[00:00] [Music] just quickly going to read your little thing I wrote about John today in an op-ed for the daily blog CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou was recruited from the high school that he taught jared leto at in the decades to follow he traveled the world recruited
[00:32] other spies in turn and oversaw operations that captured al-qaeda militants and sent them to Guantanamo Bay eventually ah trains to keep secrets there was one he could not live with his government was torturing people eventually he shared what he knew with his fellow countrymen but tonight he will share it with New Zealand and the world so John please anyway tell us your story about all the messages that you
[01:03] have to give thank you so much for having me for doing this for giving me the opportunity the soapbox I'm happy to do it and I'll apologize for the lighting it's a I have every light on in my in my room and it's still a if you're not light enough anyway um you're right I was I was recruited into the CIA when I was in graduate school I was teaching high school at the time at a private
[01:34] school in Washington DC and as it turned out my graduate school adviser was a CIA officer undercover as a graduate school adviser and he was the one who recruited me into the agency I had never really considered the CIA but I was getting ready to graduate and I didn't have a job I was getting married soon after graduation I really needed the work and the idea of seeing the world was
[02:06] exciting to me and so I said sure I'll go through the process so I did I went through the process God hired started on the first of January 1990 and started working as an analyst so really I was sitting in a cubicle thinking the big thoughts writing writing papers for the president the vice-president the secretaries of state and defense the National Security Advisor and that was great it was a lot of fun
[02:37] for a while and then I got bored went overseas also as an analyst to the Middle East learned to speak Arabic and then went back to headquarters again in 1997 again I was bored and so into not not 2000 in 1998 I made a very unusual switch from analysis to counterterrorism operations and and went overseas as a as an Operations Officer like actually
[03:09] trying to infiltrate terrorist groups and either disrupt future attacks or break up the group and found that I had a knack for it it was dangerous certainly but it was interesting it was fun it was important and so I decided well maybe I found my my place my niche I went back to CIA headquarters after serving overseas in 2000 and
[03:44] September 11th hit in 2001 that changed everything at the CIA as it turned out the CIA after 2001 returned to its roots the CIA that I had come of age in was not the real CIA the real CIA was one that that requires great oversight and one that that is constantly pushing the bounds of morals and ethics and legality
[04:16] but I was as angry as every other American on September 11th and I volunteered certainly a good Afghanistan and fight or do whatever was necessary what I ended up doing was I was sent to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations there and it was in that job that in early 2002 I led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah whom the CIA believed at the time was the number three in al-qaeda and many dozens I'm
[04:49] not allowed to say the exact number but many dozens of al-qaeda fighters at and safe houses all over Pakistan well I had occasion after capturing up as a beta to have a long conversation with him in fact I am i sat with him for 54 consecutive hours after his capture he was very upset as you could imagine he cried a lot he said that he would never
[05:20] know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood and I said listen you are not the victim here there were 50,000 people in those towers what did you think we were going to do did you think we weren't going to try to find you to capture you or to find her or kill bin Laden and he said that he never wanted to attack the United States on September 11th he wanted to attack Israel he said all he ever wanted to do was to kill Jews and I said listen I am
[05:53] the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience my colleagues are not as nice as I am so if there's one thing that you do it's that you should cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate I said suit yourself later that night a CI a private jet flew in three FBI
[06:23] agents and I loaded him onto the plane he asked me to hold his hand the whole time and I wished him the best of luck and I never saw him again well two months later I returned to CIA headquarters and on the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture I had been promoted and I was named the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations and it was in that capacity that I had access to literally everything in the CIA every operation every sensitive compartment everything
[06:56] and it was in that position that I realized that we had initiated this torture program now I I was in the cafeteria one day and a former colleague from the CIA's Counterterrorism Center approached me and said hey I'm glad I ran into you do you have any interest in being and these were his words certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard the term before so I asked him what it meant and he said very
[07:27] excitedly we're gonna start getting rough with these guys and I said well what does that mean and then he delineated these ten torture techniques and I said well that sounds like a torture program I said I think I have a moral problem with that and I declined well as it turned out of the fourteen people that they approached asking if they wanted to be trained in these torture techniques I was the only one who said no that was a source of
[07:59] great disappointment for me but I kept my mouth shut I left the CIA two years later and still kept my mouth shut but then in late 2007 I couldn't live with the administration's lies anymore it seemed like every time I turned on the television President Bush was denying that there was a torture program and the CIA's director at the time and and directors after him George Tenet were all denying that there was a torture program and I knew that that was a lie I
[08:30] knew that they were lying to the American people and I believe in transparency I believe that the American people have a right to know what their country is doing in their name and so I decided in December of 2007 that I was going to blow the whistle on this program and I gave a nationally televised interview to ABC News in which I did exactly that I said three things
[09:02] three things that have utterly changed the course of the rest of my life I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners I said that torture was official US government policy it was not the result of a rogue as President Bush had said and I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the President himself as you can imagine within 24 hours the FBI began investigating me and this is where the story in my view becomes very
[09:36] sad it becomes unamerican the FBI investigated me for a full year from December 2007 to December 2008 and they decided at the end of that investigation that I had not committed a crime that the interview was not a crime because the information was not inherently classified and so they closed the investigation four weeks later Barack
[10:07] Obama was inaugurated as president of the United States Barack Obama the self-described most transparent president in history and I should preface this by saying that I believed in the whole hope change slogan of the Obama campaign not just that I worked on the Obama campaign I took my children to the inauguration so they could see this historic moment when when for the first time in history
[10:37] an african-american man had become president I mean this was an incredible moment for America but what I did not know was that as soon as he became president the CIA asked Barack Obama to secretly reopen the case against me which he did I had no idea that I was under investigation I had no idea that the FBI was intercepting my phone calls and was reading my emails and had teams
[11:08] of surveillance on me and so I went about my regular business so what was my regular business well believe it or not John Kerry who at the time was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called me and invited me to join the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff as the chief investigator investigating waste fraud abuse and illegality in the State Department and so I took that job again having no idea that I was under FBI investigation for what became five
[11:41] felony charges the FBI investigated me for three more years and finally in January of 2012 I was charged with these five felonies including three counts of espionage espionage is one of the gravest crimes with which an American can be charged and frequently it carries with it the death penalty for telling the American people that the CIA was torturing its prisoners now
[12:11] there's something that happened in the interim and I had no idea the significance of it until this whole thing was over one of the great things the most wonderful things about working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is that you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time and you know you get together for lunch you talk about the events of the day whatever happens to be in the paper you talk about diplomacy I got a call one day a totally normal and routine call
[12:44] from a Japanese diplomat it was the number three in the Japanese Embassy in Washington and he invited me to lunch so we went to a small restaurant on Capitol Hill and I remember the lunch as being delightful I remember we talked about Israeli elections and Turkish elections and the arab-israeli peace process and at the end of the lunch he said to me so what's next for you and I said well I'm actually thinking of resigning from the
[13:15] Senate Foreign Relations Committee I promised senator Kerry that I would give him two years it's been two and a half and I think I'd like to go into business for myself I have five kids I need to start saving some money for college I think I'd like to go into the private sector and very excitedly he said no don't do that if you give me information I can give you money and I said what's wrong with you do you have any idea how
[13:45] many times I've made that pitch in my career shame on you I told him I ended the lunch and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer and I said I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer and he said oh is it that damn Russian again and I said no no it's it's a Japanese of all things and he said really a Japanese okay he said well sometimes they like to see what we're doing
[14:16] visa vie trade and then he asked me to write it up as a memo he was going to send it to the FBI I said fine so I sat there in his office and I wrote up the memo he sent it to the FBI and then called me the next day and said two FBI agents were going to come and interview me so they finally came up came to my office and said okay here's what we want you to do we want you to call him back and we want you to try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to
[14:48] pay for it I said okay do you want me to wear a wire or something and they said no we're gonna be at the next table and we'll just listen to the conversation I said fine so the morning of that lunch they called me and said that something had come up I should just go forward with the lunch and write them another memo so I met with this guy a second time and then they asked me to meet with him a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time which I did because I'm a patriot well I wrote up these memos
[15:22] after each lunch and finally in the fifth lunch he said that he had been promoted he had been transferred to his dream job and he was going to be the number two in the Japanese embassy in Cairo a year after that last lunch I was arrested and we received discovery from the Justice Department now discovery is when the prosecution has to turn over to the defense literally everything that it's collected so that the defense can
[15:53] use that to defend itself in this discovery we found a series of memos the first indicated that there never was any Japanese diplomat he was an FBI agent undercover and he was trying to get me to commit real espionage and I asked my lead attorney why would they do such a thing and he said because they have a case and they know it's a case I
[16:26] hadn't committed espionage I had blown the whistle fair and square I told the American people what they had a right to know well we also received three memos between the CIA and the Justice Department the CIA wrote to the Justice Department and said charged him with espionage the Justice Department wrote back and said but he hasn't committed espionage and the CIA wrote back and said charge him anyway and make him
[16:57] defend himself and that was the Obama administration now the Espionage Act here in the United States was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during the first world war between 1917 and 2009 it was used to charge three Americans with espionage for talking to the press just under the Obama administration eight Americans were
[17:30] charged with espionage for speaking to the press the Obama administration used the Espionage Act as an iron fist to stamp out dissent now I was a guy who always colored within the lines I was nobody special either there was nothing unusual about me in any way I'm just a guy I'm just a normal guy but one of the things that so grossly disappointed me was that I was
[18:04] the only one who said something you know there were hundreds of people inside the CIA who knew about this torture program hundreds we now know from the Senate torture report that people inside were objecting to it they were writing cables back from the secret prison saying this is awful this is disgusting a couple of them curtailed their assignments which means they asked to return to headquarters
[18:34] it's a career-ending move but not a single one of them said something publicly even worse than that not a single one of them ever said anything to the Senate or House Intelligence Committee the oversight committees I was the only one who did that was a source of great disappointment for me well in the end Kim and I were talking about this off camera a few minutes ago
[19:06] and I had to defend myself against these five felony charges I was facing 45 years in prison and over the course of ten months our negotiations had brought the Justice Department down to ten years they wanted me to do ten years in a federal penitentiary this was what they called their best and final offer and I turned it down and I said two things I said first of all I haven't done anything wrong
[19:37] and because I haven't done anything wrong I'm not doing ten minutes let alone ten years in prison secondly I'm a very longtime former CIA officer and in my 15 years in the CIA I witnessed hideous crimes against humanity war crimes and I'm going to have to testify in my own defense and I might accidentally say something about these horrible crimes that I've
[20:09] witnessed my colleagues perpetrate over the years and it might slip out in the course of my my testimony and so the CIA came back and said all right dude two and a half years you'll end up serving under two I actually turned that down and then one of my eleven attorneys the one who I liked and respected the most pulled me aside and said you just
[20:40] don't get it this isn't about innocence or guilt this is about cutting your losses this is about inflicting the least amount of pain on yourself and your family it doesn't matter whether you did it or didn't do it the federal government wins ninety eight point two percent of its cases according to ProPublica and he said if you were my brother I would beg you to take this deal so I'm begging you
[21:11] take the deal he said this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life you can be home early enough that your children won't even remember you were gone or you can get out when your children are in college and so I took the deal it becomes an economic decision with that said I would do the whole damn thing over again somebody had to say something
[21:43] transparency is real it's important a democracy can't function without transparency and again the American people have a right to know what their government is doing in their name and so I'm glad that I said something I'm glad that I said something I'm glad that I have continued to say something it's cost me my marriage my wife left three months ago she said it's just too much work to be mrs. John Kiriakou to tell
[22:16] you the truth I don't blame her but I had to do the right thing and this was the price that that we all have to pay it was all worth it thanks for listening you