John Kiriakou Unleashed: The Real CIA History, Sexpionage, Black Ops & More

[00:01] He went back to the agency and told them "Destroy all the documents." And I said, half jokingly, "So, where are the aliens?" And he laughed and he said, "That is" and many, many nights after that was just a man's voice saying eight three six. And then somebody at the CIA said, "We've got to smuggle this into the Soviet Union. How do you do that?" Well, we could do it by You're in this meeting and a determination is made that

[00:32] yes, we're going to do this. We're going to call it MK Ultra. She said, "It's all about weapon sales." All of these meetings. We found Nordine's head on the roof of the next door neighbor's house. I hate coming off as a conspiracy theorist, but and I believe very strongly that the Israelis knew exactly what was going [music] to happen, exactly when it was going to happen. We created chaos in Iraq and chaos in Syria and chaos in Libya [music] and now chaos in Iran. This

[01:02] isn't anything that's new. It's been going on for more than a century. I was with him for the first 56 consecutive hours of his captivity. I tied him to the hospital bed. He had surgery. Oh my god, I could talk about this for the next 2 hours. All right, welcome to Jay's Analysis, guys. Thank you for joining me today. We have an esteemed guest, somebody that I consider a true patriot and a hero.

[01:33] We have with us John Kiriakou. You've probably seen him all over the podcast blowing up everywhere in the last few months. He is a former essential intelligence agency officer, whistleblower, journalist, author, and now podcaster. And he joins me today to talk about how the world really works, the myths and realities of espionage. We're going to talk about history. We're going to talk about current topics. John, how are you? I'm well, thanks, Jay. How are you? Good. We had a a good time talking before, and so I thought, man, this guy

[02:04] really knows his stuff. I've listened to I don't know how many hours of you in the last in the last several months, and it's so weird because when you listen to somebody over and over and over on the internet, you start to feel like oh, yeah, I know that guy, but you don't actually know that guy. So, um there is a sort of a familiarity, and of course we do have a lot of things in common. Let's start it off with some notes that I jotted down after listening to a lot of the recent interviews that you've done. Of course, guys, you did just appear on Tucker, and I think that went

[02:35] up yesterday or the night before. Yeah, and so be sure and check that out. John's channel is of course linked, and he does his channel Deep Focus, and let's start with something that's a little spicy from the outset. I hear a lot of former CIA people, pro-CIA people, present CIA people, they they do a sort of apologetic, which I understand, but they argue that the West and the CIA never really engaged in sexual espionage or that kind of operation because of the

[03:05] legalities that it would interfere with and the the the the rights that people have. But, we hear all kinds of stories as well about Operation Midnight Climax, where this is kind of farmed out to, you know, the organized crime and this kind of stuff, and we hear about Epstein and the possible connections with various intelligence agencies throughout the world. So, is it a situation where it's not on the books, but it's done kind of on the side? Can you speak to that? Oh, yeah, I can speak to it. Um

[03:35] the CIA, since its inception, has been involved in sexual operations, sexual espionage. Certainly, sex was was a well-documented component of MKUltra, which lasted from about 1952 to 1975. People are going to jump on my head for saying it ended in 1975. It ended in 1975. Certainly, there are other operations that could be considered successors to

[04:05] MKUltra, but MKUltra ended in '75. You talked about Operation Midnight Climax, that's one of the more famous ones. It's one of those operations that we talk about today in 2026, and you just have to shake your head and and ask semi-rhetorically, "What in the world were they thinking?" But yeah, I mean sex was used routinely well into the late '70s, the early '80s. One of the very first questions, Jay, that I asked when I joined not not the CIA, but when I joined operations, which

[04:35] was about halfway through my CIA career, was about the use of honey pots, right? because when you're when you're learning counterintelligence, you learn how the Russians use honey pots, the Israelis use honey pots. Well, what about us? And one of my instructors, who became my mentor, quite a famous officer, Gus Avrakotos, he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Charlie Wilson's War. Gus told me, "We used sex all the time until Ronald Reagan became

[05:06] president." And and not we didn't stop because Ronald Reagan became president, but roughly that period, only because it just didn't work after a while. If you really want somebody to be a source for you and to commit espionage for you over the course of, you know, years, that relationship has to be built on a foundation of trust, not one of coercion. And so, you know, if you go up to somebody and say, "Listen, we set you up with a prostitute the other night and

[05:36] you didn't know, but we had the room wired for video and audio, and we have these pictures of you and videos, and we're going to release them to your wife, or we're going to release them to your government unless you work for us." That's not how you build trust. That's not how you build a long-term relationship. And then he told me a story, it very well could be apocryphal, but I've I've always believed it. And that was before the Iranian Revolution, there was an Ayatollah that we wanted to recruit and so we sent a prostitute to

[06:08] kind of bump him and lure him into um into a hotel and he had sex with her and we took pictures and video and then laid it out in front of him and said, "We've got you." And he laughed. And he said, "I'll take that in an 8 by 10 and give me two 5 by 7s of this one." And he's like, "What's wrong with you guys? Seriously, like in the movies you're going to try to threaten me? Get out of here." And it was around that operation that a decision was made that this just isn't

[06:39] working. If the Israelis and the Russians think it works for them, that's fine for them, but we just stopped doing it. Well, that's interesting because, you know, when when we look into Epstein and then the files and the emails and all these dumps that that recently came out, you know, there was quite a bit. I don't know if you had ever any time to read like Whitney Webb's book. I thought it was >> Oh, yeah, Whitney Webb is terrific. Whitney's book was great and I think she demonstrates, you know, that this is sort of a a copy-paste operation going back to Robert Maxwell and then whoever

[07:10] perhaps recruited Robert Maxwell be the Rothschilds or whoever into doing it and and taught him the ropes. It seems like that situation was relying very heavily on compromise. Many of the the details in the emails that are still somewhat ambiguous and hard to figure out, they seem to point in that direction. I remember somebody saying maybe it was Andrew Bustamante on a video or something. But somebody was saying something like "Well, once you do this, you kind of you can never do anything with them again because they're up forever we're to hate you. So you're not, like you

[07:41] said, building trust. It kind of kind of maybe as a last resort. Is that why they would rely on something like that for, you know, so many politicians and members of Congress? Is it Is it a last resort or is it a first resort for some some countries? You know, I can give you an educated guess and I'm going to say that it's probably a first resort for a lot of countries. It's unusual for me to agree with something that Andrew Bustamante has to say, but he I think he's right about that. And then coming back to

[08:12] something that you said just a moment ago, we have to also consider the use of cutouts. So, that the chance of blowback is lessened. And what I mean by that is why would you set someone up in a compromising sexual position and risk it going bad and then having that blowback on you when you can have a cutout do it. You can have Jeffrey Epstein do it. You

[08:44] can have a foreign intelligence service do it for you or an organized criminal gang or something that doesn't point back to the CIA. You know, look at it this way, too. We learned so much from this latest tranche of the Epstein documents, so much. And there are still three to three and a half million pages that the president is now saying will not be released, apparently because they would embarrass friends of his. But we now know that Jeffrey Epstein

[09:15] apparently was an access agent for the Israelis, but that he had also volunteered to work for the CIA, to work for the FBI, to work for the British MI5 and the British MI6 and the Germans and that he had tried repeatedly to get a private one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin. He couldn't quite get the meeting, but the Russians offered a meeting with Putin and two security officials, which Epstein had turned down. So, I think

[09:45] that the answer to your question is most likely yes. Uh that this is going on, that it always has gone on, and if it wasn't a direct CIA operation to use sex to to gather information, it was a CIA operation to use a cutout to use sex to get information. Yeah. >> Yeah, I think often times people think of this is something that's only a government agency as if it couldn't be Yeah, as if it couldn't be farmed out to

[10:17] organized crime. You know, Exactly. You you know, you watch The Godfather and the second Godfather, you know, they they get the politician Yeah. >> the the Corleone's whorehouses. So, so they got their you know, they got the blackmail that they needed in that situation. So, yeah, I think that's a great point is you know, the use of cutouts and I don't mean to go too much into Hollywood and movies. My wife and I were watching Peaky Grinders. That's a joke, but making fun of a guy that Peaky Blinders. There was a situation where you know, the British government with SIS at that

[10:48] time, I guess, was working with you know, Cillian Murphy's or Irish criminal gang, and together they're having to combat the IRA and the communists, and they're using the organized crime some in some cases to to do a hit. And I remember reading in some of the books on Operation Underworld and some of the stories of you know, the Genovese crime syndicate after World War I. Yes. The US intelligence apparatus at that time was even kind of making links with with organized crime. How significant

[11:19] and real do you believe those links were to the underground world of organized crime from the American intelligence apparatus over the the decades of the 20th century? Is it over Is it exaggerated? Is that something that is very important? Strong. And with the advent of the Freedom of Information Act and mandatory declassification laws, we now have more details about some of these relationships. As you correctly pointed out, the FBI worked very closely

[11:49] with the Genovese family to secure the Port of Brooklyn and the Port of Newark during the Second World War. We know how many different times the CIA worked with the Santo Trafficante family in Tampa to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. There are other examples, too. I have to be careful here. Well, you know, an obvious one from the 1980s is when the CIA was working with the Pablo Escobar cartel to target

[12:20] communist separatists in Colombia in the jungle. DEA was doing one thing, CIA's doing exactly the opposite thing and nobody saw the irony in that. There's a famous case with a mob hitman, I think he was a Colombo, named Greg Scarpa, where Scarpa was recruited by the FBI to go to Mississippi to find these three freedom writers, Chapman, Chaney, I forget the third one's name, who had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. And

[12:50] Scarpa actually kidnapped a clansman and shot him in the knees to force him to tell them where the bodies were and then, like magic, the FBI discovers the bodies in an earthen dam outside of town. So, yeah, you go through the entire history really of the FBI and the history of the CIA and there are lots of examples where they worked very closely with organized crime. Yeah, and that actually is a great transition to the next topic I wanted to ask you about and that's Operation

[13:21] Gladio because Gladio is another example of a very close connection between Western intelligence agencies and organized crime, particularly Sicilian mafia, and what we know is is the P2 Lodge, or the Propaganda Due A Lodge in Italy. And this was a post-World War II sort of, oddly enough, fascist-tending a series of lodges that were able to be sources for recruitment, according to the public journalistic material that we have, on the part of the CIA and other outfits to sort of again recruit from

[13:53] also organized crime. We have the character Michele Sindona, and we have the character Licio Gelli. And that ties into secret societies as well as Masonic networks, things like that. Is Gladio a huge component of that post-World War II alliance with the Vatican and Vatican bank structure, or is this exaggerated? I always believed that what we've learned publicly, let me preface this by saying everything I learned about Operation Gladio, I learned after I left

[14:23] the CIA. It was in 1990 that the Italian Prime Minister, and I think it was Andreotti at the time, went public when speaking to Parliament about Operation Gladio. For your viewers who don't know what Gladio is, it was an operation hatched by the CIA, MI6, the Vatican, and NATO to leave essentially sleeper agents behind right at the end of World War II and in the couple of years after, just

[14:56] in case of a Soviet invasion, so that there would be an intelligence structure in place that could help the Western services confront the Soviets. You know, in retrospect, looking at it in 2026, it seems kind of quaint, you know, the thing of an interesting movie that might, you know, get nominated for an Academy Award or two. But back then it was deadly serious. Deadly serious. We really believed the Soviets were going to invade Western Europe. We really believed it. And so people were scrambling to create an

[15:26] intelligence infrastructure. Keep in mind, too, that the CIA and NATO weren't created until 1947. So there was this period of of about a year and a half from '45 to early '47 where we were just winging it. MI6 was sort of the preeminent intelligence service in the Western world, with the KGB being the preeminent service in the Eastern world. And President Truman's advisers were saying, "Listen, we need to be prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe." And so

[15:56] Truman asked the British to send MI6 officers to New York to sit with Americans and to help us create what he called a central intelligence agency. A place where all foreign intelligence could be collected and analyzed. You know, just as a kind of a funny aside, all of this ended up happening as part of what's called the National Security Act of 1947. J. Edgar Hoover, the the long, long time director of the

[16:28] FBI, he was the head of the FBI for 40 what? 48 years? He was strongly opposed to the creation of a CIA and an NSC. The National Security Council was also created in that same National Security Act of 1947. So he was going around Capitol Hill asking members of Congress to vote against it. And this is exactly the opposite of what President Truman wanted. Truman got wind that Hoover was working against passage of the bill. And so he called Hoover in

[17:00] and told Hoover, "You've got this all wrong. This central intelligence agency, it's going to be a component of the FBI. So you'll be head of the FBI and of the CIA." And he said, "Oh." And he lifted his objection. It was a lie, of course. There was never any intention for the CIA to be a division of the FBI. And Hoover never forgave Truman for lying to him. But we were scrambling in 1946 and early 1947, finally these MI6

[17:31] officers came to New York. They were met by Bill Donovan and Prescott Bush and a handful of other swells from, you know, Wall Street and the OSS days. And with some, you know, pads of paper, they came up with a centralized intelligence service that we called the CIA. Yeah, it's a fascinating history. I remember several texts that discuss the extreme influence, I guess you could say, from British intelligence on how to structure it, how to set it up. Uh

[18:02] several early figures were very well trained by the British, like Frank Wisner. Yeah, he's a legend. >> student. Yeah, a massive student of British counterintelligence. But in terms of like, going back to Gladio real quick, a lot of writers conceive of this as a template, something that is not just about, you know, setting up networks within Europe that would stave off a Soviet NKVD-style takeover, but also perhaps train terror cells that could be activated later on. Now, we know that perhaps Gladio

[18:33] probably ended, but maybe other types of operations or templates that some authors, I think Doug Valentine and others, connect >> Yeah. Yeah, they connect these types of operations to the template of Iran-Contra training, you know, the right-wing death squads there. And also ISIS-Al-Qaeda-type training Yeah. that you would get under Brzezinski and Carter and Gates in the late '70s, early '80s for the Soviet situation. Do you think that's accurate? Is that exaggerated? Is it a template that's used? One last point, I remember reading

[19:04] Miles Copeland's book, Game of Nations, and he was discussing that in his time in Egypt and in Syria, when he was a consultant to the governments there. Obviously, he says I was working for the CIA. He says, "We would use terrorists all the time." He says, "They're they're great patsies and dupes." I'm not saying that the CIA runs every terror operation, but he says it's a very useful tool in the toolkit. Is that accurate? Is this exaggerated as well? Is it a template, a way to structure Iran-Contra, ISIS, Gladio?

[19:34] >> Oh, yeah. No, it's not exaggerated. And I would actually take issue with his statement that they're dupes. They're not dupes. They're partners. They're compensated handsomely. You bank a favor that way. Well, I I think he's saying the person who goes in and actually blows himself up is the dupe, but Oh, totally. But maybe the handlers are are not dupes. No, no. I I'm with you on that. Yes, I misunderstood. Uh yeah, that that would be the the dupe. I mean, even somebody like me, that that was not really my

[20:05] world at the CIA. I was strictly a counterterrorism officer, but even I had contact with organized crime overseas. We didn't give each other the warm and fuzzies, and we didn't invite each other to dinner at each other's homes, or introduce each other to our respective wives, but we shook hands, and money exchanged hands, and I got what I wanted, and he got what he wanted, and then we never saw each other again. That's actually quite a common event. There's risk, of course, because you're dealing with people who, you

[20:36] know, in some cases are stone-cold killers. And you need to trust them to a point where they do what you're paying them to do. The initial encounter is what's the most dangerous, I think. I I have told the story. I was dealing with a with an organized crime figure overseas in the Middle East, and there was a French intelligence officer dealing with him as well. And the French intelligence officer one day was just found dead in a ditch on the side of the road. And so, we had to all meet, like, should I go to

[21:08] the next meeting? Are they going to kill me at the next meeting? I don't know. I said I don't think he's going to kill me. I think he trusts me. So, I go to the next meeting. It was very tense. It turned out to be our last meeting. And as I was walking out, he says to me, "Oh, by the way." And I turned and I looked at him and he said, "Your French friend? Very bad tradecraft." And I wasn't really sure what to make of that other than the fact that he was admitting to me that he had killed the French intelligence officer.

[21:38] I don't know why he didn't try to kill me. But yeah, that kind of thing happens all the time. It's It's a calculated risk that you take. And you know, if the gain, the potential gain is greater than the potential risk, sure, you go forward and you're very happy to meet with criminals. In regard to to terror, again, you being expert at the say on counterterrorism, dealing with that, I think we in the world of alternative media, we tend to think immediately when you see when you hear the word terror, you immediately think

[22:10] false flag, you think staged, you think engineered. Certainly not every event is staged or engineered, something like that. There are organic believers in radical ideologies. But we also have this reality too of false flag events. If we were to think back over the last say century or last several decades, how many instances would you guess or if you had to do a percentage or some just speculation, right? Like do you think most major terror events have a kind of

[22:41] connection to a state or to some other type of entity or or is it organic? Now, that's a good That's a good question. That's a tough question. You know what? I'm going to have to say, "Oh, I'm going to take a lot of [ __ ] for this." I'm going to have to say that yes, I I most of them probably are connected to a state in some way. I hate coming off as a conspiracy theorist, but when you dig down into some of these operations,

[23:11] I mean, look at 9/11. I mean, 9/11 was carried out by al-Qaeda. We know that. I'm 1,000% confident 9/11 was carried out by al-Qaeda. But, who was behind al-Qaeda? Clearly, it was the Saudi government. And I believe very strongly that the Israelis knew exactly what was going to happen, exactly when it was going to happen, but it was to Israel's benefit that the United States be attacked so that the US would respond by killing 2 million Muslims over the next 20 years,

[23:42] which is exactly what we did. We created chaos in Iraq and chaos in Syria and chaos in Libya and now chaos in Iran, and that's to Israel's benefit. So, I think in many, many cases, yeah, there's a state behind it. And I'll add one thing. I've talked about this publicly many times, but the on the night that we captured Abu Zubaydah in March of 2002, we caught him in a in a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. One of the things that we confiscated that night was his diary. And so,

[24:13] I was with him for the first 56 consecutive hours of his captivity. I tied him to the hospital bed. He had surgery to treat three gunshot wounds. We shot him we the Pakistanis shot him while he was trying to escape that night. And so, I was so sleepy I was afraid I was going to fall asleep and he was going to escape somehow. So, I tore up a sheet, I tied him to the bed. And I'm just sitting there at the foot of the bed like this just kind of staring at him for most of the 56 hours, but one of the things that we confiscated that night in the raid was

[24:44] his diary. And so, I started leafing through the diary. And it made my hair stand up. Most of it was silly. Most of it was doodles. He was an accomplished sketch artist. Like, I would pay money for some of the drawings that he did. >> It would have been funny if the doodles were like a like a high school teenage girl's doodles. Right, right. You know, with hearts over the letter I and stuff like that. No. [laughter] Um Terrorist Terrorist with a heart of gold. Seriously. Misunderstood. He wrote

[25:16] a lot of poetry. Much of it which was quite good. He wrote letters to his younger self, which I found fascinating. And this led to a split between the CIA and the FBI, where the FBI said he was a madman. And the CIA said, "No, he's he's extraordinarily intelligent." The CIA turned out to be correct on that. He would write these letters to himself, like it was the the 27-year-old Abu Zubaydah or the or the 30-year-old Abu Zubaydah writing to the 14-year-old Abu Zubaydah saying, "Treat our mother with respect.

[25:48] You were rude to her today. Don't whistle at those girls. You're a Muslim you're a Muslim you shouldn't whistle at girls." You know, stuff like that. But what I also saw in the diary were three cell phone numbers. And they were to three members of the Saudi royal family. Why in God's name would someone that we believed at the time was the number three in Al-Qaeda. He wasn't the number three, but he was a bad guy. He had established and staffed

[26:20] Al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan, as well as Al-Qaeda's safe house in Peshawar, the house of martyrs. Why would he have the personal cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes? And so we went to the Saudis and we said, "Take care of this or we're going to take care of it, and you're not going to like the way we take care of it." The next thing you know, one of these princes dies on the operating table during bariatric surgery. They're all fat pigs. They're all fat pigs.

[26:53] The second prince is killed in a one-car accident on the Riyadh to Jeddah highway. And the third prince goes camping in the desert and dies of thirst. So, yeah. That tells me that the last thing they wanted was for the CIA to snatch these guys and to start interrogating them. Which then, of course, led me to believe that the Saudi government was involved in 9/11.

[27:24] Yeah, I mean, so many things point that way. We even had that as a 16 pages of Yeah, it turns out the Saudi >> pages. Yeah, the 20 Yeah, that the Saudis did have a key role, turns out, which many people theorized and suspected. And that's our ally, right? That's not a >> friends in the Middle East. But they're also one of the greatest funders of terrorism. >> But it's a funder of terror, Yeah. On the topic of Saudi Arabia, I don't want to get too far afield, but this made me think of this. I remember reading recently that

[27:54] Kissinger back in the 1970s had a very important role in restructuring how the petrodollar would function in the world. And that there was an intentional shifting away from using US oil or native oil here to put us in reliance on foreign oil, like Saudis and others, to give us then an excuse to I thought this was a really cunning genius sort of conspiracy plot

[28:25] here of a villain plot. So, now that now we have an excuse for foreign policing because we're tied to the oil that we get from all these other countries. And we heard recently with Trump, right, that we've got to do all this for the oil. We have to get the oil. We've got the finish oil. There's oil we've got to go get the oil. >> oil. We got to take the oil. Well, don't we have a lot of oil here? I thought Trump ran on that, right? We've got so much oil in the >> on an ocean of oil. >> an ocean of oil, but now we have to police the world over oil. Is it a plausible theory that Kissinger and I've

[28:56] heard read via the Bilderberg meetings at that time that they sort of planned out the petrodollar as a excuse for future world police? I I think that's exactly what happened. I think that's exactly what happened and we're seeing still the effects today 50 years after that policy was enacted. You know, I've got a friend, former CIA friend, who left the CIA and went into he's a he's one of these genius um engineers.

[29:27] And so he left the CIA and he went to work for one of the big oil companies. And he said something to me that was so interesting. He said, "It's not cost-effective to frack for oil if oil is at $60 a barrel or lower." Okay, if it's over 60, fracking is cost-effective, it's profitable, everybody's going to want to do it. Okay, well, oil is what? $110, $115 a barrel right now. And we're fracking a little bit,

[29:57] but what are we doing with the fracked oil? We're sending it to Japan. We sell all that oil to Japan. So, why would we export our own oil and import Middle Eastern oil? Exactly. >> Because that's exactly what we do. Well, we do it to maintain that tie to the Middle East. And as much as I hate Henry Kissinger, and I really do, the butcher of Cyprus, the butcher of Chile, the butcher of Cambodia, I hate Henry Kissinger. He was telling us the truth when he said that, that this policy as

[30:30] as as calculating and cunning as it may seem, it's it's a reality of American foreign policy. It really is. Yeah, and and let's see, if if don't mind, Jay, I No, feel free. to just to speak a minute about Venezuela. How does Venezuela fit in or not fit into this? Venezuela is different. It's separate. Venezuela's oil is is so dirty. It is so high in sulfur

[31:01] that it can only be refined at specialty refineries where they inject tons of chemicals to try to purify it. Even still, you can't purify it enough to turn it into gasoline. Right? And and these these refineries exist right now, for the most part, only in South Florida. The Chinese built one recently, the Indians built one, but for the most part, the only refineries that can handle this really dark heavy oil

[31:32] are in Florida. And the oil is used only for home heating oil. So, when we talk about oil and international oil and OPEC, of which Venezuela is a member, we have to keep Venezuela sort of off to the side because it's a different issue from a foreign policy perspective. Yeah, that's a great point, too, because we don't think about these different regions having very very different ways that they fit into the global, you know, system. But, I do want to ask you, too, about briefly here because you had such

[32:03] a There's so many places we could go. You've had such an adventuresome life, and I've listened to you many times tell the stories of when you were stationed in Greece and you were dealing with the left. And the first thing that came to my mind was, in in the case of these leftist organizations, that one of which I think tried to have you unalived, shall we say? And feel free to rehearse that story if you'd like because I think this audience may not have heard it, but the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear this kind of stuff is, who funds these things? Like, I've never even heard of this left Greek this

[32:34] organization that was radical left. And then we always look to the money to see, you know, who's funding this, who's pushing this. Who would fund such a thing and why? Would it be Soviet? You know, I mean, the Cold War is kind of coming to an end. Like, who would be behind that? Oh my god. I could talk about this for the next 2 hours. I'm going to make it short. So, the group you're talking about is called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. In October of 1975,

[33:04] the CIA named a new station chief in Athens. His name was Richard Welch. Dick Welch was a Philhellene. He was a lover of all things Greek. He had a degree in the classics. He spoke ancient Greek. He spoke modern Greek. He got a master's degree in archaeology. This guy just loved, loved, loved everything Greece. And he's named CIA station chief in Athens. So, he arrives. 6 weeks later,

[33:35] on December 23rd, 1975, he's invited to the US ambassador's Christmas party. He and his wife go to the ambassador's Christmas party in their chauffeur-driven car. They have a good time, by all accounts. And at the end of the party, they drive back to their house. In a very close-in very high-end suburb of Athens called Psychiko. These are the days before automatic door openers or gate openers. So, the driver pulls up to the gate and gets out of the car to open the gate to drive into the property.

[34:08] There is a car parked directly across the street. There are three men and a woman inside the car. We never identified the woman. Two of the men get out of the car and one of them shouts in Greek, "Richard Welch, get out of the car." Dick gets out of the car and Mrs. Welch gets out of the car. The driver runs for his life. One of the men says, "Richard Welch, have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you've been sentenced to death." And then shoots him three times in the chest with a.45

[34:40] caliber semi-automatic handgun that became known as the Welch.45. They killed 18 more people with that same gun between 1975 and 2002. They then got back in the car and drove away. The Greek police were so inept that the killers had to call the cops a week ago and say, "You idiots, the getaway car we left abandoned at the

[35:11] intersection of this street and that street. Go get it." In the meantime, the killers wrote a manifesto. Now, this became a theme. They would write a manifesto at almost every attack over the next 27 years. But this manifesto they they sent to a sympathizer in Paris and the sympathizer in Paris hand-delivered it to the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

[35:41] Sartre read it and said, "What is this craziness?" And he literally put it in a desk drawer and forgot about it. A year later, the former chief of the Greek National Police, a man named Mallios, he had been the chief of the Greek National Police during the military dictatorship and he was a he was a deeply hated torturer. He would leave his apartment every single day at the same time

[36:12] and buy a newspaper and go to the coffee shop and drink coffee. And this one day in April of 1976, he came out of his apartment. There There a man and a woman there making out. And he told us later on his deathbed that he smiled when he saw them and he thought to himself, "Young love in the spring." As soon as he walked past them the man pulled out the Welch 45 and shot

[36:43] him three times in the back. He lived for 2 hours. And the description he gave of the shooter matched Mrs. Welch's description of the shooter in her husband's assassination. They sent another manifesto to Jean-Paul Sartre. So, Sartre receives it. Actually, Sartre didn't receive it. Bernard-Henri Lévy, who is today France's most famous philosopher and poet and was Sartre's assistant at the time, he said, "Wait a minute. We've received something like this before."

[37:13] And he found the original one in the desk and then he sent them both to Libération newspaper. It's the leftist newspaper in Paris. They published them. That put 17 November on the map. 17 November was named after the date in 1974 when there was a student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic University where the military dictatorship in its final death rows opened fire with tanks on unarmed students. And to hear the students tell

[37:46] it, killed 500. To hear the fascist tell it, they killed three dozen. We'll never know. They destroyed most of the bodies. But that put 17 November on the map. You asked a very very important question. Where did they get the money? We just assumed in 1975 that these guys were tied to the KGB. But we had a long-standing agreement with the KGB. You don't kill our guys and we don't kill your guys. We try to recruit each other's guys but

[38:17] no killing. And the the Russians came to us and they said, "Listen, this was not us. It just was not us." And then the Bulgarians proactively came to us and said, "We promise this was not us and we can tell you it was not the Soviets." We couldn't figure out who it was. So, how did they get their money? How did they self-finance? They would rob banks and post offices. Now, remember these were the days when everything was done in cash, everything.

[38:48] And they would just rob banks and post offices in broad daylight. And then they would raid police stations in the middle of the night, grab the handful of cops that were on duty, tie them up, hold them hostage, steal all of their weapons and all of their ammunition. And just to add insult to injury, there is a large military museum in Athens, right in the center of Athens. The Greeks are very proud of it. And in the 1980s,

[39:18] somebody who was a member of 17 November went into the military museum and realized that none of the weapons on display had been deactivated. They were all live weapons on display, rocket launchers, machine guns. So, they went one day, a group of four terrorists went just as the museum opened, took everybody hostage, and then just took all of these live

[39:50] weapons off the wall. And then a couple of months later, they raided a military weapons depot in Larissa in central Greece and stole all the ammunition needed for the weapons that they stole from the military museum. So, they self-financed, they self-armed, and then there were specialty weapons that they somehow came into the possession of, and that's where I came in. I was able to identify analytically

[40:23] a connection between 17 November and Carlos the Jackal. And if your viewers don't know who Carlos the Jackal was, he was the Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and '80s. He was the most feared terrorist on the planet. He was a Venezuelan communist named Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. And the media dubbed him Carlos the Jackal. And Carlos provided the group with the weapons that they needed that they

[40:53] couldn't steal. I was stationed in Greece from 1998 to 2000. My entire reason for being in Greece was to infiltrate and destroy 17 November. We promised Mrs. Welch in 1975 we would find her husband's killers and we would bring them to justice and we meant it. It took 27 years. I took delivery of a level four armored BMW 540. My next door neighbor was the newly

[41:23] arrived British Defense Attaché, Steven Saunders, Brigadier General one star. I liked Steven a lot. But he was a media [ __ ] But he was a media [ __ ] Anytime he saw a camera, he would run right in front of it and offer up an interview and he would just loved being on TV. We happened to be invited to a cocktail party the night of the day that I took delivery of the new car. I was standing with Steven, with the American Defense Attaché, and the French

[41:54] Defense Attaché. And Steven was making fun of me because of my new car. As I said, we lived next door to not next door, but our backyards abutted. And he says to me, "You Americans, you're so paranoid about security." He said, "This is an EU country. It's a NATO country. What are you so afraid of? And everybody starts to chuckle. And I said to him, "You Brits live in a dream world if you think that because they have pretty beaches and palm trees

[42:25] that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance. Believe me, if they have the chance, they're going to kill you." And then we all laughed again. To make a long story short, 2 weeks later, they killed him. They killed him. They killed him in broad daylight during a morning rush. They finally issued a manifesto several months afterwards in which they specifically said that they set out that morning to kill me. But that I was driving an armored car and they knew that I was armed. And it said, "And so we elected to carry out

[42:56] the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders." That killing, everybody like Steven, that killing was what began to change public opinion. 17 November would attack. They killed the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, they killed the head of the federal tax office, they killed the governor of the central bank, they killed the minister of finance, they killed the minister of communications, but they were largely seen as Robin Hood, right? Oh, taxes were raised? They

[43:29] set fire to six tax offices and then murder the head of the tax service. And people are like, "Oh, okay. Well, they're for the poor people." No, they're not for the poor people. It's an armed criminal gang is all it is. So, in 2002, in April of 2002, a man was walking in Piraeus with a paper bag, like a grocery bag, carrying a bomb. And he was going to put the bomb underneath the car of a billionaire shipowner and the bomb went off. It blew off both of his hands and

[44:01] blew out his right eye. And as he was bleeding to death, a policeman runs across the street, takes off his own shirt to staunch the blood squirting out of his stumps, and the guy confesses to being 17 November's chief bomber. He names all the members of 17 November, and he gives the address of the safe house where all the weapons are stored. And then he survived. And so the Greeks were able to arrest

[44:33] all of them. The three most prominent members received sentences of 1,765 years in prison. The only two things that the cops were never able to recover were the old-school typewriter that they used to type the manifestos and the Webley.45. It's out there somewhere. But anyway, they were unusual in that the Soviet Union was far too liberal for

[45:05] them. They were old-school Stalinists. They wanted you to to fall into line or face death. And they saw themselves as the ones to to carry out that policy. I want to ask you about Day of the Jackal because, and this is something that I've only recently sort of got hip to, and that's because there were some articles written recently that Candace Owens shared that kind of tied into the possibility of French Foreign Legion and this kind of stuff. I I don't have any theory on

[45:37] that. I don't ascribe to all of her theories, but there was an interesting article written by a French analyst about the possibility that there are actual hit squads, and they might be considered French, but they might not actually be French. They might actually be other uh Middle Eastern countries that are actually behind some of these hits. And I know this is in the French Huh? They're French. Well, I I doubt that, but [laughter] but what I'm saying is that there might [clears throat] There are people that theorize that Israel had a role in the background of some of these

[46:08] French operations, not just banking, but also other other things that are going on in France that not many people are very hip to. But, I wanted to ask you about the situation with Day of the Jackal because that story is about de Gaulle, and I'm curious So, you're saying that Carlos the Jackal is the name came from that? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it's a funny thing. It's one of these chicken or egg situations where Carlos was almost caught in a raid on his friend's apartment in

[46:41] Brussels. His friend was not a terrorist and didn't realize that Carlos that his friend Ilich was Carlos, right? Although he was not yet known as Carlos. Anyway, the cops raid the apartment. Carlos is already gone. And a French photojournalist took pictures of like every inch of the apartment. And it turned out that the Belgian guy was reading the book The Day of the Jackal, and it was on the side table. The French journalist just decided to

[47:13] call this unnamed terrorist, we didn't yet know it was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, to call him the Jackal. And then it just so happened that a book that was next to The Day of the Jackal was written by a Spanish uh I I forget his name now, but his first name was Carlos. And so this French reporter just made it up out of whole cloth, Carlos the Jackal. And then we we learned later we learned later that Carlos was like, "Where the [ __ ] did this name come from?

[47:43] I don't like this name. Why are they calling me Carlos? And what's this Jackal thing? Why are they calling me the Jackal?" I'll tell you, I met Carlos in 2000. It took me over a year to get permission to see him. He's serving a life without parole sentence in France for the murder of seven French policemen. I had gone to see his ex-wife, Magdalena Kopp, in Germany. They They share a daughter. And she She dropped out of terrorism.

[48:14] She just She had had enough and she just dropped out. She had done time in prison. She was like, "Enough." And she quit. So, I begged her to write to Carlos and tell him that I really did need to talk to him. I wasn't going to, you know, I'm not trying to get him in trouble. I only want to know about the Greeks. It took over a year. And then of course, yeah, the the French insisted that they had to be there. So, I go to Paris. I meet up with the French. We take a train. The prison was like, I don't know, 40

[48:45] minutes outside of town. And we finally get into the prison to see Carlos. I said, "Thank you for seeing me. I'm John Kyriakou. I'm from the CIA. We promised Mrs. Welch that we would, you know, find her husband's killers. It's been 25 years. Et cetera, et cetera." And he listened and he's nodding and he's nodding. And I said, "All I want to know is who were the Greeks? Just give us the names of the Greeks. Give us one name. Just someone that

[49:18] would lead me to the killers." And he goes, "Fuck you." And then he just got up and walked away from the the you know, one of those Plexiglas things. He just got up and walked away. And that was the end of it. He never gave us anything. Two years later, it didn't matter. And he's still in He's in prison. He'll die in prison. He's well into his 70s now. Utterly unrepentant, unapologetic. This is a guy for for those of your viewers who who don't know any of the

[49:48] background. This is a guy who kidnapped literally every oil minister from every OPEC country during an OPEC summit. There was an OPEC summit taking place in Vienna, Austria. He and his gang raided the meeting site and they kidnapped every member of OPEC at the same time. And the Saudis paid him something like a

[50:19] billion dollars to let everybody go. It was Carlos that worked with Gaddafi to set up these training camps in Libya where the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, the DFLP, Abu Nidal, the IRA, Popular Revolutionary Struggle, they all sent their people there to be trained at these camps in the desert. Carlos was the money guy and Carlos was the weapons guy. Carlos was working with the Romanians and the Bulgarians. You know, they were producing gigantic amounts of

[50:49] weapons and ammunition and just selling them on the gray market. It was Carlos that had the relationship with the Eastern Europeans to buy the AK-47s and the hand grenades and the land mines and the bullets and then sell them to these groups through the Libyans. It was all very complicated and in my mind absolutely fascinating. You know, minus 9/11, I would have spent the rest of my career just working against these groups. I find it fascinating too because again, it seems rare, at least in my limited

[51:21] reading and research that this type of a person is organic or alone, you know, weapons trafficker or whatever terrorist person. There there there's usually networks. There's people behind them. There's money and power. Is he just out for his own gain or was he a true believer in a kind of Leninist perspective? You know, for him it was a combination of pure Marxist ideology and money. I'm going to tell you one other story about Carlos. I've spoken a number of times about a

[51:51] guy that I used to work with at the agency. It was a legendary contractor named Billy Waugh, w a u g h. Billy was one short of the US record. He had 17 Purple Hearts from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was a stone-cold killer. One of these guys that would go into a village in Vietnam and just mow down every living thing. So, he was a long-time CIA contractor. He and I worked very closely together. It was actually just the two of us in

[52:23] the Middle East before 9/11. We did this long-term operation together. But, anyway, he told me the most fascinating story. The details in a biography about him that his niece wrote differ a little, but the core of the story is the same. The way he told it to me was was thusly. He was assigned to the CIA station in Khartoum, Sudan. And, you know, it was one of those situations pre-9/11 where you got to work 7 days a week. But, every once in a

[52:55] while, just so you don't go crazy, you have to take a day off and sleep in. So, there's one day he and another guy from the station go to the vegetable market just to buy some vegetables. And he said he's there buying vegetables and he looks over and he sees the only other white man that he ever saw in Khartoum. And he's looking at this white guy in the vegetable market and he says to his buddy, "That's Carlos the Jackal."

[53:26] And his friend says, "Get the [ __ ] out of here." He said, "I'm telling you, that's Carlos the Jackal." And then Carlos kind of got away in the crowd. They run back to the station. Cofer Black, who became the director of counterterrorism and then later became ambassador Cofer Black and the chairman of Blackwater after that. Cofer was the station chief at the time and Billy says he ran into Cofer's office. Cofer saw him on an elliptical machine in the in the office. And he says, "Cofer, I just

[53:56] came from the vegetable market and I saw Carlos the Jackal." And Cofer says, "Get the [ __ ] out of here. Carlos the Jackal. What in the world would Carlos be doing in Sudan of all places? You're you're you're nuts." He said, "I'm telling you it was Carlos." So he says, "Well, we can't just cable headquarters and say Carlos the Jackal's in Khartoum. We need proof. You got to get a picture of him." Billy went back to the vegetable market every single day for a month.

[54:30] And then he saw him again. So what they did is they paid these two Sudanese guys to get into a fist fight. And you know, in Africa and the Middle East, it fighting is very very rare. So two guys start duking it out. A big circle forms around them. Everybody wants to get a look. And so that's what happens and Carlos, kind of a little guy, he runs over to get a look and he's kind of craning his neck to see, you know, who's fighting, what's going on and Billy's there just

[55:01] going click click click click click click click click click click click click click. They send the film back to headquarters and they said, "Oh my god, it's Carlos the Jackal." But he had the presence of mind after the fight to follow Carlos discreetly to his house. So they were able to identify the house. They initiated an operation where Carlos was made to be unconscious temporarily. And when Carlos woke up, he was on a French military plane on the way to Paris and he's been in prison ever since.

[55:33] These stories are awesome. I love hearing these kind of stories and they're not told enough. And again, this is for the sake of the audience and I'd like to see what you think about this now reflecting back to your younger days. Why does the US care what an organization of leftists are doing in Greece? Why are you there in Greece? We wouldn't have cared had they not been murdering Americans. They killed the CIA station chief, they killed two US defense attaches, Bill Nordeen and George Santis. The bomb that they used to kill

[56:04] Bill Nordeen was so big that we found Nordeen's head on the roof of the next door neighbor's house. They meant business. They shot and gravely wounded the US DEA rep in the embassy. They shot and killed a hapless Air Force technical sergeant, an African-American guy named Ron Stewart who was just doing his laundry. They shot him and killed him in the laundry room of his apartment building. The Greek public hated that too because he was black. They're like, come on,

[56:35] this man's oppressed in his own country and that's the guy that you kill? So it was because they were actively targeting Americans that we went after them like we did. This may sound like a stupid question, but my context for this question is not stupidity. If I read say Brzezinski or I read Brzezinski in Between Two Ages, he's got this footnote where he talks about Professor Anthony Sutton. And he quotes Sutton about the build-up of the Soviet Union. And we find other references here and there in literature

[57:06] to certain figures that might have played or attempted to play both sides during the Cold War. We think about Robert Maxwell, we think about an Armand Hammer, we think about Some people theorized Lord Victor Rothschild was not just British intelligence, but might have also been passing intelligence to the Soviets. And on the other side, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Yeah, there there seems to be quite a few instances where we're fighting this enemy that's also aided and propped up in many cases and perhaps the Cold War

[57:37] according to say Dr. Quigley was a bit exaggerated, right? In other words, the memorandum that kicks off the Cold War that Stalin is building up is it exaggerated or is it plausible that the Cold War is real, but also at a certain level perhaps desired? Oh, I think you've hit it on the head. I think that's exactly what the case was. Yeah, sure. Historically here in the United States, Jay, we've always needed an ism to be opposed to. In the 19-teens, it was anarchism and then it

[58:10] was communism and then it was socialism and later on it became Islamism. I mean, there's always something that we need to rally against, but at the same time, that's how you know, the deep state is able to justify its budgets. This isn't anything that's new. It's been going on for more than a century. Sure, you have to rally Americans against something. You know, it's like Smedley Butler said a long time ago, war is a racket, right? Oh, yeah. It would seem to me as well

[58:42] that World War I and World War II, although they're obviously tragedies or serious problems with ideologies. But again, it's almost like there's a dialectical control where you want to have the opposition to justify the existence. We just saw this for example this week or last week, excuse me, with the case that they're going to put against the SPLC, you know, sending significant amounts of money to people heading up these obviously [clears throat] fake cutout groups, the ridiculous groups. >> But also the head of the guy, you know, the Unite the Right guy at

[59:13] Charlottesville that I think many of us thought even at the time this is kind of a silly kind of honey trap type of situation. And it would be really foolish, I think, to be involved in that kind of stuff and perhaps even similar situations with J6, although I don't think that's come up yet in the case of SPLC, but a similar kind of template of fomenting, hyping up, causing, funding the opposition. In not every case, but in many cases. And that's why I think, you know, not many people really talk about this in regard to the Cold War, that we might have had very wealthy people in the West

[59:45] and perhaps banking elites who wanted to put money into communism, socialism, and so on, perhaps even fascism, too, according to Sutton, because, as you said, it justifies a lot of what we do. And there's a lot of resource extraction, there's a lot of geopolitical tactical, you know, bases that can be set up. And you exposed, by the way, maybe I'm not right about this, but I remember years ago, in the 2000s, when I was trying to really study all of this stuff in depth, I remember seeing all of a sudden articles popping up, maybe 2008, 9, 10,

[1:00:15] 11, CIA black sites exposed. They're in the news. Suddenly, we've got this place in Romania, this black site. Right. I think people probably thought that these things existed, but then suddenly we knew that they did exist. And you called a lot of that out. Yeah. That's why you got persecuted. Could you explain, perhaps, to those that are not familiar with your story, wh- And I think you're a hero for what you did. Why >> Why why call this out? Why are we doing this? What's the justification from the

[1:00:45] establishment's perspective? Oh, the the justification from the establishment's perspective was that we needed to do literally everything to protect Americans even if what we were doing broke the law. And my position was we're either going to be a nation of laws or we're not. You we can't be both. You can't You know, Ronald Reagan called the United States a shining city on a hill.

[1:01:16] A beacon of hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties. I want that to be true. And so you can't be that shining city on a hill and have a torture program and a secret prison program and an illegal rendition program and torture people to death and then just dig a ditch next to the torture chamber and dump their body in the ditch and then talk about how you support human rights. So we're going to have to either pick

[1:01:47] one or the other. And I came down on the side of law and order. I mean I hate to sound like an ideologue, but I came down on the side of you know, the rule of law. There was a I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in December of 2007. And I said three things. I said the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy, and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. And I was prosecuted for that. I wish

[1:02:18] that I had blown the whistle on the secret prison program. There was a woman she was a contemporary of mine at the agency and I I respected her deeply. She swears that she was not the one who blew the whistle, so I won't use her name. But she was working at the White House right after right around the time I got arrested and she was escorted out of the White House by the Secret Service and they took her badge and told her never to come back and then she was forcibly

[1:02:48] retired from the CIA. They said they leaked that she had blown the whistle on the Well, they didn't say blow the whistle, that she had leaked information about the existence of the secret prisons. She swore that it wasn't her. And in in private conversations, she swore to me that it wasn't her. And I said, "Well, if it was you, then you are one of the great heroes of the early part of the 21st century. And uh she swore it wasn't her, but

[1:03:21] I I don't know. I was just one of those guys that believed that we were the good guys. And if we're the good guys, then we have to act like the good guys. If you want to be for torture, you can be for torture, but you have to change the law. You can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist or that because you're the good guy, it doesn't exist for you, that nobody else can torture, but you can. And so I said, "No, enough is enough." And I said something. I've heard you and many others.

[1:03:51] And I think it was you. I don't want to misquote you if it wasn't you, but this is often said that, you know, when people say, "What What What is espionage? What are we doing in all these other countries?" The answer is usually given something like "We are doing illegal activities in other countries legally." Or something like that. Yeah. How do you balance, as you're say being trained and going into this world, the idea on the one hand that there's all these legalities, which which you mentioned quite often in interviews. You mentioned, for example,

[1:04:22] to Tucker that you know, certain people in the agency couldn't have public support for this or that candidate, Bob Dole or whoever. Right. >> Uh but at the same time, we've got this situation where we've got to go in other countries and do illegal things under the cover of legality. Mhm. How do you balance that as you're going through that and then make the sort of conscious decision to say, "Well, in this case, now the torture program is I'm not defending it. I'm just saying like I'm curious as to your process as you're working through these issues."

[1:04:52] >> [gasps] >> You go into a job like that really believing that you're the good guys. You really believe it. And you understand from your very first day that your job is to break the laws of foreign countries. Not to break the laws of the United States. That is forbidden. I remember one of my early bosses telling me, "Don't ever lie to finance, medical, or security. They can ruin your life.

[1:05:23] Don't ever lie to a judge." And he said, "And don't ever lie to me. Everybody else you can lie to. Everybody's lying all day long. You know, the the old cliche, how do you know when a CIA officer is lying? His lips are moving. So, yeah, I I believed that. You know, we go overseas and we lie, we commit espionage, we convince other people to commit espionage or to commit treason for us because we're the good guys.

[1:05:55] But then, when we're violating the Federal Torture Act of 1946, when we're violating the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which we which we wrote, and has the force of law because it was ratified by the United States Senate, nobody ever said we could violate the law in the United States. You know, if I go overseas, I'm I'm going to use 1949 as as a an example. If I go overseas and

[1:06:25] I receive a cable saying, "Hey, listen, the polls say that the communists are going to win the Italian election. So, steal the election for the conservatives." I'd say, "Okay." And then I spend $150,000 recruiting journalists and and planting stories. And then, what do you know, the communists lose. Well, I I would sleep very well that night because I'm the good guy and the communists are the bad guys. And so I did what my job is. But if the order is

[1:06:56] to overthrow the American government or to influence an American election or or torture someone in violation of American law? Absolutely never. Never. Because then we're not the good guys anymore. Like did we learn nothing over the course of all these decades? Did we learn nothing from Watergate, for example? Nothing from Iran-Contra. So you got to put your foot down.

[1:07:28] You know, you often hear from establishment types when this topic is brought up, well, if we don't, they will. I remember reading I remember reading decades ago or excuse me, a book written decades ago. I think it was John Marks's book about the Manchurian Candidate and MK Ultra. And the argument was made at that time, if we do not engage in these testing experimentation projects, the Soviets will. If we don't do this, they will. Do you find that to be a flimsy justification and why? Yeah, that's flimsy. Oh my God, where should we even

[1:08:00] start with with MK Ultra and and the sub the sub operations of MK Ultra, MK Chickwit and MK what whatever it was called, Night Rider or whatever it was called, I can't remember. There were like six of them. Imagine being in a meeting at the CIA and say, listen, there's this scientist in Switzerland and he just developed this thing called LSD and it does crazy [ __ ] And we've heard that the Russians are

[1:08:32] developing expertise in mind control and ESP and what they called remote viewing and all this silliness that never came to pass. So we got to do the same thing cuz the Russians are doing it. In fact, the Russians weren't doing it. The Chinese were doing it. But we didn't have sources in China at the time. So you're in this meeting and a determination is made that yes, we're going to do this. We're going to call it MK Ultra.

[1:09:05] And what we're going to do is we're going to experiment on American citizens. And we're never going to tell them we're experimenting on them. Better yet, let's start by experimenting on our own employees. And so, they start dosing their own CIA employees with LSD. People are jumping out of windows and off of balconies. They're like, "Ah, no, we we shouldn't do it on our own people. Let's just do it in, let's say, San Francisco." And then they go to San Francisco. And

[1:09:36] they did a whole bunch of horrible illegal [ __ ] in San Francisco. Things like they recruited an army of prostitutes. And they set up a safe house in San Francisco. And they said, "Go out and pick up a date. Bring him back to the safe house. We're going to dose him with LSD. And then we're going to see if he'll give us his most deeply held secrets under the LSD." All it did was it just made people crazy.

[1:10:07] Then they said, "You know what? Maybe we should do something different. We should develop a germ. Let's develop a germ and we'll just release it into the air and see if it makes people sick." So, they developed this this germ. They waited until an unusually foggy day in San Francisco. And then they just drive around town in these pickup trucks with pipes releasing the germ into the fog. They knew it was successful

[1:10:39] when a week later 11 people had gone to hospital emergency rooms with this really rare upper respiratory infection. That we caused. Then they decided what it would be like they wanted to know what it would be like if they could make like everybody in a town crazy. And so, they put LSD in the flower

[1:11:09] that was supplied to the only bakery in a little village in France. The hapless baker who had no idea that the that the flower was full of LSD made bread that day like he did every day, sold the bread to everybody in the village, everybody in the village went nuts. There's even a Wikipedia page about this. That's the CIA. All of that was illegal. Now, this was also very, very secret, top secret until 1975. The Church Committee on Capitol Hill,

[1:11:41] the Church Committee on the Senate side and the Pike Committee on the House side developed this information, and they called the CIA's leadership to come and testify under oath in public hearings. MK Ultra was outed, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Dick Helms, Richard Helms, was specifically told by Senator Church, "Don't destroy the documents." He went back to the agency and told them, "Destroy all the documents." They destroyed 85% of the documents on

[1:12:14] MK Ultra. So, what we know today about MK Ultra comes from the 15% of the documents that survived the giant, you know, destruction. And that's why we don't have answers to so many of these questions. Dick Helms was held in contempt of Congress. He was fined a few hundred dollars. And then when he got back to the agency after having taken a plea and having been fined, there was a parade of CIA employees standing in the hallway

[1:12:45] leading to his office, each one throwing in cash into a hat to pay his fine. They all looked out for each other. Yeah, it seems like I mean I don't want to say strictly speaking a cult, but some people have written about it as if that's the quote cult of intelligence. Like that's the Victor Marchetti book. The idea being then that, you know, you're sort of bound to almost like a kind of a quasi secret society perhaps. Yeah. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but >> Same idea. Yeah. No, you're right. It's the same idea. Briefly little detour

[1:13:18] here cuz I want to I've not heard you you probably have commented I just haven't heard it yet. You know, lately the government is is seeming to give a nod at many levels to so-called aliens and UFOs. I personally do not believe in aliens, but we do have a lot of bizarre stories and instances and and advanced technology that seems to perhaps mirror or mimic some of these UFO phenomena. I'm curious of what you think about that because when I hear about aliens and UFOs and these stories,

[1:13:48] there could be something spiritual going on for sure, but it also reminds me of what happens if you have a bad LSD trip. So Yeah. I and and and we on that topic of MK Ultra, it makes me wonder if you know, there couldn't be and I think there's definitely a you know, a deep state component to the UFO alien phenomenon. But also specifically in the descriptions of what people go through and how they describe these experiences, do you think that there's any likelihood that this is sort of a propagated intentional perhaps mythology or idea

[1:14:22] that's being seeded or planted that we are now under some sort of a you know, alien attack. Maybe you think that the phenomenon is real. I don't know your view. Could there be an MK Ultra, I know it's defunct, but something akin to that that overlaps with the UFO alien phenomenon? Oh, it's absolutely possible. You know, I I I have to admit I'm of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, I long believed that these sightings that people have are largely explainable.

[1:14:53] And when they're not explainable, there's I think a likelihood that it's some kind of experimental technology. You know, DARPA is working 20 years ahead of everybody else and it's probably some top secret, you know, thing. On my very first day at the CIA, I had lunch with my new boss. And I said, half jokingly, "So, where are the aliens?" And he laughed and he said, "That is the first question that every single one

[1:15:23] of us has on his first day." And I said, "So, what's the answer?" And he said, "We don't do any of that stuff. It's all at the Pentagon." He said, "I have no idea what they are, where they are. Nobody here does. It's all at the Pentagon." With that said, I've told this story before, but I'll repeat it. When I was in high school, my mom and dad bought a restaurant in Sharon, Pennsylvania. We lived in New Castle, Pennsylvania.

[1:15:53] So, they're about 15 mi apart. And to go from New Castle to Sharon, you have to go through Amish country. And the Amish don't use electricity. So, it's very, very dark. One Friday night, my dad and I left the house because we were working midnight shift. We always worked midnight shift on Fridays and Saturdays. We're driving through Amish country and there is this brilliant, like blinding flash of white light. And then there's a second flash and then a third flash.

[1:16:24] And we're both looking up at this thing, like, "What is that?" And then this orange trapezoid lights up and it's just hovering about 1,500 ft off the ground in the shape of, I hate to say it, in the shape of a saucer. And I said, "What is that?" My dad pulls the car over, we get out of the car, we're standing there staring at this thing. A guy pulls up behind us, gets out of his car, and he goes, "What is that?"

[1:16:54] And my dad said, "I don't know." And then it goes at this fantastic speed that just defies defied the laws of physics. Never made any sound. We stood there for at least another 30 seconds thinking, "Is it going to come back or what?" I don't know. So, we get back in the car and I said to him mind you, I was 17 at the time, so I didn't know any better. I said, "So,

[1:17:26] should we like call somebody? Should we call the cops or something?" And he said "And say what? We saw a flying saucer and it flew away?" He said, "People are going to think we're insane." And so, the only person I I told was my mom the next day. Well, years later, I not years later, a couple of years later I come to school here in Washington. I had a cousin who was an F-15 pilot. And um I always looked up to him cuz he

[1:17:57] was older than me and you know, he's a pilot and he's so cool. I said to him "Hey listen, my dad and I saw this crazy thing once a couple of years ago." And I told him. And he said, "Oh, listen." He said, "Every one of us at the Air Force he said, 'We all see [ __ ] like that all the time. And sometimes they come up out of the water off the coast of Norfolk.'" I said, "What are they?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "But they very well could be ours. It's just that he said, 'I'm not cleared

[1:18:28] to know what it is. I don't know what the heck it is.'" I said, "Well, what do you do when you see something like that?" He said, "We fill out a form. We send it to the Pentagon and nobody ever hears about it again. So, I I don't know. I I I've never seen, you know, little green men or anything like that. I I I I wonder, too, if, on the one hand, I I lean in the direction of some kind of futuristic advanced technology, right? That's being experimented with.

[1:18:59] On the other hand, I wonder if let's say it is something extraterrestrial, the government all these years hasn't wanted to panic us. Okay, well, guess what? Now, all this video has been leaked from the Pentagon over the last 5 years and nobody cares and there hasn't been any panic. So, why not just come out with it now and tell us what it is? I feel very similarly about that topic. I do want to shift gears a little bit because there's so many hot topics I do want your take on. A lot of them are,

[1:19:31] unfortunately, I know this is selfish, but kind of my pet thoughts. That's why I want to bounce my my theories and my thoughts off of you. Gordon Thomas wrote a fascinating book about Mossad called Gideon's Spies many years ago. He's a journalist and there's several chapters that related to the Vatican and the Cold War. Particularly, the chapter on John Paul II was interesting because there were significant advancements that Israel was able to achieve in terms of recognition and influence through John Paul II on record. I don't think that's any anything too controversial.

[1:20:01] >> Right. He discussed, for example, the Vatican becoming hip to the Mossad wanting to and trying to bug the Vatican. Then, I noticed, if you look at the dates, not too long after that, John Paul II did recognize the nation-state of Israel as a political entity, which the Vatican had not done for many decades. And that to me is a window into the possibility of a back door connection or influence there that might be pretty significant geopolitically speaking because you do have the Roman Catholic Church taking some pretty

[1:20:32] significant advances in terms of changing their attitudes towards the nation state of Israel and forbidding Judaism in the last several decades post Vatican II. I'm curious to what degree do you think that is a window into a influence campaign? Is it significant? Do you think that's plausible? And there also seems to be significant admissions in that book and other books as well with related to Gladio that the CIA had a really close connection, perhaps even more than a connection, perhaps people on the hook to what the CIA

[1:21:03] wanted throughout the Cold War in regards to the Vatican. Yeah. >> Was that a trap to basically sort of have soft power influence through the Vatican? Yeah. That was always my understanding. Yes. There were old-timers at the agency when I first joined who took credit for making John Paul the second Pope. That's what I've heard, yeah. Yeah, this was a political decision from the very beginning. It was done to weaken the Soviet Union. They knew that having a Pope from

[1:21:33] Poland, which was a Soviet satellite state at the time, would reap untold benefits because it would distract the Soviets. And then at exactly the same time, the Solidarity movement took root in the beginning in the Gdansk shipyard in Poland. And so there was no downside for the West to John Paul being Pope. If anything, this was like a gift. And the recognition of Israel, I remember how controversial that was at the time. That was just like an extra

[1:22:05] added freebie that we got on top of everything that we got with the Soviets. So yeah, I think that was the case. I remember, you know, a lot of the texts will point to, you know, a pretty close relationship with Henry Kissinger Yes. >> even going back to Paul the VI having a very close relationship there as well as William Casey. I think you know, that you had this period where there were pretty hardcore traditional Catholic people in the CIA like Casey and others known as Templars that were very committed to that alliance and I suspect and I wonder I

[1:22:35] know that has opposed Trump in recent months and then there was this meeting where Cardinal Christoph back in January was at the White House and there was these tense words supposedly said and there's this story that they reminded Cardinal Christoph and Leo of the Avignon papacy and the power that the state can have and I'm just to me I just thought that was a fascinating window into perhaps what's going on with not just the deep state but the deep church and perhaps an influence in in that structure. And you know there was a book published

[1:23:06] recently in the last I'm going to say year or two and I I apologize that I don't remember the title talking about the joint CIA Vatican operation to publish Doctor Zhivago and to Where did you say this? Yeah, I didn't even know this. I heard you say this. Yeah, make it available to Soviet citizens at the International Book Fair in Brussels in like 1971 one or whatever whatever it was where you had even the KGB minders

[1:23:40] who had accompanied this delegation of Soviet citizens to the International Book Fair themselves were bringing copies of Doctor Zhivago back to the Soviet Union. It's funny it was a book that that nobody really paid any attention to until the Cold War got really hot and then somebody at the CIA said we've got to smuggle this into the Soviet Union or how do you do that? Well, we can do it by asking the Vatican to do it for us. You know, so the Russians were all over the American book tent at the

[1:24:12] International Book Fair not paying any attention at all to the Vatican book tent and every time a Soviet citizen would come to the Vatican tent they'd say hey you want to go in the back room there's a back room. You're going to want to go back there." And then they had all these copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian. It got to the point where people would would tear out like 10 pages at a time and just tape them around their legs and then just, you know, re-enter the Soviet Union with the book taped around their legs 10 pages at a time, collate the pages again,

[1:24:44] and then pass it around to their friends. I think I have an idea as to why. And for those that don't know, I did write a book and two other books after that, Esoteric Hollywood, which largely deals with propaganda in films and in Hollywood and in fiction. But for those that might not know in the audience, and you've talked about this in many interviews, John, which is the interest that the CIA and other entities, Pentagon even, military, they have in Hollywood and fiction, why would the the CIA care about Doctor

[1:25:14] Zhivago? What What is that going to do in the Soviet Union? Who cares about that? Why would they do that? Yeah, it's it's funny. You declare victory in small increments, right? And so, if you are able to get a book like Doctor Zhivago into the hands of a Soviet citizen and maybe make one Soviet citizen question his or her own government, that's a successful operation.

[1:25:45] You plan small and hope for the best. And that's really what it was all about. There's a movie I know you're very familiar with, Three Days of the Condor. Yeah, it's And you've got Robert Redford sitting in this, you know, bookstore and he's basically just reading books and looking for things all day long. Is that real or is that exaggerated? No, that that's real. That's real. When When I first joined the agency, that was called active measures. Yeah, it it's it's all about the

[1:26:16] propaganda and it's all about combating propaganda. It's a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week process. In films, something like The Americans and we see back during the Cold War, number stations are putting out the message codes to the Soviet operatives in the US. If I recall, it's been some years since I watched Three Days of the Condor, but Robert Redford's like scanning for propaganda, but isn't it also perhaps like messages from Soviet operatives to certain cells or something like he's trying to see if he

[1:26:46] can find something Maybe it's not, I don't remember. Does that still go on in terms of I know there's number stations sort of putting out those codes and whatnot. Is that still happening at that type of a level? Okay. Oh, yeah. As recently as a week ago, I was just I just did a podcast episode of my own where I talked to two former CIA colleagues. One was a CIA attorney and the other was a anti-Soviet operations officer. And we were talking about that and I said, "You know, when I was 9 years old

[1:27:17] I've said this before. When I was 9 years old, I told my parents I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. And they bought me walkie-talkies and disappearing ink and stuff like that for Christmas. When I was 16, I told them I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. And I I meant it and I became a spy in the Middle East. Well, my dad, when I was 9, my dad took me to an auction at one of these local farms. We lived in a very rural area. And at the end of the auction, all the junk that didn't sell, they just threw into one box and my dad got the box for

[1:27:47] 50 cents. And it included a shortwave radio. So, that night we put some batteries in this thing and I listened to an AM station. It was WGN in Chicago. And I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm in Newcastle, Pennsylvania and I can hear a station in Chicago." Cuz you know, when the sun goes down AM stations go on augmented power and if you're a 50,000 W station, you can be picked up as much as like 1,500 mi away. So, I was

[1:28:19] getting Chicago and New York and Boston and Atlanta and Dallas a couple a couple times. The next night, I switched it to shortwave just to see if I can get this this on AM, what about this shortwave? And I got BBC and Radio Moscow and Radio Havana and all different kinds of of things. Well, one of the things that I heard that night and many many nights after that was just a man's voice saying eight three

[1:28:50] six for hours. And I'm like, what is this? What what it is, it's a spy what he's doing is called reading from a one-time pad. So, he's reading an encrypted message by giving only the numbers associated with the letters that are encrypted. So, those numbers will change with every message. So, I mentioned this on the podcast the other day, and the the other case officer, he said, "Oh, listen." He said, "I still listen to shortwave, and

[1:29:22] I can tell you that a week ago I heard a guy reciting one-time pad numbers." So, there it's some Russian spy somewhere in the United States and he's reading it from his one-time pad. There was a number station down in Miami that's like near Cuba that's still spitting out numbers codes. And I know for the British have these as well. Um, so I'll go ahead and start reading the super chats. HushTone says, "Jay, you look like clavicular, you're Jay-vicular." Good one. Albert Smith,

[1:29:54] $5. Jay, you've got another sad hair day. Well, I didn't want to look too silly uh talking to John Kiriakou, so I just went with I don't know, Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 mixed with James Bond. So, Ralph says $10. Jay, you're researching topics but you're muted. Okay, we unmuted. Reckon $5. Bro, in case you didn't know you're live. I know. Jay Mel $15. Why are so many XCIA in US politics? And

[1:30:24] what about the Democratic Party say Governor Virginia? Can we trust any of these people, John? No. We can't trust them. >> Easy answer. >> [laughter] >> Easy answer. I I I'll tell you I was I was a mentor to a guy, Will Hurd. Will is an was an awesome case officer, as honest as the day is long. Our politics were different but I I loved the guy. And um he told us one day he said, "Listen, I'm going to resign." I was like, "What?" I said, "Will, you're a natural born case officer. Why would you resign?" He says, "I want to run for

[1:30:55] Congress." I said, "Run for Congress, buddy." I said, "That's that's not a step up. It's not." Well, he he resigned and he ran for Congress and he won. Here's a guy who's half black, half white and he wins three times in a Supreme Court mandated majority Hispanic district. That's how honest and popular he was. And then he decided it's all posturing, no real work gets done. I'm going to quit and run for president. He runs for

[1:31:26] president for about 15 minutes a year two years ago. He dropped out before the primaries even began and the last I heard he was on the board of directors at OpenAI making millions and millions and millions of dollars. So, it worked out for him. But, you know, people like Elissa Slotkin and and Abigail Spanberger, it's all about the power. Listen, Abby, even at the agency Abby Abby was known as somebody who wasn't going to be around long because she needed she needed time to win election

[1:31:59] to different offices so that she could run for president. That's what it's all about. Elissa Slotkin's exactly the same way. The idea is that automatically they're both attractive candidates for vice president. And then the next time when it's their turn, they run for president. It's all about power. That leads me to the last question I had for you on my list here as we kind of wind down with the super chats. And that is we cover quite a bit on my channel, the idea of

[1:32:30] high-level steering committees, foundations, NGOs, think tanks. They seem to have a lot of power. Yeah. Americans look at the president, they look at the, you know, Congress, they look at the the Senate, you know, Supreme Court. And certainly those entities have power, but it seems like the there's certain agendas that never change with the politicians that come and go. For example, our foreign policy seems to be dictated by Israel for many, many decades. Yes.

[1:33:01] >> Um what is the real level of power, you could say, for these types of supra-governmental entities, these steering committees, CFR, Trilateral, or AIPAC, you know, as a lobby group, or perhaps beyond that, something beyond AIPAC, a mega group, something like that. What's the real power structure, John? Oh, they're all part of what we are now calling the deep state, all of them. CFR is a great example. Bilderberg is another. I I um

[1:33:34] Someone to whom I was once very close, I'll put it that way, found herself in a position where she began attending these meetings. And I said, "You got to tell me what what goes on in these meetings? What are they talking about? Are they like, you know, manipulating global markets and, you know, foreign policies and stuff?" And she said, "It's all about weapon sales. All of these meetings, whether it's Shangri-La or Bilderberg or any of them, it's all about weapon sales. Yes, the

[1:34:06] Bill Clintons and the Bill Gates of the world and and the, you know, prime ministers of this country and that country, they're all talking about the big overarching global issues and economies and stuff like that. Yes, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to which defense contractor made what deal. At every one of these conferences. Well, that would also still overlap with tech because we we heard this >> Absolutely. >> We we heard this last Bilderberg meeting on a couple weeks ago. What dominated

[1:34:36] the supposed talking points were CBDCs, AI, and seems like Bilderberg the last 10 years has has really allegedly focused on a whole lot of tech stuff. Is that Is that fit in with that? Absolutely, yes. Right now, it's all about tech and I think it will be even more so in the in the future. Yeah, it's all about tech. Container $15 J, what does John, and he did mention this earlier, what does John think about SRI and CIA programs studying remote viewing?

[1:35:07] For the CIA, remote viewing was a failure. They could never figure it out. They could never make it work. It was always my understanding the Russians also failed. The Chinese failed. I think it's just not possible. I think it's not a thing. Hush says for $10 John, could you tell us what you think about Elpidophoros? There was a discussion of a phone call. I can't remember the original video. What did you think of that? Uh see, now you're going to put me on the spot here. >> Maybe. I don't You know, if you if you want to don't

[1:35:38] want to say, you don't have to say. Elpidophoros is the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. He is widely believed to be by far the leading candidate to be the next ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. He's young. He's 58 years old. He's good-looking. He's widely respected. He has not been kind to me personally. Maybe I should leave it at that.

[1:36:10] Fair enough. Hendrix says, Olaf Palma of the Swedish Prime Minister He's a Swedish Prime Minister in the 1980s. Was assassinated. Was a Yeah, assassinated probably by a Gladio cell. There was a a CIA operation called Red Socks where they had tiny mustache men followers in the Ukraine. And this was part of the Maidan coup. Interesting, I had not heard that. But he's saying that there's a cell that is similar to that group that was He's saying is a Gladio cell that in the Ukraine was called Red

[1:36:42] Socks, which helped with the Maidan coup is what he's saying. Huh. I have no idea. I always heard that Palma was killed by a Kurd. He ended up being convicted and then and then on appeal the conviction was overturned. He was released and they never conclusively solved that murder. Mountain Walk, $10. Jay, ask John does he glow in the dark? Well, he's a whistleblower, so if that's what you're referring to. This is not a formal announcement yet, but we are winding down my deep focus

[1:37:14] podcast and we're going to start a new in 2 weeks on YouTube under Real John Kiriakou. It's going to be called John Kiriakou's briefing room. That'd be a different channel or the same channel redone? It's going to have to be a different channel, I'm sorry to say. Okay. And Jay, when you came on my show, we went for an hour and a half talking about mostly about Orthodox theology and threats to to Orthodoxy. It was

[1:37:44] fascinating. I couldn't believe 90 minutes had passed and and they turned it into three separate episodes. It was wonderful. >> Perfect. Yeah, that's great. And that is going to be on the deep focus or is it going to be on your new channel? Where is that going >> That's going to be on the new channel. Okay, awesome. Let's see. Porphyry says there's a secret Asian peptide. Okay. >> [laughter] >> It starts with really weird questions though. Here come all the schizos. I'm joking. Uh Jude says for $5, to clarify my last question, I want to know can John talk

[1:38:15] about what was going on in his time in the Middle East? That's a broad question. Lots was going on in the Middle East. On the one hand, you had the Arab-Israeli peace process, which we believed at the time was really taking hold. When I was stationed in Bahrain, we actually sponsored the Arab-Israeli peace talks on the environment. And then I went to Oman for the Arab-Israeli peace talks on water. I mean, it was weird to see like Israeli flags flying in Bahrain and Israeli diplomats walking around. Crazy. At the

[1:38:45] same time though, the first intifada began while I was in Bahrain and got pretty ugly, like really ugly. I mean, people died, others were executed. It was nasty. I I went into Kuwait City with the Marines on Liberation Day back in '91 and then, you know, 9/11 and it was kind of crazy. Josh says, "Thank you both. John, have you noticed any patterns from CIA or FBI drawing from uh recruiting Mormons or perhaps or other

[1:39:18] cult groups like Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Scientologists?" Oh, yeah, yeah. I never encountered a Scientologist, but Mormons are very, very overly represented in both the CIA and the FBI, to a very slightly lesser extent in NSA. And the reason is simple. Number one, they've never done anything. They don't swear, they don't drink, they don't smoke, they don't gamble, they don't screw around, they don't do anything. They don't even eat chocolate. And so they just blow right through the polygraph exam. More importantly,

[1:39:49] is most of them go on these missions when they're 18 or 19 years old, and they go to Brigham Young to the mission center, and they learn how to speak these funky languages that nobody else speaks. Uzbek, Tajik, Pashtu, these African languages. And so they arrive on the job already fluent in these languages, and they can be sent operationally immediately overseas. So the agency and the bureau just love Mormons.

[1:40:19] Yeah, absolutely. By the way, that's a vindication of something that people will keep challenging me on when I mention that. Jude says for $10, what I was specifically asking John about with the Middle East earlier. I'm sorry, I couldn't find your other super chat. You said, "What did John think was going on, for example, in the Antiochian Church during his time in the Middle East?" I attended the Antiochian Church when I was stationed in the Middle East just because there was no Greek Orthodox Church. Specifically in Kuwait, the Antiochians were very strong. You know, I don't remember there being

[1:40:50] any controversy when I was living there in the '90s. It was all pretty straightforward. And then when I was stationed in Bahrain, I was very close friends with the Greek Consul General. She was a Greek American. There was no Cypriot representation there, so she covered Cyprus as well. And then she said to me one day, "Hey, Archbishop Christodoulos is going to come to Bahrain, and he wants to meet with the Emir. We're going to have all of the Orthodox, the Greeks and the Cypriots, go with him to see the Emir." The Emir

[1:41:21] was surprised to see me. He had no idea. I mean, there was no reason why he would have known that I was Orthodox. We had the meeting, and then he pulls me aside, and he says to me, he whispers, "I like your Ayatollah." He He "I like your Imam. I trust him." And I said, "He likes you, Your Highness." Next thing you know, the Emir donates a giant plot of land. It was like 2 acres. And we built the first ever Orthodox church in Bahrain. It was very very generous. In Kuwait, there were already

[1:41:52] Orthodox churches. Later on, toward the end of the '90s, they built an Antiochian church in Doha. I was in Dubai a few weeks ago. And there are churches in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I don't think there's anything in Muscat, and absolutely absolutely positively nothing in Saudi Arabia anywhere. You'll lose your head. Um, but things were going pretty well for the Antiochians when I was living there. Henrik says, "Have you guys read Which

[1:42:22] Path to Persia from 2009 Brookings Institute?" Yes, I've I've read the whole thing. I'm familiar with it. I did actually look it up the other day. In it, they admit that the US will go to war for Israel and Iran. The US is not getting bombed by Iran, but the Gulf allies are. And I assume John probably agrees with that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. John, are there other members of N17 that perhaps never got caught and continue in Greek leftist parties? Yes. There was one in particular who admitted

[1:42:53] that he was one of the two shooters in the Welch assassination. He dropped out of 17 November. He was the only one to voluntarily leave and join the Greek Communist Party and became the president of Greece's largest labor union. Greece is one of those rare countries which very stupidly has a statute of limitations on murder. And so, he was never prosecuted. He got away scot-free with the Welch assassination. Banana says for $20,

[1:43:25] "John, can you talk about the CIA culture and its influence on America, for example, in universities, Middle Eastern countries, and spreading Americanism in terms of soft power. Wow. We we would need a whole episode for that. The answer obviously is you're exactly right. That CIA soft power is being exerted everywhere that you've just cited, whether it's in television series, or Hollywood movies, or the media, or across universities. You know, I was recruited by my grad school

[1:43:56] professor, and then with passage of the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, that became illegal. So, what they did is they just went around the EEOC. What they do now is if you are within 3 years of retirement and you're a senior operations officer, they'll send you back to your alma mater to teach some innocuous course. A buddy of mine right now is teaching a course at Indiana University called Espionage in Soviet Literature.

[1:44:26] Nobody gives a [ __ ] about Espionage in Soviet Literature. The whole point of the class is for people to come up to him after class and say, "Hey, I'd really like to join the CIA." And then he says, "Let me introduce you to a friend of mine." That's what it's for. This is from Penny for $20. Is House of Cards worth watching, or what are the TV shows or movies that really give insights into accuracy with the CIA? House of Cards definitely is worth watching. That is the story of the Clinton family.

[1:44:57] I mean, they don't even try to mask it. House of Cards is about the Clintons. Yes. Don't miss it. But an even better show is The Americans. A former colleague of mine in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Joe Weisberg, resigned. I remember the day he resigned, he he came up to me, he said, "Buddy, I just resigned." I was like, "What? Why would you resign?" And he said, "This job is just not for me." He said, "I don't have it in my gut to convince somebody to commit treason." He said, "I I can't do it." But he was unmarried, no kids. I said,

[1:45:29] "What are you going to do?" He said, "I'm going to go to Hollywood and find my fortune." And he he published a very highly regarded novel that was heavily redacted because it was so true to life. And then immediately created The Americans. And never has to work again a day in his life. Yeah, it's great show. It's my favorite one of my favorite TV shows, definitely. We we've done several podcasts with our good buddy Mark Hackard, Russia analyst, specialist, translator. Translates KGB stuff. And of course he did a great podcast with me on The Americans.

[1:45:59] Everybody be sure and follow John Kiriakou. John, thank you so much. I'm honored to speak with you and so so proud of your work and what you're doing and seeing you all over all these podcasts. And great episode on Tucker, by the way. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate it. It's good to see you again.