Danny Jones Podcast - #138 - Ex-CIA Spy Explains How the United States Turned Him Into a Dissident | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer who was sentenced to 2 years in federal prison for exposing the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. Kiriakou was the first former CIA officer to confirm that the agency waterboarded detainees and label waterboarding as torture. Follow John: https://twitter.com/JohnKiriakou Follow Danny  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For people who aren't familiar with your story, you were a CIA spy for a number of years, and you eventually blew the whistle on one of the CIA's interrogation programs and essentially got prosecuted and spent two years in federal prison. Is that right? That's right. Maybe you could expand on it a little bit better or give your own background on how you got into the CIA and how this all happened. Sure. I spent 15 years in the CIA. The first half of my career was in intelligence, in analysis, exclusively on Iraq.

And then I got bored after a while and I made a very unusual transfer from analysis to operations. I went to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, became a counterterrorism operations officer, a spy, essentially. And then chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9-11. led a series of raids that resulted in our very first high-value target captures, and then went back to CIA headquarters, got promoted on the strength of those captures. And then just as I got promoted, well, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director. That's when we started this torture program. And I objected to it, like pretty strenuously.

And waited for somebody to say something. it took years and in the end nobody said anything and then finally I said this has to be out there and so I told ABC News and the CIA fell on my head with you know it's full weight

and they prosecuted me and I went to prison for 23 months One two One two three four Give me a break Give me a break Break me off a piece of that piece of that Kit Kat bar.

Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. Zero regrets. None. And, yeah, I mean, I came out stronger on the other end. I'm not a... It's funny. When you're in your 20s and your 30s,

you think you have your life all mapped out, like the way it's supposed to be. I figured, okay, I'm in the CIA. I'm smart. I have advanced degrees. I'm kind of political, so I'm playing the game. everybody's supposed to play to get ahead.

And in my mind, and my wife was a senior CIA officer, and she said, she said one time, you know, we're going to be running this place someday. And I was like, yeah, we're going to run the place. Next thing you know, I'm like, you know, a dissident. And I'm headed to prison. And then she leaves. So your life's not all mapped out. I went to prison.

I came back. All of a sudden, I'm famous. Thanks to them. I never intended to be. And people sort of viewed me as this spokesman against torture and in support of transparency and anti-corruption and Julian Assange. And the weirdest things happen. You know, like, I'll be feeling sorry for myself, right?

And when I first got home from prison, can't get a job anywhere. And then Yoko Ono calls to see how I'm doing. Seriously. or I'm thinking, oh, you know, maybe I'll get into radio, which is what I do now mostly. Maybe I'll get into radio and then Oliver Stone calls to ask if I can be the technical advisor on some film he's doing. It's the craziest weirdest thing. Wow. What did Oliver Stone call you about?

Oh, my God. Oliver bought the rights to my first book. It's kind of a funny story if you have a minute to listen to it. I got plenty of minutes. So Oliver bought the rights to my first book. I've written nine books so far. And he wanted to do this show on what it was like inside the CIA the day before the 9-11 attacks, the day of the 9-11 attacks. And then the day after and onward where you've got all these really smart, patriotic people who want to do the right thing and serve their country.

And then they become torturers, kidnappers, murderers. Like, how does that happen in 48 hours? And it did. That's how it happened. and so we actually sold it to the history channel as a as a one season they wanted to do it as a mini-series and Oliver said he wanted to choose the writer so we're waiting and waiting and waiting and we're like what are you doing and he said I can't find the right person and then history channel said just forget it and they dropped it oh yeah I was so mad and then he calls me like two years later

and he said, did we sell a show together? And I said, yeah, it was based on my first book. He said, what was that show about? So I told him what I just told you. And he said, right, right, right. Did we write anything? And I said, yeah, we wrote the first episode. That's what we gave to History Channel.

And he says, send me that. I'm looking for something to do. So I sent it back to him. And then he calls me again the next day. And he's like, yeah, I'm not interested in. doing this anymore. Really? I was like, okay.

Wow. Yeah, he's a strange guy. He's hard to get along with. Is he really? Yeah. Intra. Because I followed his, uh, I followed his documentaries that he did on Ukraine after the whole Ukraine thing happened.

And I started watching that and did you notice like one of his documentary got banned from YouTube. Oh yeah. It sure did. Which was wild. Yep. Yep. You know what?

One of the things that I admire about him, and I'm sorry to get so far off subject, but he doesn't care what anybody. thinks about him. And I think that's wonderful. It's liberating. Yeah. You do what you think is, right. If you believe in yourself and you genuinely don't care what people think about you,

you can accomplish all kinds of stuff. Well, he's been through it. Oh, my God. From being in the Vietnam War and all everything, all the work he's done from the history of the United States and that documentary. And he just knows so much, I feel like. And it's so weird to me when people, you know, he obviously has a lot of people who talk, you know, against his work and say like this stuff that he says is kind of biased. Yeah, he's a propaganda.

Very anti-American. He gets labeled anti-American. He's not. He's a patriot. That's the funny thing. He's a patriot who thinks that that there are so many things that the government has done wrong or that the government has been illegal. Right. Or that has been illegal. and he wants to spotlight it, right?

And bring it to the attention of all Americans. And people say, oh, you hate America. You know, I don't know if the CIA killed John Kennedy, but Oliver certainly thinks that they did. And he's got some, you know, documents that, I don't know, it kind of makes it seem plausible. Again, I don't know. His new documentary about that, I don't know if you've seen it or not,

but it's pretty, it's pretty. it's pretty matter of fact. It is. It is. I don't even know if that's even considered a conspiracy theory anymore. I think it's pretty much everybody knows about it. It just doesn't really talk about it. Yeah.

It's very mainstream. Yeah. Another thing, like his, we're getting way off topic here, but we can bring it back. We got time. The Putin interviews that he did. Yeah.

Yeah. I think he's the only guy who spent, you know, over 48 hours sitting alone with Putin talking to him about things and getting his point of view. And I thought those things. I thought that was one of the most fascinating pieces of work I've seen. And you see the respect that Putin treated him with, too. Yeah, well, I mean, he got criticized for not, like, being harder on Putin during the interviews.

Like, why didn't you push back harder on, like, when he went on the Colbert show? And he's like, well, why didn't you challenge him on that or talk, you know, put him in line for saying that? And he's like, well, if you're going to be in my position in the position of interviewing Putin in the first place, you have to have some sort of respect for him as a human being in the leader of our country. You can't just fucking shit down his throat. That's right. You can't. It's not going to work.

It's not going to get you anywhere. Right. So what do you, what sort of criticism have you gotten, if any, from your position and from what you did with the CIA as far as like whistleblowing and coming out against that program? It depends. It depends who you talk to. I'll tell you one of the funny things that happened is after my prosecution, two of the FBI agents, who were involved in prosecuting me, called my attorneys and apologized to them, and said that this was a political case.

They did it because they were ordered to do it, and they just wanted to express their apologies. I said, no hard feelings. Water under the bridge, right? I mean, I'm sort of a, I've come to be a believer in fate. And if this is the way that things were supposed to happen, then this is the way things are supposed to happen. You really get to see who your friends are.

I'll tell you that when something like this happens. So, you know, for the most part, people were like, oh, my God, what you did was so brave. Nobody else had the guts to do it. And then there were a couple of people, like, there's a right-wing newspaper in Washington called the Washington Times. It's owned by the Moonies, you know, the Reverend Sun Young Moon and the Unification Church. It's that cult from South Korea.

Yeah. So they called me a traitor, a bad actor, a pro-terrorist. It's like, yeah, I don't remember you being there when we were kicking down doors and taking down al-Qaeda. So I'm pro-terrorist. Right. Saying that you whistleblue on a torture program makes you a pro-terrorist. Pro-terrorist. You know, my point has always been very simple.

that the American people have a right to know what the government is doing in their name. And it is illegal. We actually have a law in this country. It is illegal to classify something that is a crime. You cannot put a classification on something for the purpose of keeping it from the public. And so we're signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, right? We were the authors, actually, of the United Nations Convention. invention against torture. And we have a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of

1946, which specifically outlawed exactly those things that we were doing against or doing to al-Qaeda prisoners. Let me add to that. I'm interrupting this podcast to bring you this week's question on versus game. Will Steph Curry score more than 23 points in game five of the Western Conference finals? That's the question. Make sure you download versus game, follow concrete, and then vote on our game so you can win some internet money. Versus game, one word, no spaces. Go vote now. Back to the show.

In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. Right? That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier in Vietnam, waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that that photo was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Well, the law never changed. We changed. So how is this a death penalty offense in

1946. It's worthy of 20 years at Leavenworth in 1968. But then in 2002, no problem. You know, you want to waterboard the guy? Go ahead, waterboard him. You want to chain him to an eye bolt in the ceiling and

chill his cell to 50 degrees and then throw ice water on him every hour until he dies of hypothermia? Go ahead. Nobody's going to stop you. Well, why not? That's illegal. and we shouldn't be doing it. Let me tell you another thing.

When I was on assignment to the State Department, I served for two years in Bahrain, a little tiny country in the Persian Gulf, same size and same population as Pittsburgh, right? And one of the things that we do in every country around the world where we have an American embassy is we write a human rights report every year.

And the human rights report is mandated by Congress. So we write it in the field, We interview attorneys and activists and government people and journalists. We write this thing up and we send it to Congress every year. So I was the human rights officer in Bahrain and I had to write the human rights report. So tell me, if you were the Bahraini minister of interior and I come to you and I say, Your Excellency, you cannot murder 15-year-olds because they marched in a pro-democracy demonstration, right? I'm going to have to write that up and send it to Congress.

And maybe they're not going to want to sell you F-18s, right? Because you did this. You cannot just murder people when you don't like their politics. And then 15 minutes later, the CIA station chief walks in and says, don't listen to the human rights guy. We want you to open a secret prison here. And we're going to bring prisoners and we're going to torture them here. Or you torture them for us and then you give us a write-up of what they say.

And we'll give you all the F-18s you want. Who's he going to listen to? Is he going to listen to me? Right. He's not going to listen to me. Right. But the problem is that what the CIA station chief is telling him he wants is illegal. You can't do it.

Now, reasonable people can agree to disagree on how to confront terrorism. But if you want to torture people, you have to change the law and nobody's had the balls to do it. Wow. What were you doing in, well, first of all, I've had other former CIA officers in here. And we've spoken about things like, you know, Snowden and Julian Assange and other whistleblowers. And the consensus seems to be among most of those people, you know, former government officials, is that they did the right thing, but they did the wrong way. Right. what is your feeling on that when people say that what do you think about like if you could go back in time

what if you were to take your complaint or whatever you said on ABC up the chain of command and if you would have done it the right way what do you think would have happened you think anything would have changed that's a very good question it's a very difficult question for me personally you know I've thought about this a million times right I play this over in my head all the my situation was an unusual one because my chain of command created the torture program. Going back to the capture of Abu Zabeda, for example, in March 2002, I came back to CIA headquarters and I was in the cafeteria one day and one of my colleagues from the counterterrorism center came up to me and said, hey, very casually, hey, I'm glad I caught you.

I wanted to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? I had never heard that term before. I said, enhanced interrogation technique, what's that supposed to mean? And kind of excitedly, he says, we're going to start getting rough with these guys. And I said, what's that mean? And he described these 10 techniques. And I said, buddy, that sounds like a torture program to me. And he said, no, it's not.

We got it cleared by the Justice Department. And the president signed off on it a couple of days ago. I said, I don't know, man. Let me think about it. Give me an hour. Let me think about it. I went upstairs to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor of the CIA. There was a very, very senior CIA leader who I worked for in the Middle East 10 years

earlier. I knocked on his door and I said, I got to ask some advice. I said, they just asked me if I want to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think of that? And he said very clearly, first of all, he said, let's call it what it is. This is a torture program. And you know how these guys are, he said, somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation, then there's going to be a justice department investigation, then somebody's going to go to prison. You want to go to prison? And I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison.

But I said, no, no, I don't want to go to prison. So I went downstairs and I said, man, this is a torture program and I don't want any part of it. Well, as it turned out, they had asked 14 people from CTC, the Counterterrorism Center. I was the only one who said no. And then, now here I am six weeks after I catch the number three in Al Qaeda and I get passed over for promotion. And I went into the deputy director's office. We were old friends. I had worked for him in a previous assignment.

And I said, what do I have to do to get promoted around you? I have to catch bin Laden? Like, seriously, what more do you guys want from me? And he said, you know, they call you the human rights guy. I said, so? He said, that's not a compliment. So I thought, okay, well, this is my lot in life. I'm going to have to be the human rights guy.

And then the guy. that I had asked for advice promoted me out of cycle. And he said, can I swear on this? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. He said, you know why they fucked you. And I said, yeah, because I wouldn't torture Abu Zubeda. And he said, precisely. He said, now, I'm going to promote you now, but the next promotion's on you. Meaning I'm probably not going to get promoted again unless these guys start to retire, which is normally the way it happens. You have to wait them out. So I thought, well, you know, this is so clearly wrong. It's so clearly illegal besides being immoral and unethical. Like, who do I report this to?

And so very discreetly and quietly, I started to investigate. Well, I can't report it to my boss. My boss was the founder, the creator of the torture program. It was his idea. Really? Yeah. Yeah, my supervisor. Can you say his name?

Jose Rodriguez. Okay. Because I heard of another guy who was a CIA psychologist who actually lives. Mitchell and Jessen. Is that who it was? Yeah. James Mitchell. That's the one that I heard of.

They live right here in Tampa someplace. Do they really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And Jose lives in St. Augustine. That's so funny. They all in Florida.

Yeah, they all came to Florida. So I can't go to my boss. The program was coming. compartmentalized, which means that you need special clearances above top secret to even know about it. So I couldn't go to the Inspector General because he wasn't cleared for the information. Can you imagine that? The Inspector General, this is so highly classified that the Inspector General is not cleared for the information. I couldn't go there.

I couldn't go to the General Counsel's Office because they were the ones that worked with justice to legalize it. Couldn't go to justice, obviously. So what do you do? You go to the Congressional Oversight committees. You go to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The problem is they were the ones that secretly signed off on it and appropriated the money to fund it.

Right. So I'm screwed. So where do I go? The only place to go is the media. That was it. Now that was my situation. With Assange and Snowden, it's different. I was a Snowden supporter from the very beginning.

What he wanted to blow the whistle on was the fact that NSA was spying on American citizens. Not only is it against the law for NSA to spy on American citizens, it's a part of NSA's charter that they're not allowed to spy in American citizens. Since 9-11, it's been literally drag-net warrantless wiretapping on all American communications. Well, that's illegal. And again, if you want to intercept Americans communications, fine. But you've got to change the law. Right.

So Snowden couldn't go to the oversight committees. Snowden couldn't go to his boss. They were all involved. There's another NSA whistleblower who's become a dear friend of mine by the name of Tom Drake. So Tom Drake was the first person to blow the whistle on NSA's warrantless wiretapping. And his story, make your hair stand up. On 9-11, 9-11 was his first day at NSA. He had been an officer in the Air Force.

And then he joined NSA in the Senior Intelligence Service. So this is, he's arguably the country's leading expert on, on internet privacy issues. So on 9-11, it's his first day. And he said they were like giddy at NSA because they were just waiting for us to be attacked. so they could start implementing all these programs that they had developed, that they knew were illegal so they couldn't implement them. And then when the attack comes, all you have to say is national security,

and you can do whatever you want. So Tom said, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys want to implement this program that intercepts the communications of all Americans when we have this other program, this smaller program called Stellar Wind, that recognizes when the communication is from a bad guy or a suspected bad guy. And so instead of just grabbing everybody's phone calls and text messages and emails, it only grabs the bad guy's phone calls, text messages and emails. That was Stellar Wind.

And they told him to mind his business. So he went through the chain of command. First he went to his boss. His boss told him, you're new. This is none of your business. you don't know what you're doing. So he thought about it for a while and he went to the Inspector General at NSA.

The Inspector General, like the CIA Inspector General, wasn't read into the program and told him, I don't know what the heck you're talking about. We're not allowed to intercept the communications of Americans. Then he went to the General Counsel. The General Counsel said, you're in way over your head, buddy. You need to stop.

So then he went to the Pentagon Inspector General because NSA is a division, a bureau of the defense department. What did the inspector general do at the Pentagon? They destroyed the evidence that he brought out to prove his case. They shredded everything. So he decided then he's going to go to the Oversight Committee. So he goes to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and says, listen, NSA since 9-11, they've been intercepting

the phone calls, emails and text messages of all Americans, everybody. And so what happened when the committee asked NSA for clarification? They raided Tom's house. They arrested him. They charged him with seven counts of espionage and two counts of theft of government property, being the information, right? The information's in his head. He walked out of the building with the information.

he stole it, right? He stole it and gave it to the Congressional Oversight Committee. I apologize. I hit the camera. In the end... They're saying he stole it just because he remembered it? Yes. Yeah.

In the end, they were forced to drop all the charges against him because he did it exactly the way that we were taught to do it. But, like many of us in the intelligence community, his wife was an NSA officer, just like mine was a CIA officer. And when they were arresting him, the FBI went to his wife and said, we're arresting your husband and raiding your house right now as we speak. You're either with him or you're with us. And she chose them.

So he lost everything. He lost his pension. He lost his house. He lost his five kids. He lost his marriage. You know? I have to. There's a, just being the devil's advocate, there's another guy who I had on here.

His name's Andrew. He was a former CIA spy. And I made this sort of argument to him. And his response was, you have to be okay with giving up freedoms for the United States government. That is a very common and very typical right-wing trope. Because what he laid out was that. this pyramid that um

resembles the creation of a state he said on the lowest on the lowest level of the pyramid you have individualism which is we all are out for ourselves we can all go you know kill whoever we want take whatever we want um the second level of the pyramid is tribalism where you have the tribes and basically what that does that's that protects me from that protects you from me going into your tribe and clubbing your wife over the head and stealing her and you doing the same to me. That's tribalism. He said the next level of the pyramid is the creation of a state where you have

this separate government that basically protects that does all this stuff for us. That's what taxes are for and that's what the government is for to keep us all safe and to do all these things and to deal with other countries and keep the balance, the world balance in check. And his argument for that is you have, you know, you have to be okay with the government infringing on our privacy, infringing on certain amount of things to a certain extent. Yeah. And, and, um, that's one philosophy. Right. Of democracy. That's incompatible with mine. Remember, Dick Cheney was asked about, um, all the innocent people that we had at Guantanamo.

We had over 700 people at Guantanamo at one point. And almost all of them were innocent of any crime. And he said that he would rather arrest a million innocent people than to allow one guilty person to get off Scott Free. Did he really say that? Yeah. And it's the same idea. Like these guys would rather take away our civil liberties to stop another attack.

I would rather maintain my civil liberties and risk another attack. Because the civil liberties are more important to me. what is it common for husband and wife to be in the CIA together very in fact the CIA culture is such that they encourage CIA romances because you're both cleared so you can talk about you know shit at night when you're laying in bed and and you're not violating your secrecy agreement listen the CIA has softball leagues and football leagues and LGBTQ organizations and a quilting League and Christian organizations. Everything that you would want to do in your life, you know, with other people, it's inside the CIA. And that way you can talk about work and they can talk about work and nobody gets in trouble.

They try to keep you insulated from the outside world. They don't want you talking other people out there. That's wild. It's unsafe. What were you doing in 2001? You were in Pakistan? I went to Pakistan in January of 2000. Okay.

When we started bombing Torabora at the end of, uh, of October of 2001 and we pushed Al Qaeda over the border. So instead of trying to, you know, climb these forbidding mountains to capture them one at a time, I had this idea. It just, it seems so simple, but nobody had thought of it at the time. And I said, listen, if we're just going to carpet bomb them in Torabora, we can kill who we're able to kill. but the rest of them are going to run into Pakistan, right? Because we can't bomb in Pakistan. It was an allied country.

So I said, instead of having people all the way up and down the Afghan-Pakistan border and we're grabbing them one at a time, let's let them into Pakistan, let them get situated so that they feel like they're safe again. They're going to make a mistake. They always do. And then we can hit the safe houses. So instead of getting one at a time, we get 20 at a time. or 50 at a time.

And they said, I mean, they just hadn't thought of it. It was a crazy period, too. You know, it was, you know, nobody was sleeping.

People are jetting around the world, just trying to catch people. It was, it was rough. And so, um, it was funny, too. You know,

like everybody else in, in the agency, I, uh, sorry, I just, it's okay. Is that camera cool?

Is my camera okay? Yeah, it looks straight. Okay, cool. No, you're good. Like everybody else in the building on 9-11, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. Everybody volunteered, right? And they wouldn't take me.

And I just couldn't understand it. I said to a buddy of mine, I don't understand this. I volunteered three times. They won't take me. How long had you been in the CIA at that point? Almost 12 years. Okay. And my Arabic was fluent, right?

So I ran into a guy. He was an old man, a contractor, legendary guy by the name of Billy Waugh. Billy fought in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam and had 17 purple hearts. As you can imagine, such a thing. There was one guy in North Carolina who had 18, but it's the most in American history, right? The 18. Billy had 17. So, Billy and I had done some fun stuff in the Middle East before 9-11.

and about six weeks after 9-11, I ran into him in the hall. And I said, hey, Billy, I said, where you been? And he looks around and he goes, I've been in Afghanistan. I said, yeah, what are you doing in Afghanistan? And he looks at me, look, I'm nuts. And he says, I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing? And I said, that's why they haven't sent me.

And he said, did you volunteer? And I said, yeah. I said, my Arabic is fluent. I figured they would need interrogators. He goes, we're not interrogating anybody. I was like, that's why they don't want me. They're just killing people. They're not capturing anybody.

Wow. So I got frustrated, and I went into the deputy director's office, and I said, again, he was a friend of mine, and I said, man, I said, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am going straight to Exxon with my Arabic. and I'm not looking back. Totally empty threat. And he goes, just fucking relax, he says. Relax. Can you go to Pakistan? And I said, yes, when?

He said, tomorrow. I said, yes. What do you want me to do there? He said, I want you to be chief of counterterrorism ops. I said, okay. So I called my then-girlfriend. She became my wife later, and we can get into that later. And I said, I got to go to Pakistan.

When? Tomorrow. She said, okay. I'll meet you at your place. I'll help you pack. And the next day, I went to Pakistan. Wow. And it was there six or seven months.

And who, one of the first things you did or one of the main things that you accomplished when you were there was capturing Abu Zabeda. Yeah. Yeah. Can you walk me through how that went down? Yeah. Yeah. It's a story.

It became the defining event of, not just my career, really. It became the defining event. event of my life. And I'm not overstating that. So I get to Pakistan, January of 2002, and my very first day, the station chief says, I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house. He said, we're just not doing it. I said, sure. So I went back to my office and I sat there with a legal pad. And I was thinking, all right, So if I'm going to take down an al-Qaeda safe house, how would I do that? And I thought, well, I'd want it to be dark, right?

And I wrote 0200 at the top of the page. I mean, in Pakistan, as many people as they have there, they just roll the sidewalks up at night. It's like a ghost town, the whole country, at night. So I thought, I'm going to need, I'm going to need, I'm going to. need partners. I mean, you got to invite the Pakistanis because it's their country. You know, you have to, I don't mean to sound crass, but you have to

allow them to believe that they're in charge, you know, even if they're not. That's a spy tactic, right? Yeah. Yeah. Make it all, make them think that it's all their idea. And 9-11 was an open criminal investigation,

so you have to invite the FBI as awful as that is. But, I mean, I would rather work with the Pakistanis than the FBI any day. Morons. So I wrote, you know, teams. You had two Pakistanis, two CIA, two FBI. And I would need a bunch of stuff.

So I need like battering rams and guns and ammo and night vision goggles and bulletproof vests. And I made this whole laundry list of stuff. So I sent a cable to headquarters and I said, can you give me $50,000? seed money and I'll start buying this stuff. Boom. Six hours later I had $50,000. Money, believe me, was no problem. I mean

vast amounts of money. We have a lot of time. I can tell you some fun stories. So I went online, gals.com. It's a police supply house in Kentucky. And I ordered everything I needed. I ordered bulletproof vests and battering

rams and guns and ammunition and the night vision goggles and Milwaukee tukis and a satellite dish and I ordered everything. I spent the whole 50 grand. So two weeks later, it all arrives. And we set up our teams. And I got a tip that there was this Al-Qaeda safe house. Here's the address. So I called the Pakistani colonel that I was, he was my normal contact. And I said, Colonel Mohammed, let's hit this house tonight. I've been telling him, look, you know, I'm waiting for this equipment. And of course, we're going to leave it all here as a gift for you and your brave men and, you know, you know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, you have to sort of talk them up. So I called him and I said, okay, the stuff's in. I got this tip. Let's hit this address 2 o'clock in the morning. And he's like, okay. So I get to FBI people, one of whom is totally awesome and we still stay in touch. The other was an ongoing problem for all of us at the CIA. CIA and the FBI hate each other.

Right. And they have since the founding of this. the CIA and we still hate each other. So, um, 0200, we sneak up to the door of this house and we boom, we bashed the door in with a

with a battering ram and there are these two kids. One was 18 and one was 19. They put their hands up and then they burst into tears, both of them. One of them's crying. I'm cuffing him and he's like, can I call my mother? She's going to

be so worried about me. And I said to this buddy of mine, I said, this is Al Qaeda? This is what we've been so afraid of. They're children. So I was like, no, you're not going to fucking call your mother. You're going to jail. We took them to the Raul Pindi jail. How did you know for sure they were Al Qaeda?

Because I said so. Because you've said so. You know, I'm being facetious, of course. The rule that we came up with was if you, you're an Arab in Pakistan with no passport and no plausible explanation for what you're doing there, you're Al-Qaeda, right? Arabs can't get visas to Pakistan unless they're Saudi, Kuwaiti, Emirati, and have lots of money to spend.

So if you're just some kid from some village in Tunisia, you shouldn't be in Pakistan. one of them went so far as to tell me, not one of these two kids, but a guy later on, that he was there to study Arabic. And I said, Arabic. You know, of course, that they don't speak Arabic in this country. And he just looks at me. And a lot of these guys were pretty well trained by Al Qaeda.

Like, they all had the same story. I mean, like, exactly to the word the same story. They were taught this in their training in the camps in Afghanistan, that if you're caught, tell the Americans that you flew here to volunteer at an orphanage in Afghanistan and you flew through Dubai and then when you got to Karachi, you got in a taxi and you asked the taxi driver to take you to the grand mosque to thank God for your safe arrival. There is no grand mosque in Karachi. The grand mosque is in Islamabad. They don't know that.

And then you accidentally left your passport in the taxi. So you lost your passport. That's why you don't have it. And so you're waiting for your embassy to give you a new passport. And then when the Americans started bombing, you got scared. So you had to, I mean, like a hundred different guys told me exactly the same story. And none of it added up. So we started putting them at the Raul Pindi jail.

and then after a while one of the Pakistanis came to me and said listen, the jail's full. We don't know what to do with these guys. And we don't want them here in our country. And he says, I know you don't want to send them back to their country because they hadn't been interrogated. We didn't know, are they just, you know, kids

who took up the fight because they had nothing better to do? Are they masterminds? We caught bin Laden's computer guy. We caught bin Laden's mechanics. We got bin Laden's cook. We got bin Laden's doctor. So they've got information that we're going to want. So I cabled headquarters and I said,

the jail's full and the packs want them out. So what do I do with them? And I get this cable back saying, put them on a C-12 and send them to Guantanamo. And I wrote back and I said, Guantanamo, Cuba? Like, why would I send them to Cuba? And they said,

this has been the subject of much discussion at headquarters. We're going to hold them in Cuba for two or three weeks until we can figure out which federal district to charge them in. Because crimes were committed in the D.C. area in the eastern district of Virginia. That's where the Pentagon's based and Dulles Airport. In the Eastern District of Massachusetts, because one of the planes took off from Boston, and the southern and eastern districts of New York.

So there are four federal districts. We can charge them with terrorism in. Okay. And I said, that's a great idea. Just hold them in Cuba for two or three weeks. And then once we started sending them to Cuba, somebody on Dick Cheney staff said, you know what?

They have no rights in Cuba. Because the Cubans have never signed the lease agreement, like in protest. So if they have no rights in Cuba, means we don't have to put them on trial. And I was like, well, but the Constitution says that they have their right to face their accusers in a court of law. Right. Well, but they don't get the Constitution's protections.

Not Cuba. Everybody gets the Constitution's protections. If you're under the command and control of the United States on territory controlled by the United States, right? I mean, that's, I'm not a lawyer, but the Constitution's very important to me. And on my very first day at the CIA, with 300 other people, I put my right hand in the air, and I promise to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. And I have a real hard time thinking that I was the only one in the room that day who actually meant it. So, anyway, I had been there about.

six weeks and we'd been doing these raids a couple times a week and we're getting some good people we caught a couple of guys from Egyptian Islamic jihad we got a whole bunch of people from these Kashmiri terrorist groups in fact one of the things that we found in a Kashmiri safe house we found a copy of the al-Qaeda training manual and it was the very first time that analytically we were able to prove cooperation between the Kashmiris and Al Qaeda first time. And then, of course, the Kashmiris worked with Al Qaeda to attack those hotels in the Jewish Center in Mumbai a couple of, well, a year or two later. So anyway, these raids were successful, but we're only catching two, three, four at a time.

And so there was one day, you know, the weekend in Pakistan is Friday. and Saturday. And Saturday was like the only day of the week that I gave myself the luxury of sleeping till eight. You have to work seven days a week. We're working 16, 18 hour days. I came home with enough money. I bought a house.

I had so much overtime. It was amazing. So it's like six o'clock Saturday morning and the phone rings. I'm staying in this little guest house, you know, because, well, the day I arrived, they said, hey, we put you in the Marriott. And I said, are you insane? what do you think they're going to blow up? They're going to blow up the Marriott,

which they did and killed 156 people. I said, I'm not staying in the Marriott. They did it with a truck bomb. So I stayed at this little Pakistani guest house. It only had 14 rooms run by a Pakistani family. So they wake me up 6 o'clock in the morning. You got to get into the embassy immediately.

So I thought, oh, something terrible has happened. So I get dressed. I speed over to the embassy. And everybody's there. The station chief, the deputy, the FBI. he's called a leagat, the legal attache, his deputy. We had a representative there from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and then me. And the station chief says, we heard from our friends across the river, which means NSA.

We heard from our friends across the river that Abu Zabeda is somewhere in the country. We have to catch him. Everybody turns and looks at me. And I'll tell you the honest to God's truth. I'm thinking of myself, Abu Zubeda, that name sounds vaguely familiar to me. Like, I just couldn't place him, right? Right.

And then I realized, oh, oh, oh, the number three in Al Qaeda, which turned out to be wrong. But, I mean, yeah, we thought he was the number three in Al Qaeda. What was he really? He had never actually joined Al Qaeda. He founded Al Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan. He founded the House of Martyrs, safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan.

He was Al-Qaeda's logistics guy. Right. So if you needed a false passport, you needed a plane ticket, a boat ticket, you needed weapons, you needed money transferred, he was the guy that did all that.

But he had never actually joined al-Qaeda. He never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. So they said, he's somewhere in Pakistan, we have to catch him. Everybody turns and looks at me. And I go, you guys, I said, this country's the size of Texas. It's got 150 million people in it. What do you mean he's somewhere in Pakistan?

You got to catch him. Like, how do you do that? Well, that's what you're here for. I said, all right, I'll think of something. I thought of a couple of really bad ideas. You know, I was flailing around. So I came up with this one idea. We had two young technical officers.

who were on loan from headquarters. And I said, we have a cell phone number. Can we find him by the cell phone number? And they said, we could try. So they built this device from scratch, from just crap from Radio Shack. You know what I mean?

Batteries and wires and little circuit boards. I don't know how they did it. And so every time he would turn his phone on, it would ping and it would give us a direction, right? North, Northeast. And we'd be like, oh my God, and we run out to the car, and then it goes off. So that's not going to work. And I said one day in a staff meeting, I said, you know, when I was in college, I was a toll collector on the Pennsylvania turnpike, right?

So I know how the machines work, and, you know, you get the ticket and you take it to the next one, and you pay the ticket, pay the toll. and I said he keeps moving back and forth between Lahore and and Faisalabad and it's connected by a toll road. So I said, let's put all CIA people in the toll booths and when he comes, we grab him. They're like, that's a terrible idea. There are 55,000 people every day that take that toll road, right? These are two major cities. Lahore has 12 million people and Faisalabad has 7 million people. You can't just put CIA people in the booths and the booths and the city.

people in the boots and then, you know, grab him in the car. Besides, they're going to be armed with AK-47s and who knows, grenades and whatever. Right. So that's not going to work. So finally I went to the chief and I was like, I just can't do this on my own. I need a targeting analyst. Now, a targeting analyst is vastly different from an analyst. An analyst, which is what I was for the first seven and a half years there, you think the big

thoughts, you write these papers, you send them to the president. The president will make a comment in the margin, send it back to you, then you answer that question. Targeting analysts pour through data, mostly metadata. And their job is specifically to find somebody, to physically find the location of someone, so that you can kill him or capture him. Well, I had a friend who was one of the top targeting analysts at the CIA. We were both in the counterterrorism center together. And when I was at headquarters, we would go for a walk at lunch together every day and just talk about, you know, this is what they want you to do.

Talk about operations and ideas and, you know, stuff that you want to do. So I called him and I said, can you get on a plane to come to Pakistan as quickly as possible? And he said, yeah. He said, I'll be there in 24 hours. So I picked them up at the airport, four o'clock in the morning. We went straight to the office. And I said, here's the deal. We think we found Abu Zubu.

beta. He's like, you've got to be kidding me. I said, I know, right? I mean, we've narrowed it down, but he knows we're on his trail. And so we're like 24 hours behind him. We'll bust into a safe house and all of his stuff is there, but he's gone. We went into one safe house and he had poured himself a cup of tea and it was still hot. But we couldn't quite get him. So I said, you got to help us narrow it down. I just don't know what else to do. So he took this piece of butcher block paper about the size of this table, about the size of a small American billboard, right? And he wrote Abu Zabeda in the center and he circled it. And then around the name Abu Zabeda, he wrote all of the, all of the locational information that we had for people in touch with Abu Zabeda.

So around the name Abu Zabeda were phone numbers. addresses and email addresses. And then around that, he made a tertiary level of all the information of people in touch with the people who were in touch with Abu Zabeda. At the end of the week,

it looked like a spider web. It was actually very pretty, like an artwork. And he came to me and he said, I just cannot get it to any fewer than 14 sites. I said, 14 sites. We've never hit more than two in a night before. We can't hit 14 sites simultaneously.

I said, I got to get a big team in here. So I cabled headquarters. And I said, I need 36 people. I need a plane load of guns and ammunition. I need $2 million in cash. I made this whole list of all this stuff. Why $2 million in cash? Because I'm going to start throwing lots of money at lots of people.

Bribing people? I'll bribe everybody in the country that I need to bribe. And we needed to start buying safe houses, right? If we knew that he was in Lahore, Faisalabad, Karachi, Islamabad, we can't be seen like leaving the embassy, driving to Pakistani intelligence. We need to be discreet. We all grew these long, bushy beards. In the embassy, they called me the Archbishop, because mine came in all gray, right?

It was really long. And we dressed as Pakistanis, the big balloon pants and the flat pancake hats. So just two days later, this completely unmarked 737 lands at the airport and 36 guys get off, half CIA, half FBI, and then pallets. pallets and pallets of equipment. It took us hours to unload this plane. And I went to introduce myself to the Pakistani intelligence officer in charge in Faisalabad. And he said, what do you need for me to help you with? And I said, I need a real estate agent.

So he got us a real estate agent. We bought two houses. We bought a 10-bedroom, 10-bath house in Lahore. figuring we could use the bedrooms to interrogate prisoners. And then we bought a seven-bedroom, seven-bath house in Faisalabad. It was a doctor's house, I remember. And then we started briefing the team. You know, here's what we're going to do.

Here's what the plan is. We got 14 sites. We're going to have to hit every one of them simultaneously. And I said, it's never been done before. and the risk is high, right? I mean, it's, like, really high. Like, not all of us may make it back. So, on the night of the raid,

my colleague who I was closest to, he and I, I'm skipping a lot of this story because it's so long, he and I were walking back to the safe house, and he said, what do you think? You think we're going to get him? And I said, no.

I think we're going to get somebody, but I don't think we're going to get him. He's too smart. He's outsmarted us at every step of the way so far. So that day, we decided to drive. It was my colleague and me, the Pakistani colonel, and the targeting analyst. The targeting analyst dropped off and went back to the safe house. But we started going to every one of the 14 sites just to make sure we weren't being set up.

There was ingress and egress. We weren't going to be ambushed. Like, what happens if everything turns to shit? Are they going to be able to shoot at us from the roofs? How high are these buildings? So, the first one we went to, we realized was a mistake. It was a shish kebab stand with a pay phone. And clearly there was al-Qaeda living in the neighborhood.

Whenever they needed to make a call, they'd go to the payphone. But the shish-kababab stand. closed at midnight. There's nobody there. You can't raid this shish kebab stand. You're not going to get anything. So we cut it off the list. So we have 13 left. And most of these places were just, you know, one-room mud huts, concrete block, little poor people's houses with corrugated tin roofs. And then we came upon this huge house. It was bright yellow. And just as we're coming up to it, the targeting analyst calls me. And he says, I just got a call from a friendly Western intelligence service.

And they said that they had a walk-in this morning. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks in off the street and says, I have intelligence information, but I want you to pay me for it. 99% of the time they're lunatics or potential terrorists or, probes like from the Iranians or the Russians or the North Koreans just to see where are the cameras are the windows bulletproof how thick are the doors who's armed we all do this to each other wow yeah just in case they want to attack our embassy so spooky yeah it happens all the time it's very dangerous so he said that this friendly intelligence service said that there is a large

Congregation of al-Qaeda fighters and they're in a big yellow house and I said, holy shit. I said I'm right in front of the yellow house It's it's site number 12 And he said, well then that that has to be it I said I want to talk to the source. I want to talk to the walk-in And he said I already asked and they said no which made me think that there wasn't a walk in That it was an intercept But they didn't want us to know that they were intercepting al-Qaeda's communications. Why wouldn't they want you to know? Why wouldn't they want you to know? Because we would try to take it. Okay.

Take over their tap. And, you know, there's, there are a lot of pissing matches in intelligence. Not just between the CIA and the FBI, but then between the CIA and all of its allies and friends. It's so funny. It's awful. The politics involved is ridiculous. So then I said, I said to the Pakistani colonel, I said, we're going to have to put a big team on this one. And he said,

I can tell you that something bad is going on in that house. I said, how do you figure? He said, it has to be 110 degrees right now. And all of their shutters are closed. He said, it has to be broiling in there. They have something to hide. So I said, okay, we'll put a bigger team on that one. So that night at 10 o'clock, I stood on the coffee table in the safe house.

and it was all 36 of our guys plus the original 10 that, you know, those of us who were there already, plus all the Pakistanis, right? So we've got, I don't know, 60 guys. And I said, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, we're going to have to synchronize our watches, like in the movies. So we synchronized our watches. 10 o'clock, I still remember. And I said, look, here's what we're going to do. we actually chartered a bus to put everybody on this bus and take them to Faisalabad because that's where most of the targets were

three of the targets were in Lahore and the other 10 targets were in Faisalabad and Faisalabad is just one of the most horrible places on earth and believe me I've been to 68 countries with the CIA there aren't many worst places on earth in Pakistan Wow

yeah it's bad and I've been Yemen and Somalia and I've been to some of the most horrible places on the planet and Pakistan's worse. So anyway, I said, here's the plan. 0.130, we leave the safe house. 0.145, be in the target neighborhood. 0150, be parked in your spot. 0155, make sure that not only do you have line of sight of the target, but make sure that you're not being surveilled. 0.158, get out of the car, and exactly at 0200, break down the door, separate all the women and children from the men, and make sure all of the men are cuffed. And I said, because this is

an open criminal investigation, our friends from the FBI are going to begin collecting evidence, which was total horseshit, let me tell you. The difference was, the difference between the CIA and the FBI is the FBI goes in and they put little sticky notes on the four walls, wall one, wall two, wall three, wall four. Then they open all the drawers and they take pictures of what's inside the drawers. Then they look for papers and they collect all the papers, okay, because they're going to build a case. CIA, you go in, you bust down the door, you grab all the guys and you send them to Guantanamo. Oh, that's fucking hilarious.

So we were on the roof, my colleague and I, we were on the roof of the safe house at 0200. And I said to him, I looked at my watch and I said, Oh, 200, here we go. And just as I said it, we heard this sound in the distance, boink, boink, like metal on metal. And I said, that's not good. It's 2 o'clock in the morning, right?

Nobody in the country's awake. and then we hear shots fired. And I said, oh man, that's really not good. So I got on the Wauki-Toki. We knew that that big yellow house was the nearest, physically nearest to us. So I said, Site 12, come in, what's going on over there.

And the guy's like, you know, shots fired, shots fired. Well, we knew that. Also, rule number one in intelligence operations is the Wauke-Toki-talkies always die, right? They never, ever work. We used to, I actually went to NSA when I got back. They wanted to do this lessons learned thing, because this was the first successful major capture post 9-11. And I said, please, I said, you guys are all geniuses here, right? You build these computers, these supercomputers, we don't even know what they do. You put satellites. You can't make a battery that doesn't die after an hour. Come on. Like, seriously. It's funny, the most obvious things are the

things that suck the most. Yeah. So we run downstairs, we jump in the car, we speed over to the yellow house, and it's chaos. One of the things I told the Pakistanis, just before we kicked off, I said, we have to take him alive, right? My orders were very specific. We have to take him alive. So don't shoot unless you're being shot at. It was clear to everybody. So we get there.

Chaos. One guy is dead, laying dead in the street. I can show you some pictures. I have on my phone. Another guy looks like, if he's not dead, he's going to be dead in five minutes. Another guy is screaming bloody murder and he's completely soaked in blood. And these are their guys or your guys? Their guys.

Okay. I said, what the fuck happened? and this Pakistani policeman says to me, we got him, we got your man. I said, why did you shoot them? He said that they were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the other house to escape. And so he shot them.

So the first one to jump, first of all, the boink, point, boink we heard was the door was reinforced with steel. And it should have just, splintered with the first hit. This they were working on, you know, the whole time. Abu Zubeda, Assyrian bomb maker,

and his, and Abu Zubeda's bodyguard were on the second floor. On the first floor, there were, I'm still not allowed to say the number, but there were several dozen fighters, Al-Qaeda fighters on the first floor. Why wouldn't you be allowed to say the number?

They still will not allow me to say the number of people captured. Wow. Yeah. It was many. dozens. So the guys on the first floor didn't know who was on the second floor. They knew it was a VIP because there was a kid. They called him a tea walla. This kid would, he was working for them and every day he would go to the market and buy food and he would cook for them and he would make tea. And they were cut off from everybody on the first floor. So they knew that somebody

important was upstairs and they wondered if it was bin Laden. Yeah. So when we started breaking down the door, Abizaeda and the other two went to the roof, tried to jump to the roof of the next door house. And this idiot Pakistani policeman just starts picking him off with an AK-47. The first guy that jumped was the Syrian bomber. And this was a bad guy. When we got onto the second floor of that house, he had all of his bomb-making stuff on the table, explosives and everything. The soldering iron was still hot because he was, he was making the bomb and he had the plans to the British school on the table. He was going to blow up the school. This is how bad these people were. So he jumped. The Pakistani guy shot him, killed him instantly. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The second one to jump was Abu Zubeda. And the guy shot him in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach. And he was bleeding out. The third guy, the Pakistani policeman told me, he shot him through the leg, right through the center of his femur. So I said,

so which one's my guy? This one, the middle one, who was bleeding out. I said, that doesn't look anything like Abu Zabeda. We had a six-year-old passport photo of Abu Zabedah. He was a young, thin, good-looking, you know, short bearded mustache, closely trimmed.

How old? He was 24, maybe. Okay. In this picture? Okay. Twenty-two. Okay. I said, this guy, he doesn't look anything like the picture.

This guy was fat, clean-shaven, crazy Albert Einstein hair going all, every direction. So I called the targeting analyst, and I said, listen, it's chaos here. The Pakistanis shot a bunch of guys. They say we got him. But this guy doesn't look anything like Abu Zabeda, and I don't know what to do. And he said, do a retinal scan, right? Take a picture of his eye, email it to me, and I'll run a retinal scan. So I knelt down over him, and I shouted, if the he eunuch, open your eyes, if the hyunuch.

But his eyes were rolled back in his head. I could just see the whites of his eyes. I couldn't see anything. He was dying. And I said, his eyes are rolled back in his head. can't see anything. And he said, give me a picture of his ear. I didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same

ears. They're like fingerprints. Huh. Yeah. So I took a picture of his ear. Of course, these are the days when phones didn't have cameras. So I took a picture. I plugged the camera into the phone. I sent the picture to the analyst. He sends it to CIA headquarters. Then they

respond, it's him. So I said to my colleague, I said, listen, he's going to die. We got to get him to a hospital. So we threw him into the back of this filthy Toyota pickup truck. Little tiny pickup truck called a Toyota Cherry. There he is.

The picture right there on the right in the center. That one, that one. Yeah. That's the passport photo that we had. Okay. And he was six years older than that when you captured him. Yes. And 50 pounds heavier.

Why does he get the eye patch in that photo? Yeah, the eye patch. Is that a result of torture? Advanced interrogation, enhanced interrogation? When he was fighting the Soviets, he got a shrapnel wound in his eye, and he was blinded in one eye. Okay. And then as part of his torture, we drugged him one day, and we took his eyeball out. Oh.

Which is a human rights violation. It's a crime against humanity. We didn't even ask him. We didn't even tell him. They just gassed him. And then when he woke up, he had no eyeball. So they gave him a... Oh, what he was under.

Yeah. Holy shit. So they gave him a prosthetic eyeball that he has steadfastly refused to wear. Because he said that we stole his eye. And so he insists on wearing the patch. The patch looks pretty cool, though. It does actually look pretty cool. So you were standing over this guy right here in the middle of the street at 2 a.m.

While he was dying, bleeding out. Yeah. We rushed him to Faisal. about hospital. The worst place I've ever been in my life. This hospital, the windows are open, the doors are open. There are like dogs and cats just walking up and down the halls. There are clouds of mosquitoes feasting on people's open wounds.

It was disgusting. And then they had this bar of Irish Spring soap with needles coming out of it. And if you needed a shot, they'd take one of the syringes. They'd give you your shot and then stick it back in the bar of soap. So here we are. There are like six Americans dressed as Pakistanis with an Arab who's bleeding to death. We take him into the emergency room. And I said to the doctor, I said, you've got to patch him up.

My orders were to take him alive. And the guy's like, looking at me like, what? What's going on? We were like, come on, let's go. so they rush him into surgery and the rest of us just sat down to wait how long did the surgery take well that was kind of a problem word got around the al-Qaeda community that we had gotten him

and so they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital and we're diving down on the ground while he's in the middle of surgery because they knew we were in there with him So I said to the colonel, if they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead. Can you get a helicopter in here? And he said, I think so. So he makes a couple of calls. 20 minutes later, this helicopter lands in the parking lot.

I put my shirt up over my mouth like this. I walked into the operating room and I said, Doc, wrap it up. We got to go. So they sew them closed. we wheeled him out onto the parking lot and put them on the helicopter, and we flew to a Pakistani military base about 50 miles away. Now, the base was kind of funny. It had a small, not really a hospital so much it was like a clinic,

like a surgical clinic. It had eight beds. It was in a circle. And the nurse station was the hub of the wheel. And then eight beds were the spokes, right? And I noticed there was a chart that had each patient's name and why he was in there. And every one of the patients was in there for an attempted suicide, which was nuts to me. But they had this bed open, two beds open.

And so we took him in. They took him straight into surgery. So at one point the doctor came out and he said to me, it was funny because he didn't know who the prisoner was. He didn't know who I was, but this intelligence colonel said, these are VIPs. You got to do what they say. So he comes out and he's like, look, I don't know what this is about, but I'm going to tell you, I have never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived. So you may want to tell your people that this is probably not going to be a good outcome.

So I called the targeting analyst, and he called headquarters. And they were like, do what you can. So while he was in surgery, an ambulance arrived with the bodyguard who had been shot through the leg. And he's screaming. He's crying. So, you know, I've already been up 24 hours at this point. And my orders, and these were directly from George Tenet, the CIA director, 24-7 CIA Eyes-On, he said. Those were his exact words. 24-7 CIA's eyes on.

Don't let the fucking FBI sit there and take over. He's our prisoner, not the FBI's prisoner. While he's in surgery, I'm so sleepy already. I decide to walk around, this little clinic. And I hear the guy screaming and crying in the other room. So I went over to him, and I said, Kifalak, how are you? And he goes, he's crying, he goes, alhambulillah.

glory to God. And I said, yeah, you don't look so good. And he says, are you American? And I said, yeah, we captured you. And he says, the Pakistanis, the dogs, they captured me, and then they held me down. And then they put an AK-47 on my leg, and they shot me. And I said, that's not what I heard. I heard you were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the next door house to

escape. And he stops crying. And he says to me, look at me. I am 150 kilos. I cannot jump from the roof. It's like 330 pounds. Yeah. And I pull the sheet back.

I'm going to find the pictures and show you. I pull the sheet back. And he is not just soaked in blood, but there is a perfect burn mark. like the size of a dinner plate around his leg. They held that AK right on his skin and pulled the trigger.

So the doctor told me we're going to have to amputate the leg and I said, well, that's unfortunate. They ended up saving the leg but the guy's never going to walk normally again. Oh my God. Yeah, it was pretty awful. And it was the Pakistani soldiers that did that?

Yeah, because the guy pissed them off. You know, he wouldn't give up. So they shot him. God. It was bad. It was bad. So they didn't end up. They did not amputate his leg.

They did not amputate his leg. But I'm sure it completely shattered his femur. Oh, my God. The damage, it was disgusting. I'm looking for these pictures while I'm talking to you. And I'm going to... It's amazing. He didn't bleed out.

It was incredible. Well, I mean, Abu Zabeta as well, obviously. And speaking of Abu Zabeda, not bleeding out, um, when, when he came out of surgery, Um, okay, here, it's not a very good picture, but that's the, that's the bomb maker. He's clearly dead. Yeah. He's dead in that picture.

He's on a morgue table in that picture. And that's the bodyguard. Oh, my God. As you can tell, there was some significant bleeding. Yeah. And then, that is brutal. I'm going to find Abu Zabeda for you. And here's Abu Zabeda after we threw him in the back of the pickup.

truck. As you can see, he looks nothing like that picture. No. Wow. He looks totally different. Totally completely different. And I'll tell you what, I saw. And was that by design? Was he do it? Yeah. It was a disguise. Right. Uh-huh. I saw my whole career just like go up and smoke. I was like, who the heck is that? Right. So anyway, they finally bring him out of surgery. And I was really, really tired. And so I was afraid I was going to fall asleep. And I'm thinking, is the doctor secretly Al-Qaeda? Maybe the doctor's going to break him out.

Or maybe he's not as badly wounded as I think he is and I'm going to fall asleep. And then he's going to get up and run away. So I tore a sheet into strips and I tied him to the bed by the wrists and the ankles. He was bleeding so profusely. This was after surgery? After surgery. He was bleeding so profusely that it was actually pooling under the bed. I've said before, it was like a scene from a horror movie.

I've never seen anything like it in my life. He was soaked in blood. We had blood all over us. It's in this giant puddle underneath the bed. So they had this pump. I had never seen anything like this before. You know how they have like blood just dripping into your arm. Well, they attached a pump to it.

So it's forcing the blood into your arm like at this greatly accelerated rate because he was bleeding so badly that they had to replace the blood as quickly as possible. To keep him alive. Yeah, just to keep him alive. And he was in a coma and the doctor's like, I don't think he's going to make it. So I sat there with my arms crossed at the foot of his bed and I just stared at him. I just stared at him. and I put the ceiling fans on full blast to make it like slightly uncomfortable so that I wouldn't fall asleep. And then during the night, I called a buddy of mine at the safe house and I said, I said, man, would you do me a favor?

I said, I'm frigging first of all. I said, there's about to eat Abu Zabeda. I know, right? I'm starving. And I said, I'm really dirty. I smell really bad. I've got a clean shirt and a pair of underwear. Can you bring them to the hospital from the safe house?

So a couple hours later he comes. He's got like these, you know, those little cheese crackers and peanut butter crackers in that pack? He had a couple of those. He had a thing of orange juice. And there was a red t-shirt that my kids had bought me for Christmas with SpongeBob Squarepants on it,

like the decal, you know. And he gave me my clean underwear. So I got changed. And then the next day, he started to stir just a little bit. And so I stood up at the foot of his bed and I was looking down on him. And I say in my, I did it again. I'm sorry. I think you're good.

I say in my first book, you could tell the exact instant that he realized, oh, my God, the Americans have me. because he's hooked up to all these machines and his heart rate is 110, right? And when he opens his eyes, he doesn't look at my face. He looks at SpongeBob and his heart rate went to 220. And the machine starts going, beep, be, be, be, be, be, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and then you hear code blue, code blue, Bay one, code blue. And then they rush in and they shock him, you know, clean. I had never seen this before, except on TV, right? Clear, they shock him, and then they give him this shot of Demerol that they put right into the drip, and then he was out again.

That poor bastard woke up and saw SpongeBob for the first time after being blown away by an AK-47. Yeah. Yeah. It was too much for him. So he was out for another six or eight hours. He saw SpongeBob, and he knew he was fucked. He knew he was fucked. It was over.

Finally, he opens his eyes. And again, I've got him tied to the bed by the wrists and the ankles. So he's laying there like this. And he opens his eyes and he goes like this, like motioning for me to come near him. So I go right next to him. Like I put my ear right next to his mouth and I moved his oxygen mask off to the side. And I said,

Shuismek, what is your name? and he shook his head. So I said again, Shusmek. And he said to me in English, I will not speak to you in God's language. And I said, that's okay, Abu Zabeda. We know who you are.

And he starts crying and he says, please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me. And I said, nobody's going to kill you. We've been looking for you for a long time. He said, what's going to happen to me? And I said, honestly, I don't know. but I'm going to give you some advice.

I'm the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. So if there's one thing that you do, it's that you have to cooperate. And he said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate. I said, suit yourself. So I sit back down. he wants to talk. What happened? I said, well, you're jumping from the roof. He remembered going to the roof. I said, you tried to jump and Pek-Stani guy shot you. And I said, you're severely wounded. It's going to take a long time for you to recover.

But listen, you should take this time to do the right thing. A lot of people are going to ask you a lot of questions and you have to be honest. honest. And he said, no, that he didn't know anything about 9-11, that all he ever wanted to do was kill Jews, he said, that he didn't want to attack the United States. He wanted to attack Israel. And they outvoted him. Um, we talked, you know, one of the things that we, that we captured that night was his diary. And books have been written. Two books have been written about his diary. Um, um, um, he talked. Um, one of the FBI psychologists said it was the rantings of a madman. It's like, well, clearly you and I didn't read the same diary, right? Because really what it was, it was more of a doodle book than anything else. He would doodle, draw pictures, and he would write poems. He recited a lot of his poetry to me. You read it?

Oh, yeah. All of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh-huh. And then I consulted on one of the books. So one of the things that he did, and this is weird, he's a strange guy. You know, he's not a guy that you're going to want to go out and have a beer with.

Sorry to interrupt. How old was he at this time? When you captured him? 30. 29 or 30. He had this weird thing that he would do where he would write letters to himself as a young man or as a teenager. So it's the 30-year-old Abuza-Beta writing to the 14-year-old Abbas of Beta and giving himself advice. To his past self. To his past self. Listen, you should have done it this way. Oh, you shouldn't have gone out with those guys. They were bad guys.

You should have been kinder to your mother on this day. Stuff like that. It was weird. But it was expressive. He's a very artistic kind of person. So you draw these pictures and he would write poems and he would write a scene from a play. And then he would write a letter to himself.

And the FBI is like, clearly he's insane. It's like, no, he's not freaking insane. it's a doodle book. So anyway, oh my God, how we, we fought about that for years. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Because they said he was insane. Anyway, Um, well, he was just a kid. Yeah,

he was a kid. Right? Where, I don't know how old you are, but now, I mean, in my mind, I'm still 20,

but, but I'm actually 57. And I have to remind myself, you're not 20 anymore, right? I wish I was. And I think, back on things that I would have done differently.

I've never actually written it down anywhere, but right. You know, sometimes people do. So, um, so what happened to him after that, after that visit with him in the hospital when you were talking to him and? Well, I never left. I never left. And then finally one of my colleagues came and said, uh, listen, uh, we got to get

him ready to go. Uh, they're sending a plane in. And I said, where's he going to go? And my friend is like, I don't have any idea. So I told him, I said, listen, we're going to take you out of this place and you're going somewhere else. And he said, are they going to kill me? And I said, no. I said, I don't know what's going to happen to you, but I can guarantee that you are going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide.

And I'm going to tell you again, you have to cooperate. And I said, I don't mean to sound. They really wanted to keep him alive. Oh, yeah, they did. They had big plans for him. I said, I don't mean to sound cruel, but your life is over. It's over. You'll never be free again.

And so the rest of it can be easy or it can be terrible. And it's up to you. So I told him a plane is coming and it's going to take you to someplace else. I don't know where that is. So he asked me if I would hold his hand. So three FBI agents and I picked him up, you know, his gurney. I'm holding his hand with one hand and holding on to the gurney with the other. We take him out to the plane.

We had to lift him up, like to a standing position to maneuver him onto the plane. And then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back. And we tied the gurney down to the luggage rack. And I said, I leaned over and I said, remember, you have to come up. cooperate and he squeezed my hand. And I said, good luck. And then as I'm getting off the plane, one of these CIA dudes

who was wearing completely black with a black hood, he says to me, John? And I go, yeah, who are you? And he lifts up his hood. Why was he wearing a hood? Everybody was wearing hoods. Yeah, it's weird. They didn't want to be recognized.

This was the rendition team. So this is like the most secret of all the secret things that the CIA does, these international kidnappings. So they didn't want him to see their faces. And I said, who are you? And he lifts up his mask just a little bit. And he was my last boss at the CIA.

He goes, what are you doing here? No shit. Yeah. And I said, oh, I said, man, we've been doing raids. We got this as our first HVT, high value target. And he said, who is he? And I said, dude, I'm sorry. You don't have a need to know.

I'm not allowed to say who he is. And he said, no, no, that's cool. I said, where are you taking him? And he goes, oh, dude, you don't have a need to know. I'm so sorry. I said, no, no, no. I said, Godspeed, wherever you're going. I hope you have safe travels.

And then he took off. And I never saw him again. But he was going to Guantanamo. No. No, no, no. It was years before he got to Guantanamo. Really? So he went to one of those black sites.

He went to six of those blacks sites. Six of the black sites. Yeah. Now, what's the deal with the black sites, the CIA black sites? Well, for people who don't know what they are, they sound so fucking mysterious. And they are. This is, this is bad. This is how, how secret this is.

A black site is a secret facility usually housed on a foreign military base, right? I'm not allowed to say any of the countries, even though they've all been reported on in the media. The CIA has never admitted. to the existence of black sites. And so I can't confirm their locations, but I can say Google it and the locations. Yeah. So many of these black sites,

the presidents and prime ministers of the countries that they were in, had no idea that they were there. Really? These were secret, unwritten handshake agreements between the directors, the director of the CIA and the director of that country's intelligence service. So in many cases, even the ministers of defense didn't know that these secret CIA torture facilities were on their military bases in their countries.

That's how secret they were. And then if, you know, somebody would say, oh, well, what's that building over there? You know, we haven't used that building in years. And I've been seeing people coming in and out of it lately. Two days later, buildings abandoned, everybody's in a different country. That's what they would do. So you go from country A to country B to C, D, E, F, all over the world. The CIA has been doing this stuff for decades, right?

I mean, all the way back to like those LSD experiments. They were doing tests on people in different countries just because they didn't want to violate the laws. That's right. Yeah. I went back to the safe house. I slept for a while after Abu Zabeda took off. I went back to the safe house. And there was one incident that happened that I was 1,000% right about that dogged me later when I got back to headquarters.

We had done that night, one of the raids that we did was a mistake. It was a girl's school in a private house. And what happened was this house, it was an old man in his 70s and his two sons and their wives. they had the only phone in the neighborhood. And so people would come over and say, hey, can I use the phone? And the old man would say, sure, give me five rupees. They'd give him five rupees.

They make a call. They're calling, you know, Osama bin Laden. So we were like, oh, my God, that phone, that house, it's like a headquarters of Al Qaeda. We bust down the door. We grabbed this old man and his sons. And they were scared shitless. Right?

Right. So there was this idiot working for me. And he brings them to the safe house. He's got his three prisoners cuffed behind their backs and they have these black hoods on. And I said, why are they hooded? He goes, why are they hooded? We don't want them to see our faces. And I said, are you seriously fucking telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to hood. your prisoners. Take the hoods off. And he goes, dude, if you take those hoods off, I'm reporting you to headquarters. I said, I'm reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime. Now, take the hoods off. So I pulled the hoods off. Turns out these three guys were completely innocent of anything. They just happen to have the only phone in the neighborhood. So I said to the Pakistanis, what can I do to make it right for these people? Because this is going to be a PR disaster. This is like the most secret thing we've done in 20 years.

And these guys are, you know, they're going to tell everybody. The Americans broke down the door in my house. They took me. They put hoods on me and my kids. And, you know, it was awful. And he said, give him $100 each. So I said to the old man. I said, sir, we've made a terrible mistake.

And on behalf of the President of the United States, I apologize to you and to your family. And I hope that you will take this money to repair the damage that we've done to your home. And he said that he accepted my apology. The very next day, there he is on the news, the Pakistani news, standing in front of the destroyed door. And he said, it was the Americans. They broke down the door of my house. They took my sons and me. we don't know where we were, but they were very polite, and they bought us new shoes.

So it kind of went away. It was a one-day story. Wow. Yeah. Oh, so I get back to headquarters, and they ream me out because I took the hoods off. And I said, it's a war crime. Why does nobody understand this? You know, there are rules for these kinds of things that we're doing.

if we're really the good guys, then let's be the good guys. And these are all Pakistani guys you're talking to? No, they're Americans. They're all our people. Okay. Yeah. And you didn't think it was weird that you were the only guy that was like really worried about? I just figured they were all retards.

Okay. But you were the only one that was worried about the hood. Like no one else had even batted an eye at it. Yeah. No. They're like, who cares? Huh. They're our prisoners.

They're terrorists. We're the good guys. Don't you think it's weird? I always thought it was super strange how, like just after you telling that story about Abu, what's his name? Zabeda. Abu Zabeda. That bin Laden, when they captured bin Laden, they killed him instantly, right? Yeah.

They never had any intention of taking him alive. Is it weird to you that they never, like, brought his body back to the U.S.? No, no, I would have expected that they would destroy the body. I was hoping. A lot of my colleagues and I hoped that they would bring him. back alive because I mean talk about the triumph of of law and order right talk about the triumph of a constitutional democracy. Ah, we would just blew him away which is fine too. I mean the guy committed horrible crimes and killed thousands of Americans but I was hoping that we could set an example for

the rest of the world by putting him on trial finding him guilty and executing him. I thought I just thought I mean I could be wrong but I thought it was like standard practice to even if we do get and kill, we kill those high value targets that we bring their bodies back to give them to autopsy and do like DNA. Normally, yes. Well, the DNA, we took DNA. See, his family, the bin Laden family is one of the most important merchant families in Saudi Arabia.

Right. They're worth many billions of dollars. And they have the biggest construction company in, in the kingdom. They do the big stuff, like airports and ports and interstate highways. Is it currently? like that too. They're still the biggest family. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. I know his sister, his daughter or something lives in Israel or something. There's one that lives here in Orlando. Really? Uh-huh. There's one that lives in Beverly Hills. There's one that lives in...

Are these children of his? Uh-huh. Okay. Not, not of Osama. Oh, okay. Of the old man, Abdurrahman. Oh, of his dad. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, he had like 65 sons and 40-something and daughters. Jesus Christ. A whole bunch of wives. And, you know, this, Osama's the one that went, he went bad.

So, you know, as soon as it was clear that it was, that it was Al-Qaeda that did 9-11, his family just volunteered. Like, we want to give you DNA. So when you kill him, you can be sure that it's him. We said, great.

Because, you know, when you get hit with one of these drone rockets, there's going to be a shoulder over there and a foot over there and some scalp over there. It's not like you can look at the body and say, oh, that's Osama bin Laden. He's in pieces normally. Right. So we had the DNA. But what they, the reason why they threw the body overboard.

Is that what they did? They threw it off a ship? Yeah. Yeah. They flew it out to a ship. Why the fuck would they do that? Because they didn't want it to become a source of reverence. They didn't want it to be, you know,

know, a mecca for terrorists or inspirational for terrorists. So they figured if they destroyed it, there'd be no place for anybody to go to, to revere it. How would it inspire terrorists if we did an autopsy on them? Well, it's the same reason that, that, you know, Hitler was, the Soviets cremated Hitler and threw his ashes in a river. You just don't want people. You don't want a rallying point for people. And we didn't really need the autopsy because we had the DNA. Okay.

You could just sort of do a pseudo autopsy later. Right. Yeah. They had a Muslim cleric on board, a naval chaplain, who's a Muslim. And he did all the funeral prayers. They wrapped him up in a shroud, and they threw him over the side. Wow. The pictures or video of it or anything.

No. In fact, the president was very, very specific about that. Really? Oh, yeah. But even though we showed video of Hussein being hung. Yeah. that slipped out. One of the executioners did it on his phone.

Okay. That wasn't official. That was also pretty brutal. Yeah. Oh. Sorry. To his right? Yeah.

Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. Weird stuff. It's crazy. What were we just talking about? The body going overboard.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the body. So, okay, so where is Abu Zubba. What, I keep recognizing? Zubeda. Zubeda. Where is he? Yeah. now. So in 2006, after four years going from secret site to secret site, we sent him to Guantanamo.

Six years, he was going from Black Sight to Black Sight. Yeah, so we sent him to Guantanamo in 2006, and he's been there ever since. There was a very interesting article in the New York Times two weeks ago, I guess it was. Carol Rosenblum is the only reporter anywhere that covers these issues. Nobody cares anymore about Abu Zabeda. I mean, this is ancient history. It happened 20 years ago. A little bit more than 20 years ago. He doesn't have any actionable intelligence

anymore. The information's a generation old. So nobody cares except for her. And she broke this story two weeks ago that there are negotiations underway by Abu Zabedah's attorneys, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's attorney. Pull that thing a little bit closer under you.

This one? Yeah, just pull it right under you. It's a little bit. Oh, sorry. You scooted and that thing didn't. Oh, right. Abbas Zabedha's attorneys, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's attorneys, Ramsey bin Ashib, Amar al-Balooch, and maybe one other, to negotiate a guilty plea. You know, only Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's ever been charged with a crime. Abbas Zabed has never been charged with a crime, any crime. There's a ton of guys there that haven't been charged with crimes, right? Almost none of them have. Yeah, only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So the deal is they will agree to plead guilty to terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism.

And in exchange, we'll give them life without parole, but will allow them to remain at Guantanamo for the rest of their lives. What they're worried about, they now realize after 20 plus years, they're not getting out. So what they want is they don't want to go to To the Supermax in Florence, Colorado The weather's terrible, it's cold They don't like the cold, they want to stay in Cuba So that's what the deal is going to end up being Wow

Wow, have you ever heard the story Have you ever been to Guantanamo? Once What, when was that? Summer of 2002 After we had caught Abu Zabeda before we had caught Khaled Sheikh Mohammed but before Abu Zabeda arrived there.

Yeah. Wow. It was packed. Was it really? Packed. Yeah. That's so wild. And you know, it's funny,

I have some like regular contacts now who were prisoners there. Like I'm friendly with Muhammad Udslahi from Mauritania, that poor guy. I mean, there were so many innocent people. I heard a story about a guy named Latif Nassir. There was like another guy in Canada.

Canada had the same exact name. He did this like long podcast story about the guy and had contact with him or through his attorney. Yes. There are several stories like that. Have you ever heard of Mahar Arar? No. Also Canadian? So Mahar Arar was, uh, is a political science professor at the University of Toronto. And, um, he's ethnically Tunisian. He's a naturalized Canadian citizen and he's been a political science professor for a long time. So he went in 2001. He went to Tunisia to visit some cousins of his. And a woman that I was working for at the time said,

this guy is a bad guy, Maharaara. We even had staff meetings about him. And there were several of us. There were three of us. I was one of the three who said, uh-uh, you guys don't speak Arabic. That's what the problem is.

There's a bad guy who has a name that sounds, like Mahur-A-Rar, but it's not Mahir-A-Rar. This guy is a friggin political science professor. She says, grab him. So we asked the FBI to grab him at Kennedy Airport when he flew back from Tunisia. The FBI grabs him. They turn him over to the CIA. The CIA turns him over to Syrian intelligence, right?

Syrian intelligence. They tortured this guy. mercilessly for 10 months. They gave him electroshock to his balls. They pulled his fingernails out. They raped him. They did, what do you call it,

sleep deprivation. They made him a whimpering mush of a man. And then the Syrians came back to us and they said, listen, we think this is the wrong guy. This guy doesn't know anything. We broke

him. And so, we said, uh, let him go. In the meantime, his wife is waiting for him at the airport in Toronto. He was supposed to get off the plane at Kennedy and get a connection to Toronto. He never gets on the plane or gets off the plane. So his wife asks, you know, what's up? And, um, and the FAA said, oh, no, he never got on the plane in, uh, in Tunisia. But then a month later, she gets a credit card bill.

And here he had bought her a pair of sunglasses on the duty free on the plane. And she said, look, I have proof he was on the plane. He bought a pair of sunglasses from the duty-free. And they were like, oh, yeah, we don't know what's going on. Sorry. So finally he was released and he's like, they snatched me off the plane with these FBI badges. Then the CIA took me. Then the Syrians tortured me for the last 10 months.

He filed a $20 million lawsuit against the U.S. government. filed it in the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. And the CIA goes to the Eastern District Court, and they said, National Security, Your Honor, we can't talk about any of this. Sources and methods. And the judge is like, case dismissed. So... Wow.

So nothing happened? He sued the Canadian government because we informed the Canadians. You have an Al-Qaeda guy working at the... University of Toronto. And he wasn't. So the Canadians gave him $6 million. But the last time I spoke to him, he told me that he has not left his house in 14 years.

He has such terrible anxiety disorder now and agoraphobia that he has not left the four walls of his house in 14 years. Good fucking Lord. That's crazy. Yeah. If you don't mind, I'll tell you about another one. one. There's a guy named Khaled al-Masri. The name Al-Masri means the Egyptian. It's not even really a name. It's just this guy goes by Khalid. His name's Khalid al-Masri. He owned a little grocery store in Berlin. And he got in a fight with his wife one night. And their marriage was lousy,

and he just decided, I'm out of here. And so he gets on a bus to go to Macedonia. to visit his brother. He just needs to get away from his wife. In the meantime, there's this guy named Khaled, who's Egyptian. So he would be Khaled al-Masri, right? And he's on the phone saying, hey, I want to blow up the American embassy in Albania. So we get a tip that there's this guy, Khaled al-Masri, who wants to blow up the American embassy. And there's this guy, Khaled al-Masari, who's on a bus on the way to Macedonia. We send in this team with a helicopter coming down, and they stop the bus, and they snatch him off the bus.

And they send him to Egypt. And we tell the Egyptians, soften him up a little bit. Tell us what the plans are to blow up our embassy in Albania. He didn't know what the fuck we were talking about. So he's there for a year. Same thing with him. They electrocute him. They beat him.

They rape him. They pull his fingernails out. And then they come back to us and they're like, you know, there are like 50 million people named Khaled al-Masidi. This is not the guy you're looking for. And they release him. But when he comes out of Egypt, he's got a beard down to his waist. He's holding a copy of the Quran. And he told a reporter, all he wants to do now is kill Americans.

Because that's what we did to him. Right. we do this kind of thing all the time well didn't we sort of create bin laden's ideology against america i'm glad that you put it that way the answer to that question is yes we did we didn't create bin laden

there's this there's this misconception that bin laden was um one of the afghan mujahdine that we had funded during the war against the soviets he wasn't he didn't arrive in um in afghanistan until after the soviets had departed but in terms of that ideology, absolutely, yes, we created that group. What we did is we had such an obsession with communism well into the late 80s that it was, you know, the policy was to defeat the Russians at all costs.

Right. And one of the things that we did to defeat the Russians was to provide Stinger missiles to the Afghan Mujahideen. And it was the missile that turned the war around. because all of a sudden, you know, from a shoulder launcher, you can take down a Russian plane, a Russian helicopter. We just decimated the Russian military that way. And what we did is we radicalized these guys.

And then the Russians are gone. And they're still radical. And then what do we do? Then we have September 11th. Right. Jesus. Do you think that, I mean, obviously, I know your stance on, you know, all of these crazy,

these fucking torture techniques that we used to use, like waterboarding and all of these things. But do you think that waterboarding has ever been an effective technique? No. Never. Never. Never. It's meant to punish, not to collect information. I'll tell you, you know how I feel about the FBI. It's hard for me to compliment the FBI.

But if there's one thing that the FBI, FBI is good at its interrogation. They've been doing it since the Nuremberg trials. Right. In 45 and 46. And what they do, it's not sexy and it's not something you see in the movies, but they establish a rapport with a subject. They're kind to the subject.

Instead of beating him and electrocuting him and, you know, throwing ice water on him, they offer him a cigarette or an orange or a date or, you know, paper to write to his pants. or whatever. And over the course of time, and usually it's only a few weeks, the subject will open up and provide information. See, and this is the postscript to the Abbasubeda capture story. Abba Zabeta was sent to the secret site. And because, I'm going to say it for the third time, because 9-11 was an open criminal investigation, primacy was given to the FBI. That drove the CIA crazy.

We wanted primacy. This was our, operation. But the FBI, specifically an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufhan, began to interrogate Abu Zabeda. And what he did is we waited until he was recovered from the gunshots. And Ali sat across a table from him and talked. And like I say, he'd offer him a cigarette, offer him an apple or a cup of tea or something. And over the course of weeks, Abiza Beta began to speak. Now, Abbas Beda told us two things that were absolutely critically important. Number one, we didn't have any idea what the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. No idea.

We knew bin Laden was the boss, and Zawahidi was the underboss, for lack of a better term. And that was it. We didn't know anything else. We knew that there's al-Qaeda, you know, in Rome, there's al-Qaeda in Jakarta, al-Qaeda in Mexico City. we didn't know who or how or how they reported back to bin Laden. We didn't know anything. So Ali said, and I'm just going to use this as an example,

if you're going to do an attack in Dusseldorf, how would you do that? And Abu Zabedah said, well, I know this guy, Muhammad, and here's his phone number. He's in Dusseldorf, and Muhammad's got a friend, Abdullah, and here's Abdullah's phone number. Abdullah has access to weapons. And I was talking to Abdullah one time, and he told me about this guy, Roshid, and here's Roshid's number. And Roshid knows explosives.

He can build bombs. So we can call the Germans and say, hey, you have a problem in Dusseldorf, and here are the guys you need to raid. And then they raid the apartments, and they grab these guys. So we didn't know any of that stuff until Abu Zabedah started telling Ali Sufan.

Wow. The other thing that Abu Zabedah told us about, And this was one of the most important things that we learned through the course of the so-called War on Terror. We knew that there was a very bad guy out there who went by the Nom Degere Mukhtar, right? We knew this was a bad, bad guy who in 1996 had conceptualized this operation called the Bojinka plan. Have you ever heard of Bojinka? No. So this was a plan to hijack 14 747s leaving from Manila airport and fly all 14 of them into buildings up and down the west coast of the United States.

It was accidentally broken up by the Philippine police. And all we knew was that the mastermind was this guy, Mukhtar, and he had escaped. So we knew, this was like a, this was a teaching point at the CIA. Like, we really lucked out with this one. Because we didn't know anything about it, but the Filipino police stumbled on it. The guy got away, but here's the plan. We know that Al-Qaeda is going to use error liners as weapons, right? So we knew that in 1996.

They wanted to use planes as weapons. but we didn't know who Muhtar was. So Ali's like, you keep talking about this Muhtar. Who is he? And Abbas Veda smiles and he said, you don't know Muhtar? And he said, well, we know that there is a guy, Muhtar, and that he's a bad guy.

He's the operational leader of Al-Qaeda. And he said, sure, who is he? He goes, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We never heard that name before. We didn't have any idea. who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. But you know what? Two months later,

he's in custody. And what we did when we, when we captured him, we captured him in an Al-Qaeda safe house in Raul Pindi. We walked him past Abu Zabedah's cell so that they could see each other. And Abu Zabeda immediately burst into tears.

Why did he burst into tears? Because he was a true believer. And it was his information that allowed us to capture Khalidji, chick Muhammad. Wow. He ratted him out. Wow.

That's so fucking wild. So fucking wild. After you went to, after you, let's go back, or let's jump forward in time. When you originally went on, what was it, ABC, and you spoke out against the torture program. What was like the sequence of events to you getting from going from there to being actually prosecuted and getting sent to prison? Right.

So, you know, I wish I could say that my intention that day was purely patriotic. It actually wasn't. I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. and he said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zabeda. I said, that was absolutely untrue. I said, I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zabeda. I've never laid a hand on Abu Zabeda or on any other prisoner. I said, your source is either mistaken or he's a liar.

Well, he says, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself, which I had never spoken to a journalist before. I didn't know that was an old reporter's trick. Oh, he was just lying. He said that that's what he had heard. So he did have a real source? Yeah. So I said, I'll think about it.

Well, a couple of days later, the president's giving a press conference. And one of the reporters asked him about torture. What about these reports that the CIA is torturing people? And he looks in the camera and he says, we do not torture like that. Is this Bush? Bush.

I was sitting on the couch watching this with my wife, and I looked at her, and I said, he is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people in the eye, and he's lying to us. A couple of days after that, it's a Friday, and he's walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David, and a reporter shouts a question. about torture again. And he stops and he turns and he says, well, if there is torture,

it's a rogue CIA officer. And I looked at my wife and I said, they're going to try to pin this on me because they were mad that I was the only one who spoke out. They're going to pin this on me. Oh, this is after you went on ABC, he said this. No, this is before. Two days before.

Oh, okay. So the guy from ABC called you, the journalist called you, said this, And then you saw the president that was on TV. So I realized Brian Ross was telling me the truth that he did have a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubeda because that was the plan.

They were going to say, look, everybody knows that we're torturing prisoners. Let's pin it on this asshole. He's the one who would never shut up about it. So I said to my wife, You were the humanitarian. I was the human rights guy. Oh, my God.

So I called Brian Ross. I said, I'll give you your interview. And I decided in the day, leading up to that interview that whatever he asked me, I was going to tell the truth. And so I said three things in that interview that just completely changed the course of the rest of my life. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official U.S. government policy. It was not the result of a rogue. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. The president's a liar. And so, as you can imagine,

Within 24 hours, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me with the Justice Department saying that I had revealed classified information. My attorney, I hired an attorney, of course, and my attorney said, you can't. You had him on speed dial a second you walked out of that studio. You can't classify a crime. So. You can't classify a crime. Yeah.

They said, he released classified information. Torture's illegal. So by virtue of its illegality, it's unclassified. Yeah, but is it illegal if it's not in our country? How do you define if it's illegal if it's in a black site? No, the law is crystal clear. It can't be done by an American or any person acting on behalf of an American. That's what the law says.

Okay. Yeah. So the FBI investigated me for a year from December of 2007 until December of 2008. And in December of 2008, they sent my lawyer a letter called a, a declination letter saying that they were declining to prosecute me. And then one of the FBI agents said, this was the worst kept secret in Washington. Everybody knew the CIA was torturing its prisoners.

Like, everybody at the FBI talked about it. And when they started torturing Abu Zubeda, every FBI officer at the secret site left the country. They didn't even want to be in the same country while it was happening. That's how wrong they knew it was. So they dropped the charges. My wife and I went out to dinner that night to celebrate. Three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president.

And John Brennan becomes, well, first he was named CIA director, but then they withdrew the nomination. He became the Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism. Well, John and I have always hated each other. And he was one of the founders of the torture program. So Barack Obama becomes president January the 20th, 2000. 2009, John Brennan asks the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And they investigated me for three more years until January of 2012. I had no idea that my phones were tapped.

I had no idea that my emails were being intercepted. I had no idea that it was being followed by teams of FBI agents. And then on January 12th, 2012, I was arrested. charged with three counts of espionage, one count of violating the, what was it called, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, and one count of making a false statement. We were never clear on what the false statement was supposed to have been. In the end, I hadn't committed espionage, just like Tom Drake hadn't committed espionage, and Ed Snowden hasn't committed espionage, and Julian Assange hasn't committed.

at espionage. So in my case, they dropped all three of those charges. I took a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and they dropped the false statements charge. So I had been facing 45 years in prison, and I ended up getting 23 months. Wow. And I'll tell you, I turned down the 23 months. They made their best and final offer, right? 30 months, you do 23. My wife and I stayed up literally all night talking about what we should do. And I'm like, I'm innocent. I can't take a plea to something that I didn't do. And I had this idea that, you know, once I get in front of a jury, they're going to realize how ridiculous this is. They're going to realize that I was targeted because of my position on human rights. And so I emailed my lawyers. It was six o'clock in the morning,

and I said, we've been up all night. We decided I'm going to turn down the best and final. One of the attorneys calls me back immediately. He says, put on a point. And he says, put on a pot of coffee, we're on our way over. So I had 11 lawyers. So three of them come. And I mean, these are like A-list nationally known the greatest criminal defense attorneys in Washington, $1,000 an hour 10 years ago. So they get to the house. And they each had sort of different roles.

One was sort of the day-to-day guy. One was this southern gentleman in the $2,000 suit who was not. nice to everybody. And then one was just an ass kicker, right? And I liked and trusted him the most. So they're saying, look, John, you're making a big mistake here. And I said, I'm innocent. Well, be that as it may, you know, you really should think about this deal. And then the ass kicker pulls me aside. He gets right in my face and he says, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice. And it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the fucking deal.

And I thought, see, he knows better than I do. I can't win. My best friend's wife, it's linear. My best friend's wife has an uncle who was O.J. Simpson's jury consultant. And it wasn't just O.J. He did

Michael Patrick Smith, Patrick Michael Smith, whatever his name was, the Kennedy kid that got charged with rape. He did George Zimmerman. He does all these big, big cases. So because he's the uncle of my best friend's wife, he agreed to help me for free. So we get him top secret security clearance from justice.

He comes up, he reads all 15,000 pages of classified documents in my case we had this big meeting. I couldn't even meet with my attorneys at their office. We had to meet at the Justice Department's conference room because it was classified. Wow. Yeah, awful. So he said to me, look,

if we were in any other district in America, I'd say, let's go for it. We're going to win. But the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court, your jury is going to be made up of people from the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI,

the Department of Homeland Security and a dozen different intelligence contractors. You don't have a prayer. Take the deal. So I took the deal? Mm-hmm. I said to the lead attorney afterwards, if I hadn't taken the deal,

realistically, what was I looking at? And he said 12 to 18 years. Wow. Yeah. Fuck, man. It's a joke that everybody in prison is innocent. one of the things that I learned is there are a lot of innocent people in prison. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. A lot. Yeah, that's one of the big things about, I've had a couple lawyers on here. Or one, in fact, a friend of mine who's a lawyer who represents a lot of people that go on death row. And he said one of the biggest issues, the biggest problems with death row, regardless of what your moral stance is on it, is that they get it wrong a lot. A lot. Yes. it's been proven.

Yeah. Like how many hundreds of people have been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. Right. It's fucking unbelievable how often it happens. This lead attorney

that I told you about the mean one, he's so rich and has been an attorney for so long that he doesn't anymore take like new cases. He has people working for him that do that.

What he does is he only does death penalty appeals. That's it. Really? Uh-huh. Because he said he wants to, you know, public service and give back and all this stuff. He's done 13 death penalty appeals, and he's won all 13 of them.

You should see his office. What's his name? Mark McDougal. Mark McDougal. Guy's a giant. You go into his office. Sounds like a really good attorney. Yeah, really, really great attorney.

At Aiken Gump and Strauss, one of the most important law firms in the world. Wow. You go into his office, and it's like a museum of awards from every civil liberties organization in America, you know, from the NDACP to the Brennan Center for Justice. That's incredible. For all these appeals that he's won. The guy's a genius. What was it like being a guy like yourself who's been overseas, seen all this stuff,

been in these gunfights, captured terrorists, and then going into prison? Like, what was that like for you in the beginning and then how did you adapt? It was so shocking. I actually wrote a book about it that won two literary awards. I wrote, doing time like a spy, how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison. At sentencing, my attorneys asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp. Minimum security, there are no bars on the windows. They don't lock the door.

You're free to come and go as you please. You're on your honor not to abscond. Most everybody works in town. There's a little college in town. And so the prosecution had no objection. objection. So she, you know, orders that I go to minimum security work camp. And the funny thing is, too, you know, you see on on law and order, for example, when somebody's guilty, right there in the courtroom, they take them away and cuffs and, yeah. That's not how they do. I mean, they, if you're a really bad guy, they do. But what they do is they say, okay, on, you're going to get a letter from the Bureau of Prisons, and the letter's going to tell you the day and the day and the time that you have to turn yourself in. So they sent me a letter and they said,

come to the prison on February 28th, no later than 11 a.m. and turn yourself in. So I get in the car with two of my attorneys, my cousin, his son, and a documentary film crew. And we drive up to the prison. And it's weird, you just knock on the door.

And you're like, hi, I'm John Kiriaku. I'm here to turn myself in. And the guy's like, I went to the camp. And the guy's like, you got to go across, the street to the prison, they process you there, and then they walk you back over here. I said, okay. So I go across the street to the actual prison. It's got to be so hard.

You're in shock. So it's like your brain won't even really process it. You're doing it, but you're not processing it. You're not thinking about it. Maybe we should go get some McDonald's first. We did that. Did you? Yeah.

I said, let's go to McDonald's. That's so funny. That's what I just randomly thought of. Yeah. We all went to McDonald's. And so I go to the prison across the street. Camps are always across the street from a higher security prison or a penitentiary. So when there's a riot, the guys at the camp can go across to the prison and do the cooking and the laundry and the, you know, mopping while everybody's on lockdown.

Right. So I go across the street to the prison. I said, I'm John Kiriaku here to turn myself in. The guy's like, okay, just walk through the metal detector. And I walk through the metal detector. And then he said, okay, let's go. We walk out. And instead of going across street to the camp,

he starts leading me around to the back of the prison. And I said, no, no, I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street. And he goes, ha, not according to my paperwork, you're not. And I said, what do you mean? He said, you're going to prison, my friend. Like with the guard towers and the razor wire? Yeah. the double fences and the razor wire.

And I told myself, take it easy. There's nothing you can do. If you raise a stink, they're going to put you in solitary. So I didn't say anything. So he takes me to this processing area. And they give you a uniform and a sheet and a pillow and a roll of toilet paper and a bath towel, right?

This little stack of stuff. And they take your picture for a badge and the guy just says, follow me. I'm sitting there for 40 minutes. Finally, the guy just says, follow me. And he takes me to a cell. And he says, that bunks yours. And then as he's walking out, he turns around.

He says, by the way, if anybody walks into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression. And he walks away. I'm like, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I've been here 40 minutes now I'm going to get my ass kicked. Right? So I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, you have lived in far worse places than Loretto, Pennsylvania.

Right? Like, there's nobody in this prison more dangerous than the people I've been working with. And I'm including my former colleagues in that. So I thought, you're trained for this. You can handle this. just do what the CIA trained you to do. Sure enough, two guys walk in. Just walk in.

And I jumped up out of my seat and I put my fist up and I go, what the fuck do you want? Right? I'm trying to be as tough as I can. One of them says, take it easy. Now, the one had this enormous swastika tattooed on his neck. It took up the entire front of his neck. Right?

Wow. And the other one had, fuck you. tattooed on his eyelids. So every time he blinked, it said, fuck you. So I'm standing there with my fists up. He goes, are you the new, are you the new guy? And I go, yeah. And he goes, are you a fag?

And I go, no. He goes, are you a rat? And I said, no, I'm not a rat. I didn't have anybody else in my case. And he goes, are you a chomo? I go, I don't know what that word means. He goes, chomo, child molest. I go, no, I'm not a fucking child molester.

And he goes, okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I go, oh, okay, thanks. And I'm thinking, okay, so I'm with the Aryans now. Great. So they walk out. Not too long after, this black guy walks in. And I mean, this guy was just 200 pounds of knotted, rippling muscle, right? and he's holding a newspaper.

So he walks in and he's huge. He walks in and I jump up again. I go, what do you want? And he goes, take it easy. And very gently he hands me the paper. And it's the Nation of Islam newspaper. And, you know, in prison, the Nation of Islam isn't a religion so much as it's a gang, right?

There's an article about me on the front of this newspaper. And Lewis Farrakhan, of all frigging people, calls me a hero of the Muslim people for standing up for Muslim human rights. So he says, I just wanted to tell you, you're not going to have any trouble with us. And I said, okay, appreciate it.

So he walks away. It turned out that four of my five cellmates were members of Mexican drug cartels, like all of them. Nortenos, Buracios, Mexican mafia. These were bad. Bad dudes. One of them says to me one day, are you educated?

And I said, yeah. He said, could you write my appeal? I said, I'm not a lawyer. He goes, yeah, but you said, you're educated. I said, yeah, sure, I'll write your appeal. How hard could it be? Half the lawyers I know are, you know, dopes anyway. Yeah.

So I wrote his appeal. He was totally guilty. He wasn't going to get out, but everybody writes an appeal. So he told all the other Mexicans that, that I wrote his appeal and that I didn't charge him anything. It never even occurred to me to charge him anything. The currency in prison is bags of mackerel, right? Macrole?

Yeah. Okay. Like one of these silver foil bags of mackerel. You see the tuna in the grocery store, like a bag of tuna. Yeah. Yeah, but mackerel costs $1 at the commissary. So everything is in, you buy things. I can't believe.

I'm surprised they actually have mackerel. Yeah, it's disgusting. smells just to high heaven. Yeah. But anyway, so the Mexicans left me alone. And then finally, and this sort of set the tone for the rest of my time in prison. My brother called me right before I left for prison. And he said, listen, you're going to, you're going to FCI Loretto.

I got to tell you, he goes, there's a guy there that you really need to stay away from. His name is... I'm not going to say his name. He's the boss of the Gambino family. Right? And, you know, the Gambino's, they're one of the five families. This guy was in on 18 murder charges. Right?

He's the one who replaced John Gotti. When Gotti was pinched. So he's like, stay away from him. He's a very bad, dangerous guy. Well, when I got there, I would see him walking around. around the yard. He was tiny. He was five foot four,

but surrounded by these gigantic bodyguards, like half a dozen of them. So I'm sitting in my cell one day. I'm reading the newspaper. And I see movement out of the corner of my eyes. So I turn and look, and it's one of the bodyguards. We used to call him stupid Tony

because his eyes were crossed. It's awful. So it's stupid Tony, and he goes, he goes, hey. Was he actually stupid? Yeah, he was really stupid. Yeah, yeah. Guy was going nowhere in life.

He goes, hey, the boss wants to see you. And I go, he wants to see me? And he goes, yeah, let's go. Like that. So I jump up thinking, shit. Like, I've avoided this guy for four months. And now he's summoning me. So we go all the way to the other side of the prison.

We go to his room, and it's full of guys. hangers on, wannabes. The guy, the boss, is sitting in a chair. There's another guy on his knees clipping the boss's toenails. Utterly disgusting. And then when he finishes, the boss gets up, brushes his teeth. There's a little sink there. He brushed his teeth and he spits and the spit goes all around the sink, right?

Or right behind him, there's a guy sleeping on the top bunk of the bed and he punches the bed and he goes, hey, get up, clean his shit up, he says. The guy says, you got it, boss. He jumps out of bed, cleans up all the spit. Well, I'm standing in the doorway this whole time. So I go, excuse me, did you want to see me? He goes, sit down.

So I go and sit down. And I'm like practically shaking him so nervous. And he goes, you the CIA guy? And I said, I am. you write a book? I said, I did. Your book do good. I said, actually, I did very well. I made number five on the New York Times bestsellers list. And he goes, you're going to write my book. And I said, oh, is that what this is? What do you have in mind? He goes, I'm going to tell you stories, and you're going to write my book. I said, okay, well, let's think about this for a minute. You know,

I said, most of the books of this genre are written by rats. And I said, they spend the first half of the book talking about all the cool things they did. And the second half of the book, they try to justify why they turned rat. And I said, you're definitely not a rat. And you probably shouldn't talk about the cool things you've done. And he looks at me and he nods and he goes, hadn't thought of that. Never mind. But from that day, I was invited to every Italian dinner.

They had a crooked guard on payroll. He would bring us pork loin and wine and wine for the marsala sauce and fresh mushrooms and tomatoes and all the pasta we needed from the kitchen. And I gained 30 pounds in prison. Holy shit. I gained 30 pounds in prison. And then we actually. They didn't touch afterwards. Is he still in there?

No, he's out. Which leads me to another story. I had been out for three years. And around 7.31 evening, my doorbell rings. And my youngest, I have five kids, but my youngest was little at the time. He was like four. Busy guy. Yeah, I can't keep my hands to my door.

So he runs the door. he opens the door before I can get there. And I hear this sugary sweet voice. And he goes, hi, is your daddy home? And I thought, you motherfuckers. So I go to the door and I said, may I help you? I was like actively rude. And it's not my nature to be rude. The guy goes, hi, Mr. Kiriaku. I'm Special Agent Smith with the FBI. And this is my colleague, Special Agent Jones. And I said, you guys have balls coming here. You know I'm represented by counsel. And he goes, oh, no, Mr. Kiriaku, it's not about your case. You see, it's about another issue.

We know that when you were at Loretto, you were friends with Peter the Rabbit. I said, so? Well, you know, Pete got out. He's home now. I said, yeah? Good for Pete. Well, Mr. Kiriaku, we have reason to believe that Pete's taken over leadership of the Gambino crime family. and I go, and you want me to rat out a five families boss.

Get off my property. And I closed the door. I called my attorney. He called me back 20 minutes later. And he's like, I don't know what they were thinking, but they're not going to bother you again. Jesus Christ, man. That's fucking terrifying.

Because even if you don't rat them out, these guys will probably use your name when they're trying to get this guy. Exactly. And that not only implicates you, implicate your whole family. He called me, oh, I'm going to say three, three, it is, it's exactly. The mob boss guy? Yeah, the mob boss. He called me three years ago, and he said, hey, he goes, Anthony's out.

Anthony was this guy. He was also a Gambino. Yeah. That we really liked. I liked Anthony. He was the last one of our group of friends to be released. And Anthony was also the last. was also the last one to be transferred to our prison from a maximum security penitentiary to a medium to a low.

So I was sitting at the baseball field out in the yard, sitting with him when he first arrived. And poor Anthony, I mean, he was dumb. He was nice, but dumb as a stone. And I said to him, so, Anthony, you mind if I ask you how much time you have? He goes, ah, I got 20. I go 20 years? And he goes, yeah, I got a long one. I said, oh, man, I'm sorry to hear that.

You mind if I ask you, what did you do? And he goes, my crime was organized in nature. I said, right, I got it. He goes, yeah, my victim found himself on fire. I said, right, yeah. 20 years. Jesus Christ. And he's out now.

He's out now. So is it part of like a conspiracy case or RICO case? Yeah. They were all, all of them in on RICO cases. All of them. Oh my God. Yeah. RICO's real. That's just crazy.

So Anthony got out and he and the boss called me and he's like, hey, we're all getting together in Atlantic City. All expenses paid. I said, cool. You went? I went. We had a great time. FBI is there with their cameras. click, click, click, click, click, click.

They're all giving them the finger and stuff. Really? Oh, my. It was ridiculous. And then, you know, I wanted to, like, I'd never been to Atlantic City before, even though it's two hours away from my house. I'd never been. And I've always heard just terrible things about it.

So I wanted to go out and explore a little bit. So we all pile into these cars, and they're like, now we're going to go, you got a GPS, put this address in your GPS. I said, okay, I put it in. We go. It's some run-down, beat-up house. said, what is this supposed to be? This is Anthony Scarfo's

house. He was the boss. Okay. So what the fuck are we doing here? We're going to pay respects. I said, you guys are like the most boring travel companions in the world. I want to go to casino. What were they going to do to pay respects? They're just sitting out there, ogling at it. That's so weird, man.

You know, I've had a couple, you know, people who went to prison under RICO charges, being involved with the Gambino crime family and different Italian, you know, mafia groups. And one thing that's consistent that they all say to me is that there's this culture of being like of anti-rat culture. Oh, yeah. And they're all rats. They're all rats. They're all rats.

All of them. It was crazy. I'll tell you another thing that was odd. It's all about honor and respect, right? So on the one hand We're all standing in one of their cells one day We had dinner, right? Everybody's sitting around with these giant bowls heaping bowls of pasta

And one of the low-level guys walks in And he's got like his arms are full of candy bars So he starts handing out these candy bars Hershey's bars and Snickers bars And the boss says, where the fuck did you get this? and he said, I broke into a chomo's locker and I took all of his shit. And the boss gets up, he goes,

you put all this shit back and you tell him you're sorry. And everybody stops and looks. And the guy goes, but he's a chomo. They're the lowest of the low. Right. He goes, if you're going to shake down to a chomo, you do it to his face. And you say, Chomo, open your locker and give me all your shit.

You don't do it behind his back. Right. Now give him all his shit back. And he did. So after you did 24 months in prison, what was it like getting out of prison? Oh, you know, getting out was much more stressful than anybody will tell you. Home confinement, house arrest, is far worse than prison. I'd rather have just stayed in prison.

Because with home confinement, you literally cannot leave the four walls of your house. If you step outside on the front stoop or on the back porch, you're violated, you go back to prison again. And so you go stir crazy. You can't do anything. And they've got these restrictions on you. They call you 24 hours a day to make sure that you're there. You haven't run off or you didn't go out, partying or whatever. Constant drug tests.

I'm like, you guys, I've never even smoked weed in my life. I'm happy to waste as much of your time in the government. government's money as possible. But this kind of pisses me off now. Isn't that so stupid that a lot of people who get arrested and go to prison for non-drug-related charges, they get drug tests. It's all about drug testing. Ridiculous. So it's far more stressful coming out of prison. See, you think you can step back into your life again and you can't. That's just not possible. It'll never be possible. Your life will never be the same. I'm never going to work for the government again. And, you know, I left the CIA, I went to the, I was the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, the highest profile, most prestigious committee on all of Capitol Hill. I'm never going to do work like that again. Never. So, so. Stripped you of your, of your retirement. Yeah, they took my pension. I'm going to have to work till the day I die. Unless I get a presidential pardon, which is unlikely. Now, are you still like being shackled down hard by these restrictions? No. In fact, I was supposed to have three. three years of restrictions after I got home, and they lifted them after two. Okay. Yeah.

Well, that's nice. They definitely don't make it easy when you get out to get back on your feet and get a job. Oh, no. In fact, I had an offer to be a senior fellow at a think tank in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies. It's the oldest progressive think tank in Washington. And they wanted me to do prison reform and sentencing reform issues. And the Bureau of Prisons denied me.

They denied me permission to take the job. And I said, listen, you guys are up my ass about getting a job. I finally get a good job and you tell me that I can't do it. They said, it would be inappropriate for you to comment on prison reform issues. And I said, you know what? Wow. I'm going to take the job. And if you violate me, I'll let you talk to the Washington Post about why you violated me.

And I took the job. And they backed off. No shit. I got into two incidents with them. One was on that job, and those people treated me like a king at the Institute for Policy Studies. The other thing was they make you take these classes, mandatory classes. If you don't take the class, you go back to prison. Okay, mandatory how to write a resume.

I know how to write a resume. How to balance a checkbook. Thank you. I know how to balance a checkbook. suicide prevention. I go, don't you think you should give that before you go to prison? Instead of when you get home. So it was all these stupid how to kick your drug and alcohol habit. I don't have a drug and alcohol habit. So I never signed up for any of these classes. I get a call from them one day. They said, karaoke, get in here immediately. So they wouldn't let me drive.

So I had to take, I had to walk to the metro, which was, you know, 20 minutes, then I'd take the metro to Capitol Hill, then I have to get on a bus, and then take the bus to Alabama Avenue, and then take another bus to the halfway house, and then walk three more blocks through the most dangerous block in the most dangerous neighborhood in Washington. Took me two hours to go seven and a half miles, right, as the crow flies. So I go there, and it's everybody, it's the head of the halfway house, the deputy director. the case manager, a representative from the Bureau of Prisons regional office in Baltimore, right? And they're all around this conference from table. And I go in, I sit down. And one of them says, Kariaku, we are this close to violating you. You're going to go right back to prison. I go, why? What did I do? He goes, you haven't taken a single one of the mandatory classes. And I'm so proud of my response. I still chuckle when I think about it. I go, in all seriousness,

I go, did you ever see that episode of The Simpsons where Homer has to take a parenting class? And he goes to the parenting class. He's a little bit late. So when he walks in, the instructor's saying, Put a garbage can lid on the garbage can, people. I can't stress that enough. Is that what you're going to teach me in your class? To put a garbage can lid on the garbage can?

Or how to write a resume? Or how to balance a checkbook? Because I don't need your classes. He goes, step outside. So I step outside. I'm out there for like 45 minutes. I go back in. He goes, all right, you don't have to take any of the classes.

And I said, thank you. And another thing, I want to drive. It took me two hours to get here today, seven and a half miles. I said, you guys are on my back all the time about getting a job. And then you make me come here three times a week. and it kills two hours getting here and two hours getting home and then you can't understand why I don't have a job. So I want my driver's license back and I want permission to drive. Okay, you can have permission to drive.

I said, thank you. And I left. Like, you morons. You know, it's one size fits all for these dopes. It's so dumb. We have the dumbest freaking criminal justice system. I think we have the most people in prison per capita. than any other country?

By far. We have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous. Now, are you doing a podcast now? Or you're doing it some sort of daily show? Yeah, I've got a daily radio show.

A radio show. Terrestrial show in Washington. It's every day from 12 to 2. Okay. And I've got three syndicated columns now, one for consortium news, one for, for covert action magazine and one for the sheer post at the University of Southern California. And then I started something that I'm really pleased with. It's a new social media platform called Panquake. And Panquake is unlike any other social media platform you've ever heard of. First of all,

it's utterly completely transparent. Even the code is transparent. So there are no algorithms, there's nothing that's going to steer you to one line of thought or to another or to follow this guy or to not follow that guy, utterly completely open. It is based in Iceland. So freedom of speech is of the utmost importance. And, you know, frankly, the FBI doesn't have any subpoena authority or seizure authority in Iceland. So that makes it nicer too. It's blockchain-based. And it's completely and totally financed by crowdfunding, small donations, five, 10, 50 bucks. They've repeatedly turned down major money investors, repeatedly, including one who's a household name. And so, yeah, it's something I'm proud to be.

Is it similar to Twitter or Instagram or Twitter? Yes. I'm smiling because we try not to say the word Twitter. Oh, okay. Just because there are big competition, the big gorilla, 800-pound gorilla. Yeah. But yeah, it's Twitter without the algorithms and with transparency. Okay.

Yeah. That sounds fascinating. It's panquake.com. Okay. Yeah. Didn't something happen recently with consortium news? What happened with them? Yeah.

So PayPal froze consortium. That's what it was. That's what it was. And not only did they freeze the account, they seized the $9,300 we had in the account, on payday, no less. They wouldn't tell us why. And so the executive editor, Joe Lauria, was able to get through to a human being at PayPal. He's like, why did you guys do this? Oh, you violated our terms of agreement.

He's like, what, what violation? Well, there was no violation. And they finally admitted that there was nobody. who complained. They just did this on their own. And finally, they admitted that we weren't anti-Russia enough in our editorials. You weren't anti-Russia enough. Can you imagine that? Who said this? PayPal. PayPal. Uh-huh. Yep. So we, um, all of us who write for, for consortium news, wrote about this and published in other outlets to try to spread the word as, as widely as we could.

And, you know, we've got, I'm on the board of consortium news. We've got people like Chris Hedges, who's a Pulitzer Prize winner. We have an Academy Award nominated documentary producer. We've got, like, legit people. These aren't nuts, lunatics, you know, who dabbled in QAnon. These are legitimate people respected in their fields. And so we put out the word that not only did they freeze the account, but they seized all of our money.

And we said, we're going to join this classic. action suit that's already been filed against PayPal in the Northern District of California. And as soon as we said that we were going to join the class action suit, they released all of our money back to us. Wow. But they told us that we're permanently banned from PayPal. That's so fucking bonkers, man. Yeah, it's crazy.

That's so bonkers. You weren't anti-Russian enough. Yeah. And, you know, one of the reasons why I love writing for Consortium News, I actually work for the Russians, My show is with the Sputnik network. But one of the things that I insisted when they offered me this job was language in my contract saying that I can talk about any issue that I want to talk about and I can criticize any person that I want to criticize, including Vladimir Putin. And on the day... That was your agreement with Sputnik?

With Sputnik. And for people who don't know, explain what Sputnik is. Sputnik is the Russian government's official radio network. Okay. So it's like Voice of America. for us. So on the day of the Russian invasion, the way I opened my show is I said, I unreservedly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I believe this is a violation of international law. It's a violation of human rights. And I urge the Russian military to withdraw immediately. That's how I opened the show. And I have guests on that criticize the Russians. I have guests on that criticize the Ukrainians. And when I write, including for consortium news, I say, I unreservedly oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I understand why they did it, right? Two different things.

You know, war is a bad thing, right? We should let the diplomats do their jobs and try to prevent war every time that we can. But I understand why the Russians felt they needed to cross the border. That doesn't mean I like it or agree with it. It's just that I understand it. Right. And they were like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. And Sputnik airs all this stuff, even if it goes against the government's narrative.

Yeah. Because everything that you hear anywhere is that that's not what it's like in Russia. Right. Everything in Russia is tailored to what the government wants you to hear. It's all propaganda. CNN did a story about my show a couple of weeks ago, and they said that I was weakening democracy. Can you imagine? You were weakening democracy in the United States?

Because I'm a former CIA officer. I should be standing up. for my country, not working for the Russians. And I said, yeah, I said to this Nick, whatever's name was, the reporter. I said, are you going to put food on my table? Are you going to put my kids through college? Where was CNN when I got out of prison and I needed a helping hand? So don't tell me about weakening democracy. Well, that's weird because CNN hires, I think, more ex-Penagon officials than any other company. They pay. The last four CIA officials are either at, or CIA directors, are at either CNN or MSNBC.

Right. Yeah. What do you think about that? About all these ex-Pennigon officials, CIA officials. Scandalous. Scandalous. Where's the separation? You know?

It's like CNN and MSNBC. And Fox, the same thing. They're all just adjuncts of the national security state. It's crazy. That's so wild. So fucking wild. Well, man, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is,

but that seems. bonkers that that's the world we live in. Yes, it's been a real learning lesson. And where, so where can people listen to your daily show again? Almost nowhere. We've been banned from YouTube, iTunes, Iheart Radio, Spreeker, Spotify, and tune in. What?

You've been banned from Spotify? I'm weakening democracy. How the frick did you get banned from every single one of these? platform. So the only way to listen to it now is at sputniknews.com. We went from 38,000 daily listeners to 500. No fucking way. That is totally fucking wild. 38,000 to 500.

Which is what they wanted to do. Oh my God. They don't want anybody who has an alternative viewpoint. Otherwise, democracy might get weakened. Because what are you saying? What are you saying to weaken democracy? What specifically are they pointing to? I can tell you.

Every Thursday, I have a 30-minute segment called Criminal Injustice. And I have a journalist who focuses on criminal justice issues and a guy who's the head of a group called the Human Rights Defense Center. They publish prison legal news and criminal legal news magazines. And so we talk every week for 30 minutes about crooked judges, crooked prosecutors, the death penalty. Cops getting arrested for, you know, raping prisoners and selling drugs and stuff like that. Wow. And I get it all out of the Washington Post of the New York Times. But that's weakening democracy.

Holy shit. Well, this episode's definitely going to get banned from YouTube. Oh, my God. You know, a funny thing, too, is everybody at the station on Twitter, they got this tag that says Russian, Russian-sponsored media, right? I have 50,000 Twitter followers, and I don't have a tag. I don't know why. Knock on wood.

I don't want one. I'm not Russian-sponsored media. Explain this tag. This tag is implemented by Twitter? Yeah. So Twitter put a flag on these accounts that says it's a Russian... Every single one of my colleagues I'm going to show you. Whoops.

Maybe he can pull it up on the TV on the screen. Sure. What's one of the colleagues' names? Lee Stranahan. Lee Stranahan on Twitter. Yeah, Lee Stranahan. Okay. I got to see this.

Yeah. Because I know that Russia, I know that Twitter implemented tags on posts that are created by automated bots. Right. I had this guy here the other day who he has a bot that posts. There is. Russian state affiliated media. So he didn't put that on there? No, sir.

Twitter did. About a week after the Russians invaded Ukraine. click on that. What does that go to? Oh, I didn't even know you could click on it. About government and state-affiliated media account labels on Twitter. Labels on state-affiliated accounts provide additional context about accounts that are controlled by certain officials representatives of governments. State-affiliated media entities and individuals associated with those entities. The label appears on the profile page of a relevant Twitter account.

Wow. Look, and they put the flag. These labels include a small icon of a flag to signal the account status. Oh, man. That's pretty fucking crazy. I never knew about this. Terrible. I never knew about this.

Go back to his profile again. Russian state affiliated media. With the Russian flag. Now, did he put... So he didn't put the fucking Russian flag next to his name? No, no. Twitter put the Russian flag. Because you know, one of the weird things about people on Twitter is, like, I always... become suspicious

of somebody on Twitter when they have the fucking American flag emoji next to their name. Right. Right wing. You think they're some sort of like either their right wing or they're just some sort of fucking antagonist on Twitter. Yes. Who's just trying to get attention. You know what I mean? Yes. Like a provocateur. Agreed.

Uh-huh. Agreed. That's fucking bananas. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't like... I didn't know that was a thing. I wonder what Elon will do about that if he gets Twitter. Yeah.

Good question. Good question. And that's another thing about Elon is he is, a lot of his businesses are relying on federal grants and federal money. A lot. He didn't become the world's richest man by accident. Right. The American government. Yeah, SpaceX launches all these government military satellites in space.

I know that Tesla is, is super reliant on federal funding. Yep. But nobody, I haven't heard anything about it. that. I mean, I don't, not that I don't think it would be a bad thing for Elon to buy Twitter, but it's just an interesting. I hope he cleans the place up. I really do. Wow. John, thank you again. Where can people follow you again? Where can people find your books? The books are all on Amazon. Okay. I'm at John Kariaku.com, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U, just the way it sounds. Twitter, Facebook, all the usual places. Awesome. Well, thank you again for spending your time

coming down here. I very much appreciate it. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.