[00:00] if you could introduce yourselves uh yourself to our audience, your time in uh Pakistan and what capacity you were working in Pakistan and then eventually your whistleblowing and then the sort of vendetta that was unleashed against you by the American intelligence setup and where you are right now. Just a quick introduction. >> Sure. Sure. Thanks for that. >> As you want. >> Sure. Thank you. My name is John Kiryaku. I'm a former CIA officer. I was in the CIA for 15 years. Uh my the first half of my career was in analysis. The
[00:31] second half was in counterterrorism operations. And um in 2007, I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in a nationally televised interview here in the United States. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president. Um, the Obama administration, [clears throat] excuse me, in the form of John Brennan
[01:02] went after me and they pursued criminal charges. I was uh indicted on five felony uh charges, including three counts of espionage for saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. Of course, I hadn't committed espionage. >> Um, but um and those charges were dropped, but I ended up serving 23 months in prison. um something that I would do again today if I had to. I have no regrets, no remorse. I did the right
[01:32] thing. And I think that we're seeing now uh that I did the right thing. It took the American people this long to come around to my way of thinking that torture is wrong. It's illegal and should be punished. Um the last overseas job that I had at the CIA was um in 2002. I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. Uh and this was the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And in
[02:03] that position, my job was to um locate al-Qaeda fighters and leaders and to uh snatch them. >> Well, I was based in Islamabad, but I worked all over the country. Peshawar all the way to uh to Karachi. I spent a great deal of time in Lahore and Fiselabad. >> Uh Qua which was a a rough a rough place to live and work. [clears throat] Excuse
[02:33] me. But um yeah, I I finished that job and went back to headquarters. I was promoted on the strength of uh of my work in Pakistan and I served as the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And so it was a a real eye opening experience. Now I'm a I'm a an author, a journalist. I've written eight books. I have um two podcasts. I I have uh two syndicated newspaper columns. I speak all around
[03:05] the world and you know things have things have worked out. Thank god. >> Uh your voice is an authoritative voice because I mean you've been in the field. uh you've seen geopolitics play out real time especially in an area like Pakistan. Uh you were also credited for the first takedowns of I would think a high value target of the al-Qaeda Abu Abu Zubeda and then >> Abu Zubeda >> which eventually led to the actual whistleblowing of torture techniques used on him which uh didn't really work out though. Can you explain how that
[03:35] happened? How how did you nab him? And then I'll go deeper into some other questions I have about Pakistan and terrorists in Pakistan. >> Sure. You're right that Abu Zabeda was the first high-value target that we were able to to track and to find and to capture. We believed wrongly at the time that Abu Zabeda was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was not the number three. He had never joined al-Qaeda. He was he was working in support of al-Qaeda. Certainly, >> he had founded the House of Martyrs, the al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar. He had
[04:08] founded and staffed al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan. One in Kandahar, one in Helmund. Uh so he was he was a bad guy, but he was not the number three in al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, we believed that he was. We tracked his movements and we were close, this close a couple of times to capturing him. Finally, we we got a beat on him because he made a mistake. We knew that he would make a mistake
[04:38] eventually, but he made a mistake in that he used his cell phone to access his email account. >> Okay. >> And and so when he turned the phone on, we immediately captured its location, we sent teams and we we captured him. He was taken to a series of secret prisons over the course of the next uh four years and then finally in 2006 he was taken to
[05:09] Guantanamo. He's been there ever since. >> Yeah. >> He's been in American custody now for 23 and a half years. He's never been charged with a crime. And [clears throat] I've become one of those voices calling for him to be released. He was not the number three in al-Qaeda. he was not guilty of the crimes that we accused him of uh having committed. He was not involved with the 9/11 attacks. He should be released and um and he's not been and he likely won't be. >> You know, I've heard this story of yours
[05:40] uh in various podcasts and appearances that you've done. One question that I always wanted to ask you was this sentiment that you have about Abu Zubeda. Is it shared by I guess your colleagues at that time at the Pakistan I Pakistan's ISI cuz you were working with them to uh to nab targets right? >> Yeah but it was a little bit more complicated than that. Forgive me for saying this. You're Indian of course you're not Pakistani but we didn't fully trust the Pakistani
[06:10] ISI at the time. So we never told them who the target was. >> Okay. >> We we never said it's it's Abu Zuba Zadin Muhammad. >> I will take umbrage to that. That's fine. [laughter] >> Because we were afraid that word would leak out and it would get back to al-Qaeda. And so we just called him a big fish. >> Oh. >> Which which became Mr. Fish. So we believe that Mr. Fish is at this location. Let's send teams and we're going to we're going to snatch him. So
[06:42] um the reason why we we believed that the reason why we did that is because we were of the belief and in all these years of retrospect I know that this is true that there really were two parallel ISIS. >> There was the the ISI that I was working with and these guys were heroes. They were all trained at Sandhurst in the UK. They had taken classes in the US
[07:13] sponsored by the FBI. Their English was as good as mine. Great guys who were willing to put their lives on the line in the name of counterterrorism. But then there was another ISI made up of people with long beards >> who gave you a dirty look when you were walking the halls there. These were the members of ISI who had created [clears throat] these Kashmiri terrorist groups
[07:46] or Ji Muhammad or you know other groups that were blowing up Shia Muslim mosques and were attacking Americans. So we we did not have rosecolored glasses on at the time thinking that everybody in ISI is wonderful because our relationship with the counterterrorism units was wonderful. You're right. >> It was far more complicated than that. >> [music]