Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast. I'm your host, Jack Hopkins. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to ask you a favor. Don't worry, it's not a huge favor. One of my episodes has almost 60,000 views, but I've got just 6,300 subscribers, and what that means is a lot of people who are watching my podcast episodes aren't subscribed. Why does that matter? In short, the greater my subscriber numbers, the more likely it is that I can get and feature even more guests on my podcast, guests that you want to hear from, and that's good for you and it's good for me as well. So if you haven't already, please like and subscribe, and I thank you in advance. Now let's get to today's guest for today's episode.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Today's guest is John Kiriakou. John is an American author, journalist and former CIA intelligence officer. He was jailed for what the CIA called exposing the interrogation techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency. Much of the world, however, had a different view. Much of the world, however, had a different view. John Kiriakou was a whistleblower on the torture program the CIA had been running and that Gina Haspel later testified to Congress had existed. Gina Haspel was the seventh director of the CIA. Now John was an intelligence analyst and operations officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant for ABC News. He was the first US government official to confirm, in December of 2007, that waterboarding was used to interrogate al Al Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture.

Speaker 1: 2:16

Look, you are in for a treat. I just finished this episode and I already can't wait to get him back on again, so, without further ado, let's dive right in to this episode with the fascinating and intriguing John Kiriakou. All right, John, listen, I've got to tell you I've probably learned as much about world history from you as anyone else. You know, in so many of the questions that you answer, I've always just been blown away at your grasp of world history, and instead of answering something within the context of, say, the last five to ten years, you're able to go way back, and I find that most of the time when you provide that additional context oh, okay, well, this all looks different then within this Right right, yeah, good point.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Hey, may I tell you a quick story on that very issue. Sure, I had just returned from the Middle East. This was like 1996. And I was assigned to mentor a brand new junior analyst, really, really smart young woman. She had just graduated from the University of Virginia and she was covering the United Arab Emirates. And nothing ever happens in the UAE. We're close friends with the UAE. It was just someplace where she could learn you know the writing style and such.

Speaker 2: 3:44

Well, sure enough, iran invaded an island off the coast of Sharjah, which is one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates. It's actually two islands. It's called Greater Tunb T-U-N-B, and Lesser Tunb. So Iran had Greater Tunb, sharjah had lesser Tunb and the Iranians took it. And this island is, like you know, a mile by two miles. Nobody lives on it or anything.

Speaker 2: 4:14

And I said to her just offhandedly we're just chatting. And I said the UAE government's never going to do anything to get that island back, they're just going to concede it to the Iranians. And she said why? Why would they do that? And I said because the island is owned by Sharjah and they don't give a shit about Sharjah because it's a minor emirate. And I said look, foreign policy is run by Abu Dhabi and business policy is run by Dubai, and in Dubai much of what they trade is with Iran. So why upset the apple cart over a little tiny island that only has a couple of goats on it? So the Sharjahs are just going to be shit out of luck.

Speaker 2: 5:02

She goes into the boss's office and she comes back out and she sits down and she says I just resigned and I'm like what, why did you do that? And she said I realized that, no matter how much I like the job, I'll never know as much about it as you do. I said that is ridiculous. I said I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. You'll pick it all up. You're really smart. And she said no, I just realized this just isn't for me.

Speaker 1: 5:30

That's wild, and so my question then is I'm guessing you were always kind of a history buff, yeah always and a Middle East buff.

Speaker 2: 5:39

When I was 15, the Iranians raided the American embassy and took our people hostage and I was just fascinated, glued to it, and you might remember that that led to the creation of Nightline right. So Nightline on ABC was meant to give us the daily update on the situation with the hostages. I didn't know that, yeah, and then, when there were no updates to give, it became a nighttime news program and then lasted for decades.

Speaker 1: 6:12

Wow, how much did that benefit you.

Speaker 2: 6:16

As someone in the CIA, I can only imagine immensely, yeah immensely is the word, but I was very fortunate, though, jack, in that I knew when I was 15 what I wanted to do. When I was nine, I told my parents I wanted to be a spy. When I grew up and when I was 15, I had decided that I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East when I grew up, and so I looked for universities that had specific programs in Middle Eastern studies. At the time, there were only three. There was Brigham Young, and they did it just to teach their would-be missionaries Arabic.

Speaker 2: 6:58

There was Rutgers in New Jersey, and I just didn't want to go to school in Newark and um and George Washington university, which was literally one block from the white house. That's where the action is, and so I went to GW. I was one of only three students enrolled in the in the Middle Eastern studies program there, but worth every single minute, and I was able to specialize. That became um, that became something that the CIA was looking for in in the late 1980s, and I got lucky.

Speaker 1: 7:33

So you showed up with what you needed.

Speaker 2: 7:37

I was ready to go.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah you know, I've got to tell you something that I've multiple times when watching you on other podcasts and I've heard you talk about this some but any time you go a different direction than maybe what I'm thinking not in terms of predicting what you're going to say, but in terms of like being on the same page as me and you go a different direction. The thing I'm always aware of is that because I like you so much, my ears, I'm paying attention and I'm, you know, I don't go into that defensive mode. Is that something about yourself that you recognized early on that you could get people to warm up to you quickly?

Speaker 2: 8:35

No, frankly, really no. In fact. It's funny that you bring this up because I was on the job I'm going to say like six weeks. So this is February, early February of 1990. And my boss, I was an analyst. Most analysts are strong introverts and I'm a strong extrovert.

Speaker 2: 9:00

But my boss said to me you would be a good operations officer. And I said me, why would I be a good operations officer? And he said people like to be around you. Yeah, and I just thought, okay, that's kind of odd, but all right. Well, the longer that I was in analysis, the more I realized that it wasn't really as great a fit for me as I thought it was going to be, because I considered myself kind of an intellectual, you know, I had bachelor's and master's degrees, I had multiple foreign languages, I was well traveled, um, I would go to all of the uh the uh events around town that the think tanks were sponsoring. And he's like no, you're kind of a fish out of water, you should think about operations. And it wasn't until, you know, seven and a half years had passed and I got bored with analysis that I decided to give operations a try.

Speaker 1: 10:05

Yeah, and did you find almost immediately, maybe when you compared yourself to your colleagues or other people on that side of the CIA, that, wow, I'm good at this.

Speaker 2: 10:21

Oh, you know what? One of my station chiefs and this was in a big, active, major station pulled me aside and he said over the course of my 30-year career, he said I had five recruitments and I remember every single one of them. He said you've been here two years and you have five recruitments. And I said, yeah, you know, as crazy as it sounds, I kind of have a knack for this, yeah. And he said whatever you're doing, just keep doing it.

Speaker 1: 10:58

I would assume that gives you a level of confidence going into an operation once you've kind of built that foundation of trust of your ability to do that.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Yeah, it became a joke. You know we would have these classified staff meetings in the embassies. It's called a bubble. It's called a bubble what it is. It's a tempested, secure room where you can speak freely. There's a double wall. Music is pumped in between the walls, and you know you can't intercept anything there, kind of like a skiff.

Speaker 2: 11:39

It's like a skiff, but a mini yeah, that's a good way to say it. It's a mini skiff. So, um, my immediate boss, uh, had this, had this thing that he did whenever somebody made a recruitment he would congratulate them in the staff meeting and then toss them a snickers bar. That was your award for, for making a recruitment. You got a snickers bar and and there was.

Speaker 2: 12:07

You know, sometimes it takes you a month, sometimes it takes you a year to recruit somebody, and it just so happened that I recruited three people in one week, and not that, you know, I did all the work that one week. It took me a year, a year and a quarter to get up to that point and it just so happened that they all came to a head that one week. So he said, you know, I'd like to congratulate Kiriakou for recruiting, you know, mk Grasshopper, and he tosses me a Snickers bar and everybody you know, congratulations. I'd like to congratulate Kiriakou for recruiting MK Orange. And people are like, okay, and Kiriakou gets a third one for recruiting so-and-so. And one of the other guys is like, dude, stop. And I said I, it was just one of those weeks. Sure you're making us all look bad and we're not going to get promoted.

Speaker 1: 13:13

I think I'm sorry that's wild, you know I I've never heard you asked this question that I know of, and that's not to say I've watched. There may be some out there. I haven't seen when you are working in the Middle East. How relevant is your personal skin tone?

Speaker 2: 13:37

That's a good question. And no, I haven't been asked that. I found, especially when I was younger and I didn't have this gray hair and it was much thicker than it is. I fit in almost everywhere I went and my Arabic was so good at the time. People would ask me are you Lebanese? Because you kind of speak with a Yemeni accent, but you're too tall to be Yemeni accent. But you're too tall to be Yemeni. So the ability to fit in helped me immensely. And I'll tell you one thing it was so funny I was invited to a Rotary Club meeting in Abu Dhabi and the ambassador was there, the deputy chief of mission and the political officer all legit State Department people.

Speaker 2: 14:30

So they're all sitting at the same table and I decide to sit with the Arabs. Right, I don't want to sit with the guys that I work with all day long, sure. So I'm sitting with the Arabs and one of these Arabs says to me look at this, look at this table over here, and he points at the ambassador, the deputy ambassador and the political officer. He says CIA. And I said yeah, how can you tell? He said the CIA guys always sit together. And I said Mohammed, that's exactly why I'm sitting with you. Well, by the end of the year I had recruited Mohammed. He's like holy shit. I would never have guessed it.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Wow, yeah and, and you know what's always fascinating to me about those types of things we always think of. The ceia most people I would assume is based on a lot of hollywood, right, right and and it's not Right, and I've got some questions for you about that. That's one little thing that you would think. Those guys made that mistake.

Speaker 2: 15:35

I know right.

Speaker 1: 15:37

Right, right, yeah, that's me. But was that something that, prior to him saying that, that you'd kind of noticed too that you know I guess you had, because you said you know who wants to sit with the people you work?

Speaker 2: 15:53

with all day. Yeah and yeah. But you know my station chiefs. From my very first station chief he said he said, well, he said something that I later added to, when I was training, you know, young officers. He said that when you go to an event, you must come back with a fistful of business cards, otherwise why go to the event to have free, you know, hors d'oeuvres? Seriously Sure.

Speaker 2: 16:22

And and then later on in my career there, there was an officer that I worked with. We were in the same branch and she was just not cut out for this job. She was really smart. She had gotten a bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan and a master's degree from Yale. But smarts doesn't always translate into being a good CIA officer. Right, you have to be manipulative, you have to be able to think quickly on the fly. So she was doing her operational meetings and then she would go back and they would. They would ask her. So what did you learn? She's like he didn't really have anything to say. Well then you've got to terminate the contract, right, tell them look, this isn't working out, thanks for your time. Here's $1,000 going away present.

Speaker 2: 17:13

So I said to her one time my own personal rule is, if you go to an operational meeting and you come back and you don't have at least two intelligence reports to write, you have failed. The agent didn't fail. It's not his fault that you didn't ask the right questions, you have failed. And then the station chief called me into her office and she said I know what your workload is, but can you go with this officer to her next operational meeting? But can you go with this officer to her next operational meeting and you do the meeting and you teach her how to elicit the information because she's failing? And I said sure.

Speaker 2: 17:54

So we went to the meeting and had a nice conversation about two hours. And you know, we order some room service and there's coffee and we're we're laughing and talking and it's more of just a friendly conversation than it is anything else. And then at the end of the two hours the guy got up and we shook hands and he walked out and she goes you see what I mean. He just doesn't say anything important. And I said I got four intelligence reports out of that conversation.

Speaker 2: 18:25

And she said how? And I said let's go over it. So I said he said this. And then he said B, and then he said C, and then he said D. He's talking about proliferation. He's talking about a shipment of chemicals that's going to the port of Rotterdam. He's talking. She goes what do I know about chemicals? I said he told us what the chemical was. I don't know about chemicals either, but maybe it's a cocaine precursor, maybe it's a chemical weapons precursor. What do I know? You put it in an intelligence report and you let the analysts figure it out. She's like I never thought of it that way.

Speaker 1: 19:07

So I wrote out.

Speaker 2: 19:08

I read up the reports, yeah. Yeah, and then she was okay.

Speaker 1: 19:13

And is that something in your experience? For the most part, you've either got it or you don't. You don't.

Speaker 2: 19:22

Yeah, that's exactly right, and you know, one of the things that I learned relatively early on in my career was when people come into the CIA already having PhDs, they almost always fail. Interesting you're a PhD, you've just finished writing a 300-page dissertation and you are the world's leading expert on this issue. That's so narrow that literally nobody else in the world gives a shit about it, but you think you're so smart because you have a PhD. Okay, well, the president doesn't give a shit about your opinion on such and such an issue. The president wants the entire thing boiled down to half a page with three bullet points. So if you can't adapt to the CIA's writing style and tell the president only what he absolutely needs to know in order to form the most cogent policy, then you're failing and you probably should go into journalism or academia, not intelligence.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Yeah, interesting. I knew a guy when I was a kid back in the 70s and I had the privilege of growing up around a. There were a bunch of World War II vets still around. Wow, oh, that's very cool, you know, yeah, really. World War II vets still around, oh, that's very cool, you know. Yeah, really. And interestingly enough, there was part of me that had an awareness even at that age of how significant this opportunity was. And there was a guy I don't think he went to school beyond eighth grade, right A World War II vet, went to school beyond eighth grade, right A World War II vet, and he could take a fairly complex subject and condense it down into two or three sentences. That would give you enough of the foundation of it that you understood it, enough to want to pursue more knowledge. Not everyone can do that, you know I had much smarter people, educationally and IQ wise. Talk to me about the same thing.

Speaker 2: 21:41

You know, I remember during my analytic stint in that first seven and a half years, something happened in Kuwait and I had to write something that used to be called a snowflake news of the day, and that's a page. And then pages two, three and four are. Each page has two issues and each issue gets two paragraphs, fact and analysis. Okay, so here's the breaking news on page one, pages two, three and four, that's six more short stories. And then at the very back of the book is sort of the long-term big-picture things. You're allowed to go two pages on those, but then at the very, very end is something called a page of snowflakes. They no longer do this. George HW Bush absolutely loved the snowflakes because they were directly to the point of a story, a story that wasn't important enough to put at the front of the briefing. So there were hard and fast rules about snowflakes. They had to be three separate thoughts interrupted by ellipses, dot, dot, dot. And they could not be more than 36 words. So you'd say Queen of England died today. Dot, dot dot. Prince Charles expected to take the throne by noon tomorrow. Dot, dot, dot. There will be no change in British foreign policy toward the United States. That's a snowflake.

Speaker 2: 23:24

Okay, so one of the leaders that I was covering in the Middle East had what is colloquially known as a nervous breakdown. There is no such medical condition as a nervous breakdown. It's just a word that we all use, right, or a term. So I went to him and I said, hey, I wrote a flake for the president because he knows this leader very well. They're on the phone all the time. And here it is. It was like 30 words King so-and-so had a nervous breakdown. And I put parentheses, not parentheses, quotation marks around nervous breakdown, because I knew he would object to the term because it's not a medical term.

Speaker 2: 24:10

And he's like, yeah, you have to coordinate with all the other analysts who who cover the same issues so that there's agreement where you know the entire intelligence community agrees that this, this is the situation. So he's like, yeah, I can't, uh, I can't, agree with this. I'm going to have to make a couple of changes. I said, yeah, make whatever changes you want, You're the psychiatrist to have to make a couple of changes. I said, yeah, make whatever changes you want, you're the psychiatrist. He was a psychiatrist with both an MD and a PhD in psychology.

Speaker 2: 24:36

So he sends it back to me and it has 56 words, and I said, larry, we can't, we can't send this to the president, it has 56 words. He said, yeah, but I need 56 words to explain the situation. And I said we can't send it. They will not send it to the president. I mean, you and I can write 5,000 words, they're not going to send it to the president. 36 words. And so it actually had to go up through the chain of command and they just went back to my original thing with the quotation marks around it Fascinating, fascinating.

Speaker 1: 25:14

It's interesting, and I'm thinking probably not at all for the same reasons. But when I write my newsletters and it's, it's nothing I was ever taught. Obviously no english teacher would ever teach you this. I rarely use commas. Where I would have a comma, I put dot, dot, dot dot Because in my mind and I've had some feedback from subscribers a comma doesn't necessarily do translate into doing what it's supposed to do, which is kind of create that separation. But dot dot dot forces you to do it because the distance your eyes have to track a distance before they pick up again, so it almost forces the reader into a pause. So, um, yeah, that's just fascinating that that's how you had to write those snowflakes you know.

Speaker 2: 26:09

getting back to the issue of the phds, they just could not adapt to that kind of writing style. They could not adapt to not putting in their own thoughts about whatever happened to be happening around the world. It's like nobody at the White House gives a shit about your thoughts. Just lay out the facts. You can put your thoughts at the very end. And of all the PhDs I met who came into the CIA with the PhD, only one actually made it as a career. The other ones just ended up walking out ended up walking out.

Speaker 1: 26:55

I'm sure you there's a good chance you would agree that you met more operatives without the educational background who were better psychologists than some of the PhDs.

Speaker 2: 27:02

Oh my God. You know it's funny when, when you're going into operations, you have to take an enormous battery of psychological exams because they want to make sure that you have the right personality to do something like this and they want to make sure that you are able to operate, sometimes under extreme pressure. Extreme pressure because not just while you're doing the job, but you're doing the job while somebody else is trying to shoot you. Somebody else is trying to shoot you, you know, and it's no wonder, everybody has PTSD. But I was very taken when I got my psychological exams back. I tested right smack in the center of this bell curve in terms of personality type, but I tested much smarter than the average operations officer and I kind of made a joke about it with the hiring officer and he said you know you make a joke, but seriously, these tests tell me you're going to be successful because you already know the issues.

Speaker 1: 28:14

we just needed to make sure that your personality could handle the pressure and I could and assuming you were a good student in high school, yeah, I was pretty much come natural to you in terms of you didn't run into things where you're like oh my God, I can't do this.

Speaker 2: 28:35

I'll tell you what trig and chemistry tripped me up, but I didn't really care about trigonometry and chemistry. I wanted to be a spy, sure, and my intent was to be a spy, and so that's really all I focused on or cared about.

Speaker 1: 28:52

Yeah, Shift gears here for a minute. It's perhaps one of the things you are most known for, but I don't think I've ever heard anybody ask you this specific question going to become a whistleblower? Was there a? Was there?

Speaker 2: 29:17

Yeah, and I and I wish I could tell you it's because you know on principle I stood up and I decided it was nothing like that. Brian Ross called me from ABC News in early December 2007. And he said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. I said I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or on any prisoner ever. And he said well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I said, yeah, I'll think about it.

Speaker 2: 29:59

But then that week two things happened. President Bush gave this is George W Bush gave a press conference in which he looked right in the camera and he said we do not torture like that. And I happened to be sitting with my wife, who is also a senior CIA officer, and I said he is a bald-faced liar, he is looking the American people in the eye and he's just lying to us. And then that Friday he was walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to fly to Camp David and a reporter shouted a question about torture and he stopped and he turned and he said well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer. And I said to my wife Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this torture program on me.

Speaker 2: 30:53

I was opposed to it from 2007. I mean, I'm sorry, from 2002. This was 2007. But I had kept my mouth shut, thinking somebody is going to come out and say something Right. But nobody did. And it was that moment when Bush stopped and said rogue CIA officer. That I decided I'm going public. And I decided in the days between my call to Brian Ross and the day of the interview that, no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth.

Speaker 1: 31:27

And it goes without saying, you were fully aware of potential consequences, I assume.

Speaker 2: 31:35

You know I actually wasn't and in my own defense I'll tell you why I wasn't. It is a felony in the United States. It's actually in the US Code. It is a felony to classify a criminal act. Right? You can't classify a program if the program is a violation of US law. Torture was clearly illegal. We have laws going back to 1946 saying that exactly those methods that we were using were outlawed. And I thought those methods that we were using were outlawed and I thought going public is not revealing classified information because it's illegal to classify a torture program. The FBI investigated me for a full year, from December of 2007 to December of 2008, and then wrote a letter to my attorney saying that they were declining to prosecute me because it was illegal to classify a crime. But then, a month later, when Barack Obama became president, john Brennan convinced Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me and then they had me. Wow, it was ugly.

Speaker 1: 32:51

When Did you have any colleagues who were surprise supporters and backers when this all went down? Were there any people who you would have never guessed in a million years that they'll? They'll put their reputation on the line to to back me?

Speaker 2: 33:15

Yeah, there was one in particular. He was a retired deputy director of the CIA. I had worked for him at the very start of my career and I'll tell you he was a mean SOB. But he and I went to the middle East once together. I went as his you know hat holder. He was I'm not exaggerating when I tell you he was eight grades above me, that's how senior he was. So I went as his hat holder and his his note taker, and we went to a country that I had covered very closely and he was impressed with the depth of knowledge that I had in this country and its politics. So he liked me. Even though he was a mean son of a gun, he liked me.

Speaker 2: 34:10

I mean, we could hear him in his office like screaming, swearing at people. I heard him fire a guy one time, just screaming like a crazy person. And then he announced he was going to take two months off as a sabbatical. Well, you can't, you can't do that. But this is what they were telling me two months off as a sabbatical. And then I heard through the grapevine that he was actually taken two months off to donate a kidney to his sister. His sister was dying.

Speaker 2: 34:37

So I emailed him from my private account to his private account. I said what a wonderful thing. You know heal quickly. You're a role model. God bless you for what you're doing for your sister. Well, that that just aced it for the rest of my career. So when I blew the whistle he emailed me. He had just retired. And he emailed me the next day and he said you have chosen a difficult path, but I'm glad somebody did. I only wish I had had the guts to do it myself and I saved that email as a souvenir that I wasn't crazy, I wasn't a traitor, I had done the right thing.

Speaker 1: 35:18

Yeah, yeah, and I guess it goes without saying that you had people who you might have thought would be supportive, who ran the other way.

Speaker 2: 35:29

Oh listen, I had relatives who ran away from me. Yeah, Relatives. You really get to understand who your friends are truly, who they truly are, when something like this happens. How?

Speaker 1: 35:46

have you stayed, not just then, but even now? How have you stayed connected to your own North Star, so to speak, with this duality existing?

Speaker 2: 36:02

I'm going to answer that question by telling you an anecdote that I give at colleges and universities. When I speak there, I always use this example because I've always thought it was so powerful. So I say let's say you are a CIA operations officer and you have recruited a bona fide terrorist Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS bad guy, yeah, and you meet with him once a month at a hotel in the Middle East and this guy has given you actionable intelligence that you have used to save the lives of Americans, yeah. So you fly out to meet with him and at the start of the meeting he says to you you know what? I've given you everything that you've wanted.

Speaker 2: 36:53

And today you're going to do something for me. You're going to go out and you're going to get me a prostitute, or I'm not talking to you ever again. So I ask give me a show of hands, how many of you will get him the prostitute? And usually about 80% put their hands up and I say, yeah, you would give him the prostitute. It's unseemly, it's dirty, it's gross, but this is the job that we've chosen. So you're going to go out, you get him the prostitute.

Speaker 2: 37:22

What if he asks you for a child prostitute? What do you do and people will kind of look around discreetly and then, like 10%, will gingerly put their hand up. And I say absolutely not, not under any circumstances. But see, here's the rub. There's no rule. Remember, your job overseas is to break the law. Your job is to get somebody to commit treason or espionage, for you Headquarters isn't going to care if you go out looking for a child prostitute. But listen, some things really are black and white, right or wrong. And getting a man a child prostitute is just wrong. So you have to go into this job with your own moral compass. You have to go in with your own set of personal ethics, because they're not going to teach it to you. There are no ethics classes at the CIA there are no ethics classes at the cia.

Speaker 1: 38:33

Yeah, I and to. To rephrase a little bit what you said about this, your job is to break the law. I. Part of that could be construed by some people in the cia, as my job is to be as unethical and immoral as is required to, and you will bump up against lots of officers who've taken that position. Yes, yeah, yeah. So without your own solid set of values and your own north star, so to use that um, you can go off the path really quick, I'm assuming. Oh, yeah, yeah, most definitely, you really can.

Speaker 2: 39:12

Over the years, too, you read in the papers about oh so-and-so, a CIA officer was arrested and charged with rape, or charged with embezzlement, or charged with this or charged with that, because they really believe that they're the good guys under any circumstances and they can get away with anything they want to get away with. They don't have that moral compass, they're just in it for themselves. They're in it for their own gratification, whether it's sex or money or fancy watches or whatever. And they get caught.

Speaker 1: 39:47

Which leads to a question leads to a question I've. This is a question I've really been wanting to ask Is there a gray area between sociopathy and a good CIA?

Speaker 2: 40:05

Oh, most definitely, Most definitely. I've said this many times in podcasts, but I think it bears repeating. The CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths, because sociopaths have no conscience and they're impossible to control and they just blow right through the polygraph exam. You don't want people who have no conscience. Somebody with a sociopathic tendency does have a conscience, does react in the polygraph, but because we're supposed to be the good guys, is willing to work in legal, moral and ethical gray areas, right.

Speaker 1: 40:43

Interesting. I will relate a personal story.

Speaker 1: 40:48

When I first showed up at the Naval Special Warfare Center for BUDS and I was not a SEAL I had a spinal injury and was med dropped early on, so I make that clear, I was not a SEAL and we're running in formation one day and one of my class leaders went on to work, I think, on a joint terrorism task force for the Obama administration. Jeffrey Eggers was his name and you know. So you've got a couple of guys who usually are academy guys, who are your. You know the class officers. And we're running in formation one day and I don't know who initiated the cadence, but the cadence was throw the candy in the courtyard, watch the children gather around, lock and load your MP5, blow those little s**t down. Now let me tell you what went on in my head at that point.

Speaker 1: 41:57

I've always been pretty self-aware and I realized this group, we're not like other people, most other people, not that. I thought, oh yeah, shooting kids, that's cool. It wasn't that. But it was that I sang the cadence and that none of us looked at each other like that was strange. And I thought you know, I came into this knowing what the job is, and so have, both consciously and unconsciously, accepted that role, that duty. And so, as I went on through life and pursued the psychology path, I was very aware that I was not a sociopath, of course, but I'm very clear that I do have sociopathic tendencies, or I would have probably never have wanted to go there in the first place. Yeah, how many people show up there knowing that about themselves? Almost none.

Speaker 2: 43:21

Really, I think that they don't even really consider it. In fact, I tell this one story, but I only realized its import in retrospect. So when I was being interviewed for the job this is 1989, I'm being interviewed for the job and there are like four other men and one woman and we're given this scenario. Let's say that you're serving overseas and you get a cable from headquarters and they want some figures on the Indonesian economy. Okay, so go out and collect it.

Speaker 2: 44:03

So you start targeting the Indonesian second secretary for economic affairs at the embassy and you take him to lunch, you hit it off, you take him to dinner. You have a great time. You introduce your wives, your wives get along. You start going to day trips together, maybe you go for a weekend together. But after all this development you come to the conclusion that he's just not recruitable. But headquarters needs that document.

Speaker 2: 44:35

So what do you do? So one guy raises his hand and he says well, headquarters wants the document. So you have to double down and you have to just keep doing what you're doing until finally he's willing to turn over the document. And then this woman raises her hand and she says well, maybe you can get the wives more engaged and maybe you can get the document through the wife. And I'm looking around as they're answering, answering their, their answers, and I'm like I put my hand up and I said you break into the embassy and you steal it. And he says that's exactly what you do you break into the embassy and you steal it. Well, that's a sociopathic tendency. A normal person wouldn't advocate breaking into a foreign government's embassy and stealing documents. But we're the good guys and this is for the greater good and you know, usa, usa. But that's what a sociopathic tendency is.

Speaker 1: 45:31

I didn't know that was a sociopathic tendency, it just seemed like a logical answer to me Would you agree that without good people who have sociopathic tendencies we'd be in trouble?

Speaker 2: 45:41

Yes, because then all you're left with is a criminal organization. That's a mob family you're describing, not an intelligence service, sure.

Speaker 1: 45:53

Change the topic here again. I know you've got a timeline today what are, to the extent that you can and I realize there are some things you just can't talk about, but to the extent that you can, what are? I mean, it's a two-part question. First, what is a surveillance method that, for its simplicity, was surprisingly effective?

Speaker 2: 46:22

that's a great question. I was always partial to foot surveillance. You know, when you're working in a big city, a capital city, you I was always partial to foot surveillance. You know, when you're working in a big city, a capital city, usually traffic is terrible. Anywhere in the world traffic is terrible. So it's better to do it on foot, unless you're willing to drive way out into the boondocks to do your meeting.

Speaker 2: 46:45

So one thing that was easy and very effective was a technique that the CIA calls stair-stepping. So if you're looking at a map and a stair-step is you go straight one block, make a right, go one block, then make a left one block, then a right one block, go one block, then make a left one block, then a right one block, left one block, right one block, and so it looks like a staircase right. But every time you go to cross the street you look both ways to cross the street, but you're really looking for surveillance, gotcha, and so they don't know where you're going and you're making all these turns, but you're acting very normally and you're just looking to cross the street and then you cross the street and then you make a left and then you make a right and then you make a left and make a right. Spotting surveillance couldn't be any easier than that.

Speaker 1: 47:40

Yeah, that's fascinating and again, so simple.

Speaker 2: 47:44

Yeah, very simple.

Speaker 1: 47:46

Doesn't cost anything. Simple, yeah, very simple, doesn't cost anything. Part two of that, then, is what's something that you were taught or picked up regarding?

Speaker 2: 48:01

surveillance, that was surprisingly ineffective. In real time, that was surprisingly ineffective. Yeah, dead drops, really. Yeah, I was bad at dead drops for a while. It was the only thing in training that I struggled with. I mean, it sounds easy. You just, you know, you put the message, you know, underneath the footbridge, or you put it under a rock, or whatever. I had a colleague who put one inside a condom, because who's going to touch a condom? You know? Sure, but they're far more complicated than just that.

Speaker 2: 48:37

So what you do for a dead drop is, first of all, you have to identify a place that's suitable for a dead drop. But if you're in a sophisticated country like the United States or Russia or China or Cuba or Israel or even France or places like that that have really sophisticated intelligence services, just being able to identify a place for a viable dead drop is very, very difficult. Number one, number two let's say you have a place for a viable dead drop. You've got to do several things. First, you do a two or three hour or, in the case of Russia or China, an eight hour surveillance detection route to make sure you're not being followed. You go to the dead drop, you make the drop, then you do a surveillance detection route either back to your house or to your office. So you do two, three, five, eight hours to the drop and two hours back.

Speaker 2: 49:36

That's a full day. That's a full work day. Just to drop a document or something. Number two then you have to do a surveillance detection route to a predetermined site to make a chalk mark so that you tip the agent to know that there's something waiting for him at the dead drop. So just to leave a single document or a piece of microfilm or a microphone or a photograph or whatever it is you're dropping at the drop site. You're talking about a 16-hour workday.

Speaker 1: 50:19

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:23

Well, that's not practical. Yeah, what's interesting about that is a simple piece of chalk being part of fairly Well, I'll tell you what In training this really got me.

Speaker 2: 50:35

This is the only time I was criticized in training. So we're training in Northern Virginia and I have a dead drop site. That's a little bit farther out. In the boondocks I found a rock. I had a fake rock that you can put a key in. You know, people put them in front of their houses and it was the same color, the same shape as real rocks in the parking lot of an office building way out in the Virginia suburbs. So perfect. So you know I'll put the message in there. Just throw it in with the other rocks and tell the agent you know this is where it is.

Speaker 2: 51:19

So then I do the surveillance detection route to lay down the rock. I'm not being followed. And then I go to start my surveillance detection route to the place where I'm going to leave the chalk mark. So I had chosen an underground parking garage in Tyson's Corner, virginia. Well, in the week or so what I was supposed to do was just take a chalk and just make a mark on the door leading from one level to the stairwell, right, right In the week between when I picked the site and when I actually went there to make the mark.

Speaker 2: 52:01

They had painted the doors Okay, no big deal. The door was yellow when I went. Now it's blue, okay, I don't care. But they used glossy paint and the chalk couldn't make a mark. And I was just going like this and the chalk is just falling apart and it's just not adhering to the door, and so the agent never knew that. I left the drop and they were like listen, you fail. Not only did you fail, but surveillance saw you going like this on the door, like a crazy person. You would probably, had this been in a hostile environment, you probably would have been arrested and expelled. So that was such a valuable lesson for me. I still remember it today, and I'm talking this was 30 years ago, yeah, and I still think about it.

Speaker 1: 52:51

Those are the things I guess you know. There are probably multiple things you encountered in your career that they can't possibly cover in your training because there was just so many variables that could happen and that's where they rely on you to figure it out.

Speaker 2: 53:10

Yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 53:12

Yeah, I know you've got to go soon, so I've got one last question for you. Sure, to the best of your knowledge and based on your experience, what do you think the current state of our intelligence agencies is in relationship to our adversaries, and are we at any increased danger? Or are things maybe even better and we just don't know it? Where are we?

Speaker 2: 53:43

Well, keeping in mind that I left 20 years ago. I think there are areas where we're better than everybody else and I think there are other areas where we're lagging On technology. We're cutting edge and we know that thanks to the Vault 7 revelations. I mean, there is stuff that just blew my mind in the Vault 7 revelations I had no idea the CIA was involved in and they're quite advanced. In the Vault 7 revelations I had no idea the CIA was involved in and they're quite advanced. Working with NSA and DARPA and GCHQ and the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, they've developed technologies that we can't even fathom. Where they're weak is in their understanding of foreign cultures and foreign languages, especially Chinese. I would be absolutely shocked if the CIA had more than a half a dozen case officers who spoke passable Chinese, really Mm-hmm, just like on September 11th 2001. There were only like 16 of us in the entire CIA who spoke Arabic.

Speaker 1: 54:56

I mean that's inexcusable. And how does that happen, john? It can't. I can't think that it's due to a lack of foresight. Is there something? The awareness is there, but it just doesn't happen.

Speaker 2: 55:12

Yeah, yes, the awareness is there and it doesn't happen. Think of it this way you are a CIA manager and you've got these guys doing operations working for you and you're told hey, listen, this hotshot case officer who's doing all these recruitments and getting awards, you're going to have to put him in language school for 12 months and then he's going to go overseas and you're not going to see him for three more years. Well, what manager wants to give up his good people so they could go sit in a classroom for 12 months? And so they say, ah, we're going to make an exception, you're going to go overseas without the language. Well, that might maybe work for you. It probably won't, but it could. But then the agency loses because it doesn't have enough people speaking these languages.

Speaker 2: 56:02

Right after September 11th, they made a real effort to bring in new people who spoke and I still remember the languages. They didn't want to train people. They wanted you to come into the agency with Arabic, Farsi, dari, pashto, urdu, sindhi, punjabi, uzbek, tajik, Korean, chinese and Russian. If you could speak any of those languages, you went to the very front of the line. But here we are still with a shortage of hard language speakers. And what do you do?

Speaker 1: 56:46

And I'm guessing Chinese is maybe one of the tougher ones to learn, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 56:52

Absolutely. They don't want people who learned Spanish, french and German in high school. That doesn't help anybody. And if you want to focus on you know counter-narcotics or something, then go work for the DEA with your Spanish. Nobody cares, they want those tough languages.

Speaker 1: 57:10

Yeah, finally have the kind of changes that you had hoped would be implemented as a result of your coming forward as a whistleblower? Have they happened on a level that you had hoped they would?

Speaker 2: 57:30

Yes and no. Yes in that there is no torture program anymore. I'm proud to say that I had an integral role in that. I'm proud of it. John McCain said so on. The appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee in her nomination hearing. She admitted finally that the torture program was a mistake. So yes, in that respect Right. On the other hand, as recently as three weeks ago, a batch of new hires was given a slideshow with my picture on one of the slides and it said underneath the insider threat. So CIA computers now are using AI to predict if and when an employee might be thinking about becoming a whistleblower. So they can nip that in the bud. And there is a reward system for CIA employees to rat out their coworkers if they think a coworker might be thinking about blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse or illegality. So one step forward and two back.

Speaker 1: 58:44

Yeah, the implication there your, your picture and inside threat to me if I were a new trainee there, I would take that partially as a reinforcement of this is you don't do this ever, yeah, and and that's, that's a conflicting message. I would would think that's right. Yeah, that is exactly right. Listen, maybe someday you will be willing to come back and do this again, because I've got so many things I would like to talk to you about.

Speaker 2: 59:20

My pleasure.

Speaker 1: 59:21

My pleasure. That would be fantastic. Listen. Thank you so much. I know you've got to go. Thanks for the invitation. We'll do this again sometime. Looking forward to it. Thank you sir.