[00:00] finally abua begins to stir and I stand up at the foot of his bed I put my hands on my hips and I'm looking at him and he's like tied down and he opens just one eye of course he only had one eye right he opens his eye and he doesn't look at me yeah he looks at SpongeBob and his pulse goes from 120 to 220 like in a second and the Machine starts going and then you hear hold blue code blue
[00:30] and these people rush in he saw SpongeBob he knew it was up he was like oh my God the Americans have me what's up guys if you haven't already please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video and if you don't have time to watch this episode right now I'd really appreciate it if you saved it to your watch later playlist on YouTube finally if you'd like to follow me on Instagram or X those links are in my description below all right so John you and I left off in the last part the conversation
[01:01] with you going to Greece after you got basically in through the through the school you were put through eight years into your career to become a clandestine spy at this point we got to talk all about 911 and the aftermath of that and everything you did and what went on in your career but going to Greece it's it's very fascinating to me when you did because this is this is before you know America's like into the whole Al-Qaeda thing you guys at CIA obviously knew damn well what it was but the average citizen had no idea it was not a big
[01:32] deal and so the terrorism that people were worried about at the time was I think to quote George tennet like you know blow up buildings by Day drink champagne by night and it was like Eastern European type things so that's pretty much what you were put in the middle of right yeah it was it was very much eurocommunism right Greece had two primary terrorist groups that we were working against revolutionary organization 17 November which was very Le and another group called revolutionary popular struggle that mostly targeted
[02:05] Greek cops and some Greek military people mostly the cops um but I mean every Western European country had had groups like this you know we're talking about red brigades and Red Army faction and and B minoff and oxion direct and everybody was worried about these the the provisional Irish Republican Army most of those groups were cracked right and broken by the late
[02:35] 1990s in Greece they were just raging onward and you know they had killed the CIA station Chief they had killed two US defense attaches they had shot Eng Gravely wounded the DEA representative they shot and killed a an Air Force tech sergeant Ronald Stewart um they killed the Turkish Ambassador the Turkish Deputy Ambassador they fired a rocket at the German ambassador the French Ambassador and then they killed a slew of senior Greek political figures the minister of of communications who also
[03:08] happened to be the prime minister's son-in-law the governor of the Central Bank the minister of finance a number of of Greek Publishers so this was a group that you know every time it would kill it would become more mysterious to the point where they could carry out an assassination in bumper-to-bumper traffic in rush hour and nobody saw a thing whoa because people were so afraid that you know is this is this
[03:41] group the government is it the Greek Orthodox Church which I also heard more than once of course it wasn't it turns out three of the Assassins happened to be the sons of a priest from up North uh but it wasn't the Greek Orthodox church but it was so mysterious in Greek they used to call it the organization because they would just disappear after carrying out their hits so this was a real challenge now when you're sent there you had said you're sent there under like a diplomatic Alias
[04:12] meaning like you're working for the state department or whatever but are you immediately made like are you reporting to other spies on the ground or do you have like cart blanch to set your own missions like what was it it was all very uh formal so I was part of an entire branch that was working counterterrorism issues and you know mostly it was it was Greek terrorism and we we worked that issue with the Greek national police and the Greek intelligence service but there were Arab issues that you nobody else spoke Arabic
[04:44] in in you know among my colleagues and so I had to handle that too and we're talking about you know popular front for the liberation of Palestine uh pfl PGC General command Democrat front for the liberation of Palestine Abu nidal the libyans it was a whole slew of of Arabs that I had to think about besides just the Greeks you know out there trying to kill me every day and so they were taken up they're they're essentially like all
[05:16] over Europe but they had a major Hub in Greece the Arabs yeah you know there was a there was a semi secret deal that was negotiated between various Arab groups and the Greek government in the 1980s that if they um if they didn't kill Greeks they could Transit Athens unmolested H yeah which caused us no end of problems yeah I can imagine so were you getting read in at the T I mean
[05:46] obviously you're focused on Greece but you have a presence of an Arab terrorism presence there as well so you're focused on that were you getting read in on like a lot of the things that were happening with Al-Qaeda at the time time cuz it's not like they weren't active like they were doing things they were very active blowing up American embassies attacking the USS Cole right I knew almost nothing about Al-Qaeda when I returned from Athens in the summer of 2000 I was in Bahrain when um when the OPM sang
[06:19] bombing took place and that was the first the first anti-American attack that we were able to attribute to Al-Qaeda uh but the the name of this group meant nothing to anybody in Arabic it means the base right which we didn't even understand what what the heck is that supposed to mean and we knew all about Osama Bin Laden a colleague of mine wrote a paper in 1991 saying Osama Bin Laden was the most dangerous man in Saudi Arabia and I was like who is this guy I never heard of
[06:49] this guy he was just in the early planning stages in 1991 hadn't even gone to Sudan yet and so um Al-Qaeda never even popped up on my screen when I was in Athens every once in a while there'd be somebody in transit um mostly Egyptian Islamic Jihad because Cairo was only a one- hour flight from Athens and so these guys would leave Cairo arrive in Athens usually just stay in the transit lounge and then fly out to
[07:20] wherever it is they were going to go so we would get we would get a warning from you know somebody whether it was a foreign government or you know um NSA or whomever that so and so was you know was going to arrive in Athens and we would either go out there or we would ask the Greeks to go out to the airport and just you know get eyes on the guy until he got on the next plane yeah but while you were in Athens like you had some dangerous things happen as well like you were almost killed like how did how did that go down
[07:51] wow it was it was toward the end of my of my uh my my uh stay in Athens my assignment and um you know I 90% of my time was spent working against 17 November we were very provocative against 17 November we were actively running Ops against them and then they would you know shoot a rocket at the German ambassador or you know do whatever it is they were going to do and um because Athens was so dangerous at
[08:23] the time we actually spent more money on security in Athens than any other Embassy in the world wow yeah it was rated critical threat for counterterrorism that's how dangerous it was we spent wild we spent more in Athens than we spent in Beirut that's how bad it was so we also all drove armored cars and I was heavily armed the whole time I was there I had a 38 on my ankle and 9mm on my on my waist three extra magazines in a tear away fanny pack and I had a knife in my back pocket that it God forbid it came to
[08:54] that I was going to go down with a fight were you good with a knife uh not really no I would usually cut myself it's one of those things so I had to make the gun work yeah so um I was driving an armored BMW 540 it was Branch spanking new and it was the it was the very first 540 in Greece we couldn't even insure it we had to insure it through a company in Germany uh because the Greeks couldn't like compare it to anything uh to ensure
[09:25] it and um I had a new neighbor move in our our backyards uh touched each other diagonally right so he was behind my house and over one he was the new British defense atache Brigadier General Steven Saunders and Steven was a great guy Life of the Party everybody loved the guy and we were at a dinner party one night and he was he was making fun of me uh but in a friendly way a joking
[09:56] way and he was saying you Americans you're so paranoid about security he goes this is an EU country it's a NATO country what are you so afraid of with your armored cars and your weapons and I a death yeah I said you Brits live in a dream world if you think because they have pretty beaches and palm trees that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance if they have the chance they're going to kill you well a couple
[10:27] of weeks later I I accidentally slept through my alarm and I never ever did that now in a in a critical threat for terrorism post you can't set a pattern so I left my house every day at a different time and I took a different route to work every single day and sometimes that would mean it took me 30 minutes sometimes it would mean it took me two hours to get to the office was that like second nature being able to do that or was there a lot of planning and
[10:58] I did that because I was paranoid I did that for several years after I left the agency just out of force of habit just to make sure I'm not being followed and you'd be surprised how many times I actually caught these morons at the FBI later on who think they're so slick and such good surveillance anyway that's a different story so um I slept through my alarm and I was
[11:29] like oh my God I got to just get on the main road and go straight to the Embassy so my my house I was in a in a Northern suburb of Athens called giia and the embassy was on the same Boulevard gifs Boulevard which changes names uh when it gets into the city but it's literally a straight shot exactly 10 miles from four blocks from my house straight to the Embassy right the problem is this is a major
[12:01] thoroughfare right six Lanes plus two lanes of of uh yeah that's it we got it on the M plus two lanes of local Lanes on the sides right so you're talking about 10 lanes and they're Jersey barriers so once you're on that's it you're committed you can't get off so I'm normally driving in this you know nonsensical way to get to the uh to get to the Embassy and there's the embassy right there Embassy the United States so I said I I just got to get onas which
[12:33] I would never do because there are so many cars you can't tell if you're being followed and I'm worried about somebody driving up alongside of me which they normally did and then they shoot you with an anti-tank round oh so because it goes through armor that's what I was so worried about so I get on and I'm like oh my God it is a parking lot like Cairo kind of traffic jam but again I'm committed there are Jersey barriers so I did another thing
[13:03] that I never normally did I put on the radio I never put on the radio because I didn't want to be distracted you know you start whistling a song or whatever you don't notice they're coming up alongside of you with their anti-tank uh gun and then you're done so I put on the radio and they break into the the programming and this guy says avoid kefs Boulevard yeah because there's a traffic incident at filo well filo is the halfway point to the Embassy and I was
[13:35] like [ __ ] how long am I going to be stuck in this that's five miles of traffic 20 minutes pass and the guy comes on he says avoid gias because there's a criminal incident at filo and I was like oo I never heard that before what kind of criminal incident so I'm inching my way down the mountain and then he says avoid GS Boulevard there was a terrorist incident
[14:06] at filo and when he said it I could see down the hill that the left two lanes were closed there was a white car in the left lane and they had put police tape around it and I was like what the heck is that so I'm getting closer to it and I see the license plate and it was why it started with the letters ybh well because Athens was so dangerous we couldn't have diplomatic license plates right and the Greeks in their
[14:37] Infinite Wisdom gave everybody in the American Embassy license plates that began with yhb and I said oh my God they they killed some poor Greek y thinking that it was us cuz yhb ybh and then I said no wait a minute the British Embassy is ybh and Steven Saunders drives a white r so I called the station and I said hey I think Steven Saunders was just
[15:08] assassinated he said what are you seeing I said I'm on key CS I'm looking at his car I'm sure it's his car there's blood everywhere and the driver's side window is shot out so he calls the British Embassy and this woman says oh I'm sorry Steven's not in yet oh and he's like no listen we think he's been shot they're like oh my God they start calling the hospitals he's at the armed uh armed
[15:40] he's at the Red Cross hospital and he died 45 minutes later so he's stuck in traffic they drive right up alongside him they shoot him with this anti-tank round it blows his right hand completely off and then with the window shattered driving a non-armed car they shoot him three times in the chest with the same 45 that they used in all of their assassinations between 1975 and 2002 the wel 45 this is the guy
[16:12] who the week before is telling you what are you worried about he was laughing at me and I laughed at him and I was like you're nuts man I'd rather be in my armored car than in your Rinky Dink piece of junk oh my God and we laughed we laughed his wife wife was what turned this whole thing around because she immediately went on Greek television and she said this was not an attack against Steven it was not an attack against the
[16:42] British Embassy this was an attack against the Greek people this organization is not a political organization nor is it a phantom group it's a gang of criminals and they're committing crimes against the Greek State and for the first time since 197 public opinion began to change wow yeah he had two little girls at home and it was just that's horrible it was just awful but anyway what 17 November normally did was they would drop a Manifesto um at uh at the site of the
[17:13] hit they didn't drop the manifesto this time rarely they would they would mail the manifesto to one of the leftist newspapers or they would put it in a trash can and then call a leftist newspaper and tell them where they could go get it this time they let several month mons pass Steven was killed in April I think it was April 22nd I think um 99 n uh 2000 okay and so um August of 2000 I go into the
[17:46] office and my boss comes in and he goes did you see the manifesto I said oh no I didn't I didn't know that they had Senate and he said they're talking about you I said about me I said ' no no no no no I take my safety very very SEC uh seriously he said dude they talk about you they say we saw the big spy but he was driving an armored car and we knew he was armed and so we elected to carry out
[18:18] the Revolutionary sentence against the war criminal Saunders on the same road oh my God all we could conclude was that he was Steven was on TV all the time new British defense atache he's a general he had come from Ireland and then he was in Yugoslavia and he's at every party and he's meeting with the Minister of Defense so he's on TV all the time so he was easy to find and we think that while they were watching him they saw my plate
[18:49] and said ooh yhb that's the American Embassy and then they noticed that my car was armored and that's how I came to their attention so my boss saysyou got to go I go where he said home like right now I said but my my kids are at school I can't go now he said we'll pick up your kids in an armored car call your wife we're going to send another car for her I go wait I can't just leave now I I got a whole house he said we'll pack up your
[19:21] [ __ ] just get in a car and go to the airport so I went to the airport they brought my wife and kids to the airport we were on the 12:00 Delta flight back to New York and never went back I went back two years later when things had settled quieted down a little bit but that was a close one I had a closer one a year later but that was that was the first what was the closer one a year later where was that that was in a Middle Eastern country that the CIA won't allow me to name pre 911 yes pre
[19:54] 911 weeks pre 911 so I had a body who was a station Chief there and we just really really loved each other just an allaround good guy and actually he's the one who introduced me to my second wife H and um he calls me he said buddy I got a I got a favor to ask I said sure name it he goes we're running a double agent case out here and the guy is just too dangerous for my people to meet with on a regular basis he insists on speaking to the
[20:26] Chief and I just can't risk meeting with him can you come out here and pretend to be me and handle a double agent I had never handled a double agent before but I had gone through the training and I said done so I got on the plane fly to the Middle East and he says here's the story um we recruited this guy and he was a an engineer and a
[20:56] contractor for a major American defense contractor the contractor did not know that he had also been recruited by one of America's greatest enemies and they had directed him to allow himself to be recruited by the CIA so that he could report back to them as a double agent oh this is getting deep so he didn't know that we knew that he was a
[21:26] double agent so he was double double agent huh it gets complicated yeah so I go out there and I trigger the meeting and we meet at this obscure hotel in and I'm wearing a jacket do we have to bleep that [ __ ] yes yeah make a mark of that sorry yeah let's bleep that he said it yeah we we can't forget that
[21:57] we'll put the thank you never forget that yeah we got you we got you you wouldn't have known no you're good you're good I I spoke right through it that's that's why we do it so you meet with this guy in an undisclosed location meet at an at an undisclosed hotel and uh I was wearing a jacket I took off my jacket so he could see I was not armed and I said listen since this is our first meeting we need to talk about some of the basics I said the first thing we're
[22:27] going to do every time we see each other is something that we call the mad minute at the CIA so I ask you are you safe were you followed here did you do a surveillance detection route and we make plans for the next meeting so if somebody bust down the door we've at least gotten them the important stuff out of the way he said well what happens if it they do bust down the door I said we have to have a cover story we can say we went to the same University let's do that okay where
[22:58] did you go to school he said whatever school he went to and I said okay that's where I went to and I came oh [ __ ] sry sorry it's all good clip it we got it again so I I came to this country and uh just make sure on those Lessie just flip the camera to me in the post edit when he's saying it and and he'll bleep it out we're good I'm Sor it it happens all the time with you with you spooky guys yeah sorry so I came to this
[23:29] country we ran into each other we decided to hang out that's it okay that's our cover story and I said next thing we we have to do is I want you to go out and get a post office box so if there's some reason why we can't speak on the phone I'll be able to message you through the post office box and I want you to go there and check for mail once a week he said okay we'll do so we made plans for our next meeting and I said to him most importantly you need to do a
[24:02] surveillance detection route to our meeting and home from our meeting do you know what a surveillance detection route is he says I think so I said okay here's what we're going to do I want you to go from let's say your house to point a and at Point a let's say you pick up your dry cleaning and then you go to the second stop and you buy a light bulb and then you go to the third stop and you buy some pap histories and you make sure you're not being followed and then you
[24:32] can come to the meeting but once you finish the second stop get off the main roads and then use lesser used roads and then from the final stop to the hotel just take some crazy way that doesn't make any sense he said great so he said to me just so I can be sure so you're the chief and I said I'm the chief he said nobody higher than you I said you got the boss Duke I'm the
[25:03] chief so I said I'm going to give you my phone number I had what back then and we're talking about you know 23 24 years ago 23 years ago it was called a triband cell phone so it was good in every country in the world we bought it in that country and it acted as a satellite phone so he would call a local number and it would ring no matter where I was in the world which was not a novelty back then but he wouldn't have any idea if I
[25:35] was in that country or if I was you know somewhere else got it so I pretended to live there and um what name did you give him you have like a fake name oh yeah you always use a fake name yeah um I actually used my colleague's real name because remember I was supposed to be him and he's on the and he used his real name and he was on the Diplomatic list oh okay yeah got it so this went on for months I would meet him I would meet him every few
[26:06] weeks we would always meet at different hotels different locations and I would get a little deeper and deeper and deeper in my conversations with him what kinds of things were you trying to get from him without going into classified details um he was a member of a minority sect and he had friends and relatives who were active members of a terrorist group that that that sect kind of aderes to
[26:36] and so I wanted that got it so so he would never ever ever do surveillance detection routes he would get in his car drive directly from his house to the hotel and we have like four teams of guys on him and he would never see any of them and then he would leave are meeting and go directly to this enemy country's Embassy directly without stopping no turns no surveillance
[27:08] nothing and we got teams on him on top of that we're on his phone because I said let's exchange phone numbers okay so now we have his phone too yeah so this went on for about six months and um I happen to be in Washington and I get this hair on fire cable from the embassy from from my colleague and he says they're on to you and I said how he said well actually
[27:40] it's my fault he said they're they're on to me he said they were in the hotel lobby last time and they got a picture of you and they said we know who the chief is and that ain't him I said okay so we we take it somewhere else we take it to a neighboring country the next meeting he said no dude they've ordered him to kill you in the next meeting I said get the [ __ ] out of here I said this guy's afraid of his own shadow he's not going to kill me in the next
[28:13] meeting you sound like that guy in in Greece now seriously they never shoot through my armor car so I'm at headquarters and they're like operation's over I said wait a minute wait a minute let's not be Hasty here you you send me back in godamn it we can seriously disrupt this group like seriously dismantle it so I said hear me out there's a Marriott in this country okay every Marriott is designed in
[28:45] exactly the same way as soon as you walk in the bathroom's on the right right really soon as walk into your room yeah soon as you walk into the room the bathroom's on the right interesting I said how about this we tell them that the meeting is at a Marriott we get adjoining rooms our foreign intelligence liaison comrades and our guys are in the neighboring room I'll prop the door open with the that
[29:15] security lock y tell them where to come in what room I'm in for the meeting when he comes in I take him down cuz I'm going to be in the bathroom I come right out of the bathroom take him down you guys bust in from the next uh door the next room and we got him they're like I don't know it's risky I said I I'll wear a vest how about that under my under my shirt I'll wear a vest okay they agreed to it so it
[29:47] got it got unfriendly so I go out there and we have like six guys in the lobby well the bad guys have six guys in the lobby oh [ __ ] and our guys are looking at their guys everybody's armed they all know too they all know like this is the day that they kill me so I'm up in the room and my guy's calling me saying you wouldn't [ __ ] believe what the lobby
[30:18] is like right now he got a gun yep he got a gun yeah everybody got gun so do we so they text me he's coming in right now so he The Source calls me do you have Chlor form no no I'm getting there I'm getting there okay no we had Demerol injectable yeah it works so um he calls me he said I I'm here I'm in the lobby I said uh come up to the uh
[30:49] come up to the eighth floor so he comes up to the eighth floor and I'm there in the elevator Lobby and I give him this big bear hug and I Pat him down down and he's nervous really nervous and I said come come with me come on we're going to we're going to walk we're going to go to the stairwell so we go to the stairwell well the eighth floor was the top floor and I go uh we're going to meet on the roof today he's like what I said we're going to meet on the roof no I'm not going to go on the roof I said sure you are come on let's go
[31:21] we're going to go up the roof he's like no I go yeah up [Laughter] he gets nervous to the point where I think he's going to start crying and I said what's going on I thought we're friends I'm not going to the roof he says and I said oh yes you are so I push him to go upstairs and he
[31:52] starts to cry I said what is your problem he said I don't want to go to the roof I said all right he thought you were going to see if he could fly MH that's exactly what he thought so I said all right go to the fourth floor and call me from there he goes down to the fourth floor I go back to the room which is on six and he calls me he said I'm on the fourth floor I said come to 612 so he
[32:23] takes the elevator comes to 612 knocks on the door I say come in he walks in I come out of the bathroom I bare hug him I take him down the ground our guys and the and the liaison guys bust in from the other side and I'm sitting on him I have him pinned and I said to him do you think I am so [ __ ] stupid that I don't know that you came here to kill me today do you think I am such a [ __ ] amateur that I don't know exactly who
[32:55] you are and what you came here today to do he goes [ __ ] you like that he goes [ __ ] you I'm not afraid of you I said no but you're going to be plenty afraid of my friends uh huh and then bang they give him the the demall he's out well listen one of the dirty little secrets of the hotel industry is that people die in hotels every single day M right so we put them on a gurnie we cover him up we take him out the back door into an
[33:25] ambulance and drive away in the meantime right to Guantanamo no no he probably wished he was in Guantanamo after what he got yeah I'm getting text messages from uh from my buddies in the lobby like these guys are starting to freak out and they're speaking in their language like where is he he should it should have been done by now why hasn't he checked in what's going on they're saying that blatantly even though they know your six guys are there in their in their
[33:56] language so they don't think think our guys speak their unusual language the chances that one out of six come on stupid stupid idiots Amateur hour yeah we take him to the intelligence Service headquarters and when he wakes up he's tied to a chair oh so I'm standing there and I said buddy this can be easy or it can be terrible you hit him with the abuu beta line mhm I said where are the weapons
[34:26] [ __ ] you I'm never tell you anything I said if you want to live you're going to tell me where the weapons are I'm not talking our colleagues beat the living snot out of him and he just would not talk so I said or one of the liaison guys said we need to get into his house and I said okay I know where he lives but he's got a Filipino maid and she never leaves the house and they're like oh then we can't go in the house cuz
[34:57] this has to be totally secret so I said well let's just say there's a we'll say there's a gas leak and we'll we'll evacuate everybody and he's like we don't have gas lines in this country we use propane I go okay well then let's just bring a big 18wheeler full of propane and and we'll spill it on the ground and we'll declare an environmental disaster and so an hour later there's this 18wheeler driving down the road
[35:28] and we pull in front of his house there's this big wheel on the back and I'm going like this and this propane spilling all over the ground and we're like oh it's an environmental emergency and we closed the propane and then um we evacuate it was like six houses on a culde-sac we evacuate all the six houses so we go into his house he's got a safe a big safe in the house I was like this is it it's the weapons so we have a locks and pick team on standby so they come 20 minutes or so it takes them
[35:59] to uh to finally pop the lock and it's empty except for a map there's a map and it's got an X like the weapons are here x I'm serious it was nuts were you looking for biological weapons no just weapons weapons okay so it's about 25 miles south of where we were and it was out in the desert so we we go down there
[36:32] and and there's a bunker just dug you know in the ground and all of the weapons are in there like enough for a small army whoa so we confiscated him our partners destroyed them he was uh convicted of of U terrorism and given a life sentence and uh our enemies were none the wiser whoa yeah and then I flew back and I've never been back to that country
[37:04] again and this is in the weeks leading up to 911 yeah this was like three weeks before 911 like that's wow so I got a nice award for that operation that worked out well I'll bet yeah yeah you were on your game for that one I was you had said though in Greece you weren't being read in on any Al-Qaeda stuff or whatever not a word but when you got back from Greece when they sent you home from there you were at langly right okay and I'm like what is this Al-Qaeda everybody's talking about now
[37:35] they start telling you all about it yeah yeah and and I remember there was some there was some terrorist attack I don't remember which one it was but I was like Kenya I it may have been it was in that period between the summer of 2000 and the summer of 2001 and I was like oh this is what everybody's been so worried about like yeah this is bad yeah but then I just continued to do Greek stuff until the [ __ ] hit the fan
[38:07] oh you were yeah but how'd you end up in the Middle Eastern country as a favor of my buddy who was the station Chief that's it you weren't actually now he's like ah you know kiraku would be good for this I can trust him to do this right MH okay and it was that whole you know good cop thing again yeah so that's a few week before 911 you come back to the US after that yeah I came back to the US and where were you on 911 I was at headquarters you know it sounds quaint now but the uh the
[38:39] government uh printing office GPO they're up on Capitol Hill the government printing office was publishing a compendium of Declassified cables and it was called Foreign Relations of the United States Athens anara Istanbul Nicosia 1947 to 1969 I still remember it the problem is there were three cables among the thousands of
[39:10] cables in that Giant volume that outed three agency sources who were still alive so we asked gopo to stop printing and they were like nope act of Congress got a print so I called the White House and I said I need an appointment with condalisa rice this is on 911 on the morning of 911 oh my God we had a we got an appointment with condalisa rice at 9 o00 that day so I went over to kofer Black's office
[39:41] because tell people who kofer Black is kofer Black was the chief of the cia's counterterrorism center con Connie rice didn't know me from anywhere but she and kofer were you know long time colleagues he had met with her we'll get into this he had met with her a bunch before 911 telling her it was going to happen guys if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button please take two seconds and go hit it right now thank you so I get a call from the driver saying the car is ready to take us to the White House and
[40:14] um we were just going to ask cona rice to just please don't publish these three cables right just take the cables out or black out the names or whatever just don't publish these because then we're going to have to offer these guys a million bucks each or relocate them to the states and they're all like 90 years old by now so we didn't want to do that so um I go over to kof's office to tell him that the car's ready and his secretary has a TV a little TV on our desk now back then we couldn't watch TV
[40:46] on our computers yeah right and one of the World Trade Center towers is on fire and I said I go what happened to the World Trade Center and she said a plane flew into it and me cuz I'm an idiot it I said you know what that happened once before it did Empire State in the 30s the Empire State Building was hit by a plane but it was really foggy and rainy that day it's so Crystal Clear today like how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center and just as the words came out of my mouth the second plane hits where's kofer in
[41:16] the office he's in his office oblivious to any of this he does even know this is happening no so she turns to me and she says did you see that or did I imagine it and I said 'we're under attack and I ran back to my office I saidu two two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center I think we're under attack so they ran back up to cofer's office now you have to imagine this absolutely enormous office that H has about
[41:48] 150 um uh what do you call it cubicles yeah in what we call the bullpen and then around the perimeter of the office are all the private offices so You' got the director of the counterterrorism center the deputy director for operations the deputy director for intelligence the deputy director for military and then the division Chiefs eerily similar to how wall Street's set up I believe that yeah so everybody's gathered there there were TVs above cofer's uh uh office on a
[42:21] bunch of different networks BBC the Russians the French you know MSNBC CNN Fox I think Fox was around back then yeah Fox and CNN were around yeah mhm and it's just silence so imagine there 200 people standing there and then somebody shouts will somebody please lead and it was like someone had slapped Cofer in the face and he's like ah you go to the director's office tell him
[42:51] this you go to security you go to operations and starts barking out orders so the rest of us are standing there like what do we do and then someone said everybody I think we should assume that we're probably a Target it hadn't occurred to anybody there's there there are still two planes in the air yeah right then the Pentagon gets hit well we all had friends at the Pentagon close friends colleagues it's like well now what the next one's either for us or
[43:22] it's for the White House abua later said he kept saying saying the White House but pointing to a picture of the capital building M and he kept saying that that the White House was we were going to hit the white house because it was the Bastion of the Jews and he kept pointing to the capital Dome so um I know godam so um a security guy come came in and he shouted everybody evacuate and nobody budged kofer said I
[43:53] guess we'll just have to die yeah so he came back in an hour two later and he says if you don't evacuate you'll be arrested and CER said everybody just go just go get out well I mean there are I it's I can't say the number of people but there were more than 10,000 people in headquarters right that day at any given time yeah 10,000 people all leaving the parking lot at the same time yeah took me three hours to get out it was so bad I had to abandon my
[44:25] car on the George Washington Parkway and walk the rest of the way to my house my apartment my then girlfriend who became my wife met me at my place my place was closer than hers had she been at headquarters too she was at headquarters too and she's like what are you going to do they're telling us to uh to evacuate and I said nobody's moving and if I'm not going to evacuate we have work to do now and she's like they're telling us we have to go I'll meet you at your place and I said okay so we met at my place we we went to the roof we watched the
[44:55] Pentagon burn for a while and then um I said this is ridiculous we should give blood we should try to give blood somewhere so we went to a couple of different there were blood mobiles set up but the lines were so long they said it's going to take us 24 hours to get through these people and I told her listen take my keys I'm going to walk back to headquarters and so how far is that it's about seven miles so my car was like 4 miles away I walked back to my car I drove across the median it was
[45:26] still there oh yeah it was still there it was chaos yeah and I'll tell you I after I baned my car surpris it wasn't looted oh no no everybody was nuts they were just trying to get out there were a lot of cars that were abandoned a lot and so I knew it was bad when after I baned my car I I got to the um Teddy Roosevelt bridge and I saw the White House's um director for Middle Eastern Affairs walking with no shoes like to
[45:56] evacu I was like are you kidding me it's that bad the White House evacuated like how can that be they've got underground buers should shouldn't evacuated yeah they have underground bunkers so I I walked back to my car I went back to headquarters and I didn't leave for 4 days I just slept underneath the desk you know balled up my jacket and used that as a pillow and I I say in my first book too it it got so bad where you know after after lunch it's like whatever it is 4:00 they lock up
[46:27] the cafeterias the cafeterias at the time were were contracted out to Marriott I forget the name of the Marriott catering sub uh Saga was the name of it back then Saga disgusting food and they would put a chain and a lock on the cafeteria doors so we got bolt cutters and we we cut it open we looted all the food we turned everything on and we cooked all the food and we just laid it out on these folding tables in the hway and
[46:57] people just grazed for the next 4 days we ended up cutting a check to the Marriott to pay for all the food we took how how many people like you came back hundreds hundreds hundreds but like not 50% of the agency oh no no not even only only counterterrorism and Middle East Ops everybody else bugged out so those four days take me inside of those what were you guys doing name traces every station on the planet was sending requests for name traces hey
[47:28] some I just heard a rumor some guy named Muhammad Abdullah he might be a terrorist what can you tell me about him you know I'm being General here but thousands upon thousands of name Trace requests and then we started trying to come up with operations to hit these guys and you're working 19 20 hour type days oh yeah yeah now incredible obviously like there's overload you guys are in full like game response mode and everything but in those 4 days are there
[48:01] any little pockets of I'm talking five minutes of time in there where you I don't know you're around the water cooler with people and you are processing like talking human to human about what's happening and not necessarily just oh did you find this terrorist or whatever right was there any of that yeah there was a lot of crying there was a lot of crying there were some spontaneous resignations there was a woman I worked with for years when I was in the director of intelligence she was an she was a branch chief in the
[48:32] counter terorism Center on the analytics side and she was so panicked when the first tower hit she got under her desk and she wouldn't come out from the desk from under the desk then when the second tower hit she grabbed her purse and took off and every single one of her analysts went to kofer Black a couple days later and said we don't have confidence in her leadership sh and she was asked to resign whoa mhm now what was kofer like
[49:03] during these days cuz he was one of the guys who was an architect of what became the power military response Mission and obviously was pretty legendary for that but yeah how much did you have any one on one time with him at all during this I did I did multiple times he had to be pretty pissed he was pissed pissed as an understatement because he had been screaming from the rooftops that this was going to happen yep and nobody would listen to him and it wasn't just kofer it was George Tennant and it was Dick Clark as well Dick Clark was the counterterrorism Zar at the uh at the
[49:34] NSC he was a Clinton holdover and the bush people just kind of sidelined him and didn't pay any attention to him they're like ah this gay guy yelling about terrorism China China is the threat I remember that coming from the bush people from the get-go it was about China like you agency people you're all obsessed with these semi- literate Arabs it's China that's going to be our our problem and so um kofer I got to say you know I probably disagree with kofer on 99% of
[50:04] of issues kofer was a genuine hero in those days after after 911 a genuine hero he was he was a he became kind of a wartime commander and one that you could respect and follow now the whole paramilitary thing I think was a grave mistake really I do really in Afghanistan the yes why because that's up to the military they're trained to do that let the military do what they're
[50:35] good at doing but the military was involved with that I know guys who were involved they were on loan to the CIA they were CIA run operations for example ground Branch you know air branch all those guys even if they're active duty they're succed to the CIA that's right that's a mistake why wait wait wait hold on hold on one second I [ __ ] on pretty much everything we did as from a strategy standpoint not our guys who were over there but from a strategy standpoint from Suits and Washington DC in the global war on terror like we
[51:05] [ __ ] everything up the one thing I've always cited as an incredible like modern military Masterpiece which was run by the CIA in this case was the paramilitary response in Afghanistan you're the first guy I've ever heard I think it was a mistake the the the mission of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets to make the best informed policy possible if you're going to do paramilitary organizations why have the parah in front of it let the military do what it's good at doing so you're just saying you think it was a mistake from a
[51:37] order of business standpoint exactly okay all right I'm glad we did it those guys are awesome I mean you have to have people like that but you would you would agree that the the end result of what they did at the beginning I'm talking about the beginning stages here people not were ended up heroic yeah it was pretty unbelievable what they did totally unbelievable and absolutely necessary but don't you think in a time like that and I want to come back to actual 911 in a second and some of the buildup but in a time like that of a quote unquote unprecedented situation
[52:07] sometimes like you know the the job titles are going to have to get blurry no I would rather these guys answer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff than answer to Jose Rodriguez oh I see where this is going now okay so you you some of the characters who you think were given power in that you don't well there's there's no oversight yeah none zero zero respect for the law can can you expand upon that sure just as an example something that you
[52:38] and I were talking about offline um you know you you carry out an illegal torture program and you videotape it okay at a secret prison somewhere overseas the White House gets wind of it and they say okay what you did was over and above what we approved it's probably illegal we may need to Pro prute some of your people we heard that you taped it so whatever you do don't destroy the tapes and then Jose Rodriguez says destroy the tapes as quickly destroy the
[53:10] tapes as quickly as you can hea they are [Laughter] tapes I was never holding the water never you know he came out to Pakistan when I was there he came with kofer you're talking about the Godfather of the black sites by the way just for people following yes he's the Godfather of the that's a great way to say it yeah he came out to Pakistan when I was there and and so I took them over to AR liaison Partners to me and this very very senior level you know we're talking fourstar generals and um the pakistanis
[53:43] have this funny it's a very Pakistani phrase that there was a great hu and cry right it's like a 1940s 30s era yeah yeah so they say there was a great human cry I am telling you sir there was great apprehension amongst the people this is a historical representation of a real story it's not racist YouTube Don't and Jose says there was a
[54:14] hue and a Cry he's mocking them and there's they said yes sir great Hue and cry very controversial and he's like the Hue I understand the cry this is serious and I was like [ __ ] you man what's wrong with you you flew Halfway Around the World to mock these people who are putting their lives on the line for us what the [ __ ] wrong with you of course again my job is to
[54:44] sit quietly against the wall and take notes so afterwards what year is this like 0 this was January of o02 okay yeah quick question I'm not disagreeing with you on this point with him but again back to I'm talking the 8 weeks after 9/11 the paramilitary stuff not the black site stuff not all that yeah yeah that's a separate issue MH right like you're you're to me I maybe I'm misunder understand this but you're raising the point of like oh a Jose Rodriguez a guy
[55:15] like that ended up getting power over in the Middle East are you saying because they set the president with that paramilitary thing at the beginning yes okay they created a monster without realizing that they were creating a moner I see what you're saying I am I can't even believe I'm going to say this out loud I was all for I remain all for targeting uh targeting people who pose a clear and present danger to the United States yeah you have to absolutely that's how we keep our people safe yes
[55:47] um but there has to be a chain of command it can't just be black and and not open to oversight or to Legal Authority right at at the end somebody has to answer to our elected officials you know we have we have House and Senate intelligence oversight committees for a reason because we made this mistake in the 40s 50s 60s up to
[56:17] 1975 and you know to me in a lot of ways we repeated those mistakes like you give a guy who I believe is a psychopath Jose Jose who enjoys killing for the sake of killing because he thinks that's well that's you know you need people to do these dark things in Shadows and no actually you don't you need to inform the Congressional oversight committees we're going to do this operation because it's going to keep Americans safe you can't
[56:47] you can't say hey can I do this one operation and then they say yes you can do that one operation and then you do 10 times more than that right and then destroy the evidence and say yeah what are you going to do about it what are you going to call the FBI you going to report me you going to write a write a strongly worded memo that's just not the way that's not the way a civilized society should work was Jose Rodriguez the least favorite guy you ever worked for
[57:18] yeah he was just uniformly unpleasant he had no sense of humor even his his peers you know the deputy directors uh didn't like him he's not a guy you would want to go out and have a beer with how did he get to I mean he got high up obviously how did he get to that point um a couple of different ways he was actually quite good in operating in very difficult environments uh almost exclusively in Latin
[57:48] America and um and his best friend in the world was ker black oh they were really tight mhm and you like kofer I loved kofer I thought he was just great he did you ever talk to ker about Jose great leader absolutely not not my place that's interesting though so they were really tight you know kofer kind of was disrespected uh at the end in a in a disaster like 911 somebody's got to be
[58:19] the Fall Guy and they decided it's going to be kofer why who else is going to be you know George tenant had ingratiated himself with the president so it wasn't going to be George George was protecting all of his Deputy directors he had handpicked all of them um Jose was too low on the totem pole to take the heat for it had to be kofer what about Alex station what was the guy Bill what the hell Miker Mike
[58:50] Shroyer yeah yeah two junr and Alex station was saying from the very beginning they're going to attack us they're going to attack us why is nobody paying attention they're going to attack us I said in my first book July the 6th 2001 that's right right July the 6th 2001 they're coming yeah I am entertaining A group of Middle Eastern Intelligence Officers we all we all did this right you have this delegation come literally every single
[59:21] day um I had this delegation come from a a friendly Middle Eastern country all mid-level guys they're all majors and Colonels and what you do is you give them a day of briefings you take them to lunch in the director's dining room which hit them with a with tracking Nano chip right you implant the Nano chip in their brains and then you um you have a a photo up with the director and then you exchange gifts and then you take them to a fancy Steakhouse and you know spend $1,000 on dinner and
[59:54] then they go back saying what a great time they had at the CIA and it it's great for relations so that day I was entertaining this group from the Middle East and I had scheduled a full day of 30 minute briefings on all these different Global issues one of them was Al-Qaeda and so I asked a junior analyst to come in just give us a 30 minute thing on Al-Qaeda instead inok kofer and the director of
[1:00:25] operations for Alex station I stood up and I said oh I said gentlemen this is kofer black he's the director of the cia's counterterrorism center and this woman is the director of operations I I was shocked kofer s sits down and he says straight out something terrible is going to happen we don't know exactly when or what but it's going to be an attack
[1:00:56] that's unprecedented yes he had just said this to cond I think just said it yep and he said I beg you if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda please help us and silence whoa silence they didn't have any sources in al-Qaeda they were didn't no they were just nobody did they were just as shocked by the direct Ness of
[1:01:26] this briefing as as I was so at the end of the day I send these guys back to their hotel we're going to go out to dinner at like 7 so I go to Ker's office to thank him for taking the time and I said kofer I got to ask you I'm not working on Al-Qaeda was that just for their benefit to sort of shake them up or were you serious he said oh I was serious something terrible is going to happen and then as soon as I saw that second plane hit I was like oh man this is ex exactly what he was talking about yeah
[1:01:57] this is one of those things you know how the internet is with 911 and stuff and it's it's one of the topics that I always get body bagged on when when I try to talk about this I take it on the chin and I give it right back so there's no doubt to me that evidence suggests that other intelligence agencies around the world and I'll leave it at that had some prior knowledge of what was going to go down here well there were there were two we can go ahead and name go for it yeah the Israelis and the Saudis up to their
[1:02:27] necks oh yeah uhhuh and and both wanted it to happen for different reasons I love your directness that's took the took the words right out of my brain and put it on the mic there so let me add something if I may interrupt you please go ahead you know when we caught Abu zua in March of o2 which we'll tell the story of we also confiscated his his diary and I use the word diary Loosely he's like writing letters to himself and [ __ ] right so it was it was an address book book it was a diary it was a doodle
[1:02:58] book but he was writing these letters to himself as a young man so it's the 27-year-old abua writing to the 14-year-old abua saying don't make the mistakes that I made treat our father with respect you know be kind to that girl next door that you were rude to that kind of thing the FBI concluded because they are so wise that they were the rantings of a Madman no he just very creative he was not a mad man yeah um but the important
[1:03:32] part of this is in the address book part there were the names and cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes so to make a long story short we went to the Saudis and we said we're going to start killing people and some of them may be named Al saoud if you don't get on the stick well within a week all three of them were were dead one died of 43 of a heart
[1:04:03] attack yeah mhm one was killed in a single car accident on the Riad Jetta highway right his brakes didn't work anymore and one died of thirst while camping in the desert yeah mhm all right so I bring this up because it's very well documented that the CIA and FBI did not share information because there was strong I mean you've hinted at that all day you
[1:04:34] guys hat each other so John O'Neal Who was a very Brash flawed guy at FBI counterterrorism New York if youy director of the FBI and uh special agent in charge of the New York field office right so if you've ever seen the series The looming Tower or read the book by Lawrence what the hell is uh Lawrence uh oh my God that's hard it's a great book Lawrence Wright that's it yeah Lawrence Wright classic classic book excellent book so John all his flaws aside was spoton about Osama Bin
[1:05:07] Laden counting the table about it% correct Bill Shore at is that his name Mike Sher Mike Shyer at CIA 100% correct as well [ __ ] hated him Y and so there was a lack of sharing there including guys who the in Intel that CIA had about guys who were in America going to flight schools and whatever so it looks it's a very bad look for CIA and it's deeper than that even please um the CIA and FBI computer systems were
[1:05:38] incompatible what yeah so if I'm in the CIA and I write a cable and it's a finished intelligence report it goes to the CIA the state department the Pentagon the White House it can't go to the FBI because the FBI computer system is not set up to accept CIA cables oh my God and when the FBI writes a cable it can't be sent to the CIA that's how much we hated each other holy [ __ ] that's changed right but this
[1:06:10] is what we were dealing with on 91 right so point being that there's a total Communication Breakdown there and and that would you would definitely file that under the subject matter of like incompetence when you're looking at doing a autopsy of what happened definitely official incompetence okay when people run just because it I think it makes them feel good to say online the CIA did 9911 I have to look at evidence here and the and the and I say this as someone
[1:06:40] who thinks the CIA is done a lot of awful [ __ ] over the years and we've seen it publicized for sure and we'll always call that out absolutely we've talked about JFK on here we've talked about MK Ultra but on this one when you see guys like kofer black and George Tennant who was there was a meeting on July 6th like you talked about and there was another one in August at the White House I want to say George was at the one in August but cover black I believe was at both of them the [ __ ] leaders of the CIA went to the White House it's on record yes
[1:07:10] and said this is going to happen they didn't necessarily say it's two planes going into the World Trade Center another we didn't know the detail but they knew it was [ __ ] coming and the issue when you look at it is that it took the [ __ ] Clinton White House like six and a half years to start taking out kind of seriously and here you had a white house that was certainly a very flooded White House only eight months in and they're like yeah we'll worry about that latery Rice was one of the worst Defenders she's like you guys you're obsessed with this Al-Qaeda yeah yeah yeah so when you see the a the the
[1:07:43] 20 almost 25 year aftermath Now 23 years whatever it is MH where over time this is as you get farther and farther away from an event you get people who were maybe young that are now coming of age who didn't see it happen right now they look at the evidence you see a lot of a lot of information float online from all different sources ranging from Total morons to you know people who may have had some security clearances or whatever and you get this this batch of different opinions about what the inside job was
[1:08:14] and certainly as we discussed there were there was certainly some inside information here that was that was not shared and and it's a very corrupt day but when you see as someone who has every reason to also not like the CIA and maybe some of the power structures that exist there when you see so much of the American public pin it specifically just on the CIA how does that make you feel it makes me lament the fact that there is so much intellectual laziness in our country
[1:08:45] today yeah um listen the C to to Echo your comment just now the CIA has done some awful [ __ ] [ __ ] over the course of its history from 1947 onward um murdering 3,000 Americans uh in one day is not one of those things yeah no we can blame listen Al-Qaeda did this we can also blame the Saudi government I believe the Saudi government were elements elements of the
[1:09:16] Saudi government elements of the Saudi royal family were involved in this up to their necks the Israelis probably had advanced warning that this was going to happen and decided not to tell the United States because they wanted us to go to war with the Middle East right it makes them stronger that's right so they had a vested interest in the US being attacked that day but there was no Nano thermite in the paint there was no controlled demolition it wasn't the
[1:09:48] space aliens or the lizard people which I've actually been told multiple times yeah yeah that out of hand man it was Al-Qaeda yeah but you're there those next four days because I believe the par military operations started maybe five six days later something like that so you're a part of the planning for that right no that was happening very very secretly and it was an absolutely heroic group of
[1:10:19] guys all of whom were were known to us they just kind of disappeared appeared one day a couple of days after 9/11 and they were they were air dropped into um into Northern Afghanistan we talking ground Branch guys uh no it was a bunch of middle-aged guys who knew how to ride horses and shoot guns um and they weren't all CIA no they weren't all CIA um we got a podcast coming up about
[1:10:51] that next year just stay tuned a couple of them have written books or maybe one of them is WR two of them have written books uh it remains pretty highly classified but these guys put their lives on the line to to create that early relationship between the CIA and the Northern Alliance that would allow us to overthrow the Taliban and to force Al-Qaeda out of the country what did your after those four days are up I guess you went home
[1:11:22] finally yeah you take a couple days off or I was going to say like a few hours in fact in fact nobody took any time off to the point where Congress had to wave the Federal Regulation that you can only accumulate I forget what it was 2,000 hours of leave or something like that they took the cap off and they also took the cap off of overtime oh my God the overtime it's
[1:11:54] like they're bringing youone money in a wheelbarrow payday I bought a house just from oh Pakistan man listen Pakistan I'm I'm making my salary which was it was a good salary it was enough for me to live on in DC when did you first go to Pakistan uh January 6 okay two 2002 January 4th 2002 real quick just before Pakistan because I want to get there right now those three months what are you what are you doing Al Al Al just in the office at 24 hours a day yeah mhm
[1:12:26] any major breakthroughs you were a part of that you can talk about there were a couple things I'm actually pretty proud of okay what were they I I I probably shouldn't say I'll say one was domestic which kind of shocked everybody I was very proud of that uh and then there were two overseas that I was proud that no it just never occurred to anybody that there are Arabs in some of these places that I probably shouldn't say I I did well but the but
[1:12:57] on a broad level I guess the things you're referring to are are identifying people who were terrorists and us being able to get them and we started looking at al-qaeda's finances you know you gota you got to disrupt the finances on top of it all these people are getting paid I mean even if it's only $200 a month how were they paying people it was Osama bin Laden's personal money yeah but how are they getting like okay Osama Bin Laden's sitting in Afghanistan and he's getting money to some [ __ ] in [ __ ] Bulgaria a lot a lot of it was um banks
[1:13:30] in places like um Sudan or Pakistan a lot of it was What's called the haala system do you know what the haala system is I don't think so oh this is this is a problem years later when I was the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I I did a study on the haala system I flew out to the Middle East and I talked to some um UAE uh police senior police officials about the halalas halalas are informal unofficial money transfer
[1:14:02] centers so when I say informal and unofficial what I did just to test it was I walked into a a little grocery store like little like one guy selling some fruits and vegetables and I said I want to send $50 to the United States and he said where in the United States I said Washington DC he says okay give me the 15 the $50 I give him my 50 he gives me
[1:14:33] a 16-digit number just written by hand on a piece of paper and he puts an address of an Arabic Bakery in Bethesda Maryland and he says this is where you get your money whoa so I fly back a week later I take the subway up to Bethesda I go into this Arabic Bakery and I I said I need to talk to somebody about picking up uh some money and uh I give him my 16-digit number he looks in this Ledger and he
[1:15:04] gives me whatever it was $46 from my 50 totally completely untraceable now I I only did $50 just to see if it would work whoa and it worked but they're doing you know hundreds of thousands in a single transaction they're doing millions and what they the way they move the money around is by DHL DHL DHL will still deliver boxes of money oh like the company DHL DHL FedEx
[1:15:35] won't do it you know UPS won't do it DHL will do it so I was like we got to shut this thing down so Osama Bin Laden's just like DHL and his money around the world MH whoa that's like it's not hairs on skin standing up yeah so for 3 months helping identify all this stuff and then what had were is this when you were first approached about enhance interrogation no that was later that was
[1:16:05] later so I went to Pakistan in January of 02 had wild crazy success there and um and I went back to headquarters in late May of o2 and that's when I was approached okay but the the wild crazy success was Abu zua yeah and all that okay so you get into Pakistan what was your were you like the highest ranked CIA guy there yeah well in counterterrorism okay we had a chief and
[1:16:37] a deputy chief and they so they're sending you to Pakistan and what's what's the objective just like try to find any hvts we can get any of them now we're bombing this [ __ ] out of Tor B at the time we knew that the the whole Al-Qaeda leadership was in the village of torab Bora or the Vons of the village of Tabora in eastern Afghanistan and um so we're just bombing them mercilessly and they're they're crossing the mountains into Pakistan and looking
[1:17:09] for Safe Haven there uh safe houses any way they can just get away from the bombing did you guys already believe Bin Laden had made it into Pakistan at that time no we thought he was we thought he was held uh held up in in toror now the the story is pretty famous uh we had sencom had a translator who was in touch with Al-Qaeda fighters on the mountain and he said you're surrounded and we're going to kill everybody unless
[1:17:40] you surrender um which is what general Franks had instructed him to say and the al-Qaeda person he was talking to said we will surrender at dawn if you let our women and children come down and so we stupidly agreed to that so the women and children come down we start uh expecting at dawn for bin Laden to uh to give up and the rest of the
[1:18:11] al-Qaeda leadership to give up in instead nobody comes down and here during the night while we're waiting for the women and children to come down they dressed as women went down the other side of the mountain and escaped including Bin Laden Bin Laden we later Learned was dressed as a woman and sat in the back of a pickup truck and escaped MH he was like 6'4 yeah it's a tall [ __ ] woman you can say that again big feet and everything so you you go into Pakistan
[1:18:43] take me into like day one there you get on the ground what are you doing who are you talking to oh my God day one I arrive at 4:00 in the morning from London it's a beautiful country though it is actually beautiful country their food is fantastic I gained a lot of weight there just in Pakistan yeah I even you know when I went back home I I even dreamt about Pakistan I I loved the place it's rough you look you have to accept the fact they're trying to kill you and you accept the fact that you're going to catch some god- awul disease
[1:19:14] and if you just accept it just surrender to it you'll actually enjoy yourself yeah not on my list of places to go but maybe I'll reconsider that's a no that's a don't you [ __ ] dare so I arrive at 4:00 the driver says I'll pick you up at 700 to take in I said oh God please let me sleep till 8 please pick me up at 8 so I go in at 8 go up to the chief the deputy chief Hi I'm the new guy the chief I knew actually from the farm where'd you go
[1:19:44] like where is this uh the American Embassy okay you're at the actual Embassy got and uh they sat me down they said okay here's what what we want you to do we want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house I said all right now I had never done this before I had been in my training I had been trained to recruit spies to steal secrets to develop sources of information not to kick down the door of a safe house and
[1:20:15] grab everybody and put them in flexi cuffs this is new to me so I went back to my office with a legal pad and I'm thinking how do I take down a terrorist Safe House well number one I would want it to be dark so I wrote 0200 at the top of the paper and I thought I would need stuff like I need battering rams and guns and ammunition and night vision goggles and
[1:20:47] secure Communications and you know I made a long list of stuff I went to to www.s.com gs.com it's a Police Supply Warehouse in Kentucky and I ordered everything I needed and I put it on my credit card wait you paid for it sure and then I just reimbursed myself oh okay yeah that worked all this [ __ ] came in a giant crate like a few days
[1:21:19] later except the secure coms I got from headquarters and um I had an unlimited budget quite literally it was unlimited so uh I figured 911 is still an open criminal investigation and as much as we might hate to do it we got to invite the FBI to be there with [Music] us and then you know this is Pakistan so
[1:21:49] we probably have to invite the pakistanis since it's their country yeah and we're bus down doors in their country I would be upset if these Chinese gangs were roving around busting down the doors of Americans and grabbing them right but the the pakistanis are not that their intelligence agency is historically kind of toofaced no very much so but that's kind of the good part there are two very distinct factions within
[1:22:21] the isi right the one I dealt dealt with were all trained at Sandhurst the British uh West Point spoke English fluently absolutely Fearless would happily give up their lives for the mission the other faction had long beards walking aroundd yeah you don't want to deal with
[1:22:51] those guys those guys are going to cut your throat as soon as you turn around so I'm going to deal with these Good Guys the other guys I'm just going to for the time being I'm going to pretend they don't exist got it right we can work against them later see you have your choice yeah so I'm working just with the counterterrorism guys so I get a tip with a little address right I call the pakistanis I go downstairs to the FBI because they're on a different floor and I said uh hey I got a tip we got an address let's hit this place 2 o'clock
[1:23:22] we'll see how we do 2:00 we go it's two two CIA two FBI two isi and then a contingent of local Islam Abad police who are succed uh by the isi just to make sure you know we're all safe so we take this battering ram that I got from Kentucky bloop we bust the door down and there are these two kids in there one's 18 one's 19 and they start balling they were from Tunisia M and we
[1:23:54] cough on and one's like can I call my mother I'm like no you can't call you're under arrest you can't call your mother the other one's like balling and I said to my colleague this is the Fearsome Al-Qaeda this is what we're so afraid of they're [ __ ] children MH like maybe this is just a fluke so we took him took him to the RL pendy jail just locked them
[1:24:25] up couple of nights later couple days later I got a call from a friendly Arab intelligence officer Brigadier General and he says hey I heard you're the guy that we talked to about these the word got around I said sure sure let's meet for coffee so we meet for coffee he sort of pushes a paper across he said uh said here's an address some bad guys in there I said okay thank you took the paper finished my coffee went back to the to the office I said we have a tip
[1:24:56] let's bust this place down tonight so we put the team together again bust it down this time was more serious we got a couple of members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad which is the group that killed President anir Sadat oh wow and then merged with al-Qaeda in 1995 so they were still their own entity but they're like a subsidiary kind of exactly okay so I was like okay this is different these guys were were bad guys real bad guys so I'm thinking this is actually working so every couple of nights we
[1:25:27] would bust down the door of some house grab two three four guys whatever sometimes we would do two in a night you worried about waking up the neighborhood and people finding out Americans are there people were petrified at the thought that this is either Al-Qaeda breaking down the door or it's the pakistanis breaking down the door and whoever it is I don't want any part of it okay yeah and then in February of 2002 you know we we work s days a week
[1:25:58] right and and usually 14 to 16 hours a day the weekend in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday the weekend in the Middle East is Thursday and Friday but Friday and Saturday in Pakistan and Saturday was the only day I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping until 8 before I had to get up and go to the office and um now the phone rings at like 6 o' I was like damn it can't get any sleep in this country so it's the
[1:26:29] chief and he's like something's up you got to come in right away so I get dressed go into the office everybody's already there but it's the the chief the deputy chief the chief Ops then the FBI legal attache his deputy and me I go what's up and the chief says we just got word that Abu zubeda is somewhere in Pakistan we have to catch him I'm like okay I'm thinking AB was a beta who the [ __ ] is
[1:27:00] that I know that name from somewhere and then I remembered thank God I had just read an article in Time Magazine which was a thing back then that he was the number three in al-Qaeda so I said right right the number three yeah he's somewhere in Pakistan everybody turns and looks at me and I go I go guys this country is the size of Texas it's got 200 million people in it what do you mean he's somewhere in Pakistan you have to catch him like seriously you look at me you're
[1:27:31] CT Ops I was like oh [ __ ] okay let me I'll think of something I came up with a couple of terrible ideas what how so when I was in college one of my summer jobs my dad was friends with our state senator so he got me this patronage job I was a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and we knew that Ababa was moving back and forth between theore and fbad well that's a toll road so I oh so you did know that oh yeah so but but
[1:28:03] lore has 12 million and fbad has 8 million you can't just say there go catch him there he is right he's in New York go get him yeah you know so that's a toll road well it's a toll road like two-thirds of the way and then it just stops and then it's just a dirt track the rest of the way to Fe labad so you wanted the sunny Corley on him no no I was more gentle than that no all right I said I was a toll collector I know how to operate the toll machines oh my god so let's put CIA guys in all the
[1:28:35] toll booths and when we see him we grab him they're like no not going to work no no we're not going to do that I remember the were like 65,000 cars go through those boots every day sir we cannot I was like okay okay it's just an idea sorry yeah you're good Mark Mark the PA yeah sorry no you're I won't do that anymore no no it's fine I just it's it's ridiculous I got to be that careful on YouTube but you have no idea the [ __ ]
[1:29:05] that they've I'll rephrase it then so it won't cause you no no no it's all good we just bleeped it we're good okay we got it so you tried the toll booth one you had another bad idea there was another one where we were vaguely able to geolocate his phone but he would only turn on for 15 30 seconds at a time just to listen to the voicemails and then he back then you could take the battery out of the cell phone so he would just take the battery out so it would ping and we'd be like
[1:29:36] he's in that direction and then the Ping would stop because it couldn't focus on it needed more time to focus on the spot and we needed hours like to get in the car and follow the Ping and so he had to be on it for hours for us us to be able to geolocate him he's only on for at the most was 30 seconds so it we couldn't even get out of the office so finally I said to the chief I need to bring in a targeting officer now a targeting officer is an analyst but vastly different kind of analyst than
[1:30:07] than what I was in the director of of intelligence an intelligence analyst is reading allsource uh intelligence and writing articles or papers for the president the vice president the secretaries of state and defense the national security adviser a targeting analyst is taking millions of pieces of data and metadata for the specific purpose of locating a Target this is what Andy bus's wife does
[1:30:38] that's right she's a targeting analyst so post 911 this became a critically important skill so I had a friend um who actually trained Andy buam Manti's wife and I called him and I said hey can you come out to Pakistan I need help oh what what's what's going on what are you looking for I Saidi can't tell you until you get here and you got to sign a secrecy agreement but you're not going to want to miss this operation he was on the next flight so
[1:31:10] he arrives and I'm like abuaba is somewhere here we don't know where we can't find him and he's like okay so what do you have I said we got a handful of phone numbers a handful of of email addresses and a handful of physical addresses so he he took this piece of Butcher Block paper about about the size of the table maybe a little bit smaller than this table and he wrote Abu zua in the middle and circled it and then around that he
[1:31:42] wrote all of the the phone numbers and email addresses that had been in touch with abuaba and then around that he wrote all the phone numbers addresses and email addresses of everybody who had been in touch with the people who had been in touch with Abu Zeda he worked on this for a week or two and there were lines intersecting going all different directions it's like straight out of Homeland yeah it looked like a spiderweb and at the end of it he said to me I can't pair it down to anything less
[1:32:14] than 14 I said 14 I go dude we never hit more than two sites before in a night I can't hit 14 sites in a night there aren't enough of us he said I I can't I can't get it any down any lower than 14 so I wrote a cable to headquarters I said I need 36 guys I need X millions of dollars in cash we need weapons night vision goggles lots of ammunition satellite dish secure coms
[1:32:45] everything they chartered a 737 they're like say less yeah and I'm telling you 24 hours later it landed and we start offloading the stuff and we started taking it to a hotel can you imagine not really like crates that are marked arms and we're Wheeling it into the hotel and this this Pakistani security guard was like you can't bring that in here and I was like yeah yeah [ __ ] we can yeah we're authorized we're authorized and the British the the the
[1:33:16] manager of the hotel was this British guy and he knew exactly what was going on and I slipped him a couple of hundred bucks and I said keep this security guard out of my way I don't like this guy's attitude he's like he's fired cheap date I would have been like yo peel off some of those racks from the plane every once in a while he would ask me if I would sit and have a coffee with him in the lobby and I would just because he made sure we were all happy and had everything we needed well it we can't run this operation from a
[1:33:48] hotel so I went to the Pakistani isi guy in in lore and he said I've been instructed to give you anything you need what do you need I said I need a safe house and before the safe house I need a real estate agent a real estate agent so he's like okay so he gets us a real estate agent we went and looked at a bunch of houses and I picked one it was 10 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms in the fanciest section of the
[1:34:19] city and so you just take some cash out of the trunk and and it to and the guy's like and he goes sir do you mind if I ask you what you do for a living don't worry about it and I go I looked at my friend and he goes we're we're textile Barons and I said yes we are we're textile Barons and he said that's wonderful textiles are one of the most
[1:34:51] important parts of the Pakistani economy and we go yes we make lots of clothes lots welcome to Pakistan sir he says welcome welcome thank you here's your $5 million in cash so we bought this house and then we went to faisalabad which is one of the just most horrible places on Earth and we bought a second house seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms
[1:35:21] we figured we needed all those bedrooms to do interrogation H yeah so that's why I did that so that was a black sight you know what I never thought of it that way but I guess in retrospect you could probably call it that right see now you're few fingernails on the floor we were very kind I never laid a hand on anybody yeah you were kind they were kind when you were in the room then you left they're like there goes the human rights guy yeah that's true it's a cross I have to bear so so
[1:35:54] uh so you have two houses 14 bedrooms seven bedrooms you're loaded up one's in fad and the other one's where lore yeah okay so um the analyst remained in uh actually he drove down to lore with me he helped carry the money it was too much for one person to carry so he he drove back to fisel laad to sort of manage things from from there and um
[1:36:24] you know we had these 36 guys half CIA half FBI and um I gathered everybody along with the pakistanis I gathered everybody in the laor safe house and I stood on the the coffee table and I said guys at the risk of sounding melodramatic life is a game of inches we're gonna have to synchronize our watches so we synchronized our watches everybody chuckled and I said so here's what we're going to do everybody
[1:36:54] who's assigned to uh to Feist laad we chartered a bus and you're going to get on the bus and go to the safe house there so I said um it's it's 2200 now at 0130 we had cars we had rented you know a dozen cars so I said at 0130 get in your assigned car and go to your target 0155 be within line of sight of your target there's 14 targets yeah yeah
[1:37:24] three three in lore and 11 in feis labad and then one in lore we had to cancel because when we did the the dry run earlier in the day it turned out to be a a pay phone in a shishkabob stand so you're down to 13 down down to 13 so so 0158 get out of the car and exactly as the clock strikes 0200 bust down the door separate the women and children from the men grab the men and put him in the Patty
[1:37:56] wagon and so everybody got in the bus and at 0200 I was on the roof of the safe house with a colleague of mine and I looked at my watch and I said 0200 here we go and just as I said the words we hear this sound it's like dink dink dink metal on metal and I said that's not good I wonder what that is it's 2 o'clock in the morning listen the whole country of Pakistan goes to sleep at like midnight
[1:38:26] so it is dead silence out there there's no traffic there's no nothing we hear this dtin dink dink so he said to me site 13 is the closest to us I wonder if it's site 13 and then we hear shots fired and I was like oh my God so I I got on the walkie-talkie and I said site 13 come in what's going on over there and he says shots fire shots fired I was like a crap we run
[1:38:57] downstairs we jump in our car we speed over to site 13 it's chaos over there there are three people laying in the street one's dead obviously dead and um one looks like he's either dead or he's going to be dead in a minute and I'm going to show you some of the oh you got pictures of this I got pictures imagine that got pictures from 23 years ago of dead guys in the street so
[1:39:29] um I'm going to get to see it YouTube won't sorry guys oh yeah oh wow these are like real real oh they're real real they're Grizzly whoa yeah what's that what's that old line they're going to have they're going to have spiders crawling across their eyes flies flies that was ker yeah well they're going to have flies on their eyes and they did that they did so um I love that you have this
[1:40:01] like already it was a it was a real [ __ ] getting him cleared by the CIA those pictures yeah yeah so um the one guy was dead the second guy looked like he was dead or he was going to be dead in a minute third guy is screaming bloody murder so I said to the Pakistani I go I go what's what's happening here and he says we got him we got your man and I said which one is he this one
[1:40:33] right here one that's alive the guy that's almost dead maybe dead this guy didn't look anything like abuaba we had a six-year-old passport photo and the passport photo was this you know goodlooking thin young guy with a a CL closely cropped beard and mustache this guy that's laying in the street he's fat he's clean shaven crazy I say it all the time Albert Einstein hair
[1:41:04] going all every Wich way I go that doesn't look anything like him so I call the analyst and I I told him what was going on he's like give me a picture of his eye so I I kneel down and I shout at him if the hunic Open Your Eyes he's almost dead so I lift up his eye but it's rolled back in his head all I can see is the whites and I said he's this guy's dying he's soaked in blood there's blood all over the road um so he says um give
[1:41:37] me a shot of his ear cuz no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints well phones didn't have cameras in those days so I I take a picture of his ear I plug the camera into the phone I going to say it's a nice camera those were HD shot SCS oh thank you yeah it was a good camera yeah so um I send the um I send the picture to the analyst he sends it to headquarters five minutes later they come back back they said it's him so it turned out the dead guy was a
[1:42:08] bomb maker from Syria they were on the second floor of the safe house there were 23 guys at the bottom floor and then they knew that there were VIPs upstairs they didn't know who it was oh the guys downstairs didn't know who was no idea no idea who it was uh and the VIPs had a t- Walla this kid Pakistani kid who would go out every day and buy food and cook the food for the day but like I say all they knew was that there were VIPs upstairs so the Syrian bombmaker was killed they they climbed to the roof of
[1:42:38] the house and they were jumping to the roof of the next door neighbor's house to try to escape when the attack went down and the last [ __ ] thing I said before we got on the buses was take them alive right and this Pakistani cop is like Bang Bang bang with an AK-47 [ __ ] Rambo idiot so they killed him instantly he was dead before he hit the ground and you saw the picture he's clearly dead yeah he's out abua was the second one to jump and the guy shot him in the thigh the groin and the stomach H
[1:43:10] yeah so he was just about done and then the third guy was shot in the leg right through the center of his femur but we'll get to that in a minute stick a finger in there it was you could stick a fist in there did you you do it no you sure he was screaming without me having to help okay all right uh but we we had a we had a conversation about it later in the evening okay so we throw him in the back of this filthy pickup truck Toyota Cherry it was called and we
[1:43:41] rushed to FIS laad Hospital the worst place on Earth I've said in other podcast that the doors are open it's it's like 3 3:20 in the morning now the door are open the windows are open like swarms of mosquitoes are just feeding on people's open wounds dogs walking up and down the hall taking a bite disgusting yeah um I've said too I said in my first book there was a bar of Irish Spring soap and it had a bunch of syringes
[1:44:13] sticking out of it so if you needed a shot they would just pulling out put the thing give you shot stick it back in the bar of soap it was bad really bad uh so here are all these CIA guys dressed as pakistanis bringing in an Arab who's bleeding to death and I two of them right because you got the guy with the leg too yeah so I said to the doctor he's like was shocked right and I said doc you got to patch this guy up my
[1:44:44] orders were to take him Alive Now go so they take him into emergency surgery and I sit down down I'm with two colleagues and two pakistanis and we just sit down like this is exhausting well word got around the al-Qaeda community that we had gotten him and so they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital and we're diving down and I
[1:45:15] said to the Pakistani major awesome guy major khed I said uh if they realize how lightly armed we are we're dead can you get a helicopter in here we need to get out of here he said I think so 20 minutes later helicopter lands in the parking lot I I walk into the the uh surgery the operating room like this I go doc wrap it up we got to go I did and they're sewing them clothes
[1:45:46] there's the blood everywhere we put him and and and The Bodyguard that shot through the leg we put them both on the helicopter we fly him to a Pakistani military base about 50 Mi away the the there was a they called it a hospital it wasn't a hospital it was like a clinic uh right on the side of the tarmac it it was like a it was round it had a Hubb and spokes so a Red Cross kind of thing yeah and there was a desk in the center like a nurses station and then there were eight Bays around there were like
[1:46:19] three Bays that had patients in them and all were in there for attempted suicides I saw on the on the board and then they took r two prisoners so they were expecting us of course and they took abis beta right into surgery and the doctor came out a few minutes later and he said look I got to warn you I have never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived so you need to be prepared for him dying I was like damn it like there was one single order from
[1:46:50] headquarters take him alive well I was exhausted and so I turned the ceiling fan on as high as it would go to make me slightly uncomfortably cold in his room in his room and I just waited for him to come out of surgery in the meantime this [ __ ] guy is screaming bloody murder in the other bay so I went in there did you see the picture of him like looking he's laying and he's looking he's covered soaked in blood yeah so I go in
[1:47:23] there and I said uh keik how are you he goes alhamdulillah like that God thanks to God glory to God I said yeah you don't look so good I said in English and he says are you American and I said yeah and he goes the pakistanis they held me down and they put an AK-47 against my leg and they shot me I said that's not what I heard I
[1:47:56] heard you were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the next house he stops crying he goes I am 150 kilos I cannot jump from the roof like that 330 lbs and he was you saw the picture yeah big guy so I pull back the sheet and there is a perfectly round powder burn all the way around his wound and I go I don't know anything about that that
[1:48:28] happened before I got there yeah not my jurisdiction yeah I heard you were jumping from the roof wow so finally they bring up as AA out of surgery and again completely and utterly soaked in blood they're pumping blood into him with a pump and as quickly as they're pumping it in it's just spilling out of him and it's it's dripping off the bed it made a big pool under the bed it was like a scene out of
[1:48:58] a horror movie so I sat down at the foot of his bed and I'm looking at him just staring at him and I'm thinking you know what I am so tired I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep he's in a coma right yeah he's in a coma but I'm thinking what if the doctor's Al-Qaeda I don't know I don't know who this doctor is so I tore up a sheet into strips and I tied his wrists and his ankle an Les to the bed thinking if somebody tries to break him out poor guy's in a coma you're tying him down
[1:49:28] like he he doesn't have enough suffering for one lifetime I thought if somebody tries to break him out I'll hear it and I'll wake up and I'll I don't know shoot someone I don't know what I'm going to do so I just sit at the foot of the bed and I just stare at him he's in a coma for a full 24 hours I am so tired and hungry and I smell bad so I called one of my buddies over at the safe house
[1:49:59] I said buddy can you can you bring me some clothes and some food I think I got a pair of underwear pair of socks and uh I got a t-shirt in there and bring me some food and and a coffee a big one so about a half an hour later he shows up and um he gives me my underwear my socks the only shirt I had was this shirt you know about I can't believe you didn't wear this today I was so upset when you showed up at the door Danny Jones said that like it never even occurred to me
[1:50:30] to put the shirt on yeah tell people what the shirt is so my kids had bought me this shirt for Christmas it was a fire engine red shirt with SpongeBob Square Pants on it and we used to love watching SpongeBob together when they were little they're in their 20s and 30s now and that was the only clean shirt I had so I put the shirt on he brought me some orange juice and coffee and some crackers so I'm sitting there and finally Abu zua begins to stir
[1:51:00] and I stand up at the foot of his bed I put my hands on my hips and I'm looking at him and he's like tied down and he opens just one eye of course he only had one eye yeah right he opens his eye and he doesn't look at me yeah he looks at SpongeBob and his pulse goes from 120 to 220 like in a second and the Machine starts going and then you hear code blue code blue and these people rush in he saw
[1:51:33] SpongeBob he knew it was up he was like oh my God the Americans have me and they're like clear right and then they give him demall and he's out out again and then I just sat back down and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting in like 6 hours later um he starts to stir again so he opens his eyes and now he's just looking at me he's tied down he's just looking at me staring at me and he goes like
[1:52:03] this and motions for me to come over so I go next to him and I moved his oxygen mask off of his mouth and I said shme what is your name and he shakes his head so I said again and then he says to me in English I will not speak to you in God's language M and I said that's okay abua we know who you are and then he starts crying and he says please brother kill me take the pillow and kill me and I said no nobody's going to kill
[1:52:34] you I said you're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide that's not what he wanted to hear no and he wanted to know what was going to happen to him and I said honestly I don't know I can tell you though that I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience my colleagues they are not nice like I am I said the truth is
[1:53:05] your life is over but what remains can be easy or it can be terrible and it's up to you if you'll listen to some advice I said it's that you have to cooperate he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate I said well it's up to you so then I sat back down he would just look at me and then kind of wave
[1:53:36] for me to come over I move his oxygen mask are you Christian and I said yes I'm Christian we have like he's like yeah right we we have a lot in common I said yes we do I studied Islam in college and we actually do have a lot in common then he wanted to tell me about his family 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 you're
[1:54:07] not the victim here there were 50,000 people in those towers that morning did you think we wouldn't try to find you or to find Bin Laden what did he say to that he said he never wanted to attack the United States on 911 did you believe him yes because he was direct about it he said all I ever wanted to do was kill Jews and I was like oh well that puts it into perspective he just starts dying over here so he wanted to attack Israel he
[1:54:38] wanted to attack Israel and he said that he had been um he had been uh I mean it's not a democracy but essentially outvoted yeah now wasn't he not really the number he was mostely not only was he not the number three in al-Qaeda he had never actually joined Al-Qaeda so how did he even have a vote then well just because he had never pledged fty didn't mean that he wasn't an important part of the of the organization's Logistics yeah that's so confusing to me
[1:55:10] that he never officially joined but he had so much power and it was because he was really good at what he did so he so he's like Jimmy Conway from Good Fellas he's not an Italian so he's not that is The Perfect Analogy I wish I had thought of that okay that's the Perfect Analogy Jimmy Conway was Irish so he was never going to be a member he was never going to be made but he was an associate that's what we should say all right you can use that one he was an associate so he was the one who founded
[1:55:42] the uh House Of Martyrs the it's it's called the house of Martyrs it's the al-Qaeda Safe House in Pas Pakistan and he was the one that founded um and managed al-qaeda's two uh training camps one in kahar and one in lashara in Helman Province so those were important uh events yeah he also was the logs guy so if you have been in Afghanistan for a while you're
[1:56:12] tired of the fight you want to go home he'll get you out of the country he'll get you a false passport and a ticket home or you're arriving from the Middle East he'll smuggle you in make sure you're set up and get you on the payroll so he was doing all these logistics for them why did we think he was the number three Ah that's The $64,000 Question that's it it's a low number yeah well that was the the game show in the 50s
[1:56:44] um he has a cousin a first cousin with the same name Abu zua okay abu's real name is z uh Muhammad Hussein says n n is abua he had a cousin also using the ner abuaba okay so we're getting these reports Abu Zeda is planning an attack in Aman wait a minute two days later Abu Zeda is planning an attack in in London oh no abuaba it turns out he was in Montana
[1:57:14] two years ago oh no abuaba is doing an attack in in anara well we didn't know there were two of them and so we thought guy's a freaking terrorist Superman I mean there was like a whole Branch following AB aa oh my God he he had a host family in Montana oh he's in Paris he's studying in Paris oh my God he went back to him on it was two guys and one of them the other one was bad too and as soon as we arrested the one
[1:57:45] the other one just disappeared we think he probably went to to Jordan we we never figured it out who yeah so we thought well if this guy's involved in so many the planning for so many different attacks he's got to be right beneath he's got to be right at the top now the the actual number three was Muhammad ATF but we killed Muhammad ATF in in uh in um October of 2001 in the Torah Bor in the Tor Boro as soon as
[1:58:16] we started hitting to torab Bora we hit the house that Muhammad ATF was in and it turned out that when the rocket came through the roof it blew up the the uh kitchen table and A Shard of wood from the table hit him in the neck and killed him yeah good way to go yeah so who's going to be the number three it must be this terrorist Superman we keep reading about upu beta and that turned out to just not be the case so before we
[1:58:48] get there he survived this though he's talking how are you planning to like did you know where they wanted to take him or was I didn't have any idea and so what happened was one of my colleagues came in and said listen uh prepare for a flight we're bringing a plane in and I said uh where are they taking him he said I have no idea so um I I told abua you're going to be moved out of this hospital and you're going to be taken somewhere else where he was panicked and I said I
[1:59:19] don't know but I'm going to tell you again you have to cooperate you have to you don't have any leverage in this relationship now you have to cooperate so the plane landed he Hur the plane land because remember the hospital this Clinic is right on the tarmac so the plane lands and he said that's for me Isn't it and I said it is so three FBI agents came um and the four of us picked him up on the gurnie to carry him out the plane he asked me to
[1:59:51] hold his hand he's like weeping quietly so I'm I'm holding the gurnie with one hand I'm holding his hand so he has like hinki syndrome with you oh yeah I was kind to him I was the only one who was kind to him Ali sufan was kind the FBI interrogator yeah so um we took him out to the plane and we had to stand him up which was really freaking hard cuz he's dead weight right we had to stand him up
[2:00:22] to get him to maneuver him like a couch like you're moving a couch into the door of the plane and then we carried him to the back and we laid him on the luggage rack and we tied the luggage rack down and he's conscious oh yeah he all morphine lots of morphine and I'm telling you man we are soaked in his blood I had to throw away all my clothes the the the SpongeBob the SpongeBob I kept just cuz I thought it had historical value we need it we'll put we'll wear it on a pod and then we'll frame it yeah and we'll
[2:00:54] sell it I thought about framing it yeah I actually offered it up to the uh Spy Museum and they said oh yeah we'd love to have it and then they just never now like it's a red shirt so like is his blood stains like seeped into it you can't really tell you can tell some of the spots see you know at first I just didn't really realize the significance of the shirt and so I used it to paint in I painted my living room so it has specs of pain on Ito my God I know because I'm an idiot oh my
[2:01:26] God God damn it all right we we'll talk about that later so so I I when we tied him down I leaned over and I said remember you have to cooperate and he squeezed my hand and then that was it and you did not know where he was going at all no idea in fact I the guys who were on the plane the agency guys were on the plane were dressed completely in black with black hoods yeah and one of them says John and I said who are you and he lifts up his
[2:01:57] hood and it it was my last boss in CTC and I said what are you doing here it's like you're out of [ __ ] Dunkin Donuts yeah what are you doing here he said I came to pick up your prisoner who is he and I said oh dude I'm sorry you don't have a need to know because this was such a compartment compartmentalized operation I said I'm sorry you don't have a need to know where are you taking him and he goes oh dude I'm sorry you don't have a need to know and I said touche and we gave each other a hug and I got off the plane and then they they
[2:02:30] took him now he didn't go straight to Guantanamo oh no no it was years before he went to Guantanamo so he went to a bunch of black sites I think it was six altogether before he finally went to Guantanamo now this is one thing and it'll come up in a few minutes here when we get to it but like when you were later giving the ABC interview the infamous ABC interview that ended up causing all the problems for you you said something like like you said in a very John kyaku
[2:03:02] way but something along the lines of yeah he held out so long it took him 30 seconds before the water boarding got to him but as it turned out allegedly they waterboarded this guy like 85 times 83 times there's a there's a story there what's the story well when he arrived at the secret site and listen the media have reported you just can't say where I I can't say because the CIA has never confirmed the location of
[2:03:32] these sites but all you have to do is Google CIA secret sites and they all pop right up yep North Africa Poland [ __ ] there's a long people can Google it yeah so they took him to the site it took him about six weeks to recover from the gunshots and um and sufan an FBI agent um was assigned to interrogate him again 911 was an open criminal investigation so FBI has precedent FBI had had Primacy
[2:04:03] even though this was overseas so normally the CIA has Primacy overseas the FBI has Primacy domestically but the FBI had this you love that it it just it killed people at headquarters it killed them God they hated it but I I genuinely like and respect Ali and I I did when we were in Pakistan you know at the FBI Ali was not an FBI agent he was an FBI translator and so as a translator he
[2:04:34] topped out at gs12 and FBI agents go up to gs15 and then the senior um executive service so he was treated as a second class citizen at the FBI undeservedly so he was brilliant and he was really good at what he did he came up under John O'Neal he came up under John O'Neal exactly and listen if you can work under John O'Neal and Thrive then you're somebody special yeah
[2:05:04] so after six weeks Ali began to interrogate him and I've said in other podcasts I have to admit that the FBI is just really really good at interrogations they've been doing this since the nurur Trials of 1945 and 1946 they're just really good at it um they establish a rapport with the subject and they do that by being kind and offering a cup of coffee
[2:05:36] or a cigarette or an orange or if you're really good a piece of paper and a pencil that you can write to your parents oh M yep send it to the Red Cross and they deliver it so Ali established this rapport with abuaba and abuaba began after a period of four five six weeks uh began to open up and he gave us absolutely critical intelligence he was MTAR right no he told us who MTAR
[2:06:10] was right right right no no I'm saying like he was the guy that that got you him yeah yes there were two things that he gave us that were so important yeah stay with the m sorry there were two things that he gave us that were so important one was the al-Qaeda um wiring diagram we just didn't have any idea how this organization was set up we knew there was there was Bin Laden there was zaahi and then we just didn't know so we asked him how how are operations uh determined like who who
[2:06:44] comes up with the idea to do a bombing here or an assassination there or whatever and he explained it to us that these are highly compartmentalized individual cells so if you're in London you have no idea what the Paris people are doing you don't even know if there are Paris people you don't know what their names are you don't know what their operations are uh they're going to do um and they're running it like an intelligence organization exactly like an intelligence organization if you don't have a need to know you don't know
[2:07:15] yeah so II said to him as an example it's an example I use all the time if you were going to do an operation in dorf how would you do that and he said oh there's this guy Muhammad and here's Muhammad's cell phone number and Muhammad's got a cousin Abdullah and Abdullah has access to uh weapons and abdullah's got a friend Rashid he lives nearby and he has access to explosives so then we could go to the
[2:07:46] Germans and say you have a serious problem in dorf and you need to grab these guys and then they bust down the door that night and they grabb these guys so now there's no attack in dorf so that's what he gave us and then he was talking about MTAR MTAR was The Mastermind of the 911 attacks we had no idea what his true identity was we knew that there was this really bad guy out there named MTAR who was operational
[2:08:18] since at least 1996 and how did you originally find out about him yeah uh we found about him we found out about him through the Philippines uh he was planning an operation called the bojinka operation and the plan was to hijack as many as 14 747s out of Manila Airport and fly them into 14 buildings up and down the west coast of the United States yeah so we
[2:08:48] knew he was Al-Qaeda we knew his n deera was MTAR and we knew that he was serious dangerous we had no idea who he was now he went out one day he left his apartment one day apparently to get you know lunch or whatever and a cleaning lady went into the apartment to clean and saw all these plans and maps and pictures and said this looks like a terrorist attack so she calls the cops this is in '96 96 she calls the cops cops come and
[2:09:21] they say holy [ __ ] this looks like a terrorist attack we better call the Philippine in uh intelligence service they come and they say o we better call the CIA and so we take all this information we're like this could have been epically bad but we don't know who this guy is and abuaba actually laughed and said you don't know who MTAR is and Ali said no and he said he's khed shik Muhammad oh he just gave it right up
[2:09:52] mhm wow we had never heard that name before so everybody's going nuts at headquarters doing name traces on KH shik Muhammad and lo and behold they see that he was educated in North Carolina and he lived with an American family like as an exchange student what happened to him how did he become this guy he said later that what radicalized him was news video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian woman and he just decided
[2:10:25] then I'm going to kill every Jew I can and every American who supports the Jews whoa that's it it was one event like that the long arm of foreign policy so that began the hunt for khed shik Muhammad and um you know once we had an identification when was when was uh Abu zua torture was it after sufan talk
[2:10:55] with him well that's kind of that's kind of the uh the kicker in this whole thing so here's Ali sufan just breaking new ground and writing all this stuff up but remember what I said the FBI computer system is not compatible with the CIA computer system so wait you don't have CIA guys sitting in there with them no and the CIA we're sitting there like this like Whoa We we wonder what up was the beta saying Jose Rodriguez is [ __ ] hitting the [ __ ] the charges
[2:11:28] together like let's go and this is this is a long answer to the question you asked about me when I said that he was waterboarded once and he broke um so for reasons that have never been explained on July 31st 2002 George tenant went to the White House and met with the president president and he said I want you to remove the FBI from the secret site and I want the CIA to have primary Primacy
[2:11:59] rather on opposite beta and for reasons that have never been explained George W bush agreed to do that he said you're going to give me wmd and a wreck you got yourself a deal that's right so the FBI knew exactly what was going to happen and and uh uh meller was what's his first name Robert Robert Mueller who was the FBI director at the time oh sorry you're good it that doesn't affect the mic at all that doesn't Robert Mueller who was
[2:12:30] the FBI director at the time decided to withdraw all FBI Personnel not just from the secret site but from the country that the secret site was in he's like we know what these CIA guys are going to do they're going to go completely nuts we don't want any part of it everybody withdrew within 48 Hours the CIA began to torture abua right the SoCal they haven't shared any information no so the CIA still doesn't know about KH shik Muhammad that's unclear we don't know if maybe Ali told
[2:13:02] some colleagues and the colleagues told the CIA but whatever happened we had these two CIA contractors out there two psychologists who had come up with the torture program right what are their names again Mitchell and jesson they live in Florida now yeah they million or something yeah uh altogether 108 million oh nice so Mitchell and Justin began torturing him mercilessly and they waterboard him 83 times but why would you waterboard
[2:13:32] somebody 83 times because the first 82 times it didn't work right he didn't give you anything he didn't give you anything at all in fact he just clammed up so what they did was they went into the FBI computers they pulled out Ali San's reports they retyped them in the CIA dat know this uhhuh this is from the inspector General's report of 2005 that was released in 2009 and they said oh my God we waterboarded him once and look what he gave us we need to look for this khed
[2:14:04] shik Muhammad guy and somebody called dorf so we're getting these reports I don't remember this wow we're getting these reports back and I'm at headquarters and I I remember saying to my boss holy [ __ ] maybe I'm wrong about this it it looks like it's actually working it's still deplorable oh because this was when we got off this earlier but you when you came back from the Abu zua thing in mayot you got promoted and someone approached you and said hey you
[2:14:35] want to be you want to be trained in enhanced interrogation I said not a chance I I said I think it's illegal it's immoral and unethical I don't want any part of it now you're reading about the guy you arrested giving this up you're like oh [ __ ] oh [ __ ] I was wrong well I I left the CIA in 2004 thinking I was wrong wow it in 2005 the Inspector General said wait one second none of this [ __ ] was true it was all stolen
[2:15:05] from the FBI and then they Declassified that in 2009 the reason why it wasn't so newsworthy is because it was released on the morning that Ted Kennedy died and so all the news was the end of the Kennedy era right and it was kind of bar oh that's on purpose they're like oh Kennedy's dead hit him do it now I mean otherwise they would release it at 7 o'clock on a Friday before before a Monday holiday that's right yeah so um they had called you behind the scenes
[2:15:35] though like the human rights guy or something right you were like made fun of at CIA for being Against torture yeah I was the human rights guy why did you I'm I'm just curious cuz you've just come back from Pakistan you just captured a really bad guy you know we're n months8 months past 9/11 it's In the Heat of the global war on terror and yet at the time you have the presence of mind to be able to step back and you know not to say humanize these people but you're like US Constitution there
[2:16:07] are rights we need to be above that as America what what made you so automatic with that I believed very firmly that we're we're either going to be that Shining Beacon of light for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties or The Shining City on a Hill as Ronald Reagan called us or we're not if you want to get into the mud you you debase yourself and you put yourself on their level you John McCain once said never
[2:16:39] get into a fight with a pig you'll both get dirty Pig likes it but the pig likes it yeah yeah no we're better than that we're supposed to be better than that we can't debase ourself were there other things you had seen at CIA before then though in your 12 years before that conversation that weren't necessarily torture but were things that technically broke the Constitution that you went along with no really yeah nothing no especially during the Clinton years I mean it was all about rule of law during
[2:17:10] the Clinton years they were really really serious about nobody doing anything illegal in fact B clintons the clintons Bob Bob bear I know right Bob bear is a pretty famous former CIA officer um he's written a bunch of books one was made into the movie Serana that starred George yeah so Bob yeah Bob is retired and and living in uh Colorado and uh and Bob took it on the chin during the Clinton administration
[2:17:42] because he he had developed a a network of sources in Northern Iraq and was making plans to assassinate Saddam Hussein which he believed to be in the National interest and NSA intercepted one of his Communications and sent it to Sandy Berger who was the National Security adviser and Sandy Berger called the CIA and said your guys is going to do an extra constitutional assassination either you pull him back or he's under
[2:18:12] arrest for conspiracy so they pulled Bob back out of Iraq and they and they um they told him you got to go that would have changed history yeah yeah so they they were serious but once 9/11 happened man everything changed everything and that's what I'm saying you did you really didn't though no I didn't we're either a nation of laws or we're not because this this is this is one of those issues where and this happen so often with me where I'm
[2:18:44] right in the middle of you and booon sure because I don't know where it's it's first of all the anytime you use the line especially in high stake scenarios that if I were blank then I would blank that is a dangerous thing CU you don't [ __ ] know what you would do you don't know okay not until it's presented to you that's right and you got to make a a decision but when when I listen to you like because I I I admire your stance on this a lot and and and how much like you have walked the talk
[2:19:14] with this for the last 20 plus years of your life in every possible way up to an including [ __ ] going to prison for I admire that a lot sometimes I wonder though I'm like man here you have a guy who was a Savage spy like you did some real [ __ ] you were talented you got really high up in the CIA you were about it you you obviously care a lot about the country and being able to protect it and all these things y but there's a small part of it where I'm like is John not even that this makes you wrong
[2:19:45] but it's just a complicated world I'm like is Jon too much of an idealist on certain things Dick Cheney once said that he would rather imprison a 100 innocent men than to let a guilty one go yeah see that's [ __ ] up and I'm the opposite of that yeah that's where I stand and you know maybe it is a a little idealist but you know I really truly believe in the Constitution and this just seemed so
[2:20:16] outrageously wrong to me listen I'll give you I'll give you a couple of examples that I like to use because they're quite clear-cut in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS yeah that was a death penalty offense to waterboard someone and we like imprison people in Vietnam for doing that right well in 196 in January of 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American Soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese
[2:20:47] prisoner the Secretary of Defense at the time Robert mamera ordered an immediate investigation that Soldier was arrested he was charged with torture y convicted and sentenced to 20 years at lenworth well the law literally never changed never so it's a death penalty offense in 1946 it's worthy of 20 years at hard labor in 1968 2002 h no we can
[2:21:19] do it now just cuz we're the good guys they're the bad guys cuz they hit us here yeah but the thing is I've said this from the very beginning reasonable people can agree to disagree but if you want to torture somebody you've got to change the law and the law never changed and then now that's a that's a that's a very good poison pill argument I've heard you make because it's just black and white it's like that's where you take the gray this and you say well the black and white we know is the law so
[2:21:49] all right you want to do it like I I John kyaku May disagree with that but if you change the law I would have to accept that I have to accept it I might you know campaign against it and join demonstrations or whatever but if that's the law That's the Law okay then here's a difficult question to ask for that a guy who I think was faced with an impossible decision who I know you're a supporter of and frankly I am too I speak highly of him is Edward Snowden Edward Snowden was stuck I always say
[2:22:21] this in between two awful slippery slopes on the one hand he breaks his oath and breaks the chain of command to leak information that then has risk to potential people you know maybe dying as a result of it or whatever and also more importantly sets a precedent that the next guy who wants to leak something may have something 99% is important but then they can point at Snowden and all the way down eventually it's at 1% and people are leaking whatever they want right on the other hand of it he had
[2:22:51] tried to go through the chain of command because he caught something that was anti-constitutional it was against it was cut and dry against the Constitution yes what was being done and no one was doing [ __ ] about it the reason I bring this up though is because technically and let me highlight the word technically Dick Cheney and his minions around him had changed the law to allow that to happen now they did it in a very dirty way yes but they did what you just said would have needed to be done with torture so di Cheney and his minions had
[2:23:21] changed the law would you feel the same if if you or someone like Snowden had leaked that yes and but that's that's actually an easy question for me much easier than it would be for Ed Snowden because the US is also a signatory to the United Nations convention on uh torture and cruel and demeaning punishment I think is the full title of it we were actually the authors of it and when an international treaty uh is uh is approved in the Senate it carries with it the force of Law and it
[2:23:54] it supersedes any domestic law so we would also have to withdraw from the United Nations convention Against torture which would cause you know chaos internationally on the issue okay yeah yeah um you know you raised a really important Point too about the chain of command Ed Snowden you're right couldn't go through his chain of command um shut him down yeah I couldn't go through my chain of command my chain of command was Jose [ __ ] Rodriguez I'm
[2:24:26] serious um there's another whistleblower an NSA whistleblower and quite an important one named Thomas Drake so Tom's a great great friend of mine can you tell for people that aren't familiar can you tell that story because that's pretty wild sure Tom Drake was a was a a colonel in the Air Force and he uh left the Air Force to go to NSA in the senior intelligence service right so he's a very senior executive level officer at NSA his very first day on the job was
[2:24:58] 911 and so he gets there and an hour later all hell breaks loose so what he sees on his very first day is General Michael Hayden implementing something called um thin thread operation thin thread on 911 on 911 911 Hayden actually said this that day 911 was the greatest possible gift to NSA he said that uhhuh he said it now did is that out of context like did he say it no it was
[2:25:30] quite in context because what he meant was now that the gloves are off we can intercept anything we want anywhere in the world so Patriot Act uhhuh and you know it's common oh yeah so operation thin thread allows them to just vacuum up every phone call every text message every email every bit of metadata from Every American anywhere in the world well it's against the law to
[2:26:03] spy on Americans and it's against the law it's against it it's actually in nsa's Charter that they're not allowed to spy Americans well thin thread changed everything because the idea is well these Americans may be talking to terrorists so we have to grab everything and then we can sort out the details later the problem is though that bill biny Kirk weeby um and um Ed Lumis three NSA officers had developed a competing uh program called Stellar Wind
[2:26:36] yes so Stellar Wind that's what snowed and leaked yeah so Stellar Wind would be able to collect the same kind of data while protecting Americans and Hayden decided no we want to grab all of it well that's illegal and so Tom Drake God bless him went to his boss he said look this is illegal his boss said Tom mind your own business so Tom goes to the Inspector
[2:27:09] General which is exactly what you're supposed to do the Inspector General was not read into the compartment and so he said I don't know what you're talking about I never heard of any of these programs so he goes to The General Counsel The General Counsel says I advise you to keep your big mouth shut so then he goes to the Pentagon Inspector General because NSA is a DOD agency the Pentagon Inspector General reports him to the FBI and says we think
[2:27:39] you have a spy on your hands oh my God and all of the evidence that he brought out of this crime being committed at NSA the Pentagon Inspector General turned over to the FBI rather than to keep it secret like you're supposed to wow well when he didn't get any satisfaction there he did exactly what you're supposed to do and he went to the house permanent select committee on intelligence Diane RoR was the officer there and he said a major crime is being committed against the
[2:28:10] American people at NSA here's the evidence they arrested everybody they arrested Bill Benny Bill Benny who lost both of his legs to a flesh eating bacteria is in the shower on a shower chair and the FBI pulls him out of the shower naked with no legs and cuffs him behind his back how's that for a Class Act they arrest Kirk weeby they arrest Ed Lumis they arrest Tom Drake Diane R they didn't arrest but she ended up
[2:28:40] being forced out of the intelligence committee and she moved back to Oregon what the hell did she do wrong she some guy walked in that was it nothing Tom Drake is charged with with nine felonies including seven counts of Espionage and two counts of theft of government property the property being the information he walked out of the building with the information in his head and that was two felony counts of theft that's some dystopian [ __ ] yeah it is on the morning of his arrest the FBI
[2:29:13] went to his wife who was also an NSA officer and they said we are arresting your husband and raiding your house right now you're either with him or you're with us and she said I'm with you so Tom lost everything lost his pension lost his wife lost his children lost his security clearance lost his job the case fell apart he hadn't committed Espionage he did exactly as he
[2:29:44] was supposed to do so all of the charges were dismissed but he ended up working the next 10 years at the Apple Store in Bethesda Maryland as a member of The Genius Bar oh my God MH and you're friends with him today yeah very good friends and what what's he up to now he's fighting cancer oh because life just is one great big bull of cherries isn't it that's insane man yeah now your story
[2:30:18] though didn't happened till after you left so you well it started with you denying to want to be a part not not want to be a part of it don't want to be a part of it and I'll tell you I didn't say anything back then because I was convinced that this was so illegal that certainly somebody at the secret site is going to come out and say something yeah right because I'm seeing these cables coming back from the site saying I resign I didn't sign up for this this is an Abomination there was one who said
[2:30:50] this is a violation of my hypocritic oath I'm not doing this I resign secretaries fainting when they're seeing the torture sessions and then coming back it's called curtailing your your assignment to come back early that is a career ending decision to say I I can't do this I'm coming back career-ending decision you're never going to get promoted again so I thought well surely I mean there are so many people who's saying that this is a monstrous Abomination surely somebody's going to say something and they didn't so you leave in ' 04 you
[2:31:23] go to deoe and touche we talked about that in the early part of our conversation was probably separate episode and you have the whole career now you by the way like how did you feel being out of government you basically have never worked outside of government being a history teacher while you were in graduate school yeah I had never worked outside government but I was I was thrilled to do something different I didn't think I was going to miss it I I wanted something that had nothing to do
[2:31:54] with terrorism or Espionage or or political backbiting I wanted something completely different and they paid me like exactly double what I was making at the agency so you were you were basically tired from a long career that you're like it's it's time now is your wife still in CIA she stayed in she stayed in and what kind are you allowed to say what kind of job she had you said she was senior but she was in analysis on uh on Iran okay so she's still in during this time you're working at deoe life is pretty
[2:32:25] good and you get a phone call from a reporter Brian Ross is that his name correct from ABC this is like 07 I want to say December of 07 and he says that he has a source from the CIA no he had a source okay but he wouldn't say where I I was able to P it down later he said he had a source who said that I had tortured up a beta I said absolutely true I said I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zeda and he says well you're welcome to
[2:32:55] come on the show and defend yourself had you ever talked with a journalist before this no never and I see and I if I had spoken to journalist in the past I would have realized that that was an old reporters trick but I didn't I was like oh my God they're going to accuse me in National Television of being a torturer and I I'm the only one who wasn't so he said well you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself I said I'll think about it are you thinking like are you getting paranoid like holy [ __ ] maybe the same guys who were calling me like human rights guys
[2:33:27] are now going to try to pin this whole thing that is exactly what I was thinking so I'm thinking about it and then in the next couple days two things happened one President Bush gives a press conference and a reporter asks him about about torture he looks right in the camera and he goes we do not torture I did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinsky I did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinsky so I said to my wife he's a
[2:33:59] bald-faced liar he is looking the American people in the eye and he's just lying right to our faces and then a couple of days later it's Friday and he's he he walks out of the South Portico of the White House and he's walking to the helicopter to go to Camp David and a reporter shouts a question about about torture and he stops and he turns and says well if there is torture it's because of a rogue CIA officer and I said to her I said Brian
[2:34:31] Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me so I called Brian Ross and I said what's your wife saying cuz she's still in she's still in she says you have to defend yourself oh she does oh yeah so I called Brian Ross and I said I'll give you your interview and I decided in the like 4 days between that call and the actual interview I just decided that whatever he asked me I would tell the truth did you consult with a lawyer that was the most critical
[2:35:03] mistake that I made in this entire experience you didn't I did not were you okay so you're not Consulting with a lawyer but were you think obviously you're thinking about all the possible questions he could ask you and therefore if you're going to be honest what you would say but were you reviewing yourself what could or could not be classified oh yeah definitely in fact my my wife went with me to ABC she sat just off camera and afterwards I said how she going like this no no no she sat there she sat there you know
[2:35:34] supportively and I said uh how did I do she goes great I said I didn't say anything classified right and she said no you were great so I was like okay I did my part all right so online there's especially like with Wikipedia when things are written on there who the [ __ ] knows should probably check that huh yeah you should probably check that out so some of this like needs to get writed from what was then done in court or whatever but I I want
[2:36:04] to try to simplify this for people so you don't you do this interview how soon did you know you were under investigation afterwards the next day the next day the next day CNN reported that the FBI was investigating me okay at the request of the CIA and they investigated you for like a year a year from December of 07 to December of 08 did you have meetings with them with an attorney during this time I hired an attorney immediately and the attorney um a couple of times uh spoke to the FBI
[2:36:36] and then the FBI sent him a declination letter A year later a year later December of 08 they said they were declining to prosecute me that they had determined I had not committed a crime now is that legally binding is that supposed to be legally buying no it's just their decision at the time that they they don't think there's a crime here meaning they could open it up in the future if they wanted to yeah highly unusual highly unusual so you continue working at theoe during this time right no actually you moved to a new place um
[2:37:08] well oh this is when you worked for John Carrey right I was going to John Cary um deoe see I went to my partner at Dee and I said listen there's there's this thing you you need to know know about with the guy yeah in the place right exactly so I I told him and he's like oh [ __ ] I said I know I I I I can't get out of it right either either the president himself is going to accuse me of torturing a prisoner or I'm going to blow the whistle on the cia's torture program so
[2:37:39] he said go defend yourself he wrote he wrote me a letter saying go defend yourself so the next day it's like a glor mobile story it's the front page of every paper of the world right after the ABC interview yeah ABC broke the story and then the next day it's like all hell's breaking loose and he calls me he's like where are you I said I'm in New York I was given interviews to literally everybody that day I was on every Network in America that day he said I'm in Dallas
[2:38:12] fly to Dallas right now I was like well that's not good so I fly to Dallas he's like I'm going to fire you I said said oh you are are you I have news for you I have a letter with your signature on it telling me to go on this interview and he said I didn't know it was going to be this big National story I said well neither did I but you told me to go do the interview well then I want you to resign and I said [ __ ] that I'm not resigning I
[2:38:45] said man you better have your checkbook ready show me the money baby I'm I said if you you think that I'm going to make this easy for you you don't know me at all I told him I did so there was an employment lawyer in my lawyer's firm and she's like oh you have these guys by the balls so they were like we want you to resign we want you to resign he said I'm not going to resign I'm not going to do it you can't fire me because I have your signature right here so they said we
[2:39:17] want to offer you a buyout and I saidit better be handsome and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse yeah you're in the right neighborhood to say that right now and where did you go uh I worked for myself for a year and then uh then the 2008 election uh brought the Democrats uh back to Power and then I got a call from John KY that he's going to be the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee how long had you known him I
[2:39:48] had never met oh really but he followed my my story my whistleblowing oh so he liked it m he liked that you were doing that he liked it that's interesting because this was the administration that later had the justice department charge you how do you like that yeah so he says I'm going to reconstitute the Senate Foreign Relations committee's investigative function would you like to be the chief investigator and I said I'd love to be the chief investigator I said but I'm going to go after the CIA and he said 'well you do what you think you need to do I said ' all right so you work for
[2:40:20] John Carrey uhhuh how was he difficult yeah you know there were only there were only two or three times two times I guess where I I offered him unsolicited advice like you got to stop I would tell him there was one situation like every Lebanese in Washington was calling me like you gotta tell Carrie to stop calling Bashar
[2:40:50] al-assad my dear friend you got to stop saying that he's a genocidal Maniac so I I I said Senator I said every freaking Lebanese in Washington's calling me you got to stop calling Bashar alassad my dear friend he goes well we rode motorcycles together to go on Heights I said be that as it may he has a bad habit of slaughtering his own people and the Lebanese are really steamed about it he's like all right all right all right and there were several other things that
[2:41:21] I did I mean it wasn't just giving him advice but you I I went to Afghanistan U to do a study on on the heroin poppy crop oh boy and I'll tell you nobody liked it that I was doing this so I fly Afghanistan and as a senior staff member I have the rank of Brigadier General right so they got to like drop everything and cater to my needs seriously were you wait so you're investigating potential Mal around these fields Afghanistan used to be a net food
[2:41:54] exporter and as soon as the US takes over they're producing 93% of the world's heroin that's right I'd like to know how the [ __ ] that happened yeah I would too yeah nobody wanted to tell me so I get to bamer base and I said I'm going to need a helicopter to lashara and they were like oh can't do it too dangerous I was like no we're doing it like in the next hour you have to be a dick with these people sometimes right because
[2:42:24] they they think that they can just they can just pacify you until it's time to leave and I'm like no I outrank you I'm telling you get a pilot and fly me to lashara so we get down there and it's a god- awful place but man I'm telling you as far as your eye can see all there is is Poppy all of it is Poppy so I said I want to talk to a poppy Farmer they were like
[2:42:56] are you nuts and I said no I'm serious I want to talk to a poppy farmer so we go out to the poppy fields we see this guy cultivating his poppy so I go up to him and I said uh I got to ask you a question which was incredibly naive I said why don't you grow crops that have two growing seasons instead of poppy you could grow tomatoes or onions or pomegranates and he goes like this he goes the Americans told me in 2001 if I
[2:43:31] told them where the Arabs were I could grow all the poppy I wanted I go what Americans told you you could grow poppy and my military hander is like we got to go Bogey's in the area we got to go and he physically pulls me into the Jeep and takes me back to the helicopter I was like ah okay so I make an appointment to go to this DEA secret site somebody had reached out to me and said hey we heard you're doing this
[2:44:02] study and you might want to come out here we can have lunch nearby I was like okay so I I get my car I drive out to Timbuktu outside Washington freaking far and there's this secret DEA facility out there so there three of them we go out to lunch and they were like you're in over your head I said how do you figure they're like there are very powerful forces that want that Poppy to
[2:44:33] be cultivated and I said why it's 93% of the world's heroin and they said because almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and to Russia and we want them to be addicted to heroin it weakens their societies almost all of it goes to those two places and it's 93% of the world's heroin our heroin comes from Columbia and Mexico and Ecuador what about the andretta though
[2:45:05] getting the heroin from Afghanistan that happens too but it's small scale so I'm writing all this up and car's like n we're not we're not publishing that and I was like like ah they got to him too there was a Worse episode I get a call one day from a noted um human rights activist uh for one of the big human rights organizations and he says uh can
[2:45:35] can I see you I said sure he said I can't come up to the hill it's got to be at a private location so I went to John's Hopkins University and we met in a vacant classroom and he's like listen I've stumbled onto something big he goes have you ever heard of the dashy Lele Massacre and I said sure Northern Afghanistan November 30th and December 1st 2001 we arrested well in in in maseri
[2:46:06] Sharif up north in Afghanistan 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up all 2,000 all at the same time so there's not a prison in Afghanistan big enough to hold 2,000 people so we figured we have to divide them up and put them in uh Regional jails around the country so we asked abdar Rashid doam this [ __ ] traitor who was with the Northern Alliance then he was with
[2:46:37] the Taliban then he's with the Northern Alliance again now he's with the Taliban again so he said I'll I'll take them we'll take them out into the desert and we'll just hold them there until we can divide them up into smaller groups and send them around to to local jails so they put them all in shipping containers right to put them on 18 wheelers nobody put any holes for air in the shipping containers and there's no food and water and so they get out to the desert they open the shipping
[2:47:09] containers and one of the 16 survivors said that the bodies fell out like sardines from a can well we always belied doam did it on purpose right why would you feed and clothe and house 2,000 Taliban prisoners when you can just suffocate them so what was new was this human rights activist said I have a witness who was 12 years old at the time and he says that there
[2:47:42] were two men there at the site of the What's called the Box up where they were putting them onto the into the containers two men wearing black t-shirts and blue jeans and speaking English who is going to be in Maser Sharie in November of 2001 wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and speak in English yeah I I mean duh yeah so I took the information
[2:48:12] and I wrote a letter to the CIA asking for clarification I see why they charged this guy and I and I I did it under John K's signature so it was you know sincerely John krey chairman us committee on Foreign Relations oh so you didn't sign it yourself no no okay no Carrie signed it I waited weeks for a response finally one of my colleagues comes in and he says Hey the agency responded to your
[2:48:43] letter I said I just checked my mail an hour ago I didn't see any response he said no they classified it top secret well at the time I only had a secret clearance on the committee I said what' it say he says it said go [ __ ] yourself I said uhhuh that's how they want to play and then Carrie calls me hey come over to the office so I go over to his office he goes are you trying to take on the CIA on this maseri Sharif thing and I said this is a legitimate investigation into a massacre that the
[2:49:15] CIA may have had perhaps a tangential role in he's like yeah kill this right now I go okay killed it that happened several times with him because all he was ever concerned about was becoming Secretary of State it's he talked about it constantly I'll give you another example he was an egomaniac oh in the worst way give you another example in that year between when I left deoe and when I went to uh to the Senate Foreign
[2:49:46] Relations Committee I was working for myself by I had an office in a in a major Washington consulting firm the the head of it had been a white house chief of staff and he liked me he liked my politics and so he said hey I've got a vacant office you're welcome to use it and you can have a halftime secretary at his expense very generous so I'm there one of the members of the board of directors was governor Bill Richardson and I loved Richardson you like that guy oh he was
[2:50:16] awesome awesome had some interesting ties to Jeffrey Epstein but we'll leave yeah he had problems yeah but he was an awesome guy okay so he says to me one day he goes Hey listen you free for lunch I said sure we go to lunch he goes you never get to believe what happened he goes uh I had Obama over at my house for uh for Christmas wasn't he like secretary energy or something Secretary of Energy ambassador of the United Nations and congressman and
[2:50:46] governor of uh yeah new mexic got I had Biden over my house watch the Super Bowl not Christmas Super Bowl Biden oh sorry Obama and I go yeah he said we went for a walk around the ranch at halftime and he put his arm around my shoulder and he said Bill if you can deliver the Hispanic vote Secretary of State and I said no way he goes you want to be Deputy Chief of Staff I said I'll
[2:51:18] take he said okay I said okay so the election comes up Obama wins the day after the election Richardson comes in the office and I go Mr secretary congratulations he's like oh my God I can't believe it I can't wait it's going to be great we're going to do this we're going to do that we're peace in the Middle East and he's going on and on okay I'm in the shower a week or two later and I'm scrubbing my hair I get the radio going and they said
[2:51:49] president-elect Barack Obama today named Hillary Clinton Secretary of State and I was like what Hillary Clinton I go in the office I go I'm so sorry he goes they're offering me Commerce and I said that's okay we can work with that there's the foreign commercial service there's the international trade representative he goes like this he goes what the [ __ ] do I know about Commerce I said no
[2:52:20] seriously we can do this couple of weeks later again I'm in the shower uh Secretary of Commerce designate Bill Richardson withdrew himself from nomination today saying that you know he was not whatever I was like damn it so I didn't go to state but then Carrie calls and I go to uh I go to the Senate Foreign Relations commit so Carrie asks me to go with him one day to
[2:52:50] a speech he was giving at the Brookings institution one problem with carry is that he thinks he is so smart yeah that he can Veer wildly off of his prepared text and everything's cool okay and that's never the case read the prompt to Ron Burgundy read the prompter that's why you employ all these people to write for the prompter so we're at Brookings and he's doing his
[2:53:22] speech and then he says something about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and he says you know I was supposed to be Secretary of State I had President Obama over to my house for Christmas year before the election and we went for a walk Carrie says thisuh and he said to me John if you become the first Senator to endorse me secretary of state so I endorsed him he says I was
[2:53:52] the first Senator to endorse Barack Obama he says and I had a long relationship with Hillary Clinton it caused a and I'm going like this in the audience stop talking so wait did he just steal the story no that actually happened Obama promised four people Secretary of State krie Richardson Clinton eventually and the guy who died in his office the the peace
[2:54:23] negotiator uh what peace negotiator Bosnia and Middle East oh come on come on come on I have no idea what was he a senator no he was a lifelong Diplomat no idea we got to we got to Google this peace negotiator Bosnia Middle East us he he pulled the same stunt on four people what a what a talented son of a [ __ ] brutal brutal oh my God and they let's
[2:54:57] see Daniel Levy no U us peace negotiator and and Bosnia put because otherwise we'll get all these uh let's see D Richard Holbrook yeah Richard Holbrook so he promised four people yeah well two of them eventually did become uh-huh what what a Washington thing to do that's a very Washington brutal you know Harry Truman once famously said if you want a friend in Washington buy a dog yeah it's a great
[2:55:28] quote Yeah so you're working for Kerrie though while he's on the Senate Foreign Rel Relations Committee and then how did it happen that your case got reopened it had to do with John Brennan Obama but what what went on right so John Brennan was literally the only former senior Cia officer to endorse Obama yeah all the others were pretty evenly split between John McCain and Hillary Clinton so when Obama won he named brenon CIA director but the Liberals were up in arms because
[2:55:59] Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program which he later said in that 2015 documentary CIA spy Masters and the crosshairs or whatever by the N day Brothers he tried to paint himself cuz he was the current head of the CIA at that point as someone who's like the CIA should be above torture I'm like Mala you [ __ ] he he made all that [ __ ] up he was the he was the deputy executive director of the CIA at the time so he was in the briefings every single day yeah and you
[2:56:30] knew him well very well I knew him from when I was from the day I was hired wow yeah he was a he was a gs14 nobody when I was hired in the office of near Eastern in South Asian analysis yeah he must be like a good behind the scenes guy cuz the lack of Charisma on that dude oh there's a story that I probably can't get into but yeah it's connections yeah all right so so he goes to he endorsed Obama so he endorsed Obama Obama says CIA director the Senate says
[2:57:01] he can't possibly get confirmed so Obama makes him the deputy National Security adviser for counterterrorism okay which does not require Senate confirmation okay he almost immediately asks Eric Holder the Attorney General to secretly reopen the case against me now why did he want to do that because we hated each other that's it he just didn't like it I aired the cia's dirty laundry and John always had a nixonian obsession with leaks unless it was him leaking in which
[2:57:31] case you know there's a parade of journalist from The Washington Post the New York Times you know coming in and out of his office so they reopen the case yeah now this is where cuz like I looked at the Wikipedia before this on the case part specifically cuz wanted to see like what the what the narrative is alessie can you actually pull that up just pull up John's Wikipedia I I've never so looked at my you never looked at your never even occurred to me yeah let's let's pull it up but basically what it says is
[2:58:01] that the charges that ended up I think the final ones that stuck when you made the deal go down to the case alessie go way down more uh more okay all right uh go up go up yeah yeah want this yes right here so this I I'll read it straight off here the specific charges were that in 2008 kiraku confirmed the name of a CIA officer which was already well known to people in the human rights Community according to the government
[2:58:31] accountability project to someone who claimed to be writing a book about the agency's rendition practices in a separate 2008 incident kiraku gave a New York Times journalist the business card of a CIA agent who worked for quote a private government contractor known for its involvement in torture was that Duce Martinez de Martinez who was never undercover in his life okay so essentially what they're what they're saying is the final charges here didn't have to do with your ABC interview or anything like that it had to do with an
[2:59:01] email you sent three of them did but they dropped those they had to CU you didn't do anything wrong no right but the ones that eventually stuck were from emails afterwards where there was someone that you like confirmed yeah I'll tell you the whole story please so there was a journalist uh uh H was his name New York Times guy no no it was um ABC News it was Matthew Cole oh yeah who was the other guy I talked to uh what the hell New York Times
[2:59:35] name oh Scott Shane oh yeah is that it yeah they charged me with Espionage for talking to Scott Shane I like having lunch with the New York Times is not Espionage and they dropped the charges interesting yeah okay so see what they do is they they charge stack against you so that they wear you down um so he wrote me this email and he said hey I'm doing a book on the Abu Omar rendition I said I don't know anything about Abu Omar and um he said well can you introduce me to any of these dozen
[3:00:07] people and I said I don't know any of these people and I said look kidnapping was not my thing at the agency I never I never worked with those guys so he sends me another email with a list of 12 people and he says can you introduce me to any of these people I said clearly you know this issue better than I do all I know about the am Abu Omar rendition was what I read in the Washington Post and then he says what about on page whatever 165 of your book you talk about
[3:00:38] a guy I think his name is John I said oh that's John Doe I don't know what ever happened to him he he's probably retired and living in Virginia that was the crime I confirmed the last name of a former colleague do you think that's a crime absolutely not first of all I had no Criminal Intent secondly the name was never made public and that's why I say John Doe because the name was never made public and then you look at David
[3:01:10] Petraeus for example who released the names of 10 covert operatives to his girlfriend never charged you look at Leon Panetta who outed the the Osama Bin Laden shooter uh to uh Hollywood writer Mark bu and Hollywood producer Katherine Bigalow never charged with a crime and there was a CIA disgruntled former CIA officer in Maryland who put on his website the name the names of seven former CIA undercover people never charged with a
[3:01:41] crime so why charge this when there's no Criminal Intent and the name was never made public how' you did did you know you were under investigation again no no idea was a secret so the doors get the doors get HD on you one day yeah there were two things that happened um one in Discovery we got we got 15 20,000 pages of of Discovery classified Discovery and we find this Memo from from Brennan to holder and it says charge him with Espionage and then holder writes back
[3:02:11] and says my people don't think he committed Espionage and then Brennan writes back and says charge him anyway and make him defend himself this is in Discovery you have this yeah my God so we went back and we said we said it's targeted prosecution because they don't like my my political views um maybe it's like late and because we've been talking for six and a half hours and my mind's not thinking straight but like the justice department is it's not supposed to take outside not ideas from someone else in
[3:02:44] government it's supposed to act independent right that's exactly right but there was another thing that happened when I was uh working for Carrie one of the things that I absolutely loved about that job and it's what I loved about working overseas um is you get to have lunch or dinner with foreign diplomats and I just love the the exchange of ideas you know what do you guys think about the Israeli elections what do you guys think about the peace process what do you think about you know eran's new policy toward
[3:03:15] the Kurds whatever I love it yeah and I get a call one day from the Japanese Embassy from the number three at the Japanese Embassy calls me he says he'd love to have lunch I said great so we meet up at uh at this Steakhouse on Capitol Hill and um his English was so bad that we did the whole lunch in Arabic so he's their Middle East guy and I remember what we talked about that day at lunch this was in 2011
[3:03:45] [Music] we talked about the Middle East peace process Israeli elections and Turkish elections and at the end of it end of the lunch he says to me so what's next for you and I said well I I promised Senator kriy that I'd give him two years it's been two and a half I have five kids I need to think about putting my kids through college I think I'm going to resign and go into the private sector again and he goes no don't do that if
[3:04:17] you give me information I can give you money and I said do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch shame on you cold pitching me like that I said I'm going to report this and I got up and I walked out and I went directly without stopping to the office of the Senate security officer and I said I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer he goes was it that damn Russian again and I
[3:04:49] said no Japanese he goes Japanese I said I know right he said but you know they do poke around for trade information every once in a while he goes I have a standalone computer it's not connected to anything write it up I'm going to print it and I'm going to take it to the FBI I said great I wrote the entire story of the lunch next day he calls me he says two FBI agents are going to come up and see you so come down to the skiff the secure conference room and uh and you can talk to them so I go down there
[3:05:20] two young guys told them the whole story and one of them says okay here's what we want you to do we want you to call him back invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it I said okay because I'm a [ __ ] Patriot I said you want me to wear a wire they said no we're going to be at the next table we're going to listen to the whole conversation I said okay so the morning of the lunch they called and said something came up go
[3:05:50] ahead and do it and write us another memo so I did got all the information they wanted wrote it up send it back over they asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time which I did at the last lunch was a nice place in Georgetown he says to me I just got my dream job I'm going to be the number two at the Japanese Embassy in Cairo and it was so great knowing you I said great good luck shook hands never saw again year later I've been arrested we get all
[3:06:22] this discovery oh my God he was an agent there never was any Japanese Diplomat he was an FBI agent who happened to be Asian and spoke Arabic and I continually foiled their operation because I would write every single detail in these memos and send them back to the FBI they must have been like God damn this guy's good well finally one of them wrote a note and he said it's clear
[3:06:53] he's not going to take the the the bait we should end this operation and then that's when the guy said ah I got transferred to Cairo I'm like oh good luck so I said to my lawyer why would they do this I'm a patriot he said they're they did it because they have a [ __ ] case and they know it's [ __ ] and that's why we're going to trial but you didn't go to trial didn't go to trial now what went what went into that I was fully completely prepared to
[3:07:24] go to trial and and by the way you found out like literally when you were arrested that that that there was even an investigation against you within weeks yeah oh yeah when the day of my arrest was the day you found out I found out oh my God they've been they've been following me for three years got it okay tap my phones grabb my emails teams of surveillance following us to Church into into church into Target restaurants kids school all kinds of [ __ ] what' your wife
[3:07:55] say about all this oh she was furious at them not at me she was very supportive you know my my aunt died um I got arrested on a Tuesday my aunt died on the previous Tuesday and on Friday was the funeral it was in Ohio so I got in the car drove to Ohio and and I thought you know what I'm gonna go to my grandparents old house so
[3:08:26] my grandparents lived in this neighborhood that it's really like not good it's not safe so it's in the hood I I drove up and I just parked in front of it there was a car behind me and I I parked and I pulled over and stopped and the guy's like behind me so I rolled out my window and I I went like this like go around me and he's just like waiting there I'm thinking what the [ __ ] is this so I go up to the intersection and I make a really broad illegal U-turn in the
[3:08:57] intersection and he does too I'm like okay I'm under surveillance in waren Ohio of all places so I thought this is weird it's probably my first wife cuz we're going to court soon on some custody issue and she's probably hired some pi see what I'm doing this is the Friday before the Tuesday that you're going to be arrested correct so I drive to the cemetery I'm going to go visit my grandparents my aunts and uncles I got a cousin there he
[3:09:30] follows me into the cemetery so I park he Parks kind of I don't know 40 feet away so I start walking over the car to say what the [ __ ] and he takes off so I called my wife and I said this is going to sound like I'm nuts but I'm under surveillance she's like what and I told her the whole thing she's still in CIA yeah to make a long story short they thought we learned in Discovery they thought someone had tipped me off and I
[3:10:01] was running to Canada I got on the highway with no word to anybody with a suitcase and I hit the Pennsylvania tur bike and I'm going toward Canada so they had guys from the Cleveland field office and the Cincinnati field office and the Pittsburgh field office and they're all converging on Warren Ohio cuz rather than go to my aunt's funeral they think I'm running to Canada oh my God [ __ ] morons Jesus so then you get the doors kicked in and your wife's supportive
[3:10:32] yeah very wasn't wasn't she later not though I am not able to talk about that oh due to pending litigation okay we'll leave that one there so you so throughout 2012 you're getting all this discovery you're meeting with your legal team you said as you explained they stack charges and everything you're like you're going to beat these [ __ ] but eventually two of the charges are something you plea to late in the year one one they charged me with making a false statement
[3:11:03] and we were never really clear as to what the false statement was supposed to be and they ended up dropping that too so I got this one charge that's hanging over me and in the beginning the government when they first arrested me um we had a profer meeting and they said um take a plea to an Espionage charge you do 45 years and I said I am not doing 45 minutes and this [ __ ] [ __ ] who is now like the deputy attorney general for a Criminal Division she says to me take the plea and you might live to meet your
[3:11:34] grandchildren Mr kiraku yeah nice so 45 I ignored them and then like 6 months later later they said all right take a plea to an Espionage charge and he does 10 and I'm like I didn't commit Espionage having lunch with the New York Times is not Espionage that's right so that was on a Monday on Wednesday they came back eight years I
[3:12:05] said forget it they said on Friday five years and my lead lawyer was uh Plato cacheris absolutely legendary figure in White Collar defense in Washington he represented the most important people of the second half of the 20th century including Attorneys General you know President Nixon Monica Lewinsky who yeah so he probably cost a pretty penny tell me about it I still owe him he's dead I still owe him $1.1
[3:12:37] million I won't collect for him don't worry so he said to me you know I've been a lawyer here for 52 years and this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time he said usually they'll offer you 10 and if you say no the next offer is 15 then the next offer is 20 I said why are they coming down in time he said there's no case here I said okay I'll take
[3:13:07] that then they come back in October of 2012 and they offer three and A2 three and a half from 40 five is a pretty big difference yeah and I said no I'm not going to do it I haven't done anything wrong I'm not going to take it somebody's got to stand up to these people so then they came back and they said best and final offer two and a half you do 23
[3:13:38] months I have 24 hours to to uh make a decision so that night my wife and I stayed up all night long and I was the first person that's ever been charged with this crime other than a spy an actual spy who was charged when it was first written and I have a letter from the guy who wrote the law saying I should never have been charged and my congressman says I never should have been charged and I got a page full of Judges who say I should never been charged so I decided I'm going to fight
[3:14:10] this thing this law is unconstitutional I'm going to fight it so at 6:00 a.m. I emailed the lawyers there were 11 of them yeah and I said been up all night did all the research I'm going to trial so one of them emails me back and he says put on a pot of coffee we're on our way over so three of them the the three the four the four senior most lawyers came over to the house and Plato who's been a lawyer for 52 years and his
[3:14:41] brother is the chief judge in the court that's Prosecuting me um he said his exact words you stupid son of a [ __ ] take the deal I said you're the one who told me not to take the deal you're the one who said they have a [ __ ] case and they know it's [ __ ] and we're going to trial and then the second lawyer Bob Trout who is just an awesome human being all all four of these guys amazing human beings I refer business to them constantly so yeah they could cut the
[3:15:12] [ __ ] bill a little bit I know well no they did they forgave it okay they're they're they're great guys so Bob Trout who Bob Trout is sort of an elegant Southern gentleman and he says John if you were my own brother I would beg you to take the deal and then the attorney who I actually liked and connected with the most Mark McDougall who was the chief of White Collar defense at Ain Gump and Strauss the fourth largest Law Firm on the planet Earth
[3:15:42] mhm he says to me got right in my face and he says 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 I said if I don't take the deal and I'm convicted what am I realistically looking at and he said 12 to 18 years I got five kids at home so and then I'm thinking about it I'm thinking and thinking I'm standing
[3:16:13] there and Mark says this can be be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life make it the blip great sale and so I I took the deal did you feel you took the deal for those reasons and also for your family as you lay out and that's the most important thing but as a as a person who knew you didn't do anything wrong and believe that the United States
[3:16:44] is supposed to be The Shining beacon on a hill did that shatter some of your understanding of or what you thought your understanding of what this country was about well to me the Constitution is the Constitution the Constitution didn't change with what happened to me but I I realized you know what ugly hard ball politics looks like um in my in my views those people who trumped up these charges who testified against me before the grand jury you know the likes of of Jose Rodriguez For
[3:17:15] example and a whole host of others oh they testified yeah sure there's a whole a laundry list oh yeah you don't you don't get the uh the transcript of the testimony but you get the list of names um These Guys these guys are going to go down in history as as the monsters that they were in in real life I say this all the time sorry that's okay you're good good I say this all the time one of the reasons why
[3:17:45] these guys continue to double down and triple down on things like the torture program or on the John kiraku situation is that when they die torture is going to be the centerpiece of their obituaries and they need to try to salvage what's left of their legacies but the truth is they're on the wrong side of History right I'm on the right side I'm confident of that and so I'm proud of
[3:18:16] what I did I wear it on my sleeve I have nothing to be ashamed of you know there's this joke that ah everybody in prison's innocent you'd be surprised actually it's a bigger number than you think oh boy is it we have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population yeah my my friend Raj rajaratnam who was in here who's a billionaire who had a wild story of being attacked in the southern district in New York and oh as a
[3:18:48] billionaire he's not the guy that you would think is like the sympathetic figure but when you really go through the story it's it's pretty crazy what they did to him and I reviewed it inside and out and and I I believe him and I I I agree with him but you know he he talked about when he was in there you know this is one of the top five investors to ever live he's a very smart guy I think he said it's something like 25% of people in prison are at least partially innocent absolutely and 10% are completely innocent said a lot of that 25 almost all that 25% is they were
[3:19:20] they were railed by the system and forced to take a [ __ ] deal or they had horrible representation they got very common yes you know there are two strategies that the that the justice department uses one I mentioned a second ago it's called charge tacking so they'll charge you with five 10 20 felonies they'll wait until you go bankrupt yep and then they'll come back and say we'll drop all the charges but one if you take a guilty plea yeah what do you do I mean you you risk dying in prison but you still get a felony on your record you still got to
[3:19:51] give up Freedom tell I I lost my freedom I lost my right to vote and I lost my federal pension and I lost the right to own a gun so the governor of Virginia I didn't even apply for a estate a state pardon the governor of Virginia Terry mccauliff pardoned me on his own valtion I got this big certificate in the mail one day 20 we were back in the new house so 2016 good fall of 2016 I sent him a letter thanking him like it just came a
[3:20:23] courier brought it this big certificate with a gold seal in the governor's signature it says pardon at the top but you had federal charges so is that just symbolic it was symbolic so it gave me my right to vote that's cool and it gave me my state right to own a gun but I don't dare because there's a federal mandatory minimum of eight years fell in with a gun so I I never you you know I got to get a federal pardon for that presidential pardon that's crazy yeah but you go and and there's some stuff you can't talk about it from after but
[3:20:54] you go you do this and now here you are like it's getting late you were we we had a long story today with you and the train and then coming up here so I appreciate you my own fault theate all good all good but we've been talking for so long I don't want to keep you here too much longer so I think another time we can talk about you know what happened in prison and all that and then really get into what you've done afterwards cuz now you know you're a guy you got a substack you are you are using all the skills you've used from your career to provide analysis to people in addition
[3:21:26] to helping out with some of your own interests here as far as you know Criminal Justice Reform and and reforming some of the bureaucracy and things like that you know people joke my my my ex now my exwife but she she used to joke that if they thought they were going to silence you man they didn't know you at all yeah that's clear they've made me famous yeah you know you know Roger Waters from Pink Floyd do I know Roger
[3:21:58] come on Roger paid off my second mortgage really when I got arrested uhhuh to save my house for my wife and kids oh that's amazing I had never met Roger Waters and he just he followed my case and he's like somebody's got to help this guy and he paid off my second mortgage that's pretty cool it Roseanne Bar sent me five grand to give to my lawyers Yoko Ono another one would call me are you okay are you feeling okay you're not going to do anything crazy right seriously wow you'd be surprised I
[3:22:32] got you you've turned a lot of lemons into lemonade with this for sure yeah I've embraced it again I gota I got to credit my ex-wife you know in the in the days after my um after my arrest I was I was like actively considering doing something terrible to myself and she said listen they have consistently underestimated your strength consistently you're far tougher than they think you are and she said they're
[3:23:03] going to change their focus to someone else which they did it was Ed Snowden and she said you have to embrace this and you have to keep talking about it because your side of the story is going to become the side of record and she was exactly right that's great advice mhm I think I think you've done a great job of that and you got to keep doing it you know and I hope you get an opportunity to go on some other huge podcasts as far yeah thank you for this of course was fun of course of course it's we're gonna
[3:23:34] have to do a lot more because you know I I've loved your podcast with Danny where you're just breaking down all the issues and everything because you know so much about this stuff love it so you're right down the road in DC we'll definitely do that but we're going to have your substack Link in there we'll also have the link to some of your books and then anything else got a TV show now that people might be interested in what's a TV show it's called CIA Declassified it is we look at Declassified CIA documents and we use those documents to tell uh stories about historic events and it's on unified uh
[3:24:06] television it's online and we'll put a little QR code so you can see it love it all right John thank you so much man we'll get you back home and we'll do this again sometime looking forward to it all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video it's a huge help and also if you're over on Instagram be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D Dory both links are in the description below
[3:24:36] finally if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes use the Julian Dory podcast playlist Link in the description below thank you