[00:00] so john kiriakou is an author journalist former cia officer specializing in the middle east he was the first u.s government official to confirm in december 2007 that waterboarding and other forms of torture were used overseas to interrogate prisoners he's also the first ci officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter served a 30-month prison sentence for that you can hear his voice on 105.5 fm in
[00:32] washington drive around listen to him for four hours every day his book the reluctant spy my secret life in the cias war on terror is a classic get the audiobook print it's phenomenal uh we've asked him to talk about a few points he witnessed within the cia according to him his own words a great deal of respect for palestinians uh but we're asking is that respect open or suppressed
[01:03] um he received many warnings regarding covert israeli intelligence remove maneuvers in the u.s so we're asking oh really that sounds interesting arresting what were those and uh he's been noted for refusing to undertake the cia's enhanced interrogation training waterboarding sleep deprivation that was used on terror suspects so we'd like to know what he makes about
[01:34] reports that the cia justified and adopted some techniques based on israel so we've asked him a few questions including uh the good guy bad guy motif that we're hearing once again and whether the u.s could be sucked into a war with iran so it's just a probably 10 minutes worth of this time but [Laughter] please welcome john kiriakou
[02:04] thank you good afternoon everybody thank you so much i'm very happy to be here i really am this is a what a wonderful organization a great event it's not it's not a normal thing really in washington that you're able to get together with a group of like-minded individuals and and speak freely it's very nice i'd like to do this in two parts if i may i want to talk first a little bit about my background at the cia and the way the
[02:35] cia views human rights which is going to seem odd i think to most of you and then i'd like to answer um these specific questions uh that we were just talking about first of all i i joined the cia in january of 1990. i was recruited into the cia by my graduate school advisor who was not really a grad school advisor so much as he was undercover as a grad school advisor
[03:07] and he he recruited me into the cia i spent the first seven and a half years of my career working on and in the middle east almost exclusively on iraq uh i worked for a while on kuwait i went into kuwait with the marines on liberation day in 1991. very exciting but it got monotonous after a little while writing papers that you knew nobody was going to read and we all thought we were so important but nobody nobody paid any attention so
[03:39] i decided to do something more exciting more rewarding and i got involved in counter-terrorism operations as it turned out i was the only person in the entire cia that spoke both greek and arabic and um and so they sent me to uh to athens to work on arab it's quaint now arab communist uh uh terrorist groups do you remember the popular front for the liberation of palestine and abu nidal and
[04:10] they were all old men by the time i got there it became nonsensical but anyway it was a lot of fun and i got to sort of learn the tradecraft and then i went back to headquarters in 2000 after 10 years mostly in the field and then september 11th uh hit and september 11th changed literally everything at the cia when when bill clinton was elected president in 1992 he was inaugurated of course in january of 1993 the cia
[04:42] underwent something called a cull we were ordered to go through the files of literally every recruited asset we had in the world and if those assets had any human rights problems in their past we were ordered to cut ties with them to fire them um a lot of us laughed when we heard that because can you imagine the cia saying oh you were involved in human rights abuse five years ago we can't have anything to
[05:12] do with you but by god they actually did bill clinton was serious at the time about human rights and we called a third fully a third of the recruited assets that the cia had around the world that only lasted about seven years and then george w bush became president september 11th happened and everything changed overnight i'm going to go back to 1990 my very first day at the cia we had a
[05:44] senior fbi agent come to talk to the new hire class and one of the things that he said has stuck in my mind all of these 32-plus years we were talking about counter-intelligence and the fbi's role in counter-intelligence that is trying to spot spies who are spying on us whether they're moles which is unusual or intelligence officers of a foreign country well most embassies here in washington
[06:17] have what are called declared officers those are foreign intelligence officers who are here and they are formally known to the fbi and the cia as intelligence officers right so they're here to exchange paper and liaise and meet with their cia and fbi counterparts and then go back to their embassies and write a report and send it back to their capitals this fbi agent told us at the time that the israeli embassy was
[06:48] unusual now remember this is 32 years ago so the information is very old but just to give you an idea of what we were looking at the israeli embassy had two declared officers one from shin bet and one from mossad and it had 187 undeclared officers that the fbi had been able to identify spread out all across america in academia in the defense contracting industry uh we've all seen the americans right
[07:20] the israelis do the same thing just like we do the same thing but we were told that very first day that i was at the agency that we have no international friends not really i mean you can argue now the five eyes the british the the australians new zealanders the canadians not the israelis the israelis were a country a service that we we had to be leery of in some cases we
[07:51] had to fear i thought that was probably an overstatement at the time and after i had been at the cia for three years i decided i wanted to go overseas there was a program that the state department ran called the analyst overseas program where they'll take cia analysts and transfer them to the state department so you're a legitimate state department foreign service officer and you go overseas and you work for two years in an embassy and then come back and you transfer back to the cia so i thought well do i want to go to jerusalem or do
[08:22] i want to go somewhere else and i decided to go to bahrain two of the happiest years of my life the guy that i sat next to for those three years he went to jerusalem along with his wife now because they had been to israel before the cia decided to declare them as a courtesy and to say look we have these two people this married couple they're not spies they're analysts one of them isn't even really an analyst he's going to go to
[08:53] graduate school while his wife is doing the analysis we just want you to know that they're here as a courtesy on assignment to the state department what the israelis did over the next two years was to carry out a campaign of harassment and the reason i bring this up is because it's quite common i'm telling you this story because this is just a normal thing that happens to americans especially to american cia officers working and living in israel
[09:25] they went to a party one night and they came home it was party at the ambassador's residence in tel aviv they came home and all of their living room furniture had been rearranged all of it so the message was we can come into your house anytime we want and there's nothing you can do about it okay that's aggravating a little bit but no damage done the next time they went out they came home and someone had defecated in all of the toilets in their house
[09:56] they had four bad four bedroom house four bathroom house and people had gone to the bathroom in all four of the toilets and left it unflushed so another not very nice message that we can harass you anytime we want the third time it happened they came home and their dog was yelping and laying on the floor of the kitchen someone had cut its tail off and then wrapped it in gauze and tape
[10:29] and the third the fourth time it happened to them they had they had done their christmas shopping they had a a tree up in the uh the living room and they had gone to the ambassador's christmas party and when they came back all of the presents were gone all of them thousand dollars worth of christmas presents now this kind of thing happens all the time and so the ambassador has to go to the israelis and say look cut it out leave my people alone
[11:00] and they say okay okay and then they'll back off for a little while and then they start up again i have a friend who was the senior cia person in country and he went to work one day and the ambassador said to him the craziest thing happened last night he said i was in the car and my driver was driving me home and i had a blowout and we had to pull the car over to the side of the road and
[11:31] it turned out that two tires on the right side had blown out well they had been shot out have any of you ever i mean all of us have blown a tire have you ever blown two at the same time just minding your business driving down the highway well sure enough these these two men pulled up and they were so friendly and so warm and they got out and they helped us change the one tire and then they stayed there until the tow truck came to help us you
[12:01] know tow the car to get the the second tire uh replaced but then the ambassador's briefcase was missing and in the briefcase were personnel files because he was writing end-of-year performance evaluations well that way the friendly guys who stopped to help change the tire can determine who's getting a performance evaluation from the ambassador and who's not because the ones who aren't are cia
[12:32] officers right because it's the foreign service people who are working for the ambassador so we don't do things like this to the israelis ever we also don't spy on the israelis ever because of the political pressure that that would put the cia under on capitol hill i made a little note to myself to be sure to talk about the dichotomy between the state department and cia on one hand and the white house and capitol hill on the
[13:03] other hand all the years that i worked at the cia and being an animal an analyst working on iraq and enemy country at the time i was declared to my god more foreign intelligence services than i can even remember it was dozens dozens of them i only spoke to the israelis once in 15 years that i was there i had only been on the job about six months and i was told
[13:34] by my boss uh you're going to brief the israelis this afternoon i said okay and he said we don't meet with them here in the building we can't trust them to come into the building so we're going to meet them out there's a special place where we meet them because they kept trying to bring bugs into the building right oh we'll give you this gift well the gift weighs twice what it should because it's full of batteries and a listening device and you can't bring that in here so um i went to uh brief the israelis now
[14:05] because i was the junior most analyst at the time and it was like seven or eight of us that were there i was the last one to speak and so we ran around the table and it was the most sad person and the shin bet person and they're writing down every word that the analysts are saying finally they came to me and because i was not undercover i was an overt employee at the time i used my real name i said my name is john kiriakou and the shin bed officer says to me spell it so i spelled it for him and he looks up
[14:37] and he says you are jewish and i said i am not recruitable and he stopped and afterwards my boss said yeah you're not gonna brief the israelis anymore and so i didn't i never spoke to them again now once i got overseas again i was i was uh declared to so many services and i was working in counterterrorism and that's where you really want there to be lots and lots of
[15:08] cooperation so we would get calls uh you know from this country in that country in the other country and um and we rarely said no well i can tell you from firsthand experience when it came time to work with the palestinians i'm hard-pressed to think of of a group of people who were more committed to counter terrorism uh to to peace i mean it was revelatory
[15:38] for me it was it was a group of people who wanted to do the right thing they wanted good relations they wanted progress for their people um they wanted to have a role in the international community and it was a joy to work with them you know that was in that was between 1998 and 2000 and i thought wow that was really great i wonder if that was an anomaly and then i went to pakistan in 2002 as the chief of counterterrorism operations
[16:08] and it got to the point where the palestinians would would come to the embassy and they would just wave them in come on in because they belonged there we were partners we were a team that was the case at the cia and it was also the case at the state department now this note that i wrote to myself to be sure to explain the dichotomy is that it was exactly the opposite at the white house and on capitol hill
[16:39] because we didn't have to answer to voters at the cia right i don't care what you know aipac says about me if i'm at the cia i don't care i have a job to do and i was i was bound to do it the state department was the same way the state department was often criticized for something called clientitis you know you hear this a lot at the state department that
[17:10] people go to israel and they and they serve for a couple of years and then they come out like really disliking israelis and really loving palestinians and then they say okay well then you need to go to berlin for a couple of years to cool off beca we can't have all these arab lovers in the well it turns out that the whole state department loves loves arabs it's just a completely different world
[17:40] it's hard to describe and then you go to the white house especially to the national security council to work with those people who who have these fancy titles of senior assistant to the president for such and such affairs and assistant to the president and you say this is the way things should be in our policy on you know the levant or the maghreb or whatever it is and they don't want to hear it because you like arabs too much well with that said
[18:11] um we all just accepted it and frankly we all believed that we were right and the white house was wrong capitol hill forget it it's a lost cause you know on capitol hill when we were summoned to give briefings we would get in the car with somebody from the office of congressional affairs and they would always tell us before we walked into the the house or senate office buildings remember say as little as you can possibly get away with and try not to answer the questions right
[18:43] yeah that's what we would do just don't answer the questions just tell you can talk and talk and talk and not really say anything and then those senators and congressmen just get up and walk away anyway so it never made any difference i want to answer these questions in the little time that i have left one is about chas freeman why in my view was chas freeman not able to bring his immense talent to office during the obama administration i worked for chaz freeman in riyadh when he was the american ambassador to saudi arabia
[19:14] and i i was blessed over the course of my career with working with some some of the most brilliant diplomatic minds anybody could encounter he was one of them he's a he's a giant in diplomacy and an honest giant and uh you know the the easy answer to this question is aipac simply would not allow him to assume this position this is a guy that had been ambassador to saudi arabia ambassador to china i think
[19:44] he was director general of the of the foreign service for a while he was the chairman or deputy chairman of the national intelligence council he's he's published extensively he's a brilliant author a historian and barack obama names him assistant secretary of defense for international security and the israelis said oh no you don't he's pro-palestinian and that fight lasted for more than a year he waited for confirmation
[20:15] and uh and finally on capitol hill senators told the white house there's no way we're going to confirm him if the israelis say no he's not getting the job and he didn't he didn't now in different groups that we have around town we've honored him in other ways and his health is quite poor right now but but he was wronged by his country he was wronged just because he believed in in a level playing field something that i got to see a lot of here in washington over the years
[20:46] i've been noted for refusing to undertake the cia's enhanced interrogation uh training uh on uh terror suspects uh yes i did i called it a torture program i i had just returned from pakistan where i had led this raid that resulted in the capture of abu zubaydah who's in the news today because he lost his final case at the supreme court yesterday and i was asked if i wanted to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i'd never heard the term before
[21:18] and so i asked what it meant and my colleagues said very excitedly we're going to start getting rough with these guys and i said what does that mean and he explained it to me i said that sounds like a torture program are you crazy and he said no it's not a torture program the president said we could do it and justice the justice department approved it i said i don't know man that sounds like a torture program i don't i don't think i want to have anything to do with it i said i had a moral and ethical problem with it um and so i'm i'm embarrassed to tell
[21:48] you that of the 14 people who were asked i was the only one who said no and these were people that that i um no thank you these were people that i i traveled with and our wives were friends and our kids played together and they were normal people to me and it was a shock that they could turn it off and become monsters when they had to murderers in cold blood this final question is did we learn this from the israelis of course we did
[22:18] we saw what the israelis were getting away with in these prisons that they had in the west bank and in gaza nobody raised any objection at all and so we thought well if the israelis can do it we can do it and the president said we could and the justice department said we could and so we did now of course we have to take the cia's word for it they say they're not doing it anymore um we don't know and my time is up so thank you so much
[22:49] for this opportunity it was wonderful thank you