[00:01] [Music] welcome back to reality asserts itself i'm paul jay on the real news network we're continuing our series of interviews with john kiriakou the former cia officer and in the last episode we left on a cliffhanger so if you didn't watch the last episode we better go back and watch in fact you probably should watch all the preceding episodes because we're just going to pick it up thanks for joining us again thanks for having me all right so what happened next well as
[00:31] part of my job with the senate foreign relations committee like everybody else on the committee staff i had lunch on a regular basis with foreign diplomats and during those lunches we would talk about whatever happened to be in the news israeli elections developments in turkey yemen is collapsing whatever happened to be interesting and we would just give each other our views on these uh news events so i was having lunch with a japanese diplomat at his invitation at a restaurant on capitol hill and toward the end of the conversation
[01:03] he said to me so what's next for you and i said well i'm actually thinking of resigning i promised senator kerry i'd give him two years it's been two and a half i miss working for myself i think i'm gonna i'm gonna move on to do what i wanted to go back into consulting again and he got very excited and he said no don't do that i can give you money if you give me information and i said do you have any idea how many times i've made that pitch shame on you for even saying something like that i'm going to have to report
[01:33] this well i went directly from the lunch to the office of the senate security officer and i said i was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer so he asked me to write him a memo and he would send the memo to the fbi so i wrote a very detailed memo about the lunch and it went to the fbi and then two days later two fbi agents came up to the senate security office to interview me and they said what we want you to do is to call him back invite him to lunch and try to get him
[02:03] to tell you exactly what information he's looking for and how much money he's willing to pay for it and we're going to have two agents at the next table to listen in on the conversation i said terrific so i called him i invited him to lunch and we went to the lunch and we had a another great conversation and he told me what he was interested in i should add the the fbi didn't show up to sit at the next table right before that lunch they called and said just go ahead and do it and write us
[02:34] another memo so who's setting you up the fbi or the cia well i thought that i was helping out the fbi by helping them identify a foreign intelligence officer so i did this a second time and a third time and a fourth time and i might have even had a fifth lunch with him finally he told me that are you thinking this is a setup no no i thought this was a counterintelligence investigation so finally he tells me i'm being transferred to uh i said okay good luck nice to meet you
[03:06] nice to know you and i never saw him again it wasn't until a year later that we learned that there was no japanese intelligence officer there was no japanese diplomat he was an fbi agent and what they were trying to do was to set me up on a real espionage charge not one of the espionage charges that they ended up putting on me all of which were dropped i should add they knew that their espionage case against me was
[03:36] was weak to non-existent i hadn't committed espionage in fact one of the espionage charges i'm going to interrupt myself here one of the espionage charges was based on the fact that i had leaked top secret compartmented information about a cia program to the new york times do you know what that information was that the cia had a program to capture or kill al qaeda members come on i got an espionage charge for that
[04:07] the other two espionage charges were based on the fact that i had given a former cia colleague's business card he's no longer in the cia and he was never undercover i had given this business card to two reporters one at abc and one at the new york times so i got three espionage charges wait a second if you're not undercover there's lots of ci agents officers that are known and they get talked about in fact when we raised this in court uh my attorney told the judge your honor this this man was never undercover and all my client did was to to pass his
[04:39] business card which he's handing out to everybody to these two reporters and the judge said i find that very hard to believe so she turns to the prosecutors and she says is that true and the prosecutor says well your honor mr kiriakou really should have been more careful and and she turns to my attorneys and says i'll entertain a motion to dismiss those charges they were all eventually dropped but they knew the fbi knew that these that these charges and the espionage case against me was very weak
[05:10] so what they wanted to do was to catch me actually committing espionage and so they sent in this pretend japanese diplomat okay you didn't fall for it but they continue to target you anyway right but see all this time i didn't know that i was being targeted when i had lunch with a japanese diplomat this was 2011. this was the spring of 2011. i wasn't arrested until 2012 and what really did me in
[05:40] was in january of 2012 i got a call from the fbi hi this is so-and-so with the fbi field office in washington do you remember that case you helped us out with about a year ago i said sure about the foreign diplomat and he said yeah i said yeah sure i remember he said well we've got a similar case and we really need your help can you come down here i said sure in fact i said anything for the fbi well come on down on uh on thursday i said terrific so i go down
[06:13] on thursday and meet with these two fbi agents in a secure vault vaulted conference room and we're an hour into this meeting before i realized wait a minute this is this case is against me i had no idea but i should have known because another thing happened that same week the previous week my mother's sister died in western pennsylvania and so i rented a car and i went to the funeral what turned out i also had
[06:45] a hearing in ohio at family court in ohio on child support so i rented this car i went to my aunt's funeral and then from the funeral in pennsylvania i drove to warren ohio and i checked into a motel to wait for the the hearing on monday afternoon so monday morning i didn't have anything to do i got up and i thought i'm going to go look at my grandparents old house i haven't seen it in 15 years i'm going to drive through the
[07:15] neighborhood and see what what it looks like so i drive up to the house and i'm going like two miles an hour and i noticed there's a toyota behind me so i waved an apology and i sort of pulled over the side of the road and they don't want to pass he didn't want to pass and i thought well that's odd so i drive up to the intersection and i make this great big u-turn in the intersection well this guy makes a great big u-turn as well and i thought all right it's either he's a carjacker or he's a private eye that my ex-wife
[07:45] hired to follow me so i know the neighborhood well i cut through the neighborhood using what i would have called a surveillance detection route i already knew that i was being followed and i drive to the cemetery where my grandparents are buried so i i stop the car near their graves i get out this guy passes me and parks about a hundred feet away and turns around and he's just watching me yeah they want you to know right it was pretty clear so i called my wife and i said
[08:18] this is gonna sound crazy but i'm under surveillance and she agreed with me that it was probably my ex-wife having hired a private eye to catch me doing what i had no idea but then from there wouldn't be so obvious right from there i drove to uh the packard museum remember the car the packard from the 40s and 50s well it was made in that town warren ohio and there's a packard music hall and next to it is the packard museum so i drove into the parking lot of the packard museum and i made a u-turn there
[08:49] he did the same i waited until the light was red and then i sped through the red light and he got caught up in traffic and then i just sort of went in my way back to the uh to the motel so i thought well some local yokel private eye just got too close didn't know what to do because i was driving erratically and i didn't think about it well it was after this meeting with the fbi four days later that i realized it was the fbi they had followed me all the way from virginia they probably thought i was running to
[09:21] canada or something because their call had tipped me off i didn't know but but i realized that next thursday in that meeting that i'm in deep trouble in fact at the end of the of the meeting they said well you should know that as we speak we're executing a search warrant on your home and i said am i under arrest and he said not yet and i said well i want to talk to my attorney triggered by what according to them this meeting with this japanese phony japanese diplomat they decided they couldn't charge me with that
[09:52] which they couldn't because i hadn't done anything wrong and they went ahead and charged me with three counts of espionage related to the saying that the cia was capturing al-qaeda leaders uh and the the two business cards so that i got three espionage charges there they added a charge of making a false statement to the cia's publications review board which was absurd that was in the process of of writing my book they said that i made a false statement i don't even recall what the false statement was supposed to have been but i remember sitting in the conference
[10:23] room with my lawyers and they said so what exactly was the was the false statement and i said i i don't know i don't know what this is supposed to be i was supposed to have lied to them somehow anyway they also charged me with one count of violating the intelligence identities uh intelligence identities protection act of 1982 in the business card no it was different because that guy was never undercover uh i had gotten a call in 2008 so this is four years earlier i had
[10:53] gotten a call from a reporter who was writing a book on the rendition program and he wanted to know if i knew anybody that i could introduce him to that he could interview for the book i said i don't know anybody i didn't have anything to do with rendition i really never met any of those guys so he said well what about the guy in your book that you mentioned running into at the airport in in pakistan and i said yeah i can't remember his name and he said i think his first name is john i said oh
[11:24] right that's john doe or john smith i said i don't know where he is he's probably retired and living somewhere in northern virginia that was a felony and i served two years in prison for that conversation that's the one you actually had to plead to yes so they tried hard to get me and when i say hard i mean they tried to get me 45 years so that's the the the short of the to jump to the chase you were facing all these espionage charges right so you plea to this one
[11:56] my investigator developed information indicating that the reporter did not get that name from me he got it from a disgruntled former cia officer in bethesda maryland so why didn't you fight it well we went to the prosecutors to fight it and the prosecutor said first of all you can't prove that we withheld the information you can't prove that we ever had the information secondly we'll drop that charge we'll drop that iipa charge but we're going to go after you on the three espionage charges but why they're so ridiculous the three espionage charges why didn't you fight them because this is the eastern district of
[12:27] virginia it's called the espionage court and nobody ever wins in the eastern district of virginia this is why i told ed snowden when he first went public don't come home because you won't get a fair trial your jury's going to be made up of fbi agents military officers cia officers you're never going to get a fair hearing here never so for me it ended up being an economic question can my family live without me for two years basically on the kindness of strangers
[12:57] and family members and the answer was yes but could they live without me for 20 which is what i realistically could have expected if i had been convicted of the espionage charges no they couldn't have made it for 20. so i cut my losses and i took a plea it's extortion but this is what the justice department does what they do is they heap charges on you knowing that they're going to drop all of them but one if you take a plea because what you're eventually going to do is you're going to be so beaten down you're going to spend
[13:28] every cent you have and every cent you've been able to borrow from friends or family members you're going to spend your pension unless they take it away from you like they did in my case and you're going to still have to take your pension away from you yeah i lost my federal pension i've got nothing i'm going to have to work till the day i die there's nothing i can do about it so what they do is they heap on these charges knowing that eventually you're going to give up and you're going to take a plea
[13:58] that's why according to propublica that actually studied this the feds have a 98.2 percent conviction rate i said in a speech right before i went to prison saddam hussein won 98 of his last presidential election and we said the fix was in the justice department wins 98.2 percent of their cases and we say they're geniuses i say there's something wrong with the system now this was all designed to send a message in the cia do not if you're one of us you don't even poke
[14:29] around at all and it sounds the more you tell a story it's it's almost sounds like it's less about that you went public on torture which i'm sure pissed them off at the time sure but the fact that you keep poking right and and number two to shut you up this has not shut you up quite the opposite no quite the opposite in fact i said again in a speech before i went to prison if they thought this would shut me up they don't know me at all because now i've devoted my life to fighting them thanks for joining us
[15:01] happy to be here and thank you for joining us on reality asserts itself on the real news network and i'm sure john's going to be back on the real news not too distant future [Music]
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