#2392 - John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and the first U. S. official to confirm the agency's torture of detainees. Punished for being a whistleblower, he served nearly 2 years in a federal prison. www.johnkiriakou.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  So you were saying you replaced Mike Baker?

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer. He was, uh...he doesn't really talk about his work a lot. Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal. I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens. Athens was a tough place. At the time, the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.

• 0:42Joe Rogan?

  Why?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  There...it was a combination of two things. There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. They'd killed the CIA station chief, two US Defense Attaches, just bad guys all around. The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. And then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLPGC, the DFLP. Everybody was there. Because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreou at the time and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone.

• 1:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal, so it was every man for himself.

• 1:34Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Your story is pretty nuts, man.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  It's...

• 1:38Joe Rogan?

  And your story of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was...what they were doing, what you reported on, was completely illegal, and you were completely honest about it. And it was essentially about the US torture program.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:57Joe Rogan?

  Tell us how this all started. Like, how long had you been involved in the CIA?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Well, by then, I'd been in the CIA...

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Well, by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations after 9/11, I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years. And I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country. Al Qaeda was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them. And so, my job was to find them and grab them. And then just hold them, or send them to trial was the original idea. And we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right? Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri. We had killed Mohammed Atef.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  He was the head of what they called Military Affairs for Al Qaeda. We killed him at Tora Bora. But then there was Abu Zubaydah. And then there was this unknown person that we later learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So, we were looking for any of these four or five people. And then there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole bombing. So, it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah. And we captured him. It took us six weeks to track him down. And we were close a couple of times. Close where we would bust down the door and there's like an uneaten, like half eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking. And he knew we were close. So, we finally got him. And then the question is, what do you want to do with him? And they told me, hang on to him, we're gonna send out a plane and we'll take it from there. So, they did. And I wasn't cleared to know what they were gonna do with him, just like the guys on the plane weren't cleared to know who it was we had captured and why they were taking this guy, where they were taking him. But...

• 4:09Joe Rogan?

  Is that all just need to know?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all need to know. In fact, when I got onto the plane, we, three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane. We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane, then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down. And...

• 4:27Speaker 02

  One of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on. And he says, "John?" And I said, "Who are you?" And he lifts up his mask and he's an old boss of mine. And I said, "Hey, what are you doing here?" He said, "Oh, I came to take your prisoner." I said, "Where are you taking him?" And he said, "I can't tell you. You don't have a need to know." I said, "No, that's cool." He said, "Who is he anyway?" I said, "Oh dude, I'm sorry. You don't have a need to know." And he says, "Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, safe travels." And then, you know, your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and, you know, get his family story. Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he's going.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria. And one of the senior guys from the counterterrorism center came up to me, very casually. And he said, "Oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" And I had never heard that term before. This was May of 2002. I said, "Enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean?" And he goes, "We're gonna start getting rough with these guys." Like that. And I said, "What's that mean?" So he describes these ten techniques. And I said, "I don't know, man. That sounds like a torture program."

• 5:49Speaker 02

  And he said, "It's not a torture program. We got it cleared by the Justice Department and the President signed it." He says, "Think about it." I said, "Yeah." "Give me an hour. I need an hour to think about it." I walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor. And there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East. Knocked on his door, no appointment or anything. And I said, "Hey, I need some advice. I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think of that?" And he said, "First of all, let's call a spade a spade." He said, "This is a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program,

• 6:33Speaker 02

  and torture's a slippery slope." He said, "You know how these guys are. Somebody's gonna be a cowboy, they're gonna go overboard, and they're gonna kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's gonna be a congressional investigation, then there's gonna be a Justice Department investigation, and somebody's gonna go to prison. Do you wanna go to prison?" I said, "No, I don't wanna go to prison." As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, "No, I don't wanna go to prison." I went back downstairs, I said, "Listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this. I think it's illegal, and I don't want any part of it." The funny thing is, I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in Al Qaeda, and I got passed over for promotion. And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism. And then, the guy who had given me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list, and he promoted me out of cycle. So I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough. And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency, whom I had known for years. We were in the same men's group, we went to the same church, and he happens to be both a brigadier general in the army and a CIA psychiatrist. And he said to me one day, "Buddy, you know they call you the 'human rights guy' behind your back." And I said, "Yeah, I don't care."

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And he said, "You know that's not a compliment, right?" And I said, "Steve, they're wrong about this, and I'm right about it." I said, "I'm comfortable with the decision that I made." And I just left it at that. I didn't realize though, how much I had pissed them off until later on.

• 8:21Joe Rogan?

  So all you had done essentially was stand up for your beliefs, your morals, your ethics and the law. And you said, I don't want to participate in anything that I know to be illegal.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  That was the start. Listen, I wish-

• 8:36Joe Rogan?

  But you're standing out against the group thing.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  And I was the only one. I'm almost ashamed to tell you that they asked 14 of us if they wanted, if we wanted to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques. I was the only one who said no.

• 8:49Joe Rogan?

  Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to use them. You were just going to be trained in them.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Oh, no. They were to use.

• 8:57Joe Rogan?

  And then, but you would be required to use these techniques? So if you were not trained in them, then what would happen? Would that preclude you from ever being involved in any sort of a questioning? This episode is brought to you by the Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights,

• 9:42Joe Rogan?

  and starring Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis. The Mosquito Bowl, now playing in theaters. This episode is brought to you by the Apple Sports app. Guys, this is the ultimate best time of the year to be a sports fan. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. The calendar is stacked, but it can also be hard to keep track of it all. And that is where the Apple Sports app comes into play. It is the fastest and easiest way to stay on top of all the action. With scores and play-by-play automatically showing up on your iPhone when the teams you follow are playing, that means-

• 10:24Joe Rogan?

  You don't have to figure out when the games are on and how your team is doing, which is especially nice when you're following a bunch of teams and your friends are constantly blowing up the group chat. The Apple Sports app gives you all the important game details for your favorite sports teams, fast and simple. Download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced

• 11:07Joe Rogan?

  website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial, and when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Interrogation.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yes, which is funny for a couple of reasons. Number one, there was no such thing at the time as an interrogation class, right? The FBI has deep, years-long interrogation classes. We never had to interrogate anybody. And in fact, when we started capturing prisoners in Pakistan in January of 2002, I'm like, well, what do you want me to ask him? I cabled headquarters. We caught this guy, what do you want me to ask him? Oh, you'll figure it out, just go with it. I'm like, okay. So I was working with the Pakistani intelligence service and I said, listen, I'm usually the good cop, you want to be the bad cop? And he's like, yeah, I'll be the bad cop. So we bring the prisoner out, we're sitting there looking at him.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I said, what's your name? He's like, screw you. The Pakistani whacks him across the face. So I say again, what's your name? Listen, buddy, just give me your name. My friend here, he's not in a very good mood, he's not a very nice guy. Just tell me what your name is, come on. And then they tell you their name.

• 12:29Joe Rogan?

  Standard.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:32Joe Rogan?

  So what exactly, did you know what enhanced interrogation techniques they were gonna implement?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that day in the cafeteria, um, my colleague explained it in great detail. And a lot of these techniques are not torture, right? If I grab you by the lapels and say, "Dog on you, answer my questions." That's not torture. Or, the, the first one was called the belly slap. Uh, or the intention slap was another way they called it. Where I smack you in the belly, it makes a cracking sound, maybe it leaves a handprint. It's a little bit embarrassing, that's not torture. But then it graduated quickly to things like waterboarding, which everybody knows about. But there were techniques that were, that were, in my view, that were worse than waterboarding. Like, for example, there was the cold cell.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  So they strip you naked, they chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling. So you can't, you can't lay, or kneel, or sit, or anything. You can't get comfortable in any way. And, um, they, they chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour, somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you.

• 13:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  But we killed people with that technique. The Justice Department never said we could kill people. And when we would kill them-

• 13:49Joe Rogan?

  How many people died with that?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  At least two with that technique, that, that the agency had admitted to. From hypothermia.

• 13:55Joe Rogan?

  And there wasn't a protocol in place to stop them from dying?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  No, there was later, but in those early days, no. Later, we always had a doctor on scene. Like, for example, with Abu Zubaydah, his heart actually stopped during a waterboarding session. And the doctor revived him, just so he could be tortured more. It's like, you know, didn't the Germans do that? Come on now, now we're doing it? That's not cool.

• 14:19Joe Rogan?

  Is there any other way, that, like, I know that MKUltra experimented with a lot of drugs and a lot of different techniques involved in whether it was trying to find the truth out of people, or getting people to commit acts. Was, did they ever implement something where they would give someone something?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  That's a good question. The short answer is yes. Not in the very beginning, but they were working with things like truth serum and, and different drugs like relaxation drugs, gabapentin, you know, stuff like that to sort of get, get you to open up. But remember too, that the agency got in such trouble in 75 and 76 before the, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee about MKUltra, that as soon as Senator Church said, "Don't destroy the documents," the director went right back to headquarters and ordered them to destroy everything. And so only about 20% of the MKUltra documents still exist. So we don't

• 15:20Speaker 02

  really know exactly, exactly what it was that was learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't work. We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the, the fog laden, um, air of San Francisco, just to see if everybody gets sick. We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts. Uh, but we don't really have fulsome documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.

• 15:55Joe Rogan?

  So just to avoid prosecution, they figured out a way?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:59Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. And so then whatever they did learn is lost?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's lost.

• 16:04Joe Rogan?

  If there was something, whether it's MDMA or LSD or whatever they give people?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  They worked with LSD for 20 years, at least, at least 20 years. You know, they, there was an operation, it was a sub-operation of MKUltra where, um, they rented a safe house in San Francisco. They recruited a bunch of hookers and had them go out and pick up Johns, bring them back to the, to the safe house where they thought they were gonna get laid, dose them with LSD and then interrogate them and try to get them to give up their deepest secrets.

• 16:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, midnight climax.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, midnight climax, exactly. It's like, well, nobody's agreed to do this. You, you haven't informed them properly. These are American citizens. You can't just take people off the streets and, and force LSD down their throats.

• 16:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, they were running the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:58Joe Rogan?

  Until right after, a month after Chaos by Tom O'Neill came out.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  You're exactly right.

• 17:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, my mom, my, uh, wife's mom went there. She used to, she was a hippie in San Francisco. She went to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. It was run by the CIA, which is so crazy. And it's totally connected to Manson, the Manson family.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Manson was a part of it as well.

• 17:24Joe Rogan?

  It's so nuts and they wouldn't have even known about that until they found the stash of documents. They connected it all together.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And just think of what's been destroyed.

• 17:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  What we could have learned.

• 17:34Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. We only know a small fraction of what was done. So is it a case of just they're, they're not elected, they're put into power, presidents come and go, and over the course of their career, 20 years plus, they just have so much power and so much ability to get things done that they just bypass the law?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  I, I think that is, that's the whole story, right there in a nutshell. When I was there, I remember being shocked by some of the old timers who had been there for as long as 40 or 42 years. There was one in particular, he was the National Intelligence Officer for Warning. So he was the one that was supposed to say, you know, I'm worried about what Libya is gonna look like 10 years from now. And then somebody writes a paper about it. He'd been there for 42 years. He had to get a, a waiver from the director because he had aged out. Well, these guys make no secret of, of their belief that they can outwait pretty much any president. Presidents come and go and these guys are there forever. And so if the president wants them to do something that they don't wanna do, they just

• 18:40Speaker 02

  slow roll it. Just wait until he leaves. And that's the end of it. You know, that's why I say, I've said this in interviews a lot. There is a deep state. You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to. You can call it the state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. You can call it whatever you want. The fact is, it exists. And it's unelected. And it's generally unaccountable to anybody. And they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.

• 19:09Joe Rogan?

  So you find out about this torture program. You won't participate. So that puts you on the outs. And when do you know that this is going to be like a significant problem in your career?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency. You know, once I turned this down. And I got this out of cycle promotion for the Abu Zabata operation. I was, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site. And people are saying like, whoa, I didn't sign up for this. Nobody said we're going to torture people. I quit. And then they come home. Or there was a secretary who fainted once when she happened to be in the room while

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Abu Zabata was being tortured. And she curtailed her, her assignment. That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, I'm coming home. I'm not doing this anymore. That is a career ending decision to curtail an assignment. And I remember thinking, so I'm not the only one who thinks this is, this is illegal. Certainly somebody's going to come out and say something. And nobody did.

• 20:36Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. Most hard beverages overcomplicate everything. Happy Dad keeps it simple. Low carbonation, gluten free, and only 100 calories in every can. Barbecues, golf rounds, hanging by the pool, chilling after work. Happy Dad is perfect for whatever you're up to. Everyone is drinking all these skinny cans loaded with sugar, but Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal can. You can grab a variety pack featuring lemon lime, watermelon, pineapple, and wild cherry. And don't sleep on the grape collab with Death Row Records. It's a fan favorite for a reason.

• 21:17Joe Rogan?

  Happy Dad is now available nationwide in the USA and Canada. Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com. For a limited time, use the code ROGEN to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free. Enjoy a cold Happy Dad. Must be 21 plus. Please drink responsibly. Happy Dad Hard Seltzer and Tea. Malt alcohol. Orange County, California. Like, what are the techniques that they were using that were causing her to faint?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal. And when that finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, made a statement that still kind of sticks in my mind. He said, "There is no such thing as sleep deprivation." He said, "I have a stand-up desk in my office. I don't even have a chair in my office. And sometimes I'll work 24 hours and then into the next day, 36 hours. But that's not what we're talking about here." We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  And they begin to die, their organs begin to shut down at day nine. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days. And that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die. They would have heart failure, you know?

• 22:46Joe Rogan?

  How'd they keep them awake?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  You chain him to that eye bolt in the ceiling again. You have these industrial strength lights on them 24 hours a day and like death metal 24 hours on volume 11. And, um, and they just can't sleep because if they, if they collapse, they'll pull their arms out of their sockets. They're chained to that, to that eye bolt.

• 23:11Joe Rogan?

  Geez.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  It was bad. And then when people would die, they would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building. Put them in the hole, cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.

• 23:23Joe Rogan?

  No report, no nothing?

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Nothing. There was one guy they reported on and, and headquarters wrote back and said, just put them on ice until we can figure out what to do. And they literally just put them in a bathtub and filled it with ice. And then just decided a couple of days later, he started to turn. We should probably bury this guy.

• 23:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was ugly. And, and the Justice Department never said anything about that. They're like, oh, listen, uh, you know, you can do these techniques. And if you kill him, just bury him out back. Nah, that wasn't the, that wasn't the approved operation.

• 23:56Joe Rogan?

  Was any of it effective? Like, was there any actionable information?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  That's, that's the worst part of this. It, it, no, none of it was effective. You know, I say this all the time, Joe, it's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI. But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations. They've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in 45 and 46. These guys know what they're doing. And so with Abu Zabata as an example, we captured Abu Zabata. And normally overseas, the CIA has primacy. Domestically, the FBI has primacy. But 9/11 was still an open criminal investigation. And so we sent Abu Zabata out to the secret site and the FBI took over.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  The CIA was furious about this, but there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan, who did exactly as he was trained to do. And he began to engage Abu Zubaydah in a conversation. And Abu Zubaydah just gave him the silent treatment for weeks. This went on for weeks. But you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange. If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever. And finally, he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives. And I'll give you two examples. Number one, we had no idea what the Al Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. We knew it was Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and then we just didn't know what the organization

• 25:28Speaker 02

  was like, how it was built. So he explained to us how each one of these cells, all around the world, was stove piped, compartmentalized. So Cell A had no idea what Cell B was doing. And Ali said, as an example, "If you want to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf, how would you do that?" And Abu Zubaydah said, "Well, there's this guy, Mohammed, and here's his phone number. Mohammed lives in Dusseldorf, and he has a cousin, Abdullah, and Abdullah has access to weapons, and here's Abdullah's email. And then Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid. They meet at the coffee shop, and Rashid has access to explosives."

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And then we're able to call the Germans and say, "Hey, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need to do." And then they kicked down the door and they grabbed these guys. That saved lives. The other thing that he told us, and he laughed, actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about. He was talking about Muhtar, a guy using the nom de guerre Muhtar. We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Muhtar, who was a very bad guy. In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka Operation. It was supposed to be carried out...

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Uh, in the Philippines, and the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s, and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States. It just so happened that one day Mukhtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch. And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment. And she sees all this stuff laid out, and she said, "That looks like a terrorist attack being planned." She calls the cops. The cops come and say, "Ooh, this looks like a terrorist attack. We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service." They come and look at it, and somebody says, "We should probably call the CIA on this."

• 27:36Speaker 02

  And so, we confiscated everything, and Bojinka was disrupted.

• 27:42Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 27:44Joe Rogan?

  A cleaning lady.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  You never know. You just never know.

• 27:48Joe Rogan?

  It's just crazy that he would leave the plans, just hanging around.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Thinking, "Nobody's, nobody's gonna come, nobody's gonna see it." And then he ran off. So, we knew there was this guy out there planning this big thing, and his name was Mukhtar. Abu Zubayd laughed at us and said, "You don't know who Mukhtar is?" And Ali said, "No." And Abu Zubayd said, "His name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." That's the first time we ever heard that name. We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together. And it was thanks to Abu Zubayd, in turn, thanks to Ali Sufan's treating Abu Zubayd with respect. But on August the 1st, George Tenet, 2002, George Tenet went to the White House,

• 28:36Speaker 02

  and he asked the president, for reasons that have never been made clear, he asked the president to turn over primacy to the CIA.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  He did that. And the CIA Director, Robert Mueller, to his credit, he knew exactly what was going to come. Not only withdrew FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI personnel from the country that the secret site was in. And within 12 hours, the CIA began to torture Abbas Baita. He went completely silent and remained silent. And then the FBI went back to the President and said, "Look, the CIA is screwing this up. We were getting all this intelligence from this guy. Now he won't say anything. And we're putting him in a coffin. And we, we heard that he had this irrational fear of bugs. So we, we pour a box of cockroaches on him in the coffin and close up the coffin.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  And we would open it up every couple of days to change his diaper and give him food. And he went nuts." And so finally, the White House turns everything back over to the FBI. It takes Ali months to get him to talk again. And then he starts talking again. And he's given us more and more information about Al Qaeda operations in Malaysia and anti-Australia operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia. And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing him again. And screwed it all up.

• 30:08Joe Rogan?

  Now, why would they do that? I don't understand. If you're getting information, why would they decide to ramp it up and torture him?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  I think for a couple of reasons. I think we should never underestimate the motivating factor of, of a desire for revenge. Right? This was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the country. 3,000 people died because we hadn't done our jobs.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  So that was one thing. The other thing is, the CIA had entered into an agreement with these two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in October of 2001. And they said, hey, we've reverse engineered the military's SEER program. And we think this would be an effective, but harsh, interrogation technique. And so we were chomping at the bit at the agency to try this thing out, without using the word torture. We paid those guys $108 million to say, oh, we think you should torture people. Here's, here are the torture techniques. Just let us know when you want us to start. Hundred and eight million dollars for that.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  And so, we thought, well, we've already spent the money, and we really do want revenge on these guys. So, what the hell? Let's just, let's just go for it. I think that's what it was.

• 31:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So, how did you get in trouble?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  I waited for somebody to say something about torture, and nobody did. And then I got divorced. My, my kids moved with my ex-wife to Ohio, and they were little, they needed their dad. So I decided, I'm gonna leave the agency, go into the private sector so I can see my boys on the weekends. And, and still I waited for somebody to say something, and nobody did. Now, I wish that I could tell you that I stood up, and I took a stand, and that wasn't it at all. I got a call in December of 2007. So now, I, I'm out of the agency three and a half years. I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  And he said that he had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zabeda. I said, that was absolutely false. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zabeda. I said, I've never laid a hand on Abu Zabeda or any other prisoner. And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. Well, I had never spoken to a reporter before. I, I didn't know that was a reporter's trick. So, I said, I'll think about it. In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday, President Bush gives a press conference, and...

• 33:04Speaker 02

  The International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners. Human Rights Watch said CIA is torturing prisoners and Amnesty International said CIA is torturing prisoners. So a reporter says, "Look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners." What's your response to that? And the president looks right in the camera and he goes, "We do not torture." Like that. And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people right in the eye and he's lying to us." And she said, "Are you surprised?"

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Well, then on Wednesday, two days later, um, he gets another, a similar question and he said that there is no torture. I knew he was lying. And then another two days later, it's Friday and he's walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend. And a torture shout, a torture, a reporter shouts another question about torture. And this time he stops and he turns and he says, "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer." And I said to my wife, "Brian Ross's sources at the White House and they're going to pin this on me."

• 34:29Speaker 02

  So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided in the, whatever it was-

• 34:35Joe Rogan?

  Why did you think they were going to pin it on you? Because they were calling you the human rights guy and said that you were going to be a patsy?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:42Joe Rogan?

  You just assumed that that was going to happen?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:45Joe Rogan?

  Because that's just your experience with the organization?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. They're going to leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves. So I called Brian Ross, I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided that whatever he was going to ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was going to ask me, I was just going to tell the truth. And so, he met me at the ABC News studios on DeSalle Street in Washington. And, um, and I said three things in that interview that changed the course of the rest of my life. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy. It was not the result of any rogue officer. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had revealed classified information. The FBI then investigates me from December of 07 to December of 08. And then, they send my attorney a letter, called a declination letter, declining to prosecute. They said that they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there because of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Red Cross. But, most importantly, torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for

• 36:14Speaker 02

  the purpose of keeping it from the American people. So, no charges. My wife and I went out to celebrate that night. We went to dinner. Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president, and he names John Brennan, at first CIA Director, but the liberals went crazy, because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program. Everybody seems to forget that now. And we can get into that if you want. But, he then names Brennan the Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism. Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, and says,

• 36:57Speaker 02

  talking about me, "Charge him with espionage." And Holder writes back, we got these memos in discovery, when I went to trial. Holder writes back and says, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan writes back and says, "Charge him anyway, and make him defend himself." So, they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage. They waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped the espionage charges.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God, that's so gross.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  That's Washington.

• 37:37Joe Rogan?

  It's just so hard to believe that the United States of America government works like that. I believe it. I believe it.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:46Joe Rogan?

  It's hard to swallow.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University. The book is called Three Felonies a Day. And he says that we are so overregulated, so overcriminalized in this country, that the average American, on the average day, going about his or her normal daily business commits three felonies every single day. So if they want to get you, they're gonna get you. And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.

• 38:22Joe Rogan?

  So what was Brennan's beef with you? Was it just because of the fact that you did that interview? Or was there underlying tension?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  We were never pals. I've known John Brennan for 35 years. We never really cared for each other. To tell you the truth,

• 38:43Speaker 02

  I thought the guy was in over his head intellectually. He, when I first started there, he was a deputy group chief. He was a GS-15 nobody, journeyman, you know, first line, second line manager, no big deal. There are hundreds of them. And he worked for this really wonderful woman, a great intellect, named Martha Kessler. And Martha was so highly respected. She had written this book. I still remember the title called Syria: Fragile Mosaic of Power. And when you got hired, you got her book. And you had to read the book because like, this is what we do. This is the perfect example of what we do. So he was her deputy. One day, he went to her and he said, Martha, you know, I've been your deputy for X number of years.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  I think I'm ready for promotion into the senior intelligence service. And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a couple of weeks ago about this. Martha said,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Not only will you never be a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, I don't even want you working for me anymore. You're fired. Well, you're not really fired at the CIA. If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job. If you can't find another job in six weeks, then they escort you to your car, they take your badge, and, you know, so long. Good luck. Well, it's, the normal job turnover is in the summertime. This is the week before Christmas, 1993 or '94, I can't recall now.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  And there are no jobs open at Christmas, so he finally finds one job. It is in the PDB staff, the President's Daily Brief, and it is as a morning briefer, giving the President's Daily Brief briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing. So that's the National Security Council's Director for Intelligence Programs, who happened to be this guy named George Tenet. And so they immediately hit it off. Two alpha dogs, cigar smoking, hard drinking. There used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue, adjacent

• 41:02Speaker 02

  to the White House, that sold cigars. Tenet had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke, and his wife would yell at him. So they would, after the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand there and laugh and, you know, talk about chasing women or whatever. Totally hit it off. Then Tenet becomes the Deputy Director of the CIA. So he brings, he brings Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss, Deputy Director of the office that Martha's working in. He calls Martha Kessler in and says, "Now you're fired." And so she just elected to retire.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Well, he ended up being identified by Tenet as "the guy." Like, "This is my guy. This guy's going places. He needs operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years. I'm gonna make him the station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia." He's an analyst. He's never served overseas before, never recruited a spy, ever. It wasn't his job. Now, all of a sudden, he's the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world. So, he does that for a long time, by the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9/11 hijackers.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  And then he comes back as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA, right? So, it's director, deputy director, executive director, and then the deputy directors for Operations, Intelligence, Science and Technology Administration. And they're dotted lines. So, he's now one of the five most senior people in the entire CIA. He does that for a couple of years and then becomes the executive director. By the time I get promoted to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant, I'm throwing all these stupid terms out, executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, I'm meeting with Brennan every single day.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  So, we're doing the Iraq war, we're doing terrorism and Al Qaeda and all this stuff. He didn't like me, and I didn't like him. And then, when I became the quote/unquote "human rights guy," eh, that just kinda sealed it for me. But I didn't care, because I didn't respect him anyhow. I will say that Jim Pavitt, the deputy director for operations, legendary officer and a really great guy, he hated Brennan more than I did. And he used to mock Brennan, because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, "I wanna head my own agency. I wanna head my own agency." And they finally put him in charge of this thing that was temporarily called the TTIC,

• 43:46Speaker 02

  the Transnational Terrorism Information Center. It later became the National Counterterrorism Center.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  And they sort of shunted him off there. And it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in the headquarters building. It was out in one of the outlying buildings. And then he kind of went away. But where he really did right for himself is in 2007, there was this, there was this wave of retirements, right? Where enough now beyond 9/11 that people can begin to retire. So this huge wave of senior level retirements in 07. And then, once these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  And John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign. And he saved himself.

• 44:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So, how did you wind up going to prison?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Well, as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan decided he was gonna have my head. And so, he asked Holder to have the FBI grab me. And I'll tell you what, they knew they didn't have a case. So, there's a little bit of background. From 2009 to the end of 2011, I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working for John Kerry. It was a terrible job. Kerry said, "Oh, I want you to do this and do that, and we're gonna investigate this, investigate that." And then he would kill all the investigations because he wanted to be Secretary of State and he didn't want to piss anybody at the White House off.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  So, I can't talk about how Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin and all of it is because the CIA said they could. I can't talk about the Dashtilali massacre where 2,000 Taliban soldiers were suffocated to death in container trucks because the CIA didn't punch holes for them to breathe in the containers. Can't talk about any of that stuff because you want to be the Secretary of State. So, I left in 2011. And, right before I left...

• 46:01Speaker 02

  I got a call from a Japanese diplomat. And this is one of the things that I loved about that job is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats. Like, "Who's doing what? And what do you think about Israel? What do you think about China? What do you think about what's going on in, you know, Mexico or Cuba or whatever?" And I get a call from this Japanese diplomat, and he invites me to lunch. And I said, "Great." We meet at a place on Capitol Hill. And I remember that lunch very well. I remember we talked about Israeli elections, we talked about Turkish elections, and we talked about the Arab-Israeli peace process. And at the end of the lunch, he says to me, and I should add, his English was so bad

• 46:45Speaker 02

  that we had to do the lunch in Arabic. So, he said, "What's next for you?" And I said, "Well, I think I'm gonna resign soon. I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half. I have five kids, and I really need to make some money and put my kids through college." And he goes, "Oh, no! Don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money." And I said, "What the fuck is wrong with you? You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you, cold pitching me like that." And I got up indignantly, and I walked out. And I walked, and I mean directly, without stopping, to the office of the Senate Security Officer.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  And I knocked on the door. I went in, I said, "Hey, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer." And he goes, "Was it that damn Russian again?" And I said, "No, it was Japanese." He goes, "Japanese? I said, "I know, right?" He goes, "Well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information." I said, "This didn't have anything to do with trade information." "I don't think. I don't know. We didn't even get that far." He said, "Okay, do me a favor." He said, "I've got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the internet. Write it up as a memo, and I'm gonna courier it over to the FBI." So I sat there, and I wrote the whole thing, blow by blow.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  The next day, he calls me and he says, "Two FBI agents are gonna come up and talk to you." And I said, "Okay." So they come up, I recount the whole, the whole lunch. And they said, "All right, here's what we want you to do. We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it." And I said, "Because I'm a patriot." I said, "You want me to wear a wire?" And they said, "No, we're gonna be at the next table. We're gonna listen to everything." I said, "But he only speaks Arabic. That's okay. We got a guy who speaks Arabic, don't worry." I said, "All right." So I call him, I invite him to lunch. We go to lunch, do the whole thing. But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called and they said, "Operation came up.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Just write us another, another memo. Do the lunch and write us another memo." I said, "Fine." So I write another memo. They asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time. The fifth time, he says to me, "I have great news." He said, "I got my dream job. I've been promoted and I'm gonna be the deputy ambassador in Cairo." And I said, "Congratulations." I shook his hand, never saw him again. So, I've written all this to the FBI. One day, in January of 2012, so I've been out of the Senate for about nine months, the FBI calls. And I look at my cell phone, it says, "Federal Bureau of Investigation." I was like, "I wonder what that's all about."

• 49:34Speaker 02

  So I answer, and they said, "Hey, you remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago?" And I said, "Yeah." And they said, "We've got a similar situation and we need your help." And again, because I'm a patriot, I said, "Anything for the FBI." I kick myself now for saying it. I said, "Anything for the FBI. What do you want me to do?" They said, "Come down to the Washington Field Office Thursday morning at 10." I said, "Done." I go down there the next Thursday, and they're waiting for me at the entrance, which I thought was odd. And we go up to a conference room and they said, "We're both cleared SITK Gamma." And then there were two compartments above top secret

• 50:17Speaker 02

  that I was cleared for, that they said they were cleared for. And so if the, if the conversation necessitated it, we could go into that area.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  So they said, well, before, before we start, just wanted to ask you, just read your book. It was great. I loved it. Hey, what about this that you said in your book? And I was like, yeah, okay. Yeah, it was a cool story. What about this other thing? Yeah, I had fun. I said, it was kind of hard. It took me nine months to write the book. 22 months to get it cleared. Oh, yeah, you got it cleared. Yeah, of course I got it cleared. 22 months it took me to get it cleared. I'm thinking, what an odd question. Then they start asking me about something called the Sam Adams Project. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. And then the bad cop of the two says, "We know you've been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys."

• 51:12Speaker 02

  I said, "What are you talking about?" And then I said, "Wait a minute.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Are you investigating me?"

• 51:21Speaker 02

  And they said, "Yeah, and we're raiding your house right now as we speak." And I said, "Thank God." I said, "I want to speak to my attorney right now." That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me. And one of the things that I learned, and this became painfully evident when they started arresting January 6 people, was the FBI in Washington likes to make its arrests on Thursdays. Because there are no federal arraignments on Friday. So you're in the DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you. And then they arraign you on Monday. And then you want to make a deal just so you don't ever have to go inside that prison again. But because I asked to see my attorney, they let me go.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  So I called the attorney as soon as I, I got out of the office. Actually, when I was walking out, one of them went over to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was Peter Strzok. And Peter Strzok says, "Tell me he implicated himself."

• 52:23Speaker 02

  And the guy said, "Not really, no. We have to let him go." And so I grabbed my cellphone and I left, went to the attorney's office. They had already called my attorney and said they were charging me with espionage. I hadn't committed espionage. They knew I hadn't committed espionage. And in fact, since then, I'm fast forwarding a lot. Three FBI agents have reached out to me, well, two to my attorneys, one reached out to me directly, to apologize, saying that this came from the top, they thought it was a BS case. They were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they could do. One guy reached out to me through eBay, of all things,

• 53:04Speaker 02

  like to try to cover up the, uh, the trail. He's like, "Listen, I've, I've been losing sleep over this for, excuse me, for the last 13 years. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am." Blah, blah, blah. It's like, "Well, I hope you feel better. My whole life fell apart. But I'm glad you got that off your chest." So, um, it became a matter of, of just survival after that. You know, you have to take it seriously. I was facing 45 years in prison. And then when the Justice Department, um, made a, a request for a proffer meeting. The proffer meeting is, they'll give you a little idea of what they have against you, and then they make an offer. You can take it or leave it. And they offered me 45 years.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And I said, "I'm not doing 45 minutes." I didn't do anything wrong. And this woman, she became Deputy Attorney General, uh, for the Criminal Division under Biden. She said, "Take this deal, Mr. Kiriaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren."

• 54:11Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change: your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. Get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com.

• 54:53Joe Rogan?

  The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month. Or get the Premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. After a year away, Canelo Alvarez is back in the ring October 31st, facing undefeated Christian Mobily live on Dzone, and DraftKings Sportsbook has you covered for the fight. With DraftKings Sportsbook, your number one sportsbook for live betting, you can stay connected as the action unfolds and makes your picks in real time. Whether you're locked in for the main event or watching the full card with friends, DraftKings

• 55:35Joe Rogan?

  Sportsbook gives you another way to follow the fights you already care about. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use the code ROGEN. New DraftKings Sportsbook customers can spend $5 and get $200 in total bonuses within 21 days. That's code ROGEN. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-MYRESSET. 21 and over, Virginia only. Eligibility restrictions apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click to claim for 21 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Limited time offer.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it was... I went home that night and... I went home... I'm ashamed to even say it. That night, we put the kids to bed. And my wife and I were watching TV, and she said, "Come on, let's go to bed." And I said, "I can't sleep. There's no way I'm going to be able to sleep." And she said, "No, come on, let's go to bed." She knew.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I was gonna go down into the garage, turn the car on and just lay across the backseat. And she said, "No, come on. You need to try to get some sleep." And she saved me that night. But 45 years? And so, they waited 10 months before they were even willing to engage in a conversation. And then they offered 10 years on a Monday. On Wednesday, they offered 8. And on Friday, they offered 5. My lead attorney was this legendary guy named Plato Kacheras. And Plato said, "You know, I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  And this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time." He said, "Usually, they offer you 10. You say no. The next offer's 15. Then the next offer's 20." I said, "Why are they coming down in time?" He said, "'Cause they have a shit case and they know it's shit. And that's why we're gonna go to trial and we're gonna win this thing." I said, "Great." Well, they stayed at 5. And then they came back and they said, "3 and 1/2." And I said, "I'm going to trial. I'm gonna win this thing." Turned out, at the time, my best friend, his wife, had an uncle who was OJ Simpson's jury consultant. And she called him for me and she said, "Hey, my friend John, he's

• 58:03Speaker 02

  in this situation. He's like, 'Yeah, I read about this in the papers. He could use your help.'" He came up, didn't charge me a cent. He came up to Washington. We got him a security clearance, which was another thing. We asked for a security clearance. And then the Justice Department called and said, "The White House said Kiriakou's attorneys have enough security clearances." And I said, "Who at the White House said we have enough security clearances?" Well, they had to tell us. That it was John Brennan. "No more attorneys for Kiriakou. Fisher cut bait." We're like, "It's not up to John Brennan to decide if I have enough attorneys." They have an unlimited number of attorneys, an unlimited budget. As it turned out, they

• 58:47Speaker 02

  spent $6 million to put me in prison. Was society really better off spending $6 million to put me in a low-security prison for 23 months? So...

• 59:02Speaker 02

  In the end, they said, "Best and final offer. Thirty months, you do 23." Well, I was only the second American who had ever been charged with this crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  The only other person that was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scrannidge. She was a CIA secretary in Ghana in the 80s. And she was having an affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service. And in the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers in the station and the names of the sources they were running. And so the Ghanaians executed these guys.

• 59:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  She got nine months in prison. Nine months. And they offer me 45 years.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  For blowing the whistle on the torture program. So, my wife and I stayed up all night, literally all night. And because Sharon Scrannidge had taken a plea, there was literally no case law. So what we found, we found several things. We found several articles from the Harvard Law Review saying, "This law is unconstitutional. It violates the First Amendment and it is prior restraint." Right? Like, it tells you in advance, you can't say X, Y, and Z. But because there was no case law, you couldn't challenge it in court. And I said, "Well, can't we just appeal, appeal the charge? And maybe, you know, all the way up to the Supreme Court?" And they said, "Yeah, we can do that post-conviction.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  And then you're going to be 45 years waiting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing. We can't do that." So...

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  So I decided by 6 a.m. I'm gonna turn it down. I believed in my heart I hadn't done anything right. This was political. It was a vendetta by John Brennan. And Obama, by all accounts, I had friends, of course, who were still working at the agency and working at the CIA or at the White House. And they said that Obama had this Nixonian obsession with national security leaks. And it's because that came from Brennan. Obama was a senator for two years. He didn't have any experience doing anything. So he did what John Brennan told him to do. And Brennan said, "You gotta crack down on these leaks. They do nothing but embarrass us." So I decided I'm gonna turn it down.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  6 a.m., I send an email to my attorneys. I had 11 attorneys. I was paying half of them, five of them. And then one of them writes back and says, "Put on a pot of coffee. We'll be at the house by 7." So they come to my house. The four main ones came to the house. Plato was the first one in. Imagine this, like 80-year-old, 6'2", 280-pound, mean old man. He comes in and I said, "Good morning, Plato." And he said, "You stupid son of a bitch, take the deal." Like that. I said, "Take the deal? You're the one that told me not to take the deal. You're the one who told me we're gonna go to trial and win this thing."

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  And he says, "I only told you that to keep your spirits up." And then the second one, his partner, Bob Trout, a sweet gentleman, a southern gentleman. He says, "If you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal." And I'm like, "What? Now what do I do?" And then the third, who was the guy, Mark McDougal, one of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life. And the one that I liked and respected the most out of all of them. I liked all of them and respected all of them, but I felt a connection to this guy. He pulls me aside. He was a little bit angry. And he said, "You know what your problem is?

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Your problem is you think this is about justice. And it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal."

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  And I looked at my wife, and she's just like, "What are we gonna do?" So I took the deal. And I got two and a half years in prison, and they made me do every single day of it. In fact, we went to sentencing, and this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court. And the reason why we didn't go to trial in the end was that the OJ Simpson jury consultant said, "If we were, if we were in any other district in America, I would say, 'Let's go for it, we're gonna win this thing.'" But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire jury is gonna be people from the CIA,

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  from the FBI, from DoD, from intelligence community contractors? He said, "Buddy, you don't have a prayer, take the deal." Yeah. It was bad. So, at sentencing, my attorney said, "Your Honor, we request that Mr. Kiriakou be sent to a minimum-security work camp." She says, "Any objection from the Justice Department?" They said, "No objection." She goes, "Okay, minimum-security work camp. No bars on the windows, no locks on the doors. You're free to come and go as you please, you're just on your honor not to abscond." And then, most of the guys work, there's a little college in town, you go sweep the floors or whatever.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  So, I got to the prison three months later, and it's weird, the system that we have, Joe. You just, you walk up and you knock on the door, and you say, "Hi, I'm John Kiriakou, I'm here to turn myself in." That's all you do, and your friends and family just drive away. And so, they said, "Yeah, you gotta go across the street to the actual prison, they'll process you, and then they just bring you back over here." And I said, "Okay." So I go across the street, and I said, "I'm John Kiriakou, I'm here to turn myself in." And, and the guy takes me by the arm, we go outside, and we start walking around to the back of the prison, and I said, "No, no, I'm supposed to be at the, at the minimum-security camp across the street."

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  And the guy laughs at me, and he goes, "Not according to my paperwork, you're not." And I was like, "Oh, my God, take it easy." We later learned Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence, that he told them, "Make it as difficult as possible."

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  So I told myself, take it easy. If you make any ruckus, they're gonna put you in solitary. You don't say a word. So I didn't say a word. It took them about 40 minutes to process me. Then they walked me to my cell. The only thing the cop said to me, he says, a word of advice, buddy. If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression. And I said, great, thanks. I'm here 40 minutes and now I'm gonna get my ass kicked. I appreciate it. And then I started that whole odyssey.

• 1:06:11Joe Rogan?

  And so what kind of prison were you in?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  I was in FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, which is a low-security prison, but it's called a low-medium and then there's a high-medium. So this was low-medium. It took me five days to get access to a phone. And I called Mark McDougal, the attorney that I liked so much. And I said, Mark, they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins. I said, what do I do? He says, oh, my God. Well, he said, we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then. He said, buddy, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to tough it out. And so that's what I did.

• 1:06:59Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So you have this long career working for the government. They put you away. And what is it like for you to feel so betrayed and to get out? And what do you do when you get out?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  I was frankly, very angry when I got out. I didn't realize how angry I was. Like, people would mention it to me. Like, maybe you should talk to somebody. Maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option. And I was like, why? There's nothing wrong with me. I'm ready to fight and march and, you know, raise my fist against the Obama administration. And so I was wrong, of course. I was, I was so angry that, that...

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  It wasn't even healthy for the people around me. But I'll tell you, Joe, the hardest thing is you think you can just step back into your life again. And you'll never be able to step back into your life. So I thought, okay, well, I'm highly educated. I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies. I have a master's degree in Legislative Policy Analysis. I finished my PhD case, uh, classwork in, uh, in International Affairs. I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber. We don't hire felons. I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere.

• 1:08:37Joe Rogan?

  And you're broke.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  And I was broke. Bankrupt.

• 1:08:40Joe Rogan?

  So you couldn't even get a job driving for Uber?

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Uber turned me down.

• 1:08:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. But you know what, though?

• 1:08:50Joe Rogan?

  What did you do?

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Well, I was confident that I was right and they were wrong. And my, my wife, unfortunately, she's now my ex-wife, but she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever gave me. She said, "You have to keep telling your side of the story because eventually they're going to move on to their next victim. And if you keep talking, your side of the story is going to be the side of record. And eventually, the truth is going to come out." And sure enough, six weeks before, um, before I was released from prison, I called her. I was, I was allowed to call her every other day for 15 minutes. So I called her and I said, "How was your day?" And she said, "It was great."

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  And I said, "Really? Great? Why was, why was it so great?" And she said, "Because the Senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true." And I said, "That is great." And she said, "John McCain stood up on the floor of the Senate and said, 'If it weren't for John Kerry Aku, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name.'" And so when I got home, God bless him, I, the, one of the first calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff. And he said, "Senator McCain says, 'Welcome home,' and he wants to know what he can do to be helpful." And I said, "Oh, my God." I said, "Tell him." I said, "Thank you." I liked McCain very much from when I was working on Kerry's staff. Kerry was a little jealous of McCain.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  And McCain would go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi. Kerry said to me one time, why don't you two get a room or something? And I said, no, I said, it's, we have this connection over torture. I said McCain takes me seriously and I take him seriously. And so when I, when I spoke to McCain, I said, these damn Obama people, they confiscated my pension. And I'm gonna have to work until the day I die. They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension. So he came up with this idea, it was a great idea, to write an amendment. My attorney wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  And it said that every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated. So of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to. So he said, nobody reads these 1,500-page bills. We're gonna slip it in there. And he said, I'm gonna be on the conference committee. We'll get it taken care of. And then he got sick. He got a brain tumor. And he wasn't named to the conference committee. And so they pulled it back out again. And then he died. And so here I am, 10 years later.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  The only way that this can be made right is with a presidential pardon. And that's what I've been working on for years now.

• 1:11:59Joe Rogan?

  So what did you do for money?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  I was offered a job at a small think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies. And they said, we'll give you an office, but you're gonna have to raise your own salary. And so it was just like constant GoFundMe. So I did that for a year. I made $20,000 for the year. And I said, I can't do this. It's untenable. And so... I just decided, look, no company is gonna hire me, right? I can't go back into government again. And so I'm gonna have to work for myself. So I had already written my first book, made number five on the New York Times Bestsellers list. My second book, I wrote Longhand from Prison. I ended up winning two literary awards for that book.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  I won the PEN First Amendment Award, which along with the Pen Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe is one of the big four. And then I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year that year. I thought, I'm gonna keep writing books. I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium for Independent Journalism. So it's like 200 small-town papers around the country. And, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting. And then the Greek government, I happen to be Greek-American. My grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes. As soon as I was arrested, like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, what can we do to be helpful?

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  And I said, you can give me citizenship. And man, like that, I got Greek citizenship. And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law. And then they passed it quickly, the parliament passed it into law, and then the European Union adopted it. So I went to Brussels and I testified there, and then they repackaged it. Now it's the law of the land in all of the European Union. And then people in the States began taking me more seriously. I started doing some paid speaking gigs. I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple of different universities. And then, you know, after a while, you can make an okay living.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  I'm still gonna have to work until the day I die because I have literally nothing saved. It all went to the attorneys. And, you know, hope for the best. I will say that I was a third-generation Democrat. I left the Democratic Party ages ago.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions convinced me that I had done the right thing. And now, I have found common cause with populist Republicans. You know, you don't have to agree on every issue, right? You don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe in and everything they stand for. But I've struck up a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson, sweetest guy in the world, and a great supporter of mine. And Judge Napolitano. It's a love fest every time the two of us get together.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  And I realized that, you know, this thing, this political system we have, it's antiquated. It doesn't work. You have to engage with the individual. Like, I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene on some of these civil liberties issues, right? Or Thomas Massey, or Bernie Sanders for that matter. But I've realized that, nah, I've got to stand up for what's right, not what the DNC happens to think what's right, or some politician that I used to, you know, think I had respect for thinks is right.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  A couple of nights before I left for prison, the director, the former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, who later became the deputy director for operations, and was very close to Brennan, he was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA, he tweeted at me, and he said, "Don't drop the soap," with a laughing emoji. I gave myself a couple hours to cool off, and then I texted back, and I said, "Jose, I'm on the right side of history, and you are not." And that gave me such peace. I knew I could go to prison, survive this just fine, and come out and still make an impact.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, knock on wood, that's how it's worked out.

• 1:16:46Joe Rogan?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance.

• 1:17:31Joe Rogan?

  Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Believe it or not, the holiday season is here again, and that means you might need to fill some seasonal roles, fast. Maybe you need extra cashiers or stockers, or maybe something more unique like a lead elf, or an expert gift wrapper, or a Zamboni driver. Whoever you're looking for, whatever skills you need to power through the rest of the year, ZipRecruiter is one of the best places to start your search because you can try

• 1:18:14Joe Rogan?

  it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications, showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first. There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  It's ugly. You know, and you get to prison.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  One of my attorneys said, "Hey, I've had, I've collected a list of 600 emails, email addresses from people who want to know how you're doing. Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send me a letter and I'll send it around to these people." I said, "Okay, great." It took me, you don't realize it, but you're in shock for the first week or two. And then I started settling into the routine. And it was kinda... I mean, it was pretty screwed up. That first day, 20 minutes after the cop warned me about people coming into my room unannounced, these two guys just walk in boldly, just walk in. I jump up, I put my fist up, I go, "What do you want?"

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  One of them has a swastika on his neck, it took up his entire neck, it came up onto his face. The other one had "fuck you" tattooed on his eyelids. So I go, "What do you want?" And the swastika guy says, "You the new guy?" I said, "Yeah, so?" And he says, "You a fag?" I said, "No, I'm not a fag." He said, "You a rat?" I said, "No, I didn't have anybody else in my case, I'm not a rat." And he says, "You a chomo?" I go, "I don't know what that word means." He goes, "Chomo, child molester." I said, "No, I'm not a child molester." And he goes, "Okay, you could sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." And I was like, "Oh, hmm, I guess I'm with the Aryans now."

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Grand. Yeah. And then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the Banano family. And one day he said to me, I would get the New York Times and he would get the New York Post, and we would trade at the end of each day. He asked me...

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  "Let me ask you something," he says. "Why you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria?" I said, "I don't know, Pete. My first day here, they told me to sit with them." He goes, "From today, you're with the Italians." And I said, "Awesome." And they became my closest friends. I mean, I got a book out of it. They were absolutely wonderful. Honorable, honest, fun. "The smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most respect." And once word was out that I was with the Italians, it was hands off. And it was thanks to one guy, shout out to Mark Lanzalotti. Mark was from Philly,

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  and he saw in the New York Times I was going to be assigned to that prison on a Sunday. I was assigned on Thursday. And he took it upon himself to go to every one of the Italians to say, "There's a CIA guy coming here. He's not an FBI agent. The FBI are cops and rats. The CIA protected us from the Muslims." And they're like, "Oh, okay." And so it was, you know, welcome.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  No problems.

• 1:22:01Joe Rogan?

  "God, it has to be insanely stressful."

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  It was like, it was like living in the Twilight Zone. The stress, the stress will kill you. It's incredible. You see people break down all the time. They just lose it. And it's not like you're gonna, you know, be taken out to some medical unit someplace. You go to solitary, and you can live or die down in there. Yeah. Oh, so I was telling you, so I, I waited about six weeks before I was comfortable enough to write a, a letter. So I, I very arrogantly called it "Letter from Loretto" because I had such respect for Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." And so, I said two things in this. I mean, I talked about the food, and I talked about the Italians, and... But I said two things. I said, "There was this one guard who was really abusive.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  She was absolutely horrible." You know that phrase, "Rode hard and put away wet"? That was this, that was this woman. All tatted out from, you know, the neck down, and just a nasty, mean old...

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Awful, awful person. So, I was walking through the hall one day and she said, "Hey, are you that motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce at mail call?" And I go, "Kiriakou", just like it's spelled. She goes, "How about if I call you fuckface", like that. So, I said, "Classy", and I walked away. Somebody later told me, "They're not allowed to talk to us that way. That's a violation of, you know, Code 11.8 subsection, you know, B, whatever." So, I wrote it in the, um, in the letter. And I was just like, you know, "Life in prison, what am I gonna do? This, this woman swears at me, there's nothing I can do." The other thing was more important.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  I'd been there three days. And one of my cellmates was an Australian arsonist. And he said, "Let me walk you around and introduce you to the guys." I said, "Okay." We go to this other housing unit. And there's a little tiny guy there, who didn't speak any English. And he said, "This is", I forget what his name is, Ahmed or something. He's from Iraq. And I said, "Anasheirab b'marftek", "It's very nice to meet you." And he says, "Ah, tatkalem arabi, wa'ana arab, ana'min Iraq." I said, "Yeah, great, you're from Iraq. I was in Iraq, it's very nice to meet you." Turns out, he was there on a terrorism charge. He was the Imam of some mosque in New York. And somebody was trying to sell a Stinger missile to somebody. And he translated the, the document,

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in this terrorism case. So, I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day. And usually, if you're being called into lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary. So, I hear my name, "Kiriakou, lieutenant's office, immediately", always with "immediately", and they know you can't do it immediately because all the doors are locked. So, I wait for a 10-minute move period. The, the bells ring and I go to the lieutenant's office. I said, "You wanted to see me?" And they have the, this guy's picture on a, on a computer screen. "You know this guy?" I said, "I don't know him, I met him yesterday." What'd you say to him? I said, "I said, 'Nice to meet you.'" What did he say to you?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  He said, "Nice to meet you too." "Oh, yeah?" "Well, after you walked out, he called a number in Pakistan and they told him to kill you." "I said, 'Get the fuck out of here. I could kill this guy with my thumb.'" "Oh, no, no, don't do that. We've been looking for a reason to, to transfer him out." I'm like, "Okay." So, every time I see this guy, I give him the stink eye, right? And then he gives me the stink eye back. But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "That doesn't make any sense." He's Kurdish. He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish. Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan? That just didn't make sense. So, I saw him in the yard.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  And I went up to him and he got kinda scared, like he was gonna try to defend himself. And I had, you know, six inches and a hundred pounds on this guy. So, I said, "I said, 'Wait a minute. I just wanna ask you a question.'" "Did the cops say anything to you about me?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "What did they say to you?" And he said, "They told me that after we met, you called a number in Washington and they told you to kill me." And I said, "Oh, they did, did they?" So, I went back to the law library and I looked this up. And this was a Class D felony. It was conspiring to commit violence in a federal facility. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. So, I wrote it in my letter and I sent it to my attorney. And I didn't give it a second thought.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  I didn't know my attorney was friends with Arianna Huffington, who then put it on Huffington Post with this banner headline. Millions of hits. The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me. And it's in, I mean, it's everywhere from, from CNN to Playboy to The Economist and, and Time Magazine, when Time Magazine was a thing. And NPR is calling the prison to interview me. And the next thing I know, I'm called to the warden's office. Well, that's in an off-limits part of the facility. So, the warden calls me in, he's like, "I'm gonna send you to solitary right now." And I thought, you know, is now the time to be, to be humble before the warden? Or should I stake my claim?

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  And I said, "Warden?" With all due respect, I've gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you? Give me some credit. He said, "Yeah, we'll see what you say when you've spent some time in solitary." I said, "I've lived in Yemen, in Pakistan. I'm not afraid of your Loretto, Pennsylvania solitary." "Besides," I said, "go ahead and send me to solitary. CNN's gonna be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot." And I just looked at him. I never went to solitary, not for a minute.

• 1:28:12Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:15Joe Rogan?

  Jeez. So they're just trying to set you guys up?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:19Joe Rogan?

  Trying to get you guys at each other's throat and hopefully one of you'll do something.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  They did it one other time. My, one of my attorneys-

• 1:28:25Joe Rogan?

  Do you know who orchestrated that?

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:28:30Joe Rogan?

  Do you think it was the warden himself?

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  No, I don't think he was smart enough. I don't think he cared enough. It had to come from the agency.

• 1:28:38Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  There was one other incident, too. Um, I lived in the same block of cells with a, with an Afghan-American pharmacist who had an oxy problem. Nice guy. And he came up to me one day and he said, "Hey, um, the spokesman for the Taliban is here now and he wants to meet you." I said, "The spokesman for the Taliban?" I said, "Are you talking about that case in New Jersey?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "I don't have anything to say to the spokesman of the Taliban. I don't want to meet him." And he said, "Oh, okay, I'll tell him." So, I'm out in the yard one day, and my attorney had warned me, "They're, they're upset at the shortness of your sentence.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  So be very careful, they're gonna try to set you up and add years on." So I'm out in the yard and here comes this guy with a beard down to his waist and he's got his hand out to shake my hand and I put my hands up so as not to touch him and I looked just past him and there's a guard in the woods outside the thing with a long distance camera lens and he's going click click click click click click click click click click and I said, "Don't you even think about touching me." And he said, "Oh, come on, man, come on, we have a lot in common." I said, "We have nothing in common, I spent half my career trying to kill people like you." I said, "Get away from me, don't touch me or you're gonna end up unconscious on the ground."

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  And he walked away and then he got transferred out and I said, "Isn't it interesting that the spokesman for the Taliban was sent to our prison and was only here for four days? Isn't that interesting?" And then they just gave up.

• 1:30:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:24Joe Rogan?

  This kinda stuff is so hard to believe.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  It's America. You don't wanna believe this about America.

• 1:30:33Joe Rogan?

  You wanna believe we're the good guys.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Joe Rogan?

  And you wanna believe that we would never turn on our own like that over something that's just.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they do.

• 1:30:42Joe Rogan?

  But the crazy thing is, it's like the CIA torture program wasn't even effective.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  No, that's the thing. It wasn't even effective. But you know what though, Joe? When these guys die, and they've started to die, in their obituaries, it's gonna say that they were among the creators of the CIA's torture program. And so, they have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and over and over again that it was the right thing to do.

• 1:31:14Joe Rogan?

  What I don't understand is, wouldn't they want to be effective?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  You would think.

• 1:31:20Joe Rogan?

  That, I mean, that's...

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  If they were clear-headed, yes.

• 1:31:22Joe Rogan?

  That's the only thing that makes the least sense to me, like, I, idealistically, I like to think of the people that are in charge of the CIA of having a very important role in national security.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:35Joe Rogan?

  And if you're in a position where you have a very important role in national security, it's... It's imperative to do what is most effective. And if torture is not most effective.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  Then don't do it.

• 1:31:50Joe Rogan?

  Then you would abandon torture and use those coercion tactics that the other guy was using.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And in fact, they ended up abandoning the torture program. Yeah. Mitchell and Justin took their $108 million and they retired to Florida. And, uh, and then subsequent CIA directors following George Tenet said, yeah, you know, this didn't work. We're not gonna do it anymore.

• 1:32:17Joe Rogan?

  God.

• 1:32:21Joe Rogan?

  I mean.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  I, I have to laugh just because it's so nuts. What else can you do?

• 1:32:27Joe Rogan?

  It's beyond nuts. It's disgusting.

• 1:32:32Joe Rogan?

  And it's just amazing that they could get away with that.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they have. Nobody's been prosecuted. Nobody.

• 1:32:41Joe Rogan?

  Does Trump know about all this stuff?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  About my stuff?

• 1:32:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Like, have you ever tried to get a pardon out of him?

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  I, I've tried. Um, I, let me rephrase. I am trying. So I have a letter that, uh, that Ronald Reagan's former deputy attorney general generously wrote, asking the president to pardon me. Tucker Carlson signed it. Judge Napolitano signed it. Doug Deason, who's a friend of the president, signed it. Sid Miller, who's here in, in Texas, um, has signed it. And the president's former US attorney in Utah has signed it. And then, and, and I sent it to, uh, to Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney. And then other people have said, oh, I would have signed that. So we have a second letter. Dr. Phil, um, has agreed to sign it.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  There are a couple of other people, high-level people. Ken Higgin, who was the head of the president's transition team, has signed it. There are a couple of others. We had really good news yesterday from CIA Director John Ratcliffe. And he said that the CIA has no objection if the president were to pardon me. That's a big deal.

• 1:34:00Joe Rogan?

  That's great news.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  We have also a nice one-sentence statement from Tulsi Gabbard, saying that she has no objection to a pardon. So, I don't know, man. I'm hoping for the best. You know what they say in business school. Hope is not a strategy. But...

• 1:34:15Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild? And also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one. The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human-grade food. The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked

• 1:35:00Joe Rogan?

  to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So, try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  Traditional banks are making it harder than ever to secure a small business loan. That's why thousands of business owners trust Cardiff for same-day funding. With over two decades of expertise, business owners keep voting Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender. Apply now for up to $500,000 in same-day business funding at cardiff.co/rogan. Again, that's cardiff.co/rogan. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  I genuinely don't know what else to do.

• 1:36:09Joe Rogan?

  Now, you're doing all these conversations. You did the conversation with Tucker, you did his show, you're now doing my show, you've done a bunch of other shows. Do you have any concern that in exposing more of what has been done to you, that it somehow limits your possibility of being pardoned because you're exposing so many people that may still be working there?

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  I'm told that all of my detractors are either dead or retired. A friend of mine from the CIA called me the other day to say something very funny. That she was sitting in a mandatory security briefing, and she said, "One of the slides was just a picture of me, and it said, 'The insider threat'" underneath. And she said, "Everybody started to boo." And the instructor said, "Why? Why are you booing?" And one of the guys said, "He's not an insider threat, he's a whistleblower." And she said, "In the next running of the class, my picture was removed." So, I won. I won, and John Brennan lost. That's really what it's come down to.

• 1:37:23Joe Rogan?

  It's so hard to hear these stories.

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  It's terrible.

• 1:37:25Joe Rogan?

  It's so hard to imagine that our government can be so disgusting.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Oh my god, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, truly. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. And, you know, think of it this way. Also, at the working level, these FBI agents don't get promoted by not arresting you.

• 1:37:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  The assistant US attorneys don't get promoted by not prosecuting you, or by giving you a short sentence.

• 1:37:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  Right? They all see themselves as, you know, having the corner office at the law firm someday, or running for congress, or for governor, and they're gonna make that career on your back.

• 1:38:02Joe Rogan?

  That's the problem, right? Because there's a lot of cases where people are setting people up, and, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine about this one case where there was a, I'm sure you remember it, there was a 19-year-old...

• 1:38:16Joe Rogan?

  I think he was probably, at the very least, intellectually challenged guy and they tricked him into, uh, they radicalized him, gave him a fake bomb, gave him a cellphone. Do you know the story?

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 1:38:29Joe Rogan?

  And then swept in and, and got him. And he wasn't planning on doing anything.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:38:35Joe Rogan?

  It was, they talked him into doing the whole thing. He wasn't a bright person. And they got a arrest because of that. So it adds to their career.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:38:45Joe Rogan?

  Like when, when I was having a conversation about this, we brought up the, uh, the governor that they were planning on kidnapping.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Joe Rogan?

  Governor.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Whitmer.

• 1:38:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:54Joe Rogan?

  Uh, Michigan.

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And that 12 of the 14 people were working with the FBI.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Joe Rogan?

  Which is just...

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Listen, there are well documented cases where the FBI infiltrates a group and they go to a meeting. And literally everybody in the meeting is an FBI agent. Like, what is that? Is this a joke? This is what the American taxpayers' money goes for. Do you remember, have you heard of the Route 82 Bridge plot in Cleveland?

• 1:39:22Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  There are three morons sitting in a bar, getting drunk.

• 1:39:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I did hear about this.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  The other guy comes in, "Hey, you know what we should do? It would be so much fun. Blow up the Road, Route 82 Bridge. I have some explosives." And these guys are drunk. They're like, "Yeah, let's do Route 82 Bridge." Well, the guy with the explosives is an FBI informant. He set them all up. And they got like 20, 18, and 15 years in prison. It was the FBI's idea. Not their idea. They're just sitting in a bar drinking.

• 1:39:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, how about January 6th?

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  How about January 6th?

• 1:39:53Joe Rogan?

  This is the crazy... I was trying to explain to Jim Gaffigan one day. Jim Gaffigan was talking about what they did in January 6th. I go, "Do you understand that there were paid people that were working for the federal government? They were employees of the federal government that were on that lawn trying to convince people to go in?" And he was very incredulous. He, he did, he did not believe it. And I said, "They are agent provocateurs"

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:22Joe Rogan?

  "that are, that is their job to try to get you to do something illegal."

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. So they can build their careers by making these arrests.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  Not just that, but demonize the president, the former president to a much larger extent. To charge him with insurrection, to say that he was plotting to overthrow the government.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as it turns out, the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan.

• 1:40:48Joe Rogan?

  How was he plotting to overthrow the government?

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  In 2015 and 2016 with Russiagate.

• 1:40:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  You know, I remember talking to CIA friends of mine, saying, you know, they taught us in training that you've got to follow the evidence. And there's no evidence that any of this happened. I worked with Christopher Steele on an operation in London 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  There was this fundamental misunderstanding of what an operations officer was supposed to do. An operations officer goes out and collects intelligence and then sends it back. And that's it. Then it's up to the analyst to decide, this is great, this is crap, this is not true, this is partially true, whatever. So, he goes out there, talks to whatever low-level terrible sources he happened to have, writes all this nonsense down, sends it back, and they're like, oh, look what Donald Trump did. He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed. No, he didn't.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  One guy made this up and Christopher Steele wrote it and sent it back. That doesn't make it fact.

• 1:42:05Joe Rogan?

  Was it funded by Hillary Clinton?

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  It sure was. Yes, it was.

• 1:42:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which is equally wild.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  You made another point I wanted to address. These January 6 people, let's say that some of them did do whatever, broke the window, or went into the building unauthorized. Okay, then that's deserving of a smack on the hand. And a strongly worded letter and maybe a thousand dollar fine, don't do that again. 30 years in prison?

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  Again, is society really better off by locking all these people up and spending millions and millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money to do it? Of course not.

• 1:42:54Joe Rogan?

  No, of course not, but it also just divides us even further.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  It does.

• 1:42:58Joe Rogan?

  And it also very much distorted the narrative with people like Jim Gaffigan, who's a friend of mine, who's a very left-leaning comedian. And he had it in his mind that these people went in, and they also have this thing where they say a cop was murdered.

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:15Joe Rogan?

  That's not true.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  I hate that.

• 1:43:17Joe Rogan?

  They say it over and over again, that's not true. One cop died after the fact of a heart attack. You could say maybe it was because of the stress of January 6th, perhaps?

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe not.

• 1:43:31Joe Rogan?

  Maybe not.

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  Maybe he shouldn't have been a cop.

• 1:43:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you can die of a heart-

• 1:43:35Speaker 02

  If he had such significant health problems.

• 1:43:36Joe Rogan?

  Right, like, that's not normal, to just die of a heart attack because of a very stressful day. But that's it, this idea that they killed cops, that narrative keeps coming out, it was an insurrection, they murdered cops, they broke into the White House, they were looking for Nancy Pelosi, they were gonna kill her, like, okay, are you sure? Because there's a lot of this story that's bullshit. Now it turns out, at one point in time, they were saying it was 20 FBI agents, now the latest number is 270.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:44:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  That's huge.

• 1:44:09Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot of people, that's a lot of people that are encouraging people to break in. And there's many instances of these suspected people that are on camera, a lot of them are wearing face masks, there's one of them where a guy's removing the broken glass from the window and encouraging people to go in, and another guy gets in his face and goes, "Do not do that," and then he pushes that guy, "Fuck you," and the other guy backs off.

• 1:44:37Joe Rogan?

  How is that not being investigated as a serious crime? And, like, that is a serious, it's a violation of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place. If the FBI was on that lawn- I would hope what they would be doing is informing people entering into this building is a felony. Breaking these windows, getting into this building is, you do not want to do this. If you want to peacefully protest, do that. But I'm telling you, this will fuck with you for the rest of your life and most likely ruin it.

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  I think you're a hundred percent right.

• 1:45:18Joe Rogan?

  That's what I would hope from law enforcement. I wouldn't hope that they would be trying to set people up.

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  And from a civil society.

• 1:45:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  You know, do we, we want to set people up to go to prison? We want to wreck families and wreck people's lives? Why would we want to do that?

• 1:45:37Joe Rogan?

  Also, what, was there, did they turn down the idea of bringing in the National Guard?

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  You know, I, I really don't understand. It, it appears yes. It, it appears that that's exactly what happened.

• 1:45:52Joe Rogan?

  Also significantly deterred people from committing these crimes.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:45:58Joe Rogan?

  That they were encouraged to do.

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  I'll tell you, if I was at a demonstration and all of a sudden the National Guard showed up, I'd say, ah, this isn't for me.

• 1:46:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think most people would do that as well.

• 1:46:08Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 1:46:12Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. It's just so gross that

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Joe Rogan?

  There are legal system gets used against political opponents in that way, in such a devious and just sinister way.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

• 1:46:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. God, what a gross business. It's just sad because I also am a patriot and I want to think of us as better than that.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're the good guys.

• 1:46:43Joe Rogan?

  And I don't think it's necessarily the fault of these individuals. I think the system really sucks. And I think you work for that system and just like all these congresspeople that wind up insider trading. Everybody else is doing it. It's the culture. You get wrapped up in it, just like bad cops. You know, you get assigned to a precinct that's filled with corrupt cops and you have to do things to stay with them. They're your blood brothers and you're all in this together. And so you wind up doing some criminal activities that you think are just, everybody does it, is what we do.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:47:18Joe Rogan?

  And you're FBI agent. Well, we gotta set this guy up. Okay, let's set him up. This is what we do. Hey, if he doesn't do it, he's not committing a crime. We got nothing on him. Okay? And then you just convince him to do it, and he's a fucking idiot. And so he does it, and he hits that cellphone, and now you're arresting him, and he's like, "What?"

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35Joe Rogan?

  And he's so dumb, he barely knows what happened.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And the chances are, he can't afford a decent attorney.

• 1:47:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Or he's not notorious enough and newsworthy enough to, to get, you know, A-list attorneys volunteering pro bono.

• 1:47:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  So he's stuck with a, a public defender that's gonna spend eight hours on the case, and he's gonna get screwed in the end.

• 1:47:59Joe Rogan?

  And there's also the narrative that's very difficult to shake. So if you get accused of some sort of a heinous crime, the narrative for most people that are casual viewers of that story is that you're a terrorist.

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Joe Rogan?

  Or you're a guy who's gonna kidnap the governor, or you're a guy who is an insurrectionist, who's trying to overthrow the government on January 6th. And then you watch the footage that they wouldn't release during the trials, and you see them getting a guided tour. The guided tour through, through like, the, the security guards are walking them into the senate. Like, what the fuck? What is this? Like, what is, and why is no one outraged? And why is it only one side that's outraged? God, if I was a, a, if I was a, a Democrat congressman, or a senator, or if I was any sort of a politician on the other side, I'd be like, "Do you know how disgusting this is? This is, you're, you're using this to go after Donald Trump?"

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  Of all things.

• 1:48:57Joe Rogan?

  In, instead of just better political opposition?

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the media are to blame in part as well.

• 1:49:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, they're bought and paid for.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:49:06Joe Rogan?

  I mean, 100%. The, the media in this country is a complete and total failure. The, the only thing that's real media in this country are independent journalists.

• 1:49:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:49:14Joe Rogan?

  And there's mostly people who worked for large media corporations, and either were fired, or had to leave because their own ethics and morals, and eventually branched out on their own. And now they're in grave danger.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:28Joe Rogan?

  You know? And they're worried about being prosecuted or set up.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more.

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  Or killed.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's super sketchy, because that's, we like to think of ourselves as better. We're, this is the shining example for the rest of the world. This is the experiment in self-government that the whole world follows this lead. And when you see that not just tolerated, but standard.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it hurts. It really does. I was raised in a family like you were. Uh, where I was taught that this was the greatest country on earth.

• 1:50:07Joe Rogan?

  I still think it is.

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  And I do too. And that's why we have to weed out.

• 1:50:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  The likes of John Brennan.

• 1:50:16Joe Rogan?

  God.

• 1:50:18Joe Rogan?

  But it seems like there's a lot of people like that.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:20Joe Rogan?

  That are deeply rooted.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed.

• 1:50:22Joe Rogan?

  And this is what you were talking about too, that presidents come and go. But those people, that's the real power. You know, this co- this term, the deep state, a lot of people that, you know, there's a lot of people that don't like to entertain any kind of conspiracies because they think it's like a fool's journey. But you're really foolish if you don't believe in conspiracies.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:43Joe Rogan?

  Because just how many of them have to be proven true before you go, maybe I should reassess my position on these things?

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Sixty-two years after the JFK assassination, we're still learning new information.

• 1:50:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Information that's been kept from us.

• 1:51:00Joe Rogan?

  And still being kept. There's still a lot of it. I mean, they were supposed to, that was the, one of the more disappointing things about this administration, like immediately, right off the jump, we're supposed to get all the CIA files, all the JFK files. We're, we're supposed to know exactly what happened to him. We know very little. Very little new information has been released that illuminates any aspects of that case.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a shame.

• 1:51:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's terrible. Because most likely, at least some part of our government was involved in assassinating the president. And no one went to jail.

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51:37Joe Rogan?

  Nothing happened. And in fact, people succeeded and thrived after that.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Sad truth.

• 1:51:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 02

  That's exactly what happened.

• 1:51:45Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it goes back, there's so many cases, like with the, I've had conversations with people that like, they, you know, they don't want to be fools, right? So that's a lot of the people that don't want to believe in conspiracies, like, okay, most of it can be explained away by incompetence or coincidence and this and that, like, that's not even true. It's not even most of it, it's some things can be explained away.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  Some things. I had a friend at the agency, he was one of my first bosses. And he had started out in, uh, in this like internship program that the agency had, the, the, ma- it was, you had to be working on a master's degree. But anyway, his first assignment was in the counterintelligence center, which at the time was being run by James Angleton. And, um, on his first day, the secretary walked him around and, you know, this is what we do over here and this is what we do over there. And there was this entire wall of file folders. And she said, whatever you do, don't look in those folders. You're not cleared for that.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Well, he said, well, of course, the very first minute that he's left alone, he runs and looks in the folders. And he said, every single one of those folders was on an American citizen. And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.

• 1:53:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Joe Rogan?

  The crazy thing too, in a lot of people's eyes, is the difference between what they thought of, what the narrative is of the Obama administration, in terms of like whistleblowers and, like what the hope was, you know, it was hope and change, right?

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  Oh, hope and change. And you know the statistic. The Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during the First World War. Between 1917 and 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the media.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  Under Barack Obama, eight people were charged with espionage for speaking to the media. So he was the enemy of whistleblowers.

• 1:53:56Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, that was part of his campaign.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Joe Rogan?

  Part of his campaign.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:54:00Joe Rogan?

  Was protection of whistleblowers.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:54:02Joe Rogan?

  In fact, it was in the Hope and Change website.

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look at the Dosty Lali massacre that I mentioned earlier. It was part of his campaign to open an investigation of Dosty Lali. What happened was at Dosty Lali, Afghanistan, on November the 30th and December the 1st, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up en masse, right? And the Northern Alliance called us and said, "What do we do with all these guys? We don't have room for them." So we told them, "Put them in trucks, take them out to the desert, and just hold them there until we can divide them up and send them to smaller jails all around the country. And if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan."

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  But there were no air holes in the containers, there was no food, there was no water, and of the 2,000, 14 survived. And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. So Barack Obama said in 2008, if he's elected president, he's going to investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it. And then there was nothing. So I said to John Kerry, I said, "Listen, this is part of the Obama campaign. Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing." And so I went, and there are still bones just sticking out of the sand, there are

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  clothes that have just been laying there in the desert all these years. All the bodies are still there, what's left of them.

• 1:55:35Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's grisly. So I come back, and I get a call from a, kind of a prominent human rights activist, and he said he wanted to see me, but it had to be private. So we went to Johns Hopkins University, there was a classroom that wasn't being used, we met there, and he said, "Listen, I have a witness, who was 12 years old at the time." And he was hiding behind a rock. And he saw what happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out. I said, okay. And he said, but what's new is he says that there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black T-shirts and they were speaking English. I said, okay, that's all I need.

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  So I wrote a letter to the agency and I, I asked, you know, for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site at the box up? Or at the, uh, at the location where the trucks were opened? Um, and I had it auto penned, John Kerry, Chairman. Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and he says, hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter. I said, I didn't see any response from the agency. I just checked my mail an hour ago. And he said, they classified it top secret. It's down in the vault. I said, top secret? I said, well, what did it say? And he says, it says, go fuck yourself. I said, great. That's how they want to play it. So I went to Kerry and Kerry says, ah, you know,

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  we're stirring up a hornet's nest here and I think we should just let this fade into history. I was like, again? Cause you want so badly to be Secretary of State again.

• 1:57:22Joe Rogan?

  God, what a gross business.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  It's awful, hideous.

• 1:57:27Joe Rogan?

  What is it like for, for you on the outside now? Watching what's going on in the world?

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  There are some places that I'm optimistic about. And actually there are some developments that may look ugly on the surface that I'm optimistic about. First of all, this ceasefire, we're recording this on, I guess today's Thursday, but the ceasefire that was announced this morning, this is huge, huge. And I think this is not a victory for the Israelis. I think that, I think that it makes Donald Trump stronger and Benjamin Netanyahu weaker. Netanyahu's decision to bomb Qatar was too much.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Just too much. It served, it could have served to embarrass the president. What it ended up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position. So, that's a victory for the White House, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:58:22Joe Rogan?

  Can I stop you real quick?

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:23Joe Rogan?

  The correct pronunciation? How did you say it?

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  Gutter.

• 1:58:27Joe Rogan?

  You said gutter.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  Uh huh, it's qaf.

• 1:58:30Joe Rogan?

  But, so I've heard cutter.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  It's not cutter, but g- you're saying like a G?

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  They use a G sound.

• 1:58:37Joe Rogan?

  Gutter.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Other Arabs would call it Qatar, with a, like a K.

• 1:58:41Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  But, in the Gulf dialect, it's way down here, qaf.

• 1:58:46Joe Rogan?

  Qatar.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:47Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  The other thing is Iran. Man, I follow Iran more closely than anybody I know. You remember, you're, you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much. When we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China. And Richard Nixon was the most anti-China person that could possibly have been elected president. Yet it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and opened diplomatic relations. And, I've, call me crazy, but I think that if there's going to be peace with Iran, Donald Trump's gonna make that peace with Iran. It may not be in the form of a trip to Tehran, but I could see a trip to Riyadh and have

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  a meeting brokered by, by Mohammed bin Salman, and maybe we can come to some sort of an agreement on, on issue number one or issue number two.

• 1:59:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, it seems to be a part of what he wants to accomplish in these four years. Is that he wants to go down as having made significant change in the world in a positive direction.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  And, and we're seeing it, whether, whether people want to admit it or not.

• 1:59:56Joe Rogan?

  That's part of the problem, because of narratives.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  That's it. You know, peace between India and Pakistan doesn't, doesn't fit in the Democratic Party's narrative that Donald Trump is a warmonger. He's not a warmonger. Ask, you know, the Africans that he's weighed in for, and we have peace in Sub-Saharan Africa now. Or, this agreement today between Hamas and, and the Israelis. You know, I think this is the first of several new developments that's gonna lead to the end of this conflict.

• 2:00:25Joe Rogan?

  What is your take on Netanyahu's position? Because, if war is over, Netanyahu will no longer be running Israel. Is that correct?

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  Eventually Netanyahu has a vested interest in making sure that this war lasts as long as possible, because remember, he's still under indictment for corruption. Also, one thing that most Americans don't understand is the Israeli political system is such that it is literally impossible for any party to win a working majority in the Knesset. Right? There are just too many parties and too many individual interests. So you've got, you know, a dozen parties represented. Benjamin Netanyahu has never won more than 27% of the vote.

• 2:01:14Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  He's very unpopular. It's just that he's the least unpopular of the unpopular politicians. And it's a crazy way to run a country. One of the things that the Greeks did, because the Greeks had the same problem, there are just too many parties, right? So you win 20% and you become the prime minister. 20%? Nobody wants you.

• 2:01:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  So what they did is they raised the threshold to which you have to, which you have to meet to win election to the parliament, from 3% to 5%. So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties. But then the party that comes in first, first past the poll, gets an extra 50 seats. Then you don't have to go into any coalition governments with anybody. And you can run the country for four years, or five years, whatever it happens to be. That's what the Israelis need to do. But Netanyahu, longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, wildly unpopular. And it's funny, because he used to be considered a right-wing extremist, and now he's the moderate of the government.

• 2:02:17Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:02:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. The likes of Itamar Ben-Gavir, and Smotrich, and these other guys who have come in from the right, they were attacking him to the point where he had to bring their parties into this coalition government, just to get him to shut up. I mean, these are people that have felony convictions for anti-Arab hate crimes, and now they're, you know, Minister of National Security, Minister of Finance with responsibility for the West Bank. What's that?

• 2:02:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  It's a terrible, untenable position.

• 2:02:54Joe Rogan?

  Haven't they decided to go ahead and prosecute him even while he's in office?

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's an ongoing dispute that the Israeli Supreme Court has weighed in on a number of times. So the Minister of Justice is appointed, of course, by the Prime Minister. But the Supreme Court is independent of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice. So the Minister of Justice says, "You can't prosecute him while he's Prime Minister." And the Supreme Court says, "Oh, yes, you can." And orders the court then to continue the case. So if the case is going to be continued, Netanyahu's only viable strategy is delaying tactics. Appeal after appeal after appeal. You make, you submit motions on little technical issues.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  Maybe you get them to focus on Mrs. Netanyahu, who's also under indictment. And you just delay it as long as you can. But the best argument that he has is, "I can't focus on my own defense because I have a war to prosecute." Well, if there's peace,

• 2:04:01Speaker 02

  then he's gonna have to go on trial.

• 2:04:04Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Which incentivizes him to stay at war, which is so crazy.

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  Isn't it, though?

• 2:04:12Speaker 02

  Strange situation.

• 2:04:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, a lot of people aren't aware that there was hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets before October 7th.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Oh, you're exactly right. In fact, in August, we saw the biggest protests in American history, I'm sorry, in Israeli history, demanding that Netanyahu resign, and it was all because of corruption.

• 2:04:31Joe Rogan?

  And what is the specific corruption that he's been accused of?

• 2:04:35Speaker 02

  You know, it's changed over the years. Some of it had to do with business, others had to do, other accusations had to do with him trying to essentially sell positions in the government. But, you know, I read the accusations when they first came out, they weren't strong. They're defensible. So I don't know why he doesn't just grab the bull by the horns and go for it.

• 2:05:06Joe Rogan?

  So, out of all the issues that we face internationally, do you think that the Israel-Palestine is the most significant one?

• 2:05:16Speaker 02

  I don't, actually. I think the threat is greater from China. The Chinese are incredibly patient. There was a joke in The Onion the other day. It was a bunch of Chinese guys just sitting around a table. And it said, "The Chinese government sits and waits for the United States to self-destruct, or continue its self-destruction," or something like that. It's because they know that they can outweigh us. You know, we have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to be, all around the world, protecting the weak, and those without a voice, and being the peacemaker.

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  You know, we have 190 bases in 144 countries. We have to do all that. And the Chinese say, "Yeah, yeah, you have to. Go ahead. Spend all your money on that stuff." In the meantime, we're gonna have 350 mile-an-hour trains, and the best highways in the world, and the best schools, and the best hospitals, and the nicest airports. And then, all of our extra money, we're gonna essentially bribe foreign countries to do things that we want them to do. So, it's a lesson that I think we haven't learned, as a country, that there are other ways of winning hearts and minds.

• 2:06:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also they're actively engaged in making sure that people are arguing online, which is fascinating.

• 2:06:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, they're very good at these kinds of behind-the-scenes, like quasi-spy-like surreptitious actions. They actively promote...

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  Us arguing, fighting, disagreeing, they promote these societal disruptions that we're all so worried about. And you know, we blame the Russians all the time, and certainly the Russians do this kind of thing, too. But it's the Chinese that have really perfected it. And I think that most Americans don't realize how much we should be worried about that and trying to counter it.

• 2:07:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, what could be done to counter it? Because a lot of it is, what's going on in social media is echo chambers. People exist in these echo chambers, they're completely addicted to their smartphones, they're on the algorithm all day long, they're checking things and getting ramped up by things, and they're being told various narratives, whatever it is. And there was a story recently about China getting caught using ChatGPT for various different services where they were using bots. And you know, so they had done it automated through ChatGPT.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  Brad Parscale is doing it right now on behalf of the Israelis. He recently won a $6 million contract to train ChatGPT to be more pro-Israel. It was in Reason Magazine a couple of days ago.

• 2:08:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, you also have the recent purchase of TikTok.

• 2:08:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:08:25Joe Rogan?

  A lot going on.

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  Which I think could be very helpful for us. One of the things that we're bad at is identifying bots and controlling bots once they've been identified. I'll give you an example. I write columns all the time and have my own little podcast, and I said that I was optimistic that a deal seemed to be at hand, you know, between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians. And then immediately, I started getting attacked. And it was by obviously anonymous writers. I can't imagine that these writers are human beings, they had to be bots. One called me virulently anti-Semitic.

• 2:09:08Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:09:09Speaker 02

  Because I said this deal that it appears the president has negotiated was a good idea. So I'm virulently anti-Semitic. And then they built on that. And by the end of it, and nobody else was commenting, but by the end of it, they said that I was morbidly obese and ugly and stupid, too.

• 2:09:30Joe Rogan?

  That does sound Chinese.

• 2:09:39Joe Rogan?

  Morbidly obese, ugly and stupid too.

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:42Joe Rogan?

  You don't even look a little fat.

• 2:09:44Speaker 02

  No, no, I I'm six one, one ninety. I feel like I'm okay.

• 2:09:49Joe Rogan?

  You look great. That's so funny. It's kind of hilarious though, but if you just say things enough people are gonna believe it.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:57Joe Rogan?

  That it's effective, but at least it moves a narrative into a certain direction.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  You know, and ChatGPT and these other chatbots are very easy to um to influence. When ChatGPT first came out, just for fun, I said, who is John Kiriakou? And it said, John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, blew the whistle on the torture program, et cetera. John Kiriakou graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a master's degree in peace studies from the University of Bruges in Belgium. I don't even know where the University of Maryland is located specifically. I know it's called College Park. I don't know how to get there. I've never been to the University of Maryland. I didn't know there was a university in Bruges, let alone one that gave me a degree in peace studies. So I said, John Kiriakou graduated from George Washington University with degrees in this and that.

• 2:10:47Speaker 02

  And it says, you are incorrect. And I said, no, you are incorrect. And then it says, no, you are incorrect. And then I just gave up.

• 2:10:56Joe Rogan?

  Why didn't you just say, I'm actually John Kiriakou, you fucking idiot?

• 2:11:00Speaker 02

  I was afraid it was gonna, what it was gonna do to me.

• 2:11:04Joe Rogan?

  But I mean, you, did you ask it, where are you getting your, your information from?

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  No, but it pulls from literally everywhere.

• 2:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Right, so there's a narrative out there.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, somewhere.

• 2:11:12Joe Rogan?

  Somehow or another that there's universities that you never attended.

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:11:16Joe Rogan?

  Huh.

• 2:11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then, you know, if you make somebody angry, you can be just deleted from ChatGPT. A friend of mine, Pulitzer Prize nominated political cartoonist Ted Rall. He did the same thing. Who is Ted Rall? Well, Ted Rall, we know, is fifteen years at the Los Angeles Times as an award-winning editorial cartoonist. It says, there is no such person as Ted Rall.

• 2:11:46Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  So I wonder who he pissed off.

• 2:11:51Joe Rogan?

  Have you tried subsequently?

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:11:54Joe Rogan?

  Let's see what perplexity says.

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:11:56Joe Rogan?

  Pull up, that's what we use. That's one of our sponsors. Let's see, who is John Kiriaku? Let's see if they get it wrong too. Cause if that's the case, that means somebody probably planted this incorrect information out there into it. Which is like how and why, like what would be the purpose of doing that? What, I mean, especially something that's not even derogatory.

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  No, it's just factually incorrect.

• 2:12:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, about your education. He gave you different places that you went to school, which is weird. Like, that doesn't even make sense.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:12:29Joe Rogan?

  Like, what would, what would be the benefit of that?

• 2:12:33Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 2:12:35Joe Rogan?

  Do you get an answer? Well, I was trying to get the, didn't get the education. But just ask it, who is John Kiriaku? Let's see what it says. Who is John Kiriakou? Okay. American whistleblower, author, journalist, former intelligence officer. All that stuff's true. Personal background, CIA, nineteen ninety, all this is accurate?

• 2:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of that is accurate.

• 2:12:57Joe Rogan?

  Whistleblowing and legal case, recognition and advocacy. Remain active in speaking out against torture and advocating for government transparency and ethical intelligence policies. All that's true.

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:13:09Joe Rogan?

  So. Perplexity.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  All of that's true.

• 2:13:12Joe Rogan?

  Gets it absolutely correct.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely correct.

• 2:13:14Joe Rogan?

  So ask a follow up, what is his education history? There it is.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 2:13:18Joe Rogan?

  Graduated from Newcastle High School, Washington University. All this is accurate?

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  All that's, all that's correct.

• 2:13:24Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so it seems like whatever it was, was just in ChatGPT.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:13:29Joe Rogan?

  Which is really weird.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  I'm using perplexity from now on.

• 2:13:32Joe Rogan?

  What do you think it could have been? Like, what would be the benefit of giving incorrect information about your education in ChatGPT?

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know, but I'll tell you, I used ChatGPT. I teach a class in, in a graduate school class in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in, in Spain. And so, I was very proud of the, the course outline that I had written up. And I put the whole thing, I just cut and pasted it into ChatGPT. And I asked it to recommend scholarly journal articles that I could use to supplement, you know, the, the books that I had recommended.

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  So for the fourteen sessions of the pod, it gave me fourteen different links. Every single one of the links was fake.

• 2:14:22Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  Every single one of them. There were no such links. There were no such articles. It just made it all up.

• 2:14:32Joe Rogan?

  Is it possible that ChatGPT is like, has a mandate to fuck with you?

• 2:14:38Joe Rogan?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  It's possible, I suppose.

• 2:14:41Joe Rogan?

  Imagine if you weren't doing your due diligence.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:42Joe Rogan?

  And you just incorporated those links and they're like, oh my god, Kiriakou is a fraud. These aren't even real articles. This is bullshit.

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:50Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  I felt so too.

• 2:14:52Joe Rogan?

  Do you, you must be paranoid. I mean, you have to be, right? I'm paranoid.

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  You have to be.

• 2:14:56Joe Rogan?

  I mean, but you, you must be because of what's happened to you. When you see something like that, you must be like, what the fuck? It's almost like they're just always trying to get you.

• 2:15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I do feel that way some way, sometimes. I'm sure that you do too. You know, the old saying, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

• 2:15:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  There were times when I, after I got out of prison, the first two years after I got out of prison, that every once in a while, and I'll preface this by saying, I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA. Every once in a while, I would see surveillance. And, um, and I would write down the license number and just call my lawyer. And then he'd call me, you know, a day later and say, it's the FBI. They're just curious as to what you're up to.

• 2:15:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  And I'd say, all they have to do is ask. It's all they have to do. They don't have to follow me to get pizza with a buddy of mine and rest in, you know?

• 2:15:50Joe Rogan?

  You see them following you?

• 2:15:51Speaker 02

  They're really not good at surveillance.

• 2:15:58Joe Rogan?

  Which is horrible because that's their job.

• 2:15:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:16:01Joe Rogan?

  God, John. You've been through a quite an odyssey.

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  It's awful. It really is awful. I'm serious when I say I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It's a horrible thing.

• 2:16:13Joe Rogan?

  But it's also awful because you've done so much good for your country.

• 2:16:19Speaker 02

  I've tried.

• 2:16:21Joe Rogan?

  That's what's crazy. And that's, I, look, I'm, you know, I criticize intelligence agencies and everybody else who are doing wrong things. But I think they're important, very important.

• 2:16:29Speaker 02

  I do too.

• 2:16:30Joe Rogan?

  When people say we need to dismantle the CIA and dismantle, I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, like Mike Baker, I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas. Like if you talk to someone who's actually worked in the field, they will give you an understanding of all the bad things that are happening in the world that we have to keep tabs on. Like, don't say we should not pay attention. That is fucking crazy talk. You just don't want to corrupt CIA.

• 2:16:54Speaker 02

  That's right. That's it. That's the bottom line right there. We don't want to corrupt CIA. We don't want to politicize CIA.

• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

  Politicize, yes.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  I'll give you another example. Yesterday, just yesterday, the deputy director of the CIA, Ellis, named himself the acting general counsel. And people were like, oh my God, I woke up and I see these podcasts. Oh my God, Ellis has taken over the CIA. So I do a little bit of research. And by the end of it, I was like, yeah, I would have done the same thing if I were Ellis. He's qualified, right? He's had all the relative jobs, NSA, ODNI, CIA, House Intelligence Committee. He's done all these jobs. He wants the Office of the General Counsel to do what it's told to do, to further the mission of the CIA.

• 2:17:44Speaker 02

  And they refuse to do it. And so he took over. You can't criticize that.

• 2:17:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that seems like a, if he's a just man, that seems like a good response. But I don't know. I don't know enough about that world to comment on, honestly.

• 2:17:59Speaker 02

  But getting back to your point, and Mike Baker's point. You know, and I'm out of the CIA, so I don't know as much as I used to know on a daily basis. But, but Americans get only just a little, a little tidbit of what's happening in the world. Like, we don't read about these emerging threats, for example. We'll never know about some kind of counterterrorism operation that succeeded, you know? And that saved Americans from a terrorist attack. We'll just never know, because that's the, that's the nature of intelligence.

• 2:18:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:38Speaker 02

  You're not supposed to know.

• 2:18:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  You know, the likes of Timothy Weiner will write a book about failures, but the successes have to remain secret.

• 2:18:50Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Do, like, what is it like having been a public servant, having worked for the government, and having done all these things that are so critical and important for national security? And then to have that machine turn on you, do your time in prison, and come out, and now being someone who talks about it all?

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was hard at first, Joe. I won't lie to you. I felt really alone in the world. And then, a couple of days after my arrest, I got an email from a retired deputy director of the CIA, a guy that I had worked for at the very start of my career. And he said, I saved this as a kind of a souvenir. He said, "You've chosen a difficult path. I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself."

• 2:19:42Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  And that made it, that changed my entire outlook on what I was facing. That I actually wasn't alone. And most of my CIA friends, like, the people who were truly friends of mine at the CIA, are still friends of mine today.

• 2:20:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:20:00Speaker 02

  They had to be discreet about it for a little while, but they never walked away from me.

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's great.

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, John, you're a strong man.

• 2:20:11Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 2:20:11Joe Rogan?

  You know, I know how you've gone through all this, and come out on the other side as a person who comments on the state of the intelligence agencies. You know?

• 2:20:22Speaker 02

  I'll add too, that, that the election of Donald Trump...

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  In kind of an odd way freed me up to be more vocal because

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  the Obama people and the Biden people were far, far more willing to say, "That is speech that we don't like. That needs to be prosecuted." And with Donald Trump, and I don't know if he even meant to do this or not, it's like so much more is out there and in the public realm, the public domain.

• 2:21:10Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think that is?

• 2:21:11Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think at the end of the day, that's populism. It's just a different way of looking at government. It's funny because under populism, the feeling is very strong that they work for us and they answer to us. And with these mainstream administrations, whether it's Obama, Biden, George W. Bush, it's like, "Well, the wise men are running the government, so we need to sit by quietly and let them do their, their important work."

• 2:21:46Joe Rogan?

  And that's how things like the Patriot Act gets snuck in.

• 2:21:48Speaker 02

  Exactly right. That's a great point. Yes.

• 2:21:53Joe Rogan?

  And, and the NDAA.

• 2:21:56Speaker 02

  And the NDAA.

• 2:21:57Joe Rogan?

  We're not gonna use that.

• 2:21:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:59Joe Rogan?

  We don't use that on, don't worry.

• 2:22:01Speaker 02

  You know, when I was, when I was in the, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, the Obama administration passed the NDAA in 20, whatever it was.

• 2:22:14Joe Rogan?

  15.

• 2:22:16Speaker 02

  Where they legalized propagandization of the American people.

• 2:22:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  This came out of the most innocuous issue. We had this propaganda station, radio and television, called Radio TV Marti, and it was beamed at Cuba, right?

• 2:22:33Speaker 02

  The only thing the Cubans really care about watching from us is baseball. So we would broadcast a lot of baseball games. But the way it was being broadcast from Florida, there was this little strip of land on the Gulf Coast in southern Florida where they could pick it up. But only with like Dish Network, I think is what it was. Well, that's illegal because it's a propaganda station and Americans can't watch American propaganda. And so rather than like not broadcast it anymore, or move the satellite or whatever, they decided, we'll change the law to make it easier and more and legal to propagandize the American people.

• 2:23:15Speaker 02

  So now the government can produce any propaganda that it wants and foist it on the American people. It's like, thank you Barack Obama. Now I don't even know if the news that I'm reading is real or not. Thank you.

• 2:23:29Joe Rogan?

  That is so insane. That is so insane that that's the origin of it? Wow.

• 2:23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Lazy bastards.

• 2:23:39Joe Rogan?

  Well lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity. Because this is an opportunity to push something through that could be beneficial if you want to push propaganda on the American people and up until now it's been illegal.

• 2:23:52Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:23:53Joe Rogan?

  Has there ever been any talk of turning that back?

• 2:23:56Speaker 02

  No. A lot of people believed that after Ed Snowden's revelations, it would be turned back, even if it were just, you know, one part at a time. And that's just never happened.

• 2:24:07Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:24:08Speaker 02

  Where's the outrage?

• 2:24:10Joe Rogan?

  No, where is the outrage? And he's got to hide in Russia.

• 2:24:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:24:16Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:24:21Speaker 02

  Depressing.

• 2:24:22Joe Rogan?

  Do you think it could possibly push further in that direction?

• 2:24:26Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that, that...

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  First of all, 100% yes. I think that it's natural that it would push, it would push further. It's up to us to, to push back. And I don't think the American people have their act together enough.

• 2:24:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, we're too divided.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:45Joe Rogan?

  That's part of the problem.

• 2:24:46Speaker 02

  We really are.

• 2:24:47Joe Rogan?

  But something like the NDA should be a nonpartisan issue.

• 2:24:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:24:50Joe Rogan?

  Everyone should be looking at that and go, this is crazy. Something like using propaganda against American citizens. Like, what's the pros and what's the cons?

• 2:24:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:00Joe Rogan?

  I want two columns. I want you to write down all the things that are going to be negatively affected by propaganda on American citizens. All the ways that could be used corruptly, and then all the positives we're going to get out of it.

• 2:25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, we can lie to Cuba. Fuck you. That's not enough.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  No, it's not enough. I went to Cuba last year because they, they translated my first two books into Spanish and put them in the National Library of Cuba and they had this ceremony during the international book something or other for a bunch of American authors. So I went. And before I went, my editor at Consortium News said, do me a favor. He said, ever since I was a little kid, I've been an avid radio listener. He said, tune in after sunset, when the signals are stronger. Tune in to American radio stations and tell me if the Cubans are jamming them, or if you can hear stations.

• 2:25:52Speaker 02

  I said, that's a great idea. So I had a radio there in my hotel room and I got too many American stations. Miami and Fort Myers and anything you want to hear in Cuba from the United States, you can hear. They don't jam anything. And it's baseball, baseball, baseball. They want to hear every baseball game. We don't need Radio TV Marti. You know, I get a kick out of the Washington Post, just clobbers Carrie Lake all the time. Every time, every time she testifies on Capitol Hill about the Voice of America, they're like, no, we need Voice of America. We need to spend another $50 million to, why?

• 2:26:36Speaker 02

  We don't need to propagandize them. First of all, have you ever heard of this thing called the internet? Right? Because that's where almost everybody gets their information. You want to propagandize people? Do it on the internet. Not on some AM radio station that you're beaming off into space in the middle of the night.

• 2:26:53Joe Rogan?

  They must be doing that anyway. They must be.

• 2:26:55Speaker 02

  I should hope so. I should hope so.

• 2:26:57Joe Rogan?

  I mean, of these bots that we're worried about from China, a bunch of them have to also be from America.

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  I would assume.

• 2:27:03Joe Rogan?

  Some agency.

• 2:27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:05Joe Rogan?

  Which is just like, and then as AI gets more and more powerful, it's the race like who's in charge of that?

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:12Joe Rogan?

  Like, how does that go? And what happens when everything gets automated? And what happens when everyone gets on universal basic income and then they're relying entirely on the government?

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:27:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 2:27:24Joe Rogan?

  And this is maybe a decade away.

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  It's coming.

• 2:27:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Um, is there anything else you're concerned about before we wrap this up? That you want to talk about?

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  I'm less concerned about the Russians. Um, I think the president has played this right. He, he tried to kind of force the two sides together. He got pushed back. He did what he could. We just have to wait until they slug it out. And then when it looks like one's going down, then we can step in and try to negotiate something. But what are you gonna do?

• 2:27:53Joe Rogan?

  Is that really the only solution at this point?

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  You know, I have a lot of friends who are, um, professors of Russian studies, Soviet studies, all this stuff. And they all say the same thing, that the Russians are winning. The Ukrainians are losing. So the policy decision is, do we really want to jump in on the side of the Ukrainians? Or do we want to let diplomacy, let diplomats do what they're paid to do? And I always say, sure. We used to make fun of the Bush administration when I was at the agency, because we had never seen an administration work so hard to not speak to our enemies. Right? We weren't allowed to talk to the Russians, or the Chinese, or the North Koreans, or the Iraqis, or the Iranians, or the Cubans, Venezuelans.

• 2:28:39Speaker 02

  Like, my God, who do we talk to? We're not gonna accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talk to the British and the French and the Germans. So keeping the lines of communication open, I think are very important to settling this. I think eventually, what everybody predicted at the very beginning of the hostilities is going to be the final result, and that is that the Ukrainians are going to lose territory, and the Russians are going to have to agree to probably fast-track membership into the European Union for Ukraine. And not NATO membership, but major non-NATO ally status. The same status that we have for Australia, and Japan, and Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, and Ukraine. I think that's how it's going to end up.

• 2:29:24Joe Rogan?

  I just can't imagine why they would want to keep it going. I mean, at this point, they're...

• 2:29:32Speaker 02

  What I'm told is that Putin is under great pressure from his military establishment. That the Russian people don't necessarily want this to continue as much as the Russian military leadership does. That's what these professors are telling me.

• 2:29:47Joe Rogan?

  And why do they want to continue it?

• 2:29:48Speaker 02

  Because they want to destroy Ukraine. They want to take Kiev. They want it to collapse. You know, there are a lot of Russians who don't believe that Ukraine is a legitimate country. You know, even Crimea. Crimea was Russian until 1953. Khrushchev gave it to the Ukrainians as a gift, and then the Russians took it back in 14.

• 2:30:11Joe Rogan?

  And so they feel the same way about Kiev?

• 2:30:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:30:15Joe Rogan?

  It's just so horrible to see like 60-year-old men getting conscripted...

• 2:30:22Speaker 02

  Oh, right off the street.

• 2:30:23Joe Rogan?

  And kidnapped, just sent right to the front of the line, right to the wood chipper.

• 2:30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just terrible.

• 2:30:29Joe Rogan?

  And we don't even know the real numbers of casualties.

• 2:30:32Speaker 02

  No, we don't. It's got to be huge, for the Ukrainians at least.

• 2:30:36Joe Rogan?

  So you're not concerned about that? You think that's going to work itself out, as tragic as it is?

• 2:30:43Speaker 02

  I think it's going to burn itself out eventually. I'm very worried that the Israelis are going to attack Iran again. I'm worried that the Israelis aren't going to respect the deal that appears to be in process in Gaza, or the West Bank. I mean, we're not talking about the West Bank. Where just two weeks ago, a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took all their houses.

• 2:31:10Speaker 02

  You know, what happens next in the West Bank?

• 2:31:12Joe Rogan?

  There are settlers from New Jersey?

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are a lot of synagogues in New York, New Jersey, Toronto, that have these things called, called real estate seminars, where you can put your name on a list, and then they call you and say, "Hey, a house just opened up over here in this Arab village that's not Arab anymore. Come and take your house." And the, two weeks ago, the village that the Israelis cleared out was one of the last remaining Christian villages. Drives me crazy.

• 2:31:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So, what do you think their overall strategy is? They eventually want to just take over all of Palestine?

• 2:31:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I think we should, we should believe the Israelis when they tell us that, that they believe in Greater Israel, which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the southern quarter of Lebanon, a strip in, in southwestern Syria. And, I mean, the map that Netanyahu had at the UN the other day included the Sinai Peninsula, for heaven's sake. What's that all about? They took the Sinai in the 67 war and gave it back after the Camp David Accords. So, this, yeah, we've, we've... I, I'm worried about, about Israel.

• 2:32:34Joe Rogan?

  What, are you worried about Israel's influence on American politics? Because that's one of the things that's coming to light over the last couple of years, since the invasion, where people are paying more and more attention to Israel. And then also seeing what happens when you criticize Israel.

• 2:32:51Speaker 02

  They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize Israel, and usually they'll win those primaries. AIPAC is very well-funded, it is very, very well-organized. It's, it's the gold standard of, of lobbying organizations. I've never understood why AIPAC doesn't have to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department, when everybody else does. Why, why is AIPAC special, that it doesn't have to register? You know, back in 2008, I guess it was, I won a very small contract to write, um, it was like six op-eds for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.

• 2:33:34Speaker 02

  And it was because I was gonna write op-eds that supported American business in Abu Dhabi, right? So, I had to go on FARA.gov, F-A-R-A dot gov, it's the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And there's a form there, and I said, "Yeah, I took, you know, I won this contract, it was like thirty grand to write these six op-eds, and the source of the income is the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, and here's my name and my address and my phone number." Enter, done, I registered. So if you're doing something, anything, on behalf of a foreign government, you have to register.

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  Except if you're AIPAC.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  And I just don't understand that.

• 2:34:28Joe Rogan?

  That seems so insane. And whenever you see like dozens of senators and congresspeople going over to Israel, like...

• 2:34:36Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, man. My very first week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, these lobbyists came in, and we had, it was a parade of lobbyists all the time, every day, they're coming in, asking for something. So, these two guys came in, could not have been any friendlier. "Hi, welcome to Capitol Hill." I said, "Oh, thanks, it's not my first go-round, I've worked on Capitol Hill before." "Well, we wanted to welcome you with a, an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land."

• 2:35:09Speaker 02

  I said, "Thanks, no, I can pay for my own vacations, but I appreciate it." "Oh, nonsense, we'll take you to all the Christian holy sites." "Thank you, I've been, I don't wanna go." And some of my colleagues went, for their all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land, courtesy of AIPAC. And I was like, "Yeah, no, thank you, not interested."

• 2:35:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and that's just the beginning of it. That's nothing compared to helping out your campaigns.

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you, I tell this story a lot, but I think it's, I think it's appropriate here. I had been at the agency for... Two and a half months, maybe? Two, about two and a half months. And I was told to give my very first liaison briefing. So this is gonna be the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet. And I was gonna be one of about eight analysts. And I was the most junior, so I would go last. Well, we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters. We used to, but every time they would come, they'd say, hey, we brought gifts. Here's a gift for you. And it's all packed full of listening devices and batteries.

• 2:36:22Joe Rogan?

  Every one of them?

• 2:36:23Speaker 02

  Every one of them. And we'd say, you guys, you can't come back here every single time and try to bug our conference rooms.

• 2:36:28Joe Rogan?

  What'd they say to that?

• 2:36:29Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. Well, we're not sure how that happened. So we're like, yeah, you can't come in here anymore. So we rent an office where we meet the Israelis off-campus.

• 2:36:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz you just can't trust them. So.

• 2:36:44Joe Rogan?

  That is so crazy.

• 2:36:46Speaker 02

  We go to this briefing, and it's just two people. It's a woman who was the Mossad officer and an older guy who was the Shin Bet officer. So because we were all overt, we were giving our true names. And first, the senior political officer gives her briefing, and then the econ guy, and the military guy, and the oil guy, and finally comes around to me. So I said, my name is John Kiriakou, and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's current psychology. And the Shin Bet guy goes like this. He goes, spell your name? So I spell it, and he writes it down.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  And he's looking at me over his glasses, and he goes, you are Jewish? And I said, I am not recruitable. Don't even think about trying to recruit me. Afterwards, I was furious. I went back to the office. My boss said, how did it go? I said, that son of a gun Shin Bet guy tried to recruit me. Everybody started laughing. I said, why is that so funny? And he said, they've done that to every single one of us. It's like they can't help themselves.

• 2:38:00Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy how effective it is, though.

• 2:38:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Look at Jonathan Pollard. Now he's running for the Knesset.

• 2:38:07Speaker 02

  Bastard.

• 2:38:08Joe Rogan?

  It's just crazy how much influence one country has.

• 2:38:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is.

• 2:38:12Joe Rogan?

  On a much bigger country.

• 2:38:14Speaker 02

  Much bigger. And they have such a tiny population.

• 2:38:18Joe Rogan?

  I know. What is it, like, nine million people?

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Joe Rogan?

  Pretty gangster. It's pretty gangster.

• 2:38:26Speaker 02

  Kudos. Kudos to them.

• 2:38:27Joe Rogan?

  It's like Chicago taking over the world.

• 2:38:29Speaker 02

  That's right. And saying, "We're gonna do things our way."

• 2:38:33Joe Rogan?

  Not even Chicago. Chicago might have more people.

• 2:38:37Joe Rogan?

  Fuck. Wow. Well, listen, John, I really appreciate your time and, uh, thank you and and thank you for your story.

• 2:38:45Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. This was a real treat for me.

• 2:38:49Joe Rogan?

  It's a horrible thing that they did to you, but, uh, it's... I'm so glad you're out so we can get your insight.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 2:38:55Joe Rogan?

  Appreciate you very much.

• 2:38:57Speaker 02

  Pleasure's all mine.

• 2:38:57Joe Rogan?

  All right. Bye, everybody.

• 2:39:13Joe Rogan?

  Today is brought to you by the number one brand for better sex, BlueChew. BlueChew Gold is a four-in-one powerhouse that gets your brain and your body on the same page for sex. Two ingredients get the blood flow pumping, and two ingredients prime your brain for arousal. No overthinking, just peak performance in as little as 15 minutes. Look at the stats. Gold is three times stronger, five times faster, and eight times longer lasting than old-school methods. BlueChew Gold is the real deal. Right now, buy two months of BlueChew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGEN. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. That's promo code ROGEN. Head over to bluechew.com for details and important safety information. Check it out.

• 2:39:57Joe Rogan?

  This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience.

• 2:40:03Speaker 05

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems, to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles.

• 2:40:45Speaker 05

  Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.