S3E2 The Whistleblower's Tiger Mom

IN THIS EPISODE Every whistleblower should know one thing before they step forward with their secrets that demand exposing - at some point, the legal system will engage with you. When that happens, each and every whistleblowerl will need a lawyer. John was fortunate enough to meet Jesselyn Radack early in his whistleblower journey. A whistleblower herself, Jesselyn has spent her career working for whistleblowers (all of them pro bono), making sure that government over-reach and corruption do not trample a whistleblower's legal rights or the important truth they're trying to convey. Having been a whistleblower herself, Jesselyn understands on a mitochoncrial level the run of emotions and thoughts every whistleblower experiences. This is another episode in our "Whistleblower's Roundtable" series. SHOW NOTES To learn more about Jesselyn Radack and WHISPeR'S https://whisper.exposefacts.org/ important work - or to contribute to Jesselyn and WHISPeR's work, please click on this link https://whisper.exposefacts.org/! By the same token, if you believe you have information that the public has a right to know - especially if it pertains to American national security - please reach out. We can help put you in touch with the right people who can help you - and keep you safe while doing it. If you enjoy this podcast, please check out the other podcasts in the Costard & Touchstone costardandtouchstone.com family! Your next podcast obsession may be just a click away! https://whisper.exposefacts.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:39Speaker 02

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 1:50John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, what makes a spy tick. Before we get going, I want to thank you, as I always do, for listening. And I want to thank you especially for the very kind words that some of you have left at Apple and at Spotify. We read every comment. We take the criticisms to heart, always aiming to be better, and we savor the fact that you're enjoying what we're doing. We're enjoying it, too. With that in mind, we really do have gigantic plans for season three. We're already working on several deep dive stories about spies and spying that I have always wanted to tell. One of the many pleasures of telling these stories via podcast is that we can and will

• 2:33John Kiriakou?

  get so granular. We live in remarkable times. Remarkable things are happening, for better or for worse. Power is wrapping itself in a culture of secrecy. That is never a good thing, but it's because power does that. It uses secrecy to shield itself from accountability that whistleblowers exist. As power continues to shield itself via secrecy, our need for whistleblowers to step forward grows exponentially. One thing every whistleblower knows for a fact, having blown the whistle, they're about to interact with the legal system. Well, when I interacted with the legal system, I had some great lawyers. One of them was

• 3:16John Kiriakou?

  Jessalyn Radak. When it comes to defending whistleblowers against the legal system, Jess is a rock and a rock star. These days, she heads the whistleblower and source protection program called Whisper at exposefacts.org. Whisper facilitates investigative journalism in the public interest by providing pro bono, direct legal representation to whistleblowers and media sources with a focus on human rights and civil liberties. She's written opinion pieces in some of the most important publications in the world. For example, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Salon,

• 3:57John Kiriakou?

  Legal Times, The National Law Journal, and lots of prominent academic law reviews. Jess received the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award in 2012, and that same year, she won the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award and was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine's leading global thinkers. When it comes to whistleblowers and the law, nobody knows what Jess knows. Now, more than ever, with the government at war on journalists, activists, and whistleblowers, we need to protect those who reveal information that the public has a right to know, but that the government wants kept secret. What makes

• 4:37John Kiriakou?

  Jess so good at representing whistleblowers, and she's represented, among others, me, Tom Drake, Daniel Hale, and Ed Snowden, is that earlier in her life, she was a whistleblower herself. She knows on a cellular level what makes whistleblowers, or any individual whistleblower, tick. Forgive me for even starting by appearing to focus on myself, but the way I met Jessalyn Radak, the great Jessalyn Radak, who became not just one of my attorneys, but one of my closest and dearest friends, was several days after my arrest. There was a front-page

• 5:20John Kiriakou?

  article about me in The Washington Post, saying I was being charged with every crime under the sun. I was facing 45 years in prison. I was suffering from insomnia at the time, and I was laying in bed at 6:30 in the morning, just staring at the ceiling, when a friend called me, a good friend, and he said, "Have you seen The Washington Post?" I said, "No, I can't bear the thought of looking at it." And he said, "There's a woman interviewed there, an attorney, and she's saying supportive things about you. You need to call her." I looked at the Post, and it was Jessalyn Radak, who at the time was the head of the National Security Division at the Government Accountability Project. 6:30 in the morning,

• 6:03John Kiriakou?

  I called Jess's number, which I found online, thinking, "Well, I'll just leave a voicemail message." But sure enough, she answered the phone at 6:30 in the morning. I later learned, of course, that Jess is an early riser. And I said, "Hello, Jesslyn, my name is John Kiriakou." And the response just melted my heart. And Jess, you said, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so glad you called." I thought I was gonna cry. I was so desperate that morning, like thinking, "Do I really want to go through this? Do I really? Should I just kill myself? That would be so much easier. But I've got little kids at home, so I really

• 6:46John Kiriakou?

  don't want to do that." And you said, "Come in the office." I went into the office. We sat and talked for about two hours, along with your deputy, Kathleen. And at the end of it, you agreed to help me with my case in terms of running and managing media outreach, which was critically important, because it was clear my case was going to be tried in the media. And on the way out, I said, "Thank you so much for helping me. I know that you only represent whistleblowers, and I'm not a whistleblower." And you said, "You are." And I said, "I'm not. I'm just a guy who said something." And you said, "You are

• 7:30John Kiriakou?

  the poster boy for whistleblowers." And that's how we got to know each other. Now, of course, I learned in very short order that your whistleblowing, your own whistleblowing, for which you paid a price that really, kind of like me, neither one of us have ever fully recovered from. Your own whistleblowing was just as momentous, and it was at the very, very start of the post-9/11 era. So Jess, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for coming. And can you please tell our listeners about your own whistleblowing and why whistleblowing became so important to you so quickly?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Sure. I worked at the Justice Department as an ethics advisor. And in the aftermath of 9/11, I was called about giving ethics advice on the interrogation of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lind, an American who had been caught abroad fighting supposedly with terrorists. And by that point, there were pictures circulating worldwide of him blindfolded, naked, bound to a board with duct tape with epithets written on his body. It was clear he was being tortured. I think this is something, obviously, that resonates

• 8:56Speaker 04

  with you, John, because I know you also blew the whistle on torture. But for me, it shocked the conscience. And I was the ethics advisor and said, "You can't do this. You need to abide by, you need to Mirandaize him, you need to follow legal ethics rules." And it turned out that not only did they not cease the interrogation, not contact his lawyer, but the thing I told them to do was seal this and not use it for prosecution. And that's what they turned around and did. This was a very problematic interview. And at that

• 9:39Speaker 04

  point, I was wrestling with my own conscience. Not only am I working for the Justice Department, I say that in air quotes, but I'm the "ethics advisor," and we don't cut corners like this. And we certainly don't use it to then prosecute an American. So I went to turn over my emails, which had been ordered by the court, all correspondence related to Lind's interrogation. And when I went to turn over responsive documents, the file had been purged. I tried to write a memo internally to my boss challenging that, and eventually I ended up going to

• 10:18Speaker 04

  the media, which did a very big blockbuster story about the problems with Lind's interrogation that was written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. And after that, I was put under criminal investigation for leaking, though there's not really a crime called leaking. I was referred to the state bars in which I'm licensed as an attorney, and put on the no-fly list. So after experiencing that retaliation, which lasted for a matter of years, I decided to spend the rest of my life representing whistleblowers. To answer John's question, I don't think most whistleblowers conceive of themselves as whistleblowers, because

• 10:59Speaker 04

  in their minds, they're just doing their job. And then they realize something's gone amiss, and they're trying to do the right thing. I don't think most people go out and think, "I want to be a whistleblower." It's not exactly a great career aspiration, as we both know.

• 11:18John Kiriakou?

  Jess, I want to reiterate this, in case our listeners didn't fully understand. John Walker Lind was an American citizen.

• 11:29John Kiriakou?

  He was grabbed by the FBI overseas in by the military and then overseas in Afghanistan. You told the FBI that they had to read him his rights.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Yes, correct. There were pictures began circulating of him being tortured.

• 11:48John Kiriakou?

  Right.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  And there was information out there that his parents had hired a lawyer for him. And information was seeping out that he had not been allowed to have access to counsel. But the pictures alone were enough to know that you we don't do this to Americans. It was a foreshadowing of what we later saw at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib and at Black sites. When you see people being blindfolded and bound and held in basically held in a dark cage. That's not how we treat anybody, but especially American citizens.

• 12:28John Kiriakou?

  You were put out there as the bad guy. Now, like you said, you made an important point here. There is no such crime as leaking, and I'm using air quotes now here. There is no such crime as leaking, but that wasn't good enough for them. They wanted to destroy you, not just punish you. It's one thing to say, okay, you shouldn't have spoken to the media. It wasn't illegal, but we didn't like it. So we're going to move you into this other office where you're going to have boring work. That's not what they did. They put you on the no fly list. They tried to wreck your career. And in fact, I remember very clearly you left the Justice Department. You went to work for a major law firm in Washington and they destroyed that.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  They did. They called my private employer and said that they had just hired a trader in a turncoat and that I was going to give away law firm secrets. They did real estate housing law. But again, they started this smear campaign, including to members of my synagogue, including to my neighbors. And again, I what the information I revealed was not classified.

• 13:41John Kiriakou?

  No.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  It was completely unclassified information, but it was information that embarrassed the Justice Department and that has been credited with the case against John Walker Lind collapsing, which embarrassed our government.

• 13:57John Kiriakou?

  That's an important point. That case did collapse because John Walker Lind, if people might, people recall that the very early days after his arrest, the government was calling for the death penalty. And not only was the death penalty almost immediately taken off the table because his rights had been violated, just as you said they were being violated. He ended up getting 20 years as part of a plea bargain, not life without parole, not 50 years, 20 years. And in fact, he served his 20 minus three for good behavior. And he's out walking the streets of Oakland, California.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a free man, living peacefully.

• 14:41John Kiriakou?

  This was on the Justice Department. They screwed this up.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  They wanted an example. There was you, the hue and cry after nine 11, which was such a traumatic event for our country. I think they they were so enthusiastic to bring home a scalp, so to speak, that they were willing to go after a minnow with a sledgehammer to make an example out of someone and to and because there was a huge, a huge clamoring for revenge. And I get that I lost someone on nine 11. I understand that, but revenge is different than justice.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  And especially when you're the government, you're not supposed to be out to score a point, but to do justice.

• 15:33John Kiriakou?

  Yes, almost immediately, you became quite literally the go to person for national security whistleblowers. The first time I ever read your name in the papers was in relation to the Tom Drake case. Tom Drake's case was a groundbreaking case for national security whistleblowing. And throughout the body of the reporting in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, your name was right there next to his every time. Was that the first national security case that you worked on? And how did you end up at the Government Accountability Project,

• 16:16John Kiriakou?

  working specifically on behalf of national security whistleblowers?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Tom Drake's case was a seminal case because it was the first time they decided they were going to use the Espionage Act. For me, like I said, they weren't sure what to charge me with because leaking is not a crime. But they found the Espionage Act as a tool of choice, along with a couple of other Computer Fraud Abuse Act and a few other archaic laws that they were going to use to hammer whistleblowers. And Tom Drake's was the first case. And at the same time, Chelsea Manning was also being pursued under the military version of the Espionage Act. And so at the Government Accountability Project, they were hiring for an inaugural director

• 17:05Speaker 04

  of their National Security and Human Rights Program. And again, I had been, from my own experience, concerned about whistleblowers and knew that they literally had very little recourse and even less support from people who should normally be their natural allies in the civil liberties community and civil rights community. That's how I ended up working at Gap.

• 17:34John Kiriakou?

  And Tom's case took years to work its way through the system. At the same time, you weren't just sitting on your hands. There were other cases that were coming up, not just mine, but people like Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, later on, Reality Winner. And there were others. Tell us about that. And was it you that reached out to whistleblowers? Did whistleblowers come to you?

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Usually, as an attorney, you're not supposed to ambulance chase or shop for whistleblowers. Usually they came to me or they found other whistleblowers who knew me and we met that way. Again, I provided a lot of media advice, but I, as a lawyer, also realized that they were using the Espionage Act. So in a number of cases, I was also consulting with defense counsel because I realized they were dusting off this archaic World War One law to go after whistleblowers, not to go after spies or traitors or saboteurs, but to go after whistleblowers. And I saw them, I saw this pattern emerging with Tom Drake's case,

• 18:44Speaker 04

  but then with Stephen Kim and Jeffrey Sterling and you. And then after that, it continued. I thought it was an anomaly, but then it became more normalized. And the US started creating precedent. And then they used it on Snowden significantly in 2013 and then Reality Winner. And I said all along, this is a backdoor war on journalists. And people said, no, it's just whistleblowers and they don't matter. And then in 2018, they indicted Julian Assange, who is a publisher and was indicted for journalistic, ordinary journalistic activity.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  And then again, the train of Espionage Act cases didn't stop. It continued with Terry Albury and Daniel Hale and John Brennan, not that I would call him a whistleblower, but and then Courtney Williams. I mean, it has been so normalized, unfortunately, that it's not a one off the way your case was in the early days and the way Tom Drake's case was. This is now a routine thing in the arsenal of the national security establishment that it can use to go after people who, heaven forbid, embarrass the United States. But if you expose their illegality, you're screwed.

• 20:07John Kiriakou?

  I wanted to ask you two about the media and the role of the media. And I don't want to step on the media's toes here, but.

• 20:19John Kiriakou?

  I feel like I kind of have a love hate relationship with the media. On the one hand, one of the things that you did for me that was so incredibly valuable

• 20:32John Kiriakou?

  was because I could not speak to the media, remember, everything I said was impeachable. And so they could, the prosecution could use anything I said to the media against me. So you arranged conversations with the media, you represented me to the media. And we had a number of off the record conversations so that I could get my side of the story out there incredibly valuable. On the one hand, on the other hand, it was the media that ruined your career. It was sloppiness by the media that ruined your career.

• 21:10John Kiriakou?

  I've gone so far as to say that the conduct of the Intercept has been malpractice to the point of criminality in that employees of the Intercept have acted so poorly that their actions have resulted in the incarceration of national security whistleblowers. And I'm looking at you, Rich Esposito and Matthew Cole. So please tell us about the media and your own experience with the media and why there are so many bad journalists out there who claim to be national security journalism

• 21:52John Kiriakou?

  professionals and who are either so incompetent that they can't function as journalists or, and I don't think I'm looking into this too deeply, who are maybe working on behalf of the intelligence community or the FBI.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Well, I think the media can be a double edged sword and some journalists have been heroes for whistleblowers. Jane Mayer was seminal in helping out in it with me in my own whistleblowing when she did a story on Lind. And in Tom Drake's case, she won the Polk Award for her story on him. And sometimes it can be the saving grace of getting a whistleblower's story and narrative out there. But there are too many other journalists who just want a headline and they want sex, they want violence, they want intrigue and they have the worst, they don't have the whistleblower's

• 22:53Speaker 04

  interest in mind and the whistleblower becomes collateral damage to whatever headline they're able to garner. And burning sources has been a problem. I will not send whistleblowers to outlets or to journalists who have burned a source, especially when you're at a media outlet like the Intercept that claims to be all about source protection and source protection is your raison d'etre as a paper. And you've had three different whistleblowers, you've had Terry Albury and you, John and Reality Winner, three different people go to federal prison because of your sloppiness?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  And that's, it's disgraceful. And they're like, well, we helped pay for Reality Winner's attorney. As Reality said, I wouldn't need one but for their terrible reporting and sending her documents to the government, which they immediately identified her with. So there's no love lost between me and the Intercept, as well as the fact that they have consistently bad mouthed me to my own clients, which is just disgusting. And I don't know where Jeremy Skahill or anyone else gets off on doing that. But no, I would not go to the Intercept if you're a whistleblower.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  There are reliable journalists that I trust out there, but the Intercept is, and their journalists are not ones that I would put on the roster.

• 24:30John Kiriakou?

  And you're in your own experience, you had reached out to a journalist from Newsweek, quite an important A-list name in Washington, and he just completely blew your cover.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:47John Kiriakou?

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• 25:31John Kiriakou?

  And so I bought these linen trousers, I wore them to the doctor and he says, hey buddy, you lost a pound or two. The truth is, these linen trousers are light, they're beautiful, they're comfortable, and now they are my go to pants. For me, it's my two 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love how they feel. I love how they make me feel. And because they go with everything, they make getting dressed easy. And being somewhat lazy that way, I think you and I both love the easy part, don't we? Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like that 100% Mongolian cashmere we were talking about, or organic cotton and merino wool.

• 26:16John Kiriakou?

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• 27:02John Kiriakou?

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• 27:42Speaker 05

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• 28:16John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this, Just the Photographer will put you right there on the ground, right next to David, inside his head, in fact.

• 29:00John Kiriakou?

  It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Like most whistleblowers, people accuse us of being out for fame or profit or revenge. But my experience is that 95% of whistleblowers try to blow the whistle anonymously because it's not about them, it's about the information they're trying to get out there into the ether because they believe it exposes fraud or waste or abuse or dangers to public health and safety. So it's not about self aggrandizing, it's about, it's about the public's interests. But yeah, I, when I went to Isikov, I don't think he intentionally burned me. But again, that, that's not, that's kind of cold comfort when you're going through

• 30:15Speaker 04

  a living hell. But he didn't realize that Newsweek, he protected my identity and the hard copy of the article, but it was only just going digital. All outlets were only just going digital. And in the digital version of the article, my name was fully out there in the correspondence, which had been anonymized in the paper version.

• 30:40John Kiriakou?

  It didn't redact your name.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Not in the electronic version. And I don't think that was Mike Isikov trying to scrimmy. I think it was like a digital, a new digital universe that people aren't, weren't used to navigating. And even when people are used to navigating it, you can see that people still, all the time whistleblowers are getting tripped up. Because I always say that the electronic media, it makes things easier to leak, but it also makes it much easier to get caught.

• 31:11John Kiriakou?

  Let's talk about that for a second because Reality Winner.

• 31:16John Kiriakou?

  Listen, I feel bad for every national security whistleblower who puts his or her life and livelihood on the line to release information showing waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety. As you said, reality, I felt especially bad for because she sent one single page to The Intercept and Matthew Cole and Rich Esposito, the two journalists from The Intercept with whom I have a very bad personal history. Sorry. These are guys who promote themselves as seasoned national security investigators. Let me fix that. These are guys who put themselves forward

• 32:01John Kiriakou?

  as seasoned national security journalists. They received Reality Winner's one page that she sent to The Intercept through their portal. And they took that one page and sent it to NSA and said, is this an actual NSA document? Now, if you are a national security journalist, as you purport to be, then you should know that at the CIA, at NSA, at DIA, at any of these highly classified national security outlets, when you print a document, your name and/or employee identification number is embedded in a period at the end

• 32:44John Kiriakou?

  of a sentence or in the dot of an i. And so they sent the document, they scanned it and sent it to NSA and said, can you confirm this is a real document? They blew it up and it said, Reality Winner printed this document. She was arrested five hours after the story appeared in The Intercept. And then they did the same thing to Terry Albury. So in this digital age, Jess, with WikiLeaks just a shell of what it used to be, where does the national security whistleblower go?

• 33:20Speaker 04

  I would tell national security whistleblowers to consult a lawyer. My group, Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at Exposed Facts, and there are other whistleblower organizations out there who provide free pro bono legal counsel for people thinking of blowing the whistle. Because you want to be safe. You want your information to get out and for it to be heard, not for you to be the one who ends up suffering for it. So I would say consult a lawyer because unfortunately, especially for national security and intelligence whistleblowers, they're in a really more dangerous category than your regular bread and butter whistleblowers

• 34:04Speaker 04

  who might be a corporate whistleblower. They have many protections for corporate whistleblowers. Environmental whistleblowers have many protections. Not only do national security and intel employees not have those protections, but they are specifically excluded from a number of different whistleblower protection laws. And there are very strict paths they have to follow. And it's a very open question if these paths are not going to get you busted anyway. So definitely consult a lawyer before blowing the whistle, not afterwards. Everyone comes to me after they've blown the whistle and the government's breathing down their neck. Come to me before you blow

• 34:46Speaker 04

  the whistle or while you're blowing the whistle, not once the government is suspecting you of being a leaker for having disclosed information in the public interest, but that embarrasses the government.

• 34:59John Kiriakou?

  People ask me all the time if I would do anything differently. And I always say the same thing. I always say, absolutely. There's one thing I would do different. And that is to have my lawyer sitting next to me when I blow the whistle. I said, I had to be reactive. And I regret having to be reactive. I should have been proactive. And I should have had you sitting there next to me when I was at ABC News, blowing the whistle on the torture program. Also, I wanted to ask, I participate, like you do, like Tom Drake does, a million other whistleblowers, in these different events around Washington,

• 35:40John Kiriakou?

  the National Whistleblower Center, Whistleblowers of America, whistleblowers.org, all these different organizations. And they always have these really wonderful events on Capitol Hill. There's a lovely lunch, a bunch of speakers, Senator Grassley always speaks, Congressman Jim Jordan occasionally, Senator Ron Wyden, this is a bipartisan thing. But nothing really changes. Not for national security whistleblowers. Is there any reason, Jess, to be optimistic about what's happening vis a vis whistleblowers up on Capitol Hill? You mentioned these wonderful protections. Listen, if you're a whistleblower for the

• 36:21John Kiriakou?

  Agriculture Department, God bless, it's going to work out great. Or the banking sector, you're probably going to get rich from the whistleblower reward that you end up getting. But what about national security?

• 36:34Speaker 04

  There have been efforts to create, my colleague at Defending Rights and Dissentship, Gibbons, and I have worked on it along with other people, to create a reform of the Espionage Act that would allow a public interest defense. Because right now, the problem is, it is a strict liability law. The problem is, it's a strict liability law. And that means your intent doesn't matter. It doesn't mean if you leaked for fame or profit and revenge, or if you leaked because you thought the public had a right to know what the government was doing in secret in terms of surveilling you or torturing people. It doesn't matter.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  And you're not allowed to talk about your good intent until the sentencing phase, when you've already been found guilty. So basically, there have been reform efforts. I hope they will be reintroduced. There's also an AI whistleblower law that's making its way on Capitol Hill that Grassley is also supporting. But yeah, the problem is whistleblowers don't have actual enforcement mechanisms. So they have a right, in theory, without a remedy. They have the right not to be retaliated against, but when the government retaliates against them anyway, there's nothing they can do about it. And until we fix that, it's

• 38:01Speaker 04

  pretty meaningless to tell whistleblowers, especially in the national security context, that they have meaningful protections.

• 38:09John Kiriakou?

  So if you were a whistleblower today, not a whistleblower in 2001, but a whistleblower 25 years after 9/11, is there a safe way to do it? Do you whistleblow through an attorney? Do you do it anonymously? Can you do it anonymously? And I'll add one other thing. Somebody asked me just a couple of days ago, I gave an interview, and someone said, what would you do today if you wanted to blow the whistle? And I said, you know what? I'm reminded of the scene in the film All the President's Men, where if Bob Woodward and Deep Throat, who

• 38:51John Kiriakou?

  we later learned to be FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, if Woodward needed to see Felt, he would put an American flag in a flower pot on the balcony of his apartment building, which Felt could see from the road. And that would trigger the meeting. That's old school CIA spy stuff right there. Is that really where we've reverted after all these years?

• 39:15Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, I've always said that the underground parking garage, burner phones, pay in cash, that yeah, those old fashioned mechanisms actually work better sometimes than trying to use SecureDrop and messing it up, or trying to use encryption and one party doesn't do it correctly. Or like in Reality Winner's case, where there's a technology that the government recognizes and is able to use, that the whistleblower or the journalist is not aware of. A lot of journalists, they're not UPSEC experts. And while if they say they're source protection experts, they should know something about UPSEC, a lot of them

• 39:59Speaker 04

  don't, or they're too lazy to actually do it effectively. So yeah, I think a lot, unfortunately, work back to the Dark Ages and using these older methods of whistleblowing. But it's a matter of keeping people safe. And I would tell people, contact a lawyer before you blow the whistle. And let the lawyer guide you in terms of reaching out to a journalist. You should not reach out to the journalist. Let the lawyer reach out to the journalist. That way, it is privileged between you and the lawyer. Let your lawyer be there in the interview. So there are some modicum of attorney-client privilege, especially because

• 40:40Speaker 04

  a number of journalists are also lawyers. So there are ways to do this. I don't want to give away all my secrets. But there are a number of things you can do to insulate a whistleblower. And even though places claim they're about source protection, to them, that means providing anonymity and providing encryption. And source protection needs to be a hell of a lot more than that. Because once a source is burned, journalists seem to disappear. Who's doing the stories on the sources who've been burned? Are the original papers who burned them doing stories on what the government's doing? Even if it's only intimidating them, or threatening them, or harassing them? Oh, that's not a story.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  How is that not newsworthy? That should be newsworthy. The retaliation should be a story in and of itself. But instead, they just want the initial disclosure, and then the whistleblower is left to fend for him or herself. And you're out in the wilderness. And it doesn't matter if the government is engaged in all sorts of outrageous conduct. I've seen crazy stuff where the government's telling the whistleblower's mother that she's on an ISIS hit list because her son is speaking out. That is a true story. That in fact happened, and that is-

• 42:03Speaker 04

  A crazy but true story of the links to which the government will go to try to shut a whistleblower down, especially by intimidating or threatening family members. All my NSA clients, guess what? Most of them have spouses who also work for the NSA. So yeah, same with CIA. A lot of them had spouses who worked for the same agency that was going after them. So these are complicated situations that the government will exploit. And so, yes, talk to an attorney and have someone with you to protect you on the journey, rather than thinking you can go it alone because you didn't do anything wrong.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  That's a normal human assumption. I have nothing to hide. I didn't do anything wrong. Why do I need a lawyer? Why do I need protection? But you're giving the government too much credit for playing by the rules and not cutting corners.

• 43:03John Kiriakou?

  I want to add two things to that. There was a, I had a colleague at the CIA, Brian Kelly. Brian was a senior officer in the CIA's counterintelligence center. He was a mole hunter. And we knew in the 1990s, there was a mole somewhere in the government, high up in the government, because we had sources inside Russia and before that, the Soviet Union that were just dying. Something like a dozen of them were executed or just disappeared. So the FBI began investigating the CIA and they zeroed in on Brian.

• 43:45John Kiriakou?

  The head of the investigation was someone named Robert Hanson. Robert Hanson was the mole. And to take the heat off of himself, he directed that the investigation be of Brian. The FBI went to Brian's daughter in Oregon. She worked in a nursing home. And they told her that if she didn't rat out her father, they were going to execute him. He was utterly, completely, totally innocent of any crime. In the end, they arrested Hanson. Hanson died in prison, I guess about a year ago in the supermax in Florence, Colorado.

• 44:29John Kiriakou?

  Brian, Brian was given a medal, the career intelligence medal, an apology by the director of the CIA. He declined to sue the CIA and he would have won millions and millions of dollars. He declined. And then he died suddenly of a heart attack. That's one thing. Another thing is, in my own case, one of the things that I don't even know, frankly, definitively, if it was the FBI or if it was CIA security, after I blew the whistle,

• 45:04John Kiriakou?

  got a message back to me that I had encouraged Osama bin Laden to issue a statement about CIA torture, which of course I hadn't, and he never made any statement about CIA torture. But they told me that he was preparing to make a statement that would be delivered to Al Jazeera and that it was putting American lives in danger because I couldn't keep my big mouth shut. And I was like, great. I remember saying to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I was like, this would be the

• 45:42John Kiriakou?

  low point of my life if I was the one that spurred on Osama bin Laden to make an anti-American statement. And she's like, no, you didn't do anything wrong. There wouldn't be any statement if the CIA wasn't torturing prisoners. But this is what they do. They try to destroy your life any which way they possibly can. And then they know that if they work hard enough to destroy you, you're unemployable. You can't make a comeback. Daniel Ellsberg, the great Daniel Ellsberg, told me one time that no national security whistleblower ever made a financial comeback.

• 46:25John Kiriakou?

  And I said, Dan, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to proving you wrong. But it's been, for me, it's been 19 years. For Tom Drake, it's been, what, 20 years?

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• 48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you come after any regular human with the full force of the entire executive branch, even if they're a perfect angel, and I've been lucky enough to represent some pretty angelic people with records that are, they don't even have a parking ticket. Someone like Tom Drake, never even had a parking ticket.

• 48:48John Kiriakou?

  Literally.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  And they can ruin you. They are the government. They have unlimited resources. So even when you win, like Tom Drake did, meaning that they dropped all the charges and with their tail between their legs, lost this, this colossal case collapsed. He won, but still he couldn't go back, ever go back to work for the government. He couldn't get his pension back. He couldn't get back all those years of his life and is now had to deal with some serious health issues. Even when you win or prevail, or again, they didn't ultimately succeed in killing, getting

• 49:29Speaker 04

  me disbarred, even though they tried, they didn't succeed in getting me criminally prosecuted, even though they tried. I was able to rehabilitate my career. But yeah, I lost a career in government, which is what I wanted to do when I was in law school. I wanted to be a public servant. I wanted to work at the Justice Department. That was a path I saw for myself and I'm glad my life took the change that it did. But again, there were a number of really hard years in between going from the dream to getting to where I am now. And people should not have to suffer.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  The government has infinite resources to ruin a person professionally, emotionally, socially. And I think you asked if whistleblowers have certain things in common. And I would say, yes, a lot of them can be idealistic. A lot of them can have a strong moral compass. They can have belief in the system. But they can also be naive. And I don't think that's a bad thing. We don't want jaded people, only jaded opportunistic people working in the government.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  So heaven forbid, people should be, believe in the system and be naive that it works. But again, the fact that a lot of people who are whistleblowers don't, didn't even see themselves that way because they just thought they were doing the right thing, that also speaks volumes. Doing your job, you shouldn't have to choose your conscience over your career. And the worst kind of whistleblower is an accidental whistleblower. You don't think you're blowing the whistle. You're just trying to do the right thing and trying to do your job and doing, reporting up the chain of command what you think you should be. And then things go sideways and you panic.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  And so you talk to a journalist or you send a document or you say something to someone who you shouldn't have spoken to. Because again, you're in this weird environment and you're trying to normalize while really irregular things and sometimes criminal things are going on.

• 51:54John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I want to stress something too. Joshua Shulte, who was convicted, former CIA engineer, a tech genius, was convicted of releasing to WikiLeaks what has become known as the Vault 7 files or Vault 7 documents. Joshua Shulte went on trial and, and the jury hung. And so he was retried. He made an absolutely terrible mistake whereby he represented himself in the retrial and was convicted on all counts.

• 52:37John Kiriakou?

  And he will die in prison as an old man. If anybody out there listening to this has any thoughts of blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety, my God, hire an attorney.

• 52:59John Kiriakou?

  I made the mistake

• 53:02John Kiriakou?

  of going to talk to the FBI at their request in January of 2012. The worst mistake I ever made in my life. I've never told anybody this. Do you know why I didn't hire an attorney to go with me that day?

• 53:19John Kiriakou?

  I wanted to save the 500 bucks. I didn't want to spend the 500 bucks I thought I would have to spend. And instead, I went to prison for two years and ended up racking up $1,150,000 in legal fees. So always, always have an attorney sitting next to you when you blow the whistle. There's just no two ways about it.

• 53:45John Kiriakou?

  Yeah. What's next for you, Jess? You are in Paris. You are heading the whistleblower and source protection program at Exposed Facts, continuing to do God's work advising some of the most important national security whistleblowers in America. So what next?

• 54:03Speaker 04

  I'm going to continue to do what I can do for as long as I can do it. But funding is a huge problem.

• 54:09John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  It is a huge problem.

• 54:11John Kiriakou?

  And we should add, you don't charge anybody a single dollar. You never have.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  We don't. We never have. No, we represent people entirely pro bono. And whistleblowers usually have been, often they've been fired and have already racked up legal bills, medical bills, and just for trying to do the right thing. But my organization, other organizations, we're trying to survive. We would like to survive. I don't know if that will happen. Trump has been the end of so many good things. This administration has been the death knell for truth, unfortunately. And for people who are fighting for truth have been particularly vilified. I am not the only whistleblower organization that has been threatened and hammered

• 54:57Speaker 04

  by Trump and other of his associates. And I think nonprofits and their big foundations are afraid to fund the controversial stuff. A lot, most whistleblowers, every other whistleblower organization out there has a disclaimer. We only represent lawful whistleblowers. Don't even get me started. That is so completely fucked up to me. Because lawful whistleblowing, it like assumes that you have channels you can go through. And it also ignores the fact that some of the most consequential whistleblowers this century

• 55:38Speaker 04

  have not gone through channels, or they've tried to go through channels and they didn't work. So for all the organizations, oh, we only represent lawful whistleblowers. I know that's a dig at me and my organization, or it's just ass covering, or both. But really, the moral cowardice out there is just at a height just beyond what I've seen in my entire career. And I'd like to say I'm going to continue to do this work. I want to continue to do this work. But unless there are individuals and foundations who find this work valuable, I can't keep doing this work.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Me and William are working on next to nothing and have been for many years. And I'd like to retire at some point, my husband. And I have three adult children and, you know, potentially grandchildren soon. I would like to keep doing this work as long as I can. But society needs to place a premium on truth and people willing to sacrifice everything to get it out there. And you know how hard that is to

• 56:50John Kiriakou?

  Amen.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  to find that kind of support. So thank you for what you're doing and for publicizing these stories. I think a lot of people would like to try to help other truth tellers, including Tom Drake, me, and other people who have been paying it forward. By the way, Julian Assange is back on Twitter today. His account, he just became active again after a number of years of silence. So there's hope. But again, you're cast into the wilderness. So organizations like mine can really use the support of people who are interested in seeing truth, having a fighting chance.

• 57:31John Kiriakou?

  Jess, thanks so much for being with us. Great, great to see you as always.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Your dear friend, John, thank you for having me. And you're an amazing super client and a wonderful, someone who has become a wonderful, wonderful, dear friend over the years.

• 57:47John Kiriakou?

  You're a great friend to me. Thank you, Jess. One of our goals this season, beyond telling whistleblowers stories, is to provide whistleblowers with a kind of YouTube video on how to blow the whistle safely. We believe the years ahead are going to be boom times for whistleblowers. I mean that literally. There are a lot of secrets out there that frankly shouldn't be kept secret. And we want to help those people navigate the process of, well, the spy parlance is coming in from the cold. And as Jess mentioned, she works pro bono. Her work needs and deserves your help and support. So if there's any way for you to help Jess in her mission, I thank you in advance for doing a very, very good and generous thing.

• 58:34John Kiriakou?

  In the episodes ahead, we're going to open the doors to the John Kiriakou Academy of Spying. Want to be a spy? Well, we're going to share with you some espionage tradecraft secrets, starting with how to tell if the person you're dealing with, working with, living with, is the stone cold liar. That's next time on Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast. And John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

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