John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E18 Whistleblower's Roundtable with Tom Drake

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE We draw the curtain on season 2 with a preview of season 3 wherein we'll ask "What Makes A Whistleblower Tick?" To get us kicked off, John roundtables with whistleblower Tom Drake. A longtime member of America's intelligence community, Tom had just become an official at NSA when 9-11 happened - literally on Tom's first day. But, as America's "War On Terror" ramped up, Tom noticed NSA was gathering intelligence that it shouldn't - information pertaining to American citizens. NSA doing that was both outside its charter and flat out illegal. Tom chose to go through authorized channels to report what he saw. When, a decade later, the problem was still a problem, Tom finally took what he knew to the news media. What makes a whistleblower tick? Judging by Tom Drake - the right stuff.SHOW NOTESIf you're enjoying Dead Drop, please sample our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. ...tributors today dropped nearly all of the charges against Thomas Drake, the former U.S. intelligence official who walked out of the Baltimore courthouse today, had been charged under the Espionage Act with mishandling sensitive information. It's a high-profile failure for the Justice Department, which is cracking down on government leaks. Prosecutors claimed that Drake had betrayed his country, but in his only television interview on 60 Minutes,

Drake told us the only thing he betrayed was a gigantic waste of taxpayer money. I'm John Kiriaku, and this is Dead Drop. What makes a spy tick? With this episode, we're bringing season two to a close. Not to worry, though, season three is starting immediately, as in with the very next episode. The way that we're putting a bow on season two is with an episode that previews an important part of what season three of the podcast is going to focus. on. For starters, my story will pick up with both my re-entry to my life and as it would turn out, my re-entry to the world of spies and spying. If ever it became clear to me that once a spy, always a spy, was at least sometimes true. It was at this point in my life. It might be the

closest thing I have to a superpower. Funny thing, I was about to learn that the same applies to being a whistleblower. Once you've seen how the race, Al Politique sausage gets made, you can't unsee it or unknow it. Something inside of you suddenly seems attuned to the corruption. It's not unlike a familiar but deeply unpleasant smell that the back of your throat just knows. As clubs go, and being a whistleblower isn't unlike being in a club, I can honestly say that I'm honored to share this space with so many remarkable, courageous people, but I doubt

there's a one of us who really wants to be here in this club. To begin with, it means there was something super rotten in the state of Denmark that demanded attention, someone's attention. Then, once you've picked up the whistle and considered putting it to your lips, you have to know that it will mean putting your family, your finances, and your future through all kinds of painful gyrations that neither your family nor your finances nor your future, were ever meant to handle. But there's that damn compulsion inside of you

to just do the right thing. Yes, we make a choice to blow the whistle. And yet in a very profound way, we don't. We can't. Because doing the right thing isn't a choice. It's an obligation. It's a responsibility, a way of thinking. And so we blow the whistle.

Hell, anyone with access to the same information could do the exact same. same thing. They should, yet they don't. That's really what we want to explore with the series of roundtables we're going to have over the course of season three. While we continue to explore what makes spies tick, we'll also now ask the question, what makes whistleblowers tick? To kick us off is one of the members of the Mount Rushmore of whistleblowers, former NSA executive Tom Drake. Tom blew the whistle on the NSA's Trailblazer project, which at an astronomical cost violated the NSA's charter and the law by spying on Americans.

In the early 2000s, NSA was developing two electronic tools, capable of collecting intelligence from the growing flood of information pouring from new digital networks like the Internet. The first was called Thinthread. Thinthread was put through rigorous testing in 1998, and it performed each task well. It sorted through massive amounts of data, located threat-related communications with far more success than the existing system.

It used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and email data to identify suspect communications. It identified US phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy. And it used an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information. That prevented misuse and it improved efficiency. Thin Thread was hands down the way to go. Well, the second tool was the aforementioned Trailblazer, which cost billions of dollars, dwarfing the cost of Thin Thread.

Not that the wild costs really mattered. Trailblazer had political support because it was initiated by NSA head Michael Hayden when he first arrived at NSA. That, apparently, was worth everything. enter Tom Drake. Although he had worked as a contractor for NSA for a few years before NSA finally hired him, Tom was delighted to go to work as a full-on staff employee of the agency.

And indeed, he entered NSA as part of the senior executive service. But alas, Tom's first day of work was 9-11, 2001, the day that changed everything. Thin Thread had been discontinued three weeks before 9-11, and Trailblazer had been given the green light. But as he got down to work at NSA, Tom witnessed the abuses and illegality piling up and he felt compelled to act, which he did via the prescribed legal channels and institutional processes. But nearly a decade into the prescribed process, with all the illegality continuing

throughout, Tom saw clearly that nothing was going to change unless someone with deep knowledge personally took action to change things. No one ever said doing the right thing was easy. There's a reason. It's hard. But once you've been compelled to do the right thing, not doing the right thing simply stops being an option. Tom and I recorded this conversation in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the 9-11

attacks. although it wasn't exactly what I wanted to talk about with Tom, 9-11 will always be the gorilla in every room it's in. So that's where our conversation began. It's crazy to think that 25 years have passed. But then when you think about 25 years having passed, you also realize we're talking about an entire generation plus that came after 9-11 that didn't live through it. No. And I think that's why it's incumbent upon us to keep telling the story. Because we know that the official narrative is nonsensical. I'm not talking about control demolitions and dancing Israelis.

I'm talking about the fact that we should have seen it coming. We should have defended against it. We knew it was going to happen. The entire system was broken. The FBI and the CIA hated each other. You had Richard Clark and George Tennant screaming from the rooftops that it was going to happen. You had the White House slapping them down and saying, no, the real threat is China. It's not these Arabs with no shoes.

And in fact, it was the Arabs with no shoes. I wonder after 25 years if we've learned our lessons. And I fear that we haven't. Well, the problem was we didn't learn the lessons then, because it was looked forward or not backwards, and then it was used as what I call reverse false flag. It triggered all kinds of secret executive actions that we both got caught up in and became whistleblowers against.

I mean, you're holding up the mirror, the torture regime. And for me, even though I became aware of the torture regime, which actually came out before the even deeper deep state secret, which was mass domestic surveillance. ones. Yeah, mass domestic surveillance. But all trigger by 9-11, right? Absolutely. That became excuse. And of course, Cheney, five days after 9-11, said, we're going to go to the dark side. You had former CIA executive, C.I. Executive, C.F. Black, saying, we're going to take the gloves off. It was pretty clear that this was now, hey, we have our excuse. We can now restore the imperial presidency,

and now we can do all kinds of things that we really couldn't do before. But we got our excuse. but that was a failure, a fundamental failure to keep so many people out of harm's way and then look what it led to. For me, it became the first order of effect. That's what you see on TV. But then there's a second, third order effects. And this was all, we have our excuse now.

We can actually go back into Iraq. Oh, what, before? That was the first thing they were thinking of right after that. I remember the intelligence briefings. People, an Arab linguist that I work because I used to be a cryptolinguist during the Cold War. And an intelligence officer in Navy after the end of the Cold War

on the terrorism desk of all things at the Pentagon. So those effects, we are still paying a incredibly high price on the geopolitical stage. And there's also the curiosity, I've really talked to you

at length about this in a while, but given the looming anniversary, right? Yeah. Yeah. In what I still is the shadow. of 9-11, which really go deep. Here we are, after all these years, too, and so many of the major players have died.

Oh, yeah. The lawyers, some of the lawyers involved in this decision-making. Cheney is dead. Woolsey is dead, and there's just so many of them who are involved. John Rizzo, the CIA General Counsel, he's dead. Jim Pavitt, the deputy director of the CIA at the time is dead. but their legacy, this hideous legacy that they left is alive and well. And we see it in the intelligence budget.

We see it in the defense budget. We see it in the fact that Americans are not in the streets when we say we want to begin wars of choice. But before we get into all that, Tom, sure, sure. One of the things about your story that has always just fascinated me in a head-shaking kind of, is your very first day at NSA as a senior executive was 9-11. There was. And it started, I mean, just as the workday began, the first plane hit, what in the world was that like?

You haven't even probably chosen a desk chair yet. I had not. And 9-11 happened. This was interesting. I was an outside hire, even though I had been a contractor there for quite a while. And, of course, I had my previous intelligence background, which was quite extensive, both in the military, both Air Force Navy, and then I was actually supporting the DIA, the J2, in the Alert Center, the National Military Joint Intelligence Center. And I walked in that day, just to give you a little sort of with some trepidation, here's why. Guess where I was sitting, what desk I was sitting on in 1993 in the alert.

center at the Pentagon. Oh, no. And it probably doesn't even exist anymore. It was vapor. I don't know that, but I was on the terrorism desk, which in itself was a backwater desk even there because obviously you had all the military components, you had CIA, you had state. Obviously, there's all the sort of the supporting agencies as well. And of course, terrorism, as we well know, asymmetric warfare, I've been going on for quite a while, especially if you go back previous years with all the hijackings. I expressed an interest in counterterrorism in the early 1990s, and I was told in plain English,

that is a career-ending move. And then by 1997, I said, no, you know what? I'm really interested in terrorism. I really want to do this. And my boss pulled me aside, and he said, Middle East, definitely. Tradecraft. You can go into tradecraft, definitely.

But terrorism, you're never going to get promoter. it again. I said, you know what? I have 20 years, 25 years ahead of me. I'm going to go into counterterrorism. And I did. And it was fun and rewarding. And then 9-11 happened. And all of a sudden, it wasn't to backwater. And they needed people who knew what they were doing. Yep. I was originally on the, because of my NSA background, well, military, but tied to NSA, they put me on the electronic intelligence desk. But they realized, I obviously had other skill sets. And so I actually ended up on the terrorism desk, on watch, it was rotating watch. I was actually an individual ready reserve, but as a commissioned officer.

So I was fully integrated with not just the desk, but the alert center schedule as well. And sometimes we would do extra shifts. Sometimes someone got called out. I would just put on a uniform and go down the Pentagon. Well, remember when they tried to drop the World Trade Center Towers? the first time. 1993. I sure do.

I was there on that desk. That was February. I was there. We were sending out reports. And it turns out, and there were subsequent studies, if they had positioned the trucks with the bomb just a little bit differently, they may have succeeded in what their terrible plan was, which was to basically tip one of the towers over and drop it onto the other.

Now, as it turns out, it almost succeeded, about half a dozen people actually died and upwards of a thousand were injured. People don't remember, just since they don't remember this. Almost a thousand were injured, many of them quite seriously. We were sending out reports. This is what I walked in with on my first day, NSA on 9-11, 2001. We were sending out reports. we were using at the time very sophisticated technology, but we had access to all kinds of intelligence,

lots of it compartmented. And of course, for obviously specialized compartments as well, depending on the source, some of them are hypersensitive sources. Yes. We were sending out reports. And it were all being ignored. I remember I was literally on watch

just after this happened, the J2. the senior military intelligence officer at the time of two star comes down into our spaces makes his way over to the alert desk the main desk right usually it was an 05

I mean 06 but an 05 could fill in it was a military position it was rare that a civilian even though he had civilian intelligence officers would actually fill it given that it's the Pentagon he said yeah yeah I'm reading all the reports, he said, and he's shaking his head. I'm sitting there.

My mouth is just all under the floor. I'm just like, I'm arrested because the next is what he then says it came out of his mouth. Who cares? There's almost a direct quote. Who cares about some raghead spouting off fatwas in the desert underneath a fig tree? Who cares? Wow. We are reports.

We're saying they're coming back. This is what they've initiated. Spectacular attacks. They get the attention of the entire world. They're coming back, and we even made reference to the use of airplanes as weapons. You're interested? All ignored. I talk about the bojinka truck.

Eight and a half years prior to 9-11. I talk about the bojinka plot a lot because most people don't remember the bojinka plot. The Bojinka plot was supposed to be hatched from Manila. It was conceived by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, whom we knew only as Muhtar. And the idea was to hijack 14 Boeing 747s and to fly them into buildings all the way up and down the west coast of the United States. The plot was foiled by accident when a cleaning lady. stumbled on the plans as they were laid out on KSM's dining room table. He was out getting lunch and she called the police.

And the police called the Philippines Intelligence Service. They called the CIA. KS.M went on the run and there was no Bojink of Plood. But that confirmed what you just said that al-Qaeda intended to use aircraft as weapons. And we still didn't pay attention. still didn't and then we then all the other subsequent attacks took place kibar towers yeah kanzania kenya kentia the nightclub u ssss coal yep absolutely true so you are in nsaa on your very first day it happens to be 9-11 and then the first plane hits and then i was actually in i was in i was actually

the legislative affairs office oh of all places he's actually been hired in from the outside as well because NSA realized I had a problem with their overseers. It had become a huge problem. They really didn't like to be overseen. Yeah. Despite all the scandal that came out during the 70s when I was a very young teenager

and that was my own civic awakening, realizing your government going way off the rails, violating the Fourth Amendment, engaging in state-sponsored assassination, CIA. And of course, that led to a number of reforms, just given all the exposures and revelations, right, church committee, Pike Committee, and a number of others,

including the Ford Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. And under Ford, you couldn't do state-sponsored assassination, right? LedOps, quote-unquote, at that level, was supposed to not occur anymore because of all the trouble we got ourselves into. Yeah. As you well know, the history, sort of the darker side history of that side of the CIA.

So, I've, walked in that first day and and the arrangement was I would spend about a month with the number three at NSA the Signal's Intelligence Director. I reported directly to her. Wow. And I was brought in. Guess what my title was? It's so surreal. Senior change later. Ha, ha ha. Because NSA, all these studies have been conducted. We're talking really high level studies, both internally and externally, St. NSA was way behind the times, woefully inadequate for the demands

of the 21st century. You need to bring in outside hires. You need to shift all your legacy thinking. You've got to meet the future because you're growing, increase irrelevant, and you're drowning in all the data, drowning. Quote, quote, drowning. Right.

So the arrangement was, I would go around just to get a feel, because I was also going to be serving as sort of a de facto communications officer, to get a feel for what her responsibilities were, what things we could, like, where are sort of the edges, the interfaces, where are the fault lines,

where are the issues, where are the challenges, how can we meet them? And I'm also coming from a very technical background as well, although I've done a lot of management and technology consulting during my GoGo times out and Silicon Valley in elsewhere in the 90s and the early aughts.

So I walk in at O Dark 30, which O Dark 30, I realized there was a movie that was O Dark 30, but in this case it was O Dark 500, just that the sun was coming up on that fateful day, making my way down Route 32 in Howard County. I pull in to my designated, I've been given a designated, because I know it's CIS, but I was the, but I was the, Dicey's Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service at NSA, I pull into my spot, I walk into their old headquarters building, and I showed up in her palatial, a palatial for NSA. There's old school wooded, wood paneled office, quite large, expansive desk, city area, a mini conference corner, all that. My calendar became her calendar except for the very pop deck, which was the top tier, were talking about half dozen at the very, very top. I was part of what they considered the top 40 at NSA

and other than supervisory's counseling sessions. So we were at the legislative affairs office and she was trying to convince a Sissy, the Senate Intelligence Committee tag team, a technical advisory group team, why and what the country would get for the billions and billions that have been programmed for the Trailblazer program. They're having great difficulty.

all the explaining what would the nation get in terms of national security for all the many, many of billions that were already programmed at that point in time. Again, prior to 9-11. Well, this is on 9-11, of course. So I'm sitting there. And she was considered to be sort of the voice of NSA. She was usually wheeled in, even though most people, NSA were highly introverted. The joke was, you can tell the difference to someone who's introverted and extroverted NSA.

If they're looking at their own shoes, right? They're introverted. So I'd look at your shoes, they're extroverted. Yeah. So it was one of those jokes. Well, her executive assistant, who I'd known before in a prior capacity when I was a contractor, when she was also in the technical space, opens up the door, says one of the towers had been hit by an airplane. and I alerted right away

because of what I came that remember we just shared Bohinka all this is like yeah my time had down at the Pentagon I said up oh is this what I had feared all along a landmark building spectacular landmark

and a plane's crashing into it and the first that's the first thing but then it's like oh yeah I remember there were some 25 bomber that it hit the Empire State building. That was back in 1945, caused a lot of damage.

And as a side note, the actual design, the architectural design of the Twin Towers that both the North and South, far different than the Empire State Building. Far different. Yeah, but it was not a flat. Aluminum.

Yeah. That is correct. And it was very open, and it had basically, you know, it was, you had the base of the columns that extended all the way up four of them that was the primary means by which it was spectacular design there's no question about that of course it dominated in

for a number of years it was considered the vitals building buildings plural in the world not too long after without going to you know all of a sudden the door opens again the other towers hit i i knew we were under attack i literally stood up set out loud and everybody was thinking but hadn't said America is under attack. The next four months are a blur, John, because we went into crisis response

and I didn't even come to until, you know, like in terms of feeling even half human again, I mean, just 16, 18 hour days, hardly getting any sleep. Every day. I used to sleep under my desk. I would just ball up in my jacket and use it as a pillow and sleep under the desk, sleep two hours or so, get up, and then just do more work until you fell apart.

Well, we had people, the workforce, so you call it, the NSA, they just kept referring to the workforce. That's how basically the seniors, the high-level managers would refer to the people that did their real work, was the workforce. They knew we had failed the nation. They knew we had fundamentally failed to keep people out of harm's way, which was the prime directive. Well, there was also another prime directive, which was you can't spy of Americans, U.S. persons, corporations, legal residents, legal residents, legal resident aliens, visitors without a warrant. Fourth Amendment, Constitution, fundamental to how America was even came about 250 years ago now. And then, of course, the Constitution 12 years later.

to formalize all that. What was then on leech, though, is what I had to quickly confront. It was clear because the failure was used as an excuse to not just clawback executive power, but under the cover of national security and using 9-11, the failure as an excuse, we're going to start doing all kinds of things that would normally not be permitted,

or we would have to get permission, or we'd have to pass special legislation. All that was just, all those guardrails, the guardrails that existed that morning when I walked in just disappeared. I've heard you tell the story where you say that the hair on the back of your neck stood up because you recognized immediately what path NSA and the larger intelligence community were going to take. and it was not the path of respect for the rule of law. No. Rule of law is in the way,

constitution is the way. I had several moments of truth, but the primary one was not, it was basically barely three weeks, it was three weeks after 9-11. I already knew that they were starting to shift technology, IT systems, onto domestic networks to just,

and they were, I'll just say this quietly, how loud, that they were leveraging their special relationships with certain telecommunication concerns that they had existed for quite a while that became greatly expanded after 9-11. Some of them went back decades

and to get into executive orders and a whole lot of other things. And then whispers, because I was very well connected, whispers, because I was also responsible for putting the very best of America at NSA into the fight.

So I was being introduced to all kinds, kinds of basically skunk works projects that weren't part of what they called a production chain, meaning they weren't operational, but they either had demonstrated themselves as a demonstration platform. They were a pilot or a test bed. And I remember CIA director, George Tenet, had issued a memo. This is before the big, huge reorg,

to the entire intelligence meeting you say, hey, whatever you got, I don't care. We need it. Put it into the fight. We don't know where the next stack's coming from. Whatever. So that was part of my tasking. Yeah.

And so I was going around campus. Well, the whispers were they were engaging in just simply breaking the Fourth Amendment. Yeah. And I'm saying, oh, my gosh, the impact, the downstream is we don't even know yet what that's going to mean. We doubt, and now we're seeing us all normalized. But then this was, but the excuse was the failure. The excuse was we need ability, unfettered, no restrictions. It didn't matter what rights existed.

It didn't matter what a piece of paper, what it said, written on a parchment. It didn't matter. So to answer a question directly, I confronted the number three. she said she was the Sagan director she demurred she a very conflicted person as it turns out

she didn't want to acknowledge what I knew she knew that we'd gone off the rails and it was going to come back to bite us the whole thing called blowback right? Yes indeed and I get us right away but it's going to catch up with it at some point

and for this kind of deep state secret there was going to be a point just like there was with the torture regime, it wasn't got to remain secret. Okay. So she said, and I realized it was that she was handing, she was sort of handing it off, right?

Go talk to general counsel. Well, there was one attorney at the time because the special domestic surveillance program, the mass surveillance was so secret. It was authorized by the president, and that the authorization was that, a memo kept in David Addington's safe. Yes.

Okay? And he was basically the lawyer, chief of staff. Well, he was basically his counselor, right? He was. But he was in in inently involved in, hey, what else can we do? Well, yeah, we can take the Constitution throwing out the window. And John Hughes involved in, you know, others. But it was a very small set, a small.

a cabal, as I will call it, who were engaged in a conspiracy, which is a coup against a constitution of being very direct here, because that's what it was. All unnecessary. All the tools that necessary existed, we didn't have to draw the line way over to the side of security, because guess what, Franklin was right, you're going to sacrifice both of liberty and security.

So I confronted him. I said, what are we doing violating the Fourth Amendment? What are we doing engaging in on and unw-and-this-warrant? less surveillance. He said, you don't understand Mr. Drake. This is all been approved by the White House. We're the executive agent. It's legal.

And as soon as he said legal, the hair went up in the back of my head because guess where I was thrown back to as a very young teenager, Nixon administration. I remember the famous interview, a couple of three years after he resigned. The David Frost interview.

David Frost. The Frost Nixon interviews when they came right to the point that last interview and it's legal if the president says so. It's not illegal if the president says, what? This was no simple creep problem, break into the water gate. It wasn't the rogue CIA summers, all that, right? I had followed that as it unfolded over a couple of years. It led to the resignation of a president.

This was far more consequential, way more consequential. I knew when I hung up the phone, oh, and he said, don't ask any more questions. There was clearly a more than tacit threat because he's recognized, this guy's asking questions. Not only do we don't want them ask, we're not going to answer them.

I read that in that moment I know in fact I was already basically tagged by my supervisor the number three simply by asking the question and say what are we doing we're violating the constitution of all things. And that makes you a malcontent. You're a guy that's just not going to do as he's told. You're not going to play by the rules. And you said something a minute ago that I

I want to reiterate. Sure. You go to the general counsel. In fact, you really couldn't go to the general counsel because the general counsel's in on it. I had exactly the same experience. My general counsel at CIA was one of the architects of the torture program, one of the ones that worked with John U. and Jay Bivey at the Justice Department to justify the torture program.

So I went to the media. You played by the rules. And you went to the Pentagon and then to the oversight committees. I went to every channel, all the formal disclosure channels entirely. Yes. And the designated channels, whistleblower channels, in my case, there was actually two. The first one was under the Intelligence Committee Whistleblower Protection Act. Even though there were special constraints, depending on which agency you belong to, this came out in 1998 because it realized.

one that had been designed earlier, the regular whistleboard protection act, was insufficient, did not cover the intelligence community. Even though there was these other restrictions, I at that time had the authority under the law, passed by Congress, signed into law, by the president, I could go to the designated intelligence oversight committees I could go to an individual congressperson.

I could go to an individual staffer or there was another, there was actually another way to go directly to the committee. And at that time, it's important to say this, so they changed it later, you did not have to get clearance from your home agency first. You could go directly. I made contact with one of the permanent staff members,

who had oversight responsibilities in terms of the day-to-day account. They called it the staffers would have their accounts. They were basically considered the experts. They were typically senior GS-15 level is what they were, but the congressional payroll. They were the ones that were the direct liaison and interface to the agencies in which they would have relationships. For oversight purposes,

not too long after, I was pulled aside by the number three and said, oh, they're looking for leakers. That's the press. They're looking for leakers to Congress. They even set up a war room at one point. Oh, my God. A war room. The war room wasn't going out of terrorism and real asymmetric threats. It was Congress was considered to be the threat.

Oh, my gosh. We don't want them to know what we're doing because obviously they had to hide what they were violating. They had to hide the violations of the law. They have to cover it up. and actually the cover-up became far more extensive, as it turns out. I think this is where the cover-ups worth into crime in many cases, and we go back again to the Watergate era.

So, you know, this, this, I mean, it sounds interesting to paralleling with your experience because I knew after I left that conversation with the general counsel, one of the few Red Inn, red had its own compartment. At the time it was known to Stiller Wend, it was referred to later as the, president surveillance program, although when it first, when it came out four and a half,

almost four years and three months later, oh, it's the terrorist surveillance program. Well, that was, we always had free reign when it came overseas. It wasn't like you were restricted. You still had the Fourth Amendment restrictions, but you certainly didn't have any restrictions that it came to foreign intelligence. Okay. It's when it applied to U.S. persons. And so I would, there was an mail office.

I remember it's still to this day, this early October. And I didn't know about the memo. I already knew that as they was authorized, I didn't know what the memo. He was confirming what I had already discovered organically. Mm-hmm. If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes,

I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photo journalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't, what it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this.

Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at costard and touchstone. Like the donor, a DNA horror story, the hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop.

I knew I faced this was my moment of truth. Would I remain silent and act like I never heard what he told me? Pondered it momentarily, momentary moment of truth, and said, you know what? I'm eyewitness to the subversion of the Constitution from inside an incredibly secret agency. And if I don't do something, guess what? I'm complicit with the crime. I took an oath. I had taken an oath a number of times in my extended government career, Air Force twice, CIA, to the Navy.

And then the final time was the fifth time as a senior executive entering service at NSA. I knew I could not violate the oath. and that's what led to be going to all the channels. But of course, those channels, let's get real here. Let's be completely honest. As you just mentioned, the council itself, the fact that even radiated with my supervisor, remember, I'm an outside hire.

I didn't come up within the ranks. I wasn't elevated, as they say, sort of a lofty level of executive executive level the super grazes they used to call them and so I was already marked by her no doubt had the word was already going out

we got to get rid of this guy and that's a whole story in itself how far they went to get rid of me over six and a half year period so going to the general counsel obviously that's red alert It's like, you put a target on your own back.

Yeah, I put it up. But that was a choice I made. I owned the choice. I owned it. I didn't have to do that. I could have just played the game, did my job, quote-to-go, did my job,

followed foreigners. Yeah. And retired and made tons of money and that's a whole lot of the story in itself, how much money I could have made. But there's a lot more of life than just acquisition, as the Frangy would say, in Star Trek in gold press latinum.

Okay. Like somehow it's it's never enough, right? It's just you can't get enough. Really? Oh, okay. So that's when I became a whistleblower because, but I also knew I was going to play by the rules. And I also knew.

And you did. It was the third rail. There was a third rail. I knew this from Millsburg growing up as an even younger teenager. when he went to the press. After he went through the channels that existed then, there's a problem. All the channels that I ultimately exercised,

all of them were exposure channels. And guess what? Unfortunately, there was people within the oversight committees that had already been co-opted. Yes. And at the Pentagon in your case. Yes, well, I was the DOD level.

Yeah. You went to the Inspector General, and the Inspector General turned on you. Yeah, that is an extraordinary story, is how far they went, and it actually came to a head during the pretrial proceedings, the extended pretrial proceedings when the government ultimately charged me for daring exposed, and that's really why they came after me. It really ticked them off.

I did ultimately go to the press with unclassified information. They used that as the excuse in cover. What they were really ticked off about was the fact that I had exposed the mass domestic surveillance program. That was really they were taken off of them. Yeah. So you had a bunch of colleagues that were sucked into this as well, the likes of Bill Binney and Kirk Weeby and others.

Can you tell us about how you ended up working with them, partnering with them, and what happened to all of you collectively? Yeah, the very best of America. They really are. Necessity is the mother of invention. This goes back to the early days of the industrial age. You got a problem. Let's fix it.

You got an issue. Let's take it on. It was always against the backdrop that we, especially at a secret agency, we owed the very best of who we were in America to provide for the common defense as designated as one of the two primary responsibilities of the government and the preamble the Constitution. The other ones promote the general welfare. So I forget about that.

That's the people side, right? You've got to take care of the people as well, the citizens. But there's also the side and its deep. defense, right? The common defense. It's not common offense. It's common defense. I mean, I used to play in sports. It's always like the best offense is a good defense. I think sort of forgot about all that. So I had known about them from my technical background. And they were actually one of the first, it was the signals, the signals intelligence analysis research center. Again, a skunk work, sort of like the SR 71, Kelly Johnson. I was very familiar with that from

my Air Force days. And a lot of breakthroughs in the 50s and 60s, even in the 70s, sort of the foundation of the modern military that we basically just kept living off, living off of for quite a while. F-15, I mean, there's just really, of course, then you get into the corruption, the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. But they're one of a number of these very small backwater. non-operational attempts to solve the most critical

intelligence challenge problems faced by, not just NSA, but also faced by the intelligence community at large. And this was particularly critical because of the digital age, the incredible, the extraordinary expansion, explosion of Internet. And they had taken on the biggest challenge problem, one of the biggest challenge,

there was these top five. Every year they would come out, publish their top five child problems. One of them was big data. How do we deal with the extraordinary amounts of data? People forget the analog era. It was basically hard boxes, hard targets, and you had these specialized, somebody's one-off solutions,

depending on what you wanted access to. Or as you well know, the job you, you see you in various guises and forms. open and then you have Macs and all the different covers, okay, without going to detail, all the different covers. I met some of them when I was in the bubble at CIA, which was fascinating during some of our assemblies, right? It was like one place where they could say,

oh, yeah, we're married to each other, but you can't even recognize us when we leave outside the bubble, not even in the halls of the CIA. Oh, yeah, that's right. an entirely different persona. I mean, it's just, yeah, I mean, watching the agency, by the way. I don't have you seen the series. It's kind of remarkable.

It's like, yeah, I bring back memories of certain things. I used to help train people like what you ended up doing. We were actually sort of, you had a chance when I was going through my own training. You could augment, you get extra pay for it, of course, because like extra duty. Never mind. You can even sign up for the paramilitary unit at the CIA if you wanted to. We actually helped train the operatives. It was fascinating.

dead drops and how to break, you know, people trying to track you, all that. So, I see. So, yeah. So all of a sudden, there's this, I'm using air quotes here, leak investigation. In fact, nothing has been leaked. It's been, a crime has been reported to the appropriate oversight committees. New York Times article. New York Times.

Take us from there. I know there was I never went to the press before I did go to the press and it was not prior to the revelations which is the tip of the iceberg. They acknowledged later that they had 12 at least 12 sources. I was not a source. Never was a source. That was an earthquake underneath the entire intelligence community, but in particular NSA. Because it turned out. while they're focused on Tom Drake,

there were a lot of other people who objected to this thing. Correct. In other parts of the government as well. Right. And I, you know, it's, well, that's a whole story in itself because I ended up as, you know, in my capacity, I had a lot of liaisons, liaisoning I did after 9-11,

especially when I became a troublemaker. And ironically enough, they would send me on these missions, some of them I volunteered for it because it was sort of out of sight out of mind. they didn't really want me involved in NSA activities. But because I was a senior executive, and I was reporting to the number three, they couldn't just get rid of me. It would be too obvious, like, rid of me.

So, interestingly enough, I'd be sent to the school to Abdu SIGGIT 101 for new recruits. I would be sent to the CIA to talk about new ways, even innovative, even nonlinear methods for predicting the future and the challenges that we would be. face going forward into the 21st century, particularly in the aftermath of 9-11 and all the questions that were being raised, never mind the investigations that were being launched.

That was part of my tasking. But you were asking me because I got to close a loop on what you had asked me before that. Go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to ask you all of a sudden, an excuse the terminology. The leaks, the leaks. And then the shit hit the fan. Right. I just skipped over a whole bunch of stuff as well.

This is, you know, Kirk and Bill and Ed Loomis and Diane Roark, who is my primary. Not the only one. I don't talk about the other, but was my primary contact under the Intelligence Committee with the Law Protection Act. So I had brought thin thread, was what the program, this breakthrough program. It met the key challenge problem, but it was a little over $3 million program. Which is pocket change by an assessment. But it was a breakthrough solution.

It works. We're talking about a dozen people, focused, skunk works, we're going to solve this problem. And they did during a three-year period. They solved the big data problem while ensuring we were always compliant with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution

and still find the real threats. I pile everything up into one haystack or multiple haystacks and treat every straw as a needle find their real needles in the haystack. So when the New York Times article was published, I mean, it just, it was an earthquake.

I knew because so few people have been read into an extraordinarily compartmented program. We're talking one of the most compartmented of compartmented programs that I had been involved in a number of them, not just at NSA, not just at CIA, when I used to work at NPIC and building 213, Oh, boy. Okay. With national technical means to use that euphemism. I had also been involved in a lot of military ops where it was SAR SAP. So special access required, only the people that were briefed in were read in, knew about it or the details.

This one was unbelievable because the president was authorizing it. It was his imprimatur on the program and as he was executive. agent. I knew I would get picked up. I knew that. Picked up, meaning I would be immediately put on a very, very short list. And there was a series that came out some years ago called Person of Interest. I knew that I'd become a person of interest, but more than that, I'd become a target because so few people have been read in the program. Irony of Ironies, I was never read into the program, but I had people that were who I obviously had protected all these years for obvious reasons who were in my to and fro about NSA who would share and whisper certain things to me

and things I found out technically that made it crystal clear because people were like you said there were people even if they weren't going to become whistleblowers were asking questions about what are we doing, Tom. This is not who we are. And then when did this all fall on your head? Well, massive national security leak investigation two weeks after, at the very end of December, multimillion dollar, 25 full-time FBI agents, five full-time prosecutors from the DOJ,

and they drew people because I ended up having, having to deal with them, they took the best of the best at FBI, the ones that are specially trained, and you'll get a kick out of this, John. I don't know if I didn't ever share the details of you about this one. They actually pulled quite a few of them from their mole hunter unit. Oh, my God. The specialized unit at the FBI that literally is trained to go after real spies, like Aldrich Ames-type spies. Traders.

And others. Yes. Wow. Wow. They took them off their real investigation looking for real traders and had the focus on you. Yes, because I became a designated, targeted enemy of the state. And so there was a massive leak investigation. They started doing, and again, a lot of details here that I wouldn't go into both.

extraordinary electronic surveillance of me, a whole story in itself. I could write half a book about it, and later physical surveillance. They even bragged about it when they, so it all culminated in a raid of Diane Rourke and Bill Benny and Kirk Weeby and Ed Loomis in late July of 2007.

Bill and Kirk came to me shortly thereafter. and said, Tom, they were asking all kinds of questions about you. You're next. Turns out, I was the last one that we know of because I had had the bullseye on me. They considered me the ringleader. So guess what? Late November, I'm getting ready. I was teaching at the National Defense University.

This is part of we eventually, they were eventually, I got lateral best. They finally got, you know, they were able to find. a way to pull all my teams, enterprise teams, all the money, all the products out for under me, and all I was left with was an office and a desk and a computer and a flag. So I ended up at the National Defense University teaching information technology strategic leadership. And I was getting ready to go down to Fort McNair where the campus is located. Beautiful, it's a beautiful location.

and I look out the bedroom window and there's a dozen FBI agents streaming across the front law and you know, that's when the nightmare began. So I was interviewed. I knew people said, you're naive time, you're stupid. I always read my Miranda rights, but I decided to cooperate why I wanted to continue reporting high crimes and misdemeanors is defined by the Constitution.

up to including decisions made at the very highest levels of government, including the president. They didn't want to hear that. So we're not here to hear, though. We're not here. They made it very clear why they were there. Of course, they were doing their job. They were following orders.

So I cooperated with them over three separate interviews until it was obvious in the third one, when I'm down in the mole hunter unit in their conference room at the D.C. field office, the FBI field office, where I was confronted for the first time, and they played bad cop, good cop, I was confronted the bad cop was the chief prosecutor. It was Kafkaesque.

This room had no windows, but it was just Kafkaesque. So that was April, that was April 2008. I resigned from MSA because they had already suspended my clearance. They were moving to permanently revoke it. I had hired, I had hired a criminal offense attorney who I spent many, many tens of thousands of dollars and of course went into much, much more dead after that because of what happened. And then multiple attempts to get me to plead out. And they had charged you with a whole bunch of felonies, like life-ending felonies. So this is April 2010. So two and a half years after I was raided, we use that term, I wasn't visited.

No. I was raided. Well, yeah. You know what that's like. Yeah, when they break down the door of the house and a dozen or a dozen and a half, FBI agents pour in and tell you sit on the couch and don't get up, that's a raid. Yep. It was clear. I, you know, and I didn't know.

I mean, even then it's possible because, but I was the first, as it turns out, under the old espionate the old the world war one era espionics act i was the first one yes yes i would had become the scapegoat i was the one they're going to make an example of and they were going to use your case as a template to go after other whistleblowers and they did and they did yeah they did so yeah i mean so what happened um i was working for apple it was the only job i could find it was a retail job selling computers and iPhones and, you know. And it was my understanding at the time that when you applied for the job at Apple, that it had gone all the way to Steve Jobs for his approval.

Was that true? There was it. Yes. At the executive level, they actually brought out the head of HR with the store leader to ensure that unless I was convicted of a felony, they were going to stand behind me all the way. Wow. And they did.

I am actually, I am indebted to Apple for how far they went, and it was extraordinary. It became a safe place for me. Mm-hmm. People, you can imagine, people are calling up, people are calling Apple. You've got a criminal.

You've got, you know, you've got a Benedict Arnold, you know, a tree, you got a traitor working for you. unbelievable. They protected me. They said, yeah, if you're convicted, then we have a different conversation. Right. Right, right.

So it was extraordinary. But so, and of course, because once I got indicted, it was clear that intrepid reporters, especially the ones that were still the old saw gum shoe on the beat, we're going to find out where I worked. And then they would find out,

although Apple would not acknowledge where. it got out that I worked at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland. And everything is the kicker. Bethesda, Maryland, high rent district, a lot of people with the government, very, very senior personnel live in Bethesda and then the Apple Store. I can't tell you how many senior leaders of the CIA live in Bethesda, Maryland, and of course they use that Apple store. How many members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees?

live in Bethesda, Maryland. I could start naming. If I started naming names, you would instantly recognize who they were before or who they are today. Or some of them are retired or still quite prominent. It would come into the store. Often, many times, of course, they either had a very discreet security detail,

depending on what part of the government they worked in, or they had the full-blown one like the Attorney General Holder. He showed up with the black bands, and there was basically a bubble around him. I saw him a number of times. I actually saw him, I guess it was with his kids, his wife and kids at the mall in Tyson's corner of Virginia. And you couldn't get within 40 feet of the guy.

No. In the mall, they made a bubble around him. But Tom, getting back to this situation, they charged you. Was it seven felonies? No. 10. 10 felonies. So 10 felonies.

We should say something. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry, we should say something to our listeners. This is a common tactic that they use. It's called charge stacking, where they will charge you with five, ten, 20 felonies. They will drive you quite literally into bankruptcy.

And then they'll come back in the spirit of kindness and generosity and say, take a plea to one or two or five and we'll drop the others. and you never even considered. No, and they tried initially because when that extraordinary face-to-face confrontation with the chief prosecutor back all the back to April of 2008 down at the Mole Hunter, FBI, field office, mole hunter's conference from,

he made it for Crystal Claire. You better start talking. We have more than enough evidence to put you away for the rest of your natural life, Mr. Drake. That's what I was facing at that time. well isn't 20 years better than the rest of your life but no guarantees so when they indicted me i was facing 35 five under the espionage act 793e the same one that ellsberg was charged with four and this is this is just still surreal on 1001 charges felony for making false statements when in fact

they were false themselves one for obstruction of justice the four false statement charges and the Instruction of Justice were the ones they had maximum flexibility on. Those were the ones they put in your back pocket. He said charge stacking. Because even if they couldn't prevail, right. But they could still get me for several years, potentially, before a jury. Yes. In prison.

Yes. Yeah. I was behind several eight balls. But you never, this is a thing. You and I met in the immediate after. of my own arrest. And we were introduced by our friend and mutual attorney, Jesselan Radak. And one of the things that...

Extraordinary attorney. Extraordinary attorney and a great... I am indebted. I can begin to tell you, I even have a special dedication to her in my book that I just got cleared from the government, which was not just NSA. And you know what that means. Oh, yeah. That's hard work.

That's hard work. And not easy to do. Just the reason. I championed Jesselan. at every opportunity. She, and she, God knows she doesn't do it for the money because she's not making any money. She does it because it's the right thing to do

and because that's the kind of heart that she has. And she was a whistleblower herself. And she's a whistleblower on a major national security issue. And we'll get to that and when we have our conversation with her. Go ahead. But the one thing that struck me from the moment I met you was that you never considered a plea. Did not.

No. Incredible. No, and even when the case was collapsing, the last thing I was going to do, as I told the chief prosecutor in April of 2008, I will not, this has become in some ways tied to me directly. I will not plea bargain with the truth.

Yeah, there you go. But that's a whole story in itself. We don't have time to go into it. And I go into great detail in the book about how, how, because people, it was clear. I was headed for, I was headed for trial. It was clear. And as my criminal defense attorneys and I had public defenders, I was declared indigent before the court, by the way.

Yeah. When I was reigned, I was declared indigent. So the, no, no, my original criminal defense attorney, he kept the government in bay as long as he could, but he wasn't willing to continue without getting paid. I had no money left. I had no liquid assets left. I already expended them all. And so, and no other, even though there were law firms, there were individual attorneys

and knew it was a critical First Amendment case like Ellsberg. They knew that. History was ringing in their ears. But their firm said, you want to represent Mr. Drake? You have to, even though I had pro bono, because they were big enough to do that, conflict of interest. We represent certain agencies and individuals. You cannot represent.

If you want to, you have to leave. the firm. Well, why would they want to give up? I mean, you can imagine this is where you get into that security thing. Yeah. They give up the lucrative practice that they had, which, you know, they're making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to defend with no guarantee, right, that I can prevail. Yeah, no guarantee. So and then, so you, you met me. You go ahead, right? One of the things, yeah, and one of the things that Jesselin is really, really good. at is in her relationships with the media, what she did for me is what she championed with you. She got you in front of the right media personality.

Yes. People who took you seriously, who listened to what you had to say and who believed you when you said it so that your side of the story could get out there. You ended up 60 minutes. Yeah, that's a whole. she knew when I first met her what was at stake, but she also knew that we would have to.

And I knew this before I even met her. I knew once I was indicted, I had to find a way to influence the court of public opinion. I knew that was critical. That would involve the press directly. But remember, the government, as you well know in your case, they had the high ground.

Oh, yeah. They held a lot of cards. And I'll say mainstream media, who by default accepted the government narrative. And they almost always do. Yeah. And it's under Obama, no less. Why Obama? Why would his own, his, his, those more, it was more dependent then.

Why would the DOJ, right, go after you? You must. I was told by family members. dealing with family dynamics. This is the thing people don't realize the huge, massive impact that occurs, the incredibly high cost you pay with your own family. Yeah. I was headed for divorce.

I was separated for quite a while. I had my own adult children questioning who I was as their father. Yep. I went through the same thing. World War II veteran. Couldn't. he was having a hard time accepting that his son, who had been an officer in the military, was now a senior executive in the government.

Why would the government be charging him with espionage of all things? Maybe he didn't know his own son either. I mean, it was extraordinarily difficult time. It really, really was. So they held the high ground. Jessel knew when I met her, we have to establish a strategic campaign, a media campaign, pain. And so because I could, this is the other restriction. I could not say anything publicly free trial. Right. Nor could I. Not a single word to anybody. And you know why. I mean,

it's clear. They really will use it against you. Impeachable. Impeachable, right? That's right. So she had to become my voice. And I don't understand why they didn't want to engage with the media, but my public defenders were extremely reluctant to have any contact with any media because they kept saying, and it's true, we don't want to have undue influence with the jury. I did. I wanted to have undue influence with the jury. Sure. So as much as they didn't like it, and this is where I'm indebted to her, because, I mean, it could have very, it's very, could have easily become a different outcome if my case had not gone public in the court of public opinion through the press. So did I have offline meetings with a number of reporters and journalists in the

national security space? Yes. But it was like I wasn't there. Could they ask me all kinds of questions? Yes. But they could not go on their record. It was all filtered through her as a a lawyer. Yeah. Because remember, that's the only protection I had. And that was a very thin protection, as it turns out. I'll tell you something. She did the same for me.

We met with several journalists. They were not all necessarily friendly, but I was able to get my side of the story out there on background. One of the things that she did, and I know she did this very successfully with you, with, I believe it was Jane Mayer at the New Yorker. Oh, yes. Jane wrote a beautiful, beautiful expose. Well, she connected me with an Israeli journalist named A.L. Press, who wrote the same

kind of article about my case for the New York Times. The New York Times then rejected it. Then he sent it to the New Yorker, and the New Yorker rejected it. And then the London Review of Books. So I'm getting to the point where 10 or 15,000 people around the world are going to read this. Nobody's going to pay any attention. And then the London Review of Books killed it because they said that they did not want it to impact Barack Obama's reelection campaign. Yep. But you ended up, not just with this glowing, wonderful expose written by the great Jane Mayer. Oh, yeah,

phenomenal. You also ended up on 60 minutes. Whole story behind that, yes. And it turned out the case started to fall apart. against you? Well, because that became, again, the Jane Mayer article, it's New Yorker. I mean, she's been a long time, a long time investigative journalist for them, a lot of breakthrough stuff over the years, right? Including the early, the early revelations of the torture regime. She had heard about surveillance, but no one would talk. She had more people talking offline, and she was really good at getting sources to talk, even if they would not go on their record. So through another contact, partly me, but also because the strategic communications campaign, media campaign of Dessland, was now beginning to get out there, 60 minutes at a producer level, brought it to Scott Pelly in his team.

And there was all this back and forth, right? because again, Jane Mayer is working on this. She spent several months. She had dropped everything else that she was working on to focus on just me and the background and interviewed a whole lot of people, both on the record and off the record. That led to 60 minutes.

And when I first met Scott Pelley and we hit off really well, part of my youth, I grew up in Texas, that was our common connection. Okay. So, And he said, this is the most important story I'm working on right now. But they didn't know at the time, and I heard this from the camera crew,

they didn't know at the time, okay, you run across people, and this is the history of 60 minutes. They've had a lot of whistleblowers. You go back to big cigarette companies and all the exposure there and a number of others. They didn't know whether or not I could tell the story. It was much more powerful when you have the very person. And in this case, under the gun facing basically the rest of his life in prison, and trial was now scheduled for 13 June of 2011, can he tell the story?

And this was my first time on this level of exposure. And I told myself, I'm just going to be myself. Wow. What a huge risk. It was huge. I realized that. And of course, Justin was. there because there were risks to say anything at that latest stage, even though people didn't

realize how far the case was starting to collapse. But this was April when all the filming, early April, when all the filming was taking place. So that got all kinds of attention. There's no question. I mean, yes, the careful reader, those who enjoy the long form investigative pieces, They come from investigative journalists like Jane Mayer. That goes into far greater detail in terms of the background. But TV has an enormous impact. It's the combination of the visual. It's a combination of the very person who's under the gun

and could very well end up in prison. And there's Scott Pelley, of all people. Right. Who at the time was one of the most highly respected journalists in America? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that that that was broadcast. So the Jane Merritt,

the agreement, there was all back and forth. The agreement was New York would publish first. And then they would broadcast. It was a very last week that Sunday. But it was right for Sweeps week. It was a two hour. And I was at the top top of the hour.

So it was a 14. minute, 27 second. It was the full segment. You know, they do their segments. But this is the full version. Huge impact. There's no question. And then that Washington Post weighs in.

Like, what are you doing, government? Do you remember Watergate? Seriously. And then remind you sort of, do you remember our role as the press? To their credit. And it was almost like magic after that. The entire case just fell apart.

Yeah. But I was still exposed. because of what you said, the stacking, right? The charge stacking. My public defenders knew that. They knew that I was still exposed. And that's a whole story in itself because I was not going to plead to any felony of any kind. I wasn't going to plead it to anything.

Why should I? What they had put me through ruined literally. I don't have a retirement. I'm on fixed income. I have a very small annuity because of the time I did serve in the government. And of course, I was cut short, right? I didn't work even for my government, my military background, which is extensive, is all cut short. I never had a full career, okay, in terms of a full retirement.

So I never got to the point in my case where I could actually retire, which would be a rather solid pension. And then I could still go out, right? Yeah. Of course, that's around what are you willing to give up? in the defense of the Constitution and the oath that you took to defend and support it. So the good, I mean, this is on the very, I mean, it's dramatic in the book, I go into excruciating detail how that all happened because no one, up until it all began to publicly collapse, there was no indication that I was, we were going to trial. It was, that was clear.

And I said, I kept in, and there was a whole story there, the last week and a half, but it turns out the government realized that they were losing they were they weren't going to be able to go because to the judge they tried to play the judge as a fool i it turns out one of the key this is this has been less been less publicized over the years in my case i actually ended up with a judge who knew no matter what i was charged with i still had rights under the Constitution. He made that crystal clear from D-1. And then the government, in typical fashion, overreach,

they tried to play him as a fool. And to his credit, he wasn't going to be played as the fool. They even got to the point that we're the only ones, we're the only ones who can say what is classified or not. You can't. Well, you know, people don't realize that at the court level, they have their own researchers. They have their own staff, the court staff.

So it was remarkable. And so on the eve of trial, this is literally the Thursday before the Monday. The jury is already sequestered. They already have the alternates in place. They're already being given all the instructions, all the restrictions. We're going to start doing the formal selection on Monday,

start of trial. There's a break in. the afternoon. I know in the book, it's a really, it's pretty dramatic. It would make for a great stage play. It really would. Because you don't know until that moment, until that moment, which is basically the last day before the formally scheduled data trial, that I'm going to trial. There doesn't seem to be any other off-ramp. And then for the first time and after all those years, an off-ramp emerged. And so I used to play competitive chess. I didn't know that.

Yep, competitive chess. I was actually rated by the U.S. Chess Federation. I stopped playing in the military because it just got too time-consuming to stay competitive. I was a pretty good player. Probably if I had stuck with it, I would have been even better. But it took your face a log out of you to get really good at it. Bringing back to Jess and Radak, she was on the phone because there was a rather interesting conversation it took place between her.

and the public defender, one of them, and then me. And I said, you want to make a plea deal? These are my terms. I knew in that moment, because the garden was desperate, it turns out, to get out from under. The problem was they still had interlocutory review available to them. They could have instantly said, we're going to take. this up at the Fourth Circuit, the appeals level.

That would have, they did this with Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA employee. They did that with Jeffrey Sterling. He was willing to take his chance, but then they put an interlocutory review with the same prosecutor that I had who did not play by the rule at all.

And guess what? It sat up there for almost two years before they made a decision. I risked the same thing, John. I risked that they would either stall over, I will guess what they'd do in the meantime. You take it right off the white, hot heat of the press, because the press was like, all on my case.

Remember, it's so rare. People don't realize how incredibly rare it was in American history. I was the first whistleblower since Ellsberg charged in like manner, and there had only been two other instances of Americans being charged on the espionage act. Yes. I was the first whistleblower since Ellsberg. It just was so it didn't become rare As we all know too all too well

Eight people were charged at espionage Under Obama alone We have seven now under Trump Between the first and second Second administration seven Never mind all the other investigations And that doesn't count all the other leak investigations That even though the Obama administration engaged in

Eight I was the first Under the World War I era espionage act There was another minor one another one, not too long before me, where they were trying out, hey, you know, we might be used one of these other Svina I was like. Was that the case in West Virginia? Yeah, I thought so. I was the sixth.

Shammai or Shemai. Shemai Leibowitz. But it wasn't, he was under 798. Mm-hmm. And it was involving a podcaster. Yeah. And he actually ended up in prison. People don't realize all the others, by the way.

that you don't hear about that were also charged. They tried because they considered me an enemy of the state, John. They actually, I mean, they said that I had not just damaged national security. It was the highest level of damage. Exceptionally grave. Exceptional grade. Exceptional grade. Exceptional grade.

Like the Rosenbergs. Yes. That was the category. There was a gallery put out some couple of years later. They began brief, this is what they did, joint DNI, DOJ task force. Me and Snowden were placed on that as a road gallery of those

who would do us harm. We were mixed in. Remember the shooter down at the Navy Yard? Oh my God. Remember, we were put on the same list. Oh, my gosh. Robert Hansen, we were put on the same rogue's gallery. Ironically, the picture they used for me was the one that took on me

when I accepted it by ridden our truth-telling prize. But that's where I was a Benedict Arnold. They literally painted me. That's how it wasn't just a caricature. That's how I was viewed. Well, the joke was on them because things worked out for you in the end. And now look at you.

You're on the Mount Rushmore of National Security whistleblowers. And nothing's ever going to change that. well i don't i'm very i don't i have to say i'm very um i don't you know it's funny i'm very uncomfortable with any other labels that are placed on the courage or people said all kinds of that right and they use the word hero yeah oh i did john and this is really important and this is where i keep discarding my ego i do even with all the attention All I did was raise my hand with great solemnity, and I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Yes. A piece of paper that establishes fundamentally what it means to be an American. And I, the aspirational nature, the actual articles of that Constitution, I did not take lightly. My father retired. He was, you were a war, too. He was a hero. A long story. He actually was supporting OSS missions.

Wow. It's a Bombadier Navigator that reminds me I got to send you the book he wrote called Down in Greece because he was doing all this all that you would because if you're your Greek background

with the partisans and of course he was occupied Greece Donovan there's precursor to the CIA Wild Bill he went down in northern Greece

and this he was not the number of planes went down highly modified B-25 It wasn't just, it wasn't, it was not configured as a normal bomber for obvious reasons. It's flying highly classified missions for the OSS. In fact, as you know, he was put under a different cover, right? It was, he was actually a guard unit. The guard unit was actually used out of Louisiana was actually used as cover for OSS, the airborne mission.

So he first started out of North Africa, and then he moved to Italy. he started flying across Adriatic on his 44th combat mission 41st combat mission plane was struck engine caught fire and remember they're flying a low altitude anyways

one of the risks at night no less and the Germans of course you can imagine he's technically he's considered yeah he's a flying sergeant he would be a real catch I value target right and a number of them would get shot down blown up, many of them were executed.

There was a secret underground that the British had. Churchill, the Churchill basically executive action on the Churchill side. And he was down in Greece, Macedonia, that region, six months, lost 50 pounds. I don't know if you know the full history. of there was an extraordinary trust network set up at an incredible risk for the locals to bring people out American airmen bring bring American and British airmen out

who had found themselves as we used as I used to say later when I was an air crew member denied territory and extraordinary risk so on reason he doesn't he never he never he yogurt after 18. In fact. Oh, I bet. Oh, my God. You can imagine the PTSD and everything else, which we have to live with as a family in the intervening years after. That's part of my own heritage, right? I got to send you the book. I mean, it's just, I'd love to see it. Oh, my God. But you remember, he couldn't talk about it. You know from your operational, the operational side of CIA, even though there was compartments I lived inside of when I was in the DIY, right? even though technically it was interesting it was an s and t branch but i was actually in the analytic

side for highly for weapons of mass destruction that's the part of the di that i but i was assigned i think partly based on my background right uh to what was the end pick at the time right national photographic interpretation yeah but i couldn't he couldn't say anything about his experience A lot of veterans didn't talk about their war war to experience anyways. Very few did. His was classified. Highly classified. It was sitting around the poker, Penny Annie Poker at his retirement home community in San Antonio

with his buddies from the community, his retirement community. And he gets to talk in and he's in his 80s. He said, Bill, his name was Bill. He got to write about this. So he engaged with a military publishing house and got it up. Great. Yeah. That's great.

And what about you? Side up. What about you? What's next for you now? I know that you retired officially, formally, but you're still a young man. So what next? Well, I'm 69. Well, I'm 62, so I still think you're in.

Okay. So I just spent a pretty intense 16 months writing, what is a two books in one, memoir. and mirror on the abuse and pathology of power. Fantastic. And growing up in America and my time overseas and my time at the CIA and my time at NSA and then the aftermath. And then I take a big go to sort of the 200,000 foot level and say, what does this all mean going forward? You know, in terms of what I call the base human condition. So that's been my focus.

This has been my focus. I'm still available. I'm actually not in the same manner as you because it's like, wow, I think it's just about anywhere on social media. There's John Kiracca again. But I know it as an uptick, and partly because, well,

I went through a very severe health crisis for a while where I almost died. I was stage four cancer, and the good news is I'm stable. And you look great. Yeah. So I've started to make myself available again. And then you've got a lot of surveillance stuff

as you can imagine, and flock cameras and Palantir. And it's just like, oh, my gosh, all the hacking it's been going on and artificial intelligence. And it's like, what are we doing to ourselves? And now you've got this war of choice that we never should have chosen. The Middle East, you've got the Middle East itself. And I've been invited to a number of conferences and symposiums.

and more recently. And so I certainly will continue with that. I'm really hoping to get a chance here in the very near future where I get, as I did in the past, in front of the younger generation that were either just born or barely born or hadn't been yet been born on 9-11 to bring it all the way back to that faithful day.

Please make us part of that ongoing mission, Tom. This seems like one of those lessons that history teaches that we would be stupid to not learn or worse to forget. Thanks again, Tom, for roundtabling with me. As I think you'll see with our whistleblower roundtables, inside each whistleblower, there really is this greater good compulsion to do the right thing. The costs and the consequences be damned.

Over the course of the season, you're going to meet some real heroes. Hopefully, we'll inspire even more whistleblowers to step forward. The world needs whistleblowers now more than ever. As governments around the world harness technology to gather more and more information about us, we need to fight back in every way we can. Thank you, as always, for making Dead Drop part of your ongoing podcasting experience. Please remember to enhance that experience by liking, rating, reviewing, or commenting on the podcast wherever you happen to catch it. We'll see you in season three.

Until then, I'm John Kiriaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kyriaku and Alan Katz. costard and touchstone productions produces the podcast and john kariaku alan cats and nick mechanic are its executive producers this podcast it's a costard and touchstone production