[00:00] Hi everybody. I'm John Kuryaku and thanks for joining us for another Q&A episode of Deep Focus. I love doing these and I love them because you seem to love them. The they've been very successful. We have lots and lots of views, lots of questions. Please keep them coming and I want to thank you again for liking, sharing, subscribing, and telling your friends and family. Please keep it up. That's the only reason that these are a success. So, our
[00:30] first question is from Jay. Jay says, "Hi, John. I'm curious. What was the worst experience you had dealing with a foreign intelligence agency or operative during your time in intelligence?" I actually gave this question a lot of thought. Jay, you know how much I love I love Greece. I I've become a dual US Greek citizen. I go to Greece a couple of times a year. I would very much love to buy a little apartment in Greece by the end of the year just to have someplace to, you
[01:00] know, semi-retire to. But my most negative experience happened in Greece when I was assigned there from 1998 to 2000. My regular point of contact was a brigadier general in the Greek National Intelligence Service. This guy didn't like Americans at all, but he especially didn't like Greek Americans. He considered us to be traitors and he considered us all to be conservative to
[01:30] the point of being reactionary. Um, this is when the socialists were in power, the Pasok party, the panh helenic socialist movement. And um, and this guy was a was a true believer, which is cool. I mean, there was a lot of great stuff that came out of the socialist government, but he went out of his way to make my life difficult to the point where he would wait for an American holiday
[02:00] knowing that the embassy was closed and then he would call me just to say, "Oh, there's a terrorist that's passing through the airport. You need to go do surveillance on him." and just wreck my day. Um, that was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. The the most wholly negative experience I ever had, I was stationed in Riad at the time and I had a friend at the American embassy, a
[02:30] friend and his wife at the American embassy in Sana, Yemen. I had never been to Yemen at that point. This was in 1991. And so they invited me down. There was a long weekend. It was the prophet Muhammad's birthday. And so they said, "Why don't you come down for the prophet's birthday? We have a 3-day week." And um and uh you know, we'll have a good time. We'll show you we'll show you SA in the countryside. I said, "Great." So I told a couple of people in the embassy, you know, you have to ask
[03:00] for headquarters permission. And my station chief gave me permission. So the chief said, "Hey, if you're going to go to Yemen, do you mind taking a diplomatic pouch uh with you?" Now, the cool thing about taking a diplomatic pouch is you get a business class seat and the pouch gets a business class seat next to you. So, you've got plenty of room to to, you know, lay out, spread out. It's only an hour and a half from from uh Dubai, I'm sorry, from uh Jedha to Sana. So, no big deal, but still.
[03:30] So, it was an unclassified pouch. A classified pouch is in an orange bag. An unclassified pouch is in a gray bag and an unclassified pouch has by definition only unclassified things in it. And most of that is male. So at the last minute, somebody in Riad said, "Oh, would you take this radio down?" I said, "Sure, dump it in the bag." So it's all male and and this uh
[04:00] like walkietalkie, which is unclassified. You could buy it at RadioShack. And so I I land in SA. All pouches are sealed with a lead seal and has an impression of the uh you know great seal of the United States. And by international treaty, you cannot open a diplomatic pouch. So I have all my diplomatic paperwork. I have the pouch and the and it's sealed with a lead seal.
[04:30] And um I land in SA and they tell me I have to put the pouch through the X-ray machine. I said absolutely not. It's a diplomatic pouch. I have diplomatic paperwork for it and I am a diplomat of the United States of America on a diplomatic passport. I'm not putting it through the X-ray. You have to put it through the X-ray. I said, I'm not putting it through the X-ray. They pull their guns. You're putting it through the X-ray. I'm like, great. Now, I've only been in the agency
[05:00] for a year and a half at this point, and I'm just a kid. I'm like 26 years old, and they've got their guns on me. So, I put it through the X-ray, and it shows male and a walkietalkie. And I hear somebody shout, "Jassus," which means spy in Arabic. And I was like, "Fuck." Immediately, they arrest me. They cuff me behind my back and they throw me into a cell at the airport. There was a a Filipino nurse, a male nurse in there
[05:30] and I said uh I said, "What are you in for?" And he said, "Oh, my visa was expired, whatever. What are you in for?" I said, "They shouted that I'm a spy and they locked me up. What am I going to do?" This started an international incident. I was in jail for four or five hours. The ambassador came, the station chief came, they got the the head of the Yemen intelligence service involved. The foreign minister
[06:00] got involved. It went up to the prime minister. I mean, this was like a serious incident. And then they finally let me go. They had taken their jeas. They carry these curved daggers called jambias. One of the guys carried took out his Jambia and hacked away at the lead seal and opened it up and he was holding up the walkie-talkie like these. It's just a walkie-talkie. That was it. There was nothing to it. It wasn't like spy equipment or anything. But um but it was
[06:30] a very big deal. And I had heavy surveillance for the entire weekend. They were they were just all over us all weekend. That was the first of my five trips to Yemen. each time was worse than the previous time. So th those were my two most negative experiences. Brian Cassaday says, "Hey John, just want to say first how much your content has inspired me on my journey through college and my application to law school." That makes me very happy.
[07:00] Thanks for saying that. Seeing what our government has done to you has inspired me to work in government to make it even a small positive impact. My question for you is, what is the number one issue you would run on if you were ever to run for public office either at the state or federal level? That's a great question, Brian. Um, I'm not I'm not too um too young to uh remember
[07:30] Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976 and and what made Jimmy Carter a viable candidate. He was just a one-term, you know, governor of Georgia. No big deal. Nobody ever heard of him in 1976. But but in one of the early presidential debates where he was surrounded by these giants from the Senate, he said, "I will not tell a lie." Very simply, I will not tell a lie. And in the immediate aftermath of the
[08:00] Watergate uh scandal that toppled President Nixon, Americans wanted a political leader who was going to tell them the truth. If I were to run for office, I would not lie to the American people. I would not. The American people have the right to the truth. And so what I would run on, I think, not that this would necessarily win me any votes, but I would run on real
[08:30] oversight, right? It's up to to our elected officials on Capitol Hill to make sure that the honest people remain honest. If you are a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, your job is to keep the CIA honest and to keep the CIA operating within the confines of the law. Uh same with the Foreign Relations Committee. Uh same with the Armed Services Committee or the Banking Committee or the Environment Committee or the Education
[09:00] Committee or whatever. It's all about the oversight and keeping government honest. And I think that's what I would do. Thanks. Nobody's ever asked me that before. Thank you. Um, Nathan Atlantis says, "Hey, John. I'm 27 from Chicago and currently reside in Arkansas. I've been I've always been someone who has been very situationally aware and has a constant interest in the actions and movement of others. My question is,
[09:30] do you ever find yourself overanalyzing a situation or person that you come across nowadays given your experience in career or do you feel like it is a must in this current evil war uh evil world that we live in? Keep it up. Love the show. Ah, yes. I do sometimes find myself overanalyzing a situation or being overly situationally aware. And I'll tell you the worst of it. You know, I was I was a surveillance and
[10:00] surveillance detection instructor at the CIA. I've written a book called The CIA Insiders Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection. And I've taught surveillance and surveillance detection classes at Liberty University, George Washington University, and privately through um a company called IV Cyber. I just did one last night, as a matter of fact. So surveillance is very very important to me and I have occasionally
[10:30] found myself under surveillance. It's almost always the FBI. I tell them to go themselves. Excuse my language. And then they drop off. So, I was driving in southern Virginia with my wife who was also a surveillance and surveillance instructor, surveillance detection instructor at the CIA. And there was a pickup truck on me for just
[11:00] far too long. And I said to her, "I know it sounds crazy, but I think I might be under surveillance." She's like, "What?" Yeah, it's crazy. You're not under surveillance. So, I took this weird route, you know, off of Interstate 64. I got back on Interstate 64 and this guy was on me the whole time. We finally get to a a red light and
[11:30] he's like boxed me in and I started to panic and I said to her, "I'm going to crash the car in front of me and I'm going to get out of here. I think this guy's on me. I think he means us harm." She's like, "You will not crash the car in front of you. You're not under surveillance." She said, "You you've been overly trained, like trained too freaking much. It took every ounce of energy that I had to not crash the car in front of me. And
[12:00] then the very next exit, the guy gets off. I was never under surveillance. I was overly situationally aware. Um, and sometimes that scares me. Uh, but it happens every once in a while. And now I've come to the to the point all these years later where if I'm if I'm under surveillance, well, you know, congratulations. I'm happy to
[12:30] waste as much of your time and the government's money as I possibly can cuz I'm going to go about my business. I'm going to go to Starbucks. them to sit there for 45 minutes drinking a coffee and playing Angry Birds on my phone and I will waste your entire day doing stuff like that. And so now I don't have surveillance anymore. Thank you for that. Mr. Always right says, "Did the CIA have a hand in facilitating 911 in order to pass the Patriot Act?" No. Um,
[13:00] this is actually a question that I get a lot. The answer is no. Um, you underestimate Congress in that Congress didn't need 9/11 to pass the Patriot Act. They would just pass it cuz they can. And so, they didn't need a catastrophe. I will say that there may have been
[13:30] some thinking at the White House at the time, especially in the office of the vice president, OVP, where George Tennant was shouting that a terrible attack is coming and Dick Clark, the the terrorism ZAR, is shouting that a terrible attack is coming and Condi Rice, the national security adviser, and Dick Cheney saying, "No, no, no. We don't care about that. It's China, China, China." They knew we were going to be attacked. So, it's not that the CIA facilitated
[14:00] it. I think it's that it's that the White House decided not to proactively try to prevent it. And it wasn't to get the Patriot Act passed. It was to make a lot of defense contractors very rich and to wage war and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Okay. Well, last week Donald Trump nominated Kevin Walsh to lead the Federal Reserve. Most people saw a
[14:30] headline and just moved on. But there is something here worth paying attention to. Walsh has openly supported developing a US central bank digital currency. a system where your dollars exist as programmable code instead of physical cash. I spent 15 years in the CIA. I know how surveillance infrastructure works. And I know that capabilities built for one purpose rarely stay limited to that purpose. A digital dollar has the potential to let the government track every transaction you make. Freeze your account without a
[15:00] court order, restrict what you can purchase, automatically deduct fines or taxes, even put expiration dates on your own savings. I'm not saying that that's the plan, but I am saying that that's the capability. And once that infrastructure exists, history shows that it gets used. This is why I've partnered with American Alternative Assets to bring you a free report called the digital dollar trap. It breaks down what's being built, who's behind it, and
[15:30] how physical gold could help protect your savings from a system designed for control. All you have to do is go to johnlovesgold.com to download your free copy or call 1888 gold053 to request one by mail. That is johnloves.com or 888G053.
[16:00] Nathan Farre says, "Hey, John, you briefly talked about the Utah desert in today's episode. This is from a few days ago. I'm wondering what you think is going on there. Also, I recently heard of the military moving a nuclear reactor to Hill Air Force Base. I'm wondering if you could talk more on that subject. Thanks for all you've done for the American people and wishing all the best on the pardon." Thank you for that. Thanks from a Salt Lake City native. Well, Nathan, good questions. So this thing in the Utah desert, this
[16:30] monstrosity in the Utah desert is has been built by and is owned by NSA, the National Security Agency. NSA has built this thing for its massive capacity for memory. So, they have bragged that there is enough memory at this new NSA storage facility in the Utah desert to hold every phone call, every text message,
[17:00] every email, and every voicemail from every American for the next 500 years. 500 years. Now, think about this. At the same time, you're thinking about a book called Three Felonies a Day by Dr. Harvey Silverglate, a professor of law at Harvard University. Dr. Silverglate argues that we are so overly criminalized,
[17:30] so overly regulated in this country that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal business commits three felonies every single day. Well, what that means is if they want to get you, they're going to get you. And there's nothing you could do to protect yourself. Now, with this situation in the Utah desert, if they decide, I don't like
[18:00] Nathan Far. So, we're going to go through his emails and his text messages and his voicemails, and we're going to figure out what else he's done. Well, again, we're so overly criminalized, so over overly regulated, they'll find something to charge you with. And I think that's what this is for. It's not about keeping the country safe. You don't need somebody's information for 500 years to keep the country safe
[18:30] without a warrant. By the way, um I think this is an affront to our civil liberties. I think this is an attack on every single American and we've done nothing about it. So that troubles me very very much. I will be honest with you. The issue of the military moving a nuclear reactor to Hill Air Force Base I don't know anything about but I will research it. So thanks for asking. Mahmud Muhammadi says hello John
[19:00] congratulations on a wonderful channel. Thank you. Did your field experience in the Middle East change your perception and understanding of Middle Eastern countries, Arabs and Iran? If yes, how did it affect you? Did it correlate with your image of the region? What did surprise you, positively or negatively? Did you find that some of your knowledge of the region and people was completely false or somewhat incomplete? Did you ever have any contact with the Iranians during your stay that you can talk about? Love to hear your thoughts on
[19:30] these questions and cheers. I love these questions. I love them. So, let's start at the at the beginning. Did my field experience in the Middle East change your perception and understanding of Middle Eastern countries, Arabs and Iran? Absolutely yes. 100% yes. If yes, how did it affect you? I had to unlearn everything that I had learned. You know, academically in the United States, Mahmud,
[20:00] even in a Middle Eastern studies program at a major school like George Washington University, we were taught Middle Eastern history, Middle Eastern politics, foreign affairs almost exclusively from the Israeli angle. And um which was funny at first glance because many of my professors were Arabs. It turned out half of them were Middle Eastern Jews. One from Tunisia, one from
[20:30] Libya. I did study Islam under say Hussein Nasser, um former uh Iranian government official, but uh but most of what I learned was from the Israeli angle and I had to unlearn it and then learn it again from the ground up. So that was number one. What surprised me, positively or negatively, I was surprised
[21:00] at how unexpectedly complicated the Palestinian issue was in the Persian Gulf. Part of that was because I got to the Gulf just as Saddam Hussein uh invaded Kuwait and Yaser Arafat, who was the head of the PLO at the time, uh jumped in on the side of Saddam. You know, we we had a relatively good relationship with Arafat behind the scenes and we told him, "Don't do this. You're going
[21:30] to screw every Palestinian in the world if you do this. Saddam is going to lose this thing and you're going to want to be on the side of the good guys. And not just the good guys, but the very rich good guys like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates, and Oman. And Arafat said no. And he jumped in on the side of Saddam. I I went into Kuwait, as you know, uh on
[22:00] liberation day with the Marines and um and many of the Kuwaitis who were there already through the occupation or who went into Kuwait with us from Saudi Arabia, they wanted to kill every Palestinian they could get their hands on. That didn't happen, of course, and the US immediately expressed support for the Palestinians who had remained in Kuwait through the occupation. But the the Kuwaiti ruling family was serious
[22:30] that it wanted all the Palestinians out and it rather quickly replaced them mostly with Egyptians. You have to remember the Palestinians constituted the middle class in Kuwait. The Palestinians were the bankers, the lawyers, the engineers, the teachers and professors. They made the country run and then poof, they were gone and they were replaced, as I said, mostly by Egyptians. Well, here we are 25 years
[23:00] later. I was in Dubai a week ago. I was in Kuwait 3 weeks ago, and there is still a very deepseated distrust of the Palestinians. And it stems from that stupid decision that Yaser Arafat made back in 1990. So the fact that it's still so complicated after so many years is interesting to me. I want to add something too. I came across
[23:30] a quote that has always in my mind been one of the most wonderful quotes that I've ever encountered in my in my life. And I um this is a quote from Gamal Abdul Naser, the the former president of Egypt. I had it hanging over my desk for years. And this is the exact quote. He said, "The thing about you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid
[24:00] decisions. You only make complicated stupid decisions." Which makes us wonder if there is something to them which we are missing. That's US foreign policy in two sentences. So, that was another thing that I learned. We're not actually the smartest guys in the room. Often, sometimes we're the stupidest guys in the room, but we think we're the smartest guys in the room. And so, we don't listen to our partners in the Middle East. Well, guess
[24:30] what? They live in the Middle East. They know what it's like. They know their own cultures. They understand their own politics. They're studied in their own histories and they don't want us to go in and tell them what to do and what to think and what to say. And often times when we do, we're wrong. So that was another thing that I learned. Did I ever have any contact with Iranians during my stay there? No. I was not permitted to have contact with Iranians. Remember, for the most part, I was um an analyst.
[25:00] As an as an analyst, zero contact with Iranians when I became an operations officer. Yes, I did have contact with Iranians, but not in the Middle East. It was always outside the Middle East and um and now I have lots and lots of contact with Iranians. Lots. So, thanks for those excellent questions. Visionary Reels says, "John, huge fan. Love your stories." Thank you. Quick question. Have you ever been pulled over by a foreign police officer while being um
[25:30] undercover? Yes, I have. Once in Islamabad, Pakistan and once in Santa Barbara, California. So in Pakistan, I mean, these guys are making $150 a month and so they'll just set up checkpoints at night and they'll shake you down for five bucks. So here I am undercover. I'm in I'm with a passport from a different
[26:00] country and um just pay the five bucks and be on your way. So what I did is I I just started speaking Greek and uh I wasn't on a Greek passport, but I figured there's no way this guy's going to know what language this is. I started speaking to him in Greek. He didn't understand a word I said. I showed him my my passport, which was from a European country. And uh and I gave him the $5. He told me just get lost. So, I got in the car and drove away. In Santa
[26:30] Barbara, it's very very unusual to be undercover in the United States, but I was meeting with a foreign national, a target of mine. He was in he was in a in a town in uh in central California. I was passing through Santa Barbara. And I love love love Santa Barbara. It's my favorite place on earth. I wish I could retire there, but I don't have the $2 million that I would need for a one-bedroom apartment, but it's they call it the American Riviera for a good reason. So,
[27:00] I must have just missed a stop sign cuz I blew right through it. I didn't even slow down. I never saw it. And the cop lit me up. Well, I was with a colleague who actually wasn't undercover. And my colleague, he told me, "Turn the interior lights on." It was late. It was like 10:00 at night. Turn the interior lights on and put your hands on the dashboard. So I did. And my my colleague had been a
[27:30] cop back in the day. So I did. And he got out of the car, which you're never supposed to do. And he put his hands in the air and he says, "Officer, can I speak to you for a minute?" And the cop draws his gun. He's pointing it down on the ground, but he says, "Okay, approach slowly." So my buddy goes up there and says, "Look, we're CIA officers. We're on a mission right now. My friend is undercover. I'm not undercover, but please don't put this in the system."
[28:00] And the cop is like, "I I've got to at least see some ID." So I pull out my alias driver's license and the cop comes up. He's got his hand on his gun now. And I very gingerly hand him my license and he says, "Hang tight." Goes back to his car, comes back up to my car. He's like giddy. He's giggling. Oh, this has never happened to me. This license, it doesn't even come back to anything. Like, I can tell it's
[28:30] an official license. It has the, you know, the the logo where you move I forget what you call it, the hologram. It has the hologram, but it it doesn't go back to anything. And I said, I still have my hands on the dash. I said, "Yeah, that's that's kind of the idea." And he's like, "Wow, this is so cool. I probably can't tell anybody about it, right?" And I said, "Please don't." And he says, "Okay, well, you guys have a good night." And he hands me back my license and I took off. Those were the two times. Cronix the Real says, "Hey, John. Hope
[29:00] you're doing well. I had a question about your time in the CIA and it's what was the scariest moment in the agency and how did you feel after it? I'll tell you something I've never told anybody. On the morning of September 11th, uh we were ordered to evacuate. We were ordered twice. The first time the cops came by, nobody budged. The second time the cops said, "If you don't evacuate, you will be arrested." And so the chief of counterterrorism said, "Everybody
[29:30] just go. Just go." It took me two hours to get out of my parking space. It took me another two hours to get half the distance to my apartment. I lived seven miles from the agency. I got three and a half miles in a total of four hours and I just abandoned my car and I walked the rest of the way. Well, as I'm walking, I could see the Pentagon burning. And when I got to the to the head of the of the Teddy Roosevelt bridge, that's where I would make my right turn to go
[30:00] to my apartment, I saw the deputy national security adviser with no shoes. The deputy national security adviser who is supposed to be like underneath the White House protecting us right now and trying to come up with our response. He ran for his life without his shoes. And I started crying. I couldn't believe this was happening.
[30:30] And that's all I kept saying to myself was, "How could this happen? How could this happen?" And so I got to my apartment. My girlfriend met me there. She later became my wife, also a CIA officer. We we went to the roof of my building. We watched the Pentagon burn for a while and I said, "Let's let's go try to donate blood." So, we found a a what do you call it? Blood mobile. And they told
[31:00] us the line is 24 hours long. We we just can't take you. And I said to her, "We got to get back to work. This is ridiculous." And so we walked the three and a half miles back to my car, drove across the median, went back to headquarters, and then I stayed there for the next four days. Well, why do most people wait until they're sick to think about medication? That does not make sense. When someone in your house wakes up feeling awful, that
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[32:30] the number 10 to save 10% on your order today. That's allfamilyfarm pharmacy.com/jjo with the code john10. Heavy metal card pools says, "Hello John. I am James and I'm 18 years old." He actually didn't say John. He said, "Mr. Kuryaku." You can call me John. Uh, I'm 18 years old. I'm at the point where I need to decide what to do in life. I'm very interested in your line of work. So, my question to you is, where do you think the future of the CIA lies in the
[33:00] hands of Gen Z? And if you would encourage Jenz to work for the CIA, I'm so glad you asked that question. I'm on record as saying that I don't think we need a CIA. The work is duplicative all across government, but I'm not an idiot and I know that the CIA isn't going anywhere. And so really, the only way to change the CIA is to change it from the inside. So, James, I'm going to give you the same advice as an old-timer gave me when
[33:30] I first joined the CIA. He said, "After you've been there 10 years, you're going to realize that you're in a position of authority. You're a branch chief. You're a deputy group chief. You're all of a sudden somebody important and you've got 20 or 25 years ahead of you. So, you're going to be able to change the organization, maybe in a little way, maybe in a very big way, and you're going to make it law-abiding, and you're going to make it respect human rights, and you're going to make it fair and
[34:00] honest and responsive to the oversight committees. So if you are interested in this kind of thing, go to school and learn languages, hard languages, very specific languages, Arabic, Farsy, Dari, Udu, Pashtu, Cindi, Punjabi, Usuzbck, Tajik, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian. That's what the agency wants. If you can just say, "Hello, my name is James." in one of those languages, you go to the front of the line of applicants. There
[34:30] are 2500 applicants for every one job opening. So, you've got to set yourself apart. So, Gen Z is the future of the CIA. Take it seriously. Get a degree in international affairs or nuclear science or physics or whatever you want. Make sure you have one of those languages and you're going to run the place. Tristan Swaford says, "Firstly, I want to thank you for your courage and integrity standing up for what you
[35:00] believe in. Thank you. It's the acts of everyday Americans committed to the ideals that we Americans are raised on that keep those very ideals alive." I couldn't agree more. I hope you get your pardon soon. Thank you. My first question is about the farm. Now, it's a widely kept secret. It's a poorly kept secret that he names he names the farm. Okay. And after noticing it's on a riverbank, I wanted to ask if you did any aquatic
[35:30] training and what that looked like, as much as you can say, of course. My next question is about the CIA's hand in opium and other drug trades around the world. Was that common knowledge at the agency when you were there, or did it come out later? Are operations like that a driving force in your stated wishes to dismantle the CIA? Um, aquatic training. We actually didn't do aquatic training at the farm. We did aquatic training in the Pacific. It was one of the coolest things I've ever done
[36:00] in my life. So, I flew out to San Diego and I got on a submarine. I had only visited submarines before. Like when a sub would come into Bahrain, you know, we would take the crown prince, the minister of defense, give them a tour of the submarine. I had never actually been on one while it's under the water. So the captain announced, "We have a VIP visitor. He's a civilian. Treat him as an officer." Everybody was perfectly lovely to me. So
[36:30] we went up off the coast of Northern California. We came above the water. They opened the hatch. John got out of the hatch. I inflated my inflatable raft. I got on the raft. The submarine went back down under the ocean and I paddled to the shore and I had to take a knife and stab my um my raft. And then with a little folding shovel, I dug a hole and I
[37:00] buried the raft. And then I had to make my way to a certain landmark and do a dead drop and meet with a source and it was all very clandestine and very very fun. That was the aquatic training. Um, drugs. Everybody at the CIA was aware of the reporting that the CIA had been responsible for the arrival of massive amounts of cocaine in the United States,
[37:30] which eventually made their way to Los Angeles and to San Francisco, Oakland, and which became the crack epidemic. We were all aware of it. I'm going to say fully 50% believed it. I believe it. And of course, now historically, we know that that was true. The CIA facilitated the arrival of cocaine. A worse kept secret even was the Afghan poppy crop. I've told this story before, but many years after I left the CIA, I
[38:00] was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was the senior investigator. And so I flew out to Afghanistan to do a study on the heroin poppy crop. And to make a long story short, the CIA was facilitating the cultivation of heroin poppy. Afghanistan under American control produced 93% of the world's heroin. So I wrote all this up and before I gave it to John Kerry who was the uh the chairman of the committee, I sent it to a friend of mine
[38:30] at DEA and I said, "Buddy, take a look at this and tell me what you think." So he reads the the report and he he calls me back and he says, "Buddy, you know you're not going to get this published, right?" And I said, "Why not? and he said, "Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies.
[39:00] It makes them easier to dominate. We want them to all be drug addicts." And sure enough, I didn't get the paper published. Senator Kerry killed it. Um, but fast forward to right now, our country is in the midst of a fentinel epidemic. Where does that fentinel come from? It comes from China. And why can't we stop it? Because the Chinese want us to be
[39:30] addicted to fentinyl. It weakens our society and it makes it easier for them to dominate us. So, what goes around comes around. Well, that is it. So, thanks again for doing this. Thanks again for tuning in. Thanks again for your absolutely excellent questions every single time. These are always fantastic questions. If you haven't already done it, please like, share, subscribe, especially
[40:00] subscribe, tell your friends and your family, and I really look forward to seeing you next time. I'm John Kuryaku. You've been watching Deep Focus. Until then,