John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, details his 2002 role capturing Abu Zubaydah but refusing torture training—waterboarding, hypothermia cells, and sleep deprivation—after the FBI’s effective methods were sidelined by CIA’s $108M Mitchell-Jessen program. His 2007 whistleblowing on CIA torture led to a decade-long persecution, including espionage charges dropped only after financial ruin, and prison harassment tied to fabricated claims. Now a Greek citizen and EU-backed whistleblower advocate, Kiriakou critiques Israel’s West Bank expansion and APAC’s unchecked U.S. lobbying, questioning why it avoids FARA registration while accusing the FBI of selective enforcement. His shift from Democrat to populist critics stems from distrust in elite-driven governance, warning how propaganda and AI now erode public truth—highlighting systemic failures over individual accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
He was, he doesn't really talk about his work a lot.
Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal.
I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens.
Athens was a tough place.
At the time, the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.
Why?
It was a combination of two things.
There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous.
One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November.
They had killed the CIA station chief, two U.S. defense attachés, just bad guys all around.
The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle.
And then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLPGC, the DFLP.
Everybody was there.
Because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreou at the time and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone.
And your story of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was what they were doing, what you reported on, was completely illegal.
And you were completely honest about it.
And it was essentially about the U.S. torture program.
In fact, when I got onto the plane, three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane.
We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane.
Then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down.
And one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on.
And he says, John, and I said, who are you?
And he lifts up his mask and he's an old boss of mine.
And I said, hey, what are you doing here?
He said, oh, I came to take your prisoner.
I said, where are you taking him?
And he said, I can't tell you.
You don't have a need to know.
I said, no, that's cool.
He said, who is he anyway?
I said, oh, dude, I'm sorry.
You don't have a need to know.
He says, yeah, fair enough.
Fair enough.
Okay, safe travels.
And then, you know, your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and, you know, get his family story.
Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he's going.
And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria, and one of the senior guys from the counterterrorism center came up to me very casually.
And he said, oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
And I had never heard that term before.
This is May of 2002.
I said, enhanced interrogation techniques.
What's that mean?
And he goes, we're going to start getting rough with these guys like that.
And I said, what's that mean?
So he describes these 10 techniques.
And I said, I don't know, man.
That sounds like a torture program.
And he said, it's not a torture program.
We got it cleared by the Justice Department, and the president signed it.
He says, think about it.
I said, yeah, give me an hour.
I need an hour to think about it.
I walked out of the cafeteria.
I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor.
And there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East.
Knocked on his door, no appointment or anything.
And I said, hey, I need some advice.
I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques.
What do you think of that?
And he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade.
He said, this is a torture program.
They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program and torture is a slippery slope.
He said, you know how these guys are.
Somebody's going to be a cowboy.
They're going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner.
And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation.
Then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison.
Do you want to go to prison?
I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
I went back downstairs.
I said, listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this.
I think it's illegal, and I don't want any part of it.
The funny thing is, I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in Al-Qaeda.
And I got passed over for promotion.
And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.
The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
And then the guy who had given me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he promoted me out of cycle.
So I realized then I was up against something that was going to be tough.
And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years.
We are in the same men's group.
We went to the same church.
And he happens to be both a brigadier general in the Army and a CIA psychiatrist.
And he said to me one day, buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.
And I said, yeah, I don't care.
And he said, you know that's not a compliment, right?
And I said, Steve, they're wrong about this.
And I'm right about it.
I said, I'm comfortable with the decision that I made.
And I just left it at that.
I didn't realize, though, how much I had pissed them off until later on.
That day in the cafeteria, my colleague explained it in great detail.
And a lot of these techniques are not torture, right?
If I grab you by the lapels and say, dog on you, answer my questions.
That's not torture.
Or the first one was called the belly slap or the intention slap was another way they called it, where I smack you in the belly, it makes a cracking sound.
Maybe it leaves a handprint.
It's a little bit embarrassing.
That's not torture.
But then it graduated quickly to things like waterboarding, which everybody knows about.
But there were techniques that were, in my view, that were worse than waterboarding.
Like, for example, there was the cold cell.
So they strip you naked.
They chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling so you can't you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything.
You can't get comfortable in any way.
And they chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then every hour, somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you.
But we killed people with that technique.
The Justice Department never said we could kill people.
Like, for example, with Abu Zubeda, his heart actually stopped during a waterboarding session, and the doctor revived him just so he could be tortured more.
Is there any other way that, like, I know that MKUltra experimented with a lot of drugs and a lot of different techniques involved, and whether it was trying to find the truth out of people or getting people to commit acts?
Did they ever implement something where they would give someone something?
Not in the very beginning, but they were working with things like truth serum and different drugs, like relaxation drugs, gabapentin, you know, stuff like that to sort of get you to open up.
But remember, too, that the agency got in such trouble in 75 and 76 before the church committee and the pike committee about MKUltra that as soon as Senator Church said, don't destroy the documents, the director went right back to headquarters and ordered them to destroy everything.
And so only about 20% of the MKUltra documents still exist.
So we don't really know exactly what it was that was learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't work.
We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the fog-laden air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick.
We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts.
But we don't really have fulsome documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.
It was a sub-operation of MKUltra where they rented a safe house in San Francisco.
They recruited a bunch of hookers and had them go out and pick up John's, bring them back to the safe house where they thought they were going to get laid, dose them with LSD, and then interrogate them and try to get them to give up their deepest secrets.
You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency.
You know, once I turned this down and I got this out-of-cycle promotion for the Abu Zubeda operation, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world.
And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site.
And people are saying, like, whoa, I didn't sign up for this.
And then when people would die, they would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building, put them in the hole, cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.
It's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.
But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, its interrogations, they've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 46, these guys know what they're doing.
And so with Abu Zubaydah as an example, we captured Abu Zubaydah.
And normally overseas, the CIA has primacy.
Domestically, the FBI has primacy.
But 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation.
And so we sent Abu Zubaydah out to the secret site and the FBI took over.
The CIA was furious about this.
But there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Soufan who did exactly as he was trained to do.
And he began to engage Abu Zubaydah in a conversation.
And Abu Zubaydah just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.
This went on for weeks.
But you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange.
If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever.
And finally, he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives.
And I'll give you two examples.
Number one, we had no idea what the al-Qaeda wiring diagram looked like.
We knew it was bin Laden and Zawahiri, and then we just didn't know what the organization was like, how it was built.
So he explained to us how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized.
So cell A had no idea what cell B was doing.
And Ali said, as an example, if you want to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf, how would you do that?
And Abu Zubaydah said, well, there's this guy, Muhammad, and here's his phone number.
Muhammad lives in Dusseldorf, and he has a cousin, Abdullah, and Abdullah has access to weapons, and here's Abdullah's email.
And then Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid.
They meet at the coffee shop, and Rashid has access to explosives.
And then we're able to call the Germans and say, hey, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need to do.
And then they kick down the door and they grab these guys.
That saved lives.
The other thing that he told us, and he laughed, actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
He was talking about Mukhtar, a guy using the Nomdeguer Mukhtar.
We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Mukhtar, who was a very bad guy in 1996.
He had initiated something called the Bojinka operation.
It was supposed to be carried out in the Philippines.
And the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States.
It just so happened that one day, Mukhtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch.
And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment.
And she sees all this stuff laid out.
And she said, that looks like a terrorist attack being planned.
She calls the cops.
The cops come and say, ooh, this looks like a terrorist attack.
We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service.
They come and look at it, and somebody says, we should probably call the CIA on this.
And so we confiscated everything, and Bojinka was disrupted.
So we knew there was this guy out there planning this big thing, and his name was Muqdar.
Abu Zubaydah laughed at us and said, you don't know who Muqdar is?
And Ali said no.
And Abu Zubaydah said, his name is Khaled Sheikh Muhammad.
That's the first time we ever heard that name.
We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khaled Sheikh Muhammad.
But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together.
And it was thanks to Abu Zubaydah, in turn, thanks to Ali Soufans treating Abu Zubaydah with respect.
But on August the 1st, 2002, George Tennant went to the White House and he asked the president for reasons that have never been made clear.
He asked the president to turn over primacy to the CIA.
He did that.
And the CIA director, Robert Mueller, to his credit, he knew exactly what was going to come.
Not only withdrew FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI personnel from the country that the secret site was in.
And within 12 hours, the CIA began to torture Abu Zbayda.
He went completely silent and remained silent.
And then the FBI went back to the president and said, look, the CIA is screwing this up.
We were getting all this intelligence from this guy.
Now he won't say anything.
And we're putting him in a coffin.
And we heard that he had this irrational fear of bugs.
So we pour a box of cockroaches on him in the coffin and close up the coffin.
And we would open it up every couple days to change his diaper and give him food.
And he went nuts.
And so finally, the White House turns everything back over to the FBI.
It takes Ali months to get him to talk again.
And then he starts talking again.
And he's given us more and more information about al-Qaeda operations in Malaysia and anti-Australia operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al-Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia.
And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing him again and screwed it all up.
I waited for somebody to say something about torture and nobody did.
And then I got divorced.
My kids moved with my ex-wife to Ohio and they were little.
They needed their dad.
So I decided I'm going to leave the agency, go into the private sector so I can see my boys on the weekends.
And still I waited for somebody to say something and nobody did.
Now, I wish that I could tell you that I stood up and I took a stand, and that wasn't it at all.
I got a call in December of 2007.
So now I'm out of the agency three and a half years.
I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News, and he said that he had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
I said, that was absolutely false.
I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.
I said, I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or any other prisoner.
And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
Well, I had never spoken to a reporter before.
I didn't know that was a reporter's trick.
So I said, I'll think about it.
In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday, President Bush gives a press conference, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners.
Human Rights Watch said CIA is torturing prisoners, and Amnesty International said CIA is torturing prisoners.
So a reporter says, look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners.
What's your response to that?
And the president looks right in the camera and he goes, we do not torture like that.
And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, he is a bald-faced liar.
He's looking the American people right in the eye and he's lying to us.
And she said, are you surprised?
Well, then on Wednesday, two days later, he gets another, a similar question.
And he said that there is no torture.
I knew he was lying.
And then another two days later, it's Friday, and he's walking from the south portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend.
And a torture shout, torture, a reporter shouts another question about torture.
And this time he stops and he turns and he says, well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer.
And I said to my wife, Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me.
So I called Brian Ross and I said, I'll give you your interview.
They're going to leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves.
So I called Brian Ross.
I said, I'll give you your interview.
And I decided that whatever he was going to ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was going to ask me.
I was just going to tell the truth.
And so he met me at the ABC News studios on DeSale Street in Washington.
And I said three things in that interview that changed the course of the rest of my life.
I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official U.S. government policy.
It was not the result of any rogue officer.
And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself.
And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI saying that I had revealed classified information.
The FBI then investigates me from December of 07 to December of 08.
And then they send my attorney a letter called a declination letter declining to prosecute.
They said that they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there because of Amnesty International Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross.
But most importantly, torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people.
So no charges.
My wife and I went out to celebrate that night.
We went to dinner.
Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president.
And he names John Brennan, at first, CIA director, but the liberals went crazy because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program.
Everybody seems to forget that now.
And we can get into that if you want.
But he then names Brennan the Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism.
Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new attorney general, and says, talking about me, charge him with espionage.
And Holder writes back, we got these memos in Discovery when I went to trial.
Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage.
And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage.
They waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped the espionage charges.
There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University.
The book is called Three Felonies a Day.
And he says that we are so over-regulated, so over-criminalized in this country that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal daily business commits three felonies every single day.
So if they want to get you, they're going to get you.
And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
To tell you the truth, I thought the guy was in over his head intellectually.
When I first started there, he was a deputy group chief.
He was a GS-15, nobody, journeyman, you know, first line, second-line manager.
No big deal.
There are hundreds of them.
And he worked for this really wonderful woman, a great intellect named Martha Kessler.
And Martha was so highly respected.
She had written this book.
I still remember the title called Syria, Fragile Mosaic of Power.
And when you got hired, you got her book and you had to read the book because like, this is what we do.
This is the perfect example of what we do.
So he was her deputy.
One day, he went to her and he said, Martha, you know, I've been your deputy for X number of years.
I think I'm ready for promotion into the senior intelligence service.
And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a couple of weeks ago about this.
Martha said, not only will you never be a member of the senior intelligence service, I don't even want you working for me anymore.
You're fired.
Well, you're not really fired at the CIA.
If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job.
If you can't find another job in six weeks, then they escort you to your car, they take your badge, and, you know, so long.
Good luck.
Well, the normal job turnover is in the summertime.
This is the week before Christmas, 1993 or 4, I can't recall now.
And there are no jobs open at Christmas.
So he finally finds one job.
It is in the PDB staff, the President's Daily Brief.
And it is as a morning briefer giving the President's Daily Brief briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing.
So that's the National Security Council's director for intelligence programs, who happened to be this guy named George Tennant.
And so they immediately hit it off.
Two alpha dogs, cigar smoking, hard drink.
And there used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the White House that sold cigars.
Tennant had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke and his wife would yell at him.
So they would, after the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand there and laugh and talk about chasing women or whatever.
Totally hit it off.
Then Tennant becomes the deputy director of the CIA.
So he brings Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss, deputy director of the office that Martha's working in.
He calls Martha Kessler in and says, now you're fired.
And so she just elected to retire.
Well, he ended up being identified by Tennant as the guy.
Like, this is my guy.
This guy's going places.
He needs operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years.
I'm going to make him the station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He's an analyst.
He's never served overseas before, never recruited a spy, ever.
It wasn't his job.
Now all of a sudden, he's the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world.
So he does that for a long time.
By the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9-11 hijackers.
And then he comes back as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA, right?
So it's director, deputy director, executive director, and then the deputy directors for operations, intelligence, science, technology, administration.
And they're dotted lines.
So he's now one of the five most senior people in the entire CIA.
He does that for a couple of years and then becomes the executive director.
By the time I get promoted to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant, I'm throwing all these stupid terms out, executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, I'm meeting with Brennan every single day.
So we're doing the Iraq war, we're doing terrorism and al-Qaeda and all this stuff.
He didn't like me and I didn't like him.
And then when I became the quote, unquote, human rights guy, that just kind of sealed it for me.
But I didn't care because I didn't respect him anyhow.
I will say that Jim Pavitt, the deputy director for operations, legendary officer and a really great guy, he hated Brennan more than I did.
And he used to mock Brennan because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, I want to head my own agency.
I want to head my own agency.
And they finally put him in charge of this thing that was temporarily called the TTIC, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center.
It later became the National Counterterrorism Center.
And they sort of shunted him off there.
And it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in the headquarters building.
It was out one of the outlying buildings.
And then he kind of went away.
But where he really did write for himself is in 2007, there was this wave of retirements, right?
We're enough now beyond 9-11 that people can begin to retire.
So this huge wave of senior-level retirements in 07.
And then once these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign.
Well, as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan decided he was going to have my head.
And so he asked Holder to have the FBI grab me.
And I'll tell you what, they knew they didn't have a case.
So there's a little bit of background.
From 2009 to the end of 2011, I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for John Kerry.
It was a terrible job.
Kerry said, oh, I want you to do this and do that, and we're going to investigate this and investigate that.
And then he would kill all the investigations because he wanted to be Secretary of State.
And you didn't want to piss anybody at the White House off.
So I can't talk about how Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin and all of it is because the CIA said they could.
I can't talk about the Dashti Leyli massacre where 2,000 Taliban soldiers were suffocated to death in container trucks because the CIA didn't punch holes for them to breathe in the containers.
Can't talk about any of that stuff because you want to be the Secretary of State.
So I left in 2011.
And right before I left, I got a call from a Japanese diplomat.
And this is one of the things that I loved about that job, is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats.
Who's doing what?
And what do you think about Israel?
What do you think about China?
What do you think about what's going on in Mexico or Cuba or whatever?
And I get a call from this Japanese diplomat, and he invites me to lunch.
I said, great.
We meet at a place on Capitol Hill.
And I remember that lunch very well.
I remember we talked about Israeli elections.
We talked about Turkish elections.
And we talked about the Arab-Israeli peace process.
And at the end of the lunch, he says to me, and I should add, his English was so bad that we had to do the lunch in Arabic.
So he said, what's next for you?
And I said, well, I think I'm going to resign soon.
I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years.
It's been two and a half.
I have five kids, and I really need to make some money and put my kids through college.
You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch?
Shame on you, cold-pitching me like that.
And I got up indignantly and I walked out.
And I walked, I mean directly without stopping to the office of the Senate security officer.
And I knocked on the door.
I went in.
I said, hey, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer.
And he goes, was it that damn Russian again?
And I said, no, it was Japanese.
He goes, Japanese.
I said, I know, right?
He goes, well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information.
I said, this didn't have anything to do with trade information.
I don't think.
I don't know.
We didn't even get that far.
He said, okay, do me a favor.
He said, I've got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the internet.
Write it up as a memo, and I'm going to courier it over to the FBI.
So I sat there and I wrote the whole thing, blow by blow.
The next day he calls me, and he says, two FBI agents are going to come up and talk to you.
And I said, okay.
So they come up, I recount the whole lunch, and they said, all right, here's what we want you to do.
We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it.
And I said, because I'm a patriot, I said, you want me to wear a wire?
And they said, no, we're going to be at the next table.
We're going to listen to everything.
I said, but he only speaks Arabic.
That's okay.
We got a guy who speaks Arabic.
Don't worry.
I said, all right.
So I call him.
I invite him to lunch.
We go to lunch, do the whole thing.
But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called and they said, operation came up.
Just write us another memo.
Do the lunch and write us another memo.
I said, fine.
So I write another memo.
They asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time.
The fifth time, he says to me, I have great news.
He said, I got my dream job.
I've been promoted and I'm going to be the deputy ambassador in Cairo.
And I said, congratulations.
I shook his hand, never saw him again.
So I've written all this to the FBI.
One day in January of 2012, so I've been out of the Senate for about nine months, the FBI calls.
And I look at my cell phone.
It says Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I was like, I wonder what that's all about.
So I answer and they said, hey, you remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago?
And I said, yeah.
And they said, we've got a similar situation and we need your help.
And again, because I'm a patriot, I said, anything for the FBI.
I kick myself now for saying it.
I said, anything for the FBI.
What do you want me to do?
They said, come down to the Washington field office Thursday morning at 10.
I said, done.
I go down there the next Thursday.
And they're waiting for me at the entrance, which I thought was odd.
And we go up to a conference room and they said, we're both cleared, SI, TK, Gamma.
And then there were two compartments above top secret that I was cleared for that they said they were cleared for.
So if the conversation necessitated it, we could go into that area.
So they said, well, before we start, I just wanted to ask you, just read your book.
It was great.
I loved it.
Hey, what about this that you said in your book?
And I was like, yeah, okay.
Yeah, it was a cool story.
What about this other thing?
Yeah, I had fun.
I said, it was kind of hard.
It took me nine months to write the book, 22 months to get it cleared.
And they said, yeah, and we're raiding your house right now as we speak.
And I said, thank God.
I said, I want to speak to my attorney right now.
That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me.
And one of the things that I learned, and this became painfully evident when they started arresting January 6th people, was the FBI in Washington likes to make its arrests on Thursdays because there are no federal arraignments on Friday.
So you're in the D.C. jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you.
And then they arraign you on Monday.
And then you want to make a deal just so you don't ever have to go inside that prison again.
But because I asked to see my attorney, they let me go.
So I called the attorney as soon as I got out of the office.
Actually, when I was walking out, one of them went over to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was Peter Strzok.
And Peter Strzok says, tell me he implicated himself.
And the guy said, not really, no.
We have to let him go.
And so I grabbed my cell phone and I left, went to the attorney's office.
They had already called my attorney and said they were charging me with espionage.
I hadn't committed espionage.
They knew I hadn't committed espionage.
And in fact, since then, I'm fast forwarding a lot, three FBI agents have reached out to me.
Well, two to my attorneys.
One reached out to me directly to apologize, saying that this came from the top.
They thought it was a BS case.
They were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they could do.
One guy reached out to me through eBay of all things, like to try to cover up the trail.
He's like, listen, I've been losing sleep over this for the last 13 years.
I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, I hope you feel better.
My whole life fell apart.
But I'm glad you got that off your chest.
So it became a matter of just survival after that.
You know, you have to take it seriously.
I was facing 45 years in prison.
And then when the Justice Department made a request for a proffer meeting, the proffer meeting is they'll give you a little idea of what they have against you, and then they make an offer.
You can take it or leave it.
And they offered me 45 years.
And I said, I'm not doing 45 minutes.
I didn't do anything wrong.
And this woman, she became deputy attorney general for the criminal division under Biden.
She said, take this deal, Mr. Kiriaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.
And they offered me 45 years for blowing the whistle on the torture program.
So my wife and I stayed up all night, literally all night.
And because Sharon Scranage had taken a plea, there was literally no case law.
So what we found, we found several things.
We found several articles from the Harvard Law Review saying this law is unconstitutional.
It violates the First Amendment and it is prior restraint, right?
Like it tells you in advance you can't say X, Y, and Z. But because there was no case law, you couldn't challenge it in court.
And I said, well, can't we just appeal the charge and maybe, you know, all the way up to the Supreme Court?
And they said, yeah, we can do that post-conviction.
And then you're going to be 45 years waiting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing.
We can't do that.
So I decided by 6 a.m., I'm going to turn it down.
I believed in my heart I hadn't done anything right.
This was political.
It was a vendetta by John Brennan.
And Obama, by all accounts, I had friends, of course, who were still working at the agency and working at the White House.
And they said that Obama had this Nixonian obsession with national security leaks.
And it's because that came from Brennan.
Obama was a senator for two years.
He didn't have any experience doing anything.
So he did what John Brennan told him to do.
And Brennan said, you got to crack down on these leaks.
They do nothing but embarrass us.
So I decided I'm going to turn it down.
6 a.m.
I send an email to my attorneys.
I had 11 attorneys.
I was paying half of them, five of them.
And then one of them writes back and says, put on a pot of coffee.
We'll be at the house by 7.
So they come to my house.
The four main ones came to the house.
Plato was the first one in.
Now, imagine this 80-year-old, 6'2 ⁇ , 280-pound, mean old man.
He comes in, and I said, good morning, Plato.
And he said, you stupid son of a bitch, take the deal, like that.
I said, take the deal.
You're the one that told me not to take the deal.
You're the one who told me we're going to go to trial and win this thing.
And he says, I only told you that to keep your spirits up.
And then the second one, his partner, Bob Trout, a sweet gentleman, a southern gentleman, he says, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal.
And I'm like, now what do I do?
And then the third, who was the guy, Mark McDougall, one of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life.
And the one that I liked and respected the most out of all of them.
I liked all of them and respected all of them, but I felt a connection to this guy.
He pulls me aside.
He was a little bit angry.
And he said, you know what your problem is?
Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice.
It's about mitigating damage.
Take the deal.
And I looked at my wife.
She's just like, what are we going to do?
So I took the deal.
And I got two and a half years in prison.
And they made me do every single day of it.
In fact, we went to sentencing.
And this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court.
And the reason why we didn't go to trial in the end was that the O.J. Simpson jury consultant said, if we were in any other district in America, I would say, let's go for it.
We're going to win this thing.
But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire jury is going to be people from the CIA, from the FBI, from DOD, from intelligence community contractors.
He said, buddy, you don't have a prayer.
Take the deal.
Yeah.
It was bad.
So it's sentencing.
My attorney said, Your Honor, we request that Mr. Kiriaku be sent to a minimum security work camp.
She says, any objection from the Justice Department?
They said, no objection.
She goes, okay, minimum security work camp.
No bars on the windows, no locks on the doors.
You're free to come and go as you please.
You're just on your honor not to abscond.
And most of the guys work, there's a little college in town.
You go sweep the floors or whatever.
So I got to the prison three months later.
And it's weird, the system that we have, Joe.
You walk up and you knock on the door and you say, hi, I'm John Kiriako.
I'm here to turn myself in.
That's all you do.
And your friends and family just drive away.
And so they said, yeah, you got to go across the street to the actual prison.
They'll process you and then they just bring you back over here.
And I said, okay.
So I go across the street.
And I said, I'm John Kiriaku.
I'm here to turn myself in.
And the guy takes me by the arm.
We go outside and we start walking around to the back of the prison.
And I said, no, no, I'm supposed to be at the minimum security camp across the street.
And the guy laughs at me and he goes, not according to my paperwork.
You're not.
And I was like, oh, my God, take it easy.
We later learned Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, make it as difficult as possible.
So I told myself, take it easy.
If you make any ruckus, they're going to put you in solitary.
You don't say a word.
So I didn't say a word.
It took him about 40 minutes to process me.
Then they walked me to my cell.
The only thing the cop said to me, he says, a word of advice, buddy.
If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression.
And I said, great, thanks.
I'm here 40 minutes, and now I'm going to get my ass kicked.
I was in FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution at Loreto, Pennsylvania, which is a low-security prison, but it's called a low-medium, and then there's a high-medium.
So this was a low-medium.
It took me five days to get access to a phone.
And I called Mark McDougall, the attorney that I liked so much, and I said, Mark, they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins.
I said, what do I do?
He says, oh, my God.
Well, he said, we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing, and you'll be home by then.
He said, buddy, I'm sorry.
You're going to have to tough it out.
And so that's what I did.
unidentified
Wow.
So you have this long career working for the government.
Maybe you should think about a pharmaceutical option.
And I was like, why?
There's nothing wrong with me.
I'm ready to fight and march and raise my fist against the Obama administration.
And so I was wrong, of course.
I was so angry that it wasn't even healthy for the people around me.
But I'll tell you, Joe, the hardest thing is you think you can just step back into your life again, and you'll never be able to step back into your life.
So I thought, okay, well, I'm highly educated.
I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies.
I have a master's degree in legislative policy analysis.
I finished my PhD classwork in international affairs.
I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber.
Well, I was confident that I was right and they were wrong.
And my wife, unfortunately, she's now my ex-wife, but she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever gave me.
She said, you have to keep telling your side of the story because eventually they're going to move on to their next victim.
And if you keep talking, your side of the story is going to be the side of record.
And eventually the truth is going to come out.
And sure enough, six weeks before I was released from prison, I called her.
I was allowed to call her every other day for 15 minutes.
So I called her and I said, how was your day?
And she said, it was great.
And I said, really?
Great?
Why was it so great?
And she said, because the Senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true.
And I said, that is great.
And she said, John McCain stood up on the floor of the Senate and said, if it weren't for John Kiriaku, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name.
And so when I got home, God bless him, one of the first calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff.
And he said, Senator McCain says, welcome home, and he wants to know what he can do to be helpful.
And I said, oh my God.
I said, tell him, I said, thank you.
I liked McCain very much from when I was working on Kerry's staff.
Kerry was a little jealous of McCain.
And McCain would go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi.
Kerry said to me one time, why don't you two get a room or something?
And I said, no, I said, we have this connection over torture.
I said, McCain takes me seriously, and I take him seriously.
And so when I spoke to McCain, I said, these damn Obama people, they confiscated my pension.
And I'm going to have to work until the day I die.
They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension.
My attorney wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016.
And it said that every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated.
So, of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to.
So he said, nobody reads these 1,500-page bills.
We're going to slip it in there.
And he said, I'm going to be on the conference committee.
We'll get it taken care of.
And then he got sick.
He got a brain tumor.
And he wasn't named to the conference committee.
And so they pulled it back out again.
And then he died.
And so here I am, 10 years later.
The only way that this can be made right is with a presidential pardon.
And that's what I've been working on for years now.
I was offered a job at a small think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies.
And they said, we'll give you an office, but you're going to have to raise your own salary.
And so it was just like constant go fund me.
So I did that for a year.
I made $20,000 for the year.
And I said, I can't do this.
It's untenable.
And so I just decided, look, no company is going to hire me, right?
I can't go back into government again.
And so I'm going to have to work for myself.
So I had already written my first book, made number five on the New York Times bestsellers list.
My second book, I wrote Longhand from Prison.
I ended up winning two literary awards for that book.
I won the Penn First Amendment Award, which along with the Penn Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe is one of the big four.
And then I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year that year.
I thought, I'm going to keep writing books.
I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium for Independent Journalism.
So it's like 200 small town papers around the country.
And, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting.
And then the Greek government, I happen to be Greek American.
My grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes.
As soon as I was arrested, like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, what can we do to be helpful?
And I said, you can give me citizenship.
And man, like that, I got Greek citizenship.
And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law.
And then they passed it quickly.
The parliament passed it into law.
And then the European Union adopted it.
So I went to Brussels and I testified there and then they repackaged it.
Now it's the law of the land in all of the European Union.
And then people in the States began taking me more seriously.
I started doing some paid speaking gigs.
I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple of different universities.
And then, you know, after a while, you can make an okay living.
I'm still going to have to work until the day I die because I have literally nothing saved.
It all went to the attorneys.
And, you know, hope for the best.
I will say that I was a third generation Democrat.
I left the Democratic Party ages ago.
John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions convinced me that I had done the right thing.
And now I have found common cause with populist Republicans.
You know, you don't have to agree on every issue, right?
You don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe in and everything they stand for.
But I've struck up a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson, sweetest guy in the world and a great supporter of mine.
And Judge Napolitano.
It's a love fest every time the two of us get together.
And I realized that, you know, this thing, this political system we have, it's antiquated.
It doesn't work.
You have to engage with the individual.
Like, I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene on some of these civil liberties issues, right?
Or Thomas Massey or Bernie Sanders for that matter.
But I've realized that, yeah, I've got to stand up for what's right, not what the DNC happens to think what's right, or some politician that I used to, you know, think I had respect for thinks is right.
A couple of nights before I left for prison, the director, the former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who later became the Deputy Director for Operations and was very close to Brennan.
He was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA.
He tweeted at me and he said, don't drop the soap with a laughing emoji.
I gave myself a couple hours to cool off.
And then I texted back and I said, Jose, I'm on the right side of history and you are not.
And that gave me such peace.
I knew I could go to prison, survive this just fine, and come out and still make an impact.
Somebody later told me, they're not allowed to talk to us that way.
That's a violation of, you know, code 11.8, subsection, you know, B, whatever.
So I wrote it in the letter, and I was just like, you know, life in prison.
What am I going to do?
This woman swears at me.
There's nothing I can do.
The other thing was more important.
I had been there three days, and one of my cellmates was an Australian arsonist.
And he said, let me walk you around and introduce you to the guys.
I said, okay.
We go to this other housing unit, and there's a little tiny guy there who didn't speak any English.
And he said, this is, I forget what his name is, Ahmed or something.
He's from Iraq.
And I said, it's very nice to meet you.
And he says, ah, tatkalam Arabi.
Waima Arab anam in Iraq.
I said, yeah, great.
You're from Iraq.
I was in Iraq.
It's very nice to meet you.
Turns out he was there on a terrorism charge.
He was the Imam of some mosque in New York, and somebody was trying to sell the Stinger missile to somebody, and he translated the document, the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in this terrorism case.
So I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day.
And usually if you're being called into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary.
So I hear my name, Kiriaku, Lieutenant's office, immediately, always with immediately.
And they know you can't do it immediately because all the doors are locked.
So I wait for a 10-minute move period.
The bells ring, and I go to the lieutenant's office.
I said, you wanted to see me?
And they have this guy's picture on a computer screen.
You know this guy?
I said, I don't know him.
I met him yesterday.
What'd you say to him?
I said, I said, nice to meet you.
What did he say to you?
He said, nice to meet you too.
Oh, yeah?
Well, after you walked out, he called a number in Pakistan, and they told him to kill you.
I said, get the fuck out of here.
I could kill this guy with my thumb.
Oh, no, no, don't do that.
We've been looking for a reason to transfer him out.
I'm like, okay.
So every time I see this guy, I give him the stink eye, right?
And then he gives me the stink eye back.
But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that doesn't make any sense.
He's Kurdish.
He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish.
Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan?
That just didn't make sense.
So I saw him in the yard, and I went up to him, and he got kind of scared, like he was going to try to defend himself.
And I had, you know, six inches and a hundred pounds on this guy.
So I said, wait a minute, I just want to ask you a question.
Did the cops say anything to you about me?
And he said, yeah.
I said, what did they say to you?
And he said, they told me that after we met, you called a number in Washington and they told you to kill me.
And I said, oh, they did, did they?
So I went back to the law library and I looked this up and this was a Class D felony.
It was conspiring to commit violence in a federal facility.
It's punishable by up to five years in prison.
So I wrote it in my letter and I sent it to my attorney and I didn't give it a second thought.
I didn't know my attorney was friends with Ariana Huffington, who then put it on Huffington Post with this banner headline, millions of hits.
The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me.
And it's in, I mean, it's everywhere from CNN to Playboy to The Economist and Time magazine when Time magazine was a thing.
And NPR is calling the prison to interview me.
And the next thing I know, I'm called to the warden's office.
Well, that's in an off-limits part of the facility.
So the warden calls me in.
He's like, I'm going to send you to solitary right now.
And I thought, you know, is now the time to be to be humble before the warden, or should I stake my claim?
And I said, Warden, with all due respect, I've gone nose to nose with al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you?
Give me some credit.
He said, yeah, we'll see what you say when you've spent some time in solitary.
I said, I've lived in Yemen, in Pakistan.
I'm not afraid of your Loretto, Pennsylvania, solitary.
Besides, I said, go ahead and send me to solitary.
CNN's going to be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot.
When these guys die, and they've started to die, in their obituaries, it's going to say that they were among the creators of the CIA's torture program.
And so they have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and over and over again that it was the right thing to do.
Do you have any concern that in exposing more of what has been done to you, that it somehow limits your possibility of being pardoned because you're exposing so many people that may still be working there?
Because there's a lot of cases where people are setting people up.
And, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine about this one case where there was a, I'm sure you remember it.
There was a 19-year-old, I think he was probably at the very least intellectually challenged guy, and they tricked him into, they radicalized him, gave him a fake bomb, gave him a cell phone.
Listen, there are well-documented cases where the FBI infiltrates a group and they go to a meeting and literally everybody in the meeting is an FBI agent.
You know, I remember talking to CIA friends of mine saying, you know, they taught us in training that you've got to follow the evidence.
And there's no evidence that any of this happened.
I worked with Christopher Steele on an operation in London 25 years ago, 26 years ago.
There was this fundamental misunderstanding of what an operations officer was supposed to do.
An operations officer goes out and collects intelligence and then sends it back.
And that's it.
Then it's up to the analyst to decide, this is great, this is crap, this is not true, this is partially true, whatever.
So he goes out there, talks to whatever low-level, terrible sources he happened to have, writes all this nonsense down, sends it back, and they're like, oh, look what Donald Trump did.
He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed.
No, he didn't.
One guy made this up, and Christopher Steele wrote it and sent it back.
Or you're a guy who's going to kidnap the governor or you're a guy who is an insurrectionist who's trying to overthrow the government on January 6th.
And then you watch the footage that they wouldn't release during the trials and you see them getting a guided tour, the guided tour through like the security guards are walking them into the Senate.
Like, what the fuck?
What is this?
Like, why is no one outraged?
And why is it only one side that's outraged?
God, if I was a Democrat congressman or a senator, or if I was any sort of a politician on the other side, I'd be like, do you know how disgusting this is?
And those are mostly people who worked for large media corporations and either were fired or had to leave because their own ethics and morals and eventually branched out on their own.
And this is what you were talking about, too, that presidents come and go.
But those people, that's the real power.
You know, this term, the deep state, a lot of people that are, you know, there's a lot of people that don't like to entertain any kind of conspiracies because they think it's like a fool's journey.
But you're really foolish if you don't believe in conspiracies.
The crazy thing, too, in a lot of people's eyes is the difference between what they thought of, what the narrative is of the Obama administration in terms of like whistleblowers and what the hope was.
Well, look at the Dashti Leili massacre that I mentioned earlier.
It was part of his campaign to open an investigation of Dashti Leili.
What happened was at Dashti Leili, Afghanistan, on November the 30th and December the 1st, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up en masse, right?
And the Northern Alliance called us and said, what do we do with all these guys?
We don't have room for them.
So we told them, put them in trucks, take them out to the desert, and just hold them there until we can divide them up and send them to smaller jails all around the country.
And if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan.
But there were no air holes in the containers.
There was no food.
There was no water.
And of the 2,000, 14 survival.
And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can.
So Barack Obama said in 2008, if he's elected president, he's going to investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it.
And then there was nothing.
So I said to John Kerry, I said, listen, this is part of the Obama campaign.
Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing.
And so I went, and there are still bones just sticking out of the sand.
There are clothes that have just been laying there in the desert all these years.
So I come back, and I get a call from a kind of a prominent human rights activist, and he said he wanted to see me, but it had to be private.
So we went to Johns Hopkins University.
There was a classroom that wasn't being used.
We met there, and he said, listen, I have a witness who was 12 years old at the time.
And he was hiding behind a rock, and he saw what happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out.
I said, okay.
And he said, but what's new is he says that there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and they were speaking English.
I said, okay, that's all I need.
So I wrote a letter to the agency and I asked, you know, for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site at the box up or at the at the location where the trucks were opened?
And I had it auto-penned, John Kerry, chairman.
Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and he says, hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter.
I said, I didn't see any response from the agency.
I just checked my mail an hour ago.
And he said, they classified it top secret.
It's down in the vault.
I said, top secret.
I said, well, what did it say?
And he says, it says, go fuck yourself.
I said, great.
That's how they want to play it.
So I went to Kerry and Kerry says, you know, we're stirring up a hornet's nest here and I think we should just let this fade into history.
I was like, again, because you want so badly to be Secretary of State again.
And actually, there are some developments that may look ugly on the surface that I'm optimistic about.
First of all, this ceasefire, we're recording this on, I guess, today's Thursday, but the ceasefire that was announced this morning, this is huge, huge.
And I think this is not a victory for the Israelis.
I think that it makes Donald Trump stronger and Benjamin Netanyahu weaker.
Netanyahu's decision to bomb gutter was too much.
Just too much.
It served, it could have served to embarrass the president.
What it ended up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position.
So that's a victory for the White House, as far as I'm concerned.
Man, I follow Iran more closely than anybody I know.
You remember, you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much.
When we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China.
And Richard Nixon was the most anti-China person that could possibly have been elected president.
Yet it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and opened diplomatic relations.
And call me crazy, but I think that if there's going to be peace with Iran, Donald Trump's going to make that peace with Iran.
It may not be in the form of a trip to Tehran, but I could see a trip to Riyadh and have a meeting brokered by Mohammed bin Salman, and maybe we can come to some sort of an agreement on issue number one or issue number two.
Well, it seems to be a part of what he wants to accomplish in these four years, that he wants to go down as having made significant change in the world in a positive direction.
Netanyahu has a vested interest in making sure that this war lasts as long as possible.
Because remember, he's still under indictment for corruption.
Also, one thing that most Americans don't understand is the Israeli political system is such that it is literally impossible for any party to win a working majority in the Knesset, right?
There are just too many parties and too many individual interests.
So you've got, you know, a dozen parties represented.
Benjamin Netanyahu has never won more than 27% of the vote.
The likes of Itimar Ben-Gavir and Smotrich and these other guys who have come in from the right, they were attacking him to the point where he had to bring their parties into this coalition government just to get him to shut up.
I mean, these are people that have felony convictions for anti-Arab hate crimes, and now they're, you know, Minister of National Security, Minister of Finance with responsibility for the West Bank.
It was a bunch of Chinese guys just sitting around a table, and it said the Chinese government sits and waits for the United States to self-destruct or continue its self-destruction or something like that.
It's because they know that they can outweigh us.
You know, we have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to be all around the world protecting the weak and those without a voice and being the peacemaker.
You know, we have 190 bases in 144 countries.
We have to do all that.
And the Chinese say, yeah, yeah, you have to.
Go ahead.
Spend all your money on that stuff.
In the meantime, we're going to have 350 mile-an-hour trains and the best highways in the world and the best schools and the best hospitals and the nicest airports.
And then all of our extra money, we're going to essentially bribe foreign countries to do things that we want them to do.
So it's a lesson that I think we haven't learned as a country, that there are other ways of winning hearts and minds.
You know, the old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Yeah.
There were times when I, after I got out of prison, the first two years after I got out of prison, that every once in a while, and I'll preface this by saying I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA.
Every once in a while, I would see surveillance.
And I would write down the license number and just call my lawyer.
And then he'd call me a day later and say, it's the FBI.
When people say we need to dismantle the CIA and dismantle, I'm like, what are you talking about?
You know, like Mike Baker, I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas.
Like, if you talk to someone who's actually worked in the field, they will give you an understanding of all the bad things that are happening in the world that we have to keep tabs on.
Like, what is it like having been a public servant, having worked for the government, and having done all these things that are so critical and important for national security, and then to have that machine turn on you, do your time in prison, and come out, and now being someone who talks about it all.
And then a couple of days after my arrest, I got an email from a retired deputy director of the CIA, a guy that I had worked for at the very start of my career.
And he said, I saved this as a kind of a souvenir.
He said, you've chosen a difficult path.
I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself.
I'll add, too, that the election of Donald Trump, in kind of an odd way, freed me up to be more vocal because the Obama people and the Biden people were far, far more willing to say, that is speech that we don't like.
That needs to be prosecuted.
And with Donald Trump, and I don't know if he even meant to do this or not, it's like so much more is out there and in the public realm, the public domain.
You know, I think at the end of the day, that's populism.
It's just a different way of looking at government.
It's funny because under populism, the feeling is very strong that they work for us and they answer to us.
And with these mainstream administrations, whether it's Obama, Biden, George W. Bush, it's like, well, the wise men are running the government, so we need to sit by quietly and let them do their important work.
You know, when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, the Obama administration passed the NDAA in 20, whatever it was, where they legalized propagandization of the American people.
We had this propaganda station, radio and television, called Radio TV Marti, and it was beamed at Cuba, right?
The only thing the Cubans really care about watching from us is baseball.
So we would broadcast a lot of baseball games.
But the way it was being broadcast from Florida, there was this little strip of land on the Gulf Coast in southern Florida where they could pick it up, but only with like Dish Network, I think is what it was.
Well, that's illegal because it's a propaganda station and Americans can't watch American propaganda.
And so rather than like not broadcast it anymore or move the satellite or whatever, they decided we'll change the law to make it easier and more and legal to propagandize the American people.
So now the government can produce any propaganda that it wants and foist it on the American people.
It's like, thank you, Barack Obama.
Now I don't even know if the news that I'm reading is real or not.
Well, lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity because this is an opportunity to push something through that could be beneficial if you want to push propaganda on the American people.
But something like the NDA should be a nonpartisan issue.
That's right.
Everyone should be looking at that and go, this is crazy.
Something like using propaganda against American citizens.
Like, what's the pros and what's the cons?
I want two columns.
I want you to write down all the things that are going to be negatively affected by propaganda on American citizens, all the ways they could be used corruptly, and then all the positives we're going to get out of it.
I went to Cuba last year because they translated my first two books into Spanish and put them in the National Library of Cuba, and they had this ceremony during the international book something or other for a bunch of American authors.
So I went.
And before I went, my editor at Consortium News said, do me a favor, he said, ever since I was a little kid, I've been an avid radio listener.
He said, tune in after sunset when the signals are stronger, tune in to American radio stations and tell me if the Cubans are jamming them or if you can hear stations.
I said, that's a great idea.
So I had a radio there in my hotel room, and I got too many American stations.
Miami and Fort Myers and anything you want to hear in Cuba from the United States, you can hear.
They don't jam anything.
And it's baseball, baseball, baseball.
They want to hear every baseball game.
We don't need radio, TV, Marty.
You know, I get a kick out of the Washington Post just clobbers Carrie Lake all the time.
Every time she testifies on Capitol Hill about the voice of America, they're like, no, we need voice of America.
You know, I have a lot of friends who are professors of Russian studies, Soviet studies, all this stuff.
And they all say the same thing, that the Russians are winning.
The Ukrainians are losing.
So the policy decision is, do we really want to jump in on the side of the Ukrainians?
Or do we want to let diplomacy, let diplomats do what they're paid to do?
And I always say, sure.
We used to make fun of the Bush administration when I was at the agency because we had never seen an administration work so hard to not speak to our enemies.
We weren't allowed to talk to the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iraqis or the Iranians or the Cubans, the Venezuelans.
Like, my God, who do we talk to?
We're not going to accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talk to the British and the French and the Germans.
So keeping the lines of communication open, I think, are very important to settling this.
I think eventually what everybody predicted at the very beginning of the hostilities is going to be the final result, and that is that the Ukrainians are going to lose territory, and the Russians are going to have to agree to probably fast-track membership into the European Union for Ukraine, and not NATO membership, but major non-NATO ally status, the same status that we have for Australia and Japan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Ukraine.
I'm very worried that the Israelis are going to attack Iran again.
I'm worried that the Israelis aren't going to respect the deal that appears to be in process in Gaza.
Or the West Bank.
I mean, we're not talking about the West Bank.
Right.
Where just two weeks ago, a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took all their houses.
You know, what happens next in the West Bank?
Yeah, there are a lot of synagogues in New York, New Jersey, Toronto that have these things called real estate seminars where you can put your name on a list and then they call you and say, hey, house just opened up over here in this Arab village that's not Arab anymore.
Come and take your house.
And the two weeks ago, the village that the Israelis cleared out was one of the last remaining Christian villages.
I think we should believe the Israelis when they tell us that they believe in Greater Israel, which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the southern quarter of Lebanon, a strip in southwestern Syria.
And I mean, the map that Netanyahu had at the UN the other day included the Sinai Peninsula, for heaven's sake.
What's that all about?
They took the Sinai in the 67 war and gave it back after the Camp David Accords.
Are you worried about Israel's influence on American politics?
Because that's one of the things that's coming to light over the last couple of years since the invasion, where people are paying more and more attention to Israel.
And then also seeing what happens when you criticize Israel.