INSIDE THE CIA: What They Aren't Telling You — John Kiri

[00:00] we're on the brink of nuclear war right now with he stole millions of dollars of the cia's money and transferred them into secret accounts in Switzerland what time is it English he's going to invade the country we didn't think he'd take the whole country Billy W Billy was a Bonafide American hero Billy I said where you been and he looks around to make sure nobody's nearby and he says she looks around and she goes where is everybody we're the only ones left you can either stay in the world or or go

[00:30] back you can never have any contact ever again and just as the words came out of my mouth the second plane hit this guy was a terrorist Powerhouse he actually had to be resuscitated once after a water boarding session his heart stopped beating you never popped your cherry that way did you and the president it was George HW Bush he says well now what do we do and everybody turns and looks at

[01:01] me John the Archbishop kiraku Kaku uh so nice to see you thank you so much for being on the not agreement podcast thanks for the invitation nice and I saw the chuckle there when you heard the Archbishop we're going to go back to these really exciting days I'll begin with a introduction of you but really nothing will do justice to the amount of contribution that you've had in the world and in Civil Service 15 years with the CIA and then you went on into the

[01:34] private sector did some private intelligence for a while and then you came out of the shadows and became known for standing up um against the what is colloquially known as the torture program and we'll talk a little bit about that as well you are the author of nine books 10 books uh eight eight books okay yeah so this first one doing time like a spy this was my favorite one yeah it's been classic the convenient terrorist which recounts the capture of

[02:05] abuaba and then of course some Insider guides uh from a CIA operator's perspective these were commissioned these and one called the CIA Insider Guide to the Iran crisis so I start the podcast usually with uh giving a gift and uh what do you get somebody that is just so unique like yourself I started thinking like long and hard and then you know the old adage two is one and one is none uhhuh well rumor has it that the

[02:39] thing I'm about to give you you may have ended up putting it in storage or you're planning to donate it or something so that's your first your first hint I know what it is second well let's see your skills hold it and tell me if you think you know what it is oh maybe not it's it's heavier than I thought okay no I don't know it's heavier should I look well take a guess I thought it was going to be an abua

[03:09] t-shirt I mean a uh a SpongeBob SquarePants t-shirt well open up and let's take a look he's he's dead you guys he's dead I'm going to it is oh thank you oh my gosh this is an early Christmas gift for you John thank you so much it's wonderful I appreciate it much so there's a story behind it of course we'll get into you Happy Thanksgiving we just celebrated Thanksgiving and how was yours quiet it was good that's good yeah

[03:40] do you prefer quiet Thanksgiving yeah I do my mom used to have these big bashes where everybody in the family I have 27 first cousins on my mom's side W and so everybody who was in the area would come and it was a dayong thing W and I kind of prefer to just do it quietly yeah so like the outskirts of Pennsylvania kind of thing yeah Amish Country in Pennsylvania that's cool um it was awful we also just had the election and the Amish they had such a turnout did you hear about this in Pennsylvania I didn't

[04:12] know they voted they generally don't Amish don't vote but apparently they went out in tropes because um the regulatory environment uh something to do with like their inability to sell um milk unpasteurized milk oh of course that's a big issue for them it's a big issue it's such an important piece of their economy and there was so much regulation and it was overly punished if they sold the unpasturized milk that it became such a

[04:43] problem that they all went out and voted that's amazing to me yeah I'm I'm proud of them I wow yeah you know there was a thing on Facebook during covid during Co people were putting you know questionnaires on Facebook just for fun to distract their friends or whatever you know where did you meet your significant other you know what was your first date stuff like that and somebody put um admit to a Prejudice and I said all right I'm prejudiced against Amish people I admit

[05:14] it they're not nice if you're not Amish they call you English even if you're black you're white you're Hispanic whatever you're English and they're not nice like they'll say what time is it English or they sell pies and quilts and loaves of bread and you're like how much is your pie $8 it's $5 at the grocery store and then they say $9 we would see them they would come out you know when they have that

[05:44] year where they just go out and partying yeah thank you I they go nuts for a year yeah and and I've heard that they tend to go back to the almost Community always why do you think that is the community is so strong first of all Ruma is a very big deal when when an Amish boy or girl turns 18 they're allowed to what they call go out into the world for a year so they would come like to our high school and enroll senior year of high school but because they have

[06:15] freedom they go completely nuts they're smoking weed and smoking meth and getting drunk and having sex and all kinds of stuff but then at the end of the year you can either stay in the world or go back to the Amish community if you stay in the world you can never have any contact with any Amish ever again including any member of your family and so they all go back but then you read in the local paper um that they're always getting arrested because

[06:48] they'll have like stashes of weed or meth that they have hidden on the farm that they're selling to other Amish and then they get caught yeah it's a strange problem did you see the uh the series the Amish Mafia I did and it was quite addictive I think I watched the first two seasons they've got a very strong Network across Ohio Pennsylvania and I did not realize that there's such a rivalry um you know between the two groups it's not homogeneous at all not at all nothing ever is no you mentioned

[07:19] a little bit about having a lot of cousins what was your childhood like were you guys always getting together and oh my God yeah yeah it was it was a really I was very fortunate I had a great childhood my my dad's parents and my mom's parents all came from the island of RADS my dad's parents in 1931 my mom's in 1934 and um even though they all came from the same island they were very very different they were working Working

[07:49] Class People my my dad's father was a meat cutter and then went to work for 30 plus years in uh in a steel mill um my grandmother my dad's mother uh was a stay-at-home mom and housewife and um my mom's parents both worked in the steel mill but my mom had eight brothers and sisters and my dad only had one sister and she never had children so I didn't have any first cousins on my dad's side but on my mom's side 27 first cousins and at my

[08:22] grandparents house my my mother's parents house it was that was the meeting site right so every every body we would go to my mom's parents every Sunday and my dad's parents every Thursday or they would come to our house so I I was close with all my grandparents but my mom's parents were serious partyers always with Greek music blasting and tables covered in with food and 20 30 people there at any given time

[08:54] it was it was fun it was a good way to grow up that's great surrounded by music and family and food and yeah drinking unfortunately yeah family is so tight there's so much pride in in having that Heritage and you know for what it's worth it's a very unique and special Heritage to have as well I I went to Greece a couple of weeks ago and you know family members just rush to the airport and their dinners planned and

[09:27] it's it's wonderful it really is well you're kind of a national hero in Greece right thanks yeah kind of yeah people stop me on the street there all the time I was only there two weeks I was stopped in the street five times and then um the pilot of the plane came out to yeah they probably saw the roster and he like picture go that's he's here crazy let's talk a little bit about your getting into the CIA this is really like you know where your career launched and of

[09:59] course it gave you so much Global Perspective when you went abroad can you talk about the experience that you gained I was recruited um into the CIA by my graduate school adviser uh who was actually undercover as a professor uh he was a what they used to call a spotter uh trying to spot talent for the CIA he thought that I would be a good fit I ended up going to work for the for the division at the CIA that he

[10:31] created called the political psychology division by the time I got there it was the office office of leadership analysis and I was assigned to uh to be the leadership analyst for Iraq this is in the first week of January of 1990 I I wasn't excited about the prospect because nothing ever happened there ever it was the same cabinet since

[11:01] the 1968 Revolution right nothing ever happened and my boss told me at the time work hard learn the tradecraft and then after a year or so you can transfer onto something more interesting like Romania that's what he told me so um just as I felt like I knew what I was doing and I had a degree in Middle Eastern studies and you know I had followed the Middle East for years already um just as I felt like I knew

[11:32] what I was doing Iraq invaded Kuwait and we we predicted a little more than a month that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait but we thought that they would take just a sliver of Northern Kuwait which made up what's what was called what is called the romea oil field there's there's a a long narrow oil field in southern Iraq and just barely like one or two kilomet of it crosses the border into

[12:03] Kuwait and um the kuwaitis were slant Drilling and they were stealing the oil from Iraq and the Iraqis caught them and so the Iraqis threatened military action so at one point in in June of 1990 the Pentagon asked the defense atach and Baghdad do us a favor drive down the to the border and just tell us what you see down there and I remember he reported

[12:34] back the entire Iraqi military is driving South okay you're not going to send the entire military to take a 2 kilomet sliver of uh Kuwaiti you know uninhabited desert so we said he's going to invade the country we didn't think he'd take the whole country we thought he would punish the kues May bomb Kuwait City and then move back but they took the whole country August the 2 Iraqi troops

[13:06] crossed the border into Kuwait within two days of Saddam Hussein ordering his army to storm Kuwait Iraq had control of the country and would occupy it for the next 7 months the motivation to invade was mostly Financial with Baghdad wanting command of Kuwait's oil reserves so the morning of the invasion it was August the 2nd 1990 I remember it like it was yesterday I got into the office early I was 25 years old and as soon as I arrived my boss said uh don't take off your jacket we're going to the

[13:37] to the White House I had never been to the White House before other than as a tourist like everybody does right so we get in a car we go to the White House and we're escorted into the Oval Office and it's the president the vice president the National Security adviser the CIA director my boss and me and again I was 25 years old so I sat everybody sits down the president and the vice president are in these two Wing back chairs the CIA director and the National

[14:09] Security adviser on two chairs off to the side my boss and I are on this couch and the president it was George HW Bush he says well now what do we do and everybody turns and looks at me it took me a second but I you know I kicked into my briefing that I had prepared in my head on the way over and um and then we went from there Margaret Thatcher called Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of the UK she called

[14:40] the president that afternoon and famously said now is not the time to go wobbly George and so he made up his mind we were going to push them out by force so do you think that there was a little bit of reluctance there before Margaret had made that call oh yes and kind of put him on his masculinity on this spot as well I think that's exactly what happened I think that's exactly what happened and in part it was because I remember as part of my briefing the Iraqis that morning had named a guy named um Ahmed katib as

[15:14] the occupation governor of Kuwait I had met ah he hated the Iraqis as much as anybody did and he certainly never agreed to be the occupation governor of this fake you know this fake Administration but K had an interesting history he he and his roommate in medical school George habash founded the popular front for the liberation of Palestine and the president just says Jesus

[15:45] Christ and I thought well this is going to be bad yeah and then Thatcher called and said now's not the time to go wobbly George and what is George HW Bush going to be the person responsible for the pflp taking over Kuwait on behalf of the Iraqi government can you imagine so this kind of makes sense as to why also so many Palestinians were removed from Kuwait oh boy were they you know just after The Liberation I was invited to a wedding of the defense Minister's son

[16:15] the defense minister is now the Amir of Kuwait and uh Prince noaf Amir noaf and so the son it was it was his wedding we were talking about pal Palestinians cuz you know Palestinians especially in the Gulf countries the Palestinians are the middle class right it's the Palestinians that are the teachers the lawyers the engineers the professors the bankers they make the economy run and I remember

[16:45] he said to me in 12 months there will be no Palestinians in Kuwait none I said how how's your country going to run your country can't run you can't replace all the Palestinians with Filipinos and bangladeshis they can't just step into into life here and and just you know work like the Palestinians have been doing since the 50s well in the end they didn't expel all the uh Palestinians they sure wanted to but the US the UK France they all

[17:17] even the Egyptians pressured them to back off these are not the Palestinians you should be angry with you should be angry with Yasser Arafat for throwing his endorsement to Saddam Hussein I was in the Gulf at the time lived through the first Gulf War and this was you were getting scuds back then we were getting scuds in fact I have some Patriot pieces I brought some trinkets for us to Fant get through actually can you grab that by any chance that's you'll remember this uh sorry I'm should have brought these over a little closer and those are

[17:48] the the Patriot pieces right there oh right you know we found a bunch out in the and uh I don't know what ever happened to mine I had it on a bookshelf for years I hope I didn't lose it yeah look at this there was when I was in Riad um there were scuds being launched all the time and uh there was a photographer a British photographer there who took a picture of the exact moment when a patriot was hitting a scud in [Music]

[18:21] midair oh nothing yet journalists are coming up to the roof now it's foggy out tonight it's probably about 40° with about a 35 mph wind from the [Music] north a Raid Sirens are blowing all over the city of Riad and we're looking North toward the airport waiting birds away birds [Music] away first one's up there he is right up

[18:53] there right up there got him nailed him right above us second one right overhead right overhead there [Music] [Applause] go oh [ __ ] we got impact we used to carry these around I have not pulled this out in a long time

[19:24] but look it still has the saudy sand all over it I did dust all over it yeah it's dusty this is like saudy oh boy I remember we had one at every desk yeah and it's like you'd put this thing on what is it dragger um but yeah the oh my gosh look at I I honestly like it's been so long I every once in a while I'll pull this stuff out but um yeah like this is this is what got me interested in war like why are there scuds targeting the oil I went into

[19:57] quate City with Mar on Liberation day February of 1991 and we we ate MREs for 3 months that I was there I mean there was just no food the Iraqis had killed everything they had burned everything every once in a while a DA would come in from Iran with fruits and vegetables but otherwise it was all MREs and funny thing about the MREs they were all dated from the Vietnam war in the 1960s really yeah they the American MREs they keep forever oh that's amazing um gross I I

[20:28] like them I liked whatever they had beef jerky in there and you couldn't get beef jerky and Saudi and I was oh man I'd love to like talk to you about your experience of being in Saudi Arabia I hated every I'm kind of jumping around a little bit you hated every minute um what were the things that you disliked or found to be challenging well I shouldn't say I hated every minute of it I was very excited to go to Saudi Arabia and

[20:59] I went there I was stationed briefly in TF with the qu royal family and then I went to Riad and I was excited it was my first time in Saudi Arabia and so I was proud of my rudimentary Arabic at the time and I remember walking to the Embassy one morning and there was a Saudi guard there at the back entrance and I said salamu alayum and he just kind of looked at me and didn't respond and I thought

[21:31] huh that's rude but all right the next day I did it again Salam Alum he looks at me again third day salamu alayum and finally I said what's your problem and he said you Americans are hired help we brought you here to protect us and we pay you for it we're not friends wow and that set the tone yeah experience in Saudi Arabia we are not friends we buy their oil they buy our

[22:03] weapons and we just have to get along can you talk to me a little more about that strategic relationship yeah this goes back to iban saoud the founder of Saudi Arabia and uh President Franklin Roosevelt they were the one Roosevelt was the one who coined the term special relationship it's not a special relationship it been Saudi Arabia wasn't a country until the 1930s it was nomadic there were nomadic areas the Ned the hijaz a couple of other you know

[22:36] the empty quarter um and the alsaud wasn't even the most uh influential or powerful family it was the the AR Rashid family I met a couple of Rashid and they were like you don't like it here try being us we lost this used to be our country right now it's Saudi Arabia because it was abdulaziz Bin ABD that uh that took power but

[23:07] anyway um they discovered oil and we you know developed a dependence on oil with the invention of the you know the the engine and so we would buy it and they got richer and richer and richer you know another thing that I learned there too I I used the word fundamentalist one time and one Saudi that I was friendly with said you know you really shouldn't use

[23:37] that word here and I said why not and he said because we're all fundamentalists we don't see that as a bad thing and he was right they're all wahhabis they're all fundamentalist Muslims there you know it's a different kind of Islam than it is anywhere else in the gulf North Africa certainly the the syrians the Lebanese even the jordanians are more liberal not like the Saudis now it's changed I was in Saudi oh two years ago and it was

[24:11] dramatically different I saw women unveiled I saw women driving cars which was nuts to me there's actually a movie theater that that is open in in jeda you know when I was living there in Riad especially riad's more conservative than jeda is um they would have the call to prayer five times a day and literally the entire country would shut down you're in a restaurant the there's a call to prayer everybody gets up walks out they shut the the steel you know shutters you wait until the call to prayer is over they reopen the

[24:42] restaurant you go back in and finish your you know by then cold uh meal and now it's like nobody even really pays any attention I was shocked by it yeah um yeah definitely Muhammad bin Salman is pushing these reforms uh you think that you know this is interesting to me because definitely you were in Riad and it was much more conservative much more conservative than the Eastern Province where I was um nonetheless we still had

[25:12] those experiences the saies only got television in 1972 they had they had refused to allow television in the Kingdom because they thought it would be a corrupting influence until finally some member of the UL the the Council of uh religious uh Scholars said you know if we had this television we could just read the Quran 24 hours a day and they were like oh my God that's a great idea so they had an English language Channel and an Arabic

[25:44] language channel it's a little bit more liberal now but back then you would turn it on and like the English language one I still remember one that I mean this is like so emblematic of Saudi Arabia in 1990 they have the call to prayer and then they do the the reading and they have this really heavy Reverb I don't know why you may not have sex with your mother mother mother right

[26:16] you may not have sex with your father father father and then they go through all the different family members you can't have sex with it's like wow what did they leave out the cousins yeah yeah cuz they're all married right you've sure seen the king fil ioner Hospital in Riad which is one of the foremost ENT hospitals in the world why why is it there because they're all intermarried and they all have these crazy eye diseases that don't appear anywhere else in the world I've heard they're

[26:46] investing heavily on the genetic research side of things to try to solve those also you know they want to solve the issue of diabetes Well diabetes is an important uh thing to raise diabetes is rampant in this in the Kingdom because everybody's fat right I remember when I was living in bahin I was there from 94 to 96 and we would drive over the causeway to dahon or alobar there was a mall in alobar so we would go to the mall and have dinner and walk around and drive back to bahin but they were

[27:19] they were installing new um escalators at Dahan airport and they were double wide because Saudis are so fat that they couldn't fit on a normalized escalator my goodness yeah you know I remember when fast food became available and you know it's so interesting because over here in the states like you don't really want to have to hit up a drive-thru but over there it's like Prime real estate it's on the cornes like it's like this go the

[27:51] golden arch you know of um McDonald's and all of that a lot of this came after the Gulf War yes um you reminded me I'll show them all actually it burned down it got it caught fire and then um gosh you know this is the type of stuff that happens they put out the fire but then some people thought it would be a good idea to get a bunch of fans in there to get the smoke out oh my God set the fire again oh no I went to a Hardies one time in Riad and I'm standing there looking

[28:22] at the looking at the menu board and I said uh I guess I'll have a chicken breast and the guy goes sir no chicken ribs and I said are you kidding me I can't even say the word breast in this country please sir please uh the censorship was something it's it's so different now like when I tell the stories you know you're talking about the 80s and 90s but like yeah censorship was just insane they would have to cut

[28:53] out certain words and phrases and movies would have to have um Clips cut out no kissing obviously no intimacy anything of that sort channel 3 TV kind of thing and it's like we'd have Donahue and um it was like kids programming Donna Hue how to wear a gas mask oh my goodness yeah things like that it was like you know it would be like a 30 minute hsse video health safety environment video over like how to how to stay alive

[29:24] essentially in case of a chemical or biological attack coming in from Saddam those were crazy days one thing that we had in Saudi that you might recall because there was a ban on alcohol yes there's still a band on alcohol yeah but what joke that is back in the day when exploring for oil um and it was like Standard Oil and all of this they would hand out this called the Blue Flame and it was essentially how to make moonshine wow and it gives you the full like here's the alcohol content um here's the

[29:56] amount of sugar to use and you would get this upon arrival there's kind of a famous story at the American Embassy where um the logistics officer had gotten a call from the airport saying to please send some people to the airport right away because your shipment of office furniture is leaking we had this thing at the embassy called the t- room you had to go through the we had a video store a rental rental

[30:26] it was all for free you could just take whatever video you wanted mhm and they were unedited uh videos uh that we had shipped out in the Diplomatic pouch and then you go through the the video room to the tea room and it was the liquor store for the embassy and so you could buy any literally any liquor that you wanted you just you could take it home yeah but you couldn't give it away as a gift yeah well now I think they just opened up the first alcohol um like store that you can buy it but it's in

[30:57] the DQ in the Diplomatic quter in beyad and you have to be a diplomat to get in exactly in Bahrain they had two Liquor Stores um but you couldn't buy if you were Bahraini and in Doha I went to gutter the first time in 1990 the tallest building in the country was the Marriott Hotel it was the only building higher than two floors and most everything was made out of mud it it Bears no resemblance at all to what the country looks like today um but they had

[31:29] what they called the library at the at the Marriott and you had to show your passport um or your AMA your identification card no Muslims were permitted in the library there were no books in the library either it was all it was a bar yeah on the third floor of the Marriott yeah there I mean but you know those stories like Bond you with the people that have lived through them and experienced them as well so a friend of mine created the blue flame remember

[31:59] it was called Sid short for sidiki um the Moonshine and so I was like listen I'm going to have a friend over on the podcast that's going to talk about Saudi Arabia and like you know we're going to reminisce I need you to send this to me and he did which is awesome all right let's do this there we go we go let's see I have not tried this yet but supposedly we're going to tell a taste test right now and I'm going to see if it is indeed the real Sid we'll see if we go blind

[32:31] yeah um all right let's see I'm very excited to see this oh wow oh my goodness legit okay look at that sadii classic I haven't seen that 80 proof 40% alcohol so it won't light us on fire right like the real Saudi s day but like I like I just noticed he did the blue flame on top top of there that's cool okay so the recommendation let's get

[33:02] some uh let me pour you some over here um it wouldn't be Saudi if we didn't use these red seriously uh I used to drink it with Diet Pepsi or Pepsi uhuh but He suggests having it with cranberry and a SPL a splash of lime yeah all right awesome let's have a little bit I just want to taste it just going to taste it how would you like it with may I have it with cranberry cranberry you got it and uh hold

[33:34] on oh yeah oh also I didn't know I was like I remember it being white and apparently if you put Oak in with it and let it sit it takes the color of the oak exact I didn't know that I've never had dark Sid you know now that you mention it the Sid that I had was clear yeah it's so saudy to be clear right okay I have no idea how much to put in here I don't remember any of this is it yeah okay we'll split it okay well it say on the product of

[34:07] where um here I'll hand this to you you can check it out it's a um product of the USA but I think there's a very famous he told me there's a very famous Distillery where he gets it made in Wales really or Scotland I think he said Wales but somewhere in the UK sadiki goes back to 1952 it's the code word for moonshine after alcohol was outlawed in the Middle East my father was an engineer on one of these famous desert Moonshiners this

[34:37] still beside me is one of the original stills from 1960 this one belonged to Marlon Townsen he was the captain of the USS Kittyhawk aircraft carrier founder of Top Gun Naval Flight Academy and commander of the Asian air fleet he was also a famous desert Moonshiner working in the Middle East and I was like listen I got to get this because um I'm going to have you on the podcast and like there are very few people that can enjoy some Sid with me

[35:08] serious and really know what I'm talking about like what this is and it's a beautiful bottle on top of it yeah it has these Paisley etchings all over it and it's got oil field workers and that's yeah there's like oil Derk right there yeah I like it that's cool pipsy do you remember do you remember pipsy yeah sure dids cheers cheers to

[35:38] you oh my God it's delicious isn't it it's delicious I haven't had this in 20 years probably it's been 35 years for me wow and I delicious I didn't realize that it's like it's like a rum right I always thought it was more of green yeah yeah yeah but anyways cool I I just want to say a huge thank you to Nigel for sending it out by the way I also remember driving in Saudi Arabia desert Half Moon Bay Road yeah

[36:10] sure um and I remember just being so nervous but wow if you got caught boy that wasay there would have there were main over there yes I'm so glad they don't have power anymore yeah to to like you know the I didn't believe it until I saw it cuz they have the the short the short thobes and and the the canes the bamboo canes yeah one whacked my uh my wife we were shopping and she had a she had a a um scarf on but her face was in covered

[36:41] and he gave her a good whack I went after him oh man uhhuh what did you do I grabbed him three other mutain ran over and I said in Arabic I saidwe diplomats and she does not have to cover her face and I shoved the guy back and then they walked away oh she cried it was awful you you're a good protector because I also remember a story of you in Greece uh still trying to live that down yeah okay so let's start uh journeying along

[37:13] you mentioned a little about the the Gulf War um what what was the feeling like you know with the scuds when you were seeing this was like kinetic War it was the first time you probably experienced something like like eyes yeah yeah like what were some of the thoughts that and the conversations that were happening around um you know we were so concerned of the um CBR chemical biological threat what was concerning to you did you evacuate your family um were

[37:44] they with you or not or my I didn't have children yet at the time and my wife was in the US so I was there by myself and you know there was great worry uh at the at the CIA we we didn't believe Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and it turned out that he didn't but we were very concerned about chemical weapons and biological weapons biological weapons can be crafted you know in somebody's kitchen you you just need you know a little space with with

[38:16] uh you know an electrical outlet you could make BW CW we were confident that he had it the question was was he going to use it and I remember getting what are called critic cables there are levels of uh immediacy there's routine priority immediate n act which means night action means wake somebody up and have them

[38:46] address this then there's flash which is an emergency and then there's critic that means they're coming over the walls so we would get these critic cables from NSA just saying um NSA has detected a missile launch from such and such coordinates so we knew that if the coordinates were in Western Iraq it was going to Israel if they were in southern Iraq it was going to Saudi Arabia and we would just wait and then 5 minutes later here comes the

[45:29] all of them them [ __ ] guys them palaces like they would pick up like [ __ ] 12year olds off the street they didn't give [ __ ] the Lions we found them [ __ ] so UD had lions lions were like on the the Army side the big army side and they were inside this fence right and then the lions were like just lazy as [ __ ] didn't care about no army guys and then one day I seen a lady and kid walked by and they're just behind chain link and them [ __ ] Lions went nuts

[46:01] and I knew like feeding kids [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] yeah they were [ __ ] evil I read so many horrible stories about those guys that they would find a woman who was getting married and uh they would rape her and then feed her to their dogs yeah I bring your sisters in this evil guy he's a lunatic G why why would you do something like that and he got pleasure out of that [Music] power the Second Son

[46:32] cus was the head of the um what was called the special security organization so there were several rings of security around Saddam SSO was the innermost ring headed by saddam's son then there was the special Republican guard then the Republican guard and then the military and he didn't trust anybody in the military yeah wow it was bad have you ever seen that series that came out on Amazon it was called Tyrant yes

[47:04] that that remind that was such a good show cuz it reminded me it was like a little bit of Qaddafi a little bit of Saddam but the boys you know they really show like one of those reminded me of UD so much where I was just like oh that that's just like straight out of his Playbook you know the Abus of exert power onto women it's like that woman I want her he even raped t A's daughter tariz was the only Christian in government he was long time foreign minister and Deputy Prime Minister and

[47:36] um he was Catholic caldian Catholic and um and UD raped his daughter oh and then said what are you going to do about and the answer was nothing nothing and T like he was still part of the leadership the B leadership cuz I remember his face on uh one of the playing cards oh yeah yeah yeah he was up toward toward the top it was Sadam his his brother Ali maid that's right uh his half brother barzanti watan T sawi TTI um is that

[48:08] Ibrahim adori the the vice president who ended up being the only one to just die a natural death of old age because he hid out all those years taraz a handful of military guys we wrecked the place and you know like Saddam Hussein or love him or or hate him rather the fact of the matter is that he was the only Sunni bullwark against Iran and he was the only thing keeping the Iranians from just having their way in the

[48:39] gulf and now he's gone and now Iraq for all intents and purposes it's it's almost an Iranian client State correct yeah and do you think that Saudi Arabia is a good counterbalance though or or you know American base you know so there's no counterbalance to Iran right now not really there's an old saying there is no such thing as permanent relationships only permanent interests um the United States has an interest in keeping Iran at Bay but

[49:11] Saudi Arabia has an interest in neighborly relations and so we can't Bank on the notion that Saudi Arabia is always going to be on the verge of a state of war with Iran especially with with Muhammad bin Salman he's far more pregnant Matic than the earlier generation of Saudi leaders you know it cost them a lot of money to constantly prepare for war with Iran and the Iranians would kick their butts in a couple of weeks probably even with American assistance at the same time you know

[49:43] we're at uh what's it called uh a rashed I think in in south of Doha in Gutter and um and we're all over Saudi Arabia we don't really want to be there I say in my first book um The Reluctant spy that uh when I got back from Pakistan in uh in the middle of 2002 I got promoted on the strength of the abuaba capture and I was named the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations so

[50:14] my first day on that job I went in and I said so what are we doing and he said the D deputy director said actually I can't tell you what we're doing yet you need to go up to the sixth floor and sign some secrecy agreements so I went up to the sixth floor the security officer had laid out these six separate secrecy agreements a secrecy agreement says that you can never talk about these things you take them to your grave unless they're

[50:45] Declassified these have been Declassified so I signed six of them he had them all laid out and when I finished the six I said okay I said so what's up and the guy took a breath and he said well early next year we're going to invade Iraq we're going to overthrow Saddam hus and we're going to open the world's largest Air Force Base and we're going to move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia into Iraq so that we can

[51:16] deprive Osama Bin Laden of the ability of saying that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques and I was dumbfounded and I said but we haven't captured Bin Laden yet and he said the decision's been made and the battle lines are drawn he said the pro-invasion faction is ovp Office of the vice president OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense and

[51:46] NSC and the anti-invasion faction is the state department CIA and The Joint Chiefs of Staff and he said but the decision's been made so I I went back to the office and the deputy director said you sign everything and I said are they out of their minds and he said yes but the decision's been made and so six months later we invaded Iraq John when when these things are

[52:17] happening so like you know you know that there is a larger Mission at hand what's going through your mind it's a top down decision so top down decision and the CIA this is something most Americans don't understand the CIA is not a policy organization it's a policy support organization so the CIA doesn't make these decisions the decisions have to come from the White House and so when the decision is made you do as you're told how much influence do you think

[52:47] Cheney had on Bush 100% of the decision- making on these issues came from Cheney wow yeah this was all Dick Cheney all of it and at the time they were close with chalabi they who you know on the external side can people can be easily fooled I can see how you know a lot of tell was a used car salesman yeah he he was like very well spoken boy was he $2,000 suits suits right so can you talk

[53:18] a little about that I mean um how how extensive is a vetting process when it comes to discussing like leadership transition well that's that's an important issue so just as background Ahmed chelbi was very unusual in that he was a Shia Muslim kurd there are like a handful of them right almost all Kurds are Sunni Muslim so his parents took him out of Iraq in

[53:53] 1965 and then moved to Jordan and he his parents stressed education so he was educated in the UK got degrees in finance went back to Jordan and started a bank called Petra bank and this became the goto bank for Iraqi immigrants in Jordan right people put their life savings in Petra bank and Petra Bank was functioning for years

[54:23] until the late 1980s and in the late 1980s Ahmed chelby stole all $36 million that was in Petra Bank transferred it to accounts in Switzerland and London and literally escaped the country in the trunk of his secretary's car she drove him across the border into Syria and then he flew from Damascus to London he went on trial um in Jordan In

[54:54] Absentia and was sentenced to death right he bankrupted literally every Iraqi in in Jordan so sentenced an Absentia to death he's living the high life in London on the money that he stole bought a townhouse in Mayfair Central London right by herods oh my oh yeah live and large and so Iraq invades Kuwait the state department says to the CIA we need to create some sort of a an

[55:25] opposition a unified opposition group the CIA says okay we're going to create this group called the Iraqi National Congress the Inc we're going to get all the various um Iraqi opposition groups together they'll all be under the Inc umbrella this was done at a conference in Vienna Austria in uh in the fall of 1990 and frankly the reason why C the CIA thought that chelby was attractive at

[55:56] the time is because he was very Western in his orientation and his English was as good as ours that was really the bottom line and then the jordanians came to us and said whoa whoa wait a minute this guy's got a death sentence over his head in Jordan and this is what he did he's a freaking criminal so we said to the jordanians well you know exent circumstances maybe the king could pardon him that would make it easier for everybody and the King pardons him

[56:27] the CIA starts to transfer money to the Iraqi National Congress and it goes directly into cheli's pockets and he stole millions of dollars of the Ci's money and transferred them into secret accounts in Switzerland so the CIA in 1991 issued something called a Burn Notice where a cable is sent to every CIA officer in the world saying there's this guy I'm Melby he's a criminal he stole from us

[56:57] and no CIA employee is permitted to have any contact with him he's burned he's dead to us right so then 11 years later Dick Cheney says we're g to overthrow Sadam Hussein we're going to need to install somebody as the president of Iraq I like this guy Ahmed chelbi and the CIA said well wait a minute now we dealt with chelby a decade ago he's a he's a thief he's a criminal he's a liar we can't trust him the

[57:28] jordanians want to kill him he's a Shia and Cheney said I want you to deal with him anyway and George tenant stood up to Cheney and said no we have a Burn Notice on chelby we're not going to talk to him and we're not going to fund him and so Cheney said then I'll fund him so they created an internal intelligence organization within the office of the Secretary of Defense headed by an under

[57:59] secretary of defense for intelligence a position that never existed before and all of a sudden at the CIA we start getting these very specific intelligence reports Iraqi chemical weapons can be found at this location okay then we send the United Nations Inspection Team to the location there's nothing there okay well there's there are chemical weapons at this other location and then

[58:30] we send the team there there are no chemical weapons turns out chelby was just making this stuff up passing it to the Pentagon taking the pentagon's millions of dollars pocketing that and then there were no weapons of mass destruction so in the end it turned out that the Inc had been heavily infiltrated by saddam's intelligence services and and chelby never never achieved any kind of he was like

[59:02] minister of Transportation or some silly thing like that in the very beginning after Sadam was overthrown but he never amounted to anything and then he ended up dying of a heart attack shortly after but this was all on Dick Cheney Cheney forced him on us W yeah it's crazy to think um the amount of power that he was able to maneuver and SE in those days oh yes I'd love and thanks so much for you know giving that type of insight um I'd love to kind of

[59:33] go back to something that you talked about um with regards to the inability for Radicals in Saudi Arabia to start using the excuse of there being Western presence in the land of the two holy mosques to exploit the sentiment of um you know what would later become terrorism that impacted us I can kind of see the perspective of the US government at the time given that the Cobar Tower bombings had occurred a few years prior you had been sent out to Saudi Arabia

[1:00:06] after Cobar Tower can you talk about that what your findings were and then would you possibly agree with the statement that was made based on what you saw from the Cobar Tower attack I would agree so Cobar Towers uh was destroyed uh in a massive truck bomb attack on June 25th 19 1996 mhm I remember that that date because it was my um wedding anniversary and my wife had just given

[1:00:38] birth to our second son so she was in the states I was in Bahrain and I was laying in bed we were on the phone I had called her to say happy anniversary see how the baby was doing and that bomb went off mind you it was 6 18 miles away from me and it shattered all the windows in the front of my house I instinctively rolled out of bed to protect myself and she said my God

[1:01:09] what was that and I said it was a bomb and it feels like it was in front of the house so I waited and there was no follow-up bomb finally I went outside all my neighbors I lived in a small walled compound of 10 houses um there was like a Swedish diplomatic family couple of American businessmen um a couple of Gulf Air pilots and their families so we we were

[1:01:40] all outside and we were like what the heck was that it was massive whatever it was and we're looking for damage like there's got to be a crater or something and there was nothing I went back to bed the next morning I get into the embassy and we had a TV in the lobby of the embassy that had CNN on and they're showing Cobar towers and it was destroyed it's the date their loved ones serving Us in uniform were murdered 19 US Air Force

[1:02:11] personnel died in that terrorist attack and then the Ambassador runs up to me and he says do you have a Saudi visa and I said yes it turns out only two of us had Saudi visas cuz I used to take women over co-workers women weren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and they'd say oh I'd love to go to the mall love to go shopping and I'd say I have a Visa I'll take you over to the to Saudi Arabia we would drive over for an afternoon or an evening have dinner and then come back so um I had a Saudi visa and he said can

[1:02:43] you get to the Consulate in dahon like immediately and I said sure So a colleague of mine and I got in the car drove over to Saudi Arabia I had never seen devast station like that before the entire front half of the building was just sheared off like Oklahoma City it's it looked just like Oklahoma City but one of the things that still sticks in my memory was when you looked up at the building there was blood on the ceiling

[1:03:16] of all of the rooms because guys were asleep this was a this was an apartment building housing American military people yeah Force Air Force they were blown up out of their beds and just smashed against the ceiling and the blood just like gushed out of them horrible the crater from the truck bomb was so deep it was 30 feet deep that water was seeping in from the Persian Gulf here's the hole

[1:03:48] [Applause] we blamed you know fundamentalists in the end and this is kind of An Inconvenient Truth the Iranians did it we blamed the predecessor of al-Qaeda

[1:04:20] which was kind of like not yet named uh but we knew that there was this radical Saudi group they had done something called the OPM sang bombing uh in in Riad where we used to go grocery shopping at OPM saying they killed something like five people there um the only reason that the death toll wasn't higher in alobar is because one of the Lookouts the Air Force guys on the roof saw the the truck pull up and two guys got out of the truck and just ran

[1:04:50] for their lives and he started screaming for everybody to evacuate from the story that we've gathered and pretty much factual he uh he apparently tried to come through the checkpoint wouldn't let him through and uh it was suspicious so he was talking to the uh people on the roofs and they were watching him one of the Watchmen on the roofs over here somewhere seen him and uh he parked his truck and he took off running and the the the cop seen this and the first

[1:05:22] thing he did he called it in and then he he started in and he was uh yell to evacuate the building and it uh he had I guess about 3 or 4 minutes and then detonation took place he saved countless lives by doing that um but still it was a significant loss of life and um it was that event that got people in Washington to thinking we should probably try to move out of Saudi Arabia you know the king of

[1:05:52] Saudi Arabia historically his title isn't just King right it's king and custodian of the two holy mosques and they take that very very seriously the two holy mosques being of course in Mecca and Medina they take it very seriously and during the the first Gulf War anti-American fundamentalists were very successful in spreading propaganda that American female soldiers were driving that they were having sex in

[1:06:22] public that they were walking around the American bases naked that they had sex in Mecca in front of the Holy cabba none of which was true of course but people believed that silliness and so the thought was we should just get the hell out of there and the idea was well where are we going to go can't all go to gutter can't all go to Kuwait right we had the Navy in Bahrain we had the Air Force in gutter we had elements of the Army in Kuwait but we had

[1:06:53] gigantic military Pres in Saudi Arabia well the only place big enough to hold all those people was Iraq so that was the plan think of like the geost strategy in that situation yeah there's a joke like why would Iran put their country right in the middle of all of our military bases that's a good question it remains unanswered um you mentioned living in Bahrain um two the happiest years of my life yeah I was going to say I I lived

[1:07:25] there for for a year um or so and like it's just so different it's wonderful you know they're such a free people um most for the most part like a lot of them don't even wear a headdress or anything it's very open in terms of the society probably because like so many of the families were Merchant families yes but what was your experience exactly right Bahrain is truly unique in the Middle East the royal family is Sunni most most of the population when I

[1:07:57] was there was Shia which was the cause of friction the royal family has given um blanket citizenship to syrians Palestinians Indian Muslims pakistanis to dilute the Shia population and now it's about 5050 but Bahrain was determined not to be Saudi Arabia right they have an enormous expatriate community mostly British great restaurants bars

[1:08:30] nightclubs um fstar you know first class hotels beautiful clean beaches but you've raised a very important point the moneyed families in Bahrain are not from oil Bahrain has no oil right they were producing 50,000 barrels a day when I was living there and they were consuming 50,000 barrels a day their money came from trade and trade is what opened them up to the rest of the world so where the Saudis were so

[1:09:03] insul that they never met anybody from outside the Ned and the hijaz the bahrainis were trading with you know the Indians and the Iranians and the zanzibari and the omanis and they were going all over the known part of the world also you know there's a difference in in ancient histories Bahrain has a history going back to something called the dilman civilization which was dated to 1,000 BC and they

[1:09:34] embrace it and they have a worldclass First Rate Museum there the national museum of Bahrain that that interactively explores the dilman civilization right there are there are ancient ruins in Bahrain uh that are traced to Alexander the Great for example on his way to Afghanistan and India uh there are ruins uh from mamian civilization the Sumerians the Hittites

[1:10:06] in southern turkey all stopped in Bahrain and the bahrainis embrace it the Saudis whenever they would discover some ancient Pagan Temple they would bulldoze it they would bulldoze it and then when the United Nations finally complained like you're destroying these these ancient Treasures these world you know Heritage Treasures they stopped bulldozing them but they began covering them up with sand so you can't go find an ancient you

[1:10:41] know pre-islamic uh site in Saudi Arabia officially they don't exist officially there is no history before the Advent of Islam wow I didn't realize that um um I wonder now with with MBS like I remember seeing um some information about Al area and the ancient civilization there maybe there's a little bit of opening I think there is and just in the last year for

[1:11:11] the very first time in Saudi history they started issuing tourist visas I know I'm so happy one of the hardest things honestly one of the hardest things for people that grew up in Saudi Arabia as third culture kids is the inability to go back it was such a close Society even if you had an invitation it was you know what is the medical need that's right and um you know for someone that's young female single you just have to walk away from that part of your life yeah and I remember a lot of people

[1:11:42] would say that like okay it's a it's a chapter that's closed it was such a difficult thing imagine not being able to go to your childhood home ramc cons really struggled with that I I mentioned a few minutes ago that I used to go to Saudi Arabia all the time when I was living in Bahrain my ex-wife enjoyed the exoticism right she would she she would get completely covered except for her face the first time she went completely veiled and we took her mother and they laughed through the whole thing it was it was

[1:12:13] fun um and we would go every I don't know six weeks or so go to the mall buy some high-end dates right have a nice dinner go to the souk and buy you know gold or antiques or some old coffee pot or whatever and um word got around that I knew danan and alar and damam and could you know put on a nice little tour for a day so people in the embassy would ask me to take them well near the end of my

[1:12:47] my tour in Bahrain we had a turnover of personnel and all the guys that were in the embassy were replaced by women and one of them said hey would you take a group of us to Saudi Arabia so we could go shopping I said of course I'd love to so we sent our passports over the Saudis will only give a 30-day Visa they were jerks about it and then they would ask us for a 10-year Visa it's like well why would I give you a 10-year visa when you give me a 30-day

[1:13:18] Visa but you know we buy their oil they buy our weapons so we give them the 10year visas so we send all of our passports over with a diplomatic note saying second secretary for economic Affairs kiraku wants to take this list of accredited diplomats to Saudi Arabia for the day denied and for reason they put suspected of promoting prostitution oh my gosh can you imagine

[1:13:49] com in with so I I called the Saudi I called the Saudi uh conselor officer and I said you son of a [ __ ] I said you think I can't do the same thing to you he's like oh no it's not from me it was from Riad they don't like you I said okay I said I'm taking over conselor for the month of June because we had such a small Embassy people would go on vacation and we had to cover for each other so I said I walked into Consular that day the day I took over and I said no Saudi citizen will get a Visa

[1:14:20] while I'm in charge none sure enough the very first guy that comes up to the window is Saudi and I was rude and I'm not rude to anybody what's your purpose for wanting to go to the United States I said to him because I was being a jerk and he's like my six-year-old son he was burned in a kitchen fire and I need to take him to the University of Pittsburgh medical center for skin graphs I look and there's this kid and he is completely

[1:14:51] disfigured and I'm like all right right okay hold on your okay I'm so glad that the humanity okay I gave it to him yeah mashah good luck with your boy I'm from Pittsburgh I told him but I rejected everybody else and then finally they called back and they're like all right all right because people were they were leaving the American Embassy having been rejected by me going to the Saudi Embassy and or Saudi Embassy yeah saying hey the Americans rejected me and I said

[1:15:24] ABD told you two can play that game prostitution shame on you you're the guys you're the only guys I know that engage prostitutes you repressive Saudis I don't even know anybody that's ever been to a prostitute except for you guys and he's like all right all right all right and then he gave us our visas oh gosh Consular Affairs it can be used as a weapon yeah it definitely can when you're at the embassy at this point uh you were doing political on econ type yeah work okay

[1:15:56] and then what were like some highlights what was something that that's an easy one okay it was the the uprising so I I had only been there for a couple of months and this the what they're in bahin they call the first in [Music] began listen I love Bahrain I love the Bahrain people the Crown Prince and I still text each other was my phone we still text each other all the time jokes

[1:16:27] and memes and stuff we went to college together and uh but the truth is that that the Shia were oppressed right if you're a Shia Muslim you are not permitted to serve in the police in the military or in the intelligence Services why just because you happen to be a Shia Muslim it's not fair that's not right and you know the bines would use a very heavy hand in dealing with peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations when I say

[1:16:57] heavy hand I mean they would open fire on unarmed crowds and kill people and so the Shia began planting these homemade bombs they killed a couple policemen then the bahrainis responded by grabbing the bomb makers and summarily executing them it got out of hand the bahrainis also made use of this cell that they had called the ug Group which they were scary looking they were all dressed in black they had black masks and black hoods um they had

[1:17:29] machine guns it turned out they were all pakistanis but this was like the the bahini version of the special forces and they would just like walk into a village and just open fire just like that have to go and say you know how you can't justify doing something like this they didn't care they' do it anyway and from the Saudi perspective it was just way too close to home too close to the Eastern Province and the Eastern province is majority Shia yeah and so do

[1:18:01] you think that was a legitimate concern for the Saudis that you know the oil Rich Province could face similar that's something that the Saudis have been afraid of for decades that bahin Shia are going to gain too many rights Saudis uh Shia are going to get ideas about you know dangerous ideas about democracy and human rights so we should either arrest them or kill them now before things get out of hand and that's what they

[1:18:34] did um you you pointed to something very um interesting that I think goes often overlooked and that's the use of Pakistan Pakistan's military in uh the Gulf region yes and especially in Saudi Arabia especially there the relationship Bahrain uh the Emirates the relationship is deep when you were in Pakistan did you see um elements of that there's deep and Abiding Love of Saudi Arabia in

[1:19:04] Pakistan the Saudis have been very very generous with the pakistanis over the course of decades to the point where filabot is named after king fisel um it's one of the largest cities in the country I think it's the fourth largest city in the country uh the Saudis the am I going to say this there are longstanding rumors that the pakistanis have provided the Saudis

[1:19:36] with assistance in their nent nuclear program put it that way yeah um so there's a very close and abiding relationship not to say that Pakistan's not you know one of the poorer countries in the world the Saudis haven't just given them a blank check but the Saudis have been very kind over the years and the pakistanis are grateful for it um pardon me sorry I'm still getting

[1:20:06] over this so um the the nent nuclear program um do you think it's like the Emirates that you know this is a source of power to diversify away from an oilbased economy to one that's more more sustainable well but look at it this way listen I'm all for diversification of energy right I think we all should be but if you live in a desert country that has 330 days of sunlight a

[1:20:39] year why would you not fill the desert with solar panels why would you want nuclear energy that doesn't make any sense to me it's something that has long worried policy makers in the west you know the the Abraham Accords that uh this terrible terrible idea that Donald Trump had where he encouraged Bahrain United Arab Emirates Sudan

[1:21:11] Morocco Tunisia to open diplomatic relations with uh Israel the bone that that we threw to the Saudis was we wanted them to establish diplomatic relations with Israel they would exchange ambassadors open embassies in telaviv and in Riyad and the Saudi said yeah we'll do that if you build us a nuclear reactor but if the Saudis are not

[1:21:42] signatories to the nonproliferation treaty what's to keep them from doing what the Iranians are doing and just enriching uranium for a nuclear bomb and then who would they use it on deterrence maybe like the technology is moving so fast and it's such a concerning field I mean if this has been a concern since the 80s I mean just look at Pakistan getting a nuclear weapon it reshaped the entire regions yes it did power plays and oh my gosh when I was in

[1:22:15] Saudi when I was in Pakistan rather uh this was in March March or April of 2002 the the American Embassy there's a new American Embassy in in Islamabad this was the the last American Embassy which was gigantic it was on something like 25 acres it had apartment buildings it had a nightclub it had the Chancery it had everything it was a self-contained community so the cafeteria was

[1:22:48] gigantic it could hold hundreds of people at once and on the weekends it doubled as a nightclub and we have this Pakistani cover not Pakistani sorry Filipino cover band come in you know the disco ball is turning and it was you know yeah it was night club so I I have a colleague who once jokingly said she could set her watch by when I had lunch every day just as the Clock Struck 12 I'm a a creature of habit in that respect so one day I went

[1:23:20] down to the cafeteria with a very Junior officer who was working for me right at 12 right and this cafeteria could hold 300 400 people we were the only people in the cafeteria so we get our food and she looks around and she goes where is everybody and I said are you kidding me and she said no where is everybody I said they've been evacuated we're the only ones left she goes

[1:23:52] why and I said because India's going to fire a nuclear missile at us we're on the brink of nuclear war right now with with India and she said we are and I said didn't you notice that helicopter in the parking lot and she goes yeah I said it's here to rescue us she goes oh my God I have to start reading the papers I've been so busy on Al-Qaeda we're trying to find Al-Qaeda she goes I I haven't even paid any attention and I

[1:24:24] said that's why there's nobody like literally nobody in the embassy except the CIA and a handful of FBI agents that was it because the pakistanis and the Indians are constantly on the break on the brink of something terrible terrible is there still that risk between India and Pakistan going yes I will say a Pakistani a senior Pakistani military officer told me recently that the Pakistani government has placed command and control of their nuclear

[1:24:55] Arsenal under the command of an American General and so that's good enough for the Indians the Indians have backed off so the threat that we had in 2002 of nuclear war between the two doesn't exist today okay so I am curious about something that was concerning to me at the time because Pakistan is a nuclear power um when you were in Pakistan you you know you were doing counterterrorism

[1:25:26] Ops but uh on a big strategic picture there was always the concern that Al-Qaeda could reach or get or infiltrate the people that were in control of a nuclear weapon absolutely and that is what really frightens me do you think that risk still exists I think it's been vastly diminished where the risk exists is in nuclear material that had been in the custody of former Soviet

[1:25:58] republics that kind of struggle with the rule of law right so nuclear file material let's say or even nuclear waste sometimes goes missing in places like kyrgistan Tajikistan usbekistan Kazakhstan well goes missing where it's got to be somewhere is it in the hands of al-Qaeda it turned out no Isis the chin we don't know we don't know where

[1:26:29] it is so there's there's always going to be that uh that question mark frightening you talk about being a creature of habit yet you were very good yeah so at surveillance detection and changing up your routine and changing Roots um how did that serve you surveillance and surveillance detection yeah one of the lessons that I learned from first in in my CIA training and then in my two years in in Athens was to never ever ever set a

[1:27:02] pattern of behavior because as soon as they see a pattern they're going to kill you um in Greece it was revolutionary organization 17 November which was so successful and so deadly that by far it was the biggest challenge that we had to our security in the country um but like I say as an Exemplar I'll tell you when I arrived in

[1:27:33] Pakistan back then you had to Transit London there were no direct flights to Dubai the planes couldn't go that far so I go from Washington to London London to Kuwait Kuwait to Islam Abad and you arrive at 4 o'clock in the morning so the driver said oh we've put you up at the uh at the Marriott I said absolutely not I'm not staying at the Marriott for 6 months I said and it was always such a Target and I said what's the one place

[1:28:04] they're going to blow up it's going to be the Marriott I said I'm not staying at the Marriott I spent the first night there and I moved into a 16 room Guest House totally completely off the radar sure enough 6 weeks later they blew up the Marriott killed hundred and something people was a disaster so every day I would leave the guest house at a different time and I would take a different circuitous route to the Embassy every single day and we would

[1:28:35] work I mean on a slow day we would work 12 hours usually I'd work 14 15 occasionally 16 hours we were exhausted but we had to find Osama Bin Laden so I would take an equally nonsensical circuitous route back uh from the embassy to the guest house one day I leave the uh guest house and I noticed

[1:29:05] there's a guy in a motorcycle wearing a red helmet he's trying really hard to stay in my in my uh blind spot and I thought oh this isn't good so I'd speed up he'd speed up I'd slow down he'd slow down and he was just on me so doing this route that just doesn't make any sense and he's on me the whole time I get to the entrance to the Diplomatic quarter and he breaks off and I thought that's not good so we

[1:29:37] have this database the surveillance detection database and I I put in all my information where I started where I ended what I saw license plate description time of the day all that stuff so I worked like 14 hours that day so when I arrived it was dark when I left it was also dark and I come out of the embassy it took me about a quarter of a mile to get

[1:30:07] out of the Diplomatic quarter and then he's on me again and I thought oh my God I couldn't believe it and I'm taking this again completely nonsensical route that nobody in his right mind would take to get back to the to the guest house barely slept that night I was so upset set an alarm for 500 a.m got up opened the door of the guest house just a crack and I looked up and down the street I didn't see anything they had issued us these mirrors on a

[1:30:39] stick so I'm looking under under my car I don't see any bombs I don't see any tracking devices I get in the car it's like 5:30 in the morning I start driving I go like a block and he's on me again and I was like oh my God so I got to the Embassy he broke off at the entrance to the DQ where there's heavy security I waited until about 7 when the security officer arrived and I said listen I'm under surveillance I'm 100%

[1:31:12] sure that I'm under surveillance and I explained to him uh what I had seen now there's there's a very specific definition of surveillance M it's multiple sightings at time and distance so you see the the person several times at different places and um at different times of the day so he said okay well we got to we

[1:31:42] got to wait for the chief to come in so the the Chief came in about 8:00 we went to see him and I said the same thing I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance and he said okay well you know what you have to do and I said I know and he said um you never popped your cherry that way did you and I said nope never needed to he said well we're going to have teams

[1:32:13] out there you're not going to be alone don't worry we're going to get the guy well I was very worried it's all I could think about I couldn't get any work done that day there were six Old-Timers six retirees senior intelligence service former deputy director for operations associate deputy director for operations three retired heads of NE East operations who had come back after 911 as contractors and were working for me so they're patting me on the back don't worry buddy

[1:32:44] we're all G to be out there don't worry everybody's armed that day at 3 in the afternoon I had a meeting at a safe house that we shared with the Pakistani intelligence service we used to use it to interrogate prisoners so I went it was previously scheduled and I I would go almost every day and we would interview people that we had captured and I did the interview and I got up to walk out and I stopped and I turned and I said to the Brigadier

[1:33:15] General who was my counterpart I saiden Muhammad are you following me and he said no why and I said I'm under surveillance I'm positive that I'm under surveillance and I'm going to kill the guy this afternoon and he said no it's not us I never saw the guy again so we learned weeks later that these Pakistani intelligence guys were sitting around one day and

[1:33:46] they were talking about me and one of them said he's really a nice guy and another one said you know what nobody's that nice he's probably nice because he wants to trick us into thinking that he's not working against us I bet he's spying on us we don't know what he does when he's not here so they put the worst surveillance officer in the entire Pakistani intelligence service on

[1:34:17] me and I was genuinely going to kill him that afternoon it was a lark that I stopped to ask the general if they were surveilling me yeah and they were would you have absolutely and then I got to Greece uh in 98 to work against revolutionary organization 17 November and these guys were the Masters at pre-operational surveillance they in Greek they were called The Phantom organization because not only had none

[1:34:49] of them ever been caught none of them had ever even been identified they killed the CIA station Chief they killed two US defense attaches they killed a an air force uh uh enlisted man they killed the Turkish Ambassador the Turkish Deputy Ambassador um they killed six ministers they killed the the governor of the Central Bank businessmen uh ship owners and nobody had even been

[1:35:19] identified so 17 November was that deadly of a group and we really had to be like perfect practitioners of surveillance detection actually when I got home from Athens I actually became a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA it was so burned into my Consciousness do you still find yourself doing surveillance detection every day yeah every single it's good practice um

[1:35:49] it really is at the time too it was like the leftist Communist organization a or not communist leftist terrorist organizations were really um Advanced and it's Que Now when you think about it but yeah but yeah like it was all about communist ter my God I spent a majority of my time working on issues in some way related to Carlos The Jackal it's amazing to me I you know I teach a class at this University in Spain um it's a graduate school class the history of terrorism and it was shocking to me that

[1:36:20] nobody knew who Carlos The Jackal was shocking even Spain even in Spain where he was active wow so Carlos The Jackal was a Venezuelan National named um um ilich Ramirez Sanchez and this guy was I mean there was even a movie based on him called The Day of the Jackal this guy was a terrorist Powerhouse he actually he actually

[1:36:51] succeeded in kidnapping every member of opec's oil ministers Summit I remember that in the 1970s yeah I remember that story I wasn't alive yet but yes I remember every OPEC minister of oil can you imagine at once and and they paid like a hundred million do Ransom and um the reason why we were interested in Carlos was that every time we had a terrorist every time we would recruit a

[1:37:22] terrorist or one would volunteer for us or you know we would have an access agent bring back information it always pointed back to Carlos Carlos was always the guy that was arranging the training or that was acting as the middleman for the weapons and so we knew that Carlos had worked with the Libyan government he had worked with the IRA and as you said a moment ago there were communist terrorist groups in every Western European country red brigades

[1:37:54] Aion direct uh the B mhof gang popular revolutionary struggle they were everywhere everywhere the irra and so Carlos had his fingers in all of it and we knew that the Greeks were getting their weapons from Carlos we just didn't know how we ended up capturing Carlos uh it's a fascinating story I I worked with a guy an Oldtimer who's now dead he he lived well into his 90s named Billy W Billy was a

[1:38:27] Bonafide American hero he had fought in World War II Korea and Vietnam 17 purple hearts one short of the record for the United States um and then he became a CIA contractor uh after the Vietnam War he was doing um he was doing some contract work for the CIA in Sudan in Kum and he had a day off and so he went to the souk to the vegetable market to buy some

[1:38:58] vegetables and he's just buying vegetables and he sees this guy and he says to a colleague of his who had gone with him that's Carlos The Jackal The guy says are you out of your mind he said I'm telling you that's Carlos The Jackal they run back to the Embassy the station Chief at the time was kofer black who became famously the chief of the cia's counterterrorism center and then Ambassador uh kofer black the the

[1:39:28] state Department's special Envoy for counterterrorism so the way Billy told the story kofer was on an elliptical machine in his office and Billy barges in and says kofer I just saw Carlos The Jackal and kofer says get the [ __ ] out of here he said I'm telling you I was in the vegetable market and I saw Carlos The Jackal well where did he go he said I don't know I I ran here to tell you he he said well what do we do with that information you're going to have to find him find where he lives Billy went back

[1:39:59] to the to the souk every single day for a month and they found him so what they did is they paid these two Sudanese guys to get into a fist fight as you know in the Middle East fist fights are very unusual events and so when one breaks out and I saw this one once in Damascus a big circle will form around the two uh combatants and people will you know cheer them on and

[1:40:30] stand there and watch because it's just so rare an event Carlos is there craning to see the two guys fighting and Billy has a camera click click click click click click click click click and then they discreetly follow him back to his house they note the location they go back to the station process the film send it back to headquarters headquarters says it's Carlos the Jackal then they came up with the most ingenious plan

[1:41:01] they recruited his dentist right they followed him for months they recruited his dentist then they broke into his house and they put ground glass in his tube of toothpaste so every time he brushed his teeth his gums would bleed and he's like oh my God I must have gum disease I better go to the dentist he goes to the dentist he makes this appointment the dentist tips us off he made an appointment he's coming in you know whatever Tuesday at 10: Carlos

[1:41:33] goes in the dentist says oh you have gum disease I'm going to give you a little bit of gas gives him the gas knocks him up knocks him out Carlos wakes up on a French Air Force plane back to Paris where he was charged with the murder of seven French policemen and now he's serving life without Pearl whoa glass in the toothpaste holy shoot people who are watching this might say that's nonsense why don't you just go in the house and grab him well you

[1:42:05] can't because he lives in a he lives in a heavily populated area he's the only white guy in the area you're all white guys you can't be staking out this other white guy's house words going to spread like wildfire they're going to tip off the sudin government you can't do that if he's at the dentist's office yeah right you just load him into an ambulance looks like an unconscious guy maybe had a heart attack or whatever yeah and the ambulance drives situations time is your biggest asset you bet it is wow and what a

[1:42:37] surgical move Billy became a legend at the CIA for that operation for that I was wondering like what are some of the defining moments in his career I mean he's done so much like you said but that's Billy was also so full of crap he and I became friends we did this thing together in Abu Dhabi that was just so much fun and we were there for months and months so we we struck up a real friendship and then 911 happened and I didn't see him for like six weeks and I ran into him in the hall and I said

[1:43:08] Billy I said where you been and he looks around to make sure nobody's nearby and he says I've been in Afghanistan I said really what are you doing in Afghanistan and he looks at me like I'm crazy and he says I've been killing people what do you think I've been been doing I was like uh of course cuz I kept volunteering volunteering volunteering and they're like no we don't need any translators I'm like are you kidding me well it's because they weren't like interrogating anybody they were just killing them so they didn't

[1:43:39] need John the translator to go you know but at that point you were you you were already in CT at that point right so you weren't just a translator you were already a case officer done grease yeah so clearly wanted to go yeah post I volunteered four times so and finally I said to the deputy director Ker's assistant he he was an old friend of mine and a former boss I said look if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not looking back he's

[1:44:10] like relax all right all right can you go to Pakistan I saides when he said tomorrow I said yes what do you want me to do there he said uh chief of counterterrorism operations I said fine done yeah so I called my then girlfriend she later became my wife she worked a couple floors above me I said I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow she said for how long I said I don't know 6 months 12 months and she said okay I'll meet you at your place after work and help you pack and so I left the next day wow and

[1:44:42] um you know you went with this great ambition you'd also already done so much in your own career uh with Greece what at this point did you kind of catch wind of like the radical Islam um oh yeah issu sort of you know starting to percolate in the background pre 911 when I was what they call reading in to the the Greece files that took like a year okay and it was interspersed with training so in that year we had the you know USS coal

[1:45:13] bombing we had um the the double Embassy bombings in Africa uh and then yeah I I tell this story in my first book um it was July the 6th 2001 remember it clear's day I part of my job in the counterterrorism center was to entertain visiting um counterterrorism officers from foreign intelligence

[1:45:44] services so there was a group from the a Middle Eastern country and this is all very proforma right you schedule briefings for them through the day on whatever issues are important to them and then you exchange gifts and then you take them to the director's office and they get a picture shaking the director's hand and then you take them to a really expensive Steakhouse that night sorry I'm just going to bring Sor

[1:46:15] closer you bet so um I had scheduled a a briefing a 30-minute briefing for them with a junior CTC analyst on Al-Qaeda and so when it was time for The Briefing instead of the junior analyst inw walks kofer with the chief of operations for what was called the uh Alex station the Osama Bin Laden Group and I stood up like oh my God unexpected

[1:46:46] yeah and I said oh I said uh gentlemen um let me introduce kofer black Mr Black is the is the director of counterterrorism for the CIA and this is you know the the director of operations for the Osama Bin Laden unit cover sat down and he said he started off by saying something terrible is going to happen we don't know what and we don't know where but we know that it's going

[1:47:16] to be an attack on an unprecedented scale he said we're hearing the most disturbing chatter we're hearing Al-Qaeda Camp commanders on the phone with their students and they're crying and telling them I'll see you in Paradise we're hearing code words for a massive attack the honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey there's going to be a great wedding with

[1:47:48] thousands of people invited there's going to be a a a huge football match right all code for an attack and he says I'm begging you if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda please help us and they just sat there we didn't have any sources in al-Qaeda neither did they or anybody else and so he leaves that night I sent them back to

[1:48:20] the hotel I said I'll pick you up in 2 hours to go to dinner and I went to Ker's office to thank him for the briefing and I said ker I I got to ask you was that for for their benefit or were you serious and he said oh I'm deadly serious something terrible is going to happen and then two months later it happened he kepts on trying to uh alert

[1:48:52] other Intel agencies around DC he said in the in the 911 Commission that he was he and Dick Clark who was the they called him the counterterrorism Zar at the uh he was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council they were screaming it from the rooftops and then George tenant same thing screaming it from the rooftops they're going to hit us and then in July of that year was the now Infamous president's Daily Brief article Bin Laden determined to attack in US

[1:49:24] and coni rice said I wish you guys would get this counterterrorism thing out of your heads the threat is China well guess what the threat was not China the threat was Al-Qaeda and 3,000 people died needlessly because of it yeah horrible horrible day and I would love if you could share the experience that you had when you were at the agency on the day of 911 sure and

[1:49:57] some of the like the leadership that you saw come out of that day yeah so that day kofer and I had a 9:00 a.m appointment with condalisa rice uh this was before she was Secretary of State she was the National Security adviser and I'm going to use the word quaint again it was a very quaint reasons laughable now that we needed to see somebody as important as cona rice the government printing office the GPO was getting ready to

[1:50:28] publish a book of historical State Department cables and it was called Foreign Relations of the United States Greece turkey Cyprus 1947 to 1969 okay nobody's ever going to read this book maybe maybe there's a PhD candidate in history maybe that someday might reference it but nobody's really going to read this book but of the thousands of cables that

[1:50:59] are included in this thing there were three that mentioned CIA sources who were still alive so we have to at least offer them relocation you know a million dollars to live on relocate their families 17 November was still a threat and we couldn't take the chance of somebody saying you know some Greek reporter oh my god look there these three guys they work for the CIA in 1952

[1:51:31] and you know they're still alive so we made an appointment with cond with Condy rice to ask her to just pull these three cables out nobody would know right she's like absolutely not we said well we need to see you in person so we made the appointment for 9:00 a.m. at 8 I got a call from the driver saying that he was waiting for us at the West entrance and um he's going to take us to the White House so I go up to cover's

[1:52:03] office to tell him that the car is ready and his secretary she had a little TV on her desk back then we didn't have you couldn't watch TV on your computer back then so she has the TV on and the news is on and one of the towers of the World Trade Center is burning and I said what happened to the World Trade Center and she he said a plane flew into it and I said cuz I'm an idiot sometimes I said you know that happened once before in 1932 a a bomber flew into the Empire

[1:52:34] State Building but it was really foggy and raining then it's Crystal Clear today like how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center and just as the words came out of my mouth the second plane hit and then she turned to me and she said did you see that or did I imagine it and I ran back to my office and I said guys two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center I think we're under attack everybody ran back up to Ker's office because we had TVs mounted on the

[1:53:07] coming down from the ceiling above his office so we had like you know CNN MSNBC Fox BBC RT back then it was called Russia today or back then I think it was even called Russian television um France five whatever and then a plane hits the Pentagon and it's silence I mean there are like 300 of us there's the it's we're working in this enormous Bullpen

[1:53:38] so around the the walls there are private offices for the leadership kofer the deputy director for analysis deputy director for operations deputy director for military Affairs um uh couple division Chiefs that I probably shouldn't say what their offices are but anyway um and then 300 of us are in these cubicles and it was there were so many people that the aisles were named as streets like Bin Laden Boulevard um

[1:54:10] uh Winston Wy way he had been a former head of counterterrorism so they were named after CIA directors and terrorists and so you could say oh I'm in a cubicle at the intersection of Bin Laden Boulevard and Winston Wy way so silence as we're watching this unfold and you might remember well no because you were Reeds at the time but on the ticker it's like car bomb goes off in front of the state department which turned out to not be true there was no car bomb um rumors of Rocket fired at

[1:54:42] White House there was no rocket fired at the White House but people were panicking of course and then somebody behind me shouts will somebody please lead and kofer was like like someone had slapped him right you go to the director's office and tell them this you go to security you go to operations you you know finally one of the CIA cops the CIA has its own police force it's called the spose the special protective officers so

[1:55:15] special Protective Service SPS um he comes in he says everybody evacuate we're like yeah right we're the the counterterrorism center so everybody nobody budged one woman one woman ran for her life she and I used to sit next to each other she ran for her life and a couple of days later all five of her Branch members she was the branch chief they went to kofer and said um we've lost confidence in her leadership and she was fired I mean imagine that day we had like 800

[1:55:47] employees in the counter terorism Center it more than doubled after that but she was the only one who ran away they fired her do you think that was the right decision absolutely yeah yeah if you want it's moments like that you know that are going to Define what are you capable of leading right if if you're going to run away at the first sign of trouble maybe you should be working on France or trade right or Canada or something not

[1:56:19] on terrorism no so so another hour passed and the cops came back and said if you don't evacuate now we'll place you under arrest so everybody evacuated now I lived I lived about let me think five miles from headquarters it took me two hours just to get out of the parking lot and I got

[1:56:49] about halfway and I had to abandon in my car on the George Washington Parkway it was just gridlock parking lot so I just pulled onto the median got out walked away I went to my apartment my as I said then girlfriend later became my wife also evacuated and we met at my place went to the roof of the of the building watched the Pentagon burn for a while then we went out and we tried to donate blood but the blood mobile I mean there were blood mobiles all over the place

[1:57:20] and the lines went for blocks and they told us there's a 24-hour wait to donate blood and finally I said to her this is ridiculous we got to get back to work so I walked back to my car drove across the median drove back to CIA headquarters and then I didn't leave for four days I just slept under the desk I balled up my jacket and used it as a pillow and I just stayed for the next four days everybody did we had to take bolt cutters and cut the lock off the cafeteria doors and then we just

[1:57:52] stole all the food we cooked it ourselves laid it out on folding tables in the hall so people could graze and then we had to write the Marriot the Marriott owned the the company it was called um Saga back then they had the contract for the CI cafeteria we had to write a check for $10,000 for all the food that we took yeah but everybody just stayed yeah at the time it really rooted out people that uh maybe were at the agency for you know just the paycheck and the ones that really had

[1:58:24] the passion for doing something the mission Protect America and preserve um you know our our well-being at the time and it also brought in a whole new wave a generation of people oh uh let me interrupt you on that point before 911 we had 200 applicants for every position after 911 we had 2,500 applicants for every position yeah it's remarkable you really see the patriotism start to um you know come out

[1:58:54] at that time it's something I think to be proud of but you know like with any organization when you start bringing in troves of people there the the culture changes and so very much so what type of culture shift uh in the agency did you see yeah call me oldfashioned but you know the original Mission of the CIA was very clear and very simple it was to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets to provide the best analysis possible for policy makers

[1:59:27] to make policy simple as that immediately post 911 the CIA became a paramilitary organization borrowing from Special Forces from every one of the branches of the military setting up in-house for lack of a better term assassination squads uh and with the power of uh of a presidential executive order sending these teams all around the world to either kill or kidnap people who had

[1:59:58] been deemed to pose what's called a clear and present danger to the United States to American citizens or American facilities after that we had a torture program a secret prison program a rendition program an extraordinary rendition program which is so patently illegal from any aspect there's a big difference between rendition and extraordinary rendition that I think most people don't really have a feel for

[2:00:29] so rendition is quite simple let's say you are Egyptian right and I catch you in Pakistan and you don't have any plausible reason for being in Pakistan and I send you back to Egypt that's a rendition okay now I know they're going to be rough on you in Egypt but you're Egyptian so tough luck an extraordinary rendition is you're Egyptian I catch you in Pakistan you

[2:00:59] have no plausible explanation for what you're doing there and I send you to Algeria or Syria or Israel and we say don't tell anybody he's here soften him up a little bit which is you know the wink of the nod for a torture program and then just give us a transcript of what he says when you're done with and nobody knows you're

[2:01:30] there we disappear hundreds of people that way no one ever has any idea what ever happened to that guy that Egyptian guy that we knew he just disappeared one day that's extraordinary rendition and um was oh okay so when you first went to Pakistan and you're you're heading counterterrorism in Pakistan um but then you know you're on a mission to capture high value targets

[2:02:02] and at the time I mean this was part of the program and so and I was a True Believer in those early days first of all there was no torture program yet right 911 was an open criminal investigation 3,000 Americans had been murdered and so we wanted to bring the people to Justice do you think that um the extraordinary Renditions that were taking place they did involve uh extracting information um it wasn't done under

[2:02:35] centralized American hands let's you know I've always heard um that people would rather be captured and like captured under the Americans then captured it under some of the other countries that you know we're aware of so absolutely that's why like you Syria it's like you know that's why all the Nazis came to the United States they were so afraid of the Soviets after the second world war I'd love if you can elaborate a little bit on the the experience of you know what

[2:03:05] started to change your perception of it was like we were changing like what happened oh we changed boy did we change the torture program is what changed me it flipped me very quickly for several reasons um one specific and one General um the general reason I'll start with uh we have a law in this country called the federal torture Act of

[2:03:35] 1946 and it specifically prohibits exactly the techniques that we used against Al-Qaeda prisoners it's against the law can't do it it's a felony okay in 1946 under that law we EX executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS that was a death penalty charge if you waterboarded someone you got the death penalty fast forward to January of

[2:04:06] 1968 The Washington Post publishes a photograph on the front page of an American Soldier water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner the Secretary of Defense at the time Robert mcamera sees that picture orders an investigation the soldier is arrested he's charged with torture convicted and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at lenworth but then like magic in 2002 it's all legal well the law never changed the law

[2:04:39] was never amended we changed and we just decided we don't like that law anymore we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist number one number two we captured abuaba at the end of March 2002 we were able to narrow his possible location down to 13 separate sites and so we decided to raid all 13 sites simultaneously and sure enough he was in one of the one of the sites he was in

[2:05:09] the one that we thought he was going to be in I gave very specific orders that night to take him alive and this idiot Pakistani policeman mhm shot him three times with an AK-47 abua and two others had climbed the roof of the safe house they were in and they were jumping to the roof of the next door house to try to escape and this policeman was just poof shooting poof shooting again he killed

[2:05:40] the first guy the first guy was a bomb maker from Syria killed him dead before he hit the ground I was a shot in the thigh the groin and the stomach with this AK-47 and I was his bodyguard was shot in the leg so it took about six weeks to uh for him to recover enough to be interrogated we send him to this secret prison and normally the CIA always always always has jurisdiction overseas

[2:06:12] the FBI always has jurisdiction domestically but as I said 911 was an open criminal investigation and so the FBI had the lead even in the secret CIA prison so the FBI assigns a translator named Ali sufan who's an ethnic Egyptian great guy skilled interrogator to interrogate abuaba and Ali did exactly what the FBI has done

[2:06:44] since the nurenberg trials in 1945 and 1946 he established a rapport with abua relationship it took several weeks but what you do is you offer him a cup of tea an orange a cigarette paper and a pen so he can write to his mother and you was establish a level of trust finally Abu aeda began to open up and gave us actionable intelligence that

[2:07:16] saved American lives there were two things in particular that Abu zua gave to Ali we didn't know anything about the al-Qaeda wiring diagram for example we knew Bin Laden was the top IM asaah was the number two Muhammad at was number three but we killed him in torab Bora in October of 01 and then we just didn't know how the rest of the organization was structured we just had no sources so abuaba

[2:07:48] explained the structure of al-Qaeda to the point where and I use this as an example all the time Ali could ask if you were going to do an operation in dorf how would you do that and Abu Zeda said well there's this guy Muhammad he's in dorf and here's his address and he has access to guns and his cousin Abdullah this is his address Abdullah has access to ammunition and

[2:08:21] then there's a friend of theirs Rashid they met at the coffee house and Rashid knows how to build bombs so then we could go to the Germans and say you have a serious problem in dorf and this is who you need to be looking for and then they can bust down the door and grab these guys and now there's no Alid cell in dlor number one number two we didn't know who had planned 911 I mean by all accounts been l wasn't

[2:08:52] that bright that he could come up with this on his own and we knew that there was this very bad man out there going by the Nar MTAR right MTAR was The Mastermind of 911 we didn't know who he was what we did know was that in 1996 somebody going by the name MTAR had planned something called the bojinka um operation the bojinka operation was a plan to

[2:09:25] hijack a dozen 747s from Manila airport and to fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States MTAR had gone out to lunch he left his apartment and he went out to lunch and a cleaning lady went into the apartment to clean it and she sees these papers on a table she said this looks like a terrorist attack she calls the police

[2:09:57] the police come and they say this looks like a terrorist attack we're going to call the Filipino intelligence service and then they come and say this looks like a terrorist attack we better call the CIA and the CIA wrapped it all up and MTAR escaped Abu Zeda thought that was hilarious he said you don't know who MTAR is and Ali said no no and he said his name is Khaled shikh Muhammad we had never heard that name

[2:10:28] before so we do a name trace and it's like oh my God he spent his senior year in high school in North Carolina he graduated from North Carolina A&T like how could this guy possibly have been radicalized he's practically American and then the hunt was on and then 13 months later we got him in a safe house in R pendy and we've had him ever since

[2:11:01] that's what Abu Zeda did for us now the rest of the story is quite terrible it's that 9/11 was the worst intelligence failure in American history the CIA had the blood of 3,000 American innocent American civilians on its hand and there was this deep desire for revenge and

[2:11:32] so the CIA solicited from these two contract uh psychologists uh James Mitchell and Bruce jessen something that they called an enhanced interrogation program I call a torture program they charged the CIA $18 million and said here's your program why don't you let us fly out to the secret site and we're GNA we're going to tenderize this

[2:12:03] guy because you know he's withholding information on the next attack right he knows he's the number three in al-Qaeda which he was not so Robert Mueller at the time was the FBI director he knew exactly what this meant and not only did he pull his Personnel out of the secret site Mueller ordered every FBI employee to leave the country where the secret site was located he said I don't want to have

[2:12:35] anything to do with this it's torture program and Mitchell and Justin began to torture abuaba mercilessly so here was the great disconnect the CIA and the FBI historically had hated each other so deeply that even their computer systems were incompatible so Ali is debriefing abuaba every day he's writing up these brilliant debriefing cables sending them

[2:13:06] to the FBI and the FBI is not sharing them with anybody so when a CIA cable is written it normally goes to the CIA to the White House to the defense department to NSA and to the state department not to the FBI Mitchell and Jess begin to torture Abu Zeda on August the 2nd 2002 and he immediately goes silent just clams up he can't believe this is happening to him he told Ali sufan

[2:13:38] everything he wanted to know and now these strangers come and they're beating him and drowning him and he actually had to be resuscitated once after a water boarding session his heart stopped beating and they revived him so they could torture him more he he had mentioned that he had this irrational fear of cockroaches so they built a coffin put a diaper on him put him in the coffin put a box of cockroaches in with him all over his body nailed the coffin shut would open it once a day to change

[2:14:10] his diaper and give him food and then they kept him in there for two weeks just to make him go insane they made him play Russian Roulette they threatened to kill his mother you know they beat him until he had brain damage none of this stuff was approved by the justice department none of it was a part of the formal so-called enhanced interrogation techniques but here's the real crime they told us we're starting the enhanced

[2:14:42] interrogation today he went silent as I said but at headquarters we didn't know what Al sufan was reporting back to the FBI so they took Ali San's cables they retyped them in the CIA computer system and said oh my gosh look what he gave us we waterboarded him one time somebody better call the Germans and tell him about dorf and we need to look for this guy named khed shik Muhammad and at the CIA people are like

[2:15:13] holy [ __ ] this actually works yeah so you know the belief was that he al- mad became known because of the enhanced interrogation but what you're saying is that it was already through that's the big lie dialogue that's the big lie and that lie was perpetuated in Hollywood with the the dangerous movie Zero Dark 30 which the CIA actively contributed to that's a whole other story but Zero Dark 30 perpetuated the

[2:15:44] lie that the torture program led to Bin Laden's location and it was because of the torture program that we were able to find Bin Laden and to kill him that is just not true great analysis led to the location of B what a revelation and then you know you you have a moral and ethical problem with this yes I went back to headquarters from Pakistan the summer of

[2:16:15] 02 and I was approached by a senior officer in counterterrorism who asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques I've never heard that term before and I I said what's that mean he goes we're going to start getting rough with these guys and I said what does that mean he explained these techniques I said oo that sounds like a torture program to me he said it's not torture president approved it I said I don't know man let me think about it so I went up to the seventh

[2:16:47] floor there was a very very senior officer there for whom I had worked in the Middle East 10 years earlier I knocked on his door and I said I need some advice said they just asked me if I want to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of this and he said first let's call a SP a spade this is a torture program they can use whatever euphemism they want but this is a torture program secondly torture is a slippery slope and you know how these guys are somebody's going to go overboard they're going to

[2:17:18] kill a prisoner when that happens there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison you want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison it turned out I was the only person who went to prison but I went back downstairs I said this is a torture program I have a moral and ethical problem with it I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it I was passed over for promotion mind you I just caught abua I was passed over

[2:17:49] for promotion and in my promotion panel uh kofer Black's uh successor said that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counter terrorism those are the words he used to deny me a promotion the the man that I had gone upstairs to see over overrode that rejection and promoted me and then I went upstairs to be the deputy director's assistant so anyway um we start getting these cables back

[2:18:21] that oh we waterboarded him one time he gave us MTAR he gave us dorf and I said I said maybe I said to a colleague Maybe I'm Wrong about this I still think it's it's reprehensible but it looks like it's actually working well it wasn't working it was all a lie it was all information stolen from Ali sufan so and you learned this later oh I we learned it years years later uh the

[2:18:52] CIA internally learned it in 2005 when the Inspector General did a did a an inspection an investigation and it wasn't made public until 2009 when it was finally Declassified 2009 seven years after the fact it was finally Declassified John I have a question um about about you know you mentioning that Abu Zeda was not Al-Qaeda um what does that

[2:19:24] matter yeah that's a good question just wonder that because it's you know he was a logistics guy essentially every terrorist that was Al-Qaeda and others uh needed this guy you know I it's so interesting to me as well that I just see this like parallel between him and Carlos The Jackal you know like you have they they two spectrums yeah it's like two spectrums of a terorist um wheel you have the leftist Carlos The Jackal he's

[2:19:56] you know incredibly skilled at at Logistics and then you know with Abu Zeda it's the same thing every I mean he was with a Syrian bomb maker so you know he knew all these guys and he was essential to the operational success of al-Qaeda yes so what does it matter if he's Al-Qaeda or not at the time it didn't matter at the time even if even if we had known he was not the number three in al-Qaeda he was still a very dangerous very bad man right he was

[2:20:28] the logistics guy he created the House Of Martyrs the al-Qaeda Safe House in Pasha Pakistan he founded the two training camps in helmund and uh kahar provinces in southern Afghanistan if you wanted to get in to Afghanistan to fight the Americans he would get you in if you were tired of the fight and wanted to get out and go home he would get you a fake passport and a plane ticket and he would get you home bad guy he had never joined Al-Qaeda he had never pledged fty to AMA Bin Laden and

[2:20:58] he had literally nothing to do with 911 so he's been in Guantanamo he's been in American custody for 22 years he's been in Guantanamo since 2007 if he was not a member of al-Qaeda if he was not one of the masterminds of 911 then hasn't he served his time I spoke to his attorney uh two months ago

[2:21:29] and the attorney said that he was deeply involved in talks with the US government to release AB he's never been charged with a crime he's been incarcerated for it's going to be 23 years in uh in March and the only sticking point was they were having trouble finding a country that we takeen we've resettled like Bonafide bad guys from from uh Guantanamo all over

[2:22:00] the world everywhere from Switzerland to Albania to Fiji to Biz they're all over the world they're having a little bit of trouble finding someplace for abuaba but now Donald Trump is going to be the president and Donald Trump is on the record as saying that nobody will be released leased from Guantanamo ever so I don't know where it stands is he just going to have to waste away there for another four years because Joe Biden couldn't get his act together I

[2:22:32] don't know you know I I said to the attorney too would you do me a favor and it sounds odd I said but would you tell him that I send my best regards and he said actually I told him I was going to talk to you and he sends his best regards and he said to tell you two things number one he hopes that the two of you can have dinner together as free men number two he said you really did give them hope in 2007 because when you

[2:23:05] went public about the torture program a friendly guard at Guantanamo told them a CIA man went public about what happened to you you may actually get out of this and he said for the first time they actually had hope that the legal system would work the way it was supposed to work now most of them have been released there's something like 17 left at Guantanamo down from 900 or

[2:23:37] something like that almost all of whom were innocent of any crime um but abuaba ought to be the next to be released and I hope he is he doesn't deserve to be held there notore more if there is going to ever be reform within the agency you would be the first person that's called thank you because whether or not people agree or disagree um it's it's something that you've been true to yourself and true to your cause in your belief that

[2:24:07] you know human rights unwavering in this position yeah I mean human rights is such a like a um a key fundamental to who John is um and so you know I always think that you know perhaps you would being that person that is able to bring in reform um what what would be like three things that you would want to immediately do in a reform structure if there was that opportunity wow that's a good question um number one I would do away

[2:24:40] with extraordinary rendition it is so patently illegal and you know this disingenuous disingenuous wink and Nod where we pretend to not know that the prisoner is going to be tortured that has to end um number two I don't think anybody should be killed with a drone or with any other instrument without having the benefit of

[2:25:10] trial even if that trial is an Absentia it shouldn't be up to the United States to have a meeting every Tuesday morning morning which is what they do at the National Security Council where the deputy National Security adviser for counterterrorism comes up with the kill list which is what they call it it's a list of everybody to be killed that week that's that's not the American way that's not what the Constitution has taught us we're supposed to be a nation of laws so

[2:25:41] either we are or we aren't you know this is something else that's very important to me in 1978 Congress mandated the drafting of a human rights report for every country with which the United States has diplomatic relations I happen to be the human rights officer for two years when I was in Bahrain and I wrote the report which goes to Congress so my job as the human rights officer

[2:26:13] just as an example was to go into the minister of interior's office and say your highness you cannot murder a 15-year-old boy for marching in a pro democracy demonstration you can't do that that's a violation of you know X Y and Z laws I have to report this to Congress and they may cut off weapon sales to you you have to respect human rights but then maybe the CIA station Chief goes in and says don't pay any

[2:26:44] attention to the human rights guy we want you to open a secret prison here and you can torture people that we turn over to you and we'll pretend that they're not here and then you tell us what they say under torture and we'll give you $10 million they going to listen to me or they going to listen to the CIA they're not going to listen to me so either We're a nation of laws either We're a nation that respects human rights and

[2:27:16] civil rights and civil liberties or we're not but we can't pretend to be this shining City on a Hill as Ronald Reagan said and have secret prisons and extraordinary Renditions and torture programs and kill lists and drone programs come on we're not fooling anybody it has to be one or the other and so those are the changes I would make uh wouldn't that increase the

[2:27:48] threat to the United States how do protect ourselves absolutely I would rather be subject to another terrorist attack than to ignore the rights given to us in the Constitution sorry but that's my position yes you know it was it was Benjamin was it Benjamin Franklin who said um or Thomas Jefferson I don't remember now who said that

[2:28:19] governments that want both security and freedom will end up with neither yeah I don't remember who said it but yeah the Dick Cheney once said while he was vice president he would rather keep a thousand innocent people locked up in Guantanamo than to allow one guilty one to go free and I'm exactly the opposite I think that the constitution the freedoms that we have enshrined in

[2:28:49] the constitu tion are so important that we have to risk the bad guys going free in order to preserve the rights that the rest of us have this is who you are like you just stand by that uh belief and and um where where does that come from it's like it's in your soul it is the truth is I grew up in a very um tightly knit Greek

[2:29:22] Orthodox Family Church was a part of our culture right it wasn't just church it was a meeting place and you know Greek school was there and all of our friends were Greek and and my parents instilled in me well a couple of things number one a real sense of right and wrong right the CIA culture is such that they want you to believe that everything's a sh shade of gray and it's not some

[2:29:53] things are black and white they're just right and wrong and torture is wrong number two my grandfather my father's father was probably my best friend you know he died in 1978 and not a single day goes by in my life that I don't think about he was so grateful to this country for letting him igrade here he had a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on

[2:30:24] the TV until he died I have it now but he instilled in us this idea that this country has been so generous to us and so magnanimous that we should only consider public service to pay it back and so I when I was in school grad school I only looked for jobs in

[2:30:55] government Foreign Service CIA uh I got approached by the department of the Navy I only considered public service because I wanted to give something back making money has never been important to me that sounds like I'm nuts I know but it the money has just never been a motivator for me no I want my children to be proud of me and I want to leave a legacy that you know

[2:31:27] grandchildren that I don't have yet or great grandchildren or great great grandchildren who are going to be born 40 years from now will be able to look back and say you know this was my great great-grandfather I can be proud of that guy that's what I would like I think you'll get that absolutely I hope so thank you did your grandfather um Was he alive when you joined the agency no he died in 78 I joined in 90 my mother's mother was alive she was

[2:31:59] the only one everybody else had passed away you know my dad's father too he used to tell me the craziest stories like I don't know if you've ever heard of sacko and venetti they were two anarchists who were executed in the 1930s for a crime that they didn't commit my grandfather once told me a story about sneaky out of work at the steel mill in Pittsburgh to go to a sacko and venetti rally he could have been deported for that but these guys

[2:32:31] were innocent and they were going to be electrocuted which they were and he said somebody had to say something right there was a rally and so he risked everything and went to the rally for sacko and benetti that still sticks in my mind that story and you know there's another story too and this is kind of apropo of nothing but I was always the good kid in my family my brother was really bad um and now he's like wildly successful music

[2:33:05] producer and writer songwriter in in La multiple Grammy Awards and huge I was the good kid but I always had a little bit of a problem with authority now I have a serious problem with authority um my grandfather told me this story one time that he was in line at the franic Savings and Loan in Mercer Pennsylvania in 1934 to cash his paycheck and while

[2:33:38] he's standing in this line John Dillinger comes into the bank with his gang and holds up the bank and Dillinger told everybody not to worry that they're there for the bank's money not their money and they robbed the bank and they left well Dillinger is like a folk hero right he was number one on the FBI 10 most wanted list and the FBI shot him in the back like the cowards that they are but this idea this kind of Robin Hood idea it always stuck with me and I

[2:34:10] so wanted to believe that that story was true so when it came time to write my first book I said to my brother I want to tell that story in the book but I don't know if it's true so I took some time off from work and I drove to Mercer County Pennsylvania to the Mercer County Historical Society and I said my grandfather used to tell this story about how he was in the bank when Dillinger robbed the bank and I'd like to know if it actually

[2:34:41] happened not only did I find the newspaper article about the bank robbery but the newspaper interviewed my grandfather wow yeah and so I was able and I think that's where this distrust of authority comes from you know it was another another situation in in Pakistan um the night of the abuaba raid we captured I'm not allowed to say the number but it was many dozens of

[2:35:13] al-Qaeda Fighters 13 safe houses dozens upon dozens we captured so many people we had to bring them to our safe house we had a 10-bedroom safe house we had to bring them in shifts in in a Patty wagon 10 at a time to interrogate them take their pictures their fingerprints you know all that stuff and there was this idiot working for me his father had been a big Mucky muck in the CIA leadership and this guy

[2:35:45] flunked out of the operational training so they had him in a position called Sue special operations officer which means you flunked out of the Ops training so now they do surveillance they're assistant to the case officer the operations officer this guy flies out with another dozen or so Sues and I'm telling them I want you to do this I want you to do that you go here you go there they come in with this shift of prisoners and they all have hoods on I said why are they

[2:36:15] hooded and this idiot says we don't want them to see our face I said Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention seriously it is a war crime to put hoods on them take the hoods off he goes wait a minute to his men his men the guys he was with don't take the hoods off he goes I'm going to report you to headquarters I said oh I'm already reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime

[2:36:46] take the [ __ ] hoods off and we took all the hoods off we reported each other to headquarters I got in trouble listen I was as upset as anybody else in the building on 911 that doesn't mean we have to turn into Al-Qaeda which is what happened now with the Advent of AI technology moving as fast as it is you know you mentioned slightly the the there's something about like drone attacks where it just removes the um the

[2:37:19] emotional piece of pulling the trigger or something like that you know there's no like face to face you don't sense the humanity of the other person if there is any but you know everybody has a soul um I believe so I agree with technology moving the way that it is how do you see this impacting the way that we operate uh to protect our national security which is important and considering what you've experienced in been through uh do

[2:37:51] we you know keep going down a trajectory of more use of force or what is it going to look like I'm gonna that's a very good question probably the most important question that we've addressed here I'm going to answer it in several different ways well I'm going to preface it by saying I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a drone program at the Central Intelligence Agency okay CIA has never acknowledged that it has a drone program

[2:38:22] so last week Lockheed Martin stock dropped $25 in one day and it dropped $25 in one day for the craziest reason it's because Elon Musk tweeted a picture of 500 drones flying in formation and he said what idiot approved spending a billion dollars for for every F35 when the future of warfare is

[2:38:55] unmanned right why would we spend a billion dollars on an F35 when you can spend a billion dollars for 500 drones and if they all get shot down you haven't lost a single person well that sounds kind of cool but then I would refer people to the story of Daniel hail Daniel hail I'm proud to say he's a friend of Mine He's the Drone whistleblower Daniel proudly joined the US Air

[2:39:28] Force and was trained as a drone operator so he's sitting in some you know Office Park Somewhere operating drones in Afghanistan just like you said remotely you don't see their faces you probably in most cases don't even see any people you just drone the building that they're in and and he's looking on his screen as he's operating the toggles and he sees his Target his boss is looking at the same

[2:39:58] screen in Tampa and his boss says fire and Daniel says wait a minute there are two little kids there and his boss says those aren't kids those are goats he said they're two little girls I'm looking at them right now and his boss said fire and he said I can't fire his boss said fire or be court marshalled and he fired and he killed a 9-year-old girl

[2:40:30] and a 12-year-old girl and their bloody bodies were found two hours later when the team finally went to see if they had gotten the target he had a the equivalent of a nervous breakdown he said I'm a child murderer that's really what it comes down to he said I'm murdered two little kids in Cold Blood well now the Pentagon is giving medals out to drone operators medals for killing children for killing people

[2:41:02] never accused of a crime killing innocent women and elderly people you know we've even killed American citizens with drones American citizens who have not had their day in court anir alaki if anir alaki was the bad guy that the Obama White House said he was why didn't they charge him with a crime and then 6 days after killing him why did they kill his 16-year-old son and his 15-year-old nephew while they

[2:41:33] were drinking tea at a cafe they hadn't been charged with any crime is that really the country we want to be I would say no it's not and then how do you deal with the crippling PTSD that these drone operators uh have you know how many drone operators commit suicide constantly they're committing suicide there's a real price that comes with this this new kind of warfare and I think all around it's a

[2:42:04] bad idea yeah the technolog is amazing yeah the technology AI it's moving by Leaps and Bounds what about the human cost to all this there is a human cost and we're just pretending it doesn't exist it's h yeah it it is uh difficult to hear these things and then at the same time you also one needs to think about the race of dominance in this space as well if not us who kind of thing but yeah I mean I have no idea what the

[2:42:37] future is going to look like uh and hearing your perspective on this and many other issues is uh you know such an honor for me to have you here I appreciate is mine thank you so much you know that you've come here and shared your perspectives and I always like my My Hope in the podcast is that people will always listen with an open mind because as um individuals who have dealt with other humans we all have a back story and we all have something that drives us and um understanding where we

[2:43:09] come from maybe we can figure out where we're all headed and you know you were once a gray man uh operating in the shadows and known to a few yeah and you know you've since emerged as um being not just somebody that has served our government and serve the people and serve this nation um but you really have stood true to who you are as an individual you are no longer a grayman if you could do it again would you want

[2:43:40] to be a grayman or not be a grayman I'm actually of two minds on this issue on the one hand I should have gone to film school or something on the other hand I'm also a realist I would love to see the CIA abolished it's not going to be abolished I know that the only way to change the CIA is to change it from the inside and so I probably would do it

[2:44:12] again yeah and I probably would make myself even a bigger thorn in the side of the enemies of Human Rights and civil liberties than I than I was when I was there it sounds like you would have made your grandfather proud and uh you'll where can everybody find you I know you're going to probably be starting something of your own um can we listen to you more regularly yeah I hope to have a podcast up and going soon but I put everything literally everything that

[2:44:43] I do on substack so just if you go to substack just type in John kiraku it's all there Mr kyaku so what is it that makes a good human leader I think a good leader is a good leader is the person who is the is a lover of Human Rights civil rights civil liberties and is willing to sacrifice

[2:45:15] for them yeah that's what I say there John thank you oh that was fun that was beautiful it sounds like you