Julian Dorey Podcast - #249 - Most Hated CIA Spy on Hunting Osama & INSANE Covert Disguises | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ John Kiriakou is a former CIA spy who was the agency's chief of counterterrorism in the Middle East prior to being prosecuted by the DOJ. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS John's Substack: http://johnkiriakou.substack.com Follow John: https://x.com/JohnKiriakou TOMMY G SWIM DOCUMENTARY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dgdVRndfqg&t=850s IG: https://www.instagram.com/tommygmcgee/?hl=en LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - John Kirikaou vs Andy Bustamante Debate, Tucker Almost Having on a Fake CIA Spy 10:10 - Julian’s Intelligence Contact Story (Financial Services), Spying on Citizens 19:27 - John Kirikaou’s Reaching Highest Levels of CIA, Professor Who’s CIA Operative Story 30:03 - CIA Psychological Breakdown & Working Deloitte 43:25 - Polygraph Examinations, 1st Day Working CIA (Iraq Assessment) 49:11 - Operation Desert Storm & Invasion of Kuwait, Liaison for Royal Family 56:03 - Iraq Catches Kuwait Stealing Oil (US Involvement), Saddam Invades Kuwait 01:05:11 - George Bush’s Stance on Kuwait & Leaving (Insider Reports) 01:15:10 - Hunting Osama (Debacle & Disaster Operation of Invasion of Iraq) 01:26:34 - King of Jordan & CIA Predictions, Ben Gevere Israel’s Worst Cabinet Member 01:32:27 - Weapons of Mass Destruction Controversy (CIA POV) 01:49:01 - Greek Festival & Parents Meeting George Tenet 01:52:02 - Rudy Giuliani Beef Story, Impenetrable TSA Door 02:09:31 - John’s Job Offer of a Lifetime, FBI’s Embarrassment, Counter Intelligence Program 02:17:41 - Attending CIA Farm, John Enjoying Being a CIA Spy & Working Assets 02:32:17 - Spy Craft School, Being in Disguise Story 02:44:33 - Prison Story, Making Assets 02:49:47 - 1st Wife & Difficulty of being CIA Asset CREDITS: - Host, Producer, and Editor: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.instagram.com/allaman.docyou/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 249 - John Kiriakou Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What did you think of the whole WMD angle there? Of all the CIA people working on some aspect of Iraq, I only met one. She was a mid-level analyst. She was the only one who really believed that the Iraqis had WMD. This was passed down to the CIA by the White House. The White House said, the position is, there's WMD. And that's why we're going to do this. Based on what?

You guys are the ones who are supposed to decide that. Yeah, I remember a knockdown drag out fight between the CIA WMD analysts and the Department of Energy WMD analysts. And the Department of Energy, they were like, there's WMD. We got to stop them. And the CIA is like, we're not seeing it. We're not seeing any WMD. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please take a second to hit that button and leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. And you can also follow me on Instagram and on X by using the links in

my description. Thank you. John Kiriakou, this is a, this has been a long time in the making talking about having you in here. I'm glad to finally get you here, and I think it'll be the first of many we do. The pleasure's all mine. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. We'll have fun. Well, I actually remember when Danny Jones first had you on the podcast. That was like the first major podcast I think you had done. It was.

Right? Yeah. In this new era. 2022. Yes. I remember because he was up in jersey with me at my parents house in my old studio in may 2022 and he was finishing the edit of the episode and he kept uploading it and it was automatically getting demonetized so we're like holy shit the cia is

coming after danny and then we figured out let's put it in three parts. And then it worked out and the rest is history. And now here you are. Wow. I did not know that. Yeah. Wow. That was the real story. Swear to God.

But in all seriousness, I think you've done three with Danny as well as a fourth that was with Andrew Bustamante or Danny and my mutual friend who's been on our podcast a bunch. That podcast was excellent. We had a really good time. And beforehand,, I just sort of wing these podcasts. I don't really prepare for them because I figure after all these years, if I'm not an expert by now, I'm not ever going to be an expert. So I know what I want to say.

I know how to say it. I don't prepare. I started thinking a couple of days in advance, should I prepare for this Andy Bustamante thing? and i thought nah i'm not gonna prepare and it went very well i i thoroughly enjoyed that uh that debate yeah he was here the day before and we we had known that was going to be coming or whatever because danny's been trying to make that happen forever but we were talking about you because obviously he hadn't met you before and i told told him, I said, you know what? I think you guys aren't going to end up agreeing on a lot more than you think. And we did. And when you listen to that podcast, there's like 80% of it you guys are lockstep on very – I felt like it was – Danny did a really good job of keeping it on like high-level, broad, strategic kind of issues.

He did. Yeah. And that last 20%, obviously, you guys have some huge disagreements, which is, I think, motivated by your separate, very separate experiences. I think that's exactly right. Yes. But would highly recommend, we'll put that podcast actually link in description because it's so good. And in fact, I said to Danny before, before he even turned the camera on, that I was a little bit worried that we might end up agreeing on too much and it wouldn't be interesting. No, it was definitely interesting because when guys like you and Andy, even coming at it from some different perspectives, when you have been out in the world, in the field doing things, and I say the same thing about all my special ops guys that I've had in here and guys like that. It's not to say you're right about everything and I should just agree with what you say.

Certainly not. But there is a level of respect from, you know, GDCs like goddamn civilians in my seat where it's like, all right, these guys have seen these things. So I have to understand that like, they have a greater view on how shit really works in the world.

And it's very easy for me to sit here in my armchair and say, you should have done this or done that. But it's not, you know, the world is very, very gray. Oh, it is very gray. And you know, I've met a lot of these special ops guys, whether it's, you know, SEAL team members or Delta or whomever. And you can tell who the real deal guys are. Oh, yeah. And you can tell who the phonies are oh yeah yeah i i think i've told this story before i i was in the green room at um fox news i used to go on the tucker carlson show a lot tucker tucker's a good guy yeah and um i was in the green room and there was a guy in there who i didn't recognize and uh and he said uh who show you going on because they

do fox and fox business at the same studio okay so i said oh i'm gonna go on t uh and he said uh who show you going on because they do fox and fox business at the same studio okay so i said i'm gonna go on tucker and he said oh yeah me too you must be going on before before i do and i said uh he said uh who who do you work for and i said i i'm on because i used to work for the cia discover the exciting action of bet mgm casino check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz. Make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today.

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Yeah, and I don't know who this guy is, so I'm not going to explain the whole background, nor would he care. Right. So I said, how about you? He said, oh, yeah, I'm CIA too. And I said, oh, I mean, there's this immediate thing when one CIA person meets another one,

and you always ask the first question, who do you work for? Right? I said, what division are you? Or what director are you in? Operations, you know, it's operations, intelligence, science, technology, and administration. And he said, I'm an ops. I said, oh, yeah, me too. What division were you in? And's that's the real question right there because you can't fake that and he says and listen the answers are you know i was in counterterrorism i was in near east i was in you know russia eurasia whatever he goes i was in uh you know wet work uh black ops special special activities they don't say that no nobody ever said that's from a straight out of a bad movie so i just said oh that's cool and then i went in and did tucker and we went to a commercial and i said tucker i think the guy in the green room who's coming on the show i think he's faking it and he's like what do you mean i said he doesn't know any of the lingo that a cia person should know he's faking it and he's like oh he goes i say something to the to the producer oh i kind of forgot about it and then a couple of months later here's this guy in the washington

post he's arrested and charged with mortgage fraud because he went to the bank and said, I need a mortgage, but I can't tell you where I work. It's a special ops, wet work, black ops, secret CIA. And they're like, oh, here's a mortgage. And then he couldn't pay it. Matt Cox would say that's bad fraud. That's sloppy fraud. That's sloppy. At least back it up. That's unbelievable that someone like that would end up on a mainstream platform though like no vetting. Like I worry about that here because I'm an independent guy. Sure.

What you see right here – So how much research are you going to be able to do? Exactly. This is what you get. But I will say with the spec ops guys I've had in and then we've only had in – we've had in you now and then your story is very well documented. And then Boostamante and like Jim Lawler as far as CIA goes. Jim is great. Right?

So like I really checked those out as much as I could ahead of time. But I remember even thinking the first time with Boostamante before I knew him because he had – at the time, he had only been on Danny's podcast. And so Danny had done some unbelievable podcast with him that did like really high views numbers but Danny wasn't a clips guy so Andy for some reason like wasn't viral yet I was the clips guy so like there was like kind of like we both then ended up kind of sending him all over the place after that but I remember looking into it because I'm like what you know I'm i'm a backwards hat dude in my parents house right now how the fuck can i figure this out but to me there's no excuse if you are like fox billion dollar fucking company exactly like is

listen tucker had six producers on his show you mean to tell me not one single one of those producers could do a little bit of vetting yeah wow. Wow. It doesn't, now that I've seen it from the other side though, it doesn't surprise me a ton. Like at the time it's like, of course you just think these people haven't figured out, but it's, it's a weird world because you guys do still come from a place where. Yeah. Secrecy is the norm. Right. And some people are off record. I had one guy in here where he had some stuff off record and if other guys hadn't vouched for him publicly, right. We're known, right. People wouldn't have believed it. Sure. What's always strange to me though, maybe you would know

about this is when there are people like that guy you talked about in the room who are, who are saying, you know, I was CIA or something. Isn't there some sort of law where like the CIA or someone representing them comes out and denies them? There had been a law. It was the Stolen Valor Act. And it passed about, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years ago. And then the Supreme Court found it to be unconstitutional.

It's not illegal to lie about yourself, right? Unless the purpose is to defraud somebody. And in that case case we already have fraud laws on the books and so if you go around saying you know i won the purple heart and the bronze star uh no you didn't well shame on you but it's not a crime anymore that's great so so they don't they don't have an incentive to come out and stop it they're just like all right whatever no no not at all when i was at deloitte and tush i I went to the consulting firm Deloitte & Touche after I left the CIA. And so every time a CIA person applied to the company – and there were 40,000 employees at that company back then.

They would ask me to take this person out to dinner and just try to feel them out and vet them. So I remember this one guy coming, young guy, very, very aggressive in a good way. And I took him to dinner in D.C. And I said, so were you D.I. or D.O.? Directorate of Intelligence or Directorate of Operations? And he goes, I did all that shit. Like that. All right, Vinny, sit the fuck down. It's like, wow, buddy, wrong answer.

Wrong answer. And I don't think I even stayed for the whole dinner. I think I told him I had to go, and I called the partner on the way home and said, this isn't going to work. You should have had one of your mobsters come in and say, I think you're meeting with the wrong guy. To say, you believe this fucking guy. We'll get to that later for people that don't understand. That's cool, cool though that they had you like obviously you were very high up in the cia we'll get to that with your story but

so deloitte as a part of your job they were also having you vet the guys yeah can you check this guy out because he's telling us some really amazing stories and we just don't know what to make of it now here's here's another question there This is interesting because it gets into some of the, I guess, like civil liberties and constitutional type things that you now are an extreme scholar on as a part of your own story. But I got to be careful how I say this because I don't want to give up stuff I'm not supposed to give up. But I have one guy who was called in to consult on an issue for what I would call a major company. This is probably, I don't know, five, six years ago. Maybe they're on their way right now. Yeah, sounds like it.

But anyway, so he's called by someone high up at this company that says, listen, we just had an unprecedented situation. A pretty high placed employee in our company just walked into the CEO's office. He's been here a long time and revealed to the CEO that he is in the CIA and he has been put here to, you know, monitor some of the international deals that are being made, you know, because they were a multinational company and you know he now was given permission to reveal himself or whatever so that he could get more access to something like that which part of the part of the hold on a minute though here this is gonna get nuts part of the whole like cia thing is you can't spy on your own citizens it's part of the charter oh that's exactly right can't so i see you shaking your head there that's exactly what my guy did when he heard this he's like and and there's a

process for this kind of yeah he was like no way like this is bullshit whatever long story short i don't know if the guy really fucked up like the process of how he's supposed to do it but it was it was legit it's a hundred percent legit and my guy was actually called in to consult on trying to figure out how you know they were going to make this work because god they determined that the and i don't know if this is true but their best determination was that the the intentions here were actually not bad but again they were looking at this like you know we're not fucking constitutional scholars was this an american company or a foreign company in America? American company.

Okay. I have a couple observations if I may. Number one, there's a process for doing this. There are a lot of CIA people in American companies. You don't say. Yeah, imagine. But the process for it is you have to get the approval of the CEO and the director of security for a couple of reasons. First of all, are the obvious legalities, right? You can't spy on American citizens. And

the idea isn't to spy so much as it is, as you said, to monitor the foreign activities of the company so that you can gather intelligence from foreign nationals and pass it back to CIA. Okay, number one. So it has to be worked out with the CEO and the director of security. And usually the board of directors has approved this cooperation plan in advance, number one. Number two, if somebody is going to be planted in a company, unbeknownst to the leadership of the company, it almost always is an FBI agent, not a CIA officer. Yes. And that would scare the crap out of me because-

You love the FBI. I know. We're so close, all of us. Oh, the stories I could tell you about the FBI. We'll get there. But the point of the FBI is to put you in prison. That's how they get promoted they're not there to be

have coffee and join in with the company's activities and help them make money and number three my brain is starting to leak out of my brain I can't remember what I was going to say

oh yeah, number three is payroll becomes very, very complicated because you're forbidden by law from collecting two paychecks. So if you're collecting a paycheck from the CIA, let's say you're a GS 14 officer, you're collecting a paycheck. You're also collecting a paycheck from the company. You can't keep the money from the company to the point where there is a dedicated office at the department of the treasury that will do your taxes for you right and whatever money you make from the company you have to give back that's the whole point of corporate cover so that sounds like a heap of trouble heap of trouble and one of the questions i while you were saying that that i never asked

that might be interesting here because we have a real foggy area in the modern day intelligence community now with contractors oh my god guys who post 9-11 forget it right so perhaps this is someone who might have been contracted who was a long time maybe cia guy who now isn't CIA, but totally still CIA. That's entirely possible. Yeah. I'll tell you, a lot of the small and medium-sized defense contractors in the immediate post-911 era had exactly that issue, where literally every single one of their employees was a

recently retired CIA officer. There's a company,, there's a, a company, you know what, just to be on the safe side, I'm not going to say the name, but there was a company that was set up as an LLC in the late 1990s, just for these newly retired senior intelligence service executives to go and use as a tax pass through and hang out. And then they joined the golf course and they joined the country club. And then lo and behold, they started making money. Oh, yeah.

And they ended up. Yeah. They ended up hiring 250 people and they ended up selling to one of the big, you know, Fortune 100. They made tens of millions of dollars each and everybody lived happily ever after we sure we sure they went ever after and didn't stay in the in the present moment with that little sale right there by now they're all old timers okay i mean in my mind i'm still 30 i'm actually 60 so they've got to be you know 80 you're 60 i'm 60 god damn john getting up there i know right you look great though thank you i appreciate that look like you lost a lot of weight too. Lost 115 pounds.

Holy shit. You know, it's easy to get slow and fat and old and, you know, you're comfortable just watching reruns on DVR and you gotta, you gotta nip that in the bud. How'd you, how'd you lose all that weight? You just start like working out every day or? I had a really bad case of diabetes and so um it's a kind of a long story there there's an experimental surgery that uh that a scottish uh physician stumbled on by accident he had a he had a patient with stomach cancer who also happened to be a diabetic with

uncontrolled diabetes and for whatever, my diabetes was uncontrolled. I was on literally the maximum dosage of every diabetes medication on the market, plus four shots of insulin a day. And the doctor told me, you're going to die. He told me I had five years. You're going to die if you don't turn this around. And I said, what do I do? I don't know what to do. And he said, well, there's this experimental surgery because it's experimental. Insurance won't pay for it. It's going to be out of pocket. But anyway, the surgeon in Scotland found that if you physically remove a person's stomach

for reasons that they don't understand, the pancreas starts to produce insulin again. So. You don't have a stomach? No, sir. They took it out. You have no stomach? stomach no where does your food go they created a pouch that holds four ounces of food out of my intestine it's up here at the top so i can only eat what you can hold in the palm of your hand i i eat about 1200 calories a day

i'm full all the time like this you gave me a cup of coffee. That's a black coffee. And a water. And that's going to do me until 8 or 9 o'clock tonight. And then I'll say. But that has no calories. I know. But it's going to fill me. And then I'm going to say at 9 o'clock, you know, I haven't eaten since 7 this morning.

I should probably eat something. But then as a result, the weight melted off me. You know, I used to wear this Dexcom right here. You could see it in the Danny Jones podcast. The diabetes just went away like magic. Oh, it's gone. It's gone, gone. I don't take any medicine. I didn't know that was a thing.

Yeah. My high blood pressure went away, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and even my sleep apnea went away. No kidding. Yeah. Completely turned my life around. Whoa. It's pretty kidding. Yeah. Completely turned my life around. Whoa. It's pretty good. Yeah. But even like, can you eat like the feta cheese as a Greek and everything without getting full? I mean... I took my son to, one of my sons to Greece in January. Where are your people from

in Greece? Rhodes. All four of my grandparents came from Rhodes. It's glorious there. My best friend all my life is Thessaloniki. Oh, it's a beautiful, beautiful city. Saigapo, El Admo. Yeah, Saigapo. So I'm a dual citizen too, as are my kids. And I'm going back next week, as a matter of fact. Wow. Yeah, I love it there.

But anyway, I couldn't really eat the food. The changes that you have to make are obvious. But even now, what am I? Two years and two months post-surgery, I can't eat beef. I can't eat lamb. It's too heavy, too dense. But do you feel good? I feel fantastic. Well, that's great. Yeah. I'll trade that all day. I can run again. I haven't been able to run in years. Yeah. You were running when you were catching Abuzubaydah. I could barely run to the bathroom a couple of years ago. All right.

Well, let's get into your actual story because I know you've told it on Danny Jones' podcast. You've been on Dalton Fisher's podcast as well. Another good guy. Great guy. He's like right down the street here too. But you were not just any guy at the CIA. You, by the end, were a very high level guy. You obviously- Happened quickly. Yeah. Well, you made your way to the Directorate of Operations, National Clandestine Services,

and did a lot before that. And actually, what's interesting to me is, you know, I always ask different guys like how they got recruited because the CIA seems to have a lot of different modes to do this, and somehow they're able to find people who match a very specific psychological footprint. Yes, indeed. So was being a spy or working in some sort of clandestine-type job something you had thought about as a kid that you wanted to do, or did you kind of fall into this? Yes. I thought about it a lot as a kid, as a little kid. When I was 11 years old, I remember my mom and dad took my brother and sister and I to see our grandparents. They lived in a neighboring town. And when we got there, my grandfather said, did you see the news? They killed the CIA guy in Athens. That was Richard Welch, the CIA station chief.

And I remember my grandfather and my dad talking about it like all afternoon that day. And I was fascinated by it. I went to college and I was close friends with a woman named Demetra Santus. We went out one night and and when we came home, or we went back to her house, she had a message from her mom saying that her father's brother had been assassinated in Athens. He was the U.S. defense attache.

So I used to think about this kind of thing a lot. Like, why are they killing all these intelligence people in Athens? And, you know, when I was a little kid, I wanted walkie talkies and invisible ink pens and stuff. My parents always used to humor me with these little spy gadgets and stuff, little microphones and, you know, stuff that you get at the toy store for 10 bucks and it's worthless, but it's fun. And then I sort of put it out of my head when I was in college. I got a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies, and then I was finishing a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis, thinking that I would either go into the Foreign Service at the State Department or maybe do something on Capitol Hill or lobbying or whatever.

And then – do you want the whole story? Please, yeah. That's why you're here. Yeah, that's true. I had a professor in college who was one of the very few true geniuses that I've ever encountered. What made him a genius to you he had he had a bachelor's degree from harvard a master's degree from yale a phd in psychology from yale a phd in political science from yale and an md from yale medical school

right the author the author of a dozen, all on psychology and psychiatry. And he was teaching a class called the psychology of leadership. So this was my last semester of graduate school. Maybe like 87, 88, something like that. Yeah, this would have been right. This would have been the spring of 88. That's right. And his name was Dr. Gerald Post. You know, I had seen him on TV a bunch of times. Every time there'd be a, you know, on the History Channel, they would do these documentaries on Hitler's final days or the end of the Stalin era, stuff like that. And he would always give interviews on these documentaries. So he was teaching this class, the psychology of leadership, absolutely fascinating class. It was why do leaders take the actions that they do? And then what historical impact do these actions have? And you might just like think right past it, but one of the examples that he used, and I'll never forget it, was the Yalta conference that helped to define the post-World War II era. Why was that conference held in Yalta, of all places, in the Soviet Union? Can you venture a guess?

You'll never guess. No, I've never thought about that. It was because a spy told Stalin that Roosevelt was because a spy told stalin that roosevelt was sick and so he and so stalin insisted that the talks be held in yalta and roosevelt had to fly all the way around the war so he went from the united states to casablanca to cairo to tehran to yalta all the way around Europe. By the time he got to Yalta, he was exhausted. He was also near death. And Stalin insisted that they begin negotiating as soon as the plane landed. And just so he could get to sleep, Roosevelt gave up Poland. So there's a lot behind these decisions. Yeah. There's a lot behind these decisions yeah there's a lot behind these decisions

fascinating class yeah so he assigned us a paper we had to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our bosses i was working at the united food and commercial workers union at the time it was the biggest union within the AFL-CIO. And I worked for a guy who I feared a little bit. He was this mean, big, old school union organizer. He had participated in a strike at a previous job. He was with the women's uh what was it the the fabric the whatever the women's you know clothing union was whatever um and some scabs had beaten him up and they broke his back he wore this awful like brace that went from his neck to his waist just to hold his spine together. He was just a mean, tough, old-time guy. Yeah. And on Wednesday of that week, we got into an argument,

and I called him a racist, which he was. He was a racist. He got so mad, he balled up his fists, and he took a stand. And I remember thinking to myself, damn it, I went too far this time. And I put up my hands to block the punch. I knew the punch was coming. And he goes, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, what?

He did. And he goes, my penis is bigger than yours. You're like presented. I said, you know what? I said, you're nuts. You're nuts. And he goes, my penis is bigger than yours. You're like presented. I said, you know what? I said, you're nuts. You're nuts. And I quit. And I walked out.

I went back to my apartment. I typed my paper. And I said he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And then I had footnotes from all these, you know, psych journals and whatever. So I hand in the paper. A week later, I get the paper back. I got an A. And he wrote two things in the margin, Dr. Post did. He wrote, I didn't say in the paper I'd quit because it was irrelevant to the paper. But he said, I've never done this before, but I urge you to quit this job. I agree that he is a sociopath with psychopathic tendencies. And then he wrote

underneath, please see me after class. Yeah. So I went to see him. I said, Dr. Post, you wanted to see me. He says, come down to my office. It was in the same building. So I walked down to his office. He closes the door and he says, look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. And I think you would fit. Would you like to join the CIA? Now, what's going through your head? You're in your professor. Yes. Yes. That's what was going through my head. This is interesting, though, that he would pick this paper with specifically what you wrote about to choose you because when I've had guys in in the past like Bustamante, like Jim Lawler – I'm actually going to cite Jim Lawler on this one because he's the guy that talks about this a lot. He really digs into the psychological profiles that the CIA looks for.

Oh, it's deep. Oh, yeah. It's deep. But one of the things he says is that he's like the CIA, especially for covert spies, they want people who are dangerously straddling – you know what I'm going to say – dangerously straddling the line of being a sociopath, but they're not quite a sociopath. We are – we all straddle that line. I'm glad you raised that. And I'm going to, I want to respond to that and then go back to give you a little bit more detail. After I left the CIA, I met a guy at the CIA who became a dear friend. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?

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He happens to be a brigadier general in the Army as well, Army Reserve. And we go to the same church. We are in the same men's group. So we hang out. Greek guy. Greek guy. So he told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. That's right.

Because sociopaths have no conscience. Yep. sees, not sociopaths, because sociopaths have no conscience. They're impossible to control, and they blow right through the polygraph because they don't ever feel guilt. Right. So if you have a sociopathic tendency as part of your personality, you do feel guilt, but you're still happy to break the law if you're instructed to do so. And I'll give you an example. When Dr. Post got me into the process, and I'll go back to the beginning of that process in a moment, I was in a group of five other applicants. And the interviewer there said, let's do an exercise, he says. let's say you're serving overseas as a

CIA operations officer. And you get a cable from headquarters saying that they need next year's economic figures for Indonesia. So you begin to develop the Indonesian economic secretary at the embassy in the country where you're serving. And this guy becomes your best friend, which is the goal. Yeah. So you're developing him. You're taking him to dinner. You're hanging out. Your wives become friends.

You go on vacation together. You're doing this for whatever, six months, 12 months, and you determine he's not recruitable. What do you do? Headquarters needs the information. So what do you do? And one guy raises his hand. He says, you double down. You just keep doing it. You go out with him more. You spend more money. Okay. What else would you do? This girl raises her hand and she says, you know, maybe you get the wife involved. Maybe your wife can improve her relationship with his wife. And then you get the wife involved. I'm looking around like, is nobody paying any attention? I raised my hand. I said, you break into the embassy and you steal it. Keep them. He says, that's exactly

what you do. That's exactly what you what you do well that's a sociopathic tendency like what are we wasting all this time for you're breaking why do we have all these people who can defeat alarms and pick locks what are they just going to sit at home doing nothing you fly them out you break into the embassy you steal it and everybody's happy now here's the question though you're thinking about that even a hypothetical because you're not there. It's a hypothetical. But you are thinking about it in the context of being a CIA spy paid by the government literally to have carte blanche in some ways to do things like this for national security implications. And I say that because if you're like, of course, I go in there and steal it. And they're like sociopathic

tendencies. My one thing about this is if they were someone else not working for the CIA and they were painting the situation and it was just a regular American job and it had nothing to do with national security, would you ever say something like that or even think something like that is OK? You know, I'm embarrassed to say that, yes, I would think that way. And I'll tell you, when I went to Deloitte. God, you were perfect. Oh, man. I had torture stuff. You were great.

When I went to Deloitte, we had this mandatory ethics class. Oh, no. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. I mean, I've been... I'm a... How old was I when I went to Deloitte? I was 40-something. Yeah. Whatever. Only 40. Yeah, 40. That was 40. So they're like, let's say you've got this Japanese company and you're on the brink of signing a big deal. It's a $50 million deal. But PricewaterhouseCoopers, they made a bid. It undercuts us by $4 million.

And one of the Japanese says, hey, why don't we meet up at a strip club? What do you say? And I said, let me go to the bank and get $200 in singles. And they're like, what? No, no, that's exactly what you don't say. But this is also after your career though. Would you have said that before your career? No, probably not.

See, there you go. See, then point being like you played in the Super Bowl your whole career. Yeah. And now even though you're getting paid a lot and it's Deloitte and Touche, big, huge company. Big, yeah. You know, this is like a high school football game compared to that. But you're still in your mind thinking like it's the Super Bowl. So fuck it.

Let's go to the strip club, see some titties and get some information. Absolutely not. And then my boss comes up to me. He's like, the ethics people called me. I said, oh, relax. I'm not taking anybody to a strip club. Jeez. But anyway, getting back to the application process.

Well, what happens when he tells you that and you're like, yes, like down in that classroom? Is there like a secret tunnel that goes under D.C. and they take you to Langley right there? Almost. Figuratively. So I'm sitting in his office and do you know what a Rolodex is? Yeah, of course. Okay, well, I thought maybe you're too young to know what a Rolodex is.

Listen, I still use that phrase, my Rolodex. My Rolodex. So he had a Rolodex on his desk and he's flipping through the Rolodex. And I remember seeing Oliver North. So he had a Rolodex on his desk and he's flipping through the Rolodex and I remember seeing Oliver North home and it had a number and I was like who is this guy? He's got Oliver

I mean Oliver North had just been convicted. Yeah. Right from Iran Contra. So he calls this guy Bob and he says Bob, it's Jerry. I've got a good one for you Bob and he says Bob it's Jerry I've got a good one for you and he says okay bye bye

and he hangs up and he says I need for you to go to this address in Roslyn which is right across the river in Arlington Virginia and go to this address and ask for Bob I said okay it's only one metro station took me a minute.

So I get over there, totally nondescript building that doesn't exist anymore. It's been torn down. And I go up to the sixth floor and there's a security guard up there. And I said, I'm here to see Bob. And he points at a door. So I go, I go in and I buzz the buzzer and they buzz me in, but it's into a little vestibule that's like six by six. And the second door has this big spin lock, like in a bank. But a woman opens the door, she just pokes her head out and she says, are you here for Bob? And I said, yes. So she lets me in. So I'm sitting there for a minute. And this enormous guy, he had to be 6'6", 6'7", 350, comes bounding out of the office. Are you John?

Yes. I'm Bob. How the hell are you doing? Hey, great. Nice to meet you. Come on in here. Have a seat. So I sit down.

He says, Jerry says you're good. And if Jerry says you're good, then you're good with me. So here's what I want you to do. He says, I want you to go to George Washington University Medical School Auditorium Saturday morning at eight. We're going to give you some tests and then you'll hear from me. I said, okay. And that was it. I left. So I go to GW Medical School Auditorium Saturday morning at eight. There are like 300 people in there. And they gave us three tests. The first one was a map of the world, and it was completely blank. So you had to write the names of all the countries.

But I said in my first book I was a map nut from when I was a little kid. Yeah, me too. So it was just fun, you know? Just fill it all out. There are a couple in West Africa that always hang me up, like Guinea-Bissau and, you know, Guinea-Conakry and stuff like that. But I pretty much did the whole world. And then there was a current events test. It was A, B, C, or D. And it was so simple as to be kind of embarrassing, right? And then the third one was thousands of questions,

but you just had to write agree or disagree. There's a box. Agree? Disagree. And it was stuff like, I would like to conduct a symphony orchestra. You know, who cares? But there was one that said, I like boxing. And I, honest to God, don't really have an opinion on boxing.

Even to this day? No, no. Yeah. To this day, I would say, yes, I like boxing. Okay. MMA has made it more exciting. I think you're right about that. Yeah.

But at the time, I was just nuts for Mike Tyson because he had just come out. He was young. He was a beast. Nobody could last more than a round or two. It was amazing. So I think I wrote agree. But then like 600 questions later, it says, I like boxing. And I was like, Ooh, what did I say the first time? Oh, and you can't go back. It's like, I think I said yes. And then another thousand questions later, it says, I like boxing. So I'm, I don't know. So I was the first one to finish out of these 300 people.

And the rector said, you sure you're done? And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm done. I finished everything. My wife, I called my wife to come get me and get in the car. She goes, how did it go? I said, I have no idea. You were married married i had just gotten married i was 23 is this your first wife right okay so there's another one later yeah so um i went home i had no idea how i did like a week or two later bob calls me he goes you blew the doors off those tests it was amazing i said oh great he goes here's what I want you to do I want you to go to this address in Vienna, Virginia and just knock on the door

I said that's it yeah I said okay so I drive to Vienna, Virginia this little squat two story building you'd never know it was there nobody would pay any attention to it that's how they like it park my car Park my car, knock on the door. This lady answers. Are you John? Yes. Come on in. So I go in. There's a table set up and there are three people on one side of the table

and there's a chair for me on the other. So on the one side, it was a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist, which was odd. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. You'd expect maybe a sociologist, but no, this was an anthropologist. So I sit there and one of them says, uh, describe your relationship with your mother. And I said, oh, yeah, my mom and I are close. She was very nurturing and always encouraged me and, you know, drove me around to Little League and whatever.

Was your father the disciplinarian in the family? And I said, no. I said, my dad's a big, strong guy, but he's very gentle. And I think he probably would be afraid to hurt us if he were to be the disciplinarian. It's just not in his nature. He's a sweet guy. Have you ever betrayed a friendship? And I remember how I responded. I said, Ooh, I don't think so. I said, let me, let me think about it for a second. And they go, no, no, that's what we were looking for. I said, Oh, okay. And then one of them says, go into the next room. We're going to take some hair, some blood and some piss, and then you can go home. I said, okay. So I gave him some hair, some blood, and some piss, and then you can go home. I said, okay.

So I gave him some hair, some blood, and some piss. I got home again. My wife's like, how did it go? I said, I have no idea. Could you tell – did they say anything about not saying anything to your wife about who you were talking to though? They told me I could tell my wife but not anybody outside of that. Tell them – tell her there was CIA. Yeah. I couldn't tell anybody. Just in case – But that tell them tell her there was cia yeah i couldn't tell anybody just in case you tell her yeah they let me tell her they're they give you some wiggle room with

your spouse but they also strongly encourage agency romances yes strongly which you know everything everything from an lgbtq club to quilting to gospel singing yeah gospel singing oh listen i was in the cia softball league for like eight years wow yeah where literally every team is just cia people you dress up in like the black site uniforms crazy yeah pretty much. Crazy. So you're allowed to tell your wife about this though and that's like after you've done the questioning. After you've done the questioning right there, they're like go home again? Yeah, just go home.

So Bob calls me. He's like, oh my god, it was great. You blew the doors off. I said, okay. I said, honestly, Bob – and I still don't know who Bob was. I don't even know if his name really was Bob. Probably not. I think because he was Jerry Post's contact, he was the head of HR, like the actual head of HR. The head of HR. Yeah, for the CIA.

But I don't know. Nobody ever told me. So he said two more steps. He said your next step is you're going to go to CIA headquarters and there are four offices that are interested in interviewing you. And then if one or more decide they want to make an offer, then you go through the background investigation and the polygraph. And I said, okay. So it was Near East Operations. They decided they were not interested in me, interestingly enough.

There was what's called the – I forget what it is. It's like some six-month program where you just get kind of a smattering of everything, and then they decide where to put you later. They weren't interested. But then I got an offer from the analytic branch that covers North Korea, which I knew literally nothing about. And a branch that Dr. Post created, yeah, that does only psychology for the Persian Gulf. And that was a natural fit for

me. And then when I started on my first day, they said, we're going to put you on Iraq. Wait, did you go to the farm or anything before? No. No, they just- I went to the farm later. Okay. Yeah. I was there four months before I went to the farm. Okay.

Yeah. So they hire you like you've just gone through these four different days where bob was telling you to go places and they did the investigation they did the polygraph which freaked me out because i'd never had a polygraph exam before right and and i still have questions that they answer uh bat well it's the the pre-hire and after your first three years are called are called um full lifestyle polygraph everything else is called a counterintelligence polygraph so they only care about you know unauthorized contact with a foreign intelligence officer this was all about you know drinking smoking drugs weird sex, crimes, that kind of thing.

Did you have anything, you know, that you thought would be a potential resume breaker in your past? No. So you didn't have a problem with the polygraphs? No. Blew right through it. There was one question, and I was freaked out when she told me, the polygrapher told me, you know, you're reacting to one question, it's tripping you up and we're going to have to ask it again. And I was like, oh, my God, please don't let it be the gay question.

Because how am I going to explain this to my friends? I blew right through the whole process except now they think I'm gay. Right? So I said, well, what's the question? And she says, it's with your credit card usage. And I said, my credit card usage? I said, I only have the two credit cards. I'm like, I'm poor. Yeah. Right. I was only making 18 grand a year. Truth. So they asked me again about my credit

cards and I answered truthfully and then I passed. And they're not supposed to tell you if you pass. So I said, how did I do? And she goes, we're not allowed to say one way or the other. And she winks at me. And I was like, oh my God, I can't believe I made it. She probably got fired for that. I made it. I still remember her. She was very attractive, very attractive, young black woman. She's about my age. So, um, so Bob called and he said, congrats expect a letter from us and I got the letter and it said congratulations you've been hired into the director of intelligence office of leadership

analysis and for the Persian Gulf for the Persian Gulf they told me that day I'm going to be working in Iraq and I said Iraq okay this is like 88 still this is January 6th of 90 oh so this is right before desert storm shit's about to get popping out well but nobody knew that and so i said iraq okay and my boss says don't be

disappointed these were his exact words he said learn the tradecraft learn the writing style and then after a year you can transfer to something more interesting, like Romania. And I said, oh, okay. So... Did you speak Arabic? Not yet. So, I start working Iraq, and I became Saddam Hussein's intelligence community biographer.

Right? Whoa. Yeah. But whoever heard of Saddam Hussein in January of 1990? So things started heating up. And then I still remember the date. On June 30th, we published a paper in which we said we believed Saddam Hussein was going to attack Kuwait. June 30th. So this was four and a half weeks before the invasion of Kuwait.

And the night before the invasion, man, I was excited. Like, like I was so energized that I'm going to, I'm going to be able to make something of myself here. And the senior analyst came over to me and he said, I think you're not understanding the import of what's happening right now. And I said, yeah. He said, it's not unusual for the countries we cover to go to war. It's very unusual for the countries we cover to go to war with us. The next morning, August the 2nd, 1990, I'm in the shower. Back then, we had these radio showers.

They were like plastic waterproof showers you put in – or radios that you put in the shower. Oh, yeah. I've seen Goodfellas. Right. Exactly. Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy, you son of a bitch!

I just watched that yesterday on the plane. Yesterday. I've watched it 100 times. Goodfellas. Greatest movie ever made. It's pretty fucking awesome. Anyway, they announced the invasion of Kuwait.

So I rush into the office. I got there about seven and my boss says, don't take your jacket off. We're going to the White House. I had never been to the White House before. So we get in the car. We go to the White House house i'm nervous as all get out but i am the leading expert on saddam hussein period so you had spent how many months

nine months nine months now so some some secret service guy takes us into the Oval Office. And it's the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the CIA director, my boss, and me. The president sits down. I'm on a couch, right? And I remember looking around,

like trying to be as serious as I could be. And I'm looking around and thinking, my buddies would not believe this in a million years if I told them, if I called them and said, you won't believe where I am right now. So the president sits down and he goes, well, now what do we do? And everybody turns and looks at me. And I was 25 years old. So it takes me a minute, but I said, well, here's what we should expect Saddam's next steps to be. So we start plotting out what the heck we're going to do. And we got up and left. And my boss says, you might want to pack for Saudi Arabia.

So I didn't cover just iraq i also covered kuwait but kuwait was so small that we didn't really pay much attention to it but nobody in america knew as much about the kuwaiti royal family as i did and so the nine months you got all this down if this is all you do for 10 hours a day and then four hours on saturdays i mean would you mind me asking i don't know what's classified here what's not but like they obviously you're a young guy but they're like hey congrats you're on saddam or whatever early on yeah which then leads to all these other things but you know this is pre-google era pre-wh whatever that you guys are

also the cia you have resources all the files are in on paper so where these enormous like floor to ceiling rotating uh file cabinets so is that what you were doing you were just going through files the whole thing were you calling people in the field like like cia contact we had these proto computers called Delta datas. The screens were like this big and they were all green, but we would get cables constantly from the state department, the CIA, the NSA, the defense department, and then thousands, tens of thousands of pieces of press. So it's called all source traffic, all source cable traffic. Could you use keywords to type in?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. But you had to be cleared for the keyword. Like I couldn't type in China. I'm not cleared for China at that point. That all changed later. But my job was Iraq and Kuwait. And if the cable had something to do with Iraq or Kuwait, I was going to see it.

I couldn't see operational traffic. That also changed post 9-11. But I was already in operations by then, so it didn't matter to me. How would you amalgamate all this? Was it literally like you see in the movies where you had a giant room and a board with a bunch of pictures and shit on it and that's what you would do? I remember that day walking to the cafeteria. There was like a mini – we had our operations center up on the seventh floor. And they've got TVs going from half the countries in the world and everybody is sitting at these tables and typing and calls are coming in from around the world, whatever. But there was a place also on the first floor by the cafeteria. And I didn't know really what it was. I think it was, I think the office of security had it

and had a map of the world. And there were lights, uh, like, like pins, but they were lights in all the countries. And like the whole eight, nine months that I was doing my job, like maybe it would be flashing in Nepal because somebody massacred – one of the royal family members opened fire on the rest of the royal family, killed every last one of them, right? In Nepal? Yeah. So that's why there's no royal family anymore.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. right in nepal yeah so that's why there's no royal family anymore oh wow i didn't know that yeah so nepal is blinking or you know the the uh the shining path is doing something in peru so peru's blinking i remember going to lunch that day and every country in the middle east is blinking it was like a like a police car and i was like oh my god this is this is bad so uh i ended up flying out to uh well the royal family escaped from from the town of ahmadi which is the the kuwait yeah kuwait it's it's in southern kuwait it's where the oil fields are they escaped across the border into dahran and from dahran yeah that's a country no no it's a it's a city in the saudi eastern province okay i was gonna say like

that's a new one no no that's it's it's a city it's where aramco is okay yeah and so from dahran they went to taif which is just outside of mecca so i went to taif and was kind of the the liaison with the royal family is this in august 1990? Mm-hmm. Okay. So in those months, though, where you were studying Saddam Hussein and becoming his preeminent biographer leading up to the meeting with the president in the Oval Office, let me preface this by saying this. I don't want to make any mistake out here. Saddam Hussein was obviously a very bad guy. Oh, yeah. Wow. He killed his own people.

Oh, my god. It was legendary. I mean, his sons might have even been worse than he was. I would agree with that. No doubt about that, and I'm sure you know way more than I – you've forgotten way more than I could ever know. That said, we look at a lot of this hindsight 2020. Eventually we'll get to the later Iraq war, but to preface that right now, it's like we kind of went in there saying there were these wmds that there weren't there and when you look at the aftermath of what was caused as a result of us

doing that it is arguably at best and pretty much confirmed that at worst that it was actually better with saddam there's no no question about it right Right. Two million people died because of this. At the time, this is way back, are you thinking to yourself, holding two thoughts at the same time, going, really bad guy, do we have to get involved with this though? No, and I'll tell you why. That's a good question. Really bad guy, we need to push him out of kuwait which was the original plan right nobody ever used the term nation building right that was that was the one dirty word nobody could utter because it was none of our business to start building nations and we're not good at it we're

not good at it we i mean post-world war ii we can't point to a single success story really um like really not a single one well kind of germany and japan post-world war ii post-world war yeah but oh you're counting that yeah i'm counting that because of the aftermath of world war ii yeah that's really our only success story yes so um you know and let me add something too, about the cause of the war. It was clear in the early summer of 1990. Actually, let me ask you, do you mind pulling up a map of the Rumaila oil field? R-U-M-A-I-L-A-H, Rumail an oil field that's like 95% under Iraq and 5% under Kuwait. Got it. So – Which one do you want, John? Yeah, that first one looks like it.

Right there? Yeah. Okay. There you go. Now you see the green? It sort of ends at the Kuwaiti border. Yes. It goes across the Kuwaiti border like a kilometer.

And the Kuwaitis were slant drilling they were drilling diagonally under iraqi territory so they could steal the oil and the iraqis caught them right not good so the iraqis said you're stealing the oil we're going to send troops to the border and the kuwaitis are like oh my god they're starting to freak out to the border. And the Kuwaitis are like, oh my God, they're starting to freak out. So the Pentagon asked the U.S. Defense Attaché in Baghdad, do us a favor, drive down to the border and tell us if there's anything we should be worried about. He drives down to the border and he says the entire Iraqi military is on its way south. How big was their military? Oh, it was about 200,000 people. It was big.

That'll do. It was the fourth largest military in the Middle East or third. It was big. It was big. Like Iran and Egypt were bigger. But it was big. So he's like, we need to take this deadly seriously. So the State Department, under Secretary of State James Baker, sent a cable to the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie.

I loved April. She was a career diplomat, just an awesome person. She lived with her mom in Baghdad. Her mom was old and needed elder care, so she was living in Baghdad with her daughter. They were getting ready to go on vacation four days before the invasion, and so Baker sent a cable saying, before you go on vacation, go see Saddam Hussein. And she had only seen Saddam once. It was when she presented her credentials. So it was, Saddam didn't meet with anybody, really.

It's so strange, like thinking of it now, like Saddam meeting with like a US official person. Crazy, right? Yeah. So April goes to see Saddam and she told Saddam exactly what she was instructed to tell Saddam, right? Now, I remember the talking points cable that went out. And the point we wanted to convey was that the United States

does not take a position on Arab-Arab border disputes, right? Oh, wow. That's not what I was expecting. That was a critical mistake. Okay. The conventional wisdom was the Iraqis were so angry about the Romela oil field that they were going to... Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more.

Limited time only at participating Wendy's taxes extra. Take the Kuwaiti part of the field. So they were going to go into Kuwait, we thought maybe 5, maybe 10 kilometers. Because the rest is just wasteland. And just secure the field. Nobody thought they're going to take the entire country. And then it's going to fall in 4 hours. Right? The whole country fell in 4 hours.

Saddam would never i know now well we figured because the the iran war iran-iraq war had just finished like 18 months earlier like he really wants to start another war but iran's such a formidable big cunt like there's a lot there whereas kuwait you know that was the key little that was the key and in his mind the american ambassador had just said go ahead and take kuwait we're not going to interfere right i mean thinking about it though like just looking at this as a third party outsider observing i mean sending 200 000 people to the border seems excessive taking the entire country definitely seems excessive but seeing as they did drill into his country some sort of

action actually does absolutely right absolutely right and if he had just taken the romela oil field y'all would have said okay that would be iraqi today and saddam hussein or one of his kids would be the president of iraq yeah that'd be a very different world you bet it would be okay so he invades the whole country though now what happens oh my god i'll add one kind of funny thing there's a monument a memorial maybe is a better way to say it in kuwait city for one of the royal family members he was he was like the fifth or sixth brother of the emir at the time and his name escapes me now fahad sheikh fahad uh there there are two versions of the story there's the official version and then there's

the true version so So it's August. It's so hot that when you step outside, your hair is in danger of combusting, right? That's how hot it is. So 80% of Kuwaitis are out of the country. They're vacationing. The poor ones are skiing in Lebanon. Everybody else is in the States or in France or the UK. This royal family member stayed in Kuwait.

The official thing is the Iraqis crossed the border. He realizes what's happening. He grabs a gun. He goes outside. He starts firing and the Iraqis fire back and he's martyred. And so his Lincoln town car, they gold plated his entire Lincoln Town Car.

There's a giant golden fist coming out of the roof of the car. And the bullet holes are still in the car from where the Iraqis shot him. The truth is, he was drunk. He was passed out on the couch at his girlfriend's house. She woke him up and said, I think the Iraqis are invading. He goes out there drunk, like who shot who in the what now? And they shot him.

Listen, John, you cannot let the truth get in the way of a good story. That's right. You should know this. That's right. So this freaking gold-plated Lincoln, like a 1988 Lincoln,

it's enormous. It's in a traffic island right on the Corniche with this giant golden fist coming out of it. And that symbolizes the royal family's courageous – they all ran for their lives was the truth. But this is their courageous stand against the Iraqis. But we went in and it was like the shortest war ever. It was like, what, three days? Yeah. Five days?

Very, very short. There's something very important that I learned in that conflict that I've fallen back on all these years. It is to determine whether or not a war is actually going to happen, always watch the deployment of ships. It's always about the ships. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the Persian Gulf was too shallow to accommodate an aircraft carrier. So we had never sent an aircraft carrier into the Gulf.

It's also, we believed, too narrow at the Straits of Hormuz to get in. Each carrier has 12 ships that go with it. It's called a carrier battle group. Okay? By the time the bullets started flying, we had six carrier battle groups in the Gulf. We had more in the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.

Like, we brought every aircraft carrier we had in the world to just bombard the Iraqis. And then one ended up doing it really – I mean this was visionary leadership by General Norman Schwarzkopf. He was the commander of CENTCOM. Right. It was a very simple and very elementary like first- year plebe flanking move. It was as simple as that. So the Iraqis had utterly fortified the Kuwaiti-Saudi border.

So we sent a couple tanks and they fought in what became known as the Battle of Khafji. It was actually just a diversion. We didn't really intend to fight at Khafji. What we did is we sent most everybody else around into Saudi Arabia, up and around into Iraq, and we struck the Iraqis from the north. They never expected it. And so as they're trying to flee Kuwait on the Iraq-Kuwait highway, it became known as the Highway of Death. We're hitting them from the south, from Khafji, and we're hitting them from the north, from Iraq. Isn't that how they got Scipio Africanus back in the day?

Yeah. Might have been. Yeah. I hope I got that one right. Correct me in the comments. And we killed everybody. Everybody. 200,000 soldiers in their military, though. Wiped out. Wiped them out.

The only ones that Saddam kept behind were the Republican Guard, which was the special forces, and what was called the Special Republican Guard. They were members of Saddam's own family who were the final ring of security around him. Yeah. Now what? now here's the trillion dollar question given that they had taken such an act of aggression at the time tried to take an entire sovereign nation and then given that we had to send the full force of our military in we mopped the floor with them in like three days now that we're already there and already engaged and we've already knocked these people out. Why did HW not finish the job and leave it for Cheney and Dub? He was very clear at the time that if he were to order American forces to continue north, we would lose the Egyptians and the Syrians. And that would make

the coalition fall apart. It was a diplomatic miracle that we got the syrians to agree to go in with us and the egyptians that was a pretty big deal too although we we were traditionally close to the egyptians um and the jordanians asked us you know please don't do this half of our population is palestinian refugees we can't afford iraqi refugees to come to but that decision while it was the right decision, was coupled with a bad decision. And that was to do nothing to protect Iraq, Shia Muslims in the South. We had, we ended up having these no fly zones in the South and the North to protect the Shia and the Kurds. But then the big scandal at the time was it never occurred to us to also ban helicopters.

We had banned fixed wing aircraft from flying over the no-fly zones. We didn't say anything about helicopters. And so Saddam- There's a distinction? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Rotary wing and fixed wing. And said i'm sent every helicopter he had to just white people out wow and we were like oh we wish there was something we could do about that and so it just dragged on year after year after year whoa okay but we we pull out though and you're you're still like a young ass analyst here. And you were just tossed into the middle of this. You said you were sent to Saudi Arabia when this went down? Yeah, in September.

And then I went back to headquarters. Then I went back to Saudi Arabia in February of 91. And I went into Kuwait City with the Marines on Liberation Day. Okay. So I'm just trying to understand this from the outside based on what your job full job description is here because you're coming in as an analyst so when you're brought in to do that it's not meaning like oh go out in the field under an assumed name or something oh no no i was john kiriakou the cia guy right and so i was doing

things like i that one of the most important things that I did when I was in Taif is I wrote a cable back to headquarters. I said, I think the emir is having a nervous breakdown, which is going to be a serious problem for us when it comes time to coordinate military action with the Kuwaitis. What made you think that? Because all he wanted to do was tend to his rose garden. And anytime you try to talk to him he would just mumble nonsense shell shocked one of the things i learned with the psychiatrists that were in the office was there is no such thing as a as a nervous breakdown that's just a colloquialism that we've come up with to describe any number of of mental

episodes and so um we decided not to deal with the Amir anymore we're gonna deal directly with the crown prince and the crown prince had his shit together I want to make sure I'm understanding this the Amir you're talking about Kuwait yes the crown prince are you talking about Saudi of Kuwait yeah okay they were all in exile in Saudi Arabia in the city of Taif so the crown prince is supposed to be lower than the emir? Yeah, the emir is the king. Oh, okay.

In Arabic, the word emir is prince. But for all intents and purposes, it's king. In fact, the emir of Bahrain changed his title to king. Okay. Recently. So is that like – did that cause a problem though because you were going around the king? No. We invited him to Washington and he came and bawled his eyes out and got a state visit and stayed at the White House.

And we told him we loved him and we flew Kuwaiti flags all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and he was okay. HW is back there like, what a pussy. HW, I have to say, I had – I'm a lifelong lefty, but I had mad respect for HW. Really? I did. Why? He really knew what he was doing. What makes you say that?

There's a famous story from the day after the invasion. Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister of the UK, called him and said, quote, now is not the time to go wobbly, George. And that's what sort of bucked him up. But one of the reasons why I have such respect for him is that he surrounded himself with very smart people. They made mistakes like everybody makes, but for the most part, they really did use diplomacy. When W became president, we had this ongoing joke at the agency that we had never seen an administration work so hard to not talk to people as the George W. Bush administration. It's ironic though, because a lot of the people that were put in his administration-

Were the same people. Yeah. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld being two of the worst shapeshifters that I've ever seen in Washington. You know, Cheney was a tough guy when he was the Secretary of Defense. And I remember once he complained to the Washington Post because they described him in an article as a moderate Republican, and he wanted a retraction. He said, I'm not a moderate. I'm a conservative, and that should have been a warning for the rest of us. Yeah, he's one of those guys like – I mean the first word I think of with him is evil.

I can't see anything that he did. And I won't even – and I've gone through a lot of his other history too, but I won't even go back there. I will say everything he did as vice president and on. Yes. You know, you talk to – Pure evil. Yeah. I mentioned all these special forces guys that came through here and fought in those wars.

Yeah. Even the ones of them that are like conservative, first words out of their mouth when they talk about it dick cheney he was perfectly happy to send you for your to your death uh for no discernible policy reason did you ever spend any time with him one-on-one or in a small setting uh in a small setting, yeah, several times. What was that like? It was educational. And I'll give you an example. The day before we invaded Iraq in 2003, it was our final meeting. Oh, you were in there with them. Oh, yeah, I was the note taker for George Tenet.

So we were in the – at the time, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And so my job was to sit quietly against the wall and take notes. So we had the final principals committee meeting the night before the invasion, and the meeting is chaired by Dick Cheney. So it's Cheney and his note taker, Condi Rice and her note taker, Colin Powell and his note taker. Who else was there? The head of NSA,

the commander of CENTCOM, General Tommy Franks, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and us. And so George is sitting at the head of the table like I am right now, right? And there's a microphone right here. And I'm sitting directly behind him. We're the only two people in the room. And so... Just like straight out of The Godfather.

This is one of the most intense things that I've ever experienced in life, not just at my CIA career. So George is sitting there. And remember, the CIA is a policy support agency. It's not a policy agency. So whatever they're planning here, we have no say-so in it. We provide the intelligence to allow them to make a decision in a perfect world. That's the way it's supposed to work. Yes.

Right, yeah. So they had made up their mind. They're gonna invade Iraq. They're gonna kill Saddam Hussein. In fact, you know what? I'm going to interrupt myself here and say six months earlier when I got this job, I had just come back from Pakistan. I was the chief of counterterrorism ops in Pakistan. So I go my first day and I said, so what are we doing?

I said to the deputy director, and he says to me, I actually can't tell you what we're doing. Did you say it just like that? I did. Yeah. Sounds right. So he goes, you need to go up to the sixth floor, sign your secrecy agreements, and then come back down here, and then I'll tell you what we're doing. I said, okay. So I go upstairs, sixth floor, which is Near East Operations, or at least it was way back then because I'm talking 22 years ago.

So I knew the guy that was in there. He was the deputy director of ops, and I said, hey. I said, I'm here to – his name was John. I said, John, I'm here to sign my secrecy agreements. He had them all laid out. There were six of them. He had them laid out. No, no, no, no.

This is a junior guy. More junior than Brennan. Brennan was the deputy executive director at the time. So I sign six secrecy agreements, and I go, so what's up? We're going to Iraq. He says, well, early next year, we're going to invade Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And we're going to open the world's biggest air force base in southern Iraq.

And then we're going to move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia. So we can deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques. This feels like a Saturday Night Live skit. And I looked at him like my mouth was... It's so fucked with me. All I could blurt out was

but we haven't caught bin Laden yet. I thought that was the mission. The mission was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. That's what we were all working on. He starts laughing. And he goes, dude, the decision's already been made. Yeah. The battle lines are already drawn.

Oh, my God. He said the pro-war groups are OVP, Office of the Vice President, OSD, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor. He said the anti-war groups are state, CIA, and Joint Chiefs. And he said, and we've been outvoted. And this is interesting too because George Tenet gets a lot of shit for the, quote, slam dunk. Slam dunk. Now, I read In the Eye of the Storm. That was the book, right?

Yeah. i read that years ago you know i always sorry but i always get very suspicious sure of the cia guys and whatever yeah however george tennant is one of the guys over the years i've studied who ironically was in charge he was in charge from 97 to 04 which is when all the shit happened so on paper if you just looked at he'd be like, he must have been fucking terrible. I actually like George Tenet. I do too. And I think George Tenet – and I know that's just because you're Greek.

Yeah, that's 90% of it, yes. But I think – I don't think George likes me very much, but I like him. I think George Tenet is actually a real guy. He doesn't strike me as a spooky dude. He's a real emotional dude. He was never real emotional dude. He was never in the CIA.

Before being the deputy director. Which also like is another perfect point coming from the outside because he kind of has that – he's not ingrained in it, right? But he took so much shit for this stuff and continues to but i feel like i believe you when you say that camp i'm not saying i believe you for all of the cia i guarantee there were some other dudes there who were oh totally totally you're right but institutionally yeah the cia was so laser focused on osama bin laden and al-qaeda they didn't want to be distracted by a war of choice in Iraq. Another thing I learned is that in almost every one of these scenarios that came up during the course of my career, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were the most anti-war of any of the major policy

entities. I like that. I i mean that's literally been their life yeah because their position was wait a minute wait a minute the state department hasn't even tried to diffuse this let the state department work work this first and then we'll see later on if we need to go to war because they know the cost too more than anyone they understand you're exactly right you're exactly right so i'm sitting in this uh in this briefing cheney's chairing it and everybody else is just kind of sitting there and uh cheney says to general franks excuse me cheney says to general franks general franks why don't you start off with the order of battle i've said before i hate order of battle briefings.

I hate them. They're so boring to me. And I'm not a military analyst. So it's like we have elements of the 1st Division are moving north, northwest, and we have the 5th Cavalry. They're going here, and then we've got the Brigade. Who cares? First of all. Go fucking hit them. Yeah, seriously like do we really need to

know these details just do what you do and tell us how it turns out so i'm writing all this stupid stuff down and then france are you making faces while you're writing it i know right you definitely i probably was so i'm writing it all down. And George is just sitting there like a statue, just sitting there like this, not making any facial expressions or anything. And again, it's not his position to talk here. The policy decision has been made. So our role is over pretty much. So General Franks, as he's wrapping up his briefing, he says, if all goes well, we can be in Tehran by August. And George goes like this.

He turns off the microphone and he turns to me and he says, did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad? And I go, he said Tehran. Oh, my God. And he says, have these people lost their minds? Yeah. And then he turns the mic back on and just sits there. So the briefing ends. I go back to the office.

The deputy director says, how'd the briefing go? And I said, did you know we were going to invade Iran? And he goes, oh, are they still talking about that? Oh, that oh my god he goes we're not going to invade iran these guys don't know anything about the middle east and we didn't because we got bogged down as soon as you know there was this one idiot from the uh national security council i don't want to say his name but i didn't like this guy from the very beginning And it was because he was demeaning. Like, he would call Iraqis which really bothered me. I found it to be racist. And he had mocking terms for the Kurds. It just bothered me. And so he said, as Frank's ended his briefing, he said,

as soon as we cross that border tomorrow, they're going to throw flowers at us. And I said to the deputy director afterwards, I told him what this guy had said. And I said, these guys really don't understand that we are going to be an invading and occupying force. Like, I don't, if the Canadians crossed our border militarily, I wouldn't be throwing flowers at them, right? So imagine if the Americans go halfway around the world to invade an Arab country, they're not going to be throwing flowers at us. But these idiots actually believed it. heard but you know when we were in iraq obviously and shit was going south all the different units had to do door-to-doors from safety precaution which we're not good at and even besides that though like we had created an environment where we had to do that and it's like the guys have to

follow orders they have to go in their guns get on the fucking floor whatever and the way the story went is that this they go into a house and they're getting everyone on the floor whatever head down head down and a seven-year-old kid comes up looking at him with the guns with a thousand yard stare and puts his hands up and then lays down on the floor head down and they're like no no you know trying to speak something to get him to be like no no you don't have to get on the floor whatever And they like pull him up and the kid looks at him with a thousand yard stare and just like, almost like a ghost,

like floats into the next room where they send him. And, you know, like dead to the world because this was his reality. And the point of the story was that kid, when he's a terrorist in 15 years and blowing up innocence or whatever i'm not saying empathize with that act that's bad you know someone made that decision but if you can't see where the fuck he was born your your eyes aren't open there are consequences that's right to our decisions

you know i'll tell you one of the things that i learned in pakistan was that of the low-level al-Qaeda fighters, sorry, of the low-level al-Qaeda fighters that I participated in capturing, and I mean like kids that were 18 to say 25, they almost all told exactly the same story. None of them could read and write. I don't know what's the matter with me. Do you want to take a drink? Yeah. Yeah, go for it.

This break is brought to you by John, take a sip. So they couldn't read and write. They had no skills, no job training. Many of them had very poor relationships with their fathers, which I never really understood, but it's not my bailiwick. And they wanted to get married. But what man would want his daughter to marry a guy who can't read, can't write, can't work, has no skills, and no future? I wouldn't want my daughter to marry a guy like that. So the local imam would go up to these guys

and say, you don't want to live in this terrible little village. You should go make jihad against the Americans. And we'll give you $200 a month. And if you're martyred, we'll give your parents a $500 martyrdom bonus. And so, they'd go

to Pakistan and be smuggled into Afghanistan they had no beef against the United States until we started droning their villages yeah and that's when everything changed you know Iraq is different because we were busting down the doors being their daughters and killing their you know parents and all that stuff. So in the places where we weren't at war, Tunisia, think, Algeria, Yemen, whatever, they had no beef against us. And then we started sending drones to blow up the hospital or the mosque or their house or whatever. And we killed their whatever and we killed their cousin and we killed their dad and we killed the grandfather and and now all they want to do is kill americans yeah

it's a never-ending cycle man i mean you and you look at like october 7th which was you know it was terrible what happened there and the guys the guys who did that are are deplorable i don't i don't want to be misheard here totally agree i i see where a 20 year old floating over that border in a fucking parachute who's lived in a 20 mile zone where he's not allowed to leave his entire life with no hope trapped in there like sardines which was you know there were two sides that story too like i see israel's position on sure sure i do however it's like, I see where that anger comes from. I do too. I'm not, I'm not in any way. I don't advocate death and destruction, but I understand the anger. And, and I also, to that point, look at Israel and I'm like,

what are they supposed to do though? Like imagine it was 2006 and instead of the Middle East, Iraq was where Mexico is. Would you ever leave that border open no never right so what it was like to me when they gave when they gave that away if you will in like 0506 it it was creating a cycle you know which then if they didn't give it away they'd be oh you're the land grant like it's a shit or a fart type situation you're fucked fucked. There was a reason why when Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Peace Treaty, the Egyptians said, oh, yeah, yeah. We want Sinai back, but you can keep Gaza. We don't want that back. Yeah.

The Egyptians knew what they were doing. Yeah. And it's – and a guy I really like a lot is the King of Jordan. Oh, yeah, Abdullah. Do you know him? I do know him. You're another one that knows him. I have people who have been here.

Everybody at the CIA knows Abdullah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's got a nice – he's got a couple of nice residences in the DCA. I've seen one of them. Dude's balling. But what I like about him is when you look at his geopolitical predictions in the last over two decades. Yeah, he's right on.

Oh my god, is that guy right on. So right when October 7th broke out, this is maybe 10, 15 days later. I told this story in episode 224 of Bustamante, but I'll say it again. He was asked, oh, if you care so much about the Palestinians, why won't you take in the refugees? And he's like, I'm glad you asked. Half the country's Palestinian refugees. He's like, first of all, that, but secondly, these ones right here in Gaza are now a part of an ongoing geopolitical war. And if I take them in, I am going to give the worst people of Israel's government exactly what they want. They are now going to be a part of my country, and they are effectively going to be what you would call ethnically cleansed out of Gaza, and the population will be gone, and therefore Israel will have room to come in and take it.

Whereas if I don't take them in, maybe there's some sort of solution we can come to here while those people still stay in the land he's a hundred percent right i think he nailed it you know there was a piece published today let me see if i can find it real quickly uh yeah here it is um the israeli-american businessman pitching a 200 million dollar plan to deploy mercenaries to g. U.S. authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric camp in Gaza Strip. What this is, is a proposal for an Israeli settlement in northern Gaza, right? Because remember in the peace treaty, the deal was you had to destroy all the settlements in Gaza. Now they're talking about reinstituting the settlements beginning in the north, but putting these impenetrable walls around them. Well, this is an act of ethnic cleansing. You can't do that. It's a violation of international law. But this is exactly what the Israeli government's policy is.

Yeah, I'm a big believer that when people say things out loud, listen to them. So I don't want to come across as defending Netanyahu here. I think Netanyahu needs to retire and get the hell out of there. I think the guy's a disaster. The one thing I have empathized with him in this scenario with a little bit is that the guy is very conservative. Yeah. Compared to his cabinet, he's like a lefty. He's a screaming lefty. Right.

Compared to – And some of that's his fault. Itamar Ben-Gavir and – Exactly. And Smotrich and all these other guys. Taking the words out of my mouth. So Smotrich says, the financial minister, says – The finance minister.

Who also happens to have authority over West Bank security somehow. That's interesting. Yeah. So he's a multi-tool asset if you will. That's right. do with like the i don't know if it was the bible but like ancient text says israel should have parts of lebanon parts of jordan parts of egypt and parts i'm missing one country in there but he also said parts of saudi arabia which made me laugh out loud oh and i'm like i'm like so when you have a top level guy saying something like this believe him yeah so i'm not crazy for thinking that no no these

guys are dangerous you know uh smotra was it smotrich or no it wasn't it was ben cavier he's the worst he's the worst he had a picture of uh yeah goldstein yeah in his hanging in his living room he's a kahanist he's a kahan Yeah. And he's also a convicted felon having been convicted of anti-Muslim hate crimes. And that's the guy that you put in charge. Yeah. See, that's crazy to me because it makes it like – my friend Eric Zulger who's been in here, he was also on Danny's podcast before me. Great, great episode. But he's this – you would love him he's actually kind of like you like he comes

across as like happy-go-lucky aloof but he knows every fucking thing that's going on and his whole thing was after college he's probably in the cia but after college like he traveled around to all these countries that are without borders right so that aren't official like the kurds right way down to like fucking liberland wow and he becomes, you can't make this shit up, the ambassador for Liberland into Somaliland, which is another unrecognized country. I've been to Somaliland. Okay. But that one's like big. Liberland is like fucking 15 people.

Wow. He got that job on the back of a jet ski with the president of Liberland who like wanted to pay him a Bitcoin or something. Long story. But anyway, so he has this amazing quote because he's like a walking vice documentary like the old vice when it was good i'd like to meet him he's like he's like people are not their governments and i'm like holy and it's so simple so true but when you think about it it's a hundred percent true because it's like so many people in israel right now don't support like what Smotrich or Ben-Gavir is doing. In fact, Netanyahu, who heads the biggest party within that coalition, has an approval rating of 19%.

That's right. So he does not represent the Israeli people. Yeah. And Ben-Gavir and Smotrich have minuscule followings. It'd be like saying Dick Cheney represented us. Exactly. And it's like, we all hate, I mean, anyone normal hates Dick Cheney. We know he's a bad guy. You know, maybe people didn't know as much as they should have before he went in office. All right. Well then he showed you who he was. That's right. And now he's not there anymore,

but it makes these situations so complicated because, you know, we're naturally tribal around the world. And so people want to make it all about this versus that. And there spent – I want to say it was like eight years where you were doing a lot of time working the Iraq angle. Is that fair to say? Yeah, eight years. All right. So now in 2003, it had been seven years or something since you did that. But obviously, you're still extremely knowledgeable about the whole thing. What did you think of the whole WMD angle there? Oh, you know, of all the CIA people working on some aspect of Iraq, I only met one. She was a relatively, well, I shouldn't say junior. She was

a mid-level analyst. She was the only one who really believed that the iraqis had wmd yeah you know this was this was passed down to the cia by the white house the white house said the position is there's wmd and that's why we're going to do this based on what you guys are the ones who are supposed to decide that yeah i remember a knockdown dragout fight between the CIA WMD analysts and the Department of Energy WMD analysts. And the Department of Energy, they were like, there's WMD, we got to stop them. And the CIA is like, we're not seeing it. We're not seeing any WMD. There's kind of an interesting story there, and this is my own observation. Saddam's two sons-in-law, Hussein Kamal al-Majid, who was the minister of industry and military industrialization, and Saddam Kamal al-Majid, who was the head of the special security organization – I'm sorry, the head of the special security organization i'm sorry to the head of the

special republican guard they were married to saddam's two daughters um ragged and rana what an unfortunate name i know right yeah so um um so saddam's eldest son uday who was an absolute psychopath yeah bloodthirsty cold-blooded murderer he would women and then throw them off the roofs of hotels um there they are that's that's today so um so i have to make them when i'm doing that by the way john i have to make – when I'm doing that, by the way, John, I have to make a mark to Alessi. Unfortunately, like with YouTube's monetization policies, there are certain words that got to get bleeped. So when – you're great. Sorry.

No, no, no, no, no. You say whatever you want, but it's stupid words like the R word that just came up. I see. So I got to like silence that on YouTube. So when I'm doing this, nothing is wrong, but he's just making a mark. Oh, good thinking. Good thinking. But yeah, go ahead about Uday.

So Uday, his second son, Kusei, was nuts and a killer, but a little bit more responsible. We liked him. Than Uday. And we hated him less. We hated him less. But anyway, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel were afraid of Uday. And Uday saw both of them as potential challengers once Saddam had departed the scene. And it got to the point where, you know, I can't say what the, what the, there was an incident in which Hussein Kam and saddam camel became so frightened of uday they decided to defect to jordan yeah it was bad when is this uh this was 1990 like january of 93. all right so way before yeah okay so they defected to jordan and king hussein invited a group of CIA people to go to Jordan to interview them.

A bunch of us went. One of the things that struck me immediately was they were wearing sidearms. And I thought, what bad manners? You're a guest of the king. You're asking for refuge in a royal palace and you're carrying a sidearm? Like, who do you think you are? So we sat down at the table. Hussein Kamel says, all right, we need weapons. We need tanks. We need air cover. We need secure communications. And my boss is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

We're not here to help you overthrow Saddam Hussein. We would never do that. No, we're here for you to tell us where the WMD is. And he's like, I'm not telling you where the WMD is. You're going to help me overthrow Saddam Hussein. So he didn't deny it. No. I'm confident they had WMD in 1993.

Just to be clear, out there, define WMD. Definitely chemical weapons because they had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians. Maybe biological weapons. You can create BW in your kitchen. It's impossible to say, oh, that's a lab for BW because you can do it anywhere with a sink and an incubator. Yeah, I just want to make sure we define that because for what it's worth, I had Danny Hall in here who's a legendary Silver Star winner, longtime Special Forces guy. And so we did two episodes. Episode 217, like eight minutes into that one, he talks about how he did witness in the invasion in 03.

He knows they did have biological weapons. That's – Where people get hung up as the nuclear thing. I believe that. They didn't have that. Nuclear didn't exist. Right. The biological weapons, I would believe what he said.

Yeah. Yeah. CW was the big thing because that was most of the arsenal. The WMD arsenal was chemical weapons. Right. So – But they weren't giving it to you. No.

They weren't telling you. And we weren't going to help them. So we ended up sitting there staring at each other for an hour and then we just said, we're flying back to Washington. And so we did. But what we did in the meantime was we leaked a story, a false story to the Arab newspapers saying, oh my God, there was a secret CIA delegation in town. And they met with Hussein Kamal and Saddam Kamal and they gave them everything. The Iraqis, they told the Americans everything. you burned them and we think that Saddam saw the article and destroyed all the chemical weapons whoa

so that was successful that was a good leak the only remnants of chemical weapons we were able to find after we invaded Iraq had been buried in the desert and had been there for a decade and what were they? they were rockets, legitimate delivery systems where CW could be loaded.

Okay. One of the most shocking revelations, at least to me, it was shocking that I've ever had happen in my studio was episode 129 with Jim Lawler, who we mentioned earlier. Yeah, Jim's great. So Jim was, by the end of his career, if he ever left CIA, probably didn't, but he was in there Yeah, Jim's great. spies around the world, he was one of their most senior. And maybe about an hour 40 or an hour 50 into that episode, I asked him what his involvement was in the WMD investigation leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And he said he had no involvement. I looked at him, I said, and I said what I just told you, which, you know, making sure I was right that he was literally, if not the most senior, one of the most senior guys goes, no, that's said so one of our most senior or the most senior guy in that job description was

not involved in the intelligence gathering for what was going to be the biggest invasion in decades for america he was like that's what i'm telling you that should tell you a lot about dick cheney and about the the decision making process at the white house oh yeah because that is absolutely true what he said. And Jim's a huge fan of George Tenet and very close with him and a big defender of him. And when I was putting those two together, I'm like – I will say – I mentioned earlier George probably doesn't like me because of my post-CIA career. But I had deep respect for George Tenet.

George was a very difficult guy to get along with really yeah i i kind of told tell a funny story you know maybe it's funny in retrospect it wasn't funny when it was happening but you know when he became when he became the director that was a a glorious day for every Greek American in the CIA. We had a little club. We would meet once a month for lunch so that the senior people could help the junior people. And, you know, Gustav Rakatos, who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's work, Gust was my mentor. And, you know, we traveled together doing operations and all kinds of stuff. So George becomes the CIA director and it's like, oh my god, this is a great day for Greek America. And so I'd bump into him at church every once in a while.

His parents – was it his parents or his in-laws? His in-laws. They never missed a Sunday. And then as I got more and more senior at the CIA, I would be closer to him. Well, when I was still on the analytics side, he stopped me in the hall one day and he said, hey, where are your people from? And I said, they're from Rhodes. All four of my grandparents emigrated from Rhodes. And he says, ah, an Islander. You think you're better than I am. Because his people came from Ipiros, which is along the

border with Albania, mountains. And I said, no, I don't think I'm better than you. And he said, yeah, you do. All the Islanders, they think they're better than the mainlanders. And we're like, ha ha ha. We had a chuckle. And he walked his way and I walked my way. There was a Sunday that Saddam did something. I don't remember what it was. And I got a call. You got to come in and brief the director.

I said, okay. I put on my best suit. I go in, go up to the director's office. It's George and John McLaughlin,lin the deputy director the national intelligence officer for the near east ben bonk who was a great friend of mine and general i don't know what his first name was they called him soup because his he was general campbell so campbell soup it was anybody everybody just called him soup i called him general campbell so um so i do the briefing, very straightforward. And George did something during the briefing that offended me, but I didn't let on. So I'm wearing my best suit. McLaughlin was the best dressed man

at the CIA. So he had this fabulous suit. Ben Bonk didn't have any kids. So he had the money for, you know, a $200 tie and the best suit. And General Campbell's got his three shiny stars and he's in his uniform. George is wearing a pair of jeans that are torn at the knee. He's got a lumberjack shirt on. Cigar? Always. Hi there. I'm Ryan Reynolds and I have a list of things I like to have on set.

It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. Never lit. Always chewing on it. Always chewing on it. It was disgusting.

And he's wearing these Timberland boots and he took the boots off and he took his socks off and he picked his toenails while I'm giving the briefing. And later on, Ben Bach said to me, that was so fucking disrespectful. I can't believe you do that. I said, he did that on purpose because it was me. But anyway, I finished the briefing and I said, Mr. Director, if you have any questions, I'm happy to take them.

And he says to the general, he thinks he's better than I am. His people are from an island. Oh, my God. Mine are from the mountains, and all the islanders think they're better than the mainlanders, which is actually true. We do. But, I mean, they do. I don't care where he's from. Besides, we're both born in the United States, so what do I care?

Yeah. So I said, sir, I don't think I'm better than you. I don't know why you say this. And afterwards, Ben Bonk and I get in the elevator. There's a dedicated – the director's elevator that goes all the way down. And he's like, what the fuck was all that about? And I said, Ben, he does this to me all the time. I don't really understand it. And he's like, you know, the thing with the pick in his toenails, it was so disrespectful. And I said, he did that on purpose because it was me. And we have some beef.

I have no idea what the origin of it is. But I think he genuinely doesn't like me. And it's only because my people come from an island. So we move on from that. And then I was in a meeting once. Oh, my God. It was like George, John McLaughlin, all of the six deputy directors, Steve Hadley was the national security advisor. I think Colin Powell was there. It's like a fantasy football draft of people. And they're all in the director's conference rooms.

This is a big deal, right? So we're doing our briefings one at a time. And everybody – they have the Iraq military guy and the Iraq political guy and the Iraq oil guy. And then I'm there because I'm doing ops. And he's like, you believe this guy? He thinks he's better than I am. Again. And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

So I just sat there and took it. And afterwards, the deputy director says to me what's the beef with you i have no fucking idea i don't know i don't understand why he does this unless he really is see in his book in his book he did say that he had that uh what's it called? Like fraud syndrome or whatever it is. What's the term? Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome. He has that imposter syndrome.

He grew up above a grocery store, right? And all of a sudden, the guy is the longest-serving CIA director in American history. And he – this was probably a self-esteem thing on his part. Yeah, I think so. Him not knowing that my mom and dad were elementary school teachers, right? And I probably have the same imposter syndrome that he does. Because who am I? I'm nobody.

And he just decides he's going to come after me. Now, there were other Greek-Americans that he thought – He didn't come after them. No, he promoted – there was one that he just promoted all the way into the senior service. And I remember saying, you know, Andy's great, but SIS too? Like seriously? What's that all about? Was it you?

Didn't he meet your parents at one point? Yeah, at the Greek festival at St. George Church in Bethesda, Maryland. Now, when was this? He had just been named deputy director. Okay, so he met them and he still... Okay, tell the story, please. I was standing in line with my brother at the Greek festival.

Greeks have this little dessert or treat called lukoumades. It's just fried dough and they pour honey and cinnamon on it. I'm in the lukoumades line. I didn't notice that he was standing right in front of me. And I said to my brother, you know what?

The best lukoumades I ever had in my life were on the island of Gios, my first honeymoon. And he turns around and he says, the best lucumades I ever had were at the island of Gios. And I said, oh, I said, Mr. Tennant, I'm John Kiriakou. I'm one of your analysts. And we met. And I said, oh, this is my mom and dad. This is George Tenet. And then I took them to family day. We have a picture. Family day, 2000? He's director now.

Two. He's director. And my mom was like, oh my God, there's George Tenet. I want to meet George Tenet. And I said, no. No, the fuck you don't. No, no. No, don't do that. And she's like, noant i want to meet george tennant and i said i said no no the fuck you don't no no no don't do that and she's like no i want to meet him he's a mountainer and his wife was there and she had just published this cookbook that cia women had published and and she's selling the cookbook there's a cia women's cookbook yeah i need to see that shit you know i will say he did one solid for me um when i was stationed in athens i recruited a guy who was a bona fide terrorist right but we had this clinton era prohibition on recruiting people who had committed murder in a terrorist act. Was this a Palestinian or a 17N guy?

A Palestinian. Okay. And so the Europe division, they're like, sorry, you can't formalize the relationship. Well, this guy is willing to give us 17N, information on 17N. Revolutionary Organization, 17 November. Which is a leftist organization in Greece. Right. So they just won't do it.

So I flew home for the CIA Christmas party. And every year at the Christmas party, the director stands in the lobby of the old building, you know, where the famous seal is on the floor and the wall of honor with the stars and all that stuff. It's very – it's a very, you know, emotion-provoking set. So I went up and I said, Merry Christmas, Mr. Director. And he said, how are things in Athens? I said, actually, that's what I came to talk to you about. That Merry Christmas was bullshit. It was. I don't give a shit what his Christmas is like. Pionica too.

So I told him, I said, the division won't let me recruit a guy. And this, this guy's the real deal. And I mean, 24 hours later, I had permission to recruit him. Wow. He did – going back though, if I remember correctly, like he actually did meet your parents or something. Didn't he like give them something or like say – Yeah, he gave my mom a piggy bank with the CIA seal on it. And he said it was basically like a Greek stick together kind of thing.

But still, after that, he's still like, this guy thinks he's better than me. Yeah, dumping on me about being from Rhodes. So, psychologically speaking, hearing all this, it sounds... You'd never think something's textbook, talking about a guy who's like a spy, but

it sounds pretty textbook where it's like that's how he gets out his insecurity but he secretly likes you i hope so because i mean he did that for you actually i'm in i'm asking him for a favor i emailed him yesterday and i'm asking him for a favor so we'll see actually i'm gonna see if he's responded to like a little pardon type favor maybe yeah a little something a little something there's not a payment to giuliani involved with this fucking giuliani that's another thing we can talk about what did he do to you let's take that tangent fucking giuliani fucking this guy talk about this guy's an arch criminal and i think you're probably right i'm gonna make a prediction rudy giuliani dies in prison that's my prediction I don't know that you'll

be wrong about that. So, you know, I have been actively seeking a pardon from before I even left for prison. I was convicted in 2012 of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. It's an incredibly obscure law. I'm one of only two people that's ever been convicted of it. And the other person was actually a spy for the government of Ghana. Right? So the guy that wrote the law. They have those? Imagine.

Imagine. Shots fired. She was screwing a Ghanaian intelligence officer. Oh. And she gave him the names of all the CIA spies in Ghana. Oh. Yeah. Nice of her.

She got far less time than I did. She got eight months. I got 23. And I never did anything like that. Right. The guy that wrote the law that I was convicted of violating, Morton Halperin, former assistant secretary of state, assistant secretary of defense, and senior director of the National Security Council. Mort wrote a letter to President Obama saying that this is not why he wrote the law and that I should never have been charged in the first place. So I've asked several important people.

And we'll come back to that story later, by the way. I want to let people out there now. I just don't want you to get all this. Several important people to put in a word or sign a letter. I've had some success this year. That's an ongoing process. But anyway, during the Trump years, a friend of mine said – a Republican friend of mine said, oh, you should talk to Rudy Giuliani. Rudy's got the presidency here. If anybody can get you a pardon, it's Rudy. Do Kerr. Yeah. I think that was what his position was. When I first got out of prison, he emailed me and he said, hey, I think you and I should go to college campuses and do like a speaking tour together.

I said, hey, that's a great idea. Nothing ever came of it, but it was nice of him to reach out. So I emailed him. I said, Bernie, I know that you're still in touch with, uh, with Giuliani and I'd like to apply for a pardon, uh, from Trump. Can you put me in touch with him? So he says, yeah, I'll put you in touch with his guy. So he puts me in touch with Rudy's guy, his guy. Yeah. And I, I email him, the guy calls me, He says, actually, we're going to be in Washington next week. Why don't we meet at the Trump Hotel on Tuesday? And I said, okay, I get off at 2. How about if we meet at 2.30? And he said, actually, he says, Rudy is not very good by 2 o'clock. And he makes this motion. Yeah. I can't believe I'm surprised by that. Yeah. I was like, oh, okay.

He said it's going to have to be earlier. Let's call it 11. And I was like, oh. So I took the day off, right? So my attorney and I – my attorney is also one of my best friends in the world. He used to be the deputy attorney general under Reagan. What's his name? Bruce Fine.

Shout out, Bruce. He used to be the Deputy Attorney General under Reagan. What's his name? Bruce Fine. Shout out, Bruce. Shout out to Bruce. Harvard Law, Berkeley, Deputy Attorney General, General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. The guy's done everything. He's an awesome guy. So, Bruce and I go to the Trump hotel, and

and This was 2018? Yeah, 2018. hotel and and this is 2018 20 yeah 2018 and i had hired bruce introduced me to a to a republican lobbyist who had run the 2016 trump campaign in florida so i hired her and i go to i go to see rudy and his rudy and and his guy and then some other hanger on that I don't even know who it was. And we're sitting there. Thanks for seeing me. Nice to meet you. So we're sitting there.

And Rudy's like, oh, the weather's great today in D.C. It's like, yeah. Yeah, it's really nice. And how about those Mets? It's like, yeah, great. I'm a Pirates fan, but the Mets are really good this year. And I'm thinking, what the fuck is he doing? So I said, Mr. Mayor.

Oh, you hit him with Mr. Mayor? You have to, right? I said, Mr. Mayor, there's this issue of a pardon. And he says, he goes like this, anybody know where the pisser is? And he stands up and he says he goes like this anybody know where the pisser is and he stands up and he walks away and i said to the guy what just happened and he says you never talk about a pardon to rudy you talk about me you talk to me and i talk to rudy oh my god and i'm like all

right all right and the guy says rudy's gonna to want $2 million. Isn't this illegal? Absolutely. This is a felony. Absolutely. Yes. So I go, $2 million. And I laughed. I go, look, first of all, I don't have $2 million. I will never have $2 million.

Secondly, why in the world would I spend $2 million to recoup a $700,000 pension? So I said, John Kiriakou answer ever. So I said, I'm sorry for wasting your time. And Bruce and I got up and we walked out. What did Bruce say to this? I mean, that's as we're walking out, Bruce just said criminals, criminals. Well, that night I was invited to a book launch at the, at the Republican national committee, buddy of mine had written book launch at the Republican National Committee. A buddy of mine had written a book. The Republicans love him. So I went. And there was another whistleblower there, Robert McClain, who's an awesome guy.

Bob is a TSA whistleblower. TSA whistleblower. Yeah, and he's a serious, serious whistleblower. Someone wasn't wearing their shoes right. No, this guy has sued TSA a million times and he's won a million times. What's the story there? What did he blow the whistle on? They were lying to us

about air marshals being on the planes. There were no air marshals on the planes. And then, you know those super fortified doors so you can't get into the cockpit? They were fake. There was nothing to those doors. You don't know why we're reacting like this. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. Please do expand on that. He actually designed a truly impenetrable door, got a patent on it, and TSA fired him. And then when the judge ordered them to reinstate him, they put him in a basement office with no windows and nothing to do. He played video games all day. So he sued him again and again and again, and he keeps winning. What years is this? Oh, this is, it's ongoing.

He still has suits pending. Oh my God. Yeah. Robert McClain. He's an awesome guy. You should talk to him. All right. We don't cut things around here.

We do it honestly. You have no idea why this is happening right now. So I run into Bob. Hold on. I got to cut you off, John. This has nothing to do with you. But do you believe this? I think we got to write up an issue.

Yeah. No, I, I, I – listen. We had a podcast, number 167 – no, 168 with Ashton Forbes where there was – there were a lot of different arguments in there and it ended up creating a whole internet controversy and everything. Uh-oh. and the whole internet controversy and everything. One of his claims about 42 minutes into that podcast was that, quote, he could get through. He said, I've sat in a lot of planes before. I've seen that cockpit door. I could get through that no problem because he's an investigator

for the MH370 disappearance. Oh, sure. And so we had evidence that showed that these doors were fucking plutonium and you can't get through them. And you are now telling me that even if they said that was the case, that's not necessarily the truth. So. And not all the planes have the good doors. Unless you pop in here. I'll say to your credit, though, the thing is he didn't cite what you're saying.

You know what I mean? It's like he's saying this being that oh you can get through the door but it's like we know for a fact from what we're hearing that the doors are impenetrable but if he cited your source it'd be more compelling right right sure that's like oh wait he's just running on this either sure either either way like I pride myself on calling it like it is, including when we're wrong. So if that is the case, Ashton, on that point, I apologize. That's going to get clipped a lot. Hey, I always said I'm going to be honest with you.

So please continue this story that's now. Sorry about that. So I'm at the RN and and bob walks up to me and he says hey how you doing i said hey okay how are you he goes how's your day and i said oh dude i said listen to this listen to how my day was so i told him and he goes that's a felony and i said you bet it's a felony you bet it's a felony he goes, no shit, Sherlock. You bet it's a felony. He goes, did you call the FBI? And I said, no, I don't talk to the FBI. And I said, besides, what are they going to do?

Just kind of smile politely and send me on my way? So our buddy did his book reading, and I left. A couple of days later, I'm at Bruce's office. Not for any reason. We just kind of hang out. And I get a call on my cell phone. And it's from Mike Schmidt at the New York Times. And he says, a little birdie told me that Rudy Giuliani tried to extort $2 million from you for a pardon. And I said, oh, that damn Rob McClain.

I said... He was a real whistleblower. Right. And he said he was so angry that night that he called the FBI and he reported it. And the FBI said, eh, not interested.

For a blatant felony. And I'll circle back to that in a minute. So Rob is like, screw the FBI, then I'm calling the New York Times. That's the next best thing. And Mike Schmidt's a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He's a serious guy. He's a front page guy. So I told him the story and he said, you willing to go on the record? And I said, Bruce, am I willing to go on the record? And he said, hell yeah, go on the record. Giuliani tried to extort $2 million for me. So Giuliani, they call him for a comment. He says, I have no idea who this guy is. Never met him before.

And I said, Mike Schmidt called me back and I said, that's funny. Then he doesn't remember us posing for a picture together. Oh, no. So I sent it to him. Uh-huh. And so in the article, it says, you know, Giuliani denied ever meeting me, never heard of me. And then it says the New York Times has seen evidence that the meeting took place. Yeah.

And they didn't publish the picture? I don't remember if they did or not. They may have. I don't remember. That's so interesting though. Like they were that blatant about it. Yeah. Oh, it was ridiculous.

Look at that that Giuliani so uh so months pass and it just kind of that story goes away but anyway this this lobbyist that I had hired said forget Giuliani I got you in withastian gorka oh and i was like i i don't like that dude at all i don't like him at all he wears his father's nazi party lapel pin yeah like he's not a he's not a neo-nazi he's an actual nazi the lapel thing is that blows my mind and you know why he didn't last at the National Security Council? Because he couldn't get an FBI – Because he couldn't get a little FBI clearance.

And I want to slap that accent right out of him too. I hate that accent. You think the accent's real? No. You don't think so? He probably talks like this. He probably does. President Trump has never made a mistake in his life.

Ever. Ever. Not once. I am the only non-Trump family member to be followed on Twitter by the president. Which is why I went to see him. So my lobbyist says, Sebastian Gorka's got a book coming out. There's a big party at the Trump Hotel. And we're going to get him.

We're going to pigeonhole him for five minutes. Bring your checkbook, she says. And I go, oh, so that's how it's going to be, huh? Oh, to Sebastian, too. So I said, you know what? I'm a big boy. I've been in Washington for more than 40 years. I'll bring my checkbook.

So I said, how much is he going to ask me for? She says, he's going to ask you for $1,500. And I said, what do I get for my $1,500? And she said, he's going to tweet at the president, pardon John Kiriakou. It's a cheap date. Yeah. I said, all right, I'll spend $1,500 on that. Okay.

But I'm not buying his book. Nazi. So I go to the Trump and everybody is there, like every Republican member of Congress and Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson, everybody's there. So she takes me up to see Gorka and he says, sir, you're the man who wants me to tweet at the president. And I said, if you're so inclined, and he says, give me $5,000. And I said, seriously, he goes, give me $5,000. And I said, you know, I've been around for a long time and I understand the nature of Washington, but I'm not going to let you shake me down like I'm some two-bit guy off the street.

I go, fuck you. I turn around and walked out. And she's like, oh, that was just his opening price. He would have gone down to 1500. And I said, fuck him. I'm not doing this. I said, these guys are all criminals. I'm not doing this. So I walked. Time passes. And have you heard of Noelle Dunphy? I don't believe I have. She was an aide to Rudy Giuliani. And he tried to get in her pants. Yeah.

And she went to the New York Times with her story. And he tried to get me in bed. He sexually harassed me. He sexually abused me. He did this. me in bed. He sexually harassed me. He sexually abused me. He did this. He did that. And she's very, very bright. But most importantly –

Yeah, she's bright, all right. Most importantly from my perspective is that Giuliani went back to new york after our meeting and he said uh i tried to get two million dollars out of this guy for a pardon today she kept that to herself until giuliani put the moves on her and then she called the new york times and said everything john kiryaku said was true that he had confessed to her that night oh my god they tried to shake me down for two million dollars all the years this guy's been around and he's still dumb enough to get trapped

by some by a nice red dress yep yeah could you honestly could you imagine rudy giuliani demanded oral sex while on the phone to trump could you imagine just scroll down so we can see that picture hold on could like like from a female perspective could you you can't give me all the money in the world to touch that no sorry not a chance not a chance he's disgusting she also can't get it up either that wouldn't surprise me at all it says there she also claimed he went on alcohol drenched rants yeah yeah if the guy's wasted by two in the afternoon then yeah sure i could see his alcohol drenched rants unbelievable that like that's the case yeah his what when he when his wife divorced him she like put in the court papers like can't get it up like as part of the reason you know those she or somebody close to her leaked those papers to the New York Times.

And some of the things that were in them were revelatory. For example, he is a member of 16 country clubs. Can you imagine? He spends $10,000 a month on cigars. On cigars? Mm-hmm. You're going to get them for free? Right.

You didn't have a guy in Cuba? See, and he can't stop himself from defaming people, and now he's lost everything. Yeah. He really is just a caricature, man. I told you I was going to circle back around to something. Yeah, please. This is not apropos of anything that we've talked about so far, but in 2020, I was offered a job, the job of a lifetime, being the chief operating officer of a small investment company.

And so I accepted it. It was split time between Washington and Athens. And so I'm so excited. I'm meeting with important people and I'm six weeks into it. And I'm six weeks into it and I realize these guys are committing bank fraud and money laundering. And so I downloaded 15,000 pages of documents onto a thumb drive and I resigned. And I went to the FBI and said, I have evidence of a massive fraud, about $150 million worth. I've got all the documents and I need to talk to an FBI agent. Not interested. So I said to Bruce, what do I do here? He said, I'm going to call this friend, a mutual friend of both of ours who used to be the deputy director of the FBI. You're talking about Bruce Fine, the lawyer?

Yeah. So we call this friend and he says, I'll get you into the Washington field office. So he gets us an appointment with this FBI agent. And you know my position on talking to the FBI, right? You're not a fan. I'm not a fan. But this was important enough to me that I needed to swallow my pride. So I go into the FBI with Bruce. This is before you were arrested, right? No, no, this is 2022. Oh, this is, I misheard that. I thought you were saying 2012. I'm thinking this is right before they're going to no no this is this is uh 2022 oh this is i i misheard that i thought you were saying 2012 i'm thinking this is right before they're going to arrest you no no this is 2022 recent got it so we go to see this guy oh bruce is calling me right now there you go answer it yeah let's say hello shout out to bruce we're on air hey bruce how are you tell him we're on air he's got we're on the we're on the air right now, and I am just talking about you,

and your name just now came out of my mouth when you called. All good things, Bruce. All good things. Oh, I think something's happening. I'm just going to commentate here because I can hear it a little bit. I think something good is happening. Oh, you've made my day. I think there's a part in just going to commentate here because I can hear it a little bit. I think something good is happening. Oh, you've made my day. I think there's a pardon in the future.

You've made my day. Uncle Joe's going to wake up for Johnny. He's going to wake up, rise up, and pardon him. Oh, Bruce, man. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. Fantastic. I'll call you from the road.

All right. Thanks, Bruce. from the road. All right. Thanks, Bruce. Bye-bye. So Giuliani accepted your $2 million? No, listen. I have a reputation for being a litigious prick. No. I've realized that nobody's going to give you justice. You have to seize your own justice. That's damn right. And so I sue everybody.

Good for you. And that was one of my suits. It's going forward. Oh, good. So that wasn't the pardon. No, no, no. That's an ongoing process. Okay. So, so I go to the Washington field office with my thumb drive with 15,000 pages of documents. And I said, well, you know, I was hired to be the COO of this investment company. And, and the guy goes, whoa, wait, wait whoa wait wait wait wait wait one second he goes i'm going to save you a little bit of time if this doesn't have the words terrorism russia china or january attached to it we're not interested oh my god and that was the end of the meeting

that's the fbi yeah so one one of my good friends is this guy jim diorio who's been on the podcast between like co-hosting me and everything like 11 or 12 times now but jim was he was a west pointer 86 went into the special force for eight years his roommates at west point were mike pompeo and wow and he was he while in the forces he one of his things was he was an undercover guy which is like that's a very big deal yeah the best of the best like they're not going in there to capture you know that's right going in and take your business so he gets out he gets offers for he's the most connected guy i've ever seen at all agencies he gets offers from everyone he decides to go to the fbi 25 years in the fbi 25 years 11 on and off

undercover some deep cover shit wow and then his he was a major case maker but his other specialty was he was an international interrogator and i know this is one thing you've actually spoken highly of with the fbi they are really good at interrogation right so he he was one of the guys who would be called in around the world for some of these things like ali sufan was right to do that and you know when he talked about leaving the fbi in 2018 and like he is brutally honest about the fbi now i mean the first podcast we ever did like i couldn't even get him to do it for like 10 months i was like so nervous to do it and two hours in he's like yeah fuck jim comey as a staff record label as a motherfucking crit like he was just going off good for him but

he it's not law organization well he taught i i don't know that he goes that far but what he is saying is that you know there is it's not about i'm putting some words in his mouth right now but this is essentially what he's saying it's not about justice anymore so much as it is about what is the headline for. And that is exactly the example you just gave right there in practice, which is really a shame to see because like it or not, it's supposed to be like our top police unit in the country. And it feels like whatever – if there was any kind of culture there that some of it was good, and I know there's people out there who would say it was never good. Maybe that's right. But that doesn't – that appears to be really lacking today. I couldn't agree more.

And there's something to what you just said. You look back at things like COINTELPRO, right, in the 60s into the 70s. Can you tell people what that yeah cointelpro was counterintelligence program this was a program um that the fbi came up with in the 60s to spy on uh anti-war activists peace activists and black liberation groups it with the black liberation groups especially um the black panthers uh they got violent and actually killed people in cold blood, like Fred Hampton, for example. Fred Hampton was executed in cold blood by the FBI because J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI founder and director, feared what he called the Black Messiah, right? He was, you know,

the title of the movie recently, he was afraid that there would be one black figure that could unite black people in America and would make them a formidable force that the FBI would lose control of. Yeah. Martin Luther King was killed, so he was no problem. Malcolm X. That was an interesting one.

Oh, and there are still very important unanswered questions. Malcolm X was killed, so he wasn't no problem. Malcolm X. That was an interesting one. Oh, and there are still very important unanswered questions. Malcolm X was killed, so he wasn't a problem. Fred Hampton was doing dangerous things like opening food banks and proposing job training programs and other subversive actions. And so they just executed the guy. You ever hear the Jay-z lyric about that no i was born on the day fred hampton died real bleeps just multiply i was like that's some poetic justice right there right it is indeed every time i hear that i'm like that's a bar that's a bar yeah i like it but anyway going going back to some stuff like you you've previewed a lot

of stuff we we got to talk about today with your story. So I'm trying to keep – make sure we get some of this linear and go back with it. You got it. There are some things people have heard that you're like, oh, I want to hear more about that. We will get there, especially like your case and the craziness that happened there. But those eight years from like 88-ish or 89 to 96, 97 when you're working on the persian goal specifically iraq at some point that you're an analyst and you go to places as you said as john kiryaku but at some point you get pulled into the directorate of operations which is the national clandestine

service to now officially be a spy right before we get there you had said i think it was like four months into your career you went to the farm yeah okay so this is this is in that that nine months build up to the war you go to the farm how long did you go to the farm for uh the original training was six weeks best of my recollection but then i went for like very specific operational training in 98. Okay. So let's stay with the farm for one second. Yeah.

In those six weeks, did you get – the reason I was bringing it up is did you get like real spy background there? No, none of it. Okay. It was all about writing for the president. Six weeks of writing and writing and more writing to make sure. So one of the things that the CIA is actually pretty good at is, you know, you've got thousands of analysts and every, every day you're writing the president's daily brief. It's briefed him at seven o'clock in the morning. And no matter which one of the thousands of analysts writes a piece, it has to sound like it's all coming from one person. So there's a very specific CIA

writing style. In fact, when I wrote my first book, I gave it to my wife to read the first draft and she came back and she said, I hate it. Is this wife too? A wife too. And I said, I go, really? And she said, honey, I have listened to you tell these stories a thousand times and this reads like a dry government report. She said, you have to start back at the beginning and write the way you talk. Yes. And I completely changed my writing style. I can switch back and forth now.

It's like writing like a lawyer versus writing – Exactly. Same thing. Yeah, so it was all about writing those six weeks. Then when I switched to operations in 97. What precipitated that? I was bored stiff. It was clear that Saddam Hussein was not going anywhere under the Clinton administration.

And every day, I'll tell you exactly what it did. There was one precipitating event that made me say either switch to operations or resign. I got assigned to write a national intelligence estimate, an NIE. Now this is the most important document that the intelligence community produces. And it is, it is the position of the entire intelligence community all whatever it is 19 intelligence organizations in the american government so the national intelligence officer said to me i want you to write this paper and i want it to be called iraq colon saddam hussein's next 12 months and i said okay so i wrote I said, Saddam could threaten the Kurds. He could threaten the Shia. He could threaten Kuwait.

Big deal, right? I might as well have just taken the previous one and changed the date on it. So he calls together representatives of all of the intelligence services. We're talking about the Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Commerce Department, the Pentagon, the Uniformed Services, Army Intelligence, Navy, Air Force, everybody. Everybody gets a vote. So we're all sitting around the table. I'm in the middle with the NIO, the National Intelligence Officer. And you go literally sentence by sentence. So these things can take weeks. Like, okay, the first sentence is, the purpose of this paper is to examine Saddam Hussein's actions, potential actions over the next 12 months. DIA, do you agree with that? INR, do you agree with that?

Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, everybody agree with that? Coast Guard. Yeah, seriously. Everybody's in Commerce Department like they know anything. And then you go to the second sentence. We finished this paper in four hours. And the NIO says to me, that was the fastest coordination session I have ever gone through in my career. And I said, Ben, I'm ashamed of this paper.

It says nothing new. It's the same paper as it is every single year, right? Nothing ever changes. And the thing is, is if you're asked to write an NIE, you're getting promoted. This is a very big deal. He goes, no, you know, this is a policy problem. It's not an intelligence problem. You did what you were expected to do. And said i'm going to either quit or change to operations because i am bored to tears and then it just so happened that this job opened up in the counterterrorism center and they were looking for an operations officer who and at the end it says um either greek or arabic strongly desired oh and i was like hey it's like they're talking to you and as it turned out i was the only person in the entire cia who spoke both greek and arabic so i applied and i went down to the counterterrorism center, and I sought out the officer who had listed it.

He was a big shot. You said this is like 97? Very late 97. Okay. And I said, I don't know the first thing about operations, but I speak Greek and Arabic fluently. And he's like, are you kidding me? And I said, no. And he said, are you willing to be tested? And I said, oh, of course. I said, actually, I just was tested in Arabic a

couple of weeks ago, but I'll take whatever test you want me to take. And it turned out is not only was his secretary Greek, like Greek, Greek, naturalized American. She was from Rhodes. So she comes out and she starts speaking to me in Greek. Tenet's worst nightmare. Yeah. And I'm answering her in Greek and she says, he gets the thumbs up from me like that. And he's like, he said to me, it is a lot easier and a lot cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic.

Yeah. They're hard languages too. Hard languages, both of them. And they have nothing in common. And so I got the job and they sent me to the farm for the real training. I was going to say, so you've never at this point, like you've learned to think the way they think culturally at Langley. I'm sure there's a lot of discretion and maybe some natural good healthy paranoia you have in life because of who you are but you've never had to be the dude walking in jeans and a flannel through the streets tracking another dude nope you know and i ended up being good at it oh yeah i've i've heard but like but like was there a part of you right when they said all right you're you're in where you're like, oh, shit, this is a whole new.

No, I was so into it. I was so into it. Disguises and dead drops and brush passes. And it was just all the stuff you see in the movies. You know, you know, in the James Bond movies, there's always, always, always a scene where James runs into the CIA guy, right? Yeah. Because that happens every time. Like you go to a dinner party and you hear, hello, John.

You're like, fuck. Hello, Nigel. Hello, Nigel. Stay away from the shake, Nigel. Stay away from the shake, Nigel. He's mine. Like every time. So anyway, I go down there and I did not have to take – you just alluded to something that's important. I did not have to take what is colloquially known as CIA 101, right?

I was already mid-career. I know how the CIA works. I know what the offices do. I know what the different job descriptions are. So I didn't need any of that stuff where they take you. You spend six weeks in this office. Then you do six weeks in that office and six weeks in disguises and six weeks in lockpicking. I didn't have to do any of that stuff.

So we went straight into the shooting. What, you didn't have to do lock picking and disguises and stuff like that? No, because they were introductory. If you're just hired out of high school, not high school, out of grad school. But what did you know about that? I don't need to know about it. All you need to know is that it exists.

Okay. And so if you need somebody to pick a lock, you send a they're there the next day they pick your lock fair enough yeah so um my first day the the course is called crash and bang right because you crash cars and shoot stuff and so my first day we're sitting there it's like a dozen of us. And the instructor says, okay, let's start. He says, I got to ask, who here does not own a gun? And I put my hand up. God damn it, John. I know.

And I look around, and I'm the only guy with my hand up. And he says, you don't own a gun? And I go, truth be told, I've never actually touched a real gun. Like, who the fuck let this guy in? And the guy goes, oh, shit. He's like, all right. He goes, everybody else, go pick a gun. You come with me.

You get the wooden one. I did. I got the wooden one. But only for the first day. The wooden one with the orange tip. They gave you that and a whistle. At least it made a bulge under my shirt. Oh, my God.

So he's like, look, you know, you got to learn the parts of the gun. And I had to take the gun apart and put it back together again. It was a Browning, a Browning 9mm. Which ended up hurting me because the Browning, for whatever reason, the hammer has a big kick and it cut me here. So I was bleeding all over the gun. Did you report the cut, sir, this cut me? I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be a dick to everybody. But there's a medic, of course, on site all the time.

He's like, oh, buddy, you're bleeding. I was like, yeah, the hammer keeps hitting me. So he wraps my hand up and they're like, okay, you can't use a Browning anymore. So I got a Desert Eagle. Don't touch your vagina next time. That's right. It turned out I ended up not just testing first in the shooting, but one of my instructors pulled me aside afterwards and he said, have you ever shot competitively? And I said, no, these guys were ragging on me because I was the only one that never used a gun before.

And he says, you could shoot competitively like skeet. And so I did. Wow. And I ended up doing well so you were natural i was natural i have very steady hands yeah did you have glasses back then too no i i only got the glasses in my 40s okay see a good eyesight steady hands yeah it's always the people who least want it that get the most of it isn't that that the truth? Yeah. So, you know, we certified in the 38, the 9mm, the

pump action 12 gauge. And then we played around with rocket launchers and 50 cals. Oh, you got to play with rocket launchers. You doing this in the fields in Virginia? Yeah. Just chilling. Wow. Those are nasty. And then we did

something that was really cool. You've probably seen it on TV. You go into the shooting gallery, the shooting house. So you're, you're walking, your instructor's right behind you with his hand on your shoulder and you're using live ammo and you know, somebody pops up in the window and it could be a guy with an Uzi or it could be a woman holding a baby. And you have less than a second to decide whether to shoot or not. Oh, boy. Yeah. So I go through the shooting gallery and you got to have the gun down and you're like, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Right. Always the double tap. I ended up getting a 97 the reason why i didn't get 100 is because one guy i hit him in the throat and the shoulder instead of the throat and the chest okay but if you only have half of a second to get the two shots off you know i declared victory and went home yeah um there was another thing's a good score 97 was good um nobody else got that high and then you use live ammo too out in the field where you use a car, you're in a car, and they shut the engine off remotely, right? And then somebody takes a shot at you.

So you have to unbuckle your seatbelt, roll across the seat seat get out the passenger side lay on the ground try to see where the shot's coming from and then you have to shoot back well it's a robot that's shooting you i couldn't get a clear shot at the robot so i put my head up a little i shot out my own windows and then i shot the robot. And I succeeded. I scored 100. The instructor's like, damn it, Kiriakou. That was my last decent car. Shot the windows out.

I said, you told me I got to shoot the robot. I couldn't get a clean shot because you disabled my engine. Fuck the windows, Bill. I know, right? But man, that was fun, fun, fun. And then you have to crash through roadblocks. They teach you the proper way to do that. There is most definitely a wrong way to do it.

What's the wrong way to do it? It depends on how the roadblock is set up. If it's set up in a V, which is the most difficult to get through always hit the light side of the car don't hit where the engine is right you got to hit where the trunk is and the car will fly out of your way but if it's in a v even if if it's the the backs of the cars forming the v the V will, it's like a, it's like a wedge where it'll, it'll strengthen on its own. So you have to hit the engine. It makes it more difficult. And then we did, um, wow. Um, surveillance. Yeah. Did they drop you in a city and do that whole thing? Like for real?

I'll tell you one funny thing yeah it was the only thing that i distinctly um uh did not enjoy was um parachuting right so this is well before 9-11 and um i said to one of the guys why do we have to do why do we have to jump out of planes i I don't want to jump out of a plane. I'm going to be making my recruits, my recruitments at diplomatic cocktail parties, right? Like I'm offended. They're wasting my time here. I could be doing something, you know, productive.

After 9-11, I'm sitting in the back of a C-12 and the back opens up. And I said to this guy next to me i can't fucking believe listen can't say they're not prepared so they're teaching you every bit of spycraft and then they flew us out to the desert out west and we did advanced counter-terrorist driving what does that mean uh mostly sand dunes. So they're preparing you for the hills of Afghanistan. I actually flew back from Athens

to do a class called Advanced Counter-Terrorism Operations. That was deep. When you say deep, is that like you're putting masks on and learning how to do all that too? No, we did that in the original training how good were the masks back then absolutely absolutely first class johanna

mandeson in charge of that she's a genius yeah she tells a story that because she went way back with h.w bush you know from the early days yes and she went and gave a briefing to him when he was president at this point in a full mask and suit. And he had no idea it was her. And this is like 1990. She made a mask for me. It was a bald head with a comb over. Right. And a mustache and really thick glasses.

So the only seam was right here on the bridge of my nose. Right. And the glasses covered it up. So they shipped it out to me and I put it on. And my chief said, that is the best disguise I have ever seen. And I said, they told me it was the first time they'd ever done a bald head with a comb over. And he says, we got to go to the ambassador. So we go into the ambassador. It was, uh, it was Nick Burns. Who's now the ambassador to China. We go in and he says, we got to go to the ambassador. So we go into the ambassador. It was Nick Burns, who's now the ambassador to China. We go and he says, Mr. Ambassador, I have an expert who's visiting from Washington.

I wanted to introduce him. And I said, how do you do, Mr. Ambassador? He says, well, welcome to Athens. Nice to meet you. Who are you here to see? And I started making something up. And then my boss started laughing. And then I started laughing.

And he said, what am I missing? And and I went like this and I pulled it off and he's like oh my god and I said pretty good right and he's like that's the best disguise I've ever seen this is in the 90s in the 90s I have no idea what they're like now now you're wearing them right so you go put it on alone in your room or whatever you know you're wearing it because you're the fucking person wearing it when you naturally that means you're you you're biased to see flaws yes when you looked in the mirror did you were you like i don't know or yes like holy shit that's a great question and it's not unique to my disguise, but to all disguises. One thing that never feels natural is the mustache.

Because you use glue. It's all real hair, right? And it's on mesh. So you can't see the mesh. It looks like a real mustache. But if I have a real mustache, it moves naturally with my face. A glued on one doesn't. It looks stiff.

When you watch TV shows and people are wearing fake mustaches, you can tell that they're fake because their upper lip doesn't move naturally. Now, how do you work against that? Do you just like try to not say anything in front of you yeah and you can't smile broadly because the glue will come will detach you know like it's it's pliable enough to move as you're speaking but if you smile it stretches too much and the the mustache will start to come off you gotta be careful what is it made out of? Are you allowed to say that? Real human hair. No, no, no. Not the mustache. The suit. Like what?

I don't even know. Rubber. You know? It was just like a rubber mat. It was finer than what you would buy at a costume store, for example. Yeah. Does it like adhese to your body? No.

No? No. So it's not going to move at all like someone – Nope. Nope. I recruited this one guy and I sent him out to a town in the western part of the country. That's going to be – will be whatever. Excellent.

Yeah. I recruited this guy and we weren't really sure if he was dangerous. Was he a dangle, a plant? We weren't sure. And he had only known me as the bald head comb over guy oh my god and so i looked 20 years younger in real life than what this disguise made me look like and um i told him to meet me you know at at an intersection in this town and um and i walked past him like walking toward him so he looked me right in the eye and um didn't register at all no idea i went back to the hotel i put the

disguise on i came out and got him i just wanted to make sure that there was nobody around him he wasn't carrying a gun. He had no idea. Now, when you put it on though, your eyes are still your eyes, right? Yeah, your eyes are still your eyes. Although you can use- Contacts. Contacts. And some cases colored contacts.

I've got this thing, this aging thing. It's called Arcus sinilis, where my eyes are starting to turn blue around the edges. It's just a function of aging. My grandfather had it. So if I were in the CIA today, I would have to wear brown contacts because otherwise, if I'm close enough,

you know, that we're looking at each other and having a conversation, you can see the blue. Right. And that would be a giveaway. So you got to be careful. So is it just your head with it? Pretty much. They don't have like the hands?

You can do a belly. You can do hands. And what's that? Does that look like real skin? Well, it's under the shirt. I know. But like if someone told you to take your shirt off. And they'll match the color of the prosthetic to your skin.

So the prosthetic of the comb over matched your skin. There was a woman who came out. She was an artist. And she spent days matching the prosthetic to my skin color. It was perfect. So you didn't have to wear it here or anything like that? No. Wow.

It was perfect. What does it feel like? If it's just on the head, it feels very natural. But if it's thick, it can it feels very natural how thick but is it like if it's thick it can make your head look so big so like how it's is it really thin oh no it's very very thin yeah very thin yeah so it looks natural it really does it's getting scary out here yeah it's good and you know this is becoming more and more important in the age of facial recognition software. If you're undercover, or worse, you're under deep cover, or you're traveling in alias, and you have to cross borders, go through airports, I mean, how do you do that if facial recognition software is scanning you?

Can it scan your eyes? That's the thing. Like, can't the eyes be the giveaway? That's going to be a problem. Even with contact lenses. I feel like, like the shit, it'll be able to get the shaping of the pupils and everything. I would be worried about that if I were still at the CIA. All right. So you get, you learn to shoot, you learn to use rocket launchers. You learn to jump out of planes. They drop, Oh, we got off this. They drop you in a city. I've had guys like Joe Ted, I Sean Ryan in here who work with CIA, Ground Branch, and GRS. They talk about that, and Andy's talked about it, where they drop you in D.C. or something.

Were you right in D.C. doing it? Yeah, almost all of it was in D.C. I had to fly out to San Diego at one point and got on a sub, and we went up to the Oregon coast. Oh, like a submarine. A submarine. Oh. Yeah. We went up to the Oregon coast and we were, they took me, you know, whatever it was, a

half a mile, a quarter mile off the coast and they rose and I got into a little dinghy and I had to row myself to shore. You stab the dinghy, You bury it in the sand. You pick up the message that's hidden in the bottle. And then that's your instructions for the next thing. Fucking Tom Hanks out here. It was hard. Shit.

It was hard. When you were doing the drills, though, in D.C., is it like the way the other guys have described it? Is they'll be like, all right, you have to steal a shirt from this store and not get caught and stuff like that. Or you've got to get onto, into an apartment on the 10th floor of this office building or of this apartment building and come out onto the balcony and signal us. How'd you do that? I bought a clipboard and I bought a shirt and put a little name tag. And I told the woman that I was a maintenance inspector. You didn't get a ladder too? I told the woman I was a maintenance inspector and I needed to check on the condition of her balcony. So I went out there with my clipboard.

I pretended to write something, gave the guys the thumbs up and passed the exercise. That guy I told you about, Jim DiIorio, has a great quote called politeness and familiarity breeds access. And so he tells a story about like he he's out of his mind but like he's done some he works with boostamante now uh-huh put that in perspective but he was like right after he retired from the fbi he was taking these crazy contracts and so one of his guys who was like the CEO of a fucking Fortune 50 company told him that his security for his company at their headquarters was phenomenal.

And Jim was like, the fuck it is. And he's like, no, no, it's phenomenal. And Jim's like, so I could test it? He's like, oh, yeah, you'll never be able to get in there. Maybe we can splice in the Jim story here, but I'll tell John while we're in here. But he's – so Jim goes to the fucking Starbucks outside the headquarters. He's like loading his gun and making sure it's unloaded like outside the Starbucks. People are looking at him. He's like, all right, get in the game mode.

Walks in the front door, like literally goes to the front desk. He goes, oh, well, yeah, yeah, I'm going to see so-and-so on the third floor like yeah yeah okay go ahead gets up to the third floor goes up to the front desk has i think he had donuts or something he goes ah yeah sorry i'm late with these i was supposed to bring him yesterday but he's in right oh yeah yeah he's in uh yeah i'll just be five minutes walks in there sits down at the desk or walks in there the ceo sitting down at the desk goes through the door, holds up the gun to his head and says, you're dead. We need to talk. It was that easy.

Oh, my God. That is brilliant. It was like two steps. That's brilliant. Crazy. But like, you know, you guys have to learn how to do that common sense at CIA. I've said in other podcasts, I was always the good cop when I was in operations. Always.

And I found success to be far easier than it was for the guys who were the bad cop when I was in operations always. And I found success to be far easier than it was for the guys who were the bad cop. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I could see that because like you, the way you strike me and I've, I've listened to you for years now because of Danny show. And, you know, I, I just think the way you break down likeics and stuff is so good. But you have this air of obviously you're very friendly. So that's disarming. Thank you. But you give off this air that's completely untrue that's an incredible tool, which is you give off an air of complete aloofness. I don't know if you know this.

No. I mean maybe you do. I never really thought about it. Yeah. You walk in like the guy like, oh, yeah, this wow how long have you been doing this like you don't know a fucking thing that's going on no but you've already charted out the whole place and you're ready to slit the throat of the family member of the guy sitting across from you and feed it to him sometimes you have to do things i'll give you an example. I'm going to skip way ahead, skip way ahead. So I get to prison,

right? And the judge had, had ordered that I be sent to a minimum security work camp, no bars on the windows, no locked doors. You're free to just come and go as you please. You're on your honor not to abscond. And they put me in the actual prison, right? The agency, just prison right the agency just the the victim my victim objected right so um so i said well i gotta i gotta protect myself here but i'm trained to do this so i had we can come back to this but there was one incident where where the uh the arians just weren't quite sure what to make of me. And so somehow this rumor got started that I was an assassin for the CIA. And I thought, I'm going to go with it. So one of the Aryans stops me in the yard and he goes, is it true you were an assassin with the CIA? And I go, hey, we all did stuff that we weren't proud of.

It was wartime. And that was it from the Aryans. They're like, oh, you can sit with us at our table. I was like, okay. Until the Italians said, why you sit with those Nazis? Oh, sorry. Yeah, no, you're good. Keep going.

And so I was with the Italians after that. But, you know, you just got to go with it. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're very – it's a psychological power for sure. That's why it's so fascinating to listen to because I can see like guys like you. What's Jim Lawler's line? He's like, I have to make people trust me to become a traitor.

Exactly. I say all the time. What makes this job so hard is you have to convince people that you are their best friend to the point where they love you so much, they're willing to commit espionage for you. That's right. Or in some cases, they're willing to commit treason for you just because they love you. What's the difference? Espionage and treason? I mean, when you're talking to guys in foreign countries, it's pretty much always going to be that, right? Yeah. Espionage is providing secrets.

That's not treason? Treason is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. How's – Treason is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. So if I recruit a guy from Mexico to give me information on the corn harvest, which might be important to the Department of Agriculture in some way, that's not treason. It's espionage, most definitely. But treason is if I convince a Russian or Chinese, a Cuban, and north korean you know an iranian okay they're gonna hang for that so there's a small distinction yeah i got you yeah i mean they're like like we were talking about earlier with the psychological tools i could i could see where they see that in you it's like you're you're like happy to be about the action, but you are – make no mistake about it.

Beneath there is a very serious guy. Like you understand – you're not – there's no real aloofness to you. You know exactly what you're dealing with. You just know how to have a soft exterior for people so that they can kind of be taken in by that. And I think that's why I was successful. Yeah. Yeah. Like I remember I had recruited a guy why I was successful. Yeah. Yeah. Like I remember a guy,

I had recruited a guy, he was in dire financial straits and something happened in his life. I don't remember what it was, but he, he triggered a meeting, which was highly unusual. And I go to the meeting and, um, and he's got a, he's got a shopping bag. It has all of his wife's jewelry in it and he said can you give me five thousand dollars for this jewelry and i go what am i fucking jeweler like seriously that's what i told him like what do you want me to do yeah i was watching on the plane yesterday i was watching goodfellas you remember the scene where where um where polly is uh where Pauly is, well, Joe Pesci, Tommy, he's just done the, what, I make you laugh scene and he smashed the bottle over the owner's head

and the owner goes to Pauly and says, come on, you got to come in on the business, take a piece to the restaurant. And Pauly's chomping on his cigars like, what the fuck do I know? I know how to go in the restaurant and order the meal. That's all. I don't know anything about the restaurant and polly's chomping on his cigars like what the fuck do i know i know i know how to go in the restaurant and order the meal that's all i don't know anything about the restaurant business so what you want me to take a piece of this restaurant it's the same situation yeah you

go in i'm like what the fuck do i know okay oh you want listen keep your jewelry keep your jewelry what i need from you is i need two hours in your embassy's code room how about that i'll do that yeah i'd rather have that than your wife's jewelry they should make that a visa commercial priceless yeah that's right we good we happy yeah right let's have a drink yeah so you so you get pulled you're doing all this training in like 97 how long was the was the now spy training that first time not the not when you yeah it was like eight months nine months okay so you're in there yeah down and dirty are you your second wife was in cia right yeah yeah she was a senior cia officer okay are you with her at this point or is that no i went No. I went to Athens with my first wife and then we split up at the end of the Athens tour.

Now, was it hard being married to someone who you really couldn't tell anything to? Oh, my God. It was awful. It was awful, especially in Athens. I mean I was doing dangerous shit in Athens. And I remember my son. My son – my oldest son was like six at the time. And I had seven cell phones, right?

I kept them in, in a, we had a rather large house. So I used one room as a den and I kept that door locked. But he saw when I went in one time, I have seven cell phones. And he said, why do you have seven cell phones? And I said, there are a lot of people that need to call me. What are you going to say to a six-year-old? And then he says, why do you carry a gun? And I said, well, I have a dangerous job at the embassy.

And he said, Mikey's dad works at the embassy and he doesn't have a gun. And I said, well, I'm a detective at the agency. I mean at the embassy. And that was, well, I'm a detective at the agency. I mean, at the embassy. And that was, yeah, I've done that more than once. And that was acceptable to a six-year-old. But then, you know, I get a call at 11. And, you know, he says, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

And I say, marasitoats and dozitoats and little lambs eat ivy, which means meet me in three hours at the Marriott coffee shop. And so I split. And my wife's like, where are you going? I got to work. Now, my first wife was a ballet teacher. She didn't know anything about the CIA. Was she Greek?

Yes. So she spoke Greek? Yes. So she wasn't miserable living in Greece? No, no. She loved it. Okay. So I start a three-hour surveillance detection route.

I go to the meeting spot. We do whatever it is we're going to do. I do another two hours to go back. I get home six o'clock in the morning just in time to take a shower and shave and go to work. Right? And she's waiting. She's like, so what was her name she knows your cia though but she can't wrap her brain around what it is i'm doing in the middle of the night that i can't do in the middle of the day right and i said one time i have been sitting in a garbage dumpster for two hours waiting for somebody to throw a bag of documents at me.

Do I smell like I've been with a woman? Seriously? And if I was going to be with a woman, you think I would have her call home to trigger a meeting in the middle of the night? I said, you have to understand what i do for a living and she just could not accept it and so she left that's hard yeah high divorce rate in jobs like the highest divorce rate of any governmental entity yeah it's interesting though that like she knew because i've heard other stories i think maybe I'm misremembering this but where people say work at the State Department and their CIA and their spouse doesn't know. And like that I can see.

But like when the spouse knows, like I've never been in the CIA and maybe I hear a lot more stories. Let's say I didn't do a podcast but I know what the CIA is. I know they're fucking spies. I know shit's crazy like you know it's hard to put yourself in those shoes but like i feel like some of that i would understand it wouldn't make the lifestyle easier though because your hours you would understand it you're not on the clock i'll give you another example um i was winding up my tour in pakistan and i was dating the woman who would become my second wife. Who's in CIA?

CIA, senior CIA officer on the analytics side. So we had been making plans to go on vacation to Santa Fe. I had never been to Santa Fe, New Mexico, right? Everybody says it's so beautiful, great art scene, good food. We're going to go to Santa Fe. And after Pakistan, I needed to decompress. So we're coming up to my very last day and I get a cable like five hours before I'm going to leave saying, don't come home, go to this other country. There's a team waiting and you need to break into this house and get this stuff. And I was like, fuck.

So I called her and I said, I am so sorry. She said, no, no. I saw the cable. Go do your break in. She gets it. Yeah. We'll go on vacation when we can go on vacation. And I was like, oh, my God.

I got to marry her. And I did. And then that later was an issue with all the other stuff. But real quick, John, I got to run to the bathroom. We got to get into your time in Greece working against 17N and also some other stuff there. We got to get into your time in Pakistan. You've alluded to a ton and like 9-11 what was going on you obviously had a I mean you were the guy running the Abou Zubaydah capture so we'll get into that and then obviously what happened in the

transition your career with CI and all that so sounds good if this is gonna be a new episode we'll see you for the next episode and please subscribe Thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave. Please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video It's a huge help And also if you're over on Instagram be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D Dory both links are in the description below Finally if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.