Julian Dorey Podcast - #279 - CIA Spy UNLOADS on Epstein, Bin Laden, China & Israel | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

SPONSOR: 1) Get 15% off with code JULIAN at oneskin.co (***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: All of John's uncensored content is available exclusively here: https://rebrand.ly/juliandorey YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@realjohnkiriakou X: https://x.com/JohnKiriakou IG: https://www.instagram.com/realjohnkiriakou/ John's European Tour: https://tigerslanestudios.com/an-evening-with-the-ex-cia/ OTHER LINKS Joby Warrick's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Triple-Agent-al-Qaeda-Mole-Infiltrated/dp/0385534183 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Epstein Files, Black Book & Who He Worked For 11:00 - Does the US do Epstein stuff too? 18:56 - AIPAC Controversy, Jordanian King’s Thoughts on Israel Gaza 25:07 - Hunting Bin Laden, the Death of Jennifer Matthews (Khost) 30:52 - “Walk-in” Spies, Bin Laden 34:47 - How they caught Bin Laden & John Kerry dropping ball 40:57 - Why John Hates “Zero Dark Thirty,” Navy SEALs Claiming Bin Laden Kill 45:12 - Joby Warrick’s Book, Jordan King’s Rise to Power & Stance on Oct. 7 53:10 - Palestinians & failed 2-State deal during Clinton era 58:52 - Israeli Border Problems 1:02:22 - CIA relationship w/ Mossad (Stories) 1:06:39 - Future of Gaza War 1:12:07 - CIA Joke 1:14:25 - Ukraine vs Russia War, Crimea & Donbas History 1:23:17 - Zelensky a Dictator Question, Rare Earth Metals (Ukraine), Most Corrupt Country 1:36:47 - Why Kiriakou Likes Trump Now, Failed Audits, Bernie Sanders Screwed Twice 1:46:22 - John Fetterman is the Worst, Senators in the 80’s Compared to Today, 1:52:42 - Kiriakou on UFO Files, UFO Story, DARPA Work (First Internet) 1:59:40 - USA & Russia Ukraine Build-up 2:06:18 - Actively Overthrowing Iranian Government Theory, Saudi Arabia Possible Nukes, 2:13:22 - MBS Arresting hie entire family story, MBS psychopathic rise 2:24:04 - John hanging w/ Saudi King’s Favorite Son story 2:28:04 - John’s Perspective on China, China’s Soft Power 2:35:46 - Trump Declaring Cartel’s Terrorist Groups (F3ntanyl Trade) 2:42:07 - John’s endeavors CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 279 - John Kiriakou Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So I said to Kerry, this is 2009. Pakistani's arrested that doctor. They charged him with espionage. This is before he's killed, because he's killed in 2011. Correct. Right, yeah. So I said, we should get him out and bring him back to the United States. Oh, because you knew that you were read in on the intelligence that they confirmed it was him.

You knew about Bin Laden's whereabouts two years before it happened, and you weren't even the CIA anymore? Yeah. How do you know? What about the other one, though? You know what I'm going to ask about? Which one? The files.

The ones that were just magically shut from everyone at the end of 2021, at the end of Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. Oh, that. The Epstein files. You know, I almost forgot about that. Talk about literally no reason to be classified. And another thing. You know, Epstein's black book? Do I know?

I've read it. It's sold. It's sold at auction. The original sold at auction. And the photocopy is out there for people to see. Why would we be protecting a guy like him? Why? He's a convicted pedophile, first of all.

And probably way worse than just that. Yes. I think the evidence is pretty strong that he was way worse than that. Bad, bad guy. I say it all the time, and I'm going to repeat it here. I think the reason why, even in death, he's being protected is I believe pretty strongly that he was a Mossad access agent. As do I. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

Thank you. It all points to that. So why are we protecting him? Exactly. Why are we protecting him? That. Why are we protecting him? That's why you're here. Please answer. Well, look at why the Mossad might be interested in somebody like him.

Let's say you are the leader of the Mossad and you want really tightly held, closely protected information from senior American leaders, political leaders, business leaders, you can't recruit those people. You're not going to recruit Bill Clinton. You're not going to recruit Bill Gates or, you know, any of the other, Prince Andrew. You're not going to recruit those people. So you do the next best thing. You recruit somebody who has ready access to that. And then on top of that, you give him an unlimited amount of money where he's got this private Island in the Caribbean and a private jet where he can fly his friends down there. You wire the house for audio and video. So nothing is, uh, is overlooked and you ply them with alcohol and underage girls, and you've got them. You've got

them. So you can either do it the easy way or you can do it the hard way. You say to them, look, you just had sex with a 16-year-old girl. And so you're going to tell me what I want to know. Or they know what the game is. They know what they've done. Otherwise, we wouldn't have people coming out and saying, well, I kept my underwear on. Remember that? Uh-huh. So I think that that's what this was. I think that this is – because we all know that the Israelis spy on us.

I mean they're worse than the KGB or whatever the KGB calls themselves. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Yeah, they're – for the intelligence community in the United States, Israel is ranked as critical threat for counterintelligence. They are prolific spies. And so I – it just makes perfect sense to me that this would be an Axis operation. So again though, why are we the ones saying, nope, nope, nope, closed up? Because let me paint a picture for you real quick. And you tell me if I'm way off here. I don't care if I'm way off.

It's just what I think about sometimes. I remember my first conversation I ever had with Danny Jones on the phone. We talked about this. And I've had this thought for probably four or five years. I want you to imagine you're sitting in a room, a back room in Israel in 1967 or 1968. Okay? You just had the whole 1967 thing pop off. Right.

You were just over 20 years removed from the Holocaust where your race was attempted to be exterminated from this earth. Yeah. You are still four years out from the Munich Olympics where people are going to put their hands up and not help you or not let you even come in and help the situation when your people were kidnapped and the games actually continued. They didn't even pause while it was going on. That's right. So that's not even on the table yet. But you realize that there's a lot of support around the world that isn't necessarily coming to your aid. In your defense, you are a small country in the middle of the Middle East where every at the time, every single country around you would like you eradicated from the earth. And in this room is only a handful of people.

It's like Golda Meir, the leader, maybe the – definitely the head of Mossad, maybe the head of Shin Bet, one or two other people. And you are sitting around and mind you, in America, we think about everything tomorrow, the day after that. Maybe if we're a real long-term thinker, we're thinking about next year. Good point. Other places around the world, they think two, 300 years out. Certain places around the world, they're thinking thousands of years out. And when you have something like, you know, the Jewish people who have been persecuted throughout time, stuck together very well, who just witnessed an extinction event happen. They are thinking thousands of years out to make this last.

Their population had been decimated. That's why the Hasidic Jews have so many children. Yeah, sure. It's to repopulate. Another great example. So you have that thought in mind, and I say this because you're not thinking about what does Israel look like in 1987. You're thinking about what Israel looks like in 3027 and what your people, the diaspora, looks like around the world. And you say to yourself – it's now math.

It's now a mathematical, analytical tradeoff. That's why you're in this job. You say to yourself, okay, how do we ensure our survival thousands of years from now? Well, we got one place that's a great friend, America, but they are geographically separated from us and we're having some trouble getting them to come over here and help us on certain issues. We've had some tough back channel communications with them. It's not really working as well as we want and we know the people in Europe are good for nothing. So how do we make sure America is our best friend? Well, you know, this is the dawn of the TV age. It's where pop culture kind of all comes together. It's post Kennedy, who was a pop culture president. You have politics, you have entertainment, you have media, you have, you know, business, all these things are interchangeable. And you say, okay, we need to make sure we get close to these people. And we need to make sure that when we get close to these people you know we have some information that can make

sure that they're there for us when we need them and so they sit around the room and they say all right what's one thing people can't come back from and someone raises their hand and they say murder and they're like no no that's been done before people have come back from that you can come back from that and then someone in the room says and you got to believe this alessi fuck a kid and everyone in the room knows that this is a first world country we're talking about and that's a big no-no you don't come back from that you do that you're cooked it's not possible you're cooked and they sit there and they say maybe they don't say it like this but they say are we willing to sacrifice the lives effectively of 50 000 kids over the next

five six decades to make sure that our entire race survives a thousand years from now and in the words of aldo rain i'll make that deal right like that's the attitude that the people in those rooms have that's not a deal i won't make to be clear i'm not saying about myself right i'm saying this is how they might think i could see is that far-fetched no i could see that i could see that their Is that far-fetched? No. I could see that. I could see that. Their calculation is far different than our calculation would be. You're right about long-term versus short-term. We only look to the end of the current president's term.

We don't do long-term planning. We never have. We pretend to, like on nuclear stockpiles and stuff like that, but we don't really do long-term planning. They do very long-term planning. Yes. And that's why they're such prolific spies. I remember on my first day at the CIA, and I think I told you this before.

We were in the, it's called the bubble, the CIA's auditorium. And all the new hires were like hundreds of us. And we were getting briefings, like the head of security would come and brief us and the head of HR and the head of this and the head of that and whatever. And the head of counterintelligence came to brief us and said – he explained what a declared officer was versus a unilateral officer. So a unilateral officer is you're undercover overseas. Nobody knows you're undercover overseas. Nobody knows your CIA. A declared officer is somebody where, like I was declared in Athens. My boss took me to the

Greek intelligence service and said, this is John Kiriakou. He's a CIA officer and he's here to work with your people. So they've declared my status. So he said that the Israelis have two declared officers here. One Mossad, one Shin Bet. They work in the Israeli embassy. They're missing 187 though. And the FBI had – yeah. The FBI had identified 189 – yeah, 189 undeclared Israeli officers, intelligence officers, and they were in – mostly in defense contractors all across America trying to steal our defense secrets. Later on, somebody told me, well, you know, the Israelis, the Israelis are obsessed

with the idea that we're not giving them everything, right? And we give them pretty much everything, but they want to make sure they're getting everything, literally everything. For example, when the F-35 came out, they were the first ones to say, we want the F-35. And so we said, okay, we'll give you the F-35. So we just barely degraded the avionics. Okay? And we called it the F-35I for Israel. And the reason why we did that is because we don't want anybody to have exactly the avionics that we have in case you know what happens if one of these crashes in russian territory and the russians reverse engineer it now they have the f35

we did the same thing with the emirates the f35e for emirates so they said no we want your f35 the same-35 that you have. And we're like, no, we're not giving it to you. And we sold them the F-35i. Well, they're trying to steal the avionics for the F-35 because we wouldn't turn it over. It's very typical of what the Israelis do. And then, you know, at the same time, they smile and they thank you.

And our friendship is forever. Our greatest ally. Yeah yeah another one he should have stayed in philadelphia the world would be a better place yeah he's not great no it's you this is such a hard topic because people have such strong opinions and i get yelled out by everyone on this oh i'm sure a lot of things i'm pretty down the middle on this one Oh, I'm sure. Like a lot of things. I'm pretty down the middle on this one. Yeah. I fully understand why it's a state. I support that. I would like a two-state solution. Me too. I think that Hamas and Hezbollah are bad. I also think the current leadership of the Israeli government is bad. I think what's going on in Gaza is terrible. I understand October 7th was terrible and that's what started in the first place. I agree with every word you've said. Okay, so let's keep going here.

First of all, the million-dollar question, let's start with an easy one. The F-35I example. If the shoe were on the other foot, would we not do the same thing? Probably. Okay. Yeah. So you got to call it both ways on this. That's fair.

Second example, not necessarily like a guy like Epstein himself who is just so prolific and really like he was over the top about it. Yeah, he was. Like he was in your face about it. Yes. It was really disgusting and pathetic and a lot of things at the same time. The types of things he did though that involved sex trafficking, human trafficking, let's call it what it is. Do we ever do that too? Not in my experience. I ask – when I speak at universities, as part of my standard speech, I ask this question.

It's a hypothetical question. But I usually talk about ethics. And I say, imagine you are a CIA officer working overseas undercover and you have recruited a bona fide terrorist, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS, whatever. It doesn't make any difference. And you meet with him monthly in a hotel room, let's say in Amman or Cairo. And this guy has given you actionable intelligence that you have used to disrupt attacks against the United States. The guy's the real deal. And you go to meet him one day and he says, you know what? I've given you everything that you have wanted. So

today you're going to do something for me. And I'm not giving you any more information until you get me a prostitute right now. Just a prostitute. Do you get him the prostitute? I always ask, show of hands, how many people would give him the prostitute? And usually about 75% put their hands up. Yeah, I'd probably make that deal. And I say, yeah. Yeah, you would you

give him the prostitute it's it's nasty it's ugly but you know this is the job that we've chosen and that's her job as long as she agreed to it like on the business yeah okay what if he asks you for a prostitute yeah i knew it was going there how many would give him a prostitute? That's where I can't do this. They all look around and then usually about 10% will put their hand up. And I say, absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. Let's talk about peptides for a minute. If you're like me, you're seeing them everywhere. Just because something says peptide on the label doesn't mean it's actually doing anything for you that's where one skin's os01 peptide is different while some peptides just sit on top of the skin os01 goes deeper it's scientifically formulated to penetrate the cells within skin's deeper layers improving

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thank you. First of all, from a practical perspective, he's not going to walk away. You're paying him thousands and thousands of dollars for his information. You're probably willing to resettle him if something goes wrong. But this is a child we're talking about. A child. The problem though is, and this is why I bring this up, there's no rule at the agency. Remember, your job is to break the laws of the country that you're in. You're committing espionage just having the meeting in the first place. So you've got to go into a career like this with your own set of moral values, with your own ethical standards. Deep down, we all know right from wrong. It's really not that complicated. You know that it would be wrong to do something like that under any circumstances. And sometimes

people will say, well, greater good and all that stuff. And I say, no, in real life, he's going to give you the information. It's not about the child. He can go out and do whatever he wants in his own time. But you've got to draw the line between right and wrong because headquarters isn't going to do it for you. I think the incentive structure you point out in that example actually makes your answer make sense. I would believe that. But on a greater mission level, meaning like if it wasn't just some guy who you're already paying who says, you know what, go get me a kid. And you're like, fuck you. You're not going anywhere, right? If it was something where you were trying to infiltrate people who were involved with this kind of thing and you needed to not even create it yourself. You mean to disrupt a network?

Sure. A network that doesn't have to do with that, but they do this too. You're telling me, and I hope you're right too, because I would like to think we don't do this, but you're telling me that that would never happen? You know, I can't say with 100% certainty, but I can say in the 15 years that I was there, I never encountered anything even close. Yeah. I couldn't see you doing that. Never. Yeah. You wouldn't even do the torture. No, I wouldn't even do the torture. One wouldn't do the torture one guy one guy asked me for a ton of money and i'm like yeah that's a lot of money and he says well i brought all my wife's

gold jewelry i said what am i a fucking jeweler now yeah come on you know the deal you signed a contract there could it's a big organization though and we don't know how big it is and i always ask there are a lot of sociopaths walking the halls and you know that you know we're we're zeroing in on epstein here because he was caught and he was here yeah they're not the only ones who do that man you're absolutely right there's a lot of agencies that do that kind of thing around the world a lot that's where it gets messy it's disgusting it's horrible but you know the fact that we are closing those files does tell me a lot, and it tells me that there's influence bought. Yeah, there has to be because, again, there is literally no reason, no legitimate reason for any of those documents to be classified.

None. Yeah. none yeah another argument that pisses me off with this because i think people are looking at it the wrong way is the whole apac thing so everyone complains about apac yeah and they blame apac right and they blame israel right and i'm like wait a minute blame the justice department and the congress they're using the system sure that we allow to be used of course they're looking out for their own country's interest it's like blaming rich people for taking tax deductions that's what i'm saying the rich people fix the law exactly how why why don't we do that why is that not changed because i mean i'm going to be straight with you when i look at trump's current cabinet there's three positions, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, that have the most impact on foreign policy outside of Tulsi Gabbard at DNI and Ratcliffe at CIA.

There's the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the UN ambassador, and we're one of like two countries that can veto anything. Yes. I got a UN ambassador, Stefanik, whose number one funder is AIPAC, who goes in front of fucking the Senate to get confirmed and tells Van Hollen did a great job with her. He didn't like try to bury her. He knew his shit. And she told him to his face that she believes that Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank, which is a war crime for everyone. It's a war crime. For everyone keeping track out there. I then have a secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who's funded out the ass by them. And then I have a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who, you know, not his fault. He just came from Fox News. So we can't see where he's funding. But when he's walking out of meetings

with, oh, I don't know, John Fetterman, a senator who's going to vote on him. What's the first thing he says? I was very glad I could sit down for the position of United States Secretary of Defense with a United States senator and discuss our greatest ally, Israel, and our unwavering support to them. If my United States senator and my United States Secretary of Defense, number one issue for the United States Defense Department is another country, they could be the best country in the world. It could be my best friend in Britain. And like, I don't fuck with that. What about the congressman that wore an Israeli military uniform onto the floor of the house? Oh, yeah. What's the guy with, he's missing his legs. I don't mean that in a mean way. What the hell is his name? Brian. He was on that article we pulled up earlier he's the guy who announced all these things all the USAID funding Brian Manor

it's short not man do you have the link of us? Mars yeah that guy Mass what was it? Brian Mast he was wearing another country

again I don't have any issue. There's a lot of positive about Israel. But if that were a British uniform, everyone would be up in arms. Yeah, they would be. What the fuck? Yes. It's unacceptable. Yeah.

I couldn't agree more. I feel exactly the same way. And, you know, it pains me, too, that we are so willing as a country to just acquiesce to genocide. And even the act of moving Palestinians out of Gaza to develop the land, that is an act of genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Yeah, it's ethnic cleansing. Exactly. Why is nobody talking about genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Yeah. It's ethnic cleansing. Exactly. Why is nobody talking about this? You can't do it.

I was talking to an Albanian documentary filmmaker just a couple of days ago. And he said, you know, there's this idea being floated that they're going to move all the Palestinians to Albania because we're Muslim. And I'm like, Albania? I hadn't heard that he said the albanians are up in arms right secular muslims too yeah they're secular muslims yeah who don't speak

arabic by the way yeah and uh you know there was talk early on it came from the white house of moving them to this island that's owned by indonesia and they could speak arabic there and then the third idea was to split them in half and you put half in Jordan and half in Egypt. And both the Jordanians and Egyptians said, absolutely not. You know, in, in 68, uh, in September of 68, Palestinians were fighting Jordanian troops, literally on the steps of the Royal palace to take Jordan for themselves. Fully half of the population of Jordan is Palestinian. The king's wife is Palestinian.

The king's wife is Palestinian. Now, what do you think of that guy? Let's start there. I like the king. I do too. He's my favorite king. He's my favorite king too. I know we like fought a war over that here.

I don't really fuck with kings and queens, but he's a gangster. You know, when I was living in London, I used to see the Greek king, the exiled, deposed Greek king in church on Sunday. The royal family gets the first row in the church. And I used to think, you sorry bastards. You're not even Greek. You're Danish. You were imposed on us.

That's right. They speak German. King Otto I, which isn't're not even Greek. You're Danish. You were imposed on us. That's right. They speak German. King Otto I, Othonos, which isn't even a Greek name. They Hellenized it. Uh-huh. He was king for 30 years. He never learned how to speak Greek. Get the fuck out of here and let us have our democracy. Fucking Prince Philip. His dad was like in charge of Greece. Yeah. Yeah. Prince Philip, he was born in Greece.

I'm Greek-er than he is. Yeah, exactly. He was born in Corfu. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Prince Philip was, he was born in Greece. I'm greater than he is. Yeah, exactly. He was born in Corfu. Crazy. Yeah. Well, the reason I'm happy you bring that up is because I've been monitoring this one like crazy since the beginning, because that Jordanian King, I first got introduced to him through Joby Warwick's books and I was blown away by him. He's a very sweet guy. One of the things, and now I know like several people who are like friends with him from different walks of life. You know, he's got a beautiful house. In D.C.? Yeah, he's got two actually.

He's got one in Potomac, Maryland. Of course he does. That was his dad's. And then he's got a magnificent condo in the, what is it? Not the Waldorf Astoria. In New York? Four Seasons. No, in Georgetown.

Okay. Yeah. I'm less familiar. Yeah. But the thing that blew me away with Joby is that Joby's first book was about El Bellowey, the guy who blew up the base, the CIA base, who was a Jordanian doctor. I think I'm in that book. You probably are.

Yeah. Do you remember the context you might have been? Yeah. I sat next to Jennifer Matthews. The woman who died? Mm-hmm. Yeah. We were branch chiefs together.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I knew her very well. She was the chief of... I forget what she was the chief of. And I was the chief of counterintelligence in Alex Station. So we sat next to each other. Oh, shit.

You were the chief of... Did you tell me this before? I don't know. I don't remember. You were the chief of counterintelligence on the Bin Laden desk. Yeah. For how long? Oh, not long.

From when I got back from the Abu Zubaydah operation to when I went up to the seventh floor as the executive assistant. Okay, so this is after 9-11. After 9-11. All right, I think we did talk about this. But let's take a little side trip, though. We'll come back to the king. What was that like at that point? Because he's in the weeds. He's in the wind. So my job was to counter al-Qaeda efforts to infiltrate the CIA. Al-Qaeda was infiltrated. Did they ever successfully do it? No. That's good.

But the closest they ever came was, unfortunately, the host bombing where she was killed. Right. So source infiltration. Got it. All right. You know, may I finish a couple thoughts on Jennifer? And I told Joby this when he was writing the book. Many of us were furious with the CIA, not with Jennifer.

Jennifer fucked up, but it was not her fault. The CIA has got this rule, stupid rule, that in order to be promoted to the senior intelligence service, you have to have done a rotation in the policy community and a rotation in another directorate. So like for me, I started in the DI, I went to the DO, and then I did a rotation to the State Department where I was in the American Embassy in Bahrain for two years. And then I was the Iraq desk officer at State, legitimate State Department jobs. So that made me eligible to be promoted to the Senior intelligence service. She had done a rotation at state, but she had never done a rotation in ops. Well, post 9-11, everybody's like a chicken without a head, right? So if you're going to, if you're an analyst, a career analyst, she'd been in for, you know, 12, 15 years by then.

You're an analyst and they want to move you into an operational position. You've got to go through something called the operations course accelerated, OCA. So you skip all the CIA 101 silliness. You know, this is what a cable is. This is what an operation is. This is, you know, you already know all that stuff. So you just skip it. So instead of an 18 month class, yours is six months

and they teach you how to shoot and how to do the crazy driving and how to build a bomb and how to take a bomb apart and how to do all these different things in those six weeks. And then you go out to the field. So all of this, the weapons, the counter surveillance, all this stuff is fresh in your mind. But with Jennifer, they're like, oh my God, we need somebody to go to host like right now. Hey, Jennifer, you need a rotation of the deal, right? So you can get promoted. Okay, go to coast. Can you go tomorrow?

And they send her. She didn't know what the fuck she was doing. She didn't have any experience at all in operations. Zero experience in operations. She was brilliant and a great analyst, but they didn't train her to protect herself. And the next thing you know, we get this volunteer and he's bin Laden's doctor. And oh my God, it's amazing. Al-Balawi.

Yeah, Al-Balawi. And so this is going to be the greatest source we've ever had against Al-Qaeda. And it just fell into our lap because he just volunteered. And let's bring him onto the compound. And then they learn, well, it's his birthday, right? So we're going to bake him a cake. We're going to bake him a cake and sing happy birthday. Oh, you know what would be a better idea? Let's meet him outside the hard line. Let's meet him where we can't be protected because that'll show him how much we like him and how grateful we are for his information. And we'll give him the cake. So everybody leave your posts and let's all go out to the car.

Now, as crazy as this is so far, he gets out of the car and he's muttering to himself, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, alhamdulillah, maliki yuma deen. And that wasn't alerting to anybody. What does that mean again? In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. There is only one God and he is God and muhammad is the messenger of god yeah yeah that's not what you want to hear when they're standing there with a birthday cake no and then he blows everybody up yeah it was the worst it was the worst deadly attack in CIA history. We lost more people that day than in any other day in the history of the CIA.

This is like, what, like 07? Mm-hmm. So you were out. I was out. I was at ABC News then doing counterterrorism commentary. Got it. That's where your timeline picks up. So you were with her, though, on that desk for a little while.

Yeah. What was that desk like? Busy. Yeah. What kind of leads were you getting on them? Because no one knew at that time. No. Most of what we were getting was shit.

You know, you get – when I was in Pakistan, I used to get these people all the time. Walk-ins. Yep. So a walk-in is somebody who literally walks in off the street and says, I have intelligence that I want to share with the CIA. Okay. 98% of the time, it's a lunatic. Right? 1% of the time, it's either what's called an intelligence peddler, which is somebody who actually has a nugget of interesting information. And he brings it to you and you give him $100.

But then he goes to the British embassy and then the French embassy and then the Russian embassy. And then that's a month's salary. You got to make a living. Yeah. Legit. Yeah. The other half percent is what's called a probe. So this is usually, usually Iranian.

It can be Hezbollah or North Korean. And they'll come into the embassy like this. They'll be like, yeah, I have information I want to give to the CIA. Can you call a CIA guy down here for me? And they're looking like, where are the cameras? Are the doors armored? Are the windows armored? How many of the people I'm dealing with have guns?

Can I see the true name of anybody on their badge or have they obscured their badge? How many checkpoints do I have to get through before I'm actually inside? So in the event that they want to attack our embassy at some point and blow it up, they've got a design on how to do that. That's why we keep them outside the hard line. Only in the smallest embassies do you bring them in. But otherwise, you know, I'll meet you at that shack in the parking lot because you're not coming in here. Yeah. But then the remaining 1% is the real deal. And the old timers who worked against the Soviets will tell you that the greatest sources in the history of the CIA started as walk-ins because they're so deep down into the weeds that you would never encounter them. You're not going to meet those people at some diplomatic cocktail party, right?

You're not going to meet them anywhere officially. Like, are you going to meet a North Korean nuclear scientist at a cocktail party? Of course you're not. But he may just walk up to the embassy and knock on the door. That's a career-making recruitment. And so when they saw Balaoui and he's pretending to be, well, I'm not sure I want to do this. Well, but maybe I should because 3,000 Americans were killed. Oh, my God.

I can't believe I'm doing this. He played it just right yeah and they were so excited because this was the first major source that we had akin to what we once had against the soviets this is going to make people are going to get medals they're going to get promoted you know this is going to be incredible where did you guys when you were on the desk though for whatever somewhere in there where did you guys think he was where was where was your inkling bin laden yep it was pretty well split i thought he was in afghanistan and um i just didn't think he had the wherewithal to get out from torabora i thought that he was hunkered down in a cave i really did and then you know later on i said somebody said oh he's probably still

in that cave and i said no that doesn't sense. We know that he's got kidney problems. And it's cold in caves. You can't be, you can be in a cave, okay, overnight. But not years in a cave. I said, he's probably in some little village somewhere in some, you know, mud hut. And then the other half believed, no, he's probably in Pakistan. He's probably like right on the border somewhere we didn't realize he had gotten so far in and he's staying at you know what was effectively the west

point of pakistan crazy yeah right on top of it that's nuts you know can i can i go back to john carrey you can do whatever you want john you've just reminded me of something or i've reminded myself of something he asked me like i'm gonna say no fuck you one of the things i told carrie early on he he told me hey we need to come up with some investigations this is when i thought he actually meant it before i learned better yeah and i said um are you planning any international travel and he said yeah i want to go to pakistan afghanistan i said okay i'll go with you to pak Pakistan and Afghanistan. But I think what we should do is the doctor that led us to bin Laden. Do you remember the even leaving the kiddie pool.

Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. We recruited a Pakistani doctor to go to Abbottabad. Let me back up. So we've got drones, and the drones are flying over Abbottabad. We had a source who said, hey, you know, there's a guy in Abbottabad, and he's really tall, and he just walks in circles in the backyard. Never leaves. Just walks in circles in the backyard never leaves just walks in circles in the backyard so maybe it's bin laden and we said yeah maybe it is maybe it isn't but another thing that's interesting about this house that he's in is most of the houses have um eight foot tall walls around

them because you don't want anybody to see your your women right right you put walls around your house yeah you gotta keep them protected but this wall around this house is 20 feet it's not eight feet so and this guy and this tall guy in white just walking in circles fucking anunnaki someone's in there right somebody this is somebody whoever it is if it's not bin laden it's somebody so what we did is we recruited a doctor and a pakistani doctor and we said we want you to go to abu abad go to this neighborhood and give free polio vaccines but as you're giving the polio vaccine take a little dna test now somewhere rfk is going this is how they get you they come up with polio vaccine and then you're fucked so we got bin laden so um excuse me the bin laden family was was deeply ashamed of what osama had done so they offered us um they offered us their help.

And we said, well, what would be nice would be a DNA sample. So in case we kill him and we blast him to a million pieces, we can pick up a piece of meat and run a DNA test and confirm that it's him. That was a nice flex you just did, by the way. That was why I laughed. You showed me something. But go ahead. I thought you'd get a kick out of it yeah i love how you just like don't stop the story just keep going he'll laugh so um

so we had the dna profile of the bin laden family in general so we recruit this doctor he goes in the neighborhood hey you know playing the the music. No, there's no music. Like an ice cream truck. I would have gone with it. Free polio vaccines for everybody. And these women bring the children out and he gives the polio vaccine and he takes a little DNA. We run the sample. Bin Laden family.

So they had called him the walking man all this time. And it was then that they were able to confirm it was him. So Obama sends in the stealth helicopters. They kill him. They take the body. They take the wives. The rest is history. So I said to Kerry, this is 2009. The Pakistanis arrested that doctor. they charged him with espionage before he's killed because he's killed in 2011 correct right yeah so i said

we should get him out and bring him back to the united states oh because you knew that you were reading on the intelligence that they confirmed it was him you knew about bin lan's whereabouts two years before it happened and you weren't even in cia anymore yeah people talk how do you know people talk holy shit they get excited and they can't keep it to themselves yeah i'm gonna tie you down later and fucking get all the secrets out of you i've been out 20 years now so um i said to carrie we should get this guy out i said you'll be you'll be a national hero if you can get this guy out. And the Pakistanis loved Kerry. So he's like – That's not reassuring.

No. And he's like, no. Unless he just starts cracking up. He's like, I don't want to interfere in the internal relations, the internal politics of it. I said, Senator, there's no downside to this. There's no downside. This guy risked his life to give us Osama bin Laden. Let's just do him a solid, bring him back. Wouldn't do it. Just wouldn't do it.

Did he give you a reason? Like a legit? He didn't want to get involved. And now he may have had the idea on his own and raised it with Obama and Obama said, fuck you. Or he said something to, you know, whoever, whoever was CIA director. I don't even, oh, it was Hayden. Oh, no, it would have been Hayden. It was right after Hayden. Morell? Morell was acting. No, it was, what's his face from California?

The Congressman, Leon Panetta. Yeah, it was Leon Panetta because then Panetta went on to be secretary of defense. He was in charge when the Bin Laden thing happened. That's right. That's right. So maybe there was some component here that I didn't know that he – I already had the idea. I said to Obama and Obama said no and Panetta said no. I have no idea.

But I thought, you know, we should, we should help this guy out because he risked his life for us. And Kerry's just like, not interested. Did we ever get that guy out? So he's still getting his balls electrocuted today. That's terrible. Yep. He sure is.

Wow. Yes, he is. All right. So we were talking about al bellowey with this though yes because so you this is wow what a great rabbit hole so you knew all the players involved here what was going on so you already laid it out he went on if you saw the movie zero dark 30 this scene was shown i'm still angry about that stupid movie why because another rabbit hole here we go it perpetuated the lie that it was the torture program that led to Bin Laden's location. That was a lie.

Great analysis led to Bin Laden's location. They kind of showed both. Yeah. But I see what you're saying. They included that as – Torture had nothing whatsoever to do with his location. Nothing. They recruited the right people. They recruited the right people.

They used the right technology. And they found him. Yeah. You and I talked about this a lot last time we were here. So people could check out 249, 250 where we went through that. So we won't go through that again. But either way, that scene was shown in that movie. And from what I understand, maybe you can give your input here.

It was pretty accurate, that one. It was generally accurate minus the torture part. No, no. I mean the scene, the actual one scene of Elbello. The scene was 100%. In fact, I talked to – who did I talk to? Business Insider Magazine a couple of weeks ago. They had me review like eight intelligence-related movies.

Oh, you did one of those? It was so much fun. I can't wait to do it again. But one of them was that scene. Yeah. And it was right on. Wow. Right on.

You know, the only sad part is that three different Navy SEALs claim that they were the ones that did the kill shot. Yeah, there's – I'm not going to get involved with that. Yeah. You can go online and look there's some interesting conversations in the navy seal community around that one of them has made a a living oh yeah yeah now yeah yeah there's i don't like getting involved in the military drama because i don't know about yeah that's theirs to do but there are certainly like i i think there's one guy we're gonna have in

here who i want to talk to about it off camera because he's had some things to say i don't want to personally get involved but yeah i kind of wonder why that's not a louder story that there's multiple like it's talked about oh yeah there's one guy who it's like oh yeah that's who did it yeah and there's a lot of other people who are like no the fuck you didn't no he didn't you know there's an auction house on m's eastern shore, Alexander Auctions. They specialize in military auctions. And 75% of what they auction is Nazi, right? They even had – they had an auction a couple weeks ago.

They had Eva Braun's nightgown. Did you go buy it? Like where did – no, it was like $50,000. John's like, I wanted to. I've been on a couple of things, but you can't believe the stuff that they have that's been signed, like random stuff that's been signed by this Navy SEAL who claims that he's the guy, the one who's made a living from it. Like there's a soccer ball signed by the guy.

I don't want to say his name. And maybe he was maybe he was but is it really worth 500 for an autographed you know time magazine with bin laden on it that this navy seal signed i just don't understand what because one thing about the veteran community is god damn are they strong with the stolen valor stuff like they each other we've seen it in here with with some stuff where they got it wrong yes and you know ran with stuff but right you know you would think that's the that would be if that's the case the biggest stolen valor ever in modern history ever and you would think there'd be a lot louder push but that's why i'm i kind of i'm kind of like maybe he probably did kill the guy you know regardless of what you think about him because it's not loud.

There are some arguments, but it's not like someone – people every day like this didn't happen. Yeah. I don't know. It's crazy. I don't know. I don't know what the truth is. I'm out. I don't want anything to do with it.

It is one of the most incredible and compelling and exciting scenes that a person can imagine uh-huh but i don't know who imagine you put three in the head of bin laden can you imagine it'd be fucking awesome i would think about it for the rest of my life i know i wouldn't have any i mean yeah like what how do you top that in a career you don't no you don't i i don't think anything's ever the same after that no no way but so the scene of el bellowey accurate you told this is an insider too yes cool that let me add one thing about joe joe b book uh sorry joe b's book is the most comprehensive account of what happened that is humanly possible yep he talked to everybody and the way he lays it out

is very compelling and completely true. So you actually took the words out of my mouth because that's exactly what I'm going to refer to. His book that was published in 09 covered that scene specifically and what led up to it. Yes. And so when he wrote this book, the guy was a Jordanian. This was a very bad look for Jordan. Oh boy. In fact, they apologized to us. Yes. And Joby wrote the book like he does, fairly, just reporting.

He's a great storyteller, but Joby's not the guy who says, fuck you or nothing like that. No, no, no, just the facts. So he writes this book and two things happen. Number one, Elbeloie's father, who did not feel the way Elbeloie did and was embarrassed of what happened, put the book on his mantle because he said it was written fairly or whatever. That's incredible. The second thing that happened, obviously this whole thing is a very bad look for the king.

And it was not written nicely to the king. It's reporting things that are not good for the Mucabarid and obviously the things that slipped through the cracks here. The king hit up Joby and said, hey, you could have been an asshole about this. You could have injected a lot of opinions in there. This is a really bad look for me but you did this the honest way it is a bad look for our country you know we fucked up this this or that i appreciate the fact that you know you did it in a professional way so if you are ever writing a story in the future and you need some help getting sources you call me and i

will do that for you which then ended up being the book on isis which one of the pulitzer oh my god and once again the first chapter really bad look for the king and the guy is still friends with jobi and everything which tells me he respects in some way the relationship of you know what's supposed to be like the fourth estate of life yeah right and so i have followed the guy religiously since i read that book years ago. And I just found him so interesting. So he speaks perfect English. Perfect.

He's Western trained. His English is as good as ours. He's this brilliant guy. He also, I like this about him, never wanted to be king, never thought he was going to be. No, it was supposed to be his uncle. Yeah. And then it was supposed to be his older brother. And his father's on his deathbed and says, no, fam, you're doing it. Switched it up.

And he was like, what the fuck? And then his dad died. That's that. Yeah, it was shocking. So the guy, you know, he's been king now for 25 years or whatever. First of all, every major event, he has been the Nostradamus on. He play-by-played how Iraq was going to happen when he was talking with the U.S. in 01 and 02. Right?

Like he gets so much. I'm sure he's got some shit wrong in there, but like gets a lot right and he understands the middle east so well and so right when october 7th happened i was turning right to him like all right what's this motherfucker gonna say about this his wife's palestinian so he's got a little feeling that she's stunning isn't she she is queen reina right that's what it is so he was at some conference or something this is like two weeks after october 7th and he gives these long comments on this. And one of the questions that he was asked, and we actually had a clip go viral where I was explaining this last year, and a lot of people didn't know this. But one of the questions that he was asked was, will you commit to taking in Palestinian refugees?

And he said, I'm glad you asked that. No, I will not. I think they said to him, why have you said you won't do that? I think it was like a leading question because he had said like, you won't do that. He said, if I do that, you know, because he has an allyship with Israel, but that doesn't mean just like, you know, someone might not like our president at a certain time. It could be the same with him. So he basically said, if I did that, I would be giving the worst parts of Israel's government, the guys I don't like, exactly what they want. That's a great answer.

The Smotriches, the Ben-Gavirs and all that, because they believe in this expansion. And I would be ethnically cleansing these people from that plot of land, and they'd never be able to go back. And now, I was telling people about this, and I felt like this was one topic on this issue people weren't talking about a lot. And yes, being talked about all the time, because now you're seeing it play out. And there was like, you know, Netanyahu, two things happen. Netanyahu, this is what I want you to respond to. Netanyahu comes in, meets with Trump. Trump actually did something I didn't expect expect which we'll see how this turns out it looks like if you watch the press conference where they did publicly trump shocked netanyahu

he hadn't told him this and said the us is going to handle it it's a very trump thing to do i kind of like that it's it's like a half way or it's like i still don't like this but it's better am i wrong no you're not wrong okay even putin said um that he he preferred trump to biden because trump was so unpredictable you never knew when he was gonna do something or propose something that was really great and you just you knew not to expect anything great from biden but netanyahu hated that when he heard that because he wanted it yeah so maybe this will be a situation because i haven't liked the way trump's talked about it after but maybe it's a situation where the people who live there will actually end up getting to stay there which leads to my second point that i don't know if you saw this but he then had the jordanian king and they had

a very interesting 19 and a half minute public press conference together jordanian king's a real master and handling he is he's a master diplomat so he commits in that to take in 2 000 kids who have cancer and stuff like that which i think that's great. Trump liked that. And Trump was kind of dancing around the whole, well, are we going to settle in permanently in Jordan or have discussions about that? And the King was able to kind of stay away from the melee. The media kind of kept him out of that. But do you think he will be forced to relent on something like that? No, that is a red line for the Jordanians that if crossed could actually eventually lead to the collapse of the Jordanian government. Like I said, there are already so many Palestinians in Jordan that do not have the full rights of citizenship.

In fact, they even have different colored passports. Jordanians have green passports and Palestinians in Jordan have black passports. So you can tell when they're Palestinian and they're second-class citizens there. Now they know after 70 years, they're not going to get their country back. There's no right of return that the Israelis are going to finally agree to. They're stuck in Jordan and they're pissed off for four or five generations now. And so to make that worse, Jordanians are a country that has no money. It's one of the largest recipients of USAID, but people still live in poverty there for the most part.

To heap on the problems that Jordan already has, where they've got Israel and the Palestinians on one border. They've got Iraq on another border. They have Syria on another border. This is a very dangerous neighborhood, right? They have enough problems as it is. They can't take another million Palestinians. It's too much. It'll tip the balance. What if the United States leans on them to end up doing that though? How do you even say no? I think they would have to say no because you know how the Israelis always say that it's either victory or be pushed into the sea, right? It's kind of the same thing for the Jordanians on this. I think I may have told you a story. A very dear friend of mine, my first boss

at the CIA, he became the senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council under Clinton. And the very last week of the Clinton presidency, he and Al Gore were at Camp David with Yasser Arafat and his people and whoever the Israeli prime minister was, I forget now, and his people, whether it was Rabin. No, Rabin was dead by then. Yeah, he was dead. Shimon Peres probably. Well, it would have been Netanyahu. No, not in January of 2000.

No, that would have been Epstein's buddy. The hell is his name? It had to be Shimon Peres, right? No. What's the guy's – can we Google Epstein prime minister friend? Why the fuck? He was in that movie. He showed up in the one scene where they hit people because he used to be a special...

Yeah, Ahud Barak. Was it Ahud Barak? Yeah, yeah. I guess it was. Yeah, he succeeded. In 2000? Yeah. Okay. So he said, there's this enormous map of Jerusalem on this conference room table.

He said, they're so close to peace. They're literally dividing Jerusalem block by block with a Sharpie. And they finish. And they come to an agreement. And Al Gore says, my God, we have peace. And Arafat says, I can never sell this to the Palestinian people. And he starts to walk out. And Gore runs out after him.

And he said, you can't just walk out. If there's something that you're having second thoughts on, tell us. We'll renegotiate it. We can't come this close to peace and just just let it fall apart and he said i could never sell any agreement with the israelis yeah to the palestinian people and that was the end of it this is where and this is where i always defend israel with this stuff these are the realities they do face these people will will be like, you're nowhere. You're right. And what we're talking about here is a legitimate and viable two-state solution. Yes.

And it was the Palestinians that walked away. That's right. And that has happened again and again. Now, listen, if there are a lot of Palestinians who live there who may not have voted for that leadership or were pressured into voting for that leadership, I have tremendous empathy for that. I know that's a real thing. Totally agree. But the people who have been given the power or taken the power to be in charge, whether it be Arafat and the PLO or what we've seen in Gaza with fucking Hamas.

Yeah. These are not good representatives. No, you've got Mahmoud Abbas, who's 16 years into a four-year term as president, and you've got a bona fide terrorist group in in gaza so i mean what do you do now like the israelis i went to israel twice uh in 2022 for work both times it was you know i had never been to israel before never been to 72 countries with the agency i had never been to Israel. So I went as a journalist. An incredible, absolutely incredible, transformative place.

Beautiful place I've been. It's the best and the worst of what the Middle East has to offer. That's a good way to put it. And, I mean, I was just struck by it. And, you know, I went for the for the election. The Israelis are adamant about the death of the two state solution. Right. There will not be a two state solution. Well, there is already the one state solution.

And that's not working out very well, is it? Right. And I was talking to a former ambassador just the other day and he said you know why aren't we talking about the three-state solution he said the the gaza palestinians and the west bank palestinians have literally nothing in common yeah they're literally geographically separated yeah they're geographically separated they're even kind of ethnically separated right the the gaza palest Gaza Palestinians have more in common with the Egyptians than they do with the West Bank. Really? Interesting. Yeah.

And they don't really like each other. And politically, they're at odds. Yeah. So he said, I think we should be having a conversation about a three-state solution. And I think he said that a three-state solution would look more like Bosnia-Herzegovina, where you look at the map and it's all these little dots, these little islands. Here's Bosnia, but all these little dots either belong to Serbia or Croatia. It's like a map made of Swiss cheese, but it works. It works, but there's not... This is the whole... Here's where I'll push back on that.

This is the holiest land in the world. See, that's the problem. People get weird about it and it's like – this is where I see it from Israel's perspective for sure. My friend Eric Zuliger has a great quote. I say it all the time. He said, people are not their governments. I would never want to be fucking co-signed to Dick Cheney and George Bush and what they did. No way.

Right? And I understand why other people might take the easy way out around the world and do that at that time when they were around. But you have a lot of Israeli people who don't support their current government and even people that may have voted for that because it was the least of what they viewed as two evils. They're not bad people at all. Right. So I'm thinking about Israel after that government, when there's a more moderate government or something more reasonable.

The most that Benjamin Netanyahu has ever won has been like 27 percent. I didn't even know that. They have so many political parties in that country that they have these governments that are made up of half a dozen or more different parties. Yeah. Yeah. But my issue there would be even though the two places don't see eye to eye, I did know that. I didn't know they were like ethnically different. I've got to look into that more.

But I know the two areas don't see eye to eye. You have PLO and Hamas and very separate cultures. Now you have two places that are on your borders who got a lot of people who don't fucking like you. And it's going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact – That's the Israeli argument. But that's the thing. They have a good argument here.

When you look at Gaza, I almost – not now, but back then, I actually see it the way Netanyahu saw it in 03 and bear with me here he left the finance ministry he was the finance minister he's actually a very successful one he was good at that job in protest over giving gaza up and he told them he warned them for you know the two years leading up to it if you do this i will leave and he left and you know he was an og on this because he said all right you going to have a border with people who fucking hate you. Imagine if instead of Mexico, we had Iraq as our border in 2006. We'd have the biggest, most beautiful border wall you've ever seen in your fucking life. Oh, yes.

Okay? But you created a 20-mile by accident prison because north border, Israel. East border, Israel. by accident prison because north border israel east border israel south border the sinai which is owned by egypt but run by terrorists who don't like the palestinians that's right west border the fucking sea which the coral reef is where you get all the fish is nine miles out which is israeli territory so there's no fucking fish that's exactly right right so you now you created that yeah well i i've heard this before. Yeah, it's true. Over the years. It's true.

You can't fish. So how do you – if you're Israel, how do you not create that? You're trying to throw them a bone, give them land, but you then create a space where – Well, there was an idea that came up in the early 1990s. What's that? It was a Saudi idea. The Saudi idea was to use Saudi money to build a port and an airport. So you can close them all off. You can run a border fence or wall, you know, a mile out into the sea. You can mine

the area around the border, do whatever you want, have ships off the, off the coast, but let them at least trade. You build them a port so they can have have ships coming in with food and medicine and whatever you know going out with whatever products they they can make and guys i have no idea you know what that could be um and an airport that would connect them with the rest of the world and the israelis said absolutely not why now that's stupid i know why'd they say no? Because they wanted it? In 1991, I think they hadn't

gotten there yet, intellectually. You know what I mean? But things have become so desperate in the intervening years. I mean, we're talking about 34 years ago. Things are so desperate now that unless you want to just complete this genocide that

you've started, you're going to have to throw them a bone. What about 05? Why didn't they bring that back up? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. See, there's not a defense for that. That's the kind of stuff there's not a defense for. That's right. On the broad basis, I understand why they're like, well, we can't really let them in here because you're letting in, it's like Swiss cheese in the wrong way yeah i get that it's just goddamn that's that's one of the most cynical situations in the world awful just awful i just don't know if it'll ever get solved yeah i have to agree but you guys you started to say this earlier and it was very interesting you had a very telling 30 to 35-minute segment with Danny Jones and Andy Bustamante where the two of you who were from different eras of CIA told the same story about how this is behind the scenes with the frenemies kind of thing that's going on.

You already started to say there were red lights. You're told that day one. It's like you see China. You see Russia. You see Israel as like spy threats or whatever. That's right. So people at CIA, I would imagine, have a love-hate relationship here. Is that fair to say?

It's mostly just a hate relationship. I never met anybody at the CIA who was pro-Israel. Never. Not one. Not a single person. No. No, not a single person. And it's because they make it so hard to like them. You know, if we're supposed to be their best friends, we have this special relationship. Well, I'll tell you the same story I told Danny Jones. I

worked with this guy for years and he married a woman in the office, really terrific people, both of them, terrific people. And when I was going out to Bahrain on my rotation to the State Department, the wife was going out to Jerusalem because she got the same rotation to the State Department. So because she had worked with the Israelis for many years, the station decided to declare the two of them to the Israelis. So they land and they go straight to Mossad. And the chief said, these are my officers. She's on rotation to the State Department. And he's just going to study Arabic at the University of Tel Aviv. Right. No harm. So they're there for a little while. They go to a party at the ambassador's residence and they come home and all of their living room furniture had been rearranged.

And they were like, you know, not cool. But this is what the Israelis do. They break in the house. They rearrange all your furniture just to say, ha, fuck you. We can do anything we want. So they're there working. Months pass. They're having a good time. They go to the

ambassador's Christmas party. Now they're living in Jerusalem. The embassy at the time was in Tel Aviv. And so it's about a 30 or 40 minute drive to get from one city to the other. They come home at the end of the party and people had taken shits in all of their toilets in their house. Every toilet had had shit in it. You know, not cool. They're not doing anything. They're not working against the Israelis. They're just doing normal stuff. He's studying Arabic. She's just in the, the embassy's, you know, economic section or whatever. And, and then when their tour was over, two-year tour, the ambassador threw a going-away party for them, which is a normal thing. And they get back to the house, and the dog is under the dining room table whimpering because somebody had cut the dog's tail off, and they wrapped it with gauze and with medical tape.

Why would you do something like that? What do you hope to gain except to make us hate you? You know, if you're trying to win friends and influence people, that's really not the way you're going to want to go. So now here are these people who, if anything, were, you know, moderately supportive of the Israelis, who came home only with bitterness and hatred toward the Israelis for this harassment that lasted for two years.

Why? Why would you do that? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you ever think that some of that is people who want you to think it's them? I'm steel manning it, but. In a place like Israel, though, there's nobody else sophisticated enough to do something like that. That's what I would think. Yeah, it's not great because, like, again, I understand where they're coming from. They want our help on stuff.

But you got to actually, like, to hear you talk about the Five Eyes earlier and give me some surprising answers on that. There's a different way you're talking about this one. Yeah. But there's a different way you're talking about this one. And it feels like it's their game to lose and they're doing that because it's like they could be like the Five Eyes with you. Could be. And they're deciding to just be a pain in the balls. Going to go it alone. How do you see this current situation winding – like the actual Gaza issue right now? Not the two-state solution that's not winding down anytime soon,

but how do you see this situation winding down? I don't think the Palestinians are going to go anywhere. I think that as awful as things are, you've got a territory with 2 million people, probably 100,000 dead. The Lancet, the medical journal of the UK, puts it at 100,000 to 180,000 dead because we don't know how many bodies are under the rubble yet they're just counting people who who are still missing it's horrible it's horrible so you got two million people not a single working hospital no water no food no medication it's the worst humanitarian disaster since the end of the second world war and i read an article just the other day in the wall street journal that said that it's going to take them 40 years just to clear out the rubble it's been so utterly destroyed

the egyptians aren't going to take anybody the the jordanians aren't going to take anybody the albanians are not going to take anybody and the indonesians are like leave us out of this so those guys aren't going anywhere they're going to have to rebuild but at the same time you know before the fighting started the israelis allowed the palestinians two hours of water and five hours of electricity every day not not because they didn't have the capability to provide the water and the electricity just to screw them you know so every palestinian would fill the bathtub up with water and they would use that for cooking for the remainder of the day because that's all they were allowed yeah the israelis

are going to have to treat the Palestinians as human beings because they've already lost most of the world. And I can't help but to think that- They have lost a lot of the world. Yeah. And Kamala Harris's position on the Gaza war cost her the presidency. I firmly believe that. It cost her both Michigan and Pennsylvania. She may have won the election if she had taken a principled stand. You can still be pro-Israel and be anti-genocide, but you've got to put your foot down. ability to get reach who are making that middle ground impossible yes i will be called names exactly things i said today that are perfectly factual or we're perfectly leaving open the possibility that it's not something else and i'm someone who comes down the middle on this we've gotten to the point where if you criticize benjamin netanyahu as a person or as a politician

you're branded as anti-semitic which is fucking crazy outrageous i'll tell you my college roommate um i love the guy like a brother and he's a very religious jew to the point where he's become a very prominent rabbi in uh in atlanta and he told me that um he was having a political discussion with somebody who didn't know him. And this person says, you sound anti-Semitic. And he says, actually, I'm very Semitic. I'm the rabbi of such and such. Taking the hat off like you see. It's like, what are you talking about? But this is where we found ourselves.

You can't criticize anything Israeli. Otherwise otherwise you're branded and that's just sick yeah but the tide will the unfortunately like you said people are so sick of that yeah a small group of people that they're gonna ruin it for everybody i think you're right and the tide it's gonna change that's right which which is of wild. So my goal is to have in people like you who can have some nuance on it and some experience with it. And then also I'm working on doing two podcasts with some one guy that I have to get who is extremely pro-Israel and who I like a lot. I think he makes some amazing points. And then another guy who I would say is pretty strongly anti-Israel, who I also like a lot, and I think makes some amazing points. And I would like to find some nuance in it because,

John, I can tell you one thing that's not going to happen. We're not going to make a two-state solution or peace in the Middle East on the Julian Tory podcast. It's not going to make a two-state solution or peace in the Middle East on the Julian Torrey podcast. It's not going to happen. I'm not under that delusion. So if we're going to have any effect whatsoever, it should just be that people get to hear the different arguments and see that this is far more complicated. Oh, boy. I'm going to push back on both of those guys. I think I mentioned to you one time, I ran into Dennis Ross, who was the special envoy for the Arab-Israeli peace process for years across presidents, across Clinton and George W. Bush.

I ran into him in the cafeteria at the State Department one time, and we sat together. And I asked him about new ideas, and he said, there are no new ideas. Every idea has been thought of, and it's been dismissed by one side or the other. So we've got to get everybody to the point where they realize that there are no new ideas and that we go back to some of these old ideas and start to negotiate. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I got to run to the bathroom real quick, John. We got to talk Russia, Ukraine, and some stuff on China.

We put a pin in. Sounds good. All right. We'll be right back. We are back on now, John. You pin in. Sounds good. All right, we'll be right back. We are back on now, John. You had a CIA joke. Is that right? I'm driving to this event.

And I'm on the way to the event. I see this sign that's nailed to a telephone pole. And it says, Talking Dog. I was like, Talking Dog? What could that mean? I wasn't sure. Talking Dog for sale. I'm like, okay, all right. I'm

interested enough. I'm going to see what this is about. I knock on the door. I said to the guy, I saw your sign. You have the talking dog for sale. He said, yeah, it's around back. I said, can I see it? He said, sure. I go around back and there's a dog there, just kind of a mutt. And I said, hello. And the dog goes, hello. And I said, you do talk. And he said, yes, I talk. And I said, I've never seen a talking dog before. And he said, oh, I've got kind of a long history. I used to work for the CIA. I said, I used to work for the CIA. I said, what did you do there? He said, I was in operations. I said, I was in operations too. What division were you in? He said, I kind of went back and forth between divisions. For example, he said, I went into Kim Jong-un's office and I sat there and I listened

to what they were saying. And I went back out and I told the CIA. They never suspected a dog. Wouldn't understand. And then I went to bin Laden's compound and I was listening to bin Laden, what he was planning. I went back to the CIA and I told them what bin Laden was planning. And now I can go into any president's office or palace or whatever. I listen and then I come back and report. I said, that's incredible. So I said, how much are you asking for this dog? He says, 20 bucks. I said, 20 bucks? Why so little?

He goes, that dog's a damn liar. He hasn't done any of that stuff. Damn it, John. Damn it. There was another joke he told us off camera too i wish you could tell on camera that one was good too god damn how do i even like transition into ukraine after that like so about the war where fucking a million people have died from talking dogs to the war all right yeah the war is not good yeah so another one that's like hard to talk about with people to me it seems like there's egg

on every possible face involved with this obviously russia ukraine the people funding both the u.s right i empathize of course with all the people on the ground who are dying and awful terrible situation obviously russia invaded very bad and i feel bad for the ukrainian people in that way it seems like their governments kind of left them behind yeah i would agree so many different people so many different governments are at fault here we really do have to go back to the 90s you know once the soviet union fell apart boris yeltsin told bill clinton that the russians were interested in joining NATO. And Clinton said, I don't think that's a very good idea. And then years later, Putin told Obama, listen, we're interested in joining NATO.

And Obama said, yeah, I don't think that's really a very good idea. Not going to happen so what they ended up agreeing on in um in negotiations was that nato would not expand to russia's borders which it immediately did right okay lithuania estonia latvia poland uh and they took it the russians took it. They would protest diplomatically and they would get the middle finger. So they didn't trust us. They didn't have reason to trust us. We promised them that NATO would not expand to their border. NATO immediately expanded to their border. It's an existential threat to the russians then a pro-russian prime minister is elected in ukraine and in 2014 we encouraged i'm using the word encouraged on purpose others would say we um implemented uh a coup a soft coup yeah a change of government you don't have to call it a coup,

a soft coup, a change of government. You don't have to call it a coup, whatever it was. Can you explain what happened there? You're talking about Maidan. I'm talking about Maidan. I mean, it depends really on who you believe, but there was this pro-Russian

prime minister, and we encouraged an uprising to deposeose him he was deposed and a pro-american prime minister took office the russians responded angrily as you might expect by taking crimea this is actually not as big a deal as the ukrainians might have you believe why not because krimia was only a part of ukraine since 1955 it was always a part of russia but it was given as a gift by the soviet leadership to the ukrainian people why did they give it to them as a gift um for their steadfastness during the second world war so 10 years after the war uh it was to show the people's quote-unquote appreciation for those ukrainians

who weren't nazis or nazi sympathizers um uh and because frankly it was the ukrainians that that withstood the brunt of the nazi that ended with the Battle of Stalingrad. So it's ethnically Russian, even though it belonged to Ukraine. So when they gave it to them, it's not like they said, we're going to take our people out there as well and you guys can fill it up. The same people stayed. Correct. Because the Soviet Union was all one country.

So it was the Ukrainian SSR, the Russian SSR, the Kazakh SSR. They were all part of the same country, Soviet Socialist Republic, right? That wasn't a problem until 2014 when the Russians go in and say, now it's Russian again, and there's nothing you can do about it. That became a problem for the United States. We started with the sanctions for the United States. We started with the sanctions and, you know, the propaganda began. And the Russians were steadfast. We're not leaving.

We're just not going to leave. And you guys overthrew the government of Ukraine. And so shame on you for installing this pro-American prime minister. You and I were talking offline before we started the podcast about the fact that so many Americans either ignore or don't know that every single year for decades, the United Nations has ranked Ukraine as one of the most corrupt governments on the planet. Right. They used to report it in the New York Times too. Yeah, they used to. They used to. Until it wasn't, you know.

Yeah. Politically correct, I guess. So the Russians finally had had enough. And three years ago, they invaded. And the way they invaded was they did it very poorly. Yeah. In that they came in from Belarus, which makes Belarus a combatant. It's a war crime in and of itself to use a third party to invade another country. Yeah.

Yeah. The United States responded much more quickly and much more severely than the Russians had expected. Sergei Lavrov, the Soviet, the Russian foreign minister said that, yeah, same thing, said that in the inner circle, in Putin's inner circle, they were surprised at how stinging the sanctions were. They were surprised at how quickly the U.S. was able to implement the sanctions. Now, here we are three years later, the sanctions was able to implement the sanctions now here we are three years later the sanctions mean nothing to the to the Russians of course they would like to sell energy in Western Europe but they've gotten around

it because what the Europeans used to buy the Indians and the Chinese now buy so no big deal they've survived the sanctions just perfectly fine um in the meantime volodymyr zelensky gets himself elected prime minister he has a reputation as being not as corrupt as his predecessors and you know funny thing about zelensky he was a very popular tv comedian yes he was an actor he was an actor and he had no political experience but people liked him because he was an actor. He was an actor. And he had no political experience, but people liked him because he was funny. And so he won the election and immediately becomes a wartime prime minister. Does he

really talk like that? Yes, I am Volodymyr Zelensky. I don't know. There's no way, right? It seems funny to me. Yeah, I think it is. He's like five foot two. He is. He's a little tiny guy. Yeah. That's why everybody makes fun of him when he wears a military uniform. He's never been in the military.

Yeah. He didn't reach the, you have to be this tall sign. Yeah, exactly. So the real fight is over something called the Donbass. It's primarily the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Now, this is Ukrainian territory, but most of the people who live there are ethnic Russians, and they speak Russian as their primary language.

I know some Donbass Ukrainians. My best friend is married to a Donbass Ukrainian, and they want to be Russians. Really? Yeah. Even now? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

They felt left out that they were sort of cut out of Russia when the borders were drawn, when the Soviet Union fell apart. Like, hey, hey, we're Russian. We're ethnic Russian. How come we have to be in Ukraine? So it's way more recent than Crimea even. Oh, yeah. No, no, no.

It happened in 1990. Yeah, but Crimea more recent than crimea even oh yeah no no no it happened in 1990 yeah but crimea was 55 oh yeah yeah i thought you meant crimean in 2014 yeah yeah yeah you're right so you know in the end to make a long story short something that many of us said, analysts, observers, regional experts, was this war could go on forever or the Ukrainians can concede Donbass and Crimea and then there's going to be peace. And in the end, whether they do it of their own volition or they do it because they're forced to militarily, that's probably what's going to happen. Donald Trump last week said, we're going to have peace. We can do it in one day. Donetsk and Luhansk, go with the Russians.

Crimea, go with the Russians. Peace is at hand. And Zelensky's like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. He's calling all blacks free, and then he's like, get back in here. Yeah. But you know, I mean, and then he's like, get back in here. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, this is a very Trump thing to do. He sees issues in black and white.

I see a deal. Exactly. It's all about a deal. But he will cut out the people that he thinks or doesn't think want to participate in the deal. Like, for example, the Abraham Accords. Peace in our time in the Middle East. Nobody told the Palestinians. It example the abraham accords peace in our time in the middle east nobody told the palestinians it's the same thing here he says a couple days ago zolensky's approval rating is four percent no it's actually 47 percent it is yeah it's not four

percent it says he getting the four you drop the makes it up. Yeah. Yeah, he just makes it up. It's 4%. He better hope he makes it to the next election. Well, that was a shot at a comment that Zelensky made when Trump called him a dictator the day before. He said, I'm not a dictator. And Trump said, there are no elections in Ukraine. Well, the answer is because the Ukrainian constitution says that if martial law has been declared by the prime minister and approved by the parliament, all elections are canceled. So is he a dictator? Kind of. But it's got the legality of the constitution.

That's a real loophole right there. It's a loophole. Yeah. I was always one of these people who tried to be consistent in that. Look, if we're going to be peace activists, right, we're going to go out there saying, oh, we should all be at peace and work together and diplomacy and all this stuff. Then we really have to be for peace. I was opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I'm opposed to the continuation of the war too. Enough. A million people have been killed.

What, do you want to kill another million and then really devastate the whole place? Nobody's going to win then. Let's just get this thing over with. Okay, you're going to take a little haircut territorially. All right. You'll live. You'll survive it. All right.

So do you think that other people and I'm not talking like the worst aspects of like the military industrial complex. I'm talking reasonable people who may be like, I don't know about that. Do you think that's that's the issue right there? The the Washington swells want to fight this thing to the last man. You know know this bad joke that the U.S. wants to fight to the last Ukrainian. Well, that's true. All we want to do is kill Russians, to paraphrase Gustav Avrakatis back in the 1980s. All I want to do is kill Russians.

They don't care how long it takes. And frankly, and I don't mean to be cynical, but this is a very good war for the military industrial complex. Oh, of course. Very good. We're going to get there. People are making lots and lots of money. Yes. So you really want that to go away?

What are the shareholders going to think? Well, that's the thing. the reasonable people want to push back because they feel like the precedent set of kowtowing a little bit to a guy like Putin is bad because then where will he stop? Right. Because he is a bulldog. Right. And then on the other side, you have exactly what you're talking about, which is – and there's two sides to this coin too maybe. Correct me if I'm wrong. The one side is it is the military industrial complex just coming in saying this is good for business.

We can make a lot of money. BlackRock can come in and fucking clean everything up. Cool. Everyone's happy. The other side of it is in the Cold War with like a China, forget Russia for a second. Their GDP is the size of Italy. No disrespect. China's GDP is creeping up right up on us we

obviously are competing on a lot of things around the world ukraine in that area is a very strategic area to make and i hate this word but to make these words a client state well it's the bread basket of europe it it it produces much of europe's uh grain and it also has rare earth metals yeah that we would have to either otherwise buy from the chinese or from the afghans i mean the congo only has so much that we that we need we got to get the rest of it somewhere else and the ukrainians have it and you said this is and i've always heard this as i point out but like this is a place that was always called corrupt oh my god and why did they call it corrupt what because russia was involved in their politics or a lot of other things oh no

no it's about cash it's about it's about money and i'll give you i'll give you a couple of examples i knew you would so i mentioned my best friend friend from college. He's married to a Ukrainian woman of Russian extraction. And her brother still lives in Ukraine. So my buddy was doing relatively well in life, decided to help his new brother-in-law out by going in uh with him on an investment they bought um they bought the first combination gas station car wash in donbass first one novelty so they placed a longer money too well that's a different conversation. So they buy it from this Ukrainian guy. And as soon as they affect the deal and they pay the money and they get the deed, the guy sues them and says, oh, they stole it from me. I want all the money back.

And he bribes a judge to rule in his favor oh boy so my my friend has never dealt with anything like this before he hires an attorney in in kiev says what should i do the guy's like oh we're so corrupt here what you're gonna have to do is sue him back and buy a judge at the next at the appellate level yeah at the appellate level so he does he bribes this judge at the appellate level and of course he wins but the original owner then sued counter sued and bought a judge in the supreme court. Oh, my God. So my friend enlists the American ambassador. And the ambassador writes a letter to the governor of the Donbass. And I'm sure they all laughed at him. And because my buddy wasn't willing to shell out another 25 grand

for his own Supreme Court judge, he just let the thing go. They lost everything they had. Wow. Second example, and this is very controversial and it really hits me in the gut. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church for a little bit more than 1,000 years. Okay? In the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, there is no difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians. So Hillary Clinton, when she was the Secretary of State, asked Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople if he would declare the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be what's called autocephalous,

it runs itself, no longer subject to the whims of the Russian patriarch. And the patriarch said, I'm not sure that's a good idea. They've been under Russian jurisdiction for a thousand years. Politically, I really can't do that. And Hillary allegedly said, would $20 million help make the decision? Well, the Greek Orthodox church is under the thumb of the Neo-Ottoman Turks. And so he said, yeah, we could use the 20 million. So she said, we have to give it to you through Ukrainianrainian banks that's fine so the state department wires 20 million probably through usa id now in retrospect sounds about right they wire the 20 million to some ukrainian bank they do whatever it is that they do behind closed doors

in ukrainian banks And then they send 15 million to the patriarch. And he says, wait a minute. Where'd the five go? This is supposed to be 20. Where'd the five go? And the state department said, oh, well, we don't know anything about that. All we know is we paid. So now you have to declare independence for the Ukrainian Orthodox church, which he did. And it immediately caused a near war situation between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church but even even for religious purposes religion religion military political however you want to say it I just made up a word the entire culture is corrupt. Every level of it is corrupt. So if we're sending $40 billion this time, $8 billion that time, $500 million the next time, another $15 billion the next time,

where the heck is that money going? Now, it's one thing when the Pentagon says, look, when we say we're sending this money, we're not actually sending cash. We're sending it in kind. So we take $40 billion, we give it to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, and then they send weapons, weapons systems, planes, whatever. Yeah, but how did this terrorist attack take place in Paris, for example, using a rifle that had a serial number indicating that it was assigned to the Ukrainian military. Because they're taking the weapons and selling them on the black market to gangsters and mafiosi and criminals and whatever. And just pocketing the money.

You know, it's like in Goodfellas. You buy a case of liquor. Goes right out the back door. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was in Goodfellas. You buy a case of liquor. It goes right out the back door. Yeah, exactly. That's crazy. That was in my head while you were saying this. That's it. That's corruption. Yeah. And I'll tell you,

as an American who really does not have a dog in this fight. That's not what I hear, John. Oh, yeah? I hear you're a Russian asset. Oh, I've heard that. I've heard that I'm a Russian asset. You want to deny that on the record? Yeah, I'm not a Russian asset. No, I don't work for the Russians. Okay, yeah. I hear you're a Russian asset. Oh, I've heard that. Yeah, I've heard that I'm a Russian asset. You want to deny that on the record? Yeah, I'm not a Russian asset. All right, good. Yeah.

I believe you. No, I don't work for the Russians. Okay. Continue. But as an American, I resent my taxpayer money just being squandered like that when we've got bridges here that are falling into the rivers beneath them, and our kids have to have bake sales to buy school supplies. And we've got some of the worst roads in the Western world.

How come the Chinese can afford all this stuff? And we can't. How come the Chinese have a bullet train that goes 300 miles an hour and we don't? We haven't replaced our rails since the Civil War. Did you know that? Well, they are replacing them in Hoboken right now. I'm not going to lie to you. They've really torn it up, haven't they? It's happening.

Wow. They are fixing them. They're just building a new tunnel north of Baltimore right now. The tunnel that they're using presently was built just before the Civil War, and they say that they've been unable to upgrade the Acela tracks because the tunnel is so narrow, they need a wider space. So for the first time in, what, 170 years, we're finally going to upgrade the train tracks. That's crazy. But look at it this way too. We spend more on the military than the next eight largest countries combined.

Yeah. That's not cool. I think it's way past where it needs to be. And again, once again, I see a middle ground here because I see people who are like defund all this shit i for one will say if there's one part of the military industrial complex that i like it's that we have bases all over the world yeah i like that if we need it the idea though that we have to say let's hit the war button instead of the let's hit the slow down button. And the diplomacy button is where I have a real problem. And that's right to the funding that you're talking about. If there's too much of it where, you know, we can't even track this stuff. The fucking Pentagon

hasn't passed an audit since the Vietnam War ended. You know, that's that's an issue. You're absolutely right. You know, year after year after year, Congress appropriates more money for the Pentagon budget than the Pentagon asks for. Like, we want $750 billion. No, we're going to give you $850 billion. You get a car. You get a car. Exactly. You get a car.

Thank you, Oprah. That's exactly right. and then we can't understand why the pentagon can't pass an audit yeah you know they had pricewaterhousecoopers there two years ago they did a two-year audit and then they just walked away we can't figure this out we can't figure this out there's no excuse for that no there's not there's not but we've been fun now we're we're literally recording just past exactly three years into this war yes because we're gonna put this episode out literally right away next couple days but you know the the funding i can see where you want to take advantage of the opportunity.

I draw the line at we're at a million lives. And like, no offense, the fact that Zelensky thinks that this is his decision to make is fucking insane because my money bought something. And it bought our right to make the fucking decision. You are right. 100%. You are right. We should get a say. You know, I made kind of –

Get a say. We need to make the decision. I made a joke when we first started talking today that, you know, this lefty is becoming a Donald Trump true believer. Trump just said the war is going to end, period. Like it or lump it, the war is going to end. Make whatever plans you need to make. And he's exactly right. And I'll tell you where he really won me.

He won me yesterday. And I didn't – it was just such a crazy push notification on my phone that I saw. I didn't believe it. He's going to cut the Pentagon budget by 8% a year for the next five years. Show me one Democrat who's ever even even proposed such a cut well they used to oh it's come full circle in the olden days of the of the 60s and 70s come full circle full circle where there are liberal yeah ideas that are now combat that that are now like opted by the right and the left's like no we, we've seen, I mentioned this on a podcast the

other day when I was in college in history class, we studied what was then called the watershed election of 1932. 1932 was a historic election in American politics, politics, Roosevelt, because the Republican party was the liberal party. It was the party of the North. It was the party of labor. And it was the Democrats that were the conservative Southern Party, the slaveholders. And they switched sides in the election of 1932. Franklin Roosevelt had been a Republican. He had been the governor of New York.

He had been the secretary of the Navy. And he was a Republican. Of course, his cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, was also a Republican. So he was economically a Republican, but the Republicans had led the country to the Great Depression. And so Roosevelt decided to run for president as a Democrat. He was Democratic governor. He decided to run as a Democrat, but to adopt a lot of the Republican Party's policies, especially on labor, right, and on poverty. And so that election in 1932 caused the two parties to switch sides ideologically. So we studied that for decades here we are my position is between 2016 and 2024 we've seen a slow motion watershed led by donald trump where the parties are switching sides again maybe not all the the way. Yeah, not all the way.

Like we saw in 32. Yeah. But it's the Republicans who are the anti-war party, for example. It's the Republicans who are the labor party. Listen, when 67% of organized labor families, union families, vote Republican. That's nuts. That's pretty nuts. I mean, Reagan wished he had numbers like that. And he won a majority. Not like Trump did. That's nuts. That's pretty nuts. I mean, Reagan wished he had numbers like that

and he won a majority, not like Trump did not like that. So couple that with the fact that the Democrats just have no idea what they're doing right now. It's just a state of chaos over there at the DNC. We don't even know who the democratic party's leaders are right now. There are four or five people claim to be the leaders of the DNC. We don't even know who the Democratic Party's leaders are right now. There are four or five people who claim to be the leaders of the Democratic Party. Are they? Really? You know, it's a handful of things. This is why I feel like it's a uniparty system,

because if you gave anyone with a normal head the power to go run the DNC tomorrow, they could win over the country immediately. Yeah. Cut the woke shit. Right. cut the woke shit right cut the trans shit cut the vaccine shit cut the fucking don't look at the border shit cut the endless war shit which i will correct one thing there is still a contingent of the republican party that does support yeah and they came out they reared their heads this week yes yes and then they're i forget what the sixth one is there's one more i have in there somewhere but these these are very common sense type things by the way stances that like obama had 10 years ago yes you know and they don't do that and what's now now it's like people are so pissed off about it that i see the hard whipsaw back and that could have some reverberations

that people including myself aren't gonna like and it's just the equal but opposite reaction physics law of life like this is what happens when you go too far with stupid shit people are going to see through it so true you know when i see someone with a ukraine flag in their bio i you know i can go through their next fucking 40 policies word for word and they probably don't even know what these policies mean but that's what they were told to do absolutely right and you know when when you see on the evening news hillary clinton literally kneeling in front of henry kissinger that's not a brag no henry kissinger's a war criminal yeah um when you see kamala Harris championing and announcing her endorsement by Dick Cheney, that is not a brag.

You forgot the IRS too. And the IRS. And Diddy Clients all the same week. Yes. Trifecta. Yes, seriously. Seriously. So I came from a democratic family.

My grandfather had a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on top of the TV all the years I was growing up until he died. I still have the picture. I was a third generation Democrat and I quit the Democrats in 2012. I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I agree with you that on most issues, we've got a uniparty, two sides of the same coin. You can sort of tinker around the edges with some differences, but for the most part, they're the same. They're getting farther apart now. Oh, let me correct that because I explained that wrong then. I'm not saying they're the same in what they say verbally.

No, no, I agree. What I'm saying is the reason I think there's a uniparty is because these people openly endorse the five or six stances I just gave and they know it's bullshit. Sure. And they know it's bullshit. Sure. And they know it's against the polls. So why are they doing it? It's the same thing with Israel. Yeah. They'll tell you privately, oh my God, what's happening in Gaza?

Oh my God, all these people, 100,000 people. They're almost all women and children. Oh my God, how's this happening? How's it happening? You gave Benjamin Netanyahu 186 standing ovations in his last two speeches. It was four times more per second than Kim Jong-un. There's something like that. Pull that.

See? Can we get that stat? Yeah. Outrageous. It's crazy. It is. It's crazy. And you know another thing is corruption with the Democrats.

I use this example all the time. I'm going to use it again how in the world can bernie sanders win 60 percent to hillary clinton's 40 percent in the west virginia caucus and the wyoming caucus and bernie sanders doesn't win a single delegate hillary clinton wins every single delegate yeah well how was that democracy he got fucked twice he took it, which really made me angry. Yes. He took it. Because like, you know, I disagree.

He obviously has some extreme policies. I'm not where he is for sure. But like I respected him as a guy who he had his finger on the pulse. He knew where the problems were with the average American. Like he and Donald Trump simultaneously simultaneously in 2015 2016 understood that and it's like i think he still understands a lot of those things yeah but he won't it won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients vodka soda natural flavors. So, what should we talk about?

No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. You know, this is a guy who's been listed as independent for so many years too like most of his life but it's like something's stopping him from saying the quiet part out loud what is that when i worked uh in the senate foreign relations committee i had this uh routine i i i'm an early riser, so I get to the office early. I put on a pot of coffee, and then I would go downstairs to the Senate cafeteria to get a bagel. And every single day, there's Bernie Sanders sitting in the very first table, inviting anybody who wants to sit to sit, talk about any issue they want to talk about.

Didn't even care if you were from Vermont or not. And the only thing he insisted on was that you call him Bernie. I love that. I loved it too. And then, you know, you know that old phrase from Animal House? Thank you, sir. May I have another? Well, it's like that's what he said to the DNC.

Yeah. Here, let's give you a whack across the ass. Thank you, sir. May i have another yeah well it's like that's what he said to the dnc yeah here let's give you a whack across the ass thank you sir may i have another something else is there something's going something else is there because i don't he to his credit he still when the when the dnc ran kamala and they were embarrassed by that they ran from public a lot of you know non-mainstream media they're like let's not do it and it cost him that's right he's the one guy who didn't he still went on these shows while this was all going on gave his like and i respect that but it's like what's the other part you know people ask me all the time who i like for uh 2028 and the answer is nobody. I don't like anybody.

Join the club. I hate to say that, but I really don't like anybody. Everyone's bought by somebody. It's just how it is. Oh, I'll tell you who's the worst offender. Who's the worst? It's got to be John Fetterman. I'll tell you.

I was a true believer in Fetterman because he's from Braddock, Pennsylvania. I'm from Newcastle, Pennsylvania. They're very close. I know where you're going with this, John. And he – I hate the shorts and the sweatshirts. Like, dude, have some dignity and put on a freaking tie when you go onto the floor of the Senate, the most important deliberative body in the world. Have some respect.

Anyway, I sent $50, which was a lot of money to me because I don't have $50. I have five kids. I'm still fighting legal issues. I sent him $50. And it's like he became a neocon as soon as he got elected. And I take my son to this Ohio State-Michigan State football game last winter. And he says to me, is that John Fetterman sitting down there?

It's like 15 rows in front of us. I said, I think it is John Fetterman. Unmistakable. So I shout, Fetterman! Hey, Fetterman! And he turns around and he doesn't see me, but he's like waving like this. And I said, I want my 50 bucks back, you coward!

And he just waving. And then he turns around and sits down again. My son's like, you sent him 50 bucks. I said, yeah, I thought he was a lefty and he's not, he's a fake just like everybody else in the democratic party. He got bought on some issues. He sure did. Yeah. I remember not too long ago, they were calling him, you know, jelly brain and all kinds of terrible things things because he had a stroke and he couldn't get a word out and he got killed in the debate because he got confused from his TBI. And then, no, I will die for Israel. I will stand with Benjamin Netanyahu. It's like I want my 50 bucks back, you liar.

I hear stuff like that and I'm like that's not natural it's not because it just it like i'm sure he was somewhat of a supporter but it got strong like there was like the chart overnight and they're like wait a minute off the charts and then he meets with trump and he's like mr president keep up your support of israel our israeli friends need you it's like are you kidding me it's just who are you it's strange man and like and and the thing that sucks is like not just the the israelis but like i have jewish friends who'd like people ask them about this and i'm like the fuck do i know i don't support this shit you know but we your society is now turning in on itself and this is one of the things and i worry about this all

the time this is one of those things because of what some of these guys are doing and then what some of our idiots say about it i just look i am cynical on this i've never had a politician at the national level on this show. One time I had a woman on who was running for attorney general of a state, but it was never discussed. She was not on about that. No one knows that that was the case. And she didn't bring it up. She's awesome.

She didn't bring it up at all. It's probably why she lost because she's maybe not a full-blown politician like the rest of them. But I've always stayed away from it because cynically I'm like, who wants that job? Who are the people who want to be in that role, especially at this point in our history and the way these people act, what they do? They're a cute little club that you know a lot better than me down in D.C. This is what I tried to touch on earlier too. In the 70s and even the 80s, there were some giants on Capitol Hill, true independent thinkers, true intellectuals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Barry Goldwater, Ted Kennedy, both parties. And now they're all midgets, all of them. Yeah, and it's like you go on OpenSecrets.com and you can see all the different companies paying them.

Oh, it's all laid out in black and white. It's crazy. Like even with some of the UFO stuff, like the reps who were blocking it, blocking like the Schumer Amendment and whatever, were the guys who represent where Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is. And I forget what the other one is, but the one down in Alabama. And it's like, yeah, no shit. They're blocking this. Like, look at who's, you know what I mean? Like, come on.

Like, there should be some sort of rule. Like, all right, we're going to vote on X today. If you are funded by anyone that has to do with X, you cannot vote on this. Yeah. And then they all sit down and no one would vote. There was a scene in the Simpsons movie where Congress is going to vote on the bill to save Springfield, right? And just as they're going to vote, a congressman stands up. He says, Mr. Speaker, I want to add an amendment to appropriate $5 million for the perverted arts.

And so the speaker says, okay, all those in favor of the Save Springfield, fund the perverted arts bill, say aye. The nays have it. The bill loses. That's Congress today. Yeah. I was on a UFO podcast yesterday. Oh, you were

What podcast A guy named Chris Chris I'm going to find it We're going to get it He's a good guy Let's see He's a former F-16 pilot

And that's how I saved it in my Oh is he the Air Force Paranormal Chris? Yes. Is that it? Yeah I've seen him on Twitter. Nice guy so we were talking about this and he said essentially the same thing that you know just as it looks like this information is

going to be released somebody kills it and he said I said well what about these videos that came out two years ago? He said no all of those were leaked. None of those were part of the release. There were documents that released, but none of the videos were released. Somebody just proactively leaked them.

Yeah. You never saw any of that stuff when you were back in CIA, did you? No. Were you curious about it? I asked about it. Who'd you ask? I asked my boss and he said, Oh, he said, that's the first question that all of us have when we get here. And he said, I'll tell you what they told me when I got here. All that shit's at the Pentagon. We don't have anything to do with it. I don't know. I'll tell you, man, I saw something when

I was young that I'll never forget. What was that? My mom and dad bought a restaurant in Sharon, Pennsylvania. I grew up in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. It's about 20 miles away, 15 miles away. But to get from Newcastle to Sharon, you have to go through Amish country. And it's very, very dark because there's no electricity. The Amish live without electricity. So my dad and I worked midnight shift on Fridays and Saturdays. So we'd leave the house around 10, get there at 1030, start working 11, 11 to 7. And we're driving through Amish country, just the two of us. And there's this brilliant flash of white light. We both looked up and then there's a second flash and then a third flash. And then this

trapezoid lights up. It's got these bright orange lights in the four corners, bright enough that it illuminated the whole thing, whatever it was. My dad pulls over. He's like, what is that? I don't know. We get out. We're looking at it. This guy pulls up behind us, gets out of his car. He's like, what is that thing? And we're like, we don't know. And it's just hovering there and it's completely silent. So as we're looking at it, and this lasted, I'm going to say this lasted a good 10 seconds. And then she goes like that at this fantastic speed that I've never seen before since and then it was gone

we get back in the car we start driving to sharon i said to my dad should we call somebody should we like call the cops or something i was 17 at the time and he says and tell him what we saw a flying saucer and then it flew away. People are going to think we're nuts. And so we didn't tell anybody. I told my mom the next day. And my dad's like, yeah, it's true. That's what we saw.

You think that was a DARPA weapon? It could have been. Yeah. That's my inkling on a lot of this stuff. You know, at first people said like my friends they first they want to know if i had been drinking which we did a lot of back in the day i said no i wasn't drinking i was with my dad they said what had to be it had to be a balloon right and i said well that's what i that's what i would have thought except this fantastic speed that it took off with i've never seen anything like it from a

standstill making no sound just like that it was gone so i said i i don't know what the heck it was i'm not saying it was little green men i honestly don't know what it was it very well could have been some darpa thing i mean we don't have any military bases in the area but who knows i don't know did you ever have any look through or not even look through but did did things that were happening at darpa ever come up in any of the work you did yeah uh only peripherally there was there was a point at the end of the first golf war where i had to get a q clearance which is, which is a nuclear clearance. They're very tightly held.

You get a Q clearance and it's only good for like a week or two weeks. And it's only because you absolutely positively need to have this classified nuclear information. So I got this Q clearance and they sent me out to Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California. And so I was able to participate in this meeting seminar kind of thing about advanced weaponry. And it was because I had covered the Iraqi experimental weapons program and the guy who was in charge of it. So there were some DARPA people there. They weren't very open with what they were doing. They spoke in generalities even though everybody was cleared and we were all cleared for Q.

But I remember that was the first time I had ever heard of DARPA. I had been at the agency for a year and a half. You'd never heard of it before? Nah, never. I had never heard of it. And I went back and there was another guy in my branch who had had a Q clearance. He's now like one of the top six people in the CIA. And I said, I said, have you ever heard of this DARPA? And he's like, Oh yeah, DARPA. They're, they're working 20 years in advance. Yeah. They're way ahead of anything that you and I can even think of right now. I've heard 30 to 50 from people before. That wouldn't surprise me. That wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. Yeah.

They, and it's funny too. They've, they've got these little nondescript buildings all over the Washington area. There are no signs or anything. Like there's no sign that says DARPA headquarters right there everywhere. In the Roslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, near my house, there's kind of an ugly 60s office building. And it's across the street from a burrito place and a Starbucks. And there's a little historical marker in front of it.

And it says in the historical marker that this was the headquarters of DARPA. It says what DARPA was in the 1970s. And it was in this building that the internet was invented. In the 70s. Yeah, maybe earlier. They're just telling you the 70s. I mean, because, you know. Well, the first internet-like thing that they came up with was like 58.

It was early, early. What happened there? Yeah. I don't know about that. It was just the very first programs where they thought, yeah, you know, maybe this computer can talk to that computer. Let's try to figure that out. But it wasn't ready for any kind of implementation until the 70s and then it went public you know what 88 89 yeah if that crazy yeah i just wonder about

the shit that they got there and like yeah i think a lot of the i think a lot of the ufo stuff is related to that and it's and it's protecting that and i understand that and i hope we're the only ones who are 30 or 50 years ahead i hope maybe we're in a situation where china's you know so far behind in the race that they actually think they're winning and that's the goal here if so you know touche they're doing a nice job with the disinfo but it's hard to it's hard to judge it all in here because i'm a podcaster in a studio in jersey right like i'm not sitting in these bathrooms you got to do your best to just sit across from the guys and wonder what's bullshit and what's not yeah you know yeah even even with pretty much anyone but when it gets

to the weird shit like that yeah but to go back to ukraine one of the things that like i remember when this war broke out i did some content with my friend David Satter who is – that was episode 92 and then I had him in again for episode 133. And he was effectively the preeminent biographer and psychologist in the Western world on Vladimir Putin. He was assigned the bureau chief in Moscow for the Financial Times in 1976. He was kicked out of the Soviet Union towards the end of the 80s, still reported on Russia. They had, after it flipped over to Russia, he was like the last one to be let back in.

And then I'm sure this has changed now. I don't know for a fact, but I'm sure this has changed now since the war broke out. But prior to the war breaking out, he is the only western journalist who was ever kicked out of russia so putin kicked him out in december 2013 he was in ukraine headed back into russia where he lived most of the time and the fsb said there's like a famous phrase i forget what it is and they're like you can't come back in putin said no. So, you know, it was because he reported on the bombings of the apartment buildings in 1999. It was him. And then the other guy who got whacked in Britain,

what the hell is his name? Litvinenko. He was the FSB insider guy. They were the only two. And he was the only one in the Western world reporting on this. So I say all this because, you know, the thing that gets lost in all the unfortunate stuff around Ukraine and like the corruption is that like, I've always been on team Putin's not a good guy, you know, and the shit he does is crazy. This is a guy who's held onto power for now 26 years. He's rewritten the constitution a few times to do it. He kills anyone that's a problem. He created an oligopoly that's effectively like a different type of Soviet Republic afterwards.

And he kills journalists. He kicks out voices that he doesn't like. And he killed his own people to stay in power. And David's reporting on that is incredible. I highly recommend people go check it out. So when David talks about this war, like he's so Teamraine and i get it because he's lived in the middle of it this guy has killed his friends yes but like there still has to be the balance here between yes putin's a bad guy yes putin does all this bad shit yes nato's right to push back against that

but maybe nato takes it too far that it causes a bad guy to be like do bad guy shit you know what i mean that's my position yeah i think that's very fair that's my position i agree putin's a bad guy always has been i wouldn't trust any former intelligence officer with running a country in any country um i wouldn't want the cia director to be my president not a chance uh but the united states does sometimes push too hard you know i saw um uh richard blumenthal this morning senator richard blumenthal of connecticut uh complaining on cnn that that russia um has invaded ukraine russia has invaded georgia russia has invaded afghanistan and i was like buddy don't you read the new york times what about iraq afghanistan somalia libya what do you think we do all the time? I agree he's a bad guy. Yeah, yeah. But sometimes we do bad shit that push him to do bad things.

But in our defense on those, is the objective supposed to be that we then own the land and call it USA versus this is literally on his border and he wants to take Ukraine and make it a part of Russia? That is a difference, no? Yeah, sure. There's a difference. But if we put it into perspective, if the Canadians, you know, occupied something that we genuinely thought was our believed was ours and and its residents said, oh, my God, we wish we were Americans. It gets interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, it does get interesting. It's it's one of those those things it's like it's not really a great solution but i hope it is more towards like what trump's saying which is like let's get this fuck over get it over with it's costing us a fortune and a million people have died already let's be done with it you know i mentioned to you in the last time in the last podcast that we did that at the cia we used to we used to criticize the george w bush, we used to criticize the George W. Bush administration. We used to criticize the Bush State Department specifically because we would say that we had never seen a State Department work so hard to not talk to people. Right? Diplomacy was forbidden.

We're not going to talk to the Iraqis. We're not going to talk to the Syrians. We're not going to talk to the Libyans. We're not going to talk to the Afghans. Who are we going to talk to? Right? I mean, isn't it your job to be talking to these people to try to defuse powder keg situations? Joe Biden was exactly the same way. We don't talk to the Russians. We don't talk to the Chinese. We don't talk to the Iranians. We don't talk to the Cubans. You're showing your hand when you do that right i suppose i'm i'm an equal uh an equal opportunity hater people say yeah yeah but if we're gonna if if we're serious about peace then we need to have a robust and healthy state department that's engaging our adversaries in in diplomacy you know, I was on this Iranian news show a couple days ago.

Damn it, John. You're hitting all the ones that are giving you a bad name. I talk to everybody because I hope I can help to explain some things and talk sense to people. And I said the same thing. But I told them, listen, you guys are just as bad. You don't want to talk to us. And so we end up having confrontations in the Persian Gulf. We have confrontations at the United Nations. We have confrontations in Lebanon or in Yemen. We have certainly military confrontations in Iraq because we won't talk to each other. That's what we should be doing, talking to each other that's what we should be doing talking to each other do you think talking to each other would stop them though from because like this is one place i'm gonna see it from israel for sure like they do fun hezbollah sure they do fun oh yeah they're open about it yes right like do you think that would stop if we talk with them no i don't but maybe talking could lead

to real dialogue which then could lead to something that we could negotiate perhaps like a talking with kim young-un kind of thing yeah where you just keep his hand off the button do you think do you think iran do you think we're trying to overthrow the iranian regime right now i do actively yes you think we got people in there no but the israelis sure do well i know that they probably got the third ranking fucking person in the government they probably do yeah the saudi um the saudi uh crown prince muhammad bin salman just two or three days ago uh offered to mediate between the white house and uh and the iranians which is great because Pazeshkin has said publicly that he's willing to talk to the Americans.

But Khamenei has said he is not, and he's the supreme leader. Yeah. So presidents come and go in Iran just like they come and go in the United States. It all depends on what the supreme leader says. Why is MBS offering that, though when when saudi and iran have been engaged in literally like a hot war in yemen oh and elsewhere and you know this is a very mbs thing to do nobody hated the iranians as much as the saudis yeah now maybe the bahrainis too but the bahrain's pretty much a a vassal state of saudi arab I love when you say Bahrain. Bahrain. Al-Bahrain means the land of the two seas.

So the Saudis and the Iranians hate each other. And the Saudis were reasonably petrified of the Iranians. The population of Iran would dwarf the population of Saudi Arabia. The Iranian military is always a threat, even if it's old, even if it lacks spare parts, just the sheer number of people in the Iranian military. And the Iranians have a pretty decent Navy. So the Saudis have been petrified of Iran. This goes back decades. And MBS, when he became crown prince, for better or for better for worse said you know why don't we just make peace with the iranians and then we won't have to worry about them

and that's that's what he's done and now they've exchanged ambassadors and pesekian went to riyadh and mbs is going to go to tehran. And now they have cultural exchanges. And you can travel freely back and forth between the two countries. And they're not worried about the Iranians anymore. Like at all, though? Well, no, they'll always be a little bit reserved. And this is why the Saudis have long sought nuclear technology. Since the 80s, they've been seeking nuclear technology, just in case they need to protect themselves against nuclear Iran.

But now they're in a position where their relations with the Iranians are good enough that they can offer up mediation with the United States. I can't believe the Saudis don't have nukes, all that money. I would not be surprised if the Saudis had nukes. Right. They don't necessarily have a delivery system, but I would not be surprised if they had nukes. We know that they've been seeking nukes since the 80s. We know that they've spoken to the Pakistanis about it, and the Pakistanis are joined at the hip with the Saudis. To the point where the Saudis have been so generous with the Pakistanis that they named the city of Faisalabad Faisalabad after King Faisal because he gave them so much money. They love, love, love the Saudis in Pakistan.

And the Saudis see them as, you know, you pat them on the head and tell them to clean the kitchen. Good boy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, it's been worse between them, certainly. I read a book last year, and I forget the name of it right now, on Mohammed bin Salman. It was really good. I want to shout those.

Can we Google books on MBS? I'll be able to see the cover and know it, unless he. But about, like, his rise and the shit he does. And, like, I've long been very familiar with the Khashoggi story. Oh, sure. And what he did there. I mean he's not a good guy. No, he's not. He's murderous. Yeah, but we seem to be somewhat cool with him.

Now we are, yeah. Why? Joe Biden made a couple of major errors in relations with the saudis uh mbs had ordered the the assassination of jamal khashoggi and they didn't just assassinate him they did it in the most brutal freaking fashion while he probably watched on the screen i think i think he probably did yeah but there there were people in the saudi consulate in uh in ist Istanbul who could hear him screaming as they were chopping him up. And then they never found the body.

They think that the Saudi intelligence service probably put the pieces of his body in separate bags and threw them in the trash or threw them down wells in Istanbul. Well, they have video of them carrying bags out too and it could have been pieces of it i think it probably was yeah so joe biden said he's a murderer he's no good you know any insult you could think of during the the campaign in 2020 biden lobbed it at mbs and then

he won and then oil prices went up and then he had to go hat in hand. And I went to Saudi Arabia for Biden's meeting with MBS. I went to cover it. I was working for Sputnik at the time. So I went to cover it. And I got in the meeting and everything. And I'll tell you, one of the things I reported, I'm very proud of this. So they're in the Royal Majlis, right?

This gigantic room where everybody's sitting in a semicircle. And those of us in media are standing against the back wall here. So the king's in the middle next to Biden. And then it's like the foreign minister, the ambassador, the deputy foreign minister, this guy, that guy, hangers on. And MBS is all the way over here on the side. And I noticed that the king has an iPad on his lap. It's discreet, but he's got this iPad and he keeps looking down at the iPad.

And I thought, that's kind of funny. What the heck could he be looking at on an iPad while he's talking to the president? And then I happened to look over at MBS and he's got an iPad. And he's typing his father messages. And then his father would look down because his father's demented he would look down and just read what mbs told him to say you know it was mbs that was

running the media are you like looking around like has anyone else seen this i know right so i reported it that night like i can't be the first person that's ever seen this and then a buddy of mine at the agency called me because he had seen the report and he said you saw the ipad huh and i said i did how long has been that has that been going on he said since the beginning i don't even think the king realizes he's the king yeah yeah i believe that i mean the whole thing about what he did with the with the ritz carlton hotel right and my ex wife was in the ritz carlton then she happened to be there during, right. And my ex-wife was in the Ritz-Carlton then. She happened to be there during the coup. Your CIA ex-wife. Yeah.

Well, no, she's former CIA. She's with some defense contractor. Yeah, I'll bet. Yeah, well, take that for what it's worth. But – You're not allowed to talk about her. I'm not allowed to talk about her. Okay.

So she happened to be in the hotel when the coup took place and they moved everybody to the Four Seasons. Yeah, everybody. And that was – he basically went after – because it's an extensive royal family. He made it – He arrested all of his cousins who could possibly pose a threat to him, beginning with Mohammed bin Nayef. This was important because Mohammed bin Nayef was the golden boy of the saudi royal family why was he the golden genuinely good guy smart educated i think it was georgetown i can't recall now i think it went to georgetown but anyway he was the head of the saudi intelligence service

and nobody worked as closely with the american government as Mohammed bin Nayef. He was the son of Prince Nayef. Nayef for decades was the minister of interior, and then he became the crown prince. Did Nayef become king? No. Nayef died before he could become king to the best of my knowledge. I think that's right. I'm trying to remember it. Is that right?

Because it went through. Yeah, he died as crown prince Oh, no. Oh, yeah, Mohammed bin I have said alive. He's in jail, but he's still in jail. Yeah but his father was I Forget what he was. Yeah. Yeah put put knife been up the Lizzie's there. he is. Yeah, until his death in June 2012. Yeah, he was the crown prince. He died as crown prince.

Yeah. And so when he died, Salman became king. Well, crown prince. Or no, Salman the father became king. Became king, right. So the Saudis had this really fucked up kind of succession. So the founder of the country was King Abdulaziz. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks.

More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash theiporter to learn more. They call him Ibn Saud, the father of Saudi Arabia. It's blood and oil, by the way. Alessi, that was the name of the book. I just want to give those guys a shout out.

It was two authors. Cool. Yeah, that one right there. Bradley Hope and Justin Schneck. Great book. Excellent. Sorry, go ahead, John. So there was no succession plan when the old man died, but he had like 115 sons.

So King Saud was his eldest son. King Saud became king, but he had mental problems. And so he was overthrown by his brothers and exiled to Egypt. And then Faisal became king. And then Faisal was assassinated by a deranged cousin. And so Khalid became king. And then after Khalid died, Fahd became king. After Fahd, then came Abdullah. After Abdullah came, Sultan died before he became king. And then Nayef died anyway. And then Salman became king. So for years, Saudi watchers were saying, well, they're going to run out of brothers sooner or later, right? You can't just keep doing this brother to brother. It's got to be father to son at some point. So that point came when Mohammed bin Nayef was named crown prince. People were like, okay,

it's the next generation now is going to take power. Mohammed bin Nayef is the best possible choice in the West. We love him. He's smart. He's shrewd. He was the head of the Saudi intelligence service. And he went to Georgetown. I'm pretty sure it was Georgetown. My conspiracy brains are tingling.

Go ahead. He had a weekly majlis. Do you know what a majlis is? They call it a diwaniya in Kuwait, but all the other Arab countries call it a majlis. Do you know what a majlis is? They call it a diwaniya in Kuwait, but all the other Arab countries call it a majlis, where you have sort of an open house. Let's call it an open house. Okay.

So if I'm, let's say I'm a young Saudi guy and I'm going to get married. I don't really have very much money because I'm not a royal family member. So I go to the majlis and I say, Your Highness, you kiss him on the hand and on the shoulder to show your fealty. Your Highness, I'm getting married. I'm a member of this family. I'm a member of this tribe. I'm getting married. I don't have any talk to this guy and get him living room furniture. The next guy comes up.

Oh, your highness, thank you for seeing me. My car broke down and I'm a taxi driver and I need a new car. Abdullah, give this guy a new car. That's a modulus in Saudi Arabia. I got to go to one of those. Shit. Well, there's a guy waiting patiently in line. Unbeknownst

to Mohammed Benayef or anybody else, he had a bomb stuffed up his ass. Literally, he stuffed the whole bomb up his ass. And when he gets to the front of the line, he detonates it. Oh my

God. He blows himself to a thousand pieces, but he almost kills Mohammed bin Nayef. Oh, he shoved it up his ass and didn't even get to kill the guy? Tough way to go. He should have grabbed onto him. Yeah. You know, like they did with Gandhi. But anyway, that's a whole different thing.

Oh, jeez. Sean's like, good kill. Good kill. Yeah, good clean kill. So it made him a hero in Saudi Arabia. The guy was al-Qaeda. He had come from Yemen. They had been planning this for months.

The bomb was specifically designed to go up the guy's ass. It was incredible what craftsmanship. And it was, oh, my God, they can't believe he survived. So the Saudi people are like, oh my God. And then he gets named crown prince. They said, oh, he's going to be the greatest. Everybody loves him. He's a national hero.

The CIA invites him to the headquarters to give him the highest medal anybody can get because he survived this attack from Al-Qaeda. And then he goes back and he becomes crown prince. And then he gets overthrown by Mohammed bin Salman. And not just overthrown, but placed under arrest. Yeah. And then there were several other cousins that were like, hey, wait a minute, Mohammed bin Salman. You can't do this.

We're with Mohammed bin Nayef. Well, one of them dies in an airplane crash a couple days later. The other one dies in a mysterious one-car accident on the Riyadh to Jeddah Highway. And now there's nobody that can challenge MBS. How did a guy that young with that many other players who could be lined up against him, including a dude who's like in charge of the intelligence service, successfully get everyone on his side? Through fear is really what it came down to when it when it became clear in those early days that he was willing to kill his own cousins just because they might someday pose a challenge to him yeah everybody backed off um there's a a famous prince um uh al-walid bin talal uh famous at least

in the united states because he owns a quarter of city bank and he owns you know half of uh of berkshire hathaway and guy's a billionaire more than most people can count um he happened to be in riyadh when the coup took place and he was close to Mohammed bin Nayef. And so they grabbed him too. And they said, you could be executed as a Western spy. You can be executed as a supporter of Mohammed bin Nayef, or you can give us half of your money. And he gave him half the money? You bet he did. And then he ran back to the united

states as quickly as he could that is it's a whole it's like the hunger games over there that's exactly what it's like it's fucking crazy and yet they have so much economic power see nobody expected there to be this kind of a psychopath in the Saudi line of succession. Why not? Well, because the Saudis historically have been very, very consultative. They were famous for this, where it's actually written down in a family agreement where – and they have a name for it, and the name escapes me now. The something council. i forget now um where the you know the 25 or 30 senior most princes the king dies and then all the senior

most princes get together and they say okay well the next brother becomes king so who's going to become crown prince? Because they have skipped brothers. Some brothers have said, it's not, this isn't for me. I'd rather, I'd rather live in Paris, you know, or London. I don't want to be the crown prince. And they say, fine. They just skip them over.

So they, they consult on all these major personnel decisions until MBS. MBS said, no, I'm the crown prince. And whoever doesn't like it is going to get a bullet between the eyes. And then he actually did it. Yeah. He grew up like they never suspected he was going to be that kid because he was like the spoiled rich kid who played video games all the time. But what these guys were saying in their book is that when he was a teenager, he would, he had access to his father.

So he would start to just sit in on meetings and watch. And he learned how power was wielded and actually picked up on those things. And the leap that I made with this is that perhaps cause he played, like he played a lot of video games, like they were saying like a lot. And perhaps because he went into these of video games. Like they were saying, like a lot. And perhaps because he went into these fake worlds and he didn't have any stakes in his life because he has everything he ever wants. There were some other weird psychological things going on with him, like with punishments and stuff like that. Like he would act weird.

But like I think he got desensitized to the world, my guess, through the video games and kind of living within that. And then saw the application of power in the real world and kind of meshed the two, and he doesn't feel anything. He has absolutely zero empathy. He's a total sociopath. That's exactly what it is, sociopathy. I was invited to a dinner once in Riyadh. I was serving there in 91,

and there was this guy that I was friendly with at the foreign ministry. He was just a fun, nice guy, you know, a guy that you had a good time hanging out with. He even invited me to his house for dinner, which was unusual for a Saudi because I got to meet his wife. She was unveiled. And that was a very big deal. It really showed friendship. So we're invited to this dinner. And it's at one of the palaces.

I don't even remember. Was she hot? No. I love how you said that. No. Poor guy. They were probably first cousins too in retrospect. Anyway, Fahad was the king. He was not at the dinner dinner but there were a lot of princes at the dinner

and he and I went out onto the balcony he wanted to smoke a cigarette we're out there laughing and joking and then this big fat barrel of lard comes out onto the balcony and he snaps to attention my friend does

and I recognize this kid as Azuz he was Prince Abdelaziz Fahd, the favorite son of King Fahd. I had never seen Azuz before. I'd seen pictures of him. He had to be 450 pounds. It was disgusting. Whoa. Remind me to come back to that. Okay. In a second. So one of the things about Saudi culture is it's considered to be effeminate to wear jewelry. Men don't wear jewelry. The only thing you're allowed to wear is a wedding ring. That's it. So in order to show wealth or good taste, all Saudi men have a really good watch and a really good pen. So this guy had like a thousand dollar waterman, you know, whatever

special pen that he got in Geneva or whatever. And Azuz comes out and he snaps to attention and he says, your majesty. And I said, I said, hello, princess, prince. I didn't call him Azuz. That was his nickname. I said, hello, Prince Abdulaziz. John Kiriakou from the American embassy. Didn't shake my hand.

Didn't even make eye contact with me. And Azuz says, I like your pen. And my friend says, oh, thank you. And he takes it out, you know, and looks at it. And Azuz says, I'll take it now. And then just takes it, puts it in his own pocket and then goes back into the dinner. And my friend is looking at me and I said, what a fucking asshole. You didn't say that too loud, did you? Not too loud. Yeah, I was going to say.

And he just shook his head. I thought he was going to cry. But that's how these guys are. Yeah. They're used to shitting on people. Yep. And you have to just take it. You said you wanted to come back to the fact it was 450?

Azuz was so freaking fat. They were all fat like this. It was ridiculous. So when they renovated Dahran Airport, I was stationed in Bahrain at the time. This was 94,

so it was three years later. When they renovated Dahran Airport, they had to special order double-wide escalators because when the Saudi royal family members would get on the escalators,

they would have to stand sideways because their asses couldn't fit on the escalator. So they're all double wides. It's pretty sorry. It's sorry and it's just – I would recommend people read that book just because – Excellent. Yeah, it's a wide – it's crazy. If you want the sort of deeper background of the Royal family as a family, beginning with the fight to consolidate the Arabian peninsula,

the house of Saud is an absolute classic. It was written in the eighties. Yeah. Absolute classic. Okay. It was the first book I read before my first trip to Saudi Arabia. When was your first trip there? 91,

90, 90. You were, trip to Saudi Arabia. When was your first trip there? 91? 90. 90. And that was when you were the Saddam Hussein historian for CIA, right? Were you going there on something related to that? Yeah. The Kuwaiti royal family had been pushed out of Kuwait from the invasion and they were relocated to Taif right outside of Mecca. So I went too. Okay. It's coming back to me now. Babysit. Well, john one one last thing before we get out of here today one topic we we can't leave hanging out there is china because it's a you know this one's like kind of a weird one because it was like one of those things you couldn't talk

about like four years ago or five years ago it's like don't talk about china and then i'll never forget this i've told this story a few times, but I was talking with Danny Jones. This is like June 2022. So the Ukraine war. It was three months, four months. Yeah, it's just gotten started. And I said, you know, I saw something crazy today. One of the kind of old school general think tanks in DC posted a scathing paper on China.

I was like, huh. And this was also at a time where there were some podcasts that were happening on our shows where some guys were starting to talk about china who had some connections and they were doing it pretty loudly and proudly and i'm like i think this is gonna shift and i'm telling you overnight like it had probably already started it suddenly became like youtube wanted that content you know the platform was one of the and they were pushing the shit out of it wow really i look at china and i see they got a huge gdp they got a huge population they got a crazy government they got a strong military and they're buying a lot of soft power around i might even call hard power around the world and these are all problematic but

sometimes i do hearken back to the is this just like we're trying to overplay an enemy so that we have one so we have something to focus on or do you do you think that they're the full-blown legit like threat to american sovereignty through things like bricks and stuff like that i think maybe it's somewhere in the middle i hate to be I hate to be wishy-washy about it. I like that. The reason I say that is because if you look historically, Tibet aside, the Chinese have never invaded another country anywhere in the world.

They had a border skirmish with the Indians. They had a border skirmish with the Vietnamese that lasted a couple of days. With the Indians, it was longer, a couple of days with the indians it was longer couple of weeks but tibet aside i say tibet aside because they the chinese genuinely believe tibet is chinese right it's not an independent shouldn't be an independent country so they took it in the 50s i think it was 53 and they kept it um but the chinese just don't interfere militarily in other countries. They do have a very small base that ironically they share with us in Djibouti.

And there's like a fence down the middle and this side is American and that side is Chinese. It's the weirdest, craziest thing. That's got to be awkward. The Chinese have all their hangar doors open and ours are closed and i said to one of the guys i said hey how come ours are closed what's in there and he's like dude i can't tell you what's in there i said i i know what's in there i'm just pulling your leg so um anyway we don't i don't think we need to worry about the chinese militarily not the way you hear you know senators and congressmen talking about it. Why not?

Because they just don't have an imperialist past. Yeah. Now, what we do have to worry about very much is they are masters at the use of soft power. Yes. Masters. Belt and Road Initiative. Oh, my God. It's absolutely brilliant.

And talk about a country with a long-term view. Yes. Oh, my God. They look decades and decades out. it's absolutely brilliant and talk about a country with a long-term view yes oh my god they look decades and decades out you know i'm a i'm a dual u.s greek citizen right i take my greekness and my greek citizenship very seriously so i'm in greece and the greeks are having these economic problems and people are like fucking chinese came and bought the the port of piraeus the port of thessaloniki and the port of iraklion crete that's what all my friends say too yeah all my greek friends yeah they just they just come in and buy everything oh we don't want

you guys to lose your jobs we know you're broke we'll buy it you just keep working the way you work well now everybody's indebted to the Chinese. Yeah. Look, every highway that's been built in Africa in the last 10 years has been built by the Chinese. Yes. Same thing in Yemen. I remember the first time I was in Yemen. In 1991, the Chinese were building highways there. It's like thousands of Chinese, and they're all doing road construction. But they were using dynamite to dynamite through some rock to build this road.

And the tribe, they still had nomadic tribes there. They were furious at all this noise. And so one day, this Chinese, I don't know what he was, a corporate leader, the ambassador, somebody, some senior Chinese guy came in a helicopter and they're doing a ceremony and dedicating the, you know, cutting the ribbon and dedicating the highway. And here the tribe had tied ropes to the helicopter and they tied the ropes to like a dozen camels and they're dragging the helicopter into the desert to punish the chinese for making all that noise building the road whoa there's even a monument on one of the hills overlooking sana it's a monument to the chinese road workers who were killed by tribesmen while they were building the roads the yemenis had it

up to here with the chinese sounds like it but then the africans were like hey you're welcome to come here we're happy to take your money and that way i can't pay it back no and the chinese don't expect it back but instead if you can't pay it back how about yeah you let us stay or you let us process all of your rare earth metals because most of the rare earth metals that are mined are not processed on site. There's so much waste involved that you can't make money. But the Chinese have so much money that they're happy to take the loss on the ore processing because it sort of buys them an in with the countries that

mine it you know you go to you go to congo for example or whatever they're calling it now i guess it's congo and the biggest embassy in the country is the chinese embassy it's not the american yeah or the russians used to be but it's the chinese yeah africa is like ground zero it is it's everywhere when you talk with sean ryan i want you to talk with this about him or talk about this with him we'll do because i i know like he feels really strongly about this stuff a couple years ago when he was on my podcast we talked about it a bunch he's like john is here john is there john is everywhere they are and they are and it's hard to deny that and it's like it happened without anybody noticing

and then by the time the international community noticed it's too late they're everywhere and how do we roll that back we don't know well we also like accept the fact that they won't integrate our tech companies in there but they integrate all theirs here it's like this double standard it is a double standard and then there's even soft power with like the weapons of the mind like you know this is the one place where like the communism works i that makes me sick to say that but like with their kids yeah on their tiktok it fucking shuts off at nine o'clock at night first of all and secondly they're getting science videos and they're getting like like good videos here it's 24 7 and kids are getting titty videos yes and and brain melting videos oh so

they're using our freedom and democracy against itself and in this one anecdotal example, they're using their lack of freedom for themselves in a long-term investment. Stuff like this bothers me. And your earlier point about fentanyl should not be understated.

That's not an accident. I'm going to have this guy, Ben Westhoff in here. He did an amazing podcast like probably six years ago with Joe Rogan. He wrote this book called fentanyl ink. You ever see this? No guy was like a culture reporter, not a reporter on any of this stuff.

He was assigned some story like in the music industry to cover. And while he's talking to some source in the story, the guy offhand mentions fentanyl and like what a problem it is. And Ben had heard of it but he's like oh tell me more about it and very quickly he realized holy shit and he went down the rabbit hole and he's a savage this guy ben bought a ticket to china like he's an author himself and said let's let's just see how easy it is to get fentanyl wow and he like i'm gonna let him tell the full story when he comes in here but he goes to like this full warehouse and everything and they're like so you want in that package or you

want in this package oh my god and then you see that these guys are also working directly with the cartels who can just truck it across the border it's a reverse opium war oh my god and that's a big problem yeah that's a big problem you think think they're going to clean that up? I'll tell you, I think if anybody does, it's going to be Donald Trump. You know, a lot of people, I think, didn't understand the import, the full import of declaring the Mexican cartels to be terrorist groups. That opens up a whole bunch of presidential authorities and lines of funding that otherwise would have been unavailable to the military to go after the fentanyl trade. Can you explain that, like how that would work? Because this is, I have some guys coming in and I was going to ask them about it. I still will, but. Sure. You know, if an organization is declared to be a clear and present danger to american persons american installations or the

american government the president can order can order programs to be implemented to oppose them without necessitating congressional approval you can act quickly like trump send the military well he can send the military without having to get a congressional authorization because the cartels are now a terrorist group. So it opens that avenue. You don't have to get it bogged down in some debate on Capitol Hill where they attach the perverted arts funding amendment and you need 60 votes in the Senate to break cloture. You just do it. You got power. Yeah. You got power. Just do it. And nobody really talked about that, which kind of surprised me, especially the DC based press like Politico and the Hill and

even the post. They're usually right on these kinds of issues. But I think they weren't on. No, I think it was a good, they were like, Oh my God, what's president shine, shine Scheinbaum going to say? She's new and she's never had to deal with Trump for it. Oh, my God. They're not going to like us anymore in Mexico. It's like that wasn't the point. Yeah, that ship sailed. Yeah, that was not the point. Also, did you happen to notice that border crossings have gone down to almost zero yeah i gotta get more information on it but i'm certain the early the early reports are that it's a lot better than it

was yeah pretty easy to be a lot better than it was to be honest but the democrats just could not get it through their thick skulls that the american people wanted the border secure yeah and it's like the most common sense thing it's not hateful or anything i'll tell you when i was when i was in greece uh two years ago um they they were having a serious problem with the turks the the turks take billions of euros from the european union to house refugees okay they have refugees coming from syria from ira, from Kurdistan, from all over the place. Pakistan, Afghanistan. Thousands and thousands of people.

So the EU gives them billions of euros. Just keep them in Turkey. But what they do is at night, they push them across the border into Greece. Yeah. In fact, I was with my cousin. Oh my God, my cousin's a DJ on the island of Rhodes. By the way, I've heard direct stories from my guys in the Greek military about that.

It's bad. Yeah. It's really bad. So my cousin, he finishes his gig at this nightclub and he and I are standing outside. The nightclub just closed. It's like 2.30 in the morning. We're standing outside and it's right on the beach. And this boat comes up.

It just – it softly just kind of lands on the beach and like 12 Syrians get out and we're looking at these guys and I said to one of them, and to Minwain, where are you from? Min Suria, we're from Syria. I go, are you refugees? And they said, yeah.

And my cousin, he's a young guy. He just turned 30. He's like, are you hungry? And they said, yes. And he said, wait here, I'll get you food. And I'm like, what? He goes in the club. He comes out with these sandwiches. John's coming out with a stick. I know. I'm like, hey, hey, back to Turkey with all of you. So we told them, you know, we had to call the police because the police would have to process them as refugees. And so the cops came down, were very nice, very welcoming, and everything was cool. Because they said it's not the Syrians' fault. No, it's not. They're looking for a better life. That's right.

It's the fucking Turks' fault. Yeah. Because the Turks are taking the money and still pushing the refugees out. So the point of this is what the Greeks did, you know, they don't have much of a land border with Turkey. It's all in the north. Everything is islands. The islands are hard to patrol because there are like you know 1100 islands so what they did is they built a wall like an actual honest to god wall and the turks jumped up and down like across the water no no on the land part of the border in in northern greece

not a single person crosses that wall not a single one and here's me like ah trump he's lying he's the mexicans are gonna pay for it and then the greek wall oh the wall works i said i was wrong i was wrong about the wall yeah it's crazy yeah it's listen i gotta give him credit on that he talked about it so simply which i think is a turn off but when you run the tape in 2015 of what he was saying he was right he was right on that for sure yes he was a lot of other more importantly a lot of other people were very wrong that's right now and shit got crazy but john we could be here all night if we keep going across stuff i think we just did two again okay this was fucking great this was great love having you through glad to see you always some

speakers gigs thank you very much so we'll stick any links including to your sub stack thank you down below so second unified i do most my stuff in those two places and listen if you're in uh in the uk over the next two months i got like 44 speaking dates it's going to be at tigers lane studios.com all the info is we'll have that down below us but like mark make mark for those three links a lesson we'll do that thank you thank you as always sir thank you buddy all right it's great everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links are in my description below