[00:02] Special Operations Special Operations cobt opxs Espionage the team house with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park hey hey everyone welcome to episode 309 of the team house I'm Jack Murphy
[00:33] here with Dave Park and our guest on tonight's show is retired CIA officer John kiraku uh he spent time in the agency working the Iraq desk working in Greece uh and then you know had some some legal problems that we'll talk about in a little bit uh and we're excited to have him here on the show and really talk about all this and and maybe get a different perspective on some of these topics than what we usually here um before we jump into the interview I'm
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[08:26] never going to see your parents ever again yeah it's yeah and so you went to uh you say George Washington University majored in Middle Middle Eastern studies and uh What uh you know you said you had an early interest in in Espionage right I was in grad school and I was I was working a bunch of different jobs at the time to put and I was I was working a bunch of different jobs at the time to put myself through grad school I
[08:56] I worked uh I worked on campus as an RA in one of the dorms and then I worked at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union on K Street the international headquarters and so I was taken this class called uh the psychology of leadership um and it was taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of Gerald post Dr Jerry post who until he died was on TV all the time he was in dozens of of documentaries he wrote more than a dozen
[09:28] books and was really one of the country's acknowledged experts on longdistance psychological evaluations so he gave us this uh this assignment for class where we had to Shadow our bosses for a week and then write a a psychological profile of our bosses and I worked at the union for a an old school Union organizer mean tough kind of a scary guy he had
[09:58] actually had his back broken during a strike scabs beat him and they broke his back he was just a mean son of a gun and I was shadowing him for this this week and uh and we got into an argument halfway through the week and I called him a racist which he was and um he got so angry he his face got red and he balled up his fists and and I remember putting my hands up like ah like I went too far this time and he says to me my
[10:28] penis is is bigger than yours and I said what and he goes my penis is bigger than yours and I said you know what you're nuts and I quit and I walked out I went back to the dorm I you didn't compare see who who was really bigger yeah I know right unbelievable this guy I actually Googled him recently he's he's still around he lives in New York I hope he's uh I hope he's watching good for him because I remember what he said
[11:00] yeah so uh so I went back I I wrote my paper and I said I believed he was a sociopath with uh with violent and possibly Psychopathic Tendencies and I sent the paper in and a week later I got it back and I got an A and Professor uh post wrote in the margin please see me after class so um I went up to him after class and and he said come down to my office and so I went down to his office he closed the door and he says look I'm not
[11:30] really a professor here I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who would fit into the cia's culture I think you would fit into the cia's culture would you like to join the C and the truth was I I kind of always wanted to join the CIA but I was getting married in six weeks and I just didn't have a job yeah and said so I said yeah sure yeah I'd like to join the CIA that
[12:00] that's a really it was a whole process that's just I just want to interrupt for a moment just to point out that like that's a very interesting way that you were recruited I don't think the agency would recruit like that today where they have somebody who's spotted spotting spotting an assessing right yeah it's a felony now actually since since Congress passed Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1993 they can't do that anymore it's far far less sexy but you have to go to
[12:30] www.cia.gov and click apply yeah it's a better story to get called into the basement of your professor yeah do do you think that that uh help the that the change in the rules of how they're able to recruit hurts or helps the agency or both oh it helps most definitely it helps because when I joined you know it it was just a a giant gaggle of of white guys uhuh that was it I mean you know it was until 93 that
[13:00] they said you know we don't have any women or minorities working here we should probably do something about that but otherwise it was just the old boy Network you know and a bunch of a bunch of Eggheads from the ivy league that were running the place yeah so it it EEOC uh Equal Employment Opportunity Act uh made the agency a better place yeah definitely but but with less cool stories about how people got recruited yes exactly right see now they do it they do it in this odd unofficial way so
[13:32] they set up this program called The Scholar and residence program if you if you're like two three four years away from retirement they'll send you back to your alma mater at full salary to you know teach classes like a friend of mine went back to Indiana University and taught a class called uh Espionage and Russian literature for example and it's all BS but what they do is you know look for
[14:04] people who might fit into the C CIA culture and say hey I think you really really ought to apply so that's how they do it it's kind of the same thing yeah yeah it sounds like it um so from that point I mean you're you're getting married you have a line on a on a job on an actual hey a pensioned federal job which I'm sure made would have made your parents very happy um what what was the next step for you going through that Recruitment and then presumably at the farm going or you were
[14:36] started off as an analyst right I started off as an analyst yeah um so it was it was a while I mean I did the analytic training at the farm of course but that's just sort of sitting at a desk all day long but um the the the process the hiring process was honorous it took about uh I had a lot of relatives still in Greece in fact one stupid cousin who was a member of the poit Bureau of the Communist Party of Greece and that set me back months
[15:08] so yeah it it took about 18 months before I finally well not 18 it took about 16 months before I finally got hired but you know you have to go through the polygraph and the background investigation and a ton of tests and and they take your hair and your piss and your blood and it's it's very uh invasive and very timec consuming but I I ended up passing everything um got hired into Dr posts an office that Dr
[15:39] post had created uh called the office of leadership analysis and um and uh started off as the uh as the analyst the leadership analyst for Iraq I was um I was Saddam Hussein's intelligence Community biographer and then I worked with the psychologist and the psychiatrist to to write psychological profiles of of Saddam and his sons and and the members of his cabinet and Military leadership what year worked out pretty darn nicely
[16:10] because I tell you what I I actually I actually complained um about the the job because you know we would go days at a time with not a single cable coming in and I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs and my boss said to me you know don't lose hope Iraq has had the same cabinet the same leadership since 1968 but if you if you work hard and you learn the writing style you can transfer onto something
[16:42] more interesting like Romania he said so just as I got to the point where I felt like I knew it as quickly as I could I I ran into the office and my boss was there and he said um don't take off your jack at uh we're we're going to the White House and so I had only been to the White House as a tourist right so we go to the White House um we're escorted into the Oval Office and it was the president the vice
[17:15] president the National Security adviser the director of the CIA my boss and me and I remember sitting on the couch and thinking my buddies from high school would not believe in a million years that this was happening it's it's funny that you were you were in this hold on guys real quick I'm so sorry but our stream seems to be Frozen right now we are not it keeps cutting in and out it's been out for a minute now no it's back up we're having okay I apologize I I
[17:45] just I was going to say it's interesting that you were in this like in your mind at least an obscure office somewhere in the agency and suddenly you have this this meteoric rise as it becomes so relevant that you're in the Oval Office oh my God and I had just written this paper I probably shouldn't say the guy's name that I that I wrote the paper about but the night of the invasion the Iraqi government released a a press release saying that this guy was going
[18:17] to be the new governor of occupied Kuwait it turned out to not be true they were sort of hoping they could bully him into it but I had just published this paper a few days before and so um so I went to the White House with the paper in hand and um the president looked at it it was George HW Bush at the time he's looking at the paper and then he tosses it onto the coffee table and he says great so now what do we do and then
[18:47] everybody turned and looked at me I was 20 how old was I I was 25 years old time I didn't know what to do but you know I did the best I could and and it it it made the first half of my career it was it was ridiculous yeah and and what was kind of your your role um through the through the Gulf War because it sounds like you on the analytical side you became kind of like one of the go-to guys yeah I was very fortunate I spent
[19:17] the first uh several weeks on the um the task force the the analytic task force that was up in the CIA operations center and then I was sent to Saudi Arabia to be one of the liaison officers with the royal family they were exiled in the Saudi city of TF just outside of of Mecca and so I went there and then I would report back like like I remember reporting back that I think the Amir is is cracking up all he does is tend his roses and cry and so then the president
[19:50] would pick up the phone and call the Amir and say don't worry we're we're going to liberate Kuwait you're going to be the Amir again and it was it was all very exciting very heady stuff yeah you know it was a couple of the guys a couple of the old-timers told me you know appreciate this because this is never going to happen again in your career yeah and um they were wrong but it was you know one of those twice in a career yeah yeah kind of events uh no I mean that's that's
[20:20] fascinating to see all of that unfold and to kind of have like a front seat uh view for it crazy I remember we would get these cables that were marked um critic c r i TI i c critic uh it's the highest level of of emergency yeah it's it's a it's a crisis so it's like routine um gez I forget now I forget what the next one up from routine was then oh routine priority
[20:51] immediate Flash and then critic critic means they're coming over the walls right so we would get these critic cables from NSA and it would say uh scud missile uh has been detected as as being launched from such and such coordinates and real quickly I'd look at my Iraq map and if it was launched from Western Iraq that meant it was going to Israel and if it was launched from Southern Iraq it would be going to Saudi Arabia so I'd say scud launch and everybody would jump
[21:23] up and and we had you know one TV on a TV stand back then and see CNN we'd put CNN on and we would wait and it was like you know 10 minutes later they'd say breaking news there's a scud missile coming to Jerusalem or whatever so it was all very exciting and you know then then you get these calls can you come up to the director's conference room um we need you to brief the you know the Prime Minister of Belgium or or the the king of lutu i i i briefed the king of like
[21:55] Tahiti ones wow yeah yeah it's it's crazy and then you know you go do the briefing and then you go back and sit at your computer and eat a tuna fish sandwich and just start writing again and a after the after the Gulf War in this this sort of time frame here uh was there something that came after or or was this when you started thinking about the directorate of operations well I got I got very bored um well you let me back up sure near the end of the uh of the golf War people
[22:27] were telling me look you know this is this is the point where you move on to your next assignment right you can basically do whatever you want and uh and so Choose Wisely and I wanted to go overseas so I did a rotation I applied for and was granted a rotation to the state department and I went to uh Bahrain little tiny country in the Persian Gulf and um I spent two years there as the economic officer in the American Embassy unfortunately doing Iraq sanctions issues so I've had it you
[22:58] know up to here with Iraq I got back in 96 and then they put me back on Iraq again and then finally in uh late 97 the National Intelligence officer the highest ranking intelligence analyst in the intelligence Community came to me and said I want you to write a National Intelligence estimate now everybody wants to write an niie because that's how you get the big promotion to the more senior levels and I said okay what do you want me to write about and he said I want it to be called Iraq Poland saddam's next
[23:32] 12 months so I wrote it and I said three things I made three analytic conclusions I said Saddam could threaten the Kurds he could threaten the Shia he could threaten Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and I sent it in now in these coordination sessions members of all 18 intelligence uh agencies in the American government come and then what you do is you all sit around and you say or the National
[24:02] Intelligence Officer says Okay first sentence and he reads the first sentence does anybody object and of course everybody objects because they were the ones that wanted to write the paper in the first place so then you have to hash out acceptable language for everybody for the first sentence then you go to the second sentence and usually this takes weeks to get through a National Intelligence estimate so so we coordinated mine in four hours wow and the the National Intelligence officer
[24:33] the nio came to me afterwards and he said that was the fastest coordination session I have ever gone through and I said Ben I'm ashamed of this paper all we needed to do was take last year's niie and just change the date there's no new analysis in this paper yeah so I I I decided during that experience I got to get out of here I want to do something interesting important instead of just sitting in a cubicle and thinking the big thoughts all day long and so a job
[25:04] opened up in Athens and interestingly enough it said they were looking for an officer it was a counterterrorism job handled by the counterterrorism center and they were looking for an officer who spoke either Greek or Arabic and as it turned out I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic wow so so I went down to um CTC the counterterrorism center and I found the hiring officer
[25:35] who was a a senior former uh uh station Chief and I said I'd love to apply for this job but I'll be honest with you I don't have any operational experience at all but I'm fluent in both Greek and Arabic and he said are you kidding me and I said no he said are you willing to be tested I said I just tested a couple weeks ago but if you want me to test again will it turned out that his secretary was Greek so she came out started speaking to me in Greek I answered her in Greek and she says he
[26:06] gets the thumbs up from me and my Arabic tests were very fresh and he said look it's going to take some convincing because you know we we kind of wanted a seasoned Ops guy but it's a lot easier and it's a lot cheaper for me to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak GRE right yeah and so I got the job and I went to Athens how how common or uncommon is it for somebody to go from
[26:37] analysis to operations it was very very unusual there's something called a uh well you know what I won't say what it's called but anyway there's this there's this committee this process that you have to go that you have to go through to move from one director to another and to go from analysis to Ops was highly unusual pre 911 it's it's more common now but um I had to get permissions like all the way up to the deputy director for operations to make that and it
[27:09] worked out for me I had a knack for recruiting people as it turned out did uh you have to go back to the farm and go through like the the human training yeah so that's when I went back to the farm for the operational training and you know if you if you're like hired out of grad school or whatever and you go straight into Ops you're going to do a pretty good solid 18 months at the farm um but I didn't need all those well what they call CIA 101 assignments you know they they'll put you six months on
[27:40] the Iran desk and six months on the nuclear desk and six wa weeks rather six weeks six weeks six weeks on Russia I didn't need to do that because I I was already mid-career and I I knew how the agency worked so I went straight into the Ops training and funny thing you know the first the first phase of that training which lasted I don't know four months I guess the first phase was um weapons training and uh it was about a dozen of us and I go down to the farm and uh the
[28:11] instructor says in the very first session who here doesn't own a gun and I I rais my hand I happen to be sitting in the front row I rais my hand and I turned around to look and it turned out I was the only person with my hand and he says you don't own a gun and I said said well truth be told I've never actually touched a real gun and he's like oh for God's sake all right all right we're going to start from the very beginning and so he pulled me aside everybody else got their guns I got an a
[28:43] bright orange you know rubber gun and um I had that for the first couple of days and then they gave me my real gun and at the end of the class I ended up um testing first um inaccuracy I had a knack for it to the point where one of my instructors recommended that I um check out competitive shooting which I I did with a beautiful there's nothing like a pump action 12 gauge in your hand and it's
[29:14] just so satisfying in fact the instructor said why is the pump action 12 gauge the best gun and you know one guy raised his hands he says well because you can use different kinds of shot and depending on your target and blah blah blah he says correct why else some other guy says something else correct why else nobody had any answers and he says because it makes this bitching sound he goes and I thought yeah that's why I
[29:44] like the 12 it's it's it's interesting you talk about that experience because uh you know the the interesting thing about teaching Marksmanship is that when people come to it without a lot of ego attachment um espe especially men tend to come to it like this is something I should know how to do as a man and there's all this pressure you put on yourself but when somebody you you find this you know teaching women sometimes because they don't have that they don't have that hangup um they just learn the technique they just learn how to do they
[30:15] just learn the fundamentals of Marksmanship and are able to just go and do it and I wonder if that's why you didn't do well or why you did do well on the testing oh I think I think you're probably right I I didn't any bad habits that that they needed to break that's a that's a big part of it yeah yeah I it's and then after that well I'm sorry to interrupt no no no no go ahead please we we had things like um we had a bomb making class at a at a separate
[30:46] facility farther south and uh you know you start off with a Molotov cocktail and at the end of the week the final exam is you have to build a bomb of the one of the designs that they taught you during the week and then you have to blow up a car and uh you know that's just fun who wouldn't want to try something like that for a week and then it was counterterrorist driving and then Advanced counterterrorist driving which was out in the the desert in Nevada and um and then you go into uh what they call the asset
[31:18] acquisition cycle which is spot assess develop recruit um you know convincing people to commit Espionage for you or in some cases to commit treason for you and uh and then it gets even more advanced from there so it it was it was fun I mean I never considered it to be work it was great you work crazy hours but you're having such a good time that you don't even really consider it to be work yeah yeah and then you hit the ground in Athens uh counterterrorism
[31:50] position tell us what your job there and what what you were doing uh dayto day yeah so generically speaking it was to recruit spies to steal Secrets plain and simple just like that um specifically though it was it was deeper there there were two groups that were active in Greece at the time one the the most dangerous the most lethal was revolutionary organization 17 November the other was one called Popular revolutionary struggle they both
[32:21] actively targeted Americans and 17 November had murdered not just the CIA station Chief but two defense attaches and um and an American Technical Sergeant some hapless poor guy was just doing his laundry one day and they just went in and executed him in the laundry room of his apartment building so it was those two organizations but because I spoke Arabic I was also looking at you know Abu nidal and the libyans and the pflp and the dflp and whoever happened
[32:53] to be passing through Athens and Athens was a major crossroads for um for Arab terrorist groups so it was it was very busy my very first day I had only been in in the office for like an hour and we had uh what's called a walk-in somebody who just literally walks into an American Embassy and says I have information I want to pass to the CIA 99% that's not true not 99% say
[33:24] 96% are lunatics right mhm um and then the rest are um either what we call intelligence Peddlers where they'll have a little kernel of actual information that you might want so they give it to you and you give them a hundred bucks or 500 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever it is and then they'll go to the British Embassy and then the French Embassy and the Russian Embassy and then you know in some of these countries that's a month salary right there so the
[33:58] others besides The Real McCoys and they're fewer than one in 100 um there are uh what are called probes probes frighten us the most because they come and say oh I have information I want to give to the CIA in fact they're there to look to see where the security cameras are right whether the whether the door is armored um how many of the um guards are armed who's wearing um you know entry badges with
[34:30] photographs on them uh whatever intelligence they can collect about the Hardline on the Outer Perimeter of and the second perimeter of the embassy because they're actually working for the Iranians the Russians the Chinese the North Koreans whomever in case someday they decide they want to attack that Embassy they hope that they've identified a weak point right John I have a question to that uh about about probes uh but real quick uh we have to
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[42:14] they recreated Parliament and you know on paper everybody lived happily ever after but but there was this there was this opposition movement that formed among students in Paris in 1967 and it became more and more radical to the point where it then broke up into different factions one of those factions became a group called the one may movement um one may we believe eventually morphed into
[42:48] 17 November the other was one called Tom the 20 October movement and it morphed into popular revolutionary struggle called Ella its Greek acronym is Ella Ela so Ella Ella saw as its Mission the murder of Greek policemen because the police were were working hand and glove with the Hun and with the torturers and the fascists and so they they went around blowing up police vans and and
[43:19] shooting police recruits and things like that 17 November wanted to kill everybody that they deemed responsible for the overthrow of the government and that was officials of the American government the British government the French and German governments the Turkish government they killed the Ambassador and the deputy Ambassador and then fascists who owned newspapers during the Hun the uh former ministers from the Hun uh and then
[43:51] anybody who pissed them off like tax authorities right the government announces a tax increase and then they blow up the tax Authority or they they they fired an anti-tank rocket at the Minister of Finance because he made fun of them in a TV interview uh or they killed the minister of communication because he happened to be the prime minister's son-in-law and was friendly with the Communist party so it became yeah it became irrational yeah and then
[44:22] this this culminated in their final action and and this is this is one of the reasons why this became so important in my life um in uh in January of 2000 uh the British defense atache was replaced and the new defense atache Brigadier General Steven Saunders he moved in to the house caddy corner from mine our our backyards touched each other diagonally and Steven was an
[44:54] awesome guy fun loud great sense of humor the life of every party we went to we were at a dinner party one night and I had just gotten a fully armored BMW 540 that the agency bought for me to use it was the first 540 that was in Greece we couldn't even Ure it we had to ensure it through a company in Germany but I needed that big engine to carry all that armor right and so we're at
[45:27] this dinner party and and Stephen is step is jokingly making fun of me and he says you Americans you're so paranoid this is an EU country it's a NATO country what are you so afraid of with your armored cars and your bulletproof vests and I said you Brits live in a dream world if you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that
[46:00] they're not going to kill you if they have the chance to kill you believe me if they get the chance they're going to kill you ha we all laughed two weeks later I slept through my alarm which I had never done now you guys know having been you know in in the positions that you've been in you cannot establish a pattern right you've got to you've got to leave your house every day a different time you've got to take a different route to work every day because you can't establish a pattern
[46:32] that's how they're going to kill you right because if you know that you that you cross through this intersection every day at 8:30 then by God they're going to be at that intersection at 8:30 and they're going to blow up your car so I took a a different route to work every day I left at a different time every day never establishing a pattern but I I slept through my alarm this one day in April April of 2000 and I thought oh my God I don't have time to do a surveillance detection route I'm going to have to just get on
[47:02] the road and just go straight to the Embassy well the embassy was exactly 10 miles from my house just straight down the main road called KS Avenue to the Embassy so I mean we're talking about like six lanes and then a lane on each side of like service roadway so we're talking about an eight Lane major road but it's got Jersey barriers so once you're on you're on you're committed you can't get
[47:33] off I get on qcs and it's a parking lot like Cairo or Bangkok and I was like oh my God I mean traffic's epic in Athens but not like that that's ridiculous so I did something that I never ever did I put on the radio I never wanted to be distracted because they would come up to you you know on the side your car on a motorcycle and just open fire and I wanted to not be distracted I wanted to constantly scan
[48:04] my side view mirrors make sure they're not coming up on me and um and I would never play the radio that day I played the radio so the guy comes on and he says avoid KS Avenue uh because there's a traffic incident at fil F was about the halfway point and I said a crap five miles of this so I'm inching down the mountain and then a half an hour later 20 minutes later he comes on he says avoid KS
[48:35] Avenue there's a criminal incident at fil and I thought geez I've never heard that before a criminal incident at 9:00 in the morning what kind of criminal incident could there be and as I'm continuing to inch down the mountain he comes back on and he says avoid KS Avenue there was a terrorist attack in pH of they and I thought wow I never heard that before well I get near enough to the incident that I see this white
[49:05] Rover you know British Rover um and it's got police tape around it and there's blood just splashed all over the the back windscreen well I noticed that the license plate says ybh our license plates Athens was so dangerous that we were not not allowed to have diplomatic license plates so we had just regular old license plates but the Greeks in their Infinite Wisdom gave everybody in the American Embassy
[49:36] license plates that began with the letters yhb and I thought oh my God this is ybh some innocent Greek they thought some innocent Greek was an American and they and they killed him and then I remembered wait a minute the British Embassy is ybh and that's Steven Saunders car so as I get around it the driver's side window and the passenger side window are blown out and there's just blood everywhere so I called the
[50:08] station and I said hey I'm on Kefi CS right now and I think Steven Saunders was just assassinated and he said what are you seeing and I I explained and he says hang on I'm going to call the British Embassy so he calls the British Embassy and this poor woman she says I'm sorry Steven's not in quite yet may I take a message for him and he said no you're not understanding one of my officers on keas he's he's by
[50:39] Steven's car there's blood everywhere and he thinks that Steven was assassinated so they called um the nearest hospital which was the uh the Red Cross hospital and he was there um a taxi driver pulled him out of the car the first shot he was shot with an anti-tank round and the first shot completely blew off his his right hand and then they shot him three times in the chest with what was called The Welch 45 because it
[51:11] was used to kill our station Chief dick Welch and then it was used in most of the subsequent murders after that that gun was never uh recovered and so uh a taxi driver put him in the taxi and got him to Red Cross hospital but he died 45 minutes later and then um his wife did a very heroic thing um later that day she gave an interview to the Greek media and she said this was not an attack on my husband this was not an attack for
[51:43] political reasons this was a criminal act and it was an attack against every Greek this is how little respect this organization has for the Greek nation and for the Greek people and she did it with such dignity that it actually changed Greek public opinion because for for 27 years the Greeks were like ah they're not killing us or the Greeks that they're killing kind of deserved it right or they're killing Americans or Turks so we don't really care you know well beginning then they cared that's
[52:15] amazing and it turned everything around there was uh if I recall correctly John 17 November sent a letter claiming responsibility for the uh the assassination but if again if I recall correctly they also identified you in the letter yeah that was a shock to me what what 17 November normally did was they would drop a Manifesto at the scene of the assassination usually not always sometimes they would mail it to a Greek
[52:47] newspaper sometimes they would put it in a a garbage can and then call a Greek newspaper and tell them where they could find it so they did not drop a Manifesto um uh that day they waited until August so from April to August you know we're we're doing the investigation working with the Greeks and the British and trying to do the investigation and and I get in one day and the chief comes in in a in a panic and he
[53:17] says um did you see the manifesto and I said no I didn't realize that there was a Manifesto and he says they mention you and I said what do you mean they mention me and he shows it to me and they said in Greek we saw the big spy right but we knew that he was arm he was in an armored car and that he was armed so we elected to carry out the Revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders wow and I said how could they
[53:50] possibly have found me I said I am so careful about my security I can't believe they found me we ended up concluding that they were actually looking for Saunders because he was so out there he was on TV all the time he's at every party he's giving interviews to every newspaper and while they were looking for him they saw my armored car with a with a yhb license plate and said hey that must be CIA who would be driving an armored
[54:23] car so I said well now what and the chief said you got to go and I said where he said home like right now I said you mean home Washington I said my kids are in school right now I can't I can't just up and leave he said we're g to we're going to pick up your kids at school we're going to send another car to pick up your wife we'll pack out your house but you got to go now and so they drove me to the airport they sent an armored car to pick up my kids they sent
[54:55] another armored car to pick up my wife we all met up at the airport and we were on the 12:00 Delta flight back to New York so and it was two more years before I ever went back to Greece again John I I I gotta like ask I mean to I this is going back in time so I understand 17 November fighting the Hun makes certain amount of sense and we can kind of relate it's a dictatorship 1974 the Hun disolves but 17 November is still around and now we fast forward to the year 2000 and here
[55:25] they are whacking a British defense atache and menacing you I mean you didn't know it at the time and the intelligence that they had uh implies an intimate knowledge of your security protocols and where you are and when so I mean my question is what is 17 November really well that's such a good question you know we we used to debate this amongst ourselves all the time and we used to sort of
[55:57] halfway joke that um that 17 November it had to be like a bunch of 70y old guys on on um motorcycles like the band moff gang yeah like the like the B mhof gang and so it turned out that that was actually kind of the case for some of them they were they were you know senior citizens True Believers but they would recruit like really trustworthy people people that
[56:28] they could they could rely on to keep their secret and several cycled out a couple more would cycle in but the core of the organization was there since 70 you know 74 75 the first killing was the CIA station Chief Richard Welch and you know dick Welch this was a really sad story because Dick Welch had just arrived in Greece he was he had only been in Greece about six weeks and he was a real Phil Helen he had studied um
[56:59] ancient Greek in in college he had done archaeological digs he he spoke modern Greek and he had just arrived and he went to the ambassador's Christmas party December 23rd 1975 he and his wife and their driver went back to uh to his house after the party and um you know those were the days before the electric gates so the driver had to stop the car get out to open the gate and when he did that they shot him there were four people in a car
[57:29] parked across the street three men and a woman two of the men got out and shouted his name Richard Welch get out of the car and he got out of the car so did Mrs Welch the driver ran for his life and um he got out of the car and they said Richard Welch you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you've been sentenced to death and then they shot him three times with the 45 um the Greeks were so backward at the time
[58:00] that they couldn't find the getaway car and so one of the shooters called the police and said you morons the car is parked at and then he gave them an address and so then they went and got the car uh but not only were they never able to catch anybody they were never even able to identify anybody we had I'm not exaggerating when I tell you we had had 1,00 suspects there ended up being nine
[58:32] members of 17 November and we were right on three of them wow and that's how secretive this group so I mean I presumably from what you're telling me I mean you were eventually or the Greek government or the CIA was able to unmask this organization down the line I who who did these guys turn out to be well yeah so we I I wish we could take credit and and the Greeks the Greeks actually get more credit than we
[59:02] do and they deserve more credit um one member of 17 November Savas kidos uh was carrying a bomb in the city of perus uh that he was going to put underneath the limousine of a Greek ship owner and the bomb went off in his hands and it blew his hands off and so as he was laying there on the ground bleeding to death he decided to make a deathbed
[59:32] confession and he said I'm 17 November here's the location of the safe house here's the location of the guns and the weapons and the rockets and these are the other uh members of the organization and then he lived wow he survived yeah so it turned out we were right about the leader of 17 November a guy named alexandr Yoto we were we did not know the actual uh Hitman um his nickname was the black
[1:00:04] hand because everything he touched died and then the the core of 17 November was three sons of a priest from Thessaloniki yeah I talk about you know Daddy Issues um and then there were a couple that cycled in and out one was was a labor leader one was a a sixth grade teacher uh one was a mechanic but um they were all wrapped up
[1:00:36] now the Greeks ended up getting all of them the only things that they didn't find they didn't find the Welch 45 and they didn't find the typewriter the old school manual typewriter that they would write the manifestos on these guys obviously had good tradecraft good opsc oh yeah where who amongst them was trained or where do you think they got their training from yeah also a good question so the answer I think is something you're going to be you're going to be fascinated by um they
[1:01:07] were never trained by anybody uh they got their weapons from Carlos The Jackal and but we were never able to put them in any of the the Libyan um uh training camps where you know everybody else was trained B mhof and red brigades and oxion direct and IRA and pflp pflp GC the Greeks were never Ella Japanese but 17 November it was all it was all done in house now the
[1:01:39] interesting thing was in 1968 the Uruguayan defense atache in Paris was assassinated and for the life of them nobody could figure out who did it or why in the world anybody would want to assassinate the Uruguayan defense atache in Paris it turned out that was 17 November's first hit and they did it as a practice hit to see if they could get away with it and to see what lessons
[1:02:11] they could learn in the getaway and it worked you know the element of surprise untraceable weapons you hit somebody who has no idea that he's even at risk of being hit and you get away with it and so they did it's amazing I mean there's like yeah organic learning in the field yeah I I me it's just it's really hard to believe though because it's there are so many ways to leave traces there are so many like it's
[1:02:43] hard to believe that nobody taught them anything yeah well you know in this day and age too I 1975 is not 2024 with forensics and DNA now I I can't imagine that something like this would be successful and you know in when I was station in Greece they made some serious mistakes uh besides multiple shootouts with the cops and the cops were such bumbling fools that 17 November Got Away um they launched a
[1:03:14] rocket attack on the home of the German ambassador and for some reason the rocket misfired when the guy put it up on his shoulder it misfired and it cut his neck and so he bled pretty profusely on the sidewalk so I ran out there with a colleague of mine um and and members of the Greek police and there was this blood all over the sidewalk and I said we got to test the blood we got to test the DNA they were like yeah but then how are we going to do that it's on concrete
[1:03:45] it's I said take the whole [ __ ] sidewalk so we we went like literally we went to the Greek version of Home Depot and bought sledgehammers and we we broke up the sidewalk and carried it away we put it in a diplomatic pouch we sent it back to Washington the the agency gave it to uh the FBI quanico they ran a DNA uh test and there was no match in any system interpole the Greeks the Americans no match but at least we had the DNA right for later and it turned
[1:04:17] out well we learned we learned two and a half years later that was saas cedo's DNA the German ambassador had said something in some interview that he didn't like so he fired a rocket at the guy's house it's it's it's wild I you know I I I normally we save questions to the end of the show but I just saw one pop up that has to do with this how did the how did these random Greeks hook uh get hooked up with Carlos The Jackal I mean we this is before the internet or like this is like how does that happen oh
[1:04:48] yeah way way before the internet you know that that's a terrific question too was that from one of your viewers yeah yeah yeah that's a terrific question I um it it took me almost a year of asking permission to interview Carlos in prison in uh in Paris and so what I did at first once I got all the permissions you know in the headquarters chain of command I I reached out to his wife we found her living in some little town in Germany and I I went and I said look you know I
[1:05:19] know you're out of the game she and Carlos had a daughter together I know you're out of the game I know that you're you know trying to make a life for yourself we're not interested in making any trouble for Carlos you he's serving life without parole for killing a whole bunch of French policemen um I said we want the Greeks we promised Mrs Welch in 1975 that we wouldn't rest until we found her husbands Killers I said I want to talk to Carlos and I want to know who he's dealt with what Greeks he's dealt with over the years so she actually got in touch with
[1:05:52] Carlos for me and and then you know you got to you got to send a a formal request to the French and then they're jerks about it and then you have to keep asking over and over again and and then finally the French said yes so I flew I flew to Paris and went with a French to the prison and um and Carlos comes into the room and he's just a little tiny old man now I mean this and this was 24 years ago yeah so even 24 years ago he's a little tiny old man and um and I told him you know who I was and why I was
[1:06:23] there and i' had spoken to uh Magdalena his his wife Magdalena cop and um we were interested in the in the Greeks and he smiled and he said go [ __ ] yourself so we never learned what the Nexus was between Carlos and the Greeks yeah we had multiple forces tell us that it was Carlos that provided the weapons um but we never could figure out the Genesis of that relationship it's very interesting though because again when you think of how isolated the world
[1:06:55] was before the internet you know you you you can't just like look up a classified ad for Carlos theack right like you can't look him up in the phone book um yeah that came together somehow yeah yeah yeah I so yeah then so this is uh we've been talking about about the time frame 2000 and then 911 happens and what is the what is sort of the next step in your your CIA career after that
[1:07:28] right well you know 911 it's funny to me I I teach a grad school class at the University of Salam monka in Spain and um I just got back from Spain a few weeks ago it's called the history of terrorism so we spent a lot a lot of time uh on on these issues and these groups and you know three full days on Carlos The Jackal and um and then we transition to 911 and I'm talking to these stud students and grad school students I'm talking to
[1:07:59] them like you know 911 is as fresh in their minds as it is in mine because in my mind 911 happened last Tuesday right right right right and one of them raised her hand and she said Professor you realize that all of us were born after 911 right and I said oh my God no I didn't realize that oh my God okay we're going to start from the beginning so on the morning of 911 I was in CTC
[1:08:30] the counterterrorism center and I was I had a 9:00 appointment uh 9:30 appointment with condalisa rice she was the National Security adviser at the time and I was going with cover black who was the the uh director of CTC um and we were going for a very quaint reason uh the the government printing office Was preparing to publish a book called Foreign Relations an installment of a book of a series of
[1:09:02] books called Foreign Relations of the United States Greece turkey Cyprus 1947 to 1969 this book is like a thousand pages long and it's every cable sent or received by those embassies between 1947 and 1969 wow but three of those cables buried in those thousand Pages mentioned sources clandestine sources who were still alive and so rather than resettle them
[1:09:35] in the United States for their own safety and you give them a million dollars and give them different names we were gonna ask coni if she would just take the cables out right nobody's gonna miss them nobody's even gonna read these books except a couple of eggh head is working on their phds so I got a call from the driver say that the car was ready to take us to the White House and I go over to Ker's office and his secretary you know her desk was right outside his office and in those days we couldn't watch TV on our
[1:10:05] computers so she had a little TV on her desk and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire and I said well what happened to the World Trade Center and she said a a plane flew into it and because I'm stupid I said uh I said huh you know that happened once before in 1932 a plane flew into the uh Empire State Building but it was really rainy and foggy then and it's so Crystal Clear today how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center yeah
[1:10:36] and then as soon as I said that the second plane hit yeah and then she she turns to me like this and she says did you see that or did I imagine it and then to make a long story short like everybody else in the building I volunteered to go to Afghanistan to do whatever was required of of me and they kept passing me over and I kept volunteering over and over and over again and finally I went to the deputy director's office he was an old friend
[1:11:07] of mine and I said I said if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I'm Not Looking Back and he goes all right all right take it easy can you go to Pakistan I saides when he said tomorrow I saides what do you want me to do there he Saidi want you to be chief of counterterrorism Ops I saidd so I called my girlfriend she later became my wife she worked a few floors above me and um I said I got
[1:11:39] to go to Pakistan tomorrow she said how long I said I don't know 6 months 12 months I don't know she said okay I'll meet you at your apartment I'll help you pack and then the next day I flew to Pakistan and and that that tour changed the the course of the rest of my life so what what time frame was that uh that was uh January of 2002 okay and what what was what was Pakistan the station of Pakistan like at that time because I and
[1:12:12] I don't know uh the time frames but I know at one point in time like people had an issue with the uh um The Ambassador in Pakistan because he's were sort of a fan of Pakistan uh you know in terms of like doing opos what what was it like for you walking into that situation oh it was it was the Wild West you know everybody pretty much everybody had been evacuated so the only people who were there were CIA okay and
[1:12:43] FBI yeah and the Ambassador actually the Ambassador was replaced halfway through my my time there because there was a terrorist attack on on Christian Church next door to the Embassy and and seven people were killed including two uh two Embassy officers and the Ambassador just kind of um kind of cracked and um and went home wow just went back yeah they they withdrew her she went home and she was replaced by
[1:13:14] another Ambassador but I mean everybody knew the mission there was no diplomacy that was going to take place this was all about killing Al-Qaeda period that was it that was the mission and then at the same time you know i' I've always told this story that has always struck me as funny um there was a very very Junior officer who was working for me she had never served overseas before and um and the embassy has an absolutely
[1:13:47] enormous cafeteria that on the weekends is converted into a a nightclub and they have they have like Filipino cover bands that come and and you can drink and they've got a disco ball going and that way you never have to leave the the compound and so we go down there and this cafeteria can hold you know 300 people and we went right at 12: noon and we were the only two people in the cafeteria and she looks around and she goes where is everybody and I said they've been
[1:14:21] evacuated and she goes everybody and I said yes she goes why and I said don't you read the papers Pakistan's going to have a nuclear war with India like any minute now and she goes what are you talking about I said did you notice that big helicopter that's in the parking lot yes I go it's here to rescue us we're the last ones left she's like oh my God I got to focus
[1:14:52] on something other than Al-Qaeda and they go go yeah cuz we don't have enough to worry about right I'll now the Indians are going to Nuke us because they're pissed off about something and um we just you know took it from there you just deal with it yeah they ended up of course you know not nuking each other and we could focus on Al-Qaeda but yeah there's a lot of stuff going on and you you have to be as single-minded as you possibly can you know Pakistan is such an interesting story to me because
[1:15:23] everybody like the war happened in Afghanistan but a large number of the people we were fighting in Afghanistan were armed trained living in Pakistan and yet we couldn't take the war to them there did you hear me yeah you're absolutely yeah yes you're absolutely correct this is something that that most Americans I think don't understand um the word the word
[1:15:56] Taliban is the plural of the word Talib and Talib in both Arabic and pashu um means student right so um in 1994 Pakistani trucks that were crossing uh Afghanistan on their way to sell their goods in Iran were being hijacked by by Bandits and so Benazir BH said we need some kind of security for these trucks
[1:16:26] we should take these these you know Taliban who are studying in our schools and we should put them on the trucks to protect the trucks we give them an AK-47 they just sit there ride riding literally riding shotgun and uh protect the trucks and that started to work and so they came up with this idea well instead of having them sitting in the trucks we should put them in the Villages along the truck route right through kahar Province helmond province those traditionally um um pashon regions of of
[1:17:02] Afghanistan so once they were placed in those Villages they took over the villages and recruited other people to join the Taliban all of a sudden they're overthrowing the Afghan government and you know installing themselves so it was the pakistanis and the Pakistani intelligence service that created the Taliban which then in turn began to train and to arm groups that were opposed to the Pakistani government mhm
[1:17:33] because it wasn't radical enough right it was this Frankenstein monster that the pakistanis created and you know people ask me all the time were you able to trust the Pakistani intelligence service and I I always give the same answer in my mind there were two Pakistani intelligence Services there was the guys that I worked with in count C uh terrorism they were all educated at Sandhurst in the UK and they would lay down their lives for us and then there
[1:18:04] were the guys that created the Taliban with the long beards giving you the stink eye when you're walking down the hall of their of their headquarters and you know probably plotting your assassination the real regime and so yeah yeah exactly so it was a challenge you know keeping the honest people honest yeah and and it's like and one of the things about like the Taliban and that brand like it's not even it's Stone brand of like uh Islamic fundamentalism right because it's it's merged with this
[1:18:36] ancient poshon W this ancient tribal culture that brings these old old ways together with with Islam and this very fundamental belief in Islam um and it just it's it's a it's a stone not not Stone but it's an ancient you know you know yeah I mean it's it's an ancient cult in a way merging those too not very much so very much so and and that's why even
[1:19:08] years after after taking over that government they only had diplomatic relations with three countries with Pakistan Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates you know that's why they blew up the uh this the giant Buddhas because they were they were carved in you know man's image sin yeah up and Boman I think yeah yeah up and Boman exactly so start to start to talk us a little bit through like the tail end of your CIA career and and exit from the
[1:19:39] agency well you know I I led the uh the capture of Abu zubeda in Pakistan in March of 2002 and we we believed wrongly at the time that he was the number three in al-Qaeda and um when I went back to headquarters man I I was a star and uh I was very quickly promoted and uh and named the uh executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations and uh in that position you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world you're
[1:20:11] read into every compartment which is not a good thing you know there there are some things I just wish I had never I had never learned about what what some of my colleagues were up to well it was then that we decided to implement this torture program that they called enhanced interrogation techniques I was strongly opposed to it and I was actually approached and asked if I wanted to be trained in it so I could go out to the field and begin you know torturing these guys I said I had a a
[1:20:41] moral and ethical problem with it besides the fact that I believed very strongly that it was illegal um and so I declined they they asked 14 people uh if we wanted to go through the training and I regret to say I was the only one who declined so um I left in 20 let's see 2004 I left for the uh private sector and um and you know between 2002
[1:21:14] and 2004 I I kept waiting for somebody to say something about this torture program we're getting cables back where people are designing because of the torture uh one secretary that that watched a torture session fainted we we were getting cables from doctors in the Office of Medical Services saying I'm curtailing my assignment I'm coming home this is a violation of my hypocritic oath it's not something that I signed up for and I thought surely somebody is
[1:21:45] going to say something publicly to stop this Abomination and and nobody did and then in December of 2007 I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News he said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zeda I said absolutely untrue I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zeda and he said well you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself I had no idea that
[1:22:15] that was an old reporter's trick I had never spoken to a reporter before M well to make a very long story very short I gave him an interview in December of 2007 in which I said number one that the CIA was torturing its prisoners number two torture was official US government policy it was not the result of a rogue CIA officer which is something that President Bush had said and I said that the CIA um this uh I'm sorry I said that the the
[1:22:47] torture program had been had been personally approved by the president it was it was under his signature and Hell broke loose within 24 hours the the CIA asked the FBI to investigate me and the FBI did exactly that from December of 07 to December of 08 and then they sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter declining to prosecute me um they said that they had done the investigation and that um I had not they had determined I had not committed a
[1:23:17] crime can I can I ask you real quick what did they what was their impetus like what did they ask you or asked the FBI to investigate you for what was just anything that you did they were just supposed to dig through your life or what no it it was for the illegal disclosure of classified information under the Espionage Act okay yeah but the thing is is you know Human Rights Watch uh had written a paper saying the CIA is torturing its prisoners Amnesty
[1:23:47] International did the same thing and the international Committee of the Red Cross same thing this was the worst kept secret in Washington everybody knew that the CIA had a torture program everybody knew everybody knew that they had secret prisons somebody leaked that in I don't know what five or six or something so the FBI said no it's not a violation and besides it's actually against the law to classify a criminal act right if if something is a crime you can't classify
[1:24:18] it for the purpose of keeping it from the American people and torture is a crime I don't care what John Yu and Jay BBY say or Dick Cheney torture is a crime if you want to torture somebody okay change the law but the law was crystal clear so a month later Barack Obama becomes president he initially names John Brennan as the CIA director the Liberals were up in arms and that nomination was withdrawn so he then named Brennan the
[1:24:52] um Deputy National Security adviser for counter terrorism John Brennan and I always hated each other and so Brennan asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me and I had no idea I was being investigated for the next three years they they had Taps on my phones wow they intercepted my emails they would put these teams of FBI agents to follow me they followed us into church into Target to my kids school out to restaurants and then in January Ary
[1:25:25] of 2012 I was charged with three counts of Espionage coming out of the the ABC news interview and a subsequent interview I gave to the New York Times in which I just said exactly the same thing um they charged me with a account of making a false statement which we were we were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been and then they charged me with one count of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981
[1:25:55] and so you know what they do it's it's a tried andrue strategy they they charge stack they they throw all these different charges at you then they wait until you go bankrupt from legal fees which I quickly did and then they come back and they offer to drop all the charges but one if you take a plea so I was looking at 45 years had I gone to trial according to my attorneys I was realistically looking at 12 to8 years or I can take their deal and do 23
[1:26:29] months and so you know when when according to propublica the government wins 98.2% of its cases and you have five kids right what do you do right right all those dice knowing you have a 1.8% uh chance of winning or you take the deal what do you think was John Brennan's beef with you that he encouraged the this investigation he was public about it he he was public about it I aired the agency's dirty laundry and I should have
[1:27:00] kept my big mouth shut gotta do you think that I mean obviously you think that Obama would have some level of control over that do you think that Obama was neutral about it agreed with it no Obama had a nixonian obsession with National Security leaks and and I got that from people who were you know directly working directly face Toof face with Obama he was obsessed with National Security leaks unlike anything they had seen since Richard Nixon and so you know
[1:27:31] between the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and 2009 three people were charged with Espionage for speaking to the media just under Obama eight people were charged with Espionage for speaking to the media almost three times all previous presidents combined yeah they came after thanks to John brenn but but wasn't I mean wasn't Obama responsible for releasing the names of the people
[1:28:02] involved with like the brick Factory and everything like that like yeah he was and Ju Just Like Leon Panetta was responsible for exposing the names of the of the um the Special Forces guys who killed Osama Bin Laden just like David Petraeus was responsible for exposing the names of 10 covert operatives to his adulterous girlfriend and all of that is perfectly fine right but if you embarrass the agency then there's a price to pay yeah
[1:28:34] you you didn't have enough stars on your uh lapel to uh protect you oh my God I say that all the time if I had four shiny stars right here yeah no it's wild it's wild that that he had that that you say that Obama has this obsession with it but then he released names of the people who are acting on at the behest of the government doing the job the government asked them to do and then all these all these people have to like move and hide and have security teams on them because they released I I I I've seen it
[1:29:06] myself in my own work where you know somebody high ranking maybe General mccraven can get away with saying things publicly but you know if you're a specialist E4 in the Army done and you you say the exact same thing that he said yeah you're you're done yeah you're finished yeah absolutely true absolutely true that's I mean that's how Washington works and you guys know the old saying from Harry Truman if you want a friend in Washington get a dog you can't rely
[1:29:39] on anybody else yeah yeah so so you take the plea bargain and now now you're going to is it federal prison oh yeah federal prison yeah tell us about that experience well you know I wrote another book about that experience I I it was called uh doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison I never had any intention at all of writing a book uh but in in sentencing my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security Work
[1:30:10] Camp and minimum security there are no bars uh on the on the windows the doors aren't locked there are no fences or anything you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to run away and most most of those guys work in town There's a a little University in town you go you know sweep the floors or whatever and the judge asked the justice department if they had any objection and they said no so she sentenced me to um to this minimum security Work Camp well
[1:30:42] when I got there it's it's odd you just you just drive up to the prison and you knock on the door and you say you know I'm here to turn myself in so the guy says to me oh you got to go across the street uh to the to the prison the actual prison they'll process you and then they'll bring you back over here I said okay so I go across the street I knock on that door I said uh I'm John kiraku I'm here to turn myself in and the guy takes me he starts taking me around to the back of the actual prison
[1:31:15] and I said no no I'm supposed to be at the at the camp across the street and he he kind of chortles he goes huh not according to my paperwork you're not and I was like oh my God take it easy there's nothing you can do if you raise a stink they're just going to put you in solitary I didn't say a word so they processed me and the whole time
[1:31:45] I'm telling myself you can do this you've lived in far worse places than Loretto Pennsylvania you can do this my the the guard who processed me took me to my cell and the only thing he said to me in this whole thing this whole experience was if somebody comes into your room Uninvited that's an act of aggression I was like great up been your 40 minutes I'm going to get my ass kicked so we get to the cell and he just says
[1:32:17] home sweet home and he walks away so I didn't know what to do so I I took a nap actually and I think it was because I was in shock but I I wake up I don't know half hour later and I'm sitting in this plastic chair every cell gets a plastic chair and um and these two guys just walk right into my one had this swastika that took up his entire neck that came up onto his face and the other one had [ __ ] you tattooed on his
[1:32:50] eyelids so every time he blinked so two so two other white class white collar Lial uh white white yeah yeah in in Club Fed yeah which there is no such thing as Club fed by the way so I I jump up I put up my fist I'm like what do you want because I thought man if I'm going down I'm taking somebody with me so one of them says take it easy are you the new guy I go yeah he goes um are you a
[1:33:20] [ __ ] I said no I'm not a [ __ ] he goes are you a are you a rat I said no I didn't have anybody in my case I'm not a rat he goes are you a chomo I go I I don't know what that word means he goes like guess he goes chomo child molester I said no I'm not a child molester he goes okay you can sit with the arens in the cafeteria and I was like oh okay thinking great now I'm with the arens
[1:33:51] now right it was very stressful a couple of days later this black guy walks into my cell and this guy is like 200 pounds of knotted muscle this perfect human specime and he's got a newspaper in his hands and of course I jump up again I'm like what do you want and he gingerly hands me this newspaper and I see that it's the it's called the
[1:34:22] national the National call I think is what it was it was it was the newspaper of the Nation of Islam and he says are you the CIA guy and I said yeah and still I'm like this I go yeah and he says Reverend farakhan says you're a hero of the Muslim people oh my God I just wanted to tell you that you're not gonna have any problems with us I said oh okay he never spoke to me again because they don't speak to the white devil but he just wanted to say you know that I wasn't going to have a
[1:34:52] problem so four of my five cellmates were members of different um Mexican cartels bachos Nortenos MS13 I forget what and one of them said to me um are you educated and I said yeah and he said would you write my appeal and I said well I'm not I'm not a lawyer yeah but you said you're educated I said yeah okay I how hard could it possibly be to write an appeal I go give
[1:35:24] me your give me your case papers let me ask you a couple questions um are you guilty and he goes yeah I'm guilty he had like bullet bow scars in him from this shootout with the DEA so I wrote this I wrote this appeal and and the appeal was denied of course um but he told all the other cartel guys that um that I was honest and that I didn't charge him so uh so the Mexicans left me alone and then finally I was directly across
[1:35:56] the hall from from the number three in the um in the banano Prime family and uh I would get the New York Times every day he would get the New York Post and we would trade after after we uh finished our papers and he said to me one day um let me ask you something he says why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria and I said I don't know my first day here they they told me to sit with them and then very dramatically he goes from today you're with the
[1:36:29] Italians and so I I was with the Italians after that you know there there was one guy my my brother my brother rented an apartment from Carlo Gambino's sister for nine years in Carol Gardens Brooklyn and so he called me right before I left prison and he said listen there's a very bad guy in this prison you need to stay away from him and he told me who it was I I probably shouldn't say his name but um he was the actual boss of one of the
[1:37:02] families one of the five families yeah the bananos are one of the five families and and and the bananos were really kind to me I I in fact I talked to one of them three three hours ago so um I stayed away from this guy and you'd see him walking around you know every once in a while and he he's completely encircled by these six bodyguards hangers on so I'm sitting in my cell one day and I'm reading the times and I see this movement out of my peripheral from my
[1:37:34] peripheral vision I turn and it's it's a guy we used to call stupid Tony because his eyes were crossed right so I turned and I said hey and he goes the boss wants to see you and I said he wants to see me like I've actively avoided this guy yeah he goes let's go I was like oh my God so I get up and um and uh I follow him like to the extreme opposite end of the prison we go
[1:38:04] into the guy's room and it's full of people so he's sitting in one of the plastic chairs and another guy's on his knees and he's clipping the boss's toenails and I'm just standing in the doorway finally when his toenails are done um he gets up he brushes his teeth he spits into the and the spit gets all over the the rim of the the Basin there's a guy right behind him sleeping in a bunk bed and he punches the bunk bed and he get he goes hey get up clean this [ __ ]
[1:38:34] up the guy jumps out of the bed cleans it up finally I go I said uh excuse me did you want to see me he goes come in sit down I go in and sit down he goes you the CIA guy I said said I am you write a book I said I did your book do good I said actually I did very well I made number five on the New York Times bestsellers list and he goes
[1:39:05] like this he goes you're going to write my book and I said oh okay he goes I'm GNA tell you stories and you're going to write my book I said all right let's think about this for a minute I said you know book of this genre are usually written by rats and they spend the first half of the book talking about all the cool things they've done and the second half of the book they spend trying to justify why
[1:39:38] they turn rat and I said you're definitely not a rat and you probably shouldn't talk about the cool things you've done silence among these dozen guys around me and he he looks like this he goes hadn't thought of that never mind but from that day on I was invited to every Italian dinner every Italian party we walked the track in the yard
[1:40:10] together I gained 35 pounds in prison because they had a crooked guard on payroll and he would bring in the pork loin and the wine for the marsala sauce and the fresh Tom tomatoes and mushrooms and pasta and chicken and every night was this banquet of restaurant quality Italian food and so I didn't have to worry about anything
[1:40:40] I I I'm curious how how the like the Dynamics uh were you know you you sit with the arens at first and those must have been great conversations and actually I'm joking because PE like I'm sure you had normal conversations with those guys too because there were there had to be like a layer of there had to be a layer of normaly there but but you're sitting with the arens how did they react when you started sitting with this the boss that invited you over uh like was there
[1:41:11] tension yeah uh you know there were two or three guys who said oh you think you're better than we are and I'm like no no no I said listen I'm Greek they're Italian we both hate the FBI the same amount I'm just going to hang with them and and for you know 95% of them that that was cool they didn't care so you you had gotten youra tattoos just yet say that again I just saying you hadn't gotten your swastika tattoos just
[1:41:42] yet I know right like and and they would pressure me like at least get like a string of barbed wire around your bicep I'm like no I don't want to look like you guys I'm not getting a barb I don't want any souvenir of this place right right yeah that's funny but but you said that like 90 like 70 like most of them were cool with it how did you avoid how did you avoid issues with the guys that weren't cool with it or and not just with the Aryans but with anybody
[1:42:13] obviously there are people who are outside those groups or or whatever yeah also a good question so every three um there are everybody has to be a member of a group or a gang you can't survive if you're if you're by yourself okay and so you've got the arens you have the Italians you have the blacks who are divided between the Crips and the Bloods uh and their Affiliates and then you have the Hispanics which are
[1:42:44] you know a dozen different groups um even the child molesters have their own where what's called a shot collar so there's one shot for every one of these groups or gangs and if you have a problem with somebody from another race or another group you go to your shot collar and he'll go to the other guy's shot collar and they negotiate a settlement that way they reduce the level of violence well the Italians were the smallest group in the prison but
[1:43:14] they were the most highly respected and so they had kind of a an easy relationship with the um Aryans and then the blacks the Hispanics um and everybody else just kind of left the Italians alone because the Italians had a very long arm you know you piss somebody off in prison all it takes is a is a phone call to uh to somebody back in Queens and uh and you're going to have a heap of problems on your on your chest the Italians know how to run a racket there's no denying
[1:43:46] it I'll tell you what I I was there for about a month and this this boss that I told you about uh was in the visiting room one day when my wife and kids came to see me and we were sitting in the same row so you could put two prisoners in one row of about a dozen chairs and then family members directly across from them so I'm there with my wife and kids and and your kids are allowed to sit on your lap but you you can't have any physical contact with your spouse other
[1:44:16] than a kiss when they arrive and a kiss when they leave and I mean a peck on the cheek kind of Kiss so I'm there with my kids my wife is across from me the boss is you know three four seats down and there are three old gray-haired men sitting across from him and they're just sitting there and they're not saying anything and then finally the boss says to the first one you talk to Paulo and the old man
[1:44:46] says I talk to Paulo he sends his regards and then there's like five minutes of silence and then he says to the second guy yeah he says he says to the second guy you take care of the thing and the guy goes I took care of the thing it's not going to be a problem five more minutes of silence and then he says uh you see Tony he goes I saw Tony he
[1:45:20] said not to worry and then they all stood up and they hugged and they kissed each other in the cheek and they left yeah and my wife says what did we just see and I said I think that was a mafia sitdown but yeah I have a pebble in my shoe you they they're perfectly yeah exactly they're perfectly able to conduct whatever business they need to conduct out in the open without any fear of you know the the cops intervening or anybody causing any kind
[1:45:51] of problem for them I was like I was impressed to tell you the truth what kind of tradecraft could the agency learn from prison oh man thank you and we did not plant that question no so in in this book that I that I wrote coming out of prison doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison I actually won two literary awards for this I won I won the pen First Amendment award which which is one
[1:46:23] of the big four along with the pen Falkner the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allen Poe and I won the forward reviews Memoir of the year so I started writing this book as a joke right how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison and I start off with 20 life lessons that I learned at the CIA that got me through prison and when I say I started off as a joke you know we used to have these coffee mugs for sale in the CIA uh gift shop that said admit nothing deny
[1:46:55] everything make counter accusations right right okay put that as one of the the 20 life lessons um but there were others like let others Do Your Dirty Work uh don't trust anybody don't be afraid to take a punch you know stuff like that and there were 20 of these and then I would give examples like real life examples for each one of these 20 life lessons and then it became actually quite a serious book well the CIA taught me the skills that I
[1:47:26] needed to keep myself safe and to remain at the top of the social Heap in prison and then conversely the CIA can learn a lot about human Motivation by studying prisoners you know I I said an hour ago that that my job in in Greece like the job of any CIA case officer is very simply to recruit spies to steal Secrets MH but there's an an awful lot of psychological manipulation that comes with that well
[1:47:57] you can learn volumes worth of information and lessons uh by doing that in prison it's amazing I and I apologize generally we read people's books before they come on the show I was not aware of your book I'm buy I'm gonna buy it and read it after the fact but it sounds amazing oh thank you yeah it sounds amazing thank you for um oh I appreciate it very much yeah no it it really it's it's really interesting to consider
[1:48:27] prison like the ultimate testing ground for not necessarily running sources for information but there but there's definitely a lot in common there right like how to get along like everything is a cold but yeah and and you you live and die in prison based on the quality of the intelligence that you're able to gather uhuh I mean really that's what ites down to I I go into detail in the book about how this this pedophile tried to put a hit on me uh in in prison and it was
[1:48:59] because my relationships with the black uh groups were so good that they tipped me off and so I was able to set the pedophile up to go down uh which he did hard something I was quite proud of could you I can you talk about that do you want to talk about that or is that probably better not oh sure yeah oh no sure sure so this guy it's it's kind of a long story but
[1:49:29] but he set me up and and two of the black guys came up and said hey John you know uh this this pedophile he was an attorney from uh from Phil Philadelphia who had buggered a 12-year-old boy um for five years from 12 to 17 um he he was Furious because I wouldn't allow him to move into my cell I said no my cell is a pedophile free zone no pedophiles so
[1:50:00] um he offered these guys $500 to to beat me to a bloody pulp and rather than take the 500 they came and warned me and so I said well I got to I got to figure a way to take this guy down and so I was able to use my CIA skills to recruit another prisoner to plant a shank in the guy's Locker and then uh an anonymous tipster told the cops hey that pedo has a shank in his uh in his locker they went and got
[1:50:32] him they arrested him they charged him with having Contraband and they transferred him to a medium security prison another level higher it's it's amazing done and done as we used to say I I don't understand I don't understand how pedos have any influence can survive can you I I don't understand that because I I mean the stories are that like they
[1:51:03] are are PNG in prisons yes I would like P are not allowed to sit yeah they're not allowed to sit in the day room in the TV room they're not even allowed to stay in their own cells during the day they have to get out or they're going to get a beat down um there was one incident when I was there where you could buy olive oil in the in the commissary and one guy um poured a bottle of olive oil into a bowl put it into the communal microwave
[1:51:34] and then poured it onto a pedophile's face while he was taking a nap boiling olive oil wow it onto his face because the day before the pedo had been sitting in the guy's chair in the day room and he like you know the rules no pedophiles in the day room so he burned his face up yeah so yeah pedophiles are at the very bottom of the uh of the social ladder John you did about you did about two years in federal prison uh get out talk
[1:52:04] to us about your reintegration into American society as a reformed citizen I mean what what was that experience like you know what it was far more difficult than I expected it to be so many so many people think especially especially people who've been incarcerated on White Collar uh crimes we think we can just step right back into our lives again and everything's going to be fine and that's not the case at all and so you know I couldn't get a job there was a there was a think tank
[1:52:36] here in Washington The Institute for policy studies that threw me a bone but it was minimum wage and um I got rejected at you know Safeway and Target and wmart and I got rejected everywhere and so I just decided that I was going to have to embrace this in fact my my now ex-wife was extraordinarily supportive and she gave me really great advice she told me you have to embrace this you didn't do
[1:53:06] anything wrong right and so you have to get out there and tell your story over and over and over again so people understand your perspective she said the Justice Department's going to move on to their next victim which they did it was Ed Snowden in June of 2013 she said but you have to grab this by the horns and she was right and so that's what I've done and you know I've been able to make a decent living ever since and to tell you the truth my
[1:53:36] children are proud of me and I like the person that I am I can sleep at night um I know deep down that I'm on the right side of history on this torture issue so I just don't care anymore were were you so were you angry did you have to let that anger go with the system the hypocrisy in the system yeah because it it sounds like like just to add on to that like when we started the interview it sounds like you really enjoyed your time at the CIA and you did a great job like you were recognized for your
[1:54:07] performance for yeah I I enjoyed myself I loved the travel the work was interesting and and to answer your your question yes I was I was very angry I was I was especially angry at the hypocrisy you know the torturers were never prosecuted the ERS like you know so many former CIA directors including John Brennan uh were never were never prosecuted and so it took me a long time to get over that that anger um and you know I think the way that I the way that
[1:54:37] I was able to get over it in the end was just by writing constantly um I I've had a column at uh Consortium news for years I had a column at reader supported news before that I have a regular column in covert Action magazine I've written for the Washington Post the New York Times The Wall Street Journal many times for the Los Angeles Times um I've written eight books I'm working on my ninth right now and so it's it's almost it's almost a form of therapy to
[1:55:09] be able to recount these stories and then I've met I've met people like for for example Mamu udah I don't know if you've ever heard that name before or maybe you've heard of the movie The mortanian he was the mortanian this was a guy who was absolutely utterly innocent of any crime yet we snatched him in morania and took him to Guantanamo and tortured him and kept him there for 14 years and then said up wrong guy and let
[1:55:39] him go and um I talked to muhammadu regularly and this is a guy who's like you know Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King like h no hard feelings you know this is just the way life is sometimes it's not fair and I'm like I don't understand how you can you can come to a conclusion like that they 14 years of torture at Guantanamo and and you say no problem and he said what am I going to
[1:56:10] do he said they're not going to be guilty they're not going to feel guilty so I should dwell on what happened to me and make myself depressed I'm not going to do that and so he's he's gotten over it and and he's he's a model for for forgiveness you know I I wasn't joking when I told him that he reminded me of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela because I never met anybody who was so comfortable in his own skin and with his
[1:56:41] own personal history as muhammadu can can I ask you you know because there are obviously different levels of enhanced interrogation and and you know and you equate it to torture and I've been on record on the show before of saying there are certain forms of like enhanced interrogation like sleep de that I 100% support for like the short-term things of sure you know getting somebody down can in your I'm just curious to hear your opinion
[1:57:12] where what the dividing line is and what you feel is right and wrong and look I I will say that building rapport with somebody over the long term is the 100% right way and best way to gain information the FBI is especially good at that but I agree with you that most of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA used against prisoners um in the early 2000s were not torture like grabbing Somebody by the lapels and saying dog G you you better answer my question that's not torture or
[1:57:44] giving somebody a slap on the belly where it leaves a handprint and makes a cracking sound that's not torture um in most cases sleep deprivation as you said is not torture in the cia's case it was because the CIA look we know from the American Psychological Association the APA that people begin to lose their minds at day 7 with no sleep right they begin to to die at day nine but the CIA
[1:58:15] was authorized to keep people awake for up to 12 days and we murdered people wow yeah that that's yeah yeah yeah I've always sort of had the idea that if somebody leaves the exact same person that they if they leave you know the bff or the whatever um the same person the same way they came in right no marks no you know whatever that it probably doesn't hit that no psychological damage it probably doesn't
[1:58:45] hit that torture level but I would agree with that yes I would agree with that but you know when when you authorize a technique for example called Walling where they roll up a towel they put the towel around your neck and then they slam you into a a plywood wall because plywood has a little bit of give and the towel protects your neck from Whiplash but then they don't use the towel right and the wall is made of concrete and not Plywood And then you
[1:59:15] end up with irreversible brain damage to the point where you can't you can't participate in your own defense well that's that's torture yeah yeah I even think the idea of Walling sounds a little extreme to what like in my mind yeah I I agree you know even that I I agree with you um anyway it's just interesting because it's um I I think that you know there like for me I've been an an apologist for enhanced interrogation but but in the
[1:59:47] sense of enhanced interrogation was you know making somebody C making them hungry making them seep deprived over a 24-hour period not right not harming them right you know not um right nothing that like a frat guy or or a young Ranger wouldn't go through through in a hazing period really you're exactly right I I could not agree more you know yes but even walling like I said even with the toal
[2:00:18] seems a little extreme to me I I agree and you know there are legal considerations too we we have something called the federal torture Act of 1946 um which specifically outlawed exactly those harshest techniques that we used in in beginning in 2002 right and we executed Japanese soldiers during uh
[2:00:48] after World War II Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS that was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody MH um I I also say when I when I give these toxic universities in January of 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of Iraq can I ask and since you did work Saddam Hussein and and all that yeah what you know there were all these ideas that we went into a rock because of oil or because he had
[2:01:20] tried to assassinate bush senior or all these things but but we've also had people on the show who have said there were like I don't want to say deep State because that that you know such a lad turn but there were like careerists that had been through several administrations that had had their eye on Iraq during the Clinton Administration that that Iraq was always like something people wanted oh yes absolutely true um I I was
[2:01:51] intimately in involved in the planning for the Iraq War um as as the executive assistant and um you know the bottom line was the White House didn't care if there were weapons of mass destruction that that was a lovely fig Leaf to have but whether there were or there weren't the invasion was going forward you know I say in my in my first book um on my first day as the executive assistant I went into the office I had just gotten back from Pakistan so I went into the
[2:02:22] office and I said to the deputy director I go so what are we doing and he says I actually can't tell you until you sign your secrecy agreement so go down to the sixth floor Security's got some agreements for you to sign so I went down there and I walked in they had six secrecy agreements laid out for me and I signed each one of the six and I said so what's up and the guy goes
[2:02:53] well next year we're going to invade Iraq we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein and we're going to create the world's largest Air Force Base so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama Bin Laden of the ability to say that we were polluting the land of the two holy mosques wow and was so stunned oh my God I I've never heard
[2:03:25] that before we haven't we haven't oh yeah I said but we haven't caught Ben Laden yet and he said buddy the battle lines have already been drawn and the decision's been made he said the pro-invasion uh groups are ovp Office of the vice president OSD office the Secretary of Defense and NSC he said the anti-invasion are State Department CIA and Joint
[2:03:55] Chiefs but we don't get to make those decisions wow I I I I I have to say back downstairs John I just to interrupt for a moment I mean I I have heard it over and over again from CIA people uh to the point that there's no way that I could ever believe that all of them are lying to me that this was a political decision that was made at the White House level and it was mandated and push down to all the subsequent organizations that you
[2:04:27] mentioned that is 100% correct that this was a decision made by Dick Cheney and imposed on everybody in the community that and and what did so was Dick Cheney pushing it down and then info is getting pushed to Bush to Jus because bush seems like an unwi that that was a big controversy that was a big controversy because the CIA is
[2:04:58] sending these intelligence reports to to not just the White House but to the whole Community saying we can't find any weapons of mass destruction and so what Cheney did was he mandated the creation of an intelligence uh unit inside the office of the Secretary of Defense and they recruited guy by the name of Kelby yeah and his minions to just manufacture false intelligence saying
[2:05:29] there's wmd all over Iraq and the only thing we can do to stop it is to invade the country and then we're like we're not seeing any of this Intel where is this stuff coming from we want to talk to these sources we want to polygraph these sources nope not available and so the decision was made there was nothing anybody could do about it so was Iraq a real estate deal facilitated by Cheney to to basically put the world's largest Air Force Base in there and deny them you know uh sa
[2:06:00] and to deny the Saudis I I believe that was it I think that there is some truth to the desire for revenge against Saddam for trying to kill George HW Bush in Kuwait in 1993 um and and certainly the Israelis were begging us to overthrow Saddam husin at every opportunity in every meeting in Washington they would beg us to attack Iraq just like they've been begging us to attack Iran for the last 20 years and
[2:06:32] what what I'm what boggles my like imagination though is that Iraq was our our foil we we armed them we fund them they were our foil to Iran and nobody ever sat down and said what are the second order and third order effects of taking out Saddam yeah anybody who's ever read a newspaper would be able to sayl you know Iraq is the only thing that protects the Arabian
[2:07:02] Peninsula from the Iranians right we don't have to be friends with Sadam hin we just need for there to be you know I hate to sound like a fascist but we we needed from a policy perspective for there to be a Sunni strong man running the country you know democracy yes uh equal rights for all ethnic uh uh minorities or ethnic groups definitely but you can't have an Iraqi government that is subservient to Teran and that's what we
[2:07:34] ended up with and it was because the policy was a terrible policy so John uh speeding forward to your you know after you were released from prison uh I have to ask you about your association with the Russian media and butnik news or radio um how how did that come about what was your thought process behind it um H how did all of that kind of unfurl right well in in March of
[2:08:07] 2017 I got a I got a call from the Washington bureau chief of Sputnik news and um he says hey we uh we'd be interested in talking to you about a radio show and I said oh thanks I'm not interested um but I appreciate the the uh offer oh at least take a meeting so I went I took a meeting and I said H again appreciate you know what you're what you're offering but I'm not interested in working for the Russian government and then um I still couldn't
[2:08:41] find a job and they came back to me six months later and they said hey you know we thought we'd try again we'd like to offer you your own show and and I said well if I were to do a show on a Russian Network I would want the freedom to say anything I wanted and to criticize anybody I wanted including Vladimir Putin and the guy said done and I said yeah you willing to put that in writing
[2:09:11] you put it in the contract and he said yes and he did and so I took the job I did it from August of 2017 until last month MH um and then the Biden Administration forced them out of business with with sanctions but I'll tell you on the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I opened my show by saying I unreservedly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I urge
[2:09:42] all Russian forces to leave Ukraine immediately wow and then we started the show and I never nobody ever objected nobody ever said anything or dressed me down or or anything they were very good to me and um and I was able to to say anything I wanted for all those years seven years what what did you say through those seven years I mean I mean you you spoke to your criticism of the invasion of Ukraine but beyond that what was the content of those
[2:10:13] shows it was it was a combination of of us politics and international Affairs so you know we would cover in ridiculous detail just because I'm obsessed with politics we would cover American politics I did a lot on criminal justice issues in fact get this this still pisses me off after all these years um I I did a 30-minute segment every Thursday called criminal Injustice and I had two people one was a criminal
[2:10:43] justice uh journalist and the other was the head of a of a uh think tank that works on criminal justice issues and every Thursday we would talk for 30 minutes about what has happened in the area of Criminal Justice around the country crooked cops crooked judges you know death penalty cases being overturned because the poor guy was innocent that kind of thing so one day we're talking about this judge in Pennsylvania you might remember this case who had taken bribes from a private
[2:11:14] prison company to give juveniles long sentences and he would take a kickback so we're talking about this the next day The Washington Post has an article about you know Russian propaganda that is alive and well in the United States and they said that they had listened to my show and that I was and this is the exact quote from the article I was weakening our democracy by talking about these issues okay not the Crooked judge was weakening our
[2:11:45] democracy I was weakening our democracy that we should not be talking about these issues and I was like man these people just don't get it these mainstream people they just don't get it this is this is a difficult topic because I think the Russian government recruits people you know like like you that have some legitimate or I mean it's a question of perception have some grievances with the United States government and often times allows them
[2:12:17] and and promotes them to criticize the States government and of course I I completely agree that there is a space and it's important to criticize our government and many of the ones you've brought up during this interview are completely valid and important um but is there an issue where you're working with the Russian government where their goal is explicitly to harm the United States of
[2:12:49] America I can see how a lot of people would come to that conclusion I concede that but at the same time uh I'm not welcome on CNN or on MSNBC I'm welcome on Fox every time they want me to criticize the CIA but uh you know nobody was beating a path to my door to offer me gainful employment and I have kids to put through college I put food on the table so you know I I had to think about what was best for me and I think that's
[2:13:21] what I did here's the thing if you're telling the truth and that truth helps the bad guys that's a problem for the United States not for like that's an issue if what is truly happening in the United States is valid propaganda yeah right that that is an issue if if if the the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians were to hire you and all you do is tell the truth about real things that are happening in America those things
[2:13:51] are real that's an issue that America should look at and deal with why do we why do we have these factual things that are propaganda victories for our enemies if there is a judge and and there was if there is a judge who is doing this and we have this private prison system and he is he is abusing children right he is abusing children to make money and to make these prisons money
[2:14:22] and and and an enemy of our country can hire somebody to say that to report the truth that's our problem that is not the person who reports the truth that's exactly how I felt and you know people ask me you know how could you work for the Russians well you know I I wish I didn't work for the Russians or I hadn't I I wish I hadn't worked for the Russians right I would love to have my own show on you know name a network but that that that just wasn't real life and
[2:14:53] the other problem is is that on many of these mainstream networks they they don't they don't like they're they're very much a part of the system right that they don't want you reporting on a judge who is sending kids to jail to make money for both him and the jails they they're they're they want to talk politics they want to talk you know um whether it's left or right you know um well I'm just I'm very angry right now
[2:15:24] like yeah I know but you're not wrong yeah it's it's anything that if somebody tells the truth and it's a benefit to our enemy that's our problem that's not the enemy that's not the person who tells the truth that's our problem 100% agree yep um agree 100 per. you know it's um so when uh and that it's another thing that I have big issue I have is prison reform if somebody does their time they've done their time unless they're a threat to other people if they're like a child Lester or a rapist
[2:15:54] or whatever else where they might be a threat right to to people if if you have a felony and you've done your time you you've done your time you should never have to reveal that to anybody answer to anybody that's it clean slate exactly exactly uh you you shouldn't have to pay for the rest of your life because that's what that's what the jail sentence was that's what the prison sentence and and that's why we're happy to talk to you on this show John because I mean we can we can relitigate this uh ad nauseum but the
[2:16:26] reality is you were sentenced and you served your debt to society and now you're out and you should have the opportunity to reintegrate into society um but so you you said that your relationship with Sputnik ended about like a month ago I mean tell us about where tell us about where you're at now um you're said you said you're working on another book I mean where where is John kiraku at today John kiraku has turned
[2:16:56] into an entrepreneur I'll say um so I I'm I'm trying to cast a wide net like I say you know nobody's beaten a path to my door so I have to make my own way plus the fact that the government confiscated my pension and I had 20 years of proud government service so I got to work till the day I die unless you know some president at some point deems to uh to give me a a pardon so um so I I have a column as I said with
[2:17:28] Consortium news I have a column with covert Action magazine I'm in the process of of developing um a podcast with my two of my former colleagues from Sputnik uh one is a a Pulitzer prizewinning editorial cartoonist and um I'm on the board of a of a tech startup that that's actually turning into something we have 27 employees now and and those shares that I thought were worthless are actually turning into something and
[2:17:59] um and books I I tell you the truth I have a lot of trouble sleeping and so I'll just get up in the middle of the night and and bang out a thousand words I'm working on my ninth book my eighth book was something completely different I called my publisher and I said I said listen I I wrote a a book and I know that you don't really do things like this but it's called The Remains of the Day The Ultimate Guide to Washington DC's
[2:18:31] historic cemeteries and he's like oh yeah we don't really do that but go ahead and send it to me and and I'll read it so I sent it to him he calls me two weeks later he said this is the best book you've ever written wow in fact he said the editorial board liked it so much they want to commission three more the mafia Graves of New York City the historic cemeteries of Chicago and the country western Graves of Nashville oh that's cool so I got started on that
[2:19:01] interesting and um yeah we'll just see what it turns into where can people find you whether on social media or websites or go to buy your books uh what is the right place for people to go oh thank you for that the best place is substack everything I write I put on substack and it's just under John kiraku um I'm on Facebook I'm on Twitter and um uh what else uh oh yeah you know what I've got a new TV
[2:19:32] show it's an internet-based show uh at a place called unified uh television u n fyd it's called CIA Declassified and uh what we do is we take Declassified CIA documents and use them to explain historic IAL events like the Berlin uh airlift or the overthrow of the Iranian government or you know the Chile uh coup in 1973 um the Kennedy assassination stuff like that um but
[2:20:05] everything everything goes on substack that's probably the best paid place to find me cool that sounds really cool though uh especially with the foyer reading like the foyer reading room is like Wikipedia like you can just yeah go down so many rabbit holes there it's incredible oh my gosh I love it I do it myself yeah you start reading about air America and the next thing you know you're you know getting a PhD in the subject well here's an interesting uh fact for the uh like Stargate and all that stuff did you know that there were uh remote viewers for Eagle Claw yes you
[2:20:38] know it's funny we did an episode about that really oh cool and and I I didn't when it was suggested to me I said oh come on all that stuff it it's all silliness and nonsense and then I started reading the documents and I thought oh crap no I was wrong about this it's wild it's wild yeah yeah I spent like days going through down down that oh my God and MK Ultra you know there were there were like five sub operations under MK Ultra yeah like how this stuff happened in the United States
[2:21:09] of America yeah it's crazy stunning to me and and what's Wild we only know about MK Ultra because of testimonies and because they found stuff in you know in some remote location that had been like forgotten about but they burned we don't even know we don't know like nine10 of what Mk alter was about oh yeah you're you're absolutely right like what about this part of MK Ultra where they decided to um to use fog machines to uh to disperse germs in San Francisco
[2:21:42] to see who got sick yeah and 11 people came down with this rare form of uh of UTI yeah and they're like oh okay that works yeah yeah no it's fascinating um yeah it's it's it's amazing um I could geek out about that stuff for hours so I'm gonna I'm gonna put on my game face here and get to viewer questions um soy thank you very much looking back what would you do differently regards working in the CIA whistleblowing does the CIA do more good
[2:22:14] than bad on the world that's a tough one the the easy part of that question is is I'll tell you exactly what I would do differently and that is hire an attorney before you blow the whistle I cannot say that any more clearly don't say anything until your attorney is sitting next to you I hired my attorney after blowing the whistle and I had to be reactive instead of proactive um does the CIA do more bad than good I unfortunately I think yes
[2:22:45] and I've got a really great friend he's probably my best friend who's a former deputy Attorney General of the United States and and we've been talking about a book on that issue specifically and his position is that the CIA has gotten literally every major world event wrong since it was created in 1947 it missed everything from the Berlin airlift uh or the Berlin the creation of the Berlin wall to the Suz crisis to everything during the Vietnam war all the way up you know through 911 um they just get
[2:23:18] everything wrong and then they get tled up in things like MK Ultra or Iran Contra uh and then fall flat on their faces on 911 do we really need this organization I think probably not I I'll have I have a question in the in the sense of because you worked it you were good at it you had friends who did it it seems to me and you know having all the interviews that we had that at the micro level at the case officer
[2:23:49] agent uh analysis level they do a very good job you guys do phenomenal work and there's some of American some America's most talented it seems that where a lot of the failures come in is when you start getting up into policy and decis like like um the management uh issues and not pointing the finger at like just generic sis people but at actual like leadership at at the higher level would would you is
[2:24:20] that accurate in your opinion or no absolutely accurate absolutely you know once you once you pollute intelligence with politics uh or once you mix intelligence with policy it all just goes down the drain and then you have all those smart people working for for you know a needless war or a failed policy or a mistake M um sopie uh suly thank you very much
[2:24:51] what would you say to those responsible for sending you to prison do you hate them oh you know that's that's a that's a good question too and I'm proud to say the answer is no um I I really do view it as as water under the bridge it like muhammadu Utah he said I I would only harm myself if if I focused on and so you know like I said I I like the person that I am and my children respect me and
[2:25:23] they know the truth of what happens my ex-wife was right my side of the story is the side of record and so I'm I'm comfortable with all of that what what's your opinion in terms of you know Trump had classified documents at his house Biden had classified documents at his house Hillary you know removed the headers the classified headers from you know from stuff um stuff that any of us would go to jail for like what think is the answer to these double standards that we have and it's like Jack
[2:25:54] mentioned earlier if you have enough stars or high enough sis level you can say whatever you want and you're not going to jail like what do you think the answer to that is it's called prosecutorial discretion um I think the answer is that the that the Espionage Act has to be scrapped in its current form and it has to be Rewritten um because the Espionage Act says nothing about any affirmative defense or about Criminal
[2:26:25] Intent if you if you had the intent to provide classified information to a person not entitled to receive it you should be prosecuted if you did not have an intent or if you did it for legitimate legal reasons or if there was no provable harm to the National Security you should not be prosecuted and another thing that I think should should be in parallel with this is
[2:26:56] according to George W Bush's classifications are um something like 75% of classified documents are improperly classified they should not be classified we over classify everything in government and so you know if I send my wife an an email saying hey do you want to meet L meet for lunch and it's classified secret because everything at the CIA is classified Secret at a minimum and then she says yeah let's meet at noon I'll
[2:27:28] meet you in front of the you know Deli and she classifies that secret and then I call my sister and say oh hey my wife and I had lunch uh at the deli in the CIA cafeteria today have I committed Espionage those documents were classified right so you know there's got to be there's got to be a limmit there's got to be an end right and there's no end it's unwieldy it's out of control right and it's abused by by senior officials yeah certainly needs
[2:27:59] to be updated since preor War I yeah absolutely I mean they they've done the mandatory declassification uh I don't know what that act is but where they have to look at it every 10 years at least that's a step in the right direction but but they yeah but then they don't staff those offices right you know I wrote an out I wrote an not that a year ago or so about um declassification at the National Archives did you know that that there's a cue to declassify documents at National Archives that's 600 years long
[2:28:31] that's insane that at the current Pace yeah at the current Pace it's going to take them 600 years to declassify the classified documents yeah so it's great that we have these laws for mandatory declassification but then right you have to actually staff the offices where they're going to do the reading and and do the the redactions yeah and they don't bother and and now now so many of our federal agencies are are using classification just not because it's a matter of National Security it's just because they don't want to release things that are embarrassing you know
[2:29:03] they'll redact they'll redact stuff just so they don't get embarrassed it's like that's not classify listen I was talking to one of the guys at the National Security archives um that's the repository at George Washington University that gets all these classified documents and I said you know Trump promised in 16 and Biden promised in 20 that they would re they would release all of the remaining JFK assassination documents and both of them didn't you know they neglected to do it
[2:29:33] they decided not to do it and I said I said what do you think is in those documents I said I'm gonna guess that it's information on surveillance activities in Mexico City in 1963 yeah I I I think he said yeah he said I think think that's exactly what it is and I said so the big secret is that the CIA was surveilling Communists in Mexico City in 1963 who cares right
[2:30:05] who cares what they were doing they were the FBI was travailing like college professors in 1963 so who like we know we we know um yeah okay um what was what was thank you so I appreciate it what was the best thing about being in the CIA and if your kids want to join the CIA would you object um would I
[2:30:39] object probably yeah I probably would because I know I know what these people are like and and they're they're they're sociopaths the whole organization is made up of sociopaths that's how people rise to the top on the backs of everybody else and they would just as soon kill you as shake your hand so yeah I I I would not want my children to uh to join the CIA do you do you think that that is part of U I I don't
[2:31:11] want to say sociopaths having sociopath Tendencies because guys in in soft have them too but the difference between Special Operations and the CIA in Special Operations you have to be good at working in a team like you have to be able to get along in the CIA you have to be able to recruit but it is a very individual effort and sometimes it's a very competitive effort because of that individualism do you think that the people who are selected are selected for those qualities or do you think that the
[2:31:42] people who succeed succeed because they have those qualities I think I think both both uh points are true um the the problem with you know the CIA as as you just said a moment ago correctly um the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths because sociopaths are impossible to control and and Special Operations Special Operations have has that same thing you know people who are psychopaths are like literally incapable
[2:32:15] of kind of like integrating into these you have to have an ability to detach certain amount in these types of jobs that's right that's right but just as you would see in any Fortune 500 company there are going to be sociopaths who slip through the process right and who rise to the top because it's the sociopaths who rise to the top you know that's just that's just a fact of of corporate life it it's not unique to the CIA in any way right right
[2:32:46] because they they don't have boundaries yeah exactly um um Sully thank you very much would Jack and Dave have been whistleblowers if they knew what John did is there a big stigma from uh the Rangers Green Berets towards whistleblowers there's a huge stigma and I I I wrote about in my own book about the jck black site and mul and you know some of the contractors that worked there encouraged us to torture prisoners
[2:33:16] and you know I I told the privates of my squad like absolutely not you should not be participating in that that's not your job this was post OBO gab too I was like hell no absolutely you should not be participating in that do you uh do you think that in but I didn't blow the whistle yeah I I think that being a whistleblower I think it I think it really depends on uh like it takes a lot of courage to be a whistleblower and uh
[2:33:49] especially when you're part of a group of people and an organization that you love um because because you were not you know even if it's not you or anybody that that you do know and love that's participating in this thing you know um it's um you are giving up a lot when you do that um and so I think for me like in your situation you know because it was sort of after the the
[2:34:19] fact you had already left the agency you didn't you didn't like technically like blow the whistle while you were there and and whatnot like you act you went on with good faith to defend yourself not you know you got caught up in and the thing that well not Jack because he's media Savvy but me or anybody else like me you know would do is I'm just here to speak my truth and all of a sudden it's like um but to actually
[2:34:50] blow the whistle on something going on um I it really depends for me what it would be that was going on how heinous it was how widespread it was it it's I don't know if I had that much courage to be honest with you I I really don't it's it's it's a tough situation cost is is great the cost is great yeah and and again it's not just the personal cost uh in terms of like can I say something about it's about being completely alienated from your community yeah so um yeah I don't know that's a good
[2:35:22] question Sully thanks um I I'll just say that the whistleblowers and and have a lot of Courage um Sully uh thank you unfortunately paid comments I put in yesterday disappeared so I have to read I'm sorry man sorry about that uh suly uh what would you say to those responsible for sending you to prison oh no we already got I already asked that oh I guess your questions did show up man yeah yeah I did okay okay um so I guess they didn't show up in the live
[2:35:53] chat but they were but they were sitting there um default name thank you very much you have talked about how driving was your favorite part of training what part of that training do you continue to use in Daily situations oh driving every single day um everybody that drives me with me complains that I drive like a crazy person I like to think that I drive like
[2:36:24] a very self-aware defensive driver John how many people on on average would you say you pit a day oh my God that was like the funnest part of the funnest course was pitting yeah I never heard of it until they they told us you know how to do it yeah oh man and I always wondered so why does the car just sort of shut itself off when you pit it I don't know and then the blinkers come on automatically who
[2:36:55] designed that yeah um for people who might not know pitting is the move you see on every movie where the car behind comes up and hits the car on you know the car in front on the side and causes them to spin out but there's a very specific technique to do that and you have to know the technique and if you want to learn that technique join the CIA and go through the driving course uh or or probably search YouTube um yeah um you know you mentioned like the weapons
[2:37:26] handling and you know and a lot of things that I don't know that the farm does that for like because it goes through these phases right where sometimes it's um a a special operations uh or what or a a military paramilitary module that's automatic or sometimes people have to go back for with the guns and you know and the driving that's not always like part of the standard Farm experience is that correct that's right
[2:37:56] that's right th those many of those classes are done as sort of special special Runnings depending on where you're going like if you're going to go to Brussels for example you're not going to get the driving courses right but if you're going to go to you know kinasa or you know anywhere in the Middle East pretty much you're going to get it so did you go to those extra modules because you were going to Pakistan no I got them because I was going to Athens oh Athens oh that's right that's right I'm sorry about that we spent more
[2:38:27] money on security in Athens than we spent anywhere in the world at that time that's how dangerous 17 November was that's F that's fascinating and it's fascinating what you said about MI6 too or or about the Brits because when I was in Iraq I met a guy from MI6 and he was not allowed by British law to carry a weapon in Iraq that's right it it was insane yeah that's insane I carried a 9 millimeter on my waist a 38 on my ankle
[2:38:58] and I had three extra magazines in a tear away fanny pack and we always all of us used to say if if they're going to take us down we're taking as many of them as we can with us yeah um Road beef thank you very much for the very generous ration uh if possible let me read this before I say it because okay uh if possible I would love to hear John's thoughts as to what distinguishes him from other famous whs blowers like Assange or Snowden maybe
[2:39:30] it's a question of moral motivators versus notoriety V motivators uh Curious your view um that's kind of a tough one uh well snowden's the easier example of the two I think I think what Snowden revealed was absolutely heroic we would have no idea that our government was spying on us had he not told us you know this is a violation of US law it's a
[2:40:00] violation of the NSA Charter and they don't care and we wouldn't have any idea had Snowden not said something Julian is a is a tougher Julian's a tougher case you know I I'm on record as being a strong supporter of Julian ass sanes Julian's very difficult to get along with but um personalities aside uh he revealed crimes right he revealed war crimes being committed in Iraq he revealed
[2:40:31] crimes having been committed by Hillary Clinton and you know the Democrats can jump up and down all they want and say that it was Julian Assange that gave us Trump no it was Hillary Clinton that gave us Donald Trump you can't blame Julian Assange because he told the truth so you know it's it's like comparing apples and oranges really it's tough it's tough to put whistleblowers side by side because each situation is so unique and uniquely different I will say that
[2:41:03] among National Security um whistleblowers we're all friends right we all stay in touch and you know the case of people like Tom Drake from NSA and Jeffrey Sterling and Bill bny and Kirk weeby and just Rak we're all Pals and we have dinner together and we do stuff together um that's unusual uh among whistleblowers but isn't there something to be said here that you know for for sure Ed Snowden blew the whistle on
[2:41:35] something about metadata that there are very legitimate concerns about this information being collected on American citizens but he also divulged a ton of classified and special access progr to the Russians and Chinese yeah that that I I have to agree with you um just like you know there were elements of Vault 7 that should have remained classified
[2:42:05] and compartmentalized you know I want my country's intelligence service to be looking at the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans at all in a very highly technical fashion right want them I want them to be able to do something like that you know somebody said to me I I gave a speech I gave a speech in oh in Berlin and somebody said oh my god did you see that the CIA was intercepting Angela merkel's cell phone and I said that's their job that's what
[2:42:37] I want the CIA be doing I want them to intercept Angela merkel's cell phone right right we shouldn't be talking about that stuff so yeah you have legit concerns there yeah like to Pig back with Jack like for me I see Snowden as a Traer and the reason I see that is because of how and why and what he released as opposed to like focusing on one thing and going
[2:43:08] like this they're collecting this metadata and going through the Whistleblower channels right right um right which he did not do like Tom Drake did right instead of going through the Whistleblower ch channels and then when he couldn't like if he couldn't get the Whistleblower channels or if he was facing repercussions to then go to the media or whatever but to just take to just take a thumb drive of everything classified that I can to me that's that's not whistleblowing that's just being a traitor and Assange to me he's
[2:43:40] just in his you know I don't think of him as a journalist but he's not the person with the access if he's you know what I'm saying if he's a guy like plenty of people who work for the New York Times the wo you know the Washington Post the Washington Times whatever they've had people from the government tell them things and they've written articles about it that's what Assange does only in Mass right in a way so to me yeah he's a publisher he should have the exact same immunity that it's
[2:44:13] not his fault people you know that PE that people give him information um yeah well he he can't be for it his sources could potentially be 100% you know like journalist should have immunity from what you know people give them that's freedom of speech and we should respect that and people should keep their mouth shut unless it's unless it's it's a legitimate whistleblower situation where our government is committing crimes or abusing its power yeah um agreed just um let's see here um
[2:44:50] chief justice Keith thank you very much John I love your work just wondering what happened to the uh vods the video into Dem man or save live streams of political Misfits also what's the coolest souvenir or thing of sentiment from your time and service that's a great question um you know I'm sorry to say that um that with uh sanctions against Russian media every social media platform uh YouTube Spotify uh iTunes everybody just deleted
[2:45:23] all of our shows they're just they're gone forever I hate to say it that's yeah that's out of curiosity how do the how do the sanctions um how do the sanctions pair with the first amendment I know right so they did this in a very very smart way they never really sanctioned us what they did is they sanctioned the Russian Banks where we had our checking accounts and so the act of receiving a paycheck
[2:45:56] was now or is now considered to be money laundering so there's just no way we can we can have the show you know every day if we want but we can't get paid for it well I mean would you guys restart the show on your own independently on YouTube not that show no it it's time to move on from the Russians no no I don't I don't mean the Russians I don't I don't mean anything to do with the Russians I mean you and the people who were on oh political Misfits like you
[2:46:28] guys doing your own show on YouTube sponsored by you like we do this show um yeah you know that you have an audience right you have in fact we we had a meeting about it today we we hope to have something up and running in the next couple of weeks yeah and in terms of my my favorite souvenir um I recruited a guy I recruited a guy [Music] who man I have to be careful um a guy in a country somewhere at some time yeah
[2:47:01] yeah I recruited this guy in easn Europe and and he turned out to be the real deal and I recruited him after two different station Chiefs told me not to waste my time and I did it and he gave me the the Golden Goose and so when I left he gave me an antique dagger and he said in his culture when when men were close like brothers they exchanged
[2:47:33] daggers and he wanted to give me this dagger I actually gave him a Rolex I didn't know anything about this dagger thing right but but I treasure that dagger it's in my nightstand it's it's in a leather sheath it's got to be at least a hundred years old and uh it's probably not worth anything but I love it that's awesome um M Corbin thank you very much for the very generous donation what changes if any would you make to the current operations of the
[2:48:04] CIA and analyzing the adversarial landscape facing the nation um and also how do you avoid stepping on your massive um manhood in the morning when getting out of the bed thank you for [Laughter] that um you know I've written a couple of times about us Russian
[2:48:35] relations and um yeah I I was always a Middle East guy I I don't know anything about Russia I don't really care about Russia I'm not really interested in Russia but having been at the agency for as long as I was and then on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff after that um I I at least developed a couple of opinions and what I would change about the agency is that the agency blindly follows whoever happens to be at the White House at a micro level and they shouldn't I've always maintained
[2:49:07] that even in a time of war the CIA and the various Russian intelligence Services could still cooperate on intelligence sharing if they wanted to in three very specific areas counterterrorism counternarcotics and counter proliferation um there's no reason why we shouldn't be exchanging information on those areas because they're threats to both of our countries and we both
[2:49:37] have sources that we could use to trade the information and we don't you know the Russians are bad or the Americans are bad and so nothing gets traded um RS thank you very much uh your favorite improvised prison weapon and uh your favorite dish prepared by the Wise Guys oh man well the the the the boiling olive oil was something I so logical but
[2:50:09] I would never have thought of it yeah um my my best friend in prison you know you don't go to prison to make friends right but I made one friend who's like a brother to me and he he could make a gourmet Italian meal with a garbage bucket a plastic bag some water and a live electrical wire and I remember him
[2:50:39] making God this fetuccini Alfredo that had boneless skinless chicken breast and where he got the basil well I know but anyway I said to him I was eating it I was sitting on his bunk and I was eating it and I said buddy I would pay $30 for this in an Italian restaurant you have a gift and he he laughed I said no I'm I'm serious you have a gift and then the next day it would be you know he made
[2:51:11] strong bullies one time I was like where'd you get all this stuff fresh dough in a prison yeah 35 pounds man I gained 35 pounds and I enjoyed every bite of it are are in your experience because I know you weren't in a maximum security but are are the prisons just basically S I mean are they just wide open to corruption oh boy are they and you know
[2:51:42] it's it's the guards that are the corrupt ones you know when when you see a guard backing his pickup truck up to um the the commissary and stealing a pallet of poptarts that he can then you know sell on wherever it is he's selling it at the local flea market or whatever yeah or a pallet of batteries that's worth thousands of dollars or they use the profits they're supposed to use the profits from the commissary to buy things like you know tennis balls and
[2:52:13] tennis rackets or softballs or soccer balls or whatever and instead they they build a a guards only gym and then buy you know elliptical machines and treadmills yeah that's corrupt and and is that was that a um was that a for-profit prison or a government run prison it was government run the for-profit ones are far worse yeah it's it's crazy criminal and and prison reform are two things that that
[2:52:45] our country should should absolutely be embarrassed about yeah we should be yes indeed and you know the only way to make a profit is to cut costs right and the only way you can cut costs is to feed prisoners animal grade food instead of human grade food and to not give anybody medication yeah and that's exactly what they do well the other way to make profit is to make sure more people are imprisoned right exactly right you know which our government is is regardless of what what administration our government is always happy to do exactly right I
[2:53:18] mean Trump did the first step program which was at least a step in the right direction but it didn't just go so much further um uh cat uh CA thank you very much uh or this is Canadian I don't know with the No Name Canadian $5 thank you um for your foreign money that I don't even know if it works here no I'm just kidding uh hey team house once again thanks for another great episode quick question for John can we finally see the SpongeBob shirt yes you know I I think it's in I I
[2:53:50] I got divorced in 2018 and I packed all my stuff up and much of it is in boxes in my garage but yes I will dig out the SpongeBob uh shirt yes I promise we must see it um Andrew dbar thank you very much um how the hell did three Rand o' gree get hooked up with Carl Sho the he we asked that I asked that earlier Scott G thank you very much um what were the weirdest pitches the information Peddlers would give to end
[2:54:21] with you or anyone paying for their in info and why oh yeah I had a I had a I had a guy come in to the American Embassy in Athens um with a totally straight face tell me that 17 November was being headed by Queen Elizabeth and that the uh lead Hitman was jacqu kusto sounds legit wow sounds legit man and he wanted to be paid on the i' pay I'd pay him I believe it I mean you could have you could have given him
[3:01:11] president of the United educate yeah I have educated colleag oh I have okay he hasn't I have educated colleagues who believe the CIA smuggled cocaine and killed the president is this not a concern poor public trust with con uh concern sound sounds concerning yeah on that's that's a good point though too yeah yeah you would think that people would be more concerned than they actually are that we've got an organization that periodically over the years has gone Rogue but so I think I
[3:01:43] think his uh question was the flip side of that or that people believe that stuff that that people believe will believe anything about the CIA and look we all know the CIA has gone off the rails before but by and large I feel as though the CIA acts at the behest of the President right that it's generally not just some Rogue organization out there so what is it a problem that people have a lot of conspiracy theories about the CIA too yeah it is it is yeah I
[3:02:16] mentioned I when when I got out of prison I I was hired by the American Psychological Association to help them write a a a new set of rules that would govern APA members um participation in National Security uh custodial interrogations called the Brookline protocols and we were at lunch one day and it's it's me and 11 shrinks right I was the only one who wasn't a psychologist or psychiatrist and um I said hey guys I have a question for you
[3:02:47] I said not a single day goes by that I don't get at least one email from somebody saying that the CIA is beaming waves at their head and it's some kind of directed energy weapon and they're stealing their thoughts and you know whatever there's a chip in the back of their head I I feel like the CIA is trying to steal my penis whenever I go to sleep maybe that's paranoia but I I yeah so they they laughed when I said it
[3:03:18] and then one of them said this is a very common kind of like entrylevel mental illness and he said it's easily explainable a lot of times when people feel overwhelmed by life their brains default to the easiest explanation and the explanation is that there's some kind of malevolent Force out there that's doing something to them to ruin their lives and what easier
[3:03:49] malevolent Force could there be than an intelligence service that operates in secret right and so that's why the CIA gets blamed for everything that happens right right and and people see it and not just Americans but foreigners too which sometimes has beneficial people who should know better yeah but but sometimes they see it as like this omnipotent omnipresent force that always knows everything right right yeah yeah and it's not right
[3:04:22] um Taylor thank you very much looking forward to the book dropping uh came in late what was John's background that led him into the agency uh uh Taylor I'm gonna instead of having him answer this because we're really over time I'm GNA have you just go back and watch the very beginning we did go over it and did you ever think about life do you ever think about a life if you did not become a whistleblower oh I'd have tons of money and I'd be retired comfortably right now yes I think about it yeah yeah so you
[3:04:54] know what though in an experience like this you also get to see who in your life you can trust and who you can't and sometimes the answer surprises you so out of curiosity if Trump were to Pardon you would you get your retirement in back pay everything yes sir immediately okay we know that there are influential people who occasionally
[3:05:26] watch this show so we are putting out a call to get this in front of trump that the man went on TV to defend himself against accusations the the the the the whole torture program it it was already publicly like out there people knew it' been talked about you weren't the one who broke this you weren't working for the agency when this happened somebody get this in front of either Biden before he leaves or president Trump when he
[3:05:57] comes in make this happen please that's that's our ask please thank you for that uh John I got a question you did try to get a a pardon right during the last Trump Administration I that story is a wild one I'd love to hear about that like real quick if you could oh yeah I I had great support from Tucker Carlson I went on Tucker show a dozen times and he he plastered it was my picture and a sanja's picture and he says um Trump should pardon Assange and
[3:06:28] kiraku and um man I came close and Tucker C Tucker called me one day it was it was the last day of the Trump presidency he called me and he says are you sitting down and I said uhoh now what and Tucker says he's going to Pardon Little Wayne and I said what he goes little [ __ ] Wayne he's going to Pardon Little Wayne you got to come on the show tonight so I go back on the show and I'm
[3:06:58] like Mr President please you know you got to Pardon Me well it turned out I learned later also from Tucker that he intended to Pardon Me and Assange and Snowden and that he had gotten a call Trump had gotten a call from Mitch mccon and said if you pardon assandra Snowden Mitch McConnell had never heard of me if you pardon Trump I'm sorry if you pardon assandra Snowden you will lose the Republican caucus in the Senate and they
[3:07:28] cannot protect you from conviction from the uh from the U impeachment right right so the whole thing just died well what's interesting is that um what's in and and probably it was tough because you you were working for Sputnik so it play so it played into the whole Russia Russia Russia collusion you know [ __ ] and
[3:08:00] hopefully I mean Trump he knows he's going to get you know persecuted regardless like he's he's already been subject to the lawfare he'll be subject to the lawfare again I think that he personally hopefully this time doesn't care and just like you know gives you what you deserve yes thank you I hope so I'm gon to try with these with these appointments he's made this past week I I feel like you know things are looking pretty good so yeah
[3:08:30] we'll see yeah um uh proud uh proud masc thank you very much uh John big fan thoughts thoughts on Trump taking office big one you know I'm actually far far more um optimistic now than I was 8 years ago 8 years ago so much was unknown and he was untested in government and you know it was always funny to me that um he he would name all these people like like uh General Mattis
[3:09:03] for example Mad Dog Mattis he's my favorite General and then you know two years later he's an idiot he's [ __ ] he's this he's that same with uh Rex Tillerson the Secretary of State ah he's a [ __ ] when he had been he's going to be the greatest Secretary of State in history I feel like Trump really has learned how government works and um and that's why instead of appointments like Rex Tillerson where everybody's like who we're getting lots of
[3:09:34] Governors and members of Congress and serious businessmen like hedge fund uh managers people who actually know what they're doing right so we can you know you don't have to agree with Donald Trump on all the issues you can certainly have have policy differences but I'm I'm cautiously optimistic about about the leadership of this government going into this next term is it you know you you sound as though you
[3:10:05] grew up uh relatively like liberal in your ideas you know and and I and I just mean liberal yeah and you know the and you know in the 60s and the 70s especially in the 70s liberals were like the anti- system you know like [ __ ] the man you know um and whatnot and conservatives were very much like the the government right uh law and you know and it feels as though we've done this
[3:10:36] switch right we we've had this reversal oh yeah of oh I think that I think that Scholars will study the 2016 election for precisely that reason there's been a Watershed change in American politics like like we've just been gotten out of a 20-year war and for liberals to worship these generals who failed to win this war is yes amazing to me in a lot of ways because 20 years ago 25 years ago I would have thought that a general I would have seen a general say
[3:11:06] something thought well he's a general he knows what he's talking about and now I'm like right Jack I mean now it's sort of like well he was a general during the gwat well like what did he accomplish yeah that's right I John I I I I told you that we would go about two hours and we we at like three three hours and 15 minutes I I appreciate your stamina and your sorry John sorry to keep um you know F final thought if
[3:11:39] there's anything that I failed to mention anything we have not asked during this interview that you would like to bring up go for it oh thanks you know I just want to thank you guys for such a for such a great and indepth and well-informed conversation this was a lot of fun I appreciate it we we really appreciate your patience you know with us like I said you know we've gone along and most that is me and my rambling um and and again where can people find you one more time oh at substack I'm I'm John kiraku on substack but I'm also on
[3:12:11] Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and we we we will have links down in the description of the pod that you guys can click on and find John thank you for that and please let us know like whenever you have new projects starting we we'll blast it out just send us a message or whatever yeah and uh we we will be back on Tuesday with Gan U de he he's in studio right Studio he will be here here in New York what we're gonna have Jean here hopefully hopefully he'll get us
[3:12:44] pizza so we we'll we'll talk to him on Tuesday John thank you so much for for spending your Friday evening with us I appreciate it man thank you good to see you both all right uh so we'll see all of you guys on Tuesday