billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans, whether it's NSA or CIA or the FBI.
And to make matters worse, we know that the CIA can take control remotely of a car's computer system in order to crash the car, take it off a bridge, or take control of your smart TV and turn a speaker into a, Even though the TV is off, and broadcast back to the CIA.
Can they do that with devices?
Absolutely.
And I'll tell you how we know.
There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled.
And he downloaded tens of thousands of documents classified above top secret.
And instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks.
And they became the Vault 7 documents.
So our whole lives are out there, potentially, for someone to use against us.
And every country has these capabilities.
Listen up.
I spent 15 years in the CIA.
I love this country.
But one of the most important things in my life is the issue of ethics, which is why I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.
Because my superiors kept repeating that torture worked.
But besides being illegal immoral unethical, it just wasn't true and i would let them send me to prison again because it was the right thing to do.
I mean, we know that they were experimenting on american citizens and spreading diseases in american cities.
This is the stuff of movies it is.
And because you've been in this world that the average person really has no idea about, i have to ask you who do you think is the real adversary of the west?
What are you most concerned about in the world at the moment, And what about everything that's going on with Trump in Venezuela and Greenland?
And then, do you think Jeffrey Epstein was a spy?
Yes.
Who do you think he was working for?
The Israelis.
Why?
Two things I wanted to say.
The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
It means the world to all of us.
And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.
I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
Thank you.
John Kiriakou, the world knows your name.
Why?
Why does the world know your name?
I can give you two answers.
One.
I'm proud to say that I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in a nationally televised interview with ABC News.
The second reason is I blew the whistle a long time ago and just in the past 18 months I seem to have hit some sort of YouTube algorithm sweet spot.
And all of a sudden, my message is getting out there.
And you went to prison for blowing the whistle.
I did.
And I would do it again tomorrow.
I really would.
You know, I was giving an interview to the BBC the day after I got out of prison.
They were the first outlet to ask for an interview.
And so I gladly gave it to them.
And the interviewer said kind of perturbedly, you're not showing any remorse or contrition?
And I said, no, I'm not remorseful.
I'm not contrite.
I would do it again.
I would let them send me to prison again because it was the right thing to do.
And you were a spy in the CIA?
Yeah, I was quite an accomplished spy.
I spent 15 years in the CIA.
The first half of my career was in analysis, and I got bored, frankly.
And so I made an unusual, at the time, change to counterterrorism operations.
And then I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after the 9-11 attacks.
And if I'd never heard about the CIA before, and I had never heard about your role in the CIA before—
And I was a 16-year-old.
Right.
How would you explain to me what you did there, what your role was, and what the CIA is?
Sure.
The CIA is an intelligence service whose job it is, at its most basic level, to recruit spies, to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets so that the policymakers can make the best informed policy.
After 9-11, we were expecting an attack, to use Osama bin Laden's words, that would dwarf 9-11.
And so my job was to infiltrate al-Qaeda by recruiting members of al-Qaeda to tell us when and where that next attack was going to come, so that we could disrupt it.
We could kill or capture the leadership and destroy the organization.
And give me a range of the things that you did during your time in the CIA, just for a very top-line range of the types of things you worked on.
Oh, sure.
As an analyst, it was actually quite straightforward.
We would write for the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense and the national security advisor.
And who were the presidents during those times?
When I started, it was George H.W.
Bush, the father.
And then it was Bill Clinton, then George W. Bush.
There are several different publications.
There's the president's daily brief, which is the most important.
I covered Iraq the entire time that I was in analysis, from well before most Americans had ever heard of Iraq.
I was told actually that it was a training account because nothing ever happened there.
Nothing ever changed.
And then Iraq invaded Kuwait.
The next day I got to the office early.
I was 25 years old, 26 years old.
And my boss said, don't take your jacket off.
We're going to the White House.
I had never been to the White House before, except as a tourist.
And so we got in a car, went to the White House, were ushered into the Oval Office.
It's the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the director of the CIA, my boss and me.
And then we all sit down.
The president tells us, sit down.
We sit down and the president says, well, now what do we do?
And everybody turns and looks at me.
And it took me a second.
And I said, yes.
I said, Mr. President, as you know, Iraqi troops crossed the border at 2 o'clock this morning.
The royal family has run away to Saudi Arabia.
They've named a new occupation governor, et cetera, et cetera.
Do we know who that is?
I said, yes, sir.
I gave him the name.
And I said, actually, he's the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The vice president shouts, Jesus Christ.
And then the president says, gentlemen, thank you.
Thank you.
We'll take it from here.
And I remember saying to myself my friends would never believe in a thousand years what I was doing right now.
They wouldn't even believe me if I told them.
That's what an analyst does.
When I switched to operations, again, the job was very straightforward.
It was to recruit spies to steal secrets.
But then if you're involved in counterterrorism operations, there are a lot of extras that you have to be trained in.
So you go through the normal spy training.
This is how you ingratiate yourself.
It's something called the asset acquisition cycle.
Spot, assess, develop, recruit.
I meet you at a cocktail party.
You seem like a nice guy.
I introduce myself.
I ask, so what do you do for a living?
Well, if you tell me you manage a shoe store, I'm going to say, well, it was very nice meeting you.
And I'm going to go on to the next guy.
But if you tell me you work at the port, you work in the Ministry of Defense, you work in the Chinese embassy.
I'm going to invite you to lunch.
I've spotted you.
I've assessed you.
And my assessment is I'd like to get to know you.
Then I begin to develop you.
I'll give you an example.
I was in Pakistan.
I got a tip that Al Qaeda, a group of mid-level Al Qaeda fighters, was meeting every single day in a coffee shop at 10 o'clock in the morning.
My Arabic was absolutely flawless at the time.
And so I had a bushy beard that I grew for operational reasons.
Can I hear some of your Arabic?
Yeah.
It's nice to meet you.
Or... So...
I bought an Arabic newspaper and I went to the coffee shop and I just sat there.
And sure enough, at 10 o'clock, the four of them came in.
One of them looked at me and I looked at him and that was it.
We made eye contact.
I did that for a week.
The second week, I was there drinking my coffee, sitting with my Arabic newspaper.
And the one who had looked at me the week before, he nodded.
So I nodded back.
That was it.
No communication otherwise.
The third week, I'm a regular now.
He recognizes me.
So he says to me, I said, may peace be upon you.
And I say, and upon you, peace.
One day, he came in alone.
And I said, please have a seat.
Sit with me.
No sense in you sitting alone and me sitting alone.
So he sat down.
We started talking.
And I asked him how long he had been in Pakistan.
He said, oh, I've been here for five years.
I was in Afghanistan.
I was making jihad against the Americans.
And I said, oh.
That must have been hell on earth.
He said, oh, he said that the bombing of Tora Bora was hideous.
That was the word that he used.
It was hideous.
And I said, and what about your family?
How's your family?
He said, my wife and son and daughter are in Cairo.
I've never met my son.
He was born just after I left to make jihad.
I said, I'm so sorry.
And he said, yes, I'm lonely and I want to go home and We continued this relationship.
And finally, I said to him, let me take you to dinner.
Let's get out of the coffee shop.
The truth was I didn't want one of his friends to walk in and see us.
So we went to a restaurant for dinner.
And I said, listen, there's something that I haven't been truthful with you about.
I'm not Lebanese.
And I said, actually, I'm American.
And he says, I think so.
I said, well, actually, I'm a CIA officer.
And he says, okay.
So he didn't run screaming from the room or pull a gun or anything.
And he said, why do you want me?
Why do you want to talk to me?
I said, actually you have access to something that I want.
It was very specific and I told him what it was.
And he says, and what will you do for me?
And I said, anything your heart desires.
And he said, I want to go home.
I said, I can do that.
You wanted information, presumably.
I wanted information, very specific information.
Which you can't share.
No.
I'll go right back to prison.
So we got him a passport.
I bought him a first class ticket.
And I took him to the airport, gave him some cash to get himself started again.
And I said, before you go, I have to ask you, why did you agree to give me this information?
I mean, presumably I'm the enemy.
And he said I've been here five years and you're the first person who ever asked me about my family.
So I said, best of luck.
Never saw him again.
That's the job.
I have to ask you.
Take me on the journey of you being a young man in West Pennsylvania to becoming a spy.
What happened?
Because I'll be honest, I don't really know what my perception of spies is, but it's not you.
That's good.
That's good.
See, because I kind of work under the radar.
That's really interesting.
There's so many...
Once you learn about spies as a podcast, like so, if you go back a couple of years and someone had told me about spies, I wouldn't have believed them.
I wouldn't have believed that these things actually happened.
Oh, yeah.
You know, you hear about people going undercover and going to other countries and getting secrets and all of these things.
And it's not until you meet the people that said, yes, that's me.
I used to do that.
That you'll sort of, you have this paradigm shift in your mind and you go oh my God, what else might be going on?
Because I lived in this world probably up until the age of I don't know 30 years old, where I kind of just assume things are what they are as I see them.
And then, you know, you start to discover that there's layers of secrecy.
Nations are against each other.
They're doing all of these covert operations.
And even like as a podcaster.
Now I have moments where I go Like how do I know that you're not here to steal secrets from me?
Right.
So, you know what's funny?
When I had Andrew Bustamante on the show, the comment sections are always the same.
They're always like, once a CIA spy, always a CIA spy.
I hate when people say that.
It's so intellectually lazy.
But I do wonder.
And I go, okay, here's a super conspiracy theory.
What if the CIA have made spies do really well in the YouTube algorithm so that all of us, as long-form podcasters, invite them on?
And then they- You know what?
I would agree with that.
I would have agreed with that a year ago, because Andrew Bustamante has really made a handsome living out of selling his experience.
And he's on every podcast.
Yeah.
But I am the most anti-CIA former CIA person that's out there.
But wouldn't that be the perfect CIA agent?
I mean if I weren't constantly criticizing the CIA as an organization that's just out of control.
Do you think the CIA have a strategy for podcasters and for podcasting?
I think yes.
Now they do.
It took them a little while to get current.
But just like they over time developed a strategy with Hollywood…
Sure, they're developing a strategy with podcasters.
You know, it was only in the last 10 years that the CIA opened a branch within the Office of Public Affairs, whose job it is solely to liaise with Hollywood Studios.
The FBI has been doing this since the 40s.
And the goal is that everything that comes out of Hollywood should be pro-CIA.
And, you know, we end up with With Zero Dark Thirty and The Recruit and the CIA, Argo.
The CIA is always the hero in these movies.
If you were still at the CIA now and your job was to infiltrate and use creators or podcasters as an asset for the CIA's objectives, how might you design that plan?
If we were just hypothesizing?
You would have to have...
A goal that would be specific enough that you could actually track the progress to it.
So you can't just say well, I'm going to pay this podcaster X amount of money and we're going to do something with the algorithm to make him vastly popular among
Men, you know, 18 to 30, let's say there's got to be more to it than that.
It has to be a message.
You've got to be able to get a specific, well honed message out there.
And the message can be anything.
It could be love the CIA.
We're the good guys.
It could be support the overthrow of the Iranian government.
It could be any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu as anti-Semitism.
It could be anything you want it to be.
You just have to make sure that it's repeated enough.
See, this was the danger with the torture program.
This is one of the very important reasons that I went public when I did, because my colleagues, my superiors at the CIA, kept repeating this lie over and over and over again that torture worked and that torture got us information that saved American lives.
And that was just simply not true.
It was a lie.
Besides being illegal, immoral, unethical, it just wasn't true.
And so I decided, before we go down this road anymore, I'm going to go public.
So can you take me back then?
We got a little bit sidetracked there.
Sure.
John, how did you come to be a CIA spy?
Right.
When I was nine years old, I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up.
It came time to apply for college, and I only applied at one university, George Washington University in Washington, because it was two blocks from the White House and it was one of only three schools in America that offered a Middle Eastern studies program.
I was one of only four people in that brand new Middle Eastern studies program.
I stayed for a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis.
I was taking a class in that program called The Psychology of Leadership.
It was taught by an eminent psychiatrist named Dr. Gerald Post.
And He gave us an assignment one day where we had to shadow our bosses.
We had to just follow our bosses for a week.
Your bosses?
Yeah.
I worked at a labor union called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
And so we were just supposed to follow our boss around for a week and then write a psychological profile.
I used dozens of footnotes from psychology texts and I ended up saying that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies.
And I had these citations.
I passed the paper in.
Dr Post gives it back to me a week later, gave me an A and then he wrote please see me after class.
So I went up to him after the class and I said, Dr. Post, you wanted to see me.
He says, come to my office.
So we went down there.
He closed the door and he says, listen, I'm not really a professor here.
I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here.
And I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture.
I think you would fit into the CIA's culture.
Would you like to be a spy?
And I said, yes, I would.
He picked up the phone and called a number.
And he said, Bob, this is Jerry.
I've got a good one for you.
Do you have some time?
And he said, sure.
He writes an address on a scrap of paper and he says, be at this address in 20 minutes.
It was only one subway stop away.
So I jumped on the metro.
I went to Roslyn, Virginia, just across the river.
I had to buzz to be let in.
And a woman opens the door.
She says, are you here for Bob?
And I said, yes.
She says, come on in.
I'm sitting there for a moment.
And then this like six foot six, 350 pound giant barrels out of his office.
And he says, John, Bob, how the hell are you?
I want you to be at the George Washington University Medical School Saturday morning at eight o'clock.
We've got some tests for you.
I said, OK.
And then we shook hands and I left.
So Saturday morning, I went to the GW Medical School auditorium.
There were like, I don't know, 200 people there.
And they hand us a test.
My wife picked me up.
She said, how did you do?
I said, I have no idea.
Does your wife at this point know that you're applying for the CIA?
Yes.
And that was going to be pretty much the extent of what she ended up knowing.
Because once I got in, that was it.
But you were allowed to tell her?
I was not allowed to tell her.
No.
So you told her anyway?
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I first applied they said listen, don't tell anybody because you may go under cover.
You may go under deep cover and we can't have people out there who know that you're a CIA officer.
Presumably, the CIA are smart enough to be able to check if you've told her.
Yeah.
And they ask you on the polygraph, did you tell her?
Really?
And I said, yeah, I told her.
She's my wife.
What am I going to do?
You know.
But it got to the point where I'd get home from a day where, you know, I broke into some guy's house and planted a camera on a bug and I'd get home and she'd say, how was your day?
I'd say, great.
What'd you do?
Not a darn thing.
And then my phone would ring at, you know, midnight and a guy would say.
The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.
And I'd say, mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
And that means, meet me at the yacht club parking lot in three hours.
And then I'd leave.
She would say, where are you going?
It's midnight.
I got to work.
So I'd leave.
I'd do my meeting.
I'd come home 6 o'clock in the morning, just in time to shower and shave and get dressed to go to work.
And she would say...
What was her name?
And I remember this one terrible time.
That's what she said to me.
What was her name?
The truth is, I had been sitting in a garbage dumpster waiting for a guy to drive by down the alley and throw a bag of documents in.
And I stunk of garbage.
And I said to her, do I seriously smell to you like I've been with a woman?
Seriously.
Seriously.
So we ended up getting a divorce.
So you do the assessment, presumably you get in.
Yeah.
He called me like two weeks later, Bob did.
And he said, you blew the doors off those tests.
I said, oh, great.
Okay.
So a month later, they summoned me to headquarters.
And I was interviewed by the office of Near Eastern Operations, the Office of Near Eastern Analysis and the Office of Leadership Analysis.
I was offered the analysis job on the Iraq desk.
And what is the sum total of the training you were given in the variety of different roles that you had?
Yeah, that's a good question.
That's a good question.
And the answer is vastly different depending on where you start your career.
Because I started mine in analysis, the immediate training was in mastering the CIA's writing style.
So the most important product that the CIA writes every day is the PDB, the President's Daily Brief.
And it tells the president what?
What you think he needs to know.
Okay.
So, for example, when the Iraqis began moving to the Kuwaiti border, we had this big debate.
Are they going to cross the border?
Yes or no?
So I said, listen, why don't I call the American defense attache in Baghdad?
And I'll just ask him to drive down there and look and tell us what he sees.
Okay.
He drives down there, drives back.
He calls me and he says, literally the entire Iraqi military is on its way to the Kuwaiti border.
So we wrote a thing for the president saying Iraq is going to invade Kuwait and it's probably going to happen in the next 48 hours.
And when did the president see that particular briefing?
At 7 a.m. the next morning.
Okay.
And is there ever situations where the president would get it in the middle of the night?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And be told in the middle of the night that.
Yes.
There are these levels of immediacy.
There's routine, which is like, who cares?
And then there is priority, which means, eh, I'll get to it sometime today.
Then there's immediate, which means you should probably read it first.
But then there's flash, which means, oh, my God, something terrible just happened.
You should probably wake the president.
And then there's critic, which means they're coming over the embassy walls.
We're at war.
Wake up the president.
Scramble the jets.
9-11.
9-11.
That's a critic.
So going back to this question of your training.
What is it that the CIA teach you about human nature and how to use human nature to your advantage?
That could be transferable to other disciplines in life, like business.
Well, this is going to sound not very nice, but it's real life.
It's everyday life, especially in business, right?
The CIA actively seeks to hire people who have what they call sociopathic tendencies.
Not sociopaths.
Sociopaths have no conscience.
They'll just blow right through a polygraph exam.
But they're impossible to corral.
They're impossible to keep under rain.
And it's because they're not able, their brains won't allow them to feel regret or remorse.
Now, in business, most CEOs are sociopaths.
Most, not all.
But most especially in big companies, because they claw their way to the top usually on the backs of the people around them.
They don't feel bad screwing the next guy to get that next promotion.
The CIA wants people like that.
Because those are the people who are going to break into a foreign embassy.
A normal person would not advocate breaking into a foreign embassy.
That's sovereign territory of a foreign country.
I would.
I'd be glad to do it.
Why?
Because we're the good guys.
So do you have sociopathic tendencies?
Absolutely.
And what are your sociopathic tendencies?
My sociopathic tendency was to operate in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas.
Specifically.
That's what it was.
I'm really curious about what we can learn about human nature from someone whose job was to meet strangers and to get them to basically sometimes to turn against their own country.
Mm-hmm.
I'm really interested in and I think it's informative, because so many of us, you know, when we think about what good leadership is, or what good salesman or womanship is, it seems like there's transferables.
I guess for some people it's family.
I guess for some people it's something else.
That hook that you're talking about, that thing that gets them.
And the word that they use at the CIA for the hook is a vulnerability.
And it's not really a vulnerability in every case.
Now, 95% studies have been done about this internally at the CIA.
95% of the people who agree to become spies for us do it for the money, right?
It's a simple cash transaction.
You give me money, I'll give you secrets.
95%.
So you're telling me that you think human motivation is 95% driven by money?
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
The rest was love and family, ideology, revenge, and excitement.
You're going to get a handful of people who are hooked on James Bond movies and they will do it.
I mean, you're going to pay them anyway, but they will do it just for the adrenaline rush.
It's interesting because when I look at this list of things and I compare it to business, I would say it's slightly different from my experience of hiring people, specifically of hiring people.
I tend to think that You know one would ask themselves why would someone leave a company right now, like I don't know OpenAI, and go work at a startup?
They're going to get paid way more at OpenAI.
You've got this equity and these grants.
But people are en masse doing that.
And even when I think about the early days of Google, people left the big conglomerates that would pay them more.
And they went and worked for Larry and Sergey, getting paid way less.
But to be involved in something small, scrappy, exciting...
And so I, and this is what I think about when I sit.
You know, probably I've had thousands of people in my life now across my businesses.
And money is a factor, but it doesn't tend to be the biggest factor, right?
It tends to be in my experience.
There's a particular hero's journey in their mind that they want to be seen through.
They want to complete.
You know, there's a particular way that they see themselves and they want to fulfill that.
Oh, I could get that.
I work with a very, very tiny startup right now called Ivy Cyber and it focuses on privacy software things like scrambling your data so it can't be intercepted, that sort of thing.
And I've participated in a couple of pitches to angel investors.
And they all say exactly the same thing that you did.
And this is why I was confused when I heard that money was 95%.
Because I just think, especially in the work that you do, I would assume... But look at it this way.
I think this would explain the discrepancy.
You're comparing people who are making a life versus people who are betraying their country.
True.
And what's interesting as well is in those examples that you've given money is actually a proxy to be able to take care of my family and to be able to, you know, fulfill my ideology.
And maybe to get excitement and revenge.
Do you know what I'm saying?
So even that guy that wanted the plane ticket so he could fly home.
Yeah, the money could have got him home if you'd just given him.
But the reason why he wanted to go home was because his family.
His family.
That was it.
What's the extent of the things that the CIA can get as an incentive for someone to turn against their nation to give secrets?
Quite literally anything you can imagine.
Even if it's against the law?
Well, they're not going to get like drugs or, you know, child prostitutes or no, not stuff like that.
What if someone said, I want you to get me a green card?
Oh, yeah, sure.
What if they said... If the information is good enough, not a problem.
What if they said, I want you to... I've got this tax bill.
I want you to make the tax bill go away.
Okay.
Give me the plans to that Russian tank.
We'll make it happen.
What if it was an American?
Would they speak to the IRS here and just get rid of it?
Oh, if it was an American citizen, you mean?
Yeah.
No.
But why?
No.
We normally don't recruit American citizens.
By law, the CIA can't operate domestically, although they have offices all over the country.
Those offices are generally to debrief Business leaders, C-suite officers who travel to denied areas.
For example, if you take a trip to North Korea, let's say I'm going to call you and I'm going to say you don't know me, but I'm from the CIA and I understand.
You just went to North Korea.
And I was wondering if I could come over to your office for an hour and just ask you about your trip.
99.99% are going to say yes because they're patriots.
So I go to your office, I give you my business card and we just chat about you know, your impressions of the place and that kind of thing.
Just to close off on this point, are there any skills that the CIA taught you or trained you in that you think are transferable for business that we haven't talked about?
They trained us also in lying and lie detection.
That was actually quite important.
At the CIA, you're a trained liar.
And this is why the divorce rate is so high.
It's the highest divorce rate of any entity in the U.S. government.
It's upwards of 80%.
Trained to lie.
How do they train you to lie?
Hi, my name is Dave Phillips.
I work for an import-export company.
But do they teach you the art of lying?
Oh, yeah.
And what is the art?
You know, it's hard to pin down.
You just sort of have to have it.
You have to have that ability.
But the hard part is you have to keep the lies straight.
I'll give you another example.
I've never told this story before.
I was asked by headquarters – I was overseas in the Middle East.
And I was asked by headquarters to target one specific officer of this foreign country.
Target?
Yeah.
Hi, how are you?
Oh, we've never met.
I'm John.
So nice to meet you.
Let me take you to lunch.
He had access to information that we really needed.
So they told me to – accidentally bump into him.
So I surveilled him for a week and he was single.
And on Saturday morning, he went to a coffee shop.
So I go into the coffee shop and I'm looking at him and he's looking at me and I said, I know you.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs?
He said, yes.
Do I know you?
I said, I am John from the American Embassy.
Oh, nice to see you.
I said, hey, good to see you too.
Do you live in the area?
Yes, I do.
I said, oh, so do I. I didn't.
I lived like across town.
Oh, fancy meeting you here at this coffee shop.
I come here all the time.
Do you?
Yeah, he says.
I come here all the time.
Why don't you have a seat, he says.
So I sit down.
At the end of the conversation, I go back to the embassy and I read a cable and I said, he's gay.
I'm 100% sure he's gay.
So then we started this conversation, headquarters and I, how can we use that to our benefit?
Did he have a wife?
No.
He was single.
Which was unusual at his age.
How did you know he was gay?
Oh, I just, it was a vibe.
Okay.
So headquarters says, we want you to pretend that you're gay.
I said, oh, come on, you guys.
No, we really need the information.
You got to pretend that you're gay.
I said, okay, I'll do it.
I'll do it for Uncle Sam.
So I call him and I said, hey, I have two tickets to this show.
And I was hoping maybe you'd be free.
Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards.
He said, yeah, I'd love to.
So we go to the show.
He thoroughly enjoyed it.
And we go for sushi afterwards.
And then we go out again and he says why don't you come over to my place some night and I'll make dinner?
I said, great.
So I go over to his place.
He made a lovely dinner.
And then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place.
So I told my wife, you're going to have to like get out.
So she left.
I made dinner.
I removed all the pictures of us together and we had just gotten married.
So we had like our wedding picture up and everything at the dinner.
He leaned in to kiss me and I instinctively backed off.
And he said, oh my God, I'm sorry.
I thought you're gay.
And I said, oh no, I am gay.
I'm not into hairy guys.
And he's like, oh, okay.
I said, I'm sorry.
I think you're great, but I'm not feeling it.
You didn't kiss him?
No.
No.
So we remained friends.
And in the end, he gave me the information. because we were friends.
And then he opened up.
He's like, I can't tell anybody I'm gay.
They suspect I am.
And they passed me over for promotion.
And my boss asked me, is there something in your personal life that you're not telling me?
He knows I'm gay.
I said, listen, your culture's backwards.
Don't tell them you're gay.
Just say that you've just never met the right woman.
And inshallah, the right woman is coming, you know, in your life at some point.
And I actually Googled him a couple of years ago and he did become an ambassador finally.
And he's still working in that country now.
Does that kind of stuff happen a lot in the CIA where you have to take one for the team?
Yes.
Have you ever taken one for the team?
No.
I'm not sure you're telling the truth.
Well, it came close.
When did it come close?
So I was overseas.
I was a brand new operations officer.
And there was a woman in this foreign intelligence service who was the ugliest woman I've ever seen in my life.
Like, you want to avert your eyes.
Like, she came off the side of Notre Dame.
She was a stone gargoyle with a giant mole right here with a giant hair coming out of it.
That kind of ugly.
So...
So I took her to lunch and she was very nice.
And then I thought I did something kind of gutsy by CIA standards because it was early on in our relationship.
I invited her to go to lunch on a Saturday.
Now, as a rule, the people in this country were not allowed to socialize with us privately.
It had to be like their whole office, you know, or several of them together.
So I asked her just to meet me privately for lunch on saturday, don't tell anybody.
So she was someone from the middle east yes, and she agreed.
And i was like, oh my god, she said yes.
And i ran back to the office.
I was like she said yes to a lunch on saturday alone and my boss says okay, here's what i want you to do.
I want you to fuck her.
And i said what i said have you ever seen her?
And he said i know, but we're the good guys and you're going to have to take one for the team.
And I go, Oh my God.
I said, I go, okay, I'll do it.
And he says, no, you're not going to fuck her.
We don't do that.
I said, I don't know.
I just started this.
I've never been an operations guy before.
How am I supposed to know?
He said, come on.
He said, just develop her like a normal person.
You don't have to fuck her.
I said, oh, my God, you almost gave me a heart attack.
But they might not be mad if you did.
So long as I reported it and I got the recruitment out of it.
It wasn't illegal to sleep with assets.
Yeah, you're not supposed to sleep with assets.
It has happened to a couple of people I know.
And they end up being pulled back to the United States.
You have to sit in the penalty box if you do that.
You're not supposed to do that.
But yeah, it happens sometimes.
So sextortion isn't a real thing?
It can be.
We don't.
When I first got hired, one of the old-timers told me the story about an ayatollah that they were trying to recruit.
And they set this ayatollah up with a prostitute.
And he had sex with this prostitute in a room where they had cameras everywhere.
And so they bumped him afterwards.
They bumped into him and said, hey, we have all these pictures.
And they laid out the pictures of him butt naked with this prostitute.
And he said, yeah.
Give me that one, an 8x10.
Give me two 5x7s of that one.
How about some wallet size for this?
He's like, get out of here.
And he said, you know, after that, we just stop doing that.
It doesn't work.
When you recruit somebody, you really do need the relationship to be based on mutual trust.
Not coercional pressure or threats.
Threatening somebody, it's not going to result in a productive relationship.
The Russians do it.
The Israelis do it, but most intelligence services around the world don't.
Because you've been in this world.
What is it that you know about the nature of the reality that we all live in, that the average person really has no idea about?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Because, you know, going back to what I said earlier, three years ago, before I started doing all this podcast stuff and started interviewing people that had been involved in spy work and the CIA and all this, I was kind of like naive to the way that the world worked.
I thought if I have a password on my device, my device is secure.
And I thought that, you know.
Right.
All these kind of just simple things.
But what is it that you know about the nature of reality that most people don't?
Well…
I guess it's a couple of things.
John Kennedy called the CIA the best and the brightest.
And we're not.
We're just average people.
And we're not as smart as we think we are.
We're not as worldly as we think we are.
We've pretty much missed every major global development since 1947, from the rise of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the fall of the Soviet Union, to the Suez Crisis and the Iran hostage crisis and 9-11 and everything else.
We missed it.
We're really good at day-to-day updates for the president.
We're really good at recruiting minor hangers-on around terrorist groups.
But the big picture items, we're just not good at it, number one.
Number two, until 9-11, it was against the law, like in stone, to spy on Americans.
And now billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans, whether it's NSA or CIA or FBI or intelligence community contractors.
Nothing is secret.
Nothing.
And to make matters worse, let's say, maybe you did do something that law enforcement might be interested in.
They don't need a warrant anymore.
They don't need to go to a judge and say well, we have reason to believe, you know?
Blah blah, blah.
All they have to do is just buy your metadata because it's for sale.
Just go to the carrier.
Just buy it.
They don't need a judge's order to do that.
It's all out there.
We've made ourselves vulnerable.
All of our lives are out there, whether it's on Facebook or X or Insta or whatever.
If they really want to get you, they're going to get you, which reminds me of a book written by Dr Harvey Silverglate.
He's a professor of law at Harvard, and it's called Three Felonies a Day.
And he argues in this book that we are so over-criminalized, so over-regulated in this country that the average American, on the average day, going about his or her normal business, commits three felonies every day.
You may not mean to, but you do every day.
So if they decide they want you, they don't like your politics, they can get your metadata.
They can go through that metadata, find crimes that they can charge you with and ruin your life.
And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
To some extent, they did that to you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They did.
They did that to me.
Because you spoke out about a torture program that was happening in the CIA.
Yeah.
John Brennan wrote a letter to Eric Holder and said, charge him with espionage.
And Holder wrote back.
Eric Holder was the attorney general.
Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage.
And John Brennan wrote back to Holder and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
So they arrested me and charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage.
Espionage can be a death penalty case.
Charged me with espionage.
They waited until I went bankrupt 10 months later with $2 million in legal fees.
And then they dropped the espionage charges.
And they said, we can re-add the espionage charges or you can take a plea to this lesser charge.
What are you going to do?
Roll the dice knowing that the government wins 98.2% of its cases according to ProPublica?
Or do you just take the deal and make it go away?
And that's what I did.
And you got roughly two years in jail.
Yeah.
I ended up doing 23 months.
Mm-hmm.
And for anyone that doesn't know, this was because at some point in your career you spoke out about torture programs that were happening in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
Yeah, and at secret prisons that the CIA had set up around the world, right?
And going back up to the top of my question, here I'm really trying to speak to Jane Dave, who's listening to this right now.
Sure.
They have a normal life.
Yep.
They're not really aware that spies exist in the extent of the work they do.
They kind of assume that everything they see and people they interact with are normal and they think their devices and everything else is secure.
What message do you have for them?
A word of warning or caution about the reality?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Eliot Spitzer, the former... governor of New York.
When he was attorney general of New York, he said, don't nod when you can motion.
Don't speak when you can nod and don't ever put anything in a text message.
At the CIA on our very first day.
They told us not to ever say or do anything that that we would be ashamed to see on the front page of the Washington Post.
I took that seriously.
The truth of the matter is, because of technology, the way it is today, our whole lives are out there, potentially for someone to see, for someone to use against us.
So be careful what you say, be careful what you write, even in jest, because it can be taken out of context to target you.
And what about digital security?
You talked about the fact that it's possible for these forces and not just the US but other countries to be able to hack and crack your devices and see anything on your devices.
I think we will go around assuming that our devices are secure.
They're not secure at all.
At all.
It's not just NSA, CIA, FBI that you have to worry about.
It's the British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians.
I mean, everybody has these capabilities.
Everybody.
So you've got to be very, very careful.
Capabilities to do what?
To intercept communications.
I've heard you say that they can hack car systems so they could theoretically hack into my car.
Yes, we know that from WikiLeaks.
There was something in 2017 called the Vault 7 revelations.
There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled.
And instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks and he downloaded thousands, tens of thousands of pages of documents classified above top secret.
And They became what WikiLeaks called the Vault 7 documents.
So they included things like the CIA, for example, will hack into, let's say, the Iranian Ministry of Interior computer system.
But they'll leave little electronic clues all written in Cyrillic.
Cyrillic as what?
Cyrillic is the alphabet, the Russian alphabet.
Oh, okay.
Yep.
Or –
They can take control of your smart TV remotely and they can make the speaker turn into a microphone.
So even though the TV is off, it can still hear everything that's being said in the room and broadcast back to the CIA.
Can they do that with devices?
Oh, they could do that.
When I first got hired, they were able to do that.
So you could be doing that right now with my iPad.
Oh, totally.
Absolutely, yes.
That's old technology.
And then the thing about the car, this was revelatory.
They can take control again remotely of a car's computer system in order to well, I mean in order to kill you.
Crash the car.
Crash the car, take it off a bridge, take it into a tree.
Sure.
Sure.
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I've heard you talk about sleeper agents before.
Yes.
What is a sleeper agent?
Yeah, the Russians are very good with sleeper agents.
We Americans don't have – no other country that we know of uses sleeper agents.
A sleeper agent is someone who is taken virtually from birth and trained to be of another nationality.
For example, let's say you're born in Russia and from the age of two they take you from your family, with your family's acquiescence, and they take you to an American-style town that they've built out in the hinterland in Russia.
And they teach you to speak English with an American accent.
You watch American TV shows, you watch American movies, you eat American food, you get an American-style education.
So I have no idea that you're not American.
You speak English just like I do.
You know all the same social references that I make.
You follow the Philadelphia Eagles or the San Francisco 49ers or whatever.
And then they send you to the United States with a fake ID.
What they'll do is they'll go through – I was born in 1964.
So they'll go through death records from 1964 and they'll look for deaths where the person was only a day or two old.
And they'll take that name and the birth date and they'll get a social security card with the birth date.
And then they'll use the Social Security card to get you a passport, an American passport.
So you come here on your American passport.
Everything's legit.
Now your name is Bob Smith, which was really that baby's name that died.
And you get a job, let's say, as a travel agent.
And you may work as a travel agent for 20 years and never hear from them.
But then they'll activate you and they'll say we want you to go take care of this target over here.
Kill him.
Yeah.
Or we want you to get a job at the defense department and give us everything that you, that you can steal, whatever.
There's a woman in my neighborhood who was outed as a sleeper about a year ago.
She was an elementary school teacher and they grabbed her and they ended up trading her back to the Russians for two Americans, and So they're out there.
I interviewed a sleeper, a former sleeper on my own podcast a couple of weeks ago.
He was from the East German Intelligence Service and he was raised as an American and sent to New York.
He got a job, I forget doing what, like restaurant supply company or something like that.
And he got married and And he had a daughter.
And he told me as soon as I looked at her face the day she was born, I realized this life wasn't for me anymore.
So they sent him an activation.
What they do is listen to your radio message.
And he didn't respond to it.
And he told me he was on the subway one day.
He's just standing there holding the strap.
And this guy came up to him and the guy grabs the strap next to him and whispers in his ear if you don't report back, I have to kill you.
And so he ran straight to the FBI field office in New York and he said I'm an East German sleeper and I want to turn myself in.
And he became a prolific source for the FBI.
So he was taken as a young person.
Yes.
What was his story?
Yeah, taken as a young person, sent to Russia to become American.
They set him up with this phony identity.
And then after he had gone through all the training, he came over here young.
He was like 20 or 22 and did this for 25 years.
And then he said as soon as his daughter was born, he was like wow, this is what life is for not being a sleeper.
Do you think the average person listening to this conversation right now is interacting in their life, at this exact moment in time, with someone who is involved in espionage spying, the CIA or some international equivalent?
Probably not.
Because...
They're mostly focused – foreign intelligence officers are going to be spread out all over America.
If a listener of this podcast is working in a defense company, a defense contractor, anywhere in America, then my answer is yes.
Yes, you're probably encountering espionage of some sort or somebody committing espionage, whether it's Russian, Chinese or Israeli.
They're the three biggest ones that go after us.
In Washington, I mean, foreign spies, there could be as many as 10,000 in Washington.
I remember my first wife...
She was teaching ballet at a small private school.
And one of the students there, they were all like four, five, and six years old.
One of the students there, her father was a Belgian diplomat.
And so we would sit and talk and, oh, aren't the kids talented?
And, oh, this is so much fun.
They look so cute in their little tutus.
And then I went to work one day and as I was walking in, he was walking in.
And I said, oh, come on, Peter.
And he's like, you know...
I thought you were a spy.
And I said, I actually didn't think you were a spy.
He was just going for a liaison meeting.
And we had a good chuckle about it.
And I said, listen, don't tell anybody, right?
Right, right, right.
Sorry.
Sorry.
So I'm trying to figure out how many spies do you think there are in the United States?
If you think about... Foreign spies.
Foreign spies, domestic spies, people that are basically undercover.
Including Americans, you mean?
Including Americans.
The number of CIA employees is classified.
The number of CIA employees undercover is actually even more highly classified.
I can give you a guesstimate.
But also, you know, Russia, China.
Yeah.
50,000 to 60,000 altogether?
50,000 to 60,000 in the United States.
So by a couple of degrees of separation, if you know 100 people.
Yeah.
You're probably going to know one.
Sure.
So there's probably about 50,000 in the United States.
So I've just done some quick math on my notepad here.
Which means that in order to know one, you'd need to meet 6,600 people.
Okay.
Because the US population is roughly 330 million people.
That's right.
And then I did some other maths and did some research.
And I asked.
The question I was trying to figure out is how many people does the average person meet a year?
And it's roughly about 3,000 to 10,000 people.
So, theoretically...
Statistically, according to my napkin math, you're meeting one of these undercover spies.
One a year.
There it is.
Now that number I gave you is, I'm lumping like all CIA people and all foreign intelligence officers in the United States.
Interesting.
Interesting.
But again, if you work for an American defense company Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin Boeing, any of them your chances of encountering a foreign intelligence officer are even money.
Can't you as a spy with the United States ask the United States to give you loads of money?
Like, can't you say, you really want me to go do that?
Can I have a million dollars?
Because you're giving, you're potentially giving away a lot of money to other people.
Oh my God, giving away like unlimited amounts of money.
Because your budget when you were a spy, how much was it?
After 9-11, it was unlimited.
What does that mean?
It means you can basically give away as much money as you need to.
If I approach somebody and he says, I can give you this terrorist, I want 10 million.
I'm like, done.
What was the most you ever gave?
10 million.
You gave someone 10 million?
For what?
Abu Zubaydah.
Who's Abu Zubaydah?
We believed that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda.
He wasn't the number three, but he was a very bad guy.
I led the raids that captured Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, Faisalabad, Pakistan in March of 2002.
And –
The State Department had a $10 million reward.
We ended up giving the $10 million to the Pakistani Intelligence Service.
It wasn't – A person.
A person.
It was just really great analysis that led us to him.
But there were others in the so-called war on terror who –
Got more than $10 million and got it within 24 hours.
Individuals?
Individuals.
How much?
One got $25 million.
Just a person?
Uh-huh.
And the thing is, there's a lot of danger there.
If you're a shepherd or a tea boy and you make 40 a month and all of a sudden you have 25 million, something's up.
And what was the $25 million for?
It was for a very high-ranking foreign terrorist who was brought to justice.
I can't say because it was never publicly disclosed.
But what we would have to do in a situation like that is –
We would have to tell the source, you can't live here anymore.
Pick a country and that's going to be home from now on.
And then we go to that country and say, hey, can you do us a solid?
We've got this guy who you know.
He really came through and he's not going to be a burden on your economy.
Because he's got $25 million.
Which country did he pick?
Oh, I can't tell you that.
He wanted to stay in the region.
He wasn't willing to move to the United States, for example.
Because we're happy to take him.
You're welcome to come to the United States.
He's like, absolutely not.
You went to Dubai.
I would.
Yeah, with the tax code.
Interesting.
I think I'm, yeah, you can tell my bias from the questions that I ask about the things that fascinate me about espionage and spies is just it's the under their understanding of human nature and what motivates us and the psychology of humans that you can learn from um spies and the nature of human beings i guess right and also i guess the other thing that really fascinates me is just I've had so many mind-blowing moments where I've learned just how fragile the reality that I believe is.
Like I thought things were secure and I thought they were as they are, but it just doesn't appear to be that way.
There appears to be lots of secrets.
And, you know, conspiracy theorists get a hard time.
But actually the more I've done this as a job, the more I go.
Hmm, conspiracy theorists are right, more than I expected them to be.
See, and that's an important point.
I...
I hate conspiracy theories that run amok.
But you know, a former CIA director is the one who came up with the term conspiracy theory.
And it was a way for the CIA to discredit people by making them sound like crazy people, when in fact there was such a thing called MKUltra.
There was such a thing called Operation Grasshopper or MKChickwit.
The CIA did crazy, crazy stuff from roughly 1952 to 1975.
For example, they experimented with a virus that they – that they released in San Francisco.
They waited for an unusually foggy, like heavily foggy day.
They released it into the atmosphere just to see if it would make people sick.
And 11 people went to the emergency room with this rare upper respiratory infection.
And then they were like, you know, high fives.
Yeah, it works.
And then they started experimenting with LSD.
LSD was a big thing at the CIA in the early days.
We were convinced, see, and this is where counterintelligence is important.
The Chinese told us in like 1951 that the Russians were using LSD to try to engineer it to be used as a mind control drug.
That wasn't true.
That was disinformation.
The truth was the Russians had no LSD program.
The Chinese did.
So they tried to throw us off the scent by blaming the Russians.
We panicked.
And by 1952, we started this program called MKUltra, which began by using LSD experimentally.
What the CIA did was they started by dosing their own employees without telling them.
Several committed suicide.
One jumped out of a hotel window with the hope that Yeah, we'll just see what happens, see what they say, see how it feels, see if we can control them, see if we can plant memories.
That didn't actually happen.
And then they decided, no, it's not a good idea to dose our own people.
Let's just dose strangers out in public.
So they went to San Francisco.
They rented a safe house.
And they hired prostitutes to go out on the street.
Pick up Johns, bring them back to the safe house.
Johns.
Johns, people who hire prostitutes, men who hire prostitutes.
Dose the Johns with LSD and just see what happens.
But, I mean, these are like serious crimes. crimes you're committing against people.
Just reading about it here, it says under Operation Midnight Climax.
Interesting name.
Operation Midnight Climax.
That's right.
The CIA paid sex workers to lure men to safe houses where agents drugged them and then watched them through one-way mirrors and recorded their behavior.
Exactly.
They tried to erase their personality.
Nice, huh?
The goal was often to break and rebuild the human mind.
In 1973, the CIA director ordered mass destruction of the MKUltra files.
What we know comes from accidentally surviving documents, meaning this is a sanitized version.
That day, he testified before the church committee.
The church committee specifically told him, do not destroy any documents.
He went back that afternoon to the CIA and said, destroy everything.
Why?
Because it was damning.
They were experimenting on American citizens.
They were experimenting by spreading diseases in American cities.
And so he was held in contempt of Congress.
He was fined like $150, right?
And about 15% of the documents were overlooked and survived.
We'll never know exactly what happened under MKUltra.
As we sit here now, there's people on the streets of Iran that are protesting the leadership there.
And the CIA are often associated with some of the coups going back to the 1950s.
Yes.
And other countries toppling elected leaders to protect US interests.
Do you think the CIA are involved in Iran at the moment?
Probably.
Probably.
I think the Israelis are heavily involved in Iran at the moment.
I'll tell you why, for a couple of reasons, more than a couple.
Number one.
In the so-called 12-day war that we saw last year, the Israelis were absolutely masterful in the way they went after the Iranian leadership.
What they did was they focused on recruiting Afghan refugees.
Iran was home to more than two million Afghan refugees.
And, as essentially illegal aliens, they could not avail themselves of medical care, the welfare system,
They're starving.
They only eat if they can beg for enough to buy food.
And so the Israelis went to these people very discreetly and said hey, we'll give you 200 a month if you tell us where the generals live.
In which apartments do the generals live?
Where do the nuclear scientists live?
The Israelis killed the top 12 generals across the entire Iranian military and killed almost every Iranian nuclear scientist.
Because what they were able to do was to recruit these Afghans to not just tell them where they were living where the generals and the scientists were living, but what their cell phone numbers were.
And so the Israelis were able to geolocate the cell phones.
And then that's where you fire the missile.
They killed all of them.
And then, after the Iranians finally realized it's the cell phones, they ordered that no senior military officials and no scientists could carry cell phones.
But it never dawned on them to tell the bodyguards not to carry cell phones.
And so the Israelis started rocketing the bodyguards and just killed everybody else.
Have you ever killed anybody?
No, thank God.
My children asked me that.
And I told them very proudly that I have never taken any action that resulted in the death of another human being.
There's one kind of half exception.
And I think about this all the time.
In 1993, I guess it was, I was sitting in the morning meeting.
I told you earlier that every unit meets every day at 9 o'clock and you just talk about what happened in the country that you cover overnight.
I was in the morning meeting and the secretary came in and she said John General Powell is on the phone for you.
Call him Powell.
I said, General Powell?
How does he know who I am?
And she said, I don't know, but he asked for you by name.
My boss is like, well, go answer the phone.
So I went to my desk and I said, good morning, General Powell.
This is John Kiriakou.
And he says John, if the Iraqis were going to kill the president, who would actually be in charge of that operation?
And I said, well, if you're talking about the attempt to kill President Bush, George H.W.
Bush, he had been visiting Kuwait.
I said, Kuwait operations are run from the Iraqi intelligence services Basra station.
But Basra Station is headed by Saber Abdelaziz Adouri, the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
He says, where does he sit?
I said, Baghdad.
Where exactly in Baghdad?
I said, if you hold on a second, I'll look up the address.
So I looked it up.
I gave him the address.
He says, thank you.
And he hangs up the phone.
I go back in the meeting.
They were like, what did he want?
I said, he wanted to know about Sabra Dori and the attempt to kill President Bush.
I'm like, okay.
Eight hours later, we fired 47 cruise missiles into Iraqi intelligence service headquarters.
But by then, it was the middle of the night in Baghdad, and we killed the janitor.
So the next day, I said to my boss, I killed that janitor.
And he said, I knew you were going to say that.
You didn't kill the janitor.
You had no idea what Powell was going to do with the information.
I said, I know, but I still feel guilty about it.
Other than that, thank God, I never had to do it.
I'm not sure how I would sleep at night.
Do the US still assassinate people by the CIA?
Absolutely, yes.
When Barack Obama was president, John Brennan, in the first term, was the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.
And he started something called the Tuesday morning kill list meeting.
So it would be Brennan.
It would be the National Security Council attorney, somebody from the CIA general counsel's office.
And –
A representative of the director of the Counterterrorism Center.
And every Tuesday morning they would meet at the White House, come up with a list of people to kill that week.
The teams would fan out around the world, kill their targets and then go back and meet next Tuesday morning.
And are these world leaders or are they normal people?
No, these are ground-level terrorists.
Okay, so it could be someone that appears to be a normal civilian but is doing something that they don't like.
The law is pretty clear on this.
It's supposed to be somebody who poses a clear and present danger to the United States, to an American citizen or to an American installation.
Which can be quite a vague brief.
See, that's the thing.
It sounds like it's clear.
It's actually not at all clear.
And when they get back from these missions, we just have to take their word for it.
Which spy force around the world did you think was the most impressive?
Oh, the Israelis.
Really?
Yeah.
The Israelis have no rules.
They'll kill anybody.
What was it?
Three years ago?
This pager operation?
Oh, it was so fascinating.
Good Lord.
It was a work of genius.
It is genius.
It is.
It is.
It was totally illegal.
Totally illegal.
But it was genius.
The moving parts involved.
I didn't believe it was real.
I had to like, I was like, there's no way that this is real.
This is the stuff of movies.
It is.
For anyone that doesn't know, what was the story?
Ah, yeah.
Okay.
So...
The Israelis knew that Hezbollah, the terrorist group Hezbollah from Lebanon, was communicating using pagers.
They didn't want to use cell phones because they didn't want the Israelis to intercept their phone calls.
And they thought, oh, pagers, those are safe.
So the Israelis bought a company in like Hungary, I think it was that made pagers and And they got Hezbollah to order the pagers from this company.
They were able to insert explosives in the pagers.
And the pagers went to like Taiwan, and from Taiwan to Thailand, and then from Thailand to – I forget where.
Syria, I guess, and then from Syria to Lebanon.
And so –
What the Israelis did was they were able to activate the explosives in all the pagers simultaneously.
Killing people?
They killed everybody of any import in Hezbollah.
They essentially decapitated Hezbollah.
And then the ones they didn't kill in that operation.
They bombed the apartment buildings where they lived.
See, this is the thing too about the Israelis.
If they want to kill you, they won't.
They won't just do a close-in hit.
They'll blow up the entire city block where you live.
They'll kill a thousand people just to get you.
And they don't care.
And then they say, what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to go to the International Court of Justice?
Do they really do this?
Yeah.
Did you ever interact with them?
Yes.
And how did you find them to be?
Miserable.
My very first briefing that I ever gave as a junior analyst was to the Israelis.
My boss said, okay, he says, you're going to give your first classified liaison briefing.
So it's going to be the Israelis, and there are a couple things you should know.
I said, okay.
He said, we don't allow the Israelis into the building.
Ever.
I said, why not?
He said, because they spy on us.
Not only do they spy on us, they would always bring gifts.
Like, oh, we brought this wonderful gift for you.
And every time somebody tries to bring something in, you have to x-ray it.
And it's got like listening devices and it's packed with two years worth of batteries.
We're like, you guys, you have to stop doing this.
Every time you come here, you try to bug our conference rooms.
It's bad form.
You have to stop doing it.
And then they're like, oh, okay, okay.
We knew you would find it.
We're just kidding.
Come on.
So we have to meet them miles away from headquarters in a place that we rent.
So he said, nothing over the secret level, no top secret information, just up to secret.
I'm like, okay.
So I go with like a dozen analysts.
And because I'm the junior most analyst I've only been on the job at this point I'm So the first analyst says I'm the chief analyst and this is my briefing.
And then the next guy says I'm the political analyst and I'm the econ analyst and I'm the military analyst and I'm the oil analyst and the tech analyst.
And it comes to me.
So I said, because I was overt at the time, I was not undercover.
I said, my name is John Kiriakou and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's psychological state of mind.
Well, there were two Israelis there.
One was from Mossad and one was from Shin Bet.
Shin Bet is the FBI of Israel and Mossad is the CIA of Israel.
So the Shin Bet guy, he has his glasses down like this and he goes like this.
He says, spell your name.
So I spell it, K-I-R, I spell it.
And he goes, you are Jewish?
I said, don't you dare.
I am not recruitable.
Don't you dare even try it.
I was furious.
We went out of the briefing.
I was going to explode.
Everybody started laughing at me.
They're like, they do that to every one of us.
Every one of us.
They try and recruit you?
Yeah.
To turn against the United States?
Yeah.
Yeah.
On my very first day at the CIA, we got a briefing from the CIA's director of security.
And he said that all of us have to have in the very front of our minds the concept of counterintelligence.
For example, he said, there's a steakhouse right down the road on Route 123.
It's the nearest restaurant to the CIA.
He goes, don't ever eat there.
Why?
Because the KGB thinks we all eat there.
So all the customers are KGB officers waiting for CIA people to walk in and start talking about work.
Don't ever eat there.
I've never eaten there to this day.
Because they're potentially all Russian spies.
So he said, our Israeli friends have two officers in their embassy, one from Mossad, one from Shin Bet.
The FBI has identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread all across the United States, mostly at defense contractors, trying to steal our secrets.
Now, we give the Israelis 95% of our defense secrets.
You want the F-35?
Done.
Here's the F-35.
You want this advanced missile?
Here you go.
It's on us.
So they steal the remaining 5%.
Do you think...
Jeffrey Epstein was a spy.
I believe very strongly he was a spy, yes.
And who do you think he was working for?
The Israelis.
I'm confident it was the Israelis.
Why?
Jeffrey Epstein is kind of the stereotypical example that they give you in training for what's called an access agent.
This is a different kind of recruitment.
So, for example, if you're a foreign intelligence service and you want information like close-in information from a former president, from the CEO of the biggest company in the world, from a member of the British royal family, you're not going to recruit these guys.
You're not going to recruit Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or Prince Andrew.
So you do the next best thing.
You recruit somebody who has regular access to them.
And that person that you recruit is going to need to make these people feel comfortable and appreciated.
And so you give them plenty of money.
So he has this house on an island or he has the whole island.
And maybe you bring in young girls.
You get them in compromising positions, just in case you need to use what's called compromat pictures.
We know now that Jeffrey Epstein's house on the island had hidden video cameras in literally every room, including the bathrooms.
Why?
Why would he care what was going on unless it was to use that information against people?
As I said, only the Israelis and the Russians use extortion as a motivator.
So would they have made Jeffrey Epstein rich in order to give him that access?
Yes.
How could they have done that?
Oh, that's easy.
I mean, governments are the only ones really that can launder money unfettered.
And you can also do it through real estate, through fine art, and through horses.
Those are the three easiest ways to launder money today.
Fine art, real estate, and racehorses.
But presumably he would have spoken out at some point, no?
He would have said something?
No.
But it would explain why he got a sweetheart deal in 2006.
I mean, this is a guy that's been convicted of child sex crimes.
And he gets six months of house arrest with an ankle bracelet?
We have mandatory minimums in this country.
That's a five-year mandatory minimum, first offense.
He definitely had some interesting power, didn't he?
And Alex Acosta, who was the prosecuting attorney at the time and then later became Secretary of Labor under Trump.
Trump won.
Alex Acosta said that he was ordered – by the attorney general to give Epstein the sweetheart deal.
Well, who's the only person that can order the attorney general to do something?
It's the president.
So was it because Epstein was working on Clinton?
Most of the people down there were Democrats.
I mean, what was the reason?
Maybe he was working for the U.S. government.
It's possible that he could have been doubled against the Israelis or others.
Sure.
Sure, that's possible.
If you had to bet, what would you say?
If you had to bet everything you have on either him being a spy or not a spy, what would you bet on?
He was a spy.
I feel very confident in that assessment.
I debated Alan Dershowitz about this on the Piers Morgan show one time.
It was Scott Horton and me who said that he was an Israeli spy.
And it was Alan Dershowitz and General Danny Ayalon, the former head of Mossad.
Ayalon was kind of into it in terms of having a fun time.
He was just having a fun time with the conversation.
He wasn't going to admit to anything.
Dershowitz was Epstein's attorney.
So I said that I believed Epstein was an Israeli spy.
And Dershowitz interrupts me like attorneys do.
And he says, that is outrageous.
If he had been a spy he would have told me, because I was his attorney and I could have gone to the White House and I could have gotten him a better sentence.
And I said, wait a minute.
You could have gone to the White House to say go easy on Jeffrey Epstein because he's an Israeli spy collecting information from American politicians.
If I were the president, I would have hung him from a tree.
And then Piers Morgan said, General Allen, was he a spy?
And he goes, who knows?
It's a come on, man.
Who do you think is the real adversary of the West?
Because we often talk about it being Russia or... I think it's China.
Why?
What is it that we don't realize about China and their agenda?
Oh, wow.
So much.
The Chinese are so good at what they do.
And the Chinese are so patient.
You know, in the United States, we don't have long-term timelines for anything.
When we want something, we want it now.
Is that in part because we have this four-year election cycle?
Yes.
I believe that it is.
The Chinese will plan for something 25 years down the road.
Because they will still be in power then.
Yeah.
And so, you know, they're really good at stealing technology.
There are more Chinese PhD students in the hard sciences here in the United States than you can shake a stick at.
They're everywhere.
They're at every major university and they're really, really smart.
Right.
And then oftentimes they'll say, oh, you know, I've had such a great experience here.
I'd like to stay in the United States.
Yeah, I bet you would.
I bet you would.
So you can spy for China.
Do you think that's happening?
Every single day.
You think that Chinese students are in America spying on behalf of China?
Yes.
Yes.
How could you be so sure?
I'm 1000% sure.
How could you be so sure?
Because we frequently arrest them and then trade them for Americans who are in Chinese prisons.
Yeah.
And they're masquerading as students.
PhD candidates, always in the hard sciences, always.
So China are the long-term adversary.
And what is it that China want?
What is it they're doing?
And what is the outcome?
I think they want a couple of things.
I think that on a more immediate basis, they want reunification with Taiwan.
It's going to happen someday.
Even the Taiwanese will tell you, yes, we're a part of China, but we're kind of not a part of China.
We're not really independent, but we are kind of independent.
And Even American policy is that Taiwan is a part of China.
And eventually, someday, they'll be reunited.
Do you think, with everything that's going on at the moment with Trump in Venezuela and Greenland, this is going to create cover for?
Oh, I was hoping you would ask me a question like that.
I think that's a very important issue that the media really aren't talking about.
So...
Let's put it in the context of what happened last week in Venezuela, because they're all moving parts of the same policy.
So we sent a Delta Force squad into Venezuela a week ago and we snatched President Maduro, and he faces international narcotics trafficking charges in New York.
Okay.
Some people are for that.
Some people are against it.
Whether you're for it or against it, it's happened.
There's nothing we can do about it now.
But that operation may have inadvertently given the green light to something that both the Russians and the Chinese have long sought.
The United States really is the only true superpower in the world.
The Chinese have a lot more people.
They have lots of nuclear missiles. but they have one aircraft carrier.
We have 12, soon to be 14.
We have way more long-distance bombers.
We have way more fighters.
The Russians are bogged down in a war in Ukraine.
They're winning the war, but they're bogged down nonetheless.
Did this reinstitution of the Monroe Doctrine, saying that from 1814 that the Western Hemisphere is the territory of the United States.
It's up to us to protect it from foreign powers.
Well, in 1814, that meant the British Navy.
We don't really need a Monroe Doctrine, and it's not up to us whether the Argentines want to have good relations with China, for example.
We invoked the Monroe Doctrine in this operation to snatch Maduro.
So does that mean then, That if we have a sphere of influence that is the Western Hemisphere, that the Chinese have a sphere of influence that includes Taiwan, that the Russians have a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine?
Because that's kind of what it seems.
It looks like we've given the green light to both of those countries and that we're conceding the fact that it's a unipolar world right now.
In favor of a multipolar world.
Now, personally, I think a multipolar world is safer.
What's a multipolar world?
Multipolar world is where there's not just one superpower.
There are three or more.
So, in terms of policy, this simple act of just sending a team in to grab Maduro has turned international diplomacy on its head.
What do we do if the Chinese invade Taiwan?
Do we really want to send American soldiers to fight and die for Taiwan?
What do you think would happen if China tomorrow said, you know what, we're going to take Taiwan?
You know what, honest to God, I think nothing would happen.
I think we would rush to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand.
We'd rush to protect them.
Why?
Because they're major non-NATO allies.
They're good friends, close friends.
But in terms of going to Taiwan to fight Chinese soldiers, I can't imagine it.
Trump told the New York Times that whether China moves on Taiwan is ultimately up to Chinese President Xi Jinping, not the USA.
Adding that he's told Xi he would be very unhappy if China changed the status quo.
He claimed he doesn't think Xi will act while he's president.
See, and that is actually what the long-term policy is.
The long-term policy is, sure, someday...
To be determined later, you guys can unify.
Just don't do it while I'm here.
Yeah, don't do it today.
Maybe when Trump goes.
God forbid.
So going back to this point, you said they want Taiwan.
What else do you think China want?
Well... Do they want to see the US fall?
Yes, sure.
And are they actively doing things to encourage that?
Yes, but not the things that that you would expect.
Instead of running around the world, you know, overthrowing governments, invading countries, which is what we do
They go to countries and say, Hey, you need a new highway system.
We'll pay for it.
You need a new airport.
No problem.
You need a new hospital, electrical grid.
We have plenty of money from our gigantic trade surplus.
We'll pay for it.
We just want to have really good, friendly relations with you.
And that's what they do.
The Chinese essentially own Africa right now.
What are you most concerned about in the world at the moment?
What does actually keep you up at night?
What frightens me the most is that the US government over the last well, really over the last 50 years or 55 years has so inflated its military budget that what we spend on the Pentagon is now more than the next eight largest countries combined right.
Donald Trump right now spends a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon budget.
He's asking for next year to be a trillion and a half We can't afford it.
Our interest on the national debt is now the third largest expenditure in government between the Pentagon and Social Security, and then the interest on the debt.
And why does this bother you?
Because we're going bankrupt.
And all the while, the Chinese are letting us spend ourselves into oblivion.
The Chinese don't spend that kind of money.
How come I can't have a bullet train that goes 400 miles an hour?
How come I can't get to Chicago in three hours by train?
How come the airports in my country look like shit and you go to Chinese airports and they're pristine with the most amazing services and the best restaurants.
How come Chinese roads don't have potholes?
And in my town, it's like driving across Bosnia.
It's because they decided not to spend their money on weapons.
They spend it on infrastructure.
Do you think that's likely that the U.S. could go bankrupt effectively?
I do.
Yeah, I do.
We can't keep up this pace.
It's not possible.
We're going to have to raise taxes and cut the budget.
What's the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about, John?
Oh, that's a good question.
One of the most important things in my life, to tell you the truth, is the issue of ethics.
I love this country more than anything else in the world.
And I want it to do the right thing.
We're a country of laws.
And we have to obey our laws, which is why I blew the whistle on the torture program.
Who's not obeying the laws?
Our government.
In what way?
We've gotten to the point, and it started around the year 2000 or 2001.
We got to the point where if we want to do something, we just do it.
Like what?
In 1946—
We passed something called the Federal Torture Act, which banned torture.
Okay?
Also in 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American prisoners of war.
That was a death penalty offense to waterboard someone.
All right?
In 1968.
On January the 11th 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
When the picture ran, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an immediate investigation.
That soldier was arrested immediately.
He was charged with torture and he was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at Leavenworth.
And then in 2002, it's legal.
We can do it.
We can do it because we're the good guys.
The law never changed.
We changed.
And my point was always, either we're going to be the good guys or we're not.
Either we're going to be what Ronald Reagan called a shining city on a hill or we're not.
When I was stationed in Bahrain, I was the human rights officer.
So I had to write the human rights report every year that we sent to Congress.
Well, imagine if John goes in to see the Minister of Interior and I say, Your Highness, You cannot pick up a 15-year-old kid for marching in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration and then murder him, beat him to death in the police station and call his parents to come and pick up the body.
You can't do that.
I have to report that to Congress and you're going to lose your rights to buy American military hardware.
But then the CIA station chief goes in an hour later and says – pay any attention to the human rights guy.
I'll give you $10 million.
If you set up a secret prison here, we're going to send you some prisoners.
You torture them and then you give us a write-up of everything they say during torture.
Who's he going to listen to?
Is he going to listen to me?
Did that happen?
Yes.
He's not going to listen to me.
If all of a sudden torture is legal just because we say it is, And then Congress is like oh, we don't know anything because it's a secret program, so we can't talk about it.
Do we still torture people?
No.
I am very proud to say that When the McCain-Feinstein anti-torture amendment was passed into law in December of 2014, John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said it was because of me, because of my revelations.
He said, if I had not told the American people that the CIA was torturing prisoners in their name, we would never have known.
That's why I say it was worth it.
Do you think you should be pardoned by President Trump?
I do.
Have you written to him?
I have to be careful with my language here.
I applied.
My name is in the system.
I have very, very high-level supporters who have approached him personally.
And I'm hopeful that it happens.
John, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.
And the question left for you is what's something you stopped doing that improved your life more than anything?
You started
Feeling sorry for myself.
I'll be honest with you.
I have struggled with depression my entire life.
And after my second divorce I went through this period where I was just I couldn't pull myself out of bed in the morning because I felt so sorry for myself.
Because of the divorce or because of your life or because?
The whole thing.
I believed I was just a loser.
I was in my 50s unemployable, convicted felon, barely able to make ends meet, worried about where my rent was coming from one month to the next.
And then I thought, fuck you.
What's wrong with you?
You don't have to answer to anybody.
And I told myself no more feeling sorry for myself.
I was going to go make a career on my own.
And so I knew I would never work for government again.
I knew I would never work in corporate America again.
After I left the CIA, I was the head of the competitive intelligence practice at Deloitte and Touche, spying on Ernst & Young and PwC and IBM.
And it was great fun.
I'll never work in the corporate world again.
So I decided I'm going to do what I'm good at.
And I'm a terrific writer.
And I'm told that I'm a gifted storyteller.
So I'm going to write books.
I have two syndicated newspaper columns that run in 212 small town papers around the country.
I'm on TV all the time.
I have three podcasts deprogram every day on both YouTube and Rumble.
Thanks for letting me plug them, by the way.
Go ahead.
Deep Focus on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts.
John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, which is just story after story after story.
And now I make a perfectly great living.
I'm in a long-term relationship with the woman I'm crazy about and life is good.
And it all started with that decision to stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Yes.
If people around me keep saying, you've done nothing wrong.
You're a hero for what you did.
And deep down, I would do it again.
Then why am I feeling sorry for myself?
I'm right.
They're wrong.
They're criminals.
So I'm just going to go on with my life.
And that snapped me out of it.
So don't feel sorry for yourself.
Do something about it.
Act.
John, you are someone that is very good at storytelling.
You are.
You've written many books.
I'm going to link all the books below.
Oh, thank you.
So many incredible books.
I've got some of them here with me on the floor.
I could go through all of them, but we need another couple of days.
John, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your incredible storytelling, your wisdom, but also just giving us a window into a world that most of us know nothing about, because there's so many lessons that I think are pertinent to all of our lives riddled amongst there.
And I think, you know, I hope you do get pardoned.
Thank you.
I hope so.
I've got my fingers crossed.
And when you do, hopefully we can come back again and have another conversation.
I look forward to that.
It's been such a pleasure.
Pleasure's mine.
Thanks for the invitation.
This is something that I've made for you.
I realize that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health.
We all have big goals that we want to accomplish.
And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable, because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.
The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps.
And we call this in our team, the 1%.
And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here.
So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these 1 diaries.
And we released these last year and they all sold out.
So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary.
So now we have a better range for you.
So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again.
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