[00:00] Reporting live from the front line. This is the Mad That. I'm Joey Zaugg and welcome to the Mad That podcast. Welcome to season two OF MAD THAT. HELL YEAH. OH, are we over the bar? It's like we never left. >> left except for that bit where Carl got married. Yeah, we had a busy year, but we're back. We're interviewing the people like you want to hear, the craziest people around the world with the maddest stories. And uh today's is uh I know. one of the best.
[00:30] >> tell you right now that the wait has been [ __ ] worth it. Yeah. And this is the this guest here, the Kiriakou John Kiriakou Kiriakou. Let's Do you know what? Let's not It's John Kiriakou. My man deserves respect on his name. John Kiriakou. Uh genuinely one of the most fascinating episodes. >> Insane. To set the bar for the season which uh I mean, we can pull back the curtain a little bit. We've recorded nearly all of the season.
[01:00] >> to go. This is the penultimate record. And we have gone back-to-back-to-back-to-back. >> Rammers. Rammers with some of my favorite episodes ever. This is up there might be my favorite episode ever, not going to lie. Cuz I'm showing stuff that you've never seen before. We've spoke to people that you'd never expect. This season is uh tasty. And John Kiriakou is a man with so much meat on the bone that he'll probably end up coming back at some point. Yeah, he He's got caught some meat everywhere. >> He's everywhere. >> [laughter] >> To give some context, John Kiriakou
[01:30] um CIA officer between 1990 and 2004 um was recruited quite young while he was in uni by his his professor and uh went on to work in Iraq uh studied in the Middle East um like study studying the Middle East not doing like like you know the Middle East Yeah, he didn't do like psychology or something like geography. And uh then was in Athens for a bit uh and then 9/11 happened. He was in the AP center.
[02:00] So, he was like in in He was in the room when it happened, didn't he say? >> What's the What's the What's the CIA building called? >> You meant to know? It's called like Hawley or something, isn't it? Oh, Langley. >> Langley. He was there >> He was in the gaff while the biggest thing ever was happening. And he was in charge of basically going hey, we fix the world. It's like like that meme with that dog with the house is on fire. He was like that, but 9/11 was happening. But he was fine. He was fine. I mean, like there was parts when he
[02:30] wasn't fine. >> Yeah, but it it is brain was wired to be like I need to fix this. Genuinely, and I don't think this is going to be uh brush probably the smartest person we've spoke to. Oh, without a shadow of a doubt. He He's a superhuman man. Um uh yeah, to go and then after 9/11 he became I've got his actual role here to give the man credit. Chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, which Pakistan famously where Bin Laden was found later down the line. He was chasing down kind of high value targets
[03:00] uh in Al-Qaeda. Uh led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah who they thought was third in charge at the time. We go through all of this in the interview. Um and then Abu Zubaydah was then tortured and John Kiriakou was like um let's not torture people. Uh and blew the whistle and then ended up doing 30 months in prison, but was looking at uh 45 years. >> Yeah. Um ended up doing 30 months. Uh
[03:30] lost his pension. The Obama government took his pension off him. Um and now he's reinvented himself as this kind of writer and fellow who jumps on Zoom calls with us. Yeah, he basically went hey, 9/11 just happened. I'm going to get them. Let's get them. And then he got them. And then his mates went let's be horrible to them. And they went He went no, that's not what we do. And then he went I'm easy on him. >> And he was the only one that said no, let's not do that. So, he's he's also got Yeah, I don't know. He's He's just this episode So, we can't We're not
[04:00] being hyperbolic. This episode is fascinating and uh And And a real one We We talked about this after the And then John brings up near the end. It's a real episode where we just let him talk. I mean, he talks about how like internet-wise he's in a hotel in Ohio. So, like there's a little bit of a delay that you won't see because the editing's going to be brilliant. Um but the We really sat here like listening to a the most fascinating fellow in the pub. >> We We sat and listened the way you're
[04:30] listening. >> Yeah, we are like you in this scenario because we've got one of the most fascinating people on the planet. >> Yeah, we just We literally just set the Zoom up. And we've had the privilege to listen to his stories and I hope you feel the same privilege. >> Be excited for this episode. Be excited for this season because to give him his flowers, Harry's put so much work into this season. My job is to sit down and ask the stupid questions and I hope I'm good today. But Harry sources all the guests. He sorts everything out. He does all the editing. Harry has been incredible so far and
[05:00] he's set up a season that you're going to love. Well, that's very kind. But also I mean, Carl the the reason this works so well is brown-nosing each other at the start at the start of the season. The I mean, if you're new to Mad That, you'll see this Carl coming with these little gems of questions that obviously Carl has a bit of a journalism background or studied a bit of journalism. But it's questions that people want to know and not just like interviews. >> we work because you drive the story. You You know the facts. You drive the story in the person. And I maybe try and get
[05:30] like the the the real side of it, maybe. >> I'm I'm Yeah, absolutely. And it's it's the one that really pulls back the curtain on on who the person is more, I think. But anyway, this is season one season two, sorry, episode one of Mad That and it's an absolute rammer. >> John Kiriakou. Do you want to look at that little side camera? Hey guys. Hi. >> Hi John, how are you?
[06:00] I'm afraid I'm in a hotel in southern Ohio and I'm afraid that my signal's not going to be very very good. Should I try it on my phone? Um if you think that'd be better, I mean, you're all right at the moment, I think. >> fine right now. We can always let you If you're talking and then um it cuts out, we'll let you know ASAP. >> Okay. Uh Okay. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, that sounds good. Now, let's just do it like this. Great. Little question we'd like to start off with John is obviously we've got you on We've got you on as you know, John Kiriakou the the
[06:30] former CIA officer, you know, who who blew the whistle and has had this kind of illustrious kind of writing career afterwards. Um but in your words to kind of intro it, who is John Kiriakou? Oh, you know what? That's actually an easy one. There is literally nothing special about me. Nothing. I'm just a normal average guy who happened to find myself in a position where I had to either go along to get along or open my mouth and say something
[07:00] and chose to open my mouth and say something. But there's there's nothing special about me in any way. Do you think that's um a good um property, I guess, for someone who works in a secret service? That you've got nothing special, nothing notable about it. I mean, I think you're a special man, do you know what I mean? But like in your own way, do you know what I mean? The gray man, we'd say. Sure. Um Yeah, you know, one of the things
[07:30] that they drill into your head in training from the very very beginning is don't draw attention to yourself. Right? You have to just You You have to fit into the background. I'll give you a funny example. When I was serving in Bahrain um this is 30 years ago now. Uh I was always invited to Rotary lunches. You know, the Rotary Club, it's all over the world. >> So, I was I was frequently invited to the lunches and
[08:00] and I'm sitting at the table one day with this with this Bahraini He was a deputy minister. So, he was pretty high-ranking guy. And he he points at another table across the room and the ambassador the US ambassador's there with the deputy ambassador, the deputy chief of mission, and the State Department political officer who's a legitimate State Department career He's an an ambassador himself now. And he says to me, "Look at this over here. The CIA guys."
[08:30] And I said, "Uh what makes you think they're CIA guys?" He says, "That's the thing about the CIA. They always sit together." Okay, I have no idea where he got that. None of them were CIA. I was the CIA guy. >> [laughter] >> And I just kind of chuckled to him like, "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can't put one by you, man." Wow. [laughter] But yeah, they teach you from the beginning to just sort of fade into the background. Whilst you're in the CIA,
[09:00] was there What were the stereotypes, I guess, around people that worked in the CIA? Maybe I guess within people who knew kind of I guess special operations and stuff like that and also from the public. Yeah, there were some. When I joined the CIA, they had just started to actively hire people who were not from that cohort that came from wealthy, white, Protestant, Ivy League educated families from the East Coast.
[09:30] Um when I got hired, they had started looking further afield. People with ethnic backgrounds, people from second-tier schools, but who had hard foreign languages. And so, when I first arrived certainly the whole leadership of the place was still those elite highly educated, Ivy League white guys. And it wasn't until I left that that had really changed in a meaningful way. There was thing about the CIA, too. Um in 1994,
[10:00] well, let me back up. In 1989, a group of CIA women filed a class-action lawsuit saying that the CIA had discriminated against them for years just because they were women. If you were a woman, even even, you know, around the time that I got hired, you could only aspire to be a secretary or to be um an intelligence assistant. You weren't going to lead anything.
[10:30] So, they filed a class-action lawsuit. In 1994, the women won the lawsuit. And in his written decision, the judge said that he had never seen a case where the defendant had so clearly documented its own crimes against the plaintiff. And so, every woman in the CIA got a $100,000 and a two-grade promotion. Wow. Wow.
[11:00] >> And so, overnight, you had a whole bunch of unqualified women running the place. How did that affect operations? Did did the things go sideways fast? Yeah, that's a that's a good question. Um you'll get different answers from different people, but the answer you'll get from me is that a lot of things turned to [ __ ] very quickly. Yes. I worked for one of those unqualified women who got the two-grade promotion. Um she had never recruited a source in her entire life. She had served one term
[11:30] one tour overseas in Germany. And all of a sudden, she's in charge of all operations. Like, what is that? You've never done an operation. How are you now in charge of all operations? But yeah, we went through that and it it took us years to work our way through it. Wow. What What was the women's opinion on that? Because surely they're fighting for rights, but to be handed on a plate is a bit different. Were Were they happy with the promotion or did they Were they bitter about the situation? >> They were thrilled with the promotions. And their position was
[12:00] was more or less that all of this would end up working itself out. Yeah, we were we were having a bumpy period and then it was going to smooth out as these women got their sea legs. And that's that's essentially what happened. We ended up with a with a woman as the director of the CIA in Gina Haspel. So, it did work out in the end, but it was it was rough at the beginning. Yeah. It's like when they allowed um women to drive in Saudi Arabia and the the car crashes went through the roof the next day. >> Yes, that's true. >> [laughter]
[12:30] >> That's right. [clears throat] Uh you mentioned about kind of, I guess, the time when you joined. So, could you take us back to 1990 or or a bit before that? Um you know, a a young John Kiriyaku, uh what were you like back then and how did you get recruited into the CIA? Oh, I was very eager, very idealistic. I um I was in graduate school at uh George Washington University. And um I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership, which was taught by an eminent psychiatrist named
[13:00] uh Gerald Post. And um Dr. Post assigned us a paper where we had to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile on our bosses. I worked at a a labor union at the time called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. And um I was a little bit afraid of my boss. He was one of these mean, tough, old-school labor organizers. Just perfectly happy to just do get out
[13:30] on the street, you know, over whatever. So, I'm shadowing him and halfway through the week on Wednesday, we got into an argument and I called him a racist, which he was. And he put up his fists and set a stance and his face got red and I put up my hands to block the inevitable blow and he says, "My penis is bigger than yours." And I said, >> [laughter] >> "What?"
[14:00] And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours." And I said, "You know what? You're nuts and I quit." And I walked out. And I went back to my apartment. I was so angry, I banged out this paper. And it wasn't just, you know, John's angry and he he's writing a paper. I used footnotes from major, you know, psychological studies and I concluded that that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And so, I turned in the paper and a week later I got it back and Dr. Post had
[14:30] given me an A. And he wrote in the margin, "Please see me after class." So, I went to see him in his office. He closed the door and he said, "Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. He said, 'I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Do you want to be a CIA officer?'" And I said, "Sure." >> [laughter]
[15:00] >> "Why not?" Yes. Well, you just lost your job as well. Yeah, and I just quit my job, exactly. So, but he was clear that but it was up to me to to pass all of the the physical exams, the the blood test, the polygraph, the, you know, the writing test, but he sort of smoothed that path for me. And I got in. It took It took over a year, but I I found myself at the CIA. What traits do you think you had that showed uh Dr. Post that you were the guy? Well, there were two things. One
[15:30] One was the obvious one was I had an analytic ability. And so, I ended up not just joining the CIA's analytic directorate, the directorate of intelligence, but I ended up being recruited by the office that Dr. Post had founded at the CIA doing political psychology. That was one thing. The other thing is that I had sociopathic tendencies. I'm not a sociopath. Sociopaths have no conscience. And uh they they blow right through a a
[16:00] polygraph exam because they're unable to feel remorse or regret. But I'll give you an example and I I'm sure this is why I ended up getting the job. I was in a group interview with three other male applicants and a female applicant. And the instructor said, "Uh let's say that you're a CIA officer overseas and you receive a cable, a communication from headquarters, saying
[16:30] that they really, really need the latest Indonesian economic numbers. So, you go out, you call the Indonesian Second Secretary for Economic Affairs at his embassy and you invite him to lunch. And you take him to lunch and you really hit it off. Then you take him to lunch again. Then you take him to dinner. Then you uh introduce your wives and your wives become friends. Then you start taking day trips together on the weekends and you're spending thousands
[17:00] of dollars on this guy. Anything he mentions he'd like to do, you do it for him. You you rent a a boat and take him DC deep-sea fishing. Anything he wants. But 6 months into this, you realize that he's just not recruitable and he's not going to give you those numbers. What do you do? Headquarters still needs the numbers. So, one guy raised his hand and he said, "You double down and you you wine and dine him for another 6
[17:30] months and you try to to befriend him even more and he'll give you the information." And the woman raises her hand and she says, "Maybe you can work it through the wives. The wives become closer friends and maybe you can ask your wife to ask his wife to get the numbers." And I'm looking at these people like, "Are you crazy?" So, I raised my hand and he says, "Yes." I said, "You break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it." He said, "That's exactly what you do." >> [laughter] >> You break into the Indonesian embassy
[18:00] and you steal it. Now, that is a sociopathic tendency. A normal person would not default to a decision to break into a foreign country's embassy and steal classified documents. But I would. That's what I would do. Yeah. And that's what they were looking for. Wow. Wow. It's so interesting to hear someone as kind of established as yourself used kind of sociopathic tendencies as like a positive trait.
[18:30] >> [laughter] >> Do you know what I mean? Like If it works, it works. >> Yeah. It was there obviously that the kind of benefit of that, I guess, is that you you feel maybe less remorse about certain things. If uh yeah, or or or less I kind of anxious or or guilty about certain things. Was there ever any moments when you had to recruit people or you were undercover, say, that weighed on you at the time or or really, you know, that stick out in your mind that you really got you anxious? Oh, absolutely, yes. Most of the people I
[19:00] recruited, I genuinely liked. I genuinely liked them. I There was one guy I recruited that when I left the country, he cried. You know, when I told him, "Look, this is our last meeting. My colleague here is going to take over. It's been so great working with you. I think you're awesome." The guy burst into tears and gave me a big hug. There was another guy. He used to bring me gifts. Like, I would give him gifts cuz it was my job, but he would he'd give me like, you know, "I saw this book in a used bookstore and I
[19:30] know you mentioned that you like Diego Rivera and I found this great book." And you really become friends with these people. And I said to him when I left, I said, "You know, in another life, you and I would be best friends." And he laughed. He said, "I know. It's weird the way this turned out." But then there were some that when I'm giving him that big hug, it's to pat them down to make sure they're they don't they're not carrying guns that they're going to use to shoot me in the middle of the meeting. Mhm. There was one that I recruited. I
[20:00] really didn't want to recruit him. He was a bonafide terrorist and would brag to me about the attacks that he had carried out. But we needed the information and he needed our money and that was the quid pro quo. Um I was a little bit afraid of him. That's why I was always armed in our meetings and uh but I mean the job called for, you know, a high threat recruitment. And so I made a high threat recruitment.
[20:30] Wow. >> So you just do you do what the job requires. And another thing, too. This is the difference when I'm talking about sociopathic tendencies and sociopathy. When it came time to start torturing prisoners in 2002, I said, "Wait a minute. This is wrong. It's just wrong. It's illegal. It's immoral. It's unethical. We shouldn't be doing it. Oh, we have permission from the president." That doesn't make any difference. It's still wrong. The president's signature doesn't make
[21:00] it any less wrong. Yeah. >> So a sociopath would have just said, "Let's do it. Let's go for it." And that's exactly what they did. Yeah. I mean, I would love to I want to put a pin in that to kind of work, too, because obviously it's such a huge uh important topic to cover. Um I guess in the lead up to that um could you take us back to 9/11 and what the day was for you, I guess. I
[21:30] mean, it's a weird thing cuz Carl remembers 9/11. I was less than 1 year old >> Yeah, I was I was I was I was I was I was nine. I was in school. I remember we left school early. We went to a church kind of like afternoon where we, you know, did I went to a Catholic school. And then we went back to class and we got sent home early. None of us knew why. Um and I got in the car with my grandparents and they said, "Oh, America's under attack." And I didn't really understand at the time. I said I was only nine.
[22:00] And then yeah, the the day played out the way it did. But I sure your your day is much different to mine. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So um I had a meeting scheduled at the White House at 9:00 that morning with Condoleezza Rice. She was the uh the National Security Advisor. And I was going with Cofer Black, who was the director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. It was just the two of us with Condi. And it's funny, the meeting was over
[22:30] something that's so silly now in historical context. Um the the an obscure government agency called the the Government Printing Office, the GPO, was scheduled to print a volume of declassified State Department documents. And it was called Foreign Policy of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949 to 1967. Literally nobody is going to read this. Nobody. They only printed
[23:00] like 10 copies. And so um the thing was a thousand pages thick. But in those thousand pages were the names of three people who used to be CIA sources who were still alive. They were like a hundred years old. And we've got an equally obscure law in the United States that if your name is outed
[23:30] by by the US government in an official document, the president has to offer you citizenship and relocation. So rather than try to relocate three hundred-year-old men and their families, we were going to go to the White House to ask Condi just to pull those three cables out of the volume. Nobody would ever miss them. Nobody's ever going to read it anyway. So
[24:00] the driver called me at 8:30 and said um that he was he was at the south entrance and he was ready to take us to the White House. So I walked over to Cofer's office to tell him that the car was waiting for us. And his secretary had a TV on her desk and the news was on and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was burning. And I said, "What happened to the World Trade Center?" And she said, "A plane flew into it." And I said, because I'm a genius, I said,
[24:30] "You know, that happened once before in 1930. A bomber flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really foggy and like heavy rain that day. It's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?" And just as I said it, the second plane hit. Oh. And then she turned to me and she said, "Did you see that or did I imagine it?" And I ran back to my office. I said, "Guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under
[25:00] attack." And we all ran back up to the front of the office. We had these TVs hanging from the ceiling in front of Cofer's office. So one was on CNN, MSNBC. I don't think there was a Fox News yet. BBC, Canal Plus, the Russian channel, the Chinese channel, Al Jazeera. So um they're all showing the same thing. There were like 200 of us standing in
[25:30] the in the bay there watching these TVs silently. And then somebody behind me shouted, "Will somebody please lead?" And then Cofer it was like like a slap in his face. Yeah, yeah, he says, "You, go to the director's office and tell him this. You, go to operations. You, go to security." And then um we we stood there like we all knew what it was. We all knew what it was. Al-Qaeda. They'd been threatening us for
[26:00] months. We just didn't know when and where this attack was going to take place and nobody expected that it would be in the United States. So um the CIA has its own police force called the SPO, the Special Protective Office. And one of them came to the office. He says, "Everybody evacuate. Nobody move." He came back 45 minutes later. He said, "If you don't evacuate, you're going to be placed under arrest." Well, just before that Cofer had stood on a on a desk
[26:30] to sort of address everybody. And he said, "Today we're at war. Whether we like it or not, we're at war and we're all going to have to serve. Some of us not might not make it home. And so if you want to walk out now, no one will think the less of you." Nobody budged. And of the group of us standing there that day, two two of them were killed. Um Helg Abouz and Johnny Michael Spann.
[27:00] But um we ended up evacuating cuz the cops were going to arrest us. And I was home I had to walk most of the way home. I had to abandon my car. And just I'll tell you what put it put the attack into perspective for me that day. I lived 7 miles from the CIA's headquarters. I made it about halfway home. And I had to abandon my car on the side of the road because it was like a scene from World War Z where, you know, the the zombies are coming and all the cars are clogged in traffic. So
[27:30] I just abandoned my car on the highway. Walked the other three and a half miles. But as I got near my house, I saw the Deputy National Security Advisor evacuating. He he had no shoes. He actually ran out of the White House without shoes to save himself. And I was like, "You've got to be kidding me. This is how bad this is. He's got no [ __ ] shoes."
[28:00] So I I went home, met my girlfriend there. She had also evacuated from the CIA. She was a senior CIA officer. She became my wife. We went to the roof of my building and we watched the Pentagon burn for a little while. We tried to donate blood, but the lines were 24 hours long. And I said to her finally, "This is ridiculous. We should get back to work." And so we walked back to my car, drove back to headquarters, and then I spent the next four days there just sleeping under my desk an hour or two at a time.
[28:30] Wow. How how do you separate like like the fear that I would have just as a human being, just natural like protection of myself. How do you switch to work mode? Like is that just natural in you to just want to go? >> Yeah. Yeah, it's natural. You know, it's funny, too, because these ideas that you wake up in the morning and and sometimes you think somebody may kill me today. God knows people are trying. But today could be the day that they get
[29:00] me. And then you say, "Oh, well, there's nothing I can do about it. I might as well just get to work." And so you just get to work. Just do what you're trained to do. Do your surveillance detection route. Make sure that you've got your gun on your waist and another one on your ankle. And then just in case things turn to [ __ ] I had a a buck knife in my back pocket, too. I carried three full magazines, so I had 47 rounds on me. And then you just hope for the best. Wow. What what was the Is there a a moment in your mind that sticks out as the closest
[29:30] you were to death? There were there were two, actually. There were three. I I say in my first two book, I was the victim of two attempted assassinations, one in the Middle East and one in Athens. I can tell you about those in a minute. But there was one that really scared me in Pakistan. I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. And I was very very careful about my my personal safety. So every day I would leave I I stayed in this little guest house with 16 rooms. I would leave every day at a different
[30:00] time and I would take this different windy way to to the American Embassy. So I never left at the same time, never took the same route twice. One day I left to go to the Embassy and um and I noticed that there was a motorcycle trying very hard to stay in in my blind spot as I was driving. And the the motorcycle driver was wearing a red helmet and that's what caught my attention because this had to be the only motorcycle
[30:30] helmet in the whole of Pakistan. Right? Nobody I don't even know where you would buy a motorcycle helmet. So I would speed up, he would speed up. I'd slow down, he'd slow down. I move to the right, he moves to the right, you know, to the left. And I said this is this bad. So I got to the entrance to the diplomatic quarter and he broke off. So I went in. We have a We have a surveillance database. So I put in all the information, motorcycle, red helmet, black leather jacket, you know, this is
[31:00] a description of the motorcycle, that kind of thing. I worked 14-16 hours that day. It was normal at the time. And then I left. When I left, of course, it was dark. And so I come out of the diplomatic quarter and he's on me again. And I said, "Oh [ __ ] this is really bad." So I took this nonsensical way to get back to the guest house and about three blocks away from it he broke off again.
[31:30] I had a terrible time sleeping that night. So the next morning I got up at 5:00 in the morning and I opened the door of the guest house just a crack. I looked up and down the street. I didn't see anybody. I go to my car. They gave us these mirrors on extension rods so you can look under the car for a bomb or under the wheel well. I didn't see any bomb. I didn't see any tracking device. So I got in the car. I drove about three blocks and he's on me again.
[32:00] So there's an official formal 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 locations. So I took this crazy nonsensical way to work and as I got to the entrance of the diplomatic quarter he broke off again. That that sent me into a into a tizzy.
[32:30] So I waited until the security officer um got to the Embassy and I went and I said, "Listen, I am under surveillance. I'm 100% certain I'm under surveillance." So I explained to him my three sightings and he said, "Oh oh, that's bad. Okay, we have to we have to wait till the chief comes in." Finally the chief came in at 7:00 and we went to see him and I said I said, "I'm under surveillance. I'm positive." And I explained
[33:00] and he said, "Well, you know what you have to do?" And I said, "Yeah, I know what I have to do." And he said, "You never you never broke a cherry like that before, did you?" And I said, "Nope, never had to." He said, "Well, don't worry. We're going to have a huge team out there. You're not going to be alone. We're going to get the guy." So of course word spread quickly about what was happening. And I had seven old men working for me. They were old retirees. They had every
[33:30] one of them had been either the chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations during the course of his career. One had been the the deputy director of the CIA. And they came back after 9/11 just because they were so patriotic. And they're all working for me. So they're telling me, "Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry. We're all going to be out there. Don't worry. You know, you're not the only one with a gun. We all have guns. Don't worry." I said, "Yeah, I'm very worried. I said, "You guys can't even read the newspaper.
[34:00] You're going to protect me by seeing this guy from half a mile away." So um that afternoon at 2:00 I had a meeting with the Pakistani intelligence service at a safe house that we uh shared. And we used to interrogate Al-Qaeda prisoners there. So I went to the safe house. We interrogated the prisoner and I got on my jacket and I started to walk out and I I don't even know why I did it. But I turned and I said, "General Muhammad,
[34:30] are you following me?" And he said, "No, why?" I said, "Because I'm under surveillance. I am 100% certain that I'm under surveillance. And if I see this guy again, I'm going to kill him." And he said, "No, it's not us." Well, I never saw him again. Weeks later we heard that a bunch of the Pakistani intelligence officers that I work with were sitting around a table.
[35:00] And one of them said, "You know, the new guy at the American Embassy, John, he's a really nice guy." And everybody said, "Yes, yes, he's a really nice guy." And then one of them said, "You know what? Nobody's that nice. He's probably being nice to us just to lull us into a sense of complacency. I bet when he's not here working with us, he's out there spying on us."
[35:30] And so they asked the worst surveillance officer in the entire Pakistani intelligence service to do surveillance on me. And rather than to do it from a quarter of a mile back like you're supposed to, he did it from 5 ft off my bumper. And I spotted him immediately and I made plans to kill him. It was only because I paused just for that second as I was leaving the the safe house and
[36:00] I asked the general, "Are you following me?" Otherwise that guy would be in the ground today. That's how close we came. When you make the decision that you you have to, you know, kill somebody to protect yourself, what's going through your head? How how do you make that leap? You get this uh you get this uh chemical dump in your head where everything starts to move in slow motion. I still remember the day like it
[36:30] happened to me yesterday. And it's because of this dump of chemicals that my brain is producing. Um I remember in training they told us, "If you're going to shoot somebody, you better be 100% right about your reasons for doing it. Cuz first of all, there is a ridiculous amount of paperwork that goes along with shooting someone. And secondly, he better have the gun in
[37:00] his hand pointing at you when you shoot him." So I I I knew that I mean, if I'm wrong about this, I could end up in prison. I I'll be lucky to just lose my job. Yeah. Or I'm going to be, you know, a hero and get a medal because the guy really was an assassin and I stopped him before he could stop me. So you've got to be 100% sure that you're right about this.
[37:30] And I I was I was right. Wow. Yeah, he was going to die that day. You met you mentioned about um the multiple uh assassination plots on you. Uh could you tell us about them and also I guess does does paranoia start to manifest when when you have plots like this around? Yeah. >> Oh yeah, you you can't help but to be paranoid. You can't help but to believe that that
[38:00] there's at least a chance that everybody's after you. You're in a hostile environment anyway. And you know, you're you're not dressed like the natives are. You you're dressed like an American. You speak like an American. You're high profile just because you're not from there. So the other two were One was in um April of 2020. It's it's a long story. I'll just give you the the
[38:30] end result. They killed my next door neighbor instead. I lived next door to the British defense attaché. And and they killed him on April 20th, 2000 on his way to work. Later they they mailed a manifesto to a leftist um The the group was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November, a Greek group. They mailed a manifesto to a leftist newspaper and they said that they had intended that morning to kill me.
[39:00] They said, "Etha meton megalo kataskopous. We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew he was armed. So we decided to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders, the British defense attaché. So I was evacuated that day as were my wife and and kids and um and flown back to the United States. And then a year later I was handling a double agent
[39:30] who didn't know that we knew he was a double agent. And his handlers ordered him to shoot me in our next meeting. So my bosses at headquarters they said, "We have to abort this operation right now." I said, "Are you kidding?" I said, "This guy is afraid of his own shadow. He's not going to shoot me. He should be worried that I'm going to shoot him." So, we ended up coming up with a plan where I went to the meeting and I tackled him as he got into the
[40:00] room and then my colleagues burst in from an adjoining room and we got him. We slipped him out the back door of the hotel into an ambulance and um he brought security along with him. He brought six guys and they were in the lobby. I brought six guys [clears throat] that were also in the lobby and they're all standing there, you know, looking at each other. And um and our guys heard his guys say "I haven't heard anything. Why didn't he shoot? Why hasn't he called? Where is he? What's going on? Something's wrong.
[40:30] We should have heard gunfire by now." He's not answering his phone. And then our guys just left. I ran into one of the FBI agents that was involved two or three years ago. I said, "Whatever happened to, you know, the guy the double?" And he said, "Oh, dude, he's still in prison. It's been 20 24 years now. He's still in prison. He's in his 80s." Wow. Wow. >> Yeah, he'll never see the light of day ever again. How do How does that life affect your
[41:00] personal relationships? How do you How do you switch that off to be able to be around your loved ones? Surely paranoia and multiple attempts on your life must take its toll. >> Yeah. Yeah, well, think of it this way, too. My first wife was a ballet teacher. She wasn't a CIA officer. So, you know, I I'd come home from this kind of a day and she'd say, "How was your day?" And I said, "Great." >> [laughter] >> "What did you do today?" "Nothing."
[41:30] "Did you see anybody? Talk to anybody?" "No." "How was your day?" And then we would leave it at that. So, she would know She would know on untold that you were that you were kind of hold back. >> I worked for the CIA, but that was literally the extent of her knowledge. She didn't know anything else. You must have been so pissed off if you come home after a day like that and you go, "Great." And she goes, "Oh, my day was rough." And you've had like a plot against your life. You must be like, "You don't even know the half of it." She couldn't find the right brand of cornstarch at the grocery store. The
[42:00] [laughter] cookies didn't turn out. I'm like, "Oh, my god. Oh, my god." So, the day we were evacuated, I I said I I said, "Well, I can't be evacuated. I just dropped my kids off at school." They said, "We're going to send a car to get your kids. We'll send a car to get your wife. You guys can all meet up at the airport." So, I got it I They put me in an armored car, took me to the airport. They picked up my kids. They picked up my wife. We get to the airport and I said to her, I said, "I am so sorry." And she said, "I want a divorce. I'm not
[42:30] doing this anymore." And that was it. We were divorced. Um and then my second wife was a CIA officer which I thought was perfect until you realize that I married one of the sociopaths who actually slipped through the the process instead of somebody with just sociopathic tendencies. So, Have you ever seen the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Oh, yeah. Yeah, welcome welcome to my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Both act
[43:00] normal, but your day has been very easy. Yeah. >> Yeah. Wow. Um So, I mean, kind of carrying on the narrative that we've like picked up and dropped off a little bit. So, you're in Pakistan. Um Could you talk us through I mean, firstly, could you contextualize who uh Abu Zubaydah is for people who might not know? And how the kind of manhunt for Bin Laden and kind of the Al-Qaeda top guys was going from your end?
[43:30] Yeah, at headquarters, they had created this thing called the high-value targets division. It later became the high-value detainees division in the Counterterrorism Center. We had not yet captured a high-value target. And uh we didn't know a whole lot about Al-Qaeda. We knew that it was founded and headed by Osama Bin Laden. The number two was Ayman al-Zawahiri who had been the founder of uh Egyptian Islamic Jihad and was responsible for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat.
[44:00] And we knew that the uh the number three had been uh Muhammad Atef, but we killed Muhammad Atef in a bombing in Tora Bora in October of uh 2001. We didn't know anything else about Al-Qaeda. We had no idea what the structure of it looked like. We had no idea where the cells were located. But this name kept coming up, Abu Zubaydah, Abu Zubaydah. That is a nom de guerre. His actual name was Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn. And we believed at the time that he was
[44:30] the number three in Al-Qaeda. He wasn't the number three. But he had created both of Al-Qaeda's training camps in southern Afghanistan. He founded the House of Martyrs, the um Al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar. And he was kind of the Al-Qaeda facilitator. If you needed a false passport, if you needed a ticket home, if you needed to be smuggled into Afghanistan or smuggled back out, he was the guy that you went to. So, we got word that he was somewhere in
[45:00] Pakistan. And my job was to find him and to capture him. And it took us six weeks, but um but we we got him. Now, the night the night of the raids I was standing on a coffee table in our safe house and we had about 45 CIA officers. We had uh 16 FBI agents and then we had a giant contingent of Pakistani um
[45:30] SWAT team members. It was called the the Punjab Elite Force. So, I said I said, "Listen, we got to synchronize our watches like in the movies." And we did. We synchronized our watches. But I said "The hard and fast rule that I have from CIA headquarters is that we have to take them alive. We have to. Don't shoot anybody." And of course, the Pakistanis just
[46:00] opening fire on everybody, you know, [laughter] they they killed one guy. They shot Abu Zubaydah. They um they shot Abu Zubaydah's bodyguard. They nearly killed Abu Zubaydah. Um we saved his life if only so that we could torture a healthy Abu Zubaydah instead of a near-death one. And um
[46:30] and then I went back to headquarters in May of 2002 two months after we caught him, a month and a half after we caught him. And uh I was standing in the CIA cafeteria and a uh senior Counterterrorism Center officer asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of enhanced interro- interrogation techniques. I had never heard that term before. And when he described them to me, I said "That is a uh that's torture program." Yeah. He said, "No, it's not a torture
[47:00] program. It's been approved by the president and the Justice Department and blah blah blah." I said, "Nah, I have a problem with it. I I think it's illegal, but it's most definitely immoral and unethical. I don't want any part of it." And then they started torturing Abu Zubaydah on August the 2nd, 2002. And not just Abu Zubaydah, but every other high-value target that we ended up capturing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, uh um Ammar al-Baluchi. I mean, you can name
[47:30] any of them. Um we we we tortured all of them at secret prisons, no less, all over the world. The CIA changed dramatically on September the 11th. It went from a an organization whose mission was to recruit spies to steal secrets to a paramilitary organization whose job it was to travel around the world and to kill as many people as they could kill. You say you were against these torture methods. Can you Can you tell us what
[48:00] some of the methods were? What What were the things that were being used to get information? >> Sure. Sure. There There were a lot that were essentially harmless. There was one called the attention grab where they grab you by the shirt and they say, "Answer my questions." And that's that's not torture. They They had one called the belly slap. Okay, right? A slap on the bare belly, it it makes a cracking sound. It leaves a hand print. It's a little bit embarrassing. Uh the attention slap in the face, same
[48:30] thing. No big deal. You're not supposed to hit them, but it's no big deal. But then they went up to three that were particularly bad. Waterboarding is famous. Everybody knows what waterboarding is. Where, you know, you're you're on a strap to a board that's on an incline with your feet, you know, higher than your head. Material of some sort, cloth usually, is is stuffed in the mouth and wrapped around the face and then they pour water on you. And it it gives you a sense of drowning.
[49:00] You really feel like you're drowning. And in the case of Abu Zubaydah, he actually did drown. And he had to his heart stopped and he had to be revived just so he could be tortured more. But there were two other There were two other techniques that I believed were even worse than waterboarding. One was called the cold cell where the prisoner is stripped naked chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so he can't He can't sit or lay or kneel or get comfortable in any way. The cell is chilled to 50° Fahrenheit
[49:30] and then every hour a CIA officer goes in and throws a bucket of ice water on him. We We killed prisoners with that technique. They died of hypothermia. The Justice Department never said we could murder people. And then you just dig a hole behind the building and put them in the hole. We never had permission to do that. The other one was sleep deprivation. And this requires explanation because Donald Rumsfeld, when he was the Secretary of Defense, said that he
[50:00] thought this whole thing was [ __ ] cuz he could go 24 hours, 30 hours without sleeping, and he had a stand-up desk in his office. Well, we're not talking about 24 hours or 36 hours with no sleep. The American Psychological Association told us that around day seven with no sleep, people begin to lose their minds. Around day nine, their organs begin to fail and they begin to die.
[50:30] But the CIA was allowed the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for as long as 12 days. And we killed people with that technique. And that's besides all the people that we that we tortured using techniques that weren't authorized for anybody to use, causing traumatic brain injury, causing death. Now we've got prisoners at Guantanamo that
[51:00] are unable to participate in their own defenses because they were beaten so severely with their heads slammed against block walls that they've lost their minds. Well, no one was authorized to beat someone in the head until he lost his mind. And nobody was ever prosecuted. I was able to I had the honor of speaking to Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was wrongfully uh detained at Guantanamo. I'm not sure if you know Mohamedou Ould Slahi. >> wonderful. He's wonderful guy. Fun He He
[51:30] gave me a lot of time when I was about 19 and 20 when I interviewed him. And he um obviously for his story, he was he was tortured whilst in various, you know, uh prisons and and in Guantanamo. And uh and confessed to crimes that he had no business like there was no possible way he did those crimes. Uh but it was because he was being told that they would harm his mother and and they they kind of tortured him into,
[52:00] you know, sleep deprived psychosis a little bit. Um was there any uh any Or do you think there are any steps in the in the CIA that realized that it's almost like um fruitless, I guess, to torture people into false confessions? Because surely a lot of these people were coming through the you know, who were kind of al-Qaeda adjacent, say, and being led into uh confessing to crimes to kind of
[52:30] almost tie up loose ends? Oh. Yes. The answer is yes. First of all, Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a bonafide hero. This is a guy that I compare routinely, when I talk to him, to Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela because of his capacity to forgive. How this man is able to get past the trauma that was inflicted upon him
[53:00] by my government is something I don't think I'll ever understand. I have great and deep admiration for Mohamedou. I'm proud to call him a friend. Um but the answer to your question is a very simple yes. Torture doesn't work. The The The victim of torture will tell you anything that he thinks you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing him. And maybe
[53:30] one of those things is the truth. Often times it is, but it's mixed in with so much garbage that it's going to take a team of analysts six months to figure out what was true and what was not true. And by then, you know, the bomb has gone off or the attack has taken place or, you know, the assassination has taken place, whatever the the situation may be. Um it's it's the worst possible tactic to use. Listen, it's a kick in my
[54:00] stomach to have to compliment the FBI. But the FBI has been doing interrogations since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and '46. And if there's one thing they're really, really good at, it's interrogations. And they are successful at those interrogations because they're able to develop a rapport with the person being interrogated. And maybe that involves, rather than a punch in the head, it involves a cup of coffee or a cigarette or if you're really
[54:30] helpful and talkative, a pen and paper to write a letter to your family or an orange or, you know, whatever. You build a relationship with the person, a certain level of trust, and they always open up to you. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes a year, but eventually they're going to open up to you. But beating them, threatening to rape their wives and mothers, threatening to kill their children, waterboarding them,
[55:00] that's not going to make them want to talk to you. No. It just doesn't. You know, in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the actual number three in al-Qaeda, he confessed to crimes that we knew definitively he had not committed. But he was just trying to get the torturers to stop torturing him. So now it's a disaster. On top of being a crime, it was a disaster in intelligence policy.
[55:30] It's unfathomable. I mean, I I think it's maybe human nature, but the idea of torture makes me shiver. I think it should. I think it's a sign that you're human. But like the relentlessness of it and this idea that you're it is the it's the worst possible thing. It's the it's the taboo thing to talk about almost because it's so against human nature, I guess. How did they recruit the people who were willing to do this kind of stuff? How
[56:00] Who Who are the people who were like, "Yeah, I'll I'll torture people for 12 days."? Pretty much Pretty much everybody I worked with. See, this is the crazy thing. There was a guy in my office. I'll I'll use this one example. He would come in every morning, "Hey guys." We'd say, "Hey, good morning. How are you How are you?" "Hey guys, how was your weekend?" "Yeah, it was great. How was your weekend?" "Oh, it was great." Our wives were friends, our kids played together.
[56:30] As soon as 9/11 hit, he volunteered to he volunteered to work in something called the Global Resources Division. The Global Resources Division, which was what the CIA called its assassination squad. So he would fly out on Tuesday, kill the people he was assigned to kill, fly back, "Hey guys. Hey, how are you? How was your weekend?" "Yeah, it was great." And then wait until the next Tuesday and go out and kill more people. So, you know, it took me a while to for
[57:00] for this to register in my head. These are guys that I like and trust and our kids are friends and our wives are friends and they're serial killers. None of these people that they're killing have been charged with a crime. Right? The The The rule, the standard for us was they have to pose a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States, American citizens, or American
[57:30] installations. But do they? I mean, who knows? We just have to take their word for it. Like I had to kill that that 16-year-old. Clear and present danger. So I go, "Okay, well, I guess I have to believe you." Crazy. It's so unfathomable. But these were just normal people who became assassins. Obviously this is something that at the time you were as disgusted about as you are now. Um what led you to make the
[58:00] decision to blow the whistle? I wish I could tell you that it was because I was so I was so angry about what the agency had become and I was so, you know, put off, etc. etc. The truth is because um a CIA officer told a journalist that I was responsible for the torture program. It had leaked somehow to the media that this was going on and they were going to pin it on me. And so I went to the media
[58:30] and I spilled everything. I was the only one who was against it, the only one. And that's why they were going to pin it on me. And so I just went. I said, "I'll give you your interview. I'll tell you whatever you want to know." And I decided just to tell the truth. So that's what I did. How betrayed do you feel for an organization that you gave so gave so much of your life to and and you know,
[59:00] put yourself at risk um for for them to turn around and and try and pin it on you and and you know, ultimately leads to jail time for you. Do you feel How betrayed do you feel? >> I I I I felt betrayed for a while at the beginning. And I don't anymore because you know, the the personality of the organization really is just a reflection of the of the personalities of the people running the organization. And frankly, my detractors now,
[59:30] to a man, are either dead or retired. And my reputation has been completely rehabilitated in the CIA. And so I don't I don't feel hatred for the CIA. I feel hatred for the people who broke the law Mhm. Yeah. and demeaned us as a nation and who disrespected the Constitution. But in terms of the uh in terms of the agency itself, I I don't
[1:00:00] I don't feel betrayed anymore. That's good. How was your What was time like in federal prison as a as a CIA CIA uh operative? How'd that work? Like how was your time? The the fact that I was known as a CIA officer made my prison experience much much much easier. Um and it's funny because I was almost immediately adopted by the Italians, organized crime figures.
[1:00:30] Because I hated the FBI as much as they did. >> [laughter] >> And we just really hit it off. In fact, I I had dinner with two of them on Saturday night. Uh they've been released, of course. So, I mean, we're talking serious people, Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, these these kind of people, serious people. Um my problem was with the guards and the administration. But
[1:01:00] I got I'll tell you I got I got nose to nose with the uh with the warden one day. He threatened me with solitary confinement. And I I said to him, "Warden, I have gone man to man with Al-Qaeda with Hezbollah with the Iranians and I'm supposed to be afraid of you? Give me some credit. I said I've lived in far worse places than your solitary confinement in Loretto, Pennsylvania."
[1:01:30] And he backed off. One of the guards told one of the Italians that he would never challenge me. And the Italian said, "Why?" And he said, "Because I read his emails. I know how many reporters and journalists he's close to. That's all I need. I do something during my shift, I go outside to my car, and CNN's waiting for me. No, thanks." Is it humbling? Not that you needed humbling or anything, but obviously you're your uh
[1:02:00] such a kind of prestigious role to then be imprisoned alongside kind of you know petty criminals or whatever. Um yeah, is it a humbling experience? Um you know, I thought so at the beginning. I I I Yeah, I was humbled at the beginning, but then when I realized the the depth of the plotting that took place
[1:02:30] behind the scenes and I learned that there was a term for it called lawfare. I just decided to seize the initiative. My my brother said something to me right after my arrest. He said, "I know that you can't possibly see this right now, but this is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you." And he was right. I couldn't see it at all at the time. But he was absolutely correct.
[1:03:00] If they thought that that prosecuting would silence me, they didn't know anything about me. Instead, they made me famous. Famous. [laughter] Yeah. And uh I'll take it. What was life like for you immediately after coming out? That was hard. Um what they don't tell you is that you are going to be suffering from serious
[1:03:30] anxiety and depression. You know, people think that when they get out of prison, they can just step back into their lives and just start up their lives again. And that's just not true. Your life is never going to be the same. And I didn't understand that. And so, yeah, my marriage fell apart. I I had a terrible time finding work, just a terrible time. And it's taken me a good 10 years to really hit stride again. Things are going to Things are going to go nicely. I'm I'm
[1:04:00] expecting a quite a nice 2026. But the experience is such that you really get to understand who your friends are and who your enemies are. And you may actually be married to an enemy. It's It's eye-opening. Yeah. The I've spoken to um uh people you know, ex-convicts and and e- even like I've I've read stuff about kind of reality stars who
[1:04:30] who spend time in uh obviously like prison where you're surrounded by so many people and then you go out and you have this moment of kind of solitariness, I guess. And it it it hits you like a train. Obviously for yourself, you had a job before going to prison where you the it was quite solitary. You lived quite a a a private individualized life a little bit. Um yeah, did that impact you, I guess, the the roller coaster of flip-flopping
[1:05:00] between being surrounded by people and having no privacy of your own and then coming out of prison then being able to have your own thoughts almost? No, that that wasn't a problem for me. The problem was the the onerous stupid regulations that they put on you. Meaningless regulations. For example, um I was uh called in for discipline. After my release, I was called in to the by the Federal Marshals Service for discipline because I had not taken a
[1:05:30] mandatory class on how to write a resume. >> [laughter] >> And I said, "Listen, I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. I have a master's degree in legislative affairs. I finished my PhD paperwork in international affairs. I have a job. I don't need to write a resume. I could teach you to write a resume. So, do you want me to take time off work and lose money, and they were taking 25%
[1:06:00] of my gross income, so you can teach me how to write a [ __ ] resume? I'll do it if you want me to." Sorry, I I don't understand how it was your job to fight Al-Qaeda and now you want you to write a resume? Yeah. Like what? I [laughter] I was disciplined because I didn't take the class. There were two other classes I didn't take. One was how to um balance a checkbook. And the other was Oh, it was a mandatory class on the prison rape prevention act.
[1:06:30] I said, "Don't you think maybe I should have taken the prison rape prevention class before going to prison?" >> [laughter] >> So they they called me in and they they said, "We're thinking of violating you. You're going to go back to prison for another 6 months." And I said, just like this, they This is what they said to me. There were like a dozen of them sitting around this table. "We're going to send you back to prison." And I said, "Did you ever see that episode of The Simpsons?" I said, "where Homer's forced
[1:07:00] by the court to take a parenting class, and he's a a couple of minutes late. He walks into the classroom, and the the teacher's saying, 'Put a garbage can lid on top of the garbage can, people. I can't stress this enough.'" I said, "Is that what you're going to teach me in your class? To put the garbage can lid on top of the garbage can? Or how to write a check? Or how to drop a resume? I don't need your
[1:07:30] classes. They are a waste of my time. You're the ones holding me back." "Get out of the Get out of the room. Stand in the hallway until [laughter] we call you." Then they call me 45 minutes later, and and they they exempted me from all their stupid classes. Yeah, it's right. >> was the hardest part of reintegrating. Mhm. Yeah, I bet. Um as as someone who's been out with the the CIA for for a while, um those kind of abilities to read people
[1:08:00] and and kind of yeah, pick apart do make make quick judgments on people, is that something that you still do in day-to-day life now? Oh. Absolutely. The training is so deep. The training is so comprehensive, whether it's the psychology of reading people or surveillance detection, whatever it happens to be, it's so deep and so ingrained in your brain by the time they finish with you that you do it for the rest of your life without even giving it
[1:08:30] a second thought. I'm constantly scanning my rearview and sideview mirrors to make sure I'm not being followed. Constantly. You can't help it. It's You just do it naturally. >> Yeah. Can you give a a really short assessment on what you think Yeah, from the from the from the hour and a bit that you've spoken to us. You can be as You can be as honest as you like. I think that you um come well prepared, but you're both innately introverted, not extroverted, which is funny because
[1:09:00] most journalists, and I would consider you to be journalists, are extroverts. Um but yeah, I think you're you're honest. I think you were serious about preparing, but you're introverted. And very much in listening mode rather than speaking mode. I Do you know what, John? It's It's absolutely, yeah. It's It's I don't So, I mean, alongside this, we do a uh our main job is a comedy podcast. We've got a big comedy podcast that we're we do. And then this is our baby. We don't make money from this. This is our passion. >> Yeah, this is what we do because we
[1:09:30] enjoy speaking to interesting people. >> and and like if if we speak to someone who who needs a bit of coaxing and we like we and they're not they're not bad episodes but people who maybe aren't as comfortable to speak to, we're we're right in there. But to sit there it's like being in a pub. Yeah, this is this is so This is so fascinating. We don't need to speak here, John. This is so fascinating. We don't need to speak here, John. >> This is about, you know, this is about your story. And you are right. I like I am an I think I'm an extroverted introvert or
[1:10:00] introvert. It's one of them. It's uh Yeah, I think I think what you've just said there is pretty pretty on the head. And you know what? You know what you're doing so I'm never going to argue against >> Yeah, exactly. >> [laughter] >> Well, it's good to meet both of you. Good to talk to you. >> Thank you so much for your time. We really really really appreciate your time. >> It's been an absolute pleasure and an honor to speak to you. I will link all of your books and and everything like that below cuz um yeah, you know, you're a bit of a literary wonder as well.
[1:10:30] >> I mean we've not said this before but I would love if we could speak to you again in the future. If if we could if we could speak to you again and you know, pick the story up and keep going. That would And we'll be less introverted that time. >> [laughter] >> Thank you, John. That sounds like a plan. Thanks. Hell yeah. John, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. All the best. Uh I found it so interesting that he picked up on that cuz there was points where I was like It's it's a weird one, isn't it? Because obviously
[1:11:00] it's always a conscious thing in my mind that we're hosting this podcast but for a lot of people who tune in and see John Kiriakou's name, they're coming for John Kiriakou. And every and everyone's coming for the stories that John Kiriakou has. They don't need us to power on. I think that's what a lot of I listen to a lot of podcasts for research, for the guests. And that's always the thing that bugs me is when they >> [laughter] >> when you go
[1:11:30] I don't know when they make the the interview about them themselves a little bit. >> We essentially just like open the book and then go, "Hey, listen. Like We're here to just like get him talking." Obviously there's some people here for us cuz they're the fan of you know, fan of my dad and stuff but it's not about us. It's about him. And that was genuinely I reckon that was my favorite ever. So fascinating. That was my I reckon that was my favorite episode ever. So cuz I I I when I booked it I mean the fact that John got back to me in the first place anyway was like I was pretty
[1:12:00] cuz it was one of those ones where I'd sent an email and then a couple months later Yeah, yeah. he was he was dead eager um and dead lovely. But you didn't know like I'd seen all of John's stuff on off of him on TikTok and >> well-spoken. Like sometimes when we do this there's a bit and there's a bit of a other you're saying there in the edit. There's a bit of a time difference there with the Yeah, that delay. Which is probably which is why we don't jump in as much as like in person. >> Yeah. But he understood everything we said.
[1:12:30] He he packaged like there was nothing that we had to repeat. Not went over his head. Everything went in and everything that came out was perfect. And he's talking about some complex topics there and and everything you can know nothing about about 9/11, about Al-Qaeda, about anything in, you know, the what was happening on in Pakistan or the Middle East or anything like that at that time. And the man contextualized it all
[1:13:00] beautifully. >> incredible. And to I felt like a bit of a more of like I feel privileged doing this sometimes cuz I feel privileged always. I'm like, "Wow, we get to hear your story." We just had a story from the man who was in the White House during probably the biggest news story in one of the biggest news stories in the history of mankind. And he was in the epicenter of it. And he just told a story that you would never He was in the he was in the CIA headquarters with everyone the people that that everyone at the time when that
[1:13:30] attack happened. >> Rice." That morning they called her Condi. >> [laughter] >> It's Condoleezza Rice and he went, "Yeah, Condi." It's like, "Right, she's Was George Bush like Bushy?" Big bushy. Like just mental privilege to wear that story. >> that like uh if you're at the time when 9/11 happens I imagine obviously you know, I can't not from my own experience but I can imagine a lot of people in America were going, "Well, I imagine the CIA are on this. I wonder
[1:14:00] what's going on like at the government." You you know, He was standing on tables >> And and he's yeah. And he's there going Had no shoes on? Do you remember the man with no shoes on? People on Ambassadors and yeah. >> Yeah, like chaos was ensuing. And he had to switch into like, you know, CIA mode and be like, "I've got to do me job." Like He's part of the reason why America's now, you know, a lot safer than it was cuz they caught the people who did it and stuff and And he's also the reason why the the kind of governmental crimes in terms of torture and and that kind of
[1:14:30] stuff is out in the open. You know, the reason you know about >> waterboarding waterboarding um and and how prevalent it was is cuz, you know, John Kiriakou went Kerouac on everyone's ass. >> [laughter] >> Which has been the thing that we've been saying in the run-up to this episode. >> I am I'm buzzing after that one. After I felt like a privilege. And at the end when I said to him, "Let's speak again." That wasn't just like you know, a throwaway thing. I would love to get him back on. There's a lot of people that we've spoken to that's like we could definitely you know, we
[1:15:00] could we could have eked out more and stuff like that with John Kiriakou. You go into these deep deep stories and that's not even 3% of the the pantheon of of CIA stories and, you know, that he has um yeah, and then maybe we try and next time he comes over to the UK or something maybe we try Yeah, try and get him so there's less delay and we can be more extroverted. Absolutely. And Mohamedou Ould Slahi was also was mentioned there. That's someone that we'd love to get on
[1:15:30] at some point. >> We spoke to him. Have you ever Have you ever seen The Mauritanian? It's the movie documenting what happened to him in in Guantanamo. Uh and yeah, and someone that that I spoke to I mean someone that I spoke to to get on for season 2 and he was he was eager but a bit busy. Um yeah, and and the fact I find it so interesting that John Kiriakou and Mohamedou uh consider each other friends and they've come from the opposite ends. Mohamedou was a member of Al-Qaeda back when it was like the Mujahideen. And that's why he
[1:16:00] was kind of tied and Well, it was funny when when you brought him up you brought him up with a little bit of trepidation. Because you're it's not the enemy. But you know, you're bringing up someone from the other side. Yeah, I wasn't sure if he he would like yeah. Yeah, but you brought it up with a little a little soft to maybe test and he went, "He's a hero." And you're like, "Okay." Yeah. Like he's on he's on such the right side of history, John. That he recognizes this man. Go watch The Mauritanian. It's an incredible film when you you'll get more context to the story below. And go read John's books. We'll I'll I'll link them all in the bio
[1:16:30] below. Um yeah, I mean he cuz he he he he mentioned one that but he's written like 11. And they're all yeah, in-depth kind of his stories from the CIA, stories from prison. Um I love the yeah, we've done this insane podcast where we learned all about like, you know, the the things he's done. And then he's like, "Yeah, I was just mates with the Genoveses and like >> the Gambinos. I was just mates with like Yeah, I was just mates with my bosses and he was just the a guy called Johnny Wick that the government essentially wasn't.
[1:17:00] Well, I mean he said it at the start, you know, he was he he was the gray man, wasn't he? He's he's unassuming. Yet he's one of the smartest people I've ever had a conversation with. >> he's an intelligent dude. We hope you enjoyed it. I loved that one. I think that is my favorite one ever. Great. It's all it's it's up there for me. Uh yeah, certainly for this season like right up near the top. >> Yeah. Um yeah, so that's been Mata John Kiriakou, man. He went Kerouac on us.