[00:00] 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. 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
[00:32] 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, 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
[01:03] four terrorists went just as the museum opened, took everybody hostage, and then just took all of these live 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
[01:34] somehow came into the possession of, and that's where I came in. I was able to identify analytically 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
[02:04] Jackal. And Carlos provided the group with the weapons that they needed that they 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 4 armored BMW 540.
[02:35] My next door neighbor was the newly 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 happen 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
[03:06] 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 that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance, believe me, if
[03:37] 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 in broad daylight during the 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 the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders." That killing, everybody like Steven,
[04:09] 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 set fire to six tax offices and then murdered the head of the tax service. And people are like, "Oh, okay, well,
[04:40] 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 ship owner and the bomb went off. It blew off both of his hands and blew out his right eye. And as he was bleeding to death, a policeman runs across the street,
[05:12] 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 all of them. The three most prominent members received sentences of 1,765 years in prison.
[05:43] 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 Welch 45. It's out there somewhere. But anyway, they were unusual in that the Soviet Union was far too liberal for 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
[06:14] 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 hipped 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 don't have any theory on 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
[06:44] actually be French. They might actually be other Middle Eastern countries that are actually behind some of these hits. And I know this is different Huh? >> They're French. >> Well, I don't doubt that, but >> [laughter] >> but what I'm saying is that there might There are people [clears throat] that theorize that Israel had a role in the background of some of these French operations, not just banking, but also other things that are going on in France that not many people are very hipped 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
[07:17] is the name came from that? Is that what you're saying? That the the name >> 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 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
[07:47] 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 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
[08:18] 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 Carlos was like, "Where the [ __ ] did this name come from? 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
[08:49] see his ex-wife, Magdalena Kopp, in Germany. They They share a daughter. And she she dropped out of terrorism. 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 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
[09:20] 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 minutes outside of town. And we finally get into the prison to see Carlos. I said, "Thank you for seeing me. I'm John Kirakou. 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 he listened and he's nodding and he's nodding and I said all I want to know is who were the Greeks?
[09:53] Just give us the names of the Greeks. Give us one name, just someone that would lead me to the killers. And he goes [ __ ] 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 uh 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
[10:23] viewers who who don't know any of the 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 billion dollars to let everybody go.
[10:56] 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 weapons and ammunition and just selling them on the gray market. It was Carlos that had the relationship with the
[11:27] 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 reading and research, that this type of a person is organic or alone, you know, weapons trafficker or whatever
[11:57] terrorist person. 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 guy that I used to work with at the agency. He was a legendary contractor named Billy Waugh. W A U G H. Billy was one short of the US record. He
[12:27] 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 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
[12:59] that is Peace 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 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
[13:29] 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." 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
[14:00] 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's on an elliptical machine in the in the office. And he says, "Cofer, I just 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
[14:30] 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. 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 in Africa and the Middle East, fighting is very very rare. So two guys start duking it out. A big circle forms around
[15:01] 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 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 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
[15:31] 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. >> The 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 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?
[16:02] >> 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 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
[16:34] 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, 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, right? Brzezinski and Between Two Ages. He's got this footnote where he talks about Professor Anthony Sutton.
[17:05] And he quotes Sutton about the build-up of the Soviet Union. And we find other references here and there in literature 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 have 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's there seems to be quite a few instances where we're fighting this enemy that's also aided and propped up
[17:36] in many cases and perhaps the Cold War 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
[18:08] teens, it was anarchism and then it 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's a racket, right? >> Oh, yeah.
[18:38] >> It would seem to me as well 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 fake cutout groups, the ridiculous groups. But also the head of the guy, you know, the Unite the Right guy in Charlottesville that I think many of us
[19:10] 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 the 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 and perhaps banking elites who wanted to put
[19:40] money into communism, socialism and perhaps even fascism too or into sudden 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 the sudden articles popping up maybe 2008, 9, 10, 11 CIA black sites exposed. They're in the news. Suddenly we've got this place in
[20:11] 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 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 establishment's perspective? >> Oh, the the justification from the establishment's perspective was that we needed to do literally everything to
[20:43] 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. We can't be both. You can't, you know, Ronald Reagan called the United States a shining city on a hill. 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
[21:13] 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 one or the other. And I came down on the side of law and order. I mean I hate to sound like an idealogue but I came down on the side of you know, the rule of law. There was a I blew the whistle on the
[21:43] 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 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
[22:13] 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 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
[22:46] 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 she swore it wasn't her, but I I don't know. I was just one of those guys that believed that we were the good guys. And if we are 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
[23:17] can. And so I said no, enough is enough and I said something. >> I've heard you and many others and I think it was you but I don't want to misquote you if it wasn't you but this is often said that you know, when people say, well, 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
[23:47] the idea on the one hand that there's all these legalities which which you mentioned quite often in interviews. You mentioned for example with 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
[24:18] curious as to your process as you're working through these issues. >> 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.
[24:50] 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. But then,
[25:21] 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 an example. If I go overseas and I receive a cable saying, "Hey, listen, the polls say that the communists are
[25:53] 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 to overthrow the American government or to influence an American election or
[26:24] 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. >> You know, you often hear from establishment types when this topic is brought up, "Well, if we don't, they will. I remember reading
[26:55] I remember reading decades ago or excuse me a book written decades ago. I think it was a 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 start with MK Ultra and and the sub the sub operations of MK Ultra, MK Chickwit and MK what whatever it was called Night Writer or whatever it was
[27:25] 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 developing expertise in mind control and ESP and what they called remote viewing and all this silliness that never came
[27:57] 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. 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.
[28:29] And so, they start dosing their own CIA employees with LSD. People are jumping out of windows and off of balconies and they're like, "Ah, no, 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 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
[29:01] 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. 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.
[29:32] And then they just drive around town in these pickup trucks with pipes releasing the germ into the fog. They knew it was successful 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.
[30:04] And so, they put LSD in the flour that was supplied to the only bakery in a little village in France. The baker who had no idea that the that the flour 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
[30:35] secret until 1975. The Church Committee on Capitol Hill 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."
[31:08] They destroyed 85% of the documents on 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
[31:40] 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 a strictly speaking a cult, but some people have written about it as if it'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. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but >> Same idea. >> Yeah. >> No, you're right. It's the same idea. >> Briefly little detour here cuz I want to
[32:11] 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, there could be something spiritual going on for sure, but it also reminds me of what happens if you have a bad LSD trip.
[32:44] >> Yeah. >> I and and 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 components 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 that's being seeded or planted that we're now under some sort of a you know, alien attack. Maybe you think that the
[33:15] 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. 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
[33:47] 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 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
[34:19] 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. 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 work midnight
[34:50] 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. 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
[35:21] 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?" 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.
[35:52] 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, 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, couple of years later,
[36:22] 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 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
[36:52] don't know." He said, "But they very well could be ours." It's just that he said, "I'm not cleared 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,
[37:23] right? That's being experimented with. 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's 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
[37:54] want your take on. A lot of them are unfortunately, I know this is selfish, but kind of my pet thoughts and 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, who'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.
[38:24] >> 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 backdoor connection or influence there that might be pretty significant geopolitically speaking, because you do have the Roman Catholic Church taking some pretty significant advances in terms of changing their
[38:54] attitudes towards the nation-state of Israel and regarding 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 seem 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 wanted throughout the Cold War in regards to the Vatican? >> Yeah. >> Was that a trap to basically sort of
[39:27] 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 II 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 Poland, which was a Soviet satellite state at the time, would reap untold benefits because it would distract the Soviets. And then at
[39:58] 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 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
[40:29] 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 in the 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 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
[41:00] 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 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 >> I heard you say this. Yeah, I heard you
[41:31] 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 or whatever whatever it was. Where you had even the KGB minders 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
[42:01] then somebody at the CIA said, "We've got to smuggle this into the Soviet Union." Well, how do you do that? Well, we could 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 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
[42:32] 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 a book taped around their legs 10 pages at a time, collate the pages again and then pass it around to their friends. >> I think I have an idea as to why and for those who 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
[43:03] 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 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
[43:34] and maybe make one Soviet citizen question his or her own government that's a successful operation. 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's real. That's real. When when I first joined
[44:05] the agency that was called active measures. Yeah, it it's it's all about the propaganda and it's all about combating propaganda. Um, it 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
[44:36] Soviet operatives to certain cells or something like he's trying to see if he can find something I 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. Um, is that still happening at that type of a level? Okay. >> Oh, yeah. As recently as a week ago, I was just I I 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,
[45:07] 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 um 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 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 50 cents. And it included a shortwave
[45:38] 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 miles away. So, I was getting Chicago and New York and Boston and Atlanta and Dallas a couple a
[46:09] couple times. The next night, I switched it to shortwave. Just to see if I can get this this on AM, what about the 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 six for hours. And I'm like, what is this? What What it is, it's a spy
[46:40] 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 I can tell you that a week ago I heard a guy reciting one-time pad numbers." So, there there it's some Russian spy
[47:11] 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. I'm not sure if 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 jayvicular." Good one. Albert Smith, $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
[47:43] mixed with James Bond. So, Ralph thanks $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. JayML, $15. Why are so many ex-CIA in US politics? And what about the Democratic Party say Governor Virginia? Can we trust any of these people, John? >> No. We can't trust them. >> answer. [laughter] >> No. I I'll tell you I was I was the mentor to a guy Will
[48:14] 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 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 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
[48:46] 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 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 Abby Spanberger, it's all about the
[49:18] 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 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
[49:48] 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 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
[50:20] and go. For example, our foreign policy seems to be dictated by Israel for many, many decades. >> Yes. >> 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.
[50:51] Bilderberg is another. I I um 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,
[51:23] it's all about weapon sales. Yes, the 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 uh Bilderberg meeting on a couple weeks ago. What
[51:54] dominated the supposed talking points were CBDCs, AI. It seems like Bilderberg in 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 of $15. Jay, what does John I know he did mention this earlier. What does John think about SRI and CIA programs studying remote viewing? >> For the CIA, remote viewing was a
[52:24] 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. >> Harsh 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 know. You know, if you if you want to don't want to say you don't have to say. >> Elpidophoros is the Archbishop of the
[52:55] 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. >> Fair enough. Hendrick says, "Olof Palme of the Swedish Prime Minister He's a
[53:25] Swedish Prime Minister in the 1980s >> Was assassinated. >> was uh yeah, assassinated probably by a Gladio cell. There was a a CIA operation called Red Socks where they had Johnny Mustache Men followers in the Ukraine. And this was part of the Maidan coup." Interesting, I had not heard that. 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 Socks, which helped with the Maidan coup is what he's saying. >> Huh. I have no idea. I always heard that
[53:56] 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. >> But Mountain Walk $10 J, 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 podcast and we're going to start a new in 2 weeks on YouTube under Real John Kiriakou.
[54:27] It's going to be called John Kiriakou's Briefing Room. >> That'll 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 J, 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 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
[54:57] going to be on your new channel? What is that going to >> to be on the new channel. >> Okay, awesome. Let's see. Porphyry says there's a secret Asian peptide. Okay. These are some 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 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. And when I
[55:28] 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 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
[55:59] 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 recruiting Mormons or perhaps or other 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.
[56:31] 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, 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
[57:01] 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. >> 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
[57:32] because there was no Greek Orthodox church, specifically in Kuwait, the Antiochians were very strong. You know, I don't remember there being 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
[58:03] of the Orthodox, the Greeks and the Cypriots, go with him to see the Emir." The Emir 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, >> [laughter] >> and he says to me, he whispers, "I like your Ayatollah." He said, "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
[58:33] church in Bahrain. It was very very generous. In Kuwait, there were already 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. >> Hanner says, "Have you guys read Which
[59:05] 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. 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 that he was one of the two shooters in the Welch assassination. He
[59:38] dropped out of 17 November. He was the only one to voluntarily leave and joined 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, "John, can you talk about the CIA culture and its influence in America, for example, in
[1:00:08] 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 professor and then with passage of the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, that became illegal. So what they did is they just
[1:00:39] 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. 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
[1:01:09] 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. 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,
[1:01:40] 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. I said, "I don't have it in my gut to convince somebody to commit treason." He said, "I just can't do it." But he was unmarried, no kids. I said, "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
[1:02:10] 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 S. Russian analyst, specialist, translator, translates KGB stuff. And of course, he did a great podcast with me on The Americans. Everybody be sure and follow John Kiriakou. John, thank you so much. I'm honored to speak with you and so 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. Appreciate it. It's good to see you again.