CIA Whistleblower: “The Shadow Government Is Real” - John Kiriakou - #1160

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer, intelligence whistleblower, journalist, and author. Expect to learn who’s actually controlling the US government, what John thinks of the new Paramount/Warner Bros. Skydance Merger, why we should be worried about and taking China more seriously, if brainwashing is real in CIA interrogation techniques, the most impressive CIA operations they pulled off, why John plays Angry Birds every morning and much more… Sponsors: Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 6 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Why Should We Believe an Ex-CIA Agent? (00:44) Will John Ever Receive a Presidential Pardon? (03:25) Who Really Controls America? (11:32) Inside the CIA’s Levels of Security (15:26) The CIA’s Most Classified Operations (16:44) Does the CIA Classify Embarrassing Information? (17:54) Could Big Tech Become More Powerful Than the CIA? (20:37) Is the CIA Spying on American Citizens? (25:54) Why We Should Be Worried About China (30:53) How Foreign Spies Infiltrate the US Government (39:50) What Will CIA Whistleblowers Be Leaking in 10 Years? (43:18) Is Mass Surveillance the Price of Safety? (47:51) Is Brainwashing Real? (58:45) The Chicken Farmer Who Brought Down Hitler (01:03:30) Inside Operation Grim Beeper (01:06:03) The Greatest Intelligence Operations Ever (01:11:41) Can America Legally Kidnap Foreign Nationals? (01:17:20) Was 9/11 the Most Complex Intelligence Operation Ever? (01:20:47) The Location and Kidnap of Adolf Eichmann (01:22:37) The Legendary Capture of Carlos the Jackal (01:27:34) Why Working for the CIA Was So Much Fun (01:29:37) How Mass Persuasion Works at Scale (01:36:58) Does Working for the CIA Make You Paranoid? (01:38:19) How to Spot a Liar (01:46:50) How Interrogators Get People to Tell the Truth (01:54:17) Should Torture Ever Be Legal? (01:59:43) The Most Shocking Interrogation Tactics Used by the CIA (02:07:31) What Really Happens at Guantanamo Bay? (02:08:50) Was Uday Hussein One of the Most Evil Men Ever? (02:15:34) Dominance vs Prestige: What Makes a Better Leader? (02:20:16) Is This America’s First Botched Lethal Injection Execution?( 02:28:31) Why John Is Obsessed With Angry Birds (02:31:09) Is John a Model Now? (02:32:54) What Everyone Gets Wrong About Intelligence Agencies (02:35:41) Where to Find John Extra Stuff: See me live in the UK & Ireland this October: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You are an ex-CIA operative. Why should I believe anything that you're gonna tell me?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's a good question. I get it with some frequency. And all I can say is I have a very long track record. And my track record is one of telling the truth. So I can't force people to believe what I say, but they can certainly choose to believe me or choose to not believe me. I won't lose sleep over it either way.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned that you're looking for a pardon from Trump. How's that going? Do you think you're gonna get it?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  No. If I'm, if I'm being fully honest, let me, let me back up by saying that I have fantastic support from people in the inner circle around Donald Trump. And I'm very grateful for it. Household names. But I am told by one of those household names that it's not gonna happen because the CIA hates me. And I responded, this is just three weeks ago. I responded by saying that I've never met John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I've never exchanged a harsh word with John Ratcliffe. And this cabinet member said, it's not about John Ratcliffe as a person.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  It's institutional. They fear that if you get a pardon, it'll open the door for other would be whistleblowers who want to go public on issues of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality. And, and they're not willing to entertain that.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  Is there anyone else that is more persona non grata than you, do you think?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Ed Snowden.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so that's the sort of one and two of.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, when I was still at the CIA, Philip Agee was still being talked about.

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Philip Agee was a CIA case officer in the 1960s, who was serving in South America, I think it was Chile or Peru, one or the other. And he walked in on a torture session that the CIA was doing with the host government intelligence service, and decided to resign from the CIA. But more than just resigning from the CIA, he wrote a book called Inside the Company, in which he documented in an appendix the names of every undercover CIA officer that he ever met. And it was something like 1,200 names that he came up with. They wanted to execute Philip Agee.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Even years and years later, when I was at the agency, the old timers were still talking about, you know, how do we get Agee? He ended up fleeing to Cuba and lived most of his life in Cuba. But yeah, until, until Snowden, Agee was number one.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  He could give Andrew Tate some advice.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Seriously, Andrew Tate. At least if you're gonna get caught, don't be got, don't be caught wearing those silly clothes.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think he was actually, uh, the reason that he was taken away was for crimes against fashion.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  There you go. That, that actually makes sense to me.

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. How much is speaking, so President CIA, how much oversight does the president have over the CIA? How compartmentalized are those?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's, that's an issue that is debated. It, it shouldn't be because the president should be the definitive word. And the, the president's not the definitive word because,

• 3:31Speaker 01

  because there really is such a thing as the deep state. And I say this all the time, you don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. You can call it the state, whatever you want. But the fact is that it exists. And presidents come and go every four years or every eight years. And the deep state, you're there for 25 years, 30, 35 years. I used to sit next to a guy who's now one of the, you know, top four or five officers. He's been there for 37 years. So they know that if a president orders them to do something they don't wanna do, they just say, yes, Mr. President, and then they ignore him.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  It must feel a lot like being a hotelier and having guests that come and go, medium stay guests compared with you, who's been there for decades.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Forever. Uh huh. That's exactly right. And there's a bigger problem too. And it's the, the lack of congressional oversight. Between, well, starting in 1975, the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, they transformed into oversight committees. So it became, the Church Committee became the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Pike Committee became the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. But the thing is, is how, how does a staff of 40, 50 people oversee an organization of 20, 30, 40,000 people?

• 4:59Chris Williamson?

  That's how many are in the CIA?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Can't. Well, the number's classified and my information's so old. I don't know how many people, but it's gotta be a lot more than it was when I was there. So how do you oversee that huge of a bureaucracy? You can't. And you rely on self-reporting. And I'll give you an example.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  And this was not unusual in any way. I was involved in an operation that at the very end went bad. And when an operation goes bad and a life is lost, you have to report it to Congress, to the congressional oversight committees.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  I was with the station chief. We were driving back to our office. And he says to me, you're gonna write the cable? And I said, yep, I'm gonna write the cable. And he said, yeah, listen, um,

• 5:54Speaker 01

  don't send that to Congress. And I said, yeah? And he said, no, don't, don't send it to Congress. And that was not unusual. Like, oh, Congress has enough to worry about. They're working on the budget right now. We don't wanna just throw this wrench into the works by telling them we just lost a source. And I said, okay, you're the boss. And so I didn't report it to Congress.

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  Does that make the CIA a kind of shadow government?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I think that's very much what it is. Yes.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  So who's really controlling what happens behind the scenes in America?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  It's that layer right below the political appointees. So it's that layer right below the director and deputy director of the CIA, the secretary and deputy secretary of state, secretary and deputy secretary of defense. It's, it's those, it's those career government bureaucrats that aren't going anywhere.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna make an analogy between the CIA and running nightclubs. And I'm gonna try and see if I can bring this into land. So I ran events for a very long time in the north of the UK. And I had this very big events company. And one of the things that the managers of the nightclub wanted to see were the owners of the events company standing on the front door next to them. Where you stand is typically on the door, make sure that the queue's moving nicely, that the door staff aren't beating anybody up, people are paying the right amount of the till, et cetera, et cetera. Pop your head downstairs, is everything going all right inside? Outside is where the action is. And one of the things that was interesting, you would assume, well, if you're the owner, you have this more salubrious, like, you know, opulent. You just sit in the car or go for a coffee or, you know, don't even leave.

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  Like, it's one in the morning and it's cold in the northeast of the UK. Why do you even need to be there? Like, you're functionally not doing anything. All of the action is happening downstairs. All of the managers that work for me and my business partner, they're the ones that actually know everyone that's going in. By this point, I was 24, 25, 26, 27. Most of the people that were in the club were 19. But what we found was that in other events companies who decided, had less of a Puritan work ethic than me and my business partner did, when the owners started to leave the front door, the managers for the events company and the manager of the venue would start to develop a tighter relationship. And I think that we usually assume the person who has the most seniority

• 8:21Chris Williamson?

  is the one that's got the, that's closest to the information, that has the most respect. But it's quite reliably, it's not, it's the enforcer. You know, even if you look at the mafia, how many times was the boss overthrown by one of the second-in-commands or one of their lieutenants? Because it's, it really is the enforcer that is kind of at the coalface day to day. They've got sufficient seniority to be seen with respect, but they're also grinding away. They're stood on the front door of the nightclub. And that was, we could predict very reliably that particular events company, the owners stopped going out on the night time. We give it three months, six months before one of their managers goes, well, hang on a second, I'm mates with the guy that runs the venue.

• 9:04Chris Williamson?

  And the dude that runs the company, like, he's not even here. Like, why don't we just cut him out? I'll backhand you a little bit and we can go direct. And I think it sounds somewhat similar here. Not only that, but it would be as if me and my co-founder were being replaced every so often. So not even was the loyalty not to the person who's more at the coalface doing the work. But who are you being loyal to? You're being loyal to an appointee that's gonna fuck off at some point in the next few years? So it makes, it makes complete sense.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  And they have, they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  Because they don't wanna lose their job?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  They don't wanna lose their job. But even more importantly, they're the ones that make the trains run on time. They're the ones that, that are foreign policy and defense and intelligence policy. And they don't want some bomb-throwing new president to come in. I, I've said this a number of times before, but I think it bears repeating. One of the things that the CIA generally loves is when a new president is elected and he has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. Because from the day after the election, he's entitled to a PDB briefing, President's Daily Brief. And so it's usually the deputy director for intelligence

• 10:20Speaker 01

  or the director of the PDB staff, or sometimes both of them together, that will go brief the new president-elect. And I always say, as soon as they lay out the first, like, blue border report or black border report, it's like six levels above top secret. And they say, Mr. President-elect, just wait until you see the cool things we're doing all over the world. So highly classified, everybody else has to step outside. Just wait.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  They've recruited him. They made him one of the guys. They just sucked him right in. And every day, six days a week, he can't wait to get that briefing. But somebody who has foreign policy experience and maybe, you know, might be a little bit jaded about CIA failures, whether analytic or operational, isn't going to just succumb to the allure of inside information.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  What are the levels of security?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Classification? So it starts with unclassified. The New York Times is unclassified. Everybody can see it. Then there's something called sensitive but unclassified. So it's usually like an internal memo or something. You know, the Dunkin' Donuts in the CIA cafeteria is going to close for two weeks for renovation. It's sensitive because it's inside the CIA, but it's unclassified. Then there's confidential. Most of what the State Department does is confidential. Where if it's exposed, it would be embarrassing to the federal government.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Not dangerous, but it would be embarrassing. Then there's secret. Revelation of secret information would cause serious damage to the national security. Then there's top secret. Revelation of that information would cause grave damage to the national security. That's the terminology in the espionage law. But then there are compartments, dozens and dozens of compartments that are in addition to top secret. For example, when you get hired by the CIA, you don't just get a top secret security clearance. You go in with what's called a TSSCI SITK gamma clearance.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I know, it's crazy. So it's top secret, special intelligence, meaning you're allowed to see NSA reporting. And the compartments are talent, keyhole, and then gamma is above talent and keyhole. I remember laughing out loud in the first classified briefing I ever participated in, because the guy starts the briefing off by saying, the word Zarf, when standing alone, is unclassified. And I laughed out loud, like, what the fuck are you talking about? Zarf is a compartment that is no longer used at NSA, where they say, we have top secret information.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  You can see it, but he can't because it's top secret Zarf. What the heck does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. And then he's telling us, you can say the word Zarf, but you can't say what Zarf is.

• 13:38Chris Williamson?

  Right, fantastic. And then, so that's, what's the gamma is the highest?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  On sort of a day to day basis, gamma is the highest. So if I'm a CIA analyst, let's say, and I'm getting all source intelligence and I'm giving a briefing, and I'm going to go to some, you know, I'll go to Central Command to give a briefing. The guys who have the highest level security clearances are going to be up to gamma. So I can talk about gamma. Gamma is going to be sensitive to the point where, let's say, it is, you know, we've intercepted the cellphone of some foreign leader. That's going to be gamma because it's particularly sensitive. But then there's a lot above gamma. Yeah.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what that called?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Oh, sometimes they'll come and go in a matter of months, depending on the operation.

• 14:26Chris Williamson?

  Like Zarf?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Zarf. Zarf was around there for a long time. It was from like the 50s. But let's say, let's say there's a specific operation. We're going to try to locate, you know, the Ayatollah of Iran. And so we have, we have access to a certain, you know, electronic in his cellphone or the cellphone of a bodyguard or whatever. That could be, you know, top secret SITK gamma jelly jar. I'm just making that up.

• 15:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  The code names are computer generated at random, so you never know what they got.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you think of a hypothetical situation that would be the most high security

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  that you can think of?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Pretty much anything that DARPA does, the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency. DARPA is working on things that you and I see only in science fiction movies. That's why so many people believe that, that the UFOs that we've been seeing all these years are not actually UFOs. They're experimental DARPA aircraft or the Chinese version of DARPA or something like that. But DARPA is so, the work that DARPA does is so highly classified. I never met a CIA officer that had access to.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  Do you think the president even knows about that stuff?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I think that if he asked, he would be read into the compartment and told. But I think on a daily basis, probably not.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  So does he have, is it right to say that the president is the person who, if they wanted to, could get access to the most information across the board generally?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  The only person, yeah. And he's also the only person in government that can just declassify literally anything he wants with a stroke of the.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  Including gamma, Zarf?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  All of it.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  Jelly jar, right, okay. Do you think that they abuse classification to hide embarrassing things?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, yes.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  How much of it needs to be classified, that stuff?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  There's a guy named Jay William. Jay William, I forget his name. Anyway, there's a guy who was the classification czar under George W. Bush. And now he has become an anti-classification activist. His position is that fully three quarters of classified documents ought not be classified.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Politically inconvenient, personally revealing, embarrassing.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the White House and the Pentagon especially leak like cives, but there are almost always authorized leaks. Like you'll leak something for a political purpose. You'll leak something to embarrass a foreign leader. You leak, you leak something to try to get a sense of where the public might be on an issue. Well, I mean, technically, that's all a violation of the Espionage Act. You can't leak information like that, but they do it literally every single day, every day.

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Federal judge just approved the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. Larry Ellison's Oracle helps to secure TikTok's USA data and their algorithm. And then his son, David, runs Paramount, including CBS News.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Pretty convenient, isn't it?

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Oracle's name actually comes from the CIA project that its founders worked on.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that private data and media companies could potentially become as powerful as an intelligence agency?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it already is. And I'll tell you what makes it worse, too. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA sought from Congress a waiver allowing it to invest in tech startups, unprecedented in American history, right? As a government, you can't act as, you know, a private investor, as an angel investor.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  What if you get great returns?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  And they did. The CIA was the very first investor in Palantir. And Palantir now is a global security software concern, to the point where

• 18:44Speaker 01

  there's credible information indicating that it's infiltrated governments around the world. I was just in Sweden a couple of weeks ago, and there's this huge national debate in Sweden about whether or not to use Palantir to install and maintain their governmental security databases. And Palantir got the contract. So, I mean, do we trust Palantir not to just feed everything to NSA and CIA? I don't. I worked there for 15 years. I know how it works. Literally, everything is going to NSA and CIA.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

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• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com/ModernWisdom. A Modern Wisdom, a checkout. Is there a philosophical justification for having an organization like that, which gives your home countries and the country of its origins national security competitive advantage?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  That's the bottom line. And I would say, of course. For example, when Ed Snowden went public with his revelations in June of 2013, one of the things that the press really seized on was the fact that NSA was intercepting Angela Merkel's cellphone. I want NSA to intercept Angela Merkel's cellphone. I want to know what the German trade positions are. I want to know what the Germans are saying about the United States, right? I don't want the CIA and NSA to spy on me. It's a part of NSA's charter, its founding charter, that it is forbidden from collecting data on American citizens. Same with the CIA.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  It is patently illegal for the CIA to collect information on Americans. Yet they both do that every single day.

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that companies like Flock, which there's a lot of controversy around at the moment, are private companies being used to get around surveillance protections that are meant to restrain the government by just getting private organizations to do it on their behalf?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And 9/11 changed that in a terrible way, where, you know, until 9/11, if the FBI, for example, wanted to investigate you, they would have to go to a federal judge and say, we want to investigate Chris because of these four reasons. And then the judge would sign, you know, a warrant. Now, all they have to do, literally, all they have to do is write up a letter called a national security letter, take it to your service providers and say, give us everything that you have, and you are forbidden by the Patriot Act from even telling anybody that we gave you this letter. What do you do? How do you defend yourself? You can't? You don't even know you're being investigated.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And there's no judge to say, wait a minute, guys, you're going too far here. There is no safety.

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  Why do you come into land on private companies that develop technology that can be beneficial for a country? And the inevitable relationship that's going to come along? Like, I've spent time with Palmer Lucky. What he's trying to do with Andrew Rill, like, I mean, what's the tagline of that? Fight unfair?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Isn't that great?

• 22:50Chris Williamson?

  I want a clever guy, a clever guy that's on my side with a gun, as opposed to a clever guy that's on their side with a gun. And I understand that the issue is, well, if that gun is distributed around this country enough, then it can be used to enforce me. I am in the closest proximity to the gun. Hopefully, for a long time, I shouldn't be the person that's on the receiving end of it. But there is a risk. This kind of feels a little bit like the organizational geopolitical systemic equivalent of the debate that British people have around Americans having guns, full stop. But, hey, yeah, it's great that you can defend yourself with it, but also you can be on the receiving end of it. How do you square that circle in a country like this where organizations can do it?

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't decide to embed them with the government, they just go to the highest bidder, which might not actually be you? Is it not better to have eyes inside of that than it is to let it just be a free for all?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Sure. In a perfect world, yes. And that's why we need such robust oversight in this, in this area. I'm a firm believer in the rule of law. I really am. And so if, why are you smiling?

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  This thought that came across, I'm sorry, my face, my face betrays what I think inside of my head. What I thought inside of my head is the law, the law can be fucked with to just make it whatever you want.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And that's the point I was going to make. That's why we need, we need the real force of law. We, we, we can't just change the law just to suit the whims of, of the political winds. We need to be, see, this is kind of my soapbox here. This is part of my standard speech at universities. Either we're going to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about in 1984, or we're not. Either we're going to be a nation that respects the law and international law and treaties, or we're not. We can't just pretend to be this, this shining beacon of hope for human rights and civil

• 24:55Speaker 01

  rights and civil liberties, except when it's expedient to not be. You know? So if, if we're serious about privacy, for example, then by God, let's be serious about privacy. At the same time, these companies, I think, can perform a great national service. Because if their technologies are used to keep us safe, to keep Americans safe, then God bless. I wouldn't want them selling the technology to the North Koreans or to the, you know, pick your enemy. But then at the same time, if we're going to be the good guys, let's, by God, let's be the good guys and be serious about it.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  Geopolitical climate's pretty chaotic at the moment.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  It is.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  Who are you most worried about, foreign nation state, being an American?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  China. That's an easy one for me. The Chinese, first of all, the Chinese do not have a history of imperialism. They just don't. They don't invade other countries. They never have. I mean, sure, we can make an argument about Tibet, but that's, that's a separate argument. But except for, you know, a brief conflict with North Vietnam back in the day, and two border skirmishes with the Indians, the Chinese just don't attack other countries. They purchase them. They co-opt them. They, there was a, there was a headline on The Onion a couple of weeks ago that was

• 26:27Speaker 01

  funny because it was so true. It, it said, China content to sit back and watch US destroy itself. Because that's what we're doing. When we're spending between one and one and a half trillion dollars a year on the defense budget, and the Chinese aren't, we're spending more than the next eight largest countries combined.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  Is it being spent effectively?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  What's it mostly being wasted on?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I think it's being wasted on 144, what, no, 210 bases in 144 different countries, number one. I think that it's being wasted on the development of inefficient and inappropriate weapon systems like the F-35. Nobody wanted the F-35.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Because you can't have a one size fits all aircraft when one size can never fit all. And then we phase out the A-10. Everybody loved the A-10. The, the A-10 can go so low that you can practically reach up and touch it as it's firing a missile to destroy a tank. The F-35 can't do that. So in the meantime, the Chinese have enough money to buy ports and airports and factories and desalination plants and anything their hearts desire in countries all around the world.

• 27:50Chris Williamson?

  Because they're not spending as much.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  They're not spending it on, on implements of war.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  Does that not make them more vulnerable, though?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I don't think so. It buys them friends. It tends to isolate the United States, and it frees up cash.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  They're flexing economic power.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  They are. And then they can use that free cash to promote the development of new technologies that they can use against us.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  What is the end goal of China?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I think the end goal of China is exactly what the American goal toward the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. It's, it's containment and isolation, hoping that the US will eventually collapse on itself. You know, this year, we crossed the national debt border, what's the word I want to use, of 40 trillion dollars. So now, the, the number one expenditure in government is defense, and the number two is interest on the national debt.

• 28:48Chris Williamson?

  I once, I did an episode with the, the first long form episode with any Doja Pointy, and it's

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  A guy called Sam Korkos. He used to be at Levels, which is a glucose monitor, and he is now the chief information officer at the Treasury.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Good grief.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  And we did this episode in front of a huge LED wall, and we put the US debt calculator up behind us as it was going. And, you know, he's seen everything. He's seen where all of the bodies and buried in the spiders' webs are. And he was like, yeah, it's, it's a like Frankenstein's monster thing, that there's not just one database for tax. There's, you've got to do lookups across eight different multiple databases, and not everybody's information is held, and not all of the information's held in the same format, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, it's, it's a, a big sort of unwieldy megalopolis of, of information that's, that he's trying to navigate. But I guess.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Well, may I interrupt you for a second, too? Continuing on with China for a second.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  All the while that this is happening, the Chinese are actively committing espionage against us. And not just against us, but against all of our allies as well. Just recently, there was even a, a deep cover Chinese intelligence cell that was uncovered in New York City, where these Chinese intelligence officers were threatening Chinese dissidents in Greater New York, and threatening to then harm their relatives in China

• 30:10Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  if they didn't stop their activism against, against the government in Beijing. But they're, they're recruiting Capitol Hill staffers, they're recruiting FBI agents, they're trying to infiltrate the CIA. They, they have intelligence officers spread out in hard science PhD programs all across the United States. This is a serious problem for us.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  How many spies do you think are in the CIA and US government right now?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  God, I hope the answer is zero. I mean, we wouldn't have a counterintelligence center if it really were zero. It's impossible to say.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  Is it easier to ask how many departments haven't been infiltrated by foreign intelligence than how many have?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now you're going to get me on my high horse. I think the, the greatest threat

• 31:01Speaker 01

  The greatest immediate threat in terms of infiltrating the government like today, right now, is Israel.

• 31:08Chris Williamson?

  Would they be doing that covertly or overtly?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Covertly. They're being co-located in this new National Defense Authorization Act, co-located in the Pentagon and in the CIA. But I mean, as long as 35 years ago, there were, the FBI was able to identify 187 undercover Israeli intelligence operatives infiltrating or having infiltrated American defense contractors around the country. Just three weeks ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency Director sent an all-hands email to every officer in DIA saying, be particularly aware, the Israelis have really ramped up their intelligence operations against us, and they're trying to infiltrate DIA. That was three weeks ago.

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  How does a foreign nation get a spy inside of US circles of power? What's, what are some of the roots in?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  It's called the asset acquisition cycle, and it's four parts: spot, assess, develop, recruit. So I spot you. Who are you? Oh, you work for DIA. I'm gonna want to get to know you. I assess you. I assess your access to information that I want. If I determine that you do have access to information I want, then I begin to develop you. In the development portion of this, I have to identify a vulnerability. And a vulnerability might be an easy one, like you're a gambler, and you have a lot of debt. But it might be something more difficult, like you really, really love your wife, and maybe she has breast cancer.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Or you really love your kids, but you don't make enough money for them to go to a top-tier school. I can pay for them to go to a top-tier school. And then finally, when you test the person and they're willing to give you information in exchange for something, usually money, then you make it official. You recruit them.

• 33:03Chris Williamson?

  So most of the foreign assets that are inside of the US government are not foreign nationals? They're probably not people that even started? How many people do you think began their career inside of the CIA, National Defense, US government, under the pretense of doing it on behalf? How many have been turned?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  I feel pretty comfortable saying it's probably zero.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  Really? That they wouldn't have said, hey, let's get this person started from fresh, get them into university?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  No, the Soviets had great success doing that in the UK. The likes of, oh, for heaven's sake, Kim Philby, for example, and the Cambridge-

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Get that, have two massive sips of that, and I promise you, your brain will start functioning. It's good, good, good. Kim Philby.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Kim Philby and, and his cohorts at Cambridge. They were recruited at university and directed.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  And was he a British national?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, he became the, the chief of counterintelligence in MI6.

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  But would have maybe shown some sort of sympathies toward the Russians early on in his life?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  He was an overt communist when he was at university. But, I mean, there were a lot of communists in the 1930s.

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  So during the spot-assess phase, this guy's already aligned with our-

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Ideologically.

• 34:28Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Kim Philby, it's such an interesting story. Kim Philby's best friend, the best man in his wedding, was James Jesus Angleton, who was the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. So you have the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, the chief of counterintelligence in MI6, and they are best friends. But the entire time, Philby was actually a deep-cover KGB agent.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  Was the US guy legit?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  And it actually-

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  Would have been hilarious if one had been secretly working for the Russians and another had been secretly working for the Chinese.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, could you imagine? But it had such an effect on Angleton that it sort of pushed him over the mental edge. And he began a mole hunt that just destroyed the lives and careers of dozens of people.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  When he found out that the guy that he had the best-

• 35:21Speaker 01

  When he found out that Philby had, had been a KGB agent the whole time, he just leapt to the conclusion that there must be-

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  They're everywhere.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Dozens, they're everywhere.

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how Philby got rumbled?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the CIA was able to develop a source inside the KGB that said, hey, listen, this Brit, Philby, this guy's a problem. He's been with us since the 30s. And so Philby was tipped off. He happened to be at a Christmas party at the home of the British ambassador to Lebanon. He got a signal that he had been made, and he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He climbed out the window, made his way to the Soviet embassy. They put him in a coffin and shipped him to Moscow. And days later, he just shows up at a press conference in Moscow saying, I'm a communist. I've always been a communist. Long live the Soviet Union.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  The number four in MI6.

• 36:23Chris Williamson?

  And he lived out the rest of his days in?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  In fact, he became a lecturer in the KGB Training Center.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me. Well, look, I mean, he's got, he's got field experience for a few decades or whatever. He knows everything about everything. Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, there's a postscript to that. My first overseas service was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the first Gulf War. And I met a Saudi national named Abdullah Philby. And I said, Abdullah Philby, what an unusual name. It's kind of like Kim Philby. You're no relation to Kim Philby. And he said, Kim is my half-brother. We don't speak about him. So I asked the US ambassador, Chaz Freeman at the time, I said, I met this Saudi guy named Abdullah Philby, and he's Kim Philby's half-brother. And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I bumped into him a couple of times. I said, how, how's that possible? It turned out Kim Philby's father was a physician, and he became the personal physician

• 37:24Speaker 01

  to King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And served his entire career as the king's personal physician. And so the king gave him Saudi citizenship. He had divorced his British wife, married a Saudi woman, had an entire second family named Philby, but they're all Saudis.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  It's a family affair.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

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• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Going back to the Chinese, does the fact that the Chinese control the companies that make all of our chips help them with spying?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  I think it does. When I was the senior investigator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was there from 2009 to 2011. Literally, the very first investigation that I did was, was based on a tip that US passports were being made in China. They weren't being made in China. They were being made in Thailand, but the chips are made in China, which is just as bad. And so I-

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  Kind of a fundamental source security codes is embedded into these chips?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. The Chinese control, the efficacy of, of all American passports. That doesn't make any sense.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  I saw a comment on one of your reels that said, fun fact, without him, US torture would probably still be just a conspiracy theory. Given that you went to prison for revealing CIA secrets, what secrets do you think whistleblowers from inside the CIA might be leaking in 10 years' time?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that's a good question. Nobody's ever asked me that question before.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  On the fun side, you know, maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of this UFO thing. I think that would be fascinating.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  On the serious side,

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I really fear the infiltration of technology companies in our everyday lives. I really believe that our civil liberties are being violated every single day by tech companies and either the government denies it or we just pretend it's not happening. But I think, I think there are going to be whistleblowers in the future that come out and explain to us, explain to the American people, just how deeply infiltrated our lives are.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  Give me some examples of what it might be. Postulate for me.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Okay. I'll postulate going back to the 1970s. My first boss at the CIA, lovely, wonderful guy. He joined the CIA through something called the graduate, the graduate program. So it was for people working, the graduate fellowship program, people working on master's degrees. You do a semester at the CIA, then you do a semester in school, a semester at the CIA, a semester at school, and then you join the CIA as a staff officer. So his very first assignment at the CIA was in the counterintelligence center of James Angleton. He was a kid in his twenties, so he wasn't important enough to actually meet Angleton.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  So on his very first day, Angleton's secretary took him aside and showed him around the office and said, listen, in the unlikely event that you find yourself in the office alone, don't ever look at these files that are on the wall. Those are off limits to you. He said, okay. And of course, the moment he's alone in the office, he runs directly to the files.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  The marshmallow test for intelligence officers.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Don't eat that. Don't eat that marshmallow. He told me that there were thousands of manila folders on the, on the wall and that every single one of those folders was a file on an American citizen. Well, those files are all electronic now. And as I said, there are no court orders allowing the CIA, NSA, FBI to just wantonly collect information on Americans. Somebody said to me the other day, well, if you have nothing to hide, then what do you care if they're gathering your information? And my response was, do you know who first posed that question in a public forum?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It was Joseph Goebbels in 1933. Well, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care if the SS is gathering information or if the Gestapo is gathering information? It's a slippery slope. And once we just concede our civil liberties to the federal government, to any government, then we lose everything.

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  How infiltrated do you think our technology is now?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  By?

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Surveillance, any kind of surveillance.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  I think it's, they're working hand in glove. Government and, and private industry, I think it's completely, completely infiltrated.

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

  TVs, phones.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Everything. We know, thanks to the Vault 7 revelations.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  I know what that is.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Vault 7, in, in 2017, WikiLeaks published thousands and thousands of documents classified far above top secret that were allegedly leaked by a CIA engineer by the name of Joshua Schulte.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Joshua Schulte made the very ill-advised decision to represent himself in court and is now serving a sentence of 40 years without parole. He'll likely die in prison. But he released, allegedly released these documents indicating, for example, that the CIA can take control of your car remotely. Why? To send you over a bridge or to send you into a tree or into a bridge abutment. He released information indicating that the CIA had successfully hacked into the classified systems of our allies and then left code behind.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  But the code was written either in Cyrillic or in Farsi. He said that the CIA had developed technology to take over smart TVs where they could turn a speaker into a microphone. How is that even possible? But the CIA is able to do it so that they can tap a room with the TV still being off.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  There are thousands of documents, all freely available now on the WikiLeaks website. These are documents that the CIA director at the time called the crown jewel of everything that the CIA was doing.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  Nearly a third of Gen Z favors the government installing surveillance cameras in homes. Cato Institute, 2023, Central Bank Digital Currency National Survey. 2,000 Americans, we asked respondents whether they favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity. Not surprisingly, few Americans, only 14% support this idea. 75% would oppose government surveillance cameras inside their home, including 68% who strongly oppose and 10% don't have an opinion either way. This is presumably across the top. And then if we go down, I imagine they're going to break this out by age. 3 in 10 support.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Good lord.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  There it is. Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce those things? And, uh,

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  yeah, that age, 30% under 30, basically, 30% under 30. And the justification for this, or the reason for this, I think, is that generation has grown up with the trade that, well, I give my data to Facebook and Apple and these companies online and for it, in return, I get services and stuff. So the

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  means of exchange, the expected.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  In their minds, there's a quid pro quo.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  And that's just, that's how I've grown up. Yeah, like that's, and already, I mean, part of it might be a kind of informational nihilism, like confidentiality fatalism, or it's like, dude, they fucking, they've got it all already. Why not just put, you know, turn the cameras around in front?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Then you have to ask yourself, though, what if you've got a secret boyfriend or girlfriend? What if you're calling the doctor to talk about, you know, oh, maybe, maybe you've got herpes or something.

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  My chronic flatulence is.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Exactly. What if you're, you know, calling an abortion provider? What if you need to get in touch with a psychiatrist? Like, is nothing sacred anymore? Is nothing private? Are we not entitled to any privacy in our own lives? That number shocks and sickens me, to tell you the truth.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder whether it's going to get better or worse. There is always the,

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  there is the potential of that continuing and that sort of being passed down generation to generation or having some sort of a counter veiling revolution that goes against it.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  Is brainwashing real? Like, what's true and fake about that idea?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Operationally, yeah. I mean, the CIA, the KGB, the Chinese, the North Koreans, they worked on brainwashing operations going back to the early 1950s. You know, this whole notion of a Manchurian candidate, for example, this was based on, on fact, on truth. There was a, in the early 1950s, there was a source inside the Soviet Union that the CIA recorded, uh, sorry, that the CIA recruited. And this source reported that the KGB was working on, um, on a brainwashing operation, something that would even allow them to control somebody remotely from a long distance. The CIA panicked at the notion.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  The truth is that there was no such KGB operation. There was a Chinese operation, but there was nothing that the KGB was doing. So the CIA decided it was behind the eight ball. It had to play catch up and it then created and implemented what became known as MKUltra. So MKUltra ran from 1952 to 1975. It was a complete and utter failure. It resulted in the deaths of, you know, a number of people, we'll never know what the real number was, where the CIA was dosing its own employees with LSD, it was dosing

• 49:03Speaker 01

  people in San Francisco with LSD and, and pumping germs into the air to see who got upper respiratory infections. A CIA officer broke into a village bakery and, in a little village in France and put LSD in the, in the bakery's flour one morning and everybody in the, literally everybody in the village, when they ate their bread that morning, went nuts on an LSD trip. And then they're like, okay, so what do we do with this information now? We have people jumping off, you know, roofs and jumping off balconies. What do we do with it?

• 49:34Chris Williamson?

  You call MKUltra a failure?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it was a failure.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  So it didn't, not only was it damaging, but it also didn't achieve anything.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Literally nothing.

• 49:43Chris Williamson?

  I've had, do you know John Lyle? Are you familiar with him? He wrote the Dirty Tricks Department and he also wrote, he's done a lot of research. He's here in Austin and he goes into the National Archives and the most ground floor research of anybody that I know around this. And he's written two books on it and he's, he's really, really great. And yeah, that was kind of his summary as well.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  You know, one of the real shames about this whole thing is in 1975, at the Church Committee, Senator Church told the CIA director, do not destroy the documents. And he went straight back to headquarters and told people, shred everything. 15% of the documents survived.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  So that's what we know?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  That's all we know, 15%.

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay. That would suggest brainwashing isn't real.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Right. It could. I, I believe that they tried, they tried to do it and it, and it failed.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  We've got new technology now, new substances, more advanced understanding of human behavior.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Everything's changed.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that's unlocked some new capacities?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Oh, probably. Probably. I'll tell you kind of a funny story I've told once or twice in podcasts.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Something that I witnessed at the CIA that I had never seen before and I've never seen since, it was absolutely fascinating to me. In April of 2000, my next door neighbor was assassinated in Athens. He was the British Defense Attache, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders, and he was shot and killed by an assassin for a group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  It's it's kind of a long story and I'll I'll skip the the most of it.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Several months after the assassination, we had what's called a walk in. A walk in is somebody who literally walks into an American embassy and says, I have intelligence information that I want to give to a CIA officer. It just so happened that day that nobody was available. And so an FBI agent in the embassy took the walk in.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  She assessed that he was a nut and she said, thank you very much and sent him on his way. And then she wrote up a little memo and sent it to us. We were fascinated by it. So we called him back. So a colleague of mine and I, he only spoke Greek, this guy. And this colleague of mine and I were the two Greek speakers. So we called him back and we said, why don't you come on in and we'll have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria? So he came in and we said, what did you want to tell us? And he said that about forty minutes after the assassination,

• 52:26Speaker 01

  the source happened to be driving down the national highway and he had to take a leak. So he gets off the exit and there's a little chapel off to the side of the road that's locked up. And there's a large banyan tree in front of the chapel. He goes behind the back, the banyan tree to take a leak. And as soon as he does that, a van pulls up and then a car pulls up behind the van. The back doors of the van open and there's a motorcycle in the back of the van. The man in the car says to the two men in the van, Akomazie, is he still alive? And one of the men says, he should be dead by now.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Okay, that's worth investigating to me.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  The British Defence Attache has just been assassinated and this guy may have seen the assassins, right? And the the guy in the van gave a brown paper bag to the guy in the car. Did it have the murder weapon in it? It might have, worth investigating.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  This source was a simpleton. You could tell by his language, his grammar was terrible. He was uneducated. He was a farmer from central Greece. He just happened to be driving down the national highway.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  So we decided to debrief him as extensively as possible, but it was.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  You mean debrief?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Uh, interview.

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  But it was clear to us that the guy really was just a simpleton. He just couldn't really answer these questions. And so somebody at headquarters came up with the idea to hypnotize him.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  I had never participated in a hypnosis sent, uh, hypnosis session before. So we flew him to a third country where we wouldn't be interrupted. And my Greek speaking colleague and I went um to this country. We were met by a psychologist and a psychiatrist from headquarters. The psychiatrist was a sort of a certified hypnotist. So he said, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna turn all the lights off. We're gonna have the guy sitting in a chair. We're gonna make him as relaxed as we possibly can. And we're gonna count backwards from ten. And when we get to one, he's gonna be hypnotized and then we can ask him questions.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  I said, okay, this seems kind of nuts to me, but okay. So we did that. He's in the chair, sitting there very comfortably like this. The lights are all off. I'm counting backwards in Greek.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  From ten.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  In the meantime, the hypnotist says, I want you to put your right arm up or left arm up in the air. And the guy does. So I go backwards, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. And his hand goes like this, but his arm is up in the air.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  He kept his arm in the air for four and a half hours. I had never seen anything like it. There was no muscle strain, anything. It was just frozen there for four and a half hours. So I'm asking him questions. What do you see? I see the van pulling up. How many people are in the van? I see two men. Now what's happening? The driver got out. He opened the back door of the van. What do you see inside the van? I see a motorcycle. Can you see the license plate on the van? And he goes like this.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  And then he reads the license plate. I write it down. I hand it to my colleague. He runs into the adjoining room. He calls Athens, run a, run a trace on this license plate. It's a freaking stolen police car license plate. Now, how would he know that?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  The FBI thought we were nuts. What ended up happening? The guy, the source, so wanted to impress us that he started making things up in subsequent meetings.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And we knew he was lying. But everything that he said in that initial hypnosis session turned out to be true. We ended up having to cut him off because he was just unreliable. But, you know, is brainwashing possible? Yeah, I think probably. Can you get anything out of it? Maybe something limited? If there's a way to harness it and focus it, then sure, maybe something good can happen.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how many people could use that as an opportunity to sow discord.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  In the other direction.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  The flip side, that's why you have to have strong counterintelligence. Because you have to expect that your enemies are gonna do exactly that.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

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• 58:11Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get twenty-five dollars off, bringing it down to three hundred and forty bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save twenty-five dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. You know the story of the chicken farmer that brought down Adolf Hitler?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay, Mark, can you just search uh ChatGPT? Who was the chicken farmer that brought down Adolf Hitler? So I'm pretty sure it was uh Juan Payol, so a Spanish guy, and he knew that he was going to be able to help the Allies. So he walked into one of the embassies and they said, we don't need you. We can't help you. You're a chicken farmer. And he had some information or maybe he knew that he could get some. And he goes back again and they say no, and he goes back a third time and they say no. He goes, fuck it. Walks into the opposite, walks into the German one or the Italian one perhaps, and spends a couple of years infiltrating them.

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  You're thinking of Juan Payol Garcia, better known by his British codename Agent Garbo. His story is remarkable because he essentially talked his way into becoming a spy despite having no espionage. Payol was a Spaniard who trained at the Royal Poultry School.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Unsuccessfully tried his hand at chicken. He was an unsuccessful chicken farmer. Sorry, I'd fleshed out his credentials too much. Lived through the Spanish Civil War, disliked disliked both fascism and communism and developed an intense hatred of Hitler and Nazism. Later described his motivation as wanting to wage his own personal war against Hitler using his imagination. The crazy part is how he got the job. He and his wife initially approached the British and offered their services as a spy. The British rejected him. Rather than give up, Payol decided he would make himself valuable enough that Britain couldn't ignore him. So he called the German embassy in Madrid and volunteered to spy for the Nazis. He pretended to be an enthusiastic Nazi supporter with connections that would allow him to travel to Britain. The Germans were skeptical, so Payol forged documentation to make himself appear credible.

• 1:00:10Chris Williamson?

  Eventually, German intelligence recruited him, gave him money, secret codes and invisible ink, and instructed him to establish an espionage network in Britain. Except he didn't go to Britain. He moved to Lisbon and began pretending he was operating from London using newspapers, magazines, maps, travel guides and his imagination. He sent the Germans intelligence reports supposedly gathered by an expanding network of informants. The network eventually contained twenty-seven agents, none of whom existed. He invented personalities, jobs, relationships and entire backstories for them. If one of his reports turned out to be wrong, he could conveniently blame the imaginary subordinate who had supplied the information. The Germans became convinced that Payol was running an enormous intelligence operation inside Britain. And that's when British intelligence finally started to notice him.

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  MI5 initially intercepted his reports and thought there was an unidentified German spy operating in Britain. Eventually, they discovered what Payol was doing and realized this seemingly crazy Spaniard was extraordinarily talented. Nineteen forty-two, he was brought to Britain and became a British double agent, receiving the codename Garbo. He became a central to Operation Fortitude, the Allied deception surrounding D-Day. So he uh, the network reported where they were going to go. Failed chicken farmer, rejected by British intelligence, volunteers to spy for Hitler, invents an entire fake spy network, becomes one of Germany's most trusted agents, secretly works for Britain, feeds Hitler false information, plays a major role in D-Day.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Both sides decorated him.

• 1:01:37Chris Williamson?

  Dude.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. It's like this guy.

• 1:01:39Chris Williamson?

  One of the very few people in history who managed to receive military honors from both sides in the same war.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  What was, what was the Israeli name, the Israeli guy's name Levy? That became like the Deputy Defence Minister of Syria? He was a, he was a Mossad agent. He was a barber. And he kept offering and offering and offering. His Arabic was excellent and they kept saying, no, no, no. Finally, they were like, okay, okay. He, he was so good at throwing these parties in in Damascus where senior government people would come, see their senior Ba'ath party officials would come. Exiled Nazis would show up. And the way he got caught is he was secretly transmitting his reports back to Tel Aviv.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  And there happened to be a KGB signals van driving through the neighborhood and they picked up the signal and they told the Syrians, there's a spy in this neighborhood. And the Syrians got him. Now there are like town squares named after him and schools are named after him in Israel. It's the same thing.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  Enthusiasm counts for an awful lot. It can really compensate for ability.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  See, but part of the problem is you get so many people who want to do this kind of thing and they're legitimately insane.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  It's that one out of a hundred.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you need the Cristiano Ronaldo of chicken farmer secret agents.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think stuff like that's so fascinating to me. What do you make of the Beeper pager operation?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely brilliant.

• 1:03:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, you must have had a professional interest from the sidelines with regards.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 1:03:26Chris Williamson?

  Give me your assessment of that particular operation.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Well, the day that that operation took place, I got a call from a Russian television news network and they said, can you come on and talk about this pager operation? I said, sure. They said, can you say that it was a war crime and a crime against humanity? And I said, well, yeah, sure. Technically it was a war crime, right? Technically it was a crime against humanity because, you know, civilians were injured or killed, children were injured or killed. But this was an act of genius. I said, can you imagine the moving parts involved? It took, we learned later, it took a decade to come up with this idea. You had to control the entire supply chain over the course of something like five or

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  six countries and then actually get the pagers into the hands of Hezbollah operatives. And they said, yeah, but can you just say that it was a war crime and a crime against humanity? And I said, no, I got to explain what a brilliant operation it was. You can disagree with it and say it was, this is a terrible thing. All these people were killed. But this was, this was genius. I said, intelligence services around the world are going to study this for years to come. It was incredible. And they were like, thanks. Well, we'll call you some other time.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  It's the equivalent of being asked to denounce Kanye West's political views, but being unable to say that he doesn't make bangers.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:53Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Walks, it still crushes as a tune. If you hear that, you're like, I can't, my feet are moving a little bit. You know, you can say what you like about the ethics, but the end result, you know, they're here to blow their enemies up and they managed to do that.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  It was incredible. You know, it's one thing to, to locate, to geolocate a Hezbollah operative and then blow up the entire apartment block, right? Anybody can do that. It's an entirely different thing to take 10 years and take over a dozen companies in a half a dozen countries, control the entire global supply chain, and then have people on the ground to actually pass out the pagers to the intended targets. And then it works the way you wanted it to work. Incredible.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  What is the operation that you think is the most impressive or complex that you can talk about? I'm presuming that would probably be up there. Are there any others that come to mind?

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  That's gotta be the most complex. The other one that comes to mind immediately is the hunt for a terrorist named Mir E. Malkanzi. Have you ever heard of him?

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  One day in 1993, I used to, I used to take the back gate into the CIA because it was a little bit more convenient for me based on where my house was. And what you used to do back in those days is you just drive up and the CIA guard is going like this and you hold your badge up and then he goes like this, meaning come in, right? And you just drive in. Before nine 11, before, you know, terrorism, just come on in. You just hold your, hold your badge up.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  This morning, I drive into the CIA and the guard goes like this and I hold my badge up and then he kind of makes this shocked look and he runs out of his guard booth. And I was like, what in the world is that about? And I thought, eh, not my problem. And I drove to my parking space. I get to my desk and my outside line rings, my unclassified phone, which never rang. And it's my mother. And I said, what's up? And she said, are you okay? I said, of course I am. Why? She said, somebody's at the front of the CIA shooting people. I was like, what? So I hang up, turn on CNN to see what the heck is happening right here at the front gate of the building.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  And a Pakistani man by the name of Mir E. Malkanzi drove his car right up to the red light where you make the left to go into the main gate of CIA, put the car in park as other cars lined up behind him to make the left, got out with an AK-47 and just went car to car, shooting people. He only shot men. He killed two, including a colleague of mine, Lansing Bennett. Lansing and I were halfway through a paper together and he just murdered him right there in broad daylight and cold blood. Shot a communicator, Frank Darling, and then shot five other men going door to door, car to car. Calmly walked

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  back up to his car, made a U-turn, drove straight to Dulles Airport, got on a plane to Pakistan with no luggage, one-way ticket, and nobody ever questioned him.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  So then the hunt was on.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  I smile because the CIA.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  There was a psychologist in the counterterrorism center where I worked and I worked very closely with her. I liked her a lot. We did some cool stuff together. And she happened to be sitting on my promotion panel one day. And they were deciding, you know, should we promote Kiriakou or not promote Kiriakou? They decided, thank God to promote me. But she said, it was because of her that they promoted me. She said, John Kiriakou will come up with 35 ideas for an operation. Thirty of them are crazy, but five of them are really good. Well, as soon as Kanzi killed, you know, Frank and Lansing, the CIA's counterterrorism

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  center was happy to listen to any crazy idea. And so we all had crazy ideas. Things like renting an Ottoman fort on the top of a mountain in Pakistan so that we could intercept all of the telephone calls coming from the village below. Or setting up a fake radio station with a 600-foot tower so we could intercept everything in the entire region. To make a long story short, we found Kanzi initially in a flea bag hotel in Quetta, Pakistan. We were able to recruit an agent who then lured him out. The CIA is not a law enforcement

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  organization. It's an intelligence organization. So we had to tell the FBI, listen, we found Kanzi. Here he is. The FBI goes in and grabs him. And the reason I even raised that is because years later, the station chief for whom I was working had been part of the team that caught Kanzi. And he was still angry 10 years later because Time Magazine came out with a picture on the cover of two FBI agents leading Kanzi away in handcuffs. And the headline on the cover was, How the FBI Got Its Man. And it's like, they had nothing

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  to do with getting Kanzi. We got Kanzi. But that was one of the most complicated and sophisticated operations I ever heard of.

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  Can you talk about how it happened?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  It was not really. It's a combination of those intercepts in order to sort of

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  narrow the field and then human intelligence. And most, most people in countries like that are willing to sell their mothers for $500. There's an old joke at the CIA, a post nine 11 joke, that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And that's what we did.

• 1:11:22Chris Williamson?

  What is the?

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  Prevalence or legality of taking someone who has committed an act on your home turf from

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  either a third party

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  country that is not their home destination or you

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  or from their home destination, because

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  That's an easy one.

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  In the mid 1980s, during the Reagan presidency, a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and tortured and executed by a Mexican drug cartel. Congress acted very quickly in response to that that terrible incident and Congress passed a law making it legal for the United States to kidnap foreign nationals

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  extrajudicially and bring them back to the United States to face trial. So even though it's a it's a violation of the law in all of those other countries,

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  we don't care.

• 1:12:23Chris Williamson?

  I mean, like it legal here, but it's not happening here.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:27Chris Williamson?

  It's happening there.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's more? Is it more or less illegal to do it in a third party nation? Or to do it in the person's home nation?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  That's the debate. So there's a difference between rendition and extraordinary rendition. Do you know the two?

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  I mean, when I think rendition, I think of a play.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no. So a rendition is, let's say I'm a CIA officer in Pakistan. Okay, and you are an Egyptian. And you are a member of Al Qaeda.

• 1:13:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  I break down the door of your safe house one night at 2am and I grab you. And I say, oh, you're Egyptian? And you're here without a visa? I send you back to Egypt and I don't care what they do to you. That's a rendition. An extraordinary rendition is nasty. I break down the door of that safe house and I grab you and I say, oh, you're Egyptian? And I send you to Syria, Morocco, Algeria.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Anywhere in the world I want. And nobody's ever going to have any idea what happened to you. And they're going to torture you until you take your last breath. And then they're going to send us a transcript of everything you said up until you took your last breath. That's an extraordinary rendition.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  That again is the nation that is the enforcement organization of the nation that the person is in. Because I can add an additional level of complexity here. Let's say that the Egyptian is in Pakistan.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  But the people who have an issue with him aren't the Pakistanis. They're the Americans.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. Right, right, right.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in most cases, the Pakistanis don't have an issue with him.

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  But does Pakistan not have an issue with America going and taking people that are inside of their country?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  No, because remember, intelligence is a cash business. And there is a lot of cash changing hands. So we say, listen, we have this giant sack of money in the van outside. You don't care if we take these Egyptians, do you?

• 1:14:37Chris Williamson?

  And who's being paid off, local, low level, high level?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  No, it goes all the way up to the very top. When when we when we captured Abu Zubaydah, which is kind of what I became known for, there was a $10 million bounty on Abu Zubaydah. There was $25 million bounty on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And the Pakistani intelligence service built a new headquarters with the cash. Even at a lower level, I was working with this Brigadier General, General Mohammed. And

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  this guy, what a piece of work this guy was. We'd be ready to do the operation and he'd say, before we go, can we keep all those night vision goggles? And I'm like, sure, just sure, just keep them. Now, can we go do the raid?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  The guns that you're using.

• 1:15:30Chris Williamson?

  Bartering before you get started.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, those nine millimeters, we we have 38s. We could really use those nine millimeters. Okay, I'll get you some nine millimeters. Can we go do the operation now, please?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  The carpeting in my office is really he actually said that to me. And I said, General, I'm a generous person by nature, but don't shake me down. And then we went out and did our operation. Carpeting for your office. I did get him a refrigerator at one point.

• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  That's nice.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  He just wouldn't leave me alone.

• 1:16:02Chris Williamson?

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• 1:16:47Chris Williamson?

  and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. By heading to livemomentous.com/moderndwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. It's interesting, when I said most complex, impressive intelligence actions of all time, that you didn't say 9/11.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you meant CIA operations. 9/11 was incredible. And 9/11 really came out of something earlier called the Bojinka plot. You ever heard of Bojinka? B O J I N K A. So in 1996, in Manila, a very bad man who we knew only as Mukhtar, M U K H T A R, was plotting something that became known as the Bojinka plot. The idea was to hijack 14 747 jumbo jets from Manila

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  and to fly them into buildings all the way up and down the West Coast of the United States.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Crazy as it sounds, Mukhtar went out one day to get lunch. And while he was out at lunch, his cleaning lady went to the apartment to clean it. And she sees all these plans and photographs and drawings laid out on the dining room table. And she said, this looks like a terrorist plot. And she calls the Manila Police Department. They come. We presume that Mukhtar saw what was happening and ran away. He just absconded. The police came and recognized it as a potential terrorist plot. They called the Philippine Intelligence Service, who then called the CIA.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  And the CIA came in and said, oh, my God, this this was a massive terrorist attack being laid out. So we knew that there was this bad man out there named Mukhtar, who meant us harm and intended to use aircraft as missiles.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  After we captured Abu Zubaydah, one of the two most important things that he told us was the identity of Mukhtar. His debriefer, his interrogator, Ali Sufan, an FBI agent, asked him about Mukhtar. And Abu Zubaydah actually laughed and said, you don't know who Mukhtar is? And Ali said, no. And Abu Zubaydah said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  I was at headquarters that day. And the word came in, like, we know who it is. This is the mastermind of 9/11.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  So everybody was running name traces. We had never heard of him. We didn't have anything. There was literally no file on anybody named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And then the FBI called us and said, oh, my God, he went to high school in North Carolina. And we were like, what? He lived here? And then he stayed and went to like North Carolina A&M or A&T or whatever it is. And then self-radicalized and moved overseas and started plotting what became 9/11.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  It was ingenious and talk about a lot of moving parts.

• 1:20:13Chris Williamson?

  Where was he from originally? Where was his birthplace?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Where was his birthplace? Was it Kuwait? I was gonna say Saudi Arabia. Abu Zebeda was Saudi Arabia. Yeah, Kuwait. He's a Palestinian born in Kuwait. That's my recollection.

• 1:20:26Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, when I think.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Pakistani born.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  Again, if I expand the intelligence operation outside of the CIA, is there anything else? Obviously, the pager thing was.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Anything else come to mind that would make your greatest hits of all time?

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the location and kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann.

• 1:20:46Chris Williamson?

  I don't know that.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  The Nazi war criminal. He escaped from Germany. And in the early 1960s, the Israelis found him working in a car factory in Argentina. And they kidnapped him, took him all the way back to Israel, put him on trial. It was a televised trial. They forced him to wear his old Nazi uniform during the trial. And he was proud to put it on. He was convicted and then he was hanged. That was an incredible operation, especially when, at the time, the Israelis didn't even have diplomatic relations with Argentina. How are you gonna get in a, get a plane in there? Kidnap this guy.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  Managed to deal with Maduro.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's what the entire force of the US Army behind you.

• 1:21:37Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting. There seems to be broadly two categories of these kinds of operations. And I've had people like DJ Shipley on the show, you know, ex SEALs. And some are, some are brain and some are brawn. And some are precise and surgical and well thought out in advance and sort of occur without much fanfare. And then others are much more kinetic. And I think the Maduro one is an example of something that's surgical, but incredibly kinetic.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Very kinetic.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to, we lured Maduro to a Formula One driver's house that he's a massive fan of. And then secretly drugged him with this thing that was in a vape that he smoked and I go.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know the story of Carlos the Jackal. Have you heard of Carlos the Jackal? He is funny to me. I teach a graduate school course at the University of Salamanca in Spain. They have an intelligence studies program. I teach a course on the history of terrorism. And literally, none of my students have ever heard of Carlos the Jackal. The Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and 80s. His name was Illich Ramirez Sanchez. He was a Venezuelan national, an ardent communist Marxist-Leninist. But he was the Osama bin Laden of the 70s and 80s, to the point where he did one of the ballsiest operations in modern history.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  OPEC was meeting in Vienna, right? So he and his gang go to Vienna and they kidnapped every minister of oil from every OPEC country. Kidnapped the entire OPEC leadership and then held them for billions of dollars in ransom, which the Saudis gladly paid. And then they just scattered Algiers, Benghazi, you know, all over the world, Moscow, Baghdad. Anyway, Carlos was a ghost. We searched the world for Carlos and we had no idea where he was. We assumed that he was either in Iraq or in Libya, or maybe Algeria. We weren't sure.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  There was a legendary CIA contractor named Billy Wa. Billy was one of the most highly decorated war heroes in American history. Fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, doing the things that years later people don't talk about. And then he became a CIA contractor.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  I was blessed to work with Billy Wa in the Middle East before 9/11. We did some really fun stuff together. But the guy is legendary. Seven Purple Hearts. Seven. His license plate, it was a personalized Florida plate that said seven hits and had the Purple Heart next to it. So Billy was working contract at the agency, running surveillance teams. And he happened to be in Khartoum, Sudan, working for Kofir Black, who became the director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. And then became Ambassador Kofir Black, the special envoy for counterterrorism. Billy takes a day off, which was very rare.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  And he and a colleague go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables for the week.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  And they're there in the vegetable souk and Billy says to his colleague, that's Carlos the Jackal. And the guy's like, get out of here. He said, I'm telling you, that's Carlos the Jackal.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  And he runs back to the station. The way he told the story, Kofir was on an elliptical machine in his office. And Billy says, Kofir, I just saw Carlos the Jackal in the vegetable souk. And Kofir says, get the fuck out of here, Carlos the Jackal. And he said, I'm telling you, it was Carlos. And he said, well, I can't go back to headquarters and say, we saw Carlos the Jackal in the vegetable market and he walked away. You gotta go take a picture of him.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Billy went back to the vegetable market every day for a month.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  And then he sees him again. So real quickly, he paid these two Sudanese guys a couple of dollars to get into a fistfight. In the Middle East and in North Africa, fights are so rare that as soon as one happens, everybody just forms a circle around them to watch. Carlos runs right up to the circle and he's craning his neck to see if he can watch the fight. And Billy has his camera, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And then they do surveillance on him and they follow him all the way back to his house.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Headquarters confirms, oh my God, it's Carlos the Jackal. So they come up with this idea. They break into his house. And they put ground glass in his toothpaste. And then they recruit his dentist.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And so when he brushes his teeth, his gums start bleeding. He says, oh my God, I must have gum disease. I should go to the dentist. Go to the dentist. The dentist gives him some gas, puts him out. And when he wakes up, he's on a French military transport plane on his way back to Paris to face seven counts of murder. And he is still in prison today.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow, wow.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  It takes patience.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  So John Lyles first booked the dirty tricks department. One of the psychological assessments that was done of Hitler was that he had a very fragile hold on his masculinity. I don't think that they needed to get psychiatrists in to work that one out, but.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  The one testicle in the whole thing.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  They had this idea that if they could change Hitler's hormonal profile, that his hold of his masculinity would be so tenuous that he would go completely insane and that the Allies would win the war. So they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that were put into the food at the Eagle's Nest.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Chris Williamson?

  And they found him, recruited him and gave him female sex hormones to inject into the vegetables. And the goal was Hitler's gonna ingest these and his voice will go soprano and his mustache will fall out and he'll grow man boobs. And then we'll, something, something, something will win the war. I don't know what the something, something, something was, but they don't know whether or not that worked. But that was, yeah, some of the inventive, as you say. It's kind of a shame, the whole torture principles prison thing. Because the CIA actually sounds like quite a lot of fun.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I have to admit, I loved every second of it. I went to 72 countries when I was at the agency. I was in the room with kings and presidents and prime ministers and did things that,

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  you know, I still can't talk about. It was exciting every single day. I remember, especially when I was working on Greek terrorism, I couldn't wait to get to the office in the morning. I couldn't wait to see what I had missed overnight. It was so exciting. Just loved it.

• 1:29:18Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the most effective mass behavioral engineering campaign in history?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's hard.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  The most successful mass behavioral campaign. You know, frankly,

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  I think it probably has to be passage of the Patriot Act. Because it convinced all Americans to just voluntarily give up their civil liberties.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Just like that. And what did we complain about? Having to take our shoes off at the airport. We didn't complain about the fact that we were, you know, losing our, our civil liberties, that the FBI could go, you know, see what books you take out of the library without a warrant or, or intercept your emails or your text messages or your phone calls without a warrant. They just have to go to the ISP and say, give it to us. Or even more cynically, just buy it. Just buy the metadata from one of these collection companies.

• 1:30:19Chris Williamson?

  How does mass persuasion work at scale?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  Mass persuasion at scale was really a function of the, of the early Cold War era. The, the first covert action program that the CIA ever implemented was to essentially steal the 1949 Italian elections away from the communists. The communists were ahead in all the polls. It's not a very sophisticated operation. All they did is they gave $150,000 to the Christian Democratic Party and told them to spend it by renting journalists. And then the CIA would write up pro conservative articles and the journalists would place them in these newspapers. And then the communists lost.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  That was it. But that was the first one. It, it's, it's really all about the media. I'll tell you something funny. When I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, years after I left the agency, I went to Yemen. And I used to go to Yemen with some regularity. So this was in 2011, just before we closed the American Embassy there. And I had a meeting with the Defense Attache. None of the agency people would meet with me. But that was fine. I didn't care. So I met with the State Department people and the Defense people. So the Defense Attache was so excited to tell me about this cool psy-op that he was running, psychological operation. It's a propaganda operation. I was like, okay, I'm all ears.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  And I was working for John Kerry at the time. I said, he's going to be happy to hear whatever successes you've had. So he said, we're running a pirate radio station. I said, okay. So what are you, what are you doing with it? And he says, we're playing jazz. And then we intersperse the jazz with call-in shows. So we're getting young Yemeni men to like jazz, which makes them like the United States. And then when they call in to talk about the jazz, the host says pro-American things. I said, I'm sorry, that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard in my life. How much are you spending on that?

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, like 150,000? I'm like, yeah, I think they're not gonna like you spending 150,000 on that.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  So sometimes it works. Most of the time it doesn't. Usually it's money down the drain. But once in a while you get lucky.

• 1:32:53Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, Mark, can you look for, was it Nestle that coffee wasn't selling in a country in the Far East? Or some sort of confectionery wasn't selling in a country in the Far East. So they changed the flavor of the children's sweets so that when those children would grow up to become adults, they would love the flavor. It would be reminiscent of their childhood.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, there was, they were really struggling to sell. I want to say it was coffee or maybe like caramel or something like that. And, um, by, by seeding it to children,

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  they knew, they were able to project two decades out into the future when you were in charge of your own groceries.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Talk about the long view.

• 1:33:42Chris Williamson?

  You would, you would be able to come up with that. What have you got, Mark?

• 1:33:47Chris Williamson?

  Japan.

• 1:33:50Chris Williamson?

  Here's, there it is.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  Here's how Nestle convinced people in Japan to drink coffee. In the 1970s, Nestle were hustling to sell coffee in Japan. And this was a fascinating time for Japanese cuisine. Japan had recently established its first McDonald's franchise. Style of Japanese food that plays off popular western dishes had been developing for decades. This was the moment for Western companies looking to market their products in the East Asian country, but Nestle wasn't finding much success, according to Better Marketing. Unlike coffee-centric countries like Italy or Costa Rica, Japan has a rich history with tea, not coffee. So Nestle enlisted the help of Clotte Rappay, a psychoanalyst. Nestle, what can I do for Nestle? Rappay responded, according to PBS, he'd spent years working with children who had autism, a far cry from corporate marketing.

• 1:34:36Chris Williamson?

  Nevertheless, he headed to Japan where his expertise in psychology and memory allowed him to crack an important code. When consumers have a childhood memory of something like chicken noodle soup or mom's hot cup of coffee, that long embedded memory creates a bond between the consumer and the product. He deduced when he interviewed and tested consumers in Japan, he found many didn't have fond childhood memories of coffee. Tea simply wasn't, is a much larger part of the culture. He aimed to change it. Nestle engaged in a years-long campaign. It started with sweet, coffee-flavored products for kids. We started, for example, with a dessert for children with a taste of coffee. We created an imprint of the taste of coffee. However, it's unclear whether Nestle whipped out the coffee-flavored Kit Kat bars immediately. They most likely started with other coffee-flavored candies, judging from his PBS interview.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  While Japan's Kit Kat market is off-the-charts intricate and popular, the Japanese flavors didn't really emerge until the 2000s, according to the New York Times. It's more likely that espresso and cafe au lait Kit Kats popped up around that time. Still, while there may have not been Kit Kats, Nestle's coffee-flavored desserts made a difference. According to Better Marketing, those early coffee-flavored treats likely created an imprint on children. And by the time those young consumers were older and interested in a real drink, Nestle coffee was ready for them. By 2014, the coffee market was hitting record highs in Japan, according to the Japan Times. And by the time coffee-flavored Kit Kats were introduced, consumers were well acquainted with the drink and flavor. We can thank Clotte Rappay, who knew early on that food and memory go hand in hand.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:36:00Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that cool?

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Incredible. You know, in, in the seventies,

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  in the mid seventies, we got to a point in the United States where more people were drinking Coca-Cola in the morning than were drinking coffee. And the reason why that was happening is because most coffee producers used something called robusto beans. Robusto beans have that magnificent coffee smell, but they taste like, they taste like shit. And it's arabica beans that have the great coffee taste, but don't smell as wonderful as robusto beans.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  And so they had to switch to the more expensive arabica to save the coffee industry here in the United States.

• 1:36:40Chris Williamson?

  How paranoid does making, working for the CIA make you?

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Oh, you have to be paranoid. I've been out of the CIA for 22 years. I've been out longer than I was in. And I still am constantly scanning my side view and rearview mirrors, looking for surveillance. I still couch my, my language in emails and in text messages. I use encrypted apps. For what that's worth, they all have backdoors in them anyway, but I figure, you know, why make it easy? So, yeah, it, it's sort of, uh, it's sort of instilled in you. You, you never lose it.

• 1:37:19Chris Williamson?

  I've noticed that you haven't taken a drink of anything today. Is that part of that?

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually. It's funny. It's funny that you've even noticed. One of the very first things that they taught us, very first, like on the first day of operational training, is to always pee before you go into a meeting. So that you don't have to get up and excuse yourself and disrupt the meeting.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  And also it's distracting. If I'm opening cans and I'm drinking a sip over here and maybe I'm making a little ring on the table over there and no, this way I can look you directly in the eye. We can carry on our business and then I can drink something later.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  What have you, I've had a lot of people on that are communications experts that are talking about the effectiveness of understanding someone, detecting, lying, manipulation, stuff like that. What's realistic and true about working out whether someone's lying to you?

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  You know, I, I wrote a book called The CIA Insider's Guide to Lying and Lie Detection.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  It's funny, too. I'm not the expert. That wasn't the focus of my career, but it's something that I knew as much as any other, you know, normal CIA officer. It's almost, it's little things. It's the frequency of blinking, for example. When people lie, they tend to blink less frequently. When you ask somebody a question and they look up as they're thinking about it, they're likely going to give you the truth. If they look down, that could be an indication of lying. It's a lot of different things. One of the things that they showed us that was so fascinating to me at the time,

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  you remember Whitey Bulger, the Boston mob leader? Whitey Bulger had two brothers. One was the president of the University of Massachusetts. Before that, he had been the president of the Massachusetts State Senate. And his other brother was a state judge. See, these are like serious people. Well, one of the things the CIA showed us in training was a video of the brother who was the president of the university. At the time, he was the president of the Senate, being grilled before Congress about whether or not he had any contact with his brother. His brother was on the run, right on the lam.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  And he kept saying, no, just staring. No, I've had no contact with my brother. I haven't seen my brother in years. He's embarrassed our family. We're ashamed of him. I don't know where he is. But not blinking at all. And so they would show us this video of his testimony as an example of what to look for in a liar. I mentioned to you walk-ins earlier. When I was overseas operationally, not a single day went by that I didn't have a walk-in, not a single day. And the curse for me was that I spoke both Greek and Arabic, right? And so there was one time where I had flown in from Yemen and I was exhausted.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  And I land at like 10 o'clock in the morning at Dulles Airport. And I thought, I'm gonna go into the office. I'm not gonna tell anybody that I'm there. I'm just gonna do my accounting paperwork and then I'm gonna go home and go to sleep. So I go in and my boss sees me. And he says, hey, I didn't know you were back. And I said, I'm actually not back. I just came in just to do my paperwork and then I'm gonna go home and go to sleep. And he goes, okay, um, can you go to Sudan? And I said, Sudan? I said, I was just there one hour from Sudan. I said, what do you want me to do in Sudan? And he said, well, they have a walk-in and they don't have any Arabic speakers right now.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  I said, when? When do you want me to go to Sudan? And he says, like, 3 o'clock? And I was like, are you kidding me? I said, all right, let me just at least go do some laundry. And I went home, I did the laundry, repacked, went back to the airport and flew to Sudan. Anyway, not a day went by that I didn't have a walk-in. And that's the best possible on-the-job training for determining who's lying and who's telling the truth. Now, like I said earlier, 95%. There have been actual studies done internally. 95% of walk-ins are crazy people.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  I had a guy, guy came in in a Greek naval officer's uniform. So I was like, oh, okay, serious guy. He says, I know who's the head of Revolutionary Organization 17th November. I was like, great, we've been working on that since 1975. Lay it out. Well, is there a reward? I said, yeah, there's a $10 million reward. And if your information is correct and we're able to grab him, I'll give it to you any way you want it. Cash, gold, diamonds, I don't care. He says, it's actually a triumvirate of people. I said, really? And who is this triumvirate of people?

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  Queen Elizabeth, Jacques Cousteau, and Frank Sinatra. I said, okay, and how did you determine this? And he said that an angel told him in a vision. I was like, okay, thanks for coming in. But that was happening every single day.

• 1:43:07Chris Williamson?

  Decided against investigating that one.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to write it up in case he walks into another American embassy somewhere and they know off the bat that he's a nut. But of the remaining 5%, about 1% are what are called intelligence brokers. They actually do have a little nugget of intelligence. Maybe they overheard it in a restaurant where they've got a cousin who's a member of some group someplace. And so they'll come to you and give it to you. And then they want $100. Give me $100. And you give them $100. But then they go to the British Embassy and then the French Embassy and then the Chinese and then the Russians and then anybody else they think is gonna give them.

• 1:43:48Chris Williamson?

  Altering it off.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  And then that's a handsome month's salary in many countries. Then about 2% are what are called probes. The Iranians, the North Koreans, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS. They'll send people into American embassies to pretend to be walk-ins just to look to see where the cameras are. Are you armed? Are the windows bulletproof? Where's the steel reinforced hardline door? Just in case they decide to attack the embassy later, they can identify a point of vulnerability. And then that last 1% is the real deal.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  In training, our instructors taught us that the greatest sources ever recruited in the history of the CIA were walk-ins. Because the chief of the KGB's, you know, counterintelligence directorate is not gonna come up to you and introduce himself at a diplomatic cocktail party, right? He's gonna go on vacation somewhere and he's gonna walk into the American Embassy in, say, Mexico City. Or the director of the North Korean nuclear program, you're not gonna bump into him in a restaurant somewhere.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  But he's gonna go to some seminar in Vienna and he's gonna sneak out of his hotel in the middle of the night and go to the embassy. And there's gonna be a marine there on duty 24 hours. And he's gonna leave a phone number. And those will be the best recruitments of your entire life.

• 1:45:36Chris Williamson?

  You see the story of when Kim Jong-il and his son went to Disneyland?

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:41Chris Williamson?

  Can you pull up?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  How crazy is that?

• 1:45:43Chris Williamson?

  Pull up the passports behind that. Like they had fake passports. They wanted to go to Disneyland real bad. And, you know, they flew on fake passports so that they could... I mean, look, you'd not go to Disneyland in North Korea. Say what you want about the country of America. Even if they are your mortal enemy, they make great theme parks.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  And that's why he's such a film buff. He and his father both loved American movies. Look at that. Look at that. That is ridiculous.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  The most fucking Kim Jong-il looking photo as well.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Josie Pog.

• 1:46:16Chris Williamson?

  Sao Paulo?

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  Sao Paulo.

• 1:46:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that where they're saying they're from?

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Embassy of Brazil in Prague. So it's the Brazilian Embassy in the Czech Republic. How do you like that?

• 1:46:30Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. So what is, what are some of the best ways to get the truth out of someone? You're speaking to them. You want to try and determine whether or not they know something about something. What are some of the best tactics?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  It's not very sexy, but it's very simply to treat a person with respect and kindness and show great patience. I'll give you an example. You know, the CIA's torture program was just to turn people's lives into hell, a living hell. The FBI modus operandi is completely different. You know, the CIA and the FBI hated each other for decades and decades, hated each other. That's why we had 9/11. Because they couldn't even share information with one another. But the FBI is really, really good at interrogation. And they have been since the 1940s.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  The FBI method, and they train their officers very well in this method, is to simply engage people in a friendly conversation. You treat them with respect, even if they're the enemy, you know, the enemy, or a terrorist. You offer them a cigarette, or an apple, or if they're really cooperative, a piece of paper and a pen to write to their parents, or whatever. Sometimes it takes weeks or months, but eventually they're going to open up to you if you are able to establish that relationship. The very first person that I caught in Pakistan was a Jordanian national

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  who had escaped into Pakistan from Tora Bora when we started bombing it. And I cabled headquarters beforehand, and I said, I'm not, I'm not trained in interrogation. I'm not an interrogator. We didn't have interrogators at the CIA. That was the FBI's job. We're in charge now. Just interrogate him however you want. And I was like, okay, all right, well, I'm gonna wing it. We have the guy chained to an eye bolt in the table. So he's got handcuffs on and the cuffs are chained to the table. And I said to him, what's your name? I knew what his name was.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  I knew the answers to most of the questions because we had confiscated his paperwork and his passport and all that stuff. And it was a legitimate Jordanian passport. So he answered my questions. I laid out a map of the Afghan Pakistan border. And I told him to show me exactly how he got from Tora Bora to, I think we caught him in like Rawalpindi or something like that. I don't remember anymore. I knew, I knew how he got there. I mean, those mountains are so forbidding and so steep. There's pretty much only one way to get in. We called it the Rat Line. And so he showed me the Rat Line. I knew he was telling the truth.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  And, um, and I said, what in the world were you doing in Afghanistan? You're, you're a Jordanian national. You don't speak any of Afghanistan's languages. You don't have a visa, a valid visa to be in Afghanistan. What in the world were you doing there? And he said, I went to Afghanistan in 1996 to open an orphanage. He said, I'm a very pious, practicing Muslim. And there were so many children who were orphaned from the Soviet invasion and occupation. I wanted to do something to help the children.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  So as he's saying all this, I have colleagues that are running it, running outside, cabling back to, you know, wherever, the American Embassy in Amman, or CIA headquarters, or calling the Jordanian Embassy in Islamabad to ask, you know, is this stuff true? Can we identify the orphanage? Is it true that he left Jordan on this date and arrived in Afghanistan on that date? Everything this guy told me was true. So finally, I said to him, I have one last question for you. I said, I know that what you've told me is true. And I want to thank you for being honest with me. But why were you honest with me? Why did you tell me the truth? And he said to me, like I'm nuts.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  He's like, I'm your prisoner. It doesn't help me in any way to lie to you. And I thought, well, that's, that's a legit answer. And then he says, now, may I ask you a question? And I said, sure. And he says, I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam, and I will be your godfather. I said, thank you for that. I'm a Christian, but I appreciate the gesture. I really do. I said, I've studied Islam. I have a degree in Middle Eastern Studies. I speak Arabic. I appreciate the gesture. And I said, and I wish you the very best.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  But he was telling the truth about that, that orphanage. He was telling the truth about being caught up. And he's like, oh, crap. Now the Americans are bombing. Now what am I gonna do? I gotta run. It's all these Al Qaeda guys. They're gonna think I'm Al Qaeda, which we did. But we ended up, rather than sending him to Guantanamo, we just sent him back to Jordan.

• 1:52:18Chris Williamson?

  I had, uh, well, I really should not forget this guy's name. Not the Manchurian. What is the country in the middle of the Middle East that begin, that begins with Man? God damn it. It was the dude that had Osama bin Laden's cousin's number on his phone. He was detained in Guantanamo. They made an entire movie about him.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  Oh, The Mortanian.

• 1:52:45Chris Williamson?

  The Mortanian.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's Muhammadu Utslahe. He's a good friend of mine.

• 1:52:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, he's been on the show, friend of the show.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  He's great.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  He's good. It was a long time ago.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  I called him, last time I talked to him, he lectured to my class at Salamanca. And I said, I said, Muhammadu, you are the Martin Luther King of our time.

• 1:53:00Chris Williamson?

  Crazy. Absolutely crazy. Yeah, I mean, wild story. Did he ever tell you about how much he needed the bathroom on the flight over?

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  We put diapers on them, but no, he didn't.

• 1:53:09Chris Williamson?

  He said that he couldn't go. I don't know why, but he had the fullest bladder. He said the most pain of the entire, everything, the mock executions, you know, the sustained, like the most pain was the fact that I don't think he'd been able to go to the bathroom for a very long time. And he was strapped in some plane and then taken out there. Maybe the angle that he was, the angle that he was at, he couldn't, or something like that. And that was one of the things that stuck in his mind.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  That poor guy, how he is able to forgive.

• 1:53:42Chris Williamson?

  14. 14 years in Guantanamo, like three, three or four mock executions, like sexual.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Completely innocent.

• 1:53:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just the most innocent. And now just chill.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  A beautiful human being.

• 1:53:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  He's married now, he has kids.

• 1:53:57Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Chris Williamson?

  Does torture work for getting the truth out of people?

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  It does not. It, 100% proven fact, it does not work.

• 1:54:06Chris Williamson?

  Why doesn't it work?

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  Because the person being tortured will tell you anything he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing them. John McCain, for example, when he was tortured, in the beginning of his torture, they kept asking him, who are the members of his unit? And he gave them the names of the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. And they didn't know. They just, they said, good, good. You get an extra ration today. Extra food for cooperating. He didn't cooperate. But they will tell you anything. And the thing is, is then you have to take all this garbage that they gave you, give it to your analysts, who have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  It's gonna take six years, oh, sorry. It's gonna take six months for them to go through all this nonsense. And by then, you know, the bomb that you're trying to, to disrupt has already gone off.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  Would torture be worth it if it led to the discovery of someone like Osama bin Laden?

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  See, that, it comes back to that issue that we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation. Maybe, but is that the country we want to be? Listen, if you want to be a country that tortures, best of luck. But you have to change the law because torture's illegal. I don't care what John, you and Jay Bybee and Dick Cheney say. It's illegal. We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically forbids exactly those techniques the CIA used. We have the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which not only are we signatories to, we wrote it. We wrote it.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  And then like magic, in 2002, huh, it's all illegal because we're the good guys. So we say it is. I'll tell you another thing. In 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. In January of 1968, The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that day ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted on a charge of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Fort Leavenworth. The law never changed. We changed.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  So if you want to torture, if that's the country you want to be, okay, you can have that position, but you have to change the law. And again, we're either gonna be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about, or we're not. We're either gonna be the country that, that writes the human rights reports for Congress every year, for every country in the world with which we have diplomatic relations, or we're not. But we can't pretend to be one while really being the other.

• 1:57:01Chris Williamson?

  Is there a level of either threat or aggression and unfairness in interrogation from other countries? Is there a level of intensity that that could get to that would cause you to think, okay, we actually need to take the gloves off with regards to some of the rules that we're adhering to if everybody else is not?

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  I think it was appropriate to take the gloves off after 9/11. But I, I think that there's a disconnect here over what taking the gloves off meant. There's a longstanding American policy enshrined in, in an executive order that says that the CIA may kill a foreign national if he presents a clear and present danger, that's the terminology, to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation. So if you are Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you pose a clear and present danger. And so we need to kill you to protect Americans.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  But if we have the wherewithal to capture you.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  You have the same constitutional rights that I have. Right? And so if you are the bad guy that we say you are, then you have to face your accusers in a court of law and be judged by a jury of your peers. Just because I don't like your politics doesn't mean that I can do mock executions on you and waterboard you and put you in a coffin for two weeks with a box of cockroaches or or put a drill against your head or keep you naked and chained to, you know, an eye bolt in the ceiling or throw ice water on you every hour until you die of hypothermia.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  The law doesn't say you can do those things.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  So, you know, we've, we've got to respect the rule of law and we have to have appropriate congressional oversight because the CIA will push and push and push the envelope until somebody pushes back. But the problem is after nine 11, nobody pushed back.

• 1:59:24Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the physical and psychological techniques that get used, have been used during interrogations that normal people would find most shocking?

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  I think there are three that had been approved by the Justice Department that would be shocking to people. There were myriad that were not approved that the CIA did anyway. Right? We can have a whole separate conversation about that. But the three worst ones, waterboarding gets all of the, the press, right? Waterboarding is you're, you're on a board, you're strapped to the board, your feet are slightly elevated. So your head is, is lower, right? You're at an angle. They put some kind of material in your mouth, cloth, burlap, something like that, a pillowcase, whatever. And then they pour water on your face. It gives you a sense that you're drowning. In fact, enough water gets, gets through the material

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  that you do drown. Abu Zabata actually drowned. His heart stopped. He had to be revived in order for him to be tortured again. Okay, that's not, you can't do that. That's not legal.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  But waterboarding is kind of the famous one. There were two that I always believed were worse than waterboarding. One was called the cold cell. You're stripped naked, you're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling. So you can't sit or kneel or lay or get in any comfortable position. And

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  every hour, your, your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is really cold. And then every hour, a CIA officer comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you. We murdered people with that technique, murdered them. And the Justice Department never allowed anybody to murder a prisoner. That was never approved. The third one was sleep deprivation. I feel very strongly about this one. When someone leaked that the CIA was carrying out sleep deprivation against prisoners, the Secretary of Defense at the time, Don Rumsfeld, mocked the revelation in the press and he said, sleep deprivation.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  He said, I don't even have a chair in my office. I have a stand up desk and I'm well known for working 24 hours at a time. But we're not talking about 24 hours in your Pentagon office with your secretary bringing your meals in.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  The American Psychological Association has published studies showing that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. Right? They begin to die at day nine. Their organs begin to shut down. The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for 12 days. You can't live for 12 days with no sleep and industrial strength lights on you and music playing just on a loop at a volume of 11, like, you know, Bee Gees 24 seven with, you know, ear splitting volume.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  You can't survive that. You lose your mind and then your organs stop working.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  I remember when I was, after Pakistan, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations. And in that position, you get to see literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. And we got a cable one day from the secret prison and it said, hey, we were interrogating Ahmed Shmohamed over here. And unfortunately, he didn't survive the interrogation. And I was like, uh huh. And now what are you gonna do? And so the counterterrorism center sends a cable out saying, well,

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  dig a ditch behind the building and put them in the ditch. What are we gonna do?

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  Justice Department never authorized that. What are you, are you gonna rat yourself out to the Justice Department now? You just murdered this prisoner in cold blood? And then you put him in a ditch that you dug behind the building? What are you gonna do? You're gonna send a memo to John, you and Jay Bybee saying, oh, by the way, listen, you know, it didn't work out like we thought it was going to on paper.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  But that's the country we became after nine 11.

• 2:04:10Chris Williamson?

  What about the unauthorized ones?

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Oh, well, those were just, I'm, most of them were laid out in the, in the Senate torture report. Abu Zabata, for example, had this irrational fear of, of bugs. And so they put a diaper on him. They put him in a coffin. They dumped a box of cockroaches in on him and then they closed the coffin. You know, and you got a fan in there to give him oxygen. You could hear him screaming, screaming. They did it just to make him insane. Another one was called walling. Walling was kind of a big deal and it was controversial at headquarters because the idea was,

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  the idea was you start at the least offensive technique. The least offensive technique was called the attention grab or the attention grasp, where I grab you by the shirt and I say, answer my questions, you. That's not torture. The next one was the belly slap. Okay. Makes that cracking sound. It's a little bit humiliating. Makes a handprint. That's not torture either. The next one was the attention slap, which was a slap across the face, not a hard one that's going to break your jaw, a slap. It was meant to humiliate. Then there was forced nudity.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  Right? And they graduated up to what was supposed to be the harshest penalty of them all, waterboarding. And I told you there were those others that were worse than waterboarding. But then you had the, the bugs in the coffin, you had stress positions, you had walling. Walling was I grab you by the shirt and I slam you into the wall behind you. Now, what they were supposed to do is to roll up a bath towel and put it around your neck. And the wall had to be made of plywood, so it had a little bit of give to it. So I slam you against the wall, but the towel prevents you from getting whiplash. Okay? Except they didn't use a towel and the wall was made of concrete block.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  And the next thing you know, they all have traumatic brain injuries and now they can't participate in their own defenses because they're like drooling and, you know. What is that? Nobody said you could give them brain damage and smash their skulls into the wall.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  Just a couple of weeks ago,

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  the judge of the military tribunal at Guantanamo threw out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession and two other co-defendants throughout their confessions because they were, they were gathered as a result of CIA torture. Okay. Now what do you do? Now you can't try them. They're never going to get out because they have no rights at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court's already decided that, but there will never be closure for the nine 11 families. These guys will never be executed because the CIA tortured them.

• 2:07:13Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on in Guantanamo now?

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  Pretty much nothing.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  They're down to a small fraction of the number of people. I think altogether, it's like,

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  it was 34 for a while. It's, it's lower than that. Now it's like 17.

• 2:07:29Chris Williamson?

  Why was, why was it at its max?

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  770. And almost every single one of them was innocent. The place was full. Get this, let's say you and I live in the same village in Afghanistan and you borrow money from me. You don't want to pay it back. So you go to the Americans and you say, hey, that guy, Al Qaeda.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  And so the CIA grabs me in the middle of the night. I disappeared at Guantanamo. Nobody ever sees me again. And you don't have to pay the loan back. Seven hundred and seventy people. And almost every single one of them was innocent.

• 2:08:07Chris Williamson?

  You got any idea who's still there now?

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of the worst of the worst.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  KSM, Abu Zabeda, Ammar Abaluch.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  KSM's nephew, not nephew, son in law. Ramsey Beneshib. Who else? Of, it's been so many years now. Their names are starting to escape me.

• 2:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Did we ever get Uday Hussein?

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we killed him. We killed Qusay in the same gunfight.

• 2:08:36Chris Williamson?

  He's one of the, I agree with you. I think that there are rules and it's pretty important to abide by them.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  But he

• 2:08:44Chris Williamson?

  There are some extenuating circumstances.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  He was one.

• 2:08:47Chris Williamson?

  If I could find a person from history, I think Uday Hussein would probably be top of my list.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  You know, the first seven years of my career, I worked exclusively on Iraq. And I used to dream about Uday.

• 2:09:00Speaker 01

  One of my colleagues, psychologists that I worked with in the Counterterrorism Center later told me, oh, that's a classic sign of PTSD. I had a dream, it was a recurring dream, that I had gotten a job as a chef in Saddam's palace. And I was standing there in the kitchen saying, I can't believe I made it through the process. I'm a chef. I'm going to poison them. I'll kill all of them. And then I turned around and Uday is there. And he says, do you really think we're that stupid? And then I would wake up. I had that dream a dozen times.

• 2:09:38Chris Williamson?

  He was this sort of pinnacle, peak evil doer.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  He was a true psychopath. He would drive around in his limousine, point out an attractive woman on the street. Have his bodyguard snatch her. He would rape her and then throw her off the balcony of the hotel.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  Who does that?

• 2:10:03Chris Williamson?

  I'd heard that he turned up at weddings.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  To rape the bride?

• 2:10:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  So he could have her first.

• 2:10:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I had a guy on the show who, I can't even remember technically what his job was, some form of fixer. And Uday Hussein went to Vegas. He wanted to go to Vegas. And this guy was tasked with being Uday's handler for a while, getting him cocaine, getting him women. And I asked sort of of all of the people that you had to look after and schmooze and who was the most difficult client? He said, Uday Hussein was

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Without a doubt.

• 2:10:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Without a doubt. Uday's brothers in law, Hussein Kamal Al Majid, the minister, the minister of industry and military industrialization. And Saddam Kamal Al Majid, his brother, who was the head of the special security organization, the innermost ring of Saddam's security. They were married to Saddam's two daughters, Ragged and Rana. And they were so afraid of Uday that they defected to Jordan.

• 2:11:08Chris Williamson?

  Rather than be married into the family or stay married into the family?

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they went with their wives.

• 2:11:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so they saved. Oh, interesting.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Well, it didn't work out that way. So they immediately made contact with the CIA. We sent a delegation out to meet with them. My boss was a part of this delegation. And um, he said that as soon as they sat down, Hussein Kamal said, okay, here's what we need. We need, we need air cover. We need heavy weapons. We need secure communications. And my boss is like, whoa, wait a minute. We didn't come out here to make you the president of Iraq. We came out here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are. And that conversation went nowhere.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  So in the end, they decided to go back. They, they publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness.

• 2:12:06Chris Williamson?

  Refected.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Refected.

• 2:12:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  We should, we should coin that. We should take credit for that.

• 2:12:13Chris Williamson?

  It's mine and yours now.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  So

• 2:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Ariaka Williamson, 2026.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I like it. So they, they publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness. Saddam said, all is forgiven, come back.

• 2:12:25Chris Williamson?

  I know how this story ends already.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Uday met them at the border and shot them both dead.

• 2:12:35Chris Williamson?

  I mean, Uday's gonna Uday, isn't he?

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's his nature. It was his nature. You know, it's like the, the frog and the scorpion.

• 2:12:43Chris Williamson?

  It's strange, as you were talking about that, I was thinking about, you know, sort of dynasties and hereditary monarchies and stuff like that, obviously, British. But also thinking about the Medici's, stuff like that. It's, but Medici is probably a pretty good, pretty good example when you think

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:13:03Chris Williamson?

  When you think about Italy. The reason I was thinking about it was if your lineage is highly predictive of who ends up being in power. In some ways, great, because kinship is perhaps the closest loyalty that you can have from a like human psychology perspective. But the issue that you have is that if you manage to have a particularly competent, successful, decisive, wise, whatever grandfather. The likelihood that you get two or three more generations without hitting someone who's highly retarded is very, very low.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:43Chris Williamson?

  Like you

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. And you see it with financially successful families too.

• 2:13:47Chris Williamson?

  It takes on average, I think, three generations to blow it all. You look at Vanderbilt, you look at Rockefeller, you, da, da, da, da. Like, it's very, yeah. And, and with this, you're almost guaranteeing, because it's so unmeritocratic. And yeah, I, the line between genius and madness, or whatever it might be. The person, the unbelievably assertive, fantastic grandfather had the constitution genetically and with the upbringing to then really take advantage.

• 2:14:19Chris Williamson?

  But you only need to make a few little adjustments from a disposition standpoint to go from benevolent, decisive, wise leader into like narcissistic, anxious tyrant. And yeah, it doesn't surprise me when you have situations like that. You go, who, like, what? For all that Uday Hussein was successful at being evil, I don't look at him and think that he's competent in any other area. I don't think that he would make a great leader of a country. But just because you're able to do things that are more ruthless than other people, doesn't mean that you can actually do stuff that's more productive than the average person. Like pick a dude off the street.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:01Chris Williamson?

  And he would probably be better. Yeah, so I just, I was thinking about that as you talked about it.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  And if fear only goes so far, you can only cow so many people for so long before they rise up and dispose of you.

• 2:15:16Chris Williamson?

  So one of my favorite areas of research, sort of, I guess you would call this sociological, like evolutionary sociology in one form. Which is looking at the two forms of leaders that we had ancestrally. So one is prestige through dominance and another is prestige through competence. Or one would be like leadership through prestige and another would be leadership through power and fear. And what's interesting is that if you look at the most effective leaders in times of war, societies actually prefer, they lean more authoritarian. They actually want more of a tyrant, more decisive, going to either run close to the rules or maybe color outside of the lines a little bit. And you want that.

• 2:15:58Chris Williamson?

  People seem to think that the more dominant side is going to be better during war. And I think it actually might be. The problem is that when you go from wartime to peacetime, you still have a very dominant leader. And the way that they get protected was that you need a ring of sycophants around them and they end up being the enforcers. And that's kind of a, an interesting finding that you can't have a tyrannical leader at the top. This is why in chimp pods, number one might be an asshole, number two, three and four can band together and then number one's gone. But if you can do more coordination, Hitler style, right? You know, this ring of sycophants that are around him. You then start to distribute the power a little bit more. You've got some protection.

• 2:16:38Chris Williamson?

  You can have more people working to get them on some, I didn't really mean to kill your brother, don't worry, you know, ba, ba, ba, ba. They just, you do like assholery at scale, basically. But then on the other side, the prestige thing is, is good, but it's got weaknesses. Because although people might love you, like your compassion becomes a vector of fragility in some ways. So yeah, again, you know, looking at who is it that you want to lead? What's the situation in which it would be most optimal to have it? What are you thinking about? Like, let's say that the outcome that you want occurs, you almost get a pyrrhic victory, which is like one more victory will cause us to be ruined. Because if you do win, what are you locked into?

• 2:17:18Chris Williamson?

  What's the, the civilization, the, the socio-cultural situation that gets carried forward in this newly peaceful time?

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  I think, I think you're exactly right.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. And it's funny too, that

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  This is one of those things that's been studied for decades, for generations. And yet it seems to be a lesson that leaders either don't know, don't understand, or don't implement.

• 2:17:45Chris Williamson?

  I think we all have a degree of historical narcissism or solipsism or something that I'm aware that this might be some of the most well-watched wisdom of the ages, but not for me. There's something special about my time and there's always justification as well.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  Right, good point.

• 2:18:06Chris Williamson?

  We see this with the current discussion around AI and it is an existential risk and what's it doing to us? You can go back and look at some of the sort of Luddites against the printing press.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:17Chris Williamson?

  Saying that the common folk being able to read, or even I think it was Thomas Blackmore in England, who was the first person to translate the Bible into the common language so that priests didn't have to be the only conduit between the common folk and God. You could read it as your own and this, this is going to pervert the minds of the proletariats, that, you know, the, the, the common people, the serfs, the whatever, they're going to be distracted, their minds are going to be turned. And at each different point, I can make the case for why television was different. And I can make the case for why social media and phones are different. And I can make the case for why AI and VR is different. And I'm saying that to me right now, being the person that has read this stuff around what happens when you get the first common language translation of the Bible.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  You know, along the same lines, there was no television in Saudi Arabia until the 1970s. And it was because there was this debate at the time about, you know, graven images and is this a graven image, a form of graven?

• 2:19:15Chris Williamson?

  Raven?

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:16Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  It's like an idol, like idol worship.

• 2:19:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Right? So one of the 10 commandments is, is to issue graven images.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  But then somebody got the idea that, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if we have television, but we just read the Quran for 24 hours a day?

• 2:19:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  And they said, that's a good idea. And so when I moved to Saudi Arabia, there were two stations, one in Arabic, one in English. And it was just Quran, all day and all night. That was it.

• 2:19:55Chris Williamson?

  One hell of a party.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  That worked for them.

• 2:19:57Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that Krista Pike lady? Have you been tracking this story? She's the lady who got the death, lady who got the death penalty.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Oh my God, in Tennessee?

• 2:20:06Chris Williamson?

  And they failed to kill her twice.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  So as I was walking in here, they said that she is on life support and unresponsive.

• 2:20:14Chris Williamson?

  Krista.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Oh, there it is.

• 2:20:15Chris Williamson?

  Krista Pike is on a ventilator and unconscious after surviving lethal injection. This was an hour ago.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  Twice they tried to kill her.

• 2:20:23Chris Williamson?

  Krista Pike survived Tennessee's attempt to execute her via lethal injection on Wednesday, but her medical and legal future remain remarkably unclear. She's intubated on a ventilator and remains unconscious in a Nashville area hospital, her attorney said in a court filing on Friday, receiving life-saving care, life-saving care, after being injected with two ostensibly fatal doses of.

• 2:20:46Speaker 01

  Pentobarbital.

• 2:20:47Chris Williamson?

  Pentobarbital.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Chris Williamson?

  Her attorney said on Friday, she's being treated for the serious effects. Yeah, I bet.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, serious effect.

• 2:20:54Chris Williamson?

  Of the pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms. I guess that might be from just the IVs going in. A legal team filed an emergency motion Friday, asking a court in Nashville to require Tennessee Department of Correction to protect and preserve all evidence. That makes sense. But also asked for an expedited hearing on the motion. The State Department of Correction declined to comment on the pending litigation. Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slammer, who was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Now her legal case will be at a standstill. Bill Lee, a governor, Republican, announced he would call off the state's last remaining

• 2:21:38Chris Williamson?

  execution this year, while a third-party review takes place to determine exactly what happened in Pike's case, according to the Associated Press. The governor has appropriately called for an investigation. We need to know what happened. The administration is not informed, Slammer's family, of what might be next for Pike. They're devastated and exhausted. Oh, so this is the.

• 2:21:57Speaker 01

  The family of the victim.

• 2:21:58Chris Williamson?

  Family of the victim. Bracewell, who helped Slammer's parents navigate the process, said the family is mad at the state for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next. Like, look, you're the parents of this person, I imagine it's absolutely horrible. But like, what do you mean mad for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next? Like, we just failed a thing that's literally supposed to be final twice.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  Twice.

• 2:22:18Chris Williamson?

  It's slightly unprecedented.

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  Her last words were, is it supposed to hurt this much?

• 2:22:23Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 2:22:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:22:24Chris Williamson?

  So I remember watching a, who was it? It was Malcolm Gladwell. So Malcolm.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  Oh, I love Malcolm Gladwell.

• 2:22:31Chris Williamson?

  But he's very against capital punishment. And we had this conversation, I think the start of our conversation, probably half an hour, the first time he came on the show, was around that. And I said, well, it's a humane way to kill people. And he said, no, no, no.

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  It's horrible.

• 2:22:47Chris Williamson?

  The sequence of drugs. Do you know much about this?

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've followed it closely.

• 2:22:51Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain?

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  It's, it smothers you slowly. The pentobarbital.

• 2:22:57Chris Williamson?

  Is that the big mover? Cause there's three, right?

• 2:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are three. Exactly.

• 2:23:01Chris Williamson?

  In sequence.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  But the problem is, well, one, one paralyzes the heart, one paralyzes the, the respiration and the other is supposed to be the sort of the finisher. But the thing is, is when they're taken all together, they cause an inordinate amount of pain. But because you're paralyzed by then, you can't express the pain. Right?

• 2:23:22Chris Williamson?

  And no one's ever got, I mean, wouldn't it be interesting if this person becomes conscious again and is now a landmark case for this is what a two-time survivor.

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  Cruel and unusual punishment, yes.

• 2:23:34Chris Williamson?

  Of lethal injection is, I wonder, Mark, can you try and find out how many people in history in America have survived?

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Good question.

• 2:23:43Chris Williamson?

  A lethal injection? Because if they have and they're still functional, they would be a pretty good campaigner for, hey, we think that we found a humane way to take a life.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:24:01Chris Williamson?

  And bring back the fucking guillotine.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Chris Williamson?

  You know, like really, cause what you've done is you've traded something which is painless, apart from for one.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  Second.

• 2:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Millisecond, yeah, microsecond. Oh, here we go.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:24:15Chris Williamson?

  As of October 2nd, 2026, there are two ways to answer this. Eight people have survived a modern US lethal injection execution attempt. Death penalty information sent says seven people before Krista Pike survived failed attempts because execution teams could not establish a usable IV line. Pike became the eighth. Okay, can you ask?

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  Oh, but look at the bottom. There's a remarkable distinction. Pike is apparently the first person in the modern US death penalty era to survive after the lethal injection drugs were actually administered. In the previous seven cases, officials abandoned the execution because they couldn't establish the IV access necessary to administer the drugs.

• 2:24:51Chris Williamson?

  So if by survived lethal injection, you mean actually received the lethal drugs and lived, the answer appears to be one, Krista Pike. Can you ask, how did she get both doses? Did, did they do it back to back? Did they, you know, like when you take MDMA and they're like, how are you feeling? Do you want to re-up? Do you want to take half a dose after 90 minutes to like increase the high or whatever? I don't know whether, but that's insane. It totally makes sense. Like if you've got someone that's been living on death row, maybe they're not in great health, like finding an IV line isn't necessarily easy. The exact time is a little murky because they closed the execution chamber certain during injections, but witness accounts that has reconstructed slowly. The first dose appears to have been administered at about 7:41 CT.

• 2:25:37Chris Williamson?

  If the protocol says that if the prisoner is still alive, five minutes after the first dose, officials administer a second 100-milligram dose. So at 7:46 from 7:41, she's still alive and visibly breathing. Officials closed the curtain. It reopened three minutes later. Witnesses then saw her loudly snoring with her mouth open. Multiple accounts indicate that this approximately three-minute interval is when the second dose was administered. So the best reconstruction, 7:41 first dose, five minutes, 7:46 to 7:49 curtain closed, second dose administered, 7:49 curtain reopened, Pike still breathing slash snoring. One particularly important detail, Tennessee normally establishes two IV lines as a redundancy. We do not know yet whether the second dose went through the same IV line as the first

• 2:26:22Chris Williamson?

  or whether officials switched to the backup IV. And that is one of the major unanswered questions in this investigation. The report saying the second dose was administered later, so public timeline is inconsistent. The really strange part is why two doses failed. There are fully plausible explanations, including the IV and drug delivery. Pike's complaint that her arm felt like it was going to burst, bust is potentially significant. So maybe if they just fitted the IV line incorrectly and it's just in the tissue.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  Muscle, yeah.

• 2:26:48Chris Williamson?

  It's an intramuscular rather than intravenous injection. But yeah, dude, this could be.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 2:26:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I mean, it is still crazy. First woman to be.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  Barbaric.

• 2:26:59Chris Williamson?

  First woman to be executed in 200 years. Do you know what she did as the crime though?

• 2:27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:06Chris Williamson?

  Took a box cutter to.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  Grisly and she kept a piece of the skull with hair on it and was showing it around to friends.

• 2:27:12Chris Williamson?

  She broke the girl's skull into asphalt when she was 19 or something. So, yeah, I mean, it's strange with situations like this, right? This, I've thought a lot about retribution as it means to capital punishment and sort of, especially if you've taken some of the determinism red pill and thought, well, what does free will consist of? And like, how culpable are people for their actions? Uday Hussein, like, do we hold him culpable? Like morally, legally, what does this? But we do have, humans have this reflexive instinct for retribution.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  We do. We do. And that's why we still execute people in so many states. I mean, it's about half now. And even of, of the states that have the death penalty, many of them just don't carry it out. Like California, for example.

• 2:28:05Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what you would need to do in California in order to get the death penalty? And you work out when the last death in California was?

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  It's a good question too.

• 2:28:13Chris Williamson?

  While we're looking for that, what's your relationship with Angry Birds?

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  Man, I love my birds so much, I can't even tell you. No, seriously. I, I wake up an hour earlier than I need to every day, seven days a week, just to play Angry Birds and not lose a productive hour of the day. It's the very first thing I do. As soon as my alarm goes off, I put my glasses on, pick up my phone and start playing Angry Birds. I love it.

• 2:28:45Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  It's just so mindless and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. You know?

• 2:28:55Speaker 01

  I have no hobbies, or until very recently, I had no hobbies. All I do is work and I love it. It's great. It's fun. It's now, thank God, beginning to be, you know, kind of lucrative. But, um, but I don't really do anything but work. And so Angry Birds was like my only vice. I did buy a telescope with a built in camera. So I've taken some awesome deep space pictures and that's fun. Tuesday and Wednesday in DC, I'm going to be back in DC. Completely cloudless nights. I'm going to be out all night taking pictures. But, uh, and I'll show you some, um, but Angry Birds, it just, it gives me such satisfaction.

• 2:29:39Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you, you had an insanely long streak.

• 2:29:43Speaker 01

  Nine consecutive years I didn't miss a single day and then I got screwed. When I upgraded my phone, um, this is the first picture I took. And then if you leaf through, I took one on the harvest moon a month later. And, uh, yeah, that's the harvest moon. That was a pretty good one. And I haven't done any editing to that at all. That's just the picture, no editing. And that's the whirlpool galaxy.

• 2:30:16Chris Williamson?

  And you did this in DC?

• 2:30:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh. With all that ground light. Imagine what it would look like if I actually had a dark place to go.

• 2:30:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow. That is impressive.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  It's fun. But I mean, you can only do this when there are no clouds in the sky. Sometimes I'll drive up to, up to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It's about an hour and 15 minutes north of me just because they've got dark sky there. And there's a guy that lets me, that lets me just kind of park in his parking lot. He shuts the security light off and I'll sit there for two or three hours and just take pictures.

• 2:30:50Chris Williamson?

  Saying that you've got no hobbies, what happened at New York Fashion Week?

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  So I get a call from this awesome designer.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Elena Velez, she's like a neo goth. Everything's black.

• 2:31:10Chris Williamson?

  I do, when I look at you, I do think neo goth, actually.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  You're right. See, because I'm with it, right? So she asked me if I would have any interest in walking the catwalk at New York Fashion Week. And I said, oh, hell yes. Because, look, I'm 62 years old.

• 2:31:28Chris Williamson?

  Here you are.

• 2:31:31Speaker 01

  With the dog tags of my victims.

• 2:31:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  I was the only person that, that got two different, uh,

• 2:31:39Chris Williamson?

  You had two looks?

• 2:31:40Speaker 01

  Two looks. I had 90 seconds to change.

• 2:31:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah, I did. I spent for a very, very long time in my twenties doing, uh, fashion shows. And I know how horrendous that backstage.

• 2:31:52Speaker 01

  I was surprised at how much work was involved. Like we, we started at 11 o'clock that morning and the thing wasn't over until nine 30 at night.

• 2:32:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, justice for, we talk about the perils of being at Guantanamo Bay. No one's talking about how painful it is for the models at New York Fashion Week.

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  And they're all naked most of the day.

• 2:32:09Chris Williamson?

  Justice for New York fashion models. That's what I say.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  And they don't get paid. Another thing too, um, the next day, I had six emails waiting for me from friends of mine saying, buddy, there's this AI video of you going around. And I was like, no, no, it's not AI.

• 2:32:26Chris Williamson?

  It is a good get out of jail free card now for anyone who gets rumbled to just say, hey, AI is getting really, really crazy. It's really crazy. What, you know, thinking about your career and sort of what you're doing now, what is the most interesting thing about your work and that world that you've learned after spending so much time in it? That, that people from outside don't really appreciate or don't understand?

• 2:32:52Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, I think it is that

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  most of the people involved in the intelligence community are very, very bright, very patriotic people who want to do nothing more than to serve the American people. And they're not right wing ideologues. I'll give you an example. The 1992 election was, it was the morning of the election. So we all voted in the morning. I was in a branch of, um, eight people, nine people, including the branch chief. And at the end of our nine o'clock morning meeting, he said, listen, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really curious as to who, who voted for whom.

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  It turned out it was three for Clinton, three for Bush and two for Perot. And I remember thinking, wow, I'm not the only Democrat in this office. But back then you had no idea who the person sitting next to you voted for, because it was irrelevant. In 1996, there was a woman in my branch that got in trouble. She was reprimanded by HR and had a letter put in her file that made her ineligible for promotion for a year because she had a Bob Dole bumper sticker in her cubicle. And now it's just like all gone nuts. But, um, but I think what most people don't understand, especially, especially on the political left,

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  they just say CIA evil, you know, and that's just not the case. There are bad people at the CIA. There are evil people at the CIA. Psychopaths in some cases, sociopaths, murderers. But most of them are, are good, decent, smart, hardworking people.

• 2:34:42Chris Williamson?

  If you were to rank the intelligence agencies around the world, who do you think per person is most effective, most advanced?

• 2:34:52Speaker 01

  Easy. That's the Israelis. They're the best in the world. They're assholes. Don't get me wrong, but they're the best in the world.

• 2:35:01Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  I think because they've convinced themselves that they have to be or they're done.

• 2:35:08Chris Williamson?

  It's permanent existential threat, right? You know, Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill the time given for it. It's like, uh, intensity expands to give, to, uh, fill the existential threat against it.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  There it is. Yeah. That's Israel. Yeah.

• 2:35:22Chris Williamson?

  John Kiriakou, ladies and gentlemen, I, uh, I'm endlessly fascinated by what you're doing. Why should people go? You got a book. You got all sorts of other stuff going on.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  I've got a bunch of books. They're all on, uh, on Amazon. I have a new one that came out a couple of weeks ago. I have one that's coming out in 10 days, I guess.

• 2:35:39Chris Williamson?

  How to live off the grid. We didn't even, we need to do that next time.

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  We didn't do that one. Um, and I've got, um, John Kiriakou's Dead Drop on Apple, Apple Podcasts and Spotify and, uh, John Kiriakou's Briefing Room on YouTube.

• 2:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 2:35:55Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Good to see you.

• 2:35:57Chris Williamson?

  All right. Until next time. Goodbye, my beauties.