Pod Insights John Kiriakou's Dead Drop S1E24 Moment Of Truth About this episode THE BLURB: John demanding to see his lawyer saved him getting arrested on the spot. Almost all of the government's case against John was nonsense - which John and his lawyers wanted to prove in court. But, one of the government's charges against John had the very real potential to stick. In the end, the economic pressures won out. Still, if John was going to prison, he'd be doing it both in style and alongside the encouragemet of a growing list of celebrity friends. Still, can anything really prepare you for an absolute, picture definition "moment of truth"?
SHOW NOTES
You can find John's ABC News interview with Brian Ross here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6P69ewfscM&list=PLn_qhpAT9Boew2d54vRtiZqDTiVK7KkKq
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Transcript 10,805 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
0:36 Speaker 01 This podcast, it's a Casterton Touchstone production.
0:40 Speaker 02 Did you feel comfortable with the techniques?
0:43 Speaker 03 Frankly, no. And I elected to to forego the training. I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the enhanced techniques, and I sought the counsel of a senior agency officer, who's still an agency officer. And I said, what would you do in my situation? And he said, frankly, I think it's a slippery slope, and accidents gonna happen, and I wouldn't do it. And so I declined.
1:03 Speaker 02 So you did not go through the training?
1:05 Speaker 03 I did not.
1:05 Speaker 02 Have you seen waterboarding?
1:07 Speaker 03 We waterboarded each other in the beginning to see what it felt like. And it's a wholly unpleasant experience.
1:15 Speaker 02 What is it like?
1:16 Speaker 03 You feel like you're choking or drowning.
1:18 Speaker 02 And are you literally upside down?
1:20 Speaker 03 You're on your back with your feet at a slight incline. There's some cellophane or material over your mouth, and then they pour water on this cellophane. You can't breathe, and it feels like the water's going down your throat. And then you begin choking. It induces the gag reflex.
1:37 Speaker 02 But the water's not actually going into your mouth?
1:39 Speaker 03 No.
1:39 Speaker 02 Or through your nostrils?
1:40 Speaker 03 No. It just feels like it is.
1:42 Speaker 02 It feels like it is because of the pressure onto the cellophane?
1:45 Speaker 03 Correct.
1:45 Speaker 02 Like a Saran Wrap kind of thing?
1:46 Speaker 03 That's right.
1:47 Speaker 02 And how long did you last?
1:50 Speaker 03 About five seconds.
1:51 Speaker 02 Really? Would you call it torture?
1:58 Speaker 03 You know, at the time, no. At the time, I thought this was something that we really needed to do. I had heard stories of captured German prisoners from the Second World War, playing chess with their interrogators. And over the course of many weeks and months of playing chess, they develop a rapport and the German ended up giving information. Al Qaeda is not like a World War II German POW. It's a different world. These guys hate us more than they love life. And so you're not going to convince them that because you're a nice guy, and they can trust you and they have a rapport with you, that they're going to confess and give you their operations. It's different. You're not going to be able to slowly seduce them to talk? Not these guys.
2:42 Speaker 03 And at the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do. And as time has passed, and as September 11th has moved farther and farther back into history, I think I've changed my mind. And I think that waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn't be in the business of doing. Why do you say that now? Because we're Americans and we're better than that.
3:11 John Kiriakou? I'm John Kurayaku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. This is the penultimate episode of our series, What Makes This Spy Tick. But before we return to the penultimatum, we want to thank you for listening and for helping our little podcast grow way, way beyond anything we imagined. Your likes, ratings, your kind reviews and comments, your recommending the podcast to friends and strangers alike, it's all helped and we truly appreciate it. The recording you heard in the teaser, well, that was a much younger me sitting down for the infamous Brian Ross interview. You can find the whole interview on YouTube. We'll link to it in the episode's show notes. I felt compelled to do the interview because when he reached out to me to ask for it,
3:54 John Kiriakou? Brian told me he had a source who told him that I had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah, which of course, I hadn't. I said, "Your source is either deeply mistaken or he's a liar." I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. And Brian responded by saying, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." I had no idea that that was an old reporter's trick. I'd never spoken to a reporter before. I said, "Well, I'll think about it." That was on a Monday. On Wednesday, two days later, President Bush gave a press conference. He was asked about reports from a variety of human rights organizations that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. President Bush looked right in the camera and he said in that very Bushian way,
4:40 John Kiriakou? "We do not torture." And I remember saying to Catherine, "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking us right in the eye and he's lying to the American people." I learned what we had planned to do with Zain about a week before the torture began. So in the last week of July 2002, I knew that the torture was going to begin in a week. I was the executive assistant to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations. I got that job upon my return from Pakistan. It was kind of a reward for having captured Zain. In that position, for the next year, I had access to literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world. I had more compartments than you could shake a stick at.
5:25 John Kiriakou? I saw the cables going back and forth between headquarters and the secret site, where the secret site is saying, "This is what we're planning to do." And then headquarters is writing back saying, "Good, go ahead and do it. That's exactly what we want." What the CIA officers at the secret site were waiting for was for the FBI to get the hell out of the country. Because the FBI was opposed to the torture program. And then, as it turned out, Robert Mueller, who was the FBI Director at the time, ordered his men not only out of the secret site, he ordered all FBI personnel to leave the country where the secret site was located. He didn't want any FBI officer to be even indirectly accused of having had anything to do with this torture program.
6:10 John Kiriakou? Mueller was read into the program. He knew it was going to happen and he was furious about it. He ordered all the FBI personnel out of the country. And on August 2nd, 2002, the CIA began to torture Abu Zveda. I had a friend who was one of the 13 who said yes to the torture training. And he came up to me a day or two before the torture began. And he said, "Well, we're gonna start this thing. It's gonna happen in the next day or two days." And I said, "Man, I think this is a terrible mistake. It's a terrible mistake. We shouldn't be in the business of torture." And he said, "It's not torture. The Justice Department's attorneys told us that it's not torture." And I said, "You know, we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this.
6:54 John Kiriakou? But either way, it's not gonna work." Sure enough, just a couple of days later, on August 2nd, we began torturing him. And he immediately clammed up. The agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department was that there were these 10 techniques, but that the contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, would start with the easiest technique. Grab him by the shirt and give him a shake. And it would graduate to a smack on the belly. And then that would graduate to a smack across the face. And it would go all the way up to waterboarding, which was supposed to be the worst. I always thought that there were other techniques that were worse than waterboarding. One was the cold cell. The prisoner is stripped naked.
7:38 John Kiriakou? He's chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so he can't get comfortable in any way. He can't sit, or kneel, or lay. His cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him. Well, we murdered prisoners using that technique. The other technique that I always thought was worse than waterboarding was sleep deprivation. The Secretary of Defense at the time was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld used to brag that he had a stand-up desk in his office. He didn't even have a seat. And sometimes he would work for 24 hours. And he was deprived of sleep, and that's not torture. But that's not at all what we were talking about. We know from the American Psychological Association
8:23 John Kiriakou? that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. They begin to die of organ failure at day nine with no sleep. Well, the CIA was authorized- to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days. And this is being chained to that eyebolt in the ceiling, having industrial strength lights on all the time, and just loops of death metal or children's jingles just playing 24 hours a day to make you crazy. And that's exactly what happened. We made them crazy. Another thing, and this was outlined in great detail in the Senate torture report. There were some techniques that required safeguards. For example, there was a technique called walling,
9:05 John Kiriakou? where you grab the prisoner by the shirt and you slam him into a plywood wall. But you have to have a bath towel wrapped around his neck so that he doesn't get whiplash. Well, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's son-in-law, they slammed him into the wall. But, uh-oh, the wall was concrete block and not plywood. Plywood has a little bit of give, concrete block doesn't. And they forgot to put the towel around his neck. In the end, he suffered from a traumatic brain injury that he has never recovered from, to the point where even the Pentagon acknowledges that he is unable to participate in his own defense. He has permanent brain damage. The Justice Department never said, "Smash their heads against the wall until they have brain damage." The Justice Department never said, "Freeze them until they die",
9:50 John Kiriakou? or "Keep them awake until their organs shut down and they drop dead", and then you just dig a ditch on the side of the building and bury them in the ditch. Nobody at the CIA ever, ever had permission to do something like that.
10:05 John Kiriakou? I was apprehensive about the interview. That was on a Monday. On Wednesday, Bush gave this press conference. On Friday, he was leaving the South Portico of the White House, walking to the presidential helicopter, Marine One, to fly to Camp David for the weekend. Since the invention of the helicopter, reporters would stand out there on Fridays and shout questions at whoever happened to be president. On that day, a reporter shouted a question about torture. And Bush stopped. He normally ignored those questions, but he stopped, and he turned to the reporter, and he said very pointedly, "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer." made me immediately think Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're gonna
10:50 John Kiriakou? pin this on me. Remember, I was the one who had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism because I refused the training. On Monday, I went to see my bosses at Deloitte, my director and managing partner. I told them the situation. They are going to accuse me of being instrumental in the CIA's torture program and in torturing prisoners, possibly to death. I want permission to go on the show and defend myself. It was clear to me that Deloitte had never dealt with a situation like this. Now, my immediate boss, my director, was a former CIA employee. He was an analyst, but he had been there for twenty-something years. He understood the CIA culture. Things like this happen and
11:32 John Kiriakou? people get stabbed in the back. He recommended to the managing partner that I be allowed to go on the show. They wrote up a memo that the general counsel signed, my partner signed, and I signed. Said that I could go on the show and defend myself, but I was not permitted to mention Deloitte or any Deloitte client. I said, "Oh, don't worry. That will never come up." And it never did. I had a copy of this letter, and they kept copies of the letter. A couple of days later, I went on the show. Brian Ross came to Washington, and we met at the ABC Studios on DeSalle Street, just off of Connecticut Avenue. I went with Catherine, and she sat just off-camera. I decided in the days leading up to that interview
12:16 John Kiriakou? that no matter what he asked me, I would simply tell the truth. I said a lot in the interview. I said three things that were the most important. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy. It was not the result of a rogue. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the President himself.
12:37 Speaker 02 And did you and other CIA officers feel without a doubt you had the legal right to do what you were doing?
12:43 John Kiriakou? Absolutely. Absolutely.
12:45 John Kiriakou? And then the entire US government seemed to fall on my head. I really believed that the information was so out there that even if the CIA had never released it formally, it didn't matter. Plus, I believed in my heart that it was so illegal, I didn't care what the Justice Department said, this was an illegal program. And there's a law in this country that makes it illegal to classify a crime. If an element of the US government is involved in criminal activity, it is illegal to classify the information for the purpose of keeping it from the American public. We are obligated, our members of the military are obligated to refuse to follow illegal orders.
13:28 John Kiriakou? If you are ordered to commit a war crime or a crime against humanity, you are compelled to refuse to carry out the order. We don't want a Nazi Germany-style Holocaust to take place at the hands of the American military. I finished the interview and the first thing I did was say to Catherine, "How did I do?" And she said, "You were great." "Really? I didn't say anything classified, right?" "No, you were great." And so I walked home and I thought, "Well, we'll see what happens tomorrow." How bad could it be, after all? It was just the truth. I honestly believed that this would be a one-day story. I figured there'd be a little bit of excitement at the agency, it might be a little kerfuffle
14:12 John Kiriakou? between the Director of Operations and the Office of Security. I really, genuinely did not think that I had said anything that the American people shouldn't have heard. Brian Ross called me the next day and he said, "Hey, would you like to come up and watch it go live on World News Tonight? And then we'll have dinner and then we'll go back to the studio and we'll watch it on Nightline." I said, "Yeah, that sounds like fun." They put me up in a hotel. I went up to New York. My plane was delayed. I actually missed the breaking story on World News Tonight. When I landed at LaGuardia, I've only been on the plane for an hour. I turned my phone on and the mailbox was full. Oh my God, what's happened? So I started listening to the messages. A couple were from friends, family members.
14:57 John Kiriakou? One was from Catherine, who said essentially, oh no. And the rest, dozens of voicemails, were from journalists from all around the world. I realized this is a major international story. I had opened a Pandora's box. The CIA was on its heels. I went into ABC News. Brian said, my God, this is bigger than we ever imagined. So we sort of hung around until Nightline. There was a much longer version of the interview on Nightline than there was on World News Tonight. I got a call from my boss. He wanted to see me in Dallas first thing in the morning. I said, okay, I'm in New York, but I'll get the first flight. I fly to Dallas. When I arrived, he told me not to come into the office
15:42 John Kiriakou? and indeed not to come onto any Deloitte property. And I thought, oh shit, this is bad. I went to a hotel, I got early check-in, and my phone is just ringing off the hook. One of the calls was from NPR. The reporter there wanted my reaction to a statement by Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri. He was either the number one or the number two on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He wanted to see me hanging from a tree. I was so flabbergasted by the statement. I just said, look, it's an election year and Senator Blunt wants to win reelection and I'm an easy punching bag today. And that was all I could think to say. My boss called back and he said,
16:23 John Kiriakou? "Go back to Washington, come into your office at nine o'clock tomorrow morning." I knew what that meant. I flew back to Washington. I actually got to my office at seven o'clock in the morning, boxed up everything I had in there, stuffed it in my car, met him at nine o'clock and he brought some toady from HR with him. As soon as she walked in, I knew exactly what was happening. But in the meantime, I'm glad to say I had the presence of mind to call an attorney. I said, "Listen, I think I'm gonna get fired today." And I explained the situation. "But I have this letter, and it's signed by the general counsel of Deloitte and by my partner. And it specifically says that I can go on TV." She said, "Oh, we have him by the balls."
17:07 John Kiriakou? "It's not my nature to be combative in meetings. It's not my nature to be combative with anybody, let alone with my superiors. But I gave right back as well as I took in that meeting." Finally, he said to me, "This is my director." He said, "I want you to resign." I said, "Absolutely not." I really did feel righteous indignation. "They told me I could do this, and I went on the show and told the truth." I was flabbergasted by the position that the company was taking on this. I told the truth in exposing a crime. I did it with their permission, and they wanted to fire me. And I said, "You gave me written permission to do this." "Well, we didn't know it was gonna be a big international story." "Well, I didn't know it was gonna be a big international story."
17:52 John Kiriakou? "You know this is gonna blow over in a couple of days." Which, of course, it did. They wanted my resignation, and they wanted it like right then. I said, "Not in a million years. If you don't resign, I'm gonna fire you." I pulled my attorney's business card out of my shirt pocket. "This is my attorney. I speak only through her." I stood up and walked out. One of my colleagues called me about an hour later and said that as soon as I walked out of the office, the director called him and said, "In a panic, did you know he had an attorney?" As it turned out, one of my neighbors from a few houses down also was a director at Deloitte. And of course, this was the talk of the firm. He walked down to my house that night, and he said, "Boy, you really stepped in it today, didn't you?"
18:37 John Kiriakou? "Yeah, I didn't expect this reaction, especially since they put the noose around their own necks by giving me this letter." Let me tell you what's going on behind the scenes. The CEO is a Luddite. He doesn't like computers. So he's got this big bulletin board in the office. And the bulletin board is covered with 3x5 cards being held up with thumbtacks. And each 3x5 card has a problem on it. And his goal every day is to Move as many of the three by five cards as he can. He said, "One of those three by five cards says John Kiriakou, and they want this thing over with. They want you out and they want to be done with it. They're gonna offer you six weeks of severance. Just between us, and I never said this, they're willing to go 18 months.
19:22 John Kiriakou? Sure enough, the next day, they offered me six weeks of severance. And my attorney laughed at them and said, "Forget it. You dug this hole. You're gonna have to climb out of it." Negotiations went on for about five days. They agreed in the end to 18 months of severance. They gave it to me in one lump sum. Now, what was hard about all that is you, they give you that in one lump sum, and then the tax bite is monstrous. And I lost my health insurance for my entire family. I had four kids at the time. So, we lost that. Just as this was happening, the entire economy tanks. And we went into the Great Recession of 2008, 2009. They fired me, essentially. I resigned, is what it was, less than two weeks before Christmas,
20:04 John Kiriakou? just in time for the recession to begin two weeks after that. Couple of days after I gave the interview, I opened the Washington Post, like I did every day, and sat down with a cup of coffee. There I see, in black and white, the CIA had filed what's called a crimes report against me, telling the Justice Department that I had revealed not just classified information, but top-secret information. Top-secret information is said to cause grave danger to the national security. Not danger, not great danger, grave danger. Lives are being lost. That was ludicrous, it was absurd. But this is what they do.
20:46 John Kiriakou? The Post and CNN, as well, reported that I was under investigation for espionage. I called a friend of mine, was not in government, but traveled at very senior government circles. His response was, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." And I said, "Oh, no! I'm calling you so that I feel better about things." And he says, "Buddy, you need to hire an attorney, like, right now." I hired arguably the best criminal defense attorney in all of Washington, Plato Kucheris. Plato said, "You didn't commit a crime. Nobody in America knows more about the Espionage Act than I do, and I'm telling you, you didn't commit a crime. Relax." As it turned out, the FBI investigated me for the next year, from December of 2007 to
21:30 John Kiriakou? December of 2008. And then in December of 2008, they sent Plato something called a "Declination Letter," declining to prosecute me. This is very unusual. This was a statement by the FBI. Usually, you don't even know if you're under investigation, and even if you do know, they never tell you, "We've concluded the investigation, you're not being charged." In this case, they wrote us a letter, saying that they had concluded the investigation, they had concluded that I had not committed a crime, and the case was closed. I think that Robert Mueller felt so strongly about the torture program. He believed it was a crime, certainly. I think he instructed his people in the counterintelligence division to send that letter.
22:12 John Kiriakou? That night, Catherine and I took the kids out to dinner, and we celebrated. I believed I was free and clear. The CIA was furious at this development, furious. Several things began happening at the same time. First, I appeared to have been exonerated, and so I get a call from John Kerry, who was just about to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He invited me to come to his office for a conversation. At the same time, John Brennan, an old nemesis of mine from the CIA, is named CIA Director. Now, he ended up not becoming CIA Director in Obama's first term, because the progressive
22:53 John Kiriakou? left was up in arms over this appointment. John Brennan, after all, was one of the godfathers of the torture program. Even though he endorsed Obama, and worked on the Obama campaign, advising Obama on national security issues, he could not deny his support of the torture program. He ended up becoming the Deputy National Security Advisor for counterterrorism in the first term, and in the second term became CIA Director because the liberals forgot about it. John Brennan, at the same time that I'm speaking with John Kerry, asked Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, to secretly reopen the case against me, which Holder did. My real detractors at the CIA were, of course, John Brennan,
23:34 John Kiriakou? but also a stone-cold killer by the name of Jose Rodriguez, who was the director of the Counterterrorism Center and went on to become the deputy director of the CIA for operations. They went to the Justice Department, and Brennan asked that the case against me be secretly reopened. I had no idea that for the next three years, I was under constant surveillance, my telephones were all tapped, and my emails were being intercepted. John Kerry offered me a job as the new senior investigator of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job that I gladly accepted. He told me that I would have carte blanche to investigate anyone and anything that I wanted, which turned out not to even vaguely be true.
24:19 John Kiriakou? But that's what he said, and so I accepted the job. This is one of the most senior jobs on Capitol Hill. I was one of only four senior staff members. I asked John Kerry why he wanted me in this job, and he said, "Well, for a couple of reasons. First, nobody has taken it on the chin from the media like I have, so I know what you're going through with this press coverage." And he said, "Torture is wrong. It's wrong under any circumstances." Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? He wanted to extend a helping hand. To tell you the truth, I had nothing else going on. I was in the running for a job at one of the big polling organizations to head their Middle East office, which meant moving to Doha gutter.
25:03 John Kiriakou? That wasn't realistic. I had little kids at home, and so I accepted Kerry's offer. I started writing my first book, The Reluctant Spy, in August of 2007, so months before I blew the whistle. As I'm writing this book, I'm having to update it all the time because all these different things are happening. There were some stories that I could tell friends and family members, and I had specifically asked the CIA to allow me to drop my cover. They had no objections to me dropping my cover, and along with dropping cover, it dropped a lot of the cover on these operations that I was participating in. People told me all the time, "You're a great storyteller. You're a great storyteller. You should get these things down on paper." Because your kids are gonna wanna know these stories after you're gone.
25:48 John Kiriakou? Or your grandchildren, they're gonna wanna know who their grandfather was and what he did. Thought, you know what, that would be kind of a nice legacy, if only for my kids and my as-yet-to-be-born grandchildren. And so I started writing. I really did understand from the very beginning the importance of the Abu Zubaydah operation. I was so proud of the first draft of the book, I gave it to Catherine. And I said, "I want you to read it, and I want you to be brutally honest in your assessment of it." And a couple of days later, she came to me and she said, "Honestly, I hate it. I think it's terrible." "What? Really?" "Honey, I have heard you tell these stories a thousand times. This book reads like a dry government report. You need to write it the way you tell it."
26:31 John Kiriakou? And just that simple sentence caused me to completely change my writing style. And the change has been permanent. And so when I write, I write in kind of an airy storytelling fashion. Unless I am writing a government report, which I've done over the years, in which case they're dry and direct and to the point. But I think people wanna be entertained by stories, and so I write them just the way I tell them. In March of 2008, just a few months after I blew the whistle on the torture program, the Los Angeles Times called me. And they asked me to write an op-ed on Iranian foreign policy in Latin America. I said, "Sure, why not?" Figuring, you know, it's an easy $400. The LA Times is a major paper of record.
27:16 John Kiriakou? Once I get published there, I can get published in the Washington Post or the New York Times or wherever, and maybe I can make this sort of a side hustle. So I started writing this op-ed. Well, truth be told, I had written an op-ed for them in 2007 on Afghanistan, and they loved it. And it was one of the most viewed op-eds of the entire year 2007. So I'm sitting at my desk at home, in my den, which was aloft up on the top floor of the house. My cellphone rings. I recognize the number as coming from the CIA exchange. I answer the phone, and it's an attorney in the general counsel's office. And he says to me, "You..." Better not be writing about Iran. And I said, very clearly, fuck you. I don't work for you.
27:59 John Kiriakou? Everything I write, I send to the Publications Review Board, and you can't tell me how I can and can't make a living. I hung up on him. I was furious. But I sat right back down and continued to write my op ed. I learned later, of course, that they were enraged that I would do such a thing. Now, I did, at the end of the day, send that completed op ed to the CIA's Publications Review Board for clearance. And they cleared it within 24 hours with no changes. But it wasn't quite as easy as that. The LA Times published the op ed a few days later, and Catherine was immediately called into the Office of Security. The Office of Security invited her into a conference room,
28:44 John Kiriakou? and there was a camera set up there, and the camera was on. It was recording. Trying not to panic, she sat down and said, what can I do for you? And they said, well, your husband has a piece in today's LA Times about Iran, and it contains information that's classified at the top-secret level. And she said, that's not possible. My husband got that op ed cleared by the Publications Review Board, and he doesn't have access to top-secret information. And the security officer said, but you do. Well, we had a rule in our house written in stone that we never talked about Iran. Because she worked on Iran, and I never wanted to put her in a bad position.
29:28 John Kiriakou? So she called me in a panic. And I said, what are they saying was classified? One was that, like, the Iranians had purchased a bicycle factory in Venezuela. That was one. And I forget what the other one, it was something about, like, machine parts in Bolivia or something like that. I said, I've got the source material here. They're both from United Press International and Espanol. She says, "Please fax them to me immediately." I faxed them to her with a handwritten cover letter that I was really hoping she would show the CIA's Office of Security, saying, "Number one, apparently there's nobody at the CIA who speaks Spanish, and apparently there's nobody at the CIA that reads the
30:13 John Kiriakou? press, because this information's not top secret. It's unclassified, and everybody in Latin America read it." They got off her back, and they left her alone, but this was the first of several run-ins that I was about to have with the CIA.
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31:06 John Kiriakou? If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this, Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.
31:50 John Kiriakou? It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop. I started the job in John Kerry's office in February of 2009, and Kerry specifically said that I could investigate anyone and anything I wanted. There had been an investigative function in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 70s.
32:34 John Kiriakou? It was done away with in 1974. He wanted to make the Foreign Relations Committee relevant again and go after wrongdoing. And who better to do it than John Kiriakou and Doug France, who had been the chief investigative reporter for The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and had been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes. So we made a heck of a team, Doug and I. Well, just a few weeks into the new job, I get a call from a major human rights activist. He said he had some explosive information that he needed to pass to me. He couldn't do it on the phone. Was I free to meet? I said, "Absolutely. Where do you want to meet?"
33:17 John Kiriakou? In a classroom at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. He gave me the room number. I took the subway over there, went to the room. It was not in use, the lights were off, but he was sitting inside. I said hello, I introduced myself. I told him I had come alone. He asked me to turn my phone off, which I did. And then he said, "He had a source, a new source, who was in northern Afghanistan on November 30th, 2001. This source was 12 years old at the time and was hiding behind a large rock. He had witnessed something called 'the box up', this is what it was called at the CIA, 'the box up', in a village called Dashdi Lali in northern Afghanistan.
34:02 John Kiriakou? Now, what happened was, on November 30th, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up en masse to the Northern Alliance, which was allied with the United States. They all gave up. They laid down their arms, put their hands in the air, and just surrendered. The Northern Alliance called the CIA, "What do we do with these 2,000 men? There's not a prison in the country that is big enough to hold them." And we said... Put them in trucks, take them out into the desert and hold them there until we can divide them up and spread them to jails all around Afghanistan. We'll put them in groups of 10 or 15 or 20 and just jail them until we can figure out what to do with them.
34:44 John Kiriakou? Well, one of the senior most officials in the Northern Alliance was a monster by the name of General Abdurashid Dostum. Dostum had been on the side of the Soviets, then he switched to the side of the Taliban, then he switched to the Northern Alliance, then he switched to the Karzai government where he was vice president, then he switched back to the Taliban, all the while massacring anybody who stood in his way. Dostum ordered all 2,000 Taliban soldiers to be put in tractor trailers, semis, but nobody ever thought to punch holes in the truck for them to breathe. There was no water. Of the 2,000 that were put in the trucks, 14 lived.
35:29 John Kiriakou? And one of the survivors said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. I always believed that Dostum did it on purpose. That was his nature. He was a genocidal murderous maniac. What this human rights activist was telling me was that his source was a little boy at the time. He was hiding behind a rock and he was watching the Taliban soldiers be loaded into the truck. But what was explosive was that he saw two white men wearing blue jeans and boots and wearing black t-shirts and they were speaking English. Well, the official account of the Dashdi Lali box up was that there were no Americans on site.
36:09 John Kiriakou? So what Americans are going to be in Dashdi Lali, Afghanistan on November 30th, 2001, other than the CIA? So my head was spinning when I, when I came out of that meeting. I went straight back to the office and I wrote a letter to the CIA recounting the facts as I had heard them and asking for clarification. Was the CIA there? And if so, what were they doing there? I sent the letter to the CIA under John Kerry. ...autopen signature. On the same day, November 30th, 2001, there was an uprising about 20 miles away at an old fort called Kalet Ajangvi.
36:51 John Kiriakou? There were hundreds of Taliban prisoners being held at the fort. There were CIA officers on site with AK-47s. But these prisoners began a revolt. They started by chanting and then they got themselves so worked up into a frenzy that all together they began to run toward the CIA officers who were holding them. There were only a half a dozen guys there. The CIA officers opened fire on these prisoners, but they were overwhelmed. While a lot of prisoners were shot and killed, Johnny Michael Spann, Mike, Mike Spann, with whom I worked in the counterterrorism center, was overwhelmed. He ran out of ammunition.
37:33 John Kiriakou? And when the Taliban prisoners got him, they stomped him to death, jumping up and down on him, smashing him.
37:42 John Kiriakou? He was the first one of my colleagues to be killed after 9/11 in the line of duty. Others were killed later, but Mike was the first one. Just as Cofer Black had predicted, that we're all going to have to fight this war and not all of us are going to come back. He was correct. And the news coverage was almost exclusively about the uprising at Kalet Ajangvi fort. I remember in the Washington Post, news about the box up at Dashdi Lali. It was literally four lines long. That was it. Nobody cared. Now, it did come up in the 2008 presidential campaign. These human rights campaigners were serious about wanting an investigation. Then candidate Senator Barack Obama said,
38:25 John Kiriakou? "If I'm elected president, I'm going to instruct the National Security Council to immediately begin an investigation of the so-called box up at Dashdi Lali." We all celebrated that. And then as soon as he was elected, he said, "Well, on second thought, better to let sleeping dogs lie." I was not inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, certainly not that one. The presence of those two guys in their jeans and black t-shirts demanded real investigation. Was the CIA involved in the box up? It's a simple question, yes or no? And if the answer is yes, what were they doing there? Did they know that there was no air for the prisoners? Did they know that there was no water? And if they did know, that's a war crime. It was the CIA's idea to truck them into the desert.
39:09 John Kiriakou? Now, I've been around when decisions like that are made on the spur of the moment or casually, without anybody even considering worst-case scenarios. That was a worst-case scenario. At the same time, knowing that General Dostum was involved should have been a red flag to anybody on the headquarters side. If Dostum is involved, you want to double-check and triple-check that things are going the way they're supposed to be going. Not that people are being crammed like cattle into a cattle carrier, but with no air and no water. Six weeks after I sent the letter, again, that was under Kerry's signature, one of my colleagues walked into my office and said, "Hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter." And I said, "I didn't see any response.
39:54 John Kiriakou? I just checked my mail an hour ago." And he said, "No, it's down in the vault. It's classified at the top-secret level." Well, I only had a secret clearance at the time. I was waiting for my top-secret to come back into effect. And I said, "Well, what did it say? It says, 'Go fuck yourself.'" Okay, that was a very clear message that, no, you are not going to investigate Dashti Leili or Kalate Jongvi or anything else. The investigation was killed immediately. Even Kerry, he's like, "Well, you know, well, what do we hope to accomplish? We're just going to point the finger at the agency and then the White House is going to be upset?" The truth of the matter is, John Kerry wanted desperately to be Secretary of State.
40:36 John Kiriakou? In that period of 2008, when I didn't have a job, I started working for myself and I ginned up a couple of consulting contracts. Well, I had a great friend who worked for an important firm in Washington called Kissinger McCarty Associates. Yes, that Kissinger and that McClarty. Henry Kissinger broke off and Mac McClarty renamed the firm McClarty Associates. Mac McClarty was very, very kind to me. Mac McClarty had been Bill Clinton's chief of staff. He gave me an office and a part-time secretary, just because he's a nice guy. Bill Richardson, who had been the governor of New Mexico, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, and secretary of energy, was also a part of McClarty Associates. Bill and I struck up a friendship.
41:21 John Kiriakou? I liked him so much, I voted for him for president in 2008, even after he dropped out of the race. He was just such a great guy, gregarious, loud, always in a great mood. This is a guy who made things happen overseas. He was forever jetting around the world to free some hostage or carry on some kind of negotiation. He came to me one day and he said, "Listen, something happened, good or bad?" "Oh, it's good. It's gonna be good for both of us." I invited Obama to watch the Super Bowl at my house. This was January of 2008, before the primaries had started. And he said, "At halftime, we walked around the property." Bill had like 1,200 acres out in New Mexico.
42:02 John Kiriakou? So they're walking around the property, and he said, "Obama put his arm around Richardson's shoulder and said, 'Bill, if you can deliver the Hispanic vote, Secretary of State.'" And he's like, "Oh, my God, yes, I'll deliver the Hispanic vote." Bill's mom was Mexican-American. His Spanish was fluent. He was a proud Hispanic politician, and by God, he endorsed Obama immediately and went out there and tried to drum up support in the Hispanic community. At the end of the year, Obama wins the presidency. And the day after the election, I went into the office and I saw Richardson and I said, "Mr. Secretary, congratulations." He says, "I want you to be my deputy chief of staff." I said, "I'll take it." I said, "But I want to be ambassador in the second term. I don't even care where, just somewhere, anywhere." And he said, "We're gonna have a good time."
42:47 John Kiriakou? I said, "Oh, my God, we're gonna have a good time." Couple of days later, I'm in the shower, I've got the news on the radio, I'm listening to Washington DC's all news station, WTOP. The news reader says, Barack Obama has named Senator Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. And I said, "Oh shit." So I get shaved and dressed. I go into the office and I said, "I'm so sorry." And he said, "Ah, they promised me something." "Is your friend?" He named a friend of mine. "Is he still on the transition team for intelligence?" "Yeah." "Would you tell him that I wouldn't mind being CIA Director?" I said, "Yeah, sure." I call my buddy and I said, "I'm talking to Richardson and he wants to be CIA Director." My buddy says, "Really? We're not even really considering him.
43:30 John Kiriakou? He's not on the list, but we'll put him on the list, but I don't think it's gonna happen." And I said, "All right, I'll tell him." Another week or so passes. Again, I'm in the shower, I've got the news going and the news reader says, "President-elect Obama has named Governor Bill Richardson Secretary of Commerce." And I thought, "Huh, Secretary of Commerce." Go into the office, there he is. "Mr. Secretary, congratulations." And he says to me, "What the fuck do I know about commerce? Tell me that. What do I know?" I said, "No, no, we can make something out of this. There's the Foreign Commercial Service, there's the International Trade Rap. We can do something here. And then you become Secretary of State in the second term." "I don't know, I don't like it," he says. Another week passes, I'm in the shower again, got the news cranked.
44:13 John Kiriakou? "Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has withdrawn his nomination as Secretary of Commerce." And then Kerry called me and I ended up going to Capitol Hill. There were only two times that I ever gave John Kerry unsolicited advice. He was giving a speech at the Brookings Institution. One thing Kerry always did that used to drive us crazy is he would never follow the script. The script is the script for a reason, but he would always go off topic because he thought he was smarter than everybody else and he knew better than everybody else. And he would end up invariably making a fool out of himself. So he's giving this well-prepared speech that the speechwriter had slaved over for days. He says, "You know, I was supposed to be the Secretary of State. I invited President Obama to my house for Christmas.
44:58 John Kiriakou? After Christmas dinner, we went for a walk around the neighborhood and Obama put his arm around my shoulder and said, 'John, if you endorse me first, before even the Kennedys, Secretary of State.'" So I endorsed him. People forget, I was the first one who endorsed him. Kennedy endorsed him a week later, but I endorsed him first. I was supposed to be the Secretary of State. I'm making this motion of my finger across my throat like, "Cut, cut, stop talking." Richardson has exactly the same story. Obama promised Secretary of State to 20 different people if they would do X, Y, and Z for him. Welcome to Washington. That's how things were. And these guys were both shocked that they didn't get the Secretary of State position that Hillary Clinton got it.
45:41 John Kiriakou? Afterwards, I said, "Senator, you can't tell that story in public. It's a bad look." "I know, I know," he says. "I'm still pissed off about it because I should be Secretary of State." I said, "Well, that's what Richardson says. He's supposed to be Secretary of State." The only other time I ever gave unsolicited advice was that every time he talked about Syria, he would always say, "My dear friend Bashar al-Assad." I told him one day, I said, "Senator, you gotta stop saying 'my dear friend Bashar al-Assad.'" Every Lebanese in Washington is calling me, asking me, "What the fuck my boss is doing, calling this murderous dictator my dear friend?" And Kerry said, "Well, he and I connected, and we rode motorcycles together to the Golan Heights. We really hit it off. We really understand each other." "That's great, but he's a genocidal dictator, and you can't call him my dear friend."
46:26 John Kiriakou? "I know, I know. I'll stop." "Okay." It was clear to me from the very beginning of that job that Kerry wanted nothing more in life than to be Secretary of State. And to be Secretary of State, he couldn't risk pissing off the President, or the National Security Advisor, or the CIA. It's not unusual to get a lunch invitation from either a foreign diplomat or from a journalist in Washington. I would always clear it with my boss. It's part of the job to go liaise with them and talk about international affairs and foreign elections and things like that. That was normal. We did that all the time. But I wasn't actually living a normal existence. On the surface, it appeared normal, but underneath the surface, I was under intense investigation.
47:10 John Kiriakou? Nothing was as it seemed.
47:14 Speaker 05 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
47:47 John Kiriakou? One day, I got a call from the number three at the Japanese Embassy. He invited me to lunch. His English was so bad that we did the lunch entirely in Arabic. We met at a steakhouse on Capitol Hill. I remember that lunch very clearly. It was delightful. And I remember we talked about Turkish elections, Israeli elections, and the Arab-Israeli peace process. At the end of the lunch, he said to me, "What's next for you?" Well, I told Senator Kerry that I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half, and I think I'm going to resign soon. I have five children. I need to put them through college, and I need to get out there and make some money. And very excitedly, he said, "No, don't do that.
48:32 John Kiriakou? If you give me information, I can give you money." And I said, "What is wrong with you? Do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you. I'm going to report this." And I threw my money on the table, and I walked out, and I went without stopping to the Office of the Senate Security Officer. I walked in. I said, "I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer." He said to me, "Let me guess. Was it that damn Russian?" "Russian? No, I haven't met any Russians." "No, it was Japanese." "Japanese?" "Yeah, he cold pitched me at the end of lunch." And I told him the story. He said, "Well, you know, the Japanese do poke around every once in a while looking for information related to trade negotiations." He said, "I'll tell you what.
49:17 John Kiriakou? Sit at this standalone computer. It was unconnected to the Internet." He said, "Write it as a memo, and I'll..." I'll send it to the FBI. I wrote the memo. He sent it to the FBI. He called me later and said that the FBI was gonna send two agents up the next day to talk to me. So they send these two young agents up. They asked me to recount the entire story, so I do. They said, "We want you to call him back, and we want you to invite him to lunch, and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he's trying to collect, and how much he's willing to pay you for it." And because I'm a patriot, I said, "Do you want me to wear a wire?" And they said, "No, we're gonna be at the next table." I said, "But he doesn't speak English. He only speaks Arabic."
50:00 John Kiriakou? And they said, "That's okay. We're gonna record everything. We're gonna take it back." So I invite him to lunch. He says yes. And then the morning of the lunch, one of the FBI agents called me and said, something had come up that I should go forward with the lunch and write them another memo as detailed as I possibly could. I always prided myself at the agency on the detail in my reporting cables, to the point where one of the station chiefs I was working for told me that he loved reading my cables because he felt like he was in the room watching the thing go down. It was a great compliment. I do the lunch. I go back to the Senate Security Office. I write the memo. The security officer sends it to the FBI. They call me back. They ask me to meet him a third time,
50:43 John Kiriakou? and a fourth time, and a fifth time, which I do. In the fifth lunch, at a place in Georgetown, he says to me, "I have great news. I was promoted and I got my dream job. I'm gonna be the number two, the deputy chief of mission, at the Japanese Embassy in Cairo." I said, "Congratulations." We shook hands, and I never saw him again. Several months later, it's January 2012. I get a call from the FBI. I had already left the Senate Foreign Relations Committee almost a year earlier. They said, "Do you remember that operation you helped us out with a year ago?" "Sure." "Well, we've got a similar problem, and your country needs you."
51:26 John Kiriakou? And I said, because I'm also, in addition to being a patriot, I'm sometimes an idiot, I said, "Anything for the FBI." Around the same time that this was happening, I also got a call from a prominent conservative journalist at The Washington Times, which is the right-wing newspaper in Washington. He invited me to lunch. I was worried about this one. This guy had a reputation for real muckraking, and I had heard from multiple sources that there was actually a task force with his name on it at the FBI, and they were looking to see where he was getting his information. I went to my boss and I said, "I've gotten three emails from this guy. The first two I just deleted, but he's persistent and he's insisting that we go to lunch. What should I do?"
52:11 John Kiriakou? He said, "Let me talk to Carrie." Carrie said, "Go ahead and have lunch with the guy. Just see what he wants." I went to lunch with him. It was at Charlie Parker's Steakhouse in Washington. It was a perfectly lovely lunch. We talked mostly about politics, who might be running for president for the Republicans, and what was the mood in Washington. It was just a normal Washington lunch. At the end of it, I said, "Well, thanks. This was delightful. It was great to meet you." He said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not why I asked you to lunch." He leans forward and in a whisper, he says, "You're being investigated by the FBI. They believe that you're the source for the John Adams Project." I said, "I don't have any idea what the John Adams Project is." He said, "That is definitely not the response I expected."
52:55 John Kiriakou? I said, "I'm serious. I never heard of the John Adams Project. I don't know what it is." He said, "It's the Project at Human Rights Watch to identify the torturers in the CIA's torture program." I said, "Honest to God, I've never heard of that, ever. I'm certainly not the source for the John Adams Project, and I don't know what you're talking about. You're being straight with me." I said, "I'm being 100% straight with you. I never heard of this thing." I stood up, I shook his hand, and I walked out. My boss said, "What did he want? He says I'm under investigation by the FBI." My boss said, "I don't think that's true. Just as a courtesy, they would have told Carrie." And Carrie would have given me the wink and the nod. I would know about it. I said, okay, that's good enough for me. And then I just finished
53:40 John Kiriakou? my day and went home. On January 16th, 2012, I took the subway downtown. I walked over to the FBI's Washington Field Office. One of the two agents that I was supposed to meet was waiting for me at the entrance. I will admit to you that I was nervous and I said something to Catherine before I left. I said, you know, this just doesn't smell right to me. There's literally nobody else in the federal government that can help the FBI with whatever it is they need to do. Why me? I'm out. I've been out. Why pull me back in? And she said, well, just feel them out and see what they want. I went down there. The one was waiting for me at the entrance. Couldn't possibly have been any friendlier. Takes me up to a vaulted room. I meet the bad cop, the one who was rude
54:24 John Kiriakou? from the outset. Sat down. The good cop asked me where I was from originally. And I said, I'm from north of Pittsburgh. Oh, you're a Steelers fan? I said, yeah, I'm a big Steelers fan. Oh, Roethlisberger had a heck of a season this year. Yeah, he had a great season. And the other guy's just sitting there staring at me. And I'm thinking, the fuck is his problem? I was just so oblivious. At first, it was football. It was about mutual friends that we had. And then one of them said, I just watched Charlie Wilson's War. And I noticed in your book, you said that Gus Avrakatis, who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was your mentor at the agency. What was Gus like? Yeah, Gus is a bona fide American
55:05 John Kiriakou? hero. He was awesome. He was mean, but he was great and a great friend. And we went on and on. The bad cop's just sitting there giving me the death stare. That led to other parts of my book. Well, when you said X, didn't the agency give you a pushback for that? No, I got everything cleared from the Publications Review Board. It was a battle. It took me nine months to write the book. Took me 22 months to get it cleared. And they left 90 pages on the floor. But everything that was in the book, I got it cleared. The questions are becoming more and more pointed. They're asking me about Pakistan. You know, you gave an interview in which you said this. And that didn't appear in the book. Did they take that out? I remember thinking, "What the heck is going on here?" And I opened a bottle of water
55:50 John Kiriakou? that they had sitting there. At this point, I'm sitting there for an hour and 20 minutes, and we haven't yet gotten to the Japanese ambassador, but their questions are really pointed. And then finally, one of them says, "There was a catastrophic leak to the Guantanamo Defense Attorneys." And they start laying these pictures in front of me. "Do you know any of these people?" I'm looking at the pictures. "Nope, nope, nope, nope. I don't know any of these people." "This one, I do know. Boy, he got fat. He put on maybe 100 pounds. I know him." But he had never, ever been undercover. He's an overt employee. On his LinkedIn, he says, "Central Intelligence Agency." The final picture was of my last boss at the CIA. It was a snap taken off of CNN. He
56:35 John Kiriakou? was also overt and out there giving interviews. I said, "All these other people, I don't have any idea who they are." They were all taken clandestinely, outside the entrance of an undercover CIA facility in the Virginia suburbs. I said, "I didn't even know that the CIA had that facility." They said, "We believe that you're the source of this leak, and you should know that we're raiding your house right now as we speak." My response to that deflected part of the blow, I'm grateful to the combination of luck, wits, and training that gave me the presence of mind at that key moment to tell them calmly, but with definite urgency, "I want to speak to my attorney, and I mean right now."
57:18 John Kiriakou? In the business of spying, you never want to be the last person in the room to realize what's going on. But there I was. In the next episode, the shit hits the fan and starts flying in all directions. The government's case against me was almost entirely nonsense. Almost. Aye, there's the rub. Still, I was determined to battle it out to the bitter end, to have my day in court, to stand up for doing the right thing. But alas, grand plans and the legal system don't often play well together. Our justice system isn't always just. And when the CIA is out for blood, it's likely there will be blood. If you're enjoying the podcast, please don't forget to like it, rate it, review it, or
57:58 John Kiriakou? share it on whatever platform you find us. It really does help us grow. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast. And John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
58:26 Speaker 01 This podcast, it's a Costart and Touchstone production.
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59:06 Speaker 05 Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
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