[00:00] We had um $2 million in cash in the van with us in two duffel bags and my colleague said, "What would possess you to cheat the CIA out of 20 bucks? If you're going to steal, steal millions." And we looked at each other and laughed. Yeah. It'd be a little hard to pass the polygraph on that, right? [Music] Today I am honored to welcome to the Dr.
[00:30] Phil podcast a true patriot, whistleblower and author John Keryaku. Now John is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and played a key role in counterterrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 and beyond. John felt compelled to expose some practices being employed by the CIA that he just did not
[01:00] feel morally comfortable with. We're talking about things that he considered to be outright torture, such things as water boarding, for example. Now, some of these disclosures I'm going to say led to his indictment, and I'm not sure that that's exactly right. We'll let him describe what he thinks led to his indictment. There's what was said publicly that led to his indictment and,
[01:31] you know, a lot of things behind the scenes that may have led to the indictment. We'll let him talk about that in a minute. But the indictment was by the Obama administration and it was under the Espionage Act. Now, that's a law designed to punish spies. I don't think anybody ever accused him of being a spy, but nonetheless, that was the act that was imposed. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture
[02:02] program. Now, John is a best-selling author of The Reluctant Spy and Doing Time Like a Spy. John received the Joe A. Callaway Award for civic courage and continues to champion human rights and transparency. Boy, transparency has become a real important issue in this day and time. Now, beyond his career in intelligence and writing, John continues to advocate for human rights, transparency, and the ethical
[02:34] treatment of whistleblowers like himself. John, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Phil. Such a pleasure for me. Well, you have been a busy guy in your profession. A couple of quotes that I want to attribute to you, and you can own them or not. I want to be sure I'm right. One is you said I exposed the CIA and went to prison for it. That something you said. Uh it is. You said there are some
[03:06] things we should not do even in the name of national security. Is that something you said? Indeed it is. All right. This is something that you took very seriously in your life. Why did you go into the CIA? Were you recruited? I was recruited in graduate school, but to tell you the truth, I was only considering uh jobs in public service. I'm the grandson of four uh uh
[03:38] grandparents who immigrated to this country from Greece. And in our household while I was growing up, uh it was instilled in all of us really that that we owed this country such a great debt of thanks for giving us a new life in this wonderful country that we needed to pay that debt back. And so my parents were elementary school teachers in the public school system and they instilled in us the notion that we should go into public service as well. So, you went
[04:10] into public service, but you didn't sit around in the sandbox as a kid envisioning yourself being a CIA agent. Actually, I did uh when I was nine, I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up, and they bought me uh walkie-talkies for for Christmas that year. I remember Yeah. And then when I was 16, I said specifically, I I remember telling my father that not only did I want to be a spy, but I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. And so I um
[04:43] I went to George Washington University and got a an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies. Uh, I stayed at GW for a master's degree in legislative affairs, but with a concentration in foreign policy analysis, thinking if I can't get into the CIA, I'll go to Capitol Hill or I'll go to the foreign service. And then, as it turned out, my graduate school advisor uh, who gave me an A on a paper, it was a psychology exam, asked me to, he wrote
[05:14] in the in the margin of the paper, please see me after class. So I went to see him and he said, 'Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer? And I jumped at the chance and the next thing I knew, I had my right hand in the air and I was swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. Wow. So he was he was kind of taking a
[05:44] chance cuz he was undercover. So, he was actually, let's talk about that for a minute because I have an issue with some of what's going on in the elite universities of the United States right now. And I'm wondering if we're sending our kids to get educated or indoctrinated. What do you say about that? Right. that is going to be a fight that we are going to have to fight from here
[06:16] on out. I will say that the way that I was uh uh recruited into the CIA is no longer legal. With passage in 1993 of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, you can't do this old boy network. But what they do now is they just do it out in public. The CIA created this this uh program called the Scholar and Residence Program. So if you've done your 25 or 30 years, you're planning to retire, they'll send you back to your alma mater for 2 or 3 years, you can teach some meaningless class like a friend of mine
[06:48] went back to Indiana Indiana University and taught uh espionage in Soviet literature and uh and students will just go up to him after class and say, "Hey, I'd love to get into the CIA." And he makes a recommendation. So rather than do it to do it behind closed doors like they did it with me, they just do it out in the open now. Okay. So we actually do have professors in universities now that
[07:18] aren't necessarily who they seem to be. Correct. They are actually operatives, CIA operatives or maybe from other agencies that are there to indoctrinate, to recruit. What What are they there for? Why are they in those roles? Oh, it's a combination of the two. They're always looking for people with hard foreign languages or people who have an aptitude for difficult foreign languages. They're looking for people who are patriotic on
[07:51] their face, patriotic, and if they think that you can fit into that culture, and it's it's deeper than just, you know, fitting into the culture. I I've said uh in many podcasts that a CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Because, of course, sociopaths have no conscience. They blow right through a polygraph exam, but they're impossible to control. People who have sociopathic tendencies
[08:23] do have a conscience. They do react to the polygraph, but at the same time, they're happy to operate in these moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. I I remember when I was when I was going through the interview process, um there were four or five of us there and uh and the instructor said, "Let's say you're a CIA officer and you get a cable from headquarters telling you to uh recruit the Indonesian economic secretary because you need some Indonesian
[08:54] economic information." And you cultivate this relationship for a year. you become friends, your wives become friends, you vacation together, but you you come to realize that he's not recruitable. What do you do? And a guy put his hand up in the air and said, "Well, you double down. You do it another 6 months." A woman raised her hand and said, "Uh, maybe you can work it through the wives." And I'm looking around looking at these people. I put my hand up and I said, "You break into the embassy and you steal it." And the instructor said, "That's exactly what you do." Well, I
[09:27] came to learn that's a sociopathic tendency. Do you have sociopathic tendencies? Probably. Uh, I was perfectly happy to break into people's homes or offices overseas and plant bugs or plant cameras. I was perfectly happy to convince people that I was their best friend to the point where they were w willing to commit espionage for me or in some cases treason because I believed we were the good guys and I was doing this
[09:58] uh for the safety and security of of Americans and American installations. And so I never gave it a second thought beyond the fact that we were the good guys. Life is full of surprises and emergencies often strike when we least expect them. But preparation is key and that's where Jace Casease comes in. With Jace Casease, you'll have essential emergency prescription medications right at your fingertips, ready when you need
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[17:18] this recruitment an actual chance. And I recruited him. This was a a group that no that the CIA had never infiltrated before, but I took it slowly. I did the research and uh and found success. Right. And that's a chance you wouldn't take today. No, it's not a chance I would take today. I kick myself. Well, you have five children now, right? So, I have five children, right? And I think they would be quite upset with me. Yeah. You look at it a little differently when you have kids. They reward you for that kind
[17:48] of thing. But you say that when you go into the CIA, there is no class on morality. They don't sit down and go over ethics with you. They look for results, not how you get them. That's exactly right. And that was something that bothered me for a very long time. Although I never had to really do anything about it until the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. That's when things changed, not just for me, but it changed for the agency. It changed in a big and permanent way. They
[18:19] started playing a different kind of ball. They started playing hard ball. They started being more desperate to get information. Is that the shift? That's right. Let's cut to the chase. Your savings could be in serious trouble. When Elon Musk is out here warning us to brace for temporary hardship, you might want to listen. I trust Preserve Gold to safeguard my accounts, and I urge you to do the same. They're the only precious metals company I recommend. Are you going to sit back
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[19:21] 5050. That's Dr. Phill to 5050 today. Before 9/11, we had literally zero uh penetrations of al-Qaeda. In fact, several months before 9/11, I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern uh intelligence officers at headquarters. This was something that we did literally every single day. We would have these delegations of visitors from our partners around the world. We would give them a day full of briefings. We
[19:51] would exchange gifts, take them up to the director's office for a photo op, and then we take them out to a nice dinner afterwards. We would do this with different groups every single day. And so I had scheduled an al-Qaeda briefing for this delegation. This was July the 6th, 2001. I still remember the date. And I asked the junior al-Qaeda analyst just come in, give these guys just the basic briefing. Instead of the junior analyst coming, the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center,
[20:22] Ambassador Kofer Black, showed up with the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden unit. And I I stood up and I said, "Oh, gentlemen." And I said, "This is Ambassador Kofheer Black. He's the director of of counterterrorism." And and Kofheer sat down and said, "Something terrible is going to happen. We don't know what it is. We don't know where it'll be, but we know it's going to be an attack on a massive scale." He said, "We're hearing code words for an enormous attack. The honey salesman is
[20:54] coming with vast quantities of honey. There's going to be a great football match. There's going to be a a huge wedding. We're hearing al-Qaeda camp commanders on the phone with their students and they're crying and telling their students, "I'll see you in paradise." He said, "I'm begging you if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda. Please help us." And at the end of the day, I went to his office to thank him for taking the time to come and speak to these men. And I said, "Kepher, I have
[21:24] to ask you, I don't work on al-Qaeda. Were you saying that for their benefit or were you serious? And he said, "Oh, I was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen." And then sure enough, 9/11 came and it played out in front of us. This meeting was for what purpose? Why was he there giving this information? because we were so desperate to to penetrate al-Qaeda and we had no uh no operations or cases that
[21:56] were entrained to lead us to a penetration. And he believed that an attack was nearly upon us that he thought, well, I'm going to throw a Hail Mary and just ask these random Middle Eastern intelligence officers if they have anybody inside al-Qaeda that we don't know about. Maybe they can help us. And they couldn't. Nobody could. They didn't know or they weren't willing. They didn't know. Al-Qaeda really wasn't their problem. Uh al-Qaeda had no no
[22:26] problem, no beef with with this service. you know, we caught so many al-Qaeda people in these operations in Pakistan that I headed after 9/11 that and they all told the same story that that they actually made it quite plain for me. Um, at at the the grunt level, I'm talking about the 18year-olds, the 19year-olds, right? They all told basically the same story. They were they were illiterate. They lived in isolated villages in their home countries and they wanted to get
[22:57] married. But what man would want his daughter to marry someone who can't read and write, who has no job prospects, no skills of any kind? So the local imam went to them and said, "You don't want to stay in this village. You should go to Afghanistan and make jihad against the Americans, and we'll give you $300 a month, and if you're martyed, we'll give your parents $500 as a martyrdom bonus." Well, they couldn't find the United States on a map. But $300 is better than no dollars. And so they made their way
[23:28] to Afghanistan to fight the Americans at a higher level, the camp commanders, the al-Qaeda leadership. It really all started well for two reasons. One, because we established military bases in Saudi Arabia. That's what Osama bin Laden objected to personally. But for many of the other al-Qaeda leaders, it was because we we were so staunchly pro- Israel in our foreign policy that they saw this as a way to get back at us to to pay us back for turning our backs in
[24:01] their view on on poor Arabs. That's a different take than a lot of people here. So this was a retaliation and these al Qaeda that were going into Afghanistan to fight, they had no beef with America, they were just going there for the job. They were just going there for the job. In fact, when I first arrived in Pakistan in January of 2002, the very first counterterrorist raid that I led on a on what we believed
[24:31] to be an al-Qaeda safe house led us to capture two 18year-olds from Tunisia. And as soon as we broke down the door, they both burst into tears. And one of them asked if he could call his mom. And I remember turning to a colleague of mine and saying, "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we've been so afraid of. These are children." And so I just kind of filed it. We would do raid after raid after raid. And sometimes we would catch more
[25:03] important people. Like I said, camp commanders uh were the the first significant captures that we had made. But these guys, like I say, illiterate, had no idea what the United States was about, where it was located, couldn't name who the president was. This was just a way to earn some money. Yeah. And when you recruited some of these terrorist informants, they had to be high enough up that they knew something to be of value, right? Yes.
[25:35] Correct. These weren't the 18-year-old grunts. These were people that were high enough up to do some planning and that sort of thing. Did you have any guidelines with how you recruited them, what you could do and not do? No. And that that is one of the things that I like to lecture about at colleges and universities. There were no guidelines. I mean certainly there would be financial guidelines. 95% of the recruitments that a CIA operations officer makes are for money. It's all
[26:06] about the money. And it can be $1,000 a month. It can be $20,000 a month. It can be a lump sum for $10 million. We can pay it in diamonds or gold or any way that you want to receive it. But there was no guideline as to what to do ethically or morally. One of the examples that I use in in speeches when I go to universities is I say, "Let's say you are a CIA operations officer and you've recruited a bonafide terrorist, a
[26:39] member of ISIS or Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda, it doesn't matter what it is, and this man has given you actionable intelligence that you have used to disrupt attacks and to save American lives." And then you fly out to the Middle East one month to meet him and he says to you, "I've given you everything that you've wanted tonight. You're going to do something for me. You're going to go out and you're going to get me a prostitute. And if you don't, I'm not going to talk to you anymore." So I say, "Give me a show of hands. How many of
[27:11] you would get give him the prostitute?" And usually about 80% put their hands up in the air. And I say, "Yeah, in real life, you probably would get him the prostitute. It's not very nice. It's a kind of a dirty business, but this is the this is the job that we've chosen for ourselves. But what if he asks you for a child prostitute?" And people get nervous. They'll look around. About 10% will put their hand up and I say, "Absolutely not. Not under any
[27:44] circumstances. It's a child for God's sake. But the issue here is that there are no rules. Remember, your job while overseas is to break the law. Your job is to convince people to commit espionage for you. Your job is to get people to give you classified information or protected information. It's not to to it's not to disrupt human trafficking. But you have to go into this situation with your own set of moral values. You
[28:15] have to know what the right thing to do is because headquarters isn't going to tell you. They're not going to say, "Oh, remember uh employee rule number 305 says you can't provide child prostitutes." You have to know in your heart what's right and what's wrong. But that's up to you. That's up to the individual. So, if you've got somebody that just doesn't have a real good moral compass, they just don't find true north on their compass and they want that information, they're going to do
[28:46] whatever they need to do to get it. That's exactly right. And sometimes there are there are employees who can't turn it off. You know, every 10 years or so, you'll see in the Washington Post or the New York Times that a CIA employee, almost always an operations officer has been arrested for sexual assault or for embezzlement or something like that because they just don't have a moral compass. I remember one of my uh station chiefs telling me early on in my career, "Never lie to security, finance, or
[29:18] medical. They're the three offices that could ruin your life." Well, it's actually more than that. Never lie to yourself. Never lie to your station chief, right? You've got to bounce ideas off of somebody to give you a second opinion. Because if somehow you wake up one morning and you think it's all right to put a roofy in in a woman's drink at a cocktail party and assault her afterwards, which has happened, then you
[29:48] need somebody to to check your thought process. You kind of have the same process. Whether you're recruiting somebody for the agency or you're recruiting somebody that's an enemy asset, you kind of follow the same procedure, right? Yes. You spot them, you assess them, you assess their vulnerabilities, you develop a relationship, and then you ultimately recruit them. It's the same procedure whether you're doing it for the agency or you're recruiting some terrorist that
[30:21] you want to give you secrets. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. When you say assess their vulnerabilities, what are you looking for? Vulnerabilities are probably the most important. And they're not necessarily as awful as they might seem. A vulnerability may be that a person, you know, is a drunk or is a drug addict or or hates his boss and is is angry for being uh passed over for promotion. But more commonly, a vulnerability is this guy really loves
[30:53] his children and he doesn't make very much money. And at the CIA, we can get your child enrolled in any university in America, quite literally any university in America, and the CIA will pay for it. So if you want your child to go to Harvard or Stanford or one guy asked Strayer College, we'll do it. Um, another vulnerability is uh somebody who just really loves the United States.
[31:26] I recruited a an agent one time who would not take a single dollar from me and didn't want any favors like a college education for his children or grandchildren. He just loved the United States and he enjoyed the excitement, the clandestinity of uh of meeting um and then you know sometimes you'll get somebody whose spouse has cancer or some dread disease and by God you can get them into the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic and and they'll give
[31:57] you anything that you want so long as you can you can provide medical care. So that's what you're assessing in that in that development. uh stage or the assessment and development stage. What can I give this person that is going to make him want to give me what I want? And how do you get them into the university? How do you get them into say Harvard or University of Texas or wherever? How does the CIA do that? The CIA has agreements with
[32:29] uh just well every university almost every university in America uh with every you know Fortune 1000 or Fortune 1500 uh company in America and you know university administrators and corporate leaders they're they're patriots as well and they want to do whatever they can to be helpful. I I'll give you another example. I I recruited a guy who was absolutely crazy for the Chicago Bulls and I got him a basketball autographed
[33:01] by Michael Jordan. I just bought it at at the, you know, the NBA store online and had it shipped out to me. And I told him, "Listen, you know, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows Michael Jordan. And we told Michael Jordan all about you." and he autographed this basketball and I put it in this acrylic box. He couldn't give me the information I wanted fast enough and he didn't take any money for it. It was just because I was so thoughtful, he said that I gave
[33:34] him this basketball because I knew how much he loved the Chicago Bulls. So, you find what their currency is, what they're interested in, and then you find a way to get it to them. That's exactly right. And money is not a particular barrier when you're going after somebody that the agency values. No. No. I I'm smiling because we used to have this saying that intelligence is a cash business and cash is not a problem. uh you know during during the
[34:05] Afghanistan war in the very early days of the Afghanistan war we were literally throwing money out of the side of helicopters and it led to this joke at the agency that you can't buy an Afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one and that's what the agency did. So, if they get a million dollars to rent a warlord and it's cash, how do you know they didn't rent them for 750 and keep 250? That is a great question. And I
[34:36] will tell you, over the course of my entire career, I never saw or heard of anybody taking a single dollar. Again, we're doing this out of a sense of patriotism and duty. Now, when you're meeting with a with a source and you give him his monthly pay, which of course is always in cash, he signs a receipt and the receipt you it's perfectly fine if he signs Mickey Mouse. He never signs his real name. You tell him just pick a name, stick with that
[35:06] name, and uh you know, that's what he signs every month. Uh but you're going to be polygraphed on this, too. And they're going to ask you, have you ever misappropriated uh funds? I think the question is, have you ever misappropriated more than $20? That's what they asked me on the polygraph. And by God, you have to be able to say no. And you have to be able to say it with a clear conscience. So, they do check. Oh, yeah. In fact, Dr. Phil, I remember uh when we had a colleague of mine and I were setting out to um to drive to
[35:38] Fiselabad, Pakistan. This was about two weeks before we captured Abu Zuba. and we had um $2 million in cash in the van with us in two duffel bags. And my colleague said, "You know, I could never understand why people would cheat on their on their accounting paperwork for for 20 bucks or 30 bucks. What would possess you to cheat the the CIA out of 20 bucks? If you're going to steal, steal millions." And we looked at each other and laughed. And I said, "Yeah, I
[36:09] I wouldn't even steal the millions." and he said, "No, neither would I." Yeah. It' be a little hard to pass a polygraph on that, right? That's right. But it's not unfathomable for a highlevel source. I know in Zero Dark 30 they have a scene in there and they're trying to get a source to come up with a phone number and he wants a Lamborghini. So, they just get him a Lamborghini in the middle of the night. That's not far-fetched. No. No. That's actually easy. You just
[36:39] take a big sack of money over to the Lamborghini dealership by the airport and next thing you know you've got a Lamborghini. Yes. He's happy and you got the phone number you want or the information you want and moving on. Exactly. Right. All it's all in the name of the of the successful operation. All of it. Yeah. I remember just after 911 uh I I went up to Ambassador Black and I said, "Keoffer, I wanted to talk to you if you have a minute. I have an idea for an operation." And before I could get the words out of my mouth, he put his
[37:10] hands up and he said, "Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all." And that that continued for years after the 9/11 attacks. Really? And where did that money come from? Congress couldn't appropriate it fast enough. Um, we were we were receiving multibillion dollar supplemental appropriations. So we had our our fixed budget that that the oversight committees had or the
[37:40] appropriations committee had appropriated and the oversight committees had authorized and then literally the day after 9/11 we got something like 160% supplemental uh appropriation and then got another one again at the end of the year. We really couldn't spend it all. And you had no problem with that. to you that's business and you're doing what you have to do to get what you need to get. When was the first time you became aware of and had a problem with I guess we'll
[38:13] call them enhanced interrogation techniques. I had an inkling when I was still in Pakistan. Uh, we we captured so many al-Qaeda fighters on the night of the Abuvea capture that we had to bring them into our safe house for interrogation in shifts in a patty wagon. And the first group of 10 came out of the patty wagon and they were all wearing hoods. And I said to one of the one of my colleagues, he was working for me. I said, "Why why are they hooded?" And he said, "We don't
[38:45] want them to see our faces." And I I got angry and I said,"Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. Take the hoods off." And he said, "Stop. Don't take the hoods off." And I said, "I'm going to report you to to headquarters." And he said, "I'm going to report you to headquarters." I said, "Fine." And I took the hoods off and we reported each other to headquarters and I was reprimanded. So, I thought, "Wow, well,
[39:17] the Geneva Convention is crystal clear that hooding a prisoner is a war crime. I guess it's a new world. I'm going to have to get used to it." But then I got back from Pakistan in May of 2002 and I was standing in the in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria and a senior officer walked up to me very casually and he said, "Hey, I'm glad I ran into you. would you be interested in being trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? I had never heard that term before? And I
[39:49] said,"Enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean?" And he said very seriously, he said, "We're going to start getting rough with these guys." And I said, "Well, what does that mean?" And he described these 10 techniques. And I said, "That sounds like a torture program." And he said, "No, it's not torture. The Justice Department approved it and the president signed off on it. I said, "Uh, give me an hour. I need an hour to think about it." So, I I just walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor of the CIA, which
[40:19] was the executive floor. There was an extraordinarily senior officer up there for whom I had worked in the Middle East 10 years earlier. And I knocked on his door and I said, I said, "Hey, I need some advice. Uh, I was just asked if I want to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. what do you think of that? And he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade. He said, this is a torture program, and torture is a slippery slope. And you know how these guys are. Somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a
[40:50] congressional investigation, and there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? And I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. So, I went back downstairs and I said, "Look, I have an ethical and moral problem with this and I think it's illegal. I'm not interested." And I'm sorry to tell you that of the 14 people that were approached, I was the only one who said no. And so, I I had a friend in the counterterrorism center who he
[41:21] happens to be a psychiatrist and a brigadier general, and we go to the same church. We're in the same men's group. and he came up to me uh a few days later and he said, 'You know they're calling you the human rights guy behind your back. I said, 'Yeah, I know. I've heard it. And he said, 'You know that's not a compliment, right? And I said, Steve, I don't care. I'm on the right side of this and they are not, and I'm sticking with my guns. What were some of the 10 on the list? Well, it started off with a few that were very mild. I I would not
[41:53] consider to be uh torture where, you know, you grab somebody by the lapels and give them a shake and say, "Answer my questions, dog on you." Um, and then it graduated to a smack on the belly. It was called an attention slap cuz it leaves a handprint. It makes a loud cracking sound. Then it was a slap in the face. But but it graduated to things like um water boarding where the prisoner is strapped down uh on a board. His feet are elevated compared to his
[42:24] his head. U cloth is put in his mouth and then water is poured on his face and it's supposed to induce a feeling of of drowning. In fact, in the case of Abu Zabeta, he did drown and had to be revived uh because too much water had gotten down his throat. his heart stopped beating. But then there were a couple of other things that I believed were worse than uh water boarding. One was called the cold cell where a prisoner was stripped naked. He was
[42:54] chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling like this. His cell was chilled to 50° Fahrenheit and then every hour a CIA officer would go into the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him. And we we murdered several prisoners that way. Uh they they died of hypothermia. There was another one um that sounds like it's no big deal, but it was sleep deprivation. So again, you're stripped naked, chained to that eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't kneel or lay or
[43:26] get comfortable in any way. Um loud acid rock music is is uh is uh pumped into the cell. All these industrial strength lights are on 24 hours a day. Well, we know that this is according to the American Psychological Association, the APA, that people begin to lose their minds around day seven with no sleep. They begin to die around day nine, die of organ failure. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for up
[43:58] to 12 days. And people died because of that uh that technique as well. So I said, "Listen, you know, this this is so clearly illegal." I had done some research on my own. We we have a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically outlawed exactly those techniques that the CIA was now using. And in fact, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS during the Second World War.
[44:30] Furthermore, in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that that picture was published, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Levvenworth. And then like magic in 2002 all these things are suddenly legal. Well, we never we never amended the law. The law
[45:02] never changed. We changed. We took on this this air of victimhood that because we were the good guys and we lost 3,000 civilians on September 11th. That it was okay for us to do this because we had to stop this existential threat that al-Qaeda had become. And once you became aware of all this going on, how did you become a whistleblower? How did you actually do it? Only very reluctantly. And I'll tell you, I wish that I could
[45:34] tell you that I stood up and I told them, you know, that's not the way it happened at all. This was clearly illegal in my view. So I waited for somebody who was directly involved in the torture uh to come forward and go public. I actually got promoted on the strength of the Abu Zubeta capture and I I was promoted to become the uh executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. So in that position, it's such a stressful position
[46:06] that you can only do it for a year. You know, you're in the office at 3:45 a.m. You're briefing the deputy director at 6:00. You brief the director at 7. So, it's it's tough. Uh, but it also gave me access to literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world for that one year. And so, I'm following this enhanced interrogation situation at a secret prison overseas. And um I kept waiting for somebody to to come uh forward and and blow the whistle on it
[46:36] because people were writing in classified channels, hey, I'm a I'm a medical doctor. I took a hypocratic oath. this is not what I signed up for. I'm not doing this. I quit. I want to come back to headquarters. So, there were, you know, dozens of people objecting to this program. I thought certainly somebody's going to say something and nobody did. Finally, I resigned um to go into the the private sector. I wasn't making enough money to
[47:06] put five kids through college, so I had to I had to do something different. And two and a half years after I resigned, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. I had never spoken to a journalist before. So I didn't know about these journalist tricks, but he said that he had a source who said that I had uh I had tortured Abu Zubed. I said absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubeda. I said I never laid a hand on Abu Zubed or
[47:37] on any other prisoner. your your source is either grossly misinformed or he's a liar. And like I said, I didn't know these reporters tricks. And Brian Ross said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." I said, "Ah, yeah, I'll think about it." A couple of days later, President George W. Bush is giving a press conference. And he looked right in the camera and he said, "We do not torture like that." And I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, I said, "He is looking the
[48:10] American people in the eye and he's lying to them." And then two days later, it was a Friday and the president had walked out of the South Portico of the White House. He was walking to the helicopter to go to uh Camp David and a reporter shouted a question about torture and the president stopped and turned and said, "Well, if there is torture, it's becau it's because of a rogue CIA officer." And I told my wife, "Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin
[48:40] this on me." So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll do your show." And I decided in the four or five days, you know, between that call and the show that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth and let the cards fall where they may. And that's how it happened. So you went on ABC News interview. You said what you said about what was going on and clearly stated you didn't involve yourself in torture. You
[49:13] were recruited. You were asked to do it, declined. Correct. But you didn't deny that it was going on. Correct. I said three things that that that caused the controversy. I said that the CIA was torture against prisoners. I said that prisoners were um that um I'm sorry, CIA was torturing prisoners. That that torture was official US government policy. There was no rogue CIA officer. and I said that the policy had been personally approved
[49:43] by the president. And here's where it gets weird. A, as you might expect, the the CIA uh filed what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had revealed classified information to the public. So, the FBI investigated me from December of 2007 to December of 2008. And then in December of 2008, they they sent my attorneys a declination letter declining to prosecute me. They said that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
[50:15] International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, Red Cross had all published papers saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that it was the worst kept secret in Washington. So, they declined to prosecute. My wife and I actually went out to dinner that night to celebrate. And then three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan as the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John and I always disliked each other. I never
[50:46] trusted him. I never liked him. And he was one of the godfathers of the torture program. All of a sudden, he's pretending to be whatever he is, a Democrat. I don't know. I had no idea that within days of Obama's inauguration, John Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And so for the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were intercepted, and
[51:16] teams of FBI agents um followed me everywhere I went, even into church. We learn later we we received 15,000 pages of discovery after I was charged. I was charged in January of of 2012 with five felonies including three counts of espionage. And remember espionage can be a death penalty charge and I had three counts. So, we we learned in Discovery that Brennan had written a memo to Eric
[51:48] Holder, the attorney general, and he said, "Charge him with espionage." And Eric Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." And so they did. And then 10 months later, I went bankrupt under the weight of $1.15 million in legal fees. And as soon as I went bankrupt, they dropped the espionage charges. Well, didn't Brennan
[52:19] concede in writing that there was absence of any evidentiary foundation for the charge? He sure did. And you know, I'm I'm proud to say that as terrible an experience as this was, as difficult an experience as this was, not just for me, but for my wife and my children, um I knew I was right. And so what they ended up doing was because
[52:52] there there was no I hadn't leaked any classified information, they found an email exchange that I had with an author. An author reached out to me saying he was writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition. Abu Omar was a Muslim cleric in Milan, Italy, and the CIA kidnapped him and sent him to Egypt. And he was tortured in Egypt. And then the Egyptians came back to us and said, "This is the wrong guy. We don't know who this guy is. We're just going to let him go." So, he was writing a book about
[53:24] this operation. And he wrote to me to ask if I could introduce him to uh to somebody who knew the Abu Omar case. And I said I said, "Listen, kidnapping wasn't my thing at the agency. I don't know anybody who was involved in this case." So, he sent me a list of a dozen names. He said, "Can you introduce me to any of these people?" I said, "I don't know who any of these people are." He sent me a second email with another dozen names. And I told him, "You obviously know this case better than I do. I only know what I've read in the Washington Post." And he said, "Well, in
[53:55] your first book on page whatever it was, 165, you talk about this guy, John. Can you introduce me to him?" And I said, "John? Oh, yeah." I said, "You're talking about John Do." I said, "I don't know what ever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. That was a felony. That was a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Now, that law had only been invoked once for a spy, a woman, a CIA
[54:30] secretary who was sleeping with a member of the Ganaan Intelligence Service. And she gave him the names of all of the recruited agents in Ghana. and the government executed them. The law was never again used uh against anybody until me. And because they couldn't get me on espionage, they said, "Well, we'll get him on this." And the Justice Department said, "Well, wait a minute. He didn't actually expose the name. He just confirmed the name." And Brennan said, "Run with it."
[55:03] And so they did. In the end, my wife and I, well, I got a what the Justice Department called the best and final offer of uh 23 months. See if this description is right. After the ABC News interview, Keryaku exchanged emails with a freelance writer. In the emails, he disclosed the name of a former CIA colleague who had participated in the detention and interrogation program. The employee at
[55:34] the time was at the time still undercover. The freelance writer then shared the name with the lawyers representing detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The name then appeared in a sealed legal filing submitted by the defense attorneys. Although the name was not made public at the time, the disclosure angered federal officials and the resulting federal investigation led
[56:05] to Karyaku's arrest. The name that was disclosed appeared on the New York Times website in October of 2011. So, what they're saying here in this account is that the name that you confirmed was only disclosed in sealed legal filings and was not made public at the time that you didn't make the name public. No, no, I didn't make the name public.
[56:36] And you know, one of the things that really stung at the time was while I was going through this whole ordeal awaiting trial, the director of the CIA, um, uh, General, uh, David Petraeus, revealed the names of 10 undercover CIA operatives to his girlfriend and biographer. Yet he was charged with a misdemeanor, one sole misdemeanor, and he got 18
[57:07] months of unsupervised probation. And at his sentencing hearing, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and thank him for his service to the country. Absurd, isn't it? Well, it certainly sounds like a very personal vendetta. Mhm. I mean clearly a double standard and a targeting. But let me ask you this. Do you think in the final analysis that the
[57:38] things that you disclosed and wrote about weakened this country or strengthened this country? Oh, I think they weakened us. Seriously weakened us. You know, we really are what Ronald Reagan once called a shining city on a hill for so much of the world. They want to look up to us. They love that Congress has mandated uh a human rights report every
[58:11] single year for every country in the world with which we have diplomatic relations. They want us to be leaders on human rights. They want us to take the high road. they they respect us because of it. So, getting down into the mud, John McCain said something uh at the time, uh John McCain, of course, the the senator from uh Arizona and the former Republican presidential nominee, he said, "Never get into a fight with a pig. You're both going to get dirty, but the pig enjoys it." And truer words were
[58:42] never spoken. You know, I was in prison for 23 months and six weeks before I was released, I called my wife. I I was allowed to call my wife every other day for 15 minutes. So, I called her and I said, "How was your day?" And she said, "It was great." And I said, "Great? Really? What made it so great?" And she said, "The Senate torture report came out today and it proved that everything you said was true." and she said, "John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate
[59:14] and said that the country owed you a debt of gratitude because the American people would otherwise not have known what the country was doing in their name." And you know what? That made it all worthwhile. Certainly, over the course of 23 months in prison, and I was in real prison, I wasn't in some club fed. I would sit there and feel sorry for myself, but that single event made it all worthwhile. And then thank God uh just weeks later we saw passage of the McCain Feinstein amendment which
[59:46] formally and permanently banned torture. So I I'm I'm proud to have had whatever role I had in that legislation. This is something we should never have done. It made us weaker as a country. It turned people around the world against us. It didn't make us any safer. it it was just wrong from the very beginning. Well, I can tell you having been trained in both clinical and forensic psychology and having spent a
[1:00:18] lot of my professional career in deception detection, interrogation techniques, and you know, of course, deception detection has two pieces to it. One is determining when someone is lying, and then the other part is getting to what is the truth. That's right. And those are two very separate things. One is is somebody telling you a lie? And then if they are, then what is the actual truth with torture or enhanced interrogation
[1:00:48] techniques, they almost always lead to some kind of information. Absolutely true. Not necessarily truthful information or useful information. And it always require that you go to a higher level of interrogation the next time to get a piece of information. It's not nearly as effective as psychological techniques and
[1:01:20] relationship building. Other times there interrogation techniques and they are manipulative. There's no question. It's psychological warfare. Everything from planting a mind virus to doing different things to manipulate the person's thinking and plant false hope and do various types of mind games. But the research is very clear. You're going to get further
[1:01:53] faster with psychological interrogation techniques than you do with physical torture. That's not a close call, is it? No, it's not a close call. We We can all complain about the FBI as much as we want, but if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations. And at the secret prison after uh Abu Zuba uh recovered from his gunshot wounds, he was interrogated by an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan.
[1:02:23] And Ali was a master at interrogations. He treated Abu Zuba with respect. He would give him a cup of tea, give him an orange, uh later on a a sheet of paper and a pen to write to his parents. He built a relationship. He built a rapport with Abu Zubeda to the point where Abu Zubeda trusted him and volunteered actionable intelligence that saved American lives. That's the way to do it. Well, I think that all negotiators and
[1:02:55] interrogators will tell you one of the key tenants of building a rapport is the individual has to believe that you understand why they're doing what they're doing. And until unless and until they believe you get it, that you understand why they're doing what they're doing, you're never going to get past first base. But once they believe that you get it, that you understand why they're doing what they're doing, only
[1:03:27] then will you begin to have any kind of rapport with any kind of exchange of information. Unless they believe that, hey, he or she understands why I've done this action or taken this position, they feel like they're just talking to a suit, an empty suit. They just feel like they're just talking to a machine. I I'm I'm with you 100%. I I made one recruitment that I was very proud of. Uh he was a member of al-Qaeda, a relatively well a mid-level member of al-Qaeda. And when I was leaving
[1:03:59] Pakistan to return to the United States, I asked him, "Why did you allow me to recruit you?" And he said, "I've been here for 5 years, and you were the first person that ever asked me about my children." And that's all it was. It was that I was kind to him. nothing more. Yeah. What mattered to him. I totally get it. Well, John, we're out of time for today. I would like to
[1:04:30] talk again and pursue some more of the information that we haven't gotten to, but I think is so very very important and interesting to people to understand what is really going on. I want people to learn more about what you have to say. You know, John is a best-selling author of The Reluctant Spy and doing time like a spy. He is a champion for human rights and transparency. John, I
[1:05:02] hope we can talk again and do a part two of what we're talking about today because I'd love it. I'm not a third of the way through my outline of what I want to talk to you about, but I could talk for this much time again. If you would allow me, I'd like to reschedu and pick this up for part two because I think people will be absolutely compelled because we're just starting to scratch the surface here. Well, thank you so much. I'm a very longtime fan and this was a real treat
[1:05:34] for me. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to the next time. It has been for me. We'll do this sooner rather than later and we'll just kind of pick up where we left off. Can we do that? I'd love it. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Very intriguing conversation. We'll talk again very soon. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Phil. All right. Talk soon.