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[02:35] Pennsylvania and into Ohio. Wow, I always thought that out west there, they weren't there. That was the steel towns. Yeah. Yeah, rust buckets, steel towns now. Okay, so when all of a sudden you grew up in PA, did you go to college? Yeah, I went to college at George Washington University. I got a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies there, and then I stayed for a master's degree in policy analysis. And then, as it turned out, one of my advisors was not really
[03:05] a professor there. He was actually a CIA officer undercover as a professor there. And he recruited me into the CIA. Wow, and then, what year was this we're talking about? That was 1988. Wow, that was, you look too young to be around there. Thank you. I feel like a tired old man. Did you know I asked me to be in the CIA too? No, I did not know that. I knew this guy. All of a sudden, I told him, this was before 9-11. And I told him, you know,
[03:36] I'd like to help my country. I'd like to go into the CIA. So he says, really, Bo, I said, yeah. So he says, somebody will contact you. What was that? I get a phone call, and they tell me to meet under the old clock in Peacock alley at the Waldorf Astoria. Someone will contact you. Yes. So all of a sudden, I'm standing there at 12 noon, and then all of a sudden I hear, Boudito. I'm looking around. It was a woman, about four foot tall. Hey, Boudito. And she flashes this double-sided identification,
[04:06] CIA. And I said, how you doing? She goes, my name is so-and-so. I said, oh. And then she sits to me now and she goes, you know, we looked, you're over. You had a great career as a New York City homicide detective. Why do you want to be in the CIA? I said, I love my country. I just feel as though I'm not doing enough. I'm a private investigator. I travel around the world. That could be my cover. I could go to Abadabadu wherever I got to go. And I could make believe I'm investigating something else when I'm investigating the Abadabadu. So all of a sudden, she's there.
[04:36] She's listening to me. So she says, OK, somebody else will contact you. And I'll never forget, she gave me a card and it's called Something Fox Farms in Virginia. Fox. Remember, it was like, oh, you know what they do with the fox? They blow the horn. Yeah. And that in signal was on as something Fox Farms. And that must have been a CIA location there. So everything was good. The next day, I used to do Imus in the morning. Remember, Imus, the radio guy? Yeah, 34 years, I did him. And yeah, until he retired.
[05:06] So I mean, I'm a little bit keeping secrets. That's what I tell you. So the next day, I hit, I hit the Imus. He had ways and he's dead. I'm getting, because I'm really, I can't believe that they're reaching out to me to be a CIA operative. So I said, I can't tell you, Don. He's a wattball. I said, you want me to really tell you, I've been contacted by the CIA to be an operative in the Middle East. You know, I know all these Saudi Arabian guys. I spent a lot of time there.
[05:36] Put it this way. After I blasted it out on the Imus in the morning, they never freaking call me. They said, this guy can't keep a secret for one day. That was my CIA operative responsibility there. Let's talk about you. I never became a CIA operative. Sorry. I can't keep the secret. All right. So then you were, this is in the 1980s. Okay. So you went over to Middle East after that. I started off as an analyst. I spent the first seven and a half years of my career there as an analyst working on Iraq. A lot of that was
[06:06] overseas, mostly in the version. Was there a need to listeners working on Iraq? What does that mean? Well, you know, the CIA does many things. One is analysis and the other is operations. In analysis, usually, you sit in a cubicle in headquarters, you think the big thoughts, you write papers that nobody's ever going to read, and then you send them over to the White House. And every couple of years you go overseas, maybe you stay for a year, two, three years, you become an expert, you learn to speak the language, and then you come back and transfer.
[06:36] Were you fluent in Arabic? I was fluent in Arabic. I have a, I have a knack for foreign languages and they recognized that early on, so they took advantage of it. What's that dialect that all the terrorists use? What's that dialect? Fusha. Footcock? Fusha. Oh, Fusha. Okay, good. Fusha. And then I learned Khalidjig, Gulf dialect as well, because I spent so much time in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. I was in Saudi Arabia
[07:06] in the late, the late 70s and the early 80s, I used to go to Riyadh, and we'd fly to, what's that place called in the Red Sea? Jeddah. And then there was supposed to be no alcohol in Saudi Arabia. And the palace that I was in, they had more booze than the bar downstairs. And then we used to fly to Jeddah, and we would bang the Middle Eastern airline students with all the princes. We'd give them $1,500 and bang them over there in the hotel. This is a very religious country.
[07:36] This is in the 19, late 70s and 80s we were banging them. Wow. You know, we used to, we used to ship alcohol out and we would get these calls from the airport from customs and immigration. They would, they would call us and say that our shipment of office furniture was leaking. And could we come and get it please? The thing I didn't like when I arrived in Riyadh, these son-of-a-bitches, when I'd come from New York, I'd take Flight 24. It was a Pan-American, it was a combination flight. When I would,
[08:06] I would go into Dahran and then I'd have to catch the next flight to Riyadh. Am I correct with that? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. They would throw all my shit out of my suitcase and I'd say, hey, Abdul, take it easy. And they were looking for porno movies. I told them, you want to find porno movies? I'm with Prince Fahad bin Abdul-Lizees. Go to his palace. He's got more porno movies than a porno ball. Yeah. And then he became king. Yeah, no, no. This was, this was Fahad bin Turkey. He got blown up. Open Turkey.
[08:36] He got blown up a couple of years ago in Yemen. He became the highest ranking guy. He's the guy that broke my leg jumping out of a plane in Paris, California. He had a hundred jumps, his partner Abdul-Lizees, bin Nasser bin Abdul-Lizees. We jumped out of a plane. I broke my freaking leg in half, my ankle and I had to retire from the police department. I don't care. Terrible. But so let's talk about you and not both. Okay, so you went after 9-11 what happened? Yeah. You kicked into patriotism.
[09:06] I got bored in analysis. You just sit there and you just write paper after paper after paper. You know nobody's reading these papers. And then you're telling people, well, I'm writing for the president. I'm writing for the Secretary of State. But they're not reading your stupid papers. And so I said, I got to do something different. I want to go overseas. And it turned out that they were looking for a person to work in Athens against Arab terrorists. And as it turned out, I was literally the only person in the entire CIA
[09:36] who was fluent in both Greek and Arabic. Wow. And so they sent me to Athens for two years. And I liked it so much I switched over to operations. So then after 9-11, they made me the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. I went out to Pakistan and started. Was this after the four Americans were killed in Pakistan? This was after the four Americans. Right. Cause my friend John O'Neill who died in World Trade Center, Johnny O'Neill was an FBI agent along with Tom Nicoletti. They want that. That's when they called in, this
[10:10] is before 9 11 and they wanted a strike on this, uh, bin Laden dickhead and they had him in there and shaking baked a Reno wouldn't let him send the hellfire and blow this guy up. And this is, this is the truth that what happened. If they would have killed him, maybe 9 11 would have occurred. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And they had a second opportunity to get him as well. Bo, uh, bin Laden, like a tourist was transiting Doha airport one time and the gutteries, um, stopped him there and
[10:40] president Clinton called the a mirror gutter and said, you've got to turn him over to us. But the problem was the justice department had never bothered to indict the guy. And because he hadn't been indicted, they wouldn't go to turn him over. And so they let him go. And he went on to Sudan and from Sudan to Afghanistan. So we missed him several times. And I'm talking to John. I used to hang out with John at Elaine's was a bar up on 88th Street on the second avenue. And John used to tell me about this bin Laden guy and with the call, he was a bad dad. And then with the two embassy bombings. I mean,
[11:14] the son of a bitch, we knew what he was. And we didn't have balls because of Reno. She shaking baked Reno. The same one that handled that very good over there in Waco. She did a good job over there too. With all those kids getting killed. There was no need for that. And this woman is a disgrace. And she died. So happy days for I don't care. But you know what? We could have maybe saved 9 11. So now you're over there after 9 11. And then you get involved with investigating al Qaeda. One more footnote. When I was
[11:45] in two years ago, I was in Athens. And this is when the first wave of Syrians were coming over, probably one quarter of them terrorists who the hell knows. And I'm walking around my gold watch and a couple of cops grabbing go No, no good. Do not wear your watch here. Everyone's getting robbed. People don't understand the crime wave that has occurred across Europe with the advent and the of the Syrians. I mean, some of them are good people, but you got scumbags in there and they're robbing people and all that. Okay,
[12:17] so now all of a sudden you're in you're in Pakistan. How did you? What was your cover in Pakistan? I had very, very light cover in Pakistan because I was declared to the Pakistani intelligence service. So my job to you as an operative. Yeah, they declared you weren't like selling fucking magic excuse my language. You weren't selling magic competence and shit. No, I was I tried to buy a lot of magic carpets. No, I was pretty well out there. And so my job was to work
[12:47] with them to try to capture as many al-Qaeda fighters as we possibly could. They were a lot of them. A lot of them were in Pakistan. Oh, boy, were they and I'm proud to say that one of the ideas that I came up with is, you know, we had officers all the way up and down the border. And I said, this is ridiculous trying to catch these guys one at a time in the most formidable, forbidding landscape in the world. I said, let's just let them in, let them into the country and they get them. Yeah, we'll
[13:19] get them in their safe houses. So instead of catching one at a time on the border, we catch 10 instead of going into tour abroad with all that bullshit terrain, give them a little lamb balls or whatever they eat, right? And that's exactly what we did. And you know, they're stupid. So they're all on their cell phones. They're all checking their emails. Watch your porno. Watch your porno jerking off. They all watch porno. You know, the night that, as an aside, the night that bin Laden was killed, a buddy of mine from the CIA called me and he said, how much
[13:53] porn you think is on that computer? And I said, are you kidding? That computer is going to be completely porn. And it was, it was all porn. My friend is the guy that whacked them there, Rob O'Neill. And they got a lot of porn there, Carl. You didn't know. He was that religious about Abu Dhabi. What's the guy? Muhammad, that he was jerking off with porn all the time. He's just the same as the other guy from Iraq, the Saddam Hussein and his two brothers, brothers, sons, Dewey and Goui there. What was their names? Call them. Uday. Uday and
[14:24] Hussein. Yeah, Dushbeg and Dushbeg. Yeah, yeah, that was a quick question. Did you get a lot of cooperation from the ISI or were they kind of? That's a great question. The short answer is yes, but but the the ISI people that I was dealing with, they were specifically the counterterrorism people and they were all educated and trained in the US and the UK. But then when I would go over to ISI headquarters, you see a lot of people with long bushy beards, short chalwar kamis giving you
[14:54] the stink eye. Those are the guys that created the Taliban. Those are the guys that trained and armed the Kashmiri separatists. So in my mind, there were two separate ISIs. There was the group of good guys working with us and the group of bad guys working against them. The ones that went through British intelligence, American intelligence, and we all know the ISI knew exactly that big bird there, the bin Laden. They knew where he was all the time. And I mean, he was being he was being protected by them, if anything. And I think the line was drawn in the sand. I got to say one
[15:27] thing about President Obama and I'll praise him for one thing. I praise him for taking this prick out. Of course, it was a very dangerous mission. And if they took out our helicopter, it could have been rather embarrassing. God bless Obama for doing that. And he's good in my eyes. He did one thing good. That was one thing. So let's talk about the actual operation that you were in charge of to capture Abu Zubaydah. Yeah. Well, who's that below the Zubaydah? Tell me well, we, we thought at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the
[15:59] number three in Al Qaeda, that turned out to be untrue or incorrect, but he was a very bad man. This is a guy who had created both of Al Qaeda's training camps in southern Afghanistan. And he was the founder of Al Qaeda's safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan called the House of Martyrs. So if you were a young jihadi, and you wanted to go make jihad against the Americans, you got in touch to the Abu Zubaydah, he got you there. Or if you were already in the fight and you were tired, you wanted to go home, you went to
[16:29] Abu Zubaydah, he got you a fake passport, he got you a ticket and you went home. So he was kind of Al Qaeda's logistics guy. He was the guy that made the trains run on time. Well, in March of February of 2002, we got word from, from the force that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in the country and we had to catch him. He was in Pakistan. He was somewhere in Pakistan, which was ridiculous because Pakistan is the size of Texas, and it has 180 million people in it. And you
[17:00] can't just say he's somewhere in Pakistan, go catch him. So we set out to hunt him. And that's what we did. Now, he knew that we were on his trail, and we were actually closer than we realized we were. We were about a day, sometimes two days behind him. But he was constantly changing locations. Finally, I called headquarters and I said, listen, we're just not going to be able to find him like this. I need a targeting analyst out here. The next day they sent out a guy who's a friend of mine, a targeting analyst,
[17:31] different from the kind of analysis I used to do. A targeting analyst pours through reams, thousands, millions of pieces of data to try to locate a target so we can kill him. So this targeting analyst flew out. He spent about two weeks trying to figure out how we could geolocate. I was a beta and then finally he came to me and said, I just can't get it down to any 15 sites. I said, my God, we never hit more than two sites simultaneously in a
[18:03] single night. We can't get 14 sites, you know, all at the same time. But I realized we had to. And so I cabled headquarters and I said, we need a big team, 36 people, half CIA and half FBI. We need weapons, ammunition, battering rams, night vision goggles, secure communications, bulletproof vests. They chartered a 737. They put everything on but with pallets, 36 guys. They flew out to Pakistan and the next day they got their support guys. Were
[18:35] there military support guys? Were you like SEALs with you or was just CIA guys? No, this was actually before the SEALs started getting involved. The SEALs got involved after Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. So this was about seven months before the SEALs got called in. So it was just us. I mean, we were dopes. We didn't really know what we were doing. What do I know about busting down doors and grabbing people? I had never done that before. So this was a CIA, CIA complete operation without support of the military guys. Yeah, yeah. We had the support of a group called the Punjab
[19:08] Elite Force, which was the SWAT team from Lahore Pakistan. These guys were fearless. Good guys, but they were really good guys. Good guys and they were the only ones who didn't wear bulletproof vests. They only wore these black t-shirts with a with a 45, a stencil of a 45 on and then it said Punjab Elite Force. They weren't afraid of anybody. Well, a little psychopathic to me. That's kind of stupid to me because those bullets will take you right out. I'd have a, I would have a plate right up there. You ain't gonna get
[19:39] my nuts out of having another plate around them. Okay, so now you're zeroing in on Abul, Zakataka, whatever his name is, and what happens? How do you catch him? He made a mistake, Beau. He made a stupid mistake and we had counted on him making a mistake. He accessed his hotmail account with a landline. And as soon as he did it, I mean, within five minutes, we don't tell too much technology because there might be some abadabadou's listening. We have great technology, believe it or not.
[20:11] This is 18 year old information, so it's all different now. But sure enough, that address was one of the 14 on our list. And that night at 0200, we busted down 14 doors simultaneously as the clock struck, struck two and... You have to kill anybody? Grabbed everybody. No, my orders very specifically were to take them alive. But this idiot Pakistani cop shot him three times with an AK-47, shot him in the thigh, the groin in the
[20:41] stomach. Oh, he got one of his bullpigs, so they can't be no more of them. That's good. Oh, it was a good shot. It was a bloody mess, let me tell you. And so, a bunch of us threw him into the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck. We took him to Faisalabad Hospital, middle of the night, 3.30 in the morning. We shocked the doctor. All these Americans walking in at 3.30 in the morning dressed as Pakistanis with an Arab who's bleeding to death. And I told the doctor, listen,
[21:15] my orders were to take him alive. You need to sew him up. And I mean right now. So they took him into the operating room. They're trying to sew him up. But you had Pakistani guys with you. Yeah, we had Pakistani guys with us. The squat guys. Yeah, but there were a bunch of blonde-haired, blue-eyed CIA guys wearing shower camis that looked ridiculous. All right, so now you sew the guy up. Where do you bring him then? Well, the problem that we had is while he was in surgery, word got around the al-Qaeda community that we had gotten him and they started driving past the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital.
[21:46] Wow. So I told this Pakistani major that I was with. I said, look, if they realized we're so lightly armed, we're dead. Can you get a helicopter in here? He said, yeah. 20 minutes later, a helicopter lands in the parking lot. I walk right into the operating room, kind of like this. I told the doctor, wrap it up. We got to go. They sewed him up as fast as they could. We wheeled him onto the helicopter. We flew to a military base about 50 miles away. And then I got a call from the station and they said that George Tenet, the CIA director,
[22:19] had ordered, these were his exact words, 24-7 CIA eyes on, do not leave his bedside. And I ended up sitting there for the next 56 hours. I tore up his sheet. I tied him to the bed because I was afraid I was going to fall asleep. And I just sat there at the foot of the bed and stared at him for the next 56 hours. Wow. Okay, so then what happens? Where do you go next? Well, 24 hours into this, he starts to stir. And in the meantime, I had called one of the guys over at our safe house and I said,
[22:52] buddy, I smell so bad, I'm grossing myself out. I said, can you send over some clean clothes? The only clean clothes I had, I had a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, and a red t-shirt that my kids had bought me that I slept in. It had a SpongeBob SquarePants in the middle of it. So I put that on with my big poofy Pakistani balloon pants. And 24 hours later, he starts to stir. Remember, he's tied to the bed, so he's tied like this. And I stood up at the foot of the bed and he opened one eye and you could see the exact
[23:27] instant that he realized, oh my God, the Americans have me. Because he looked at SpongeBob and his heart rate went from 110 to 220 and he coded. And so they call the code blue, they rush into the room, they shock him with the paddles, they give him a shot of demoral, and then he's out again for another six hours. So six hours after that, he wakes up, he's terrified, and he motions for me to come next to him. So I move his oxygen mask off to the side and I said to him in Arabic,
[24:01] shuismek, what is your name? And he shakes his head. So I repeated it, shuismek. And he says to me in English, I will not speak to you in God's language. And I said, that's okay, Officer Vader, we know who you are. He starts crying and he says, please brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me. And I said, nobody's going to kill you, we've been looking for you for a long time. And I said, I don't know much, but I know that you're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide. So he relaxed. Finally, he wanted to know what happened.
[24:35] He couldn't really remember what happened. I said, you tried to escape. He had climbed to the roof of his safe house to jump to the roof of the next door house. And the Pakistani guy shot him. And we talked a lot. We talked about Christianity versus Islam. He recited poetry. He cried a lot. He said he would never know the touch of a woman. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. And I said, listen, you're not the victim here. I said, there were 50,000 people in those towers.
[25:06] What did you think was going to happen? Did you think we wouldn't try to find you? To kill you? To kill Bin Laden? You're lucky you're alive. We could have killed you the other night. And he said, no, I only wanted to kill Jews. He said, I was overruled. And I said, well, be that as it may, you're not the victim here. And then finally I said to him, he was really worried about what was going to happen to him. And the honest to God's truth was I didn't know what was going to happen to him. I didn't have a need to know. And so I said to him, I'm being honest with you.
[25:38] I said, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'll tell you one thing. I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues go down hill after this. All down hill. I said, if I could give you one piece of advice, it's that you have to cooperate. And he said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate. I said, suit yourself. So a couple of hours after that, again, at about five in the morning,
[26:10] an unmarked CIA jet landed on the tarmac right outside the hospital room. The hospital was right on the tarmac on this base. And he asked me if I would hold his hand. He cried all the way to the plane. Three FBI agents and I carried his gurney out to the plane. It was hard to get him on because he was strapped to the gurney. So we sort of maneuvered him onto the plane. We strapped him on the luggage rack at the back. And I leaned over and I said, remember, you have to cooperate.
[26:40] And he squeezed my hand and I never saw him again. That was it. Yeah. That was it. You should have given him a BLT, bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. What's the name of those pants that you said? The Salwar Commence. That's the thing. I can't stop this. What was that food? MC Hammer. MC Hammer is the way to open that pants, right? Yeah. Okay. So now you don't see him again after this, right? No, I don't see him again. So when does this whole thing come out about the allegations against you? Yeah.
[27:10] Well, because of the strength of this capture, this was the senior most al-Qaeda person we had ever done. Well, wasn't the other guy under bin Laden, the guy that looks like a professor there with the glasses? What's his name? He's still at large. The al-Qaeda number two guy. Oh, yeah. Aiman Azawaki. The Azawaki. We never whacked him yet? No. Can't find the guy. Can't find it. Unbelievable. You know, and I wonder too, and I don't have any inside information here, Bo, but as an educated observer, I wonder if we're just not looking for him. Because al-Qaeda is pretty much irrelevant now.
[27:43] And I wonder if we just walked away. You know, we're focusing on ISIS and maybe other groups. We just don't care about al-Qaeda anymore. Yeah. If I saw him, I'd whack him. Yeah, I would, too. Okay. So now let's go. How do you get in trouble? Because as far as I'm concerned, you're a great American right now. What happened? Thank you. I'm a patriot. I want that to be clear. I'm an absolute patriot. So I go home to headquarters, and because of the capture, I got promoted. And they made me deputy assistant, I'm sorry, I was executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA for operations.
[28:14] And in that position, you have access to literally everything around the world that's happening. And August 1st, well, before I even started in that job, I get back to headquarters, and I'm in the cafeteria one day. And a buddy of mine from the counterterrorism center comes up to me and he says, hey, I'm glad I ran into you. You want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? What are we talking about now? Yeah, this is a senior counterterrorism officer.
[28:44] What year? This is May of 2002. Go ahead. So I'd never heard the term enhanced interrogation techniques. I said, what is that? And so he explains it to me. And I said, man, that sounds like a torture program. Are you kidding me? And he said, no, no, it's not torture. The president signed off on it and DOJ said that we could do it. And I said, let me think about it for an hour. So I went up to the seventh floor. It's the executive floor of the CIA. There was a very, very senior CIA officer
[29:15] up there who I had worked for about a decade earlier. So I knocked on his door and I said, hey, I need some advice. They just asked me if I want to do these enhanced interrogation techniques. And he says to me, listen, first of all, let's call the spade a spade. This is a torture program. They can call it whatever they want. They can use whatever euphemism they want. This is a torture program. And torture is a slippery slope. And you know how these guys are, he says. Somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens,
[29:45] there's going to be a congressional investigation. Then there's going to be a justice department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? And I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. It turned out I was the only person who went to prison. But I went back downstairs and went back. to this senior officer and I said, this is a torture program. I'm not interested in it. And so I went about my business. Well, August 1st, 2002, we start torturing Abu Zubeda. Oh, you're a friend. You start torturing him. Yeah. Oh, and then you saw him again. I thought you didn't see him.
[30:17] No, no, no. I was in headquarters. They were torturing him at a secret prison overseas. Yeah. But I'm reading the cable traffic as it's coming back. Were you there at the scene of the torture? No, I was not. Oh, so you know that because you were high up, you knew they were interrogating him. Good. And I had to brief the director every morning about all this stuff that was going down. And who was the director at that time? Yes, George Tennant. Okay, good. So I said, this is a war crime. I mean, we're signatories to the United Nations Convention
[30:53] Against Torture. And we have the Federal Torture Act of 1946. It specifically outlaws exactly these techniques. And to tell you the truth, I waited for somebody to go public. I just figured somebody would because as we're torturing him, people are, they're objecting in cable traffic. And some of them actually returned to headquarters from overseas because they had such serious objections. But nobody said anything. So two years later, I resigned from the CIA to go into the private sector.
[31:27] I've got five kids. I needed to make some money, put them through college. And still I kept waiting for somebody to say something. Now, what year is this now? This was 2004. I left the CIA. Good. You left the CIA. You went to private practice. Good. Yeah. 2004. I went into the private sector. And then in December of 2007, and this is where the shit hit the fan, December of 2007, I get a call from Brian Ross of ABC News. Now, I've never spoken to a reporter before.
[31:59] So Brian Ross tells me that he has a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, absolutely untrue. I was kind to Abu Zubaydah. I was the only person who was. I said, I've never tortured anybody. I never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or anybody else. I said, your source is either mistaken or he's a liar. And Ross says to me, and I had no idea this was an old reporter's trick. He said, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I said, I'll think about it.
[32:29] In the meantime, a couple of days later, President Bush gives a press conference. And he looks right into the camera boat, looks right into the camera and he says, we do not torture. Well, I was sitting with my wife, now my ex-wife, but she was also a senior CIA officer. And I said, he is a bald-faced liar. He is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying. And then a couple of days later, he's walking from the back of the White House onto the helicopter to go to Camp David.
[33:00] And a reporter shouts a question and Bush turns around and he says, well, if there is torture, it's the result of a rogue CIA officer. And I said to my wife, I said, So they knew that you were talking with the ABC guy. Go ahead. But I hadn't even said anything. But I said, Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me. So I decided that I was going to do Brian Ross's interview and I was going to tell the truth.
[33:32] This was an illegal program. It was unconstitutional. And I believed it was a war crime. It was anti-American to carry out a program like this. You know, and this is why the FBI, when we started torturing Abu Zubaydah, literally every FBI agent in the country, in that foreign country where we were torturing him, left the country. Because not only did they want no part of a torture program, they didn't even want to be in the same country where the torture was taken place.
[34:03] So I went public December of 07. Yeah. Here's where it gets weird, Bo. The FBI investigated me from December of 07 to December of 08. And in December of 08, they determined that I had not committed a crime and they closed the case. They even sent my attorneys a declination letter declining to prosecute me. I had no idea that three weeks later, when Barack Obama became president, that John Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me.
[34:37] I had no idea that my phones were being monitored, that my emails were being intercepted. There was surveillance. Another Pfizer warrant. Here we go. Yeah. Exactly. Now, the thing is, under the whistleblower protection, why weren't you protected under that? That is the best question. It's because national security whistleblowers are exempt from the protections of the Whistleblower Protection Act. Yeah, but right now we have a whistleblower.
[35:08] It's supposed to be involved with national security. Security ratting out the Trump. Ratting out Trump. Yeah. They amended the law in 2015 after I got out of prison. Ah. And so now you're protected. Although let me say for the record. Let's back up again. 2012. Let's go back. So now all of a sudden, Brenny comes in with Obama in 08. Now they reopen the case in what, in 09? Yeah. In 09, January of 09. And when do you get the next call from that you have a problem?
[35:40] In January of 12. That many years later? Yeah. So check this out. In the interim, I start working for John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Good friend of mine, John. He was a decent man. He used to hang out at Mar-a-Lago. Me and John Kerry, when his wife was alive, she couldn't handle the booze that well, but John's a good guy. I like him. We don't agree on a lot of things, but John's a good guy. Well, I'm working for him as the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations
[36:10] Committee. And one of the great things about that job is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time. It's a great exchange of information. So one day in 2011, remember, I have no idea I'm under investigation. One day in 2011, I get a call from a Japanese diplomat and he wants to have lunch. So we have lunch, lovely lunch. We talked about, I remember it well, we talked about Turkish elections, Israeli elections, the Middle East peace process. And at the end of the lunch, he says to me, so what's next for you? And I said, actually, I think I'm going to resign soon.
[36:41] I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half. I got a bunch of kids at home. I got to put through college. I'm going to go back into the private sector. And he goes, he whispers, he goes, no, don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money. And I said, what the hell's wrong with you? Do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch in my career? You're just going to cold pitch me? Shame on you, I said. And I went and I mean, without stopping, I went literally directly
[37:13] to the office of the Senate security officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. What you have to do, right? You have to do. You're compelled by law. Yeah. Yes. So I reported it immediately. And he told me to write it up and he called the FBI. Day later, two FBI agents come to see me at my office and they asked me to tell them the story again. So I did. And they said, here's what we want you to do. We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch,
[37:44] try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and what he's willing to pay for it. Right. I said, okay. So I did. And I wrote them another detailed memo. They asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time. How much money was involved? Zero. Oh, you with with him? Yeah. He was offering me $5,000 a month. That's it? Believe it or not, that's kind of standard pay for a for a sort of run of the mill spy.
[38:18] Oh, really? So, yeah. That's bog of a basement to me. Yeah. I'm reporting all of this in excruciating detail back to the FBI. Okay. In the final lunch, he says he got promoted. He's being transferred to his dream job. He's going to be the number two at the Japanese Embassy in Cairo. I shake his hand. And I never saw him again. A year later, December of 12th, I get arrested. I'm charged with three counts of espionage,
[38:50] one count of making a false statement. And we were never really sure what the false statement was supposed to have been and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Act of 1981. So we get discovery from the Justice Department, 15,000 pages of classified information. And in this discovery, we get a series of memos. First of all, there's a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder saying, charge him with espionage.
[39:20] And Holder responds, my people don't think he committed espionage. And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself. But then we get these memos that show that there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent. And they were setting you up. And they were setting me up. Why? Did you take the 5,000? I didn't take one red cent. And I paid for the lunches. And what they ended up doing was the Japanese
[39:53] American FBI agent sent a memo to his boss, Peter Strock, saying he's not going to take the He keeps reporting the contact. Let's just end this. Yeah. And so that's why they came up with the story that he had gotten transferred. But they tried repeatedly to set me up on an espionage charge, and I kept reporting it back to the FBI. And so all the espionage charges were finally dropped, but what they do is something called charge stacking. They'll charge you with a whole bunch of felons. And they beat you into the ground.
[40:24] Yeah. They wait until you go bankrupt. And then they come back and they say, all right, we'll dismiss all the charges but one, if you take a plea, what are you going to do? You didn't go to trial where this could all be exposed. You couldn't afford it, right, John? I spent $1.15 million on attorneys. I still owe them $880,000 that they'll never see. And I ended up, instead of 45 years, I ended up with 23 months. Wow. Yeah.
[40:54] Yeah, five kids. I mean, you know, I mean, just the hittiest thing. These stories, you just can't believe it. But if you would have went to trial and got convicted, you could have gone away for a long time, right? Well, I asked my attorneys because I turned down every deal until the very end. And even the 23 months, I initially turned it down because I kept saying, as soon as I get in front of a jury, they're going to realize how ridiculous this is. I'm innocent. This is a setup, and I'm going to be acquitted. So my boss, my boss, my lead attorney, pulled me aside, and he said, he was angry.
[41:30] And he said, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And so I took the deal, and I said to him, if I turn the deal down and I go to trial and I lose, what am I really looking at here? And he said, you're looking at realistically 12 to 18 years. Take the fucking deal, he said. So I took the deal. What do you think the intelligence community came after you?
[42:03] Oh, they were furious that I had aired the dirty laundry. You know, there are these internal systems in place where if you don't like something, you can complain. But my chain of command created the CIA's torture program. They implemented the CIA's torture program. So they were furious that I had gone public. It was unforgivable. In fact, that was a word that a former colleague used with me, that what I had done was unforgivable. I went public. Yeah.
[42:33] And what we're starting to see with Brennan, what's the other guy's name? Yeah. National Security Advisor there, Brennan, and what's the other guy, the other clown from CIA? And then he's on CNN all the time. Oh, not National Security Advisor, DNI, Clapper. Clapper, yeah, Clapper and his other jerk, or Brennan, and they're exposing everything. They were the leaks on it, whether you like Donald Trump or not, they've been leaking
[43:03] like son of a bitches, and they were the head of the intelligence organization. And they've been leaking stuff right on TV. Yeah. That's right. They're leakers, and they're both liars. I mean, we all saw the footage of Clapper lying under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that NSA doesn't intercept the communications of American citizens. Yeah. They lie, they leak, and they get away with it. John, so what are you doing now, John? Well, I've got a radio show here in Washington every day from 4 to 6, the afternoon drive.
[43:40] And I write a weekly syndicated newspaper column. I write books. I give speeches. You know, little here, little there, I patch together a living. Was he friends with our friend from the Swiss bank? Yes. Yeah, Brad Birkenfeld. I think that's how we get in touch. In fact, I'm having dinner with Brad tonight. Brad is great here. Well, Brad, that'll be with me tomorrow. And he has some interesting story, but that has like a kind of a similar thing. This guy was opening up, and nothing ever was done with all these son of a bitches not paying taxes, and it pisses me off.
[44:12] And you know what? They should have went after them and all these high-falutin' people with these accounts. It's unbelievable. But you know what? I just, I, you know, we got to wrap it up because we're all time-constrained here. But let me tell you something, John. You're quite an American patriot. And guys like you, whether you agree with the water board or not, I have my own personal opinions about water board, and I have my own, my personal opinions about torture. And when, you know, I was down in 9-11, I'll never forget what the sight I saw. I'll never forget what I observed with these terrorists and my own feelings on something.
[44:46] If I had someone that was going to explode a nuclear bomb in New York City, I may have done it a different way. Not water board. You know what I'd have done? I would have bought a pig, a live pig, got the son of a bitch open, put it on the abadabadoo's head, shoot him in the kneecap, and say, unless you tell me, you're not going to get to your 72 virgins. I may have done that. I may have done that, Collin. Yeah. I'd been known when I was in New York City, detected back in the 70s. I used to be able to hold guys off the roof by their ankles, and if the guy shot a cop and I lost grip, I never lost a prisoner, never killed anybody.
[45:21] Also I was the advent of water board, what is called toilet pulling. What they would do, they would have these apartments that they've haven't flushed the toilet. Two years, poo poo in there, and I used to be able to put the guys head in there, and then I would pull it out, and I'd have poo poo all over my arm, but he would tell me what I want to know. They shot a cop, sorry, but you know what? Things have changed, and you want to know something in reality? They've tortured our soldiers, and they've tortured our military. So that's my own personal opinion, but I do respect your opinion, John, the same
[45:51] as my opinion, and I mean that with all my heart, and you have a real important point of what you feel, and I respect it. I totally respect it, John. We do something on our show every week. We do our punk of the week. Punk of the week means something, or somebody that's really pissing you off. Who's your punk of the week, John? You know, my punk of the week, I think it has to be the same person it is every week, and that's John Brennan, because John Brennan is a liar. John Brennan is the opposite of a patriot.
[46:22] John Brennan needs to be dealt with. What about you, Carla? What's your problem? Well, I have to go with the bail reform in New York. It was recent news that there were three guys busted in Washington Heights. They were dog fighting. They had heroin. They had loaded guns. One guy got bail. The two guys, the other guys, no bail. They're out in the streets. Well, my punk of the week is this ugly two guys. I got two punks. One my fat friend, Jerry Nadler, the one that got his stomach stapled, he used to weigh about 400 pounds. I can't even look at him.
[46:52] And then the other bug-eyes there, Adam Schiff, I can't look at this guy. I would take an arrest and slap him right in his face and straighten his eyes out. I got two punks of the week, those two. As far as the lady goes on speaking the house, she's just an old lady there just crackling away. And in reality, what we should be doing is doing jobs and getting things done in Washington instead of all this bull crap. Sent you to him. Sent you to the president. You shouldn't have made that phone call. He doesn't. Let's move on.
[47:22] He didn't do something that was so criminal. He didn't take a bribe. Let's go on with this. Let's get things done in this country. We have a great economy. I love this country. Let's bring everybody together instead of this division. That's my punk of the week. Amen. John, where can people find you? Where's your website? Where's your radio show? Oh, thank you. I'm at JohnKyriaku.com, John, J-O-H-N, Kyriaku, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. I'm on Facebook and Twitter and I look forward to hearing from everybody. All right, John, thanks very much for being here.
[47:54] Really, really great stories. Yeah. Very interesting stuff. We'll probably want to do a follow-up at some point and get your opinion on some current events. We're just a little short of time this week. Thanks for all our listeners. You can follow us on social media. We're at One Tough Podcast on Twitter, and Bo is at Bodeedal on Twitter. You can email us any questions, comments, guest suggestions, One Tough Podcast at gmail.com, and we'll see you next week. Hey, John, thank you very much. God bless you. Merry Christmas to you, dear kids. God bless you. Merry Christmas and happy New Year. All right, my friend, thank you.
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