"NOT SILENCED" - The CIA and John Kiriakou - Stories Untold

[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the director of the CIA, my boss and me. And the president looks around, he says, well, now what do we do? And then everybody turns and looks at me. We had put the kids to bed and were watching tv and she said, I'm exhausted, I'm going to go to bed. I said, I'm going to stay up and watch tv. I wasn't going to stay up and watch tv. I was going to go into the garage, start the car and lay on the backseat. She said, no, I really want you to come to bed. She could sense I'm just approaching what the jam up is. And it's a white rover in the left lane. There's police tape around it and there's blood just coating all the windows inside. My boss runs in, he said, did you see the manifesto? He said, you're in it. And he goes, you've gotta go. Another car picked up my wife. Another car picked up my kids. Take them to the airport. My wife says, I want a divorce, I'm not doing this anymore. So I went to the chief, I said, I need 36 people, half FBI, half CIA. Guns for everybody, ammunition for everybody, charges for the doors, night vision goggles, secure communications. I needed encrypted like high end nsa encrypted walkie talkies and I needed like several million dollars in cash. I'm telling you, 24 hours later, this unmarked 737 lands at the airport. [00:01:30] Speaker B: It's freaking unbelievable. [00:01:31] Speaker A: And everybody gets. [00:01:36] Speaker B: In the house. My next guest is a retired undercover CIA officer who among dozens of other things played a significant role in pakistan hunting down al qaeda. He would later become a whistleblower for the 911 torture program which subsequently landed him in prison, albeit under questionable charges. He's an eight time author, a fellow whiskey sipper. You can find his uncensored stories now on unified TV which I'll link below. It may come as no surprise that he's an amazing storyteller. He'll keep you at the edge of your seat at every second. But within those stories you'll also recognize the commonality between he and us common folk. The most significant aspect of this guest is that he is genuinely a great person and I'm so honored to have stolen a few hours of his time for this cast. So without further ado, please help me in welcoming my new friend to the T cast, Mr. John Kiriakou. We're finding some commonality in people like yourself who have extraordinary stories and experiences and kind of bringing it around to where somebody normally wouldn't tune in to hear someone, especially somebody, has even some. A controversial career. But, you know, with a whistleblowing aside, just, you know, the CIA automatically gets kind of a wrap with some people. [00:03:06] Speaker A: But. [00:03:06] Speaker B: But the idea is, again, just to kind of humanize people and make everyone realize how much like we are really, even if we're, if we're working in. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, I'm very happy to do it. [00:03:17] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate it and I'm. I won't go all the way back and necessarily sit on the early years, but I would like to get a little backstory about your childhood, what your interests were and what your original goals were. Because, you know, getting into the CIA, like, what does that trajectory look like? You wanted to be an astronaut and change your mind or. [00:03:38] Speaker A: You know, I told my dad when I was nine that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. [00:03:44] Speaker B: Really? [00:03:44] Speaker A: And they thought that was kind of funny. And I remember that Christmas they bought me a set of walkie talkies, right? And my brother and I would go all around the neighborhood, you know, spying on the neighbors or whatever. [00:03:56] Speaker B: They had a little Morse code thing on the side. [00:03:57] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. They had a little Morse code thing on the side. Yeah, that's exactly right. [00:04:02] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:04:02] Speaker A: You know, cheap. Like it said, it would say in the box, it's got a, you know, one mile range. Yeah, it had like 100 foot range, right? Yeah, but it was fun. We played with those for ages. And then. And then my grandparents like, oh, you should be a dentist or a doctor or something. And then when I was 16, I told my dad, I remember where I was. We were. We were driving past Fraser's Pond on Old Plank Road, and it was time to start thinking about colleges and what college I wanted to go to. And I said, he said, you don't still want to be a spy, do you? And I said, I do. I want to be a spy. But, Dad, I want to be a spy in the Middle East. And he's like, oh, my God. [00:04:46] Speaker B: Wow. And at the time, how intense was that of proclamation? I mean, compared to that? [00:04:53] Speaker A: I meant it. And I'll tell you why I meant it. Because When I was 15, the Iranians raided the American Embassy and took our diplomats hostage. And I was obsessed with this thing. ABC News created Nightline just to give us an update every single night on what happened that day. That's why Nightline was created, was to give us the daily update on the hostage crisis. And So I would stay up late at night just to see the day's developments in Iran. And then an army recruiter came to school. This is going to sound silly, but he came to the school. [00:05:32] Speaker B: High school. [00:05:33] Speaker A: High school. Newcastle. High School, Newcastle, Pennsylvania. And he said, if anybody comes down just for a conversation, you don't have to promise anything. Just come for a conversation. I'll give you a pair of tube socks. So I said to my dad offhandedly, I said, oh, I'm going to go talk to the army recruiter on Saturday. He said, why? I said, they're giving out free sock. I'm just going to go for the conversation. And my dad was a very gentle, very sweet man. And he said to me, if you go down there on Saturday, you and I are going to have a serious problem, boy. And he never spoke to me like that, so I skipped it. But then I started looking for universities that had very specifically programs, majors in Middle Eastern studies. Now there are a bunch of them. In 1981, there weren't. It was Brigham Young, which I had zero desire to go to. It was Rutgers, which was all right, I was thinking about that, and George Washington University. And then I got. I only applied to gw. I didn't apply anywhere else. And then he said, we don't. We don't have the money to send you to a school like that. I still remember what it was. It was $4,600 a year. Oh, my gosh, can you imagine? [00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:52] Speaker A: And my parents didn't have $4,600 a year. I said, I'll take out loans. He said, I have a better idea. Go to the University of Pittsburgh and you can get a degree in Soviet studies. I said, but I don't care about Soviet studies. I don't have any interest in Russia or the Soviet Union or learning Russian. And it was a problem for us. But I ended up going to gw, took out a ton of loans and got my degree in Middle Eastern studies. [00:07:19] Speaker B: I love that. And especially at a time where the Soviet Union was the thing. [00:07:25] Speaker A: It was the thing, all right. My very first day at the CIA, we had a series of briefings, right? The director of the CIA comes and welcome to the CIA. And he's there for a minute. And the head of personnel and the head of this and the head of that, well, the head of security came. And one of the important things that he said that day, like, very declaratory. The gravest challenge facing the United States today is the threat of Soviet Communism. And I was like, I Said to myself, do you not watch the news? There is no such thing as Soviet communism anymore. I mean, the Soviet Union held on for another 11 months. But seriously, old man, Soviet communism is the. The threat that we're facing? [00:08:13] Speaker B: Well, they were still the other superpower. They were at the time. So. [00:08:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, this was. This was right before the Russian economy fell apart. So if you were an old timer at the CIA. Okay, I get that you. You think the Soviets are a threat. [00:08:28] Speaker B: And what else. What else? Did you have siblings or anything? [00:08:32] Speaker A: A brother and a sister, Brother and a sister. [00:08:34] Speaker B: And both parents stayed married and your childhood and all that. [00:08:38] Speaker A: Right, so my dad had a. My parents were both elementary school educators, but my dad had a PhD in music. And we were very musical in our family. And he. But he wanted us to be musical but not go into music. [00:08:52] Speaker B: That's a smart musician. [00:08:54] Speaker A: Because we'd starve. Right. My brother went into music. [00:08:57] Speaker B: You'd never get into gw? [00:08:58] Speaker A: No, you wouldn't get into gw, but my brother went into music and has become one of the most important music producers in Hollywood. Really Made tens of millions of dollars and seven number one hits and. Yeah. [00:09:12] Speaker B: How fantastic is that? [00:09:13] Speaker A: My sister went into investments. Well, that was one of the big investment houses. [00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's the diversest family I've ever heard. That's even a word. That's crazy. Do you play any instruments or were you made to learn how to do that? [00:09:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I took piano lessons for 12 years, classical piano, and. And then I played clarinet, and my dad had a Greek band for 50 years. And so that's how my brother and I put ourselves through college. Was playing weddings and baptisms and, you know, wild festivals and stuff. [00:09:48] Speaker B: And Greek specifically. That was there, like a niche in there? [00:09:52] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:09:52] Speaker B: Okay. [00:09:53] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. In fact, a book came out recently, like two years ago, called the History of Greek Music in America. And I was like, oh, what an interesting niche book. And I picked it up and there's a picture of my dad in there. [00:10:08] Speaker B: Really? And he. Cause he. He immigrated from Greece. [00:10:12] Speaker A: No, it was my grandparents. [00:10:13] Speaker B: Your grandparents immigrated? [00:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah, from Greece. 19. My dad's family, 1931, my mom's. 1934. Then my dad was born in 34 and my mom in 40, so they were brand new arrivals. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Interesting. So do you still play at all? Have any interest? [00:10:29] Speaker A: I don't. I regret that I don't pick it up. Like, a serious regret that I have. [00:10:34] Speaker B: Pick it back up. Yeah, it'll be like, nothing. You'll have it all up. Here, you just will have to teach yourself how to do it. [00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah. That muscle memory has to come back. [00:10:40] Speaker B: Hey, if you're like me and you grow frustrated sometimes about ways that you can make a positive impact, I can tell you that one of the simplest things that you can do that goes such a long way is to like and subscribe to this channel. Subscribe and share some of these videos that you're enjoying. It brings other people into the middle, regardless of their perspective, to start engaging into that productive conversation that we all need. Thanks in advance. So when you got to the point where you were decided you're going to the CIA, and that was an interesting story, too, because you kind of ended up still getting recruited. [00:11:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Even though that was your goal, I had no idea that you had actually earmarked that as a career. And then someone still approached you. Had you mentioned that to someone before? It was just happenstance. Yeah. [00:11:24] Speaker A: You know, I was thinking, maybe I'll apply to the CIA, maybe the Foreign Service. And I ended up getting a master's degree in Legislative affairs, thinking maybe I could meld the two and end up on Capitol Hill or something. And then in graduate school, I was kind of spotted. And. [00:11:45] Speaker B: And so what this leads me to what do they look for? I know you've met, I've heard you mentioned before, that they look for sociopathic tendencies, but not sociopaths. [00:11:55] Speaker A: Right, right, right. [00:11:56] Speaker B: So I would love to know, first of all, is there really a line? And how wide and gray is that line? And where do you think you fit into that. That realm? What are your sociopathic tendencies? [00:12:09] Speaker A: I suppose I can answer that question best by giving you an anecdote. [00:12:15] Speaker B: Okay. [00:12:16] Speaker A: So when I was going through the process, I was in a room with three men and a woman, other applicants. And the tester, the instructor, gave us this scenario, and he said, let's say you're serving overseas, and you get a cable from headquarters, and they want you to. To get the latest numbers on the Indonesian economy. Right. So they tell you to target the Indonesian economic officer in the country that you're serving in. And you start to develop him. You make contact, you take him to lunch, you hit it off, you take him to dinner. Your wives become friends, you barbecues together, and he becomes your best friend. Right. So everything's going great, but you realize in this process, he's not recruitable. He just does not have an exploitable issue that you can use to get your hook in. What do you do? So this guy raises his hand and he says, well, you double down and you do it, you know, for another six months, and you buy him gifts and whatever. And. And the. The woman raises her hand and she said, maybe you work it through the wives. Maybe, maybe your wife can convince his wife to, you know, get the information. And I'm looking around, like what? I raised my hand. I said, you break into the embassy and you steal it. The guy goes, that's exactly what you do. That's a sociopathic tendency a normal person would not default to. I'm going to break into a foreign embassy, I'm going to steal their documents. [00:13:59] Speaker B: It's not taking no for an answer. Essentially, yeah, like, that's a mission and you're going to accomplish it somehow. [00:14:05] Speaker A: You're exactly right. That's the mission. They didn't say, oh, you know, give this a try, and if it works, that's great, and if it doesn't, well, that's okay. You tried your best. No, no, no, no. That's not how it works. They said, get the documents, so you go get the documents. That's a sociopathic tendency. Now, the problem is that the sociopath will give you the same answer, but the sociopath will have no conscience. And so we'll blow right through a polygraph exam. Somebody with a sociopathic tendency will do it because it's the right thing to do, because we're the good guys, but does experience regret or remorse and will react and respond on a polygraph exam. [00:14:53] Speaker B: So that's the measurable is the polygraph. [00:14:56] Speaker A: It's the polygraph. [00:14:58] Speaker B: They can tell the emotional value that it's triggered by doing actions like that. [00:15:03] Speaker A: That's exactly what they'll mark, what they'll register. So the polygraph, in terms of being the best way to describe the polygraph, is as a tool. Right. The polygraph only measures physiological changes. That's it. It's not a lie detector test. [00:15:23] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:24] Speaker A: So if you are asked, you're hooked up to a polygraph, and the polygrapher says, have you ever stolen anything worth more than $20? You don't think, oh, man, if I did that, I would feel so guilty. Wow. I remember when I thought about stealing something worth more than no. You're going to react to that. Your fingertips are going to sweat, your heart is going to start to race, and they're going to say, oh, you fail. So if he asks you, have you ever stolen anything more than $20? You say, no, and move on to the next question. [00:16:01] Speaker B: Unless you have. [00:16:02] Speaker A: Unless you have. In which case they say, look, we're not looking for perfect People. We're looking for honest people. So just answer the question truthfully. The thing is, what they want you to do is trip yourself up by answering honestly. I'll give you another example. I worked with a guy who was a fantastic operations officer, but he came to operations from polygraphy. He had been there 20 years, just got bored, wanted to do something different. He said to me one time that he had had people over the course of 20 years admit to literally every crime that you can imagine, usually because they thought that's what the CIA wanted to hear. Like, he had a guy. He had a guy admit to committing a murder outside of Syracuse, New York, because he's like, yeah, I want to do black ops wet work. You know? Oh, my God. Yeah, that's not cool. And my buddy's, like, pressing the emergency button under the table so that the cops can come in and turn this guy over to the FBI. But my example is this. He was polygraphing a CIA employee. A custodian. Even the janitors get polygraphed, okay? Right, because they're susceptible to recruitment. They have access. Exactly. So he said, the guy just blows right through this thing, no problems at all. This is like his third or fourth polygraph, and all the guy does is, you know, mow the lawn and sweep the floors, whatever. So at the end of it, my friend says, so is there anything major that you might have done that we haven't. That we haven't covered? Murder, bank robbery, bestiality. The guy goes, what was that last one? [00:17:51] Speaker B: No. [00:17:52] Speaker A: And my buddy goes, I knew I had him. He goes, oh, bestiality. It's actually quite common. It's when you have sex with an animal. Lots of people do it. He says, no big deal. [00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:05] Speaker A: And the guy goes, I might have done that couple, three times. And my friend's like. He said his heart was racing, like this is the first bestiality admission he had ever had. So he goes, okay, that's cool. Under what circumstances might you have done bestiality? And he says, well, sometimes when I fight with my wife, I get back at her by going out to the barn and buggering her horse. He goes, okay, all right. And when was the last time you might have done that? And, you know, he gave a date. They escorted him out of the building, they took his badge, you know, the whole. The whole thing. But that is what the polygraph is meant for. He wasn't hooked up to the polygraph at that point. He had blown right through the polygraph. It's to get you to Admit to something, because once you admit to it, they can throw you out of the building, tell you never to come back. [00:19:03] Speaker B: And do they? What are the standards there? They have typical law enforcement standards. You couldn't have committed certain crimes within 5, 10, 20 years, whatever. It is all the same type of stuff. [00:19:13] Speaker A: And it, and it changes too. Like when I, when I first applied, you couldn't have done drugs ever, Ever. Like, youthful experimentation. Nothing. Not even weed. Nothing. And now it's, you can't have done drugs in the last nine months. [00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:29] Speaker A: And since weed is weed in today's context, they don't even ask about it anymore. Back when I got hired, you couldn't be gay and you couldn't even be, like, not sure if you were gay or not gay or bi or whatever you like. Thank you. We'll. We'll send you a letter. Thank you. Get out. [00:19:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:19:48] Speaker A: Now that's all changed. [00:19:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure It's. I mean, over generations. I mean, it used. Used to have to be a male. [00:19:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:19:54] Speaker B: Certain height and everything else, too. [00:19:56] Speaker A: And from an eastern university, you know, now the place is full of Mormons because. And same with the FBI, because Mormons lead very straight lives for the most part. Right. Polygraphs are no problem. And they speak the craziest languages because they go on their missions after high school and they'll go to, you know, Tajikistan or, you know, Belarus or whatever, and they learn these really difficult languages that the CIA then doesn't have to spend a year or two years and $500,000 teaching them how to speak. [00:20:32] Speaker B: Do you think that it's advantageous to have squeaky clean people come in and new enforcement and operations? [00:20:39] Speaker A: I do not. [00:20:40] Speaker B: And so what, what do you. If it were up to you, how would you adjust any of those requirements? I mean, they're all kind of constantly being messed with anyway. [00:20:51] Speaker A: They are, they are. [00:20:51] Speaker B: But how would you. [00:20:52] Speaker A: And I think you have to. I, I think the agency has to adopt local customs. For example, there were a lot of us who have served in Yemen over the years, okay? Yemen's tough. It's ugly and poor and society is rough and violent and everybody's armed and culturally, they chew got every day. Got Q A. T got is a shrub. It's about waist high. Shrub. And they pick the leaves and they stuff the leaves in their cheeks so that old men will have one cheek that hangs lower than the rest of their face. Right? From 60, 70 years of chewing gut. Now, chewing gut, it's disgusting, but it's like a Very mild. What can I compare? Like the coca leaf. Right. So it's like drinking a pot of coffee makes your heart race. Yeah, but it's a cultural thing. So every day at 3 o' clock, everybody in the country is chewing gut. Every male in the country is chewing gut. It's unseemly for women to chew it. Well, got is a, is a, you know, it's listed on the DEA, you know, Schedule, Schedule 1 drug. You go to prison for 20 years for chewing cot. But if you're a CIA officer trying to recruit this Yemeni tribal leader and he invites you to the got you, you're going to go chew, right? Right. So the CIA had to say, well, okay, if you're an operations officer and yeah, you got to chew gut, go ahead and chew the gut. They need to do more of that. They need to attract more people who are willing to push the bounds without lapsing into illegality here in the United States. And let me explain that. [00:22:50] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [00:22:53] Speaker A: I still believe that for the most part, we are the good guys. Right. 99% of the people at the CIA are good, patriotic, smart Americans who want nothing more than to serve the country. You have 1% that are psychopaths are just out killing people for the thrill of killing people. But that's a separate conversation. [00:23:13] Speaker B: And that's a percentage of any given group you're absolutely size then. [00:23:17] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So the squeaky clean people are going to have trouble adjusting to a life of breaking the law. Your job as a, as an ops officer is to go overseas and break the law. Sometimes lots of laws. I mean, already you're committing espionage. From the moment you land in the country, you're committing espionage because at the very least you're conspiring to violate the national security laws of that country. That's what you've been hired to do. [00:23:50] Speaker B: Just because of who you are. [00:23:51] Speaker A: Just because of who you are. You're undercover, which is, you know, a lie. You're living a lie, which is also espionage. And in many cases you're trying to convince people to commit treason. Now treason in most countries or not most, in many countries is a death penalty charge. And your job is to get them to do that, to risk death because they love you so much. I mentioned that Indonesian, you know, that fake Indonesian diplomat. Well, you want to convince somebody that you are their best friend, right? Their best friend. And you do all these different things together and you vacation together and your wives are friends and your kids are friends. And then you say, buddy, you know how I feel about you. I think you're great, and you're my best friend, and we have such a good time together. Do you mind giving me a peek at the plans for that new Russian tank? I'd really appreciate it. It would mean a lot to me, and, you know, my boss is such a dick. It would really help me out at work. Just, you know, let me just. Maybe I'll just take a screenshot of the plans for the new Russian tank. Could you do that for me? It'll only take a minute. [00:25:04] Speaker B: That's a. That's a cold call almost, right? I mean, at some point, you got to just spill the beans, right? Is that how it works? At some point. [00:25:11] Speaker A: At some point, you do have to spill the beans. In almost every recruitment pitch, it's called breaking cover. You have to be honest with the guy. You have to say, look, I. And this breaks my heart because I haven't been honest with you, but because we're so close, you're like my brother. I have to be honest with you. And I have to tell you, I'm actually in the CIA. I hope that. I hope you're cool with that. And by then, most of them have figured it out, sensed it. Like, where are you getting all this money? Number one, we have practically unlimited budgets at the CIA. I recruited a guy once. He told me, I have to think of how to word this so that I don't. [00:25:57] Speaker B: Don't get yourself backed up in this. [00:26:00] Speaker A: He told me that he absolutely loved the skyline of the city that we were serving in. He's like, this is the most beautiful city in the world. The skyline, it just takes my breath away. So I was like, oh, me too. I love the skyline. It's amazing. And I got us a helicopter tour of the skyline. He would have thought I'd given him a pot of gold or something. Like, nobody had ever done anything like that for him. And then in a conversation one time, he said that his dad, when he was a little kid, his dad taught him how to fish. And so, you know, wherever he was, he would go to a river or stream and. Yeah, did you ever do deep sea fishing for marlin? And I plunked down five grand and took him out on a Saturday, and he caught a frigging marlin with a sword out, you know, six feet long. He cried when he caught that marlin. He was so happy. Where am I getting all this money? I mean, American diplomats are paid better than most, but. [00:26:57] Speaker B: But there's a limit. [00:26:58] Speaker A: But there's a limit. Yeah, we gotten we had a big kerfuffle with, with an ally back in the 90s. It took us more than a decade to recover from it because a first tour officer took out a diplomat from that country from their foreign ministry to lunch and ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine and the guy immediately reported it to their version of the FBI. Next thing you know, everybody's getting expelled. [00:27:24] Speaker B: And you just overstepped, right? [00:27:26] Speaker A: You just went too far right off the bat. $2,000 bottle of wine. [00:27:29] Speaker B: Yeah, it's almost like graft in these other countries. You give them, you have to know how much to give them to get where you're going. Or if it's too much, then something else is up, right? [00:27:38] Speaker A: In Greece, they call it the fake laki, which means a little envelope. Now that little envelope can have €10 in it or 100. You don't want to put 20,000 in it. That can come later, depending on what you do for me. But yeah, you have to be aware of where you are, what stage you're on in the relationship. [00:27:57] Speaker B: And how do you figure out where to start? Is that just assimilating into, I mean, how do you take time to assimilate in the culture? What kind of training do you get? Are you giving it to yourself? [00:28:06] Speaker A: That's a great question. You get some training, not a ton. Most of the training is in language and you're expected to be, you know, you went to college, you probably went to graduate school, you probably traveled to a couple dozen countries before you joined the CIA because you love travel, you love international affairs. So they trust that you aren't going to be an idiot. So let's say I lived in, you know, Pakistan. What I'm going to do to start is invite people to lunch. It's totally normal and non threatening. So we go to lunch, and lunch is going to cost me five or ten bucks. I'm not going to throw all kinds of money at you right off the bat. But I had a friend who let me back up and say that the crown jewel of any operations officer's career is to recruit a penetration of a foreign intelligence service, right? We all want to do it. You get a medal, you get a photo op with the director, you get promoted. Everybody wants to do it. I had a guy, a friend, who told me a story one time. He was friendly with this guy in this foreign intelligence service and it was a poor country, but you can't be so crude as to just pitch the guy, you know. So they went to do a joint operation together, and our Guy was authorized to cold pitch a foreign terrorist. So he brought this gym bag with 50 grand in it. And he said, they're sitting in the car right before they get out to go knock on the terrorist door. And he opens up the gym bag and he goes, look at this. He lifts the 50 grand. You know, it's in wads of, you know, the things. 10,000. He goes, look at this. My headquarters has authorized me to give this asshole $50,000. 50,000 of the taxpayer's dollars. This makes me so angry. I could be giving this to good people, good guys, but they want me to give it to the terrorists. And he said, the guy is just like this, looking at the money. Never looked at him. Just was looking at the money. And he's like, this makes me so angry. But our problem is we have so much money, we just don't know what to do with it. They go, they make the cold pitch. The guy tells them to screw off. They grab him, they cuff him, take him away. He wouldn't take the money. But the next day, the liaison officer calls and says, hey, can we meet for dinner and not tell anybody? [00:31:06] Speaker B: Brilliant. So that's. But that's less. That's a. That's the slyest cold pitch I've ever heard. Because that's exactly what it was, essentially pitching to the guy with him. Right, sure. [00:31:17] Speaker A: He knew exactly what he was doing. [00:31:19] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. So cold pitching is a. Would be typically a terrible idea. [00:31:23] Speaker A: Terrible. [00:31:24] Speaker B: Other than an exigent circumstance. [00:31:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Most people go through their entire careers and never do a cold pitch because they don't work. Yeah, for the most part. [00:31:33] Speaker B: Unless they're just so incentivized by the money. But. But that's possible, though, too, that you can get so much money. You could pay them a significant amount and give them asylum somewhere or whatever is that. You could set them up that way. You. [00:31:48] Speaker A: You want to not raise the asylum issue just because they're more valuable working in place. See, if it's. If it becomes so dangerous that they have to be resettled, then of course, yes, you can talk about asylum or resettlement in whatever country you want to go to. And you don't have to take money. You can have the money deposited in an account in any country you want. You can have it in diamonds, you can have it in gold, you can have it in Bitcoin. You can do whatever you want. It makes no difference how you receive it. You just agree to receive it. [00:32:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And during your. So you started actually as. Not as an operations person. So an analyst, and I assume that was still fulfilling. Or did you go into operations because you. [00:32:41] Speaker A: You got bored? [00:32:42] Speaker B: You aspired to go do something else? [00:32:43] Speaker A: I got bored. I started in analysis, which was a lot of fun in the beginning. My very first day at the agency, at the lunch break, we met our new bosses. And my boss said, so, we're putting you on Iraq and Kuwait. And I said, okay, all right, that's cool. And he said, well, listen, we're putting you on Iraq and Kuwait because nothing ever happens there. It's the same cabinet since 1968. Right. Sometimes we go days without receiving a single cable, but. And this is exactly what he said to me. But you learn the tradecraft, you learn the writing style, and in a year, you can transfer onto something more interesting, like Romania. [00:33:34] Speaker B: Yes. [00:33:34] Speaker A: And I said, okay. [00:33:35] Speaker B: And you knocked on wood super hard. [00:33:38] Speaker A: And eight months later, just as I got to a point where I really knew what I was doing, Iraq invaded Kuwait. One of the old timers came up to me the night before. We had predicted a month before Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. So there was this. We were arguing amongst ourselves, yeah, it's going to happen. No, it's not going to happen. Yeah, they're just going to take this little sliver of sand because there's oil there. So we ended up. One of us, I don't even remember who it was, said, why don't we just send a cable to the defense attache in Baghdad and ask him just to drive down there and tell us what he's seeing? So we sent a cable. Hey, could you do us a favor? Just drive down to the border and just tell us what. What you're seeing down there. He drives down, drives back, writes us a cable and says, literally the entire Iraqi military is driving to Kuwait, which. [00:34:38] Speaker B: Was a big military. [00:34:39] Speaker A: Yeah. You don't use your. And it was one of the biggest in the Middle East. [00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:34:43] Speaker A: You don't send your entire military to take a sliver. No. So we wrote a paper on June 30, 1990, saying Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. And then the night before the invasion, we were like, yeah, it's going to happen tonight. Tonight's the night. [00:35:00] Speaker B: Really? It got that refined information, and one. [00:35:03] Speaker A: Of the old timers came up to me and said, I don't think you fully appreciate the import of what's happening right now. I thought I did, but I didn't. He said, it's not at all unusual for the countries that we cover to go to war. [00:35:20] Speaker B: War. [00:35:21] Speaker A: But it's highly unusual. For the countries we cover to go to war with us. And that's what this is. And the next day I got up early because I knew it was going to happen. And sure enough, turn on the radio. 6am, 5am, whatever it was. Iraq invaded Kuwait, took the entire country, and they're killing everybody. So I get to the office before 7. It was early, and my boss said, don't take your jacket off, we're going to the White House. I had never been to the White House before, except as a tourist. So car picks us up, we go to the White House, this Marine escorts us into the Oval Office. Mind you, I'm 25 years old. [00:36:03] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:36:04] Speaker A: It's the President, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Director of the CIA, my boss and me. So we're standing there and then like, there are very specific, there's a very specific seating arrangement in something like this. [00:36:23] Speaker B: I'm sure you'd walk in and just wait to be told, right? [00:36:26] Speaker A: That's exactly what I did. I just stood there and I didn't say a word. And I waited to be told. So my boss and I were put on the couch. The President and the Vice President sat in these two nice wing back chairs. And then the National Security Advisor and the CIA Director were in like slightly less comfortable chairs. And the President looks around, he says, well, now what do we do? And then everybody turns and looks at me and I'm looking at the President like. And I didn't say anything. It took me a second. And I said, well, well, Mr. President, Iraqi forces cross the border at 2:00am, you know, our time. And they announced the overthrow of the Kuwaiti government and they installed a new puppet regime headed by Dr. Ahmed Khatib. We know a lot about Ahmed Khatib. He finished medical school at the American University of Beirut and his college roommate was George Habash. Together they formed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And the Vice President goes, jesus Christ, like that. And the President's like, so what do we do? Well, it wasn't my position to tell anybody what to do. But later that afternoon, something that has become famous happened. Margaret Thatcher called him and she said something that really dictated American policy. She said, famously, now's not the time to go wobbly, George. And so the next thing you know, we sent 565,000 troops and six carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf and we liberated Kuwait then that kind of made me a star. [00:38:19] Speaker B: Yeah, you were the guy. [00:38:20] Speaker A: I was the guy. And so it was great for a Few years, I decided it was time to move on. I applied for a State Department position in Bahrain, also in the Middle east, covering Iraq. I went to Arabic language school for a year. My Arabic was absolutely perfect. And I was the ambassador's translator for the next two years. [00:38:43] Speaker B: Wow. [00:38:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it was great. And then I came back thinking, okay, now it's going to be something really great. And they put me back on Iraq again. So I did that for another like year and a half. And it was clear to me that Bill Clinton was not serious about doing anything. It was like, you better not cross this line or we're going to put more sanctions. And then he crosses the line and we put more sanctions, then, well, you better not cross this new line, you know. And I'm like, come on, I gotta get outta here. So I decided to do something completely different. And I made a highly unusual switch into counterterrorism operations. [00:39:27] Speaker B: Which, how was, how difficult was that? I mean, that's like you said, it's atypical to. [00:39:32] Speaker A: It was very atypical. Yeah, it's still atypical. But when I applied for the job, I was very honest. I said, I speak fluent Greek and fluent Arabic, but I don't have any experience in operations at all. And the guy who was the hiring authority said, well, it's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. [00:40:00] Speaker B: That's smart. [00:40:02] Speaker A: So because I was already considered mid career, I didn't have to start at the beginning. What, what they call CIA 101. Like for a new hire. This is what the CIA does. This is what this office does. This is what that office does. I had already been in for eight years. [00:40:17] Speaker B: Right. You didn't need orientation or whatever? [00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't need any of that stuff. So I went straight into the ops training. And the ops training was. The ops training was more fun than I've ever had in my life doing anything. It was, they had, they had courses with names like Crash and Bang. Right. You just learn how to crash cars through roadblocks. And you should see my knee actually, because of Crash and Bang, it's a wreck. I had to have knee replacement because of Crash and Bang. [00:40:48] Speaker B: Really? [00:40:48] Speaker A: Yeah, because they don't give you nice cars to crash. They give you shit cars to crash. Course where your seat becomes detached and your knees slam into the dashboard and you break your leg. [00:41:00] Speaker B: Oh my God. [00:41:00] Speaker A: Yeah, well. [00:41:01] Speaker B: And you're not going to be Driving fancy vehicles anyway, when you actually need to use it either. [00:41:05] Speaker A: That's right. [00:41:05] Speaker B: So that's probably why they do it. [00:41:06] Speaker A: That's right. So you learn counterterrorist driving. Then they fly you out into the desert in Nevada and you do advanced counterterrorist driving. And then you do weapons certifications. Weeks and weeks and weeks on weapons, different weapons. So you get certified and then you do. Well, depending on what your specialization is. Mine was counterterrorism, so mine was more intense. Then you do airborne. You're jumping out of planes and there's a bomb course. You have to learn to build a bomb, learn how to defuse a bomb. Then you learn how to make like four different kinds of bombs so you can recognize them. [00:41:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:50] Speaker A: And much to my surprise, that actually came in handy one time. So after that, then you learn at the actual spy craft how to recruit spies to steal secrets. [00:42:02] Speaker B: Okay, so that's your UC training. [00:42:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. [00:42:05] Speaker B: So how much of that was super valuable versus leveraging your own kind of personal intuition? [00:42:12] Speaker A: Oh, on my first trip back to headquarters after going overseas in an ops capacity, I ran into one of my trainers in the cafeteria and I told him I had just made my very first recruitment. In fact, I put in an email and I sent it to everybody in my class. We all did that our first recruitment. And I said, the crazy thing is that it was exactly like. It wasn't training. It was almost like a joke. [00:42:44] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:42:45] Speaker A: It went exactly like they told us it was going to go. But the thing is, you're developing the source, and then by the time you're ready to break cover and formally recruit him, he knows what's going on. He's not a moron. He knows that this is not. You're not a normal diplomat. [00:43:08] Speaker B: You don't have too many people that come from nowhere and all of a sudden fall in love with you in a few months. [00:43:13] Speaker A: That's right. I remember Bill Clinton came out to Greece when I was in Greece, and I was the note taker in his meeting with the prime minister, the prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister. It's actually kind of a funny story. When a president comes to the country that you're serving in, everybody has to pitch in. Doesn't matter what agency you're working with. There's a ton of work and everybody has to pitch in. So the ambassador that I was working for at the time, Nick Burns, he went on to be ambassador to China and a bunch of other different things. He just put all the jobs in A hat. And you picked it out of the hat. So I got lucky. And my job was to take notes in the president's meeting with the Greeks. So it was the president, it was Secretary of State Albright, it was the National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, and the ambassador and me. And then for the Greeks, it was the prime minister, the defense minister, the foreign minister, and the Greek note taker. So the Greek note taker was an intelligence officer, and I was declared to the Greeks, so they knew I was an intelligence officer. So we go in, and I smile at him, and he winks at me like, you, too, huh? Your flies are. Yeah, right. So we go in, and Clinton, he was the sweetest guy in the world. He truly was. But he says to the. To the Greeks, can I offer you something to eat? There was a table off to the side that was just completely covered in food, like a buffet, and juices and coffee and tea and water and all kinds of stuff. And he says, may I offer you something? And the prime minister says, no, no, thank you. The defense minister. No, no, none of them want anything. He goes around, he comes to me, and he goes like this. May I offer you something to eat? And I said, oh, no, thank you, Mr. President. I'm fine. And he goes, oh, are you with me? And I said, yes, sir, I'm with you. And he said, I'm sorry. I thought you were Greek. And I said, I kind of am, but I'm not really. I'm with you. [00:45:21] Speaker B: Long story. [00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:22] Speaker B: Just move on. [00:45:23] Speaker A: So I took the notes. There's kind of a funny postscript I've told a couple of times. But the meeting was stupid. The meeting was, we love you and you love us, and we have really great relations, and this is the birthplace of democracy, and we have lots of Greek Americans in our country. And the Greek says, and we love you, too. And we have lots of American companies here, and we would like to have more American companies here. And then they get up and they shake hands, and Clinton hugs them, and photo op. [00:46:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:46:00] Speaker A: It was a ridiculous waste of time. [00:46:04] Speaker B: The big pandering session. [00:46:06] Speaker A: So the Greeks get up and leave. Now we're on the top floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. The Presidential suite takes the whole floor. So Clinton and Berger walk out together. Albright and the ambassador walk out together. And then I walk out. So again, my job is to keep my mouth shut and just stand there until somebody asks me to do something. So I'm just standing against the wall. I'm about three feet away from Clinton and. And Berger. They finish their conversation, and Berger drifts over to Albright and Burns. So Clinton's just standing there, and I'm standing there, and I'm. And we're looking at each other. So just then, at the end of the hall, the elevator door opens, and Hillary gets off with Chelsea. And she's got this. This puss on, right? This is right after the Lewinsky scandal, like, months after. And she's got this look. So she walks right up to us, and she just stands there. One thing about Bill Clinton, he hates silence. He's always got to be joshing and joking and telling a story and getting people to laugh. And so we're just standing there, like, looking at each other, and he says, boy, we sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn't we, Hill? She's looking at him, and she doesn't say anything. So he repeats himself. We sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn't we, Hill? And she goes, jesus Christ, Bill. It rained all day. I'll be in the room. And she walks away. And I'm looking at him like, you poor man. And he goes, let's get the fuck out of here. So he and I walk to the elevator. There's some Secret Service guys down there, and they get on with us. And then we go down to the basement, and there are 500 screaming women making up the Greek US Women's Business Council Roundtable, something screaming. And he gave this, like, vintage Clinton speech. And they're shouting, we love you, Bill. You know, I never saw anything like it. [00:48:17] Speaker B: My life just recovered. Not. [00:48:19] Speaker A: Not instantaneously. [00:48:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is probably why she's so bitter, too, because he can turn it off and on, too, elsewhere. [00:48:27] Speaker A: I'll tell you another thing that I don't think I've ever told anybody publicly. I have a friend who was one of the four top fundraisers for Clinton in 92. And Clinton named him an ambassador. So he came back after his ambassadorial stint and was running finance, helping to run finance for the 96 campaign. And then in 97, the Monica Lewinsky thing broke, and everybody close to Clinton got together behind his back and decided, we've got to get him to resign. He needs to resign, and Gore should become president. So they asked Clinton to meet them at the Willard Hotel, just a block from the White House, and they're gonna. They're gonna lay it on him. He's gotta resign. Well, the man's not stupid. He knew exactly what they were doing. He has spies all over the Democratic Party. [00:49:27] Speaker B: Right. [00:49:29] Speaker A: So they had met the night before and they said, we've got to be firm, we've got to be tough. The message has to be clear. He has to resign. So he gets, Clinton gets to the, to the meeting room. And the way it was described to me was he starts off by saying, I have let you down, friends, with a tear that rolls down his cheek. And my friends, like five minutes later, we're screaming, we love you, Bill. We're with you, Bill. [00:50:01] Speaker B: Need to move him to operations. [00:50:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And Gore's like, what just happened? [00:50:08] Speaker B: He just got done. That's beautiful, though. That's what I mean. I mean, you have to be a master manipulator at that level. [00:50:16] Speaker A: You can't be president and not be a sociopath because then you're going to go back to the White House and order drone hits on 50 people. Yeah, yeah. [00:50:25] Speaker B: Well, part of that's being a dude, too. You just compartmentalize everything. [00:50:28] Speaker A: Yes. [00:50:28] Speaker B: And he certainly had to. [00:50:30] Speaker A: He had to. [00:50:31] Speaker B: There's some Secret Service guys that used to work, Hillary too, that had those similar stories from the other side. You know, it just crazy, crazy. But I think that was the beginning of a time where we started to get more insight into personal lives of presidents, I think. [00:50:47] Speaker A: Right. Because, you know, looking back to Kennedy or Roosevelt, that stuff was off limits. [00:50:52] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:52] Speaker A: If it happened, nobody talked about it. [00:50:54] Speaker B: Right. And there was no, obviously there was no media that could just immediately send it around the world in a click of a button. [00:51:01] Speaker A: That's right. Do you remember the whole Gary Hart thing? [00:51:04] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:51:04] Speaker A: Where, you know, reporters are following him and. Or they weren't following him yet. And he said, I'm not doing anything. Go ahead and follow me. And they followed him to his girlfriend's house where he spent the night and then came out wearing the same clothes and it was all over the newspapers and he had to drop out of the presidential race. [00:51:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. You know, it's a different world now for sure. [00:51:27] Speaker A: Sure is. [00:51:28] Speaker B: But I don't know how. I still don't know how you're going to get a politician that everybody truly likes to get through that process without thinking. It's bullsh. Like you said. [00:51:37] Speaker A: You're absolutely right. You know, I've been in Washington a long time. I came here the week after I turn to go to college. And I've been here for the most part ever since, except for serving overseas. And then I kind of had a two year sabbatical off to the side, which we can get to later. But I've been in Washington for what, 43 years now. And back then, Democrats and Republicans lived in the same group houses together up on Capitol Hill. And they'd play poker on Fridays, they'd go to church on Sundays and, you know, everybody was friends. And now they don't even speak to each other. They plot against each other and they censure each other and impeach each other. And like, what happened, I don't know. [00:52:22] Speaker B: It's rubbed off to the public too, where the sentiment is the same way at every level. It really is the shame. [00:52:28] Speaker A: And I'm not seeing how we turn it around. [00:52:31] Speaker B: I was going to ask you. [00:52:32] Speaker A: Not unless there becomes a viable third party. Yeah, I don't know. [00:52:39] Speaker B: I mean, but a third party meaning not a Republican or Democrat or a third party within one of those parties. [00:52:50] Speaker A: I struggle with this. I say in my first book, I was with was being the operative word. I was a third generation Democrat, right. My grandparents came here during the Depression. To hear my grandfather tell it, Franklin Roosevelt was practically waiting there at Ellis island to give him a passport and a job at the steel mill in Pittsburgh. And, you know, we've been Americans ever since. He had a framed picture of Roosevelt on the TV till the day he died. I have it in my den. But I'm not a Democrat now and I never will be a Democrat ever again. When I got out of prison in 2014. 15 Gary Johnson, who also used to be a Republican, he was the governor of New Mexico. Gary was the Libertarian Party's candidate for president. And he asked me if I would campaign with him. And so I thought, you know what? I like these libertarians. I like them, they're good people. And we have a lot of the same ideas that, you know, and I'm going to come right out and say it, Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem, it's not the solution to the problem. So I approach libertarianism from the left, others approach libertarianism from the right. But we meet at a certain point. And so, you know, this year, for the first time in decades, more Americans have described themselves as independents than as Democrats or Republicans. There really is a need for a viable third party, whether it's one that already exists, like the Libertarians or the Greens or whatever they're calling it now, the Unity Party, or I forget what the name of it is now that Ross Perot started the Reform Party, or one in the center, which I'm not really comfortable with because I think already we've got, we've got a right of center party and then we have a farther right of center party. [00:54:55] Speaker B: Right, exactly. [00:54:57] Speaker A: That's my view. [00:54:58] Speaker B: And more than likely, I think the, the first step to getting there is having somebody drop from one of those primary into the middle. [00:55:05] Speaker A: That is the key right there. Yeah, Somebody with the guts to say, look, this system we have isn't working. You know, I, I have a book coming out that tangentially talks about politics of the, of the 19th century. Around the time of the end of the Civil War. There were six different parties in Congress at the end of the Civil War. Six different parties. Solomon P. Chase, who had been one of Lincoln's cabinet members, he was the Secretary of the treasury, former governor of Ohio. He had been a Democrat, he had been a Republican, he had been an anti slavery Democrat. And then he joined three other parties after Lincoln was killed. Every time he would disagree with a policy of the party, he would just jump to another party. And that, that was quite common back then. [00:55:56] Speaker B: Was it better that way though? It seems like pad jumping might be just as problematic. [00:56:02] Speaker A: You know, on the one hand, you raised an important point. On the one hand it makes me think, no, it's better because you keep the honest people honest and you make sure that they're representative of what the American people want. On the other hand, look at countries like Italy or Israel that have a dozen parties represented where nobody can ever get the majority. And so you have to look at Israel where Benjamin Netanyahu has put together a government that includes in the most important ministerial levels, senior most ministerial levels, two men who have been convicted of hate crime felonies. What's up with that? So that's the bad thing about multiple. [00:56:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and there's probably no absolutes anyway, especially in politics. [00:57:01] Speaker A: The Greeks have a nice. I'm biased because I'm Greek, but the Greeks have a system that works. They, they had until like 10 years ago, a multi party parliamentary democracy. And so it was just impossible to get a majority. And then you have to deal with the communists or the fascists or whatever, and that's just not workable. So they passed this law that whatever party, you get proportional representation, but whatever party comes in first gets an extra 50 seats in the 300 seat parliament. [00:57:35] Speaker B: All right? [00:57:36] Speaker A: And it's worked. They've had socialist governments, they've had capitalist governments, and it works. [00:57:41] Speaker B: And you end up with the majority and you end up with the leadership too. [00:57:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:57:45] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. Well, all right, so we get back to your operations now. [00:57:50] Speaker A: Operations. [00:57:51] Speaker B: I went on a tangent and I Appreciate that. [00:57:53] Speaker A: That's my fault. I know it all. [00:57:54] Speaker B: It's actually. No, it's wonderful because those were like some of my extra questions, and I'd love to hear some of your philosophical solutions or whatever. So I. I love it. I appreciate it. You had. Once you hit operations, you were. You had some hits put out on you. More than once? [00:58:11] Speaker A: More than once. [00:58:12] Speaker B: Do you have any stories you'd like to. I think I've heard about the one in Pakistan. You had a double agent or something, or. You don't have to tell the same ones. Yeah, talk about. Talk about those. And how did you handle those? [00:58:23] Speaker A: I just got back from Greece two days ago. I go frequently to speak and meet, and I've become kind of famous in Greece for my whistleblowing. [00:58:35] Speaker B: As you are here, sir. [00:58:36] Speaker A: No, thank you. That's not all it's cracked up to be. But in Greece, that was the first time I ever had somebody try to kill me. And I didn't even realize that there was this operation underway, which I still shake my head over, because I took my training very, very seriously. I became a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA and I didn't spot the surveillance. And so I had been working against this group called Revolutionary Organization. 17 November. They had killed 27 people, including the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of communication, the Governor of the Central Bank. Murderous, bloodthirsty organization of the extreme communist left. They weren't associated with the Communist Party because the communists were far too right wing for them. So this was the group I was there to work against. And I didn't realize that they knew who I was and were working against me. So In January of 2000, I had already been there for a year and a half. A new British defense attache arrived, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders. Steve was an awesome guy. Great sense of humor, great storyteller. Just a good time, Charlie, right? He was at every party. He was a media whore. He loved. He was on TV all the time. [01:00:24] Speaker B: Ate it up. [01:00:25] Speaker A: Yeah, he ate it up. Lovely wife, two little girls. We were at a dinner party. He lived next door to me, so we were at a dinner party one night, and I had just taken delivery of a fully armored BMW 540 that the CIA's Counterterrorism center bought for me. Windows were this thick. Yeah, no exaggeration. Fully armored. And it was a 540 because I needed a big engine to carry all that armor. We couldn't even insure this car, because it was the first 540 in Greece, we had to insure it through a German company. So we're at a dinner party that night, and he's making fun of me jokingly, and he says, you Americans, you're so paranoid about security. He goes, this is an EU country, it's a NATO country. What are you so worried about? Ha ha, ha. Everybody laughs. And I said, you Brits, you live in a dream world. If you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they're not going to kill you if they have the opportunity, if they have the chance, they're going to kill you. We all laughed again. Two weeks later. I made a mistake that I made only once that day. I slept through my alarm. I would get up early every day because every day I would take a different route to work, a route that made no sense. Right, right. [01:01:57] Speaker B: Taking your six, always. It's just a habit, though. [01:02:00] Speaker A: It becomes a part of you. You don't even. I mean, you just do it because you're. You do it. You. You're trained to do it. It's natural. [01:02:07] Speaker B: So this isn't going to be a mistake of complacency. [01:02:10] Speaker A: No. [01:02:10] Speaker B: Because you were actually even doing what you're trained to do still. [01:02:13] Speaker A: But I'm going to be late to work. That was what I was worried about. Like, doggone it. All right, I'm not going to do the surveillance detection route today. I'm just going to get on the main road and just go straight to the embassy. Now, I lived in a northern suburb of Athens called Kifisia. So Kifissia was on literally the same road as the embassy, called Kifisias Boulevard, which becomes Queen Sofia Boulevard. No turns. You just get on straight 10 miles. Exactly 10 miles. You know how dangerous that is? There are Jersey barriers most of the way down. So once you're on, you're on, you're committed, you can't get off. [01:02:59] Speaker B: No escaping. [01:03:00] Speaker A: There's no escape. [01:03:01] Speaker B: No Jay. Turned into the same lane of traffic. [01:03:05] Speaker A: Nope. So I get on and I'm thinking, I'm taking a real risk doing this, but I've got a gun, I've a nine on my waist, I have a.38 on my ankle. And God forbid if it all turns to shit, I have a. I have a buck knife in my back pocket. So I get on QPCs and it's gridlock like Cairo, Right. And I'm like dog on it. I'm never going to make it to work. I'm inching my Way down the mountain. And like I say, it's exactly 10 miles. So I then did something else that I never did. I turned the radio on. They. They told us in training, don't ever play the radio because it's distracting. You've got to constantly be scanning your side view mirrors, make sure that you're alert. And we were taught to talk out loud to ourselves. Like, guy in blue jeans, red T shirt. So that you can remember. Later, I saw a guy in blue jeans with a red T shirt. I'm seeing him again. That's the same guy. [01:04:07] Speaker B: Just kind of narrating your scene as you go. [01:04:09] Speaker A: That's exactly what you do, just to keep it all fresh. Because if you say it out loud, you're more likely to retain it. [01:04:14] Speaker B: Sure. [01:04:16] Speaker A: So I turn on the radio and the announcer comes on and he says, avoid Kifisias Boulevard. There was a traffic incident at Philothe. Philothe is about four miles into it. And I was like, fuck, I got four miles of this. [01:04:34] Speaker B: Too late. [01:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's too late. I'm committed. So I'm inching my way down half hour passes. He says, avoid Kifficias Boulevard. There was a criminal incident at Philothe. And I remember thinking, criminal incident. Never heard them say that before. [01:04:52] Speaker B: Weird term to use. [01:04:53] Speaker A: Anyway, I wonder what that could be. Another half hour passes, and he says, avoid Kifisias Boulevard. There was a terrorist attack at Philothe. Well, I'm just approaching what the jam up is, and it's a white rover in the left lane. There's police tape around it, and there's blood just coating all the windows inside. And I look at the license plate and I was like, oh my God. Now, Athens was so dangerous for Americans that we did not have diplomatic license plates. You see diplomatic plates all around Washington and New York. They're red, white and blue, and they're unusual. We didn't have those plates in Athens. [01:05:37] Speaker B: Those are targets. [01:05:38] Speaker A: They're targets. But the Greeks, in their infinite wisdom, gave everybody in the American Embassy license plates that began with the letters yhb. And the rover I see is ybh. And I said, oh my God, they killed some innocent Greek thinking it was one of us. And then I said, no, the British embassy has ybh And Stephen Saunders drives a white rover. [01:06:06] Speaker B: No way. [01:06:08] Speaker A: So I called the station chief and I said, hey, I'm stuck on GIFI CS and I think Steve Saunders was just assassinated. He said, what are you seeing? So I told him and he said, okay, get into the office. As Fast as you can. He called the British Embassy and said, one of my officers is on the road and thinks that Stephen Saunders was murdered. And the woman, her brain didn't comprehend what he said. And she says, I'm sorry, Stephen's not in yet this morning. And he said, no, you're not listening to me. We think Stephen was just assassinated. Oh, she says, they start calling the hospitals. Sure enough, he's at the hospital that's immediately next door to the British Embassy. He died 45 minutes later. So that was April 20th. Usually what the 17th of November would do is they would drop a manifesto at the site of the hit. Not always. Sometimes they would put it in a garbage can and then they would call a leftist newspaper and tell them where to find it. This day they didn't remain anonymous. Yeah, it was just anonymous. We knew it was them. We knew it was them for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was their mo, Two guys on a motorcycle. Secondly, we learned later that the passenger on the motorcycle shot Stephen with an anti tank round and it blew his right hand completely off. And the testimony later was when he shot him, Stephen lifted up the stump and looked at it like, what just happened to me? And then he turned and looked at the shooter and they shot him three times in the chest with what was called the Welch 45. Called the Welch 45 because Dick Welch was their first victim. He was our station chief and they used the Welch 45 in every hit after that. [01:08:08] Speaker B: So. [01:08:11] Speaker A: He bled to death. A taxi driver pulled him out of the car and rushed him to the hospital. That's how he got to the hospital. But the car was, it was just soaked in blood and he didn't have a chance. Anyway, we set out to double down on our efforts to find the 17th of November. We began working with the British. We were told to open our files to them. Then Fast forward to August 16th. I get into the office, totally normal day. My boss runs in. He said, did you see the manifesto? And I said, there was no manifesto. He said, no, it came out today. I said, no, I didn't see the manifesto. He said, you're in it. I said, what do you mean I'm in it? And he shows it to me in Greek. It said, ida meto un megalocataskopos. We saw the big spy, but we knew that he was driving an armored car and he was armed. So we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. And he goes, you've got to go. I said, where? He goes, home You've got to go home right now. I said, I just took my kids to school. I can't go home. He goes, we'll get your kids and your wife. You take a car to the airport. So one of the drivers put me in an armored car, drove me to the airport. Another car picked up my wife. Another car picked up my kids, take them to the airport. My wife says, I want a divorce. I'm not doing this anymore. [01:09:47] Speaker B: Hmm. [01:09:48] Speaker A: And she divorced me. [01:09:50] Speaker B: Wow, what a whammy. [01:09:53] Speaker A: And then I was on the 12 o' clock Delta flight to New York. [01:09:56] Speaker B: And that was the end of that whole op. Because then later you found out that they'd known all along who you were. [01:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:01] Speaker B: And there was no intel ahead of time that would have. [01:10:04] Speaker A: Now, I mean, the only thing we were able to deduce was that Steven was so high profile, he was on TV all the time and in the papers all the time wearing his Brigadier General costume. And so he was easy to find. And I think they saw my car and they said, that car is armored, and that license plate's from the American Embassy. That has to be a CIA guy. I think that's how they got me. [01:10:36] Speaker B: Or they could have been in the room when you were having that laughable conversation. [01:10:40] Speaker A: They very well could have been. They sure could have been. [01:10:43] Speaker B: Wow. That's wild, man. You're lucky. [01:10:46] Speaker A: I was very lucky. [01:10:46] Speaker B: That's the worst situation to ever be in, is to be out working, not knowing that you're made. [01:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:54] Speaker B: Is that the only time that you felt like you were already made without you being aware? [01:11:00] Speaker A: Yes. Maybe. [01:11:04] Speaker B: I mean, other than, you know, towards the end, when you were pulling triggers anyway or something. Right. At some point they find out. [01:11:09] Speaker A: But, yeah, the second time. The second time was more complicated. The first time, they could have gotten me, and I had never seen it coming. You know, my mom and dad came to visit about a week after Stephen was killed. And my boys were little at the time. They were 7 and 4. And I took a picture of my mom. She's kneeling down, and she has her arms around the boy's shoulders. And so I knelt down and I took the picture. It's in front of my house, but in the background of the picture, there's a man in a red Toyota, and he's looking right at the camera. And so I sent it in after the fact, and I said, can we run these plates? And the plates came back stolen. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:12:05] Speaker B: That's like. That's. That's part of your. That's A new movie script for you. That's gotta be a good opening scene right there. [01:12:10] Speaker A: I. This happened 25 years ago and still I think about it all the time. [01:12:16] Speaker B: Especially with your family involved. That's a little worse, a little more closer to home. [01:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:21] Speaker B: So do you do anything now to protect yourself now that you're retired? Is there any kind of standard protocol other than doing your checking your sixes? [01:12:29] Speaker A: And that's checking the sixes. I'm the most self aware driver that's out there. [01:12:34] Speaker B: Yeah. But that's all you can do really well. [01:12:37] Speaker A: And I'll tell you. Yeah, that's all you can do. I. I taught a course for George Washington University in surveillance and surveillance detection. It was a summer course in this intelligence studies program. So on the very first day, I said, we're going to walk slow motion through a surveillance detection course. And here in D.C. there's a small bridge called the P Street Bridge, which connects Dupont Circle with Georgetown. And it's the perfect bridge for an SDR because it's called a funnel. You can only get from Dupont Circle to Georgetown by crossing the Peace street bridge. It goes over the Rock Creek Park. Rock Creek. And so I walked them up to Dupont Circle. We did a cover stop. It had a back exit. We went out the back exit, we looped around, we crossed the Peace street bridge. So when we crossed the bridge, I stopped everybody and I said, now the reason we did this is because we funneled our surveillance by forcing them to cross the bridge with us. So if we were under surveillance, our surveillance would have had to be right behind us. Like this woman right here sitting in the car. I said, nobody sits in the car and reads a newspaper. That's just in the movies. And this woman followed us. If any of you were paying attention, she followed us from Dupont Circle. And now here she is at the end of the Peace street bridge. So if I were overseas, I would call that confirmed surveillance. An hour later, my lawyer calls me and he says, the FBI said that you are acting strangely as though you're doing a surveillance detection route. And I said, tell the FBI that I spotted their surveillance. And so did a bunch of 18 year olds who have never done surveillance detection before. Morons. [01:14:49] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. [01:14:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:14:50] Speaker B: And. Oh yeah, well, we won't get. We'll jump in the gun if we find out why that was, what was happening. [01:14:56] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:14:58] Speaker B: So, okay, so we go. You get to the point where you're working operations and how do you end up in Pakistan? That leads to Abu Zubaydah. And all that, the arrests. And you're gonna have to, like, kind of set the tone a little bit about what era this is and how you ended up in Pakistan. But this is while you're in operations, and this kind of leads to your whole famous slash infamous ride. Yeah, right. [01:15:25] Speaker A: That's right. [01:15:26] Speaker B: So I'm. I'm curious about how you got there. And then I'm fascinated by the expeditious operation, the exigent resources that were just thrown there. I mean, it just. You make it sound easy. Like, hey, I need millions of this and this and this. So I'm really fascinated. Yes, I'm fascinated with that. I mean, it's like you whip over that point sometimes when you tell that story of, like, wait a minute. [01:15:53] Speaker A: You know, it makes you want to say God bless America. [01:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:15:58] Speaker A: I mean that seriously. [01:15:59] Speaker B: For sure. [01:16:00] Speaker A: So the entire agency changed on 9 11. It'll never go back to what it was. I worked for a deputy director who. Whose mantra was that the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets to allow our policymaker, policymakers to make the best informed policy. Life should be so simple. Because it all changed on September 11, and we became a paramilitary organization. Necessarily so 25 years later. No, not so much. But on September 12, 2001, we had work to do. So that summer, I had been working with a contractor named Billy Waugh. Billy was like 70, 72, 73 years old. Legendary bonafide American hero. He had 17 Purple Hearts. [01:17:07] Speaker B: Good Lord. [01:17:08] Speaker A: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. That was one short of the record. And I said to him, billy, that has to be some kind of record. 17 purple hearts. And he goes, there's some sorry ass son of a bitch from North Carolina has 18. He had the filthiest mouth. We were in the Middle east together. We were training Middle Eastern intelligence services and how to do counterterrorism operations. And the head of this Middle Eastern service came to me and he said, you're a very nice man. I said, thank you, Excellency. And he says, but please tell Billy, no f. No gd We're Muslims. I said, I've. I've tried. Yeah, I've tried. He won't listen to me. Yeah, at that age, yeah, he's not gonna change. [01:17:54] Speaker B: I'm done. [01:17:55] Speaker A: So September 11th comes. Like everybody else in the building, quite literally. I volunteer to go to Afghanistan and do whatever they want me to do. Anything. And I kept saying, I speak Arabic. I speak Arabic. I speak Arabic. There were only 16 people in the CIA that spoke Arabic. 16. So, like, why am I not being flown to? [01:18:16] Speaker B: All of you should go. [01:18:17] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly Nothing. I run into Billy in the hall, like in October. So three, four, five weeks had passed. I go, billy, I said, where have you been? He goes, I've been in Afghanistan. And I said, really? What are you doing there? And he goes, I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing? And it dawned on me that that's why they hadn't sent me, because I kept saying, you need linguists to do the interrogations. There were no interrogations. They're just shooting people. So I finally went into the Deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center's office. He was an old friend of mine. And I said, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I said, as God is my witness, I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic, and I am not looking back. He's like, will you relax? He goes, all right, all right. Can you go to Pakistan? I said, yes. When? He goes, tomorrow? I said, yes. What do you want me to do? He said, I want you to be the chief of Counterterrorism ops. I said, done. So I go back to my. My office, called my girlfriend. She was a senior CIA officer up a couple floors. She became my wife. I said, I got to go to Pakistan tomorrow. And she said, for how long? I said, I don't know. Six months, 12 months. I don't know. And she said, okay, I'll meet you at your place. I'll help you pack. So we met up at my place. I packed the next morning. I drove to the airport, flew to Pakistan, and I arrived at 4 o' clock in the morning. The driver picked me up at 7 at the guest house and took me in. The chief was in, and he said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an Al Qaeda safe house. I said, okay. He said, then we're going to start busting down doors. I said, okay. So I went back to the office. Now, I had a staff, a staff of seven old men, all in their 70s. One or two may have been in his 60s, one was in his 80s. Every single one of these guys had been either chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations. And one of them had been deputy director of the CIA. But they're so patriotic, they all volunteered to go right back into the belly of the beast for a lousy measly $385 a day. [01:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah. It kind of needs to be restated. Sometimes you get an audience of people that really didn't experience 9 11. [01:21:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:01] Speaker B: And the emotional value, it was like Pearl Harbor. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. [01:21:07] Speaker A: In fact, I remember somebody saying, this is our Pearl Harbor. [01:21:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:21:15] Speaker A: And then a buddy of mine said, buddy, he was older than me. He said, this is what it was like when Kennedy was killed. Like, just so we understand, we grasp the severity of what's happening, I mean. [01:21:26] Speaker B: Everybody in the whole United States joined hands. [01:21:29] Speaker A: I mean, everybody in the United States. Yeah. [01:21:30] Speaker B: Seen it since. [01:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:21:33] Speaker A: I'm. I don't think we'll see it again in my lifetime. [01:21:36] Speaker B: Well, barring another catastrophe. [01:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So I sat down with these guys, introduced myself, and I'm the kind of person that saw this as perhaps the greatest learning opportunity of my life. That's why I got on with these guys so well. One of them came up to me one time and says, can I offer you some constructive advice? I said, please. He said, you've taken on too much. You need to dole this stuff out. I was working 18 hour days, sleeping at the desk. He's like, we're all experts. We all speak these languages. Just dole it out. [01:22:15] Speaker B: Awesome. [01:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah, they helped me a lot. And then we all slept in this or stayed in the same guest house, and we would have dinner together and just sit up drinking beers at night. And they would tell these, you know, well, when I was leading the Bay of Pigs invasion, it's like, oh, my God, Gene, was that you? Like, you're Gene Gately. [01:22:39] Speaker B: Like, I read all about these cats. [01:22:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And gene was like 80 something years old. Fucking Kennedy. We could have won that thing. Yeah. It's like, aye, aye, aye. But anyway, they would tell these stories, and I'm like, you know what? I could use that opinion. And I would file their experiences in my. In my head for later. It really was a great learning experience. So I sat down with a legal pad and I thought, well, what would I do? What would I want to do for a counterterrorism bop taken down a safe house? So the first thing I thought of is I would want it to be dark, right? I don't want anybody to see me. I don't want anybody to be awake. So I wrote 0200 at the top of the page. And then I thought, I need. I need weapons, I need ammunition. I need battering rams, I need night vision goggles, I need money. I need explosive charges for the doors. You know, all different kinds of stuff. So I wrote it all down and, and they, they wrote back to me at CTC Counterterrorism center, www.olls.com. [01:23:51] Speaker B: Sent you to the catalog. [01:23:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So I never heard of Gauze. It's like the greatest police supply house in America. I just ordered everything on my CIA credit card. They put it in the, in the apo, and, and I got it like, you know, a week later. [01:24:05] Speaker B: That's awesome. [01:24:06] Speaker A: I think I spent like $50,000 in that first shipment, but I got everything I needed. So we got a tip from the Pakistanis that there was this Al Qaeda safe house that they were watching. And do we want to bust down the door? I said, yeah, let's do it. So the FBI is there in the building, so you have to invite them. And it is the Pakistanis country, so you have to invite them. [01:24:37] Speaker B: So the FBI's role was. [01:24:39] Speaker A: Well, see, this was the weird thing. What was the FBI's role technically? The CIA always, always has primacy overseas. [01:24:49] Speaker B: Right? [01:24:50] Speaker A: And the FBI always has Primacy domestically. But 911 was an open criminal investigation. So while the CIA still had primacy, we had to do each operation with law enforcement in mind. [01:25:07] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay, yeah. [01:25:09] Speaker A: And we do things completely differently in the FBI. [01:25:13] Speaker B: And you're not talking about like HRT with you, you're talking about FBI agents. Investigation level. [01:25:19] Speaker A: Yes. Okay, that's a great way to put it. Investigation level. Normal FBI agents, no HRT people at all. Okay, so two o' clock in the morning, it's two CIA to FBI, two Pakistanis. We just walk up to this door, take the battering ram, ploop, knock the door open. There are these two 18 year old kids in there. They both burst into tears. We cuff them. One of them's asking if he can call his mom. And I said to a colleague of mine, this is the fearsome Al Qaeda. This is what we're so afraid of. Their children. I can't believe it. So we took him to the Rawalpindi jail. Rawalpindi is the sister city of Islamabad. Islamabad is the capital, but Rawalpindi is like 20 times the size. And they're connected, okay? And it's a shithole. You don't want to go to jail there. So we were like, okay, that worked. High fives. We all went home, went to bed. So I get a call a week later from an Arab intelligence station chief. And he said, hey, I heard you're the guy to talk to if we've got an address. I said, yeah, well, let's meet for coffee. So we meet for coffee. He slides this address across the table to me like, you know, we're on a TV show, like anybody else cares. We're in the American Embassy cafeteria. [01:26:53] Speaker B: He's like sliding the address, making a deal. [01:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So I said, okay, I'll call everybody together and we'll hit it. So we bust down the door. This was actually kind of an important one. We got a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad which had merged with Al Qaeda. They were the ones that killed President Sadat back in 1980. And then we had a couple of Al Qaeda, like mid level guys. This was, this was, you know, worthy of a standalone cable to headquarters. So we were like, okay, this, this is working. And we're doing one or two a week, maybe three. And then we're branching out. We're going to Karachi and Quetta and Lahore and Peshawar and all over the place and it's, it's working out. And then I get a call. The weekend in Pakistan is Friday and Saturday. Saturday was the only day that I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping until eight. Otherwise you're, you're, you know, 18, 16, 18 hours a day in the embassy. [01:28:02] Speaker B: Eventually you're not effective. Eventually. [01:28:04] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. You gotta get at least some sleep. So my phone rings, seven o' clock, it's the station chief and he said, you need to come in immediately. Something's developed. So I get dressed, rush into the embassy. It's the chief, the deputy chief, the FBI guy, his deputy and me and they said, we got a call overnight from NSA and they said that Abu Zubaydah is, quote, somewhere in Pakistan and you have to catch him. Everybody's looking at me and I go, what's that supposed to mean? I said, come on guys, this country is the size of Texas and it has 120 million people in it. You mean he's somewhere in Pakistan? [01:28:52] Speaker B: Go find him. [01:28:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that was it. [01:28:54] Speaker B: Easy. [01:28:55] Speaker A: Okay, good luck. Came up with some terrible ideas. So NSA is sending us these hair on fire cables. He's here, he's there. He's over here again. He's moved over here again. It's like, well, you got to help me out. He's driving back and forth between Lahore and Faisalabad, okay? Lahore has 12 million people. Faisalabad has 7 million people. So that doesn't narrow it down too terribly much. So I said to the chief, I said, you know what, When I was in college, my dad was friends with our crooked state senator and he got me a job as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania turnpike. That was my summer job. Summer of 85, I go, I know how to operate the toll booths, and Faisalabad and Lahore are connected by this toll road. So why don't we put CIA guys in all the toll booths and when Abu Zubaydah comes through the lane, we grab him. That's a terrible idea. Terrible for a whole bunch of reasons. Finally, I said, look, I. I can't catch him. I. I don't know. I. I've done everything I can think of. There's nothing that I can come up with that's going to help us catch him. But I said, I have a friend at headquarters who's a targeting analyst. He's really good, and we should fly him out here. So I called him and I said, I said, hey, we're. We're chasing down a vip. I couldn't tell him who it was because he wasn't read into the compartment. Chasing down a vip. Can you come out here, like, tonight? And he's like, sure. So, drives to Dulles, flies to Pakistan. I pick him up four o'clock in the morning. And I had the secrecy agreement, so he signs the agreement. I said, it's abu Zubaydah. He's like, oh, my God, you have, you have a beat on him. And I said, not one. That's good enough. [01:30:49] Speaker B: Not exactly, no. [01:30:50] Speaker A: That's why you're here. So he slept two or three hours, and then we brought him into the station. And he took this piece of butcher block paper, about that big, and he wrote abu Zubaydah in the middle and put a circle around it. And then around the circle, he wrote all of the phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses that we knew were in touch in one way or the other with abu Zubaydah. And then he did it on a secondary level and then on a tertiary level. It took him about two weeks. And so he drew these lines connecting, you know, each one of these. These numbers or addresses or what, these bits of data to the point where I've said this before, it looked pretty like an artwork, like a spider web. [01:31:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:31:51] Speaker A: And then he says to me, I just can't get it down to any fewer than 14 sites. And I said, 14 sites. We've never hit more than two before in a single night. We can't hit 14 sites. He said, I just, I can't. I can't do it anymore. So I went to the chief And I said, 14 sites. He said, well, he said, just send a cable to headquarters and list everything you need. So I said, I need 36 people, half FBI, half CIA. I need guns for everybody, ammunition for everybody, charges for the doors, night vision goggles, secure communications. I needed encrypted, like high end NSA encrypted walkie talkies. [01:32:36] Speaker B: Yeah, he's got people spread out all. [01:32:37] Speaker A: Over the place, satellite dishes. And I needed like several million dollars in cash. I'm telling you, 24 hours later, this unmarked 737 lands at the airport. [01:32:52] Speaker B: It's freaking unbelievable. [01:32:54] Speaker A: And everybody gets off. [01:32:55] Speaker B: You should have hijacked a plane. Well, we have gotten everything in the joke. [01:32:58] Speaker A: We used to have this joke at the agency where every six to 12 months you get a, you get an email from the director saying one of our officers was arrested this morning for using his CIA credit card for a personal expense and we will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And we used to say, why in God's name would somebody steal $20 from the CIA? Why? What would possess you to steal $20 from the CIA? If you're going to steal from the CIA, steal like $2 million, right? [01:33:34] Speaker B: Make it worth it. [01:33:35] Speaker A: We had this $2 million in big duffel bag and the analyst and I get in this, we requisitioned a van, it was all packed with, mostly with weapons, but we had the 2 million in there. And, and he said $2 million in cash. I said, I know, right? Didn't we always say, if you're going to steal, steal 2 million. And we both laughed. And then we just drove to Lahore. Yeah, yeah, I spent the whole 2 million. I spent more than 2 million. There's this other joke at the agency that for example, you can't, you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And we were throwing, literally throwing money out of the side of helicopters just to get these guys on board. Anyway, that's a different issue. [01:34:23] Speaker B: So. And I assume that all that stuff is, you know, you've, you have to. [01:34:27] Speaker A: Turn in to the dollar, right? [01:34:30] Speaker B: So eventually you're keeping track of all that mess too. So you can't be completely flipped even. [01:34:35] Speaker A: To the dollar to the cent. I'm telling you with sincerity to the scent. [01:34:40] Speaker B: Well, that's good to know. [01:34:41] Speaker A: We accounted for that money. There was a very young brand spanking new first tour officer that was assigned to me and she had never served overseas before. And I said to her, she was like in totally over her head. Cause we're like, you know, right, Loading weapons and putting stuff together and she was panicked. She ended up resigning when we were all done. But anyway, I said, listen, I know, I know what's going through your mind? This is not the way things normally happen. She was, she was hired the week before 9, 11. [01:35:15] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. [01:35:16] Speaker A: So she thought, oh, I'm going to be assigned to Brussels and then I'm going to go to Paris and she's in Pakistan, like loading weapons. So I said, I know what you're thinking, so I'm going to assign a very specific job to you. It's one of the most important jobs in the station. You're going to be the finance officer. I said, I'm going to give you the advice that an old timer gave me once. Never fuck with medical, security or finance. Not only can they ruin your life, they can put you in prison. So to the dollar, we have to account for every one of these $2 million. I said, you're never going to have to shoot anybody. You're not going to go on the raids. Just make sure that the books balance. And that's what she did. And she was great at it. [01:36:05] Speaker B: Good. [01:36:07] Speaker A: So to make this incredibly long story slightly shorter, we decided to drive around. A colleague of mine and I and two Pakistani intelligence officers decided to drive around to all 14 sites the day of the, of the raid and, or the day before. The day before the raid was at 2:00am okay, so it was the day before. So most of these places were just like hovels, huts made out of concrete block, you know, with a tin roof. Just dumps, Third World dumps. And one of them was a payphone in a shish kebab stand. So we dropped that one immediately. So obviously there are Al Qaeda people living there in that immediate neighborhood and they're using the payphone. But you can't raid the shish kebab stand two hours after they close for the night. So we, we dropped that one. Um, two of the remaining sites were in Lahore. Eleven were in Faisalabad. So Lahore was fast and easy. Faisalabad was like 45 minute drive. We drove over there and we started going to each one of those sites. Well, we're almost done. And the reason we're driving around, because I want to make sure it's not a setup, there's ingress and egress. You know, we're not going to be ambushed or funneled. [01:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:37:44] Speaker A: You never know what could go wrong. And you have to count on everything going wrong just to be on the safe side. So, so we're almost done. We're driving onto the campus of the University of Faisalabad to cut through. And the analyst calls me from Islamabad and he said, I just got a call from a friendly Western intelligence service. And they said that they had a walk in. A walk in is somebody who literally walks into the American embassy and says, I want to talk to a CIA officer. So you put on a disguise, you go down there, you talk to him. 95% of the time, there are crazy people. Right. You're beaming waves at my head, and you're stealing my thoughts and my dreams. Sometimes they are probes. The Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans will send people in pretending to be walk ins. They're looking around to see where the cameras are, how thick the glass is, where the armored door is located, how many people have weapons. So if they decide to attack the American embassy at some point, they know what the vulnerabilities are. Some are what are called intelligence peddlers, where they have a little nugget of intelligence. And they come to the American embassy and they say, I have this intelligence. And you say, okay, let's. That's legitimately intelligence. Here's a hundred dollars for your trouble. But then they go to the British embassy and sell it and the French embassy and the Russian embassy and street informants. Yeah. And there's a month's salary right there. [01:39:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:39:26] Speaker A: You know, good on them. But sometimes the walk in is the real deal. Right? And the old Soviet hands would tell you that the greatest sources in the history of the CIA were the walk ins, because they were people deep in the military leadership, deep in the nuclear program that you would never have access to. You don't even know their names. And they just walk up to your office and say, I want to work for you guys. So for that reason, you have to take every single walk in seriously. There's a protocol, and you have to take it seriously. Okay. So I said, well, he said that the walk in said that there's a big, brightly colored house that's full of al Qaeda. And I said, okay, I want to talk to the walk in. He said, can't do it. I already asked. They said, walk ins, off limits. Which told me that there was no walk in, that it was an intercept that they didn't want to declare to us. [01:40:27] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [01:40:28] Speaker A: Which was selfish. But anyway, that's okay. [01:40:31] Speaker B: But you also understand the level of paranoia at that point, too. I always do is tell one wrong person and. [01:40:38] Speaker A: And the whole op is done and somebody's going to get killed. So just as I am hanging up my phone, we pull out of the back of the University of Feistlebad, and there is this enormous yellow house. And I said, that's it, that's the house. [01:40:54] Speaker B: Just intuitively. [01:40:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And colonel Muhammad said, the Pakistani ISI guy said, I can tell you right now something bad is happening in that house. I said, how do you figure? He said, it's got to be 100 degrees right now and all the shutters are closed. They're broiling in there. But they want us to think that the house is closed up and there's nobody inside. I said, well, we're going to put a big team on that house. And then we're driving around and the analyst calls back and he says, are you sitting down? Abu Zubaydah just made a terrible mistake. He accessed his email account with a landline. I said, oh my God, tell me you have an address associated with the landline. He said, we have the address and it's site 13. I said, oh my God, we're going to get him. I said, we're on our way to 13 right now. So we drove over to 13 and it's an empty field. Nothing has ever stood there. And I said to the colonel, how can this be? We're sure that the number came from this? And he laughed and he said, you haven't been in Pakistan long enough. He goes, this happens all the time. Whenever plots of land are divided for development, each plot of land is assigned a landline. Right. And so poor people will climb the telephone pole, splice the wire and then run the line to their house so that they can make phone calls. And the bill goes to the owner of the land. [01:42:34] Speaker B: Yeah, they won't even find out until they have someone come move in. [01:42:39] Speaker A: Exactly. So he calls this young tech officer, guy looked like he was a teenager, he climbs the pole. I said in my first book it was like Medusa's head of wires, very Pakistani. He climbs the pole, he finds the wire, he literally follows it like this down the pole, then down the alley. And he says, it's that house right there. You know, I still get chills thinking about it. [01:43:11] Speaker B: That's awesome. [01:43:12] Speaker A: We're high fiving each other. That night one of my colleagues said to me, do you really think we're gonna get him? And I said, no, we're gonna get somebody. But no, you just thought it was. [01:43:29] Speaker B: Still too good to be true. Yeah. [01:43:32] Speaker A: And he's so smart. I'll get to that in a second. So at 10 o' clock that night, we were in the safe house. We had two safe houses. And I stood on the coffee table and I said, guys, at the risk of sounding melodramatic. We have to synchronize our watches like in the movies. So we synchronized our watches. Check. And I said, here's the plan. Everybody leave the Safe House at 0130. Be in the neighborhood by 0150. Be in place by 0155 with line of sight to the target. 0158. Get out of the car, and exactly as the clock strikes two, break down the door, separate the women and children from the men, grab all the men and put them in the paddy wagon. We had so many people, because, remember, it's not just the 36 that flew in. It's plus my whole staff, plus the whole Pakistani contingent. [01:44:33] Speaker B: Yeah, you're going to need at least, what, eight. You do eight people to a site per site. [01:44:38] Speaker A: And then. And then we had a triple team on the big site. [01:44:40] Speaker B: Okay. [01:44:42] Speaker A: We had to charter a bus with some Pakistani driver, you know, who has no idea this is like the biggest CIA counterterrorism operation in the history of the CIA. Literally. It was. And he's, like, driving his bus with all these CIA people. [01:44:59] Speaker B: Love it. [01:45:00] Speaker A: So that night at 0200, we're on the roof of the safe house in Feislobad, and I looked at my watch, and I said to a colleague of mine, I said, 0200, here we go. And as soon as I said it, we could hear this metal on metal, boink, boink, boink. And it was site 13, which was the closest site I got on the walkie talkie. What's going on over there? Shots fired, shots fired. Everybody freaks out. And rule number one of operations, the walkie talkies never work. Right. I say all the time, we put men on the moon, we can't last. We can't make a battery that lasts more than 15 minutes. [01:45:39] Speaker B: That's true. [01:45:39] Speaker A: I don't understand what the. What. How hard is it to make a battery? I don't understand this. [01:45:46] Speaker B: So it's Murphy's Law. [01:45:47] Speaker A: It is. We jump in the car, we drive over to site 13, and it was chaos. Lots and lots of blood, but we got him. [01:45:59] Speaker B: And that's. And so was that on the same channel as all the other folks, too. So you had a shooting there and there were. [01:46:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:46:06] Speaker B: So if you'd had multiple shootings and. [01:46:07] Speaker A: Everybody else like, holy shit, what's going on at 13? Because they're breaking down the door, and people are like, I give up. [01:46:13] Speaker B: Yeah, fortunately. Or you'd have had all kinds of screaming chatter from multiple locations. You'd have also been screwed that's right. Been able to interpret what's going on. [01:46:22] Speaker A: That's exactly right. And we were only supposed to use the walkie talkies in case of an emergency. Otherwise it was silence. [01:46:28] Speaker B: Right. [01:46:28] Speaker A: That big, that yellow house. I'm not allowed to say the number of people that we caught that night, but. But that house wasn't the problem that we thought it was going to be because everybody in there was just a kid. There were no leaders. It was just like a way station for them to spend a couple of weeks before they can get smuggled out. So we were expecting the worst and nothing happened. We got them all. [01:46:56] Speaker B: And then you got Abu Zubayda at that point, who was injured. So there was a. And part of the interesting part of the story that I find fascinating is your short lived relationship with him during that interim. Can you talk about that? [01:47:17] Speaker A: You know, as it's turning out, it's not as short lived as I thought it was. I spoke to his attorney a couple of weeks ago. [01:47:25] Speaker B: Are you kidding me? [01:47:26] Speaker A: No. And I said, well, we had a long, long conversation. I've not told anybody this, but I said, my government will never apologize to him. So I want to apologize to him. He was not the number three in Al Qaeda. He was never even a member of Al Qaeda. We have never charged him with a crime. And we tortured him to within an inch of his life. He had to be revived with CPR just so we could torture him more. [01:48:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:48:03] Speaker A: And he's still in Guantanamo. He's been in our custody for 23 years and he's never been charged with a crime. And he said, abu Zubaydah knows that we're speaking today, which kind of surprised me. And his recollection of that night is a little different from yours. [01:48:26] Speaker B: It always is. Of course, he was a little bit more heroic. And Stan, Right? [01:48:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:48:32] Speaker B: Didn't go down so easily. [01:48:33] Speaker A: Not like shot three times and pissing himself, which is my side of the story. So. So he said that in 2007, when I went public with a torture program, a friendly guard at Guantanamo went to his cell and whispered to him. A CIA man went public with what happened to you? And he said for the very first time they felt hope that the world was finally going to know what was happening and that the torture would stop and that it stopped. And I said, does he have any hope of getting out? And he said, believe it or not, we negotiated a release with the Biden administration. They approved him for release. They never said so. The only chink in the armor was that they couldn't find a country willing to take him. And so we were just casting around, asking this country, that country, and the other country, will you take this guy so we can release him? And the negotiations were ongoing, and then Donald trump won. [01:49:41] Speaker B: And he's still sitting. [01:49:42] Speaker A: He's not going anywhere. [01:49:45] Speaker B: Wow, that's fascinating. [01:49:46] Speaker A: He said that when he's finally released, he wants the two of us to have dinner together as free men. [01:49:51] Speaker B: Really? I absolutely adore that because, I mean, that's what I was. I really wanted to ask you if you could speak to him, because I know at some point, perhaps it was in one of your books. I mean, I've read three of the. You have three books? [01:50:04] Speaker A: Thank you. I have eight. [01:50:06] Speaker B: Oh, I've only scratched the surface then. [01:50:11] Speaker A: Well, the eighth is coming out in a couple of weeks. [01:50:12] Speaker B: Okay, well, I'm looking forward to that. But there were. There was some kind of conspiracy that you had mentioned, too, about people that could have essentially acquitted him of the crimes that he was accused of. And I'm. I'm fascinated with that because conspiracy theorists frustrate me, typically. Me too, because there is so much we were talking about earlier, so much red tape. Now to get any kind of mission accomplished from step one, all these other people have to finger square everything. [01:50:40] Speaker A: I always say that whenever people come to me with a conspiracy, I always say, do you have any idea how many moving parts there are in a conspiracy where everybody involved has to keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives? [01:50:54] Speaker B: Never happens. [01:50:55] Speaker A: Never happens. [01:50:55] Speaker B: That's why we have so many murderers in prison. [01:50:57] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. [01:51:00] Speaker B: But in this case, it actually was a conspiracy. There were several people that could have attested because am I mistaken in that he was actually one of two Abu zubaydah. [01:51:11] Speaker A: There were two people named abu zubaydah. It was our abu zubaydah and his first cousin. But we didn't know that there were two. And I remember these. These cables coming in like, abu zubaydah is planning an attack in amman. Like, ooh, okay. Abu zubaydah is planning an attack in greensboro, north carolina. We're like, what? Abu zubaydah is planning an attack in jerusalem. Oh, my God. Abu zubaydah's planning an attack over here. We're like, this guy's a terrorist. Superman. Yeah, no, it was two people. [01:51:45] Speaker B: And. But. But your. For lack of better terms, your abu zubaydah was not necessarily a good guy. [01:51:52] Speaker A: No, no, he was not a good guy. He was a bad guy. He was doing things in support of al qaeda. There were two things in particular that he did that were, you know, worthy of prosecution. One was he founded the. What's called the house of martyrs, the Al Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan. Two, he founded and staffed Al Qaeda's two training camps in Kandahar province in Afghanistan. Well, and there's a third. He acted as something of a logistician for Al Qaeda. He never pledged loyalty to osama bin Laden. He never joined Al Qaeda as a member. But if you were an Al Qaeda fighter and you just wanted to go home, he would smuggle you out, he would get you a passport and a ticket home and go home, like leave the organization. Just. Yeah, go back to Egypt or Tunisia or wherever. Just go home. [01:52:49] Speaker B: So he's a cooperator of sorts, not necessarily somebody that was responsible for. [01:52:55] Speaker A: And if he had been charged and convicted in a federal court, he likely would have been sentenced to 20 years which with good behavior would have been 17. And he's already been in for 25. And was tortured and has a life. [01:53:11] Speaker B: Sentence or do they. [01:53:13] Speaker A: No, he's never been charged. [01:53:15] Speaker B: So they're just still holding him. [01:53:16] Speaker A: They're still holding him indefinitely. And the senate torture report says. The senate torture report quotes a CIA cable that I remember seeing and shaking my head saying abu Zubaydah must never be allowed contact with the outside world. He must never be released. And when he dies, he is to be cremated and his ashes thrown into the Caribbean. [01:53:44] Speaker B: So it's essentially evidentiary based because then the truth will come out. [01:53:49] Speaker A: Yeah, the truth will come out. The things that we did to him. [01:53:54] Speaker B: Okay. So it's fascinating that we're still holding them and there isn't enough logical minds or do you think, do they think at this point they're going to let him go and he's going to be so pissed off that we will have another 9, 11. [01:54:08] Speaker A: The naysayers will tell you, yes, that's the fear. The truth is almost nobody has taken up the fight again. Mind you, when we caught him he was a young, strong, 27 year old man. He's in his 50s now and he's utterly broken their health. All of them, Abu Zubaydah and all the other people at Guantanamo, their health is dire. There's one, there's one guy who. Now this is a, this is a terrible story story. You're not getting any health care in Guantanamo just like we didn't get any health care in prison. Right. They don't give a shit about your health. And so there's one guy who developed a tumor on his spine and it Made him a paraplegic. So there's a certain medical device that they needed to. To operate to take the. The tumor out. The medical device was available only in the states and the nearest one was in Miami. Well, Congress, in their infinite cowardice, passed a law saying that nobody that's ever been held in Guantanamo may be allowed in the proper United States. Why? [01:55:23] Speaker B: What was the motivation for that? [01:55:24] Speaker A: Supermax is you're afraid they're going to escape from supermax? [01:55:28] Speaker B: Yeah, Right. [01:55:29] Speaker A: Where nobody's ever escaped from. They're just cowards on Capitol Hill. So they couldn't take him to Miami for the surgery. Well, the alternative then is to send the device to Guantanamo. Well, the device is very, you know, fragile. So after six months of hemming and hawing, they decided, okay, we're going to put the device on a plane and send it to Guantanamo. And they dropped it and broke it. And so he's a quadriplegic now. He's still in Guantanamo. [01:56:02] Speaker B: And he's not technically being tortured yet. [01:56:04] Speaker A: Right. [01:56:05] Speaker B: The neglect is almost in and of itself. [01:56:08] Speaker A: Right, right. So Abu Zubaydah, all he wants, according to his lawyer, is to maybe meet a woman someday and get married, maybe have a child. He just wants to go home. [01:56:23] Speaker B: Do you think he's at all like he was the day you spent the better part of a day with him in the hospital? 56 hours. So a couple of days in the hospital and trying to elicit information from him before he got handed over to people who even know the torture program wasn't something you were keenly aware of. You also knew it wasn't going to be nearly as pleasant as you correct at his bedside. [01:56:49] Speaker A: That's what I told him. [01:56:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:56:51] Speaker A: But the nicest guy you're going to meet in this experience. [01:56:54] Speaker B: How much. How much of that personality of somebody who you, you know, is terrorist and everything else and you've got the emotion of 911 is still on your mind. [01:57:04] Speaker A: I told him that I said I should hate you. I should want to kill you. [01:57:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:57:11] Speaker A: And I don't. I said, you're pathetic. He's just looking at me. [01:57:19] Speaker B: How so? And there was something also. Go ahead. [01:57:22] Speaker A: I'm going to show you some pictures. [01:57:24] Speaker B: I love it. Oh, gosh, look at that. [01:57:29] Speaker A: Some of them are pretty grisly. [01:57:33] Speaker B: That's him that night. [01:57:34] Speaker A: Yes. [01:57:34] Speaker B: Wow. Oh, that's. Some of the other guys didn't do so well. [01:57:39] Speaker A: They didn't do so well. [01:57:42] Speaker B: How fascinating. That's pretty. That's insane. Oh, good lord. But what. I mean, what a surreal Experience, to have that level of a connection with somebody. And I'm curious, how do you think he felt any inclination? And I know you have all these manipulation tactics and everything else, but it seemed to me, as I hear you speak about it, that it was more a personal level thing where you kind of just implored to him, like, dude, I. For some reason, you know, obviously you want the information, but you also want the best for him at that point. Is there any. Is there. [01:58:31] Speaker A: I was not a trained interrogator and I didn't know what the plans were for him. I had no need to know. So I wasn't read into the next compartment. My job was to catch him and that's where my job ended. So I thought, you know, if I can connect with this guy on a personal level in any way, if I can elicit anything at all that might save an American life, forestall an attack. You know, be a little nugget as to who might be hiding where. Remember, we thought he was Al Qaeda. We thought he was a leader of Al Qaeda. [01:59:11] Speaker B: Right. Which is why it makes it twice as big, is fascinating. [01:59:14] Speaker A: But does he know where bin Laden is tonight? And then I got into a major, major situation right after he flew out, we went back to the safe house and we had also captured his diary and his cell phone. In that raid, the CIA and the FBI fought over the meaning of the diary for 20 years. And I'm confident the CIA was right and the FBI was wrong. The FBI said he's a crazy person. He's a madman. A madman was the word that they used. And I said, no, no, no, you read this. This is. He's brilliant. They said it's the, the, the doodlings of a madman. And I said, no, it was the 27 year old Abu Zubaydah writing letters to the 14 year old Abu Zubaydah saying, don't make the mistakes that I've made as you grow up. Treat our mother and father with respect. Don't try to grab that girl's boob in fourth grade or whatever. Treat elders with respect. He would write himself these notes about the mistakes that he had made. And then he would write poetry and then he would draw a doodle of something. And he was quite skilled as a draftsman. I mean, beautiful artworks. [02:00:33] Speaker B: It's all kind of self therapy. [02:00:35] Speaker A: Yeah, but then he would write like the cell phone numbers for three Saudi princes. [02:00:42] Speaker B: There's something. [02:00:43] Speaker A: All of whom ended up dead somehow. [02:00:46] Speaker B: Yes, conspiratorially. I know. [02:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah. One died of thirst. Imagine that. So anyway, the other thing we, we found was his cell phone. So here's his cell phone. I'm in the safe house with this army of people, half CIA, half FBI, the Pakistanis just standing against the wall because they. They're already in over their heads on this. And one of the FBI agents, Jennifer, she takes the cell phone, throws it into an evidence bag, seals it. It says evidence on the top. And she signs it and puts her badge number. And as soon as she does, it starts ringing. So I grab it and she goes, stop. [02:01:31] Speaker B: Oh, no. Now it's evidence. You can't touch it. [02:01:34] Speaker A: I go, jennifer, it could be bin Laden calling. If it's bin Laden calling, then we can call it into NSA and they can rocket wherever it is that he's hiding, right? She goes, you better not open that bag. I said, I'm going to open the bag. She goes, I will place you under arrest if you open that bag. Meantime, everybody forms a circle around us. Like, everybody's waiting to see, like, who's. [02:01:56] Speaker B: Gonna win this one. [02:01:58] Speaker A: And she says, so help me God, I will arrest you in front of everybody. [02:02:01] Speaker B: It's not Coffin Daffer, is it? [02:02:03] Speaker A: No. [02:02:04] Speaker B: Okay, making sure. Go ahead. [02:02:06] Speaker A: I tossed it back to her, and then it stopped ringing. I said, it's on you if we don't get bin Laden. It's on you, not on me. [02:02:16] Speaker B: But it wouldn't have been. [02:02:17] Speaker A: No, it was actually his mother. His mother. Somebody had called and said the Americans got him. And she was calling to, you know, tell me it's not true. [02:02:28] Speaker B: So we, out of respect for your time, we will get to the point where you decide that or America government decides. Another conspiracy, technically, because again, it's something of a significant movement to take what was set in stone from the beginning, that we don't torture people. They allowed for the torture. You obviously had an opportunity to be involved with it, decided not to. And then at some point, you get through this other end of the torture program. You're retired. And first of all, the torture doesn't work. [02:03:13] Speaker A: It doesn't. [02:03:14] Speaker B: The FBI, apparently, you said, got all the right answers and then the torture. Never got anything that manifest any further. [02:03:21] Speaker A: Than they did actually, then set everybody back. Because every time we would torture him. [02:03:25] Speaker B: He would just clam up because he knew nothing else. Essentially, is what we're at now. [02:03:30] Speaker A: You know my feelings about the FBI. I mean, it's kind of an ongoing joke, really. I hate the FBI. I've always hated the FBI, but they are really good at interrogations. Really good. And they've been doing it since the Nuremberg trials. [02:03:45] Speaker B: And that's why their natural inclination was the same as yours. [02:03:48] Speaker A: Yes. [02:03:49] Speaker B: Not being an interrogator was to endear yourself to them. [02:03:54] Speaker A: Exactly. [02:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That's where the true answers came. [02:03:57] Speaker A: Yes. And he really did provide intelligence that saved American lives. [02:04:03] Speaker B: Okay. [02:04:03] Speaker A: To the FBI. [02:04:05] Speaker B: And yet it's still to no avail. Still sitting there. [02:04:09] Speaker A: Yep. [02:04:10] Speaker B: And then at some point, I say, you decided. I'm curious about this because this part gets murky to me because I've heard different things and I would love to hear your. Because you ended up in an interview or were asked at some point that, you know, were you involved with this? Are you aware of this? And you obviously wanted to make sure your name was not included in any of the torture program stuff. As this started coming out. I don't know if it was an interview or somewhere where you said you were with the ABC news person. Is that basically where it broke? Okay. And you were kind of caught off guard about questions that went outside of your purview regarding the program. [02:04:50] Speaker A: Yes, in part. [02:04:51] Speaker B: Okay. [02:04:52] Speaker A: The other part was an illegality that was taking place. So what you're talking about is in the initial interview that I gave to Brian Ross, I said that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded one time. One time. [02:05:10] Speaker B: That's all you thought was the truth, though, at the time? [02:05:12] Speaker A: Yes, because that's what had been reported from the secret site. So here's the background to that. The CIA and the FBI hated each other. So hated much that even their computer systems were incompatible with one another. Right? Yeah. So if I'm in the CIA and I write a cable, I can say, send it to the CIA, State department, White House, dod, Treasury, nsa. I can't send it to the FBI. And an FBI cable can only be sent to the FBI. [02:05:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So do that on purpose. They had, like, word perfect until, like, exactly right. [02:05:50] Speaker A: That's exactly right. Word perfect. You remember that? [02:05:53] Speaker B: Yes. [02:05:54] Speaker A: So Ali Sufan is getting all this intelligence out of Abu Zubaydah. He's reporting it back to the FBI in the FBI channels, and the CIA is cut out. So then the CIA takes over immediately, starts torturing him, waterboarding him 83 times, and he clams up. We learned in 2005, and this was declassified in 2009, that what the two contract psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, did was they took the FBI cables that Ali Soufan had written, retyped them in the CIA computer, and sent them in saying, we waterboarded him one time. Look what he gave us. Well, that was already known to the FBI because Ali had collected it. He hadn't given the CIA anything. But they lied and they said that he had given it to them only because they waterboarded him one time to take credit. [02:06:56] Speaker B: But how does that happen? Why does the FBI not balk, especially with that contentious relationship, and say, wait a minute. [02:07:03] Speaker A: We got that information in part because the reporting cable from the secret site in CIA channels was kept from the FBI because, remember, they're not compatible. And it's none of the FBI's business what the CIA is writing in its channels back then. [02:07:18] Speaker B: So they just assumed you might have gotten the same information. Couldn't debunk it either way. [02:07:23] Speaker A: Right. [02:07:24] Speaker B: Interesting. They used their own little word perfect against themselves. [02:07:28] Speaker A: And it wasn't until 2009 that we learned that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 187 times. [02:07:38] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's. And that's the interesting part about that interview too. You know, when you finally find that you were still only educated slightly and had a lot of misinformation that you can only know what you know at the time, and the emotion was still pretty fresh from 911 in 2007. So it's a. It's a lot different situation. [02:07:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:07:59] Speaker B: But when you mentioned that you were kind of caught off guard and everything too. I know how sharp you are and I know you know how to manipulate people. It seems like if I wanted to manipulate you or throw you a hardball from the left side question, you would call bullshit right away. [02:08:15] Speaker A: Now I would. But back then, much more experienced. That was the first time I had ever met a reporter. I'd never met one before, but just. [02:08:23] Speaker B: In life in general, you don't. So you were just kind of. It was almost like forgetting to check your six. Almost. [02:08:29] Speaker A: I had. Yeah. I had made a decision in the days before that interview that I would just tell the truth. I didn't expect to tell that much truth. [02:08:39] Speaker B: Right. [02:08:40] Speaker A: But he just kept pushing and. [02:08:44] Speaker B: Oh, it is what it is. There's nothing else to it. He just. He kind of. He got you. [02:08:48] Speaker A: You know, he and I have become good friends. And he says that one of his greatest regrets in all of his career. This is a 14 time Emmy winner. He said his greatest regret is that he bullied me in that interview. Hmm. I called him one day. [02:09:03] Speaker B: So he even knew he did it. [02:09:04] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I called him one day in 2008 and I said, I feel like you ruined my life. You. You Owe me for ruining my, my life. And. And he got me a job at ABC News as the. As the counterterrorism. [02:09:18] Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome. Even though you didn't know the extent of ruin yet. [02:09:22] Speaker A: No, no, no. [02:09:23] Speaker B: I knew nothing. [02:09:24] Speaker A: Which is also funny because since then, since I was arrested and prosecuted, three of the FBI agents on my case have apologized to me. [02:09:35] Speaker B: That's great, though. I mean, it's better than nothing. [02:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. I'll take it. [02:09:39] Speaker B: Especially since you still spite the FBI. [02:09:41] Speaker A: I do, I do. Man, I wish they had made me Deputy Director of the FBI. [02:09:45] Speaker B: So once you. So you almost did it by accident, you would say. [02:09:49] Speaker A: You know, I wish I could tell you that I was so sophisticated, educated and so smart that I went on TV and I told them, and that really wasn't it at all. [02:09:59] Speaker B: It just came out. [02:10:00] Speaker A: Just came out. [02:10:02] Speaker B: That's fascinating. It's fascinating knowing who you are, that that would happen to you. [02:10:07] Speaker A: But you know what, though? My wife told me. My wife told me the night of my arrest, she said, you have to embrace this. She said, you can't run from it. You have to embrace it. You're going to be the CIA anti torture guy. You're the whistleblower. It's your life now, whether you like it or not. Don't run from it. Because she said, eventually they're going to move on to their next victim, which they did. It was Ed Snowden, and they're going to forget about you. But if you keep talking about it, your side of the story will be the side of record. [02:10:44] Speaker B: That's great advice. [02:10:45] Speaker A: Exactly right. [02:10:45] Speaker B: That's great advice. [02:10:47] Speaker A: Even my brother, my brother who, you know, knows music and has no idea intelligence, foreign affairs, he said to me, I know you can't see it. This was the night of my arrest. I know you can't see it, but this is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. [02:11:03] Speaker B: Well, that'd be a really interesting insight from a brother who you would think would have only the perspective of like. [02:11:12] Speaker A: Oh, my God, what have you done? [02:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Or just being worried for you. If nothing else. [02:11:17] Speaker A: He was. [02:11:17] Speaker B: And you were worried for yourself because you also put that little comment in the book that was like, how in the world do you put a comment about, I actually contemplated doing something that I'm not proud of and then moved on from that comment. You just leave the reader to assume it was the worst. But did you, did you hit a rock bottom? So you get convicted and you have a period of time between Conviction and going to prison. [02:11:43] Speaker A: Four months. [02:11:44] Speaker B: Four months. So it's almost. I mean, it's almost worse than just saying, just freaking take me, because now you have to. [02:11:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [02:11:51] Speaker B: Split that four months out. [02:11:52] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was. [02:11:53] Speaker B: And you. We went through quite a bit of turmoil. [02:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:11:56] Speaker B: Tell me about that. Elaborate on that sentence that you just left us hanging on. [02:12:01] Speaker A: My. My wife and I, she's now my ex wife. We were watching TV one night and I'm at rock bottom. We had put the kids to bed and we're watching tv and she said, I'm exhausted. I'm gonna go to bed. I said, I'm gonna stay up and watch tv. I wasn't gonna stay up and watch tv. I was going to go into the garage, start the car and lay on the backseat. Literally. That's. I had thought about it all day and I was gonna do it. And she said, no, come to bed. And I said, no, I'm gonna stay up. She said, no, I really, really want you to come to bed. I Like, she could sense. [02:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah. That premonition. [02:12:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [02:12:40] Speaker B: Well, it's fascinating, too, that. And obviously it's a blessing that you didn't. [02:12:44] Speaker A: Obviously. [02:12:45] Speaker B: But what would that have done to the story, too? [02:12:47] Speaker A: I know, right? [02:12:48] Speaker B: Sort of made it look like it would have. [02:12:50] Speaker A: It would have damned me. [02:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it would have. Yeah. Completely discredited yourself. [02:12:53] Speaker A: Completely. [02:12:54] Speaker B: Which is not what goes through your mind. I find that fascinating, again, to somebody who otherwise is controlling that you're willing to let go because you've been such a dark place. That's crazy. [02:13:06] Speaker A: When I got to prison, too, I was determined from the very beginning that I was going to make something out of this. I wasn't exactly sure what, but I was going to turn it into something. And then I had a couple of turns of just good luck, good fortune. One of my attorneys said that 600 people had signed up for a listserv, and they just wanted to know that I was okay. So she says, when you get to prison, when you feel up to it, just write me a letter and I'll send it to these 600 people. I didn't know that she was a friend of Ariana Huffington. And so I wrote. Sorry, wrote this letter in which I exposed two crimes that had been committed against me by these retard guards in the prison. [02:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:14:02] Speaker A: And Ariana put it like this banner headline on the Huffington post. It got 2 million hits. And then, like, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me. And it's in the Economist and the Atlantic Monthly and Playboy and Time magazine, and I'm on the back cover of the Nation, and it was ridiculous. [02:14:28] Speaker B: And it was just an indictment on these two dumbasses. [02:14:31] Speaker A: And then the warden calls me in. [02:14:34] Speaker B: I'm sure he did. [02:14:35] Speaker A: And he says, I'm going to put you in solitary and we're going to forget where you are and throw away the key. And I thought, you know what? I have nothing to lose. And I said, what, Warden? I have gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and I'm supposed to be afraid of you? Give me some credit. And I've lived in a lot worse places than your solitary in Loreto, Pennsylvania. And he backed off. [02:15:05] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. And you had a miserable experience in there. That from the. From the jump, you were supposed to be in a camp. [02:15:15] Speaker A: Minimum security camp, yeah. Club Fed, Yes. [02:15:18] Speaker B: It didn't work out so well, so you got in and mixed it up with the guys. And what kind of CIA tactics did you leverage to get your way out there? Do you. [02:15:27] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, my second book is all about that. It's called Doing Time Like a Spy. How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. [02:15:35] Speaker B: Great book. [02:15:36] Speaker A: Thank you. So, you know, I started writing it as a joke. It was just a joke. But when I would ask other people to read it, they were like, this isn't funny. Not funny at all. So then I said, okay, well, I'll be serious about it then. And I showed how I used these 20 lessons that the CIA taught me to make sure that I was safe and at the top of the social heap in prison. [02:16:04] Speaker B: Yeah, manipulation tactics. [02:16:06] Speaker A: It's all about manipulation. The whole. Your whole existence is about manipulation. [02:16:11] Speaker B: You had Crips and Bloods and Italians and everybody, but if you had had media there, you might have been screwed. [02:16:16] Speaker A: Screwed. Yeah, but I mean, Gambinos, Bananos, Genovese, Colombos. I was. I was a whole lot one called me yesterday. [02:16:27] Speaker B: Really? So you still tighten those guys? [02:16:29] Speaker A: Absolutely. [02:16:30] Speaker B: As long as you do time. I suppose that's kind of a brotherhood in and of itself, too, right? [02:16:33] Speaker A: Yep. [02:16:34] Speaker B: And a lot of those guys were, you know, they're thugs and whatever, but they're still. [02:16:38] Speaker A: Come on. An illegal gambling charge. Come on. [02:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's all they could get. [02:16:43] Speaker A: You know, the. The FBI makes them do the perp walk, right? We 25 RICO predicates and then they take a plea and get six months for having a little. [02:16:52] Speaker B: Right. [02:16:52] Speaker A: Armed bandit in the back of the bar. [02:16:54] Speaker B: Right. Come on, you just can't get them on racketeering, you got to get them on something else. [02:16:59] Speaker A: You know, there was a guy in there, he. He was doing. He was doing a sentence for killing the guy who killed his dad, right? Like, oh, this. This guy killed my dad, so I kill him, right? So he was a member of one of the five families. And he just kind of took to me and he said, I got to give you some advice when you get out. He said, you need to. You need to show respect to your. Your parole officer. I was like, fuck them. I've had it with all these people. He's like, no, no, no, hear me out. And he told me about his own experience. And I was like, oh, okay, okay. He said he got violated twice. They're always yanking his chain. He said, you're very high profile and important. People hate you. He said, don't hand it to them on a silver platter. You're smarter than that. [02:17:50] Speaker B: So you were slick and made it through, and you still maintain good relationships with some of those cats too. [02:17:57] Speaker A: Yes. [02:17:57] Speaker B: Which again, is kind of part of the whole brilliance. I mean, you don't have to be an intellectual geopolitical spy genius for to be a friend of John Kirak. [02:18:09] Speaker A: Not at all. Not at all. [02:18:11] Speaker B: I love it. And I hope you get a chance to talk to Zubaydah one day too, because I would love to witness any of that. [02:18:17] Speaker A: I'm friends now with Muhammadu UD Slahi. I don't know if you've ever heard of Muhammadu. A movie was made of his experience called the Mauritanian. It was absolutely brilliant. It was in the theaters for a while and was nominated for a couple of Oscars. But Muhammadu, we just kidnapped him. We kidnapped him at a cousin's wedding in Mauritania and tortured him mercilessly and sent him to Guantanamo. And he was there for 14 years. And then we were like, oh, wrong guy. Let him go. And I said to him, I teach a class at this university in Spain, graduate level course in the history of terrorism. And I had him as a speaker. And he gets on. He's like, you're a hero, John. You're a great man. I was like, are you kidding? I said, not me, you're the hero. I said, when I think of you and I picture you in my mind, you're next to Mandela and Martin Luther King. How you didn't come out of there being a murderous psychopath. [02:19:20] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [02:19:22] Speaker A: He forgave everybody. [02:19:24] Speaker B: It's amazing when they do that. [02:19:25] Speaker A: And I said, if Muhammadu can Forgive everybody for torturing him mercilessly for 14 years without so much as an apology. I can forgive a handful of people for 23 months at a low security prison. Yeah, it's no big deal. [02:19:42] Speaker B: Well, that's still quite honorable of you that you can do that. It's very human. And that's one of the things I respect about you most. The things that I. Obviously we've just met recently, but having read and hear the things that you talk about, the fact that you are politically set in the middle and are not so extreme and are agreeable in conversations and learning, and I think you're a fantastic example for people. [02:20:07] Speaker A: Thank you. Political party means literally nothing to me. And as you said, neither does. Whether you, you know, you went to college, you didn't go to college, you have this job or have that job, it makes no difference. You're a good person, a good human being. Then you're a friend of mine. [02:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. And a good idea is a good idea. So that's it. Let's start looking at them like that. [02:20:29] Speaker A: That's exactly right. [02:20:31] Speaker B: And is there anything in closing, is there anything that I can do for you or anything that you need me to mention or anything that I can do to promote your cause? [02:20:40] Speaker A: I appreciate it. As you might imagine, making a living, still kind of a challenge. Okay, so I try a little bit of this, little bit of that. I'm teaching, I'm writing. My eighth book is coming out soon and I've got. Okay, so I'll list them. I've got a TV show on an online platform. The show is called CIA declassified. We take original CIA documents that have been declassified and we explain world events based on these new documents. I want to watch it's CIA declassified on unified tv. U n I f y d Online, I've got a substack. Everything I write I put on substack. So it's all there. It's just John kiriakou.substack.com and I've got. I've got two YouTube podcast, Deep focus with John kiriakou. And the other one is called deprogram that I did with Ted ral. He's a pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. [02:21:38] Speaker B: Really interesting. I'll have to go check that out. I'm already fascinated. So do you get any of the illustrations on there? [02:21:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:21:48] Speaker B: That's fascinating. [02:21:49] Speaker A: Good stuff. [02:21:49] Speaker B: I'm looking forward to it. Well, if there's anything else I can do to help promote your cause. [02:21:53] Speaker A: Thank you so much. [02:21:54] Speaker B: I appreciate that. I'm just a little old me, but. [02:21:57] Speaker A: The pleasure is all mine. [02:21:58] Speaker B: I'm so honored to have you, man. Thank you so much. [02:22:01] Speaker A: Thank you for having me. [02:22:01] Speaker B: I want to give you. This is my. This is not my eighth book. This is my only book. [02:22:06] Speaker A: I'd love to have your book. [02:22:09] Speaker B: Just keep you from having to spend any money. But it's the least I could do. I couldn't smuggle any whiskey up here. Normally. Normally I bring that plus of whiskey from Texas, but, you know, I didn't remember my suitcase to smuggle whiskey up here. You sip whiskey at all? [02:22:22] Speaker A: I do. I was in Scotland two weeks ago. [02:22:25] Speaker B: Are you a Scotchman even? [02:22:26] Speaker A: You know, I prefer whiskey. American whiskey. [02:22:28] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Me too. All right, well, I still may get that to you then. [02:22:31] Speaker A: Scotch tastes like gasoline. And I thought maybe I was just missing it, you know, maybe I'm just getting bad scotch. [02:22:38] Speaker B: All of it's an acquired taste. You know, the first time you tried bourbon too was probably. [02:22:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was rough. [02:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. Really need to put sugar in it. So you used it. [02:22:45] Speaker A: I do like Irish whiskey, though. Thank you very much for this. You know, speaking of the Crips too. As you might imagine, I was. I was pulled into the lieutenant's office more than once. Usually for swearing matches where we just swear. They always ask you this question, can we talk man to man? That means off the record. I'm going to swear at you and you can't report me for it. Okay, so then I swear right back at him. Am I a fucking moron? I go, maybe I don't know you well enough. [02:23:12] Speaker B: We're still off the record. [02:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Because I said, ah, this guy's a fucking moron. I said on the phone one day. And they called me. Anyway, so I got in the lieutenant's office and the only pictures that they had posted on the wall, like taped on the wall, were the Crips and the Bloods. And they worked hard to keep them separate, even in a low security prison. I was surprised by that. [02:23:34] Speaker B: That's nuts. Well, they're just a giant organization. Like I said. All you can hope is that they don't start to collaborate. [02:23:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Then we're all in trouble. That's right. [02:23:43] Speaker B: Or any gang, really. [02:23:44] Speaker A: But the Aryan Nation, man, those guys were scary. [02:23:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's. Those are the worst. Because they're motivated by hate, too. [02:23:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. [02:23:51] Speaker B: That's a tough one. [02:23:52] Speaker A: They're very quick to kill. Very quick. [02:23:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's emotional based stuff. [02:23:59] Speaker A: Yep. [02:23:59] Speaker B: Well, thank you. I run you so far over, so. [02:24:02] Speaker A: No, that's okay. I'm meeting a buddy of mine and 15 minutes ago. [02:24:07] Speaker B: Yes. [02:24:09] Speaker A: Damn it. [02:24:11] Speaker B: What's it take? What you gonna do? Success around the sandbox the second grade. [02:24:20] Speaker A: Rules. [02:24:22] Speaker B: A confident fake to make you do make you do what they want. [02:24:28] Speaker A: When they won't be the fool I. [02:24:33] Speaker B: Definitely diplomatic Bas is the one to see you through don't let those bigots take you off your game or just let him loose Just sit here in the front seat, Baby, ain't that sweet? Take a little honey from the money. [02:24:49] Speaker A: Be but don't pay the pool. [02:24:54] Speaker B: A hypolitical magical potion A missing beast at the end of the game Slow roll see the truth and soul motion I never found in 63 like truth lies between blurry lines if you gonna call me back.