08:51] of the people sitting next to me or the people I worked for. Politics never came up. It was never discussed. I remember one time uh in 1996 a woman in my office got in trouble because she had a Bob Dole bumper sticker on her desk. She was ordered to remove it. Uh and so politics just never played a role in day-to-day life at the CIA until September 11th. And then it became very political and very politicized. It was actually worse
[09:22] under the Obama administration than it was under the George W. Bush administration. And I think that that's really the genesis of this fight that we're now seeing between the CIA and the Trump White House. How did it become more politicized specifically during the Obama years? Obama was very good at cultivating people inside the CIA. You know, one of the things that's funny to me is the CIA prides itself on its ability to recruit uh and I I use that in quotes to recruit
[09:54] new presidents. What they do is especially when a president really has little or no national security background or experience like Barack Obama, they start briefing him as soon as he's elected president. And I can tell you as soon as that new president sees his first blue border report or black border report, something that's so highly classified it has to have a blank cover page. It's classified at a level several several levels above top secret.
[10:25] That's heady stuff. And then they do the briefing and they say, "Mr. President-elect, we want to tell you about all the cool things we're doing around the world." Well, once they've let that president in on all the secrets, they've recruited him and he's one of the guys. He's a part of the club. They did that with Barack Obama. But Obama was smart, too. And Obama began sending people to the CIA that he knew were political loyalists. You know, John Brennan was one. John Brennan was
[10:55] supposed to be the first CIA director uh under Obama, but progressives objected. Don't forget that John Brennan was the number three at the CIA under George W. Bush and was up to his neck in the torture program even though he denied it later. Uh there was nothing progressive about John Brennan. So Obama knew he could wait out the liberals and that's exactly what he did. Uh as soon as he won re-election, he named John Brennan CIA director and nobody objected by then. At the same time, Brennan brought
[11:26] his own people in and they too were Obama loyalists. they had owed their careers to Obama. The next thing you know, you have this politicized leadership at the CIA when the CIA is supposed to be nonpartisan, apolitical. Um, and frankly, I don't think we saw that kind of politization of the agency since the Reagan administration when when U. Casey brought in businessmen, Wall Street friends of his to be the deputy director and deputy director for
[11:56] operations. To what extent then is the CIA shaped by and and each administration differently shaped by the impact of of the president and the director that he appoints? It normally shouldn't be but uh but it is now. See the the president will appoint a director and a deputy director. the deputy director is almost always either a career officer or a military officer because and again, especially since September 11th, there are these military
[12:28] programs and and military and paramilitary offices. So, it's it's probably wise to have somebody with military experience to advise you. And it's my experience that it's the military guys, it's the generals who are the least likely to use military force because they know how terrible war can be. Um but that's that's changed now. Now you have presidents like Obama appointing the the director the deputy director and then appointing the divisional deputy directors the deputy
[13:00] director for operations for for uh intelligence which is analysis for science and technology. um and and it becomes more political than at a lower level that is going to eventually trickle down and the end result unfortunately is going to be the politization of analysis which is very difficult or I'm sorry which is very which is a very bad thing. Um and let me add one more thing about the politization of intelligence. One of the golden rules at the CIA when I was an
[13:32] analyst was that you could never ever make a policy recommendation, right? We were not a policy-making organization. We were an intelligence gathering and analysis organization. And so your job was to give the president the news, put it into context so he can make a policy decision. George W. Bush changed that and mandated that every article that ran in the president's daily brief had to also have a policy recommendation paragraph. That was a very dangerous
[14:03] development and it it insinuated the CIA into the policym process which should have been the domain of just the white house and the state department. And did those recommendations continue during the Obama years? they did in the beginning uh through Obama's first uh term and it's my understanding that they've finally gone by the wayside but in the meantime you have all these Obama loyalists that are there and so the effect I think is the same and which brings us to to the present situation
[14:34] and what the impact is today. One of the things that has been kind of amusing to me about this whole fight between Trump and the CIA is I think most Americans have consistently underestimated Donald Trump. We we think he's a buffoon. We think he's insane. We think he's short-tempered. And in fact, he probably has had a longer term view and and he fooled a lot of us. Well, I think that Donald Trump has underestimated the CIA. You know, the CIA has worked for
[15:05] presidents who didn't like it in the past. Bill Clinton was no fan of the CIA. Jimmy Carter certainly was no fan of the CIA. And John Kennedy was legendary. John Kennedy wanted to break up the CIA into a million pieces. It's a shame he didn't have the opportunity to do it. Um, and I think Donald Trump thought that he could just snap his fingers and and point and people would fall into line. That's just not the way the CIA works. you know, the at the working level, most CIA officers when
[15:36] once you get up to a position of, let's say, GS-15 or higher, you get into the senior intelligence service, you've been there for 20, 25, 30 years, and you know, you can wait out this president. You know, this guy's only going to be around for four years or 8 years. And uh you've weeded out other presidents in the past. And I think that's exactly what what the CIA is doing now. They know that Trump's not going to be around forever and they will be around forever and they're just going to wait him out. Some of it though is goes beyond waiting
[16:07] out. Some of it is really pushing back. A lot of it is pushing back. You know, there are several things besides just waiting that the CIA can do. The CIA can elect to, for example, not carry out covert action programs um ordered by the president. they can just say that it's not possible or that it's too dangerous or it they just don't have the manpower for it. And so if the president wants to enact a certain policy, the CIA can essentially just say no, they're not going to do that. Um I've seen that
[16:39] happen in the past. U the CIA can also elect to not target uh uh the top spy prospects. Um they and they can do that to try to embarrass the president. Let's say you need a you need a a source inside XYZ terrorist group. You know, why take the risk? It's just going to make the president look good. And so, you don't do that. And then, you know, when there's another attack, god forbid, it's on this president's watch and the buck has to stop there. You predicted
[17:11] that the CIA was going to have some influence and play some kind of a role behind the scenes in getting rid of Michael Flynn. Talk about that. I did. Um, I'm actually impressed that you uh that you know that um Michael Flynn was one of the most wildly unpopular people uh that I've ever encountered uh in the intelligence community. He didn't like the CIA. The CIA didn't like him. They didn't trust him. Uh he was the director
[17:42] of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is sort of seen as the the poor the poor second cousin of the CIA. Uh there there used to be a kind of a a mean-spirited joke that the only people who worked at DIA were people who couldn't make it through the CIA hiring process. And so there was always this animosity between Flynn and um and the agency. And then all of a sudden, with the stroke of a pen, after Donald Trump is elected president, uh, Flynn is named
[18:14] national security adviser, which gives him primacy over the CIA. The CIA was not going to allow that to happen. And I can't help but to think that so many of these leaks that we're hearing about, you know, coordination with the Russians or whatever the leaks are, I can't help but think that they aren't coming out of the CIA. And to what extent do you think the CIA was involved in this whole dossier that that Clapper presented to the president and all the things surrounding that?
[18:45] Yeah. That had CIA written all over it. The the British officer who compiled the dossier um Christopher Steele uh is an MI6 officer. MI6 is the is the sister organization the the liison organization of the CIA. It's MI6 that CIA normally deals with just like FBI normally deals with both MI5 in the UK and Scotland Yard. So no MI6 officer, past or present, would initiate such a such a dossier, such an investigation without
[19:16] the direct input of the CIA. I I think that the CIA's fingerprints were all over that whole operation. And and Christopher Steel, who you knew, talk a little bit about what what his involvement might have been. Yeah, I I actually worked with Christopher Steele nearly 20 years ago on Greek terrorism after the assassination of the British defense ates in Athens. I found I found him to be an absolutely outstanding officer, smart, suave, analytic,
[19:47] accomplished, truly good at his job. So, whoever hired him to do this investigation and to compile this dossier knew exactly the kind of person that they needed to carry this out and they knew to go to the best. Well, who would know such a thing other than the CIA because they they had worked with him for many many years. What do you make of these uh Wikileaks documents that came out yesterday about the CIA's hacking efforts?
[20:18] I I spent most of the day going through these documents and although they were they were written certainly many years after I left the agency, they they appear to me to be legitimate uh uh documents, CIA documents. Um I'm worried most about the CIA spying on American citizens. It it made me just sick to my stomach to see that the CIA had cracked the iPhone. They had cracked the Google Android. They had cracked the Samsung
[20:48] smart TV and apparently had even cracked the uh the computers that are in our cars now that that should sometime in the near future allow us to uh to have um automated driving. Uh look, I I want I want a robust intelligence service in this country to protect American citizens. I want an intelligence service that we can trust and that we can have confidence in. Uh, I don't want to have to worry about my intelligence service spying on me or on
[21:20] other American citizens. That's unconstitutional. It's illegal and it's not something Americans should have to worry about, unfortunately, because there is literally no congressional oversight of the CIA. That's exactly what we have to worry about. We have to worry about the CIA spying on us. What do we know about Mike Pompeo and what we might expect from him? Well, I have a I have a very close friend who uh has briefed Mike Pompeo more than a dozen times, and this was before Pompeo became the CIA director.
[21:52] And he said to me, "Pompeo's domestic politics aside, uh this is actually a very bright guy. This is a guy with no real political ties to Donald Trump. It's a guy who's a patriot and uh who wants to do the right thing with the agency." That made me happy until he named Gina Haspel as the CIA's deputy director. Uh I I don't like Mike Pompeo's domestic politics, but again, his position on abortion, for example, has nothing to do with his
[22:23] ability to lead the CIA. I'm perfectly happy to put that aside. It's my understanding that he's an excellent manager and that he's a good leader, but I think that he just doesn't understand. for example, that something like torture is patently illegal in this country and it's not something that we should be pursuing. So, I think the jury is still out over the long term. Which brings us around to your situation. And for our listeners that don't know, talk a little
[22:54] bit about what you went through. Well, when I returned from Pakistan uh in 2002, I should add in Pakistan, I led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of Abu Zuba and many dozens of al-Qaeda fighters. I'm not allowed to say the exact number. Um, we believed at the time that Abu Zuba was the number three in al-Qaeda. That turned out to not be true. Although he was a bad guy, he had never actually joined al-Qaeda. So, I got back to headquarters in the
[23:26] middle of 2002 and was asked by a senior officer in the counterterrorism center if I wanted to be what he called certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. Uh, I had never heard that term before and I asked him what he meant and he described to me um these 10 techniques and I said that sounds like a torture program. I don't think I want to be a part of that. But I said give me an hour. Let me think about it. And in that hour, I went up to the CIA's seventh floor, the executive
[23:56] floor, and uh consulted with a very senior CIA officer for whom I had worked in the Middle East a decade earlier. And I said, "What do you think about this?" And he said, "First, let's call it what it is. It's a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program. Second, torture is a slippery slope, and you know how these guys are, my colleagues." He said, "Somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner and then there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department
[24:26] investigation and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?" I said, "No, I don't want to go to prison." And ironically, I'm the only one who went to prison. But I said, "No." And I went back downstairs and I told the CTC officer, "This is a torture program and I don't want any part of it." Well, that was in May of 2002. On August 1st, 2002, the CIA began to torture Abu Zuba. And this torture was merciless. We've made a lot about waterboarding and what a terrible uh torture technique waterboarding is. But
[24:57] there were things that were worse than waterboarding in my view. Things like sleep deprivation. You know, people begin to lose their their minds around day seven of of sleep deprivation and they begin to die at day nine. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake as long as 12 days. Um, indeed, there's one Guantanamo defendant who's unable to participate in his own defense because he lost his mind through the use of sleep deprivation. Another technique was
[25:28] called the cold cell where a prisoner is stripped naked and he's chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling. So, he can't kneel or sit. He can't get into any comfortable position. The cell is chilled to 50° F and then every hour someone goes in and throws a bucket of ice water on him. We killed people using that technique. But the torturers were never prosecuted. The the people who went overboard and who killed the prisoners were never prosecuted. The the
[25:58] CIA CIA officer who destroyed taped evidence of the torture was never prosecuted. the lawyers who came up with it, you know, who who used specious legal arguments to justify it, the pro the uh psychologists who who invented it, no, nobody was ever prosecuted. In fact, we have very specific laws in this country. We have the 1946 torture act which specifically outlawed the techniques that we used against prisoners post 911. And the United States is not just a
[26:29] signatory but was the drafter of the international convention against torture uh which has primacy over US law. Uh both of those laws outlawed torture. And I'll add one more thing. In 1946, the US government executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. That was an executable offense in 1946. And in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier
[27:01] waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. That soldier, that American was prosecuted. He was convicted of torture and he was sentenced to 20 years in a military prison. Well, the law never changed between 1946 and now. So all I conclude is that we changed and we decided that this was the kind of people that we wanted to be to allow this kind of of abomination as part of our policy. Well, I decided in
[27:33] in 2007 after keeping my mouth shut for a long time that uh that I would go public and that's what I did in an interview with ABC News. And were you the only one? Were there others that felt as you did that didn't come forward or were there others that just went along? To tell you the truth, in 2002, um I was the only one 14 of us were asked if we wanted to be trained in these torture techniques and I was the only one who said no. I there was this feeling of of vengeance. You know, we we
[28:05] were still so traumatized by 9/11 that people wanted revenge on on al-Qaeda. Uh but we know now from the Senate torture report primarily that there were people who were objecting internally. Uh a couple of them even cretailed their their assignments at the secret prison where Abu Zubedo was being tortured and they went back to headquarters which is a careerending decision but nobody ever went public. Even after the Senate torture report was released nobody went
[28:35] public. John Keryaku thank you so much for spending time with us here on radio. Who? What? Why? Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on Radio Who Why. I hope you join us next week for another Radio Who Why podcast. I'm Jeff Sheckchman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whoy.org/donate.