Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/30/22 John Kiriakou on the CIA, FBI, JFK and 9/11

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Scott talks with John Kiriakou—former CIA officer, whistleblower and author— to discuss revelations, old and new, about the CIA’s connections to Lee Harvey Oswald as well as the agency’s awareness of 9/11 hijackers before the attacks. They also look at the Saudi regime’s connections to the attacks and explore possible motives for the purported ally to help attack the United States. Throughout the interview, Scott and Kiriakou explore the bad blood between the CIA and the FBI. Kiriakou tells some personal stories to illustrate how this rivalry manifested before and after 9/11.  Discussed on the show: Kiriakou’s new Substack Kiriakou’s podcast appearance with RFK Jr Why America Slept by Gerald Posner The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright Michael Scheuer doesn't like John O'Neil The Siege (IMDB) John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer and author of The Convenient Terrorist: Two Whistleblowers’ Stories of Torture, Terror, Secret Wars, and CIA Lies and Doing Time Like A Spy. He is the host of Loud and Clear on Sputnik Radio. Follow him on Twitter @JohnKiriakou. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing john kiriaku former cia officer and author of a few books including surveillance and surveillance detection how to disappear and live off the grid

lying and lie detection boy you've really been busy here uh doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison you know he went to prison over the torture scandal not because he tortured people to death but because he revealed the names of some who had tortured people i don't know about to death or not but um so he's the only one who got in trouble for blowing the whistle and of course he wrote the insider's guide of the iran crisis with the great gareth porter and the reluctant spy before that about the war on terrorism. Oh, and the convenient terrorist about

the couple of Abu Zabedas. Right. Very interesting stuff. And he's got a brand new substack, which is Johnkiriaku.substack dot com. Welcome back to the show, John. How are you doing? Thanks so much, Scott. It's great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, happy to have you here. So tell me, why did you kill Jack Kennedy?

I know, right? I'm just coming around. It's taking me all this time to just come around to the to the idea that that at least elements of the CIA were responsible for killing for killing JFK it's taken me this long you know it did it you know it did it for me

too Jefferson Morley I was talking to Jefferson Morley the other day former Washington Post journalist amazing historian and scholar nobody knows as much about the Kennedy killing as he does and he uncovered a document at the at the National

Archives just about three weeks ago from this latest tranche of Kennedy documents that shows that the hands-off Cuba committee that Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of was actually a CIA front organization. Even if Oswald didn't know that he was being paid by the CIA, the CIA knew about Oswald. And you remember just before he was killed, he said he was a patsy? I think that's what this is all about. well you know um so and that's was i don't know how to pronounce the name but this is the document that uh confirms that this guy joan naninides or something like that he was the CIA agent you

an edis yeah yeah how do you say it yo an edis oh well great greek greek guy say it yeah i can't do it yeah um bad guy okay great so and so that was it so he's the direct connection there between the alleged shooter who it seems like must have gotten off one of the shots or maybe not that might be assuming too much whether he had you know actually pull the trigger at all but at least the accused shooter um is has a direct connection there now this guy was a CIA officer he was himself an agent of an officer he was an officer you know i need this yeah he was long known as a bad guy uh you know sort of a black ops i hate that that that term, but it replies in this case. And I wanted to say something else. I happened to be on

Bob Kennedy's show the other day. And after it was done, he told me something that was just fascinating. He said that on November 22nd, 63, his mom picked him up early from school. She took him out of school and brought him home. She told him on the way home what had happened. And when he got to the house, they lived in a big mansion in McLean, Virginia called Hickory Hill. He said that his dad was there with John McCone, who was the head of the CIA. And John McCone was a longtime family friend, he said. McCone would come to the Kennedy House every day after work and swim in their pool. Oftentimes he would stay for dinner.

He was unmarried at the time. And so he was very close to the Kennedy family. So Bob said that when he got out of the car, his dad and McCone were standing there talking, and he overheard his dad say, tell me your people didn't do this. and McCone responded, I have no idea who did this. And he said, the fact that McCone didn't say, oh, well, of course not. Of course none of my people would have done something like this. That's not what he said.

He said, I have no idea who did this. And he said it's stuck in his mind for the last 60 years. Yeah. You know, I'd like to go back to that. See, well, what I'd like to do is lawmower man, the, uh, By osmosis, somehow, all of those books without having to sit and spend a year reading through them all. Right. Right.

Because I'm just too young. I don't know. But I still would like to understand this. I mean, I guess, well, what I was trying to say is he was the Attorney General. He could have said, I'm special prosecuting all of your asses and started going crazy, right? But then he would have been relying on Jay Edgar Hoover. But hell, he could have just indicted Jayhager Hoover. He could have done whatever he wanted.

He could have said, listen, the CIA couldn't have done this without you running cover for them. So now I'm indicting you for conspiracy too. You bad old trans test school, whatever the hell. And he could have done whatever he wanted, right? But you know, as much, he didn't do that. He stuck around for a little while, then he resigned. And resigned to run for president and got himself shot again, you know, a couple years later. Yeah.

Yeah, he did. As much as Hoover hated the Kennedys, Hoover hated the CIA more. And I wonder what would have happened if Kennedy had gone to Hoover and said, I think the CIA did this. Because, you know, there's a story that I heard many years ago that when Congress was writing the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, Hoover was adamantly opposed. He didn't believe we needed a CIA. There was already an OSS. It was winding things down now that the war was over. And the only way that Truman could get Hoover to back off to get this bill passed was to

lie to Hoover and tell him that once it was created, the CIA would be a division of the FBI. And so Hoover withdrew his opposition. And then, of course, he was duped. It was never meant to be a division of the FBI. He was livid. He never forgave Truman for it. and institutionally, this hatred of the, between the FBI and the CIA lasted well beyond the 9-11 attacks.

Yeah, but not anymore. They're just one in the same agency now? Yeah, it's pretty much one in the same. You know, the big, the big change, the thing that finally brought them together after all those years was the CIA. I mean, Donald Trump, right? Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much.

What were you going to say? I was going to say the computer systems. The computer systems were never compatible. Like, for example, when I was at the CIA, I could email somebody at the State Department or at NSA or DIA or energy or whatever I wanted. I couldn't email anybody at the FBI because the systems weren't compatible. Similarly, when any agency in the intelligence community released an intelligence report, no matter the classification, I would see it at the CIA.

All the analysts would see it at the CIA, not FBI. reports again because they were incompatible and so it wasn't until after 9-11 like well after 9-11 like two three four years after 9-11 that they finally cleared each other for the information made the systems compatible and then institutionalized a modus operandi where they could actually share information yeah they did one other thing too actually after 9-11 They named a CIA officer as deputy director of the FBI for counterterrorism, and they named an FBI officer as the deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. So just to keep the honest people honest and make sure that this transfer of information was indeed taking place,

they sort of placed people in each other's agencies. All right. Well, you know what, as long as we're going down this road, how about September 11th and the role of Prince Bandar bin Salton and Prince Turkey Alfaisal? I think the news is not very well publicized over this last year, but I think just over this last year, we've had a major leak from the lawsuit against the Saudis that's been published in pieces in a couple of papers here and there. It seems to reveal, if I understand, right, John, that it's not just that the Saudi embassy was running the guy who was running, or at least protecting, carrying and feeding for the San Diego cell, the Flight 77 hijackers, but that all the different hijacker cells in America were being run and protected by the Saudi embassy in that same way. and uh and so like i'm sure i'm over simplifying that but can you let us know like what what have we really learned over the last year beyond those 28 pages i i believe that the Saudis or elements of the Saudi government were deeply involved in the planning and the financing of the

9-11 attacks going all the way up to bandar bin sultan and uh and turkey al-feisel turgiafaisal of course was the head of the Saudi intelligence service, and Bendar bin Sultan was the long time Saudi ambassador to the United States. When he left the U.S., he went back to Saudi Arabia to become the national security advisor, the first Saudi national security advisor. And, you know, Bandar was always a Washington favorite. He was the head of the diplomatic corps because he was the longest serving ambassador. He had wild popularity. inside administrations, be they Republican or Democrat, everybody loved Bandar. But I remember in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, Bandar coming to the CIA ostensibly

for a briefing on the latest developments. And George Tenet got right in his face and said that we knew there were Saudi government officials that were involved. We knew that there were royal family members involved and he says bandar i'm telling you right now we're going to start killing people and i don't care if their last name is saud and i remember thinking this is a historic conversation i'm witnessing you know i mean george used to get mad easily and he would yell and swear and point fingers and make nasty comments but i had never seen anything like this And then later on, you know, years later, after all these allegations, we see that that Saudi intelligence officers with ties to the bombers or not the bombers, the hijackers, had accompanied Crown Prince Abdullah to Crawford, Texas to visit with President Bush. And we know that Bandar's wife was involved in sending money to this Saudi consular official in Los Angeles.

The money was then passed to the hijackers. You know, these are serious like life and death kind of, kind of, we used to call them Cat 1 issues. Category 1 means drop everything else you're doing and work on this at the CIA. And they've never been answered. And what's worse than that is... Wait, which was the guy that went to Crawford? It was a Saudi...

You know what Larissa knows? She was the one who laid all this out for me. He was a Saudi intelligence. officer and he accompanied he was part of the party that accompanied crown prince abdala or maybe maybe abdala was king at the time i can't no no no he was crown prince at the time yeah i mean there's there's there are direct lines you can you can trace these direct lines and so what's new from the last year though because there was a leak from this lawsuit right yeah there was a leak from this lawsuit and it was it was the depth of uh of official

Saudi involvement. But, you know, the response then from the U.S. government has just been crickets. Like, well, you know, it's more than 20 years ago. We're trying to rebuild our relationship with the Saudi royal family. I mean, the thing is, too, though, is it doesn't make sense, right? Because Prince Bandar, and by the way, you know, there are people who, which this is hardly worth addressing, I don't know, there are people who are upset because they think this is the modified limited hangout and you know they think all this other stuff bombs in the building and all that but i think all that conspirator stuff is the limited hangout and this was always the question was totally what did saudi intelligence know and when did they know it but then why did they

do it because there is just no sense in which bandar and fysel are interested in waging some holy war against the United States provoking us into invading Afghanistan to bleed us to bankruptcy or get Riyadh nuked either, by the way. Right. And this is the guy, you say he's close to Washington. They call him Bandar Bush. He was so close to the father there. Yeah, that's right. That's right. In fact, George H.W. Bush was a regular visitor at Bandar's 50,000 square foot chalet in Vale. Okay. But I mean, but what's all this about Tenet? Because if I'm going to be, a conspiracist enough to say, well, look, if they did it, they did it. I mean, it sounds like what you're implying anyway, and which is the obvious truth or conclusion, right, is they did

this as a favor for Bush and Cheney, who needed a massive horrible terrorist attack to kill a lot of people so that they could go and have some wars. Why else would they do it? I would say, I would push back on that only because Bush and Cheney had already planned to attack Iraq. So we already had our nice, neat little war being planned. You know, it was Richard Pearl that went to the White House on September 12th and said, you know we have to attack Iraq, right? It was Richard Pearl that went and said, this is our opportunity. The plans were already being drawn up.

Afghanistan was kind of a fluke. In fact, I mean, Gareth Porter thinks that, you know, one of the main reasons that September 11th happened, But it wasn't a deliberate blind eye in the sense of we want the attack to happen. It was a deliberate blind eye only in the sense of Wolfowitz and the neocons consistently spending the first eight months of that presidency saying the CIA is trying to distract you with all this bin Laden and Afghanistan crap. And you're going to take the eye off the ball when the prize is Saddam in Baghdad. And by the way, we think he backs Osama anyway and all of that crap. But now, but here's the thing. So, but again, though, I got to nail you down.

Because on one hand, you're telling me, and this does sound like a limited hangout to me, you are former CIA spy, telling me, yeah, George Tenet, he was really mad. Well, he was the director of central intelligence. And, you know, there's this whole other question about his analysts at Alex Station trying to infiltrate or somehow use these San Diego guys as double agents or some kind of thing. That guy, Ray Noelowski, you know, did the. rich blee podcast on all of that stuff where like it looked like the CIA analysts knew you know they'd follow these guys from Malaysia to Bangkok to LAX to San Diego the guys living with FBI informant cash and checks from Bandar's wife and then at some point the Alex station ladies or whoever was in charge just drop the ball nobody tells the FBI that oh yeah by the way these

guys are going to kamikaze a plane of the Pentagon you better look out for them and so this happens anyway so but and look by the way i'm not really a truth around this and i don't really buy my own argument about bandar did this because he had a deal with cheney to hit new york because i think no it doesn't make sense he's taken too big of a risk that especially you hit the pentagon you know you could kill some general's wife and then he could get mad and take dick cheney out back and shoot him and sit in his chair and do whatever he want and never even mind Bush and and and and nuke riot because that's what happens when you hit the Pentagon you know what I mean I don't know yeah that would be the risk so so there's no assurance there's no collection of

assurances that would be enough but then so what's the explanation CIA man for why prince bandar would do such a thing to us man well I think that there are a lot of of true believers in Saudi Arabia true believers in in Islam who who don't give a shit about the United States and want to attack the United States, fundamentalists inside the royal family. And I think that's what we saw in this case. In fact, you remember... Well, I mean, I'd buy that, but we're talking about Bandar and Faisal,

who those guys are going to betray the Bushes on behalf of some royal cousin I've never heard of, who likes bin Laden's view instead. I can't think of any other reason why they would allow something. like this to happen. I mean, I've thought about this for years, and I just don't understand what their motivation would be, especially Bandar's motivation. You know, maybe his wife's a nut. She's a fundamentalist.

I don't know. I never met her. And that does seem a weird way to make that payoff. You know, Phil Giraldi, he, when he first got into 9-11 stuff, another former CIA officer, he went further than me on some things. I was like, yeah, I'm not so sure about some of those things. But then when it came to the Saudi thing, he actually wrote a thing for the American and conservative essentially debunking the 28 pages and saying, you know, if you don't

beg the question here and you just try to look at it honestly, this isn't really out of character for what the Saudi embassy does for Saudi immigrants to the United States all the time or people here on visas all the time. They give them a ton of money. They pay for their education or this, that, or whatever. Yeah. And it's not just the Saudis. It's all the Gulf countries do that. Yeah. So if you're a citizen of that country, you get a check, period. And that point. So here we are. And don't forget, let me add one other thing. Go ahead. Don't forget, when we captured Abu Zubeda in March of 2002 in Pakistan, we also confiscated his address book. Uh-huh. I know where this is going. Yeah, there were the names and numbers, these two Saudi princes. And we went back to the Saudis and said, you know, what the heck is this? I was a beta, who we believed at the time, was the number three in al-Qaeda he's got uh he's got the personal cell phone numbers of these two

saudi princes the next thing you know one of them is killed in a one car accident in the desert and the other one goes camping in the desert and is found later having died of thirst no well but wasn't also the case that he had the number for prince bandar's castle in aspen colorado oh see that i didn't know that i didn't know that would be you be the guy who knows that Yeah, I should be the guy that knows that. Yeah. Because I just think I learned that from Larissa, but... No, that's not true.

I think she thinks that, but no, no, no. I remember there's some news report about Zubeda had Bandar's phone number in Aspen. Wow. Here, let me Google it as long as... Yeah, I'd like to know. We're screwing around on a Friday afternoon here, man. Wait a minute, you wrote the book on this guy. You wouldn't know that.

Yeah, but it was like 10 years ago. Bandar phone Aspen Yes Prince Sultan bin Faisal was the one killed in the car accident Okay, yeah

So here you go This is Oh, here's the Aspen Times version of it CNN, 28 pages Indirect 9-11 link to Bandar revealed So what's here

Oh, it was in the 28 pages Oh, it was? That was what it was. The Zabedas phone book, both those numbers were unpublished, and one of them was an unlisted number for a company that managed Bandar's estate in Aspen, Colorado, reads CNN. An unlisted number was also found for a bodyguard who worked at the Saudi embassy in Washington. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And I'm looking at a book here called Blood Horse.

No, no, no, no. That's the site. It's Why America Slept by Gerald Posner, Random House Book. Oh, I hate that guy. Yeah, I do, too, actually. When he's not plagiarized, speaking of Larissa,

I remember him outright plagiarizing her. She wrote a thing on her blog at largely, and then 10 minutes later, he's on MSNBC, just outright regurgitating, just stealing it. That guy's a piece of crap. He wrote a thing even, like his whole speciality was like nothing's a conspiracy right MLK killed himself JFK killed himself

David Koresh killed himself Timothy McVeigh killed himself and you're about to sorry go ahead no this is Prince Ahmed bin Sultan who died in the car accident but they later said he had a heart attack while he was driving and there's um and there's another one oh Prince Fahad bin Faisal who died of thirst. And their funerals were a day apart. Wow. Who knows? Well, now I want to ask you about other old terror war stuff.

What about the al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi in 2003 that the neocons convinced Bush were launched out of Iran? Oh, my gosh. Well, 2003 or the earlier ones? Maybe it was 2002. 19 in 1996 that was oh that was no no yeah no that's a whole other story well go ahead and talk about that and we'll get back to oh three in a minute yeah i was talk about cobar because that's a great one yeah cobar i i was living in bahrain at the time and i mean it's you can see al cobar from my house right it's just right across the water you can see the lights at night and i was on the phone with my wife

it was our anniversary january i'm sorry uh june the 25th 1996 and And so I was on the phone with her. She was, she was in the state. She had just had our second child. And there was an explosion that just shattered the windows of my living room. I thought my house was under attack. So I rolled off the bed and got underneath it. So I told her there was just an explosion.

I got to go. And I hung up. I stayed under the bed for a few minutes and then went outside. And my neighbors were all outside thinking that they had been. bombed we couldn't see anything there was no like you know crater nothing was on fire and i was like i don't know what the heck that was so i went to bed the next morning of course it's all over the news that it was al hobar so i drive over there with a way by the way so that means this is a barracks and it was airmen american airmen yes were killed 19 of them and i don't know how

You know, you could see, it was one of the most incredible things that I've ever seen. I drove over there the next morning with another CIA officer. And Warren Christopher, who was Secretary of State at the time, flew in with a whole bunch of CIA people. And the whole front half of the building was just sheared off. Like you see... It looks like Oklahoma City. I was just going to say, like you see an images of Oklahoma City. It was just sheared off.

But worse than that, the crater was 30 feet deep. It was so deep that water. was seeping in from the Persian Gulf and on the ceilings in the building there was blood because the bomb was so big people were blown up out of their beds and just kind of squished on the ceiling that's how many of them died it was from the the force of the of the sound wave of the impact just squished them and you went there and saw this yourself pardon me you went there and saw this yourself oh yeah yeah i've got devastating pictures yeah it was terrible terrible but anyway my point was sorry i forgot my point my point was we worked really hard as a government to blame that

on iran you know with no evidence whatsoever all we knew was that two guys were in a truck uh they they drove up to the the barracks more the barracks i the barracks i the barracks i I say barracks with air quotes. It was more like an apartment building. And then they ran like hell. And when the lookout guy on the roof saw them running, he started running floor to floor screaming for people to evacuate. He probably saved dozens of lives.

But it was nighttime. And so many people were sleeping that they just couldn't get out. Man. Yeah. And then so what? They blamed it on Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah. Exactly. And listen, I can tell you, Saudi Hezbollah is different from every other Hezbollah, Kuwaiti Hezbollah and the main Hezbollah and Syria. We've never had a beef with Saudi Hezbollah. They hate the Saudi royal family because the Saudi royal family oppresses them. Well, and there's some tiny powerless little group there, right?

Little teeny tiny. It's probably a couple of dozen guys. So there was never any evidence that the Iranians had done this. never you know we had they were covering up for who well we had heard of this group al-qaeda because a year earlier they had they had blown up the opium sang building in riad and they killed i don't know five people seven people all uh third country nationals working that's where i used to do my grocery shopping uh they blew it up because they sold pork there right like there was a back room you could go in and discreetly buy bacon or ham steaks or whatever so they blew it up killed all these indian guys that used to work there. So we knew there was this group Al Qaeda, but, but this group that we barely knew anything about, they couldn't pull off something like Al-Kobar, right? It had to be the

Iranians. It's this group think that's so pervasive at the CIA. Sounds like a bunch of idiot liberals on Twitter. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audio book of my book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the War on Terrorism, the audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable.

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Academy Award winner, Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. All right. Well, so I don't know, I feel like I must have let you off the hook too easy there on September 11th somehow, but I'm very happy to... I agree with you 100% on that issue. Well, I don't even know what I think about it, so you can't because... No, but you said, you know, you're not a believer in the nanothermite and...

Oh, yeah, I hate all of that stuff. Oh, it's all so bummed. Yeah, no, I don't buy it. Yeah, no. But so, I don't know. I don't understand it, though, because I do think I understand the level of involvement of the Saudi government and doing it. And the only obvious motive is one that, to me, is just too much of a stretch.

I mean, and you know what? I'm saying that as a proud former conspiracy cook who predicted that attack for years before it happened. And what I said it was was the CIA is going to do it and blame it on that bin Laden guy and then invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, I was saying that on the radio in 1998, 99. In fact, I had a funny anecdote. Somebody stole the tape. I lost all my tapes out of my buddy storage shit.

of my first radio show. Oh, that's terrible. But I had that anecdote, and I knew that part of one of those anecdotes was I was on the phone with this guy when we were both kind of predicting September 11th, and I said, then they're going to go to war with Iraq, and then he goes, well, they'll have to go to Afghanistan first, because that's where bin Laden is now, and you got that lady Christian Ammanpur on CNN, always trying to get rid of the Taliban, so that'll be on there, too. And this is like in the end of 98, maybe beginning in 99, we're saying this, and Bush hadn't

even begun to run yet, and we're just like totally predicting. all this. So I was like, well, I got a witness, even though I lost the tape. You know, I know I have a witness because I was talking to this guy till. And then what happened was I was at a party and I knew I met a guy or I re-met a guy who I know knew this guy and I got in contact with him. Oh my God. And I told him that story and I said, do you remember that? And I said, yeah, then they're going to be a terrorist attack in New York and they'll blame it on Osama and then they'll invade Iraq and then you said, yeah, but they'll have to stop in Afghanistan first because of Christianama, I'm poor, and Osama bin Laden.

And he goes, no, I don't remember that. Oh, oh, man. I'm not going to lie to you. I got no witnesses, but it's definitely true. But anyway, but then, look, even then it happened just exactly the way I predicted it. But then, one, all that stuff that you just mentioned with the thermite, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is all, every bit of that, you know, it really, like, jaded me of the, that. tired kind of conspiracy thinking about the stuff. And I decided I was going to hold my horses and really learn as much as I could about Oketa and who these guys were and what they were doing and all

of that stuff. And so I don't know if this is a smart thing to say, but I took a lot of what Michael Schoyer said to heart. Then, you know, when he came out with Imperial Hubris and I talked with him, I asked him, hey, man. And, you know, I think he was involved with torturing people and stuff, like, not personally, but in, like, participating in it and stuff. Maybe you could fill me in on that. But he was a hardcore anti-Al Qaeda dude. Hardcore. And even now that he's gone like way cookier, I still think that he says what he means. And I asked him, hey man, come on, do you think that they let this happen, turn a blind eye, somehow got the Saudis to help and do this thing so they could have this war and this and that? And he goes, nah, because I don't think that the

White House knew enough to ignore because of the childishness of people like George Tenet and Louis free and all of these others in charge. the police and spy agencies you all hate each other so much and whatever so like what would connolly's a rice know to even you know turn a blind eye to or what would dick cheney know these guys were working on missile defense and the name in north korea or whatever boondoggle when they came in that kind of thing working on getting to bagdad and didn't want to be distracted with all this Saudi stuff i mean just like what you're saying with kobar like oh man we don't want to have to go after some Saudi princeling let's blame it on the iatoll and you're right yeah exactly

Exactly. Exactly. You know, let me tell you something, too, about, about Schoyer. I always liked and respected Schroyer. He's become kind of a nut since he left the agency. He's very conspiratorial. Or even really, like, since the Obama years, I would say. That's a better way to say it. Since the Obama years. But I had a great deal of respect for him and for his understanding of Al Qaeda from the very, very beginning. But where I finally walked away from him was just recently when he married Alfreda Bikowsky. Alfreda Bikowsky, the red-headed devil who headed Alex station, who before that was the chief of operations in Alex station, who oversaw the torture program.

Alfreda was bad news from the get-go. And she married him. Like, how the heck did that happen? So, I don't know. Yeah, like, I mean, he was, I mean, that's part of the, well, go ahead and elaborate about that. because the story is that he called Sandy Burger a pussy or something, and so he got exiled to the library.

And so from 96 or from 99 through 01 or whatever it was, he was not working, but collecting his government check to sit in the library, but kicked out of Alex Station. And so she was running it. So when I was saying earlier, that story, like Ray Noleski says, I know I say his name. I'm so sorry, Ray. I really respect you.

I'm just too stupid to say your name, right. But he says, you know, she was trying to run this up. They were, she and Rich Bleak. They were trying to turn the San Diego cell into double agents, but that failed and then they dropped the ball, something like that. Do you know about that? Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. In fact, just after that went bad, I became the chief of counterterrorism.

I'm sorry, the chief of counterintelligence in Alex station. In Alex station. Yeah, in Alex station, yeah. From what day to what day? Oh, I was there for a short period of time because I got promoted on the, the strength of the, uh, of the Abu Zabeta capture. I went up to the seventh floor. So I was there from May to August of 2002. Oh, okay, but after September 11th. Oh, yeah, yeah, after September 11th. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. So she and Rich Blee were very, very close because they were,

they were like-minded on these issues. They just wanted to go in guns blazing. And if you couldn't turn somebody, then, then you kill them. But like we said a minute ago, they also had this very passionate hatred for the FBI. So even after they realized that they couldn't turn these guys in San Diego, they couldn't recruit them not realizing that they were the actual hijackers or planned to be the hijackers. They never told the FBI that these guys were in the country, you know, so they couldn't be arrested.

All they had to do was say, look, you know, there are these bad guys. They're in San Diego. We took a shot at them and they turned us down over to you guys. They never did that. I'll give you another example. When I was in Pakistan, we had a guy a walk-in. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks in to the American embassy and offers up intelligence.

99% of the time they are crazy people. There are probes, usually from the Iranians, just looking to see how thick the walls are, how thick the windows are, who's got a where the cameras are located. And sometimes their intelligence brokers, we call them, where, you know, they'll offer you a little nugget that may or may not be true. And you give them a hundred bucks. And then they go to the French embassy, then the British embassy, then the Russian embassy. And, you know, that's a month's salary right there.

So it's that 1% that you're working for. It's that 1% that makes you take these walking. very, very seriously. So because I spoke Arabic and other languages, I was the designated walk-in guy. We had a guy come in and he offered us some intelligence. And we did a raid a couple nights later based on his intelligence. It was a bust. So he said, oh, the guy must have moved.

You know, my information was several days old. For my own safety, I waited to tell you. he wouldn't know it was me. Okay, he gives us additional information. We do a second raid. It's also a bust. We do a third raid and it's a bust. So clearly this guy's a liar. We don't know why he's lying, but in the course of the debriefings, he admitted that he was the one. He was the actual guy that fired a shoulder-fired rocket, a shoulder-mounted rocket at the American embassy in 1995. So I said to the chief, I said, look, this guy's a liar and a fabricator, but we have him on this rocket attack. So let's just turn it over to the FBI and we'll grab the guy.

You know, he had the opportunity to do the right thing. He's been yanking my chain and wasting my time for all these weeks. Let's get him. And then we just extradite him to the United States to face, you know, a terrorism charge. We went down to the FBI office together, which was on the first floor and they were like yeah yeah we're not interested yeah this is kind of your problem it's just to walk in it's like this guy friggin fired a rocket at the american embassy and it's not it's not important enough to prosecute that was the relationship back then between the CIA and the FBI they just hated each other so much that that there was no motivation or willingness to help one another yeah so a couple more anecdotes on that you got time to kill here still sure yeah so

The one, people can look this up on YouTube. It's pretty easy to find. You just type in Michael Schoyer, John O'Neill, and you look for the one where he's sitting at the desk testifying before Congress. And he said, John O'Neill is the head of the counterterrorism division in New York, the FBI Counterterrorism Division. Well, he was the head of the whole FBI field office. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, okay. The New York field office, so the terrorism officer was under him then. Right, right, exactly. was a very big shot right but then he got run out of the FBI and he became the head of security on September 11th at the World Trade Center which he knew was a likely target and the building fell on him so then here's a clip of Michael Schoyer saying that um the the congressman asks him you know I forgot the question how he sets him up about you know that you were you were uh condemned this guy

John O'Neill and Shor says that's right I also said that when that building fell on him that that was the only good thing that happened to America on 11 September and he's just mad as hell like you can tell he's like ready to get up and fight somebody there

over this dead guy that he still hates that much and and then oh so here's another important anecdote and I don't know if people can find this anymore but should be it was a little Twitter video I don't know what it originally was maybe it's on YouTube Tube 2. But it's famous people all around. You should be able to find it. Alex Gibney is the

documentary, the famous documentarian, taxi to the dark side and all that stuff. And then he's got Lawrence Wright, who famously wrote The Looming Tower and a lot of other things. It's from the New Yorker magazine and all of this stuff, right? Austin Eye. And then they're interviewing Doug Miller and Ali Sufant and Rossini is the other one, all three former FBI agents, counterterrorism agents. And I think Ali Sufahn was O'Neill's right-hand man. And they're portrayed by Denzel Washington and the guy that played Monk in the movie The Siege, by the way, that Lawrence Wright wrote in the 90s.

Anyway, so these guys are sitting down and talking about September 11th and what happened that day to them or whatever, I forgot the whole angle. But the point is this. Ali Sufan was working, again, FBI. counterterrorism was working the coal bombing in Yemen and then once the tower started falling down he got a phone call that said hey you better come into the embassy aka CIA headquarters in Yemen right

and he goes in and they take him in the back room and they open up a manila envelope uh and he looks at the you know you can imagine like it's a powerpoint type slide you know little graphic thing, like a Snowden file or whatever, a little pictogram of the Malaysia meeting. And he goes, oh, I get it. Half of this is the coal bombing, and half of this is

what happened today. This September 11th attack is like, this is it. This is the whole plot. It was like hatched. Both of these plots were hatched at the Malaysia meeting. And the CIA has known everything about everybody there and everything that they've been up to this whole time. And thanks a lot for not telling me, guys, because

that's why our towers just got knocked down. And now you tell me now that they've fallen. Exactly right. So, and you could see. Zero cooperation. And I guess from Schoyer's point of view, right, and I forget if I ever asked him about this directly, but the obvious thing, I think he told me this, was the FBI wanted to take every scrap of data that they could find and lock it all up behind a grand jury where nobody else could get to it. And the CIA was like, we need that stuff for killing people with. Exactly.

Exactly. Is that really right? Like, that was the way the beef came down was really that kind of territorial. 100% true. I'll tell you another story. The night that we captured up was a beta, we got a lot of stuff along with him. We got his diary. We got his address book. We got his cell phone. We got a copy of the Al-Qaeda training manual. I mean, this was a giant leap forward for our analysts and our collectors. And remind me what month this was. This is in early 02. The end of March 2002. So in the chaos that was taking place, an FBI agent there by the name of Jennifer, she took up his abeta's cell phone and she put it in an evidence bag and she sealed it. And as soon as she sealed it, I mean like the second that she sealed it, it started ringing.

So I grabbed it. And she said, whoa, wait a minute. What are you doing? I said, I'm going to answer the phone. phone. And she said, you're not answering the phone. I said, as soon as I open the phone, NSA is going to pick it up. This could be bin Laden calling. We don't know who's calling. This could be a major event for us operationally. She goes, do not open that bag. I said, Jen, we've got to open the bag so that we can answer the phone so that we can track the person calling and capture them.

and everybody we got heated and it's still ringing right this is all happening within a matter of 30 seconds and there were you know 36 FBI and CIA people around us half FBI have CIA and they're all just silent standing there watching us scream at each other and I said I'm opening the bag and she said if you open the bag I will arrest you and charge you with obstruction of justice and I just stood there and then the phone said stopped ringing, and I tossed it back to her. The headquarters was absolutely livid, but this goes in part to this, this hatred between the FBI and the CIA, on the one hand, and on the other hand, you know, the FBI looks at everything

as an open criminal investigation, and the CIA doesn't give a shit about open criminal investigations. They just want to bust down the door and grab the bad guys and prevent the next attack. now i'm not saying that that's the right thing to do i'm just saying in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 that was how people felt yeah well man so the reason i brought you on today was to talk about joshua shulte how he wrote this note to the judge about how he would rather be dead than locked in solitary confinement anymore i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this guy and why he's locked in solitary confinement this poor guy joshua shulte was a

CIA hacker and you know the CIA's got an entire army of hackers as you might imagine and they tend to be quirky people a lot of them have you know they're on the spectrum one way or the other they're strong introverts and they like just sort of sitting in front of a computer all day long well shulte was very unpopular in his office he would he would toss nerf basketballs at people while they were working and he had a bad relationship with his branch chief. They just didn't like him. Well, he finally left. And what he was accused of doing, what he was convicted of doing was taking out information with him on a thumb drive that he passed to WikiLeaks. And these documents came to be known as Vault 7. The CIA said this was, in fact, a former CIA deputy director said

this was akin to an intelligence Pearl Harbor. It was the worst, the single worst thing that ever happened to the CIA because it was the crown jewels of what the CIA was capable of doing. So Schulte was arrested very quickly and sent to MDC Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. It's a notoriously horrible place. The whistleblower Marty Gottesfeld was there. What's his name? Epstein was there.

And many prisoners, not just Schulte, but many prisoners have complained about conditions. There's no heat, for example, in the wintertime, and even your toilet water freezes. There are no windows. You go crazy because you're isolated literally from any form of human contact for 24 hours a day. You're allowed one phone call a month, and it can only be to your lawyer. The food is terrible. It's a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, a bologna sandwich for lunch, and a bologna sandwich for dinner. every single day of your life.

So Schulte was, he went on trial last year and was acquitted on two counts. And then it was like another eight counts that it was a hung jury. And so the Justice Department decided to retry him. And these are all espionage counts. They retried him. And he did something that was like unbelievably stupid. He fired his lawyers, and he said that he could represent himself better than they could represent him. You know, that old saying that the man who represents himself has a fool for a client.

He ended up being convicted on all charges, and he now faces 80 years in prison. The way they've treated him indicates to me that when he finally comes up for sentencing, which I think is in March, he's going to get the maximum or pretty darn close to the maximum. Well, and they're giving him these special administrative measures to, is that right? Yeah, they're giving him special administrative measures, which really cut him off completely from the outside world. He can't speak to family members, he can't have visitors, he can't speak to the media ever.

the only reason that we know about this is that he wrote a letter to the judge, which he's allowed to do, and then the judge released it by having it put in the court records and leaving it unsealed. So, you know, there are two CMUs management units. What's the C stand for? Communications. Communications, thank you. Two communications management units in the United States. One is at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, which also has the federal death row. And the other is at the Supermax prison in Marion, Illinois. Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblowers there, Marty Goddisfeld, who's a hacktivist and never hurt anybody, is there. That's where Victor Boot was.

I mean, these CMUs and SAMs, they're supposed to be for the worst of the worst, the most dangerous, the most horrible, the most deadly prisoners that we have in America. And they're not. They're used for political reasons to silence people. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you think about who, you know, what we're talking about here, I read a thing when they interviewed the jurors too, and they're like, well, he was guilty of the crime and everything. But, you know, the worst you could say was he was guilty of the offense. Right. We're talking about leaking government secrets to somebody we're not talking about rob in a store and putting a gun to some ladies head and you know that's right and many or even some you know uh robocall scam where you rip off old

ladies of their savings or something we're talking about leaking government secrets here and they're treating him when you think about like who goes in the hole it's somebody who is already in prison for murder and then murders somebody else in there or something like that right not this guy who's just boy you sure did make CIA mad and everybody knows it's it's not the CIA it's just CIA because you don't say the god it's just God and so look at what they can do to you they'll they'll give you a living death in the whole so true and and that's what it's going to be it's going to be a living death because it's not like he's going to be put in the hole uh for for a week for insubordination or for a month

for fighting somebody he's going to die in there he's going to go into the hole and he's going to stay there for the rest of his life. It's terrible. It's a terrible injustice. And I wanted to make another point, too, if we've got the time. That is that much of what he is alleged to have released was actually in the public interest. Without his revelations, we wouldn't know that the CIA can remotely take over control of our cars, you know, by hacking into the car's computer system. To do what? To drive the car into a tree or into a bridge abutment or off a cliff to kill you we wouldn't know that the cia can take over control of our smart TVs and reverse engineer the speaker so that it acts

as a microphone even when the tv appears to be off i'd like to know if the cia is doing that to american citizens but we wouldn't know any of that without josh shulte yeah and you know marble cake we look they can break into your server and make it look like some other country did it exactly they put a couple of uh carillic words or words in arabic or farce and say oh look it was the iranians that did it or was the north koreans that did it yeah look they wrote iron felix right in there um marble cake they call that well and this is the thing right is that anyone could have guessed this i hate to if you go oh yeah you're just finding this out now or whatever look anyone could have figured that the

CIA would spend as much money as they can, building their own NSA if they can. Sure. But what this did was it proved that that's what they did. And that, in fact, our discourse was entirely lacking. When we're discussing FBI and NSA spying on the American people, CIA is getting a free pass as though their only job is messing with the foreigners or whatever, like in the mythology. When, in fact, they have all of, you know, essentially, looks like many of the same

capabilities, if not the server space that the NSA has, to spy on Americans without, of course, any pretext of it being a criminal investigation or any kind of thing like that. They can do whatever they want and call it intelligence collection. Yes, exactly. And when no one to review them, who's going to review them? Diane Feinstein? No, nobody reviews. You know, this is another thing.

The CIA has tens of thousands of employees. And the intelligence committees have what? a dozen and a half people and they're going to do oversight of every program and every operation well and they're not even trying that's not even their job no they're all cheerleaders oh man um no it's a hell of a story and look there's another important part of this uh fault seven thing is that asange man you know what i need to get my facts totally straight

on this i hope that you know it better than me assange was negotiating with the cia and they were going to get him a deal with the justice department to drop the charges. But then, was it Assange's lawyer? Went or something like that, I think, went to somehow let John Warner in the Senate know. And then he went to Comey at the FBI, and Comey ruined it. Do I know what I'm talking about? You know, I hadn't heard that specifically, but I'll tell you something similar. I had paid a Republican lobbyist when Donald Trump was president to get me a pardon. And I'm going on the Tucker Carlson show. I went on like 12 times. And Tucker Carlson has these chiron's pardon Asanj and Kiriaku with our pictures

side by side. And my lobbyist keeps going to the White House. And then I get passed over. And I heard later from the lobbyist that Trump was going to pardon Assange's. Snowden and me and Mitch McConnell went to him and said if you pardon Assange or Snowden you're gonna lose the Republican caucus in the Senate and they'll vote to convict you and so none of us got pardoned he just walked away yeah and I said why why can we not be mutually exclusive why do I have to be lumped in with Assange and and Snowden when my case was so much less controversial and she said that's just how they saw it yeah well yeah

because that was the the republicans in the senate that lindsay graham and them who are doing the extorting that was their take yeah and now so listen i think i found something here about so this is just the wikipedia damn version forgive me but it's the only thing that came right up that that that had this it says during january and february of 17, the Department of Justice was negotiating through Assange's attorney, Adam Waldman, for immunity and safe passage for Assange, to leave the embassy and come to the United States to discuss risk minimization of future WikiLeaks releases, including redactions, and to testify that Russia was not the source for the WikiLeaks release in 2016.

And then in mid-February, 17, Waldman, who was pro bono asked Senator Mark Warner, who was co-chairman of the Intelligence Committee, if he had any questions to ask Assange, and he contact, there's something left out there, he contacted Comey, and Comey told Walman stand down and end the negotiations

with Assange. Now, the other thing, this doesn't mention what I was thinking. The other thing, oh no, it does. It goes on to say something about, they quote Ray McGovern here. I know he was working off of something else. At the time they were they were working on negotiating over vault seven like he let it be known to them that

he had it but he hadn't released it yet wow and it was like look man if you guys want me to not release these documents set me free and the CIA the way i remember the story and i'm sorry i don't have all my footnotes together here but the way i remember the story was the CIA was willing to make that deal they were like don't you release that leak man you want maybe we can work out a deal but don't you do it and then once they ruined the deal then he posted it just like in the deal you know wow um see but there it is it goes back to the fact that that their interests are frequently at odds and they just hate each other yeah well and that would make sense right i wonder how pissed off the cia was that because it was you know

the way i remember it anyway it was clearly like they were willing to make the deal but and and even I think we're working with DOJ on it, but then when the FBI found out about it, that was when it, you know? Yeah. Anyway, but, I mean, they do have something about the marble framework here. I called it Marble Cake something. It was the marble framework. That's the thing for leaving false tracks of the server you broke into and all of that. Yeah.

Terrible. Man. Okay. Well, anyway. Oh, one last. thing before I let you go, which is, apparently I'm in Oswari, put out a new podcast. I hadn't heard that. Oh, yeah, okay.

So, I mean, they claimed that they killed them last summer in a drone strike in Afghanistan. Right. And now, but the thing I read, you know, I need to go ahead and, uh, and bite the bullet. I guess I'm by a membership at that site website. I hate to do it. Um, but they really are always ahead on all those translations. and stuff um but i think what i read though i i barely read into it i just barely saw a little new summary about it that said that there was nothing obvious in there that um made it clear what time

it was recorded right it's not like he cites a current event that happened after he was supposedly killed or something obvious but you know it was purported to be new or it was at least new to the world yeah so yeah oh my gosh yeah fantastic Okay, with that, I'll let you go. Have a great weekend and a happy new year. I appreciate you making time for us time. Good stuff. Fantastic.

Thanks for having me. Hell yeah. All right you guys. That's John Kiriaku. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.