[00:00] Welcome to Foresight. My guest is John Curiacco. He's the author of three books of which you can see behind us. John comes to us at a very difficult time in our country. John, if anything exemplifies what we seem to be lacking, not only in our politicians, but in our media,
[00:33] in our schools sometimes, in our just general daily process of life. And that is honesty, patriotism and dealing with very, very difficult subjects. I asked John to be here today to enlighten us a little bit about the three books that he's already written. But I mostly asked him to be able to speak of who he is and what constitutes a person
[01:04] who would put himself in his life and his loved ones at jeopardy. And that is not what we normally think of people doing. But there are those out there, there are those people, both men and women who do that, who jeopardize everything for truth and honesty. John, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. It is indeed a pleasure. So as we were saying earlier, what I'd like you to do is just to pick your first book,
[01:35] which I believe is The Red Lucked in Spy, and sort of give us a praisey of what the story is about. Sure. And we'll just go through each one like that, and then we'll get to more fun things afterwards. Sounds good. The first book is The Red Lucked in Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. I was in the CIA from January of 1990 until mid-2004. The first half of my career was in analysis, Middle Eastern analysis focused
[02:06] almost solely on Iraq before most Americans had ever heard of Iraq. And the second half of my career was in counter-terrorism operations at first, and it's kind of quaint now, but first targeting European communist terrorist groups. And then of course, like everybody else in the intelligence community, moving on to al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups. I left the CIA in 2004 and went into the private sector. After I left the CIA, I waited for somebody, anybody, to reveal the existence of the torture
[02:45] program, which I believed to be illegal, immoral, unethical, certainly. And nobody said anything. And you didn't just come to that conclusion that it was more illegal. I mean, there were already written pages of why that was not a legal thing to do. Oh, very clearly written pages. From, what is it, Nuremberg? That's right. From Nuremberg. In 1946, Congress passed a law called the Federal Torture Act. And it banned specifically the kinds of techniques that we were using
[03:20] against al-Qaeda prisoners. In January of 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese, North Vietnamese prisoner. The day that that photo was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture,
[03:54] convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth. Well, the law never changed. We changed. So why was waterboarding an executable offense in 1946 punishable by 20 years at hard labor in 1968, and then suddenly, as if by magic, perfectly legal in 2002? I knew it wasn't legal. In Robert McNamara, the one who was responsible for the Vietnam War, who would later write a book.
[04:26] That's right. Begging forgiveness. Begging forgiveness for that. Yes, you're exactly right. A notorious figure in modern American history. But even he knew that this was a bridge too far. It was just too illegal, too obviously, and clearly illegal. Well, the Bush administration decided that it wasn't illegal, and that we were going to use it, and we were going to use it with frequency, which we did. It was finally again made illegal with passage of the McCain-Feinstein
[04:58] amendment in the summer of 2015. And the issue, aside from being a humanitarian fault, was, I think McCain's attitude was because he had gone through the torture himself, that what we would be doing was we would say, well, this is okay. So if we thought it was okay, then other people would do the same. Precisely. We like to present ourselves to other countries as a shining beacon of human rights and civil rights and civil liberties,
[05:35] and we're not. So we either- That's a hard truth. Will be, yeah. That's a very hard truth. We either will be or we won't be. One of the complaints I had when I was at the CIA surrounded the State Department's annual Human Rights Report. Congress mandated in 1978 that every American embassy in the world write a Human Rights Report every year on the country that is hosting us, right? So in every country where we have diplomatic relations around the world, we write a Human Rights Report, and that report goes to Congress
[06:08] annually. So imagine you're the State Department Human Rights Officer, which I was for two years in Bahrain, 1995 and 96, and you go into the Minister of Interior's Office and you tell him your Excellency, you cannot just pick up a 15-year-old boy and torture him to death, and then call his parents the next day to come and pick up the body. That's an extra judicial killing. It's a violation of the law and you can't do it, and I have to put it in the Human Rights Report. And then 15 minutes later, a CIA officer comes in to meet with
[06:41] a minister and he says, don't pay any attention to what that State Department guy said. We want you to open a secret prison for us so we can bring prisoners here and torture them, and nobody will know about it. It completely undercuts our international moral authority. So when we go to other countries and we say, you need to respect human rights, they laugh at us because they know that we don't respect human rights. Yeah, respect begets respect. And it damages the country. Right, right.
[07:12] So either we're going to observe and respect international law or we're not, but we can't do both. Being respecting the international laws of which we are responsible for having written. I said earlier today in a talk at Hamilton Hall that we were the drafters of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. And then we say, well, we don't like this UN Convention Against Torture because it won't let us do what we want to do. We wrote the law. Right. It's kind of like the treaties back in the 17...
[07:43] That's right. The Indian treaties. That's right. So what I found fascinating within the realms of the first book was what you had to go through in order to get into the CIA. One of the things that I thought was fascinating was at that time, very few other Asians spoke Arabic. They couldn't even... And still very few people speak Arabic. So you took it upon yourself to learn the language. Yes. And so you're trialing. You speak Greek, you speak English, and you speak Arabic.
[08:15] Yes. So when people saw you coming down said, yeah, we need him. Well, when I made the decision to switch over from analysis to operations, I saw a job advertised in Athens. It was a counter-terrorism officer's job. And it said either Greek or English, I'm sorry, either Greek or Arabic preferred, not mandatory, either Greek or Arabic preferred. So I found out who was responsible for hiring and I made an appointment. I went down to see him and I said, listen, I'm an analyst and I don't know the first
[08:48] thing about operations. But I speak Greek and Arabic fluently, both of them. He said, get out of here. And I said, no, really. No, you don't really, right? Well, as it turned out, I was one of only two people in the entire CIA who had those two languages. And the other one was a language teacher. So I said, I know I'm not qualified for this job, but I'd like to throw my hat in. He said, listen, it's way easier and way cheaper for me to hire a linguist and teach him operations than it is for me to take an operations officer
[09:22] and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. And so I got the job. So I wonder that persists today where there are still so few people who understand the language. Well, they go through these fits and starts where we need to go out and hire as many Arabic speakers as we can. But then many Arabic speakers are either first-generation Americans or they are refugees who became Americans. And so they have trouble with the polygraph or with the background exam and they end up not getting hired. So what has happened at the CIA
[09:54] is now a plurality of the Arabic speakers are Arab Christians. mostly Lebanese, Coptic Egyptians, who have the language don't have the counterintelligence problems that might be associated with someone from those countries. They get hired, but then they have this innate bias against Muslims in their own country. And so it's kind of hard to use them operationally because they're hard to control. Exactly.
[10:24] So the evening upon the capture, this is the part where I was, you know, I couldn't put the book down. I mean, okay, all right. So give us a little bit about the build up. I mean, I know you were in charge of the money. You were the one who went out and said, okay, well, in order to go through this whole thing, we need to have a building where we can work out of. We may need two buildings. So you go out and you survey the place and get everything down, and then you make that
[10:57] part of it happen. Yes. And of course, the other part of the story that I love is when you get lost on the way back. For the life of me, I couldn't find the hotel. Yeah. I mean, you know, amongst all the seriousness of what you're going through, all right, where's the McDonald's that we can see? I forgot about that, actually. I'll tell that. I forgot all about it. In January of 2002, I was named Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan, big job. This was an opportunity to prove myself, to serve the country, and to exact justice
[11:32] against the people who had killed so many Americans on 9-11. So I went to Islamabad, Pakistan, which is the capital, and took up my job at the embassy there. When I first arrived, on my first day, the senior CIA officer in country told me that what he wanted me to do was to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house. I had no idea how to take down an al-Qaeda safe house.
[12:04] I went back to the office with a legal pad, and I wrote, safe house, take down. And I thought, okay, so if I were going to take down a safe house, what would I do? Well, I would want it to be dark, because I wouldn't want anybody to see me. And so I wrote at the top of the page, 0-200, figuring everybody's asleep by two o'clock in the morning. And then I thought, well, I need battering rams. So we're going to order some battering rams. From a catalog, it's a police supply catalog, www.galls.com.
[12:36] You can buy anything you want. So we ordered a few cases of battering rams. And I thought, well, we break down the door. We separate the men from the women and children. And then we take the men to jail. And we can interrogate them, either jail or a safe house. So we tried it one night. We had a tip with an address, and we broke down the door at two o'clock. And there was a 19-year-old Tunisian kid in there, just started crying, asked if he could call his mom. And we said, no, you can't.
[13:08] And we took him to the jail in Raul Pindi and interrogated him there. And we sent him to Guantanamo. And I thought, wow, that was easy enough. So we said, well, let's try it again. And an Egyptian intelligence officer handed me a slip of paper with an address on it. So I said, OK, we'll try it again. We broke down the door at 2 a.m. Two guys from Egyptian Islamic jihad were in there. We grabbed them, interrogated them, put them on a plane to Guantanamo. I said, well, this job's easy.
[13:40] But then I got a call one weekend that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan and that we had to catch him. We had to take him alive. Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was the director of logistics for al-Qaeda. So if you needed a fake passport, if you needed a safe house, if you needed to get back to your home country or to sneak into Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah was your guy. He founded both of al-Qaeda's training centers, training camps in southern Afghanistan and Kandahar province. And he also founded the al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan called the House of Martyrs.
[14:15] So this is a bad man, a bad guy. But you can't just say he's somewhere in Pakistan, go catch him. Because Pakistan is the size of Texas and it has more than 200 million people in it. And we knew from our NSA friends that he was constantly moving between cities, constantly. And so we were hot on his trail, but we were always a day or two or three behind. Later on when we finally captured him, we also captured his diary.
[14:48] And he knew that we were on him. That's why he was moving so frequently. And he would write these passages, I just made it out ahead of the Americans. They got to the house the next day, thanks to God I will continue to fight on and on and on. Sounds like cat and mouse. That's exactly what it was. It was cat and mouse. So clearly my ideas to capture him were not working. And so I asked headquarters to send me a targeting analyst.
[15:21] A targeting analyst is an unusual character at the CIA. Most analysts sit in these cubicles. They think the big thoughts, they're experts on these obscure issues or on a country. They write papers for the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor. A targeting analyst is completely different. He would take thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of pieces of information and pour
[15:53] through them, a lot of its metadata, to try to figure out a person's location. Now why do you want to know these locations? You want to capture this guy, you want to kill the guy, you want to fire a rocket from a drone at the guy, whatever. You have to locate this one person. Now everybody makes mistakes. Bin Laden finally made a mistake. Abu Zabeda certainly made mistakes. They all make mistakes. And in the meantime, you're recruiting human assets in the area, in that click
[16:26] of people. An asset being someone who could give you information. That's right. We call those people agents. We call ourselves officers. So you're recruiting agents to report back to you that Muhammad Abdullah is over here in this house and Abdul Rashid is over here at this house and then you can kick down the door and take them. So we chased Abu Zabeda all over the place. The analyst finally came. He worked tirelessly, 18 hours a day, just writing on this giant piece of paper,
[16:59] writing information from the metadata that helped us to narrow the possible locations for Abu Zabeda. He finally came to me and said, I can't narrow it down to fewer than 14 possible locations. But we had never done more than two raids before in a night, ever. We had never hit certainly 14 places simultaneously at two o'clock in the morning. So I asked headquarters to send me a plane full of people, pallets of weapons, communications
[17:30] gear, walkie-talkies. Another building. Yeah. Two million dollars in cash that I bought two buildings with. Just everything we needed. More battering rams. And they came. And so we decided we were going to divide up into teams. I bought two safe houses, one in Faisalabad, one in a nearby city that I'm not allowed to name, that was two hours east. Yes. They let me say it's a giant city, two hours east, and there's only one city, two hours east. So anyway, yeah, stupid rules.
[18:05] So on March the 22nd, 2002, we hit 14 sites simultaneously. I'm not allowed to say the number of al-Qaeda fighters that we caught, it was many dozens. Then in one of those houses was Abu Zubaydah, his bodyguard, and an al-Qaeda bomb maker. In another house we caught both of the commanders of the two al-Qaeda training camps. And Abu Zubaydah was shot trying to escape.
[18:36] He was jumping from the roof of his safe house to the roof of the neighboring house. A Pakistani policeman shot him with an AK-47, hit him in the thigh, the groin in the stomach, nearly killed him. We rushed him to a hospital, it was a gruesome scene, but they were able to save his life. Let's jump ahead a little bit if we could, because we sort of know what is eventually going to happen to some degree. So now I want to bring it back to when you get back here. And all the great things, all the great time that you had spent trying to figure
[19:08] this whole thing out, and finally did figure it all out. But now that's passed. And now things are about to happen, that we know should not have happened to you. I got back to headquarters May the 6th, 2002, and I was in the cafeteria one day. And a senior officer from the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which was my home office, approached me very, very casually. And he said, oh hey, I'm glad I ran into you. Hey, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
[19:42] I had never heard that term before. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, we're going to start getting rough with these guys, very excitedly. I said, what's that mean? And he told me these 10 techniques that had been approved by both the Justice Department and the White House that were going to be used on all kinds. I said, man, that sounds like a torture program to me. And he said, no, no, justice said it's okay. The president signed off. I said, I don't know. I went and actually sought the counsel of a senior,
[20:13] very, very senior CIA officer. And he agreed with me, this is a slippery slope. You don't want any part of it. Of the 14 people they asked, I was the only one who said no. Originally it was two of us. And then the other one changed his mind and went through the training. I became known as the human rights guy at the CIA which was not a compliment and was not career enhancing. But I had a real ethical problem with a torture program. As I said, when we first started our conversation,
[20:45] we have laws that govern this kind of thing and torture is simply illegal. And so I declined. Now because we had caught Abu Zabeda, even with that declination, I was promoted and I became the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. So I had access to literally every cable that was being produced by every CIA officer around the world. You do nothing in your class but go up, up, up as you travel into the ranks of the CIA.
[21:16] 12 exceptional performance awards, a sustained superior performance award, two meritorious unit commendations. I got the medal for bravery. I got the counter-terrorism service medal. So I wasn't some schmo. And that's the part I want you to talk about. That's because you're not some schmo and because you do carry a lot of weight, not only from a humanitarian point of view but from your just general knowledge of right and wrong. And that's very, very important.
[21:47] Well see, this is one of the things about the CIA that you've hit on that I think is really crucial. There's literally no training in ethics, right? You have to have your own moral code when you go into the CIA and you have to know right and wrong because they're not going to teach it to you and you are continually confronted with these moral quandaries, these dilemmas operationally and you have to decide should I do A or should I do B? A is ugly but it's going to get the job done.
[22:19] B is a personal affront to me so what do I do? And nobody is going to tell you you should do A or you should do B. You have to do it yourself. And that's a personal choice. And there are consequences to those choices. And I think that another thing I haven't heard you speak about at all or is not mentioned in the book to any great degree was your upbringing. And what it was like to be a little John Kiriago and without naming places or street addresses
[22:50] or anything like that. But just the fact that you grew up in a very organized, very loving background. I was very fortunate. All four of my grandparents emigrated from the Greek island of Rhodes. Primarily as economic refugees. Rhodes had been under Ottoman domination control for almost 500 years. They turned it over to the Italians in 1917 and the Italians occupied the island until 1947. So my grandparents all left.
[23:21] And we're so grateful to this country for giving them an opportunity to make something not just for themselves but for their children. My dad and his sister were the first people in their family ever to go to college. Ever. And so the American experience was very, very important to my grandparents. I mentioned earlier in the talk at Hamilton Hall that to hear my grandfather tell the story,
[23:53] Franklin Roosevelt was waiting for him at Ellis Island to give him a job and to give him citizenship. And of course he wasn't. But until the day he died in 1978, there was a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on the TV. He was very serious about this. And so I came from a strongly nuclear family, strongly Greek American church every Sunday, Greek school Tuesdays and Thursdays. You know, the Greek dances and parties and such in the summertime.
[24:23] But at the same time, a love of the United States and a desire to pay the country back for what it had already given us. My father served in the military, of course, during the Korean War. And I only considered public service. Only. It never even occurred to me to go into the private sector because all through my childhood, I was told we have to pay the country back. We have to pay the country back. And so that's why I joined the CIA. I told my parents when I was nine
[24:54] that I wanted to join the CIA. Yeah, that was the one, the biggest part of that book was seeing and hearing your, you grow up and going to school and being like the top of your class and graduating top of your class and how one of the professors took you aside at the end of graduation and said, hey, listen, I have an offer. There's some information that you might be interested in.
[25:25] Right. Which was when... He was actually undercover as a professor, which is now illegal, by the way. We have the Equal Employment Opportunity Act now in this country since 1993. But he was undercover as a professor looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. And he thought I would fit in. And so it's up to you to pass the tests and the polygraph and the background investigation and all that.
[25:55] But he certainly got the ball rolling. I'll be forever indebted to him. But he was right. I was a good fit. Sort of a double-edged sword though. It was certainly a double-edged sword. Yeah. And you know, the funny thing too, he told me an absolutely fascinating story one time. And it made me think that I was a lot more like him than I had realized. And I think he saw it in me before I ever saw it in him. Right. He was the founder of a unit inside the CIA that did psychological and psychiatric examinations
[26:29] by long distance, mostly of foreign leaders. And he was getting ready to go on vacation one time in 1971. And his boss came up to him and said, I want you to do a psychological profile before you leave and handed him a file. And the file was on Daniel Ellsberg. Well, it's illegal for the CIA to do anything with an American or against an American. And he said, you want me to do a psychological evaluation on an American citizen? He said, not a chance.
[26:59] And he handed it back. We should state too for those who aren't aware of who Daniel Ellsberg is. Yes. Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers in 1971 that showed that not only were we losing the Vietnam War, but our generals knew that we were losing the Vietnam War for almost a decade and had been lying to the president the entire time. So perhaps one of the most important whistleblowers of our time. He's the godfather of all modern national security whistleblowers. I have nothing but deep love and respect for Dan Ellsberg. He's been a great source of support for me.
[27:31] So he went on vacation. And when he came back, he gets a subpoena. And the subpoena is for this congressional committee. And they want to know, why did you do this psychological evaluation of Daniel Ellsberg? He said, I didn't. It turned out his boss did it and wrote his name on it. So he stood up. And he ended up testifying before the Watergate Committee saying, this is wrong. I knew it was wrong. I refused to do it. And they knew it was wrong. And they did it anyway.
[28:02] So sometimes you just have to stand up and call it like it is. One of the things about the CIA is, CIA culture is such that they want you to believe that everything is a shade of gray. And that's just simply not true. Some things are black and white. They're right and wrong. And for me, torture was just simply wrong. So all that has been exposed several years go by. I'll leave that to you to describe because I know you know
[28:35] the exact dates in August and 2008 and 2009. So everything seemed to be fine when you're out. You get out. And then suddenly one day everything falls apart. Which time? Yes. Just prior to you being? Yes. Sent. I left the CIA in 2004 and I gave an interview to ABC News in 2007 in which I blew the whistle on the torture program.
[29:05] I was investigated by the FBI for a full year from December of 2007 to December of 2008. They determined that I had not committed a crime. They closed the case. I had no idea that three weeks later when Barack Obama became president and John Brennan became the Deputy National Security Advisor that John, an old colleague of mine, asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. No idea. They tapped my phones. They intercepted my emails.
[29:36] They put groups of FBI agents on my house, on my car. And then they set you up. And then they set me up. They tried. They tried to set me up at first. Yeah. At the time I was working for John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I was the senior investigator. And the great thing about that job is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time and it's a great opportunity to exchange ideas and Opinions about what's happening around the world mostly in the Middle East for me
[30:09] So I get a call from the number three at the Japanese Embassy and he invites me to lunch. I said I'd be delighted we meet at this little cafe on Capitol Hill and I remember the lunch we talked about Israeli elections and Turkish elections and we talked about the Middle East peace process and At the end of it he said to me so what's next for you and I said actually I think I'm gonna resign soon I told senator Kerry. I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half. I have five children I need to make some money so that I can put them through college and
[30:41] He said no, don't do that. If you give me information I can give you money and I said well, what's wrong with you? Yeah, did he not realize who we were speaking to yeah Well, I I can't believe that you would make a pitch like that. I said shame on you Yeah, yeah, I got up and I walked out and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer And I said I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. Oh boy He says well sit at this standalone computer write it up as a memo. I'll send it to the FBI
[31:13] It's a long story short The one who was who was trying to turn you was not someone who was doing that at all But rather a member of there was no Japanese diplomat, right? I met with him five times at the FBI's insistence It turned out that he was an FBI agent under cover Trying to get me to commit espionage so that they could prosecute me and send me to prison for the rest of my life on an espionage charge a real espionage charge now espionage is One of the gravest crimes with which an American can be charged and sometimes carries the death penalty private sloth
[31:49] Yes, precisely. Yeah. Yes, who was someone who was I believe World War two was it World War two World War two He was charged with espionage and he was I think the only man executed He was shot shot firing squad right by firing squad, huh? The American soldier. Yeah, I hadn't committed espionage and they knew it. So they were trying to set me up Well, we ended up getting in discovery. We got memos from John Brennan to Eric Holder saying charge him with espionage and Holder writes back and says my people don't think he committed espionage and
[32:22] Then Brennan wrote back and said charge him any way and make him defend himself and that's exactly what they did I was charged finally with five felonies including three counts of espionage Those espionage charges were all thrown out. I hadn't committed espionage But I was ruined financially and what they do they they're very smart about the way they do this And this isn't unique to John Kiriakou. They do this all over America And this is why the government according to ProPublica has a 98.2 percent conviction rate, right?
[32:57] Because what they do is something called charge stacking where they'll charge you with five ten twenty felonies and They'll wait until you go bankrupt and then they come back and they say, okay We'll drop all the charges, but one if you take a plea Well, what do you do? Nobody ever wins in court ever, right? And so you're looking at 45 years in prison or two years in prison Which ones are going to be and if you go to trial and lose you get 45 years and you still owe your lawyers three million dollars
[33:28] Yeah, so what do you do you take the plea? Everybody takes the plea because it becomes an economic decision, right? Another thing they do is something called venue shopping they'll charge you in the federal district that You are most likely to get the harshest sentence in and so that's what they did with me they moved you to a spot Yeah, the Eastern District of Virginia. It's called the espionage court and it's where no No national security defendant has ever won a case ever so I was there Jeffrey Sterling the CIA
[34:01] whistleblower was there Ed Snowden was charged there and we just learned in the last month or so that Julian Assange has been charged there as well No Some rather high-profile people I guess I'd say so so Again to jump ahead a little bit You were you went for the for the short term. Yes, so you went for is it 23 months 23 months 23 months so so now you're about to be incarcerated. Mm-hmm. You have a family. Yes. You have a wife
[34:33] You have a child mm-hmm one or two five At that time no at that time five. Yes Yeah, and with my youngest my youngest was a year old Right. Yeah, it was tough. So yeah I Thought being here was gonna be pressure. I can't imagine what it must have been like To get it was a nightmare. It had to be it had to be not a single day goes by that You don't think of killing yourself. Oh, geez because what's the alternative? Yeah You know when I first went to meet with the Justice Department with my attorneys
[35:07] This woman one of the attorneys at Justice said Take a plea mr. Kiriakou and you might live to meet your grandchildren Right, and I said I did nothing wrong, and I'm not taking a plea. They started at 35 years Take a plea. We'll let you do 35 and then they came down almost instantly to 10 And I said I'm not doing 10 minutes. I didn't do anything wrong Then they went to eight and then five and then my lead attorney a
[35:39] Legendary figure named Plato Kicharis Said I've been an attorney in Washington for 54 years. He said and I have never Seen them come down in time and I said Why are they doing that? Because usually they'll offer you 10 and if you say no they come back at 12 or 15 Right. Yeah, I said why are they coming down? Yeah, yeah, and he said I don't want to swear But he said you have a they they have a crappy case, and they know it's crappy
[36:09] And I said let's fight him. He said oh, we're going to trial. You didn't do anything wrong and So we went right up to trial But then they had an in-camera meeting that's a private meeting secret with the judge To which my attorneys were not permitted And when the judge came out of chambers she denied all 75 of my motions to declassify documents that were necessary for me to defend myself And so I literally had no defense as we were walking out of the courtroom
[36:42] I said to my attorney what just happened and he said we just lost the case. That's what happened And I said what do we do now now we take a plea and So they started the negotiations The the government wouldn't come down below three and a half years, and I said fine. You know what? I'm going to trial and I'm gonna testify on my own behalf and I might accidentally talk about some of the hideous war crimes and Crimes against humanity that I have witnessed over the course of 15 years in the Middle East, and they said okay
[37:16] Okay, two and a half you do 23 months So I took it so 23 months For someone who had never been in jail before now. I'd never been in any kind of trouble in my life ever with anyone Safe to say right now to just to sort of turn the subject around a little bit that you know that there are so many people Behind you. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that at the time. Yeah. Well, how could you yeah? Yeah, you can't possibly feel any more alone and they come out of the walls
[37:48] So your your your life in prison was was not without Excitement and learning there was some drama and learning you're right. Yeah Learning wow talking about a perspective. Geez. Oh man. I I never gave The prison system two seconds of thought never in my life. I never knew anyone that went to prison right so My attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp and the prosecution agreed And the thing about a minimum security camp is there are no bars on the windows
[38:20] There's no fence the door is unlocked you work in town Usually as a janitor at the local university or whatever and you're free to come and go as you please But you're on your honor not to run away to a scond So what you do is you just drive up to the prison one day and knock on the door and turn yourself in Yeah, so I did I went to the prison with my cousin and his Son-in-law a documentary filmmaker and two of my attorneys and I knock on the door said hi
[38:51] I'm John Kiriakou. I'm here to turn myself in. Okay. They said come through the metal detector I did and then they start leading me around to the back of the actual prison with the guard towers and the concertina wire And I said no, no, I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he said not according to my paperwork. You're not So so that was it. So I want to I want to jump ahead in that too because it's 23 months and I don't Get a lot of that in so
[39:23] Let's just go to halfway through You know, you've now you you've already established yourself in the prison people know who you are Yes, and you have respect when you're there because they know What you did yes a rumor got started that I was an assassin for the CIA which was preposterous, but I never I never corrected that and that was something that got started among the the Aryans and They called me the Muslim killer But then at the same time two guys from the nation of Islam
[39:57] Which in prison is not a religion. It's a gang came up to me and handed me a newspaper article where Lewis Farrakhan said that I was a hero of the Muslim people, right? Because I was a human rights advocate. So the Aryans thought I was killing Muslims, the Muslims thought I was saving Muslims, and I just kept my mouth shut. And then only once did a neo-Nazi approach me and he said, hey, is it true that you were a hitman for the CIA and you were killing Muslims? And I had prepared myself for the question.
[40:30] And very dramatically I said, listen, it was wartime and we all did things we weren't proud of. So I didn't say no, I didn't say yes. He thought that was a cool answer. And one of the things the CIA taught me early on was to form strategic alliances. And so the Aryans were okay with what I did because I was not a rat. The Italians adopted me because I hated the FBI as much as they did. And as it turned out, four of my initial cellmates
[41:02] were members of Mexican drug gangs. And one of them asked me if I was educated. I said I was. He asked me if I would write his appeal. Well, he's not going to win an appeal. First of all, he's an illegal immigrant who got caught with, you know, eight tons of cocaine or whatever it was. He's doing life without parole. And so he's not going to get out. But I said, sure, I'll write your appeal. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to get a legal appeal. So I wrote it and he was denied. But he told all the other Mexican gang members
[41:32] that I was a good guy because I did it and I didn't charge him anything. And so I never had any trouble with anybody. Not really. Which is really remarkable. It was remarkable. So there does come an end to that. There does come an end and you are released eventually. A little bit about that, about how that period was like when you were coming out for the first time. It was surprisingly emotional. You know, I've had PTSD a couple of times in the past.
[42:03] I had PTSD coming out of Greece because there was an assassination attempt against me and they nearly got me. They got my next door neighbor instead, the British defense attache. So I did struggle with PTSD for a while. Interestingly enough, I had none coming out of Pakistan. I don't know if I was just too busy or too excited or whatever it was, but I felt perfectly fine coming out of Afghanistan. Coming out of prison was tough. I still have prison dreams.
[42:33] It's the same dream. It's a variation of the same dream almost every night. I had boot camp dreams like that. See, it's the same thing. And how many years has it been since you've been in boot camp? 40. You see? But it sticks with you. And so it was tougher coming out than I thought it was. You know, I said at the time, you think that you can just come out and step back into your life again and you can't. Your life is never going to be the same. Yeah, well, first of all, your life had been decimated by the government by taking your retirement,
[43:03] by taking your money, by taking your housing, everything. So you basically had nothing to come out of. Literally nothing. The parents of a friend of mine, both physicians offered me a job in their medical practice. They just sort of made up a job just so I had something. And then I went to work for a progressive think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies. They had a massive layoff after a year because, you know, liberal groups, they don't have any money. Yeah. And so they laid off 14 of us. That lasted a year.
[43:34] So it was tough. I wrote books. I lecture mostly at universities around the country. I do a lot of lectures in Europe now. I have two syndicated newspaper columns. I have a radio show. But it's hard. You have to patch things together little by little. Yeah. Keep cash flow coming. That's the hardest part. And then, you know, my wife, too, was just a rock solid, the greatest supporter I could ever hope for. And then once I got to the point where I was okay,
[44:06] she said, you're okay. You're on your feet. I said, I'm on my feet. I feel good. Things are moving in the right direction. She said, okay, I want to divorce. I met this guy over here and she took off. Five kids. Five kids that I got custody of. That makes total sense to me. And so that progresses to a second wife. That was my second wife. Oh, that was your second wife. See, my first wife. And this is another uniquely CIA thing. My first wife was a ballet teacher.
[44:36] And she knew I worked for the CIA and that was it. She didn't know anything else. Right. So we're overseas. I come home from work. How was work? Great. What'd you do? Nothing? Well, who'd you talk to? Nobody? And then one of my seven cell phones would ring at night, at midnight, and I would speak in Arabic and then leave and not come back for a day. And then she would want to know what's her name.
[45:06] Oh, right. Right. And so 14 years of marriage down the drain, because I couldn't tell her what I did for a living. So I married a CIA officer. Right. Which happens. Yeah. Which is encouraged, because you're both cleared. And so you can talk about work. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a CIA softball league. There's the quilting club. There's a choir. I mean, there's any club that you could possibly want they have. Sure.
[45:36] Because everybody's cleared. Because they want to keep everybody. Yes. So you can talk about work and not fear accidentally revealing a secret. Right. Wow. It's a lot of pressure. It is. The CIA has the highest divorce rate of anywhere in the U.S. government. It's 80%. Wow. Mm-hmm. It's tough. I think I'm asking about another wife. So are you currently? No. Okay. I think it's just not for me.
[46:07] Yeah. I've been married 29 years all together. And I just can't get a ring. 25, 22, 14, 12, and 7. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah. Well, I think we've come to that time where I can say to you, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. And sharing your life with us. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John.
[46:37] Thanks a lot. And here we are again, back at the end of a story. There are many of them, and there will always be many. And hopefully the position that John has taken will bring him happiness and hopefully prosperity. Thank you for joining us. I'm Ken Weaver from Foresight. Until next time.
[47:07] Thank you.