"NOT SILENCED" - Part-1: The CIA and John Kiriakou - Stories Untold

[00:00] It's the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, the director of the CIA, my boss, and me. And the president looks around, he says, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turns and looks at me. We had put the kids to bed and we're watching TV. And she said, "I'm exhausted. I'm going to go to bed." I said, "I'm going to stay up and watch TV." I wasn't going to stay up and watch TV. I was going to go into the garage, start the car, and lay on the back seat. She said, "No, I really want you to come

[00:30] to bed." I like she could sense, "Well, I'm just approaching what the jamup is, and it's a white rover in the left lane. There's police tape around it, and there's blood just coating all the windows inside." My boss runs in. He said, "Did you see the manifesto?" He said, "You're in it." And he goes, "You've got to go." Another car picked up my wife. Another car picked up my kids. take him to the airport. My wife says, "I want a divorce. I'm not doing

[01:00] this anymore." So, I went to the chief. I said, "I need 36 people, half FBI, half CIA, guns for everybody, ammunition for everybody, charges for the doors, night vision goggles, secure communications. I needed encrypted, like high-end NSA encrypted walkie-talkies, and I needed like several million dollars in cash." I'm telling you, 24 hours later, this unmarked 737 lands at the airport.

[01:30] It's freaking unbelievable. And everybody gets off. [Music] My next guest is a retired undercover CIA officer who among dozens of other things played a significant role in Pakistan hunting down al-Qaeda. He would later become a whistleblower for the 9/11 torture program which subsequently

[02:00] landed him in prison, albeit under questionable charges. He's an eight-time author, a fellow whiskey sipper. You can find his uncensored stories now on Unified TV, which I'll link below. It may come as no surprise that he's an amazing storyteller. He'll keep you at the edge of your seat at every second. But within those stories, you'll also recognize the commonality between he and us common folk. The most significant aspect of this guest is that he is genuinely a great person, and I'm so

[02:30] honored to have stolen a few hours of his time for this cast. So without further ado, please help me in welcoming my new friend to the tecast, Mr. John Kuryaku. We're finding some commonality in people like yourself who have extraordinary stories and experiences and kind of bringing it around to where somebody normally wouldn't tune in to hear someone um especially somebody who has even some a controversial career, right? But, you know, with a

[03:00] whistleblowing aside, just, you know, the the CIA automatically gets kind of a wrap with some people. But, but the idea is again just to kind of humanize people and make everyone realize how much alike we are really, even if we're if we're working in opportunity. Yeah, I'm very happy to do it. Well, I appreciate it. And I I'm I won't go all the way back and necessarily sit on the early years, but I I would like to get a little backstory about your childhood, what your interests were and and what your

[03:30] original goals were because, you know, getting into the CIA, like what what does that trajectory look like? You want to be an astronaut and change your mind or, you know, I I told my dad when I was nine that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up, really. And they thought that was kind of funny. And I remember that Christmas they bought me a set of walkie-talkies, right? And my brother and I would go all around the neighborhood, you know, spying on the neighbors or whatever. They had the little Morse code thing on the side. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. They had a little Morse code thing on the side.

[04:00] Yeah. That's exactly right. That's awesome. You know, cheap. Like it said, it would say on the box, it's got a, you know, one mile range. It had like a 100 foot range, right? But it was fun. We played with those for ages. And then and then my grandparents like, "Oh, you should be a dentist or a doctor or something." And then when I was 16, I told my dad, I remember where I was. We were we were driving past Frasier's Pond on Old Plank Road. And it was time to

[04:30] start thinking about colleges and what college I wanted to go to. And I said, um, he said, "You don't still want to be a spy, do you?" And I said, "I do. I want to be a spy, but dad, I want to be a spy in the Middle East. And he's like, "Oh my god." Wow. And at the time, how intense was that of of proclamation? I mean, compared to I meant it. And I'll tell you why I meant it. Because when I was 15, uh, the Iranians raided the American embassy and took our diplomats hostage.

[05:00] And I was obsessed with this thing. Uh ABC News created Night Line just to give us an update every single night on what happened that day. That's why Night Line was created was to give us the the daily update on the hostage crisis. And so I would stay up late at night just to see the day's developments in in uh in Iran. And then uh an army recruiter came to school. This is going to sound silly,

[05:30] but he he came to the school high school. high school, Newcastle High School, Newcastle, Pennsylvania. And he said, "If anybody comes down just for a conversation, you don't have to promise anything. Just come for a conversation. I'll give you a pair of tube socks." Uhhuh. So, I said to my dad off-handedly, I said, "Oh, I'm going to go talk to the army recruiter on on Saturday." He said, "Why?" I said, "They're they're giving out free socks. I'm just going to go for the conversation." And my dad, my dad was a

[06:00] very gentle, very sweet man. And he said to me, "If you go down there on Saturday, you and I are going to have a serious problem, boy." And he never spoke to me like that. So, I skipped it. But then I started looking for for universities that had very specifically programs, majors in Middle Eastern studies. Now, there are a bunch of them. In 1981, there weren't. It was Brigham Young, which I had zero desire to go to.

[06:30] It was Ruters, which was all right. I was thinking about that, and George Washington University. And then I got I only applied to GW. I didn't apply anywhere else. And then he said, "We don't we don't have the money to send you to a school like that." I still remember what it was. It was $4,600 a year. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine? Yeah. And my parents didn't have $4,600 a year. I said, "I'll take out loans." He said, "I have a better idea. go to the University of Pittsburgh and you can get

[07:00] a degree in Soviet studies. I said, "But I don't care about Soviet studies." I don't have any interest in Russia or the Soviet Union or learning Russian. And it was a problem for us, but I ended up going to GW, took out a ton of loans and uh and got my degree in Middle Eastern studies. I love that. And especially at a time where the Soviet Union was the thing. It was the thing. All right. my very first day at the CIA, we had a

[07:30] series of briefings, right? The director of the CIA comes and welcome to the CIA and he's there for, you know, a minute and uh the the head of personnel and the head of this and the head of that. Well, the head of security came and one of the important things that he said that day, like very declaratory, the gravest challenge facing the United States today is the threat of Soviet communism. And I was like, I said to myself, do you not watch the news? There is no such thing as

[08:00] Soviet communism anymore. I mean, the Soviet Union held on for another 11 months. Mhm. But seriously, old man, Soviet communism is the threat that we're facing. Well, they were still the other superpower at the time. So, yeah. Yeah. This was this was right before the the Russian economy fell apart. So, if you were an old-timer at the CIA, okay, I I get that you you think the Soviets are a threat. And what else? What else?

[08:30] Did you have siblings or anything? A brother and a sister. Brother and a sister. And both parents stayed married. and for your childhood and all that, right? So, my dad had a uh my parents were both elementary school educators, but my dad had a PhD in music and um we were very musical in our family and he but he wanted us to be musical but not go into music. That's a smart musician cuz we'd starve, right? My brother went into music. You'd never get into GW. No, you wouldn't get into GW. But my brother

[09:00] went into music and has become one of the most important music producers in Hollywood. really made tens of millions of dollars and seven number one hits and Yeah, he really How fantastic is that? And my sister went into uh investments. Oh, well, one of the big investment houses. Yeah. So, you That's the diversest family I've ever heard, if that's even a word. That's crazy. Do you play any instruments or were you made to learn how to do that? Yeah, I took piano

[09:30] lessons for 12 years. classical piano and uh and then I played clarinet and my dad had a Greek band for 50 years and so that's how my brother and I put ourselves through college was playing weddings and baptisms and you know wild festivals and stuff and Greek specifically that was there like a niche in there oh yeah okay oh yeah in fact a book came out recently like two years ago called Greek the history of Greek

[10:00] music in America America. And I was like, "Oh, what an interesting niche book." And I picked it up and there's a picture of my dad in there. Really? And he cuz he he immigrated from Greece. No, it was my grandparents immigrated. Yeah. From Greece. 19. My dad's family 1931, my mom's 1934, then my dad was born in 34, and my mom in 40. So they were they were brand new arrivals. Interesting. So do you still play at all? Have any interest? I I don't. I regret that I

[10:30] don't. it. Pick it up. Like a serious regret that I have. Pick it back up. Yeah. It'll be like nothing. You'll have it all up here. You just will have to teach yourself how to Yeah. That muscle memory has to come back. Hey, if you're like me and you are frustrated sometimes about ways that you can make a positive impact, I can tell you that one of the simplest things that you can do that goes such a long way is to like and subscribe to this channel and share some of these videos that you're enjoying. It brings other people into the middle regardless of their perspective to start engaging into that productive conversation that we all need. Thanks in

[11:00] advance. So when you got to the point where you were decided you're going to the CIA and that was an interesting story too because you kind of ended up still getting recruited. Yeah. Even though that was your goal. I had no idea that you had actually earmarked that as a career and then someone still approached you. Had had you mentioned that to someone before? No. It was just happen stance. Yeah. You know, I was thinking, h maybe I'll apply to the CIA, maybe the foreign service, and I ended up getting a master's degree in

[11:30] legislative affairs, thinking maybe I could meld the two and end up on Capitol Hill or something. And then uh and then in graduate school, I was kind of spotted. And uh and so what this leads me to, what do they look for? I know you've I've heard you mention before that they look for sociopathic tendencies but not sociopaths, right? So I would love to know first of all, is there really a line and how wide and

[12:00] gray is that line and where do you think you fit into that that realm? What what are your sociopathic tendencies? I suppose I can answer that question best by giving you an anecdote. Okay. So when I was going through the process, um I was in a room with three men and a woman, other applicants, and the the tester, the instructor gave us this scenario, and he

[12:30] said, "Let's say you're serving overseas and you get a cable from headquarters and they want you to get the latest numbers on the Indonesian economy, right? So they tell you to target the Indonesian economic officer in the country that you're serving in and um and you start to develop him. You make contact, you take him to lunch, you hit it off, you take him to dinner, your

[13:00] wives become friends, you barbecues together, and he becomes your best friend, right? So everything's going great. But you realize in this process, he's not recruitable. he just does not have an exploitable issue that you can use to get your hook in. What what do you do? So this guy raises his hand and he says, "Well, you you double down and you do it, you know, for another 6 months and you buy him gifts and whatever." And uh

[13:30] and the the woman raises her hand and she said, "Uh maybe you work it through the wives. Maybe maybe your wife can convince his wife to, you know, get the information." And I'm looking around like, "What?" So I raised my hand. I said, "You break into the embassy and you steal it." The guy goes, "That's exactly what you do." That's a sociopathic tendency. A normal person would not default to, "I'm going to break into a foreign embassy. I'm going to steal their documents." It's not taking no for an answer

[14:00] essentially. Yeah. Like that's a mission and you're going to accomplish it somehow. You're exactly right. That's the mission. They didn't say, "Oh, um, you know, give this a try and if it works, that's great, and if it doesn't, well, that's okay. You tried your best." No, no, no, no. That's not how it works. They said, "Get the documents." So, you go get the documents. That's a sociopathic tendency. Now, the problem is that the sociopath will give you the same

[14:30] answer, but the sociopath will have no conscience. And so we'll blow right through a polygraph exam. Somebody with a sociopathic tendency will do it because it's the right thing to do because we're the good guys, but does experience regret or remorse and will react and respond on a polygraph exam. So that's how that's the measurable is the polygraph. It's the polygraph. They can tell the emotional

[15:00] value that that's triggered by doing actions like that. That's exactly what they'll what they'll mark what they'll register. So the polygraph, you know, in terms of being the best way to describe the poly polygraph is as a tool, right? The polygraph only measures physiological changes. That's it. It's not a lie detector test, right? So, if you if you are asked you're hooked up to a polygraph and and the polygrapher says,

[15:30] "Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $20?" Hey, don't think, "Oh, man. If I did that, I would feel so guilty. Wow, I remember when I thought about stealing something worth more than No, you're going to react to that. Your fingertips are going to sweat. Your heart is going to start to race. and they're going to say, "Oh, you fail." So, if he asks you, "Have you ever stolen anything more than $20?" You say, "No," and move on to the

[16:00] next question. Unless you have. Unless you have, in which case, they say, "Look, we're not looking for perfect people. We're looking for honest people. So, just answer the question truthfully." The thing is, what they want you to do is trip yourself up by answering honestly. I'll give you an another example, right? I worked with a guy who was a fantastic operations officer, but he came to operations from polygraphy. He had been

[16:30] there 20 years, just got bored, wanted to do something different. He said to me one time that he had had people over the course of 20 years admit to literally every crime that you can imagine, usually because they thought that's what the CIA wanted to hear. Like he had a guy he had a guy admit to committing a murder outside of Syracuse, New York because he's like, "Yeah, I want to do black ops wet work." Uh, you know, oh my gosh. Yeah, that's not cool. And my

[17:00] buddy's like pressing the emergency button under the table so that the cops can come in and turn this guy over to the FBI. But my example is this. He was polygraphing a CIA employee, a custodian. Even the janitors get polygraphed. Okay? Right? because they're susceptible to recruitment. They have access. Exactly. So he said the guy just blows right through this thing. No problems at all. This is like his third or fourth polygraph. And all the guy does is, you

[17:30] know, mow the lawn and sweep the floors, whatever. So at the end of it, my friend says, "So is there anything major that you might have done that we haven't that we haven't covered? murder, bank robbery, beastiality. The guy goes, "What was that last one?" No. And my buddy goes, "I knew I had him." He goes, "Oh, beastiality. It's actually quite common. Uh, it's when you have sex with an

[18:00] animal. Lots of people do it." He says, "No big deal." Yeah. And the guy goes, "I might have done that couple three times." And my friend's like, he said his heart was racing. Like this is the first beastiality admission he had ever had. So he goes, "Um, okay. That's cool. Under what circumstances might you have done beastiality?" And he says, "Well, sometimes when I fight with my wife, I

[18:30] get back at her by going out to the barn and buggering her horse." He goes, "Okay. All right. And when was the last time you might have done that? And you know, he gave a date. They escorted him out of the building. They took his badge, you know, the whole the whole thing. But that is what the polygraph is meant for. He wasn't hooked up to the polygraph at that point. He had blown right through the polygraph. It's to get you to admit to something because once you admit to it, they can

[19:00] throw you out of the building and tell you never to come back. And do they what are the standards there? They have typical law enforcement standards. You couldn't have committed certain crimes within 5, 10, 20 years, whatever. It's all the same type of stuff. And it and it changes too. Like when I when I first applied, you couldn't have done drugs ever. Ever. Like youthful experimentation, nothing. Not even weed. Nothing. And now it's you can't have done drugs in the last nine months. Yeah. And since weed is weed in today's

[19:30] context, they don't even ask about it anymore. M back when I got hired, you couldn't be gay and you couldn't even be like not sure if you were gay or not gay or by or whatever. Like, thank you. We'll we'll send you a letter. Thank you. Get out. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's all changed. Yeah. I'm sure it's I mean over generations. I mean it used to have to be a male certain height and everything else too. and and from an Eastern university, you know, now the place is

[20:00] full of Mormons because and the same at the FBI because Mormons lead very straight lives for the most part, right? Polygraphs are no problem. And they speak the craziest languages because they go on their missions after high school and they'll go to, you know, Tajikistan or, you know, Bellarus or whatever and they learn these really difficult languages that the CIA then doesn't have to spend a year or two years and $500,000 teaching them how to

[20:30] speak. Do you think that it's advantageous to have squeaky clean people come in and do enforcement and operations? I do not. And so what what do you if it were up to you, how would you adjust any of those requirements? I mean, they're all kind of constantly being messed with anyway. They are. They are. And I think you have to I I think the agency has to adopt local customs. For example, there were a lot of us who have served in Yemen over

[21:00] the years. Okay, Yemen's tough. It it's it's ugly and poor and society is rough and violent and everybody's armed and culturally they chew got every day. Got q a t got is a shrub. It's about waist high shrub and they pick the leaves and they stuff the leaves in their cheeks so that old men will have one cheek that

[21:30] hangs lower than the rest of their face right from 60 70 years of chewing gut. Now chewing gut it's disgusting. Uh but it's it's like a very mild what can I compare like like the cocoa leaf, right? So it's like drinking a pot of coffee makes your heart race. Yeah. But it's a cultural thing. So every day at 3:00, everybody in the country is chewing gut. Every male in the country is chewing gut. It's

[22:00] unsemly for women to chew it. Well, gut is a is a, you know, it's listed on the DEA, you know, schedule, right? Schedule one drug. You go to prison for 20 years for chewing cot. But if you're a CIA officer trying to recruit this Yemeni tribal leader and he invites you to the gotchu, you're going to go chew. Right. Right. So the CIA had to say, "Well, okay, if you're an operations officer

[22:30] and yeah, you got to chew gut. Go ahead and chew the gut." They need to do more of that. They need to they need to attract more people who are willing to push the the bounds without lapsing into illegality here in the United States. And let me explain that, right? Yeah. I still believe that for the most part, we are the good guys, right? 99% of the

[23:00] people at the CIA are good, patriotic, smart Americans who want nothing more than to serve the country. You have 1% that are psychopaths or just out killing people for the thrill of killing people, but that's a separate conversation and that's a percentage of any given group. Once it gets size, then Yeah. Absolutely right. So the squeaky clean people are going to have trouble adjusting to a life of breaking the law. Your job as a as an ops officer is to go

[23:30] overseas and break the law. Sometimes lots of laws. I mean already you're committing espionage from the moment you land in the country. You're committing espionage because at the very least you're conspiring to violate the national security laws of that country. That's what you're you've been hired to do because of who you are. Just because of who you are. You're undercover, which is, you know, a lie. You're living a lie, which is also espionage. And in many cases, you're trying to convince

[24:00] people to commit treason. Now, treason in most countries, not most, in many countries is a death penalty charge. And your job is to get them to do that, to risk death because they love you so much. I mentioned that Indonesian uh you know that fake Indonesian diplomat. Well, you want to convince somebody that you are their best friend, right? Their best friend. And you do all these different things together and you

[24:30] vacation together and your wives are friends and your kids are friends and then you say, "Buddy, you know how I feel about you. I think you're great and you're my best friend and we have such a good time together. Do you mind giving me a a peek at the plans for that new Russian tank? I'd really appreciate it. It would mean a lot to me. And you know, my boss is such a dick. It would really help me out at work. Just, you know, let me just maybe I'll just take a a screenshot of the plans for the new Russian tank. Could you do do that for me? It'll only take a

[25:00] minute. That's a that's a cold call almost, right? I mean, at some point you got to just spill the beans, right? Is that how it works? At some point, at some point you do have to spill the beans. In almost every recruitment pitch, it's called breaking cover. You have to be honest with the guy. You have to say, "Look, I and this breaks my heart because I haven't been honest with you, but because we're so close, you're like my brother. I have to be honest with

[25:30] you. And I have to tell you, I'm actually in the CIA. I hope that I hope you're cool with that." And by then most of them have figured it out, sensed it. Like where are you getting all this money? Number one, we have practically unlimited budgets at the CIA. I I recruited a guy once. He told me I have I have to think of how to word this so that I don't don't get yourself backed up in this. He told me that he

[26:00] absolutely loved the skyline of this city that we were serving in. He's like, "This is the most beautiful city in the world. The skyline, it just takes my breath away." So, I was like, "Oh, me, too. I love the skyline. It's amazing." And I got us a helicopter tour of the skyline. He would have thought I'd given him a pot of gold or something like nobody had ever done anything like that for him. Yeah. And then in a conversation one time, he said that um his dad when he was a little kid, his dad taught him how to fish. And so, you

[26:30] know, wherever he was, he would go to a river or stream. And yeah, do you ever do deep sea fishing for marlin? And I plunked down five grand and took him out on a Saturday and he caught a freaking marlin with a sword out, you know, 6 feet long. He cried when he caught that marlin. He was so happy. Where am I getting all this money? I mean, American diplomats are paid better than most, but but there's a limit. But there's a limit. Yeah. We gotten we had a big

[27:00] kurfuffle with with an ally back in the '90s. It took us more than a decade to recover from it because a first tour officer took out a diplomat from that country from their foreign ministry to lunch and ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine. And the guy immediately reported it to their version of the FBI. Next thing you know, everybody's getting expelled and you just overstepped, right? You just went too far right off the bat. $2,000 bottle of wine. Yeah.

[27:30] It's almost like grafted. In these other countries, you give them, you have to know how much to give them to get where you're going. Or it's too much, then something else is up, right? In Greece, they call it the fake laki, which means a little envelope. Now, that little envelope can have€10 in it or 100. You don't want to put 20,000 in it. That can come later depending on what you do for me. But yeah, you have to be aware of where you are, what stage you're on in in the relationship. And how do you figure out where to start? Is that just

[28:00] assimilating into I mean, how do you take time to assimilate in the culture? What kind of training do you get or giving it to? That's a great question. You get some training, not a ton. Most of the training is in language and you're expected to be, you know, you went to college, you probably went to graduate school, you probably traveled to a couple dozen countries before you joined the CIA because you love travel, you love international affairs. So, they trust that you aren't going to be an

[28:30] idiot. So, let's say I I lived in, you know, Pakistan. Um, what what I'm going to do to start is invite people to lunch. It's totally, you know, normal and non-threatening. So, we go to lunch and lunch is going to cost me five or 10 bucks. I'm not going to throw all kinds of money at you right off the bat, but I had a friend who um well, let me

[29:00] let me back up and say that the the the crown jewel of any operations officer's career is to recruit a penetration of a foreign intelligence service, right? We all want to do it. Yeah. You get a medal, you get a photo op with the director, you get promoted, everybody wants to do it. I had a a guy a friend who um told me a story one time. He was friendly with this guy in

[29:30] this foreign intelligence service and it was a poor country but you can't be so crude as to just pitch the guy, you know. Mhm. So they went to do a joint operation together and our guy was authorized to cold pitch a foreign terrorist. So he brought this gym bag with 50 grand in it. And he said they're sitting in the car right before they get out to go knock on the terrorist door and he opens up the gym bag and he goes,

[30:00] "Look at this." He lifts the 50 grand. You know, it's in wads of, you know, the things 10,000. He goes, "Look at this. My headquarters has authorized me to give this [ __ ] $50,000. 50,000 of the taxpayers dollars. This makes me so angry. I could be giving this to good people, good guys, but they want they want me to give it to the terrorist. And he said, "The guy is just

[30:30] like this looking at the money." Never looked at him, just was looking at the money. And he's like, "This makes me so angry. But our problem is we have so much money. We just don't know what to do with it. They go, they make the cold pitch, the guy tells him to screw off, they grab him, they cuff him, take him away. He wouldn't take the money. But the next day, the liazison officer calls and

[31:00] says, "Hey, uh, can we meet for dinner and not tell anybody?" Brilliant. Mhm. So that's but that's less that's a that's the sest cold pitch I've ever heard cuz that's exactly what it was. essentially pitching to the guy with him, right? Sure. He knew exactly what he was doing. Yes. Uhhuh. Yeah. So cold pitching is a would be typically a terrible idea. Terrible idea other than in negligent circumstances. Yeah. Most people go through their entire careers and never do a cold pitch because they

[31:30] they don't work. Yeah. For the most part. Unless they're just so incentivized by the money. Mhm. But but that's possible though too that you can since you can get so much money you could pay them a significant amount and give them asylum somewhere or whatever. Is that you could set them up that way? You you want to not raise the asylum issue just because they're more valuable working in place. See, if it's if it becomes so dangerous that they have to be resettled, then of course yes, you

[32:00] can talk about asylum or resettlement in whatever country you want to go to. Mhm. Um, and you don't have to take money. You can have the money, you know, deposited in an account in any country you want. You can have it in diamonds. You can have it in gold. You can have it in Bitcoin. You can do whatever you want. It makes no difference how you receive it. You just agree to receive it. Yeah. Um, and during your So, you started actually as not as an operations

[32:30] person, so an analyst. And I assume that was still fulfilling or did you go into operations because you got bored you aspired to go do something else? I I got bored. I started in in analysis which was a lot of fun in the beginning. I my very first day at the agency at the lunch break we we met our new bosses and my boss said uh so we're putting you on Iraq and Kuwait.

[33:00] And I said, ' Okay, all right, that that's cool. And he said, 'Well, listen. We're putting you on your rock and quit because nothing ever happens there. It's the same cabinet since 1968, right? Sometimes we go days without receiving a single cable. But, and this is exactly what he said to me, but you learn the trade craft, you learn the writing style, and in a year you can transfer onto something more interesting

[33:30] like Romania. Yes. And I said, "Okay." And you knocked on wood super hard. And eight months later, just as I got to a point where I really knew what I was doing, Iraq invaded Kuwait. One of the old-timers came up to me the night before. We had predicted a month before Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. So, there was this, we were arguing

[34:00] amongst ourselves. Yeah, it's going to happen. No, it's not going to happen. Yeah, they're just going to take this little sliver of sand cuz there's oil there. Um, so we ended up one of us, I don't even remember who it was, said, "Why don't we just send a cable to the defense atache in Baghdad and ask him just to drive down there and tell us what he's seeing?" So, we sent a cable. Hey, could you do us a favor? Just drive down to the border and just tell us what what you're seeing down there. He drives down, drives back,

[34:30] writes us a cable, and says, "Literally, the entire Iraqi military is driving to Kuwait." Which was a big military. Yeah. You don't use your And it was one of the biggest in the Middle East. Yeah. You don't send your entire military to take a sliver. No. So, we wrote a paper on June the 30th, 1990 saying Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. And then the night before the invasion, we were like, "Yeah, it's going to happen tonight. Tonight's the

[35:00] night." Really? It got that refined information. And one of the old-timers came up to me and said, "I don't think you fully appreciate the import of what's happening right now." I thought I did, but I didn't. He said, "It's not at all unusual for the countries that we cover to go to war, but it's highly unusual for the countries we cover to go to war with us." And that's what this is. And the next day, I got up early cuz

[35:30] I knew it was going to happen. And sure enough, turn on the radio, 6:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., whatever it was, Iraq invaded Kuwait, took the entire country. They're killing everybody. So, I get to the office before 7. It was early and my boss said, "Uh, don't take your jacket off. We're going to the White House." I had never been to the White House before except as a tourist. Yeah. So, car picks us up. We go to the White House. This Marine escorts us into the Oval Office.

[36:00] Mind you, I'm 25 years old. It's awesome. It's the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, the director of the CIA, my boss, and me. So, we're standing there and then like there are very specific there's a very specific seating arrangement in something like this. I'm sure you'd walk in and just wait to be told. Right. That's exactly what I did. I just stood there and I didn't say a word and I waited to be told. So, my

[36:30] boss and I were put on the couch. Um the president and the vice president sat in these two nice wing back chairs and then the national security adviser and the CIA director were in like slightly less comfortable chairs and the president looks around. He says, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turns and looks at me and I'm looking at the president like and I didn't say anything. It took me a second and I said, "Well, well, Mr. president.

[37:00] Iraqi forces crossed the border at 2:00 a.m., you know, our time, and they uh announced the overthrow of the Kuwaiti government, and they installed a new u uh puppet regime headed by Dr. Ahmed Katib. We know a lot about Ahmed Katib. Uh he finished medical school at the American University of Beirut and his college roommate was George Habash. together they formed the uh popular

[37:30] front for the liberation of Palestine. And the vice president goes, "Jesus Christ like that." And the president's like, "So what do we do?" Well, it wasn't my position to tell anybody what to do. But later that afternoon, something that has become famous happened. Margaret Thatcher called him and she said something that really dictated American

[38:00] policy. She said famously, "Now's not the time to go wobbly, George." And so the next thing you know, we sent 565,000 troops and six carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf and we liberated Kuwait. Then that kind of made me a star. Yeah. You were the guy. I was the guy. And so it was great for a few years. I decided it was time to move on. Um I applied for a state department

[38:30] position in Bahrain, also in the Middle East, covering Iraq. Um I went to Arabic language school for a year. My Arabic was absolutely perfect. And I was the ambassador's translator for the next two years. Wow. Yeah, it was great. And um and then I came back thinking, "Okay, now it's going to be something really great." And they put me back on rock again. So I did that for another like year and a half. And it was clear to me

[39:00] that Bill Clinton was not serious about doing anything. It was like, "You better not cross this line or we're going to put more sanctions." And then he crosses the line and we put more sanctions. then well you better not cross this new line you know and I'm like come on I got to get out of here so I decided to do something completely different and I made a highly unusual switch into counterterrorism operations which how was how difficult was that I

[39:30] mean that's like you said it's atypical to it was very atypical yeah it's still atypical but when I applied for the job I was very honest I said I speak fluent Greek and fluent Arabic, but I don't have any experience in operations at all. And the guy who was the hiring authority said, "Well, it's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and

[40:00] Arabic." That's smart. Mhm. So, because I was already considered mid-career, I didn't have to start at the beginning what what they call CIA 101, like for a new hire. This is what the CIA does. This is what this office does. This is what that office does. I had already been in for eight years orientation or whatever. Yeah. I didn't need any of that stuff. So, I went straight into the ops training. And the ops training was the ops training was more fun than I've ever had in my

[40:30] life doing anything. It was they had they had courses with names like crash and bang, right? You just learn how to crash cars through roadblocks and you should see my knee actually because of crash and bang. It's a wreck. I had to have knee replacement because of crash and bang. Really? Yeah. Cuz they don't give you nice cars to crash. They give you [ __ ] cars to crash. Of course. Where your seat becomes detached and your knees slam into the dashboard and you break your leg. Oh my god. Yeah. Well,

[41:00] and you're not going to be driving fancy vehicles anyway when you actually need to use it either. That's right. So, that's probably why they do it. That's right. So, you learn counterterrorist driving, then they fly you out into the desert in Nevada, and you do advanced counterterrorist driving, and then you do weapons uh certifications, weeks and weeks and weeks on weapons, different weapons. Um, so you get certified and then you do uh well

[41:30] depending on what your specialization is. Mine was counterterrorism, so mine was more intense. Then you do airborne. You're jumping out of planes. And uh there's a bomb course. You have to learn to build a bomb. Learn how to diffuse a bomb. Then you learn how to make like four different kinds of bombs so you can recognize them. Yeah. And much to my surprise, that actually came in handy one time. So, uh, after that, then you learn at the actual spy craft, how to recruit

[42:00] spies to steal secrets. Okay. So, that's your UC training. Yeah. That's So, how much of that was super valuable versus leveraging your own kind of personal intuition? Oh, on my on my first trip back to headquarters after after going overseas in an ops capacity, I ran into one of my trainers in the cafeteria and I told them I had just made my very first um recruitment. In fact, I I put

[42:30] in an email and I sent it to everybody in my class. We all did that, our first recruitment. And I said, "The crazy thing is that it was exactly like it was in training." It was almost like a joke. Amazing. It went exactly like they told us it was going to go. But the thing is by the you're developing the source and then by the by the time you're ready to break cover and formally recruit him, he

[43:00] knows what's going on. He's not a [ __ ] He knows that this is not you're not a normal diplomat. You don't have too many people that come from nowhere and all of a sudden fall in love with you in a few months. That's right. You know, I remember Bill Clinton came out to Greece when I was in Greece and um I was the notetaker in his meeting with the u the prime minister. The prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister. It's actually kind of a funny story. When a president comes to the country that

[43:30] you're serving in, everybody has to pitch in. Doesn't matter what agency you're working with, there's a ton of work and everybody has to pitch in. So the ambassador that I was working for at the time, Nick Burns, he went on to be ambassador to China and bunch of other different things. He just put all the jobs in a hat and you picked it out of the hat. So I got lucky and my job was to take notes in the president's meeting with the Greeks. So, it was the president, it was secretary of state Albbright, it was the national security

[44:00] adviser, um, uh, Sandy Burgerer and the ambassador and me. And then for the Greeks, it was the prime minister, the defense minister, the foreign minister, and the Greek noteaker. So, the Greek notetaker was an intelligence officer. And we I was declared to the Greeks, so they knew I was an intelligence officer. So, we go in and and I smile at him and he winks at me like, "You too, huh? your flies. Yeah, right. So, we go

[44:30] in and Clinton, he was the sweetest guy in the world. He truly was. But he says, uh, to the to the Greeks, uh, can I offer you something to eat? There was a table off to the side that was just completely covered in food, like a buffet and juices and coffee and tea and water and all kinds of stuff. And he says, "May I offer you something?" Uh, and the prime minister says, "No, no, no, thank you." The defense minister, "No, no, no. They none of them want anything." He goes around the room. He comes to me and he

[45:00] goes like this, "May I offer you something to eat?" And I said, "Oh, no, thank you, Mr. President. I'm fine." And he goes, "Oh, oh, are you with me?" And I said, "Yes, or I'm with you." And he said, "I'm sorry. I thought you were Greek." I said, "I kind of am, but I'm not really. I'm with you." Long story. Yeah. just just move on. So, I took the notes. There's kind of a funny postcript I've told a couple of times, but the meeting was stupid. The meeting

[45:30] was we love you and you love us and we have really great relations and this is the birthplace of democracy and we have lots of Greek Americans in our country. And the Greek says, "And we love you, too, and we have lots of American companies here, and we would like to have more American companies here." And then they get up and they shake hands, and Clinton hugs them, and photo op.

[46:00] Yeah, it was a a ridiculous waste of time. It's a big pandering session. So, the Greeks get up and leave. Now, we're on the top floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. The presidential suite takes the whole floor. So Clinton and Burger walk out together. Albbright and the ambassador walk out together and then I walk out. So again, my job is to keep my mouth shut and just stand there until somebody asks me to do something. So I'm just

[46:30] standing against the wall. I'm about 3 feet away from Clinton and uh and Burger. They finish their conversation and Burger drifts over to Albbright and Burns. So Clinton's just standing there and I'm standing there and I'm and we're looking at each other. So just then at the end of the hall, the elevator door opens and Hillary gets off with Chelsea and she's got this this puss on, right? This is right after the Lewinsky scandal, like months after, and she's

[47:00] got this look. So she walks right up to us and she just stands there. One thing about Bill Clinton, he hates silence. He's always got to be joshing and joking and telling a story and getting people to laugh. And so we're just standing there like looking at each other and he says, "Boy, we sure had a good time at the Parthonon this morning, didn't we, Hill?" She's looking at him and she doesn't say anything. So he repeats

[47:30] himself. We sure had a good time at the Parthonon this morning, didn't we, Hill? And she goes, "Jesus Christ, Bill, it rained all day. I'll be in the room." And she walks away and I'm looking at him like, "You poor man." And he goes, "Let's get the [ __ ] out of here." So he and I walk to the elevator. There's some Secret Service guys down there, and they get on with us. And then we go down to the basement and there are

[48:00] 500 screaming women making up the Greek US women's business council roundt something screaming and he gave this like vintage Clinton speech and they're shouting we love you Bill you know I never saw anything like it in my life just recovered not not loving instantaneously. Yeah, which is probably why she's so bitter too because he can turn it off and on too elsewhere. I'll tell you another thing that I don't think I've ever told anybody publicly.

[48:30] Um, I have a friend who was one of the four top fundraisers for Clinton in '92 and Clinton named him an ambassador. M so he came back after his ambassadorial stint and was was running finance helping to run finance for the 96 campaign and then in 97 the Monica Lewinsky thing broke and everybody close

[49:00] to Clinton got together behind his back and decided we've got to get him to resign. He needs to resign and Gore should become president. So, they asked Clinton to meet them at the Willard Hotel, just a block from the White House, and they're going to they're going to lay it on him. He's got to resign. Well, the man's not stupid. He knew exactly what they were doing. He has spies all over the Democratic party, right? So, they had met the night before

[49:30] and they said, "We've got to be firm. We've got to be tough. The message has to be clear. He has to resign." So he gets Clinton gets to the to the meeting room and the way it was described to me was he starts off by saying I have let you down friends with a tear that rolls down his cheek and my friends like 5 minutes later were screaming we love you Bill we're with you Bill. They need to

[50:00] move him to operations. Yeah. And Gore's like what just happened? just got done. That's beautiful though. That's what a I mean, you have to be a master manipulator at that level. You can't be president and not be a sociopath. Because then you're going to go back to the White House and order drone hits on 50 people. Yeah. Yeah. Well, part of that's being a dude, too. You just compartmentalize everything. Yes. And he certainly had to. He had to. There's

[50:30] some Secret Service guys that used to work Hillary too that had those similar stories from the other side, you know, that just crazy crazy. But I think that was the beginning of a time where we started to get more insight into personal lives of presidents, right? Because you know looking back to Kennedy or Roosevelt, that stuff was off limits, right? If it happened, nobody talked about it, right? And there was no obviously there was no media that could just immediately send it around the world in a click of a button. That's

[51:00] right. Do you remember the whole Gary Hart thing? Oh yeah. Where you know reporters were following him and or they weren't following him yet. And he said, "I'm not doing anything. Go ahead and follow me." And they followed him to his girlfriend's house. Yeah. Where he spent the night and then came out wearing the same clothes and it was all over the newspapers and he had to drop out of the presidential race. Yeah. Yep. Know it's a different world now for sure. Sure is. But I don't know how I still don't know how you're going to get

[51:30] a politician that everybody truly likes to get through that process without thinking it's bullsh you're absolutely right. You know, I I've been in Washington a long time. I I came here the week after I turned 18 to go to college. And I've been here for the most part ever since except for, you know, serving overseas and then I kind of had a two-year sbatical off to the side. um which we can get to later. Um but I've been in Washington for for what 43 years now. And back then Democrats and

[52:00] Republicans lived in the same group houses together up on Capitol Hill and they'd play poker on Fridays. They'd go to church on Sundays and you know, everybody was friends. And now they don't even speak to each other. They they plot against each other and they censure each other and impeach each other and like what happened? I don't know. It's rubbed off to the public too where the sentiment is the same way at every level. It really is the shame. And I'm I'm not seeing how we turn it

[52:30] around. I was going to ask you. Not unless there there becomes a viable third party. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, but a third party meaning not a Republican or Dem Democrat or a a third party within one of those it parties. I I struggle with this. I say in my first book, I was a I was with was being the operative word. I was a third generation Democrat, right?

[53:00] My grandparents came here during the depression. to hear my grandfather tell it. Franklin Roosevelt was practically waiting there at Elvis Island to give him a passport and a job at the steel mill in Pittsburgh. And you know, we've been Americans ever since. We He had a framed picture of Roosevelt on the TV till the day he died. I have it in my den. But I'm not a Democrat now, and I never will be a Democrat ever again. When I uh got out of prison in

[53:30] 2015, Gary Johnson, who also used to be a Republican, he was the governor of uh New Mexico, Gary was the Libertarian Party's candidate for president. And he asked me if I would campaign with him. And so I thought, you know what? I like these Libertarians. I like them. They're they're good people. And we have a lot of the same ideas that, you know, and I'm going to come right out and say it. Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem. It's not

[54:00] the solution to the problem. So I approach libertarianism from the left. Others approach libertarianism from the right. But we meet at a certain point. Mhm. And so, you know, this year, for the first time in decades, more Americans have described themselves as independents than as Democrats or Republicans. There really is a need for a viable third party, whether it's one that already

[54:30] exists like the Libertarians or the Greens or whatever they're calling it now, the Unity Party or I forget what the name of it is now that Ross Perau started, the Reform Party. or one in the center, which I'm not really comfortable with because I think already we've got we've got a a right of center party and then we have a farther right of center party. Right. Exactly. That's my view. And and more than likely, I think the the first step to

[55:00] getting there is having somebody drop from one of those primary parties into the middle. That is the key right there. Yeah. Somebody with the guts to say, "Look, this system we have isn't working." You know, I I have a a book coming out that tangentially talks about um politics of the of the 19th century. Around the time of the end of the Civil War, there were six different parties in Congress at the end of the Civil War. Six different parties. Solomon P. Chase,

[55:30] who had been one of Lincoln's um cabinet members, he was the Secretary of the Treasury, former governor of Ohio. He had been a Democrat. He had been a Republican. He had been an anti-slavery Democrat. And then he joined three other parties after Lincoln was killed. Every time he would disagree with a policy of the party, he would just jump to another party. And that that was quite common back then. Was it better that way though? It seems like pad jumping might

[56:00] be just as problematic. You know, on the one hand, you raised an important point. On the one hand, it makes me think, no, it's better because you keep the honest people honest and you make sure that they're representative of what the American people want. On the other hand, look at look at countries like Italy or Israel that have, you know, a dozen parties represented where nobody can ever get the majority. And so you have to look at Israel

[56:30] where when Benjamin Netanyahu has put together a government that includes in that includes in in in the most important ministerial levels, senior most ministerial levels, two men who have been convicted of hate crime felonies. What's up with that? Yeah. you know, so that's the bad thing about multiple Yeah. and there's probably no absolutes anyway, especially in

[57:00] politics. But the Greeks have a nice I'm biased uh because I'm Greek, but the Greeks have a system that works. They they had until like 10 years ago a multi-party parliamentary democracy and so it was just impossible to get a majority and then you have to deal with the communists or the fascists or whatever and that's just not workable. So they passed this law that whatever party come you get proportional representation but whatever party comes

[57:30] in first gets an extra 50 seats in in the 300 seat parliament. All right. And it and it's worked. They've had socialist governments. They've had capitalist governments and it works and you end up with the majority and the leadership too. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, that's interesting. Well, all right. So, we get back to your operations now. operations. I I went on a tangent and I appreciate that. It's my fault. I do it all. It's actually No, it's wonderful because those were like some of my extra questions. Anyway, I'd love to hear some of your philosophical

[58:00] solutions or whatever. So, I I love it. I appreciate it. Um, you had once you hit operations, you were you had some hits put out on you more than once. More than once. Um, do you have any stories you like to I think I've heard about the one in Pakistan. You had a double agent or something or you don't tell the same ones. Yeah, talk about talk about those and how did you handle those? I just got back from Greece two days ago. Um I I go frequently uh to speak and meet and I'

[58:30] I've become kind of famous in Greece uh for my whistleblowing. Mhm. Uh as you are here, sir. No, thank you. That's not all it's cracked up to be, I tell you. But in Greece, that was the first time I ever had somebody try to kill me. And I didn't even realize that there was this operation underway, which I still shake my head over because I took my training very very seriously. I became a surveillance

[59:00] detection instructor at the CIA and and I didn't spot the surveillance. And so I'd been working against this group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. They had killed 27 people including the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the minister of finance, the minister of communication, the governor of the

[59:30] central bank, murderous, bloodthirsty organization of the extreme communist left. They weren't associated with the communist party because the communists were far too, you know, right-wing for them. Okay. So, um, this was the group I was there to work against, and I didn't realize that they knew who I was and were working against me. So, in January of 2000, I had already

[1:00:00] been there for a year and a half, uh, a new British defense atache arrived. Uh, General, Brigadier General Steven Saunders. Steve was an awesome guy. Great sense of humor, great storyteller, just a good time Charlie, right? He was at every party. He was a media [ __ ] He loved the He was on TV all the time. Ate it up. Yeah. At every he ate it up. Lovely wife, two little girls. We were

[1:00:30] at a dinner party. He lived next door to me. So, we're at a dinner party one night and I had just taken delivery of a fully armored BMW 540 that the CIA's counterterrorism center bought for me. Windows were this thick. Yeah. No exaggeration. Fully armored. Yeah. And it was a 540 because I needed a big engine to carry all that armor. We couldn't even insure this car because it was the first 540 in Greece. We had to insure it through a German company.

[1:01:00] So, we're at a dinner party that night and he's making fun of me jokingly and he says, "You Americans, you're so paranoid about security." He goes, "This is an EU country. It's a NATO country. What are you so worried about?" Haha. Everybody laughs. Mhm. And I said, "You Brits, you live in a dream world. If you think because they have

[1:01:30] palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if they have the opportunity, if they have the chance, they're going to kill you." Mhm. We all laughed again. Two weeks later, I made a mistake that I made only once that day I slept through my alarm. I would get up early every day because every day I would take a different route to work, a route that made no sense. Right. Right. Figuring your six always. It's just a a habit though. It it

[1:02:00] becomes a part of you. You don't even I mean, you just do it cuz you're you do it. You you're trained to do it. It's natural. So, this isn't going to be a mistake of complacency because you were actually even doing what you're trained to do still. But I'm going to be late to work. That was what I was worried about. Like, dog gone it. All right, I'm not going to do the surveillance detection route today. I'm just going to get on the main road and just go straight to the embassy. Now, I lived in a northern suburb of Athens called Guys.

[1:02:30] So, if was on literally the same road as the embassy called Gicas Boulevard, which becomes [Music] um Sophia's Queen Sophia Boulevard. Okay. Okay. No turns. You just get on straight 10 miles. Exactly 10 miles. You know how dangerous that is? There are jersey barriers most of the way down. So, once you're on, you're on. You're committed. You can't get off. No

[1:03:00] escaping. There's no escape. Yeah. No. Jay turned into the same lane of traffic. Nope. So, I get on and I'm thinking I'm taking a real risk doing this. But I've got a gun. I have a nine on my waist. I have a 38 on my ankle. And god forbid if it all turns to [ __ ] I have a I have a buck knife in my back pocket. So, I get on KCS and it's gridlock like Cairo. Nice. Right. And I'm like, "God on it. I'm never

[1:03:30] going to make it to work. I'm inching my way down the mountain." And like I say, it's exactly 10 miles. So I then did something else that I never did. I turned the radio on. They they told us in training, don't ever play the radio cuz it's distracting. You've got to constantly be scanning your side view mirrors. Make sure that you're alert. And we were taught to talk out loud to ourselves. like um guy in blue jeans uh red t-shirt so that you

[1:04:00] can remember later. I saw a guy in blue jeans with a red t-shirt. I'm seeing him again. That's the same guy. Just kind of narrating your scene as you go. That's exactly what you do just to keep it all fresh because if you say it out loud, you're more likely to retain it. Sure. So I turn on the radio and the the announcer comes on and he says, "Avoid GCS boulevard. There was a traffic incident at Filo." Filth is about four miles into it. And I was

[1:04:30] like, "Fuck, I got four miles of this." Too late. Yeah. Yeah. It's too late. I'm committed. So I'm inching my way down. Half hour passes. He says, "Avoid GCS Boulevard. There was a criminal incident at Filith and I remember thinking criminal incident. Never heard them say that before. Weird time to use. Wonder what that could be. Another half hour passes and he says avoid Kicas Boulevard. There was a terrorist attack

[1:05:00] at Filith. Well, I'm just approaching what the jamup is and it's a white rover in the left lane. There's police tape around it and there's blood just coating all the windows inside and I look at the license plate and I was like, "Oh my god." Now it Athens was so dangerous for Americans that we did not have diplomatic license plates. You

[1:05:30] see diplomatic plates all around Washington and New York. They're red, white, and blue and they're unusual. We didn't have those plates in Athens. Those are targets. They're targets. Yeah. But the Greeks in their infinite wisdom gave everybody in the American embassy license plates that began with the letters YHB. And the rover I see is YBH. And I said, "Oh my god, they killed some innocent Greek thinking it was one of us." And then I said, "No, the

[1:06:00] British embassy has YBH and Steven Saunders drives a white rover." No way. So I called the station chief and I said, "Hey, I'm stuck on geese and I think Steve Saunders was just assassinated." He said, "What are you seeing?" So I I told him and he said, "Okay, get into the office as fast as you can." He called the British embassy and said, "One of my officers is on the road and thinks that Steven Saunders was

[1:06:30] murdered." And the the woman like her brain didn't comprehend what he said. And she says, "I'm sorry. Steven's not in yet this morning." And he said, "No, you're not listening to me. We think Steven was just assassinated." Oh. They start calling the hospitals. Sure enough, he's at the hospital that's immediately next door to the British Embassy. He died 45 minutes later. So that was April the 20th.

[1:07:00] Usually what 17 November would do is they would drop a manifesto at the site of the hit. Not always. Sometimes they would put it in a garbage can and then they would call a leftist newspaper and tell them where to find it. This day they didn't. I mean, yeah, it was just an we knew it was them. We knew it was them for a couple of reasons. Um, first of all, it was their MMO. Two guys on a motorcycle.

[1:07:30] Secondly, we learned later that the passenger on the motorcycle shot Stephen with an anti-tank round and it blew his right hand completely off. And the testimony later was when he shot him, Steven lifted up the stump and looked at it like, "What just happened to me?" And then he turned and looked at the shooter and they shot him three times in the chest with what was called the Welch 45. called the Welch 45 because Dick Welch was their first

[1:08:00] victim. He was our station chief and they used the Welch 45 in every hit after that. So he bled to death. A taxi driver pulled him out of the car and rushed him to the hospital. That's how he got to the hospital. But the car was it was just soaked in blood and he didn't have a chance. Anyway, we set out to, you know, double

[1:08:30] down on our efforts to find 17 November. We began working with the British. We were told to open our files to them. Then fast forward to August the 16th. I get into the office, totally normal day. My boss runs in. He said, "Did you see the manifesto?" And I said, "There was no manifesto." He said, 'N no, it came out today.' I said, 'N no, I didn't see the manifesto. He said, 'You're in it.' I said, 'What do you

[1:09:00] mean I'm in it? And he shows it to me in Greek. It said mealascopos, we saw the big spy, but we knew that he was driving an armored car and he was armed. So, we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. And he goes, "You've got to go." I said, "Where?" He goes, "Home. you've got to go home right now. I said, I just took my kids to school. I can't go home. He goes, we'll get your kids and your wife.

[1:09:30] You take a car to the airport. So, one of the drivers put me in an armored car, drove me to the airport, another car picked up my wife, another car picked up my kids, take them to the airport. My wife says, "I want a divorce. I'm not doing this anymore." And she divorced me. Wow. Mhm. What a whammy. And then I was on the 12:00 Delta flight to New York. And that was the end of that whole op because then later you found out that they'd known

[1:10:00] all along who you were. Yeah. And there was no intel ahead of time that would have No. I mean, the only thing we were able to deduce was that Steven was so high profile. He was on TV all the time and in the papers all the time, wearing his Brigadier General costume. And um and so he was easy to find. And I think they saw my car and they said, "That car is armored and that license plates from the American embassy. That

[1:10:30] has to be a CIA guy. I think that's how they got me." Or they could have been in the room when you were having that laughable conversation. They very well. Dudes, they sure could have been. Oh, that's wild, man. You're lucky. I was very lucky. That's the worst situation to ever be in is is to be out working not knowing that you're made. Yeah. If is that the only time that you felt like you were already made without you being aware.

[1:11:00] Yes. Maybe. I mean, other than, you know, towards the end when you were pulling trigger anyway or something, right? At some point they find out. But yeah, the the second time the second time was more complicated. the the first time they could have gotten me and I had never seen it coming. You know, my mom and dad came to visit uh about a week after Steven was killed. And um my boys were little at the time. They were seven and four. And I took a

[1:11:30] picture of my mom. She's kneeling down and she has her arms around the boy's shoulders. And so I knelt down and I took the picture. It's in front of my house. But in the background of the picture, there's a a man in a red Toyota and he's looking right at the camera. And so I sent it in after the fact and I said, "Um, can we run these these plates?" And the

[1:12:00] plates came back stolen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's like that's that's part of your that's a new movie script for you. That's got to be a good opening scene right there. I this happened 25 years ago and still I think about it all the time. Especially with your family involved. That's a little worse, a little more closer to home. Yeah. So, do you do anything now to protect yourself now that you're retired? Is there any kind of standard protocol other than doing checking your sixes? And that's

[1:12:30] checking the sixes. I'm the most self-aware driver that's out there. Yeah. But that's all you can do really. Well, and I'll tell you, yeah, that's all you can do. I I taught a course for George Washington University in surveillance and surveillance detection. It was a summer course in this intelligence studies program. So, on the very first day, I said, "We're going to walk slow motion through a surveillance detection course." And here in DC, there's a a

[1:13:00] small bridge called the Pea Street Bridge, which connects Dupont Circle with Georgetown. And it's it's the perfect bridge for an SDR because it's called a funnel. You can only get from from Dupont Circle to Georgetown by crossing the Peace Street Bridge. It goes over the Rock Creek Park, Rock Creek. And so I walked them up to Dupont Circle. We

[1:13:30] did a cover stop. It had a back exit. We went out the back exit. We looped around. We crossed the Peace Street Bridge. So when we crossed the bridge, I stopped everybody and I said, "Now, the reason we did this is because we funneled our surveillance by forcing them to cross the bridge with us. So, if we were under surveillance, our surveillance would have had to be right behind us like this woman right here sitting in the car. I said, "Nobody sits in the car and reads

[1:14:00] newspaper. That's just in the movies." And this woman followed us. If any of you were paying attention, she followed us from Dupont Circle. And now here she is at the end of the Peace Street Bridge. So if I were overseas, I would call that confirmed surveillance. An hour later, my lawyer calls me and he says, "The FBI said that you are acting

[1:14:30] strangely as though you're doing a surveillance detection route." And I said, "Tell the FBI that I spotted their surveillance." And so did a bunch of 18-year-olds who have never done surveillance detection before. Morons. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And they Oh yeah. Well, we won't get we'll jump in the gun if we find out why that was what was happening. Right. Right. So, okay. So we go, you get to the point where

[1:15:00] you're working in operations and how do you end up in Pakistan that leads to Abu Zuba and all that the arrests and you're going to have to like kind of set the tone a little bit about what era this is and how you ended up in Pakistan. But this is while you're in operations and this kind of leads to your whole famous slash infamous ride. Yeah. Right. That's right. So, I'm I'm curious about h how you got there and then I'm I'm fascinated by the

[1:15:30] expeditious operation and the exigent resources that were just thrown there. I mean, it just you make it sound easy like, hey, I need millions of this and this and this. So, I I'm really fascinated. Yes, I'm fascinated with that. I mean, it's like you whip over that point sometimes when you tell that story of like, "Wait a minute." You know, it makes you want to say, "God bless America." Yes. Yeah. I mean that. Seriously, for sure. So,

[1:16:00] the entire agency changed on 911. It'll never go back to what it was. I worked for a deputy director who whose mantra was that the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets to allow our policy m policy makers to make the best informed policy. Life should be so simple. Yeah. Because it all changed on September 11th and we became a

[1:16:30] paramilitary organization necessarily. So 25 years later, no, not so much. But you know, on September 12th, 2001, we we had work to do. Mhm. So the summer that summer, I had been working with a contractor named Billy Wah. Billy was like 70 72 73 years old. Legendary bonafide American hero.

[1:17:00] He had 17 Purple Hearts. Lord, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. That was one short of the record. And I said to him, "Billy, that has to be some kind of record. 17 purple hearts." And he goes, "There's some sorry ass son of a [ __ ] from North Carolina has 18." He had the filthiest mouth. We were in the Middle East together. We were training Middle Eastern intelligence services and how to do counterterrorism

[1:17:30] operations. And the head of this Middle Eastern service came to me and he said, "You're a very nice man." I said, "Thank you, excellency." And he says, "But please tell Billy. Tell Billy no F, no GD. We're Muslims." I said, "I've I've tried. I've tried. He won't listen to me." Yeah. At that age, yeah, he's not going to change. I'm done. So September 11th comes, like everybody else in the building, quite literally, I volunteer

[1:18:00] to go to Afghanistan and do whatever they want me to do, anything. And I kept saying, "I speak Arabic. I speak Arabic. I speak Arabic." There were only 16 people in the CIA that spoke Arabic. 16. So like, why am I not being flown to All of you should go. Yeah, exactly. Nothing. I run into Billy in the hall like in October. So 3, four, five weeks have passed. I go, "Billy," I said, "Where have you been?" He goes, "I've been in

[1:18:30] Afghanistan." And I said, "Really? What are you doing there?" And he goes, "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?" And it dawned on me that that's why they hadn't sent me because I kept saying, "You need linguists to do the interrogations." There were no interrogations. Yeah, they're just shooting people. So, I finally went into the deputy director of the counterterrorism cent's

[1:19:00] office. He was an old friend of mine and I said, "If you don't send me to Afghanistan right now," I said, "As God is my witness, I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not looking back." He's like, "Will you relax?" He goes, "All right, all right. Can you go to Pakistan? I said yes. When? He goes, "Tomorrow." I said, "Yes." "What do you want me to do?" He said, "I want you to be the chief of counterterrorism ops." I said, "Done." So, I go back to my my office, called my

[1:19:30] girlfriend. She was a senior CIA officer up a couple floors. She became my wife. I said, "I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow." And she said, "For how long?" I said, "I don't know, 6 months, 12 months, I don't know." And she said, "Okay, I'll meet you at your place. I'll help you pack. So, we met up at my place. I packed the next morning. I drove to the airport, flew to Pakistan. And um I arrived at 4:00 in the morning. The driver picked me up at 7:00 uh at the guest house and um took

[1:20:00] me in. The chief was in and uh he said, "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house. I said, 'Okay.' He said, 'Then we're going to start busting down doors.' I said, 'Okay.' So, I went back to the office. Now, I had a staff a staff of seven old men, all in their

[1:20:30] 70s. One or two may have been in in his 60s. One was in his 80s. Every single one of these guys had been either chief or deputy chief of Neareastern operations, and one of them had been deputy director of the CIA. Oh. But they're so patriotic. Yep. They all volunteered to go right back into the belly of the beast for a lousy measly $385 a day. Yeah. I'm It's It kind of needs to be restated sometimes. You know, you get an audience of people that really didn't experience 911. Yeah. And

[1:21:00] the emotional value the it was like Pearl Harbor. Oh my gosh. Yeah. In fact, I remember I remember somebody saying, "This is our Pearl Harbor." Yeah. And then a buddy of mine said, a buddy, he was older than me. He said, "This is what it was like when Kennedy was killed." Like, just so we understand, we grasp the severity of what's happening. Yeah. I mean, everybody in the whole United States joined hands. I mean, everybody

[1:21:30] in the United States, I haven't seen it since. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I don't think we'll see it again in my lifetime. Well, barring another catastrophe. Yeah. So, I sat down with these guys. I introduced myself and and I'm the kind of person that saw this as perhaps the greatest learning opportunity of my life. That's why I got on with these guys so well. Like, one of them came up to me one time and says, "Can I offer you some

[1:22:00] constructive advice?" I said, "Please." He said, "You've taken on too much. You need to dole this stuff out." I was working 18our days, sleeping at the desk. He's like, "We're all experts. We all speak these languages. Just dole it out." Awesome. Yeah. They helped me a lot. And then we all slept in this or stayed in the same guest house and we would have dinner together and just sit up drinking beers at night and they would tell these, you know, well, when I

[1:22:30] was leading the Bay of Pigs in invasion, it's like, oh my god, Jean, was that you? Like you're Jean Gaitley. Like I read all about these cats and Yeah. And Jean was like 80 something years old. [ __ ] Kennedy. We could have won that thing. Yeah. It's likeay. But anyway, they would tell these stories and I'm like, you know what? I could use that opile experiences in my in my head for later. It it really was a great learning

[1:23:00] experience. So, I sat down with a legal pad and uh I thought, well, what would I do? What would I want to do for a counterterrorism op taking down a safe house? So, the first thing I thought of is I would want it to be dark, right? I don't want anybody to see me. I don't want anybody to be awake. So, I wrote 0200 at the top of the page. And then I thought I need I need weapons. I need ammunition. I need battering rams. I

[1:23:30] need night vision goggles. I need money. I need explosive charges for the doors. You know, all different kinds of stuff. So, I wrote it all down and um and they they wrote back to me at CTC, Counterterrorism Center, www.galls.com. G the catalog. Yeah. So, I never heard of Gauls. It's like the greatest police supply house in America. I just ordered everything on my CIA credit card. They

[1:24:00] put it in the in the uh APO and and I got it like, you know, a week later. That's awesome. I think I spent like $50,000 in that first shipment, but I got everything I needed. So, we got a tip from the Pakistanis that uh there was this al-Qaeda safe house that they were watching and do we want to, you know, bust down the door? I said, "Yeah, let's do it." So you know the FBI is there in the building so you have to invite

[1:24:30] them and it is the Pakistanis country so you have to invite them. So, the FBI's role was Well, see, this was the weird thing. What was the FBI's role? Technically, the CIA always always has primacy overseas, right? And the FBI always has primacy domestically, but 9/11 was an open criminal investigation. So, I see. While the CIA

[1:25:00] still had privacy, we had to do each operation with law enforcement in mind. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Oh, and we do things completely differently than the FBI. And you're not talking about like HRT with you. You're talking about FBI agents, investigation level folks. Yes. Okay. That's a great way to put it. Investigation level, normal FBI agents. No HRT people at all. Right. Okay. So 2:00 in the morning, it's two CIA,

[1:25:30] two FBI, two Pakistanis. We just walk up to this door, take the battering ram, ploop, knock the door open. There are these two 18-year-old kids in there. They both burst into tears. We cough them. One of them's asking if he can call his mom. And I said to a colleague of mine, "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we're so afraid of. They're

[1:26:00] children. I can't believe it." So we took him to the Rahul Pindi jail. Rahul Pindi is the sister city of Islamabad. Islamabad is the the capital, but Ra Pendi is like 20 times the size and they're connected. Okay? And it's a [ __ ] hole. You don't want to go to jail there. So, uh, we were like, "Okay, that worked. High fives." We all went home, went to bed. So, I got a call a week later from

[1:26:30] an Arab, um, intelligence station chief, and he said, "Hey, I heard you're the guy to talk to if we've got an address." I said, "Yeah, well, let's meet for coffee." So, we meet for coffee. He slides this address across the table to me like, you know, we're on a TV show. Like, anybody else cares? We're in the American Embassy cafeteria. He's like, sliding the address, making a deal. Yeah. So, I said, "Okay, I'll I'll call everybody

[1:27:00] together and we'll hit it." So, we bust down the door. This was actually kind of an important one. We got a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which had merged with al-Qaeda. They were the ones that killed President Sadat back in 1980. And then we had a couple of uh al-Qaeda like mid-level guys. This was this was, you know, worthy of a standalone cable to headquarters. So, we were like, "Okay, this this is working." And we're doing one or two a week, maybe three. And then

[1:27:30] we're branching out. We're going to Karach and Queta and Lahore and Bashaw and all over the place, right? And it's it's working out. And then I get a call. The weekend in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday. Saturday was the only day that I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping until 8. Otherwise, you're uh you're, you know, 18 16 18 hours a day

[1:28:00] in the embassy. Eventually, you're not effective eventually. Yeah. Exactly. You got to get at least some sleep. Mhm. So, my phone rings 7:00. It's the station chief. And he said, "You need to come in immediately. Something's developed." So I get dressed, rush into the embassy. It's the chief, the deputy chief, the FBI guy, his deputy, and me. And um they said, "We got a call overnight uh from uh NSA and they said that Abu

[1:28:30] Zuba is quote somewhere in Pakistan and you have to catch him." Everybody's looking at me. And I go, "What's that supposed to mean?" I said, "Come on, guys. This country is the size of Texas and it has 120 million people in it. What do you mean he's somewhere in Pakistan? Go find him." Yeah, that was it. Easy. Okay, good luck. I came up with some terrible ideas. So,

[1:29:00] NSA is sending us these hair on fire cables. He's here. He's there. He's over here again. He's moved over here again. It's like, well, you got to help me out. He's he's driving back and forth between Lahore and Fiselabad. Okay, L'ore has 12 million people. Felabad has 7 million people. So, that doesn't narrow it down too terribly much. So, I said to the chief, I said, "You know what? When I was in college, my dad was friends with

[1:29:30] our crooked state senator, and he got me a job as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That was my summer job. summer of 85. I go, I know how to operate the toll booths and Fis Labad and Lahore are connected by this toll road. So why don't we put CIA guys in all the toll booths and when Abu Zuba comes through the the lane, we grab him. That's a terrible idea. Terrible for a whole bunch of reasons. Finally, I said,

[1:30:00] "Look, I I can't catch him. I I don't know. I I've done everything I can think of. There's nothing that I can come up with that's going to help us catch him. But I said, I have a friend at headquarters who's targeting analyst. He's really good and we should fly him out here. So I called him and I said I said, "Hey, we're we're chasing down a VIP." I couldn't tell him who it was cuz he wasn't read into the compartment. Chasing down a VIP. Can you come out here like tonight? And he's like,

[1:30:30] "Sure." So drives to Dulles, flies to Pakistan. I pick him up 4:00 in the morning and I had the secrecy agreement. So he signs the agreement. I said, "It's Abu Zuba." He's like, "Oh my god, you have a you have a beat on him." And I said, "Not one that's good enough." Not exactly. No, that's why you're here. So, he slept two or three hours and then we brought him into the station and uh

[1:31:00] and he took this piece of butcher block paper about that big and um and he wrote Abu Zuba in the middle and put a circle around it. And then around the circle, he wrote all of the phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses that we knew were in touch in one way or the other with Abu Zuba. And then he did it on a secondary level and then on a tertiary level. It took him about two

[1:31:30] weeks. And so he drew these lines connecting, you know, each one of these these numbers or addresses or what these bits of data to the point where I've said this before, it looked pretty like an artwork, like a spiderweb. Yeah. And then he says to me, I just can't get it down to any fewer than 14 sites. And I said, 14 sites? We've never hit more than two before in a single night. Yeah.

[1:32:00] we can't hit 14 sites. He said, I just I can't I can't do it anymore. So, I went to the chief and I said, 14 sites. He said, well, he said, just send a cable to headquarters and list everything you need. So, I said, I need 36 people, half FBI, half CIA. I need guns for everybody, ammunition for everybody, charges for the doors, night vision goggles, secure

[1:32:30] communications. I needed encrypted, like high-end NSA encrypted walkie-talkies. Yeah, you got people spread out all over the place. Yeah. Satellite dishes. Um, and I needed like several million dollars in cash. I'm telling you, 24 hours later, this unmarked 737 lands at the airport. It's freaking unbelievable. And everybody gets off. You should have hijacked a plane. Well, we've gotten everything you want. We used to have this joke at the agency where every 6 to

[1:33:00] 12 months you get a you get an email from the director saying one of our officers was arrested this morning for using his CIA credit card for a personal expense and we will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And we used to say, why in God's name would somebody steal $20 from the CIA? Why? Why would what would possess you to steal $20 from the CIA? If you're going to steal from

[1:33:30] the CIA, steal like $2 million, right? Make it worth it. We had this $2 million in big duffel bag and the analyst and I get in this we requisitioned a van. It was all packed with mostly with weapons, but we had the$2 million in there and and he said, "$2 million in cash?" I said, "I know, right? Didn't we always say if you're going to steal, steal 2 million? And we both laughed and then we just drove to L'ore. Yeah. Yeah. I spent

[1:34:00] the whole 2 million. I spent more than 2 million. There's this other joke at the agency that for example, you can't you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And we were throwing literally throwing money out of the side of helicopters to get these guys on board. Anyway, that's a different issue. So, and I assume that all that stuff is, you know, you you have to turn in to the dollar, right? And so, eventually you're

[1:34:30] keeping track of all that mess, too. So, not even to the dollar, to the scent. I'm telling you with sincerity, to the scent. Well, that's good to know. We we accounted for that money. There was a very young, brand spanking new first tour officer that was assigned to me. She had never served overseas before. And I said to her, she was like in totally over her head cuz we're like, you know, right, loading weapons and putting stuff together. And she was

[1:35:00] panicked. She ended up resigning when we were all done. But anyway, I said, "Listen, I know I know what's going through your mind. This is not the way things normally happen." She was she was hired the week before 9/11. Oh my gosh. Right. So she thought, "Oh, I'm going to be assigned to Brussels and then I'm going to go to Paris and and she's in Pakistan like loading weapons." So I said, "I know. I know what you're thinking. So I'm going to assign a very specific job to you. It's one of the

[1:35:30] most important jobs in the station. You're going to be the finance officer." I said, "I'm going to give you the advice that an old-timer gave me once. Never [ __ ] with medical, security, or finance. Not only can they ruin your life, they can put you in prison. So, to the dollar, we have to account for every one of these $2 million. I said, "You're never going to have to shoot anybody. You're not going to go on the raids. Just make sure

[1:36:00] that the books balance." And that's what she did. And she was great at it. Good. Mhm. So, to make this incredibly long story slightly shorter, um, we decided to to drive around, a colleague of mine and I and two Pakistani intelligence officers decided to drive around to all 14 sites the the day of the uh of the raid. And um, the

[1:36:30] day before? The day before, sorry. The raid was at 2 a.m. Yeah. So, it was the day before. So most of these places were just like hobbles, huts made out of concrete block, you know, with a tin roof. Yeah. Just dumps, third world dumps. And um one of them was a pay phone in a shish kebab stand. So we dropped that one immediately. So obviously there are al-qaeda people living there in that immediate

[1:37:00] neighborhood and they're using the pay phone. But you can't raid the shish kebab stand two hours after they closed for the night. So we we dropped that one. Um two of the remaining sites were in Lahore. 11 were in Fiselabad. So Lahore was fast and easy. Fiselabad was like 45 minute drive. We drove over there and we started going to each one of those sites.

[1:37:30] Well, we're almost done. And the reason we're driving around because I want to make sure it's not a setup. There's ingress and egress. You know, we're not going to be ambushed or or funneled. Yeah. Yeah. You never know what could go wrong. And you have to count on everything going wrong just to be on the safe side. So we're we're almost done. We're driving onto the campus of the

[1:38:00] University of Fisalabad to cut through and the analyst calls me from Islamabad and he said, "I just got a call from a friendly Western intelligence service and they said that they had a walk-in." A walk-in is somebody who literally walks into the American embassy and says, "I want to talk to a CIA officer." So, you put on a disguise, you go down there, you talk to them. 95% of the time um there are crazy people, right? You're blow you're beaming waves at my head and

[1:38:30] you're stealing my thoughts and my dreams and yeah, sometimes they are probes. Um the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans will send people in pretending to be walk-ins. They're looking around to see where the cameras are, how thick the glass is, where the armored door is located, how many people have weapons, so if they decide to attack the American embassy at some

[1:39:00] point, they know what the vulnerabilities are. Um, some are what are called intelligence peddlers where they have a little nugget of intelligence and they come to the American embassy and they say, "I have this intelligence." And you say, "Okay, well, that's that's legitimately intelligence. here's a $100 for your trouble. But then they go to the British embassy and sell it and the French embassy and the Russian embassy and street informants and yeah and and there there's a month salary right there. Yeah. You know, good on them.

[1:39:30] But sometimes the walk-in is the real deal, right? And the old Soviet hands would tell you that the greatest sources in the history of the CIA were the walk-ins because they were people deep in the military leadership, deep in the nuclear program that you would never have access to. You don't even know their names and they just walk up to your office and say, "I want to work for you guys." So, for that reason, you have to take every single walk-in seriously. There's a protocol

[1:40:00] and you have to take it seriously. Okay. Okay. So I said, "Well, the he said that the walk-in said that there's a that there's a a big brightly colored house that's full of al-Qaeda." And I said, "Okay, I want to talk to the walk-in." He said, "Can't do it. I already asked. They said walk-in's off limits." Which told me that there was no walk-in, that it was an intercept that they didn't want to declare to us. Okay. Interesting. Which was selfish. But

[1:40:30] anyway, that's okay. But you also understand the level of paranoia at that point too. I always do tell one wrong person and and the whole op is done and somebody's going to get killed. Yeah. So just as I am hanging up my phone, we pull out of the back of the University of Vice Lab and there is this enormous yellow house and I said, "That's it. That's the house." Just intuitively. Yeah.

[1:41:00] And Colonel uh Colonel Muhammad said the the the Pakistani ISI guy said, "I can tell you right now something bad is happening in that house." I said, "How do you figure?" He said, "It's got to be 100° right now and all the shutters are closed. They they're broiling in there, but they want us to think that the house is closed up and there's nobody inside." I said, "Well, we're going to put a big team on that house." And then we're driving around and the analyst calls back and he says, "Are you sitting down? Abu Zuba just made a terrible

[1:41:30] mistake. He accessed his email account with a landline." I said, "Oh my god, tell me you have an address associated with the landline." He said, "We have the address and it's site 13." I said, "Oh my god, we're going to get him." I said, "We're on our way to 13 right now." So, we drove over to 13 and it's an empty field. Nothing has ever stood there. And I said to the colonel, "How can this be? We're

[1:42:00] sure that the number came from this." And he laughed. And he said, "You haven't been in Pakistan long enough." He goes, "This happens all the time. Whenever plots of land are divided for development, each plot of land is assigned a landline, right? And so poor people will climb the telephone pole, splice the wire, and then run the line

[1:42:30] to their house so that they can make phone calls and the bill goes to the owner of the land. Yeah. They won't even find out until they have someone come move in. Exactly. So he calls this young tech officer. Guy looked like he was a teenager. He climbs the pole. I said in my first book it was like Medusa's head of wires. Very Pakistani. He climbs the pole. He finds the wire.

[1:43:00] He literally follows it like this down the pole then down the alley and he says, "It's that house right there." You know, I still get chills thinking about it. That's awesome. We're high-fiving each other. That night, one of my colleagues said to me, "Do you really think we're going to get him?" And I said, "No, we're going to get somebody, but no." You just thought it was still too good to be true to be

[1:43:30] true. Yeah. And he's so smart. I'll get to that in a second. So at 10:00 that night was we were in the safe house. We had two safe houses. And I stood on the coffee table and I said, "Guys, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, we have to synchronize our watches like in the movies." So we synchronized our watches. Check. And I said, "Here's the plan. Everybody leave the safe house at

[1:44:00] 01:30. Be in the neighborhood by 0150. be in place by 0155 with line of sight to the target. 0158, get out of the car and exactly as the clock strikes to break down the door, separate the women and children from the men, grab all the men and put them in the patty wagon. We had so many people because remember it's not just the 36 that flew in. It's plus my whole staff plus the

[1:44:30] whole Pakistani contingent. Yeah, you're going to need at least what, eight? You doing eight people to a site per site and then and then we had a triple team on the big site. Okay. We had to charter a bus with some Pakistani driver, you know, who has no idea this is like the biggest CIA counterterrorism operation in the history of the CIA. Literally, it was. And he's like, you know, driving his bus with all these CIA people. Love it.

[1:45:00] So that night at 0200, we're on the roof of the safe house in Feist Labot and I looked at my watch and I said to a colleague of mine, I said, "O200, here we go." And as soon as I said it, we could hear this metal on metal boink boink boink. And um it was site 13, which was the closest site. I got on the walkie-talkie. What's going on over there? Shots fired. Shots fired. Everybody freaks out. And rule number one of operations, the

[1:45:30] walkie-talkies never work. Right. I say all the time, we put men on the moon, we can't last we can't make a battery that lasts more than 15 minutes. That's true. I I don't understand what the what how hard is it to make a battery. I don't understand this. So, it's Murphy's law. It is. We jump in the car. We drive over to site 13 and um and it was chaos. Lots and lots of blood. But we got him. And that's And so was that on the same

[1:46:00] channel as all the other folks too? So you had a shooting there and they were Yeah. So if you had multitude to had all kinds of screaming chatter from multiple locations, you'd have also been screwed and you would been able to interpret what's going on. That's exactly right. And we were only supposed to use the walkie-talkies in case of an emergency. Otherwise, it was silence. Right. That big uh that yellow

[1:46:30] house, I'm not allowed to say the number of people that we caught that night. But um but that house wasn't the problem that we thought it was going to be because everybody in there was just a kid. There were no leaders. It was just like a way station for them to, you know, spend a couple of weeks before they can get smuggled out. So we we were expecting the worst and and nothing happened. We got them all. And then you got Abuza at that point who

[1:47:00] was injured, right? So there was a and part of the interesting part of the story that I find fascinating is your short-lived relationship with him during that interim. Can you talk about that? you know, as it's turning out, it's not as short-lived as I thought it was. Um, I spoke to his attorney a couple of weeks ago. Are you kidding me? No. And I said, um, well, we had a long, long

[1:47:30] conversation. I've not told anybody this, but I said, um, my government will never apologize to him, so I want to apologize to him. He was not the number three. in al-Qaeda. He was never even a member of al-Qaeda. We have never charged him with a crime. And we tortured him to within an inch of his life. He had to be revived with CPR just so we could

[1:48:00] torture him more. Yeah. And he's still in Guantanamo. He's been in our custody for 23 years and he's never been charged with a crime. and he said, "Abuaba knows that we're speaking today." Which kind of surprised me. And his recollection of that night is a little different from yours. It always is. Of course, he was a little bit more heroic and stand right. Yeah. Yeah.

[1:48:30] Didn't go down so easy. Not like shot three times and pissing himself, which is my side of the story, of course. So um so he said that in 2007 when I went public with the torture program, a friendly guard at Guantanamo went to his cell and whispered to him, a CIA man went public with what happened to you. And he said for the very first

[1:49:00] time they felt hope that the world was finally going to know what was happening and that the torture would stop and that it stopped. And I said, um, does he have any hope of getting out? And he said, believe it or not, we negotiated a release with the Biden administration. Uh, they approved him for release. They never said so. The only the only [ __ ] in the in the armor was that they couldn't find a country willing to take him. And so we were just casting around

[1:49:30] asking this country, that country, and the other country, will you take this guy so we can release him? Mhm. And the negotiations were ongoing. And then Donald Trump won. And so and he's still sitting. He's not going anywhere. Wow. That's fascinating. He said that when he's finally released, he wants the two of us to have dinner together as free men. Really? I absolutely adore that because I I mean that's what I was I I really wanted to ask you if you could speak to him because I know at some point perhaps it was in one of your

[1:50:00] books. I mean I've read three of the You have three books. Thank you. I have eight. Oh I've I've only scratched the surface then. Well the eighth is coming out in a couple of weeks. Okay. Well I was looking forward to that. But there were there was some kind of conspiracy that you had mentioned too about people that could have essentially acquitted him of the crimes that he was accused of and I'm I'm fascinated with that because conspiracy theorists frustrate me

[1:50:30] typically. Me too because there is so much we were talking about earlier so much red tape now to get any kind of mission accomplished from step one. All these other people have to finger square everything. I always say that whenever people come to me with a conspiracy, I always say, "Do you have any idea how many moving parts there are in a conspiracy where everybody involved has to keep their mouth shut for the rest of their lives?" Never happens. Never happens. That's why we have so many murderers in prison. Exactly. Exactly. But in this case, it

[1:51:00] actually was a conspiracy. There were several people that could have attested because am I mistaken in that he was actually one of two Abu Zuba. There were two people named Abu Zubeda. It was our Abu Zubeda and his first cousin, but we didn't know that there were two. And I remember these these cables coming in like Abu Zuba is planning an attack in Aman. Like oo okay. Abu Zuba is planning attack in Greensboro, North Carolina. We're like

[1:51:30] what? Ibiza is planning an attack in Jerusalem. Oh my god. I bet planning an attack over here. We're like this guy's a terrorist superman. Yeah. No, it was two people. And but but your for lack of better terms, your Abu Za Yes. was not necessarily a good guy. No, no, he was not a good guy. He was a bad guy. He was doing things in support of al-Qaeda. There were two things in particular that he did that were, you know, worthy of

[1:52:00] prosecution. One was he founded the what's called the House of Martyrs, the al-Qaeda safe house in Pashaw, Pakistan. Two, he founded and staffed al-Qaeda's two training camps in Kandahar province in Afghanistan. Well, and there's a third. He acted as something of a logistician for al-Qaeda. He never pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden. He never joined al-Qaeda as a member. But

[1:52:30] if you were an al-Qaeda fighter and you just wanted to go home, he would smuggle you out. He would get you a passport and a ticket home and go home like leave the organization. Just Yeah. Go back to Egypt or Tunisia or wherever. Just go home. So he's a cooperator of sorts, but not necessarily somebody that was responsible for. And and if he had been charged and convicted in in a federal court, he likely would have been

[1:53:00] sentenced to 20 years, which with good behavior would have been 17 and he's already been in for 25. Yeah. And was tortured and has a life sentence or do they No, he's never been charged there. So they're just still holding him. They're still holding him indefinitely. And the the Senate torch report says the Senate torch report quotes a CIA cable that I remember seeing and shaking my head saying Abu Zuba must never be

[1:53:30] allowed contact with the outside world. He must never be released and when he dies he is to be cremated and his ashes thrown into the Caribbean. So it's essentially evidentiary based because then the truth will come out. Yeah, the truth will come out. The things that we did to him. Okay. Um so it's it's fascinating that that we're still holding him and there isn't enough logical minds or do you

[1:54:00] think do they think at this point they're going to let him go and he's going to be so pissed off that we will have another 911? You know, the naysayers will tell you yes, that's that's the the fear. The truth is almost nobody has taken up the fight again. Mind you, when we caught him, he was a young, strong 27y old man. He's in his 50s now and he's utterly broken. Their health, all of them, Abu

[1:54:30] Zuba and all the other people at at Guantanamo, their health is dire. There's one there's one guy who um now this is a this is a terrible story. You're not getting any health care in Guantanamo just like we didn't get any health care in prison, right? They don't give a [ __ ] about your health. And so there's one guy who developed a tumor uh on his spine and it made him parapolgic. So there's a certain um medical device

[1:55:00] that they needed to to operate to take the the tumor out. The medical device was available only in the states and the nearest one was in Miami. Well, Congress and their infinite cowardice passed a law saying that nobody that's ever been held in Guantanamo may be allowed in the proper United States. Why? What was the motivation for that? Supermax is you're afraid they're going to escape from Supermax. Yeah. Right. Where nobody's ever escaped from.

[1:55:30] No, they're just cowards on Capitol Hill. So, um they couldn't take him to Miami for the surgery. Well, the alternative then is to send the device to Guantanamo. Well, the device is very, you know, fragile. So, after 6 months of heming and hawing, they decided, okay, we're going to put the device on a plane and send it to Guantanamo. and they dropped it and broke it. And so he's a quadripolgic

[1:56:00] now, but he's still in Guantanamo and he's not technically being tortured yet. Right. The neglect is almost in and of itself. Right. Right. So Abazua um all he wants according to his lawyer is to maybe meet a woman someday and get married, maybe have a child. He just wants to go home. Do you think he's at all like he was the day you you spent the a better part of a day with him in the hospital? 56 hours. So,

[1:56:30] couple of days um in the hospital and trying to elicit information from him before he got handed over to people who even know the torture program wasn't something you were keenly aware of. You also knew it wasn't going to be nearly as pleasant as you correct at his bedside. That's what I told him. Yeah. but the nicest guy you're going to meet in this experience. How much uh how much of that personality of somebody who you you know is this terrorist and

[1:57:00] everything else and you've got him the emotion of 9/11 is still on your mind. I told him that. I said I should hate you. I should want to kill you. Yeah. And I don't I said you're pathetic. He's just looking at me. How so? And there was something also. Go ahead. I'm going to show you some pictures. I love it.

[1:57:30] Oh gosh, look at that. Some of them are pretty grizzly. That's him that night. Yes. Wow. Oh, that's some of the other guys that didn't make didn't do so well. They didn't do so well. How fascinating. That's pretty. That's That's insane. Oh, good lord. So, what I mean, what a surreal experience to have that level of of a

[1:58:00] connection with somebody. Um, and I'm I'm curious how how do you think he felt any inclination? And you know, I I know you have all these manipulation tactics and everything else, but it seemed to me as I hear you speak about it that it was more a personal level thing where you kind of just implored to him. Yeah. Like, dude, I for some reason, you know, obvious obviously you want the information, but you also want the best for him at that point. Is there any

[1:58:30] position to that? I was not a trained interrogator and I didn't know what the plans were for him. I had no need to know. So, I wasn't read into the next compartment. My job was to catch him. And that's where my job ended. So, I thought, you know, if I can connect with this guy on a personal level in any way, if I can elicit anything at all that might save an

[1:59:00] American life, stall an attack, you know, be a little nugget as to who might be hiding where. Remember, we thought he was al-Qaeda. I thought he was the leader of al-Qaeda, right? Which is why it makes it twice as as fascinating, you know, but you know, does he know where Bin Laden is tonight? And then I got into a major major situation. Right after he flew out, we went back to the to the safe house and um we had we had also captured his diary and his cell

[1:59:30] phone uh in that raid. The CIA and the FBI fought over the meaning of the diary for 20 years. And I'm I'm confident the CIA was right and the FBI was wrong. The FBI said he he's a crazy person. He's a mad man. A madman was the word that they used. And I said, "No, no, no. You read this. This is He's brilliant." They said, "It's the the the doodlings of a madman." And I said, "No, it it was the 27-year-old Abu Zuba writing letters to the 14-year-old Abu

[2:00:00] Beta, saying, "Don't make the mistakes that I've made as you grow up. Treat our mother and father with respect. Don't uh try to, you know, grab that girl's boob in fourth grade or whatever. Uh treat uh elders with respect. He would write himself these notes about the mistakes that he had made and then he would write poetry and then he would draw a doodle of something and he was quite skilled uh as as a draftsman. I mean, beautiful artworks.

[2:00:30] Um it was all kind of self therapy. Yeah. But then he would write like the cell phone numbers for three Saudi princes. There's something. All of whom ended up dead somehow. Yes. Conspiratory. I know. Yeah. One died of thirst. Imagine that. So anyway, um the other thing we we found was his cell phone. So here's his cell phone.

[2:01:00] I'm in the safe house with this army of people, half CIA, half FBI, the Pakistanis just standing against the wall because they they're already in over their heads on this. And one of the FBI agents, Jennifer, she takes the cell phone, throws it into an evidence bag, seals it, it says evidence on the top, and she signs it and puts her badge number. And as soon as she does, it starts ringing. So I grab it and she goes,

[2:01:30] "Stop. Oh no, now it's evidence you can't touch it. I go, Jennifer, it could be Bin Laden calling. If it's Bin Laden calling, then we can call it into NSA and they can rock it wherever it is that he's hiding. Right? She goes, you better not open that bag. I said, I'm going to open the bag. She goes, I will place you under arrest if you open that bag. Meanwhile, everybody forms a circle around us. Like everybody's waiting to see like who's going to win this one. And she says, "So help me God. I will

[2:02:00] arrest you in front of everybody. It's not cough and daff, is it? No. Okay, making sure. Go ahead. I tossed it back to her and then it stopped ringing. She said, "It's on you. If we don't get Bin Laden, it's on you, not on me." But it wouldn't have been. No, it was actually his mother. His mother, somebody had called and said, "The Americans got him." And she was calling to, you know, tell me it's not true. So we out of respect for your time, we

[2:02:30] will get to the point where you decide that or America government decides another conspiracy technically because again it's something of a significant movement to take what was set in stone from who from the beginning that we don't torture people. They allowed for the torture. Yes. You obviously had an opportunity to be involved with it. Decided not to. Yes. Um and then at some

[2:03:00] point you get through this other end of the torture program. You're retired. Uh and first of all, the torture doesn't work. It doesn't. The FBI apparently, you said, got all the right answers and then the torture never got anything that manifest any any further than they actually then set everybody back. Yeah. because every time we would torture him, he would just clam up because he knew nothing else essentially is what we're we're at now.

[2:03:30] You you know my feelings about the FBI. I mean, it's kind of an ongoing joke really. Yeah. I hate the FBI. I've always hated the FBI, but they are really good at interrogations. Yeah. Really good. And they've been doing it since the Nuremberg trials. And that's why their natural inclination was the same as yours, not being an interrogator, was to endear yourself to them. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That's where the true answers came. Yes. And he really did provide intelligence that

[2:04:00] saved American lives. Okay. To the FBI. And yet it's still to to no avail. Still sitting there. Yep. And then at some point I say you decided I'm curious about this because this part it gets murky to me because I've heard different things and I would love to hear your because you ended up in an interview or were asked at some point that you know were you involved with this? Are you aware of this and you obviously wanted to make sure your name was not included in any of the torture program stuff as

[2:04:30] this started coming out. I don't know if it was an interview or somewhere where you said you were with the ABC News person. Is that basically where it broke? Ross. Okay. And and you were kind of caught off guard about questions that went outside of your purview regarding the program. Yes. In part. Okay. The other part was an illegality that was taking place. So what you're talking about is um in the

[2:05:00] initial interview that I gave to Brian Ross, I said that Abu Zubeta had been waterboarded one time. One time. That's all you thought was the truth though at the time. Yes. Because that's what had been reported from the secret site. So here's the background to that. The CIA and the FBI hated each other so much that even their computer systems were incompatible with one another. Right. Yeah. So, if I'm in the CIA and I write

[2:05:30] a cable, I can say send it to the CIA, State Department, White House, DoD, Treasury, NSA. I can't send it to the FBI. And an FBI cable can only be sent to the FBI. Yeah. So to do that on purpose they had like word perfect until like 20 or something. That's exactly right. Word perfect. You remember that? Yes. So Ali Sufan is getting all this intelligence

[2:06:00] out of Abu Zubeda. He's reporting it back to the FBI and the FBI channels and the CIA is cut out. So then the CIA takes over, immediately starts torturing him, waterboarding him 83 times, and he clams up. We learned in 2005 and this was declassified in 2009 that what the two contract psychologists Mitchell and Jessen did was they took the FBI cables

[2:06:30] that Ali Sufan had written, retyped them in the CIA computer and sent them in saying, "We waterboarded him one time. Look what he gave us." Well, that was already known to the FBI cuz Ali had collected it. He hadn't given the CIA anything, but they lied and they said that he had given it to them only because they waterboarded him one time to take credit. But how does that happen? H why does the FBI not bulk

[2:07:00] especially with that contentious relationship and say, "Wait a minute, we got that information." in part because the reporting cable from the secret site in in CIA channels was kept from the FBI cuz remember they're not compatible and it's none of the FBI's business with the CIA's writing in its channels back then. So they just assumed you might have gotten the same information. Couldn't debunk it either way. Right. Interesting. They used their own little word perfect against themselves. And it wasn't until

[2:07:30] 2009 that we learned that Abu Zuba had been waterboarded 83 times and Khaled Shake Muhammad 187 times. Yeah. And that's and that's the interesting part about that interview too. You know, when you finally find that you were still only educated slightly and had a lot of misinformation that you can only know what you know at the time and the emotion was still pretty fresh from 911 in 2007. Mhm. Uh so it's a it's a lot different situation. Yeah. But when you

[2:08:00] mentioned that you were kind of caught off guard and everything too. I know how sharp you are and I know you know how to manipulate people. It seems like if I wanted to manipulate you or throw you a hard ball from the left side question, you would call [ __ ] right away. Now I would much more experienced. That was the first time I had ever met a reporter. I'd never met one before. But just in life in general, you don't you so you were just kind of it was almost like forgetting to check your six almost. I had Yeah. I had made a

[2:08:30] decision in the days before that interview that I would just tell the truth. I didn't expect to tell that much truth, right? But he just kept pushing. Uhhuh. And oh, it is what it is. There's nothing else to it. He just he kind of he got you. You know, he and I have become good friends. And he says that one of his greatest regrets in all of his career, this is a 14time Emmy winner, he said his greatest regret um is that he bullied me in that interview.

[2:09:00] I called him one day he did it. Oh yeah. I called him one day in 2008 and I said, "I feel like you ruined my life. You you owe me for ruining my my life." And uh and he got me a job at ABC News as the as the counterterrorism Oh, that's awesome. Even though you didn't know the extent of ruin yet. No, no, no. I didn't. Which is also funny because since then, since I was arrested and prosecuted, three of the FBI agents on

[2:09:30] my case have apologized to me. That's great, though. I mean, it's better than nothing. Yeah, it is. I'll take it. Especially since you still spite the FBI. I do. I do, man. I wish they had made me deputy director of the FBI. So once you So he almost did it by accident, you would say. You know, I wish I could tell you that I was so sophisticated and so smart that I went on TV and I told them and that really wasn't it at all. It just came out. Just

[2:10:00] came out. That's fascinating. It's fascinating knowing who you are that that would happen to you. But you know what though? My wife told me, my wife told me the night of my arrest, she said, "You have to embrace this." She said, "You can't run from it. You have to embrace it. You're going to be the CIA anti-tor torture guy. You're the whistleblower. It's your life now, whether you like it or not. Don't run

[2:10:30] from it." Because she said eventually they're gonna move on to their next victim, which they did. It was Ed Snowden. and they're going to forget about you. But if you keep talking about it, your side of the story will be the side of record. That's great. That's exactly right. That's great advice. Even my brother, my brother, who you know knows music and has no idea intelligence, foreign affairs, he said to me, um, I know you can't see it. This was the night of my arrest. I know you can't see it, but this is going to turn

[2:11:00] out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. Well, that'd be a really interesting insight from a brother who would you would think would have only the perspective of like, "Oh my god, what have you done?" Yeah. Or or just being worried for you if nothing else. He was. He was. And you were worried for yourself because you also put that little comment in the book that was like, "How in the world do you put a comment about I actually contemplated doing something that I'm not proud of and then moved on from that comment?"

[2:11:30] You just leave the reader to assume it was the worst. But did you did you hit a rock bottom? So you get convicted and you're you have a period of time between conviction and going to prison. Four months. Four months. So it's almost I mean it's almost worse than just saying just freaking take me because now you have to split that four months out. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was And you went through quite a bit of turmoil. Tell me about that. elaborate on that sentence that you just left us hanging on. My my

[2:12:00] wife and I, she's now my ex-wife. We were watching TV one night and I'm I'm at rock bottom. We had put the kids to bed and we're watching TV and she said, "I'm exhausted. I'm going to go to bed." I said, "I'm going to stay up and watch TV." I wasn't going to stay up and watch TV. I was going to go into the garage, start the car, and lay on the back seat. Literally, that's I had thought about it all day and I was going to do it. And she said, "No, come to bed." And

[2:12:30] I said, "No, I'm going to stay up." She said, "No, I really want you to come to bed." I like she could sense Yeah. that premonition. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's fascinating, too, that obviously it's a blessing that you didn't obviously didn't. But what would that have done to the story, too? I know, right? Would have made it look like It would have It would have damned me. Yeah. It would have Yeah. completely discredit yourself completely which is not what goes through your mind. I find that fascinating again to somebody who otherwise is in such control that you're

[2:13:00] willing to let go because you've in such a dark place that's crazy. When I got to prison too I I was determined from the very beginning that I was going to make something out of this. I wasn't exactly sure what but I was going to turn it into something. And then I I had a couple of turns of of just good luck, good fortune. One of my attorneys said that 600 people had signed up for a a list serve and they just wanted to know

[2:13:30] um uh that I was okay. So she says, "When you get to to prison, when you feel up to it, just write me a letter and I'll send it to these 600 people." I didn't know that she was a friend of Ariana Huffington. And so I wrote, sorry, I wrote this letter in which I exposed two crimes that had been committed against me by these [ __ ] guards in in the prison.

[2:14:00] Yeah. And Ariana put it like this banner headline on the Huffington Post. It got two million hits and then like Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me and it's in The Economist and the Atlantic Monthly and and Playboy and Time magazine and I'm on the back cover of The Nation and it was ridiculous. And it was just an indictment on these two

[2:14:30] dumb asses. And then the the warden calls me in. I'm sure he did. And he says, "I'm going to put you in solitary and we're going to forget where you are and throw away the key." And I thought, "You know what? I have nothing to lose." And I said, "Warden, I have gone nose tonose with al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians. And I'm supposed to be afraid of you. Give me some credit. And I've lived in a lot worse places than your solitary in Lorettto,

[2:15:00] Pennsylvania." And he backed off. Oh, that's interesting. And you you had a miserable experience in there that from the from the jump you were supposed to be in a a camp minimum security camp. Yeah. Club fed. Yes. It didn't work out so well. No, sir. So, you got in and mixed it up with the guys. And what kind of CIA tactics did you leverage to get your way out there? Do you do you Oh, yeah. My second book uh is all about that. I It's

[2:15:30] called um Doing Time Like a Spy. How the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison. Great book. Yeah. Thank you. So, you know, I I started writing it as a joke. It was just a joke. But when I would ask other people to read it, they were like, "This isn't funny. Not funny at all." So then I I said, "Okay, well, I'll be serious about it then." Huh. And uh and I showed how I used these 20 lessons that the CIA taught me to make sure that I was safe and at the top of

[2:16:00] the social heap in prison. Yeah. Manipulation tactics. It's all about manipulation. The whole your whole existence is about manipulation. You had crips and bloods and Italians and everybody, but if you'd had media there, you might have been screwed, right? I've been screwed. Yeah. But I mean, Gambinos, Bananos, Genovese, Columbos. I was I was a whole lot. One called me yesterday. Really? So, you're still tight with those guys? Absolutely. Yes. When you do time, I

[2:16:30] suppose that's kind of a brotherhood in of itself, too, right? Yep. And a lot of those guys were, you know, they're thugs and whatever, but they're still Come on. an illegal gambling charge. Come on. Yeah. That's all they could get. No, the the FBI makes them do the per walk, right? We 25 Rico predicates and then they take a plea and get six months for having a a little uh unarmed bandit in the back of the bar, right? Come on. You just can't get him on racketeering. You got to get him on something else. You know, there was a guy in there. He he

[2:17:00] was doing he was doing a sentence for killing the guy who killed his dad, right? Like, oh, this this guy killed my dad, so I kill him. Right? So, he was a member of one of the five families and he just kind of took to me and he said, "Uh, I got to give you some advice when you get out." He said, "You need to you need to show respect to your uh your parole officer." I was like, "Fuck them. I'm I've had it with all these people." He's like, "No, no, no.

[2:17:30] Hear me out." And he told me about his own experience. And I was like, "Oh, okay. Okay." He said he got violated twice. They're always yanking his chain. He said, "You're very high-profile and important. People hate you." He said, "Don't hand it to them on a silver platter. You're smarter than that." So, you were slick and made it through. Mhm. And you still maintain good relationships with some of those cats, too. Yes. Which again is kind of part of the whole brilliance. I mean, you don't

[2:18:00] have to be an intellectual No, sir. geopolitical spy genius for to be a friend of John Kira. Not at all. Not at all. I love it. And I hope you get a chance to talk to Zaba one day, too, cuz I would I hope to witness any of that. I'm friends now with Muhammadu Uli. I don't know if you've ever heard of Muhammadu. A a movie was made of his experience called The Moritanian. It was absolutely brilliant. It was in the theaters for for a while

[2:18:30] and was nominated for a couple of Oscars. But Muhammadu, we just kidnapped him. We kidnapped him at a cousin's wedding in Moritania and tortured him mercilessly and sent him to Guantanamo and he was there for 14 years and then we were like, "Oh, wrong guy. Let him go." And I said to him, he's he we were I I teach a class at this university in in Spain, graduate level course in the history of terrorism. And I had him as a

[2:19:00] speaker. And uh he gets on, he's like, "You're a hero, John." you're a great man. I was like, are you kidding? I said, not me. You're the hero. I said, when I think of you and I picture you in my mind, you're next to Mandela and Martin Luther King. How you didn't come out of there being a murderous psychopath, right? And and yeah, he forgave everybody. It's amazing when they do that. And I said, if Muhammadu can forgive everybody for for torturing him mercilessly for 14 years

[2:19:30] without so much as an apology, I can forgive a handful of people for 23 months at a low security prison. Yeah, it's no big deal. Well, that's still quite honorable of you that you can do that. It's very human and that's the one of the things I respect about you most. the things that I obviously we've just met recently, but uh but having read and and and hear the things that you talk about, the fact that you're politically set in the middle and are not so extreme and are

[2:20:00] agreeable in conversations and learning and I mean I think you're a fantastic example for people. Thank you. political party means literally nothing to me. And as you said, neither does whether you, you know, you went to college, you didn't go to college, you have this job, or have that job. It makes no difference. You're a good person, a good human being. Then you're a friend of mine. Yeah, that's awesome. And a good idea is a good idea. So that's it. Let's start looking at him like that. That's

[2:20:30] exactly right. And is there anything in closing, is there anything that I can do for you or anything that you need me to mention or anything that I can do to promote your cause? I appreciate it. As you might imagine, making a living is still kind of a challenge. Okay. So, I try a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I'm teaching, I'm writing, and my eighth book is coming out soon. And and uh I've I've got Okay, so I'll list them. I've got a TV show on an online platform. The the show is

[2:21:00] called CIA declassified. We take original CIA documents that have been declassified and we explain world events based on these new documents. It's CI classified on unified TV unifyd online. Uh I've got a Substack. Everything I write I put on Substack. So it's all there. It's just John Kuryaku.substack.com. And I've got uh I've got two YouTube uh podcasts, Deep Focus with John

[2:21:30] Kuryaku and the other one is called Deprogram that I do with Ted R. He's a Pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. Really interesting. I'll have to go check that out. I'm already fascinated guy too. So, do you get any of the illustrations on there? Uh yeah. Did you? That's fascinating. It's good stuff. I'm looking forward to it. Well, if there's anything else I can do to help promote your cause, thank you so much. I appreciate that. I'm just a little old me, but the pleasure is all mine. I'm so honored to have you, man.

[2:22:00] Thank you so much. Honored. Thank you. I want to give you This is my uh this is not my eighth book. This is my only book. I'd love to have your book. Let's keep you from having to spend any money, but it's the least I could do. I couldn't smuggle any whiskey up here. Normally, normally I'll bring that plus a whiskey from Texas, but you know, I didn't room in my suitcase to smuggle whiskey up here. Do you sip whiskey at all? I do. I was in Scotland uh two weeks ago. Are you a Scotch man even? You know, I prefer whiskey, American whiskey. Oh, okay. Me, too. Scotch.

[2:22:30] Yeah. All right. Well, I still may get that to you then. Scotch tastes like gasoline. And I thought maybe I was just missing it, you know? Maybe I I'm just getting bad scotch. All of it's an acquired taste. You know, the first time you tried bourbon, too, was probably Yeah. Yeah. It was rough. Yeah. It was really need to put sugar in it so you get used to it. I do like Irish whiskey, though. Thank you very much for this. You know, speaking of the Crips, too. Um, as you might imagine, I was I was pulled into the lieutenant's office more than once. Um, usually for swearing matches where we just swear. They always ask you this question. Can we talk manto

[2:23:00] man? That means off the record I'm going to swear at you and you can't report me for it. Okay. So then I swear right back at him. Am I a [ __ ] [ __ ] I go, maybe. I don't know you well enough. We're still off the record. Yeah, exactly. Because I said, uh, this guy's a [ __ ] [ __ ] And I said on the phone one day and they called me to anyway. So I got in the lieutenant's office and the only pictures that they had posted on the wall, like taped on the wall, were the Crips and the Bloods and they worked hard to keep them separate even in a low

[2:23:30] security prison. I was surprised by that. That's nuts. Well, they're a giant organization. Like I said, all you can hope is that they don't start to collaborate. Yeah, that's right. Then then we're all in trouble. That's right. Or any gang really. But the Aryan Nation, man, those guys were scary. Yeah. And that's those are the worst cuz they're motivated by hate, too. That's that's a tough one. And they're very quick to kill. Very quick. Yeah. Mhm. Well, it's emotionalbased stuff. Yep.

[2:24:00] Well, thank you. I've run you so far over, so Oh, no. That's okay. I'm meeting a buddy of mine in 15 minutes ago. Yeah. Damn it. What's it take? What you going to do? Do what you going to do? Success around the second grade rules. A confident fake to make you do make you do what they want when they won't pay the

[2:24:30] [Music] pool. A diplomatic is the one to see you through. And don't let those bigots take you off your game and just let them loose. Sit here in the front seat. Baby, ain't that sweet? And take a little honey from the money be. But don't be the [Music] fool. Political magical potion. A missing piece at the end of the game. A slow roll. See the truth in soul motion.

[2:25:00] And if I found in 60 frames like wine and moonshine the truth lies between blurry lines. If you [Music]