Danny Jones Podcast - #180 - CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and whistleblower on the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program. Today, Kiriakou is an author and co-host of Political Misfits on Sputnik Radio. EPISODE LINKS https://twitter.com/JohnKiriakou http://johnkiriakou.substack.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 0:00 - Andy Warhol 2:30 - Twitter Files 12:14 - Iraq war 15:12 - Paranoia & surveillance 26:28 - Julian Assange 29:05 - Hamilton 68 44:41 - Ukraine 54:08 - China 1:11:30 - Iran 1:18:56 - Sociopaths make perfect spies 1:27:10 - Do CIA officers kill? 1:29:46 - Mentality of Israel / Mossad 1:40:22 - Jeffrey E. 1:53:04 - America’s forgotten cemeteries 2:17:19 - Jeffrey E. (Part 2) 2:20:19 - Directed energy weapons 2:28:33 - UFO’s 2:35:42 - Cuba 02:50:07 - Globalism VS Nationalism 2:52:19 - Trump Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John was watching a bunch of your videos last night from you linked to on your substack that you do every day on the Sputnik radio station. And you were mentioning something about how you met Andy Warhol. Oh, yeah. I was like, what? This guy was hanging out with Warhol? No, I wish I could say I was. I was in college. I was a senior in college.

And I was just, I mean, since I was a little kid, I just loved Andy Warhol's work. And he was from Pittsburgh. And I was from the town just north of Pittsburgh. So he was a local hero on top of it. And then I happened to find myself with four days in New York and nothing to do. So I thought, I'm going to find Andy Warhol. I mean, now everybody knows where Andy Warhol's house was. It's got a historical marker on it.

Right. But I didn't know then. I knew where the factory was. What was he like? Just like you might think. Very, very quiet, very meek. Yeah. But friendly enough, I got his autograph.

That's amazing. Yeah. I had no idea that that documentary they made about him was used with a complete AI voiceover. It bothered me very much. They just manufactured his voice. So he's like narrating his own documentary 35 years after his death. It's weird. That is so hard for me to wrap my head around. Like even the morals behind that.

You know, it was kind of, it was kind of interesting when, when this. technology first appeared because then you can have like Tupac Shakur being a hologram and making an appearance at a concert that's kind of kind of kitchy cool

but this is just not right where you're presenting it as you know a legitimate as a legitimate you're presenting the person as a legitimate participant in a documentary or a show, and it's just not.

Right. It's not true. And especially after somebody's been dead for so long, like, the fact that you could die and they can basically rewrite your legacy however they see fit. Exactly. That's terrifying. It really is. It's awful.

Awful. I'm very uncomfortable with it. So we just got done watching that clip of Matt Taibi getting grilled by that guy on MSNBC. What can you explain, when did you first hear? about these Twitter files coming out and how did how did your your relationship with Matt

evolve and how did you guys communicate throughout his work on the Twitter files? Right. Matt and I have been friends for I'm going to say seven or eight years now. When he was

at Rolling Stone, if he was working on a story that involved the intelligence community and he needed clarification on a point, he would send me an email and say, does this sound right to you? Does this sound crazy to you? You know, and I'd say, oh, yeah, you know, sounds right or no, that's not the way it's done or no, that sounds like the FBI or whatever. And then with the advent of Twitter back in whatever it was, 2009 or 2010, we both got on Twitter. He was working for Rolling Stone at the time. And I'll tell you, when I was in prison, people used to like anticipate the arrival of Rolling Stone just to see, what Taibi was working on that month. Really? Yeah.

That's how popular he was. You know, because he, Matt, this isn't new. What we saw, what we saw on MSNBC is not, is not a new component of Matt's personality. He's extraordinarily bright. He's a crazy hard worker. And when he finally publishes something, he's confident that he got it right. If he didn't get it right, he'll say, I didn't get it right, or I missed one of these details. Right.

But if you're going to take him on, you know, he's not going to suffer fools and he's not going to, he's not going to consider rhetoric as, as a defense. So anyway, we, we stayed in contact usually through Twitter. He would DM me. I would DM him. And then, and then he called me one day to say, listen, Elon Musk wants me to do this to go through all the files. Now, I mentioned to you when we were watching the clip that Matthew Hassan got something wrong, like wrong, wrong. Yeah, what was that? What was, what that was, was, it's a very complicated and inefficient way in which Elon Musk has given the three journalists that he chose, Mike Schellenberg, Matt, and I forget the woman's name, access to the so-called Twitter files. what they did is they took a snapshot of everything that had ever been exchanged in emails in the corporate headquarters from the day that the company was founded until the day that

Elon Musk bought it and they made this database it standalone they made it searchable and then that was it so it's not like oh my gosh these these emails that I'm pouring through reveal X. What it is is like he has to say, I wonder what Twitter said about Hunter Biden. Right. And he has to go in and type in Hunter Biden. And then a thousand emails will pop up.

And then he goes through them one by one. And then Schellenberger has to say, I wonder what they did about, let's say, the FBI. And so he's like, you almost have to have a premonition that there's something in that database that is newsworthy. So when I last talked to him, and I'm going to say this is about two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, he said that they had only gone through 10% of the documents that are in this database. He said there's so much more that we don't know about.

He said there's so much more that I don't know about because you can't just like open up the files and start going through them. It's too much. It's just too much. So it's almost like you have to go in there with some sort of an idea of what you're looking for. Exactly. And most likely you're going to find it. You're going to find what you're looking for. Exactly.

Such an enormous database. But you have to have an idea first. It seemed like the overarching thing that this guy was missing that was just grilling Matt on there was that he was trying to nitpick the details, but he was avoiding the overarching theme that like intelligence is deeply embedded in these social media companies. Everywhere. See, this is the thing. I like Mahdi Hassan. He's a nice guy. I've been on a show half a dozen times. Nice guy. Mejty Hassan from MSNBC. Nice guy. But, you know, there's a reason why people call that network MSDNC, right? Because they're like the official mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. Should it matter, for example, if Jim Jordan is the chairman of that committee? It shouldn't matter. Why is the, for example, you know, I spent two and a half years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Why should it be okay? if John Kerry is chairing it, but not okay if Dick Lugar's chairing it.

That doesn't make any sense. Either you have respect for the institution or you don't have respect for the institution. You can't just have respect for the institution when the party that you happen to like is chairing it. Right. And then the committee is crazy when the party that you don't like is not chairing it. Right. Don't you think it's kind of a problem, though, when Elon is handing him all the stuff? Like Elon is literally like saying, hey, I'm just going to spend $44 billion on Twitter, hand you all the documents.

It's going like, again, like they, I kind of have a hard time watching when he was showing, you know, Matt quoting, Matt being quoted on Joe Rogan's show saying when they start handing you stuff, you've lost. And then he basically made the point like Elon's handing you everything here. Right. But I think that in the Joe Rogan interview, what he meant was when it's the CIA handing you, the information. Right. but it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? It could be construed as the same thing. Yeah.

Now, the difference is that Elon isn't handing him a file and saying, here's a story. He's giving him access to literally everything and is not editorializing. He's not saying, this is where I want the story to go. Or I want you to focus on Hunter Biden. Or I want you to focus on, you know, XYZ. He's not doing any of that. The Joe Rogan interview was done just after the news was made public that Kandelanian from NBC and MSNBC, the chief intelligence correspondent, was caught thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by Jason Leopold,

then of BuzzFeed, now of Bloomberg. He was caught sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor, saying, does this look okay to you guys? Is this okay to publish? It's like, dude, do you work for the CIA? Or do you work for NBC? Which one? Because it can't be both.

And if you're going to be a CIA mouthpiece, then be honest about it. You know, we saw in that same tranche of Freedom of Information Act documents, emails from the CIA to reporters saying, you better not publish that story. if you do, we'll never cooperate with you again and you won't be invited to the Christmas party. I mean, what is that? That's censorship. I had a guy on here, a friend of mine, Jack Murphy.

He has a podcast called The Team House Podcast, and he was working on this really big article. He spent, I think, over a year on it. Wow. Where he was reporting. I guess he has a lot of former CIA sources that he works with and a lot of Army intelligence people that he works with.

And the gist of the story was he had evidence that the CIA was working through a NATO partner to conduct sabotage inside Russia. I remember that story. You remember that? Yeah. And there was like there was munitions, warehouses that were catching on fire, you know, railroad explosions, all kinds of crazy things going on. And he was when he was working on the story, I guess he was working through one of the top two or three publications in the U.S.

And he was going through the editor. They were like getting ready to press the button to publish it. And they go, hold on. We have to have a conference call with the day. deputy director of the CIA. Uh-huh. That's exactly how it works. And if they were really serious about it, the phone call would be with the national security advisor. Uh-huh. That like makes my heartbeat, I've gone through that half a dozen times. And once they had that phone call, the deputy director basically said this is absolutely 100% incorrect. He goes, in fact, these are rogue Ukrainians doing

this stuff. Okay. Then put a disclaimer in the article. Exactly. And but, but it's, But he has an off-the-record agreement or something with this publication. So the editor refused to do that. And then the editor went ahead and said, okay, we have to make this article jive with everything the deputy director said. So he pulled it. He says, no, I'm not doing that. So he published.

He self-published it. See, and that's exactly why Syherst can't get published in the United States anymore. He only publishes in the London Review of Books. That's so crazy. I mean, the, I understand, like the, like I said before, I understand the necessity for the CIA to keep covert ops off the front page of the newspaper. Sure. Right?

That makes sense. I understand that. But when you're literally like destroying the integrity of journalism in the country and this at the same time, where does that go? Like that seems like a big problem that a lot of people don't know about. And then when it comes and then when it, when that extends to these social media platforms, it gets really fucking terrifying. Yeah, I'll tell you a story. when we were gearing up for war against the Iraqis. This was in late 2002, very early 2003.

We were trying to put together whatever they called it, the coalition of the willing or whatever stupid moniker they came up with. And the Israelis came to us, and they said, we went in on this war. And we said, absolutely not. If you jump in, we lose the Jordanians, we lose the Egyptians, we lose the Saudis. We even lose overflight clearance from the, from the Syrians.

Absolutely not. And then like a week later, all these communications towers in the Western Iraqi Desert just started tipping over, right? They're all on three legs. They were, you know, between 500 feet and 1,000 feet. These are major towers like broadcast towers. Three legs. And then somebody was putting explosives on one of the legs. on all of them.

So all over the western Iraqi desert, these towers just started tipping over. Well, somebody told the New York Times, it's an Israeli sabotage team. The Israelis are doing this. And the New York Times came to us and said, what's going on? You're working with the Israelis on this?

And we said, we're not working with the Israelis, and we don't have any idea. It's probably the Iraqis blown up their own towers so that they can blame us. But what do you say? right when you were with the CIA did you have any kind of any kind of communication with these major publications never never never in fact one time uh in 2002 i got a call at home late like 10 and a guy said he was he gave me his name and he said that he was a friend of my wife of my wife's and um and that he was with the boston

globe and i hung up on him and the next day i was there's a database to report contact with the media. So I went in to the database. I said, this is the guy's name. He said that he was a friend of my wife's, and my wife said she'd never heard of the name before, and he said he was a reporter from the Boston Globe. So the Office of Public Affairs called this guy and said,

cut it out. And he's like, sorry, I had to give it a try. Whoa. But I was undercover at the time. I don't have any idea how he knew who I was. So who was he? He was some junior young reporter from the Globe, the Boston Globe. Interesting.

Yeah. And he's like, hey, were you in Afghanistan? I'm like, who is this? I think we met in Jalalabad, and I hung up on him. Yeah. That's creepy when that shit happens on. Not good. Because was it a guy from the Boston Globe?

Was it some Al-Qaeda guy? I mean, I didn't know. I mean, no matter who it was, I wasn't supposed to talk to them anyway. But you have to be careful about stuff like that. that do you think you're I mean obviously I know the answer to this but how do you think your life in the CIA and then not even not even counting what happened to you after how they destroyed your life but like everything that you've been through everything that you've seen all the experiences the crazy I came and begin to imagine some of the shit you've seen how has that sort of like affected your outlook on the world and like are you always just like looking over your shoulder are you paranoid oh man that is such a good question you know nobody's ever asked me that question really yeah funny that is a really good question um it's kind of a complicated answer um

listen there's a there's a something i think about all the time there's a psychiatrist in bethsda maryland whose entire practice is just to treat fucked up former CIA people who lost their minds overseas. Right? That's her entire practice. And when I got home from Pakistan, you know, every time you come home from a combat tour, you have to go through psychological testing at the agency. And they were like, yeah, you're good. I said, yeah, I feel fine.

This is after the Abu Zabedah capture? After Abu Zabedah. After the massacre in the church next door to the embassy, seven Americans were killed. 14 people were killed. Seven were Americans. Two were colleagues of mine. And I've got, I'll show you later some pictures on my phone, you know, of a human head laying on the ground when we first arrived for, you know, for rescue. But I didn't have any PTSD at all.

With that said, even after all these years, I left the CIA 20 years ago. I'm still very paranoid about surveillance. And I've actually spotted surveillance a number of times. And I've reported it to my attorneys. And it always turns out to be the FBI. Really? Uh-huh. Like, how are they surveilling you?

They were just curious to see what you're up to. I'm like, fuck them. I'm a private citizen. They would respond to your attorney saying that? Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, a number of times. How do they surveil you?

Oh, what's their tactics do they use? They're good. The style of surveillance is called, oh, what's the first word? Discrete to lose. Discrete to lose means they're so far back that they risk losing me, but they're so far back

because they don't want me to spot them. Right. But I'm constantly looking in my rearview mirror and side view mirrors. And if I see a car, or in the case of the FBI, because they thought they were so smart, a pickup truck with a snowplow on the front. Like, who's not going to notice that?

Right? Then I jot myself a little note. And then if I see that same car, an hour later, 15 miles away, I'm pretty confident I'm under surveillance. If I see him a third time, I'm calling my attorney. And that's what I would do. You know, one time in Pakistan, I don't know if I told you this last time I was here,

but I was very, very good about surveillance. I actually became a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA after Pakistan. And when I first arrived in Pakistan, a colleague picked me up at the airport and he said, oh, we put you in the Marriott. And I said, the Marriott, are you out of your minds? If they're going to blow up one place, what's it going to be? It's going to be the Marriott. I said, I'm not staying in the Marriott.

So I stayed there the first night. and then they moved me into this little 16-room guest house owned by a Pakistani family. Six weeks later, they blew up the Marriott and killed 156 people. So I was in this little, yeah, with the truck bomb made a crater so deep that water was seeping in from the water table.

That's how big this bomb was. I'm like, you see? What did I tell you? So anyway, every day I would leave at a different time and take a different route to work. and every night when I was done, and the days were very, very long, it wasn't unusual to work an 18-hour day.

I would leave and take a different route back to the guest house. So it's not to set a pattern. As soon as you set a pattern, that's when they kill you. Because they know that at 605, he's going to cross right through this intersection, and that's when we fire the grenade at him. Right.

That's how people get killed. Right. So I left one day, and I noticed a guy on a motorcycle with a red helmet trying really hard to stay in my blind spot. Now, the only reason I even noticed him at first was because he had a helmet. And I had never seen anybody with a motorcycle helmet in Pakistan. I don't even know where you would buy a motorcycle helmet in Pakistan, right?

But I noticed him, and it was red. And I thought, okay, noted. So I got to this neighborhood called the diplomatic quarter where most of the embassies were. And he broke off. So I wrote myself a note when I got to my desk. I left that night. I worked 14, 15 hours, whatever it was. It was dark when I arrived, and it was dark when I left.

And as soon as I pulled out of the DQ, the diplomatic quarter, there he is again. I don't know how to respond to that. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, your watch. As soon as I pulled out of the diplomatic quarter, there he was again. And I thought, oh, that's not good. right there's a definition of surveillance it's it's multiple sightings at time and distance so you see him at multiple times at different places and at different points in your trip right so i took this

weird circuitous nonsensical route back to the guest house and several blocks away he dropped off again i was really nervous and that night um i got everything ready and advance for the next day and I got up at five o'clock in the morning and I went to the front door the guest house I opened it just a crack I looked up and down the street and I didn't see anything went out to my car and they give us these these retractable sticks with cameras on the bottom I'm sorry with mirrors on the bottom oh you know so I look underneath the car we all we all had them good God I didn't see any like bomb or surveillance device or tracker or anything thing. So I got in the car and started driving and son of a gun, there he is again. So I got to the embassy

and I was waiting for the security officer to come. He finally showed up around seven. And I said, listen, I'm under surveillance. I'm positive that I'm under surveillance. And he's like, well, how are you so sure? So I said, you know, three sightings over two days. And I told him everything. He's like, ooh, yeah, okay, that's surveillance. We have to wait for the chief to come in. Chief came in around 8, 815, went to his office. And I told him, I'm under surveillance, I'm positive. And I told him the story.

And he's like, well, you know what you have to do. And I said, I know. And he says, don't worry. We're going to have a team out there. We'll have guys all around you. and then he said, you never had to do that before, did you? And I said, no, never. He said, yeah, it's going to be okay.

We're going to have a whole group of guys out there. So I worked in this branch. I was the head of this branch that was staffed mostly with contractors. They were very, very senior CIA officers. One was former deputy director of the CIA who after 9-11 had volunteered to come back as contractors. So it was me and like these seven. old men in their 70s and one was in his 80s. He had been the chief. In his 80s? He was the chief for the Bay of Pigs operation, if you can imagine. He's long dead now.

Okay, okay, I'm not thinking of the same guy. Okay, okay. I'm thinking of, I was thinking of Felix. No, no. Felix Rodriguez worked for him. Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, he was an old man back in 2002. So, uh, all day long, they're like slapping me on the back. like, don't worry, buddy, we're all going to be out there. Don't worry. Everybody goes through this. I said, I'm very worried to tell you the truth. I'm very worried about this.

Well, around 2 o'clock, I had a meeting at a safe house that we shared with the host service. We used to interrogate prisoners there. And so I went, we had this fresh prisoner, so I went to question him. And I finished. and on the way out, my normal contact was this one-star general, the Pakistani general. So I'm walking out and he goes, are you okay? Because I was distracted to say the least. And I don't know what possessed me to say it, but I said, General, are you following me?

And he said, no, why? And I said, because I'm under surveillance, I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance. and when I see the guy again this afternoon, I'm going to kill him. And he said, no, it's not us. And I never saw him again. I never saw the surveillance again. We learned later that they were all sitting around one day. And one of them said, that John Kiriaku from the American embassy, he is such a nice guy.

And then another one said, you know what? Nobody's that nice. he's he's pretending to be nice so that we'll drop our guard he's probably working against us which i wasn't so they chose the worst possible surveillance guy to just check me out and see what i was doing when i wasn't with them and i spotted him immediately and i was going to kill him and if i hadn't told the general that afternoon that i had spotted the surveillance and that i was going to kill the guy he'd be in the ground right now. Wow.

That kind of experience become so burned into your brain even after you return to the United States like Al Qaeda's not going to surveil me in the United States. The FBI might. They're not going to try to do a hit. But what about a carjacker?

You know? Or a nut or an armed robber or who knows? So you just You know, they trained you so hard over the course of so many years. It's just not something that you can forget. It's wild that even in your own group of people, these covert CIA officers overseas, that you constantly are thinking that your own people could be double agents or against you.

That is an extreme level of paranoia, which is justified. Well, let me interrupt you on that. And I don't mean to jump to a totally different topic. We can talk about Julian Assange later, but on the Julian Assange case. Do you remember at the tail end of the Trump administration, when WikiLeaks released the Vault 7 documents? And Mike Pompeo said that WikiLeaks was a hostile non-state intelligence actor. those were very carefully chosen words because any time

there's a covert action program being considered like murdering Julian Assange you have to brief the congressional oversight committees if it's a counterintelligence operation you don't have to brief the committees why because if it's counterintelligence maybe it's the committee members that are the spies, that are the moles,

that are working for the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians or the Cubans. And so you don't tell anybody. So just by calling WikiLeaks a hostile, non-state intelligence actor, the assumption is maybe Senator So-and-So supports WikiLeaks. That would make him an enemy. So you don't have to brief it. And then you can go do your hit and murder Julian Assange and deny it in the media. and if a member of the oversight committees is interviewed by the New York Times or by CNN, he can say, I don't think it was the CIA because they would have briefed us on something like that.

Yeah. And that was basically proven that that was a, there was a, I remember there was an article about this on Yahoo. Yahoo News. Yahoo News of all places. Yes. I had another CIA officer in here and I asked him about that. And then he said, this is bullshit. I think he didn't say it was bullshit, but he said he discredited it because it was from Yahoo News.

Bull. because the author was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Investigative journalists. You got to find that Yahoo News article. Formerly with the New York Times. And they say in the article that they interviewed 36 current and former intelligence office.

Current and former. Yep. Wow. How many current CIA officers are you in touch with? Are you allowed to say? Sure. Current. I'm going to say.

Two. Two. Yeah. Former. Wow. Is there such a thing as, I mean, your case is different, but once you leave the CIA, aren't you always in the CIA? No. Once you leave the CIA, you're in the CIA for another year.

So what happens is you submit your resignation. Your resignation is never accepted. They process you in a leave without pay status so that if there is an operation that you are uniquely qualified for, or if there's an asset that you recruited that will only talk to you, that gives them the right to call you back in that year and you have to do the operation. If there is no callback in the year, then they accept your resignation and they implement it. Okay. The reason I have that question is going back to the Twitter files, there was that Hamilton 68 thing that was basically founded by it. They were all former intelligence.

Oh, yeah. Oh, and there are several of those kinds of organizations. For people that are familiar with that, can you explain what that Hamilton-168 was? Yeah, Hamilton-68 is a company, do we have it? What is the headline of this? What is this article? Oh, kidnapping assassination and a London shootout. This is not the article.

This was an article about basically a CIA plot to, I think, killed Julian Assange. Oh, Mike Isikoff. That is the original. Oh, this is the original. I think they changed the headline. They must have. they must have yeah Mike Isikoff is

a very serious investigative journalist hmm yeah okay so what we're talking about Hamilton 68 Hamilton 68 so Hamilton 68 is like so many of these other

companies I mean how do you even describe a company like this they're founded by former CIA FBI NSA DNI people to go through the news and to decide what is real and what is fake. And so they'll do things like issue warnings, for example, on alternative news sites, consortium news, for example.

They'll say, oh, this is unreliable. They publish Russian propaganda. Well, you know what? They actually don't ever publish Russian propaganda. They were founded by a guy who started with the Los Angeles Times. and then spent almost his entire career with the Associated Press. He's the guy that broke the Iran-Contra story. You don't like their position on Ukraine and Russia.

That's why you say it's Russian propaganda. Or you don't like their position on Syria because now the CIA is arming al-Qaeda. We had them change their name from al-Qaeda in the Levant to the Nusirah front. It's still al-Qaeda, but it's slightly less radical. than ISIS. Like, you know, it's like WWE

in that sometimes there's just no good guy. Right. You know? So why do we have to pick a side when all three sides are bad? So Hamilton 68 is one of these. It's got like Mike Hayden on it

and the former director general of NATO and some former DNI. And it's just... So these are like very top level officials in these agencies. Very, very top level. Mike Morel. And then what they do, the way they make money, and I think this is scandalous,

is they contract out to the government mostly to the Pentagon and different elements of the Pentagon. And they say, what we'll do is we'll aggregate all the news on the internet. And then

we'll put a green check mark or a red check mark next to the URL. So when people at the Pentagon, Google an article, what's being said about Ukraine today? Oh, these red check marks pop up. So don't go to covert action magazine. You're saying like on Twitter when they gave you the different, like didn't they give consortium news a red check saying that it was like Russian state? Yeah, Twitter wouldn't accept the red check.

Oh, okay. But Hamilton 68 issued it and it's on the Hamilton 68 side. And if you're on a government computer, the red check pops up. Oh, on a government computer. On a government computer. That's how they make their money. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy.

So then, listen, if you're an analyst, if you're an intelligence analyst, analysts are always proud to say that they are all source analysts. So you're not just taking CIA source material. You're not taking just NSA intercepts. You're taking everything. Those plus State Department cables, plus they're called DODIRs, their military reporting, and press. Now, I knew as an analyst that I was less likely to find something original and true in a Sri Lankan tabloid than I was in the Wall Street Journal. but now the likes of Hamilton 68 are telling me

no, no, no, don't even read that one. That one's no good. We gave it a red checkmark. You won't like that. It's propaganda. But even though these guys are so far removed from these agencies, how tied in are they still? See, that's the thing.

They still go to the dinners? They still... Oh, my God, yes. I went to an event at the National Press Club three or four weeks ago, and Michael Hayden was the host. he and I never got along. I never respected him.

He was a torture apologist. We were both supposed to be on the Bill Mars show one time. And we were in the green room, and I called him Mike. And he insisted that I call him General Hayden. And I said, I'm not in the military, Mike. Sorry, I'm not calling you General Hayden. And he got up and walked out. And he skipped the show.

Really? Yeah. He had a major stroke about a year ago. So at the press club the other night, he got up and he was literally drooling out of his mouth. And he had two canes and this woman wiped his mouth. And he's like, thank you for being here, everybody. I just want to say. And then there's this long, pregnant pause.

Thank you for being here, everybody. And then he sat down. It's like, seriously, you're still rolling him out for these events. And then they're like, we want to tell you about the alternative media. It's dangerous for our democracy and freedom. It's like, you fascist. The alternative media. Yeah.

That's funny. That's a funny term. That's another thing that I learned from these Twitter files is how they're able to label these. I don't know what you call them. What are they? Like, NGOs like this. Yeah, pretty much. This election integrity organization.

Yes. Like, what is that? According to whom? Who decides what has integrity and what doesn't? And if you have any experience in this stuff with like how the government labels like, for example, the Patriot Act, you look at something like the election integrity project. It's almost like you know what it is. Yes.

Yeah, right. Getting back to consortium news and Hamilton 68. Hamilton 68 sent a letter to consortium news saying, we don't like you. We're doing a review of you. And we think we're going to give you a red checkmark because you're a Kremlin apolit. So you can appeal if you want. So I'm on the board of consortium news, as are a lot of very serious journalists. I mean, these are Chris Hedges, another two-time Pulitzer winner from the New York Times.

We're a bunch of us on the, Andrew Coburn, who we just looked at this article from the, the independent. He's on the board. So I said, well, who signed this letter? said it's some guy I never heard of. So we Googled him. And it turned out it's this this guy in his 20s working for Hamilton 68. And he had worked briefly for a science related newswire that went bankrupt and shut down a few years ago. He had three published articles. And then he went to Hamilton 68. So this kid who knows nothing about anything, he's going to be. He's going to be a lot of

to decide that consortium news gets a red checkmark? And not only did they give consortium of the red check mark, but as soon as they did, our PayPal count was permanently suspended. And not only was it permanently suspended, they confiscated the $9,500 that we had in there, and we couldn't meet payroll. So we joined a class action suit in federal court in the 9th district in California with a couple of other publications who also got the red check mark and had their PayPal accounts suspended

and PayPal said, oh no, we don't want the cost of litigation that gave us all our money back. But we can't use PayPal anymore and we have this red check mark now because the likes of Mike Hayden and this 20-something-year-old kid decided they just didn't like what we were publishing.

Where do you think all of this goes? with the social media and and with Hamilton 68 and this office in the Pentagon giving people checks on certain websites and all the stuff. And then when you throw Elon into the whole mix, it just gets even more confusing. Like what is the future of, do you ever think about like what it will look like in 10 years on social media? Oh, I'm very worried. Are we going, do you think it will, there will be a reckoning? Do you think the pendulum is swinging more towards openness, like with open algorithms that provide more transparency? do you think is going more totalitarian and censored and and more like propaganda based?

There are efforts to push back, but they're very difficult. So are you, I guess my overarching question is, are you optimistic or are you not optimistic? I'm pessimistic. Pessimistic, okay. But there are some elements of hope. There's a group called Panquake. Yes. That's sort of an open source.

It's supposed to be a social. social media platform akin to Twitter, but completely open source, completely transparent, nonprofit, that kind of thing. And so they asked me if I would be interested in talking it up, being sort of a brand ambassador. I said, let me check it out first. So I did. I checked it out. And I sent the information to a couple of very tech savvy friends of mine, one Tom Drake from NSA. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tom's a great friend. And they said, yeah, looks legit. And it's based in Iceland, and it's powered by, you know, a geyser. So it's, there's no effect on the

environment. It's carbon neutral. I mean, they thought of everything. So things are going really, really well. We incorporated lawyers in Luxembourg and Iceland and the the corporation is housed in Tonga because then we're not, you know, under the auspices of the FBI or the CIA. And then we get suspended from Twitter with no explanation, permanently suspended. Like, for what reason? Never got an explanation. So we're like, okay, well, they threw us off Twitter.

And a bunch of us, like, tweeted at, this is before Elon Musk, tweeted at Twitter, like, what, why did, why would you, suspend these people. They haven't done anything. There's no violation of the terms of service. No response. Suspended. Then we get a notification from the bank that we use in Iceland that our accounts have been frozen. And it turned out this was all done at the request of the FBI because they said these people that have created this panquake, they're all supporters of Julian Assange. So we think there may be criminal activity here. It's like, so, so I'm being, I'm being punished because I believe that Julian Assange exposing

war crimes committed by the American military puts you in an uncomfortable position. So they finally freed up our, our money again. But the Icelanders who have been, or had been very, very friendly up until that point, said, you guys are going to need to get out of Iceland. So now we're looking where to relocate. Really? Yeah, like, where do we go? Guernsey, the Isle of Man? I mean, where do you go? Is it still banned on Twitter? Yeah.

And we've begged Elon Musk to let us have our account back. No response. So I'm not optimistic about the future of transparency and media. You know, especially now with the Ukraine war underway, anybody who doesn't tow the official line is an extremist or is propagating fake news. or you're a propagandist or a Kremlin apologist. You know, how do you defend yourself? And that's what you end up doing all the time, is defending yourself. What do you think is going to happen with Ukraine? Do you think that there's going to be any sort of a peace deal made? How long do you think this is going to last?

And what do you think the outcome is going to be? I honestly believe that eventually there's going to be a peace deal. There's going to have to be because just based on sheer numbers, even though things have gone badly for the Russians, they have so many more people that they can commit to the battlefield that eventually the Ukrainians are just going to be spent. And so it's so much better, so much wiser

to sit at the negotiating table and to come up with something, you know? Do you think that the U.S. is not going to be the one to do that? No way. No way. I think really the only chance right now of anybody doing that is the Turks. The Turks. Yeah, the Turks have offered twice now.

And the Turks are the only NATO country that have maintained close relations with the Russians. But they're also members of NATO. Nothing's going to happen before Turkish elections, which have now been postponed until October because of the earthquake. They were supposed to have taken place in May. Crazy, right? So in the event that there are talks, it's going to be the Turks. I might otherwise say the Chinese because the Chinese have had such success recently, but there's no possible way that the State Department will allow the Ukrainians to sit at the table with the Chinese.

Right. Not after what happened between the Saudis and the Iranians. After everything they've done so far, like the statement that the United States has made so far, like how I can't imagine, I can't imagine the Chinese getting the Russians to come to the table with some sort of a proposition. and Victoria Newland saying, oh, okay, sure. Exactly. Exactly. You know, when I was still at the CIA, I was still an analyst, actually, it's before I went into operations.

And I was assigned to the American embassy in Manama, Bahrain. So I was on loan to the State Department for three years from 1993 to 1996, and I was in Bahrain from 94 to 96. I was the economic officer in the embassy. And this was sort of at the height of the Arab-Israeli. peace process. And the Bahrainis were asked to host the Arab-Israeli peace talks on the environment. They were thrilled. And there was a very formal way in which we did this. So I had to join with my Russian counterpart, who I really liked. We got along very well. This was a spy? Probably. But he was

undercover as an economic officer. Okay. So you guys just like I was? You guys just assume you guys are under, you guys are okay. That's amazing. So I called him. And I said, Igor, I got instructions from the department to deliver the invitation to the peace talks. He says, yes, yes, my foreign ministry sent me instructions. I said, okay, let's go. I'll call the foreign ministry. I'll make an appointment for us tomorrow at 10 o'clock. And we'll go jointly deliver the invitation to begin the peace talks.

Like an hour before I left, I get a cable from the State Department. And they said, go alone. Don't go with the Russian. So real quickly, I wrote back and I said, but it's a joint U.S. Russia sponsor. peace conference. They said, no, no, no, we don't want the Russians to have any more influence in the Middle East than they already have, which is zero. Go alone.

So I went alone. It was embarrassing. So I deliver the invitation of Bahrainis, and he calls me. He's like, dude, what the fuck? And I said, man, I'm so sorry, but my instructions came in and they told me to cut you out. I apologize. He's like, you guys are doing this, doing this to us in every country in the Middle East.

I'm like, I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We just don't want you guys to get a foothold here. Wow. It was brutal. And now we're jumping up and down over Syria because about a week and a half ago, Bashar al-Assad went to Moscow. You know, there are of course, Russian troops in Syria.

He went to Moscow and he asked for additional troops, two more temporary bases, and he offered up a permanent base to the Russians. Now, they've had a small Navy base in northwestern Syria for decades. Oh, okay. And we went crazy. The State Department released these statements like, this is an affront to peace. It's going to ensure continued war, blah, blah, blah, blah. No. No.

Our presence in Syria is illegal. I think I mentioned this the last time I was on the show. There are only three ways that you can legally be in another country. Your military can legally be in another country. if that country has attacked you, number one, number two is if that country's government has invited you, and number three is with the approval of the United Nations Security Council. We don't have any of those, but we have special forces, troops in Syria, quote, to protect the oil fields. They're not our oil fields to protect.

The Russian military is there at the invitation of the internationally recognized legitimate Syrian government. Just because we don't like that government doesn't mean that we can just send troops and occupy their oil fields. But that's what we do. That's what we do. Sure. So you really think

there's any possibility that China can negotiate peace between these two countries? Because I just don't see if China's behind it. I don't think the U.S. would accept. We'll never, ever accept it. Absolutely not. The Turks will tolerate it. Our relations with the Turks are not good right now. But because they're members of NATO, we sort of de facto have to accept the fact that they could play a role in this. And I also heard that part of the effort with this war is to basically

deplete Russian supplies and ammunition and war materials. That's right. Which is why we were so upset two weeks ago when Xi Jinping said that there is no limit to China's friendship with Russia. We read that to mean there's no limit to Chinese arms sales to Russia. Right. Which then would prolong our cost and pain significantly. Aren't they just sell? I heard also they were just selling their stuff back to them because Chinese bought stuff from Russia and they were basically just selling it back to them. Oh yeah, yeah. That's happening. And on the U.S. side, the Ukrainians don't know how to use American systems, right? So we're training them on things like surface to air missiles or radar or artillery.

We can trade them at Fort Hood or wherever. Most of them are at Ford Hood. But they just don't know how to fly F-16s. They just don't know how. And it's complicated. And it's going to take them nine months, 12 months to learn how to fly an F-16. And then what do they do with them? If we send F-16s to Ukraine and they keep them at Ukrainian Air Force bases,

the Russians are going to bomb them and destroy them. But if we have them fly out of Poland, that's an act of war because Poland is a NATO country. Right? So we can't do that either. So what we've done is we've gone to the Moroccans, to the Cypriots, to the Indians, to the Israelis, and we've said,

we want to buy all of the migs that you have. And we'll give you F-16s to replace them. The Cypriots said no. The Moroccan said gladly. The Indians said, we'll think about it, but the answer's probably going to be yes. And the Israelis said, we don't want these migs anyway. We bought them just to have them. You can have the migs.

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it's just so hard to stay on top of it. And you know, we should be watching Capitol Hill, too, because at the first, the only opposition was the right-wing fringe, you know, the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green. And it's becoming far more mainstream now. You know, we have a defense budget that is $880 billion. That's more money than the next nine biggest country. combined. We can't keep this up. You know, we wonder why we have bridges that fall down into the

rivers below them. Why our interstate highway system is, is in a disastrous condition, why our airports are international embarrassments that anybody who travels internationally can see, right? Why our hospitals are all second rate and falling down? It's because we spend all our money on the military. You know, the Chinese have these high-speed trains that would be able to get us from New York to Chicago in three hours. How come we don't have those trains? The technology's out there. The French have them. The Germans have them.

How come we don't have them? Because we've chosen to spend our money on the military, not on infrastructure. That has to stop at some point. And then we're spending so much more now because of Ukraine. Where's that peace dividend we used to talk about? you know the thing the thing about china is is it seems like the narrative is sort of shifting away from kind of like trying to be like oh you know china like it used to be considered like don't talk bad about chinese people it's xenophobic well in the beginning of the pandemic it was like

that and now it seems like the narrative is slowly shifting the other way maybe not so slow it seems like people on the left now maybe not so slowly yeah people on the left now are taking a strong stance against China. Oh, yeah. You know, and me and my couple of friends of mine were even laughing when that Chinese spy balloon folk flew across the United States. And we're talking, I'm like, there's somebody at the CIA just sitting here chuckling right now at their desk thinking that like this is just some sort of narrative shift that they're

trying to put on the media. Like, there's no way they don't know about these spy balloons going across. Of course not. Why would they, why would they pick one out and just like focus like that on the news about it? That balloon is so dangerous. It seems so suspicious. Oh, my God, yes. And you know what's funny?

This is kind of a pet peeve of mine on this issue. Who was it that called it a spy balloon? Right? The media. Yeah. Nobody's ever confirmed that it was spying. Yeah, what happened after they shot it down? Didn't they take it apart and figure out, like...

They said that they likely wouldn't be able to find it. They got pieces of it. But for the most part, it just sank. Oh, really? Yeah. But nobody in any position of authority in government ever said that it was. was engaged in spying. The media did. It's the media that call it the Chinese spy balloon. We don't know if it was a spy balloon. What do you think it was?

I think it was probably a weather balloon. Really? I do. Listen, the whole planet is ringed by satellites that are so sophisticated that they can read license plates on individual cars. You don't need an impossible to control balloon to spy on anything. You already have a have all the satellites up there spying on everything. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. No, it really doesn't. One time I was flying from D.C. to L.A.

And we were over Arizona. And the pilot came on the intercom and said, folks, above us and on the left is a weather balloon. He said, I've been flying for 25 years. I've heard about these weather balloons. I've never actually seen one until now. So I'm going to tip the plane And if you look out the left side of the plane

You'll be able to see this weather balloon Wow So he tips the plane I happen to be on the left side I'm looking out, I'm looking up I don't see anything Nobody saw anything So the pilot comes on a minute later

And he says the flight attendant tells me That you can't see this weather balloon You have to look really high up To give you an idea He says we're at 30,000 feet And it's at 150,000 feet So I understand buckled my seatbelt. I got down

on the ground. He tips the plane and then you could see it. It's enormous and it was silver. And he's like, isn't that an amazing sight? I've never seen one before. This is one of these NASA weather balloons. Okay. I think that's what it was.

So why? We're not the only ones that have them. But did the Pentagon never officially qualify that as a Chinese spy balloon? Didn't the government say it was that? It was only the media? Yeah. They said it was a Chinese balloon. Yeah, but nobody ever said this is what it was doing It was picking up signals intelligence. It was floating over American

Military bases. It was checking out the defenses of NORAD None of that none of it just out flew like this like in the shape of an omega and then it you know went over here and then So you don't think spy balloons are on technology that's being utilized today by any agencies? No I don't think they're necessary except for DEA and the border CPB Customs of Border Protection They use them to look for drugs and for people crossing the border illegally. They're mostly tethered, though. And instead of being at, you know, 150,000 feet, they're more like 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet.

You see them in Puerto Rico. You see them all along the border in Texas. And what kind of stuff are they taking, like, photos? Are they trying to intercept communication? It's video. It's video. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Although communications, I would. I would expect that the ones in Texas are communications oriented. Right. Yeah, like... Oh, it does. What does this say? Can you zoom in on it at all? Like, it's too small.

I can't read it. See, the alleged Chinese spy balloon. Oh, alleged Chinese spy balloon. Was likely capable. Those are mealy-mouthed CIA words, the qualifications. Wow. That's how we used to write at the CIA. likely capable.

That means we don't know. Right. Likely, possibly, presumably, reportedly. That's CIA language. Oh yeah. That's CIA language. Those qualifiers. If you were absolutely positive, you would say almost certainly.

That's what they taught us in CIA writing training. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So do you think there was any sort of nudge from a intelligence to tell these media companies to go with this? Oh my God, yes. Okay.

Absolutely, because this fits, the timing fits perfectly into this new anti-China narrative that we have. Right. Yeah, definitely. Is this anti-China narrative justified at all? Can you make an argument that this is a good thing? I can't, and I'll tell you why. The Chinese spy on us as much as we spy on them. The Chinese are all over the United States, especially on university.

campuses and in U.S. defense contractors trying to recruit sources of information or they've sent Chinese Ph.D. candidates to study in the United States hoping that they'll be recruited into the defense contracting industry and then report back to Beijing. They're very, very sophisticated. So it's not like, you know, oh, we're beating up on the Chinese. No, the Chinese are the bad guys here, but it's no more now than it was 10, 20, 50 years ago. They've always done this. Another thing, too, and this is something that I just don't understand as a part of American policy, is the Chinese own so much U.S. government debt. They are the biggest investors that we have, or one of the biggest investors that we have.

Our economy is intricately intertwined with the Chinese economy. If we fall apart, they fall apart, and vice versa. So why pick a fight? You know, shouldn't we be looking for areas in which we can communicate with the Chinese? Rather than to, you know, to send Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan and now Kevin McCarthy's going to go to Taiwan, which was another thing. You know, I'm sorry to get a little bit off the subject. No, no.

When Nancy Pelosi announced that she was going to go to Taiwan, right before she left the speakership, a reporter asked if she was going to take a military aircraft. And the Pentagon said, we don't know anything about any trip to Taiwan. And then the White House said, we haven't been informed of any trip to Taiwan. That was a lie. Because there's a process by which members of Congress, go overseas. The process is you send a memo to the State Department

liaison on Capitol Hill. There's one in the House and one in the Senate. You say Speaker Pelosi and the following people want to go to Taiwan. The State Department liaison sends that to the appropriate desk at state. In this case, the Taiwan desk or the Office of Chinese Affairs. And then they write a cable to the U.S.

Interest Section in Taiwan requesting country clearance. So usually it's an ambassador. We don't have an ambassador in Taipei. It's an interest section. So the consul general would issue, this is just a formality, issue country clearance, giving permission for this delegation called a CODEL, congressional delegation.

If there was no member of Congress, it would be a staff del, a congressional staff delegation, allowing them permission to go into the country. So Nancy Pelosi can't just decide one day, I'm going to go to Taiwan. and then like log on to orbits and book a ticket. That's not how it works. Right. Well, when somebody that important, like the Speaker of the House, travels internationally, they're not going to go to Dulles Airport and, you know, take United to Seoul and then transfer.

They don't do it like that. They go to Andrews Air Force Base and they get on an American jet and they take an official flight. So everybody knew about it in advance. Not just knew about it. Everybody approved of it in advance. The State Department, the Defense Department, and the White House. They all denied it. They were all lying.

What? Did they have any good reason to deny it? Yeah. Because then the Chinese would say, well, this wasn't an official visit. She's an outgoing speaker. And the White House, the State Department of the Pentagon didn't want her to go. so it's not as offensive as it otherwise might have been well it is as offensive because they're lying about the permission you know there should be a policy where where we don't send senior u.s. officials

to Taiwan we should allow Taiwanese officials to visit the united states for diplomatic meetings but it's so provocative when a senior American goes to Taiwan, especially if they talk about military equipment, that the Chinese flip out over it. Like, why poke the bear when you don't need to? I'm not saying, don't ever do it. Sometimes, you know, a country needs to slap down another country. It's just a part of the diplomatic give and take.

But why now? When we're so focused on Russia and so worried about Russia and we so don't want the Chinese to supply the Russians, then why are you pissing off the Chinese if you don't want them to get in bed with the Russians? Do you get the feeling that Russia's not a big enough enemy for us? Yeah. We need China. That's a much scarier enemy. Because you need an enemy against which to rally so that you can justify the military spending. Since 9-11, we've entered into a permanent war-trial.

time economy. And if we were to cut defense spending, we would immediately go into recession. And we don't want to risk doing that. Right. That's something I just learned watching an episode with my buddy Andy Bustamante. He was explaining that how the like we would officially be in a, I'm going to forget the details now, but that was the implications of it. That if we stopped these wars, we would, our GDP would fall below a certain level and we would be officially in a recession. That's right. That is wild. That's right.

You know, it's not an accident that there are now more millionaires per capita in the Washington, D.C. area than anywhere else in America, including Silicon Valley. That's new since 9-11. Another great quote from Andy is he said he also, he was undercover. He didn't say it, but I could gather from what he said. he said he was in East Asia undercover for, I think it was close to 10 years and he speaks fluent Mandarin.

Wow. But he couldn't officially tell me he was in China. Right. But I, you know, so he basically, one of his great quotes that he just recently said was a 5,000 year old country doesn't move quickly. They move slowly.

And you don't realize you're caught in the mudslide until it's too late. And he was explaining like what they're doing with buying with sending people over here learning our law buying land here the the the uh the belt and road initiative all over the world and one of the scary things that he said about the belt and road and the belt and road initiative is like they have these ports and they had these airports and all these roads and stuff and building all over the world all over the world that can be converted to a military bases i'll tell you funny story when i was on the senate foreign relations

committee staff, I made a, I made an official trip, a Staffdell to Yemen, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. And when I was in Djibouti, I went to the U.S. base there. It used to be a French base. And the French decided they didn't want to be in Djibouti anymore. And so they sold half of the base to us and half of the base to the Chinese. It's the only Chinese military base in a foreign country anywhere in the world. So, I don't even know where that is. Djibouti. Jabuti, yeah.

Can you pull map? D-J-I-B-O-U-T-I. Jabuti. It's a horrible, terrible place. Really? Yeah. I'll tell you a story about Djibout. You got to zoom out a little bit.

Okay. Yeah. It's grim. Wow. Okay, you see that deep bay that cuts into it. Yeah. Yeah. So the U.S. ambassador asked me one day if I wanted to go to Somalia the next day. And I said, oh yeah, I definitely want to go to Somalia. So we got a car. It was the ambassador. It was the head of security, the defense attache and me. Okay, you see that,

you see that lake, like what's that say, Gubet? The first lake or the second leg? The first lake on the right. Yep. So the road goes from Djibouti city, which is on the very far right. And you follow the water and then go around the lake. Okay. And then it cuts south to Djibouti. So the municipal dump for the whole country is right by the lake. Oh, no.

So as we're hugging the lake, before we cut south to Djibouti, at the dump, we saw this family digging a hole. and there's a body next to the hole in a shroud, right? So they're burying grandpa in the dump. So we went to Somalia. We met with some tribal chieftains there. And we drove back up to Djibouti. And as we passed the dump, there was a pack of wild dogs digging up the body. And I said to the ambassador, there but for the grace of God.

You know? Like, thank God my grandparents said, you know we should we should emigrate to america not we should emigrate to jibouti right so anyway i i was on the base and it was funny because there's this long line of um hangers and all of them had their doors open and they were all chinese fighter jets and then there was the same number of hangers there's a fence down the middle and then there's same number of hangers on the American side and all of the doors were closed. And I said, how come all the doors are closed? I knew why the doors are closed. And the guy's like, yeah, we probably shouldn't talk about that. I go, why not? I was just

kidding with him. I go, why not? What's going on in there? What kind of secrets you guys have going on in there? He's like, come on, man, don't bust my balls. Then I went to Yemen and I was in a cab. And I said to the guy, so how's the war going? And he's like, oh, the war's going actually pretty well. The Houthis are very tough, but the Saudis are using their drones and they're

fighting with the Houthis with the drones. And I thought, Saudis don't have drones. We sure do. In Djibouti, which is 16 miles across the water from Yemen. You can swim to Yemen. It's only 16 miles from Yemen.

Yeah. If you can make the map smaller. Yeah, zoom out a little bit. Take a look at Yemen. Oh, it's literally right there. Uh-huh. 16 miles. It's called the Babel Mandeb.

Yeah, it's kind of a choke point. Hey, John. Yeah. You just scoot to the right a little bit. Oh, to the right. His right? Yeah. Oh, sure.

Thank you. Yeah. That's such a crazy part of the world. It really is. What I saw that you just reported on something recently about Iran and Saudi meeting. Wow. This is such an important. important development, it's crazy.

And they have to be going crazy in the State Department. Right. Because remember, the policy from the beginning of, you know, of the post-World War II era has been to keep the Russians and the Chinese out. Well, the Russians out. The Chinese after the rise of Mao. Keep them out of the Middle East, right? The Middle East is solely our domain.

Right. It's always been that way. Well, the thing is, is when you take extrademarkable, positions, like on Syria, for example, or on Yemen, then you put yourself in a policy corner that you can't get out of. And then, you know, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, not Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The president called him, uh, well, a genocidal murderer, which he is. Who called him that? Which president? Biden. Oh, okay. Yeah. And he deserves to, you know, be deposed, he chopped up

Jamal Khashokchi. All of that's true. But there's going to be some pushback from the Saudis. And so what the Saudis did is they decided to make nice with the Chinese because they knew it would drive us nuts. Now, the Saudis have always had a terrible relationship with the Iranians, always.

Right. Since the 1979 revolution. Why is this? Because Iran is the world's biggest Shia Muslim country. Okay. And the Saudis are Sunni Muslims. But beyond that, the king's actual title is king and custodian of the two holy mosques, Mecca and Medina. Both mosques.

Right. So the Saudis, because they're the guardians of the mosque, the custodians of the holy places, they have to issue visas. every year to everybody who wants to come into the country, right, to make the Hajj or the Umra. Well, in 1980, the Saudis were in the midst, I mean, sorry, the Iranians were in the midst of their revolution and Iranian gunmen took over the holy Kaaba in Mecca and held it, you know, at gunpoint by force and killed a bunch of people. And then the Saudis sent special forces in and they killed a bunch of people. And the Saudis broke off for, relations with the Iranians. So they patched the relations together again in the late 80s, the

early 90s, but they were always difficult. And then the Iranians supported Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. Most of the Saudi citizens in the eastern province are Shia. The problem for the Saudis is that's where all the oil is too. And so they're very, very sensitive to any meddling at all in the eastern province. Well, there was a pro-democracy demonstration. So what do you do? You immediately blame the Iranians. You kill everybody. They executed, I think it was 88 people in one day, or 82 people in one day, something like that, with the crimes mostly being participating in a pro-democracy demonstration, and then you break diplomatic relations. Well, we're perfectly happy when the Saudis don't have diplomatic relations with the with the with the iranians because if the Saudis don't neither do

the bahraini's or the emirates and that's good for us because we tell them oh my god the the iranians are so dangerous you need this new 50 billion dollar system to keep you safe and the bahrainis are going to need one too and they're poor so maybe you should pay for that and then the amirates you know they have they have all the oil in the world in abu dhabi and they have all the trade in the world in dubai so they have plenty of money so we're going to sell them systems too And we'll give you F-35s. And if we can't, we'll give you F-18s, you know, with special radar. But you have to pay cash.

Well, now that Muhammad bin Salman is the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, he said, I'm tired of being under the thumb of the Americans all the time. And they disrespect me by calling me a murderer and, you know, coming here, hat in hand and begging for oil. And then yelling at me when I cut production and make prices go up and screw the Americans. So what happened first was about two months ago, the Saudis entered into an oil sales deal with the Chinese. And for the first time ever, and I mean literally ever, they didn't pay in dollars. The Chinese didn't pay in dollars. All oil transactions around the world have to be in dollars. Right.

This deal was in yuan. And the Saudis accepted the yuan. So that broke, that set the precedent. and it broke this long string going back to the 1930s. Well, now that the Chinese have been paying in Yuan, the Brazilians said, you know what? If the yuan is a legitimate international currency,

we should join with the Argentines, the Chileans, and I think they said the Mexicans, and we should make a Latin American currency, and we should stop using dollars. Well, what this means, is little by little, we're being pushed out of the place where we've been king of the hill for almost a century. Now the Saudis, I'm sorry, now the Chinese have brokered the resumption of diplomatic relations

with the Saudis and the Iranians. Now they're offering themselves up to the Russians and the Ukrainians. They've got Belt and Road, so they're building new ports all over Africa and like 24 different countries in Africa and they're financing airports. They went to Greece and they bought the port of Piraeus, the biggest cargo port in the world. They bought the port of Iraq, Lian, Crete. They bought the port of Thessaloniki. That's something that I've heard people say that the thing about China is this communist dictatorship, but at least they don't push communism on everyone else.

Never. But look at Australia. Right. Look at Greece. My buddy Julian, his friend just got like a 5,000. dollar ticket for walking his dog somewhere after hours in Greece. I think it was right. It was on it. It was near a port near a Chinese port. Oh man. Wow. So how do you explain like that's the Chinese have been so much smarter in the way that they spend their money than we have?

You know, an African, an African leader once told me it was here in Washington. It was at a conference. He was the vice president of the Congo. And he said, you know, the Americans always promised us democracy, but the Chinese always gave us food. Like, what do you think we needed? We didn't really need the democracy. But they sure needed the food. The thing I've been thinking about lately is by learning more from talking to people like yourself, people who are educated in this, people who have been in the government, left the government, have a very, you know, comprehensive understanding of geopolitics and the history of the, and the history of the, these countries and conflicts is that it seems like the general consensus is we might not be the

number one superpower in the next 50 years it really is going to be a multipolar world i really believe that there's nothing we can do to stop this chinese uh expansion belt and road was it was a work of genius yes it seems like they do so many things so much better than we do it right i mean i'm not trying to say like a communist dictatorship no no i don't like communism. I like capitalism. No. They just they spend their money very wisely. Right. Right. That's what it comes down to. And it just seems like our

government, on the other hand, is just, it's like the Olympics for narcissists sociopaths. Yeah. Who can figure out how they can make the most money and get the most power. Isn't that the truth? Yeah. And that brings me to another something else I was talking about. This other guy I had in here, I know if you're familiar with Mad Dog, Jim Lawler.

Oh yeah. Sure. He was telling me that he was explaining me basically the story about how he got recruited into the CIA. And he He was telling because I guess he was out in Iran's much other places of recruiting people. And he says when he was recruiting people, he would look for people that had these narcissistic traits. Absolutely. Narcissists are the purpose of people to be agents. Perfect.

Why? Because they're so arrogant. They conclude, well, yes, of course the CIA would want to recruit me because I'm so important that they can't do their jobs without me. That's amazing. That is absolutely true. what he said. Absolutely true. You know, what they teach you in training is you have to look for somebody with a vulnerability, but the word vulnerability means a whole lot of different things. For example, let's say you are Iranian. No, and that's too hard because we don't have an embassy there. Let's say

you're Indonesian, right? And I'm just making this up, so I'm not like revealing any secrets or anything. But what they teach you in training is everybody has a vulnerability. So you have to go through what's called the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit. So I spot you. I meet you at a diplomatic cocktail party. Or I meet you at a dinner somewhere. Or I meet you in a meeting at your foreign ministry.

So I assess you. Does this guy have access to something that I might want? You know, if you are the officer responsible for, you know, coffee exports. I'm not interested. No. But if you work at the port

in the part that's off limits to everybody else, yeah, I'm interested. I mean, I'd like to know what's coming into the port. Is it weapons? Is it chemical? Precursor chemicals for cocaine. You know, it could be anything. The third part

is develop. That's when we get to know each other. I take you out to dinner. Our wives become friends. I start spending money on you because I have an expense account and you don't. You mentioned that, oh, all your life you fantasized about seeing New York. Well, I'm going to send you and your wife on an all-expenses paid trip to New York. Or you love fishing, but, oh, you could never afford one of those charters.

They're $10,000 a day. No problem. You want to go charter fishing? Let's go catch a sailfish or a swordfish. or a tuna. No problem. I've got plenty of money. And then once I've understood your vulnerability, I'm going to recruit you.

Now, the vulnerability can be one of many, many different things. Maybe you've got a kid with a cleft palate and you can't afford the surgery. I'll send your kid to the friggin Mayo Clinic and pay cash. Or maybe you so love your kid and he's really really. smart, but he's going to go to the local school, the local college because, you know, nobody wears shoes because everybody's poor. No, no. I'll send him to Boston College

or Harvard or UT, wherever he wants to go. Pick a school. We have relationships with all of them. Happy to get him in, we'll pay for everything. Or maybe you got passed over for promotion and you want to fuck your boss, right? You want to get him back.

Because you're the smartest and hardest and hardest working person in that office and they screwed you and they passed you over. You want to get revenge. Come and talk to me. I'll help you get revenge. I'll pay you handsomely for it too. You know, or... It's so wild that you can just, people can build these relationships. Like they're like, at what point do you draw a line between like becoming friends with somebody and getting to know somebody being friends with their family? and just trying to do a job and manipulate somebody. I think I may have mentioned to you in the last time we talked that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. That's fascinating to me. It works. It works for them. Sociopaths are impossible to control.

They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they pass the polygraph very easily because they don't feel guilty about anything at all. and they tend to rise to the highest levels of the CIA. People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience, but are still perfectly happy to work in moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. I'll tell you, a guy that I worked for, a very senior CIA officer that I worked for, told me that he had five recruitments over the course of a 30-year career. And he said he remembered every day.

detail of those five recruitments. I was fortunate in that I had five recruitments in four years at one stretch. Wow. It was because we were fighting multiple wars. I was in poor countries

where it's easier to recruit somebody because money goes so much farther. People are more vulnerable. More vulnerable. And 95% are going to do it for the money. Another like four percent are going to do it for revenge. and 1% is going to do it for patriotism.

They just love the United States. Right. You know, they watch those Tom Clancy movies, and, you know, they want a piece of the action. And what you do is you dummy up an award. You just, you know, do it on, do it in Microsoft. You make a fake award, and you put a gold seal on it,

and you sign the CIA director's name. Right. You frame it, and then you take it to one of the meetings, and you say, listen, the headquarters gave you this award. You can't keep it because you're undercover. so we're going to keep it in a safe in headquarters. And they're like, oh, one guy started crying when I gave him the fake award. He started crying.

God bless you. God bless you. God bless America. I was like, yeah, yeah, God bless America. Now, what about the plans for that Russian tank you were talking about? So a long way of saying, my actual point was. So you admittedly have sociopathic traits. Oh, I was perfectly happy to break into people's houses.

and plant bugs and cameras and because we were the good guys I had convinced myself that we were the good guys my country needed me right right and then after 9-11 I was like you know what we're all fucking war criminals every one of us I got to get out of here yeah but anyway out of all the people I recruited there were two to whom I said you know what in a different life you and I would be friends I'd like to hang out with you. Yeah. Sorry about your luck. This is not that life. That's this is not that life. Cut his throat. Yeah. Jesus. How many people like you that are working covert overseas in these obscure countries, how many people of these CIA officers have to kill? And how many of the, are all of them trained to

kill? No. No. The average CIA officer will almost never find himself in a position where he has to kill somebody. Almost never. Almost never. Almost never. I mean, you know, we had a situation back in the 90s where, um, where one of our, let me think how I'm going to say this. One of our case officers had recruited a third country national in a European country. Okay. So he's in Europe, but this guy's from some terrible enemy country. And he's given information and the information's good.

And one of the. analyst at headquarters says, wow, whoever this sources, because the analysts don't know who the sources are. The analyst said, wow, whoever this source is, his information is really good. Can I come out and debrief him? So the station said, sure. Come on out, TDY. We'll set up a meeting. So the analyst and the case officer went to the predetermined hotel to do the meeting. When they walked into the room, the source pulled out a gun and shot. the case officer tried to shoot the analyst and missed and then ran. The analyst saved the case officer's life by stanching the bleeding.

Oh, wow. But it was a setup from the beginning. It turned out this source was actually an officer in that enemy country's intelligence service and was running a double agent op with a point being to kill our officer. now the officer should have been armed he wasn't because he thought he could trust the source and in a situation like that he ought to have had a moment to pull out his weapon I was always armed in in the places where I served not in Bahrain nothing ever happens there but but in the other places where I was an active ops officer I was always armed

usually with two weapons I had one in a tear away fanny pack and I had one on my ankle you know, just in case things got really bad and you went through three clips when you got six more shots in your ankle. Right. Yeah, save one for yourself. What is the difference between U.S. intelligence, CIA,

Mossad, MI6, and Chinese intelligence? What are the main difference is? And who is like the most superior in your view? Good question. There's no easy answer to that. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to say overall, they're all good. They all have problems. The problem at the CIA is post-9-11, we got away from traditional human intelligence and human recruitment.

And we turned into a paramilitary organization, which is not what we were set up to do. And it's not something we're generally good at. There are units in the CIA whose job it is to go around. the world and kill people or kidnap them. So you don't have the average CIA officer, you know, working in an American embassy every day,

getting an assignment to go out and kill somebody. That just doesn't happen. Right. There are these dedicated teams. Mm. And... Yeah, like the Bin Laden team. Exactly. So the Bin Laden team was active duty special forces

on loan to the CIA for that specific operation. Right. They also have former special forces from all the branches who leave the military and, you know, you leave on a Friday and on Monday, you're at the CIA for your second career. So they do very specific high risk operations so that the rest of us don't have to go through that training and, you know, screw it up. Right. Yeah. But they don't recruit anybody. they just they're they're snatch and grab teams or or hit teams um you were telling a story uh there's a

video i watched where you're you're explaining to an audience the difference between or it was this like the state department's relationship with um Israeli intelligence and the arabs and uh you were explaining how vicious in this circumstance that the Israeli intelligence officers were towards these people that were who were those people and they were stationed in in israel for something yeah so this the state department and the CIA have this program called the analyst overseas program so there are i don't know dozens of these positions all around the world and if you're a kind of a mid-level young CIA analyst uh in order to get promoted into the higher levels of the CIA this the senior intelligence service you have to do rotations in another

directorate and in a policy position. The State Department, of course, is a policy organization. So we all wanted to do rotations in the State Department. I did two myself. And these two analysts that I work with, husband and wife team, they get assigned to what was then the American consulate in Jerusalem. Now, because this is not a secret program, this is totally above board. You really are on assignment at the State Department. We went to the Israelis and said, and said, you know these two as CIA officers. They're not going to be here as CIA officers. They're on loan to the State Department doing legitimate State Department work.

So one of them went to work as just sort of a normal Foreign Service officer. And the husband took a two-year sabbatical to get a master's degree in Arabic, right, at one of the local universities. So they're not harming anybody. well the Israelis because this is what the Israelis do harassed them and they harassed them in a very cruel

kind of way first there was one night where where they were invited to a party at the ambassador's residence which is quite common you go to more than you can even count I can't even remember how many

dinner parties I went to at the ambassador's residence and when they got back to their house, all of their living room furniture had been rearranged. All of it. With the message being, we can do anything we want. We can come in your home anytime we want, and there's nothing you can do about it.

So, you know, the next day they reported to security like, oh, you know, we went home from the party and all the furniture was rearranged. And security's like, oh, okay, thanks for telling us. us we'll make a note of it but then they went to another party and when they came home um you know they always give us houses or apartments that are way bigger than we would ever need because you have to entertain so they came home from the second party and people had taken shits in every one of their toilets and left them unflushed they had like four bathrooms in this house

and people had taken shits in every one of the bathrooms again with a message being there's nothing you can do. Then finally, the third time, it was the ambassador's Christmas party. They go home from the Christmas party. They go into the house and they can hear the dog crying. It's whimpering. And somebody had cut off its tail and then wrapped the stub with gauze and medical tape. So then, you know, the embassy has to go to these Israelis and say, cut it out.

why are you harassing these people? They haven't done anything to you. We've been totally above board with you. Just leave them alone. And you have to torture the poor dog. What's the matter with you? And then like, all right, all right, sorry. Okay.

And then they'll let three or four years go, and then they'll start doing it again. There was another incident where the ambassador was in his limousine with his driver on his way from the embassy to the residence. And they had a blowout. but the odd thing was that two of the tires blew out on one side of the car so as soon as they drift over to the to the side this car pulls up and these two friendly guys get out oh we see that you've had a blowout can we help you

let us help you oh no we're going to call the embassy they're going to come and pick up the this is the american ambassador going to come and pick them up and take him home so these guys get back in their car drive away. Well, it turns out that the two tires had bullet holes in them, which is why they blew out. And, oh my goodness, the ambassador's briefcase is missing. And God knows what he had in it.

Right. You know, how many classified documents were in there? Or personnel reports. But this is what they do. But why did they do that? Like, did they just assume that the U.S. is lying to them about these people and they wanted to? An Israeli Mossad officer once told me

that the mentality in Israel is that they can't trust anybody, including us, that if they're going to survive as a nation, they have to rely only on themselves. So if that means that they have to spy on the Americans as actively as they might spy on the Egyptians or the Jordanians, then that's what they're going to do. And that's what they do. My very first briefing, when I was first hired at the CIA was a Mossad officer and a shinbet officer. And he was at an off-site location. And I thought that was kind of funny.

Like, why don't we just go to the conference room? That's where everybody else gets briefed. They said, no, no, no, no. Israelis are not allowed inside the building. We used to allow the Israelis in, but then they brought a gift one time. It was a big CIA seal. And it had a transmitter embedded inside

with enough batteries to last a year. and a half. And they were like, oh, you should put this in your conference room. So we x-rayed it, and we find it's a listening device. So no more Israelis allowed in headquarters. So we meet at this off-site location. And it's a whole bunch of analysts. This was like right as we were getting ready to attack Iraq. What country was this in? It was in Washington. Oh, in Washington. Yeah. And because I was the most junior analyst, I was the last one to speak. So, everybody's like given their briefings and my boss said go ahead and use your real name because you're not undercover which i wasn't at the time so he's like they're they're cleared up to the secret level

for the information don't give them anything top secret but there wasn't much to give that i would have given them anyway that wasn't at the secret level so it comes to me i'm the last one to speak and i said john kariaku from the office of leadership analysis and the guy said spell it and I spell it K-I-R I spell the name and he looks up to me and he goes You are Jewish?

And I said I am not recruitable And that's how I left it Like how dare you How dare you Try to develop me Five seconds into our first conversation You think I've never been trained?

Shame on you Five minutes from Langley Yeah right five minutes from Langley exactly you are do you think they are the most ruthless intelligence agencies out of all of them

absolutely have you ever seen the show Fauda no oh my god listen what's that one about whoever is listening to this or watching this you got to go on Netflix F-A-U-D-A Fauda

it is about Shindbet and it's a special unit inside Shimbet and how it fights the Palestinians with the help of the PLO so it's a completely

true to life based on facts show written by former Shinbet officers if you want to see how shinbet and Mossad work you got to watch the show I got chills just now I got chills thinking of it

because the balls these guys have the stuff that they do that we would be like oh my God I would go to prison for the rest of my life if I did something like that. Right. And they just do it and then move on. Like it's nothing. This seems like a good opportunity

to bring up Jeffrey Epstein. What do you think about him? What do you think he was intelligence? I'm confident he was intelligence. Yeah. This is a thing that I've had debates with with people too is that I've had people tell me that blackmail is not a real thing.

Blackmail is useless. That there's no reason that this guy would be bringing scientists and politicians to some island to get some sort. of dirt on them for some sort of to hold them hold blackmail over their head for favors i agree with that you do blackmail is effective in in the very uh short term right if you need somebody to give you something and you have you have information that you can really hold over his head he might end up confessing to his own side he might end up killing himself which happens with some

frequency so it's only going to work for you for a little bit I don't think that was necessarily the case with Jeffrey Epstein. I'm convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was working for Mossad. And I'm convinced that he was working for Mossad for a long time. He fit the profile, I'll put it that way, of what we would call an access agent. An access agent. Yeah. So Jeffrey Epstein's not going to give you classified information because he doesn't have access to classified information.

That's not why he would have been working for Mossad. let's say Mossad wants access to a former president of the United States, a member of the British royal family, the greatest minds on Wall Street, who are willing to talk when their guard is down and their pants are off about the people that they know and the people that they're talking to. You think Bill Clinton didn't talk to Barack Obama? Of course he did. Presidents and former presidents talk all the time to get advice from one another. All the time. So you're going to get somebody who's Jewish, who loves money and who loves Israel, and you're going to get him to invite all these people down to his private island, put them in compromising positions, and just get him talking.

and then you report back everything, everything. Because it's not necessarily the guy, as much as it is the people that the guy has access to. I'll give you another example. When I was in training, one of our instructors said that the best recruitment he ever had in his life was a copy of machine repair man.

He said, now, does the copy machine repairman have any access? to classified information? Of course not. But what happens when the copy machine breaks in the Prime Minister's office? They've got to have it fixed. So you recruit this guy,

just wait till it breaks or need service. And then when he goes to repair it or to service it, he puts in a device that every time somebody makes a copy, it sends another copy back to Langley. And so you see literally everything that the Prime Minister is seeing. that's access.

The repair man's not, you're not going to win a medal because you recruited a repair man. You're going to win the medal because you got the repair man to compromise the prime minister. But why all the scientists and the physicists?

Oh, yeah. The Chinese are really, really focused on hard sciences. Because those are the guys that are working on the nuclear program. Those are the guys that have access to DARPA scientists. They're working on things like microwave weapons.

They're working on things like Havana Syndrome maybe, whatever that turns out to be. They're working on things like anti-missile laser systems that are going to be the next generation of what we deploy to the battlefield. Yeah. I'm talking about like Jeffrey Epstein bringing, having those scientific conventions on his island.

Oh, the same thing. The same thing. Listen, that whole island had. be wired for sound and probably sound in video and everything going back to the Mossad so that they can see the the mosa'at has never the Israeli government has never trusted that we give them the best of our technology i mean i always assumed that we did but they are convinced that we don't so if they can steal it and then compare it to what it is that we're giving then they'll know well you steal it by gathering the information from the scientists who are working on the systems.

And at the very least, even if this, let's say this scientist goes to an Epstein convention and he doesn't really say anything, there are going to be 10 Mossad agents attending that convention too, pretending to be scientists. And that's where you make the introduction and you start that spot assess, develop, recruit, cycle. Wow. It's a long-term operation. This is not something that happens overnight. I remember somebody in my

training class, my operational training class saying, well, how long does it take to recruit somebody? Well, a cold pitch takes five seconds. You knock on the door and say, hey, CIA, I want you to work for me. That almost never, ever, ever works. In my whole career, it worked one time. normally it's going to take you a year to ingratiate yourself with the person

to make this person think that you are their best friend to the point where you're going to be able to safely make the pitch sometimes it'll take two years so you know you got to meet them at some point and then once you meet them and you exchange business cards then that slow development begins what do you think is going to happen with like there's a trial of gilane maxwell

yeah and that was really weird because i mean it was in i think it was it was not videotaped because it was in federal court right there's like a weird rule exactly i don't know why that rule exists that seems weird but there's a a lot of stuff a lot of like crazy conspiracies that think that say that he was murdered because he had dirt on people and that we knew about that and we didn't want to let that out like people like hillary clinton Right. And Bill Clinton would have had him, you know, they're, I'm sure you're familiar with, like, the whole Clinton kill list. Yeah. There's stories of, like, people that have worked with them that have ended up, like, committed suicide with a shotgun wound to the chest. Right. Things like that. Like, what do you, what do you make of that whole conspiracy? I don't, the Clintons aside, because most of those Clinton, the Clinton deaths have been debunked. Yeah. They've been debunked. Oh, most of them have. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Like, even, even, even the, even. The Clinton's, yeah. Like, even. Even. surviving family members of people who who have died or committed suicide

said look you know it's a disservice to their memory to say that the Clintons had anything to do with this like the guy was depressed for six months and suicidal and he had attempted suicide once before and then he ended up committing suicide it's not Hillary Clinton's fault now on on Epstein

man I've looked at this from every angle I did a podcast about this one time and I think I was able to come to this conclusion only because I've been in prison myself. Most prison guards have their heads up their asses. Sorry, hate to say it, but these guys are flunkies from the military, or flunkies from the local police academy, or they were too stupid to get into the police academy in the first place. Right. Number two, the cameras never work. Right? Cameras in prisons break,

and nobody ever fixes them. So that's how people get away. with things in in prison. I think what happened was Jeffrey Epstein was suicidal. He was clearly, he clearly told people around him that he was suicidal. He should have been in solitary confinement. And when you're suicidal, what they do is they strip you naked and they give you a paper smock to put over you, right? So you can't use it to tie a knot and hang yourself. They never did that with him. They put him in with this cop, right, who just got convicted yesterday. That guy just got convicted? Yesterday. Yeah, it was in the news. Really? Yeah, four counts of murder. This guy was a beast. Did you see that guy? Yeah. He looked like a fucking gorilla on steroids. I don't think I've ever

seen anybody so huge as this cop. I don't remember his name. Maybe we can find a picture of it. Yeah, the name of the cop who was the prison cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein. And that's another thing. But why would they put him in a cell with that guy? Right. Maybe they wanted the guy to kill him. So another thing was the guards. Look at this fucking guy. Look at the picture on the left. Go to the one to the top left, black and white one. That's the one that was in the New York Post yesterday. That guy is a mammoth of a human being.

Yeah. That's got to be all steroids. Oh, yeah, 100%. Jeez. Oh, man. Go to the one where it shows him in the black shirt on top left next to Jeffrey Epstein's face. Yeah. His neck is wider than Jeffrey's whole body. Seriously. So the cops, one of the cops was working a double shift.

You're not allowed to work a double shift, right? You get too tired. And so they had him on a double shift anyway. They were supposed to go by Jeffrey Epstein's cell every 15 minutes. And he didn't. He was at least 30 minutes because he was probably sleeping in the guard booth. So I think that rather than, you know, Jeffrey Epstein being murdered, I think he did commit suicide or was allowed to commit suicide, in part because of the incompetent boobery of the Bureau of Prisons, and in part because pretty much everybody in that case wanted him to commit suicide.

You know, they didn't want him to talk about the Clintons. Right. They didn't want him to talk about Alan Dershowitz and the Trumps and all these people that had been to the island. Yeah, but isn't that kind of like everyone in the case wanted him to commit suicide? Isn't that just like evidence that they could have killed him? Like they all want him dead. Like if he was a massage agent and he did have all this money and he had all his contacts. The guy is obviously a narcissist, a sociopath to an extent.

Oh yeah, definitely. He didn't seem to me like a guy. He seems to me like I mean, I'm ignorant on a lot of this stuff obviously. But he seems to me like a guy who thinks. thinks he might have it out. He seems to me like a guy who thinks he has, you know, he knows powerful people. Yes. And the powerful people walked away from him. So what is there to live for? I mean, he got by by the skin of his teeth in 2006, right? How did a convicted child sex predator end up making a comeback after 2006? I had Bill Gates coming to hang out with him after that.

After that. And Alan Dershowitz, you know, and Bill Clinton? And Bill Gates. Wait, for some reason, I'm blanking on who Alan Dershowitz is again. Oh, the Harvard Law Professor. Trump's, one of Trump's attorneys. Oh, okay. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Okay. Dershowitz was a lifelong Democrat and then he flipped to Trump. But he's like probably the most important attorney in America today. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I know who he is now. I'm going to get fucking roasted in the comments. He's the guy that he's the guy that said that he kept his underwear on. Right.

Right. He is probably also one of the only guys now who defends Epstein. Yes. He defends Epstein to the death. Yes. He does. Yes. One of the only guys. Right.

And he's like the Michael Jordan of lawyers. Yes, he is. Very much so. He even has a book published. He published a book with the same publisher as Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy's new book. Oh, Skyhorse. Skyhorse.

Yeah. They're my publisher too. Oh, are they really? Yeah. That's amazing. I've done. five books for them. Really?

Yeah. You're coming out with a new book, aren't you? Yeah. June, first week of June. What's this one about? It has nothing to do with intelligence. It's funny. My second book was published by Rare Bird Books.

There with Simon and Schuster. So give us a list of your books real quick. Sure. So the first one was The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. Dang it, which I meant to bring for you. I'll send it to you. Okay. The second one was doing time like a spy, how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison.

The third one was the convenient terrorist Abu Zubeda and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars. And then they commissioned four books. So I did a series. The CIA Insiders Guide to the Iran Crisis. The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection. The CIA Insider's Guide to Lying and Lie Detection. and the CIA Insider's Guide to disappearing and living off the grid. And then I said to myself, I'm going to do a book for myself, right? Something that I've always been interested in and that nobody else had ever written about. So I wrote this book. It normally takes me nine months to write a book.

I wrote this book in six weeks. I can't tell you how many times I look at my watch and it's like six o'clock in the evening and I start writing. And then I look at my watch and it's, 2.30 in the morning. And I'm like, oh, crap, I gotta get up in four hours. That's incredible. Yeah. I wish I had that talent. Bang this thing out in six weeks. It's called Remains of the Day, the ultimate guide to Washington, D.C.'s historic cemeteries. So I called the guy at Rare Bird, and I said, listen, I know you don't normally publish books like this. But my

first book with them won two literary awards, including one of the big four. I won the Penn First Amendment Award, which with a pen first amendment. Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe are the big four. So I'm a serious, you know, I'm a serious author. And I've written, I had written seven books at that point. So I said, I know you guys don't do books like this normally, but this one's actually really important to me. Would you take a look at it? And he's like, well, we really don't do books like that, but okay, send it to me. I'll take a look at it. He calls me two weeks later. And he says, this is the best book you've ever written. And I said, really? And he said,

The editorial board liked it so much. They want to commission two more. They want the mafia graves of New York City. And they want the historic cemeteries of Chicago. And I said, okay, send me a contract. So then he sends me the contract. I sign it. I had finished the Washington book.

I'm about a third of the way done with the mafia book. And he calls me, he goes, what do you think of the country western graves of Nashville and Memphis? And I said, relax. Let me finish these next three books. And then we can talk about the Nashville and Memphis. Interesting. So what made you want to write about the cemeteries in Washington?

When I was nine years old, we lived not too far from a cemetery when I was a little kid. When I was nine years old, I was in the cemetery looking for salamanders under rocks. And I found a salamander. And the rock that I found it under was next to this small tombstone, had some guy's name on it. and it had a medallion of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I never heard of the... I was nine. I didn't know what the Congressional Medal of Honor was. So I went back home. I had this shoebox with my salamander in it.

And my mom said, did you have a good time? I said, yeah, I found a salamander. And I saw a gravestone, and it said, Congressional Medal of Honor on it. What is that? And she said, oh, that guy's a hero. We should go to the library and see what his story is. And she told me, everybody has a story.

So we went to the public library. We were regulars at the library when I was a kid. And we looked him up. And he was a farmer in our town. And he fought in the fourth Pennsylvania infantry. And he captured the Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Petersburg. And got the Congressional Medal of Honor, returned to Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and farmed until his death in the 1890s. And I became fascinated.

by cemeteries. Like, I would go back to that cemetery and you see the giant obelisk that has the name of the local hospital on it. So the Jameson family made Jameson Memorial Hospital and that's where the Jamison's are. Or, you know, the guy who owned the tin mill

is in that giant mausoleum over there. The guy who had the steel mill or the coal mine, they have these big 19th century memorials. I wasn't interested in those people. Like I said, this guy was just a a common farmer who did something very, very brave. And so, especially when I joined the CIA,

no matter where I was in the world, I went to a cemetery or two or three. And, I mean, I found like Evita Peron and Nikolai Choshescu and everywhere I'd go, I'd, Oscar Schindler, you know, there are just so many interesting stories. There's this wonderful website too called findagrave.com that will give you a little hint if somebody's interesting and then you can do your own research. So what I wanted to do is write a book. Nobody had ever written a book about, I mean, there are a million books about Arlington Cemetery, but there are none, literally none, about the cemeteries inside Washington, D.C. So it took me months just wandering around cemeteries, and I found 250 of the most fascinating people that you've never heard of. Wow.

and incredible things that they did. There's this guy in Congressional Cemetery. I won't waste your time, but... It's a cool idea. It's so much fun. There's this guy a little tiny stone with his name and the dates. The dates are like 1787 to 1852, right? And so I'm wandering around, and I have my phone with me all the time, and I'm on

find a grave, you know, like, well, who's this guy? He's probably a nobody. 90% of them are nobody's. So I look at this guy. He was a mid-level nobody in the Department of the Treasury. Okay? A nobody. We would call him a cubicle drone today. And in 1812, the British invade Washington. They set the White House on fire. They set the Capitol building on fire. The president flees to McLean across the Potomac. the first lady dolly madison grabs the portrait of george washington and she flees to loudon county it's chaos this night in washington this guy has the presence of mind to say oh shit the

british are burning the whole city i wonder if anybody's rescued the declaration of independence and the constitution so he goes to the national archives everybody's fled and he takes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's Military Commission, and he rolls them into a sheet, and he takes them to a barn in Leesburg, Virginia, and hides them in the rafters of the barn until we push the British out. And then he returns them to the National Archives. So he's greeted as a hero. He never told anybody that he did this.

when the coast was clear, he came out with, hey, you know, I've got these documents. I saved them all. So he's greeted as a hero at the Treasury Department. But the fact of the matter is that he was actually a dick. And nobody liked working with him. And so he got kind of a little bit of a hero complex after this. And so many people went to the Secretary of the Treasury. Like, I can't work with him.

He's a dick. That they fired him. and so as not to, you know, set a bad precedent and humiliate him. They said, we're not firing you. We're transferring you to a job in the National Lighthouse Service. Well, this is a total dead-end job. So he's just sitting there. He's supposed to manage all the lighthouses.

And he was bored. And so in his spare time while he was bored, he invented the refractor light that we still use today in all of the lighthouses in America. it's named after him. Wow. This guy was a genius. Yeah, he was a genius. And nobody would have remembered him.

No, nobody knows who he is. That's incredible, man. As you know, it's so true how when you start picking up rocks and looking under rocks, you'll find some of the most interesting things in the world. You just never know. People are lazy. They don't like to do that. And that's really cool that you did that.

There's a very little-known, small cemetery in very far. upper northwest, not even northwest, it's right on the northwest, northeast line at the very top of North Capitol Street. So another block, and you're in Maryland. And it's called the old soldiers and sailors home National Cemetery. So there's a nursing home there that was set up during the Civil War for people who had like lost legs and couldn't care for themselves. And when they died, they were buried in the cemetery next to the nursing home. there are like 23 or 27 Congressional Medal of Honor winners there. They weren't very interesting to me.

Because you go on the Medal of Honor website and it's like, killed lots of Indians, killed lots of Indians, killed lots of Indians. Well, that's just not interesting. So I'm wandering around the cemetery. And there are about 15,000 burials there, which is quite small for a cemetery. There's one woman. one.

So I was like, well, who is this woman? Agnes Bikowsky. Maybe she was just married to the guy in charge. Maybe she's nobody. So I started to research her. Oh my God, what a fascinating story. It turns out she was married to the guy who ran the place. That's why she's there.

But that has nothing to do with her story. She was born in 1897 in Washington and wanted to become a librarian. and the first World War broke out. And her parents said, maybe you shouldn't be a librarian. Maybe you should be a nurse. She said, yeah, that's probably a better idea. So she goes to Bellevue Hospital in New York City,

the famous Bellevue Hospital. Now it's a mental institution. They had a nursing program there, and she became a nurse. And as soon as she graduated, she joined the Red Cross, and they sent her to Italy to care for severely wounded American soldiers.

And as soon as she arrived, she was assigned to care for, a severely wounded American ambulance driver by the name of Ernest Hemingway, who she called Ernie, 19 years old. And they immediately began a torrid affair that lasted for four months. And then she broke up with him. And she married an Italian lieutenant. Well, by then Hemingway had recovered and was transferred out. They never spoke to each other ever again. But in 1926, he wrote his first short story. He published his first short story, and she's the lead character. And then in 1932, he published The Snows of Kilimanjaro,

and she's the lead character again. And then his masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms, she's the lead character. And it turned out that she's the lead character in six of his books. she later went on to divorce the Italian and she married this American colonel who was in charge of the nursing home. Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in, I think it was 1958, 62, something like that, 62 maybe. And a year later, his brother called her and said, I'm writing a book called my brother Ernest Hemingway and I'd like to interview you for the book. She said, how do you know that I knew your brother? I never told anybody. I never even told my husbands.

And he said that Hemingway never stopped talking about her, that she was the only woman he had ever loved. He had four failed marriages. He was a notorious alcoholic and he was abusive to all of his wives. But she was the only one that he had ever loved. And so the brother went up to Washington and interviewed her. she gave him pictures of them sitting on his hospital bed while he was recuperating and love letters that they had exchanged. And she had kept a scrapbook.

Every time he was in a newspaper, she would cut out the article. And she said her husband just always thought she was a Hemingway fan. No way. And so the picture, the love letters, and the scrapbook are now in the Hemingway Museum in Key West Florida. and now people know who Agnes Pekowski is. That is fascinating, man. Oh, my God. And you just stumbled upon this lady.

I just stumbled. Like, I wonder who that is. So cool. I'm sorry, I'm wasting your time, but I'll tell you one more story. You're not wasting my time. This is amazing. I love this.

I was walking around Rock Creek Cemetery, which is really the nicest and largest cemetery in Washington. And there are important people buried there. There's, when you first pull up, in, on the right hand side, there's a little cul-de-sac, and there are monumental mausoleums all around with all the most important names of the 19th century business families. Like the hecht company, the big department store, it's the hecht family, and there's a

beer family, and the, have you ever heard of Woodward and Lothrop, another big department store chain, the Woodward family, and the Lothrop family? I'm not interested at all in any of those people. Yeah, there you go. What are we looking at? Rock Creek Cemetery. Oh, this is Rock Creek Cemetery. You see the one up and over one.

Right there. I'll tell you about that in a second. So I came upon this mausoleum that is on a traffic island. So this is prime real estate in a cemetery. And it was a name that I didn't recognize. It was Boyd. I was like, I don't have any idea who that is. Probably just some rich guy from the 1800s.

But I wrote it down. Like, when I get home, I'll take a look. So I look in. And instead of being marble or granite, it's all glass inside. So you can see the coffins. And it was like six of them. There was, you know, Mr. Boyd. His name was Israel Boyd.

And then his wife and his kids and one of his grandchildren. So I just made a little note. So when I got home, I had actually gone to see that. That sculptures by August St. Goddins, the greatest sculptor in 19th century America. That's a spooky looking sculpture. Yeah. Yeah. It's an important one, too.

That is John Quincy Adams' grandson, John Adams' great-grandson and his wife. The grandson had that sculpture made by St. Goddance because his wife had killed herself, and he wanted that grief to be expressed in a statue. People come from all over the country to look just at that statue. It's incredible. There it is. So anyway, I get back home, and I look up this guy, Israel Boyd. it was a story you're never going to believe. So this guy is a boyd and his brother.

Born and raised in Washington, and they wanted to be scientists. They wanted to be chemists. And their parents are like, yeah, uh, no, you're going to be bakers. We don't have money to send you to college to be scientists. You're going to be bakers. They didn't want to be bakers.

But the father's like, no, you're going to be bakers. So they open up this little bakery. And they hated it. kneading the dough every day, it's hard work, and you have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning. So they said, you know what, why don't we invent a machine to need the dough for us? So they invented the first mixer. Okay? So you just pour it all in this big tub, and the mixer goes like this, and it mixes all the dough.

And that worked really well. And then they said, you know, what else we should do, we should invent a machine that cuts the dough so every loaf is exactly the same size, shape, and weight. And they did that too, right? And other bakers are like, wow, look at these things that the boy brothers are inventing. We want to buy those. So they started selling this equipment all across the country. And then one of them said, I wonder what it would taste like if we put milk in the mix instead of just water. But that made it fluffier. Nobody had ever thought to put milk in the dough. And then they said, you know how paper boys deliver the paper

every day? We should hire an army of boys to deliver bread. So if you call in your order by 3 o'clock, the boy will deliver your bread in time for dinner and it's still hot. Well, by the time of the First World War, they had the biggest bakery in America. It took an entire city block behind Union Station, and they were rich beyond their wildest dreams. So they decided, time to retire. We're going to sell the whole business. So the business, their flagship product was this bread. And it had a terrible name.

It was like Mrs. McGillicuddy's delicious bread. Right? This is a stupid name. So they sell the business to the National Baking Company, Nabisco. National baking company. Hmm. And Nabiscoe loved the whole setup. They hated the name of that bread, Mrs. McGillow.

Le Cuddy's delicious bread. So the only change they made was they changed the name to Wonderbread. No way. It's labor intensive. How many people did you have to dig through their lives? Oh, thousands. Thousands. Yeah.

The research takes forever. The writing, I just blow right through it. Blow right through it. There's one in Congressional Cemetery. You know, Jay Edgar Hoover's buried in Congressional Cemetery. And about 30 feet away from him is his alleged boyfriend, Clyde Tolson. So, I mean, everybody knows the stories about J. Edgar Hoover. But what they don't know is that there was a guy who's acknowledged to be the first gay activist in the military, right?

He was even on the cover of Time magazine. He's in uniform and the title just says, I am a homosexual. He was the first person that come out. And he led to... First person in the military? In the military. He led to the gay rights movement. He created, founded the gay rights movement.

So he thought it would be kind of funny to buy a plot as close to Jay Edgar Hoover as possible. He said in an interview that it was his last fuck you to the system. Well, after he died, because he became such an iconic figure, hundreds and hundreds of gay people began to... began buying the plots, my fault, began buying plots around him. So now Jay Edgar Hoover is in the very center

of the only officially gay section of any cemetery in America. That's incredible. I didn't realize there was a gay section. Yeah, nobody does. That's amazing. And everybody's gay and everybody's important in the gay movement.

Isn't it so funny how people, we put so much value on what happens after we die. Isn't that the truth? You know, I don't know if you're aware, but like the cemeteries, some of the cemeteries in Mexico, they like worship these narco warlords. Yeah, they do.

They're insane. Yeah. They spend millions and millions of dollars on these, like, these little houses built on these cemeteries that they walk in, where they have music playing 24-7, they'll park cars in there. Crazy, man. They go there and, like, have parties in these mausoleums

for these, like, faint, like these legendary narc like Mexican narcos. It's nuts. You know, you'll see a lot of plots from the 19th century where, for example, there's kind of a famous one in Massachusetts. I went once to see it, but it's a grave. And then immediately next to the grave is a set of stairs that goes down to be alongside the actual entombment.

And it was because the grave is for the grave is for. for a little girl, she was eight years old, and she was afraid of thunderstorms. So every time there was a thunderstorm, her mother would go down there and sit next to the casket so her daughter wouldn't be afraid. You know, and you see a lot with steel grates on top of the grave, because they were rich people who were afraid that grave robbers would take their bodies and hold the bodies for ransom. You see, you see a lot of that. I saw one funny one. It was in, it was in Princeton, New Jersey. I went to find, there was a handful of graves I wanted to find there. Um, uh, I forget which president was like Chester Allen Arthur or somebody like that. Some obscure president. Uh, but the Menendez,

uh, Kitty Menendez, and I forget her husband's name, their sons murdered them in LA. Remember the Menendez murders? The Menendez brothers in the 80s. Anyway, you're too young. But, um, I found one gravestone and all it said was, I told you I was sick. I told you I was sick. Yeah. That's all it says. There's no name, no dates, no nothing. That was like her last, her last communication.

I told you I was sick. That's so funny. It's also so weird that we're like, that we like to bury our dead in boxes. That's right. And not just boxes, but then concrete faults and they're lined with lead. Like, why? Why do we do this? Let nature take its core.

Have you ever heard of a Tibetan, what's it called? It's called a, oh, it's called a Tibetan sky funeral. No. Where I guess in Tibet, what they do is they take the dead up to the top of this mountain, and they let the vultures come, like, rip the carcass apart. Because I guess it's like a part of, like, letting the human body go back into the ecosystem. Yeah, right. Circle of Life. Like in the rainforest, if something dot, or like in, specifically the Amazon,

on rainforest. If something dies in the rainforest, there's so many different types of animals and insects and bugs and fish and probably strip it down and nothing. Something dies. It is literally nothing. It's it's dust in a matter of hours because of all of the animals that will consume it and it just gets absorbed. Wow. Wow. I believe that. Like the fact that we don't like let our bodies go back into the earth is a weird thing to me. It is indeed. We got a little bit off track. What we're talking about before we talked about? Killing. killing. No, we were talking about something else. Oh, Epstein.

I know what I want. Yeah, we're talking about Epstein. Did you know about the, going back to Epstein? Are you aware of the bone in his neck that broke? Yes. The high, what's it called? Hyoid. Hyoid, that's it. Yes. That was always a weird thing to me. That seemed like the biggest red flag. Yeah, because that's common in a strangulation, right?

I don't know how common it is with a sheet. Right. But it is with strangulation, manual strangulation. So it's really hard to break that bone. Yeah. I think the, I think out of all the autopsies that were done from hangings, I think it was only like 40. I'm going to, I'm definitely getting this wrong. You could probably look this up.

But look up the statistics, easy for you to say, on hyoid bone fractures. And it was like 40% of hangings, I think. So it's really hard to break that bone unless you got some like violent trauma. Yeah, maybe the cop did it. Right. That's the argument for the for the highway one being broken is that you know, maybe the cop Maybe the cop killed him.

Mm-hmm. Which is fishy. I never really That's the reason I question it. You know, otherwise, if you don't believe one of the elements of a conspiracy with Epstein. What does it say? 17 to what? 76%.

I can't read it. It's too small. John, you got it. Yeah, it says, injuries to the high bone are rare. The most commonly reported injury is fracture, yet this is often a post-mortem finding with an incidence of between 17 and 76% in victims of strangulation and hanging.

In survivors, it's more often associated with a trauma other than manual strangulation. Interesting. Okay. So anyway, if you believe the official story, you have to believe that at every step of the way, something went wrong.

The cop was too tired. the cameras weren't working, the cop didn't make his rounds, you know, somebody fell down at every step of the way. Yes. Or he was killed. Or he was killed.

Then why do you believe that he was, that he killed himself? Because every one of those guards has his head up his ass. Every one of them. They're all morons. So when they say, well, the cop fell asleep, yeah, I used to see him sleeping in there all the time.

The cameras didn't work. Yep, none of the cameras work. Yeah, but the guards being morons doesn't change, doesn't support suicide anymore than it supports him being killed, right? Like, the guards could still be morons. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we shouldn't we shouldn't discount also that Epstein asked to be killed. You know, maybe the cop killed him because Epstein asked him to. That's possibility. I don't know. I don't know. We'll never know what happened in there. We'll never know.

Another thing I really wanted to talk to you about, which I've been fascinated with lately. I'm reading a book all about it right now is DARPA. Oh, yeah. I'm reading the Pentagon Brain book right now. Yeah, I'm about halfway through it. Right. I had these two guys on here, who I think you had on your show as well, about six months ago. One of the guy's name was Len Bear, and the other guy's name was he was a Harvard graduate who was recruited to a think tank to work for.

on some stuff for DARPA. And they were talking about this directed energy stuff. Yeah. And this guy was claiming, you know, it was, he was, he had this Russian accent, which was funny. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. Len?

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, he was claiming that he was being actively targeted by some sort of directed energy weapons that are coming from satellites or something. You know, not something that somebody's hanging out in front of his house, like pointing something at him, but it's some sort of like switch that's going off in his, in his head. Yes. But he had no, there was no, like, he has no history of working with any government.

He worked, I forgot what he did, but he was like a medical doctor. He was a medical doctor, right. He was like a hormone doctor. And he's a safety inspector for a food company now. Right, right. So, like, there was no plausible reason why any, anyone who would be targeting him. You talked to him. Yeah. What did you make of that stuff? And do you think that's anything that, you think is what they think it is? I have kind of a history on this issue. Because I'm out there as a CIA whistleblower, I attract a lot of people who have this complaint.

I happened to be on contract with the American Psychological Association back in 2015. And we were at lunch one day. And I said, hey, guys, it was like a dozen psychologists. I said, guys, I got a question for you. Not a single day goes by that I don't get at least one email from somebody saying that, the government is beaming some sort of waves at them and it's painful and it's making them you know vomit and they have a dizziness and whatever and i said does any of this make sense to you and they looked at each other and and started laughing and one of them said this is a very

common form of mental illness um they have found in their studies that when people feel overwhelmed their brains default to the most easily explained reason. And that is a dark outside force. Well, that's why everybody blames the CIA. Now people know more about DARPA. They're talking about DARPA. But then I talked to a New York Times reporter about this. And he said, you know, so many people are quick to blame mental illness.

But he said in his research, he found that there are some people who are just incredibly sensitive to the millions of waves that are flying through the air at any given time. Cell phones, radar guns, you know, anything. If we could see the waves, we wouldn't even be able to see each other. There are so many of them. Right. Right. And then I talked to Bill Binney, who used to be the number. number four at NSA. He was the chief

Bill Benny, chief technology officer at NSA. And I said, Bill, is this mental illness or is this like sensitivity to microwaves or what is this? And he said, I think that there's science behind it. I think that that DARPA is doing something that we don't fully understand. He said, we do know that DARPA is working on these not just next generation battlefield weapons,

but two generations battlefield weapons, lasers that will temporarily blind you so that we don't have to kill you, but it'll take you off the battle for. Crowd control. Crowd control is a perfect example.

Yes. He said, we don't know if it's DARPA that's doing this kind of thing. But he said, I can tell you how you can tell who is insane.

and who's not. Ask them if the waves follow them when they travel. He said, there is no technology to beam this stuff from satellites. It's not possible.

No. No. But he says, if it just happens when they're at a certain location, if it just happens when they're at home, where it just happens when they're at work, that's a problem. It's either a sensitivity or somebody's doing something to them. But if it

happens like everywhere they go. They went to their brother's house and it happened there and then they checked into a hotel because they thought they were going crazy. It happened there. No, that's a mental illness. Interesting. Yeah. That's what this guy, Len was saying. It was happening to him everywhere. So it happened to it in the airport and the way here. Yeah. But it doesn't happen to anybody else around him. Right. That doesn't make any sense. Right. This guy sent me, a guy sent me an email one time and he said this was happening to him. And I said, well, here's a link to this New York Times article on wave sensitivity. Here's an article from the website of the American Psychological Association saying,

you know, maybe you should see a therapist. And then he sends me back an x-ray. Like he'd scanned an x-ray and attached it. And it clearly had a chip like in the head. And I'm like, no way. So I did a reverse search on Google and it's just out there. like a Google image. Yeah, it's a Google image.

Somebody planted it on the internet and it's used 100,000 times. So I'm like, look, sorry, if you're not going to be honest, there's nothing I can do to help you. But no, I said the CIA doesn't give a shit about you. They're not using you as an experiment. They're not beaming waves at your head to see what happens. If they were going to do that, and I don't think that they are, because that wouldn't be the CIA, it would be DARPA and NSA. It wouldn't be the CIA. Yeah.

They might use it. once it's finally developed as a weapon. But in terms of experimentation, that's got DARPA written all over it. And NSA? An NSA. Why NSA? Because NSA is the one that deals in the signaling all the time. Like, for example, NSA, the Pentagon in general, and NSA are the ones that control all those satellites.

So if we did have the technology to use satellites to beam these waves at people, NSA would at least know about it. DARPA would have been the one to develop it. Right. Let me add one other thing. There's a county in far western Virginia, Highland County. He mentioned this.

I told him about Highland County. Oh, did you really? Yeah, because there are, there's an incredibly sensitive military listening site there. With these enormous dishes, they're like, you know, five stories tall, right? All plant, all pointed up at the, the sky trying to pick up signals from other galaxies and stuff.

Well, because it's so sensitive, I don't mean in a classified way, I mean, like, in a technological way, they forbid any outside electronics, right? There are no cell phones, no cell phone towers. The houses in this county, nobody lives out there, it's just farms. But they don't even have cable TV, right? No dish network, no nothing. Right. have this, or who have exhibited this sensitivity, when they go there, it ends.

That's why I think a lot of this is, I think they're genuinely suffering. And I think they really genuinely believe that they're being targeted. But I think it's that they're sensitive to cell phone signals and radio signals and TV and walkie-talkies and all the other crap that's flying through the air right now. This leads me to the same topic of UFOs and the shit that we're seen in the sky. Yeah. How fascinating is this? Oh, oh, it's incredibly fascinating. With, with bated breath, I await these releases. I really do. I actually saw one when I was a kid. Oh, really? With my dad. No way. Yeah. Where? It was in Amish country in western Pennsylvania.

We lived in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and my dad and mom owned a restaurant in a town 20 miles away, Sharon, Pennsylvania. My dad and I were working the midnight shift over the weekend. So we got in the car at 11. We're going to start working at 12. And we're, we have 5,000 Amish families in our county, Lawrence County. So it's dark, right? It's dark at night. So we're on State Route 60, going from Newcastle to Sharon.

And there's this brilliant flash of white light, like blinding, brilliant flash of light in the sky. And we both looked up, my dad's driving. I was 17. And then there's a second flash and a third flash. And he said to me, what is that? And then this orange trapezoid lit up. Right? It wasn't like saucer shaped.

I mean, it was saucer shaped, but with hard edges. And it was just floating there. And it had an orange light in each of the four corners. Whoa. So we pulled over and we got out of the car and we're standing there looking at it. And this guy pulls up behind. us and he gets out of his car and he goes what is that and as soon as he said it it just went like that and it was gone at this fantastic speed never made a sound like there was no buzzing or

nothing it was silent it was just floating there and gone I'll never forget it I said to him we go back in the car and I said so what do we do do we like call the cops or something and he said to tell him what? We saw a spaceship and it flew away. So we didn't tell anybody. What year would that have been? 1981. 81, okay.

So was it DARPA? Or was it aliens? If you were to bet. I can't imagine in 1981 we had that kind of technology. I mean, the speed with which this thing vanished was, it's unlike anything I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what it was. I know there are scientists that were studying

anti-gravity in the 50s and I wonder I wonder how much of that stuff went into DARPA I wonder but like if you look at the modern stuff like the stuff that these fighters fighters are picking up on their new radar

which is amazing to them I mean you listen to their communications and they're amazed by what they're seeing yes but then I've had other people tell me that DARPA does like hologram technology to like to like throw off enemy radar.

So I don't know what to think. You know, there's lots of those technology that technologies that they mess around with and experiment with. And, you know, why wouldn't they experiment with it? Right. With our own people off of our coast. Right.

Although I, it would be arrogant of us. I don't want to sound like a nut. But it would be arrogant of us to think that of the billions, maybe more, limitless number of galaxies. and planetary systems that were the only ones that are technologically advanced.

Oh, right. I agree with that. At the same time, you know, I would wonder why, especially our government is putting it in the light is elevating it to the level it is. Right. That, well, it could be two things. Either it's they think it's aliens or it's so

highly classified DARPA that they want to throw everybody off. Right, right. That's what I, that's what I want to So you don't think it's DARPA. I don't because I think that if it were DARPA, we would at least be using some elements of the new technology in the systems that we have. You know?

Like the F-35 wouldn't be crashing into the ocean like it does. Like we would be going half to the speed of light, you know? Well, that's what these things do do. Yeah, that's what I mean. But we would be doing it on the battlefield right now. instead of having eight different companies designing the F-35

and then oh no it fell apart oh it fell off the aircraft carrier oh no what are we going to do and everybody hates the F-35 like oh can't you bring the Wardhawk back can't you bring the F-16 we would be doing these spaceships by now maybe we're not there yet maybe they're just testing it

or maybe we you know obviously DARPA works with a lot of contractors right so a lot of these military industrial complex contractors like Boeing and all these other places could be testing this stuff and not yeah i don't know it's possible do you remember when john pedesta said that if hillary clinton were to be elected president the first thing she would do on her first day as president would be to release all the UFO files podesta this is like a hobby for him

he's fascinated by it and i i guess hillary loved the idea too yeah but the reason that but none of them do a lot of them say that like and then they don't do it like clinton It's like the Kennedy assassination. Bill was famous for saying something. Yeah, like the Kennedy assassination. Listen, if you're going to release it, just release it. Stop talking about it and just release it. Right.

They probably don't know, though. Like, could you imagine if they told Trump about aliens? You think he could keep that a secret? Oh, not for a minute. Not for a minute. It's got to be above their heads. Yeah. You would imagine.

Crazy. Have you ever worked with anybody in DARPA? Never? No, never. I know a lot of these former Navy pilots do. They get, they talk about like doing. work for DARPA or like being contracted by them to do certain things. You know, imagine the brain power in a place like that.

Like, you know, a lot of different organizations claim to have the best and the brightest. These guys are like frighteningly smart. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but they're, the crazy thing is too, they're geniuses that are also rich, making a lot of money. Yes. And like they're motivated by getting their budgets ramped up. and, you know, trying to sell these new technologies and this new, this new, these new war game technologies and all this stuff. And it's just, you know, I don't know, it's fascinating.

The book's great. I don't know if you've ever read it, but it's called The Pentagon's Brain by Andy Jacobson. It goes back to, like, the early nuclear tests and stuff that they did off of a bikini atoll. Wow. And, like, these nukes that were detonated in briefcases, that they could detonate in briefcases. Like, one of the first guys that worked on the, on the, on the first guys. first thermonuclear bombs. He was able to bring one on a commercial

flight in his briefcase, brought it to Washington as a test. Can you imagine? No, it's dark shit, man. Is there anything else that you're working on that we haven't really talked about? I know we talked about your book. Well, you know what? I'm on Substack now. I saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. John

Kiriaku, what is it? John Kiriaku.com, I think. Whatever it is. Is it true that they're not putting I heard that just recently they stopped putting like the like the like retweet on substack links on Twitter Elon's like doing some crazy shit right now

You're kidding me Yeah I saw that that was part of this whole Matt Taiibi thing You know somebody hacked into my Twitter account two weeks ago And took it over And I did everything I was supposed to do I reported it to Twitter support They hacked in They changed my

password then they changed my recovery email address to some email address in Brazil. So can you give me my my Twitter account back? They said, please send supporting documents. I'm like, supporting documents, you're the ones that informed me that I was like, okay, so I forward the emails from Twitter saying the password's been changed, the recovery email's been changed, this is the new, all they do is like, dot com. BZ or BR, whatever Brazil is.

So then they sent me another email last Tuesday, and they said, oh, sorry, there's nothing we can do. We recommend that you just start a new Twitter account. And I'm like, no, I've been on Twitter for 13 years. I'm verified with a blue check mark, which I earned. I didn't pay for. I have 50,000 followers. No, I'm not going to just start a new Twitter account. so they just didn't bother to answer me.

So I was going to call Matt Taeby this morning. I was doing this. No, I did it in the cab or in the Uber on the way over here. I was going to call Matt and I got a text from Katie Halper. And her Twitter account was hacked and they stole her address too. And she just got it back. So she was texting me to say she's back on Twitter. I said, I'm still not back on Twitter.

I was going to call Matt this morning. morning and ask if he could recommend somebody. And she's the one who told me what I told you. And she said, no, no, here's a woman at Twitter support. Just send her an email directly and say, I sent you her email address. So I'm hoping I can get my Twitter account back. So you emailed her already? No, not yet.

I'm going to do it on the way back to the airport. That's crazy, man. Yeah. This is how you have to do it now. Didn't you, do you think that's intelligence fucking with you? No, I think it's Louise Mench fucking with me. Louise. Oh, yes.

That's that crazy lady who said a bunch of shit about you. being a Russian, what she say about you? Yeah, she said, oh man, I was in Cuba a couple of months ago. Really? And yeah, my first book was included in the permanent collection of the National Library of Cuba. So there was this ceremony for authors. I bet you they got some crazy cemeteries there. And they're gorgeous.

Really? Yeah, gorgeous. That's a whole other conversation. How long were you in Cuba? A week. Okay. So I couldn't sleep one night. And so I went on my email and a friend of mine said, buddy, you need to check Twitter.

So I go on Twitter and here's this fucking, this Louise Mench, former member of parliament in the UK. She describes herself as an unhinged British witch. That's her bio. It's accurate. Yeah. And she says, and I've never met the woman. Never met her, never interacted with her, no idea who she is other than she's a former member of parliament. So she says, John Kariaku, convicted of espionage for spying for the Russians, has something to say about, like I tweeted something about Israel, Palestine.

And then a minute later, she tweets, John Kariaku, convicted traitor, hashtag treason, hashtag death penalty. and I was like What the fuck is this? I called my attorney. It was 255 a.m. I woke him up. He's also a friend of mine, so he didn't go nuts. And I said, I'm so angry right now, I feel like flipping out.

I said, I'm going to send you two screenshots, and I sent them. And he's like, oh, yeah, we got a suit. This is called defamation per se. She knew it was a lie, and she tweeted it anyway. So I filed a suit. And I did a lot of research before we filed. She does this to everybody. Everybody from the entire leadership of the FBI

to the entire leadership of Congress to half of the non-Fox news personalities in the country. Anybody she doesn't like, or if she doesn't like your politics, you're a traitor and espionage and a Russian propagandist and a Russian stooge and she's just a bomb thrower. But I'm a litigious prick.

So we FedExed papers and said, you have 48 hours to retract and apologize. And she retracted and apologized. And this all happened while you were in Cuba? I had just gotten home from Cuba by the time we filed the paperwork. Yeah. What were you doing in Cuba, by the way? My book.

So they included it in the National Library of Cuba. The first book. So it was me in like a dozen and a half other authors. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then they translated my first two books in Spanish. And so they were setting them around to bookstores all around the country. That's incredible.

It was nice. What's it like down there? Incredible. What's their internet and their television and their communication? I heard that like everything is completely. What I heard was I watched this documentary. about this this like Caribbean island band who went down there to do a concert

and they needed to let everybody know who they were because apparently they don't have any access to music or the internet or TV or anything like that. No. In fact, I wrote a column about this. Oh, did you? I was so surprised. In fact, the day I went to Cuba was the day that Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address.

so here's Joe Biden's State of the Union address that's carried live on every Cuban network and there's a simultaneous subtitle in Spanish I couldn't believe it so I'm flipping through the channels and it was everything CNN BBC RT I saw my own show really my own shows it's syndicated by ORA TV it's a Mexican network and here's my it's me talking to talking to was it Lenn Burr? that night? I think it was Len actually. Really? Yeah. But I had no problems watching anything that I wanted.

I'll tell you what's especially popular in Cuba is ESPN because they're all about baseball 24-7. Right. So no, I had no problems with the Internet either, although people on the trip who had been there before said that it's markedly better. now than it was two or three years ago. Oh, okay. Markedly better. Yeah, the story I heard was that there's this kid who has, who started this thing called the Piquete, where he had this little hard drive that he would come, he would ship it from

the United States or bring it from the U.S., and he would load up all that month's, like, top hits on music, top documentaries, movies, and news, put it on this little hard drive, bring it down there, and then they would pass it from neighborhood to neighborhood to neighborhood. Everyone would download everything on it. And that's how they would gather information. Well, I'll tell you. A friend of mine asked me if I would check out AM radio while I was there. And could I hear any stations in the United States?

So there are radios in the rooms. We stayed at the Hotel Nacional. And I got stations, not just Miami, obviously, but as far as Chicago. Like, every station is available in Cuba. Really? Yeah. I listened to a Cubs game in English. Was there anything you could?

get? Like was there anything that was being censored there? No. Nothing. Not in my experience. The only thing that they warned us about before we arrived is they said not to bring in any pornography. And I was like, oh, okay. I mean, nobody had pornography. It's free on the internet. There's no reason to like bring it in. And they said that they're really sensitive about pornography. What's the deal with Cuba and the U.S. and presidents taking the stance against this embargo? Yeah. What is like the, can you explain that overall?

That's a very topical question. Yeah. So, you know, one of the crown jewels of the Obama administration was opening relations with Cuba, something that they worked on for years. And it looked like things were really going well. We opened, we reopened embassies. There were cultural exchanges. We were providing visas. They were providing visas. And you didn't need a reason to go to Cuba. If you just decided, hey, I'd like to go to Cuba today, you could just get on an American Airlines flight and go.

Then Donald Trump ended it. Like, completely utterly ended it. No more travel at all. Why do you do that? Because Cubans are bad guys. They're communists. There was no other reason behind that? Nope.

Nope. End it. Wouldn't it benefit us to have that? Very, very. much. Yes. We would get much more out of that relationship than the Cubans would. Yes. So then when Biden was elected, everybody just assumed that because this was such an important part of the Obama administration, that Biden would just re-implement what Obama had agreed to. And he didn't. What he did was he opened the door just a crack. So you can go back to Cuba if you have a specific

reason for doing it that's been approved by the Treasury Department. Because this was an official event I was allowed to go on my U.S. passport. Frankly, I would have gone anyway through Cancun on my Greek passport. So it was no skin off my nose.

But you can go from Miami, from Orlando, from Tampa, or from Fort Lauderdale. Really? Yeah. And if you don't have a reason to go, you can go through Cancun, Mexico City, NASA, or Santa Domingo. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. But I'll give you another example of how rough it makes things. You know, it's like stepping back into the 50s. Every cab is a 57 Chevy. It's crazy. I took so many pictures because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

There was a woman in our group who was, she got bitten by a mosquito. and got dengue fever. So at breakfast the next morning, she's like, I don't really feel very well. By noon, she had a raging fever, and she was like, so we took her to the hospital. Well, dengue fever's endemic to Cuba.

They know how to deal with it. They gave her an IV. They gave her an antiviral. And she felt better. They probably gave her, what's it called? The horse paste. Yes. What's it called?

Why am I forgetting the name of it right now? What's the famous pill that for the... The one that people, that Joe Rogan was taking and he was talking about everyone hates. Yeah. Ivermectin. That's what they gave her. Ivermectin. That's used for dengue. Yeah. So she felt better the next day. They released her from the hospital. So she was a night in the hospital. She had a doctor assigned to her and two nurses assigned to her. She said she was never without help. Right? And the next day she felt great and they let her go. Her bill was $65. So how do you pay it? Because of the employment. American Express can't use any credit cards, any, zero, no credit cards. And they don't take cash at the hospital. They only take credit cards.

But Americans aren't allowed to use their credit cards in Cuba because of the embargo. Every other country in the world can use a credit card. Canadians, the Mexicans, the Bahamians, any European, not Americans. So this became like an entire day thing. Well, because we were an official delegation, the Minister of Health, paid out of his pocket the $65. Really? Now, is it like that,

is that the same thing in China? If you go to China, can you not use your credit cards? No, you can use your credit cards there. But not in Cuba. Not in Cuba, not in Iran, not in North Korea. Those are the only three. And I'll tell you something else.

When I came home, I wrote a long, like a 4,000-word article about this for the Shire Post in Los Angeles. And they, they paid me for it. So they sent my money by Zell. And in the memo line, it said article,

a CIA officer's trip to Cuba. I get an email from Zell saying, I'm suspended from using Zell for violating Cuba sanctions. So they said, you can appeal your suspension by answering these questions. Why were you in Cuba? What were you doing in Cuba? Where did you stay? So I'm like, none of your fucking business.

none of your fucking business none of your fucking business that's how I answered all the questions so then they were like well now if you want to appeal you have to go to they gave me some address in Arlington Texas I live in Arlington Virginia so I wrote back and I said

and you're too stupid to realize after 13 years of banking with PNC Bank that I live in Arlington Virginia not in Arlington Texas so I don't know I can't use Zell anymore that is so fucking bananas man yeah it's crazy you know you said earlier you said something about there you said you mentioned that there should be or could be one day a balance between all these superpowers and all these countries in the world i believe we're coming to that do you

think that you know obviously the word globalism or like a one world government is a very very It's a thing you gotta stay away from. It's scary, especially when you think of things like the world economic form. You think of like, you know, eat bugs and not own anything. It's scary and dystopian sounding. But nationalism, obviously, is nothing better than that. Like, there's something in between there that's good, between globalism and nationalism. Yeah.

What do you think it would take to have some sort of harmony? Yeah. I think that that multipolarity is a good thing because it's going to force the United States to engage in diplomacy, where we walked away from diplomacy during the Bush administration. And except for this brief period in Obama's second term, we just haven't utilized diplomacy like we always did in the past. I remember complaining at the CIA that, and I was complaining about the George W. Bush administration that I had never seen people work. so hard to not talk to our enemies. Like sanctions, we need sanctions, more sanctions. Well, how much more could you possibly sanction?

And what have we achieved with our sanctions? Right. The Cubans have been under sanctions for 62 years. We haven't brought the Cubans down. And the country's this big, right? I mean, do you think that more sanctions are not going to force these other countries into the embrace of the Chinese or the Russians. So we need to let diplomacy do what it's supposed to do.

And I think we don't have the stomach for that. I think we like being the only big kid on the block. But the Chinese with Belt and Road and the fact that they're swimming in money is kind of forcing us to that position. I think that's where we're going to end up. What do you think about Trump going and talking to all these people? Like wasn't the first president to go and talk to Kim Jong-un?

personally and like meet with yeah and all these people like one of the only regularly good things that I can say about about Trump is he was right on North Korea he really was right and I only regret that

that he seemed to not even he he he wanted to do it but his North Korea envoy seemed to back off in the second part of of Trump's term and the Democrats were just waiting to kill it anyway right so Trump

was right about North Korea, he was wrong about sanctioning the Chinese because that began this slow deterioration of our economic relationship with the Chinese. And it was something that the Biden people wanted to jump on because you remember in the 2020 election, Biden was accused of being pro-Chinese. Do you remember that? Trump was pro-Russian and Biden was pro-Chinese. I remember talking to this old lady in my hometown. She was a friend of my mom's. She was probably 80, 82, whatever. And she said,

some election we're going to have. And I said, yeah, it's going to be a tough one. And she said, I don't like Biden. And I said, really? Why not? And she goes, he's with China. And I said, what do you mean by that? She just kind of looks at me, like, what do you mean?

And I said, well, no, what do you mean? He's with China in what way? And I said, come on Mrs. C, you gotta stop watching Fox News. You throw these grenades into the middle of the room and you can't back them up. Right. But yeah, Biden wasn't with China any more than Trump was with Russia. It was just all nonsense.

Right. So instead of lying about each other, why don't we maybe try to build some diplomacy like we used to? A lot of people think that, you know, that he was really good on foreign politics and foreign policy. Trump? With like dealing with these people, yeah. Yeah, I never did. You don't think so. I get that a lot from my friends who are conservatives.

But I'll tell you, I talk to a lot of foreign nationals, and I travel a lot. I made six foreign trips in the last 12 months in the last 10 months. And people hated him and feared him. Yeah. They didn't like him at all. People in other countries. Yeah. He was so unpredictable.

Yeah. One guy told me, actually, he was a senior official in the Luxembourg foreign ministry. I went to Luxembourg to sit on a panel, and he sat next to me. And he's like, as crazy as it became, he said, the first thing I would do when I opened my eyes in the morning is I would reach over, get my phone, go on to Twitter, and see what craziness Trump was saying. Right. I feel like the media secretly wants him back in office. I kind of get the same feeling. I think it's weird that, don't you think, like the timing.

Right, of Elon getting Twitter and letting Trump back on Twitter. Yeah. And now this whole, this whole thing of him getting indicted and having to go to court in New York. And like, I'm just like, I'm just thinking like, imagine this motherfucker gets a mugshot that's going to, that's going to outdo Escobar's mugshot. That's going to be his campaign poster. And he is going to win in a landslide if that happens. Well, listen, I'm addicted to the polls, right? I talk about this in my radio show every single.

day. I go through like the statistics and I go through everything in every poll that's released every morning. And Joe Biden can't beat any of the Republicans running for president. With that said, none of the Republicans can beat Donald Trump. Exactly. You know, the week before Trump was arrested, the week before Trump even said he was going to be arrested, he was leading Ronda Santas nationwide from between five and 13 percentage points depending on the poll now the polls

are consistent that he's beating DeSantis by 30 to 35 percentage points wow yeah nobody's anywhere in the same orbit yeah it's only helping the thing about him that sucks is the worst I mean there's a lot of things that suck about him but the worst thing is like

the divisiveness and how he breaks people and I think China likes that yeah China just, I think they just want to throw fuel on that fire. They want us to be just more divided. Absolutely, because it makes their job easier. Exactly. They just love the chaos. Yes.

Yes, they do. Something I've been hearing recently about DeSantis is that he, they're saying he's a Trojan horse for globalism. I think I, I think Rose and Barr said that. Because he, there's some sort of like act that he's trying to put in place in Florida. You hear about that with blogger? He's trying to make political writers have to register with the government before they're allowed to write about politicians. Oh, see, we have this thing called the Constitution. Right.

Yeah. But this is a real thing. It's all over the place. I mean, people are writing about it that if you're in Florida and you're a blogger, a political blogger or a journalist, you have to register with your local government authority and let them know what side you're on. What? And you have to, or else you get fined like thousands of dollars. Oh, man, I would beg for them to arrest me in front of. I would beg them.

So what would John Kariaku do if the United States was no longer the world's superpower? And China is now the number one superpower and the United States is brought to its knees. Where would you go? What would you do? What sort of CIA spy tactics would you use to survive and thrive in the world? I'll give you two different answers, depending on how much on our knees we ended up being. Right. I'm a patriot.

I love my country. I want it to succeed. I think that it's making a lot of mistakes, which I write about and talk about every single day. By the way, that's amazing for someone like you to say. After what happened to you, after the CIA systematically dismantled your entire life? Well, see, I see them as the criminals.

And so that's what I write and talk about. Yeah. You know, there was one night, the night we captured up as a beta. We captured dozens and dozens of Al-Qaeda fighters. And we had so many, we captured so many people that night that we didn't have enough space to interrogate them all. And so the Pakistanis were bringing them over in groups of 10 in a paddy wagon,

bringing them to our safe house. And we were splitting them up and interrogating them. So this load, the first load of 10 came in, and they were being led in by this fucking idiot that was working for me. And they all had hoods on. And I said, why do they have hoods on? And he says, we didn't want them to see our faces. And I go, are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention?

Seriously. It's a war crime to put hoods on them. You can't put hoods on them. Take the hoods off. And he goes, guys, if you take those hoods off, I'm reporting you to headquarters. And I said, no, no, I'm reporting you to headquarters. because you've committed a war crime. So I grabbed the hoods

and I took the hoods off of every one of them. We reported each other to headquarters. And I got in trouble. They said I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism. And I'm like, it's a war crime. It's a treaty that has been approved by the Senate. It has the weight of law.

they didn't want to hear it and I said look we can't just ignore the laws we don't like we can't just pretend that they don't exist if you want to torture people God bless go torture but you got to change the law

you can't just pretend that we don't have an anti-torture statute you can't pretend that we're the authors and the original signatories of the United Nations Convention Against Torture change the law

right you think think torture's so great. Put your name on it. Let's have a vote. Well, you don't want to do that? Then you're a war criminal. Right. So I'm right.

They're wrong and I can sleep at night. But you don't put the CIA in the same basket as you put the United States of America. No. No. I don't. Like I say, we have a lot of problems. But I see myself now as kind of an activist for the things that I believe in and the things that are important to me. I'm opposed to Ron DeSantis because he was in the judge advocate general's office in Guantanamo and sat in on torture sessions.

Why aren't we talking about that? He should be disqualified for what he did in the torture program. DeSantis? Yeah, DeSantis. I don't even know about that. Nobody does. When was he there? 2005.

Wow. Yeah, but he said, I don't want to talk about it. Well, you know what, buddy? You're running for president. You have to talk about it. So back to my original question. Yeah. Oh, no.

My second answer there. Oh, oh, okay. I'm a Greek citizen. And all my children are Greek citizens. We have dual citizenship. And I love Greece. It's my second homeland. And what is Greece's relationship with the rest of the world?

Why would Greece... Is that just coincidence that you have a Greek citizenship? Or is Greek strategically a good place to be? Well, both. My grandparents all came from Greece And when I got arrested I'm kind of famous in Greece Like the last time I went

There was a camera crew to document my arrival at the airport And they're like welcome home Mr. Gariaka Welcome home I'm like At first I looked I said oh there must be somebody famous on the plane And I looked and they're like No no welcome home I'm like oh my God I'm so embarrassed My hair was like I slept

You know propped up against the side of the plane And anyway So when I got arrested, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, what can we do to be helpful? And I said, you can give me citizenship. And bang like that, I got citizenship. Now, I qualified for it anyway, but instead of waiting three years for it to work its way through the bureaucratic process, they just gave it to me. Just like that. That's incredible.

It was great. And then once I had it, I got it for all five my kids. So we're all Greek citizens. That's amazing. It's awesome. Greece is a NATO country. It's an EU country. It's strongly pro-American.

But it doesn't get involved in these high-level entanglements. Right. They just sort of sit things out. Right. All right. Well, you heard it here, folks. Get a Greek citizenship. John, thanks again, man.

Thank you. Tell people, I'll link it below, but I'll link your substack. Thank you. And you're assuming you got your Twitter back. I'm going to get my Twitter back. I'm optimistic. Next time you come here, you have to wear the SpongeBob shirt. Oh, I still have the SpongeBob shirt.

Well, that's a deal then. Okay. You're wearing the SpongeBob shirt for episode three. I'll do it. All right, cool, man. Thanks again. Thank you. And goodbye, World.