[00:00] Does the CIA listen through our phones and laptop cameras? Yes. I hate to say it, they can uh take over your smart television and turn the speaker into a microphone so that they can listen to what's being said in the room even when the TV is turned off. Hello, I'm John Kuryaku. I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator for the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and I'm
[00:31] here today to answer questions from the honesty box. The first one is what did the CIA actually do? There are several answers to that question. What the CIA is supposed to do, what it is legally tasked with doing is very simply to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and then to analyze those secrets to give the president and other senior policy makers the best information with which
[01:02] they can make policy. Now, in real life, it's not that simple. The CIA does whatever the president tells it to do. That could be to overthrow foreign governments. It could be to implement covert action programs to influence the foreign media to even kill people. It just depends on who the president is and what policy he wants to implement. What skills make a good agent? You might be surprised by the answer. Actually,
[01:33] the CIA when it recruits spies, when it recruits operations officers, doesn't necessarily look for the big buff guy who works out, you know, every day or six days a week. They look for people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Sociopaths are impossible to control because they have no conscience. They blow right through a polygraph exam, but they won't take orders. People who have sociopathic
[02:05] tendencies do react to a polygraph. They do experience regret or remorse. They will respond to directives and orders. I'll give you an example. When I first was recruited by the CIA, I was asked in a group of new hires, uh, what we would do if we got a cable from CIA headquarters ordering us to collect information on the Indonesian economy. You recruit the Indonesian economic secretary, you make
[02:35] him your best friend, you spend money on him, your wives become friends, you vacation together, but you learn that he is just not recruitable. So, what do you do? Well, one of my colleagues said, "You double down, work the case another six months and hope for the best." A second colleague said, "Maybe you work it through your wives. Maybe your wife can convince his wife to give you the information." I raised my hand and I said, "You break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it." And the
[03:05] instructor said, "That's exactly what you do." That's a sociopathic tendency. What's the coolest piece of spy tech you ever got to use? You know, there's kind of a dirty little secret about spy techch, and it is that 95% of it is purchased from Amazon.com. Seriously, because it is cheaper and it is quicker just to go online and buy it and then use it operationally than it is to invent it from scratch. The coolest
[03:35] piece of spy techch that I ever used was uh it was a leather briefcase. I just went into the local marketplace in Pakistan and bought it. I think it cost the equivalent of like $10. And over the course of 3 days, one of our technical officers pulled the threads out of it, installed a wire all the way around the briefcase, which could act as a listening device, and then packed the area around the wire with these little
[04:06] teeny tiny batteries that I had never seen before. And then he sewed the whole thing closed again. So I walked into a meeting with my little briefcase. The bad guy took the briefcase from me, opened it up, looked through it. It didn't have anything in it because it was all sewn into the lining. And we sat there and had the uh had the meeting while my colleagues half a mile away were able to listen to the entire thing. It was very cool. Does the CIA listen through our phones and laptop cameras?
[04:37] Yes. I hate to say it. There was a dramatic leak uh in 2017 that the CIA came to call the Vault 7 disclosures, gigabytes worth of documents leaked by a CIA technology engineer. What he told us was that the CIA can intercept anything from anyone. Number one. Number two, they can remotely take control of your car through the car's embedded computer to
[05:09] do what? To make you drive off a bridge into a tree to make you kill yourself and make it look like an accident. They can uh take over your smart television and turn the speaker into a microphone so that they can listen to what's being said in the room even when the TV is turned off. God knows what else that they can do that uh that hasn't been leaked. Are hitmen real? Yes.
[05:39] At the National Security Council, there is a committee that meets every Tuesday morning at 9:00 to drop something called the kill list. They sit around a table and they make a list of all the people that they want to kill that week. And then they take it back to the CIA which has a dedicated unit. I won't tell you the name, but it has a dedicated unit that takes receipt of the list. They say, "Okay, number one, they drive to the airport, they get on the plane, they go out to that country, they kill the person, they
[06:09] come back, and then they go to number two on the list. That happens every single week." Now, we can have a conversation about whether that's right or whether it's wrong. It's certainly immoral. It's illegal, but it's been tasked by the president. Uh, at the same time, they will tell you there hasn't been another 9/11, has there? Maybe it's cuz we're out there killing people. >> What kind of people would be on that list? >> Oh, the the most dangerous terrorists in
[06:39] the world. Or at least people that the CIA deems to be the most dangerous terrorists in the world. How does the CIA recruit spies in foreign countries? uh that cuts right to the to the very heart of what the CIA is. The CIA trains its officers in something called the asset acquisition cycle. It has four steps. Spot, assess, develop, recruit. So, let's say you're a brand new CIA officer overseas. You get out there and mingle and go to
[07:11] diplomatic cocktail parties or go anywhere where there might be a viable target for you. You spot the target. You go up. Hi, how are you? I'm the new officer at the American embassy. I'm covering political affairs or economic affairs or trade or whatever it is you're doing. You exchange business cards. That's spotting. Assessing is I say, "So, what do you do for a living?" If you tell me that you do something that I'm operationally interested in, that's my assessment of you. Then I
[07:42] develop you. That's actually the fun part. That is us going to lunch and going to dinner and I spend money on you because I have literally an unlimited budget to do so. And maybe we go on vacation together and our wives are friends and you mention off-handedly that you like to go fishing, let's say. So, I charter a boat for $4,000 and I take you deep sea fishing because you could never afford to do it on your own. And then we become best friends. And
[08:12] because we're best friends, I say to you, "Hey, would you do me a favor? Um, yeah, I'm sorry to ask, but you know, the Russians have this new tank, and I know that you guys have access to the plans, and I would really appreciate it if you could just make me a copy of those plans. I know that sounds kind of funny, but it would help me a lot." So, hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Give me the I I'll pick them up uh tonight. And then maybe I start giving you a little bit of money. And then finally, when it comes to the recruitment, I say, "I
[08:43] haven't been totally honest with you. I'm actually a CIA officer undercover. Are you okay with that? You're a great guy and you're my best friend. And how about if I give you $5,000 a month and you just answer my questions, right? That's cool, right? And you undoubtedly will say yes and the rest is history. >> Got to be a good actor to do that. Pull that off. [laughter] >> And a sociopath.
[09:16] >> Do you ever fear for your life? Not now, but over the course of my career, I did several times. And I'll give you one example. There were two active assassination attempts against me. In one, I just got lucky. And unfortunately, my next door neighbor was killed instead. He was the British defense atache in um Athens, Brigadier General Steven Saunders. I think about it every single day. In another an enemy country sent one of its officers and a double agent to kill me. But we had
[09:46] advanced warning that it was going to happen and we were able to well we were able to neutralize the threat as they say in the movies. But there was another experience that I had that troubled me deeply. I was serving in Pakistan at the time and I was staying in a small guest house because it was safer than a big uh hotel. Sure enough, the big hotel was blown up and 45 people were killed while I was living there. But I left my guest house at a different time like I did every day and took a different route
[10:17] like I did every day to go to work. And I noticed that a man on a motorcycle wearing a red helmet was trying very hard to stay in my blind spot. I worked 12, 14 hours, whatever it was that day, and I left and it was dark and sure enough there he was again. There's a definition of surveillance. It's multiple sightings at time and distance. So, I've seen him multiple times at different times of the day and at different places. I'm definitely under surveillance. I got up at 5:00 in the
[10:49] morning, got in the car, drove a block, there he was again. So, when I got to the uh to the office, I said to the security officer, "I am under surveillance. I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance." He said, "Well, let's wait until the uh the chief comes in." And when the chief finally came in, I told him the story and he said, "Well, you know what you have to do?" I said, "I know. I'm going to kill him if I see him this afternoon." I was worried about it all day. And all my co-workers came
[11:19] up to me that day to slap me on the back and say, "Don't worry. We're all going to be out there. We're going to have a whole security team." I said, "I know, but I never killed anybody before, and I'm so worried that he's going to kill me before I get a clear shot at him." That afternoon, I had a meeting at a safe house that we shared with the local service. And on my way out at the end of the meeting, and I don't know why I did this, but I turned around and I said, "General, are you following me?" And he
[11:52] said, "No, why?" And I said, "Because I'm under surveillance and if I see this guy again, I'm going to kill him." And I never saw him again. I learned later that several of their officers were sitting around and saying, "You know, that new American guy, he's such a nice guy. Nobody's that nice. I wonder if he's being nice just to try to make us drop our guard." And they decided to put the worst surveillance officer in their entire intelligence service on me. And
[12:25] if I hadn't said something that afternoon, he would be in the ground today. Does Trump have the UK and Europe's back? No, he doesn't. When we hear from journalists or political figures that Donald Trump doesn't like the Europeans, he doesn't like NATO, he doesn't like the European Union, we should take the man at his word. I don't think he does have Europe's back or even the UK's back. When he says America first, he
[12:55] means America first, whatever that means. He has an idea in his own mind. Uh, but I don't think he cares one wit about Europe. Which film or TV series portrays spy work the most accurately? Great question. I will tell you that at the CIA, we watch every single spy movie and spy series. All of us do. I'm proud to say that I have been the script adviser on the Born Ultimatum, on Kill the
[13:27] Messenger, on True Lies, and on Burn Notice. We love this kind of thing. Most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of the CIA, except a couple. In terms of TV, Homeland, wow, they got it right. The only thing that they got wrong was if you go crazy, they send you to the hospital until you're not crazy anymore. Um, in movies, there was a movie that came out in 2004 called The Recruit. The first half of the movie
[13:59] where the lead character is uh going through training. 100% accurate except for one minor difference. They didn't beat us in training. Everything else that he went through, we went through it in spades. Most other movies stinkers. And listen, just as a general rule, if somebody calls the CIA the company, turn it off. Is social media the biggest intelligence gathering tool today? It is absolutely one of them. Yes. You know, I
[14:30] I I was always amazed when I was at the CIA at how targets, legitimate intelligence targets, would literally put their entire lives on LinkedIn and Facebook. Incredible. You don't even have to do any research. They lay it all out right there on on the screen for you. So, uh the answer is yes. If you value your privacy, if you don't want to pop up on the radar, you have to stay away from social media. What was 9/11's impact on the world?
[15:01] [sighs] You know, I was in the CIA's headquarters on the morning of 9/11. Well, we knew we were at war. And one of the first thoughts that I had that morning was, "Does Osama bin Laden have any idea what he's done? Does he have any idea how many people are going to die?" We all knew what the American response was going to be. It was going to be merciless. The question is, what was 911's impact on the world? It was dramatic and lasting. We're almost 24
[15:33] years after the 9/11 attacks, and we still can't go through airports uh with our shoes on. Untold trillions of dollars have been spent on counterterrorism and defense, and that is probably never going to change. Why are there so many wars in 2025? Well, do you want my real answer or do you want my diplomatic answer? My real answer is the US has a defense budget that is bigger than the next eight largest countries combined. After 9/11,
[16:05] the US entered into something like a permanent wartime economy where if we didn't have a war to fight and to finance, we would actually go into recession. Now, we see ourselves as the world's peacekeepers. In many cases, we're not. We tend to be places where we're not want or welcome and we end up forgetting to leave. There's an old joke inside the CIA about Iran. Like, why would Iran put its country right in the middle of all of our military bases?
[16:36] There you have it. Why are there so many wars? It's because the US has an activist foreign policy and uh and sometimes we make uh friends on the wrong side of issues. Can the CIA make someone disappear without a trace? You bet they can, and they do all the time. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA created, for example, an archipelago of secret prisons, and they would just disappear people. We would capture people in al-Qaeda safe
[17:07] houses, for example, let's say in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and we would ship them off to these these secret prisons. And when I say secret prisons, I mean in many cases they were so secret that even the presidents and prime ministers of the countries where this where the prisons were based didn't know that there were secret CIA prisons in their countries. So the CIA can make people disappear in that respect. Uh they can kill people and just bury them, you know, in some
[17:38] crazy foreign land and nobody would ever know. But if you're a CIA officer, or better yet, let's say you're a KGB officer and you want to defect, the CIA will give you a completely new identity, more money than you can ever count, and you and your family can live happily ever after, you know, under the name uh John Smith, and nobody would be the wiser. How does the USA track terrorist threats? They use something called the terrorist matrix. Uh, it's also called
[18:10] all source intelligence. Believe it or not, members of terrorist groups actually give press interviews in which they telegraph what they're going to do in their next attack. That's one way. The media, electronic surveillance, it could be intercepting cell phones, intercepting emails, intercepting encoded messages, uh even intercepting messages from game platforms. We have satellites that track these things. We have spies providing what's called human short for human intelligence. So you use
[18:42] literally every source at your at your dispense and uh and put this matrix together to try to disrupt that next attack. Can you be a spy and have a moral compass? What a great question that is. I'm going to say yes because I had a moral compass. Uh it cost me my freedom. It cost me my job. It cost me my family. But it was worth it. There are some things that you are tasked to do as a
[19:17] CIA counter intelligence officer that you just have to say no to. There are some things that are so immoral, so unethical, in many cases so illegal that you just should not do it. What is the most controversial thing you've worked on or heard about? It has to be the torture program. I went to prison for 23 months for going public with the CIA's torture program. Uh I went on ABC News in the United States in December of 2007 and I
[19:49] said three things. I said 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 himself. The FBI investigated me. They determined I had not committed a crime. Then Barack Obama became president. They secretly reopened the case against me. I was indicted and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for giving this uh this interview. Remember,
[20:19] espionage can be a death penalty charge. I had three of them. Well, I hadn't committed espionage, and finally they dropped those charges. But I ended up taking a plea to a lesser charge just to make this thing go away. I had five kids at home. I had gone bankrupt from from the legal expenses and I was facing 45 years in prison. They offered me 23 months and I took the deal. But I would do it again today if I had to because somebody had to stand up and say that
[20:50] this was wrong. Shouldn't torture be legal if we are protecting American lives? Absolutely not. not under any circumstances. Torture doesn't work. Torture is illegal internationally. It is immoral. And you end up making a recruitment video essentially for your greatest enemies. For example, when it became apparent that the US was torturing uh military prisoners at Abu Grae prison in Iraq uh and video was
[21:21] leaked showing those prisoners in orange jumpsuits. ISIS bought orange jumpsuits and made its kidnapping victims who were mostly aid workers and uh and American journalists wear orange jumpsuits and then beheaded them on camera. They did that only because the US was torturing its prisoners. So torture does not work. Torture is illegal. It is immoral. It is unethical. And no one should be in the business of doing it. What's the most
[21:52] dangerous country in the world right now? Also a good question. There are several. Um, and I've been to all of them. I never got to go to the nice places. I went to 72 countries with the CIA and almost all of them were just awful. Some of the most dangerous places in the world are Yemen, Somalia, Gaza, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan. Uh, you have to sleep with one eye open. You just never know how bad things are going to get. And I'll give you an
[22:23] example. I went to uh I went to Yemen five times. And every time I went, it was worse than the previous time. The fifth and final time that I went, we were only allowed to stay at one hotel. The hotel had a 30 foot high wall around it to protect it from bomb blasts. You couldn't stay in any of the other hotels by then. Well, the day after I arrived, a group of South Korean diplomats arrived. And on the drive from the airport to the hotel, they were ambushed
[22:55] and they were all killed, six of them. A couple of days later, a group of South Korean intelligence officers arrived to investigate the murder of the six diplomats, and they were ambushed, and they were murdered. And so the South Koreans just closed their embassy and went home. That's a pretty dangerous country. What do you make of US foreign policy right now? A complete and utter disaster. I've never seen an administration that works so hard to to offend and alienate our
[23:27] friends. Threatening to invade Canada. That's an act of war. Canada is not just a NATO country, but it's a five eyes country. Five eyes being the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. the closest alliance in the entire world. And what we're going to send an army to Canada and overthrow them? It doesn't make any sense. Even if you're joking, why would you even joke like that out loud? We don't coordinate with our European allies. Uh we we're threatening
[23:58] to invade Panama to take the Panama Canal. We're threatening to invade and enex Greenland. It's craziness. So, I'm not a big supporter of US foreign policy right now. Does China actually pose a real risk to the West? I think no. And I'll tell you why. China simply does not have a history of expansionism. If you put aside Tibet, which the Chinese have always claimed to be a part of China, the Chinese have never invaded
[24:31] another country. They had a little border skirmish uh in uh with the Vietnamese in the 1970s. They had a little border skirmish against India in the 1960s, but they they don't invade countries. And they have only one military base outside of China. It's in Djibouti. And believe it or not, they share it with the United States. It's the US that sees China as the big threat. And Australia and the Philippines kind of see China as a threat, but the Chinese are perplexed as
[25:01] to why we so distrust them. Is there a threat from China to Taiwan? Of course, there is. Taiwan is also seen by the Chinese as being a legitimate part of China, but there's no indication that the Chinese are preparing any offensive measures against Taiwan. I just don't see what the big threat is. Is the CIA or MI6 more elite? MI6 is an absolutely top tier first rate service, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. At
[25:34] the CIA, we used to say how much we wished we could be like MI6 because MI6 is small and it's lean and when they decide to do something, by God, they go out and do it. At the CIA, when we decide to do something, we have six layers of bureaucracy that we have to go through to finally get permission. and then the attorneys get involved and then you have to send it to the president and then he has to sign it or change it or reject it or do whatever it is he has to
[26:04] do. They don't have that kind of a problem at MI6. They just report directly to the prime minister and they can get things done. The CIA has a budget that absolutely dwarfs the MI6 budget and we have our own, you know, high level technology budget, satellites and spy planes and all kinds of crazy things. So, they're both great services, but but they're different at the same time. Are sleeper agents real? Yes, they are. And the country that is the best at using sleeper agents is Russia. The
[26:35] United States doesn't have a a program of sleeper agents. And I'm frankly unaware of any Western intelligence service that has sleeper agents or that uses sleeper agents. The Russians have an army of sleeper agents. In fact, just in the last two or three years, uh a group of Russian sleeper agents in Northern Virginia, including one in my neighborhood, uh were were disrupted and um arrested. So what a sleeper agent is is somebody who
[27:05] is trained as an intelligence officer who is then sent to the United States or the UK or Brazil or Paris or wherever um and told to just get a job, any job and be a national of that country. And so you've got people who in the case of what happened in Washington recently um one was a was an elementary school teacher and um one worked for an airline. Everybody thought they were Americans and in fact they're collecting
[27:39] classified information mostly from US defense contractors and secretly transmitting it back to Russian intelligence uh in the evenings. They were disrupted and expelled from the United States. Is Chief of Disguise a real job? You bet it is. They have the most fun in the world. On the day that I got hired, I was sitting with two other brand new officers. And I sat down. I said, "Hi, my name's John. It's nice to meet you both." They said, "Um, what are you
[28:09] going to do here at the agency?" I said, "I'm going to be an intelligence officer. I have degrees in Middle Eastern studies. What are you guys going to do?" The woman said to me, "Oh, I just graduated from the Falls Church, Virginia Academy of Beauty." Academy of Beauty. She ended up becoming a master disguise maker. And the guy on my left was a cartoonist for his college newspaper. He drew a little cartoon that was very popular. He became a master forger. So, it doesn't really matter what your
[28:40] background is. If you're good at it, there's a place for you at the CIA. And many of those places are working for the director of disguise. What made you decide to blow the whistle? It's very brave. Thank you. Uh, you know, at the CIA, we are trained to believe that everything in life is a shade of gray, and that is just simply not true. Some things are black and white. They're they're right or wrong. And the United
[29:11] States has laws that ban torture. We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946. We are not just signitories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. We wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In 1946, the United States executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American PS. In 1968, an American soldier waterboarded a North Vietnamese prisoner and was given 20 years at hard labor in
[29:43] a military prison after being convicted of torture. The law never changed. So, how is it then that from 2002 to 2005, torture was somehow magically legal? It wasn't legal. We were committing crimes against humanity. And so it was something that I I having known the details, I couldn't sleep at night. And I believed and and in retrospect I I was right that the American people had a right to know what
[30:14] their government was doing in their name. And I'm proud to say that because of my revelations, the McCain Feinstein Amendment was passed into law and it formally and permanently banned torture. Have you investigated any of us before this shoot? Funny you should say that. There was some light touch work done. Let's let's just put it put it there. Especially the cameraman. That one there. [laughter]