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Dec. 4, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
01:02:32
CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou trades stories with RFK Jr in this episode.

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John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.
John was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda.
In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.
Telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was officially U.S. government policy, that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush.
He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designated to punish spies.
He served 23 months in prison as a result of that revelation.
In 2012, Kiriakou was honored with the Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who, quote, advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates, end quote, and by the inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly's series of Americans Who Tell the Truth, which features notable truth-tellers throughout American history.
He won the Penn Center USA prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International whistleblowing prize for bravery and integrity in public interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity Intelligence also in 2016. and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity Intelligence also in You are an incredibly prolific writer.
I spent a summer vacation in 2001 in maximum security prison in Puerto Rico, you know, for my litigation against the Navy for the bombing of Vieques.
Yeah.
But it was one of the greatest summers of my life because I didn't have a cell phone.
I didn't have to make decisions.
And I got to sit there and write.
I assume some of your writing took place in prison, although...
A lot of it did.
There's nothing else to do.
Yeah.
And also, yeah, exactly.
There's nothing else to do.
He's the author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life, and the CIA's War on Terror.
Another book, Doing Time Like a Spy, How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, The Convenient Terrorist, Abu Zubadah, The Weird Wonderland of America, The Secret Wars, and The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
That must have been a retrospective because that was a long time ago.
Yes.
I wrote that with Gareth Porter, the great Vietnam War era historian and author.
And what we wanted to do was to counter this narrative that Americans have been so bombarded with over the last 40 plus years.
That Iranians hate the United States unnecessarily.
That the Iranian leadership is quote-unquote crazy.
It's not crazy at all.
And that we've been mucking around in that country for coming up on a century now.
Yeah.
I did an article...
I think it was in 2016, that was one of the most read articles in the year in Politico.
And I went through that history, and I was talking about, the article was about how the CIA had essentially orchestrated The war in Syria, which was a pipeline war, because the agency and the State Department wanted to build a pipeline through Syria to bring natural gas from Qatar, which would have put the Russians out of business.
Bashar Assad, the ruler of Syria, was blocking it because he had a strong alliance with the Russians.
And so he had to be deposed.
And that was basically the story.
But it's the same thing.
We've tried to overthrow a third of the countries in the world.
And one of the worst things that we ever did as a nation was to overthrow the first democratically elected government in the 8,000-year history of Persia.
And Mohamed Mossadegh, who was this incredible...
A beloved leader in Iran and all over the developing world who figured out that when he tried to nationalize the holdings of BP oil company, which was stealing from Iran, and Winston Churchill tried to overthrow him, he expelled the British.
All of his advisors told him, you've got to expel the United States.
And he said, no.
I trust the United States.
They were a colonial nation.
They're the fathers and the founders of the democracy that we want to create here.
And he trusted in Truman and when Eisenhower came in, Allen Dulles, We sent Kermit Roosevelt over there and they brutally overthrew him and installed the Shah and we've been living with the blowback of that for the last 50 years.
Nobody in America knows that story and every single person in Iran knows that we overthrew their democracy.
You know, and we accused him for decades of being a communist.
Not only was he not a communist, but the Communist Party of Iran, the Tudai Party, actively opposed him because who are the most anti-communists?
It's the socialists.
And he had worked for years to deny the Soviet Union a foothold in Iran.
And then we just turned it all on its head.
You know, Bob Shear, the eminent journalist from the L.A. Times, told me that when he was a young, aggressive journalist, he wanted to write an article about Mossadegh and the overthrow.
And so he said he just looked in a Washington, D.C. telephone book and found Kermit Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt, of course, was retired from the CIA by then.
He was living in a nursing home in northwest Washington, and he called him.
I think he went to work for the oil companies He did.
You're exactly right.
That's where he went right from Iran to work for Exxon, I think.
That's exactly right.
Roosevelt had never given an interview and Bob has a very persuasive way about him and Roosevelt ended up speaking to him and Roosevelt told him That at the CIA, everybody knew that Mossadegh wasn't a communist.
They did this for the British, and more specifically, they did it for British Petroleum.
And he said it was the gravest mistake he had ever made in his career.
I mean, words are nice after the fact, but here we are, what, 80 years, 75 years, 70 years, I guess it is, this year, after the overthrow.
And relations with Iran have never recovered.
If anything, they're worse.
Right?
And one of the things that Americans don't understand is the hostage crisis was prompted because Kissinger persuaded Jimmy Carter to allow the Shah to come to our country.
Yes.
And then I think to get cancer treatment.
And at the same time, Clinton, if I remember this directly, Richard Bissell, who was this abysmal CIA officer who had been part of the original overthrow, in his ambassador to Iran.
So everybody in Iran thought we were about to overthrow them again, and that's why they invited the embassy.
We don't understand that there's, like you said, the Iranian people are more like Americans and more aligned in their values with Americans than probably any population in the Mideast, with maybe the exception of Israel.
But it's the way that they view life.
They're open.
They're funny.
They're competitive.
They're irreverent.
Normally, they're very irreverent.
They were not historically fanatics.
They were...
No, no.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
They had decades of exposure to Western culture.
Funny to say, they had and continue to have one of the most extensive collections of modern art.
Anywhere in the world.
Now, they're all locked up now because much of it is deemed to be degenerate.
But if you wanted to see Picassos and Warhols and Gaugans, they were in the Tehran Museum of Fine Art.
That is so ironic.
There's so many things I want to talk to you about.
Have you seen the...
You must have seen the Netflix documentary.
It's not a documentary.
It's kind of a documentary.
Right, I did.
In fact, I was the script consultant.
It is amazing, really riveting.
I recommend it to anybody, but it shows the power that, you know, the CIA had over the United States Senate, that they're all terrified.
I think she was the head of the Intelligence Committee.
She was.
She was the chairman.
and that she was taking orders from the CIA and they were in spying on the United States Senate.
There was no fallout for that at all.
You know, one of the things, a criticism that I long had of Dianne Feinstein was that she was too much of a cheerleader for the CIA.
You know, to me, oversight, congressional oversight is Daniel Patrick Moynihan kind of oversight, real oversight, where you know what's going on, you follow covert action, you go through the budget line by line and provide real oversight That's what the committee was originally intended to do, or the committees, I should say.
Let me interrupt you for a second to tell people what this is about, because a lot of people are listening to this and they have no idea what we're talking about.
Oh, you bet.
You bet.
Why don't you summarize what it was about?
Sure.
The report is a film written and directed by Scott Z. Burns about the investigator on the Senate Intelligence Committee who was tasked with writing what became the Senate Torture Report.
Now, there were three investigators in the beginning.
One resigned and the other one just kind of fell by the wayside.
It was too much work.
It was overwhelming.
And it took years and years to investigate.
And not just that it took years to investigate, but that the CIA was actively working to dissuade, to discourage, or even to send these investigators off on tangents in the wrong direction.
And one investigator saw it through, was able to.
The torture report was during Immediately after 9-11, the United States, which had this long, long history of creating the Geneva Convention, which actually Abraham Lincoln framed, you know, of Washington saying during the Revolutionary War,
When the British were torturing American prisoners and killing them in prison ships off Manhattan, and a British officer suggested to Washington, we can torture some of these guys and find out what their plans were.
And he said, if we have to do that, it would be better that, you know, that this nation doesn't exist.
Because this nation is going to be based on idealism.
Lincoln said the same thing during the Civil War and then created the documents and the protocols that ended up becoming the Geneva Convention, which we pushed everybody in the world to say we're not going to torture people anymore.
Yes.
And during the Bush administration, a number of people, these neocons in the White House, Jonathan Yu and Wolf, yeah, all developed these really twisted legal theories that it was okay to, you know, basically nearly kill somebody.
Yes.
And may I add to that?
In 1946, We executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.
That was a death penalty offense.
We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946 which specifically prohibited us from carrying out exactly those actions That we carried out in 2002 to 2005, following the 9-11 attacks.
In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner of war.
On the day that that photo ran, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered an investigation.
Well, in 2002, we're torturing three dozen different people.
The law never changed.
It never changed.
It was never amended by Congress.
We're the ones who changed.
I mean, the worst torture happened to the guy you arrested, right?
Yes.
He was the guinea pig.
He was the first one that we tortured.
I think I remember that they waterboarded him over a hundred times.
Yeah.
Now, these 10 techniques were supposed to start with the least offensive.
The least offensive was they would grab him by the lapels and give him a shake and say, answer my questions.
And then it would go down from there to, you know, a slap in the face, a slap in the belly, something called walling, where they would shove him up against the wall, but he was supposed to have a towel wrapped around his neck and the wall was made of plywood.
They started with the most severe technique.
They started with waterboarding.
And when they did the walling technique on him, he didn't have a towel wrapped around his neck and the wall wasn't made of plywood.
It was made of concrete block.
And he got permanent brain damage from that.
And there were other things, too, things that were never authorized and for which no one was ever brought to justice.
During the course of his interrogation, the FBI agent that interrogated him at the time, Ali Soufan, found that Abu Zubaydah had this irrational fear of insects.
And so they slapped a diaper on him.
They put him in a coffin for 11 days and And they poured a box of cockroaches on top of him before they closed the coffin, just to make him crazy, to drive him crazy.
It got to the point where he would start to cry and curl up into a fetal position just when his interrogator walked into the room.
They called it learned helplessness.
But literally nothing that they did to him was legal.
And don't forget, we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
I say all the time, too, that when I was on rotation to the State Department from the CIA overseas, I served in Bahrain for two years.
It's a little tiny country in the Persian Gulf.
And I was the human rights officer.
Congress has mandated that Every country with which we have diplomatic relations have a human rights report written about them by a State Department officer or somebody in the embassy.
So that was my job in Bahrain.
And I would go to the Minister of Interior and say, Your Highness, you cannot pick up a 15 year old boy for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration peacefully and beat him to death and then call his family to come and pick up the body.
I have to report that to Congress.
But how much authority then do I have when the CIA station chief goes in an hour later and says, don't listen to the human rights guy.
We want you to open a secret facility here where we can take people to torture them, or better yet, you torture them so we can deny it, and then you give us a transcript of everything we say.
We're either going to be that shining beacon of light that respects human rights and civil rights and civil liberties, or we're not.
We're either going to be a country that's governed by the rule of law, or we're not.
We can't be both.
So that was a footnote to what happened with the torture tapes.
So there were tapes.
Now, here's what I want people to understand, because a lot of people who watch this know who Averill Haynes is.
And Avril Haines is now the Director of National Intelligence, meaning she's the highest spy in this country.
That's right.
She was the Deputy Director of the CIA and was in the middle of all this.
And then she played a part in the cover-up of a lot of these crimes.
Yes.
And instead of being punished for it, she was promoted.
Yes.
And people on this show I don't know her because she was one of the major players in a simulation, a coronavirus simulation, Old Event 201, that took place in October of 2019, two months exactly before people realized there was a pandemic loose.
The Chinese knew it as of mid-September 2019, so they knew it a month before, and George Gayo Who's director of the Chinese CDC was at Event 201 in New York City where they modeled a coronavirus pandemic that killed 65 million people, supposedly.
And they weren't modeling medical protocols.
In other words, there was no interest in public health.
It was how do we use a pandemic as a pretense for eliminating constitutional rights and clamping down totalitarian controls.
And one of the contributions that April Haynes made was to tell people we need to not only to censor, they were all agreeing we need to get the social media to start censoring dissent about criticism of government policies needs to be abolished from the internet.
And she said we need to also create a unity of opinion, an orthodoxy, flooding the zone with authoritative voices.
So then two months after she simulates a coronavirus pandemic, we then get the coronavirus pandemic that they simulated.
And then at the Munich Security Conference, which is the International Annual Conclave of Spies from all the Western nations, the World Economic Forum modeled a monkeypox epidemic that is supposed to hit in May of 2022.
And then exactly on time, two years later, May of 2022, the WHO announces a monkeypox pandemic.
Monkeypox has never spread from human to human before.
You know, but Avril Haines' role in all of these things, and then when President Biden directed all of the spy agencies to find out whether The coronavirus had come from Wuhan.
He put Avril Haines in charge of the investigation.
And Avril Haines, and by the way, the CIA, Tony Fauci had funded a lot of the gain-of-function in Wuhan, but nowhere near what the CIA had been funding and made.
The NIH has been running their funding through EcoHealth Alliance, which is a CIA asset, and then tens of millions of dollars through USAID, which is also regarded as a CIA front group.
Gable Haynes was given 90 days to figure out, did it come from Wuhan?
And she came back with another whitewash document.
So she is the goddess of the cover-up.
And she's been put in charge of this.
So people know who she is.
So tell her about her involvement.
I'm glad you brought this up because this is, I think, a very, very important point.
This is not at all a partisan issue.
We can't just point at the George W. Bush administration and Donald Trump and say, look what they did.
Look what they did.
They used the CIA as a weapon.
It was at least as bad under the Obama administration.
It continues with the likes of Avril Haines during the Biden administration.
Gina Haspel, when Donald Trump named her CIA director at the agency, and I've been very public about this, we used to call her bloody Gina because that was her history.
I mean, she was not just a supporter of the torture program.
She was one of the creators of the torture program.
She's the one that destroyed the tapes of Abu Zubaydah being tortured after being specifically told by the White House counsel to preserve the tapes because they may have contained evidence of a crime, which, of course, they did.
So this is not a Republican or Democratic thing.
Okay, so Gina Haskell is then general counsel.
The CIA, she's specifically ordered by the White House, and Congress is saying, we want Congress.
Yes.
And instead of preserving them, Their evidence of crime, she destroys them, which is a crime.
Which is a crime!
Right, which is a crime.
Who also disingenuously tried to convince people that he wasn't a torture supporter.
I was the director's morning briefer during that period.
John Brennan was one of the godfathers of the torture program.
It's funny how they all try to create these new histories for themselves.
And when Gina Haspel should have never been considered, she violated the law.
She covered up a terrible CIA crime.
Yes.
And in doing that, as you know, there's a lot of people like you.
Most of the people, the CIA, my daughter-in-law was in the CIA clandestine services.
She is the most idealistic human being I know.
Most of the people who join the CIA are patriots.
They're idealistic.
They love our country.
They love the Constitution.
But the people who get promoted are the outlaws, the criminals, the And that is a bad example to all of them.
And when Gina Haspel gets rewarded for her crime by being appointed deputy director of the CIA, Averill Haynes is their supporter.
You're absolutely right.
You know, when this happened, when Gina Haspel was named director of the CIA, the Washington Post called me and they asked if I would write an op-ed in opposition, of course.
I jumped at the opportunity and I said in this op-ed, what kind of a message does this appointment send to the CIA workforce?
To me, the message is, don't pay attention to the law.
Go ahead and violate the law.
Not only will you not be prosecuted, but you'll be promoted.
And you might even become the director of the CIA if you ignore the oversight committees and you ignore the White House counsel.
That's Washington.
They just don't care.
And that's why it's up to the rest of us to hold their feet to the fire.
You know, I say all the time, when I put my right hand in the air on my first day at the CIA, and I swore to uphold and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I hate to think that I was the only person who actually meant it that day.
It couldn't have been just me.
So we have to keep fighting them at every step of the way.
So now, to go back to the report.
Yes.
Okay, so after Gina Haskell destroys all of that material illegally, then the Senate starts investigating the destruction.
And the CIA, rather than answering questions, and by the way, this is the same thing they did during the Warrant Commission.
Absolutely.
They were, you know, Alan Dulles, whom my uncle John Kennedy fired when my uncle was killed.
He said to a young reporter, I'm glad the little shit is dead.
He thought he was a king.
And he then has himself appointed to the Warren Commission and then steers all the debate away from the CIA. And American people never find out that Lee Harvey Oswald, since 1959, was a CIA asset.
He was recruited out of the Marine Corps.
Sent on a mission to Russia by James Jesus Angleton.
You know, those are things we should have known about.
People should have known about that and been able to question, but would nobody find out about it because he was there running the committee.
So the same thing happens again.
You have the CIA, you have the Senate investigating this destruction, this illegal destruction of these documents.
And while they're investigating it, We don't know who ordered us that it be bugged.
Isn't that what happened?
We don't know definitively.
We think it was John Brennan.
We think something like that would have to go all the way to the top.
John Brennan was the director of the CIA. Avril Haines was the deputy director at the time.
And the funny thing about that is that John Brennan was always very close to Dianne Feinstein.
Personally close.
He liked and respected her until she started to ask questions.
And when Senator Feinstein ordered her investigators to do the right thing and to get to the bottom of this torture program and whether or not the CIA had violated the law, it got too close for comfort for John Brennan.
And Brennan, in what I think is probably unprecedented, maybe, what do I know, action, ordered the CIA to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.
To see what it was that they were working on, to see what it was that they had uncovered in this investigation.
Now, the sad postscript to this.
I mean, how illegal is it?
The CIA by its charter is not allowed to spy on Americans, right?
That's right.
That's right.
They weren't just spying on Americans.
They were spying on American senators who were investigating them.
It's insane.
And then when Feinstein found out about it, you probably recall, she took to the floor of the Senate in a very unusual move.
And she criticized the CIA and John Brennan by name very specifically.
It raised a lot of eyebrows here.
And in unofficial Washington, we really didn't know what it was at the time that had spurred this on.
So word finally got out that Brennan had ordered his people to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.
Feinstein, to her credit, reported this to Eric Holder as a crime.
She filed a crimes report with the Justice Department.
And then Brennan filed a crimes report against Feinstein's investigators, saying that they had illegally obtained highly classified national defense information, and he wanted them charged under the Espionage Act.
What was the information they obtained that they were being spied upon?
That they had a torture program that was patently unconstitutional.
Can you imagine?
And that is why he wanted them investigated.
That's why he wanted them charged with a crime.
Yes.
Because they were doing their jobs.
And they had uncovered the torture program.
And the details of the torture program.
When I went public on torture, I said, well, I said what you said.
I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy.
And that the policy had been personally approved by the president.
And then I also outlined the torture techniques.
Later on, thanks to Senator Feinstein, we learned things like rectal hydration using hummus, for example.
We learned about using a power drill to threaten to lobotomize prisoners.
Russian roulette being played against prisoners.
We learned about all these things that were extrajudicial, that were never approved, and for which nobody was ever prosecuted or even investigated.
And then, like I said a moment ago, the sad postscript to all this was Eric Holder just said, now, now, everybody go back to your corners.
Nobody's going to be investigated or prosecuted.
Let's just move on.
Well, the CIA should have been prosecuted.
John Brennan should have been prosecuted for breaking into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.
And let me add one other thing.
This report, we have to constantly remind ourselves that what was released by the Senate, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not the torture report.
The torture report is more than 5,000 pages long.
It's never been released.
What was released- Who wrote the report?
Who was the Chief Counselor of Fine State?
Yeah, I'm going to look right now.
And who plays him in the movie?
It was Adam Driver.
Adam Driver plays him in the movie.
Yeah.
What's his name?
I'm going to look right now.
He really was a hero.
And Adam Driver did a great job.
Big hero.
Big hero.
I'm going to look right now.
I assume that he had his life totally ruined.
Yeah.
Daniel Jones.
That's right.
Dan Jones.
Yeah.
In fact, he moved on.
I think he went to the Pentagon.
And he's just kind of living a normal, quiet, middle-class life.
But it's enough to wreck your marriage and your family and your career in a place like Washington.
But the Senate Torch Report, what was released, was a very heavily redacted 500-page executive summary.
We really don't know what was in the report.
And I would make one recommendation, too, to people who are listening to this.
Read the executive summary, but pay very close attention to the footnotes.
Because that's where the real story is told.
It's in the footnotes.
For example...
Even the executive summary, as I understand it, I haven't seen it, is also redacted, right?
Oh, heavily.
Heavily redacted.
The person who made that call to not release the 5,000 page report, then even to redact the executive summary, that again was Averill Haynes.
Correct.
That was Averill Haynes.
Okay, so Avril Haines, for covering up this crime, is now the number one spy in America.
And she is, President Obama is one of his, probably his top three advisors.
Let me tell you something else that Avril Haines did.
To know fanfare two weeks ago is she announced, conveniently on a Friday afternoon, when nobody's paying any attention, that the CIA is in the process of opening its first ever laboratory.
Have you heard this?
No.
Yeah, they're opening a laboratory.
It was announced by the University of Virginia, CIA, to open first ever research and development laboratory.
Now, they won't tell us what it is they're going to be doing in this laboratory.
But, I mean, all we have to do is think back to MKUltra and experimentation with LSD and, you know, all of these horror stories from the 50s to the mid-70s.
I mean, in truth...
The CIA has been operating laboratories since 1947, because Fort Detrick is a CIA laboratory.
You're absolutely right.
Nixon closed down Fort Detrick.
The army actually destroyed all its stocks.
But before they did, the CIA went in there and took a sample of every single pathogen and kept it somewhere that we don't know.
But the CIA was also...
I think they had 178 universities at one point that were doing...
You know, these mind control experiments and biological warfare experiments illegally, Operation Artichoke, I'm MKUltra, all of the other MKs and professors who are dreaming up new ways of killing people and controlling their minds and torturing them.
Yes, yes.
It pains me as an American to agree with you on this issue, but everything you've said is true.
Here's an announcement from the University of Virginia, of all places.
It says, today the Central Intelligence Agency launched CIA Labs, a federal laboratory and in-house research and development arm for CIA to drive science and technology breakthroughs for tomorrow's intelligence challenges.
CIA Labs joins the community of more than 300 U.S. federal labs, and it establishes CIA as a research partner for other labs, academia, and industry in disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence to biotechnology to quantum computing and advanced materials.
That scares the daylights out of me.
Yeah.
There's also this, and I don't know if you know about this, but if you start looking at the kind of stuff they're researching, the synthetic biology and the AI stuff, there's kind of a fascination with transhumanism, you know, that is shared by the Silicon Valley companies, which are all linked in one way or the other to CIA, either through in-cutel investments...
Or through state security agreements or through contracts.
I mean, all these, you know, Microsoft and everybody else are all taking billions of dollars from CIA contracts for spying on everybody.
Yes.
Amazon Cloud Services.
And, you know, that's another thing, too.
You mentioned a few minutes ago that the CIA is statutorily prohibited from spying on Americans.
Of course, it's always spied on Americans.
But the same thing is true of NSA. It's not just...
It's a part of NSA's charter that NSA is not permitted to spy on Americans.
And in fact, they spy on every single one of us.
That's why they have that enormous facility in Utah that has enough memory storage space to save every phone call, voicemail, email, and text message for the next 500 years.
Why do we need our intelligence services to have that kind of capability?
Why does the CIA need a lab to do experimentation on God knows what new MK program they may be coming up with?
And again, where's the oversight?
You know, I spent two years working for John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we had oversight, of course, of the State Department.
Well, the State Department has, what, 10,000 employees?
12,000 employees?
There were 18 of us.
Imagine what it's like on the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees.
What does the intelligence community have?
Maybe 30,000 employees and you have two dozen overseers and half of them aren't cleared for the covert action programs?
That's not oversight.
That's just make-believe.
It's pretend.
So I think we're in trouble here.
Yeah.
What did the CIA teach you about surviving in prison?
You know, I started writing that book as a joke.
Because G. Gordon Letty wasn't actually in the CIA. Right.
FBI. He was a Dutchess County prosecutor.
Right.
You know, he had all these techniques for prison survival that he used from his intelligence training.
Oh, yes.
Including lighting his hand on fire to intimidate people or impress them.
I remember that in the movie.
You know, for me, I wrote out 20 life lessons that the CIA taught me, and some of them were all in fun, like, admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.
Yeah.
Which I ended up using with the guards a couple times.
And it just so frustrated them.
They told me to get out and didn't bother me again.
But it was things like making strategic alliances.
The moment I got to prison, the guard who was processing me told me that if somebody comes into my room uninvited, that's an act of aggression.
And I have to defend myself.
I said, great.
I've been here 20 minutes and I'm going to get my ass kicked.
So I got to my cell and sure enough, two Aryans just walked into my room and I jumped up and I put my fists up and I said, what do you want?
I was trying to be as tough as I could.
And one of them said, are you the new guy?
I said, yeah.
He had a big swastika on his neck.
It took up his entire neck.
I said, yeah.
Yeah.
Are you gay?
I said, no.
He said, are you a rat?
I said, no.
Are you a chomo?
And my fists are still up.
And I said, I don't know what that word means.
And he says, like, I'm stupid.
He says, chomo, child molester.
I said, no, I'm not a child molester.
And then he says, okay, you can sit at the Aryan table in the cafeteria.
And I thought, great, I'm with the Aryans now.
And it just so happened that directly across the hall from my cell was the boss of the Bonanno crime family.
And he walked over to my cell and he says, why are you going to sit with those Nazi retards?
Those were his words.
I said, I don't know what I'm doing here.
I don't know where to sit.
I don't know who to talk to.
I don't know anything.
I've never been in prison before.
And he says very dramatically, from today, you're with the Italians.
And so that was one of the rules from the CIA. You make these strategic alliances.
Four of my five cellmates were members of Mexican drug gangs.
And one of them asked me if I was educated.
And I said, yes.
And he said, would you write my appeal?
And I said, well, I'm not an attorney.
Well, you said you're educated.
I said, sure.
I thought, well, how hard could it be?
The guy's obviously guilty.
They caught him with 50 tons of cocaine, right?
So I wrote his appeal and he lost.
But he told all the other Mexican drug lords that I was a good guy and I didn't charge him anything.
So that kept the Mexicans off my back.
And then the Nation of Islam guys, it was just the craziest thing.
A couple of days before I went to prison, Louis Farrakhan said that I was a hero of the Muslim people because I had respected human rights.
And so one of these Nation of Islam guys gingerly handed me a copy of the Nation of Islam newspaper and told me that I wouldn't have any trouble with them because Farrakhan said I was okay.
Wow.
What prison were you in?
I was in a prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, FCI Loretto, which is another thing.
You know, my judge recommended that I go to a minimum security work camp.
And the FBI and the Justice Department were upset that I didn't get 30 years.
I got 30 months.
And so they determined that I was never going to see the inside of minimum security anything.
I went to real prison with the guard towers and the double fence with the concertina wire and all that.
And then, you know, my children had to go through that every time they wanted to come and visit me.
And they were little, like one, seven, and ten.
I was in a maximum security prison in Guaynabo in Puerto Rico.
But I saw my child for the first time because my wife had a baby while I was in prison.
My youngest boy, Aiden Vieques, was named after the island that we were defending.
But the first time I saw him was on Visitor's Day in that prison.
And it was a rigmarole.
I mean, we had to do, you know, we had to do full naked checks to go back from the visitor's room.
Bend over and people putting flashlights, you know, at every place.
Oh, yes.
So, and then they never turned the lights out.
That was one of the things.
That's enough to drive you crazy.
When they shut the cell doors at night, it was this screaming, which I still don't know who was doing it or whatever, but I had...
It was just really eerie.
I was lucky because there was 140 men on my cell block, and most of them were people who had done pretty bad crimes.
And there was a lot of gang people, because it was a federal offense.
But when I went in, there were about 60 political prisoners of the 140 who were in jail for the same reason I was, because they were opposing Vieques, and they were doing some of them one year, some of them only a few months.
But anyway, it was that...
We kind of formed a quirk of people whose kind of ideology and idealism ended up permeating the entire cell block.
Yes.
And we had dances at night.
We had a lot of musicians there who were famous Puerto Rican musicians who were doing salsa and that kind of stuff.
So it was very, for me, it was relaxing.
It was like being on a Catholic religious retreat.
There you go.
I made a joke a moment ago about the Italians.
I made a joke about the Italians, but they took very, very good care of me.
They had a guard on the payroll who would bring in lamb shank and white wine for the Marsala sauce and fresh vegetables.
I gained 35 pounds in prison.
35 pounds because we ate like kings every single night.
Other than that, it could be a little bit tough.
There was one incident where I had an empty bunk in my cell and this guy wanted to move into our room because we didn't have pedophiles in our room.
And I said, well, what are you in for?
And he said, murder for hire.
And I said, well, I don't think I like that any more than I like the pedophiles.
I said, you can't come into my room.
Well, I made an enemy by saying that.
And there was another guy who was a serial killer.
He was a long distance truck driver and he would rape and kill women and just dump them out on the side of the highway.
They finally caught him and he got 40 years.
So for whatever reason, he constantly sought my approval.
And I tried to stay away from him because frankly, I was a little bit afraid of him.
And so one day we were in the TV room.
And the murder for hire guy didn't realize that I was sitting three feet away from him.
Earlier that day, NPR had requested an interview.
So I was called to the warden's office to sign a release.
And this murder for hire guy says, did you hear they called Kiriakou to the warden's office?
It's because he's a rat and he's down there ratting all of us out.
Well, you call somebody a rat and blood's going to be spilled.
But I just sat in the chair and I didn't react.
So the serial killer says to me, did you hear?
That son of a gun just called you a rat.
And I said, an hour ago I heard him call you a child molester, which was totally untrue.
But one of the things in my book is, always have other people do your dirty work.
So this serial killer got up and beat this guy to a bloody pulp.
He was hospitalized for six weeks.
He ended up getting an extra five years for attempted murder on top of his 40 years.
And the murder for hire guy was sent to another prison.
I was called to the warden's office and he said, you know, I understand that you were the cause of all this.
Well, remember, admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations.
I said, I don't know what you're talking about.
Well, the one called you a rat, and the other one, you said something to him, and he got up.
I said, well, maybe you said something to him.
Did you ever think of that?
Maybe you're the cause of all this.
Maybe I was sitting there watching TV, and I don't know what you're talking about.
Finally, he told me, just get out of here.
This is what the CIA is doing to us every day.
Yeah.
But it kept me safe.
And that was my goal.
Just to be safe.
So, do you have any relationship with people within the agency or outside or the other whistleblowers?
I do.
I do, believe it or not.
Yes and yes, to answer both of those questions.
First of all, the whistleblowers, especially the national security whistleblowers, we're like a family.
Beginning with the great Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg is a giant in my life, and he's a giant in modern American history.
We're blessed to still have him at the age of 92 years old.
I'm so honored to know Dan Ellsberg and to be able to call him a friend.
I can't even tell you.
I feel the same way about him, and I know him very well.
He's been to my house on many occasions.
He knew my father, and of course, for those of you who don't know Daniel Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine.
He was probably number one in his class at Harvard.
He's one of these 180 IQ guys.
He was hired by the Rand Corporation.
First of all, to go to Vietnam and to accompany the combat troops, but also then to write the history of the Vietnam War, which was the Pentagon Papers.
And at one point, and he was very pro-war when he started, and he ended up turning against it.
And he, at one point, decided to risk his freedom and his relationships, his livelihood.
He became so angry at what was happening in Vietnam that he went and mimeographed.
I think it was six volumes.
It was a huge, huge document.
And they mimeographed it at night.
They brought a mimeograph machine in and mimeographed it, and they took the copies out and then distributed them to the New York Times, the Washington Post.
And it blew the whistle on the Vietnam War and went to fraud the whole thing.
Yeah.
But he was in, he knew my dad, and he actually went when he was trying to figure out the Vietnam War.
He went to my father, and he said my father had gone with his brother, John Kennedy, when my Uncle Jack was a senator.
They had gone to Vietnam, and they had met with De Gaulle, and De Gaulle had said to them, whatever you do, do not go into Vietnam.
Wow.
And they had gone to Vietnam, and they had been at Da Nang, and they had seen the French Foreign Legion being overwhelmed by the Viet Congen.
And they saw these men, these Vietnamese, willing to just laying down their lives in droves.
And they said, how are you ever going to conquer that?
You know, they're coming out of the woods.
They're willing to die for their country.
They're fighting for what they believe is their freedom.
You know, they wouldn't want a foreign country running their country any more than we would.
My uncle had resisted.
All of his advisors were telling him, you've got to send 250,000 combat troops in.
And he kept saying, no, no, no.
In the end, he sent 16,000 advisors who weren't legally allowed to fight.
They were green grays, but he never sent a single combat troop.
He resisted literally every single person around him.
And Ellsberg went to I interviewed my father and he described to me the interview and he said, how did you know?
And my dad started explaining to him kind of the generic reasons why they didn't think it was right to go in.
And then he said, but how did you know back then?
How were you so prescient to know?
And he said, my dad slapped his hand on the table and it went whack.
And he said, it was just a resounding.
And he said, because we were there, we saw that they were willing to die.
And that they didn't care.
They were willing to sacrifice every single man, woman, and child in their country for freedom.
And we knew you could never beat that.
Anyway, it was a beautiful story.
That is a beautiful story.
Dan is kind of the godfather of the whistleblower community.
But we're all in close touch, with the exception of Ed Snowden, because it's just not easy.
For Ed to stay in touch.
But Tom Drake from NSA and Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe from NSA, Jeffrey Sterling from CIA, a whole cast of characters from FBI. We get together for dinner.
We appear at the same events.
We really do have a community.
And then to answer your second question, I stay in touch with a surprising number of CIA people.
You know, the day after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a retired deputy CIA director.
I had worked for him a couple of different times over the course of my career.
He said something that it was just so kind.
I saved it all these years.
He said, you've chosen a difficult path, but I'm glad somebody did.
I only wish that I had had the courage to do it.
Wow.
And that meant so much to me that I saved it.
It was motivating.
I'll tell you something.
Anthony Fauci said something just like that to me at one point, believe it or not, in 2016 when I went to see him.
And I'm sure he would take it back right now.
He's taken it back many times since.
Wow.
That's dramatic.
Anyway, go ahead and finish what you were saying.
You know, we've got things like Facebook and Twitter and things like that.
So CIA people can still stay in touch with me and not have to pass it through CIA security and report contact with John.
So it's worked out nicely.
I still stay in touch with a dozen or so former colleagues.
Before my father was killed, you know, his first instinct when his brother was killed, the day I was at school and I was brought home from school that day early.
And when I got home, my father was walking in the yard with John McComb, who was the director of the CIA. The CIA, you know, we lived in McLean, so we were only a half mile from Langley.
And McComb came over.
McComb used to come to our house every day after work and go for a swim in the pool.
And he would often come on his lunch break to eat lunch with my dad.
My dad called him up and they had brought in McComb after they fired Dulles.
And McComb was a very pious Catholic.
He was a Republican.
He was a very pious Catholic.
And my father asked him, the first thing he said is, did our people do this?
That was his first reaction about his brothers.
But before he died, that was 63.
My father then runs for president in 68.
He was asked about, like Pete Hamill, who was one of the reporters who was covering him, who was also a confidant.
And Pete Hamill asked him a week before he died, he said, what are you going to do about the CIA? And my father said, he said the only way, and of course there's a famous story that my uncle, you know, Alan Dulles lied to him.
And Bissell and Cadell had lied, or Charles Cadell, the three guys they fired, had lied to him about the Bay of Bigs to try to, you know, because they said, yeah, the whole island's going to rise up and go after Castro, overthrow him as soon as they hear about the Bay of Bigs.
They knew that was a lie.
And they thought, if we can get those guys on land, President Kennedy is a young guy and he's not going to be able to tolerate politically their defeat, so he'll send in the Essex, the aircraft carrier, and that will do the work of wiping out Castro.
And he refused.
He told them, I'm not going to involve the U.S. military.
The U.S. government is not going to attack a sovereign nation.
That's right.
And so, in the middle of the night, my uncle...
When the men were dying on the beach, and he had to deny them air cover, my uncle came out and said, out to his aides of the Oval Office, and he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind.
Yes, indeed.
And then he subsequently fired the three top guys, and he brought in McComb.
My father was asked, and he initially asked my father to run the CIA, but my father didn't think it would be right for the brother to be running a secret police organization with all this power.
So my father, but it was always on the top of his mind, what do you do about the CIA? Because they become this government, this parasitical government.
Organism that is devouring our democracy.
You know, this secret government that is manipulating everything and subjecting Americans to this constant barrage of PSYOPs propaganda in order to maintain permanent wars and all this kind of stuff.
So my father said the only way to solve the problem is to separate the clandestine activities, the kind of paramilitary branch, from the espionage function.
And espionage means information gathering.
Right.
And analysis, and that's why the CIA was originally created.
It was not supposed to be doing, you know, overthrowing governments and fixing elections and running around and shooting and torturing people.
No.
Dulles added that function subsequently through a little tiny loophole, and what had happened is the paramilitary tail began to wag the espionage dog, and the function of the espionage section becomes justifying all these aberrant actions by the clandestine services, and then creating new actions for them to go.
My father said, The agency that is doing the espionage, doing the actual information gathering, should be looking over the shoulder of the clandestine services and holding them accountable and making sure that the blowback does not, the cost of the blowback does not exceed all the benefits of the action in the first place.
Nobody does it.
There's no accountability.
So if he had been elected, that's what he would have done.
Can you imagine how different the country would be today?
After 9-11, the CIA's Counterterrorism Service received a classified supplemental budget.
And I went up to Kofor Black one day.
This is about a week after 9-11.
Kofor Black was the director of the Counterterrorism Center at the time.
And I said, Kofor, I've got an idea for an operation that I wanted to run by you.
And he put up his hands and he said, whatever it is, just go do it.
I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all.
That was the attitude.
Yeah, right.
And as you correctly said, the purpose of the CIA was to recruit spies to steal secrets so that analysts could analyze those secrets and allow policymakers to make the best informed policy for the country.
But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.
But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.
Now that Executive Order 12333 has been, well, altered, recalled, changed, whatever you want to say, and the CIA can freely fly around the country and either murder people in cold blood or snatch them and the CIA can freely fly around the country and either murder people in cold blood or snatch them off the streets and send them to secret
Well, this is exactly what we were fighting against in the 70s with the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.
We're back to the bad old days again with little or no oversight.
We've got people, for example, like Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, who wants so much to provide the kind of oversight that the law called for in 1975, 1976.
And he just doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.
I sort of confronted him at a dinner party one night.
And I said, it was right when I got out of prison.
And I said, Senator, I got to tell you, I was kind of disappointed.
I kind of expected a little bit more from you in the way of support.
And he got a little angry.
And he said, look, it takes all my energy just to not lose my security clearance.
And I thought, oh, that's it.
That's it.
I get it.
It's terrible, but that's how Washington works.
They have no boss.
They have no boss.
They're their own boss.
No accountability.
They're a rogue agency.
Indeed.
John Kiriakou, thank you so much for being yourself, for the way that you live your life.
I hope you'll come back and join us again, because this conversation isn't even a tenth over.
There's so many things I want to ask you about.
Such a treat for me.
Thank you so much.
You know, I'm a big fan of yours.
I want to thank you for what you've done for the country, what you continue to do for the country.
And I'm at your service.
Anytime you'd like to talk, just let me know.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Hey, do you think the agency has a guy assigned to you to watch everything you do at this point?
I do.
I get letters from them every once in a while, threatening letters.
They'll complain about different journalists that I've spoken to and tell me to back off.
Or I just sent my eighth book to the publisher, and I had to wait until...
The agency cleared it.
So I did this book called The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection.
And they redacted an entire chapter.
And I said, well, I want to appeal this because this is clearly unclassified.
I don't have access to classified information.
They said, no, what you wrote is currently and properly classified.
I said, you realize I got it from the CIA website, right?
I mean, you guys published it.
I just took it off the website.
Oh, give us a week.
And then they came back and said, okay, okay, you can go ahead and publish it.
But it's just constant harassment.
Constantly.
Little stuff.
Let me ask you something.
You know, in your past, because they've been very clear, particularly the European intelligence agencies, which, of course, all the 5i groups are sharing their intelligence with the U.S. And they've been very clear, the Germans and the MI5 and MI6, that they consider anti-vaxxers.
Figures to be the equivalent of terrorists.
Domestic terrorists.
And that they are, in fact, they said this specifically, that they are using, they are targeting them with all of their cyber warfare.
So do you think, in your best estimate, How much of my life is being monitored?
Oh, I would say all of it.
I'd be pretty comfortable saying, I think you're constantly being monitored.
I mean, do you think they're plugged into my TV set and watching me, you know, that kind of stuff?
Probably not.
Probably not to that extent.
But I would be very surprised if there weren't FBI surveillance teams on you to see who you're talking to, who you're meeting with.
Sure.
I think that they're disturbed by what you stand for.
And do you, is there a way, I mean, I should probably talk to you about this offline at some point, but it's an interesting issue that people are interested in.
Is there a way to thwart that or to find out about it or to find out any more information about it?
Yes.
It's been my experience and the experience of many of my friends and former colleagues that you would be pleasantly surprised what you can get through the Freedom of Information Act.
And while you may have to wait for five years doing it through the CIA, the wait at the FBI is about six weeks.
So, you know, I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI on everything they have on me from the day I got out of prison until whatever the day was that I filed.
And sure enough, six weeks later, they sent me a CD-ROM that just completely exposed that.
We parked a half a block away from his house and we had eyes on and he left for work at 7.15 and then he came back from work at 2.35 and Why are you wasting the taxpayers' money watching me come and go from my house?
But they'll tell you the truth, even if it makes them look silly.
You know, I'll tell you a funny story.
I was doing something, having a conversation with my uncle, Teddy Kennedy, at one point.
And I was planning on doing something that he didn't want me to do.
And he said, you better not do that.
I've seen your FBI files.
Anyway.
I need to get those myself.
Anyway, John, thank you very, very much.
Thank you so much.
It was a great pleasure.
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