#661 - John Kiriakou

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He has a new book coming out called the ultimate guide to CIA skills, tactics and techniques. Today's guest is Mr. John Kiriyaku. Yeah, I applied for a presidential pardon. You applied for a presidential pardon? Yeah.

In fact, I brought a couple of letters, I hope you don't.

Long as you don't meet me. If I sign, I'm going to sign up. No, anything. I'm telling you that. Okay, I was going to ask if you thought it would be helpful.

I got, did you really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no, no.

I'm talking to Tulsi Gabbard on Friday. Did I tell you that? Oh, nice. Her husband is one of the surgeries today I saw. Yeah.

My surgery yesterday. She's great. Yeah. Tulsi Gabbard. She's, there's just something about it that seems genuine to me.

“And that's why they tried to destroy her.”

Is that, is that what you think is going on with her right now? That's why the Democrats tried to destroy her. I really do. But even right now, I mean, she's just taking a leave. I know it's for her husband's health.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Headed into surgery this morning. Oh, is that what it says? Yeah.

She tweeted, or she programmed it. Yeah. Yeah, do you think? Because she's kind of like, and she just took a break. She took a complete break from politics.

Yeah. You remember when she was running as a Democrat every time she would inch up in the polls, the DNC would change the rules for participating in the next debate. So they would do it just one or two percentage points out of her reach every single time. Because they were threatened by her message.

She just wouldn't get with their program.

She's always seemed very like she has her own, oh, she was definitely independent.

That's the feeling. Yeah. She's always seemed very independent. Well, they did the same thing with Bernie Sanders. He's like exactly the same thing with Bernie Sanders.

So I guess my question would be like, you know, and I can't remember if I asked Bernie this or not. But why would you stay in a party that you know what a certain point is not that's cheating you. Yes.

“And you know, the Democrats did something in after the 1972 election, which I think”

people don't pay anywhere near enough attention to. Nobody at the DNC wanted George McGovern to be the 1972 nominee. He was the most popular at the time, especially among young people, but he was the weakest nationwide. Any end at a losing 49 states.

But, you know, it's a party of the people, right? If the people want George McGovern as the nominee, then George McGovern should be the nominee. And they didn't let him become the nominee. No, they let him become the nominee.

And then as soon as he lost the race, they instituted this thing called super delegates. So if you are a member of House, a member of the Senate, a governor, a lieutenant governor, a state party director, a state committee chairman, you're automatically made a delegate to the convention. Well, they're like 1500 of them.

And so you end up with situations like West Virginia and Wyoming, where Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in both states and Hillary Clinton wins literally every delegate. Some of those states, wow, like how's that fair? So it explained that to me a little bit better because I'm going to get on this and George McGovern was a major reason Democrats later created super delegates.

to a way to give more influence to experienced officials and reduce the chance that a highly activist primary electorate would produce another nominee they saw as to extreme. So you're saying the people believed in this guy. Oh, yeah. They lost the people believed in him, but the party and whoever that is didn't want

it to be like just like a populist vote. They didn't want just the people to have the choice. They wanted to go back to the days with the smoke filled back rooms with the party bosses choosing who's going to be the nominee. And if they put more on the shoulders of just the super delegates, then they could control

fewer. It was fewer people that had to control exactly. Well, exactly, I'm proud to say in 1983, I was a sophomore in college. I was the speaker's committee chairman. I was the whole committee of the George Washington University College Democrats in the

days when I was a Democrat.

“And I saw a little blurb in the Washington Post saying, hey, remember George McGovern, he's”

thinking running for president again. So I wrote him a letter. I said, hey, I read that you're thinking running for president again. We have a fantastic theater here at the school. We can do all the legwork, ready-made volunteers.

My phone rings a few days later, wakes me up and it's George McGovern. Yeah. And he says, can I see that theater? I said, of course. So he comes over to school and we walk over to the theater, nobody recognized him.

And he said, yeah, the theater is perfect. And there's like a cutout for cameras. And it was perfect. So he says, don't tell anybody, but I am going to run for president again. And this is after the 72 loss.

So yeah, this is, yeah, 11 years after the 72 loss, I'll be getting this president. So we put out press release major announcement by Senator George McGovern on such and such a date or it's Washington University in the Marvin Theater.

And packed the place and it was on the news, and here's what a sweet guy was.

He did the announcement and brought important people with him, like Mo Yudal, remember Mo Yudal, he ran for president in 76, he was a congressman from Arizona. And there he is. And then Cliff Robertson, the Academy Award-winning actor in his wife, Dina Merrill. Yeah, they both came.

So he brought some, like, brothers and sisters, he brought his own influencer. Yeah. And Frank Mankowitz, who had been a Robert Kennedy senior's press secretary, was Senator McGovern's press secretary. He was doing geek, huh?

Oh, yeah, I was, I mean, it was incredible. And then he makes the announcement, he shakes everybody's hand, and he invites me back to his apartment and his wife made tuna sandwiches. Nice. Just the loveliest people.

He ended up crazy as it sounds, coming in third. Walter Mondell won Gary Hart came in second, and McGovern came in third, and that was for the Democratic Party. Yeah. Wow.

And they kept saying dropout George, dropout George, dropout George, because he was pulling young people.

“I remember Jesse Jackson when he ran, he was very close, right?”

Wasn't he the populist choice kind of? Yes, he was the populist choice, 1984 and 1988. He was very much so. And because I remember, we had, I think we had a sign for him, like, you know, our family

was always like, you know, pretty, you know, liberal and hopeful and new ideas.

Right. That's how mine was. Yeah. But not, but not like ethereal at the same time, not like unrealistic, right? Not unrealistic.

But we're hopeful, you know what I'm saying? But yeah, didn't Jesse Jackson and did they just not serve as him or what happened with Jesse Jackson? Yeah. They let him kind of self-destruct.

See, it says here he won 11 contests. He did very, very well in '88, but he was never a Democratic Party insider. Got it. The insiders were not going to let him have that nomination. That's what they do.

And the Republicans don't have such a system. You don't think so?

Never have super delegates, which means then an insurgent candidate like a Donald Trump

can win a nomination. I see. But it's less likely to happen in a Democratic Party, much less likely to happen. Because of super delegates. Wow.

I didn't realize that only one party had those. Al Franken, because, hold on before we move forward on now, Franken. So, but didn't Jesse Jackson win a few like in a row, like he was, yeah, he was in a roll. He was building momentum.

Uh-huh. And they were like, yeah, we're going to put the brakes on this.

“And when they say, we are going to put the brakes on this, who is the ways?”

It's the state committee chairman who make up the Democratic National Committee. Got it. But it's just the insiders. It's like the money talking, whoever those like, it's the smoky background. This Congresswoman from Florida, her name escapes me three names.

But anyway, she was the head of, what was it? No, she was the head of the DNC in 20, a Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz gave Hillary Clinton's campaign all the debate questions before

the debate. Remember that? But Bernie didn't get the questions crazy. It's crazy. It's fixed.

Yeah.

“I think we all know what happened at this point.”

Yeah. The fix was in. But the fix was in. It starts to make you feel like, okay, the regular person, like, what you really want, the, even the idea of that, it used to feel real, and it doesn't feel really

anymore. Like, that, I think is one of the scariest things happening in America right now. You're like, it used to feel hopeful.

And now it feels, it's, it's, will we survive, it feels, there's something else, it's

not a hope. I don't even know if it's somewhat of a fear, but it's more of an uncertainty. But America used to feel like this hopeful thing, like, we're building this thing that's going to, that, that mean something that we're going to pass on to our children and that could possibly stay in the test of time.

And when that, when something like that, you believe in something like that. It makes your day-to-day interactions and your interaction with your country, and it makes that all more meaningful to you. So you show up for it differently. We're sitting here with John Kirriyaku.

Kirriyaku. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for the invitation. I love the show. I've seen so many clips of you recalling stories from your time in the CIA is having

a good memory of requirement for the job. Oh, yeah. Is it really? Oh, my gosh. Is it a requirement?

It's actively encouraged. I had a station chief one time who gave me the biggest compliment. I had a what one time was a station chief. Okay. So, I was doing, I was doing an operation in the Middle East, but I was doing it from headquarters.

The station chief called me. We were friends from our training days, and he said, listen, we recruited a double agent out here. He's insisting on meeting with the chief, but it's just too dangerous for me to meet with him because he doesn't know that we know he's working for the bad guys.

Got it.

“Can you come out here every month and meet with him and pretend to be me?”

And I said, sure. So I did to make a long story short. I would do the meeting and then go straight to the airport and fly back to Washington and there was a midnight flight. And I would write the cable, the reporting cable, from headquarters instead of writing

it from the station and then sending it to headquarters. I'd write it from headquarters to send it to the station. And the great compliment he gave me was, he said, your memory is so good. You remember so many details that when I read the cables, I feel like I'm in the room watching it go down and I said, that is exactly what I'm going for.

Yeah, I've always been proud of being able to do that.

It wasn't a requirement when you, uh, when you, uh, I guess, I don't feel you auditioned for the CIA, but how do you, yeah, you kind of do. Yeah. What's that process like? Like, how do you get extensive, is it, it's changed from when I joined.

When I joined, I was in graduate school at George Washington University and I was taking a class called the Psychology of Leadership.

“And the class was about why foreign leaders make the decisions that they make.”

One of the examples that sticks in my mind is the yalta conference at the end of World World War II. Why was it in yalta of all places? I was up for me with it, bringing up the yalta conference. The World War II, yeah, um, the yalta conference was the World War II meeting of the heads

of government of the United States, UK and the Soviet Union to discuss the post-war reorganization of Germany and Europe, okay. Yeah. So Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, they all met in yalta, they all met in yalta, which is really, really hard to get to.

And you can't just, you know, get an employment fly over the war, the war is still going on. So Roosevelt took a train to, to Norfolk, Virginia, then took a boat to Malta, which took like a week, right, back those days, which is obviously a siop because it rhymes with the altar.

Right. And then he had to go to Cairo and then Iran and then from Iran to Yalta, he was sick. He died a month later. Wow. So the reason why it was in yalta is because Stalin had a spy in the White House, and

the spy told him Roosevelt is sick. And so Stalin wanted him to be as weak as possible when they arrived or when the American side arrived, Roosevelt was exhausted and he wanted to go to sleep. But Stalin insisted that the talks begin immediately. And so just to be able to go to bed, Roosevelt gave up Poland.

Look, I'm pulling, let's talk tomorrow. Exactly. Oh. Yeah, dude. Look, sometimes you show up, and you're like, yeah, you can't do it.

That's fine. I got, you know what I'm saying?

“I got to brush my teeth and lay down for a few minutes.”

It's crazy.

The things you will give up when you first get somewhere, just to get to your

room and unpack, and then to urinate. Oh, so I'm in this class, and just to be clear, so they made him go all that way, just because they knew it would weaken him. Yeah, there it is. So they created a path that would just like, yeah, that would add to him because they had

a spy in the White House. Yeah. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. At Warm Springs, Georgia just two months after the yalta conference. Well, the grueling 7,000 mile trip to the Soviet Union combined with this severe underlying

cardiovascular conditions took a significant toll on his already failing health. Wow. You see what a well-placed spy can do for you? That's stride at you, right? That is strategy.

It's, that's the big leagues. That's the big leagues. So I'm in this class, and the professor, Dr. Gerald Post, Eminence Psychiatrist, tells

us to shadow our bosses for a week, just watch our bosses, spend each day with them, and

do a psychological profile on our bosses. And this is when you're at George Washington University, you're a student. Right. Okay. It's in grad school.

There's Jerry. And what a great man he was. He died of COVID, the poor guy. So he was murdered. Right.

Carry on. I'm working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the time, and I work for

“this guy, he was a mean, like, angry old school union organizer, right?”

I was a little bit afraid of him to tell you the truth, big, strong, mean guy. And halfway through the week, we got into an argument, and I called him a racist, which he was. Yeah. And he got so mad.

He said a stance and he put up his fist like this, and I put up my hands thinking, "Damn, I went too far this time." And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours!" And I said, "What?" And he goes, "My penis is bigger than yours."

I said, "You know what? You're nuts." And I quit. And I walked down. So I went back, and I banged out my paper.

I said he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And I, I, I, I've footnoted the whole thing, wasn't just John venting on. But with a possibly decent wainer on it. Right. Apparently.

You got to put that on me. And so I get the paper back a week later. Dr. Post gave me an A, and then in the margin he wrote, "Please see me after class." So I go up to him. I said, "Dr. Post, you wanted to see me."

He says, "Come to my office." The, the classroom was like on the sixth floor and the office was on the fourth. So I went down there. He closed the door and he says, "Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm the CIA officer under cover as a professor here.

I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit in. Would you like to join the CIA?" And I said, "Oh, yes, I would." And so the rest, though, is up to you.

He, it was kind of a long story. I'll skip it. But he made a couple of calls that got me deep into the process. Got it. So Mr. Post was your professor.

Yes. And you also had this job where you were under where the, where the, where the guy was the racist guy. Yeah. That was at a union. I was using that union job to put myself through grad school.

Got it. And then I just, I quit and I walked out. I said, "The guy's dangerous." And I guess the way I wrote the paper made him think that the analysis was concise. It was to the point and I backed it up with the facts.

So I go through these weird, he sent me across the, across the river to Roslan, Virginia. Arlington, Virginia, it's a little neighborhood right across the Potomac from Washington. Hold once again. So, so he was a CIA operative this professor? Yes.

Now when someone's a CIA operative, but also a professor, are they an actual professor that then gets hired, that's a great question. Like which is first? That's a great question.

It's usually that they're a CIA operative first and then they get hired as a professor.

What he did is illegal today. Got it. So in 1993 Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the EEOC, which made this illegal.

“So now it's very not sexy, you just go to www.cia.gov and click apply, right?”

Different. It's different. It's a little easier. Back then, it was all white guys from Ivy League schools for the most part and now it's different.

It was exciting. It was exciting. I bet it was one of the most exciting things. I used to park my car out in the North 40 and then take 20 minutes to walk all the way around the compound, so I could walk in the main door across the giant seal and see the wall

of honor and the flags and I felt like I wanted to cry, you know, that was so proud to

I felt like you were part of something. I really did. I can imagine, you feel like you were part of something, like what did you feel like you were part of? I came from this very liberal household and I remember my mom and dad get into an argument

one time. It was the Pennsylvania primary of 1976 and my mom vote. My dad voted for Frank Church who had created the church committee that completely reorganized the CIA instripped it as power to carry out assassinations and things like that. My mom voted for Birch by, who was a senator from Indiana.

My dad said Birch by, why do you vote for him?

“She said he's so good looking and my dad's like, what?”

Church is the guy doing all the work and I remember you fascinated by this argument that they were having. So when Dr. Post approached me, I called a friend of mine that I was in class with who was married to a guy at the CIA and I said, listen, I'm not a naif. I know the CIA is history, it's pretty ugly.

Do I want to be involved in an organization like this? I want to go into public service. I want to see the world. She said, let's have dinner. So the three of us get together for dinner, and he's like the battle day CIs of the CIA

are gone. The battle day CIS are gone. He said 75 with the Church committee and the Senate, the Pike Committee and the House changed everything. No more assassinations.

No more overthrowing governments, which was true for a little while, little while. Because four years later, Ronald Reagan becomes president and next thing you know, we're doing Iran, contra and we're bombing different countries and everything just went back to the way it was. But there was like this golden period.

My friends are going to yell at me for saying that. There was this period where the CIA was a really awesome place to work. Got it. And so when you're walking into that, when you're taking me back to that moment, you're walking

“in, did you feel like I'm a part of something that's important to America or I'm a part”

of just an intriguing life and this is exciting that you feel like I'm like Clark can't like. And there's no wrong answer. This is all just like curious. Oh, sure.

The first seven and a half years that I was there, I was an analyst.

Actually in the, the office, the doctor post had founded the political psychology division. And I really felt like I was a part of something big, you know. I was only on the job eight months and it was just as I started to feel like I really knew what I was doing. I was the, I was the leadership analyst, the psychological analyst on Iraq.

And the reason I was given Iraq was because not my words. These were the words of my leadership. Nothing ever happens there. It's the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution, nothing ever happens. So learn the writing style, learn the tradecraft, and you can move on to something interesting

like Romania. They told me. I said great, so I'm, my friend just played ball and Romani actually. It's a great place for me. He's a love it.

Oh, yeah. It's great. I got to get over there. I don't know. My buddy Patrick McCafford is he just finished playing ball over there.

Anyway, carry on. I love it. So, um, just as I get to the point where I, where I really feel like I know what I'm doing, Iraq invades Kuwait August the second 1990, I walked into the office early, like before seven.

And my boss says, yeah, shit's pop and I show up. I couldn't wait to get into the office that day. My boss says, don't take you jack it off. We're going to go to the White House.

I'd never been in the White House before.

And so, um, we go to the White House. There's this Marine stand in there. He walks us into the, into the West Wing. And we go into the anti-room of the Oval Office, and then the Secretary takes us in. And here's the President, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor and the C.I.

Director, and so you just kind of stand there. You wait to be told what to do. There are two nice chairs like this. The President's in that one, the Vice President's in this one. There's a couch here.

My boss and I sat on that. There are two, like, more uncomfortable chairs over here for the C.I. Director and the National Security Advisor.

“And we sit down and the President goes, well, now what do we do?”

And then everybody turns and looks at me, and I'm looking at them. And then it took me a second. And I'm like, oh, well, as you know, Mr. President Iraqi troops cross the border at 4 o'clock this morning in the Quady-Royal Family, ruling family, fled to Saudi Arabia, blah, blah, blah.

But I remember thinking my friends would never believe in a million years what I was

doing right now. Wow. They would never believe it. And I was 25 years old. And it happened overnight that you were kind of suddenly having an influence.

Like you right there. Like they're looking to me for information. That actually was kind of a recurring theme in my career.

Got it. A lot of times.

So when you're walking into the building, when you take that long way and you pass

like the flags and walk over the seal, it's just like, I'm a part of something. Yeah. I really feel it.

“Do you think that's the same CIA that we have today?”

No. No. 9/11 changed everything and it changed it permanently in a bunch of different ways. Not just, have you ever heard of executive order 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, I haven't? 1, 2, 3, 3 was signed by Gerald Ford and it came in the aftermath of the church and

pipe committees and yeah, the responsibilities and guidelines for the U.S. intelligence community. Okay, executive order 1, 2, 3, 3, establishes the goals, responsibilities and guidelines for the U.S. intelligence community got it. Number one, you can't kill people anymore, right?

- This was after the church convention, right? - Right. - Exactly.

You got to stop killing people, and we had these, you know,

we're putting explosives in Fidel Castro's cigar, and putting poison on the steering wheel of his car, and stupid stuff. And so, one, two, three, three, six. - Real Tom and Jerry shit.

- Yeah, exactly. You can't do that stuff anymore.

“And then it's been amended over the years,”

well, after 9/11, Bush is just like, just kill everybody you want. And so, we set up these offices. One whole office called the Special Activities Division, and then there's, in the counterterrorism center

where I was working, there was one called the Special Activities group. And their job very simply was just to, you know, send teams around the world, kill people, come back, get the list for the next week, go out there, kill them, come back, get another list, kill those guys.

It was like, nobody's trying to collect intelligence anymore. - Things changed overnight. - overnight. - One time, I was, I was travel in somewhere, you know, 'cause I had my luggage with me and everything,

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or pound-la-w-pound-529. This is a paid advertisement. Do you think there's a lot of like conspiracies about 9/11, right? And I'm sure you've had, I take a lot of shit

about the conspiracies, yeah. You do? - I do. - I take a lot of shit because I don't believe in them. - You don't. - No. So from your experience,

'cause you were there when it happened, you were in the CI when it occurred to where we are now, has your point of view changed at all since then? - Yeah. My point of view actually has changed.

So I don't think I deserve a lot of credit, a lot of the, sorry, the criticism that I get. I'm gonna start on July the 6th of 2001. - Okay. - So, and I'm out for me

- Okay, I'm glad. - I'll explain it to you then.

'Cause I get all the time. The Jews did it. The Saudis did it. Literally, the space aliens did it. These really government did it.

The Bush family did it. They, you know, it's like, come on people. Nano, thermite, there's no such thing as nano, thermite, paint that they painted in 1972 to make the buildings blow up. Come on, you guys.

- That's me, sounds very, that sounds ridiculous. - Yeah, it's ridiculous. But what doesn't sound ridiculous is somebody having long-term strategy, like you were saying a little while ago, that people play a longer game right now.

And we're not good at that generally. - Oh, yeah, I don't think that we are. We're like a country when everything now, you know. And we're kind of a newer country as well. So it's like, and we got everything fast anyway.

And when you get something fast, you don't really have a ton of respect for it in some ways. - That's right. - That's right. And it's tough for me to say that 'cause we all just live like one life term,

“but I think some of that could be infectious over”

like a society over time.

I never even thought about it before.

That it's like, yeah, when you get something easy, you kind of use to something coming easy. - That's it. - And so, but I do believe that other countries could have strategy against us.

And also, and I believe that they're worth. - And what it changed for us as a people, like what it changed like for how we look at our own eyes, for how we walk out of like, I remember on 9/11, I walked out of a building,

I was staying with some friends, I walked outside. And there was just some construction going on, and it'd been going on for a while, and they were redoing these like, this stone walkway, I was in Charleston, South Carolina.

And they had these bulldozers and stuff out there, and like, people had been excited about the construction, like it was like, 'cause the streets are cobblestone, it's really beautiful. And suddenly that day, everybody was like,

are these like, are they demolishing something? Like suddenly this had a whole different energy of like, oh, like this is the rubble, like it was a connection with like,

“what you just seen on television to suddenly like,”

something that was being done that was positive, structureally was now suddenly looked at like, there was a lot of fear around it. And I don't know that's a ridiculous small thing, but that's normal, that happened at the time.

- Right, and it's just how much of a small thing in your head, like, okay, I just seen this, and now everything is scary. That's what I'm trying to say. - Right, everything is scary. - That's exactly right.

- The whole country was traumatized. - It was our pro-harber, the pro-harber of our generation. - And it changed, how you would operate, it changed, it changed just like ever, it adjusted so many things.

Go on, though. - So July 6th, 2001, I'm hosting a group of intelligence officers from a Middle Eastern country. This is something we did literally every single day,

usually multiple times a day. And what we do is we set up a day of briefings, they get a photo up with a director, you know, shake and hands, we exchange gifts, and we take them out to a fancy dinner at night.

So these guys, they're all mid-level, like majors and lieutenant colonels. So it's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of it, a lot, yes. So I set up a day of briefings,

and I went to see this kid, young guy, 20s, that was covering al-Qaeda.

“And I say, can you come and just talk to these guys”

about al-Qaeda for an hour, he said yes. So it came time for his briefing, but instead of him coming, the director of counterterrorism comes, co-for-black, later ambassador, co-for-black,

and he come from which country? - The, oh, for the US. - Yeah, yeah, he has our director. So he showed up, co-for shows up with the director of operations

from the Assama bin Laden unit. And I jumped up, I was like, oh, gentlemen, I said, this is, this is co-for-black. He's the director of counterterrorism for the entire American intelligence community.

And you work in a counterterrorism, yeah, got it. And so he came in and sat down, and he was very, very serious. He said something terrible is going to happen. We don't know exactly when or exactly where,

but we know it's going to be in attack on a scale

that we've never seen before.

He said we're picking up chatter from the al-Qaeda training camps where camp commanders are on the phone with their students and they're crying and telling them I'll see you in paradise.

We're hearing code words from a massive attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey, where there's gonna be a huge wedding or a huge football game. And he said, we know that they're planning

an enormous attack. We just don't know when or where. And he said, I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us. It just sat there and looked at him.

Nothing. So at the end of the day, I was not working on al-Qaeda at the time. I later, weeks later, became the chief of counterintelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit. And so I went to his office at the end of the day

before I took those guys to dinner. And I said, "Cofer, I gotta tell ya. You shocked me with that briefing today. Was that just for them or were you serious?"

Something terrible is gonna happen."

“And then on September 11th, there it was.”

He and I were supposed to go to the White House that morning. We had a meeting with Condolese Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at the time. On an issue that's so stupid now, almost embarrassed to tell you what it is.

It was about a book that was being printed by the government printing office, this minor governmental agency called Greece Turkey Cyprus. I don't know, it was called Foreign Affairs of the United States. Greece Turkey Cyprus, 1949 to 1967.

Literally nobody's gonna read this book. Nobody, I was gonna tell you that, nobody's gonna read it. Literally nobody. Yeah. And it's like a thousand pages long.

That's money laundering. And it had the names of three CI sources who were still alive. And we've got this obscure law in the United States that if the government outs a CI source,

we have to offer the source citizenship. These guys are like 198 and 97 years old. They're not gonna, they don't care. Right. Nobody's gonna read the book anyway.

“So, we were gonna go down there and ask her,”

just pull those pages out of the book. You know, nobody's gonna miss it. Nobody's gonna read it anyhow. Just pull the pages out or redact the names or whatever. But I went up to tell them that the car was ready.

And the secretary's got a little TV under desk and the World Trade Center's on fire. Said what happened in World Trade Center. She said a plane flew into it and I go, 'cause I'm a genius.

I said, you know, that happened once before in 1930, a bomber flew into the Empire State Building. But it was like pouring rain and fog. I said, it's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying

into the World Trade Center?

And just as I spoke the words, the second plane hit.

And then she turned and she said, did you see that or did I imagine it? And it's like, oh, everything's gonna go to shit now. And at this point, you're already working in counterterrorism, yeah?

Well, I was already in counterterrorism, but I was working on a group, see again, I'm embarrassed to even say, I was working in a group that was targeting European communist terrorists, like Carlos the Jackal, who nobody remembers now.

He was the Assama bin Laden of the '70s. Nobody remembers who in the world. Really? Yeah, Carlos the Jackal, bring 'em up. There he is.

Well, he looks swive, huh? He was Venezuela and Eliech Ramirez Sanchez. Listen to the balls this guy had. OPEC had an oil minister's meeting, right? So the ministers for those who don't know what OPEC is,

it's an organization of petroleum exporting countries. So it's based like your oil kind of commission. And monopoly, yeah, monopoly. Yeah, monopoly, what he called the cartel. It's an oil cartel fair.

So he and his gang of terrorists rated the OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna, Austria, and kidnapped every single minister of oil. They killed three people, so they were, yeah. He demanded a plane, flew everybody to Libya,

took his billion dollars ransom that they gave him,

and then let everybody go. Wow. So he was just trying to get a bag, really, yeah. Oh, yeah, and he was good at it. And then he was so good at it.

He set up terrorist training camps in Libya and Lebanon. And he trained the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. He trained Greece's revolutionary organization 17 November. The Red Brigades, the Oxion Direct.

“Why did he feel so convicted to do this sort of behavior?”

He was a true believing communist. And he just wanted to bring down the West, huh? Interesting, yeah. But take me back, so it's like, you guys hear that something's going to happen, but what do you do with that point?

Well, see, that's the key. What do you do? We didn't know what to do, so we're going to the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, this one, and they're like, we don't know what's going on.

Well, as it turned out, that wasn't true. Almost all the hijackers, was it 17 or 17, and the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, right? And we know that the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bender bin Sultan, al-Sahood,

his wife transferred $50,000 from her personal bank account to the hijackers. What do we supposed to make of that? Yeah, son, as you got to get your girl to Vimmo, if you got it, you know what I'm saying?

Seriously, you know, the only time I ever saw George Tenet, it was the CI director at the time. The only time I ever saw George completely lose his shit was an amitting with Prince Bender. He said, if we don't start getting help

from the Saudi government, on this case, we're going to start killing people, a lot of people, and some of them are going to be named Al-Sahood. I go out to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations there in January of '02.

So it's still fresh. We're bombin' Torabora. All these al-Qaeda people are trying to get out of Afghanistan,

And my job was then to catch them when they came in.

“But we're bombin' what, we're bombin' which country?”

Afghanistan. We're bombin' Afghanistan, right? But why were we looking for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? That's where they were living. All of them.

They launched 9/11 from Afghanistan. Got it. At least theoretically, the ideas came when they were in Afghanistan. Because so in the American population,

it always felt like we never went after Saudi Arabia.

That's what it felt like. Yeah. And we should have. But if you didn't know that, we did not. We suspected, but we didn't have.

There was no smoking gun. So that's what I'm getting to. We catch Abu Zabeta. Zayn al-Abedeen Muhammad Hussein. Abu Zabeta, who we believed at the time,

I should have been around a stroke for a second. No, no, that's his name. No, I'm just joking. That was a joke. The profession of faith.

La-La-La-La, I've been around people that are stroking out. And if you don't tap him with him, they'll just keep going. And they never buy a vowel. And then they just fucking tap out.

Oh, that's terrible. So you guys were doing this guy? So we're looking for him. Oh, bro. And we catch him.

“This dude is a fucking mumble rapper, I think.”

Go on. He, we were on him for six weeks. We chased him. Some days we bust down the door. And there's like a warm meal and a half-lit cigarette

still on the table. We're like dang it. With 15 minutes, we could have gotten him. Some days we were a day or two behind. So he knew we were after him.

He knew we were chased him all over the freaking country. And we catch him. In late March, 2002, in Faisalabad, Pakistan. So we also confiscated his diary. This led to a huge fight between the FBI and the CIA, huge.

And the CIA was right in the FBI was wrong. But the fight was, well, we captured his diary. So I'm sitting in that sound so suspect that he has a diary. It was more than a diary, though.

But even though, you don't sound like as a regular person. No, it didn't have terrorism stuff in it. Right.

But even then, first of all, who the fuck has it?

See, but look, he does have an eye patch. Yeah. Oh, he drew a lot of well. It's all drawings. Oh, okay.

Yeah. All of its drawings. And most of them are classified top secret. The CIA wasn't allowed them to be released. Got it.

Because they were mostly about the torture that was done to him. Understood. So anyway, we catch the diary. And I call headquarters and I said, listen, we got his diary.

“And there's some fascinating shit in here, like what?”

And I said, well, for one, they're the cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes. Like, what's up with that? So they were like, put it in writing. So I write this cable back. And I was like, we found these three princes here.

They're cell phone numbers. George calls in the Saudi ambassador. The president calls the king. What kind of country you run it over there? So we said, we want those three princes.

We want them. Like, right now. Next thing you know, one goes in to the hospital for bariatric surgery because they're all fat. And he dies on the operating table.

The other one is driving from Riyadh to Jeddah on the Riyadh to Jeddah highway. He's in a one car accident and is killed in the accident. The third one goes camping in the desert, which is a very popular pastime. And dies of thirst. Yeah.

So we couldn't interrogate any of them. Who do you think was you think that Saudi Arabia did that? 100%. Right. Do you think we ever got to the bottom of 9/11, do you think no?

You don't know. And I'm going to say something that's very unpopular. I think that these Riyadhs, while not involved in 9/11, absolutely positively had advanced warning of 9/11. They had sources inside of Al Qaeda and they purposely did not tell us the details.

Because they knew what was going to happen. They knew that we would attack Afghanistan and we would attack Iraq and we would kill 2 million Muslims.

And I mean, these dancing Israelis, they've never answered for this.

I'm still mad about the dancing Israelis. I've heard about the dancing Israelis bring it up. So you're saying that you believe that they knew, I think they knew an advance and didn't warn us. But they didn't warn us because we would then we would do their dirty work for them.

We would take out issues with their surrounding guys. And there are videos making the rounds now of Benjamin Netanyahu over the years, over the last 20-plus years, testifying before Congress and saying, you know, if we just took out Saddam Hussein, we would be peace in the Middle East. If we just took out more Mar Qadafi, there would be, I guarantee you, he says, there would

be peace in the Middle East. And we do it all. We'd take out Iran and we're going to have peace in the Middle East. It's starting to get a little bit more like I think, so a little sus. So, the Iraqis have electrical towers like we have everywhere, but ours have four legs

So just a few days before we attacked Iraq, at that time, I'm the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations at the CIA. So it's a serious, most serious job I ever had in my life. She evokes us to a lot, literally everything, well, and the Israelis come to us and they said, listen, you guys are going to attack Iraq in a couple days.

We won in, we said, absolutely not. We put this coalition together with all these Arab countries as soon as you guys jump in, all the Arabs are going to drop out, just let us do it. Next thing, you know, every one of these electrical towers just begins to topple over, like 150 miles worth in the western desert, because somebody put explosives on just one

of the three legs. And I remember my boss saying, these damn Israelis, they just can't leave well enough alone. They just don't ever do, is they're told, let me look at this, the dancing Israelis. And we're talking about the Israeli government, we're not talking about Israeli people.

I'm far less worried about the dancing Israelis than I am about the Israelis who were arrested on 9/11. Okay.

It was just like, just so I can say the claim because I don't know, I've never even spoken

about this. The dancing Israelis is a 9/11 related conspiracy trope based on the arrest of five Israeli men in New Jersey on September 11, 2001.

“And this is according to Perplexity, and it was some guys, I think they were on a building”

top, and they were kind of dancing around, a thriving each other, a break truck or something as you can see the towers in the distance. Yeah, New Jersey woman reported five men in your event overlooking Manhattan who appear to be celebrating and taking photos as the twin towers burned, police later stopped, suspicious fan and detained five Israeli citizens.

They had items like box cutters and multiple passports, which conspiracy theorists later fixated on, but box cutters are normal tools for a moving delivery job. They were happy because they knew exactly what was going to happen, that we would have to enter the war, we would attack Afghanistan, we would probably then take a permanent position in the region, which is exactly what happened.

That's why they were dancing. Happy, 9/11 was a good thing for Israel, it got us militarily engaged over the long term, but they don't think that they were involved in the setting up of it. I don't. No, no.

And there's never been any evidence to suggest that they were involved in this way.

I have no idea. No. But there was another thing too, and this is a bigger issue, it's that, these really spy on the United States, they've always spy on the United States, do we spy on them also? And that's written in stone at the CIA, we do not spy on Israel, but they openly spy

on us. They're all over the country, stealing defense secrets, do we spy on other countries? Yeah, we spy on almost every. Why can't we spy on them? It's a political decision that's been made.

Yeah, a political decision in the White House on Capitol Hill. Sometimes it just feels like our country is just kind of owned by Israel and they just don't say that. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's fictional?

Well, I don't think it's so clear cut.

“I think the truth is that the Israelis have an inordinate political influence in the”

United States, especially in our elections. Yeah. Well, they just have that election of Thomas Massey that exactly, that's the best example. That got overtaken. What happened with that election?

Let's bring it up.

I mean, I know that Thomas lost law, but it was the largest, yeah, $35 million was spent.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or APAC, and other pro Israel interest groups have uncorked over 9 million in a bid to unseat Republican representative Thomas Massey on Tuesday, which they did in a competitive primary that has shattered spending records. Prominent pro Israel GOP donors have funneled millions more into a super PAC stood up by President Donald Trump's political operation that has spent nearly 7 million on

the race. Overall, ad spending has topped the 32 million, making it the most expensive house primary on record per tracking firm ad impact. For a job that pays $180,000 a year.

“So what are the long-term benefits of them getting this position?”

Or was it just about getting Massey out? It was getting Massey. The thing about APAC is if you are not 100% pro Israel, they will primary you. Though, they'll primary you with somebody who is 100% pro Israel, and sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, where you've got, for example, there was an incumbent Democrat

in New Jersey who voted pro Israel 90% of the time. They ran a primary opponent against him, and who was 100% pro Israel, and he lost. But so did she, and the one that won was the one that's pro Palestinian. I see. So son is by taking out by aiming for one, you might let another through.

You end up hurting your own cause. Got it.

The biggest thing is just, if Israel is involved in a genocide, they're genociding people.

It's almost like, why would you let Nazi Germany invest in your people who are going

“to be running congressmen or senders in your country?”

It's crazy. I don't see how there's not a law. Why isn't there a law if there's a country doing like a Holocaust or genocide that they're not allowed to invest in, that they're not allowed to have a lobby in our elections. See, was there ever a law about that?

No. And they would lose their shit over the use of the word genocide. You used it. I use it. It's a genocide.

We've been using it on here for years. It meets all the international legal requirements of genocide. Yeah. Well, I think the UN has voted that it is. Yeah.

Vote passed because I think there was maybe some groups that would agree to it. What didn't pass the security council, but it passed by 90 something percent in the General Assembly. Yeah, but I just, I don't understand why that seems fair. And also, I'm amazed that I don't understand why people that made like movies and wrote books

about the Holocaust, why they don't speak up and say, hey, yeah, this is the same thing that I wrote about. You can show picture to picture that makes it exactly. It's wrong, no matter who's doing the killing or who's being killed. It's just wrong.

But I don't see why some of those people don't speak up. Yeah. Well, there is an increasingly large number of Jewish Americans who are speaking out. There's a big group called Jewish Voices for Peace. The Orthodox Jewish community in New York has been very vocal.

Just this week, there was a protest going on when you all Israel day parade. And a lot of the Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn showed up with Palestinians and Iranian flags. And it caused violence. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I just don't understand why, what is America afraid of like, like, what

have you seen like in the CIA, because it does, you hear a lot that like, that is really influence like has taken over our CIA and our FBI. Do you think that that's true or not? Well, I can't speak the FBI and my CIA information is dated. I left the CIA more than 20 years ago, but when I was there, we kept the Israelis at arms

length. Like, seriously, so the very first intelligence liaison intelligence briefing I ever gave was to the Israelis. I had been only on the job six weeks. My boss said, listen, you're going to give a liaison briefing.

It's going to be a whole big group of people. So you're going to be the last one to talk because you're the most junior.

“But you need to know some of the ground rules.”

He said, we do not meet with the Israelis in the building. We used to, but every time they'd come, they'd bring us gifts.

And the gifts are always packed with listening devices and batteries.

Is that true? Yes. 100% true. Would you guys find him? How do you even know that that's true?

Because you have to X-ray everything that comes into the building. He just want and we walk in off the street with, you know, boxes of gifts and say, here, this is for you. And what they do, just so a couple of Palestinian ears from the rubble. And they're like, oh, oh, oh, we're just joking.

Oh, it's like joking stuff. Yeah, it's not joking, right. So that happened during your time was that with other countries too. So I'm sure there's other countries that like, oh, there are other countries. We don't even have liaison with.

Got it. But with Israelis, we had to rent a place and we would meet with him in the place.

On my very first date, the CIA, you meet in the auditorium called the bubble.

And the head of HR comes out and the director comes and says, welcome to the CIA.

“And then the head of security is just a parade of important people come to welcome you.”

So the head of security said, set a couple things, one was funny. He said, the greatest threat facing America today is the threat of Soviet communism. And I said to the guy next to me, this is kind of not read the papers. There is no Soviet union anymore. Anyway, he went on to say that the Israelis have two declared intelligence officers

in the United States, one Mossad and one Shinbet. So CIA and FBI equivalents, they're at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. But the FBI has identified 187 additional undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread out all over America stealing secrets from defense contractors. So the lesson was, don't ever talk about work outside the building, don't ever eat

the restaurants in McLean, Virginia because they're all Russian KGB and back then it was the KGB and Israeli Mossad agents eating there to hear what the CIA people are saying. Wow. Yeah. It sounds exciting, no, at least.

It was kind of exciting. I bet it was like a real who done it.

I really did.

I loved it until I didn't love it.

Yeah. After 9/11, everybody went nuts and just wanted to kill everyone. I was getting ready to go to Pakistan. And so I stopped by the office on my way to the airport just to say goodbye. Because Kofra said, on 9/11, he stood up on his desk over black, he said, go for black.

Yeah, he stood up on his desk and he said, today we're at war. All of us are going to have to do our part, not all of us are going to be able to come home.

“So he said, if you, if you want to walk now, walk, and nobody will think less of you.”

Nobody budged. So I stopped by the office because I want to say goodbye. I don't know. Am I going to get shot? Am I going to get blown up?

Am I going to get killed? I don't know. So I just want to say goodbye. Say goodbye to Kofra. Kofra to my boss, excuse me, and to the people I was working with.

But why would you guys shot him? I was the Chief of Counterterrorism Operations. That's what the job I'm going out to. I'm busting down doors three nights a week and I worked for this guy, lovely, lovely guy. Nice suits, just a really, like very professorial.

And he gives me a hug and he leans in and he says, kill them all. And I said, really, have we gotten there already? Wow. And he says, kill them all. And then I went to the airport.

I was like, am I the only guy who thinks we should do this by the book? Apparently, I was. That's it. That's crazy, man. It was ugly.

“You should see some of the pictures that I have on my phone.”

Let's make your hair stand up. I don't know. I'm already, there's already a lot of stuff I'm not allowed to look at. I have blockers on my phone. Oh, yeah, it's kind of a don't-emise to charity, I think so.

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expensive car repairs again go to car shield.com and use code Theo for 20% off. So when you get involved like how bad did it get after on 11 where the rules of like interrogating and that sort of thing, that's a good question. You know the dirty little secret was literally not one single CIOF sir was trained in interrogation techniques.

So as soon as we started catching these guys, I mean I only been there but a week we started catching them and my boss is like interrogating them. I'm like, I don't know how to interrogate people.

like that.

“Yeah, I wore sneakers most days polisher jeans pro.”

You can interrogate somebody in a polisher and it's all I brought with me that in sweatshirts because it was cold when I arrived. You got to put on a Chicago bear's jersey or something. Oh my god, it was so weird. See, in one of the early raids, we had also confiscated the al Qaeda training manual.

Well, I used to have one of those or not, no, no, no, no, I turned everything in. But you know what it might be online, I might be out there and I'm not alone. So I spoke and read Arabic and so we're going through the training manual and I'm translating it to the guys in my branch as I'm reading it. Well, everything that was in the manual, these prisoners would do as we would catch them.

So I say, what's your name? The guy goes, oh, like he's having a ruptured appendix. What's your name? And he, like, pretends to faint and falls off the chair and then he just kind of opens one eye to look at you.

I'm like, get the fuck up and get back in the chair. What's your name? And then like, dea, dea, hit him, dea, not hit him, dea, grab him by the shirt and shake. You tell me what the rules were. There were no rules.

And so what kind of environment, what did you end up having to do? Like, what do you do in those sort of situations? Like, well, are you responsible to go on our information? Do you even feel like the people you're catching have real information? The shit sounds kind of vague.

Everybody has something. It's called the mosaic concept where everybody's got a little tile in his brain. And if you collect enough tiles, you can put the whole picture together. So I mean, some of it sounds comical now. I would say the Pakistani lieutenant colonel that I was working with on a daily basis.

I'd say, you want to be the good cop today. I'll be the bad cop or you want to be the bad cop again. I'll be the good cop. And then we decided in advance. And I go in, you know, we start talking these guys.

The first guy we captured, he was Jordanian and they bring him in.

He shackled at the ankles, shackled at the waist. And then they undo the waist shackle and they chain him to an eyeball in the table.

“So you have to know the answers to all the questions that you're asking, right?”

So I'm like, what's your name? He tells me his name. Where did you come from? I came from Torabora. What happened in Torabora?

The Americans began bombing us. And then where did you go? He said, I tried to escape. So I went into a cave and then the Americans bombed the cave and the guy, like, had blood and escorted out of his ears and he had brain damage and finally made it across the border.

I lay out a map and tell me exactly how you got across the border. We knew what the rat lines were. And he told the truth. This is the way we came through this past. Everything he told me was true.

And so I said to him, he said, what's going to happen to me? And I said, honestly, I don't know. You're probably going to spend some time in jail here. And then we're going to send you to Jordan. And I don't know what the Jordanians are going to do to you.

Because he was Jordanian. Yeah. So I said to him, but let me ask you something. I know that what you told me was true. Why did you tell me the truth?

And he goes, I'm your prisoner. What good would it do me to lie to you? He said, I know how these things work. I know that you knew the answers to these questions. It doesn't help me in any way to lie to you.

And then I said, OK, thank you. And then he says, let me ask you something now. He said, I assume you're Christian. And I said, yes. And he says, I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam.

And I'll be your Godfather. I said, well, thank you very much. And what is that? It's almost like a boy's couch or something. And he did a scout leader, kind of like he'll be your sponsor.

Yeah, like my sponsor. He's going to convert me to Islam. And I'm going to say-- Which is Muslim, yeah? Yeah, yeah, OK.

And I said, yeah, thanks, but no thanks. And I wish you the best.

“And I remember saying, oh, colleague of mine, my God,”

if everyone goes like that, it's going to be incredible.

The next raid we did, we bust down the door to a clock in the morning. And it's two kids. They're 19 years old from Tunisia. And they both just burst into tears. And so we cough them.

And one kid is just heaving, sobbing. And the other one is begging me to let him call his mother. And I'm like, no, I'm sorry. You can't call your mother. What they do?

They were Arabs without passports or visas in an al-Qaeda safe house. And that was good enough for me. Got it. So we got to the point where we had literally filled the Rahuopindi jail in Rahuopindi, Pakistan.

It's this gigantic city that's kind of attached to Islamabad. Islamabad is a capital, but it's very, very small. Rahuopindi is where the military is located.

And it's like five, six, seven million people there.

That's it? My God, I haven't been the Rahuopindi jail in 24 years.

I never-- I don't remember it.

Look in that good either. I never been. Well, yeah, thank your lucky stars. Really? Yeah, it's not good.

So the packs called me and they said, look, we've literally filled the jail. You got to do something with these guys. I said, OK, so I call headquarters. I said, the packs are telling me that the jail's full. What do you want to do with them?

They said, put them on a C12 and send them to Guantanamo. I said, Guantanamo, Cuba? Why would we send them to Cuba? And they said, we came up with this idea. We're going to send everybody to Cuba.

And then we're going to divide them up after we figure out what federal district court to charge them with, because 9/11 was an open criminal investigation at the time. And the crimes were committed in the Eastern District of Massachusetts, hijacking. The Western District of Pennsylvania hijacking. The Eastern District of Virginia, the Pentagon, and the Southern District of New York.

I said, that's a great idea. So we just started loading these guys on an endless parade of C12 transport planes and sent them to Guantanamo.

And then somebody in Dick Cheney's office probably David Addington, although he's never

admitted it, somebody said, you know what? These guys don't have any rights in Cuba. Why don't we just leave them there, like forever? And here we are, 24 years later. Some of them are still there.

And they're still there. Most of them, you think? 34 of them. At the height, we had like 770.

“I think it was when it was at its most full.”

I went there one time as a to perform as a comedian. Yeah. Went down there and was performing for some of the troops there and stuff. You got to see some of the awe. Just don't you would fly in it?

See it in the distance. Oh yeah, when you would fly in it night, they would fly in like this kind of crazy pattern. Yeah. They do. And it was lit up.

It almost looked like a big wedding ring in the distance because they had like, just these bright, bright lights on the fences surrounding the base. And so you come in like at this crazy kind of pattern and you kind of had to go around. Right. I think you can't cross Cuban airspace.

I think we'll have to go around and come up from the south. We went from somewhere in Florida and I'm going around. Yeah. It was pretty intense. I mean, it was definitely it was interesting.

And then we got to go right up by the, by the detainee centers.

“And I think we even saw some guys playing volleyball and stuff.”

But um, where they're tortures where people lost their lives, where you were involved in. Not that I was involved in, thank God. There were, you know, but like at what point do you call like one office get in at a hand? Like if you've been in one that was getting out of hand? No, because when we were catching guys, we had not yet implemented the torture program.

So the torture program was was conceived and approved in October of 2001. Okay. I got to Pakistan in January of 2002. And we're like, what do we do with these guys? Well, they have to be eyes there with us there that you can't, you can't like hit a murder.

You can't do anything to them. If they don't talk, then okay, we just sent them to one tonimo. Because you ended up coming out and talking, speaking out about torture that was happening. Right.

But how would they let you do that if you weren't aware of it first, hand though?

Well, because remember, I became the executive assistant to the deputy director. Oh, she was see the report coming back. You see other cables coming back in? Yeah, exactly. Huh.

With some of it pretty intense. You feel like it was bad. You know, most of the news outlets that I talked to, they make the biggest deal out of waterboarding. There's waterboarding right there.

“I think that there were, there were tech things that were worse than waterboarding.”

Sleep deprivation? Yeah. As one, and in terms of causing death, the cold cell. You see sensory deprivation that was also a terrible one. What is that like?

Sensory deprivation, they put you in like an isolation tank and you're surrounded by water. And you literally go crazy from the silence. So you're in like, like, one of those, kind of one of those places you can go pay to do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But instead of being in there for an hour or two hours, you're in there for three weeks. Is there, are they playing music or? No, it's, it's, it's complete silence and darkness, complete and totaled like your dead. Well, yeah. I think Aaron Rogers does that.

Yeah, I think that's nuts. But there were a couple that were worse than than waterboarding. The cold cell, we strip the prisoner naked, you chain him to an eyeball to the ceiling. So he can't lay or say it or get comfortable in it. You keep your underpants on it.

No, no, no, no, because the idea is to humiliate them. Remember, in their religion, nakedness is shameful, right, nakedness in front of a woman. And we would have women interrogator a strip of the naked, just to humiliate them.

You see this rectal feeding? Yeah, what we did is we forced tubes up their asses. And then with a pump pumped hummus up there, just to insult their culture. No way. Who was coming up with these ideas?

I'm sure these, there were two contracts psychologists at the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Is that true? Mm-hmm. They came up with these plans.

Yeah.

And we paid them a hundred and eight million dollars to the taxpayers money for it.

Wow. But when you look at where these people criminals, I see this is what's going on.

“The thing, that's the thing, Theo, they've never been charged with a crime, right?”

So if these guys are as bad as we say they are, charge them with a crime. If there is bad as we say they are, find them guilty, sense them to death, and execute them. We won't even charge people in our country or committing a crime, a crime, no. So I think that is like, that's like a problem that's been across the board is like, what

is the crime? Charge somebody with a crime? Yeah. You're not happening in our own country because this is so wild to hear about because it's like, you know, it's really interesting, like, just as a person, right?

You're like, okay, did these guys do something really bad to kill people in our country? Right? Were they doing really harmful stuff or are they like, and they were, right? Yeah. But they confessed through torture.

So none of it's admissible, none of it. Right. Okay. So, but then it's like, yeah, it's like, how do you solve something like that? You know, with more crime?

Well, there was a, there was a deal that was made during the Biden administration. So it was, it was like the top three or four, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Omar al-Baloo, Tramsi Banishib, and somebody else. They agreed to plead guilty to terrorism and what they got in exchange was life without parole and a promise not to send them to supermax in Colorado because they said they

couldn't deal with the cold, they wouldn't understand Cuba because it's warm. So life without parole and Biden's Secretary of Defense vacated the deal and he says, you can't make a deal like that. I have to make that deal because I'm the Secretary of Defense and it went through the courts and then the Biden administration, there it is right there.

“The Biden administration Department of Defense and who were these four guys?”

They were the men accused of watching Muhammad, well, he'd been in touch, Mustafa Haussawi. They were accused of plotting the September 11th terrorist attacks, right? The Biden administration Department of Defense reached plea agreements with three prominent al-Qaeda figures, whom he just mentioned, accused of plotting the September 11th terrorist attacks.

However, following intense political and public backlash, the administration moved to block the agreement and the courts later threw it out. So what happened to the guys are just still there? You see right there, the terms, they agreed to plead guilty to murdering 2,976 people in exchange for life without parole.

Okay, so the deal was thrown out. So now what do they have? Why is it they have to life without parole? That's the deal. Right.

Same thing. Is the same thing?

They're never going to be released.

But why didn't we, what was the reason why the, because the reaction from people was it was really reaction from the Biden administration, from the Biden defense department. There was nine or 11 families too. I guess, nine or 11 families just want to chop everybody's head off. And I understand, I get it.

I really do. It makes sense. I get it. But that's never going to happen. It's never going to happen.

We're a country of laws. We can't just pretend that we're a country of laws, except when the laws aren't communion for us. But if you kill enough people, it seems like you would face the death penalty.

“Yes, but you have to blame the CIA for that.”

If the CIA hadn't tortured these guys, they would all be-- Oh, I see. It's impossible. It's all in the miserable. Got it.

They confessed everything. But it was all in the torture. And so you can't do anything. Oh. Now there's no evidence against them.

None. What? I can't even imagine what it's like to be some of those families and like, and just the drawn out of all of that. And it's been 24 years in September.

Let's get a little bit more current. Oh, did you see that they just had-- like, they have those flattellos that are going to Gaza? Did you see that the prime minister of Ireland's sister was on one of them? I'll tell you the Irish hate the Israelis and the Israelis hate the Irish.

Is that always been the case, you think?

No. Only in the last eight or ten years. Let me see this Gaza aid flattellos activist home after torture, ship, nightmare, scroll a little. Irish activists have claimed they were kidnapped and beaten by Israeli forces after their

aid flattellotos. It was intercepted in international waters. Margaret Connelly, the sister of President Connelly was among the emotional arrivals of double in airport on Saturday.

She said none of them could look us in the eye.

“What did the humanizing thing to do to many women aged from 22 to 75?”

It's just, wow, imagine if Obama's sister, can you imagine, I want to interview Greta Turnberg. That would be fun. It would be cool, huh? Yeah.

I just would like to get to see what she's like. I never been around. I just see you just see bits and clips of people. So it'd be pretty fascinating. The Irish detainees were among hundreds of participants from other countries who were also

detained when the latest iteration of the global smooth flattellos flattellos was stopped by Israeli forces and international waters. And a lot of these groups were trying to get there to bring aid to the people in Gaza. And then also I think to just document what was going on there. They've had the largest killing of journalists in the history of the world.

In the history of the world.

Yeah. How many people not outreach? Have you heard of, I don't know if people have any feelings anymore? I don't know what's going on. Have you heard of Sharina Buakla?

No. I couldn't even hear that. I don't even know how to, you know. I couldn't hear. I couldn't do it.

If I show Sharina Buakla was an American citizen. And she was the top journalist on Al Jazeera. So bring her up, Sharina Buakla, Buakla. So again, American citizen, she goes to Israel and she's covering the fighting between these raisins and Palestinians.

I think it was in the West Bank. There she is. Yeah. In the West Bank. She's wearing a bulletproof vest that says press and she's wearing a helmet that says press.

And she's she's taking cover behind a tree and has really snipers shot her in the face and killed her, killed her instantly. So her funerals held a couple of days later in a Greek Orthodox church in the West Bank. The IDF raids the church beats the Paul Bears and they drop the coffin. You're lying.

Isn't that awful? Let me see. And the subsequent violent disruption of her funeral drew widespread international condemnation of Israel during her funeral procession, the Israel police attacked the Paul Bears at the St. Joseph's Hospital, and he serves them with batons and stun grenades.

The hospital itself was also stormed by Israeli police officers who assaulted patients and through stun grenades. What is an American citizen unbelievable? And we didn't say anything. We didn't say anything.

Well, most of our media won't say a lot of stuff about this. What do you think is going on? It feels like this is almost like, it almost feels like the twilight tone. Does it make any sense to you? Yes, very much.

Well, as someone who's seen a lot of like science and things that go on, what's going on here, like does Israel have like an in goal?

“Like I have a lot of Jewish friends that are great people and stuff like that, right?”

And one of my best friends is an IDF special forces veteran. No way. Yeah. How does he feel about this sort of? He's ashamed.

He's ashamed. He's like, we didn't used to be like this. I just don't under like, is there some goal of Israel that's as a bigger goal do you think? Do you think so?

Well, the goal might be in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

It integrates for the first time ever, the Israeli and American militaries.

So they become like one military. It's like, who thought of that? Oh, my friend, Rokana actually is putting together, he's trying to put together a bill. I think to challenge this, I'm not good. And I don't know if the term is a bill, I'm not sure.

So you know, I'm more of an emotional guy than I like and respect Rokana. I hope he runs for president. He's a neat guy. We had him on here. And it was cool.

I think he's a really interesting guy. I think he's brave. I like this stuff that he's brave enough to do. And I say the same thing about Tucker Carlson.

“I think Tucker, I'll tell you something about Tucker is the Tucker that you see on the”

screen. That's Tucker in real life. I agree. He's the sweetest guy. He means exactly what he says.

He doesn't hold anything back totally honest. Well, I think it's like you're just a human being who lives in a country and you're supposed to have these things of what means something. And then you start to see all this stuff that you're like, well, this goes against everything that I've learned.

This goes against like, especially like you grow up like you see like every other book at the airport is about the Holocaust for my entire life. So it's like every time you get on a plane, you're grabbing one of your learning about and you're like, you see these things that are wrong or that are like, you know, and then you see this thing happening like, well, how is this?

And then if you mention like, and people act, I don't know, it's almost like you feel like you're being just gas lit and then you're media won't cover a lot of it.

So I don't know what's going on. And I don't know what's going on. I was on the Pierce Morgan show not too long ago.

I go on every couple of months and I never been on his show.

What's that guy like? Oh, he's a good guy, too. And I have to be tall or not. I haven't met him in person, actually. Only on Zoom.

Always wanted to tell you, somebody said he was like, five, five, dude. What? Yeah. That would surprise. Six, one.

Six, one. It may be the exchange rate on him or something. Yeah. It's the exchange rate. So I was on his show and I was with Scott Horton, who's one of the most brilliant

people I've ever met. And Alan Dershwitz and Danny Ayarlon, general Danny Ayarlon, former is really general. And there we are. There we are.

So, so when you're on with Dershwitz, Dershwitz never

shuts his mouth. Oh. That's it. That was what I was going to say. Let's see.

Former stage in John Kiriku believes you're fair. I know that wasn't it. That's Jeffrey Epstein. No, it was about, it was about Hamas and Gaza. And he asked me, because I had said the least on this episode.

And he said, do you believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization? And I said, I said, yes, if the point was on October 7th was to attack civilians, the definition of terrorism is the act of using violence to instill terror in a civilian population. So that's the definition of terrorism. So yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization.

He said, do you believe October 7th was a terrorist attack? And I said, yes, he said, then what are you doing on the show? I was supposed to be in the like anti Israel, I guess or whatever. And I said, Pierce, you can't have as a policy. Just kill everybody.

Women, children, the elderly, wipe out every hospital, every school, every apartment block, that's genocide. Yeah. Somebody's got to say it, yeah. I mean, it's scary.

And then, and then to think, how would our country be okay right now with us joining military forces with a group that's doing that? I'm sure not. Okay.

“And then you have to ask, what about these people like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham?”

Lindsey Graham said the other day, well, we could go that until I breathe my last breath, I will stand with Israel. Why? Why? Oh, that dude, just the new rotting a fucking bullshit.

My God. And cruises just as bad. And these clowns from Florida that were IDF uniforms under the floor of the house, they should be arrested. Let me see that.

It was Congressman. Fine. You're fine. You're fine. But you're like an eight, you're supposed to have like a read on these types of things.

Like, what do you think's going on? I think it's a packs money. I think it's two things. It's a packs money, millions upon millions and millions of dollars in American politics. So they have an inordinate influence on our political system.

And a pack is the only group of its kind that does not have to register as a foreign agent. Right. You know, I've made a point on a couple of podcasts. Back in 2000, like eight, I got a very small contract. Just, I don't know, 5, 6,000 bucks to write four op-eds in support of the Abu Dhabi Chamber

of Commerce.

“So I wrote these op-eds, oh, you should do business in Abu Dhabi.”

It's really business-friendly. They love Americans. Everybody makes money. All right. Send.

I had to register as a foreign agent. Because I was, I was publishing in support of a foreign entity. Interesting. What the heck is a pack doing? 24/7.

All right. They don't have to register as foreign agents. Yeah. And I, I think it seems like we have our, our, our people, our government officials are afraid to stand up to them.

I don't know why they're afraid. They're afraid. And then you have these morons. Why do you think they're afraid? Well, why do you think they're afraid?

They're afraid. They would be primary. Like, even if you get primary, but like, you would eventually somebody will win. Like, yes, but, but who among them has the courage to be the first? I mean, mass he stood up, mass he took it.

I, I saw him about a week before the election, but he can't be the only person in there. Well, Marjorie Taylor Green, but she didn't have the guts. She quit. She quit halfway through. What are they?

What do you think they're compromising these people? Like, what are they saying to them? Are they saying like something bad is going to have, like, what do you suggest?

You will never work in politics ever again.

“We will, how do you, what do you have to get your career?”

Then if you lose, then what do you have any, do you have nothing to lose? Yeah, that's what you and I say. You and I would say would stand up, you know, bring up the thing about the just the government. Just like the government's being interacted, those two ordered, that's right. The House Armed Services Committee has unveiled its proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization

Act, which would see a record chattering $1.15 trillion spent on the U.S. military of the next fiscal year. Following the bill, as many provisions as section 224 entitled, the United States Israel Defense

The provision would bring the U.S. and Israel into an unprecedented partnership covering technology sharing, the co-production of weapon systems, and bilateral research and development across multiple domains of warfare, including biotech, autonomous systems, AI, cyber, warfare, and more.

“It could just mean that we are, uh, we're employing technology that they have, right?”

Is there any more specifics about this? Yes, closer than that. I'll tell you what, if I'm not saying it isn't, look, it definitely scares me. I mean, I don't want to be involved with the country that's doing something like that. And I don't think that's crazy for me to say that either.

Even if it's just this, um, that means they're not going to have to steal the 2% of Defense Technology that we don't give them. I'll give you an example when I was still there, we were developing the F-35.

So they came to us and they said, we want the F-35, we want to be the first one to have

the F-35. We said, Great. We're going to have, we're going to give the F-35. We're going to call it the F-35I for Israel. And it's going to have just a barely, slightly degraded, um, avionics system, just in case

God forbid, you know, it doesn't get shot down. And then the Chinese and the Russians get it and then they can steal the avionics. They said, no, not good enough. We want the F-35, the same one that you guys fly. In the meantime, the Emirates came to us and they said, we want the F-35.

We said, Great. We're going to give you the F-35E. We're going to call it for Emirates. And it's going to have just a slightly degraded avionics package. Same thing we're giving the Israelis.

They said, fine. We'll take it. The Israelis then test their spies with stealing whatever the downgrade was in the avionics so that they could re-upgrade it once they took delivery of the F-35. Well now we're just going to share everything with them.

We'll just give them the F-35E.

“But can you, I like, can you fall to country like it's kind of interesting because I think”

if you think that we're playing like that though, I guess I always felt like we were

out of the colonization era. I know I'm with you and I know what you're getting at and so it's like you can't fall to country really for just trying to survive. And you don't. I don't.

And I'm going to say you are. I'm thinking out loud. I let me finish the sentence real quick. Sure, sure. Sorry, John.

But yeah, you can't fall like, you know, if a country's just trying to survive and they're good at it and better at it than others, then it's like that has to be respected in some senses for sure. Agreed.

I don't fault these Israelis for doing this.

If I were the Prime Minister of Israel, I would do the same thing when it comes to acquiring defense technology. I fault the U.S. government and it makes not one weight of difference if there's a Democrat in the White House or Republican in the White House. We don't stand up to these railies.

Yeah. You know, I will say Reagan did in the so-called year of the spy when Jonathan Pollard was, no, it actually wasn't Reagan by then. It was Clinton, wasn't it? Clinton stood up and said, we're going to prosecute this guy, Pollard.

He got 30 years and he did every single day of the 30 years. And then when he got out of prison, Miriam Atleson, or not Miriam Atleson, her husband, it was what's his name, Atleson, the King of Las Vegas, sent his private jet, the jet took Pollard to Israel, Netanyahu met him at the airport. He kissed the ground and in an interview, Sheldon Eelson, and in an interview, he urged

American Jews to take up arms against the American government. And then Huckabee meets with him and welcomes him into the American embassy. I would have shot him if he had come into the American embassy and I was the ambassador. Yeah, I just don't understand. I think it makes it like, I don't know.

“I think a lot of people are looking for guidance right now.”

I think you're right. If you're a regular person who we're just trying to get through the week, we want to believe in our country, we get scared that our taxes are going towards, like, violent things and evil things. That's the thing.

It starts to feel like there's something evil going on. Yeah, and it's not like we're right and everybody else in the rest of the world is wrong. You know, you look at these votes if I'm right about anything. We look at these votes at the UN General Assembly and it's everybody in the world voting yes and voting no is the United States.

I'm serious about this because I served at the UN. It's the United States Israel, Costa Rica and Palau and little island with 30,000 people in the Pacific. That's it. And the whole rest of the world is voting the other way.

You've talked to like, you've worked in counter terrorism. Is it we like terrorism such an interesting term because it's like at a certain point,

Is that making sense, even?

Yeah, I like that. I might steal that. Yeah, steal it. I don't even know exactly what it means, but you know, they just had, I saw something the other day it was like a $300 billion to rebuild parts of, I don't think it's Iran,

but I think it's Libya.

“Can you look that up, 300 billion to rebuild parts of Libya?”

That we just blew up. Yeah, yeah. So right here, it says a truce, $300 billion investment plan in our moves. What's in the deal draft that can end USR on more? USR and Iran mediators are now engaged in high stakes negotiations aimed at ending the

conflict. It's about a fragile ceasefire in the place and months of turmoil in the Middle East. The possible truce plan includes key bargaining points between the two sides, including

a $300 billion investment package and the crucial straight-up hormones issue making the

agreement extremely close, Lee Watts for. However, one of the biggest developments emerging from the discussions is it proposed, multi-baying dollar reconstruction and investment package that could fundamentally reshape Iran's economy if a final deal is reached. So it's just why it's like we just went there and got involved in this.

I don't know if this is a taxpayer thing. God, I hope not. Just the whole thing is like, I don't know. You start to feel so defeated sometimes and you start to feel like your vote isn't going to do anything.

Yes. That's a scary part.

And then part of this feels like a long-term sign-up, like it's a slow weakening of the

values. Okay, let's put things in this society over time that'll tear apart the American family and that'll poise in people and let's do you think there's big sign-ups like that going on? Like, let's put COVID out there so that people are separate from each other and that people

can't go to meetings and meet up and so you start to deteriorate the value of human connection and let's make food so that it's just poisoning people and that it's, you know, that it's just going to, you know, it's going to make people sicker. Let's make health care.

“So it's not, there's no real way, besides extreme stress that you have to go through”

if you even have to make a claim like, you know, do you think that some of that is just corporate greed and stuff or do you think some of that's a longer-term sign-up by like bigger powers out there? I don't, I don't think it's a part of a bigger sign-up. Okay.

But I do it. Believe firmly that it's mostly corporate greed, you just reminded me of something, excuse me, I saw recently and it was this experiment that, I don't know, somebody did. I saw on YouTube where they put a, they put a homemade hamburger on the ground and they put a McDonald's quarter pounder on the ground and then they photographed it, you know, over

the course of days and then weeks and then months. Bugs come, ants come, they go to the, to the hamburger, they tear the bun down, mostly they went for the meat but they end up, you know, a week later it's just a spot on the sidewalk. Even bugs won't touch a McDonald's hamburger and then months later it's, it looks like it just came out of the package, you know, and Europeans can't understand how we eat

like that. Yeah.

“Like, they're a lot of different McDonald's can't do that in European countries.”

Yeah. Let's look at the ingredients right here, the difference between McDonald's Europe and McDonald's America. Western ingredients versus foreign ingredients. Wow.

So the U.S. has 10 plus ingredients and the, at Europe has four ingredients in the U.S. Potatoes, vegetable oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor, wheat and milk derivatives, dextrose, sodium acid, fice, pyro, so pyrofacet and salt, pyrophosphate. Pyrophosphate. Thank you.

And then Europe has potatoes, non-hydrogenated oil, rapeseed or sunflower and dextrose. And look below that and contains hydrogenated oils, beef flavoring and TB HQ, which are banned, restricted in EU. These are for the French fries. It says contains hydrogenated oils, beef flavoring, TB HQ.

And then it says for Europe that those are those exactly things are banned and restricted in the EU. What about the burger? Yeah, what does it say? The U.S. beef is 100% pure beef, the additive, several hundred additives, several hundred

additive prohibited in EU. And let me see. Europe says 100% beef from British Irish farmers, no hormone treated beef. And then the additives are strict or quality control and fewer additives.

propylene glycol, alginate, and caramel color.

What the fuck? Why?

“I just like at some point you have to be like what happened, you know?”

And while the Europe Big Macs sauce contains simpler ingredients list and 40 fewer calories it says. The differences are EU food regulations are much stricter, customer preferences, and local supply chains vary. And the U.S. fries would likely be illegal to sell in Europe due to ingredient restricts.

Have you ever seen what's in the Mick Ribb? I tell you what, I love those Mick Ribb's. Well, the black community goes bonkers when they come back, I know that. Rush to McDonald's for Mick Ribb, but then when you see what's in it, you're like, oh my God. Well, yeah, dude, anybody thinking it does anything to do with a fucking animal to make

Ribb, but at a certain point, we are also guilty. And we are. It's like, yeah, yeah, it's our own laziness and we give in and we just go do it. That's a big part of it.

So that's what's interesting too right now.

It's like there's a real test of like, what do I, you know, how much do I want to stay enough for myself? And but then also how much can I, some people are trapped financially by certain abilities and restrictions? Yeah.

Well, so it's just kind of interesting and it's tough and I don't want to get all super down.

“What do you feel like there are a lot of foreign agents in America right now?”

Oh, yeah. In fact, there's an advertisement that you see on the sides of buses around Washington saying that and it's, the, the advertisement is to visit the Spine Museum that there are between 10 and 15,000 foreign intelligence officers in Washington DC in Washington DC more than anywhere else on the planet.

Wow. Do you think that's real? There's a spy on this bus. Oh, that's what that advertisement saw. It's part of the, thank you Edward Snowden.

It's part of the advertising campaign. Yeah. And is the campaign to, to, what to hire more than that? To get it. People to go to the Spine Museum.

Oh, it's to get them to go to the Spine Museum. Dude, I've been in the Spine Museum before. It's awesome. It's great. Spine Museum.

It's so good. Yeah, it's really great. I agree. Times were different back in the day when it was like, you'd like be, like using a secret pan or like you'd have a holding page in with like a little backpack on.

Oh, no. Now it's all so crazy sophisticated. I was just telling somebody the other day about the, the, the CIA trained cats to wander onto the Soviet embassy compound with collars that had listening devices on it. Just to see what the Russians were saying when they come out of the embassy.

But that didn't work because you can't train the cats. So they trained pigeons and they put little listening devices around their pigeon, little pigeon feet. And they would land on the window cells. But the thing is that the Russians had double pain glass and they were piping music

in between the two pains of glass. So the pigeons couldn't hear anything. What a game. What a game of like a espionage. Oh, so much fun.

That's so, see, that kind of stuff is so exciting. Now, it feels like, um, I don't know, it feels like we're entering something like a surveillance state or we are, we are. It's not like the old days. You know, one of the best recruitment side for me, Theo, I was doing surveillance on

this guy for a week. I thought, you know, this guy would be an interesting target. He doesn't have, he hasn't make much money, um, oh, you were doing surveillance on a guy on a guy. And what is that mean you're doing surveillance here, like you're wandering around in the

distance? Yes. That's exactly what it means. Around the distance, watch him every day, see where he goes, what he does, where he hangs out, who he talks to, his, his wife had left him, but I noticed he walked his dog every

morning at 6.30 every morning, he'd leave the house at 6.30 and he would walk across the park. The dog would do his business and then he'd walk back.

“So I asked in the office, I said, hey, does anybody have a dog?”

And one of the women's like, yeah, I have a dog. I said, can I borrow your dog for a week? She says for what? I said, I want to, I want to accidentally bump into this guy. And while he's walking his dog, I want to walk your dog.

And then I meet him, and I'm going to say hello, and then the next day I'm going to

say hello again, then third day I'm going to invite him to lunch and whatever is the best

recruitment I ever made in my entire career. And we bonded over the dogs. And it wasn't even my dog at the end of the week, I just gave her a dog back. And did you learn something from the guy? Oh, my God.

This guy was like every case officer's dream recruitment. And what recruitment means somebody that you're just, you're trying to gain intel from. The person, you, you pitch him, you say, look, I'm with the CIA. Oh, you, you told him, yeah, I'm with the CIA. I know who you are.

I know what you do. And I'm willing to pay you very handsomely to give it to me. And he's like, how handsome he is handsome. And I gave him a number.

Well, this is 25 years ago. And then it was $5,000 a month. It would probably be 20,000 a month now. And good money. And he wanted all of his expenses.

I said, what expenses do you think you're going to have? Yeah. What's the dog shots for the dog? I know, right. So, oh, he nickel and dime to me the expenses.

And my boss would always say, just just give it to him, just give it to him.

Because the information was so great. So we had the information about what his country, he worked in the embassy, got it of his country. And I gave him a disposable cell phone. And back then, you had to buy these little cards at the convenience store and you scratch

“him off and you put the number in your phone and it gives you units, you remember that.”

And so the phone was only supposed to be used to call me. He used it for everything. He'd give me like $800 phone bills at the end of the month. And I'm like, come on, man. Come on.

That's awesome. Can you sign grand already? That dude that friggin' snake. I love that. Yeah.

My boss just just pay it, just pay it. A acoustic kitty. Oh my gosh. Oh, it's an, oh. A acoustic kitty was a central intelligence agency project launched by the directorate of science

and technology in the 1960s. It was intended to use cats to spy on the criminal and soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure of veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull, dear God, and a thin wire into its fur. This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings.

Due to problems with distraction, the cats sense of hunger. It sees a bird had to be addressed in another operation, $20 million dollars. $20 million, dude. And that's your Somali fraud right there. The first acoustic kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet

embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately. However, this was disputed. The equipment was taken out of the cat, the cat was re-soned for a second time and lived a long and happy life afterwards.

That sounds like a cover up. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a cat that has call waiting, you know, that's a fucking insane dude. I worked with this one guy. It was going to a denied area.

A place where CIA people just can't go, right? But he looked kind of ethnic and he could fit into, you know, whatever, the culture.

And so I said, buddy, aren't you afraid of being kidnapped and then we just never see

you again? And he said, yeah, they offered to implant a chip, a beacon, a ping in my butt crack. He says, and I said, no, leave my butt crack alone. Yeah. Yeah.

That's yeah. That's fair.

“I think that's to be our national anthem.”

How weary do people have to be of being spotted on today? Do you think there's a lot of these new, like, data center projects and stuff like, that's going on with that? First let's talk, yeah, real quick about the data centers. What do you think is really going on?

Because if you look at the size of these places, like, we don't need that much that, like, we're already using our phones. We're already have, like, televisions, like, that, you know, there's already, like, a lot of something stored on servers, how are we jumping to a level where we need that? That's what I want to know.

Oh, I have to agree. Besides the fact that they use massive amounts of water and oddly enough, they're located in a lot of states that don't have a ton of water, like Texas, yeah, or you go out to a loud and county Virginia, okay, we have enough water.

But loud and county Virginia, you drive for miles and miles, and they're just these never-ending

gigantic complexes of data centers. The proposed Stratos project in Utah is a massive 40,000-to-water Utah, a 40,000-acre AI data center campus, two and a half times larger than Manhattan. Yeah. I want to have an actual data, how about the, and just the data center requires more than double

the current energy consumption of the entire state of Utah. Yeah. Come on. I mean, that's unbelievable. Really going on there.

Do you have any intel about it?

“You have to assume that this is interrelated, because look at the companies that are involved.”

We're talking about Palantir, and NVIDIA, and the BRACSIS, and all these big companies that either took CIA investments to get started as seed money, or are staffed by retired senior CIA officers. They're not doing it for their health. Why is this, so is the CIA now is spying on our own people?

Oh, yeah. That's what Ed Snowden warned us about. Yeah. Without Ed Snowden's revelations, we wouldn't have any idea that NSA and CIA were spying

It's a part of NSA's charter that it may not spy on Americans.

“And this place in Utah, he and Julian Assange told us about Utah.”

This new compound in Utah that NSA has enough memory, storage space for every phone call, every email, and every text message from every American for the next 500 years. Well, why? Just that building? Then why do they need all these buildings?

Yeah, why do they everywhere? What are they collecting? I'm not sure. And that's what it must be. It's got to be all of our information.

What would you do right now? Is there any way that people can protect themselves? Do you know? It's almost impossible now. I wrote a series of books during COVID for Skyhurst Publishing, the CIA insider's guides

to surveillance and surveillance detection, lying in lie detection, and disappearing and living off the grid. They put them together, and they're republishing them in the next month, I guess. There's one volume, CIA skills, tactics, and the ultimate guide to CIA skills, tactics, and techniques.

There we go. But when it comes to protecting yourself from the data state, you got to go Eric Rudolph,

“or Unibommer, and just own no technology at all, it's the only way to protect yourself.”

Otherwise, you're going to be scooped up in all this. Now the odd thing is, according to Ed Snowden, NSA, CIA, other governmental organizations are scooping up all this data, and they're just holding it. Why? Why are they holding it?

Now, time was, really, until the immediate post 9/11 period, where if the government wanted your information, they had to go to a federal judge and say, we want the Ovonne's information, and this is the reason we want it. When the judge had to say, okay, that's a legitimate reason I'll sign the warrant. Now they just write something called a national security letter.

They give it to your provider, and they say, give us everything you have on the Ovonne, and they just turn it over, or they go to these new data centers, and just put your name in, your information, and everything pops up. They don't even, you don't have any legal protections.

“They just take whatever they want, and that's legal now, they can do that.”

And that's legal now, have that become legal in the National Defense Act of 2016. National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, well, yeah. Which also, this is a pet peeve of mine that nobody knows about. It also, for the first time in American history, allowed the American government to propagandize the American people.

It was always illegal for our government to propagandize us.

What does it mean? Well, for example, the voice of America, that's our government's propaganda news outlet. We beam it overseas, so everybody gets the official U.S. point of view. Okay, back in the 80s, the Reagan administration came up with, with these two broadcasters called Radio Marti and TV Marti to beam at Cuba.

The Cubans tried to jam them all the time, but what they mostly are used for is to broadcast baseball games in Spanish, which the Cubans love. Got it. I flew down to Cuba to do a study. I did a study for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when I was the chief investigator

there. And nobody watches TV Marti. You can only actually get it in the waiting room of the U.S. consulate, got it. So if you're there to apply for a visa, you can watch a soap operand Spanish that's American propaganda.

Nobody cares. Radio people like listening to baseball. So dish network, when it began, when it began selling services in Florida, found that there was this just narrow swath along the shore on the west coast of Florida, where you could pick up TV Marti.

That's illegal. You can't prop against the American people, got it. As Americans, we're not allowed to watch our own governments propaganda. So instead of telling dish network, well, you're going to have to like move your satellite or do something or pixelate it or whatever, said, no, no, no, no, we'll change the law.

And so in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, the Obama administration said, we can propaganda as Americans now. So now Radio TV or no problem. Wow.

But I mean, we're always propaganda as I mean, people are propaganda all the time.

Yeah. I went to Yemen in 2011 when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

So I have a meeting with a defense attache. And he was so proud of this thing that he was doing this cyop. I hate that word, cyop. I said, sure, what's your cyop and he goes, we're funding a radio station here, modeled on NPR and it plays American jazz.

And then it has a calling show. So young Yemeni guys can call in and talk about the jazz. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? That's a terrible idea. Nobody's going to listen to that and nobody did and they shut it down after a year.

But that's what we're doing. But what was the goal of it, even, to make people pro-American because they would be like, "Oh, Americans have jazz." Oh, I see. So I'm going to be pro-American now.

What are you thinking? You sit there. That sounds like money laundering. Yes, seriously. That's what it sounds like.

“How do I know I can believe you about anything, kind of?”

People ask you that all the time? Oh, yeah. People ask me all the time. Because who would believe anybody there's XCI, who would even say, "Whoa, that's such a thing with me."

No, generally, I don't read the chat. Anywhere. Right? Everybody I talk to, at your level, you talk or Carlson, Patrick Beddavid, Rogan,

whomever, they never read the chat.

Sometimes I can't help it, and I'll scan them. The only time I ever respond is when people say, "Once CIA, always CIA, moron. You thought all of that all up on your own." That's true. That's true.

So I said to one guy, I said, "You know what? Let me call it Snowden." And the sons of Philip Aegee and Ray McGovern and tell them that you think they're all still in the CIA. So I went to prison for telling the truth.

And that's the point. I would do it again in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat. Nobody else has gone to prison for ratting out the CIA, and it's illegal programs. I was proud to do it. That's a good answer.

Thank you. It's a really good answer. If you were not lying here, and I can say this, if you really went to jail and everything, then it's a great answer.

“And if you did it, I'll believe you, I believe you.”

But also, it's a little part of me that's like, "If he didn't, then that's not even colder, that he's making it up and living it." That's the most CIA, that would be pretty intense. But that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah.

Nobody in the world hates me as much as my ex-wife does. From spending all that time in the CIA or in jail, at least jail you have a good excuse. But she came every month with the kids and visited me for two years. And so why does she hate you then? Oh, no, that's, that's all post story post, yeah.

I'm actually prohibited by court order from answering that question. Well, I think that's amazing that she did that and brought your kids to do it. She was great. She was great. A lot of why.

I mean, I can't even imagine it's a tough thing for families. Especially if you had young children, Kudos to her for that. Yeah. Was bringing in prison kind of fun? Um, fun.

No, I, no, I wouldn't say fun. Like, what was kind of cool about it?

I'm always wondering how to deal.

“You know, there's this old saying that you don't go to jail or make friends.”

And I made some lifelong friends in jail. Um, mostly named Gambino, Lukaise, Beneno. Yeah, okay, genavise. So a lot of good storytellers in our bed. Listen, those guys were so honorable.

I learned so much from those guys in just 23 months. Well, lessons I'll carry with me forever. Real honor. It's funny. The Italians were the smallest, they call them gangs in prison.

The Italians weren't a gang. I'll use the word gang just for the purpose of this response. They were the smallest gang in the prison. Yet commanded the highest level of respect. Really more than the blacks and the Latinos.

The blacks and the Latinos were always at each other's throats.

Right. And they had, like for example, it was crimson bloods. And there was this uneasy piece between them just because it's not worth upsetting the apple cart. And everybody goes to solitary and then gets spread out all over the country. For the Latinos, it was far more complicated.

Because it was Boracios, notagnos, Latin kings, MS-13, Mexican mafia, and then the individual cartels. So overall, there's one gigantic, Hispanic prison gang called Pisces. And then within Pisces are all the different divisions. God.

Yeah. And the Pisces, if you were Hispanic, you were automatically in Pisces, whether you liked it or not. And you'd had to work out every single day.

Right. And the whites are like, "We have nothing to do with this." Yeah. I just want to do it just to get in shape. Yeah.

It sounded like an emotivation. We had Aryan brotherhood. What are they doing? What are they up to? You know, Aryan brotherhood of Texas is far more violent than Aryan brotherhood.

And they're not, it says they're right there, they're not connected.

I never met anybody from the Aryan brotherhood of Texas.

Aryan brotherhood at a low security prison just wants to sort of, you know, go along to get along. Yeah. Yeah. You stay out of my way.

I'll stay out of years. My very first day in prison. My very first hour in prison when the, when the guard dropped me off in my cell.

“The only thing he said to me, the whole time I was, you know,”

checking in and getting processed was if somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an active aggression. And I said, great. Thank you. I've been here 40 minutes.

I'm going to get my ass kicked now. Sure enough. As soon as he left, these two guys walked into my cell just walked right in. One of them had a swastika that took up his entire neck and then came up onto his face.

And the other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids. Oh, yeah. I check. I mean, that's, yeah. And so I jump up.

I go, what do you want? Because I thought, you know, if I'm going down, I'm taking one of them down with me at least. What do you want? And the, the one with the swastika, he says, you're the new guy. I go, yeah.

So, this is like a, this sounds like a story from like the 1940s. It was powerful. It was powerful.

I said it in my second book.

“Prison is a combination of seventh grade, the Lord of the flies and a mental institution.”

And it's set in the 1950s. That's all right. So, I go, what do you want? He goes, you're the new guy. I said, yeah.

So, and he goes, I'm standing there like this. He goes, you a f***. And I go, no, I'm not a f***. He says, you were bummed out. You were rat.

No, no, no, gaze a love. You were rat. And I said, no, I'm not a rat. You were tomo. I go, I don't know what that word means.

He goes, tomo, child molester. I said, no, I'm not a child molester. That's good. And then he says, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm with the Aryans now.

But then a couple of months later, simple rules. I was across the hall from a captain in the banana family. And he said to me, one day he goes, let me ask you a question. Why do you sit with those Nazi retards every day? And I said, I don't know, I said, my first day here, they just told me to sit with them.

And he goes, from today, you are with the Italians. And I said, it's about time, I was like, yeah, took you long enough. You got drafted. Yeah. But they were the best.

Yeah, but a lot of good stories do.

“Any good story coming to mind from some of you, like a good story you heard in prison?”

Yeah, there's, there's one. I'm actually, you're going to think less of me. And I don't care. That's fine. I could tell you some stuff.

That would probably make it even. There was a guy in my housing unit who was a serial killer. He was called truck because he drove long distance trucks from East Coast, the West Coast. And he would pick up prostitutes at truck stops and he would rape them and murder them. Drive them a couple of hundred miles down the highway and then dump the bodies out.

So the cops estimated that he killed 14. It was probably more than that. But he strangled one and she survived. And she was able to give the cops the license number. Now this was in the days before DNA training, DNA testing.

Yeah, this was in the 70s. Oh, he'd been in for a long time. He was doing life, got it.

So for reasons that were never clear to me, this guy constantly sought my approval.

He was full of shit. He would come up. He had the worst breath because he had just these black and rotten nubs. Where is he that used to be his teeth. And he was saying he was fucking dick soft.

Oh, awful. He goes, you see, I, and I said, yeah, I used to be. He goes, I did work for the CIA. I ran a shrimp boat full of weapons to Angola. I go get the fuck out of here.

I didn't know he was a serial killer. I go get the fuck out of here. The shrimp boat to Angola. Have you ever been on a shrimp boat? And I walked away.

People are looking me like, are you crazy? Do you know who that is? I didn't know it was. So instead of making a mad, it just made him more actively seek my approval.

So I'm a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Oh, yeah. And he would say, hey, John, the Steelers were the game of the featured game of the week. I saved you a seat in the TV room. I'm like, oh, thanks, truck.

Like, okay. John, I, I know you listen to classic rock. There's a new classic rock station 1600. You should check it out. Okay, thanks, truck.

In the meantime, there's this guy we called cat in the hat.

And he comes up to me one day and he said, hey, I heard you had an empty bunk in your cell. I want to move into your cell. I heard it's a good cell. And I said, well, I'm not so fast, buddy. I said, we don't allow any pedophiles in our cell.

And no rats. I said, what's your crime? He goes murder for hire. And no fucks. I don't even care about that.

Yeah. But the other guy, I can't speak for the other guys.

“I'm just trying to like, I'll try to be a part of the group, you know?”

Like, go on, go on. So he says, murder for hire. I said, I don't think I like that any better than the pedophiles of the rats. What were the circumstances? And he said, I owed the mob a lot of money.

100,000 in gambling. I couldn't pay it. So it took out a life insurance policy on my business partner. And I hired a hitman to kill him. And the hitman got caught.

I said, let me think about it. Well, think about it. I went straight to the law library and I looked up his case. And that wasn't it. It was true.

He owed the mob 100,000. He took out the life insurance policy. He hired the hitman. He got caught. Because of course he's going to get caught.

Where's the first place that cops are going to go?

And where the money went? And he ratted out the hitman so that he wouldn't get the federal death penalty instead he got 20 years. So I said, no rats in the room. So he was mad at me.

“Anyway, one day, Jake Tapper comes up to the prison to interview me.”

And I get called down to the lieutenant's office. Normally, if you're called down to the lieutenant's office, it's to go to solitary. If you come back, usually it's because you read it somebody out. Well, I went down there to sign the waiver so I could give Jake Tapper the interview.

So I'm sending the TV room next to truck. Truck was very, very sensitive about being called a chomoe, because that girl that he strangled was 16, which technically made him a chomoe, right? So trucks sitting here.

I'm sitting here. Right here is Kat and the hat with his back toward me. He's on the computer. There's like this internal internet, not internet, internal email system.

He doesn't see me. I'm sitting 18 inches away from him. And then he says to the guy next to him, "Do you hear? Kuriyaku got called down to the lieutenant's office.

He goes, "That guy's a fucking rat." He went down there to rat us out. And I just sat there watching the game. And then truck says, "That fucking guy just called you a rat." And I said, "And now we're going.

I heard him call you a chomoe."

“Which was a total lie, I just made it up.”

He didn't say a single word. He just stood up, walked over here, and beat this guy almost to death. They had to land a helicopter in the yard to life-flight Kat and the hat to Pittsburgh.

They gave truck five more years, and Kat scan in the hat, huh? Yeah, it's Kat scan in the hat. See, I know how come I didn't think of that? Because I'm not a comedian.

I should have put that in my book. I don't know. Is there any real value on me thinking of that? That's a good question. Six weeks later, Kat and the hat is finally released from the hospital.

He comes. He's all fucked up still. And he's like this. Somebody had told him what had happened. He goes, "I wanted to say I'm sorry for calling you a rat.

I should never have said that."

And everybody stops to look to see what I'm going to say. "Well, what am I going to say? I forget it. It's all one on the bridge." I go, "Listen, look at me.

Look at me." And he lifts his head up. And I said, "So help me, God. If I ever hear my name cross your lips. Ever again, you're dead.

And there won't even find you." Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Is everybody like that? The CIA guys tough after all.

But I said in the book. One of my rules that I learned at the CIA, let others do your dirty work. And then I get called down the lieutenant's office again. Because as he's beaten him, I sat back down. I'm watching the game.

Everybody else runs. As soon as there's a fight, everybody just runs like cockroach. Right? So I'm watching the game. karaoke, lieutenant's office immediately.

They always do it the same way.

It's like their caricatures of themselves. So I go down there. And one of the lieutenant's there, two of them. And he says, "So tell us about this fight. I go, what fight?

What fight? You're going to be smart guy now." I said, "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The fight. We had four cameras showing you saying something

to that crazy person." And then he got up and beat the other guy. I said, "I was watching the stealers game. I don't know what you're talking about." Oh, you're not going to tell us about the fight.

I said, "You know what? Maybe I will tell you about the fight. Maybe it was you that started the fight. Did you ever think of that? Maybe it wasn't me.

I was an innocent bystander. Maybe you put them up to fight each other." I think I might make a complaint against you.

And I wrote in my book. Rule number one. It meant nothing. Did I everything make counter accusations?" And as I was walking out, I just said exactly.

Dang, bro. I don't even know what to think anymore.

“You know, I think that's where you get people to that point.”

You're like this, you know. They pushed me and pushed me. And at sentencing, the judge sentenced me to a minimum security work camp. And the CIA was furious that I got such a light sentence. And I was going to minimum security camp.

So the CIA intervened to send me to a media-- sorry, a low security prison, which is an actual prison with the double wall. They were furious that I was.

When I was first charged, I mean, this is a potential death penalty case.

Three counts of espionage for talking to ABC News and the New York Times. Because you were talking to them about torture, right? What cases specifically were you talking to them about? Abu Zabida. And they were furious because nobody had ever confirmed that there was a torture program.

And I said it was illegal, besides being immoral and unethical. It's illegal. You want to torture people? God bless. But you got to change the law first.

Right? We're a nation of laws.

“Which country do you think had the toughest torture programs over the years?”

Or do you even know? Over the years, let's go back a hundred years.

The Chinese, the Vietnamese, and the Belgians, the Belgians.

If you can imagine, the horrors that they perpetrated in Congo of epic proportions. Yeah, the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the United States. Is it weird to like, we talked about the term terrorism now, but it's like it definitely feels like we talked about it a few a little bit earlier. It's like, it feels phenomenal. It's like, how much is America like a terrorist state in the world?

And I hate to say that because this is the country that we live in. Yeah. But it's like, I think at a certain point if you use, you know, I don't know. I don't know. You know, it's got to be hard to figure that out.

But it's like, you know, it's like, when do you use like fear tactics? And that sort of thing to make sure that everything's okay, you know? Yeah, I don't know. It's like, do you hear my question? Do you think it's possible for America to get to a place where we're an actual peace keeper?

Or do you think it's possible to keep peace without terror? Make any sense or not? Yeah, that's a hard question. Good. And I think my answer has changed over the years.

I believe for a very long time that we were the good guys. I was a true believer. That's why I worked there. We were the good guys. And we saw I think as people we still are as people we still are.

As people we still are. Agreed. Agreed. We still are. Somebody coming in on a Facebook post that I made the other day.

Like I heard you say that the United States is the best country in the world. You should be ashamed of yourself. I was like, I believe that the United States is the best country in the world. Well, that's why I live here. I could go live in some other country if I wanted to.

But this is the best country in the world. We have problems every country has problems. But the reason why I'm as active and as vocal as I am is because I want to change the things that I disagree with. I don't think we should be a nation that tortures people or murders people without trial. If somebody is a clear and present danger, which is the language that's used in the

amendment to 1, 2, 3, 3, 3. Okay. Clear and present danger. They're getting ready to deliver the dirty bomb or whatever. Okay.

Sometimes we have to work in the shadows, awful, but it's a fact of life. But if you just send teams around the world to kill people who's politics, you don't like.

People who have never been charged with a crime, then shame on us.

That's not what the founding fathers gave us.

“So if you want to torture people, you've got to change the law.”

Ronald Reagan said, "We were a shining city on a hill." Right? We were a beacon of hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties. That's the country I want to be. Same.

That's what most you want to be. Exactly. Do you think we can get back to that place or what do you think? I think it's possible. You do?

I think it's going to take a very long time, but I think it's possible. And I think we have to start by trying to snap out of this mindset that we have to be the world's policeman. Like why? I have relatives in Greece and friends all over Europe and they ask me the same question all the time. Why are you guys doing this?

Could that be rather in Libya?

Of course.

“I think a lot of people don't know what's going on. They just want their families to be okay. They don't want that as centers.”

A lot of people do not want AI. They don't give us shit about it. I'm going to benefit you. The Pope is frightened. I'm trying to get the Pope to come and offer that. We go to the Vatican and talk with the Pope.

I want to learn about what he thinks. The Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church just issued an encyclical 100% supporting everything the Pope set on this. Well, yeah, it would be a blessing to get to talk with them and just learn. I just want to be able to share a message. Be a part of not me share, but just be part of the telephone game of helping or being a part of the message.

Get it out if I can. Because I do think it's important. We don't want that. Nobody wants it. 30 people want it.

100 people want it with a lot of power. We don't want it. Exactly. Yes, nobody wants it. Nobody wants it.

Nobody wants it. Yeah, there it is right. Nobody wants it. Yeah, I read about this.

“I've read part of the Pope's, but I haven't seen this new one.”

This is from the Orthodox Church. Yeah, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop. It's L.B. the photos. His name endorsing everything the Pope said about AI. You have a new podcast.

Thanks Sean for hanging out. Sorry if I haven't. Thank you questions at certain point. No, your questions were great. And they cut right to the heart of things.

I'm going to get my brain back on track a little bit. It's just been like a long month. But before you do leave, I need you have a podcast that you're starting your own. Finally.

Thank you. Finally. Thank you. You've been on all of them. So you have to start your own.

I'm excited. The briefing room. Yeah, John Kiriock is briefing room. John Kiriock is briefing room. We're going to launch it in about four weeks.

If you go to real John Kiriocko on YouTube, it'll pop up saying coming soon. Please, please, please subscribe. And I have another one too. Called John Kiriocko's Dead Drop.

That's on Apple Podcast and Spotify. It's just story after story after story. And it's been actually very popular. Been very lucky. We've gone up to number five in the history category worldwide.

Well, it's excited. It's really, yeah, very exciting. Yeah, it's an exciting time. I mean, that's one thing that we also have to remember. It is like sure things seem this way in that way.

But also it isn't like if you can see excitement as like being of all things and not just things that seem positive. But things that could seem to be decided. Then there is a lot of excitement. And so that's like a nice way to think about things.

Agreed. And this year book, The Ultimate Got to See. I Skills Tactics and Techniques.

“Yeah, is there a basic one you can give us out of the book, man?”

There's just something that you can notice about people. Yeah. The one, the part that I'm proud of stuff in this book is the section on surveillance and surveillance detection. I took it so seriously that I actually became a surveillance instructor at the CIA for the last two years that I was at headquarters.

I'll tell you something that happened to me when I was in Pakistan.

I was always very, very, very careful about my own personal security.

And I noticed one day, I was staying at a guest house, a little 14 room guest house. And I noticed one day there's a guy in a motorcycle. He's trying really hard to stay in my blind spot. And the only reason I even noticed him was he had a red motorcycle helmet on. And nobody in Pakistan wore motorcycle helmets.

I don't even know where you would buy a motorcycle helmet. So I was like, huh, that's funny. I speed up, he speeds up, I slow it down, he slows down. I changed lanes, he changes lanes. I'm like, this, this isn't good.

I get to the entrance to the diplomatic quarter, which was the part of town where all the embassies were and he breaks off. Well, I work like 14, 15, 16 hours every single day. I get to work when it's dark, I leave work when it's dark. And so I pull out of the diplomatic quarter. And the guy's on me again.

And I was like, oh, this is definitely not good. I was worried about it all night. So the next morning, I get up at five o'clock in the morning. And I'm taking a different route to work every day. I'm leaving it in a different time every day.

My routes to work don't make any sense. Just to make sure I'm not being followed. And now twice, I am being followed. There's a definition of surveillance at the CIA. It's multiple sightings at time and distance.

So you see the person more than once at different times of the day and at different places. So we have a database.

So I put in the database when I first arrived.

I think I'm under surveillance. It's a motorcycle. Here's the license number. This is a description of the guy. He's wearing a red helmet.

Next day, I get up at five o'clock in the morning. I'd just open the door a crack. I look up and down the street. I don't see anybody. So they had assigned us these like poles.

These retracting poles with the mirror on the bottom. So I look under my car.

So you get to be careful, you know. So I get in the car. I go like two blocks. And the guys on me again. So I finally get to the office.

And I waited for the security officer to come in. And I said, listen, I'm under surveillance. I'm 100% sure I'm under surveillance. I told him about the three sightings. He's like, oh, this isn't good.

I said, I know. He said, we have to wait until the chief comes in. So finally, the chief comes in around seven. And I said, I'm under surveillance. 100% certain.

So I explained to him the three different sightings.

“And he's like, well, you know what you have to do.”

And I said, I know.

He goes, you never popped your chair that way.

Did you? Let's shoot somebody. And I said, no. Never needed to. He's like, well, we're going to have teams out there.

Don't worry. We're going to have guys all around you. You're not going to be alone. I'm like, okay. All right.

I was very worried. So I get back to my office. My office, it was me. I was the only staff officer. And six retirees who had all been in the senior intelligence service.

Every one of the six had either been the chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations. One had been the assistant deputy director of the CIA. But they all came back after 9/11 for patriotic reasons. But if you're a contractor, you can't be the chief. So they all worked for me, right?

And we got around there like, don't worry, buddy, we're all going to be out there.

Don't worry about a thing.

I'm like, I'm very worried. Then after noon, I have a meeting at a safe house that we shared with the Pakistani intelligence service. We interrogated a prisoner. And I get up to leave. And I don't know what possessed me to stop.

And I turned.

“And I said, General Muhammad, are you following me?”

And he says, no, why? I said, because I'm under surveillance, I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance. And I'm going to kill the guy this afternoon. And he's like, no, it's not us. I never saw him again.

So weeks later, we heard that a bunch of them were sitting around the table. And one of them said, the new guy, Kiriyaku. He's a nice guy. And there's like, yeah, he's a very nice guy. And then one of them said, you know what?

Nobody's that nice. He's probably being nice just to trick us into a sense of complacency. We don't know what he's doing when he's not here. He's probably spying on us. I wasn't.

But they put the worst surveillance officer in the entire Pakistani intelligence service on me. So instead of two blocks back, he's right there in my blind spot. And it was only because I stopped before I got to the door that afternoon. And that's General Muhammad. If they were following me, that's the only reason that guy's not in the ground today.

I was going to kill him that at you. Oh, yes, I was. Dang, John, buddy. Because I was convinced he was going to kill him. That big guy.

That's crazy, bro.

“Dang, dude, I think everybody wants to shoot somebody.”

But they don't let you. I worked with the guy, great friend. Go to the same church from the same men's group. And he's a psychiatrist. Sorry, you made me laugh.

He's a psychiatrist. And he said to me, I find it fascinating that you don't have PTSD. And I said, is that good or bad? He said from a psychiatric point of view. And I said, yeah, he goes, not good.

I said, I wasn't afraid of those people's teeth. I was not afraid of them. He had his interest to man. The things that we hold, what's going on inside of us, you know? How it comes out, what gets figured out, you know?

You just never know.

You never know what's going to bother you.

You never know what's going to stick in your mind. And bother you in fester for years. It happens. Yeah. The stories, man.

And about just making a story, you know? I mean, you seem like a kind of guy that likes to make a story, you know? I like telling these stories. And people say, I-- And living a story, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, listen, I'm going to drown in the junkie. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have these stories in my past. I'd be like, oh my god, my first wife. She's like, I want to move back to Ohio.

And I want you to sell car insurance with my cousin, Dean. I said, I would rather cut my throat than move to Ohio and sell insurance with your cousin's name. I'd rather join the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Seriously.

Seriously. And you did. Good idea. I think, look. Insurance next time.

Yeah. Next life. Don't tell your son I said what's up that you mentioned on the way in. Thank you, Max. Max, tell my son what's up.

And it's Kiriakos at Greek, Greek, Greek. Just thinking about that. You have a new book. If a new podcast. Thank you so much for your time, brother.

Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. Thank you. You too, man.

It's a pleasure. Thank you. Now I'm just looking on the breeze.

I must be calm and stoned.

Oh, but when I reach that ground,

I'll share this piece of mine.

I found I can feel it. Can not bounce.

Though it's going to take.