[00:00] [Music] The Clear Signal with Steve [Music] Fisher. Well, hi everyone. Welcome back to the Clear Signal. This is of course the first show of series number two. And uh well, I guess if you may have noticed, uh this is the first podcast that doesn't come with an advisory at the start about it having been a radio show in the first instance. Now, I've made the decision to do things a little bit differently in this series. in fact returning a bit to my journalistic roots
[00:31] if you like as a podcaster now that's something I've been doing since the medium was in its infancy and frankly uh a long time before it became the uh the kind of in thing that it's morphed into these days and don't get me wrong um I actually think this is a really good thing it's it's been a really long journey for podcasting and I'm really pleased to see where it's all going uh as I sit here recording this here in the uh the early stages of 2025 so uh in this series instead of making it all about radio and then converting it back to a podcast. What I'm going to do in this series is uh do
[01:01] it the other way round. And uh there's really a core reason for this. In doing it this way, it's going to allow me to conduct more in-depth and long formative views. Uh you know, if and where circumstances call for it. Um now, I love talk radio. It's what got me into this business in the first place. Uh just a love of listening to it and uh eventually becoming a podcaster and indulging in it a bit myself. Uh and I'm really keen to continue having a presence in uh in that medium as well. But doing the show this way, I think will make for a better radio show somewhere down the track. Uh, of that I'm pretty certain. And now, as you'll
[01:33] hear shortly, my guest in this edition is someone who's really well used to going long form when it comes to interviews and conversations. Uh, and his story, as you'll hear, is absolutely compelling. It's it's just fascinating. Now, more of that in a moment, but first, all the usual formalities. Signal.com.au, of course, is where you'll find me online. Uh there you'll find all the information you ever needed to know about the show, a little bit more about who I am if you're so inclined. Uh there's links there of course to previous shows and crucially there's information there on how you can contact me. Um I welcome your feedback,
[02:04] be it good, be it not so good. If it's not so good, all I ask is that you keep it constructive and of course keep it respectful. You know, you don't have to agree with my viewpoints on everything. That's what makes the world really go around and makes it uh makes things really interesting. Imagine how boring things would be if we all just agreed on everything the whole time. Anyway, now of course if you have a story idea, a suggestion for a potential guest, anything along those lines, well, please drop me a line either via the contact tab on the website. Uh or you can even send me an email directly if you like. My email there is simply
[02:37] steve@clearssignal.com.au. Okay, let's dive in. My guest this week is a man with a backstory that, you know, kind of reads like the myriad of spy novels that we've probably all consumed. Well, I know I have anyway. I kind of just love that genre to to be really honest with you. And uh comprising a career long journey in the field of intelligence and counter espionage and counterterrorism. His 14 years at America's Central Intelligence Agency saw him gain the highest of security clearances, focusing a lot of his work on the Middle East and specifically Iraq, eventually finding his way into counterterrorism roles.
[03:09] some of those operational and then going on to head up their Pakistan-based operations as the search for Osama bin Laden went on and on. He also spent a considerable portion of his career as the senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Uh that was during the the time of the Obama administration uh serving under John Kerry, who I'm sure you've all heard of. Uh he's well known in intelligence circles for heading the operation to capture a man who was thought to be at the time one of Elqaeda's top ranking officers. an operation which in fact would go on to have a profound impact on
[03:40] him in later life. He's also known in those same circles as a high-profile whistleblower, exposing the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. Uh, and that's something for which he paid a hefty price as well. Uh, and you'll hear all about that. Now, uh, that's probably best described as a a brief career summary. To be honest, it doesn't even nearly come close to covering off some of the fascinating things that this man's been involved in. His name is John Keryaku and although he's been speaking on these issues for many years and in fact hosting a radio show of his own and getting around in journalism circles for
[04:10] many many years now, I think it's his recent appearances on various podcasts that have just hit the algorithms at the right spot and have been gaining him some some wider attention all around the world. And I'm really pleased to say he was more than happy to appear on this one as well. Now, John of course likes to talk about his backstory a lot, but he also likes to commentate these days on some of the more contemporary uh political issues that are going on uh news items, intelligence items, all that sort of stuff. So, in this interview, we covered off on a lot of changes in the US political system. Of course, this is
[04:41] of course in the wake of the recent US elections. Of course, uh John has some very uh definite views on how all that played out. So, we're going to touch on some of that first and then we're going to go in and talk a bit about his career and uh some of the things that happened in and around all of that. Now, I uh recorded this interview with John, you know, a week or two ago. And uh I got to say, despite a rather annoying technology fail with my uh usually quite robust recording system at one point, John was really gracious with his time and we continued on. Uh you will notice probably an hour or so in just as a bit
[05:11] of a disclaimer that the quality of John's audio dips a little. Uh, and that's because at that point that's where I had to switch to a uh a backup recording method to finish off the interview. Well, as the saying goes, you got to love technology, right? Anyway, let's get in and meet John Kuryaku. I really hope you enjoy this [Music] conversation, John. It's a great pleasure to have you with us. Welcome. Thanks so much for the invitation, John. Um, you popped into my YouTube feeds three or four, five, six months ago now.
[05:41] And uh, just out of the blue and it's interesting how YouTube knows this stuff about the things you're interested in, isn't it? Because I've been fascinated by the clandestine world like many of us, I think. I mean, a lot of us would read books and novels and see movies and dream of a lifestyle like that. But you've actually lived that life. Yeah. You know, there are a couple of things that are that have sort of taken me by surprise. Um, I've been talking about these issues for a long time. I've been talking about them for 17 years.
[06:11] And six months ago, for reasons that probably will never be clear to me, I seem to have hit that YouTube sweet spot in in its algorithm. And where interviews I had done were getting 500 views, 800 views, now they're getting 5 million, 10 million, I have no explanation for it. But I'm glad word has gotten out. I got to tell you now, I've read every Tom Clancy novel ever written. I've read the Greyman series, uh, Victor the Victor the the assassin, and I've read every uh Mitch Rap novel
[06:43] that's ever been written. So, I feel like we're kindred spirits, John. I joke, of course. But there you go. But it really does fascinate me. Um, I I know there's so many things I like to talk to you about. Your backstory has been well covered in some of those podcasts. Uh, and we'll give a shout out to those. Uh, I I would like to touch on it a little bit later on, but you also talk a lot about contemporary politics and things that are going on right now. When I first approached you, it was just before Donald Trump's inauguration. I thought maybe we might just just wait a little to do this interview and just see how things have played out. As we record
[07:13] this in the middle of March 2025, it's been an interesting few weeks. Oh, yeah. Uh that's the understatement of the year. uh so far, you know, the in Trump's first term, I thought it was it was a four-year slow motion disaster for our democracy. Uh Trump surrounded himself with with fools and idiots and people who were unqualified for the job. And I can't even believe these words are going to
[07:44] come out of my mouth, but this is a different Donald Trump this time. Not to say that I support most or even some of what he's trying to accomplish. Uh for example, uh he started deporting people who have valid visas just because he doesn't like uh their political positions, especially as they relate to the Middle East. That's unconstitutional. It's illegal. but on some very narrow issues that are important to me like for example the day-to-day
[08:16] running of the CIA or or the broader intelligence community and appointing people to lead those organizations who are going to take a hard look at what they do that I support. Tulsi Gabbard I think was an inspired choice to be director of national intelligence. I like her. I trust her and I know people who work for her who know that she is as honest as the day is long. Um I wouldn't have named Marco Rubio Secretary of State. He's a he's a cold warrior and
[08:48] he's he's opposed to any rapro between the United States and Cuba or the United States and and Iran or the United States and North Korea. That's going to be a problem. But at least where it comes to intelligence, this is a different Donald Trump than what we saw eight years ago. And and this shocked me as well, but two weeks ago, he said that he was going to request from the Congress an 8% year-over-year cut for
[09:20] the next 5 years of the defense budget. That's a 45% cut in defense spending. No Democrat in American history has ever asked for a 45% overall cut in defense spending. I think that is absolutely fantastic. Is it sustainable? Uh no. No way. There's no way Congress is going to let him uh let him do it. There's just no way. Listen, over the past h 100red years,
[09:50] the defense department or the war department is what it was called before that has um gone out of its way to establish manufacturing or manufacturing through subcontractors in literally every one of the 435 congressional districts in America. So if you cut the Pentagon budget, people in every single congressional district will lose jobs. And so there's going to be some real push back uh in uh in Congress. But still, just the idea that it's not okay for us to have a
[10:23] bigger defense budget than the next eight largest countries combined is finally starting to have some resonance. some of the commentary that's been going on here. However, particularly in light of the uh the the rather interesting press conference he had with Vladimir Zalinsky in the White House just recently. Um it has people allies such as Australia, people are now questioning, well, can we still rely on the US to be an ally? And frankly, a country like Australia needs to have the US as an ally. Yeah. You know, I'm I'm no fan of Voteir Zilinski, but I thought
[10:53] that uh I thought that it was very bad form to humiliate him publicly like Donald Trump and JD Vance did a couple of weeks ago. That was clearly set up in advance. They clearly planned to embarrass him and humiliate him uh in front of the entire press corps and that may have worked out for their Ukraine strategy, but other European leaders have been saying not so privately. Well, if he's
[11:26] going to treat an ally like Zilinski like that, how's he going to treat us? Why should we trust the United States to be a friend if they if they turn on a dime against Zilinski like that and then humiliate him in public on top of it? So where they may have gotten some kudos from from the the MAGA base, I thought that was really very shortsighted and um and undiplomatic. It was one of the things now I wasn't a huge fan of Barack
[11:56] Obama for example but one thing I always liked about Obama was he could play the role of a statesman really well. Um you don't really yeah that he did see that with you don't really see that with Donald Trump. Whether you like his politics or you don't. I mean it's kind of a case of what you see is what you get. But I think in in in as much as he's come back as a slightly different Donald Trump this time I think there's still elements of the old Donald Trump president version one that he really needs to work on. as you say. Yeah. I I'm really worried about some of these
[12:26] uh freedom of speech, freedom of expression issues. You know, the idea that you can take a green card holder uh a green card holder is also called a US person where they have um um immigrant status, uh resident alien status. They have all the the protections of of an American citizen and you just order a person's arrest and incarceration without access to an attorney, without access to a phone and prepare that
[12:57] person for deportation. I mean, it's never been done before in American history. And it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Uh just today, we're we're talking uh on what did you say? March uh March I guess it's the 17th for me or the 18th for you. Um we deported a a a scientist from Brown University back to Lebanon because she attended Hassan Nasella's funeral. She's never written anything controversial. She's never said anything
[13:27] publicly that was controversial. But Donald Trump doesn't like her politics. And so she was expelled from the United States. This is a cancer researcher from Brown University. I think it's a very dangerous trend. It's interesting too in in context when JD Vance is getting up and lecturing the Brits, I think quite rightly over their attitude to free speech and freedom of expression. Uh what's going on in the UK, I find personally disturbing. But it's almost as if you say they're not practicing what they preach. Yeah, I I complain a
[13:58] lot about um about the Brits, especially um about their uh official secrets act, which really does squaltch free speech. Um it squaltches freedom of the press, and it it makes just about anybody vulnerable to a prosecution based on something that they happen to say, whether it's classified or not. It can de be deemed to be uh too sensitive for uh public consumption. even if you don't have a security clearance uh when you're saying it. But
[14:29] um you're right, the United States has no has no cause to point the finger at other countries and their their uh squaltching of free speech when when we're doing exactly the same thing. When we look at uh the political strategies of um the Trump and Vance versus say Biden and Harris, it it certainly is stark. There certainly is comparison. How is that playing domestically versus we talk about how it's viewed externally here in Australia, but that's a great question. That's a great question and
[15:01] it's one that's very controversial over the last couple of days because as as Donald Trump's popularity declines, the Democratic Party's uh popularity is also declining. There was a poll that was published just yesterday showing the Democratic Party uh with a 24% approval rating as a political party. That's the lowest ever recorded. Ever recorded. Mind you, the Democratic Party was established in 1820 and public opinion polls began in
[15:35] 1890 and it's never been more unpopular than it is today. The Democrats have no idea how to confront Donald Trump. They don't have any idea. Well, first of all, they can't they can't confront him in the House of Representatives. It's close, but the Republicans have a majority. But they can confront him in the Senate because to do something called to break closure, which means to forcibly end debate, you have to have 60 votes out of a 100red senators. The
[16:08] Republicans have 53 seats. So, it should be easy for the Democrats to kill Republican um bills that they don't like. In fact, the Democrats just fold fold like a like a, you know, a paper doll. There's nothing behind them. They have no ideas of their own. And so, because they have no ideas and no real leadership, uh they they can't uh they can't force an agenda. There was a controversy just uh this past week where
[16:40] uh the government was due to run out of money at midnight um Friday uh Friday night, Saturday morning. And uh and of course, Republicans needed 60 votes in the Senate in order to force a six-month temporary spending bill and keep the government open. Well, the Democrats could have forced the government to close, which would have put pressure on Trump to at least make some concessions to the Democrats and Democrats would jump in and vote yes and everybody would
[17:10] get a little piece of something. Uh Trump gave Democrats the middle finger and said, "If you want to shut the government down, go ahead and shut it down and it's going to be on you." Well, the Democrats panicked and they voted. Seven of them voted yes. And so there were there were more than 60 votes, 64 votes uh in the Senate that went with Republicans and uh Trump got his spending bill. The Democrats got literally nothing in return. I see probably the most prominent of those being Chuck Schumer. He's now copying Chuck Schumer. He's he's he's a he's a
[17:43] strange character. Look, sitting over this side of the Pacific, he's a very odd player, it seems to me. And he's far weaker than than most people realized, I think. You know, Schumer Schumer's one of these sort of old school backroom dealmakers. The He's the kind of Democrat that young Democrats loathe. And he's one of these guys who Well, let me let me back up and say I I'm of the belief that we have seen a slow motion C
[18:14] change in American politics over the last eight years. When I was in college in the 1980s, we studied the um the elections of 1932 as as a sea change election. Prior to to the election 1932, it was Republicans who were the liberals. It was Republicans who were the the party of of um uh organized labor and uh civil rights and civil liberties. That changed in 1932 with the
[18:46] election of Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt became the party of socialism and organized labor and everybody flipped. Well, I think everybody's flipping back again in in a slow motion way starting in 2016 where now Donald Trump has won 23 of um of union members votes and Democrats are the ones pushing increases in defense spending uh to to cold war
[19:19] levels uh demanding that there not be talks for example with Iran. demanding that we continue to fund Israel and to allow them to do anything they please in Gaza despite the fact that they admit to that 90% of the casualties are are civilians. There's nobody to tell them to stop. And so why would anybody want to support Chuck Schumer when what you're getting is sort of an old school cold warrior? You're not going to get anything from Chuck Schu. Chuck Schumer
[19:50] is not calling for 45% cuts in the defense budget. Donald Trump is. It's kind of the concept of it's kind of the concept, John, of the neocon that we hear a lot about. I mean, you That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is exactly right. They're all neocons. That that there's no difference between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals. They all support the same thing on foreign and defense policy. Yep. Yep. It's all an industry, which you know, you talk a lot of people here will use the term it's a uni party. We see that with with both sides of politics here in Australia. Doesn't really matter.
[20:20] They'll say anything they like. It's just happened that I wear a red shirt or you wear a blue shirt. But in the end, we all sort of stand for the same thing. Yeah. We call it the duopoly here that the two parties are just two sides of the same coin. Do you think um do you think the the Democrats though in that four years that they were in, did they lose their way? I mean, they seem to be focusing on things that were not as important. And it it seems to me that the the result of the US election I mean I I I talked to a lot of people I know a lot of people that live in the south and I mean you know I lived in a very red
[20:51] state so obviously people there are quite happy that Donald Trump won. However, there are people who voted for him that probably don't like him. But it seems to me it was more a wholesale repudiation of the way the Democrats under Biden and Harris were running the US. People a large majority it seems didn't didn't agree with that. And I wonder how the Democrats regroup from that. Oh, I have to agree. Um, you know, the Democrats, even when they did things that were positive positive for the
[21:22] country, nobody knew about it. The the Republicans controlled the uh the debate. For example, the Republicans started this this lie that uh that the Biden administration supported open borders. That became the catchphrase, no more open borders. Well, the borders have never been open ever, right? We we have we have fences. We have walls. We have we have border guards and and national guard troops. The borders have never been opened. But the Republicans just kept hammering on the Biden
[21:54] administration um saying that the borders were open. They would talk about these caravans. That was another thing. Only Fox News, which is the right-wing news network, uh Fox News as a mantra, would would talk about these caravans of of migrants that were on their way north. They're in this state in Mexico. Now they're in the next state in Mexico. They're on their way to the border. We have to stop them. Well, there were no there were no migrant caravans. It was all made up. And so the
[22:25] Biden administration when it did positive things just never really got the word out. It's like there was this malaise in the White House. Everybody knew that Joe Biden wasn't in his right mind. I mean, you'd have to be blind to see that he wasn't a demented old man. He was a demented old man during the 2020 campaign. Yeah. You know, there were three on my own on my own radio show. Um, at the time, uh, we talked about three different things that
[22:56] happened in that campaign. Once he was participating in a debate and his teeth fell out, we we didn't know that he had dentures. He's an old man who doesn't have any of his own teeth and his teeth actually fell out. Good lord. while he was debating and he had to catch them and put them back in. He was debating in Iowa before the Iowa caucuses and his eye spontaneously started to bleed. He had some sort of a blood pressure event. It burst a blood vessel in his eye and
[23:27] the white of his eye turned red with blood. That's not normal. Something's wrong. And then finally, he gave a speech in Iowa the week before the Iowa caucus. And the lights were so bright that he became confused and he didn't know where the crowd was. And so he gave the entire speech with his back to the audience. That's not normal. It's the most high high-profile case of elder abuse, I think, that probably the world has ever seen. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And then, you know,
[23:58] everybody pretended that no, he was fine. He was the the strong leader that we needed at the time. and and who would have been who would have been there to replace him but Kla Harris who was so unpopular among Democrats that in 2020 she didn't even make it to the Iowa caucus which is the very first contest of the primary season. She didn't even make it. Nobody wanted her to be the vice president. And so it's not like the party could could sort of lean on her
[24:31] when they needed somebody to replace Biden. She was forced on Democrats. Yeah. Um I I you know there were some quality candidates that the Democrats could have picked. A lot of people talked about Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania for example. Even Gavin Newsome, I mean I'm not really a big fan of the way he operates, but he's very popular in that state and that state does bring a lot of votes with it. I I cannot understand for the life of me why they they seem to bypass their own democratic process and just install her in there. I don't I don't I to this day, John, I don't get it. You know, there
[25:02] was talk um from party insiders at the time that Biden would drop out, that he would not make an endorsement, and that there would be four regional primaries. Um North, what was it? North or the Atlantic states in New England, the South, the Midwest, and the West. And um there were three people with Kla Harris being one, three people who were likely to jump in. And then they said, "No, no,
[25:34] we're not going to allow anybody to vote on this. We're just going to pick her. So take it or leave it." And people decided to leave it. M yet they they claimed other you know other candidates were a threat to democracy but they kind of subverted democracy in their own you know I often thought you know a lot of people have said here and I kind of agree with it there's 350 odd million Americans and those were the candidates they came up with you know I would have liked to have seen seriously there are some you know even on the Republican side um you know the gentleman from
[26:06] Florida whose name escapes me that would have been a that would have been an interesting contest say him versus Newsome oh Ron D Santis. D Santis. Yeah. Yeah. That would have been that would have been a good race. That would have been a good race. And Republicans are a little bit afraid of Dant of um uh Nuome. U they're afraid of Newsome because he's young. He's good-looking. He's got negatives. Um and they're trying to pin things on him that he's had nothing to do with like the the recent fires in Southern California. The fires aren't Gavin Newsen's fault. You
[26:37] know, there are arsonists. The the equipment is hundred years old. There are any number of reasons why fires break out and they break out every single year in California. Oh yeah. Yeah. But they're afraid of they're afraid of Newsome and that's why they complain about them so frequently and and and Newsome is interesting. I have noticed I don't know whether you have just in the last couple of weeks he seems to be raking ranks a little bit with mainstream Democrats now and starting to speak out against some of their strategies and some of their policies. I've seen him even going on podcasts where people might challenge
[27:09] his views, which I don't think you would have seen even 3 months ago. Yeah, I think you're right. In fact, um I saw a newspaper report the other day saying that Gavin Newsome has the most interesting Republican podcast uh out there now, which was funny. And then just last week he denied he denied parole to a whole slew of people who you know have been in prison for 20 30 40 years who are now eligible for parole. He said nope nobody's leaving prison everybody's days. Yeah. Not really a
[27:42] leftwing position. No that there's a real shift and I think uh he's starting to play the long game. That's my view of that and I think that's right. It may well work. It may well work. You talked about Fox News before, John, and um I've talked a lot in my podcast with other journalists, and I see this myself working in news media. There it is become a hyperartisan place. Um perhaps it always was, but it's more overtly so say in the last particularly the last 10, 15 years. um the role that you think that plays in day-to-day the way people your average
[28:14] person in the street sitting down to the 6:00 news is really subjected to a narrative depending on which side they choose to listen to. And I don't know without any question. I I don't I don't know that that's really a healthy thing. Oh, I think it's very unhealthy. But you're absolutely right. Everybody has a go-to almost everybody has a go-to uh network for news and there's very little actual news. It's mostly commentary. So, if you're a conservative, you're going to watch Fox News, and it's the most uh
[28:44] watched news uh channel in America. Uh if you are a mainstream left-winger, if you're if you're in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, you're going to watch MSNBC. Or if you're a little bit farther to the right, but still to the left of the the American political center, um you're going to watch CNN. My my view is well twofold. I'll make two points on this. Number one, I'm one of of the few people who jumps from network
[29:16] to network. You have to see what all sides are saying. So, I watch Fox and CNN and MSNBC, but I also make sure to tune to Al Jazzer and BBC and um Canal Plus and I I watch news from everywhere. I watch RT everything I can I can consume. I I do. Um but another problem that we have here in the United States is that well we've we've got a right-wing party and then the other party is
[29:47] farther right-wing and that's the choice. I don't know how the Democrats are I don't know how anybody ever convinced themselves that the Democrats are a left-wing party and then if you watch Fox News they're identified there as the radical left. I asked a friend of mine one time, a very dear friend of mine, actually he's my best friend from childhood. He he said something about the radical left. And I said, "What what makes them radical? What makes Democrats radical?" And he said, "Oh, come on." I
[30:18] said, "No, no, I'm serious. It's a legitimate question. What do you think it is that makes them radical?" Well, like uh he says, "This this environmental protection stuff." And I said, "Oh, like they want clean water and clean air and that's radical to you." And he's like, "Well, I don't know. You're trying to put me on the spot." I said, "You watch too much Fox News. You can't even identify what the word radical means." But the the truth is we have a a right of center party and
[30:50] then we have a very right of center party. And on the left, nothing nothing that sticks. We have a Green Party that routinely and regularly gets about 1% or 3/4 of 1% in elections. And then we have a Libertarian party that the last few years has sort of tended more left than right. And it gets about 1 and a half% and that's it. That's it. The the two main parties will work together to snuff out any any third party that they
[31:24] think could possibly be a threat. Yeah, that's we are actually seeing that in action right here in Australia at the moment where we are seeing that's right. You are we are seeing Yeah, we're seeing parties who well people who are independent and other people who alleged that they are independent being funded by wealthy interests elsewhere. Um you know I think legitimately they're trying to close a loophole to stop that. But in doing so they're they're making it almost impossible for anyone else but the two major parties here to be a part of it which you know doesn't play well for democracy. I don't know where you find a middle ground in that, but um I
[31:56] don't think they want to find a middle ground to be really honest with you. We we've got these uh we've got a couple of startups here. Um uh things like uh the Reform Party which came out of that that movement in the 1990s that Ross Perau self financed. Um they're they're not on most of the ballots uh in in the 50 states. Uh we've got um oh New York has a party called the rent is too damn high party and um and they're great
[32:27] in New York City. They actually elect people to the New York City Council but they just can't seem to gain a foothold outside of New York City. U and a slew of other parties. There's a constitutionalist party which is another far right-wing party. Um nothing else really has been able to take. What we really need is people moving back on either side to the sensible center. It would be nice to see that. I think you know we talk about uh hyperartisanism and media being structured along party lines and
[32:58] politicians and their strategists are very smart that way. They know how to play and set up particular narratives. I see that reading news media all the time. You've really got to be able to pick apart narratives and just report the news. It's sometimes it's not that easy to do because you've really got to be able to be alert to those narratives and try and just work around them and present a story that you know might suit both sides of the fence and let people make their own mind up. That can be a challenge for a news reader. It really can be and you know it's getting worse here in the States too. Our our
[33:28] so-called newspapers of record are the uh New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Um those are the four you know on which PhD dissertations are based as an example but um but the New York Times has taken to not correcting its own mistakes. The Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos, the owner of uh the founder of Amazon.com. And um two weeks ago, he
[34:00] announced that uh that there will be no um uh opinion articles permitted that in any way criticize capitalism. Can you imagine that? They're not permitting any opeds that criticize capitalism. Period. They said you can go to some other organization, some other outlet if you want to read criticisms of capitalism. So the editor resigned, the opinion editor resigned. Some some uh reporters resigned. But you
[34:33] know the the media here are owned by by billionaires. Uh look at Fox. It was probably the first one to go. Yeah. And um you know Bloomberg is another one. And uh now Jeff Bezos has the uh has the Washington Post. It's where do you go for news? That's why you have to go everywhere. Yeah. I think and one of the encouraging things now is that there are there are other sources you can go to. There are plenty more online where you can go to. There are some podcasts around for example that you know really help you I think to better understand
[35:04] the way this sort of stuff works. And of course you can listen to podcasts and stuff that tell you exactly what you want to hear too. It's just a matter of being more there's that too. Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit more just before we move on to some other subjects, John, about Trump's strategy. Um, his trolling of Canada, your neighbors to the north. Now, I got to admit, I found that quite amusing when he first started talking about Governor Trudeau, but it's gone, in my opinion, way too far now. And I think whatever strategy he's playing at has led to a it's backfiring now. It's led to a wave
[35:34] of nationalism in Canada. Um, I wonder what you're seeing over there. Yeah, I I have to tell you my my own view is the same as yours. It was kind of funny. He was trolling. We thought he was trolling Trudeau. He's never liked Trudeau. He's called him names. He called him a pipsqueak and just stupid childish names. Um Trudeau always uh always held his temper. He never really said anything publicly. And it was funny when he called when Trump called Trudeau
[36:05] the governor of Canada. Yeah, it was. But then on a hot mic, Trudeau was heard saying to um uh Carney, who's who's now the prime minister, uh that that Trump is serious about this idea of just taking Canada. And so the Canadians needed to to be alert and to watch him, what whatever it is he he was planning to do. Well, Ford uh not Bob Ford, but the brother, the one who's the governor of Ontario province now, said something the
[36:36] other day. That was that was actually Doug Ford. It was actually funny, but funny in a serious way in that he said, "You want to enex Canada? Go ahead. Um, that'll give us six seats in the House of Representatives and two Senate seats. Uh, and and the Republicans will never win an election again in uh in America." Touche. Yeah. Touche. Go ahead. We'll all vote for the Democrats. He said, um, I'm actually more worried about Greenland.
[37:06] You know, the United States has um has an air base in Greenland. It's had one for many, many years. Greenland is a, for lack of a better word, a colony, a protectorate of Denmark. Denmark, of course, is a NATO country. Um, everybody thought Trump was joking or trolling when he said he wanted to take Denmark 8 years ago, but he keeps bringing it up. And it turns out that Denmark is is rich in rare earth metals. And Trump has this obsession now with rare earth
[37:38] metals. Ukraine has rare earths. The United States has some, but far less than what we need. We buy most of it from from central Africa. Uh but it's all refined in China. All of it. To refine rare earth metals is very very expensive to the point where it's a money losing proposition. But the Chinese are willing to take that loss if they can maintain a monopoly on the refining. So I think in the back of his
[38:08] mind, Trump sees this as a long-term problem correctly, most likely. But to correct the problem, the solution is not to invade Canada or to invade Greenland. Uh but then you get these stupid followers like uh this congressman there. There's a junior congressman from the state of Georgia, Republican congressman from the state of Georgia who two weeks ago sponsored a bill uh house resolution 1116 which calls for the president to
[38:41] take Greenland by any means necessary and to change the name of Greenland to red, white, and blue land. It's just ridiculous, isn't it, though? And and it's bad for our foreign relations. Now the Danes are worried. The the the Greenlanders I didn't even realize Greenland had a prime minister, but they they called special election just last week and they elected somebody. The the parties came together in Greenland and they elected somebody whose whole platform would be
[39:13] to oppose any attempt by the United States to take any part of Greenland. But this is not we shouldn't be thinking about stuff like this. we should be thinking instead about sitting across the table from the Iranians or or reopening our embassy in Havana or or something that's going to, you know, encourage peace in in the the world. You know, it's one thing to go out there and put an ambit claim. You see a lot of unions do that, for example, when they want a big pay rise. They'll go for something outrageous. But we we see some of these statements that he seems to be
[39:43] making. You know, maybe he might have got a short-term sugar hit from that, but I think cooler heads prevailing now. I I can't see what he's playing at here. The tariffs is another one that's interesting. That's not playing well here in Australia. He's just decided to put a 25% tariff on steel that we export to the US. It's probably it's probably one of the few things we do export to the US. We bring in far more from the US, so we're no threat to you guys. Um what it's not going to play well long term. And you know, interestingly, politically, if the strategy might have
[40:16] been to troll Trudeau and make him so unpopular that people would perhaps switch in the next election in Canada to a like-minded person in in in the form of Pierre Polyv, who's a conservative. Mhm. Right. That's backfiring on him now. And you it's backfiring and you you see it here. We're about to come into a federal election period here in Australia where the conservative leader here, Peter Dutton, is already now being touted by his opposition as being, well, he's a friend of Trump. He's an Australian Trump and you don't want that. You want to stick with us, the Labour Party who's
[40:47] currently in power here. So, you know, I if that was Trump's strategy, it's not working. I have a cousin in Greece. I I'm a dual US Greek citizen now and I have a cousin in Greece who um was elected governor of um of the Danese islands with the island of roads being the the biggest and most populous our ancestral island and um he's a socialist and he said that his conservative party
[41:17] um colleagues are very worried about Trump for the reason that you just explained. They're afraid of being tied to Trump, if only because they happen to be conservatives and they're afraid that um that that association is going to drag them down in the next election. We're already seeing it if you look at the public opinion polls in Canada where where the the Liberals were thought to be headed for a for a beating and now
[41:47] they're just about even in the polls again and Carney has an actual chance of winning this thing. I think the same thing as you just said is happening in Australia. Um, I think that I think that Trump's unpopularity is what is keeping Kier Starmer um so high up in the polls in the UK undoubtedly. It's going to backfire. Yeah. Yeah. And K Starmer is, at least in my view, is a disturbingly he's a nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It it it he's nothing. It bothers me. I mean, I I
[42:18] can understand why the Brits uh this probably sidetracking a little, I guess, but I can understand why the Brits wanted to move away from the Conservative government who broke so many promises, but to go to a totalitarian clown like this. No, no, it doesn't sit well with We could go on for hours about that. Have to agree. John, I wanted to move on to defense and intelligence. Um, you have a long career in the intelligence community, obviously. I wonder just looking here regionally in Australia around this part of the world. How is the Australian intelligence community looked at by the US? Are they seen as a key partner, a
[42:48] key strategic partner? Oh yeah, absolutely key. Absolutely key partner. Australia of course is part of Five Eyes just like the United States is along with the UK, Canada, New Zealand. And um you know I remember just after 9/11 when Five Eyes was first floated, the idea of the Five Eyes Alliance was was first floated. Uh George Tennant was the CIA director at the time and and he told us in an all hands um uh email an email sent to every every CIA officer uh explaining what this alliance would look
[43:19] like. He said that that we would be sitting side by side with our allies and that they would have access to literally everything they were doing. And many of us laughed at that like well that's you know not possible. And in fact no that's exactly what happened. It got to the point where we had, you know, MI6 and MI5 officers uh sitting at headquarters. NSA had GCHQ people. Uh we had Australians. I don't recall the New
[43:51] Zealander, but there may have been a New Zealander in in the counterterrorism center where I was where I was assigned, but they they meant that we would all have access to each other's information and everybody literally opened the books. It was really historic. Australia has uh just like the US in fact um the US has so many different intelligence agencies. Um Australia has a number of them too. Most people here would think of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization or AIO, but I would imagine the people that you probably dealt with
[44:22] more I suppose would be ASUS, the Australian Security Intelligence Service, which is more an external agency. Uh would that be a fair assumption? That's right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. for uh for SEO, it would have been uh the FBI that would be their their normal partner. And which is kind of funny because until 911, there there were no FBI agents in our building. And there were no CIA people at the at the FBI. We were completely stovepiped. Well, that's an interesting one, too. Let's let's have a look at that one. So, I've got a I've got to I've heard you
[44:52] talk uh in very long form on these other podcasts, John, about the waring tribes between CIA and FBI. And as you it's probably the same here in these parts of the world. Why does that exist? I mean, aren't we all playing on the same side or are we playing on the same side? Oh, sure. Sure. We are. You the CIA and the FBI and I'm told I've been out for a long time, so I'm told this has finally changed or it's in the the process of changing. But um you know, until after 9/11, the CIA and the FBI hated each
[45:25] other to the point where they just would not cooperate with one another. starting in 1947 with passage of the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA. Well, I can tell you exactly how it started. When the National Security Act of 1947 was being considered in Congress, Jay Edgar Hoover, who was the very longtime director of the FBI, he was director for 48 years, um he announced his opposition to the passage
[45:56] of this bill. Now, the bill created the CIA, created the National Security Council. Um, so it was a major change in US intelligence policy. So, President Truman, in order to get Jed Edgar Hoover's support for the bill, lied to him and told him, "No, no, you're wrong about this bill. It's going to create this thing called the CIA, but the CIA is going to be a division of the FBI." and he said, 'Oh, okay. So, I'll be the
[46:27] head of the FBI and of the CIA. Okay, I I relinquish my uh my opposition. And um that was a lie. And so the the bill passed, the president signed it into law, and the CIA was created. And um and uh General uh William Donovan became the first director of the CIA. Well, that same year, 1947, Hoover ordered the FBI to refuse any and all cooperation with the CIA. And only when we really truly
[47:02] had to cooperate with each other did we even, you know, talk to one another. In all the years I was in the CIA, not one single time did I ever go to the FBI. Never. I mean, I had more I had more interaction with, you know, the Egyptian intelligence service than I ever had with the FBI. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot was made over 9/11 about uh intelligence breakdowns and and what information each particular agency may or may not have had that they may or may not have shared. Yeah, that's exactly
[47:34] right. 911 happened because the CIA and the FBI refused to cooperate with one another. And then even after 9/11, I tell the story in in my first book and I've told it in podcasts too. The night that we captured Abu Zuba in Fisalabad, Pakistan, um we also uh confiscated his cell phone and one of my FBI colleagues threw it in an evidence bag and sealed it and wrote her name on it. And as soon as she threw it in this evidence bag and sealed it, it started to
[48:04] ring. So I picked up the bag and she said, "Stop. M don't open that bag. I said, Jennifer, are you crazy? It's ringing. It could be Bin Laden on the phone for God's sake, calling to ask if it was true that we had gotten him. And she said, don't open the bag. I said, I'm going to open the bag and I'm going to answer the phone so that NSA can pick up the call because that was going to be more important. I told her it could be Osama bin Laden for God's sake. Everybody's half CIA, half FBI, they
[48:35] formed a circle around us just to watch and see how this was going to play out. Finally, she said, "If you open that bag, I'm going to place you under arrest and I'm going to charge you with obstruction of justice." And then the phone started ringing and I tossed it back over to her. It's uh high stakes bureaucracy playing in there, it seems to me. I'll say. Yeah. Yeah. when you're looking at uh this part of the world, I mean, I guess working in in the intelligence service is very much when
[49:06] you're an operator on the ground or whether you're someone at high level, it's all about levels of trust. I hear a lot of talk, for example, about we always talk about the Israelis, for example, being our greatest friends, but from what I can glean, the Mossad, for example, is actually not that well trusted at all. Is that something I mean do you have to apply a level of suspicion to all intelligence services whether they're friend or foe? No, actually um with with the five eyes intelligence services it was always
[49:36] smooth sailing. I mean we we really are friends. We re I I I would socialize with those. I got an award from MI6 for a joint operation that we did. Um the Israelis though are in a class of their own. Um, not only not only were our relations with the Israelis difficult and really I'm being very nice about it by just using the word difficult. Um, but we distrust the Israelis to the point where they're not
[50:08] permitted in the headquarters building. Wow. They're not permitted to even enter the compound. We meet them at an offsite location. Um, Israel along with Russia, China, Cuba and Iran are ranked as critical threat for counter for counter intelligence. Imagine that Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, and Israel. Idiot. Israel is is touted as some of our best
[50:38] friends. I don't That's bizarre. They're not. And they have spies placed all over the United States at every American defense contractor trying to steal defense secrets because although we give them 99% of what they want, they're willing to take the risk to steal that remaining 1%. Yeah, I think a lot of people would be really surprised to hear that, Johnny. You know, particularly in in in light of the current environment around the world that there's a lot of things going on in
[51:09] that part of the world that everybody knows about. Well, there's there's a story, too. I'm sure you've heard me say on other podcasts. I had some friends at the CIA who um served in Israel. This was a married couple and they were what we called declared. So, they went they went to Israel and the the senior CIA officer in the country took them to Mossad and said, "These are CIA officers. One of them is on rotation to the state department doing legitimate state department work and the other one
[51:41] is going to attend the University of Tel Aviv and uh get a degree in um Arab studies. So no secrets. They're not doing anything against the Israelis. They're just there and the Israelis know it. We've informed you. Everybody's, you know, on the up and up. Well, they were there for a few months and they went to a a dinner party at the ambassador's residence when when the American embassy was still in uh Tel Aviv. And when they got home, all of
[52:12] their living room furniture had been rearranged while they were out. So, MSAD had gone into the house and just rearranged all the living room furniture just as a message that, you know, we're watching you and we can do whatever we want. there's nothing you can do about it. So at Christmas uh they went to the ambassador's Christmas party in Tel Aviv and at the end of the party they drove back to Jerusalem and people people had taken
[52:43] shits in all of their toilets in their house and just left it unflushed. And then when they were getting ready to leave after having spent two years there, the ambassador had a going away party for them. And then when they got back home, the dog was under the dining room table whimpering because somebody had cut its tail off. Good lord. And then wrapped the stump in in medical tape and gauze. Like why why do that? Why why piss off
[53:14] the CIA when you're relying on the CIA for for intelligence? You know, if I were a CIA officer who had been abused by the Mossad, I wouldn't give them the time of the day. No. No. In a briefing, let alone actionable intelligence just because I don't like them. It really comes back to that that talk we had about trust. I mean, it's as if they're saying, "We don't trust you." But like you say, you can say, "Well, we don't know we can trust you either." I mean, I can't see how that would be a
[53:46] good way to do business, but yep, I agree. I guess they have their methods. Well, I guess it comes to when you're talking about adversaries and particularly in this part of the world now, we must think of China. Chinese infiltration, the Chinese are not stupid. They know what they're doing and they they think a lot more long-term than any Western politician would ever think. They don't have to think beyond elections obviously. And we have, in fact, we have recently seen them coming around our coast. They circumnavigated Australia with uh couple of their ships, two or three of their ships in fact, and probably a submarine as well. And that's
[54:16] gunboat diplomacy. really that is them saying we can come here you know don't don't upset us we can do anything we like there are so many Chinese here now and they are they are known to be infiltrating into all sectors of government and business um how do we counter that I mean we have to be we have to be smarter oh boy you're exactly right we have to be smarter the Chinese we just found a Chinese network here of uh what we call illegals uh where they're they're
[54:47] Chinese nationals living here sort of undercover uh with working cover jobs and then actually carrying out espionage. Uh but it's not traditional espionage aimed at the United States, the US government or defense contractors. It was targeting other Chinese who aren't pro-China enough. Mhm. And they would send out these teams to just beat people up or to threaten them or to in one case
[55:21] them and threatened their parents who were still back in China. Um we underestimate China at our own risk. Uh you're right, the Chinese are smart and they're powerful. They have a virtually unlimited budget and they've made great inroads in in the West, but especially in Australia. Um, we have to confront them using really good trade craft. We have
[55:52] to focus our training and our officers to counter the Chinese threat. The Chinese threat is not going to be in your face military. It's going to be subtle and secret and it's going to come from within. One of the strategies that they use and they've used it to quite great effect branching out across the Pacific and they've used it in Africa and they've tried to use it here of course as their belt and road initiative here in our state in Victoria where I present this from. We had a state government at one point attempt to
[56:22] engage in an infrastructure program funded by the belt and road initiative. It's a debt trap program obviously we know how these work now. Now of course um you know They're not the only country that's engaged in this sort of behavior, but they're very good at it. I've read John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hitman, for example. Oh, terrific. The US has been around and done this, too, but the Chinese Oh, yes. are very good at it, and they're very clever at the way they use it. Now, here in Victoria, that was squashed by the federal government at the time, fortunately. But it just goes to show you how deeply
[56:54] their hooks are into state and federal politicians in this part of the world. Oh, you're absolutely right. You know, Greece, I mentioned Greece a little bit earlier. Greece learned this the hard way. The Greek uh economy of course collapsed in um in 2008 and the Greeks were desperate. They they had uh bonds that were that were worthless. They had debt that was overwhelming. The whole country was going uh bankrupt. the the World Bank and the International
[57:25] Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank had these ownorous terms that were that were uh connected to to the bailout proposal. And so the Greeks made a really terrible decision. They decided to sell the port of Pereus, the port of Thessaloniki, and the port of Hanya Cree to the Chinese. And um and now they're out of their they're out of their economic doldrums. Uh just today uh Greek government debt was moved out of the
[57:56] junk uh category, but the Chinese now control the Greek economy. And you mentioned Africa a minute ago. You go to any one of these countries in the Sahel or in subsaharan Africa and every new road is built by the Chinese, every new airport, every new port, every new hospital, all of this is Chinese money. And the Chinese aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They're extracting mineral concessions, for example. They're
[58:27] swaying votes at the United Nations. Uh this is real long-term planning. And I will say it's far smarter than the way the US has done it. I was talking to a Congalles diplomat not too terribly long ago. And um and he said, "You know the difference between you and the Chinese? You promise us democracy and the Chinese promise us food." Yeah. Yep. Mhm. very very very interesting. I I think you know a lot of people I think a lot of politicians and businessmen here have sat sat by in this part of the world and have said well you know the logistics
[58:59] trail that they would have to have to invade Australia uh is significant. However, by them now sending ships and I can tell you now John this won't be the last time they do it. I think there'll be a bigger fleet come next time. They're obviously not just sailing around showing the flag. I could they would be engaged in signals intelligence collection for example. Um and just seeing what sort of a response Australia sent out some frigots to shadow them. We couldn't sustain that because our our two count them two uh you know replenishment ships were both unserviceable. So we had a couple of P8s
[59:30] going out and watching them. Well, you know, that's not going to go unnoticed. And the Chinese don't need to invade Australia. They just need to cut us off. If they blockade oil shipments into this country, we'll be shut down in very short order. And surely they know this, right? Surely they do know it. And you know, I I like to think that that the Chinese are as are as smart and as forwardthinking as we believe they are.
[1:00:00] um in that they know just like you and I know that any move on a country like Australia or Japan or South Korea is going to result in World War II. And so while we try to one up each other all the time, actual shooting hostilities uh just aren't going to you you can't win a war. It's just it's it's a
[1:00:31] non-winable proposition. Well, I think it makes you know we we see um treaties such as ANZIS, for example, is one in this part of the world. Um and obviously Orcus, which a lot of people are talking about. A lot of people think that is purely only about Australia acquiring nuclear power submarines. It's it's it's a little bit more involved than that, although that is the the key point about that. Um right, Donald Trump uh interestingly recently has taken a bit of a swipe at a former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turble. Um Turble was actually out in the media yesterday
[1:01:02] talking about um Orcus. I'll just play this little clip to you. Orcus is a terrible deal. It is so unfair to Australia. The most likely outcome of the Orcus Pillar One is that we will end up with no submarines of our own. There will be Australian sailors serving on US submarines, US flag submarines, and we will provide them with a base in Western Australia. So, we will have lost both sovereignty and security and a lot of
[1:01:33] money as well. So, that's why I say it is a really bad deal. So, people say, "Does will Donald Trump like it?" Well, of course he'd like it. It's such a bad deal for us. He will his only thing be back of his mind. He'll be thinking, "Who are these dumb guys that agreed to this deal?" Now, I got to tell you, I'm not I've never been a fan of Malcolm Turble, but I wonder, John, do you think he has a point? I think he's 100% correct. Donald Trump only wants what is absolutely best for Donald Trump. And if that means it happens to be the best for
[1:02:04] the United States, too, okay, that's even better. But, uh, Burbo is exactly correct. Donald Trump's not going to not going to give Australia a good deal just out of the goodness of his heart. It's not in his nature. He just can't. He could never bring himself to do something like that. This is a bad deal for Australia. So, what do we do? I mean, we need to be able to project power um in some form. I mean, Australia's defense force is exactly that. It's a defense force. But I think, you know, we we seem to be moving into a time where we need to be able to expand
[1:02:35] our our sphere of belligerance, if you like, our sphere of influence militarily. We need to be able to say to the Chinese, look, you you can't just come in here and, you know, cut us off if you want to. We need to be able to do that. Australia's current fleet of commassass submarines, for example, are not capable of going the sort of distances that are needed to perform that role. So that's right. And that's why Australia needs nuclearpowered subs. Yes. And I believe we should have had them three decades ago, but uh you know, we can't we can't change that obviously. But um you know, we have Australian sailors at the moment embedded uh we're
[1:03:06] told embedded on some of the um Virginia class submarines. Now, um, apparently we're going to get a couple of what are called, uh, secondhand Virginia class submarines. Uh, but of course, under the terms of August, the British, uh, will bring some of their boats here occasionally. And we have actually a US submarine over in Perth at the moment, uh, getting getting ready for some deployment. So, um, you know, the Chinese will be looking at this very, very carefully. When you're in involved in this sort of stuff, let's say you're a Chinese spy and intelligence agency, what sort of methods are they going to
[1:03:37] be sort of using? Is it going to be purely just taking photographs or are they going to be actively trying to infiltrate this? No, that's that's the easy part. Yes, they're going to want to know they're going to want to know negotiating positions. Um, you know, this is the hard thing about uh about being a spy is I I had a a boss. He was the deputy director of the CIA for operations and he used to say this all the time that our job is to recruit spies to steal secrets. It's as
[1:04:08] simple as that. And he's right. We're not going to infiltrate, for example, al-Qaeda. We have to recruit somebody who is going to infiltrate al-Qaeda for us. So the Chinese are not going to just directly infiltrate the uh the Australian government. And then you have these Chinese just sort of walking around Parliament or walking around the prime minister's office. That's not how it works. They find somebody, they identify somebody who has access to this kind of information. They identify a vulnerability and then they exploit that vulnerability. 95% of the time the
[1:04:41] vulnerability is is money, right? Rarely it is um ideology. It could be anger for having been say passed over for a promotion. Uh but usually it's money. Maybe you have a child who is sick. Maybe your wife has cancer, maybe you have gambling debts, whatever it is. But if those Chinese intelligence officers are able to to spot, assess, develop, and recruit somebody who have who has
[1:05:11] access to that information, that's what they're going to do. And you know, money talks and I mean, we we see, you know, we see a significant Chinese presence in this country in the business community. One of the things that Australia has weakened itself by doing is we don't have a lot of heavy industry now. We've outsourced that uh largely to Asia and largely to China. And we saw that really hit us actually quite hard during the pandemic times when supply chains just shut down. We couldn't even manufacture face masks here for example. Um they that's another point of leverage I
[1:05:42] guess. Yeah, you're exactly right. And we've done exactly the same thing. We've done the same thing. We manufacture not much. For example, we don't m manufacture any uh clothing in the United States anymore. Um almost all technology is imported. We do still manufacture cars, but that's that's pretty much it. Even John Deere tractors, the sort of the flagship of the American agricultural uh uh sector, John Deere is all manufactured in in Taiwan. So yeah, the
[1:06:15] the Chinese did the same thing and it it happened very slowly, but they were able to undercut union wages and uh you know, people want cheap t-shirts, for example. Uh there's there's a cost that comes with all that, but we we had the same we had the same manufacturing problems uh that that you had during COVID. We bought all those masks. We had N95s and then KN95s with the K meaning they came from China. We had to import all of those. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean that that's
[1:06:45] that's an and one of the other things they did when uh Australia's prime minister at the time Scott Morrison dared to question the origins of of co and started delving into that. The Chinese said we won't have that and they put tariffs on our w our wine exports and things that really hurt local manufacturers here. So there's an example of really overt coercion uh you know but obviously on on a on a micro level that's that's obviously done you know differently. Well, I didn't realize that, but that that's exactly what it is. That's a heavy hand. Yeah. So, it's
[1:07:16] interesting times. It's tough times. I don't know how politicians here can take a populist view on that and say, "Well, we're going to stop that." But in reality, I think that's easy said, not so easy implemented. I agree. You know, I always I always believe too that that at least in the intelligence community here in the United States, we were underestimating China as as as a short and medium-term threat. We talk about China being a long-term threat all the time, but um all the years that I was in the CIA, we were so
[1:07:47] laser focused on on counterterrorism and counterp proliferation and then Russia and Iran. Oh my god, how many times we went to the brink of war with Iran that all this time the Chinese the Chinese were getting away with, you know, well, this economic coercion and belt and road and and buying loyalties in Africa and the Middle East. You know, I went to Djibouti. Oh, when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
[1:08:18] staff, I went to Djibouti back in like 2011 and there's a a base there, Camp uh Le uh Camp Lemonet, I think it's called, and uh it used to be shared. There's actually a fence down the middle and on the right side it's an American base and on the left side it was a French base. Well, now it's still with a fence down the middle, but the right side is American and the left side is Chinese. Like, why did the Chinese need a base in
[1:08:48] Africa? What do they intend to do with that base? Yeah. Well, nobody really was focused on it. Yep. Yep. Well, focus is an interesting thing, isn't it, John? Because at the moment, the entire world seems to be focused upon Eastern Europe and what's going on in Ukraine. The Chinese Yes. I you know it may even be a it may even be a product of what's happened here with them sailing a boat around Australia. You know some military planners here are talking about them having a a uh a timetable for about 2027 for going in and trying to retake Taiwan
[1:09:18] for example. They would logically now be taking advantage of the fact that maybe everybody's eyes off the ball of what they're doing and going in and you know maybe we can while everybody's looking at what's happening in Ukraine and places like that well maybe we can try some things. Yeah. You know, I I'm worried about that because here we are already in 2025 and the United States at least would be utterly unprepared for such a confrontation. Yeah. And we, you know, here in Australia, I mean, we've just seen the latest batch of uh, you know, the marine rotational force coming
[1:09:48] to Darwin. That's why that's why, you know, we come back and talking about trust and relationships and alliances. I mean, Australia, a lot of people say, "Well, we don't need the Americans here." Well, we absolutely do because um, it's it's vital to our security. And I hope that that the US would still see Australia as as um strategically important that way. Well, I can tell you in the intelligence world, um Australia is absolutely that important. Well, that's good to know. That's good to know. John, I uh we've been talking for a long time and I know you've done a lot of long podcasts, but uh I I would like
[1:10:18] to talk about uh just as we go on here a little bit about your career about uh because it's it's it's it's a a fascinating journey that you've had through the intelligence community and being part of that world. Um I think it's probably fair to say that it went in directions that you wouldn't have anticipated when you joined. But Oh, yeah. Um can you can you tell us a bit about how how were you recruited into the CIA? How did that happen? Presumably, you didn't just front up the CIA headquarters and say, "Well, here I am." No. No. Actually, it was uh I was recruited in a way that is no longer
[1:10:48] legal. As a matter of fact, uh I was in graduate school at George Washington University. I was working on a master's degree in um legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis. And I thought, "Oh, I'll end up uh on Capitol Hill one of these days or maybe as a lobbyist." And um I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership with an eminent psychiatrist by the name of uh Dr. Gerald Post. And um he assigned us an odd paper. He he ordered us to
[1:11:21] shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our bosses. And so I was working for a labor union at the time, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. And I was my my boss there was an old school union organizer. He was a mean, tough, angry, big, strong, nasty guy. And so I'm shadowing him. And then halfway through the week, it was on a Wednesday,
[1:11:52] he and I got into an argument. And I called him a racist, which he was. He got so angry he he set a stance and balled up his fists to punch me. Wow. And I I put up my hands to block the punch. And I remember thinking, "Oh, I went too far this time." And instead of punching me, his face got red and he blurted out, "My penis is bigger than yours." And and I said, "What?" And he said it again, "My penis is bigger than
[1:12:22] yours." And I said, "You know what? You're insane." and I quit and I walked out. I went back to my apartment and I in my anger I wrote this paper and I I said with supporting evidence that I believed he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly um violent tendencies. So a week later I get the paper back. I had gotten an A and Dr. Post wrote in the margin, "Please see me after class." So I went to see him. I
[1:12:53] said, "Dr. post you wanted to see me and he said, "Listen, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer?" Simple as that. And I said, "Sure, why not? I wanted to see the world. I wanted to um be involved in some way in foreign policy or
[1:13:24] intelligence policy or something. And the truth of the matter was I was getting married in six weeks and I had no job. And so the next thing I knew I was in the CIA. What What era was this? What what are we talking like? Who was president at the time? Right. Ronald Reagan was president, believe it or not. Um, so this was 198 uh 88 and uh this method of recruiting people into intelligence was outlawed in
[1:13:56] 1993 under Bill Clinton with passage of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act. So now it's it's far less sexy and clandestine. just have to you have to uh go on www.cia.gov and click apply now. Yeah, it is as simple as that really. Who would have thought that? So So you were looking for a job as you said. I mean there must have been other things that appealed to you better. I mean we've all seen things like James Bond and all that sort of stuff. I suppose as a young man you might have thought well that sounds
[1:14:27] rather romantic. Let's do that. Oh yeah. you know, I I gave a lot of thought to going into union organizing and um and I uh was offered a job in the Department of the Navy, which I had really no interest in. I I did really only serious seriously consider public service. My my four grandparents all came from the island of Roads. They were all um immigrants. And I was raised to believe that that we owed the country a debt of
[1:14:59] gratitude for allowing us to immigrate. And so really I I only considered public service. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean uh you know it's it's it's a great way I mean Americans are very big on serving your country. You hear a lot of you know I I I lived in the States for example with an Air Force family. So you know we were sort of right into all that sort of stuff. So uh you can see how that would be appealing. What what what how do they how do they train someone to be a an officer? What is the title when you go into the CFO CFO into the CIA? Um how do they train you to to do that sort of
[1:15:31] work? Well, um it depends on who's recruiting you. If if it's the director of intelligence, which is the analytic arm, you go in as a CIA officer. Your title is intelligence officer. And so, I mean, colloqually, you're just called an analyst. Uh if you're going into operations, it could be anything. You could be you could be under the cover of any of a number of federal departments. You can be under deep cover where you might be you might be um assigned to a
[1:16:04] private business or, you know, maybe you're a you could be anything. You could be a farmer, you could be a photographer, you can be in the case of Emirilis Fox Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 's daughter-in-law, she was a she was an art consultant. Uh that was her deep cover position. So it could be anything if it's operations. And so they would go in and and you know, I suppose it would be very specific to the sort of role they wanted you to do, but um I think in your case, you you mentioned that you're also hold Greek citizenship.
[1:16:34] So I guess language skills would be a big factor in that. Yeah, the language skills are of of primary importance. Um it's a little different now. I I went in speaking Greek and then the agency taught me Arabic and I became a go-to Arabic linguist. Uh but now they're specifically looking for Arabic, Farsy, Dari, Udu, Pashtu, Cindi, Punjabi, Usbek, Tajik, Korean, Mandarin,
[1:17:06] and Russian. If you speak one of those languages, you go to the very front of the line in the application process. Well, I can sort of vaguely speak Dutch. So, I guess I'd have no chance in that case. When I was when I was going to school, they only taught us uh Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Those were the only languages we were allowed to choose from. So, uh yeah. Yeah. I suppose with the Greek heritage though, I mean, Melbourne, for example, has a very large Greek community here and and they are very proud of it. And teaching Greek language skills is is part and parcel of
[1:17:37] of having Greek uh background. Indeed. Certainly not the case with the Dutch. I can tell you that. My father rarely spoke it actually. So when what what parts of the world you you spent a lot of time obviously in the Middle East, but I know from listening to other podcast that you you actually spent a lot of time in Greece looking at terrorist organizations. I got to tell you, I was actually quite surprised to know that that that is a factor in that part of the world in Greece. Oh, it it was until 2002. And and there are still an anarchist groups that, you know, will throw a bomb or a Molotov cocktail or
[1:18:09] something or kill a policeman every once in a while. But when I was there, not only was it a parade of of Arab terrorist groups, Abu Dal, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PLP, General Command, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Libyans, I mean, everybody was there. But but the ones that were really dangerous to us as Americans were Revolutionary Organization 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle. They both had very close ties to Carlos the
[1:18:41] Jackal and uh were very very successful at murdering uh Americans uh Greek officials and occasionally the Turkish ambassador and uh their final assassination was the British defense ates. But it it was very very dangerous when I was there. Carlos the jacket was an interesting one. I mean that was a a sort of a you know everyone seems to have heard of of him and his exploits but um I I suppose you would have had a great inside knowledge of a far deeper knowledge of some of the things that
[1:19:11] that individual would have got up to. You know, I I teach a class I teach a graduate school class in intelligence studies at the University of Salamanca in uh Spain. And a a very important core part of this class is um one of the classes is the history of terrorism. A core part of it is Carlos. There was no more dangerous person on the planet in the 1970s as Carlos the Jackal. And I was shocked in this last iteration
[1:19:43] of the class that of my 13 students, nobody had ever heard of Carlos the Jackal. And I said, "Seriously, none of you have ever heard of Carlos the Jackal. You've never seen the movie The Day of the Jackal." And then one of them said, "Professor, we were all born after 9/11." And I said, "Oh my god, okay. Well, now I understand it." Oh, that hurts. Yeah. Because in my mind 911 was, you know, two weeks ago. Oh yeah, I know. I Ramirez Sanchez, I believe his
[1:20:15] name was. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that is right. 911. That's an interesting one. Um I suppose significant. You would have been well entrenched within the intelligence community at that time when that happened. Um interesting thing. We always talk about 911 here with the with the glitch of time zones. That was actually 912 here. Uh and and I remember that morning clearly. My children were young. I believe it was a Saturday morning here and my kids were up early wanting to watch their Saturday morning cartoons and they they came up and were complaining of course that uh they
[1:20:46] weren't able to watch it. There was strange things strange things happening on the television and my wife went down to the back room and had a look and she came back and said to me, "You have got to get up and watch this. You will not believe what's happening." And you know, John, um I mentioned that I've read a lot of Tom Clansancy movies. My first thought when I saw what was happening in New York that day was this reads like something out of one of those novels. Like I've read about this stuff in fiction, great escapism and now here it is right in front of my very eyes. I will never ever forget that day. You
[1:21:16] know, it's my parents told me, "Oh, it's exactly like like the day that John F. Kennedy was was killed. You remember exactly where you were, exactly what you were doing. You remember how it played out that day." And um I was uh I was planning to go to the White House uh with the director of counterterrorism uh Ambassador Kofer Black. We had a we had a 9:00 appointment at the White House to meet with Conda Rice. And so I got a call from the driver saying that
[1:21:46] the car was ready to take us to the White House. And I walked over to Kofheer's office to tell him that we were ready to go. and his his secretary had um a small television on her desk. In those days, you couldn't watch television on your computer. They hadn't advanced that far yet. And um I said to her, "What happened to the World Trade Center?" And she said, "A a plane flew into it." And I said, because I'm a genius, I said, "Uh, oh, you know, that happened once before in the 1930s. A
[1:22:18] bomber flew into the Empire State Building, but it was raining and foggy then. It's so crystal clear today. 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 the second tower? 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 I said, "Guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under attack. And we we ran back up to the
[1:22:51] front office and um there were TVs mounted above the office hanging down from the ceiling. So there's one on Fox, one on MSNBC, one on CNN, one on BBC, one on Penalt, one on, you know, RT and um and it was just silence. It was, you know, 200 people just standing there in complete silence like, well, we all knew it was coming. We sure didn't know it was going to happen here and here it is. Yeah, it's um I still think to this day
[1:23:21] I mean people u you know look back at that but that really was a day that really literally did change the world forever. I um and and we went on into a lot of interesting wars that you know we've sort of look back on now and and wonder whether perhaps that was the right the right move. Australia's uh prime minister at the time John Howard was in I think Washington DC on that day. uh I remember that and described it as one of the greatest acts of international bastardy uh in in world history. Um the world really did change that day and and it certainly would have
[1:23:51] changed the way that I guess not only the US military operated but certainly the intelligence community would have gone into overdrive. Oh boy did we. Um we were ordered by the CIA's police force to evacuate. Uh nobody moved and then they came back 45 minutes later and said if you don't evacuate you'll be arrested. So we all tried to evacuate. It took me 4 hours to get out of the CIA parking lot, if you can imagine. My my girlfriend, who later became my wife, was working several floors above me. So, I called her and I
[1:24:23] said, "We've been ordered to evacuate." And she said, "Yeah, we have, too." I said, "Meet me at my place." I got about halfway home and I had to abandon my car on the side of the road just because it was chaos. There was it was gridlock. You couldn't move six inches. So, I abandoned my car. I walked the rest of the way home. He and I went out and tried to donate blood, but the lines were so long at the blood mobiles that they told us it was a
[1:24:53] 24-hour wait. So, we we went to the roof of my apartment building. We watched the Pentagon burn for an hour. And then I said, "This is ridiculous. We have to get back to work." And I walked back to my car, drove back to headquarters, and then I didn't leave for four more days. I just slept underneath my desk. Everybody did that. The decision was made in very short order to invade Iraq. There's a well-known clip from General Wesley Clark. I'd like to just play it. It goes for about a minute and a half. I'm sure you've heard it a million times, but just for the benefit of our audience. Right after 9/11, about 10
[1:25:26] days after 911, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and and Deputy Secretary Wolfitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me. And one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you got to come in. You got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you're too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "You, we've made the decision. We're going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We're going to war with Iraq. Why?" He said, "I don't
[1:25:58] know." He said, "I guess they don't know what else to do." So, uh, I said, "Well, did they find some information collect connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments." And um, he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."
[1:26:28] So I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that." He said, he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. He said, "I just" He said, "I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today. and he said, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off
[1:26:59] Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, I said, "Well, don't show it to me." Now, I got to tell you, John, I I was probably like everybody else at the time. I was angry about what I'd seen. I think something like 130 Australians died in that in the tower collapses as well. And it was like, yeah, let's go ahead and get them. Absolutely. And you say it's Iraq, let's go after Iraq. But with the benefit of hindsight, uh, you know, and and that that clip is really
[1:27:29] telling. I think it was we had to be seen to be doing something. But I mean, what was the intelligence? What was the gouge on that? What was the intelligence that said we must go into Iraq now? Well, well, there there was no intelligence. Iraq had literally nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, uh, Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated the United States. Uh, there was nothing Muslim. There was nothing Islamic about Saddam Hussein. You know, there's kind of a famous story um about uh Richard
[1:27:59] Pearl, who was one of the the I'm going to use the word cabal of neoonservatives um circling the the Bush orbit there. And uh the the story is that uh that Richard Pearl had gone to the White House on the 12th of September and and told uh several people there uh you know we have to attack Iraq, right? That it was Richard Pearl who first was the one to vocalize it. we have to attack Iraq. And then when there was no intelligence
[1:28:31] to indicate that there was any uh connection between Saddam and 9/11, uh Ahmed Chalabi just made it up and passed it to the Pentagon, passed it then from the Pentagon to Dick Cheney and the decision was made. When I came back from Pakistan, I had I had been the the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. I got promoted on the strength of the Abu Zubeta capture and I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And so
[1:29:02] on my first day, I went in and half jokingly clapped my hands together and said, "Okay, so now what are we going to do?" And then very seriously, my boss said, "Well, I I actually can't tell you. You have to go up to the sixth floor. You have to sign some secrecy agreements and then come back down here and we'll talk about it." So I went up uh to to this room and uh I said, "Hey, I'm I'm here to sign my secrecy agreements. There were six of them." So I signed the six of them. And uh and I
[1:29:33] knew the security officer with whom I was dealing. I said, "So what's the big secret?" And he said, "Well, next year we're going to invade Iraq. We're gonna overthrow Saddam Hussein and we're going to open the world's largest air force base in southern Iraq so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability of to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques. And all I could think to say was, "But we haven't caught bin
[1:30:05] Laden yet. We should all be focused on Bin Laden." and he said, "Buddy, the decision has already been made and the battle lines have already been drawn." The pro-invasion faction is the office of the vice president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. And the anti-invasion faction is the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said, "We have our orders. We're going to invade Iraq." And that was I went I went back downstairs and he
[1:30:36] said, "Did you sign the secrecy agreements?" I said, 'I did.' I said, 'Are they out of their minds? And he said, 'Yes, they are out of their minds. It's, you know, you think of so many lives lost and on all sides of that conflict that that that happened as a result of that. And we're talking sort of 24 years later now, coming up 24 years later, right? Um, okay. They got they got Bin Laden in the end, but ironically, they found him in Pakistan. So, you know, like I say, at the time, it's like they had to be seen to be
[1:31:06] doing something. Um, obviously, it wasn't the right thing. I don't think they'll ever be prosecuted, but someone has to answer for this, you would think, at some point in time. You know, I used to think that there would be some sort of attempt, even if it was an unsuccessful one, at prosecuting somebody, George W. Bush, uh, uh, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney. Well, here we are, you know, 24 years later, nobody's going to be prosecuted. The victors are
[1:31:37] never prosecuted. And uh we have a million, maybe as many as 2 million people dead uh from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, frankly, that were offshoots of this, like like Somalia, for example. Um and after all these years, the Iraqi people hate us. Uh we've removed the Sunni bull work against Iran. The Iranians still hate us. Uh the Saudis are sick of us. We
[1:32:09] gain nothing from this war or for from either of the wars. We gain nothing. You know, I talked to I I've had over my time as a journalist in defense. I I I have mixed with a lot of people who've been into the Middle East area of operations, the MO as it's known here. I can't think of one of those who has not come back from that conflict quite jaded about their experiences there on whatever level they went there. So that's that's quite telling in itself. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Now John, um I should mention to our listeners, we've had a little technical glitch in the middle of this. So um people are wondering why the
[1:32:39] sound has changed a little bit, but um I'm also mindful of your time. So I I I just want to talk a little bit about you mentioned Abu Zabeta a few times. Um that was a a very big operation. I would like to talk briefly about that and and the capture of that, what you were doing at that time and the I would say the unexpected impact that that operation had on your life that you could not have known at the time. But who was Abu Zabeta? Yeah, Abu Zabeda, we were told at the time, was the number three in al-Qaeda. That was just simply not true. He was not the number three. And not
[1:33:10] only was he not the number three, he had never actually joined al-Qaeda, he was he was a bad man. He was serving as something of a logistician for al-Qaeda. He had he had created al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan. He had founded the House of Martyrs, al-Qaeda al-Qaeda's um safe house in Pashaw, Pakistan. He could get people back and forth across borders, but he had never actually joined al-Qaeda. and he was not the number three. In any
[1:33:41] event, we we captured him in uh in late March of 2002 and we we rendered him to a secret CIA prison where he was he was tortured mercilessly. Uh he was moved from secret prison to secret prison all around the world and then finally in 2005 he was sent to Guantanamo where he remains. He's never been charged with a crime. Um I uh I objected to the torture of Abu
[1:34:14] Zubeda. I believed then and I believe now that torture is illegal. It is immoral. It is unethical. And I don't care how bad the the person is. Nobody literally nobody should be subject to torture. And so I waited for somebody to say something and nobody did. Finally, to make a long story short, in 2007, I said something. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy. And I said that the policy had
[1:34:46] been personally approved by the president. So, the FBI began investigating me and determined after a year of investigation that I had not revealed classified information and they elected to not uh prosecute me. But then when Barack Obama became president three weeks later, uh, John Brennan asked him to secretly reopen the case against me. And so they investigated me for three more years. And then in January of 2012,
[1:35:18] I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for uh telling the American people that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I'm going to point some people uh at the end of this podcast to a couple of other podcasts where you've talked about this in long form and if people are uh interested in this backstory. It is it is intense and it is fascinating and about the way that operation took place uh how you went about capturing Zeda and and in fact how you were approached. Can you just talk about how you were
[1:35:48] approached about being read in on what was called enhanced interrogation uh methods because I think that's that's quite interesting. Yeah, I I I was just standing I was standing in the sandwich line in the CIA cafeteria and a senior officer from the counterterrorism center came up to me and he said, "Hey, I'm so glad I ran into you." And very casually, he said, "Would you be interested in being trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" Well, I have never heard that term before. And I
[1:36:18] said, "Well, what does that mean?" And he said, "We're going to start getting rough with these guys." And I said, 'Well, what does that mean? And then he described these 10 techniques that were clearly a torture program. I sought the advice of a of an even more senior officer. And then I went back downstairs and I said I said, "Look, this is a torture program and I don't want any part of it." And um I was actually passed over for promotion because I I declined. And engaging in torture is, as I understand
[1:36:49] it, it's not constitutional. That's that's the the legal side of it. Is that is that how that works? Well, yes and no. I mean, even even if a constitutional attorney or a federal judge rules that the that the constitution doesn't specifically mention it, we have several other laws that clearly outlaw it. We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically bans exactly those techniques that were used. Um, we have the, uh, United Nations Convention
[1:37:19] Against Torture, which not only are we signitories to, but we actually wrote. Um, and we have a history where where we actually executed Japanese soldiers in 1946 who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. And well, the law never changed. So, how was it that that torture was illegal in 1946 and then all of a sudden like magic in 2002? Um, it's it's, you know, suddenly
[1:37:52] perfectly fine. There is another XCIA guy or some people say probably still a CIA guy. I don't know. I know you've been on podcast with this gentleman. Um, his name's Andrew now. I can't pronounce his surname. Is it Bora Monte? Is that how you pronounce Boram Monte? Yeah. He strikes me as an intense and very intelligent man. I have watched a very willing debate between you and he where you discuss the difference between the what I might term the whatever it takes philosophy because hey they they didn't play by the rules when they went after us versus the we must keep it within the bounds of the law philosophy which is
[1:38:22] where you're coming from and I remember you describing him as a true believer. Um how do we how do we balance that? If we need to be able to get information out of these people there's got to be a way to do it. We obviously always have to maintain that we are better than them and stay within the bounds of the law. So, it's an interesting two-sided coin. Well, I it and it's a rather easy answer to tell you the truth. The FBI, for as much as we at the CIA or formerly at the CIA uh dislike them, they're really,
[1:38:53] really good at interrogation. And they've been doing this since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 46. They're really good at it. And what they do is they establish a rapport with the prisoner. And sometimes that takes days, sometimes weeks, months, sometimes years. But if you treat a person with respect and instead of offering him a punch in the face, you offer him a cup of tea and show that respect, eventually he's going to open up to you. Uh, we should have we should
[1:39:24] have allowed the FBI to do what they're trained to do, to do what they're what they're good at doing, and we should have let them uh continue to interrogate Abubeta rather than forcing the FBI to turn him over to the CIA and then just uh just wreck the whole case from there. And and as a as a a consequence of this CIA decision to torture, literally nothing that Abu Zuba or Khalik Muhammad or any of the other prisoners said under torture can be used against them in court. And so they're in this limbo,
[1:39:56] this no man's land where they can't be released because they they're considered to be dangerous, but they can't be prosecuted because everything they said was as a result of torture. So the result for them is they spend the rest of their time in in Guantanamo or wherever it is they are. That's right. Yeah. Interesting. What how how was your stance viewed within your contemporaries within the intelligence community? I imagine some would have been supportive and some would have not been supportive. Oh yeah, you're you're exactly right. It was pretty well split. But I will say
[1:40:28] that I very arrogantly said back in 2007 that they can prosecute me if they want, but I am on the right side of this issue. I am on the right side of history. And now here we are all these years later and my detractors at the CIA have either retired or they've died. And my side of the story is the side of record. Now my side is what is being taught in CIA training classes. I was asked to give a speech on battlefield ethics at the uh at the US military
[1:41:01] academy at West Point and that was an invitation by the the common dant himself a a three star lieutenant general. So I like to think that I did the right thing. You certainly paid a heavy price. They they sent you to prison for a couple of years. Yeah. Two two years. 23 months I was in prison. And you know what? I don't regret one second of it. I would do it again tomorrow. Yeah. Well, there you go. That's that's certainly a demonstration of someone who stands for their principles and I I I respect you for that. Absolutely. Thank you. Well, John,
[1:41:31] um with with the unfortunate technical glitch we've had and we spent a lot of time talking, I really appreciate it. There's so many more things I'd love to talk to you about. I'd love to uh to do it again. Um you're doing a speaking tour coming up going around uh around the world and you're coming here to Australia. I I am and I'm very excited to come to Australia. Um, this is through uh a Londonbased production company called Tigerslane Studios. So, it's tigerslanestudios.com and they've um they're in the process of arranging a
[1:42:02] 150 speech around the world tour. I'm starting off in the UK and Ireland and I hope to come to Australia around the 1st of July. Uh after Australia, we go to New Zealand and then Canada and then back to back to Europe. But it's exciting and it's going to be a lot of fun and and I'm going to go into detail on all these stories. I'm so looking forward to that. You know what? You're going to be here in July and I'm going to be in your part of the world in July. So, I regret that I may miss you unfortunately. Uh people can find you of
[1:42:34] course on your Substack. Uh tell us about your Substack and other podcasts that you've been involved in. Yeah. Um my Substack is easy. It's John Kuryaku.substack.com. Everything I do, I put on Substack, but I I'm also um involved with a an online TV show at something called Unified TV. It's unifyd television. There's a show called CIA Declassified that I do and we use declassified original CIA documents to try to tell some of these these
[1:43:05] confusing historical stories like did the CIA uh kill Salvador Yende? The answer is yes. Did the CIA did the CIA um you know overthrow the uh South Vietnamese government? The answer is yes. Again, um but we use the CIA's own document to uh to fill in some of the gaps on these stories. Joe Keryak, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and I I hope we can do it again in the future. Thank you, Steve. I look forward
[1:43:35] to doing it again very soon. Thank you. The clear signal. Well, there we are. Wasn't that great? Uh, so many topics covered off there. And, uh, I got to tell you, uh, had we not experienced that rather annoying recording system glitch. I had a stack more I could have added to that list. And, uh, John has actually really generously offered to come back and chat another time, uh, on another show. And, uh, I'm I'm going to take him up on that obviously, and I'm already really looking forward to that. I really hope you enjoyed that interview. Again, if
[1:44:06] you have some questions for John Kuryaku, please do send them through to me. That email address once again is steve@clearss signal.com.au. Now uh during that interview I did mention that John's featured heavily on a number of other podcasts and he does that quite regularly. In fact, if you want to spend some more time hearing about his career in far more detail and I got to say by that I do mean five or six hours of content each time around. I highly recommend having a search for John on one of either the Julian Dory podcast that's dy uh the Dalton Fischer podcast
[1:44:38] or the Danny Jones podcasts. There's many others, but any of those three are the ones that I've watched in depth. They're excellent and they're really compelling discussions and uh some of the things uh John's been up to in his career, which we really only had time to touch on lightly in this uh this podcast. Uh they're just absolutely mind-blowing. And like I say, the sort of stuff that you'd read in a Tom Clansancy novel or something like that. But uh this is stuff that's really happened in real life. It's it's just amazing to think that sort of stuff goes on. I did mention there too the debate that he had with another ex agency operator who's doing really well in the