Julian Dorey Podcast - #250 - CIA Terrorist Spy on Surviving Assassination & Nailing Al-Qaeda's #3 | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: November 13, 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 Kiriakou vs. Bustamante: https://youtu.be/ElMSJDkqSYQ?si=kKWzhflF6aFMiPJG 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 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - John Relocates as CIA Spy in Greece, Al Qaeda Operations 08:12 - Almost Killed in Athens (17th November), Colleague Assassinated 20:06 - 2nd Time Almost Assassinated, Double Agent Plot & Crazy Story 37:51 - Learning about Al Qaeda & Day of 9/1$ 47:35 - 4 Days After 9/1$ & Tracking Terrorist 50:43 - Paramilitary Mistake of Afghanistan War 57:30 - Jose Rodriguez, Israeli’s & Saudi’s Desire for American Soil Attack 01:11:41 - Congress Waived Federal Regulation 01:19:01 - Working in Pakistan, Pakistani’s CIA Equivalent 01:31:12 - CIA Targeter Assisting in Pakistani Operation, CIA Black Sites 01:40:02 - Hunt for Abu Zubaydah & Getting Him 01:46:53 - Abu Zubaydah Needing Emergency Help 01:57:10 - High Target Value of Abuzabada & Meaning Behind Capture 02:02:57 - Abu Zubaydah Sent to Black Sites & Eventually Guantanamo Bay 02:10:53 - Ali Soufan FBI Interrogator Onto Next High-Level Target 02:20:21 - Breaking the Constitution & Philosophical Belief 02:24:51 - Tom Drake NSA Whistleblower Story 02:33:08 - Reporter Reaches Out to John Kiriakou 02:40:31 - Working with John Kerry & Difficulty, Afghanistan Poppy Fields 02:49:54 - John Kerry is an Ego Maniac, The Obama Lies 02:56:03 - Re-Opening John Kirikou’s Case Again 03:07:35 - Day of John’s Arrest, Coming After Him 03:21:10 - Find John CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 249 - John Kiriakou Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finally, Abu Zubaydah begins to stir. And I stand up at the foot of his bed. I put my hands on my hips and I'm looking at him. And he's like tied down and he opens just one eye. Of course, he only had one eye, right? He opens his eye and he doesn't look at me. Yeah, he looks at SpongeBob. And his pulse goes from 120 to 220, like in a second.

And the machine starts going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And then you hear, hold blue, code blue. And these people rush in. He saw SpongeBob and he knew it was up. He was like, oh my God, the Americans have me. 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. All right. So John, you and I left off in the last part of the conversation with you going to Greece after you got basically in through the school you were put through eight years into your career to become a clandestine spy at this point we got to talk all about 9-11 and the aftermath of that and everything you did and what went on in your career but going to Greece it's it's very fascinating to me when you did because this is this is before you know America's like into the whole Al-Qaeda thing you guys at cia obviously knew damn well what it was but the average citizen had no idea it was not a big deal and so the terrorism

that people were worried about at the time was i think to quote george tenet like you know blow up buildings by day drink champagne by night and it was like eastern european type things so that's pretty much what you were put in the middle of, right? Yeah, it was very much Euro-communism, right? Greece had two primary terrorist groups that we were working against, Revolutionary Organization, 17 November, which was very lethal. And another group called Revolutionary Popular Struggle that mostly targeted Greek cops and some Greek military people, mostly the cops. But I mean, every Western European country had groups like this. You know, we're talking about Red Brigades and Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof and Action Direct and everybody was worried about these, the provisional Irish Republican army. Most of those groups were cracked, right, and broken by the late 1990s. In Greece, they were just raging onward. And, you know, they had killed the CIA station chief, they'd killed two US defense attaches,

they had shot and gravely wounded the DEA representative. They shot and killed an Air Force tech sergeant, Ronald Stewart. They killed the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador. They fired a rocket at the German ambassador, the French ambassador. And then they killed a slew of senior Greek political figures, the minister of communications, who also happened to be the prime minister's son-in-law, the governor of the central bank, the minister of finance, a number of Greek publishers. to the point where they could carry out an assassination in bumper-to-bumper traffic in rush hour and nobody saw a thing because people were so afraid that, you know, is this group the government? Is it the Greek Orthodox Church, which I also heard more than once? Of course it wasn't. It

turns out three of the assassins happened to be the sons of a priest from up north, but it wasn't the Greek Orthodox Church. But it was so mysterious. In Greek, they used to call it the phantom organization because they would just disappear after carrying out their hits. So this was a real challenge. Now, when you're sent there, you had said you're sent there under a diplomatic alias, meaning you're working for the State Department or whatever, but are you immediately made like, are you reporting to other spies on the ground, or do you have carte blanche to set your own missions?

Oh, no. It was all very formal. So I was part of an entire branch that was working counterterrorism issues. And mostly it was Greek terrorism, and we worked that issue colleagues. And so I had to handle that too. And we're talking about, you know, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLPGC, General Command, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Nidal, the Libyans. It was a whole slew of Arabs that I had to think about besides just the Greeks out there trying to kill me every day. And so they were taken up – they're essentially like all over Europe, but they had a major hub in Greece. deal that was negotiated between various Arab groups and the Greek government in the 1980s, that if they didn't kill Greeks, they could transit Athens unmolested. Yeah, which caused us no end of problems. Yeah, I can imagine. So were you getting read in at the time? I mean,

obviously, you're focused on Greece, but you have a presence of an Arab terrorism presence there as well. So you're focused on that. Were you getting read in on like a lot of the things that were happening with al-Qaeda at the time? Because it's not like they weren't active. Like they weren't doing things around the world. They were very active, blowing up American embassies, attacking the USS Cole. I knew almost nothing about Al-Qaeda when I returned from Athens in the summer of 2000. I was in Bahrain when the OPM sang bombing took place. And that was the first anti-American attack that we were able to attribute to al-Qaeda.

But the name of this group meant nothing to anybody. In Arabic, it means the base. Right. Which we didn't even understand what the heck is that supposed to mean? And we knew all about Osama bin Laden. A colleague of mine wrote a paper in 1991 saying Osama bin Laden was the most dangerous man in Saudi Arabia. And I was like, who is this guy? I never heard of this guy. He was just in the early planning stages in 1991, hadn't even gone to Sudan yet. And so Al Qaeda never even popped up on my screen when I was in Athens. Every once

in a while, there'd be somebody in transit, mostly Egyptian Islamic jihad, because Cairo was only a one hour flight from Athens. And so these guys would leave Cairo, arrive in Athens, usually just stay in the transit lounge, and then fly out to wherever it is they were going to go. So we would get a warning from somebody somebody whether it was a foreign government or you know uh nsa or whomever that so and so was you know was going to arrive in athens and we would either go out there or we would ask the greeks to go out to the airport and just you know get eyes on the guy until he got on the next plane yeah but while you were in athens like you had some dangerous things happen as well like You were almost killed.

How did that go down? Well, it was toward the end of my stay in Athens, my assignment. And 90% of my time was spent working against 17 November. We were very provocative against 17 November. We were very provocative against 17 November. We were actively running ops against them. And then they would, you know, shoot a rocket at the German ambassador or, you know, do whatever it is they were going to do. And because Athens was so dangerous at the time, we actually spent more money on security in Athens than any other embassy in the world. Wow. Yeah. It was rated critical threat for counterterrorism. That's how dangerous it was.

We spent more in Athens than we spent in Beirut. That's how bad it was. So we also all drove armored cars and I was heavily armed the whole time I was there. I had a 38 on my ankle and nine millimeter on my waist, three extra magazines in a tearaway fanny pack, and I had a knife in my back pocket. God forbid it came to that, I was going to go down with a fight. Were you good with a knife? Not really, no. I would usually cut myself. It's one of those things.

So I had to make the gun work. Yeah. So I was driving an armored BMW 540. It was brand spanking new. And it was the very first 540 in Greece. We couldn't even insure it. We had to insure it through a company in Germany because the Greeks couldn't compare it to anything to insure it. And I had a new neighbor move in. Our backyards touched each

other diagonally, right? So he was behind my house and over one. And he was the new British defense attache, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders. And Stephen was a great guy. Life of the party. Everybody loved the guy. And we were at a dinner party one night, and he was making fun of me, but in a friendly way, a joking way. And he was saying, you Americans, you're so paranoid about security. He goes, this is an EU country. It's a NATO country. What are you so afraid of with your armored cars and your weapons? Kiss of death. Yeah. I said, you Brits live in a dream world. If you think because they have pretty beaches

and palm trees that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance. If they have the chance, they're going to kill you. Well, a couple of weeks later, I accidentally slept through my alarm and I never, ever did that. Now, in a critical threat for terrorism post, you can't set a pattern. So I left my house every day at a different time and I took a different route to work every single day. And sometimes that would mean it took me 30 minutes. Sometimes it would mean it took me two hours to get to the office. Was that like second nature being able to do that? Absolutely.

Or was there a lot of planning? And I did that because I was paranoid. I did that for several years after I left the agency, just out of force of habit, just to make sure I'm not being followed. And you'd be surprised how many times I actually caught these morons at the FBI later on who think they're so slick and such good surveillance. Anyway, that's a different story. So I slept through my alarm and I was like, oh my God, I got to just get on the main road and go straight to the embassy. So my house, I was in a northern suburb of Athens called Kifisia. And the embassy was on the same boulevard, Kifisia Boulevard, which changes names when it gets into the city.

But it's literally a straight shot exactly 10 miles from four blocks from my house straight to the embassy, right? The problem is this is a major thoroughfare, right? Six lanes plus two lanes of – yeah, that's it. We got it on the map right here. Plus two lanes of local lanes on the sides, right? So you're talking about ten lanes and they're Jersey barriers. So once you're on, that's it.

You're committed. You can't get off. So I'm normally driving in this nonsensical way to get to the embassy. And there's the embassy right there, the embassy of the United States. So I said, I just got to get on QVCS, which I would never do because there's so many cars, you can't tell if you're being followed. And I'm worried about somebody driving up alongside of me, which they normally did. And then they shoot you with an anti-tank round because it goes through armor. That's what I was so worried about.

So I get on and I'm like, oh my God, it is a parking lot. Like Cairo kind of traffic jam. But again, I'm committed. There are Jersey barriers. So I did another thing that I never normally did. I put on the radio. I never put on the radio because I didn't want to be distracted. You know, you start whistling a song or whatever. You don't notice they're coming up alongside of you with their anti-tank gun and then you're done. So I put on the radio and they break into the programming and this guy says, avoidivicius boulevard yeah because there's a traffic incident

at philothe well philothe is the halfway point to the embassy and i was like shit how long am i going to be stuck in this that's five miles of traffic 20 minutes pass and the guy comes on he says avoid avoid KVCS because there's a criminal incident at Filothay. And I was like, ooh, I never heard that before. What kind of criminal incident? So I'm inching my way down the mountain. And then he says, avoid KVCS Boulevard. There was a terrorist incident at Philothe. And when he said it, I could see down

the hill that the left two lanes were closed. There was a white car in the left lane and they had put police tape around it. And I was like, what the heck is that? So I'm getting closer to it and I see the license plate. And it started with the letters YBH. Well, because Athens was so dangerous, we couldn't have diplomatic license plates, right? And the Greeks, in their infinite wisdom, gave everybody in the American embassy license plates that began with YHB. And I said, oh my God, they killed some poor Greek thinking that it was us because YHB, YBH. And then I said, no, wait a minute. The British embassy is YBH and Stephen Saunders drives a white Rover. So I called the station and I said, hey, I think Stephen Saunders was just assassinated. He said, what are you seeing? I said, I'm on KVCS. I'm looking at his car. I'm sure it's his car.

There's blood everywhere. And the driver's side window is shot out. So he calls the British embassy. And this woman says, oh, I'm sorry, Stephen's not in yet. And he's like, no, listen, we think he's been shot. They're like, oh my God. They start calling the hospitals. He's at the Red Cross hospital and he died 45 minutes later. So he's stuck in traffic. They drive right up alongside him. They shoot him with this anti-tank round. It blows his right hand completely off. And then with the window shattered,

driving a non-armored car, they shoot him three times in the chest with the same.45 that they used in all of their assassinations between 1975 and 2002. The Welch 45. This is the guy who the week before is telling you, what are you worried about?

He was laughing at me. And I laughed at him. And I was like, you're nuts, man. I'd rather be in my armored car than in your rinky-dink piece of junk. Oh, my God. And we laughed. We laughed. We laughed. We laughed. His wife was what turned this whole thing around because she immediately went on Greek television and she said this was not an attack against Stephen. It was not an attack against the British embassy. This was an attack against the greek people this organization is not a political organization

nor is it a phantom group it's a gang of criminals and they're committing crimes against the greek state and for the first time since 1975 public opinion began to change wow yeah he had two little girls at home and it was just that's horrible horrible. It was just awful. But anyway, what 17 November normally did was they would drop a manifesto at the site of the hit. They didn't drop the manifesto this time. Rarely they would mail the manifesto to one of the leftist newspapers or they would put it in a trash can and then call a leftist newspaper and tell them where they could go get it. This time they let several months pass. Stephen was killed in April. I think it was April 22nd, I think. 99? August of 2000, I go into the office and my boss comes in and he goes, did you see the manifesto? I said, oh no, I didn't know that they had sent it. And he said, they're talking about you.

I said, about me? I said, no, no, no, no, no. I take my safety very, very seriously. He said, dude, they talk about you. They say, we saw the big spy, but he was driving an armored car and we knew he was armed. And so we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence against the war criminal Saunders. On the same road. Oh, my God. All we could conclude was that he was, Stephen was on TV all the time, new British defense attache. He's a general.

He had come from Ireland and then he was in Yugoslavia and he's at every party and he's meeting with the minister of defense. So he's on TV all the time. So he was easy to find. And we think that while they were watching him, they saw my plate and said,

ooh, YHB, that's the American embassy. And then they noticed that my car was armored. And that's how I came to their attention. So my boss says, you got to go. I go, where? He said, home, like right now. I said, but my kids are at school. I can't go now. He said, we'll pick up your kids in an armored car. Call your wife. We're going to send another car for her. I go, wait, I can't just leave now. I got a whole house.

He said, we'll pack up your shit. Just get in a car and go to the airport. So I went to the airport. They brought my wife and kids to the airport. We were on the 12 o'clock Delta flight back to New York. Never went back. I went back two years later when things had quieted down a little bit. But that was a close one. I had a closer one a year later, but that was the first.

What was the closer one a year later? Where was that? That was in a Middle Eastern country that the CIA won't allow me to name. Pre-911. Yes, pre-911. Weeks pre-911. So I had a buddy who was a station chief there. And we just really, really loved each other. Just an all-around good guy.

And actually, he's the one who introduced me to my second wife. And he calls me. He said, buddy, I got a favor to ask. I said, sure, name it. He goes, we're running a double agent case out here. And the guy's just too dangerous for my people to meet with on a regular basis. He insists on speaking to the chief. And I just can't risk meeting with him.

Can you come out here and pretend to be me and handle a double agent? I had never handled a double agent before, but I had gone through the training and I said, done. So I got on the plane, fly to the Middle East. And he says, here's the story. We recruited this guy, and he was an engineer and a contractor for a major American defense contractor. The contractor did not know that he had also been recruited by one of America's greatest enemies. And they had directed him to allow himself to be recruited by the CIA so that he could report back to them as a double agent.

Oh, this is getting deep. So he didn't know that we knew that he was a double agent. So he was a double, double agent. Uh-huh. It gets complicated. Yeah. So I go out there and I trigger the meeting. And we meet at this obscure hotel in...

And I'm wearing a jacket. Do we have to bleep that? Shit. Yes. Yeah. Make to bleep that? Shit. Yes. Yeah. Make a mark of that? Sorry. Yeah.

Let's bleep that. He said it. Yeah, we can't forget that. We'll put the – Thank you. I'll never forget that. Yeah, we got you. We got you.

You wouldn't have known. No, you're good. You're good. I spoke right through it. That's why we do it. So you meet with this guy in an undiscl do it. So you meet with this guy at an undisclosed hotel. And, uh, I was wearing a jacket. I took off my jacket so he could see I was not armed. And I said, listen, since this is our first meeting, we need to talk about some of

the basics. I said, the first thing we're going to do every time we see each other is something that we call the mad minute at the CIA. So I ask you, are you safe? Were you followed here? Did you do a surveillance detection route? And we make plans for the next meeting. So if somebody busts down the door, we've at least gotten the important stuff out of the way. He said, well, what happens if they do bust down the door? I said, we have to have a cover story. We can say we went to the same university. Let's do that. Okay. Where did you go to school? He said, whatever school he went to. And I said, okay, that's where I went to. And I came to, oh, sorry. Sorry. It's all good. Clip it. We got it again. So I came to this fuck sorry it's all good we got it again

so I came to this country and uh just make sure on those Alessi just flip the camera to me in the post edit when he's saying it and he'll bleep it out it happens all the time with you spooky guys

yeah sorry so I came to this country we ran into each other we decided to hang out that's it okay that's our cover story and i said next thing we we have to do is i want you to go out and get a post office box so if there's some reason why we can't speak on the phone i'll be able to message you through the post office box and i want you to go there and check for mail once a week. He said, okay, we'll do. So we made plans for our next meeting. And I said to him, most importantly, you need to do a surveillance detection route to our meeting and home from our meeting. Do you know what a

surveillance detection route is? He says, I think so. I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. I want you to go from, let's say your house to point A. And at point A, let's say you pick up your dry cleaning and then you go to the second stop and you buy a light bulb. And then you go to the third stop

and you buy some pastries and you make sure you're not being followed. And then you can come to the meeting. But once you finish the second stop, get off the main roads and then use lesser used roads. And then from the final stop to the hotel, just take some crazy way that doesn't make any sense. He said, great. So he said to me, just so I can be sure. So you're the chief. And I said, I'm the chief. He said, nobody higher than you.

I said, you got the boss, Duke. I'm the chief. So I said, I'm going to give you my phone number. I had what back then, and we're talking about, you know, 23, 24 years ago, 23 years ago, it was called a tri-band cell phone. So it was good in every country in the world. We bought it in that country and it acted as a satellite phone. So he would call a local number and it would ring no matter where I was in the world, which was not a novelty back then. But he wouldn't have any idea if I was in that country or if I was somewhere else.

Got it. So I pretended to live there. What name did you give him? You have like a fake name? Oh, yeah. You always use a fake name. Yeah. I actually used my colleague's real name because Oh, yeah. You always use a fake name. Yeah. Yeah.

I actually used my colleague's real name because remember, I was supposed to be him. And he's on the – And he used his real name. And he was on the diplomatic list. Oh, okay. Yeah. Got it. So this went on for months. I would meet him.

I would meet him every few weeks. We would always meet at different hotels, different locations. And I would get a little deeper and deeper and deeper in my conversations with him. What kinds of things were you trying to get from him without going into classified details? he was a member of a minority sect and he had friends and relatives who were active members of a terrorist group that, that, that sect kind of adheres to. And so I wanted that. Got it. So, so he would never, ever, ever do surveillance detection routes. He would get in his car, drive directly from his house to the hotel.

And we have like four teams of guys on him. And he would never see any of them. And then he would leave our meeting and go directly to this enemy country's embassy. Directly. Without stopping. No turns, no surveillance, nothing. And we got teams on him. On top of that, we're on his phone

because I said, let's exchange phone numbers. Okay, so now we have his phone too. So this went on for about six months. And I happen to be in Washington and I get this hair on fire cable from the embassy from, from my colleague. And he says, they're onto you. And I said, how? He said, well, actually it's my fault. He said, they're, they're onto me. He said, they were in the hotel lobby last time and they got a picture of you and they said we

know who the chief is and that ain't him i said okay so we we take it somewhere else we take it to a neighboring country the next meeting he said no dude they've ordered him to kill you in the next meeting i said get the fuck out of here this guy's afraid of his own shadow he's not gonna kill me in the next meeting you sound like that guy in greece now seriously never shoot through my car so i'm at headquarters and they're like operations over i said wait a minute wait a minute let's not be hasty here you You send me back in, goddammit. We can seriously disrupt this group. Like seriously dismantle it.

So I said, hear me out. There's a Marriott in this country. Okay? Every Marriott is designed in exactly the same way. As soon as you walk in, the bathroom's on the right. Right? Really? As soon as you walk into your room, yeah.

As soon as you walk into the room, the bathroom's on the right. Interesting. I said, how about this? We tell them that the meeting's at a Marriott. We get adjoining rooms. Our foreign intelligence liaison comrades and our guys are in the neighboring room. I'll prop the door open with that security lock.

Yeah. Tell him where to come in, what room I'm in for the meeting. When he comes in, I take him down because I'm going to be in the bathroom. I come right out of the bathroom, take him down. You guys bust in from the next door, the next room, and we got him. They're like, I don't know. It's risky. I said, I'll wear a vest.

How about that? Under my shirt, I'll wear a vest. Okay, they agreed to it. So it got unfriendly. So I go out there and we have like six guys in the lobby. Well, the bad guys have six guys in the lobby. Oh, shit. And our guys are looking at their guys.

Everybody's armed. They all know, too. They all know. Like this is the day that they kill me so i'm up in the room and my guy's calling me saying you wouldn't fucking believe what the lobby is like right now he got a gun yep he got a gun yeah everybody got do we. So they text me. He's coming in right now. So the source calls me. Do you have chloroform?

No. No? I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Okay. No, we had Demerol injectable. Yeah, it works. So he calls me.

He said, I'm here. I'm in the lobby. I said, come up to the eighth floor. So he comes up to the eighth floor and I'm there in the elevator lobby. And I give him this big bear hug and I pat him down. And he's nervous, really nervous. And I said, come, come with me. Come on.

We're going to walk. We're going to go to the stairwell. So we go to the stairwell. Well, the eighth floor was the top floor. And I go, we're going to go to the stairwell. So we go to the stairwell. Well, the eighth floor was the top floor. And I go, we're going to meet on the roof today. He's like, what? I said, we're going to meet on the roof. No, I'm not going to go on the roof.

I said, sure you are. Come on, let's go. We're going to go up the roof. He's like, no. I go, yeah. Up. Up. He gets nervous to the point where I think he's going to start crying.

And I said, what's going on? I thought we're friends. I'm not going to the roof, he says. And I said, oh, yes, you are. So I push him to go upstairs and he starts to cry. I said, what is your problem? He said, I don't want to go to the roof. I said, all right. He thought you were going to see if he could fly.

That's exactly what he thought. So I said, all right. Go to the fourth floor. and call me from there. He goes down to the fourth floor. I go back to the room, which is on six. And he calls me. He said, I'm on the fourth floor. I said, come to 612. So he takes the elevator, comes to 612, knocks on the door. I say, come in. He walks in. I come out of the bathroom. I bear hug him. I take him down the ground.

Our guys and the liaison guys bust in from the other side. And I'm sitting on him. I have him pinned. And I said to him, do you think I am so fucking stupid that I don't know that you came here to kill me today? Do you think I am such a fucking amateur that I don't know exactly who you are and what you came here today to do? He goes, fuck you like that. He goes, fuck you. I'm not afraid of you. I said, no, but you're going to be plenty afraid of my friends. And then bang, they give him the Demerol. He's out. Well, listen, one of the dirty little secrets of

the hotel industry is that people die in hotels every single day. Right? So we put them on a gurney, we cover them up, we take them out the back door into an ambulance and drive away. In the meantime. Right to Guantanamo? No. No. He probably wished he was in Guantanamo after what he got. I'm getting text messages from my buddies in the lobby like these guys are starting to freak out. And they're speaking in their language like where is he?

It should have been done by now. Why hasn he checked in what's going on there's some saying that blatantly even though they know your six guys are there in their in their language so they don't think our guys speak their unusual language chances that one out of six right come on stupid stupid idiots amateur hour yeah we take him to the intelligence service headquarters. And when he wakes up, he's tied to a chair. Oh. So I'm standing there and I said, buddy, this can be easy or it can be terrible. You hit him with the abuser beta line.

Mm-hmm. I said, where are the weapons? Fuck you. I'll never tell you anything. I said, if you want to live, you're going to tell me where the weapons are. I'm not talking. Our colleagues beat the living snot out of him, and he just would not talk. So I said, or one of the liaison guys said, we need to get into his house.

And I said, okay, I know where he lives, but he's got a Filipino maid and she never leaves the house. And they're like, oh, then we can't go in the house because this has to be totally secret. So I said, well, let's just say there's a, we'll say there's a gas leak and we'll evacuate everybody. And he's like, we don't have gas lines in this country. We use propane. I go, okay, well, then let's just bring a big 18-wheeler full of propane

and we'll spill it on the ground and we'll declare an environmental disaster. So an hour later, there's this 18-wheeler driving down the road and we pull in front of his house. There's this big wheel on the back. And I'm going like this. And this propane's spilling all over the ground. And we're like, oh, it's an environmental emergency. And we close the propane.

And then we evacuate. It was like six houses on a cul-de-sac. We evacuate all the six houses. So we go into his house. He's got a safe, a big safe in the house. I was like, this is it. It's the weapons. So we have a locks and picks team on standby.

So they come. 20 minutes or so it takes them to finally pop the lock. And it's empty except for a map. There's a map. And it's got an X. Like, the weapons are here, X. I'm serious. It was nuts. Were you looking for biological weapons?

No, just weapons, weapons. Okay. So it's about 25 miles south of where we were and it was out in the desert. So we go down there and there's a bunker just dug in the ground. And all of the weapons are in there, like enough for a small army. Whoa. So we confiscated them. Our partners destroyed them. He was convicted of terrorism and given a life sentence.

And our enemies were none the wiser. Whoa. Yeah. And then I flew back and I've never been back to that country again. And this is in the weeks leading up to 9-11. Yeah, this was like three weeks before 9-11 wow yeah so i got a nice award for that operation that worked out well i'll bet yeah yeah you were on your game for that one i was you had said though in greece you weren't being read in on any al-qaeda stuff or whatever not a word but when you got back from greece when they sent you home from there you were at langley right okay and i'm like what is this

al-qaeda everybody's talking about now they start telling you all about yeah yeah and and i remember there was some there was some terrorist attack i don't remember which one it was but i was like kenya it may have been it was in that period between the summer of 2000 the summer of 2001 and i was like oh this is what everybody's been so worried about like yeah this is bad yeah but then i just continued to do greek stuff until the shit hit the fan. Oh, you were? Yeah. But how did you end up in the Middle Eastern country? As a favorite of my buddy who was the station chief.

That's it? That was it. You weren't actually. No, he's like, ah, you know, Kiriakou would be good for this. I can trust him to do this. Right. Okay. And it was that whole, you know, good cop thing again. Yeah.

So that's a few weeks before 9-11. come back to the u.s after that yeah i came back to the u.s and where were you on 9-11 i was at headquarters you know it sounds quaint now but the uh the government uh printing office gpo they're up on Capitol Hill. The government printing office was publishing a compendium of declassified cables, and it was called Foreign Relations of the United States, Athens, Ankara, Istanbul, Nicosia, 1947 to 1969. I still remember it. The problem is there were three cables among the thousands of cables in that giant volume that outed three agency sources who were still alive. So we asked GPO to stop printing and they were like, nope, act of Congress, got to print. So I called the white house and i said i need an appointment with condoleezza rice this is on 9 11 on the morning of 9 11 oh my god we had a we got an appointment with condoleezza rice at nine o'clock that day so i went over to

kofar black's office because tell people who kofar black is kofar black was the chief of the cia's counterterrorism center connie rice didn't know me from anywhere, but she and Kofor were longtime colleagues. He had met with her. We'll get into this. He had met with her a bunch before 9-11, telling her it was going to happen. 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. So I get a call from the driver saying the car's ready to take us to the White House.

And we were just going to ask Condoleezza Rice to just please don't publish these three cables, right? Just take the cables out or black out the names or whatever. Just don't publish these because then we're going to have to offer these guys a million bucks each or relocate them to the States. And they're all like 90 years old by now so we didn't want to do that so um i go over to kofra's office to tell him that the car's ready and his secretary has a tv a little tv on her desk now back then we couldn't watch tv on our computers, right? And one of the World Trade Center towers is on fire. And I said, I go, what happened in World Trade Center? And she said,

a plane flew into it. And me, because I'm an idiot, I said, you know what? That happened once before. In the 30s, the Empire State Building was hit by a plane, but it was really foggy and rainy that day. It's so crystal clear today. Like, how can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center? And just as the words came out of my mouth, the second plane hits. Where's Kofar? In the office? He's in his office. Oblivious to any of this. You don't even know this is happening? No. So she turns to me and she says, did you see that? Or did I imagine it? And I said, we're under attack. And I ran back to my office. I said, guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're

under attack. So they ran back up to Kofor's office. Now, you have to imagine this absolutely absolutely enormous office that has about 150, what do you call it, cubicles in what we call the bullpen. And then around the perimeter of the office are all the private offices. So you've got the director of the counterterrorism center, the deputy director for operations, the deputy director for intelligence, the deputy director for military, and then the division chiefs. Eerily similar to how Wall Street's set up. I believe that. Yeah. So everybody's gathered.

There were TVs above Kofor's office on a bunch of different networks. BBC, the Russians, the French, MSNBC, CNN, Fox. I think Fox was around back then. Yeah, Fox and CNN were around. Yeah. And it's just silence. So imagine there are 200 people standing there and then somebody shouts,

will somebody please lead? And it was like someone had slapped Kofor in the face and he's like, ah, ah you go to the director's office tell him this you go to security you go to operations and starts barking out orders so the rest of us are standing there like what do we do and then someone said everybody I think we should assume that we're probably a target. And it hadn't occurred to anybody. There are still two planes in the air, right? Then the Pentagon gets hit.

Well, we all had friends at the Pentagon, close friends, colleagues. It's like, well, now what? The next one's either for us or it's for the White House. Abizabeda later said, he kept saying the White White House but pointing to a picture of the Capitol building. And he kept saying that the White House was – we were going to hit the White House because it was the bastion of the Jews. And he kept pointing to the Capitol dome. So – I know. So a security guy came in and he shouted, everybody evacuate.

And nobody budged. And Kofor said, I guess we'll just have to die. Yeah. So he came back in an hour or two later and he says, if you don't evacuate, you'll be arrested. And Kofor said, everybody just go. Just go. Get out. Well, I mean, there are – I can't say the number of people, but there were more than 10,000

people in headquarters, right? That day at any given time, 10,000 people all leaving the parking lot at the same time. Yeah. It took me three hours to get out. It was so bad. I had to abandon my car on the George Washington Parkway and walk the rest of the way to my house my apartment my then girlfriend who became my wife met me at my place my place was closer than hers had she been at headquarters she was at headquarters too and she's like what are you going to do they're telling us to uh to evacuate and i said nobody's moving and if i'm not going to evacuate we have work to do now she's like, they're telling us we have to go. I'll meet you at your place. And I said, okay. So we met at my place. We, we went to the roof. We watched the Pentagon burn for a while. And then, um, I said, this is ridiculous. We should give blood. We should try to give blood somewhere. So we went to a couple

of different, there were blood mobiles set up but the lines were so long they said it's going to take us 24 hours to get through these people and i told her listen take my keys i'm going to walk back to headquarters and so how far is that it's about seven miles so my car was like four miles away i walked back to my car i drove across the median it was still there oh yeah it was still there it was chaos yeah. It was still there. It was chaos. Yeah. And I'll tell you, after I abandoned my car – I'm surprised it wasn't looted.

Oh, no, no. Everybody was nuts. They were just trying to get out. There were a lot of cars that were abandoned, a lot. And so I knew it was bad when – after I abandoned my car, I got to the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge and I saw the White House's director for Middle Eastern affairs walking with no shoes to evacuate. I was like, are you kidding me? It's that bad. The White House evacuated.

Like how can that be? They've got underground bunkers. They probably shouldn't evacuate. Yeah. They have underground bunkers. So I walked back to my car. I went back to headquarters, and I didn't leave for four days. I just slept underneath the desk, balled up my jacket and used that as a pillow.

I say in my first book too, it got so bad where after lunch, it's like whatever it is, 4 o'clock, they lock up the cafeterias. The cafeterias at the time were contracted out to Marriott. I forget the name of the Marriott catering sub. Saga was the name of it back then. Saga, disgusting food. And they would put a chain and a lock on the cafeteria doors. So we got bolt cutters and we cut it open. We looted all the food. We turned everything on and we cooked all the food and we just laid it out on these folding tables in the hallway. And people just grazed for the next four days.

We ended up cutting a check to the Marriott to pay for all the food we took. How many people like you came back? Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds. But like not 50 50 of the agency oh no no not even only only counterterrorism and middle east ops everybody else bugged out so those four days take me inside of those what were you guys doing name traces every station

on the planet was sending requests for name traces. Hey, some, I just heard a rumor, some guy named Muhammad Abdullah, he might be a terrorist. What can you tell me about him? You know, I'm being general here, but thousands upon thousands of name trace requests. And then we started trying to come up with operations to hit these guys. And you're working 19, 20-hour type days. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Now –

It's incredible. Obviously, like there's overload. You guys are in full like game response mode and everything. But in those four days, are there any little pockets of I'm talking five minutes of time in there where, I don't know, you're around the water cooler with people and you are processing, like talking human to human about what's happening and not necessarily just, oh, did you find this terrorist or whatever. Was there any of that? Yeah. There was a lot of crying. There was a lot of crying.

There were some spontaneous resignations. There was a woman I worked with for years when I was in the directorate of intelligence. She was a branch chief in the counterterrorism center on the analytics side. And she was so panicked when the first tower hit, she got under her desk and she wouldn't come out from under the desk. Then when the second tower hit, she grabbed her purse and took off. And every single one of her analysts went to Kofor Black a couple of days later and said, we don't have confidence in her leadership. And she was asked to resign. Whoa. Now, what was Kofor like during these days? Because he was one of the guys who was

an architect of what became the paramilitary response mission and obviously was pretty legendary for that but yeah how much did you have any one-on-one time with him at all during this i did multiple times he had to be pretty pissed he was pissed pissed is an understatement because he had been screaming from the rooftops that this was going to happen yep and nobody would listen to him and it wasn't just kofor. It was George Tenet and it was Dick Clark as well. Dick Clark was the counterterrorism czar at the NSC. He was a Clinton holdover. And the Bush people just kind of sidelined him and didn't pay any attention to him. They're like, ah, this gay guy yelling about terrorism. China,

China is the threat. I remember that coming from the Bush people from the get-go. It was about China. Like you agency people, you're all obsessed with these semi-literate Arabs. It's China that's going to be our problem. percent of of issues kofar was a genuine hero in those days after after 9-11 a genuine hero he was he was a he became kind of a wartime commander and one that you could respect and follow now the whole paramilitary thing i think was a grave mistake really i do really in afghanistan the yes why because that's up to the military they're trained to do that let the military do what they're good at doing but the military was involved with that i know guys who were involved they were on loan to the cia they were cia run operations for example ground branch you know air branch all those guys even if they're active duty they're seconded to the cia that's right that's a mistake why wait wait wait the job hold on hold on one sec i shit on pretty much everything we did as from a strategy standpoint not our guys

who were over there but from a strategy standpoint from suits in washington dc in the global war on terror like we fucked everything up the one thing I've always cited as an incredible, like modern military masterpiece, which was run by the CIA in this case, was the paramilitary response in Afghanistan. You're the first guy I've ever heard. I think it was a mistake. The mission of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets

and then to analyze those secrets to make the best informed policy possible. If you're going to do paramilitary organizations, why have the para in front of it? Let the military do what it's good at doing. So you're just saying you think it was a mistake from a order of business standpoint. Exactly. Okay. All right.

I'm glad we did it. Those guys are awesome. I mean, you have to have people like that. But you would agree that the end result of what they did at the beginning – I'm talking about the beginning stages here. People not – where it ended up. Heroic. Yeah, it was pretty unbelievable what they did. Totally unbelievable and absolutely necessary.

But don't you think in a time like that – and I want to come back to actual 9-11 in a second and some of the buildup. But in a time like that of a quote-unquote unprecedented situation sometimes like you know the the job titles are gonna have to get blurry no i would rather these guys answer to the joint chiefs of staff than answer to jose rodriguez oh i see where this is going now okay so you you some of the characters you think were given power in that you don't like. Well, there's no oversight. Yeah. None. Zero.

Zero respect for the law. Can you expand upon that? Sure. Just as an example, something that you and I were talking about offline. You know, you carry out an illegal torture program and you videotape it, okay, at a secret prison somewhere overseas. The White House gets wind of it and they say, okay, what you did was over and above what we approved. It's probably illegal. We may need to prosecute some of your people. We heard that you taped it. So whatever you do, don't destroy the tapes. And then Jose Rodriguez says, destroy the tapes as quickly

destroy the tapes as quickly as you can ay caramba there are tapes I was never holding the water never you know he came out to Pakistan when I was there he came with Kofor

you're talking about the godfather of the black sites by the way yes he's the godfather that the black sites, by the way, just for people following. Yes. He's the godfather of the, that's a great way to say it. Yeah. He came out to Pakistan when I was there. And, and so I took them over to our liaison partners to me. And it's very,

very senior level. You know, we're talking four star generals and the Pakistanis have this funny, it's a very Pakistani phrase that there was a great hue and cry, right? It's like a 1940s, 30s yeah yeah so they say there was a great hue and cry i am telling you sir there was great apprehension amongst the people this is a historical representation of a real story it's not racist, this is just the way it was.

And Jose says, there was a hue and a cry. He's mocking them. And they said, yes, sir. Great hue and cry. Very controversial. And he's like, the hue I understand. The cry? This is serious. And I was was like fuck you man what's wrong with you you flew halfway around the world to mock these people who are putting their lives on the line

for us what the fuck's wrong with you of course again my job is to sit quietly against the wall and take notes. So afterwards. What year is this? Like, oh, this was January of oh two. Okay. Yeah. Quick question. I'm not disagreeing with you on this point with him, but again, back to, I'm talking the eight weeks after nine 11, the paramilitary stuff, not the black site stuff, not all that.

Yeah. That's a separate issue right like you're you're to me i maybe i'm misunderstanding this but you're raising the point of like oh jose rodriguez a guy like that ended up getting power over in the middle east are you saying because they set the precedent with that paramilitary thing at the beginning yes okay they created a monster without realizing that they were creating a monster. I see what you're saying. I am – I can't even believe I'm going to say this out loud. I was all for – I remain all for targeting people who pose a clear and present danger to the United States. Yeah.

You have to. Absolutely. That's how we keep our people safe. Yes. But there has to be a chain of command. It can't just be black and not open to oversight or to legal authority. Right. At the end, somebody has to answer to our elected officials.

We have House and Senate intelligence oversight committees for a reason, because we made this mistake in the 40s, 50s, 60s, up to 1975. And to me, in a lot of ways, we repeated those mistakes. You give a guy who I believe is a psychopath. Jose. Jose, who enjoys killing for the sake of killing because he thinks that's – well, that's – you need people to do these dark things in shadows. And no, actually, you don't. You need to inform the congressional oversight committees. We're going to do this operation because it's going to keep Americans safe.

You can't say, hey, can I do this one operation? And then they say, yes, you can do that one operation. And then you do 10 times more than that. Right. And then destroy the evidence and say, yeah, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to call the FBI? Are you going to report me? Are you going to write a strongly worded memo?

That's just not the way that's not the way a civilized society should work was jose rodriguez the least favorite guy you ever worked for yeah he was just uniformly unpleasant he had no sense of humor even Even his peers, the deputy directors didn't like him. He's not a guy you would want to go out and have a beer with. How did he get to, I mean, he got high up, obviously. How did he get to that point? A couple of different ways. He was actually quite good in operating in very difficult environments, almost exclusively in Latin America. And his best friend in the world was Kofor Black. Oh, they were really tight. And you like Kofor? I loved Kofor. I thought he was just great. Did you ever talk to Kofor about Jose? Great leader. Absolutely not.

Not my place. That's interesting. Not my place. So they were really tight. You know, Kofor kind of was disrespected at the end. In a disaster like 9-11, somebody's got to be the fall guy. And they decided, it's going to be Kofor. Why? Who else is it going to be?

You know, George Tenet had ingratiated himself with the president, so it wasn't going to be George. George was protecting all of his deputy directors. He had handpicked all of them. Jose was too low on the totem pole to take the heat for it. Had to be Kofor. What about Alex Station? What was the guy, Bill... Mike Schroyer.

Two Junior. And Alex Station was saying from the very beginning, they're going to attack us. They're going to attack us. Why is nobody paying attention? They're going to attack us. I said in my first book, July the 6th, 2001.

That's right. July the 6th, 2001. That's right. Right? July the 6th, 2001. They're coming. Yeah. I am entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers. We all did this, right? You have this delegation come literally every single day. I had this delegation come from a friendly Middle Eastern country, all mid-level guys.

They're all majors and colonels. And what you do is you give them a day of briefings. You take them to lunch in the director's dining room. Hit them with a tracking nanochip. Right. You implant the nanochip in their brains. And then you have a photo op with the director. And then you exchange gifts and then you take them to a fancy

steakhouse and, you know, spend a thousand dollars on dinner. And then they go back saying what a great time they had at the CIA and it's great for relations. So that day I was entertaining this group from the Middle East and I had scheduled a full day of 30 minute briefings on all these different global issues. One of them was Al Qaeda. And so I asked a junior analyst to come in, just give us a 30 minute thing on Al Qaeda. Instead, in walk Kofar and the director of operations for Alex station. I stood up and I said, Oh, I said, gentlemen, this is Kofor black. He's the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. And this woman is the director of operations. I was shocked. Kofor sits down and he says straight out, something terrible is going to happen.

We don't know exactly when or what, but it's going to be an attack that's unprecedented. Yes. He had just said this to Condoleezza. He had just said it. Yep. And he said, I beg you, if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda, please help us. And silence. Whoa.

Silence. They didn't have any sources in Al-Qaeda. They didn't? No. They were just – nobody did. They were just as shocked by the directness of this briefing as I was. So at the end of the day, I send these guys back to their hotel. We're going to go out to dinner at like seven. So I go to Kofor's office to thank him for taking the time. And I said, Kofor, I got to ask you, I'm not working on Al-Qaeda.

Was that just for their benefit to sort of shake them up? were you serious he said oh i was serious something terrible is going to happen and then as soon as i saw that second plane hit i was like oh man this is exactly what he was talking yeah this is one of those things you know how the internet is with 9-11 and stuff and it's it's one of the topics that i always get body bagged on when I try to talk about this. I take it on the chin and I give it right back. So there's no doubt to me that evidence suggests that other intelligence agencies around the world, and I'll leave it at that, had some prior knowledge of what was going to go down here. Well, there were two we can go ahead and name. Go for it.

Yeah, the Israelis and the Saudis up to their necks. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. And both wanted it to happen for different reasons i love your directness that's took the took the words right out of my brain and put it on the mic there so let me add something if i may interrupt you please go ahead you know when we caught abu zubaydah in march of 02 which we'll tell the story of we also confiscated his his diary and i use the word diary loosely he's like writing letters to himself and shit right so it was it was an address book it was a diary it was a doodle book but he was writing these letters to himself as a young man so it's the 27 year old abu zubaydah writing to the 14 year old abu zubaydah saying don't make the mistakes that

i made treat our father with respect you know be kind to that girl next door that you were rude to that kind of thing the fbi concluded because they are so wise that they were. He was not a madman. Yeah. But the important part of this is in the address book part, there were the names and cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes. So to make a long story short, we went to the Saudis and we said, we're going to start killing people. And some of them may be named Al Saud if you don't get on the stick.

Well, within a week, all three of them were dead. One died of 43 of a heart attack. Yeah. One was killed in a single car accident on the riyadh jetta highway right his brakes didn't work anymore and one died of thirst while camping in the desert yeah all right so i bring this up because it's very well documented that the cia and fbi did not share information because there was strong i mean you've hinted at that all day i hate each other you guys hate each other so john o'neill who was a very brash flawed guy yeah at fbi counterterrorism new york deputy director of

the fbi and uh special agent in charge of the new york office. Right. So if you've ever seen the series The Looming Tower or read the book by Lawrence – what the hell is it? Lawrence – Oh, my God. That's horrible. I can't remember his last name. It's a great book. Lawrence Wright. That's it.

Yeah, Lawrence Wright. Classic, classic book. Excellent book. So John, all his flaws aside, was spot on about Osama bin Laden. Yes, he was. He was pounding the table about it forever. 100% correct. Bill Shor at, is that his name?

Mike Shoyer. Mike Shoyer at CIA. 100% correct as well. Fucking hated him. Yep. And so there was a lack of sharing there, including guys who, the intel that CIA had about guys who were in America. Correct.

Going to flight schools and whatever. So it looks – it's a very bad look for CIA. And it's deeper than that even. Please. The CIA and FBI computer systems were incompatible. What? Yeah. So if I'm in the CIA and I write a cable and it's a finished intelligence report, it goes to the CIA, the State Department,

the Pentagon, the White House. It can't go to the FBI because the FBI computer system is not set up to accept CIA cables. Oh, my God. And when the FBI writes a cable, it can't be sent to the CIA. That's how much we hated each other.

Holy shit. Now, that's changed. Right. But this is what we were dealing with on 9-11. Right. So point being that there's a total communication breakdown there and, and that would, you would definitely file that under the subject matter of like incompetence when you're looking at doing an autopsy of what happened. Definitely official incompetence. Okay. When people run just because it because I think it makes them feel good to say online, the CIA did 9-11, I have to look at evidence here. And I say this as someone who thinks the CIA has done a lot of awful shit over the years. And we've seen it publicized for sure.

And we'll always call that out. We've talked about JFK on here. we've talked about mk ultra yep but on this one when you see guys like kofor black and george tenet who was there was a meeting on july 6th like you talked about and there was another one in august at the white house i i want to say george was at the one in august but kofor black i believe was at both of them the fucking leaders of the cia went to the white house it's on record yes and said this is going to happen they didn't necessarily say it's two planes going into the world trade center no because we didn't know the detail but they knew it was fucking coming and the issue when you look at it is that it took the fucking clinton white

house like six and a half years to start taking al-qaeda seriously yes and here you had a white house that was certainly a very flawed white house only eight months in and they're like yeah we'll worry about that later condi rice was one of the worst offenders she's like you guys you're obsessed with this al-qaeda yeah yeah so when you see the after the 20 almost 25 year aftermath now 23 years whatever it is where where over time, as you get farther and farther away from an event, you get people who were maybe young that are now coming of age who didn't see it happen, right? Now they look at the evidence. You see a lot of information float online from all different sources ranging from total morons to people who may have had some security clearances or whatever. And you get this batch of different opinions about what the inside

job was. And certainly as we discussed, there was certainly some inside information here that was not shared and it's a very corrupt day. But when you see as someone who has every reason to also not like the CIA and maybe some of the power structures that exist there, when you see so much of the American public pin it specifically just on the CIA, how does that make you feel? It makes me lament the fact that there is so much laziness in our country today hmm yeah listen the Seattle to echo your comment just now the CIA has done some awful shit over the course of its history from 1947 onward murdering 3,000 Americans in one day is not one of those things yeah no we can blame.

Listen, Al Qaeda did this. We can also blame the Saudi government. I believe the Saudi government or elements, elements of the Saudi government, elements of the Saudi royal family were involved in this up to their necks. The Israelis probably had advanced warning that this was going to happen and decided not to tell the united states because they wanted us to go to war with the middle east right it makes them stronger that's right so they had a vested interest in the u.s being attacked that day but there was no nanothermite

in the paint there was no controlled demolition it wasn't the space aliens or the lizard people, which I've actually been told multiple times. Yeah. Yeah. It gets out of hand, man. It was Al-Qaeda. Yeah. But you're there those next four days because I believe the paramilitary operations started maybe five, six days later. Yes.

Something like that. So you're a part of the planning for that, right? No, that was happening very, very secretly. And it was an absolutely heroic group of guys, all of whom were, were known to us. They just kind of disappeared one day, a couple of days after nine 11., and they were airdropped into northern Afghanistan. Are we talking ground branch guys? No. It was a bunch of middle-aged guys who knew how to ride horses and shoot guns. They weren't all CIA.

No, they weren't all CIA. We got a podcast coming up about that next year. Just stay tuned. They weren't all CIA. put their lives on the line to create that early relationship between the CIA and the Northern Alliance that would allow us to overthrow the Taliban and to force Al-Qaeda out of the country. What did your, after those four days are up, I guess you went home finally? Yeah. You take a couple of days off or?

No. I was going to say like a few hours. No, in fact nobody took any time off to the point where congress had to waive the federal regulation that you can only

accumulate I forget what it was 2000 hours of leave or something like that they took the cap off and they also took the cap off of overtime. Oh my God, the overtime. It's like they're bringing you money in a wheelbarrow. Payday.

I bought a house. Just from? Oh, Pakistan, man. Listen, Pakistan, I'm making my salary, which was, it was a good salary. It was enough for me to live on in DC when did you first go to Pakistan? January 6th okay

2002 January 4th 2002 real quick just before Pakistan because I want to get there right now those three months what are you doing? Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda just in the office at night

24 hours a day yeah any major breakthroughs you were a part of that you can talk about? There were a couple things I'm actually pretty proud of. Okay. What were they? I probably shouldn't say. I'll say one was domestic, which kind of shocked everybody.

I was very proud of that. And then there were two overseas that I was – it just never occurred to anybody that there are Arabs in some of these places that – I probably shouldn't say. I did well. But on a broad level, I guess the things you're referring to are identifying people who were terrorists and us being able to get them. And we started looking at al-Qaeda's finances. You got to disrupt the finances on top of it. All these people are getting paid. I mean, even if it's only $200 a month.

How were they paying people? It was Osama bin Laden's personal money. Yeah, but how were they getting, like, okay, Osama bin Laden's sitting in Afghanistan and he's getting money to some asshole in fucking bulgaria a lot a lot of it was um banks in places like uh sudan or pakistan a lot of it was what's called the hawala system do you know what the hawala system i don't think so oh this is this is a problem years later when i was the chief investigator on the senate foreign relations committee i i did a study on the Hawala system. I flew out to the Middle East and I talked to some UAE police, senior police officials about the Hawalas. Hawalas are informal, unofficial, what I did just to test it was I walked into a little grocery store, like little, like one guy selling some fruits and vegetables.

And I said, I want to send $50 to the United States. And he said, where in the United States? I said, Washington, D.C. He says, OK, give me the $ the 50 i give him my 50 he gives me a 16 digit number just written by hand on a piece of paper and he puts an address of an arabic bakery in bethesda maryland and he, this is where you get your money. Whoa. So I fly back a week later. I take the subway up to Bethesda. I go into this Arabic bakery and I said, I need to talk to somebody about picking up some money. And I give him my 16 digit number. He looks in this ledger and he gives me whatever it was 46 from my 50 totally completely untraceable

now i do i only did 50 just to see if it would work whoa and it worked but they're doing you know hundreds of thousands in a single transaction they're doing millions and what they the way they move the money around is by DHL. DHL? DHL will still deliver boxes of money. Oh, like the company DHL. Yeah, DHL. FedEx won't do it. UPS won't do it. DHL will do it.

So it's like, we've got to shut this thing down. So Osama bin Laden is just like DHL and his money around the world. Whoa. That's like hairs oning his money around the world. Whoa. That's like hairs on your skin standing up. Yeah. So for three months, you're helping identify all this stuff. And then what – is this when you were first approached about enhanced interrogation? No.

That was later. That was later. So I went to Pakistan in January of 2002, had wild, crazy success there. And I went back to headquarters in late May of 2002, and that's when I was approached. Okay, but the wild, crazy success was Abu Zubaydah and all that. Okay, so you get into Pakistan. What was your were you like the highest ranked cia guy there yeah well in counterterrorism okay we had a chief

and deputy chief and they so they're sending you to pakistan and what's what's the objective just like try to find any hvts we can get any of of them. Now, we're bombing the shit out of Tora Bora at the time. We knew that the whole Al-Qaeda leadership was in the village of Tora Bora or the environs of the village of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. And so we're just bombing them mercilessly. And they're crossing the mountains into Pakistan and looking for safe haven there, safe houses, any way they can just get away from the bombing. Did you guys already believe bin Laden had made it into Pakistan at that time? No. We thought he was held up in Tora Bora. Now, the story is pretty famous uh we had centcom had a translator

who was in touch with al-qaeda fighters on the mountain and he said you're surrounded and we're going to kill everybody unless you surrender um which is what general franks had instructed him to say. And the Al-Qaeda person he was talking to said, we will surrender at dawn if you let our women and children come down. And so we stupidly agreed to that. So the women and children come down. We start expecting at dawn for bin Laden to give up and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership to give up. Instead, nobody comes down. And here during the night, while we're waiting for the women and children to come down, they dressed as women, went down the other side of the mountain and escaped. Including bin Laden? Bin Laden, we later learned, was dressed as a woman and sat in the back of a pickup truck and escaped.

He was like 6'4". Yeah. It's a tall fucking woman. You can say that again. Big feet and everything. So you go into Pakistan. Take me into like day one there. You get on the ground.

What do you do? Who are you talking to? Oh, my God. Day one, I arrive at 4 o'clock in the morning from london it's a beautiful country though it is actually a beautiful country their food is fantastic i gained a lot of weight there just in pakistan yeah i even you know when i went back home i i even dreamt about pakistan i i loved the place it's rough jay you look you have to accept the fact they're trying to kill you and you accept the fact that you're going to catch some god-awful disease

and if you just accept it just surrender to it you'll actually enjoy yourself huh yeah not on my list of places to go but maybe i'll reconsider that's a no yeah that's a don't you fucking dare so i arrive at four the driver says i'll pick you up at seven to take in i said oh god please let me sleep till eight please pick me up at eight so i go in at eight go up to the chief deputy chief hi i'm the new guy the chief i knew actually from the farm where'd you go like where is this uh the american embassy okay you're at the actual yeah and uh they sat me down they said okay here's which what we want you to do we want you to come up

with a standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house i said all right now i had never done this before i had been in my training i had been, in my training, I had been trained to recruit spies to steal secrets, to develop sources of information. Not to kick down the door of a safe house and grab everybody and put them in flexi cuffs. This is new to me. So I went back to my office with a legal pad. And I'm thinking, how do I take down a terrorist safe house? Well, number one, I would want it to be dark. So I wrote 0200 at the top of the paper. And I thought I would need stuff, like I need battering rams and guns and ammunition and night vision goggles and secure communications. And, you know, I made a

long list of stuff. I went to www.galls.com, G-A-L-L-S.com. It's a police supply warehouse in Kentucky. And I ordered everything I needed. And I put it on my credit card. Wait, you paid for it? Sure. And then I just reimbursed myself. Oh, okay. Yeah. All this shit came in a giant crate like a few days later, except the secure comms I got from headquarters.

And I had an unlimited budget. Quite literally, it was unlimited. So I figured 9-11 is still an open criminal investigation. And as much as we might hate to do it, we got to invite the FBI to be there with us. And then, you know, this is Pakistan. So we probably have to invite the pakistanis since it's their country yeah and we're busting down doors in their country i would be upset if these chinese gangs were roving around busting down the doors of americans and grabbing them right but the the pakistanis are not – their intelligence agency is historically kind of two-faced, no?

Very much so. But that's kind of the good part. There are two very distinct factions within the ISI, right? The one I dealt with were all trained at Sandhurst, the British West Point. Spoke English fluently. Absolutely fearless. Would happily give up their lives for the mission. The other faction had long beards. Walking around.

Bismillah. Rahman Rahim. Alhamdulillah. Malik Yuma Deen ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Yeah, you don't want to deal with those guys. Those guys are going to cut your throat as soon as you turn around. So I'm going to deal with these good guys. The other guys I'm just going to,

for the time being, I'm going to pretend they don't exist. Got it. Right? We can work against them later. So you have your choice. Yeah. So I'm working just with the counterterrorism guys. So I get a tip with a little address, right? I call the Pakistanis. I go downstairs to the FBI

because they're on a different floor. And I said, hey, I got a tip. We got an address. Let's hit this place two o'clock. We'll see how we do. Two o'clock we go. It's 2 CIA, 2 FBI, 2 ISI and then a contingent of local Islamabad police who are seconded by the ISI just to make sure we're all safe so we take this battering ram that I got from Kentucky we bust the door down and there are these two kids in there

one's 18, one's 19 and they start bawling they were from tunisia and we cuff them and one's like can i call my mother i'm like no you can't call you're under arrest you can't call your mother the other one's like bawling. And I said to my colleague, this is the fearsome Al-Qaeda. This is what we're so afraid of. They're fucking children. Like maybe this is just a fluke.

So we took them, took them to the Rawalpindi jail, just locked them up. A couple of nights later, a couple of days later, I got a call from a friendly Arab intelligence officer, Brigadier General. And he says, hey, I heard you're the guy that we talked to about these, you know, the word got around. I said, sure, sure. Let's meet for coffee. So we meet for coffee. He sort of pushes a paper across. He said, uh, he said, here's an address. Some bad guys in there. I said, okay, thank you.

I took the paper, finished my coffee, went back to the office. I said, we have a tip. Let's bust this place down tonight. So we put the team together again, bust it down. This time was more serious. We got a couple of members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which is the group that killed President Anwar Sadat and then merged with Al-Qaeda in 1995. So they were still their own entity, but they're like a subsidiary kind of... Exactly. So I was like, okay, this is different. These guys were bad guys, real bad guys. So I'm thinking, this is actually working. So every couple of nights, we would bust down the door of some house, grab two, three, four guys, whatever. Sometimes we would do two in a night.

You worried about waking up the neighborhood and people finding out Americans are there? People were petrified at the thought that this is either Al-Qaeda breaking down the door or it's the Pakistanis breaking down the door. And whoever it is, I don't want any part of it. Okay. Yeah. And then in February of 2002, you know, we work seven days a week, right? And usually 14 to 16 hours a day.

The weekend in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday. The weekend in the Middle East is Thursday and Friday, but Friday and Saturday in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday. The weekend in the Middle East is Thursday and Friday, but Friday and Saturday in Pakistan. And Saturday was the only day I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping until eight before I had to get up and go to the office. And, um, now the phone rings at like six o'clock.

I was like, damn it. Can't get any sleep in this country. So it's the chief. And he's like, damn it. Can't get any sleep in this country. So it's the chief. And he's like, something's up. You got to come in right away. So I get dressed, go into the office. Everybody's already there, but it's the, the chief, the deputy chief, the chief ops, then the FBI legal attache, his deputy and me. I go's up and the chief says we just got word that abu zubaydah is somewhere in pakistan we have to catch him i'm like okay i'm thinking abu zubaydah

who the fuck is that i know that name from somewhere and then i remembered thank god i just read an article in time magazine which was a back then, that he was the number three in Al-Qaeda. So I said, right, right, the number three. Yeah, he's somewhere in Pakistan. Everybody turns and looks at me. And I go, guys, this country is the size of Texas. It's got 200 million people in it. What do you mean he's somewhere in Pakistan?

You have to catch him. Like seriously, you look at me, you're CT ops. people in it what do you mean he's somewhere in pakistan you have to catch him like seriously you look at me you're ct ops i was like oh fuck okay let me i'll think of something i came up with a couple of terrible ideas how so when i was in college one of my summer jobs my dad was friends with our state senator so So he got me this patronage job. I was a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And we knew that Abu Zubaydah was moving back and forth between Lahore and Faisalabad. Well, that's a toll road.

Oh, so you did know that. Oh, yeah. But Lahore has 12 million and Faisalabad has 8 million. You can't just say, go catch him. There he is. He's in New York. Go get him. Yeah.

You know? So that's a toll road. Well, it's a toll road like two-thirds of the way and then it just stops and then it's just a dirt track the rest of the way to Feisalabad. So you wanted the sunny Corleone on him? No. No. I was more gentle than that. No.

All right. I said, I was a toll collector. I know how to operate the toll machines. Oh, my God. So let's put CIA guys in all the toll booths. And when we see him, we grab him. They're like, no. Not going to work.

No, no. We're not going to do that. I remember the PACs were like, 65,000 cars go through those booths every day sir we cannot it's like okay okay it's just an idea sorry yeah you're good mark mark the pa yeah sorry no i won't do that anymore no no it's fine i just it's it's ridiculous i gotta be that careful on youtube but now they're awful you have no idea the shit that they've i'll rephrase it then so it won't cause you trouble. No, no, no. It's all good. We just bleeped it. We're good. We got it.

So... You tried the toll booth one. You had another bad idea too. There was another one where we were vaguely able to geolocate his phone. But he would only turn it on for 15, 30 seconds at a time just to listen to the voicemails. Back then you could take the battery out of the cell phone. So he would just turn it on for 15, 30 seconds at a time just to listen to the voicemails. And then he – back then you could take the battery out of the cell phone. So he would just take the battery out. So it would ping and we'd be like, he's in that direction.

And then the ping would stop. Because it couldn't focus on – it needed more time to focus on the spot. And we needed hours like to get in the car and follow the ping. So he had to be on it for hours for us to be able to geolocate him. He's only on for, at the most, was 30 seconds. So we couldn't even get out of the office. So finally I said to the chief,

I need to bring in a targeting officer. Now, a targeting officer is an analyst, but vastly different kind of analyst than what I was in the Directorate of Intelligence. An intelligence analyst is reading all source intelligence and writing articles or papers for the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the National Security Advisory. A targeting analyst is taking millions of pieces of data and metadata for the specific purpose of locating a target this is what andy bustamante's wife does

that's right she's a targeting analyst so post 9-11 this became a critically important skill so i had a friend who actually trained Andy Bustamante's wife. And I called him and I said, Hey, can you come out to Pakistan? I need help. Oh, what's going on? What are you looking for? I said, I can't tell you until you get here and you got to sign a secrecy agreement, but you're not going to want to miss this operation. He was on the next flight. So he arrives. And I'm like, Abba Zubaydah is somewhere here. We don't know where.

We can't find him. And he's like, okay. So what do you have? I said, we got a handful of phone numbers, a handful of email addresses, and a handful of physical addresses. So he took this piece of butcher block paper, about the size of the table, maybe a little bit smaller than this table, and he wrote Abu Zubaydah in the middle and circled it. And then around that, he wrote all of the phone numbers

and email addresses that had been in touch with Abu Zubaydah. And then around that, he wrote all the phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses of everybody who had been in touch with the people who had been in touch with Abu Zubaydah. He worked on this for a week or two. And there were lines intersecting, going all different directions. It's like straight out of Homeland. Yeah. It looked like a spider web.

And at the end of it, he said to me, I can't pare it down to anything less than 14. I said, 14? I go, dude, we never hit more than two sites before in a night. I can't hit 14 sites in a night. There aren't enough of us. He said, I can't. I can't get it any lower than 14.

So I wrote a cable to headquarters. I said, I can't get it any lower than 14. So I wrote a cable to headquarters. I said, I need 36 guys. I need X millions of dollars in cash. We need weapons, night vision goggles, lots of ammunition, satellite dish, secure comms, everything. They chartered a 737. They're like like say less and i'm telling you 24 hours later it landed and we start offloading the stuff and we started taking it to a hotel can you imagine not really like crates that are marked arms and we're wheeling it into the hotel and this this pakistani security guard was like you can't bring that in here and i was like yeah Not really. Like crates that are marked arms and we're wheeling it into the hotel.

And this Pakistani security guard was like, you can't bring that in here. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So fuck we can. Yeah, we're authorized. We're authorized. And the manager of the hotel was this British guy and he knew exactly what was going on. And I slipped him a couple of hundred bucks and I said, keep the security guard out of my way. I don't like this guy's attitude. He's like, he's fired.

Cheap date. I would have been like, yo, peel off some of those racks from the plane. Every once in a while, he would ask me if I would sit and have a coffee with him in the lobby. And I would just because he made sure we were all happy and had everything we needed. Well, we can't run this operation from a hotel. So I went to the Pakistani ISI guy in Lahore and he said, I've been instructed to give you anything you need. What do you need? I said, I need a safe house. And before the safe house, I need a real estate agent. A real estate agent.

So he's like, okay. So he gets us a real estate agent. We went and agent. So he's like, okay. So he gets us a real estate agent. We went and looked at a bunch of houses. And I picked one. It was 10 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms in the fanciest section of the city. And so. You just take some cash out of the trunk and hand it to him. And the guy's like.

And he goes, sir, do you mind if I ask you what you do for a living? Don't worry about it. And I go, I looked at my friend and he goes, we're textile barons. And I said, yes, we are. We're textile barons. And he said, that's wonderful. Textiles are one of the most important parts of the Pakistani economy. And we go, yes, we make lots of clothes, lots.

Welcome to Pakistan, sir, he says. Welcome, welcome, thank you. Here's your $5 million in cash. So we bought this house. And then we went to Faisalabad, which is one of the just most horrible places on earth. And we bought a second house, seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms. We figured we needed all those bedrooms to do interrogations. Yeah.

So that's why I did that. So that was a black site. You know what? I never thought of it that way, but I guess in retrospect, you could probably call it that. Right. See now you're- Two fingernails on the floor. We were very kind. I never laid a hand on anybody. Yeah. You were kind. They were kind when you were in the room. Then you left it like, there goes the human rights guy. Yeah, that's true when you were in the room. Then you left. They're like, there goes the human rights guy. Yeah, that's true. It's a cross I have to bear.

So you have two houses, 14 bedrooms, seven bedrooms. You're loaded up. One's in Faisalabad and the other one's where? Lahore. Lahore. Yeah. Okay. So the analyst remained in – actually, he drove down to Lahore with me.

He helped carry the money. It was too much for one person to carry. So he drove back to Faisalabad to sort of manage things from there. And we had these 36 guys, half CIA, half FBI. And I gathered everybody along with the Pakistanis, gathered everybody in the Lahore safe house. And I stood on the coffee table and I said, guys, at the risk of sounding melodramatic. Life is a game of inches. We're going to have to synchronize our watches. So we synchronized our watches. Everybody chuckled. And I said, so here's what we're going to do. Everybody who's assigned to Feisalabad, we chartered a bus and you're going to get on the bus and go to the safe house there. At 0130, we had cars.

We had rented a dozen cars. So I said at 0130, get in your assigned car and go to your target. 0155, be within line of sight of your target. There's 14 targets. Yeah. Three in Lahore and 11 in Faisalabad. And then one in Lahore we had to cancel because when we did the dry run earlier in the day, it turned out to be a payphone in a shish kebab stand. So you're down to 13. So 0158, get out of the car. And exactly as the clock strikes, 0200, bust down the door, separate the women and children

from the men, grab the men and put them in the paddy wagon. And so everybody got in the bus and at 0200, I was on the roof of the safe house with a colleague of mine. And I looked at my watch and I said, oh, 200, here we go. And just as I said the words, we hear this sound. It's like, dink, dink, dink, metal on metal. And I said, that's not good. I wonder what that is. It's two o'clock in the morning. Listen, the whole country of Pakistan goes to sleep at like midnight. So it is dead silence out there. There's no traffic.

There's no nothing. We hear this ding, ding, ding. So he said to me, Site 13 is the closest to us. I wonder if it's Site 13. And then we hear shots fired. And I was like, oh, my God. So I got on the walkie-talkie. And I said, Site site 13 come in what's

going on over there and he says shots fired shots fired i was like oh crap we run downstairs we jump in our car we speed over to site 13 it's chaos over there there are three people laying in the street. One's dead. Obviously dead. And one looks like he's either dead or he's going to be dead in a minute. And I'm going to show you some of the... Oh, you got pictures of this? I got pictures. Imagine that.

He's got pictures from 23 years ago of dead guys in the street. So, um... I'm gonna get to see it. YouTube won't. Sorry, guys. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

These are, like, real real. Oh, they're... real real. They're grisly. Whoa. Yeah. What's that old line? They're gonna have... they're gonna have spiders

crawling across their eyes flies flies that was kofar yeah well they're gonna have flies on their eyes and they did this is that they did so um i love that you have this like ready it was a it was a real bitch getting them cleared by the cia those pictures yeah yeah so um the one guy was dead the second guy looked like he was dead or he was going to be dead in a minute the third guy is screaming bloody murder so i said to the pakistani i go i go what's what's happening here and he says we got him we got your man and i said which one is he this one right here the one that's alive the guy that's almost dead maybe dead this guy didn't look anything like abu zubaydah we had a six-year-old passport photo and the passport photo was this you know know, good looking, thin, young guy with a

closely cropped beard and mustache. This guy that's laying in the street, he's fat, he's clean shaven, crazy. I say it all the time, Albert Einstein hair going every which way. I go, that doesn't look anything like him. So I call the analyst and I told him what was going on. He's like, give me a picture of his eye. So I kneel down and I shout at him. If the hell you're going to open your eyes, he's almost dead. So I lift up his eye, but it's rolled back in his head all i can see is the whites and i said he's this guy's dying he's soaked in blood there's blood all over the road um so he says um give me a shot of his ear because no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints well phones didn't have cameras in those days so i I take a picture of his ear. I plug the camera into the phone.

I was going to say, it's a nice camera. Those were HD shots. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it was a good camera. So I send the picture to the analyst. He sends it to headquarters. Five minutes later, they come back. They said, it's him. So it turned out the dead guy was a bomb maker from Syria. They were on the second floor of the safe house. There were 23 guys at the bottom floor. And then they knew that there were VIPs upstairs. They didn't know who it was. Oh, the guys downstairs didn't know who it was.

No idea. No idea who it was. And the VIPs had a tiwala, this kid, Pakistani kid who would go out every day and buy food and cook the food for the day. But like I say, all they knew was that there were VIPs upstairs. So the Syrian bomb maker was killed. They climbed to the roof of the house and they were jumping to the roof of the next door neighbor's house to try to escape. When the attack went down. And the last fucking thing I said before we got on the buses was take them alive right and this pakistani cop

is like bang bang bang with an ak-47 fucking rambo idiot so they killed him instantly he was dead before he hit the ground and you saw the picture he's clearly dead yeah he's out abu zubaydah was the second one to jump and And the guy shot him in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach. Oh. Yeah. So he was just about done. And then the third guy was shot in the leg right through the center of his femur. But we'll get to that in a minute.

Stick a finger in there? You could stick a fist in there. Did you do it? No. You sure? He was screaming without me having to help. Okay. All right. But we had a we had

a conversation about it later in the evening okay so we throw him in the back of this filthy pickup truck toyota cherry it was called and we rushed to feisalabad hospital the worst place on earth i've said in other podcasts that the doors are open it's it's like 3 3 20 in the morning now the doors are open the windows are open like swarms of mosquitoes are just feeding on people's open wounds dogs walking up and down the hall it was a bite disgusting yeah um i've said too i said in my first book there was a bar of irish spring soap and it had a bunch of syringes sticking out of it so if you needed a shot they would just pull one out put the thing give you a shot stick it back in the bar soap it was bad really bad

so here are all these cia guys dressed as pak Pakistanis bringing in an Arab who's bleeding to death. Two of them, right? Because you got the guy with the leg too. So I said to the doctor, he's like shocked, right? And I said, Doc, you got to patch this guy up. My orders were to take him alive. Now, go. So they take him into emergency surgery and I sit down. I'm with two colleagues and two Pakistanis and we just sit down like this is

exhausting. Well, word got around the Al Qaeda community that we had gotten him. And so they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. And we're diving down. And I said to the Pakistani major, awesome guy, Major Khalid, I said, if they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead. Can you get a helicopter in here? We need to get out of here. He said, I think so. 20 minutes later, helicopter lands in the parking lot. I walk into the surgery, the operating room like this. I go, doc, wrap it up. We got to go.

I did. And they're selling him clothes. There's blood everywhere. We put him and the bodyguard that shot through the leg, we put them both on the helicopter. We fly him to a Pakistani military base about 50 miles away. There was a – they called it a hospital. It wasn't a hospital. It was like a clinic right on the side of the tarmac.

It was like a – it was round. it had a hub and spokes so red cross kind of thing yeah and there was a desk in the center like a nurse's station and then there were eight bays around there were like three bays that had patients in them and all were in there for attempted suicides i saw on the on the board and then they took our two prisoners. So they were expecting us, of course. And they took Abizbeta right into surgery. And the doctor came out a few minutes later and he said, look, I got to warn you, I have never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived. So you need to be prepared for him dying. I was like, damn it. Like there was one single order from headquarters. Take him alive.

Well, I was exhausted. And so I turned the ceiling fan on as high as it would go to make me slightly uncomfortably cold. In his room. In his room in his room and i just waited for him to come out of surgery in the meantime this fucking guy is screaming bloody murder in the other bay so i went in there did you see the picture of him like looking he's late and he's looking he's covered soaked in blood yeah so i go in there and iek, how are you? He goes, Alhamdulillah, like that. God, thanks to God, glory to God. I said, yeah, you don't look so good. I said in English. And he says, are you American? And I said, yeah. And he goes, the Pakistanis, they held me down and they put an AK-47 against my leg and they shot me.

I said, that's not what I heard. I heard you were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the next house. He stops crying. He goes, I am 150 kilos. I cannot jump from the roof like that. 330 pounds. And he was. You saw the roof like that. 330 pounds. And he was. You saw the picture.

Yeah, big guy. So I pull back the sheet, and there is a perfectly round powder burn all the way around his wound. And I go, I don't know anything about that. That happened before I got there. Yeah. Not my jurisdiction. Yeah. I heard you were jumping from the roof. Wow. So finally they bring up his abate out of surgery. And again, completely and utterly

soaked in blood. They're pumping blood into him with a pump. And as quickly as they're pumping it in, it's just spilling out of him. And it's, it's dripping off the bed. It made a big pool under the bed. It was like a scene out of a horror movie. So I sat down at the foot of his bed and I'm looking at him, just staring at him. And I'm thinking, you know what? I am so tired. I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep. He's in a coma, right? Yeah, he's in a coma. But I'm thinking, what if the doctor's Al-Qaeda? I don't know.

I don't know who this doctor is. So I tore up a sheet into strips and I tied his wrists and his ankles to the bed thinking if somebody tries to break him out. This poor guy's in a coma. You're tying him down. Like he doesn't have enough suffering for one lifetime. I thought if somebody tries to break him out, I'll hear it and I'll wake up and I'll, I don't know, shoot someone.

I don't know what I'm going to do. So I just sit at the foot of the bed and I just stare at him. He's in a coma for a full 24 hours. I am so tired and hungry and I smell bad. So I called one of my buddies over at the safe house. I said, buddy, can you, can you bring me some clothes and some food? I think I got a pair of underwear, pair of socks, and I got a t-shirt in there. Bring me some food and a coffee. A big one.

So about a half an hour later, he shows up and he gives me my underwear, my socks. The only shirt I had was this shirt that you know about. I can't believe you didn't wear this today. I was so upset when you showed up at the door. Danny Jones said that.

It never even occurred to me to put the shirt on. Yeah. Tell people what the shirt is. So my kids had bought me this shirt for Christmas. It was a fire engine red shirt with SpongeBob SquarePants on it. And we used to love watching SpongeBob together when they were little. They're in their 20s and 30s now. And that was the only clean shirt I had.

So I put the shirt on. He brought me some orange juice and coffee and some crackers. So I'm sitting there and finally Abu Zubaydah begins to stir. And I stand up at the foot of his bed. I put my hands on my hips and I'm looking at him and he's like tied down and he opens just one eye of course he only had one eye he opens his eye and he doesn't look at me

yeah he looks at Spongebob and his pulse goes from 120 to 220 in a second and the machine starts going beep beep beep and then you hear cold blue code blue and these people rush in you saw a spongebob he knew it was up he was like oh my god the Americans have me and they're like clear right and then they give him Demerol and he's out out again and then I just sat back down and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. And like six hours later, um, he starts to stir again. So he opens his eyes and now he's

just looking at me. He's tied down. He's just looking at me, staring at me. And he goes like this and motions for me to come over. So I go next to him and I moved his oxygen mask off of his mouth. And I said, uh, what is your name? And he shakes his head. So I said again, and then he says to me in English, I will not speak to you in God's language. And I said, that's okay. I was a beta. We know who you are. And then he starts crying and he says, please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me. And I said, no, nobody's going to kill you. I said, you're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide.

That's not what he wanted to hear. No. And he wanted to know what was going to happen to him. And I said, honestly, I don't know. I can tell you though, that I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they are not nice like I am. I said, the truth is your life is over, but what remains can be easy or it can be terrible. And it's up to you. If you'll listen to some advice, I said, it's that you have to cooperate. He said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate. I said, well, it's up to you. So then I sat back down. He would just look at me and then kind of wave for me to come over. I move his oxygen mask. Are you Christian? And I said, yes, I'm Christian. He's like, yeah, right. We have a lot in common. I said, yes, we do. I studied Christian. He's like, whew. Yeah, right.

We have a lot in common. I said, yes, we do. I studied Islam in college, and we actually do have a lot in common. Then he wanted to tell me about his family. He cried a lot. He said he would never know the touch of a woman. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. And I said, you're not the victim here. here there were 50 000 people in those towers that morning did you think we wouldn't try to find you or to find bin laden what did he say to that he said he never wanted to attack the united states

on 9 11. did you believe him yes because he was direct about it he said all i ever wanted to do was kill jews and i was like well, that puts it into perspective. He just starts dying over here. So he wanted to attack Israel. He wanted to attack Israel. And he said that he had been, he had been, I mean, it's not a democracy, but essentially outvoted. Yeah. Now, wasn't he not really the number three?

He was most definitely. Not only was he not the number three in Al-Qaeda, he had never actually joined Al-Qaeda. So how did he even have a vote then? Well, just because he had never pledged fealty didn't mean that he wasn't an important part of the organization's logistics. Yeah, that's so confusing to me they never officially joined but he had so much power and it was because he was really good at what he did so he's like Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas he's not an Italian so he's not is the perfect analogy I wish I had thought of that okay that's the perfect analogy Jimmy Conway was Irish,

so he was never going to be a member. He was never going to be made, but he was an associate. That's what we should say. All right. You can use that one. He was an associate. So he was the one who founded the House of Martyrs. It's called the House of Martyrs. It's the Al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan. And he was the one that founded and managed Al-Qaeda's two training camps, one in Kandahar and one in Lashkar Gah in Helmand province. So those were important events. He also was the logs guy. So if you have been in Afghanistan for a while, you're tired of the fight, you want to go home, he'll get you out of the country. He'll get you a false passport and a ticket home. Or you're arriving from the Middle East, he'll smuggle you in, make sure you're set up, and get you on the payroll.

So he was doing all these logistics for them why did we think he was the number three ah that's the 64 000 question that's it it's a low number yeah well that was the the game show um he has a cousin a first cousin with the same name abu zubaydah okay abu zubaydah's real name is zayn al abedin uh uh muhammad hussein this is nom de guerre nom de guerre is abu zubaydah he had a cousin also using the nom de guerre abu zubaydah okay so we're getting these reports abu zubaydah is planning an attack in amman wait a minute two days later abu zubaydah's planning an attack in Amman. Wait a minute. Two days later, Abu Zubaydah's planning an attack in London. Oh no, Abu Zubaydah, it turns out he was in Montana two years ago. Oh no, Abu Zubaydah's doing an attack in Ankara. Well, we didn't know there were two of them. And so we thought this guy's a freaking terrorist Superman. I mean, there was like a whole branch following up Zabato. Oh my God. He had a

host family in Montana. Oh, he's in Paris. He's studying in Paris. Oh my God. He went back to Amman. It was two guys. And one of them, the other one was bad too. And as soon as we arrested the one, the other one just disappeared. We think he probably went to Jordan. We never figured it out. Yeah. So we thought, well, if this guy is involved in so many – the planning for so many different attacks. He's got to be right beneath Zohar. He's got to be right at the top. Now, the actual number three was Mohammed Attaf, but we killed Mohammed Attaf in October of 2001.

In the Tora Bora. In the Tora Bora. As soon as we started hitting Tora Bora, we hit the house that Mohammed Attaf was in, and it turned out that when the rocket came through the roof, it blew up the kitchen kitchen table and a shard of wood from the table hit him in the neck and killed him yeah good way to go yeah so who's going to be the number three it must be this terrorist superman we keep reading about up as a beta And that turned out to just not be the case. So before we get there, he survived this though. He's talking with you for hours. He did. And how are you planning to, like, did you know where they wanted to take him? No, I didn't have any idea. And so what happened was one of my colleagues came in and said, listen, prepare for a flight. We're bringing a plane in.

And I said, where are they taking him? He said, I have no idea. So I told Abizubeda, you're going to be moved out of this hospital and you're going to be taken somewhere else. Where? He was panicked. And I said, I don't know, but I'm going to tell you again, you have to cooperate. You have to. You don't have any leverage in this relationship now Now you have to cooperate. So the plane landed, he hurt the plane land because remember the hospital, this clinic is right on the tarmac. So the plane lands and he said, that's for me, isn't it? And I said, it is. So three FBI agents came, um, and the four of us picked him up on the gurney to carry him out to the plane he asked me to hold his hand he's like weeping quietly so i'm holding the gurney with

one hand i'm holding his hand so he has like a whole cincy syndrome with you oh yeah i was kind to him i was the only one who was kind to him ali sufan was kind the fbi interrogator yeah so um we took him out to the plane and we had to stand him up which was really freaking hard because he's dead weight right we had to stand him up to get him to maneuver him like a couch like you're moving a couch into the door of the plane and then we carried him to the back and we laid him on the luggage rack and we tied the luggage rack down and he's conscious oh yeah see all morphine lots of morphine and i'm telling you man we are soaked in his blood i had to throw away all my clothes the the yes the the sponge bob i kept just because

i thought it we need had historical value we need it we'll put we'll wear it on a podcast yeah and then we'll frame it yeah and we'll sell it i thought about framing it yeah i actually offered it up to the uh spy museum and they said oh yeah we'd love to have it and then they just never now like it's a red shirt so like is his blood stains like seeped into it? You can't really tell? You can tell some of the spots. See, you know, at first I just didn't really realize the significance of the shirt.

And so I used it to paint in. I painted my living room. Oh, my God. So it has specks of paint on it too. Oh, my God. I know because I'm an idiot. Oh, my God. God damn it.

All right. We'll talk about that later. So when we tied him down, I leaned over and I said, remember, you have to cooperate. And he squeezed my hand and then that was it. And you did not know where he was going at all? No idea. In fact, the guys who were on the plane, the agency guys who were on the plane were dressed completely in black with black hoods. Yeah.

And one of them says, John? And I said, who are you? And he lifts up his hood and it was my last boss in CTC. And I said, what are you doing here? It's like you're at a fucking Dunkin' Donuts. Yeah. What are you doing here? He said, I came a fucking dunkin donuts yeah what are you doing here he said i came to pick up your prisoner who is he and i said oh dude i'm sorry you don't have a need to

know because this was such a compartment compartmentalized operation i said i'm sorry you don't have a need to know where are you taking him and he goes oh dude i'm sorry you don't have a need to know and i said touche and we gave each other a hug and I got off the plane. And then they took him. Now, he didn't go straight to Guantanamo. Oh, no, no. It was years before he went to Guantanamo. So he went to a bunch of black sites.

I think it was six altogether before he finally went to Guantanamo. Now, this is one thing and it will come up in a few minutes here when we get to it, but like when you were later giving the ABC interview, the infamous ABC interview that ended up causing all the problems for you. You said something like, like you said in a very John Kiriakou way, but something along the lines of, yeah, he held out so long it took him 30 seconds before the waterboarding got to him but as it turned out allegedly they waterboarded this guy like 85 times or something yeah 83 times there's a there's a story there what's the story well when he arrived at the secret site and listen the media have reported you just can't say where. I can't say because the CIA has never confirmed the location of these sites. But all you have to do is Google CIA secret sites and they all pop right up. Yep.

North Africa, Poland, fucking – there's a long one. People can Google it. Yeah. So they took them to the site. It took them about six weeks to recover from the gunshots. And Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, was assigned to interrogate him. Again, 9-11 was an open criminal investigation. So FBI has primacy domestically, but the FBI had this. You love that.

It just, it killed people at headquarters. It killed them. God, they hated it. But I, I genuinely like and respect Ali. And I,

I did when we were in Pakistan, you know, at the FBI, Ali was not an FBI agent. He was an FBI translator. And so as a translator, he topped out at GS-12. And FBI agents go up to GS-15 and then the senior executive service. So he was treated as a second-class citizen at the FBI, undeservedly so.

He was brilliant, and he was really good at what he did. He came up under John O'Neill. He came up under John O'Neill, exactly. And listen, if you can work under John O'Neill and thrive, then you're somebody special. Yeah. So after six weeks, Ali began to interrogate him. And I've said in other podcasts, I have to admit that the FBI is just really, really good at interrogations. They've been doing this since the Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946. They're just really good at it.

They establish a rapport with the subject, and they do that by being kind and offering a cup of coffee or a cigarette or an orange, or if you're really good, a piece of paper and a pencil that you can write to your parents. All right. Yep. Send it to the Red Cross and they deliver it. So Ali established this rapport with Abu Zubaydah. And Abu Zubaydah began, after a period of four, five, six weeks, began to open up. And he gave us absolutely critical intelligence. He was Mukhtar, right?

No. He told us who Mukhtar washtar, right? No. He told us who Mukhtar was. Right, right, right. No, no, I'm saying like he was the guy that got you him. Yes. There were two things that he gave us that were so important. Stay with the mic. I'm sorry.

There were two things that he gave us that were so important. One was the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram. We just didn't have any idea how this organization was set up. We knew there was bin Laden, there was Zawahiri, and then we just didn't know. So we asked him, how are operations determined? Like who comes up with the idea to do a bombing here or an assassination there whatever and he explained it to us that these are highly compartmentalized individual cells so if you're in london you have no idea what the paris people are doing you don't even know if there are

paris people you don't know what their names are you don't know what their operations are they're going to do. They're running it like an intelligence organization. Exactly like an intelligence organization. If you don't have a need to know, you don't know. Yeah. So Ali said to him, as an example, it's an example I use all the time. If you were going to do an operation in Dusseldorf, how would you do that?

And he said, oh, there's this guy, Mohammed. And here's Mohammed's cell phone number. And Mohammed's got a cousin, Abdullah. And Abdullah has access to weapons. And Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid. He lives nearby and he has access to explosives. So then we can go to the Germans and say say you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf and you need to grab these guys and then they bust down the door that night and they grab these guys so now there's no attack in Dusseldorf mmm so that's what he gave us and then he was talking about muhtar muhtar was the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks We had no idea what his true identity was. We knew that there was this really bad guy out there named Mukhtar, who was operational since at least 1996. And how did you originally find out about him?

Yeah, we found out about him through the Philippines. He was planning an operation called the Bojinka Operation. And the plan was to hijack as many as 14 747s out of Manila Airport and fly them into 14 buildings up and down the west coast of the United States. Yeah. So we knew he was Al-qaeda we knew his nom de guerra was muhtar and we knew that he was serious dangerous we had no idea who he was now he went out one day he left his apartment one day apparently to get you know lunch or whatever and a cleaning lady went into the apartment to clean and saw all these plans and maps and pictures and said this looks like a terrorist attack so she calls the cops this is in 96 96 she calls the cops cops come and they say holy shit this

looks like a terrorist attack we better call the philippine in uh intelligence service they come and they say we better call the cia and so we take all this information we're like this could have been epically bad but we don't know who this guy is and abu zubaydah actually laughed and said you don't know who muhtar is? And Ali said, no. And he said, he's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Oh, he just gave it right up. Wow. We had never heard that name before.

So everybody's going nuts at headquarters doing name traces on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And lo and behold, they see that he was educated in North Carolina. And he lived with an American family, like as an exchange student. What happened to him? How did he become this guy? He said later that what radicalized him

was news video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian woman. And he just decided then, I'm going to kill every Jew I can and every American who supports the Jews. Whoa. That's it. It was one event like that. The long arm of foreign policy. So that began the hunt for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And, you know, once we had an identification – When was Abu Zubaydah tortured? Was it after Soufan talked with him? Just breaking new ground and writing all this stuff up. But remember what I said. The FBI computer system is not compatible with the CIA computer system. So wait, you don't have CIA guys sitting in there with them? No. And the CIA were sitting there like this, like, whoa, we wonder what Abu Zubaydah is saying. Jose Rodriguez is fucking hitting the fucking charges together like, let's go. And this is a long answer to the question you asked about me when I said that he was waterboarded once and he broke.

So for reasons that have never been explained, on July 31st, 2002, George Tenet went to the White House and met with the president. And he said, I want you to remove the FBI from the secret site and I want the CIA to have primary, primacy rather, on opposite beta. And for reasons that have never been explained,

George W. Bush agreed to do that. He said, you're going to give me WMD in Iraq. You got yourself a deal that's right so the fbi knew exactly what was going to happen and and uh uh muller what's his first name robert robert muller who was the fbi director at the time oh sorry you're good that doesn't affect the mic at all good that doesn't robert muller who was the FBI director at the time. Oh, sorry. You're good. That doesn't affect the mic at all. Good. Robert Mueller, who was the FBI director at the time,

decided to withdraw all FBI personnel, not just from the secret site, but from the country that the secret site was in. He's like, we know what these CIA guys are going to do. They're going to go completely nuts. We don't want any part of it. Everybody withdrew. Within 48 hours, the CIA began to torture Abu Zubaydah,

right? The so-called... And they haven't been shared any information. No. So the CIA still doesn't know about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? That's unclear. We don't know if maybe Ali told some colleagues and the colleagues told the CIA, but whatever happened, we had these two CIA contractors out there, two psychologists who had come up with the torture program. Right. What are their names again? Mitchell and Jessen. They live in Florida now.

Yeah. 60 million or something. Yeah. Altogether, 108 million. Oh, nice. So Mitchell and Jessen begin torturing him mercilly, and they waterboard him 83 times. But why would you waterboard somebody 83 times? Because the first 82 times it didn't work, right? He didn't give you anything.

He didn't give you anything at all. In fact, he just clammed up. So what they did was they went into the FBI computers. They pulled out Ali Soufan's reports. They retyped them in the CIA database. We know this? This is from the Inspector General's report of 2005 that was released in 2009. And they said, oh my God, we waterboarded him once and look what he gave us. We need to look for this Khalid Sheikh Mohammed guy. And somebody

called Dusseldorf. So we're getting these reports. I don't remember this. Wow. We're getting these reports back. And I'm at headquarters. And I remember saying to my boss, holy shit, maybe I'm wrong about this. It looks like it's actually working. It's still deplorable. Oh, because this was when we got off this earlier but you when you came back from the abu zubaydah thing i got promoted you got promoted and someone approached you and said hey you want to be yeah you want to be trained in enhanced interrogation i said not a chance i said i think it's illegal it's immoral and unethical i don't want any part of it but

now you're reading about the guy you arrested giving this up oh shit i was wrong why i left the cia in 2004 thinking i was wrong in 2005 the inspector general said wait one second none of this shit was true it was all stolen from the fbi and then they declassified that in 2009 the reason why it wasn't so newsworthy is because it was released on the morning that Ted Kennedy died and so all the news was the end of the Kennedy era right and it was kind of bear oh that's on purpose they're like Oh Kennedy's dead yeah don't do it now i mean otherwise they would release it at seven o'clock on a friday before before a monday holiday that's right yeah so um they'd called you

behind the scenes though like the human rights guy or something yeah right you were like made fun of at cia for being against torture yeah i was the human rights guy why did you i'm just curious because you've just come back from pakistan you just captured a really bad guy you know we're nine months eight months past 9-11 it's in the heat of the global war on terror and yet at the time you have the presence of mind to be able to step back and you know not to say humanize these people but you're like U.S. Constitution. There are rights. We need to be above that as America. What made you so automatic with that? and civil rights and civil liberties or the shining city on a hill as Ronald Reagan called us or we're not if you want to get into the mud you you debase yourself and you put yourself on their level you John McCain once said never get into a fight with a pig you'll both get dirty pig likes it but the pig likes it yeah yeah no we're better than that we're supposed to be better than

that we can't debase ourself were there other things you had seen at cia before then though in your 12 years before that conversation that weren't necessarily torture but were things that technically broke the constitution that you went along with no really yeah nothing no especially during the clinton years i mean it was all about rule of especially during the clinton years i mean it was all about rule of law during the clinton years they were really really serious about nobody doing anything illegal in fact the clintons the clintons bob bob bear i know right bob bear is a pretty famous former cia officer um he's written a bunch of books. One was made into the movie Syriana that starred George Clooney. So Bob is retired and living in Colorado.

And Bob took it on the chin during the Clinton administration because he had developed a network of sources in northern Iraq and was making plans to assassinate Saddam Hussein, which he believed to be in the national interest. And NSA intercepted one of his communications and sent it to Sandy Berger, who was the national security advisor. And Sandy Berger called the CIA and said, your guy is going to do an extra constitutional assassination. Either you pull him back or he's under arrest for conspiracy. So they pulled Bob back out of Iraq and they told him, you got to go. That would have changed history.

Yeah. Yeah. So they were serious. But once 9-11 happened, man, everything changed. Everything. And that's what I'm saying. You really didn't though. No, I didn't. We're either a nation of laws or we're not. Because this is one of those issues – and this happens so often with me – where I'm right in the middle of you and Bustamante. Sure. me where i'm right in the middle yeah of sure when boostamante sure because i don't know where it's

it's first of all the anytime you use the line especially in high-stakes scenarios that if i were blank then i would blank that is a dangerous thing because you don't fucking know no you don't you would do you don't okay not until it's presented to you that's right and you got to make a decision but when when i listen to you like because i i i admire your stance on this a lot and and and how much i like you have walked the talk with this for the last 20 plus years of your life in every possible way up to and including fucking going to prison for so i admire that a lot sometimes i wonder though i'm like man here you have a guy who was a savage spy like you did some real

shit. You were talented. You got really high up in the CIA. You were about it. You, you obviously care a lot about the country and being able to protect it and all these things. But there's a small part of it where I'm like, is John, not even that this makes you wrong, but it's just a complicated world. I'm like, is John too much of an idealist on certain things? Dick Cheney once said that he would rather imprison a hundred innocent men than to let a guilty one go. Yeah, see, that's fucked up. And I'm the opposite of that. Yeah.

That's where I stand. And maybe it is a little idealist, but I really, truly believe in the Constitution. And this just seems so outrageously wrong to me. Listen, I'll give you a couple of examples that I like to use because they're quite clear-cut. In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. Yeah. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard someone. And we like imprisoned people in Vietnam for doing that, right?

Well, in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, ordered an immediate investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth. Well, the law literally never changed. Never. So it's a death penalty offense in 1946. It's worthy of 20 years at hard labor in 1968. 2002, eh, no, we can do it now. Just because we're the good guys. They're the bad guys. Because they hit us here.

Yeah. But the thing is, I've said this from the very beginning, reasonable people can agree to disagree but if you want to torture somebody you've got to change the law and the law never changed and then now that's a that's a that's a very good poison pill argument i've heard you make because it's just black and white it's like that's where you take the gray this and you say well the black and white we know is the law so all right you want to do it like i i john kiriakou may disagree with that but if you change the law i would have to accept that i have to accept it i might you know campaign against it and join demonstrations or whatever but if that's the law that's the law okay then here's a difficult question to ask for that.

A guy who I think was faced with an impossible decision, who I know you're a supporter of, and frankly I am too. I speak highly of him, is Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden was stuck – I always say this – in between two awful slippery slopes on the one hand he breaks his oath and breaks the chain of command to leak information that then has risk to potential people you know maybe dying as a result of it or whatever and also more importantly sets a precedent that the next guy who wants to leak something may have something 99 is important but then they can point it stoned and all the way down eventually it's at one percent people are leaking whatever they want. On the other hand of it, he had tried to go through the chain of command because he caught something that was anti-constitutional. It was against – it was cut and dry against the constitution what was being done, and no one was doing shit about it.

The reason I bring this up though is because technically – and let me highlight the word technically – Dick Cheney and his minions around him had changed the law to allow that to happen. Now, they did it in a very dirty way. Yes. But they did what you just said would need to be done with torture. So if Dick Cheney and his minions had changed the law, would you feel the same if you or someone like Snowden had leaked that? Yes. But that's actually an easy question for me, much easier than it would be for Ed Snowden, because the US is also a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Torture and Cruel and

Demeaning Punishment, I think is the full title of it. We were actually the authors of it. And when an international treaty is approved in the Senate, it carries with it the force of law, and it supersedes any domestic law. So we would also have to withdraw from the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which would cause chaos internationally on the issue. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you raise a really important point too about the chain of command. Ed Snowden, you're right, couldn't go through his chain of command.

They shut him down. Yeah. I couldn't go through my chain of command. My chain of command was Jose fucking Rodriguez. I'm serious. There's another whistleblower, ansa whistleblower and quite an important one named thomas drake so tom's a great great friend of mine can you tell for people that aren't familiar can you tell that story because that's sure tom drake was a was a colonel in the air

force and he uh left the air force to go to NSA in the senior intelligence service, right? So he's a very senior executive level officer at NSA. His very first day on the job was 9-11. And so he gets there and an hour later, all hell breaks loose. So what he sees on his very first day is General Michael Hayden implementing something called Thin Thread, Operation Thin Thread. On 9-11. On 9-11. 9-11, Hayden actually said this that day. 9-11 was the greatest possible gift to NSA.

He said that? Uh-huh. He said it. Now, is that out of context? Did he say it? No, it was quite in context because what he meant was, now that the gloves are off, we can intercept

anything we want anywhere in the world. Patriot Act! Uh-huh. And you know it's coming. Oh, yeah. So, Operation Thin Thread allows them to just vacuum up every phone call, every text message, every email, every bit of metadata from every American anywhere in the world. Well, it's against the law to spy on Americans. And it's against the law.

It's against – it's actually in NSA's charter that they're not allowed to spy on Americans. And it's against the law. It's against, it's actually in NSA's charter that they're not allowed to spy on Americans. Well, thin thread changed everything because the idea is, well, these Americans may be talking to terrorists, so we have to grab everything and then we can sort out the details later. The problem is though, that Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis, three NSA officers, had developed a competing program called Stellar Wind. Yes. So Stellar Wind – That's what Snowden leaked. Yeah.

So Stellar Wind would be able to collect the same kind of data while protecting Americans. And Hayden decided, no, we want to grab all of it. Well, that's illegal. And so Tom Drake, God bless him, went to his boss. He said, look, this is illegal. His boss said, Tom, mind your own business. So Tom goes to the inspector general, which is exactly what you're supposed to do. The inspector general was not read into the compartment. And so he said, I don't know what you're talking about. I never heard of any of these programs. So he goes to the general counsel.

The general counsel says, I advise you to keep your big mouth shut. So then he goes to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA is a DOD agency. The Pentagon inspector general reports him to the FBI and says, we think you have a spy on your hands. Oh my God. And all of the evidence that he brought out of this crime being committed at NSA, the Pentagon inspector general turned over to the FBI rather than to keep it secret like you're supposed to. Whoa. Well, when he didn't get any satisfaction there, he did exactly what you're supposed to do. And he went to the house permanent select committee on intelligence. Diane Rourke

was the officer there. And he said a major crime is being committed against the American people at NSA. Here's the evidence. They arrested everybody. They arrested Bill Binney. Bill Binney, who lost both of his legs to a flesh-eating bacteria, is in the shower on a shower chair. And the FBI pulls him out of the shower naked with no legs and cuffs him behind his back how's that for a class act they arrest kirk weeby they arrest ed loomis they arrest tom drake diane rourke they didn't arrest but she ended up being forced out of the intelligence committee

and she moved back to oregon what the hell did she do wrong she Some guy walked in. That was it. Nothing. Tom Drake is charged with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage and two counts of theft of government property, the property being the information. He walked out of the building with the information in his head, and that was two felony counts of theft. That's some dystopian shit. Yeah, it is. On the morning of his arrest, the FBI went to his wife, who was also an NSA officer, and they said, we are arresting your husband

and raiding your house right now. You're either with him or you're with us. And she said, I'm with you. So Tom lost everything. Lost his pension, lost his wife, lost his children, lost his security clearance, lost his job. The case fell apart. He hadn't committed espionage. He did exactly as he was supposed to do. So all of the charges were dismissed. But he ended up working the next 10 years at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland, as a member of the Genius Bar. Oh, my God.

And you're friends with him today? Yeah, very good friends. And what's he up to now? He's fighting cancer. Oh. Because life just is one great big bowl of cherries, isn't it? That's insane, man. Yeah.

Now, your story, though, didn't happen until after you left. So you – well, it started with you denying to want to be a part – not wanting to be a part of it. Don't want to be a part not not wanting to be a part of don't want to be a part of it and i'll tell you i didn't say anything back then because i was convinced that this was so illegal that certainly somebody at the secret site is going to come out and say something yeah right because i'm seeing these cables coming back from the site saying i resign i didn't sign up for this this is an abomination. There was one doctor who said, this is a violation of my Hippocratic oath. I'm not doing this. I resign. Secretaries fainting when they're seeing the torture sessions and then coming back. It's called curtailing your assignment to come back early. That is a career ending decision to say, I can't do this. I'm

coming back. Career endingending decision. You're never going to get promoted again. So I thought, well, surely, I mean, there are so many people who are saying that this is a monstrous abomination. Surely somebody's going to say something. And they didn't. So you leave in 04, you go to Deloitte and Touche. We talked about that in the early part of our conversation. It was probably a separate episode. And you have the whole career now. By the way, like how did you feel being out of government?

You basically have never worked outside of government. I had never. Since being a history teacher while you were in graduate school. Yeah. I had never worked outside government. But I was thrilled to do something different. I didn't think I was going to miss it. I wanted something that had nothing to do with terrorism or espionage or political backbiting.

I wanted something completely different. And they paid me like exactly double what I was making at the agency. So you were basically tired from a long career. I was exhausted. You're like, it's time. Yeah. Now, is your wife still in CIA? She stayed in.

She stayed in. Yeah. Are you allowed to say what kind of job she had? You said she was senior. She was in analysis on Iran. Okay. So she's still in during this time. You're working at Deloitte.

Life is pretty good. And you get a phone call from a reporter, Brian Ross, is that his name? Correct. From ABC. This is like 07, I want to say. December of 07. And he says that he has a source from the CIA. No, he had a source. Okay. But he wouldn't say where. I was able to pin it down later. He said he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, absolutely untrue. I said I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. He says, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. Had you ever talked with a journalist before this?

No, never. And I see – if I had spoken to journalists in the past, I would have realized that that was an old reporter's trick. But I didn't. I was like, oh my god, they're going to accuse me in national television of being a torturer. And I'm the only one who wasn't. So he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I said, I'll think about it. Are you thinking like, are you getting paranoid? Like, holy shit, maybe the same guys who were calling me like human rights guys are now going to try to pin this whole thing on me?

That is exactly what I was thinking. So I'm thinking about it. And then in the next couple of days, two things happen. One, President Bush gives a press conference and a reporter asks him about torture. He looks right in the camera and he goes, we do not torture. I did not have sex with that woman. Miss Lewinsky. I did not have sex with that woman.

Miss Lewinsky. So I said to my wife, he's a bald-faced liar. He is looking the American people in the eye, and he's just lying right to our faces. And then a couple of days later, it's Friday and he walks out of the South Portico of the White House and he's walking to the helicopter to go to Camp David. And a reporter shouts a question about torture and he stops and he turns and says, well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer. And I said to her, I said, Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me.

So I called Brian Ross. What's your wife saying? Because she's still in. She's still in. She says you have to defend yourself. Oh, she does. Oh, yeah. So I called Brian Ross and I said I'll give you your interview and I decided in the like four days between that call and the actual interview I just decided that

whatever he asked me I would tell the truth did you consult with a lawyer that was the most critical mistake that I made in this entire experience you You didn't? I did not. Were you, okay, so you're not consulting with a lawyer, but were you think, obviously you're thinking about all the possible questions he could ask you. And therefore, if you're going to be honest, what you would say, but were you reviewing yourself? What could or could not be classified? Oh yeah, definitely. In fact, my, my wife went with me to ABC. She sat just off camera. And afterwards I said – Is she going like this? No, no, no. She sat there. She sat there supportively. And I said, how did I do? She goes, great. I said, I didn't say anything classified, right? And she said, no, you were great. So I was like, okay, I did my part. All right. So online, especially like with Wikipedia, when things are written on there, who the fuck knows?

I should probably check that, huh? Yeah, you should probably check that out. So some of this needs to get righted from what was then done in court or whatever, but I want to try to simplify this for people. So you do this interview. How soon did you know you were under investigation afterwards? The next day. The next day. The next day CNN reported that the FBI was investigating me. Okay.

At the request of the CIA. And they investigated you for like a year? A year, from December of 07 to December of 08. Did you have meetings with them with an attorney i hired an attorney immediately and the attorney um a couple of times uh spoke to the fbi and then the fbi sent him a declination letter a year later a year later december of 08 they said they were declining to prosecute me that they had determined i had not committed a crime now is that legally binding is that supposed is that legally binding? Is that supposed to be legally binding?

No, it's just their decision at the time that they don't think there's a crime here. Meaning they could open it up in the future if they wanted to. Yeah. Highly unusual. Highly unusual. So you continue working at Deloitte during this time, right? No, actually. You moved to a new place.

Well. Oh, this is when you worked for John kerry right i was going to john kerry um deloitte see i went to my partner at deloitte and i said listen there's there's this thing you need to know about with the guy yeah in the place right exactly so i i told him he's like oh shit i said I know I I can't get out of it right either either the president himself is gonna accuse me of torturing a prisoner or I'm gonna blow the whistle on the CIA's torture program so he said go defend yourself he wrote he wrote me a letter saying go defend yourself so the next day it's like a global story it's the front page of every paper in the world right after the abc interview yeah abc broke the story and then the next day it's all hell's breaking loose and he calls me he's like where are you i said i'm in new york

i was given interviews to literally everybody that day. I was on every network in America that day. He said, I'm in Dallas. Fly to Dallas right now. And I was like, well, that's not good. So I fly to Dallas. He's like, I'm going to fire you. I said, oh, you are, are you? I have news for you.

I have a letter with your signature on it telling me to go on this interview. And he said, I didn't know it was going to be this big national story. I said, well, neither did I. But you told me to go do the interview. Well, then I want you to resign. And I said, fuck that. I'm not resigning. I said, man, you better have your checkbook ready.

Show me the money, baby. I said, if you think that I'm going to make this easy for you, you don't know me at all. I told him. I did. So there was an employment lawyer in my lawyer's firm. And she's like, oh, you have these guys by the balls. So they were like, we want you to resign. We want you to resign.

I said, I'm not going to resign. I'm not going to do it. You can't fire me because I have your signature right here. So they said, we want to offer you a buyout. And I said, it better be handsome. And they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Yeah, you're in the right neighborhood to say that right now. So where did you go? I worked for myself for a year. offer i couldn't refuse yeah you're in the right neighborhood to say i know and then i went where'd you go uh i worked for myself for a year and then uh then the 2008 election uh brought the democrats

uh back to power and then i got a call from john kerry that he's going to be the new chairman of the senate foreign relations committee how long had you known him? I had never met him. Oh, really? But he followed my story, my whistleblowing. Oh, so he liked it. He liked that you were doing that. He liked it.

That's interesting because this was the administration that later had the Justice Department charge you. How do you like that? Yeah. So he says, I'm going to reconstitute the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's investigative function. Would you like to be the chief investigator? And I said, I'd love to be the chief investigator. I said, but I'm going to go after the CIA. And he said, well, you do what you think you need to do. I said, all right. So you work for John Kerry? Uh-huh. How was he? Difficult.

Yeah. You know, there were only two or three times, two times, I guess, where I offered him unsolicited advice. Like, you got to stop, I would tell him. There was one situation. Like, every Lebanese in Washington was calling me. Like, you got to tell carrie to stop calling my dear friend you got to stop saying that he's a genocidal maniac so i i said senator i said every freaking lebanese in washington's calling me you got to stop calling my dear friend he goes well we rode motorcycles together to the Golan Heights.

I said, be that as it may. He has a bad habit of slaughtering his own people and the Lebanese are really steamed about it. He's like, all right, all right, all right. And there were several other things that I did. I mean, it wasn't just giving him advice, but I went to Afghanistan to do a study on the heroin

poppy crop oh boy and i'll tell you nobody liked it that i was doing this so i fly to afghanistan and as a senior staff member i have the rank of brigadier general right so they got to like drop everything and cater to my needs seriously were Wait, so you're investigating potential malfeasance around these fields? Afghanistan used to be a net food exporter. And as soon as the US takes over, they're producing 93% of the

world's heroin. That's right. I'd like to know how the fuck that happened. Yeah, I would too. Yeah. Nobody wanted to tell me. So, I get to Bagram Air Base, and I said, I'm going to need a helicopter to Lashkar Gah. They were like, oh, can't do it. Too dangerous. I was like, no, we're doing it like in the next hour. And they think that they can just pacify you until it's time to leave. And I'm like, no, I outrank you. I'm telling you, get a pilot and fly me to Lashkar Gah. So we get down there and it's a god awful place.

But man, I'm telling you, as far as your eye can see, all there is, is poppy. All of it is poppy. So I said, I want to talk to a poppy farmer. They were like, are you nuts? And I said, no, I'm serious. I want to talk to a poppy farmer. So we go out to the poppy fields. We see this guy cultivating his poppy.

So I go up to him and I said, I got to ask you a question, which was incredibly naive. I said, why don't you grow crops that have two growing seasons instead of poppy? You could grow tomatoes or onions or pomegranates. And he goes like this. He goes, the Americans told me in 2001, if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted. I go, what Americans told you you could grow poppy? And my military hand is like, we got to go. Bogey's in the area. We got to go. And he physically pulls me into the Jeep and takes me back to the helicopter. I was like, ah, okay. So I make an appointment to go to this DEA secret site. Somebody had reached out to me and said, Hey, we heard you're doing this study and you might want

to come out here. We can have lunch nearby. I was like, okay. So I get in my car. I drive out to Timbuktu outside Washington, frigging far. And there's this secret DEA facility out there. So there were three of them. We go out to lunch. And they were like, you're in over your head. I said, how do you figure?

They're like, there are very powerful forces that want that poppy to be cultivated. And I said, why? It's 93% of the world's heroin. And they said, because almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and to Russia. And we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. Almost all of it goes to those two places and it's 93% of the world's heroin. Our heroin comes from Colombia and Mexico and Ecuador. What about the Andretta though, getting the heroin from Afghanistan? That happens too, but it's small scale. So I'm writing all this up and Kerry's like, no, we're not. We're not publishing that. And I was like, ah, they got to him too. There was a worse episode. I get a call one day from a noted human rights activist for one of the big human rights organizations. And he says, can I see you?

I said, sure. He said, I can't come up to the hill. It's got to be at a private location. So I went to Johns Hopkins University and we met in a vacant classroom. And he's like, listen, I've stumbled onto something big. He goes, have you ever heard of the Dasht-e-Layli massacre? And I said, sure. Northern Afghanistan, November 30th and December 1st, 2001. We arrested, well, in, in, in Mazar-i-Sharif up north in Afghanistan, 2000 Taliban soldiers gave up all 2000 all at the same time. So there's not a prison in Afghanistan big enough to hold 2000 people.

So we figured we have to divide them up and put them in regional jails around the country. So we asked Abdul Rashid Dostum, this fucking traitor who was with the Northern Alliance. Then he was with the Taliban. Then he's with the Northern Alliance again. Now he's with the Taliban again. So he said, I'll, I'll take them.

We'll take them out into the desert and we'll just hold them there until we can divide them up into smaller groups and send them around to local jails. So they put them all in shipping containers, right? To put them on 18 wheelers. Nobody put any holes for air in the shipping containers and there's no food and water. And so they get out to the desert, they open the shipping containers, and one of the 16 survivors said that the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. Well, we always believed Dostum did it on purpose, right? Why would you feed and clothe and house 2000 Taliban prisoners when you can just suffocate them? at the site of what's called the box-up, where they were putting them into the containers. Two men wearing black t-shirts and blue jeans and speaking English. Who is going to be in Masar-e-Sharif in November of 2001

wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and speaking English? I mean, duh. Yeah. So I took the information and I wrote a letter to the CIA asking for clarification. I see why they charged this guy. And I

did it under John Kerry's signature. So it was, you know, sincerely, John Kerry, chairman, U.S. Committee on Foreign Relations. Oh, so you didn't sign it yourself? No, no. Okay. No, Kerry signed it. I waited weeks for a response.

Finally, one of my colleagues comes in and he says, hey, the agency responded to your letter. I said, I just checked my mail an hour ago. I didn't see any response. He said, no, they classified it top secret. Well, at the time I only had a secret clearance on the committee. I said, what'd it say? He says, it said, go fuck yourself. I said, uh-huh. That's how they want to play. And then Kerry calls me. Hey, come over to the office. So I go over to his office. He goes, are you trying to take on the CIA on this Mazri Sharif thing? And I said, this is a legitimate investigation into a massacre that the CIA may have had perhaps a tangential role in. He's like, yeah, kill this right now.

I go, okay. Killed it. That happened several times with him because all he was ever concerned about was becoming secretary of state. He talked about it constantly. I'll give you another example. He was an egomaniac. Oh, in the worst way. I'll give you another example. And when I went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was working for myself, but I had an office in a major Washington consulting firm. The head of it had been a White House chief of staff, and he liked me. He liked my politics.

And so he said, hey, I've got a vacant office. You're welcome to use it, and you can have a halftime secretary at his expense. Very generous. So I'm there. One of the members of the board of directors was Governor Bill Richardson. And I loved Richardson. You liked that guy? Oh, he was awesome.

Awesome. Had some interesting ties to Jeffrey Epstein, but we'll leave that there. He had problems. Yeah. But he was an awesome guy. Okay. So he says to me one day, goes hey listen you free for lunch i said sure we go to lunch he goes never gonna believe what happened he goes uh i had obama

over at my house for uh for christmas wasn't he like secretary energy or secretary of energy ambassador of the united nations and Congressman and Governor of New Mexico yeah I had Biden over my house watch the Super Bowl not Christmas Super Bowl Biden I'm sorry Obama and I go yeah he said we went for a walk around the ranch at halftime and he put his arm around my shoulder and he said, Bill, if you can deliver the Hispanic vote, secretary of state. And I said, no way. He goes, you want to be deputy chief of staff? I said, I'll take it. He said, okay. I said, okay. So the election comes up. Obama wins. The day after the election, Richardson comes to the office and I go, Mr. Secretary, congratulations. He's like, oh my God, I can't believe it. I can't wait.

It's going to be great. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. We're in peace in the Middle East. And he's going on and on. Okay. I'm in the shower a week or two later and I'm scrubbing my hair. I get the radio going and they said, President-elect Barack Obama today named Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. And I was like, what? Hillary Clinton? I go in the office. I go, I'm so sorry. He goes, they're offering me commerce.

And I said, that's okay. We can work with that. There's the foreign commercial service. There's the international trade representative. He goes like this. He goes, what the fuck do I know about commerce? I said, no, seriously, we can do this. A couple of weeks later, again, I'm in the shower.

Secretary of Commerce Designate Bill Richardson withdrew himself from nomination today saying that he was not whatever. I was like, damn it. So I didn't go to state, but then Kerry calls, and I go to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So Kerry asks me to go with him one day to a speech he was giving at the Brookings Institution. One problem with Kerry is that he thinks he is so smart that he can veer wildly off of his prepared text and everything's cool. And that's never the case. Read the prompter, Ron Burgundy. Read the prompter. That's why you employ all these people to write for the prompter.

So we're at Brookings and he's doing his speech. And then he says something about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And he says, you know, I was supposed to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And he says, you know, I was supposed to be Secretary of State. I had President Obama over to my house for Christmas, year before the election. And we went for a walk. Kerry says this. And he said to me, John, if you become the first senator to endorse me, secretary of state. So I endorsed him, he says.

I was the first senator to endorse Barack Obama, he says. And I had a long relationship with Hillary Clinton. It caused a – and I'm going like this in the audience. Stop talking. So wait, did he just steal the story? No. That actually happened. Obama promised four people secretary of state.

Kerry, Richardson, Clinton eventually. And the guy who died in his office, the peace negotiator. What peace negotiator? Bosnia and Middle East. Oh, come on, come on, come on. I don't know. I have no idea. Was he a senator?

No. He was a lifelong diplomat. No idea. We got to Google this. Peace negotiator, Bosnia, Middle East, US? He pulled the same stunt on four people. Brutal. What a talented son of a bitch brutal

brutal oh my god Daniel Levy? no US peace negotiator and Bosnia put because otherwise we'll get all these let's see Richard Holbrook And Bosnia put because otherwise we'll get all these –

Let's see. Richard Holbrook. Dick Holbrook. Yeah. Richard Holbrook. So he promised four people. Yeah. Well, two of them eventually did become.

What a Washington thing to do. That's a very Washington thing. Brutal. You know, Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. Yeah. It's a great quote. Yeah. So you're working for Kerry, though, while he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And then how did it happen that your case got reopened? It had to do with John Brennan. Yeah, John Brennan. Obama. But what went on here? So John Brennan was literally the only former senior CIA officer to endorse Obama. Yeah. All the others were pretty evenly split between John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

So when Obama won, he named Brennan CIA director, but the liberals were up in arms because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program. in that 2015 documentary CIA spymasters and the crosshairs or whatever by the Naudé brothers he tried to paint himself because he was the current head of the CIA at that point yeah as someone who's like the CIA should be above torture I'm like Malika you fucking he he made all that shit up he was the he was the deputy executive director of the CIA at the time so he was in the briefings every single day. Yeah. And you knew him well, very well. I knew him from when I was from the day I was hired. Wow. Yeah. He was a, he was a GS 14. Nobody. When I was hired in the office of near Eastern and South Asian analysis. Yeah. He must be like a good behind the scenesscenes guy because the lack of charisma on that dude.

Oh, there's a story that I probably can't get into. Okay. Yeah, it's connections. Yeah. All right. So he goes – he endorsed Obama. Oh, so he endorsed Obama. Obama says CIA director. The Senate says he can't possibly get confirmed. So Obama makes him the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism, which does not require Senate confirmation. Okay. He almost immediately asks Eric Holder, the attorney general, to secretly reopen the case against me. Now, why did he want to do that?

Because we hated each other. That's it. He just didn't like it. I aired the CIA's dirty laundry, and John always had a Nixonian obsession with leaks unless it was him leaking in which case you know there's a parade of journalists from the Washington Post the New York Times you know coming in and out of his office so they reopened the case yeah now this is where because like I looked at the Wikipedia before this on the case part specifically because I wanted to see like what the narrative is. Alessi, can you actually pull that up?

Just pull up John's Wikipedia. I've never looked at my Wikipedia. You never looked at your Wikipedia? It never even occurred to me. Yeah, let's pull it up. But basically what it says is that the charges that ended up – I think the final ones that stuck when you made the deal. Go down to the case, Alessi. Go way down. More. More. Okay. All right. Go up. Go up. Yeah. Yeah. The specific charges were that in 2008, Kiriakou confirmed the name of a CIA officer, which was already well known to people in the human rights community, according to the Government Accountability Project, to someone who claimed to be writing a book about the agency's rendition practices. In a separate 2008 incident, Kiriakou gave a New York Times journalist the business card of a CIA agent who worked for, quote, a private government contractor known for its involvement in torture.

Was that Deuce Martinez? Yeah, Deuce Martinez, who was never undercover in his life okay so essentially what they're what they're saying is the final charges here didn't have to do with your abc interview or anything like that it had to do with an email you sent three of them did but they dropped those they had to because you didn't do anything wrong no right but the ones that eventually stuck were from emails afterwards where there was someone that you like confirmed yeah i'll tell you the whole story please so there was a journalist uh what was his name it was a new york times guy no no it was um abc news it was matthew cole

oh yeah who was the other guy? I talked to the New York Times. Oh, Scott Shane? Is that it? Yeah, they charged me with espionage for talking to Scott Shane. Having lunch with the New York Times is not espionage.

And they dropped the charges. Interesting. What they do they they charge stack against you so that they wear you down um so he wrote me this email and he said hey i'm doing a book on the abu omar rendition i said i don't know anything about abu omar and um he said well can you introduce me to any of these dozen people and i said i don't know any of these people. And I said, look, kidnapping was not my thing at the agency. I never worked with those guys. So he sends me another email with a list of 12 people.

And he says, can you introduce me to any of these people? I said, clearly, you know this issue better than I do. All I know about the Abu Omar rendition was what I read in the Washington Post. And then he says, what about on page whatever, 165 of your book, you talk about a guy, I think his name is John. I said, oh, that's John Doe. I don't know whatever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia. That was the crime. I confirmed the last name of a former colleague. Do you think that's a crime? Absolutely not. First of all, I had no criminal intent. Secondly, the name was never made public.

And that's why I say John Doe, because the name was never made public. And then you look at David Petraeus, for example, who released the names of 10 covert operatives to his girlfriend, never charged. You look at Leon Panetta, who outed the Osama bin Laden shooter to Hollywood writer Mark Boll and Hollywood producer Catherine Bigelow, never charged with a crime. And there was a CIA disgruntled former CIA officer in Maryland who put on his website the names of seven former CIA undercover people never charged with a crime. So why charge this when there's no criminal intent and the name was never made public?

Did you know you were under investigation again no no idea so the doors get the doors get hit on you one day yeah there were two things that happened um one in discovery we got we got 15 20 000 pages of of discovery classified discovery and we find this memo from from b to Holder, and it says, charge him with espionage. And then Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage. And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself. This is in discovery. You have this.

Yeah. My God. So we went back and we said, it's targeted prosecution because they don't like my political views. Maybe it's like late because we've been talking for six and a half hours and my mind's not thinking straight. But like the Justice Department is – it's not supposed to take outside ideas from someone else in government. It's supposed to act independent, right? That's exactly right. But there was another thing that happened.

When I was working for Kerry, one of the things that I absolutely loved about that job, and it's what I loved about working overseas, is you get to have lunch or dinner with foreign diplomats. And I just love the exchange of ideas. You know, what do you guys think about the Israeli elections? What do you guys think about the peace process? What do you think about, you know, Erdogan's new policy toward the Kurds, whatever? I love it.

And I get a call one day from the Japanese embassy, from the number three at the Japanese embassy. He calls me. He says he'd love to have lunch. I said, great. So we meet up at this steakhouse on Capitol Hill and his English was so bad that we did the whole lunch in Arabic. So he's their Middle East guy. And I remember what we talked about that day at lunch. This was in 2011. We talked about the Middle East peace process, Israeli elections, and Turkish elections. And at the end of it, end of the lunch, he says to me, so what's next for you?

And I said, well, I promised Senator Kerry that I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half. I have five kids. I need to think about putting my kids through college. I think I'm going to resign and go into the private sector again. And he goes, no, don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money. And I said, do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you. Cold pitching me like that. I said,

I'm going to report this. And I got up and I walked out and I went directly without stopping to the office of the Senate security officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. He goes, was it that damn Russian again? And I said, no Japanese. He goes, was it that damn Russian again? And I said, no, Japanese.

He goes, Japanese? I said, I know, right? He said, but you know, they do poke around for trade information every once in a while. He goes, I have a standalone computer. It's not connected to anything. Write it up. I'm going to print it and I'm going to take it to the FBI. I said, great.

I wrote the entire story of the lunch. Next day he calls me. He says, two FBI agents are going to come up and see you. So come down to the SCIF, the secure conference room, and you can talk to them. So I go down there. Two young guys. I told them the whole story. And one of them says, okay, here's what we want you to do.

We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it. I said, okay, because I'm a fucking patriot. I said, you want me to wear a wire? They said, no, we're going to be at the next table. We're going to listen to the whole conversation. I said, okay. So the morning of the lunch, they called and said, something came up, go ahead and do it and write us another memo. So I did. Got all the information they wanted, wrote it up, sent it back over. They asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time, which I did. At the last lunch, it was a nice place in Georgetown. He says to me, I just got my dream job. I'm going to be the number two at the Japanese embassy in Cairo.

And it was so great knowing you. I said, great, good luck. Shook hands, never saw him again. Year later, I've been arrested. We get all this discovery. Oh my God, he was an agent. There never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent who happened to be Asian and spoke Arabic.

And I continually foiled their operation because I would write every single detail in these memos and send them back to the FBI. They must have been like god damn this guy's good well finally one of them wrote a note and he said it's clear he's not going to take the the the bait we should end this operation and then that's when the guy said i got transferred to cairo i'm like oh good luck so i said to my lawyer why would they do this? I'm a patriot. He said they did it because they have a shit case and they know it's shit and that's why we're going to trial. But you didn't go to trial? Didn't go to trial. Now what went into that?

I was fully, completely prepared to go to trial. And by the way, you found out like literally when you were arrested that that that there was even an investigation against you within weeks yeah oh yeah what the day of my arrest was the day you found out i found out oh my god they've been they've been following me for three years got it okay tap my phones grab my emails teams of surveillance following us to church, into church, into Target, restaurants, kids' school, all kinds of shit. What did your wife say about all this? She was furious at them, not at me.

She was very supportive. You know, my aunt died. I got arrested on a Tuesday. My aunt died on the previous Tuesday. And on Friday was the funeral. It was in Ohio. So I got in the car, drove to Ohio, and I thought, you know what? I'm going to go to my grandparents' old house.

So my grandparents lived in this neighborhood that it's really like not good. It's not safe. So it's in the hood. I drove up and I just parked in front of it. There was a car behind me and I parked and I pulled over and stopped. And the guy's like behind me. So I rolled down my window and I went like this, like go around me. And he's just like waiting there. I'm thinking, what the fuck is this? So I go up to the intersection and I make a really broad illegal U-turn in the intersection. He does too. I'm like, okay, I'm under surveillance. In Warren, Ohio of all places. So I i thought this is weird it's probably my first wife because we're going to court soon on some custody issue and she's probably hired some pi to see what i'm doing

this is the friday before the tuesday that you're going to be arrested correct so i drive to the cemetery i'm going to go visit my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. I got a cousin there. He follows me into the cemetery. So I park. He parks kind of, I don't know, 40 feet away. So I start walking over to the car to say, what the fuck? And he takes off. So I called my wife and I said, this is going to sound like I'm nuts, but I'm under surveillance.

She's like, what? And I told her the whole thing. She's still in CIA. Yeah. To make a long story short, they thought, we learned in discovery, they thought someone had tipped me off and I was running to Canada. I got on the highway with no word to anybody with a suitcase, and I hit the Pennsylvania dirt bike, and I'm going toward Canada. So they had guys from the Cleveland field office and the Cincinnati field office and the Pittsburgh field office, and they're all converging on Warren, Ohio,

because rather than go to my aunt's funeral, they think I'm running to Canada. Oh, my God. Fucking morons. Jesus. So then you get the doors kicked in think I'm running a Canada. Oh my god. Fucking morons. Jesus. So then you get the doors kicked in and your wife's supportive. Yeah, very. Wasn't she late or not though?

I am not able to talk about that due to pending litigation. Okay. We'll leave that one there. So throughout 2012, you're getting all this discovery. You're meeting with your legal team. Yeah. You said, as you explained, they stacked charges and everything. You're like, you're going to beat these motherfuckers. to be. And they ended up dropping that too. So I got this one charge that's hanging over me. And in the beginning, the government, when they first arrested me, we had a proffer meeting and they said, take a plea to an espionage charge. You do 45 years. And I said, I am not doing 44 minutes. And this fucking bitch who is now like the deputy attorney general for a criminal division, she says to me, take the plea and you might live to meet your grandchildren, Mr. Kiriakou. Yeah, nice.

So 45, I ignored them. And then like six months later, they said, all right, take a plea to an espionage charge. And he does 10. And I'm like, I didn't commit espionage. Having lunch with the New York Times is not espionage. That's right. So that was on a Monday. On Wednesday, they came back eight years.

I said, forget it. They said on Friday, five years years and my lead lawyer was uh plato kacheras absolutely legendary figure in white collar defense in washington he represented the most important people of the second half of the 20th century including attorneys general you know president nixon monica lewinsky yeah so he probably cost Attorneys General, President Nixon, Monica Lewinsky. Ooh. Yeah. He probably costs a pretty penny. Tell me about it. I still owe him. He's dead, and I still owe him $1.1 million.

I won't collect for him. Don't worry. So he said to me, you know, I've been a lawyer here for 52 years, and this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time. He said, usually they'll offer you 10. And if you say no, the next offer is 15. Then the next offer is 20. I said, why are they coming down in time? He said, there's no case here. And I said, okay, I'll take that. Then they come back in October of 2012 and they offer three and a half.

Three and a half from 45 is a pretty big difference. And I said, no, I'm not going to do it. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm not going to take it. Somebody's got to stand up to these people. So then they came back and they said, best and final offer, two and a half, you do 23 months. I have 24 hours to make a decision. So that night, my wife and I stayed up all night long. And I was the first person that's ever been charged with this crime, other than a spy, an actual spy who was charged when it was first written.

And I have a letter from the guy who wrote the law saying I should never have been charged. And my congressman says I never should have been charged. And I got a page full of judges who say I should never have been charged. So I decided I'm going to fight this thing. This law is unconstitutional. I'm going to fight it. So at 6am I emailed the lawyers. There were 11 of them. Yeah. And I said, been up all night, did all the research. I'm going to trial. So one of them emails me back and he says, put on a pot of coffee. We're on our way over.

So three of them, the, the three, the four, the four senior, most lawyers came over to the house and Plato, who's been a lawyer for 52 years. And his brother is the chief judge in the court.

That's prosecuting me. Um, he said his exact words, you stupid son of a bitch. the deal i said you're the one who told me not to take the deal you're the one who said they have a shit case and they know it's shit and we're going to trial and then the second lawyer bob trout who is just an awesome human being all all four of these guys, amazing human beings. I refer business to them constantly. Yeah, they could cut the fucking bill a little bit. I know.

No, they did. They forgave it. Okay. They're great guys. So Bob Trout is sort of an elegant southern gentleman, and he says, John, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take the deal.

And then the attorney who I actually liked and connected with the most, Mark McDougal, who was the chief of white collar defense at Aiken, Gump, and Strauss, the fourth largest law firm on the planet earth. He says to me, got right in my face and he says, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And I said, if I don't take the deal and I'm convicted, what am I realistically looking at? And he said, 12 to 18 years. I got five kids at home. So, and then I'm thinking about it.

I'm thinking and thinking, I'm standing there. And Mark says, this can be a blip in your life, or it can be the defining event of your life. Make it the blip. Great sale. And so I took the deal. Did you feel – you took the deal for those reasons and also for your family as you lay out, and that's the most important thing. But as a person who knew you didn't do anything wrong and believed that the United States is supposed to be the shining beacon on a hill, did that shatter some of your understanding of what you thought your understanding of what this country was about? Well, to me, the Constitution is the Constitution. The Constitution didn't change with

what happened to me. But I realized, you know, what ugly hardball politics looks like. In my views, those people who trumped up these charges who testified against me before the grand jury you know the likes of of jose rodriguez for example and a whole host of others oh they testified oh sure yeah sure there's a laundry list oh yeah you don't you don't get the the transcript of the testimony but you get the list of names. These guys are going to go down in history as the monsters that they were

in real life. I say this all the time. That's good. I say this all the time. One of the reasons why these guys continue to double down and triple down on things like the torture program or on the John Kiriakou situation is that when they die, torture is going to be the centerpiece of their obituaries. And they need to try to salvage what's left of their legacies. But the truth is they're on the wrong side of history.

Right? I'm on the right side. I'm confident of that. And so I'm proud of what I did. I wear it on my sleeve. I have nothing to be ashamed of. You know, there's this joke that everybody in prison is innocent. You'd be surprised, actually.

It's a bigger number than you think. Oh boy, is it? We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population. Yeah, my friend Raj Rajaratnam who was in here who's a billionaire who had a wild story of being attacked in the Southern District of New York. As a billionaire, he's not the guy that you would think is like the sympathetic figure. But when you really go through the story, it's pretty crazy what they did to him. And I reviewed it inside and out and I believe him and

I agree with him. But, you know, he he talked about when he was in there, you know, this is one of the top five investors to ever live. He's a very smart guy. I think he said it's something like 25% of people in prison are at least partially innocent. Absolutely. And 10% are completely innocent. Absolutely. And he said a lot of that 25, almost all that 25% is they were, they were railed by the system and forced to take a shit deal or they had a horrible representation. Which is very common. Yes. You know, there are two strategies that the Justice Department uses. One I mentioned a second ago.

It's called charge stacking. So they'll charge you with 5, 10, 20 felonies. They'll wait until you go bankrupt. Yep. And then they'll come back and say, we'll drop all the charges but one if you take a guilty plea. Yeah. What do you do? I mean, you risk dying in prison.

But you still get a felony on your record you still gotta tell me about it freedom i i lost my freedom i lost my right to vote and i lost my federal pension and i lost the right to own a gun so the governor of virginia i didn't even apply for a state a state pardon governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, pardoned me on his own volition. I got this big certificate in the mail one day. We were back in the new house of 2016. Fall of 2016. I sent him a letter thanking him. Like it just came, a courier brought it, this big certificate with a gold seal and the governor's signature. It says pardon at the top. But you had federal charges, so is that just symbolic?

It was symbolic. So it gave me my right to vote. That's cool. And it gave me my state right to own a gun. But I don't dare because there's a federal mandatory minimum of eight years. Fell in with a gun. So I never – I got to get a federal pardon for that presidential pardon that's crazy yeah but you go and and there's some stuff you can't talk about

it from after but you go you do this and now here you are like it's getting late you were we we had a long story today with you and the train and then coming up here so i appreciate my own fault the whole being late all good all good but we've been talking for so long. I don't want to keep you here too much longer. So I think another time we can talk about what happened in prison and all that and then really get into what you've done afterwards because now you're a guy. from your career to provide analysis to people in addition to helping out with some of your own interests here as far as you know criminal justice reform and and reforming i'm trying some of the bureaucracy and things like that you know people joke my my my ex now my ex-wife but she she used to joke that if they thought they were going to silence you, man, they didn't know you at all. Yeah,

that's clear. They've made me famous. Yeah. You know, you know, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd. Do I know Roger? Come on.

Roger paid off my second mortgage. Really? When I got arrested. Uh huh. To save my house from my wife and kids. Oh, that's amazing. I had never met Roger Waters and he just, he followed my case and he's Oh, that's amazing. I had never met Roger Waters.

And he just, he followed my case and he's like, somebody's got to help this guy. And he paid off my second mortgage. That's pretty cool. Roseanne Barr sent me five grand to give to my lawyers. Yoko Ono, another one, would call me. Are you okay?

Are you feeling okay? You're not going to do anything crazy, right? Seriously. Wow. You'd be surprised. You've turned a lot of lemons into lemonade with this for sure. Yeah. I've embraced it again. I got to, I got to credit my ex-wife, you know, in the, in the days after my, um, after my arrest, I was, I was like actively considering doing something terrible to myself. And she said, listen, they have consistently underestimated your strength consistently. You're far tougher than they think you are. And she said, they're going to change their focus

to someone else, which they did. It was Ed Snowden. And she said, you have to embrace this and you have to keep talking about it because your side of the story is going to become the side of record. And she was exactly right. That's great advice. I think you've done a great job of that and you got to keep doing it. And I hope you get an opportunity to go on some other huge podcasts i look forward to that yeah thank you for this of course it was fun of course of course it's we're gonna have to do a lot more because you know i've loved your podcast with danny where you're just breaking down all the issues and

everything because you know so much about this stuff love it so you're right down the road in dc we'll definitely do that but we're gonna have your sub stack link in. We'll also have the link to some of your books and then anything else. I've got a TV show now that people might be interested in. What's the TV show? It's called CIA Declassified. It is, we look at declassified CIA documents and we use those documents to tell stories about historic events. And it's on unified television. It's online and we'll put a little qr code so you can see it love it all right john thank you so much man thank you back home and we'll do this again sometime looking forward to it all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get

back to me peace 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.