Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett CIA Whistleblower: They Can See All Your Messages! I Was Under Surveillance In Pakistan! About this episode Former CIA officer and whistleblower JOHN KIRIAKOU reveals how easily you’re tracked, the truth about surveillance, manipulation, and torture, and why exposing the CIA sent him to prison!
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and intelligence analyst who served for 15 years, including as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11. He publicly blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, for which he served 23 months in prison.
He explains:
◼️How intelligence agencies can monitor your car in real time
◼️The proven psychology the CIA uses to recruit spies
◼️Why he went to prison for exposing the truth, and would do it again
◼️The surveillance mistake that instantly makes you easier to track
◼️Why telling the truth is treated as a national security threat
(00:00) Intro
(02:32) I Blew the Whistle on the CIA
(04:09) What Was Your Role in the CIA?
(12:27) How Did You End Up Being a Spy?
(14:47) The CIA’s Strategy With Podcasters
(17:28) How Did You Get Into the CIA?
(23:14) What Was Your Training Like?
(27:38) People's Vulnerabilities
(31:13) What Can the CIA Really Get for Someone?
(32:59) Lying and Lie Detection
(37:34) Do You Often Have to ‘Take One for the Team’ in the CIA?
(41:13) What Does the Average Person Not Know About the World?
(47:21) Digital Security
(51:48) Sleeper Agents: Training Spies From Birth
(56:19) Is the Average Person Interacting With a Spy?
(58:10) How Many Spies Are There in the US?
(01:03:46) Conspiracy Theories
(01:05:11) Dosing Americans With LSD
(01:08:33) Are the CIA Involved in Iran?
(01:10:50) Have You Ever Killed Anyone?
(01:14:48) Which Spy Force Is the Most Impressive?
(01:21:15) Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?
(01:26:39) Who Is the Real Adversary?
(01:28:54) Is Venezuela a Cover for Something Else?
(01:33:04) Does China Want the US to Fall?
(01:33:52) Is the US Going Bankrupt?
(01:35:57) Why Does the US Government Keep Breaking the Law?
(01:39:52) Should You Be Pardoned by Trump?
(01:40:31) What Did You Stop Doing That Improved Your Life?
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Transcript 16,756 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans, whether it's NSA or CIA or the FBI. And to make matters worse, we know that the CIA can take control remotely of a car's computer system in order to crash the car, take it off a bridge, or take control of your smart TV and turn a speaker into a microphone, even though the TV is off and broadcast back to the CIA.
0:22 Steven Bartlett? Can they do that with devices?
0:23 Speaker 00 Absolutely. And I'll tell you how we know. There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled and he downloaded tens of thousands of documents classified above top secret. And instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks and they became the Vault 7 documents. So our whole lives are out there, potentially, for someone to use against us. And every country has these capabilities. Listen, I spent 15 years in the CIA. I love this country. But one of the most important things in my life is the issue of ethics, which is why I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, because my superiors kept repeating that torture worked. But besides being illegal, immoral, unethical, it just wasn't true. And I would let them send me to prison again because it was the right thing to do. I mean, we know that
1:08 Speaker 00 they were experimenting on American citizens and spreading diseases in American cities.
1:13 Steven Bartlett? This is the stuff of movies.
1:14 Speaker 00 It is.
1:15 Steven Bartlett? And because you've been in this world that the average person really has no idea about, I have to ask you, who do you think is the real adversary of the West? What are you most concerned about in the world at the moment? And what about everything that's going on with Trump in Venezuela and Greenland? And then, do you think Jeffrey Epstein was a spy?
1:30 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:30 Steven Bartlett? Who do you think he was working for?
1:31 Speaker 00 The Israelis.
1:32 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:38 Steven Bartlett? Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you.
2:24 Steven Bartlett? John Kiriakou, the world knows your name. Why? Why does the world know your name?
2:32 Speaker 00 I can give you two answers. One, I'm proud to say that I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture programme in a nationally televised interview with ABC News. The second reason is I blew the whistle a long time ago and just in the past 18 months, I seem to have hit some sort of YouTube algorithm sweet spot and all of a sudden, my message is getting out there.
3:03 Steven Bartlett? And you went to prison for blowing the whistle?
3:05 Speaker 00 I did, and I would do it again tomorrow. I really would. You know, I was giving an interview to the BBC the day after I got out of prison. They were the first outlet to ask for an interview. And so I gladly gave it to them. And the interviewer said, kind of perturbedly, "You're not showing any remorse or contrition?" And I said, "No, I'm not remorseful. I'm not contrite. I would do it again. I would let them send me to prison again because it was the right thing to do."
3:42 Steven Bartlett? And you were a spy in the CIA?
3:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was quite an accomplished spy in the CIA. I spent 15 years in the CIA. The first half of my career was in analysis and I got bored, frankly. And so I made an unusual, at the time, change to counter-terrorism operations. And then I was the chief of CIA counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks.
4:06 Steven Bartlett? And if I'd never heard about the CIA before, and I had never heard about your role in the CIA before, and I was a 16-year-old.
4:15 Speaker 00 Right.
4:15 Steven Bartlett? How would you explain to me? What you did there, what your role was and what the CIA is?
4:21 Speaker 00 Sure. The CIA is an intelligence service whose job it is, at its most basic level, to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets so that the policymakers can make the best informed policy. After 9/11, we were expecting an attack, to use Osama bin Laden's words, that would dwarf 9/11. And so my job was to infiltrate Al Qaeda by recruiting members of Al Qaeda to tell us when and where that next attack was going to come so that we could disrupt it, we could kill or capture the leadership and destroy
5:06 Speaker 00 the organization.
5:08 Steven Bartlett? And give me a range of the things that you did during your time in the CIA, just for a very top-line range of the types of things you worked on.
5:16 Speaker 00 Oh, sure. As an analyst, it was actually quite straightforward. We would write for the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the national security advisor.
5:28 Steven Bartlett? And who were the presidents during that time?
5:30 Speaker 00 When I started, it was George H. W. Bush, the father, and then it was Bill Clinton, then George W. Bush. There are several different publications. There's the President's Daily Brief, which is the most important. I covered Iraq the entire time that I was in analysis, from well before most Americans had ever heard of Iraq. I was told, actually, that it was a training account because nothing ever happened there, nothing ever changed, and then Iraq invaded Kuwait. The next day, I got to the office early. I was 25 years old, 26 years old, and my boss said, "Don't take your jacket off. We're going to the
6:14 Speaker 00 White House." I had never been to the White House before, except as a tourist. And so we got in a car, went to the White House, were ushered into the Oval Office. It's the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the director of the CIA, my boss, and me. And then we all sit down. The president tells us, "Sit down." We sit down, and the president says, "Well..." Now, what do we do? And everybody turns and looks at me. And it took me a second. And I said, yes, I said, Mr. President, as you know, Iraqi troops crossed the border at 2 o'clock this morning. The royal family has run away to Saudi Arabia.
6:56 Speaker 00 They've named a new occupation governor, et cetera, et cetera. Do we know who that is? I said, yes, sir. I gave him the name. And I said, actually, he's the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Vice President shouts, Jesus Christ! And then the President says, gentlemen, thank you. Thank you. We'll take it from here. And I remember saying to myself, my friends would never believe in a thousand years what I was doing right now. They wouldn't even believe me if I told them. That's what an analyst does. When I switched to operations, again, the job was very straightforward. It was to recruit spies, to steal secrets. But then if you're involved in counterterrorism operations, there are a lot of extras that you have to be trained in.
7:41 Speaker 00 So you go through the normal spy training. This is how you ingratiate yourself. It's something called the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit. I meet you at a cocktail party. You seem like a nice guy. I introduce myself. I ask, so what do you do for a living? Well, if you tell me you manage a shoe store, I'm gonna say, well, it was very nice meeting you. And I'm gonna go on to the next guy. But if you tell me you work at the port, you work in the Ministry of Defense, you work in the Chinese Embassy, I'm gonna invite you to lunch. I've spotted you. I've assessed you. And my assessment is, I'd like to get to know you. Then I begin to develop you. I'll give you an example.
8:26 Speaker 00 I was in Pakistan. I got a tip that Al Qaeda, a group of mid-level Al Qaeda fighters, was meeting every single day in a coffee shop at 10 o'clock in the morning. My Arabic was absolutely flawless at the time. And so I had a bushy beard that I grew for operational reasons.
8:47 Steven Bartlett? Can I hear some of your Arabic?
8:48 Speaker 00 Yeah. Tasharef bimariftak. It's nice to meet you. Or, Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, alhamdulillah, Malikiumadin, rahmanirrahim. So...
9:00 Speaker 00 I bought an Arabic newspaper and I went to the coffee shop and I just sat there. And sure enough, at 10 o'clock, the four of them came in. One of them looked at me and I looked at him and that was it. We made eye contact. I did that for a week. The second week, I was there drinking my coffee, sitting with my Arabic newspaper. And the one who had looked at me the week before, he nodded. So I nodded back. That was it. No communication otherwise. The third week, I'm a regular now. He recognizes me. So he says to me, "Salam aleikum." I said, "Waalaikum asalam. May peace be upon you." And I say, "And upon you peace." One day, he came in alone.
9:44 Speaker 00 And I said, "Tafadzal, please have a seat. Sit with me. No sense in you sitting alone and me sitting alone." So he sat down. We started talking. And I asked him how long he had been in Pakistan. He said, "Oh, I've been here for five years. I was in Afghanistan. I was making jihad against the Americans." And I said, "Oh, that must have been hell on earth." He said, "Oh..." He said that the bombing of Tora Bora was hideous. That was the word that he used. It was hideous. And I said, "And what about your family? How's your family?" He said, "My wife and son and daughter are in Cairo. I've never met my son. He was born just after I left to make jihad." I said, "I'm so sorry."
10:26 Speaker 00 And he said, "Yes, I'm lonely and I want to go home." We continued this relationship. And finally, I said to him, "Let me take you to dinner. Let's get out of the coffee shop." The truth was, I didn't want one of his friends to walk in and see us. So we went to a restaurant for dinner. And I said, "Listen, there's something that I haven't been truthful with you about. I'm not Lebanese." And I said, "And actually, I'm American. Are you okay with that?" And he says, "I think so." I said, "Well, actually, I'm a CIA officer."
11:10 Speaker 00 And he says, "Okay." So he didn't run screaming from the room or pull a gun or anything. And he said...
11:20 Speaker 00 Why do you want me? Why do you want to talk to me? I said, actually, you have access to something that I want. It was very specific. And I told him what it was. And he says, and what will you do for me? And I said, anything your heart desires. And he said, I want to go home. I said, I can do that.
11:41 Steven Bartlett? You wanted information, presumably.
11:43 Speaker 00 I wanted information, very specific information.
11:45 Steven Bartlett? Which you can't share.
11:46 Speaker 00 No, I'll go right back to prison. So, uh, so, um, we got him a passport. I bought him a first class ticket. And I took him to the airport, gave him some cash to get himself started again. And I said, before you go, I have to ask you, why did you agree to give me this information? I mean, presumably I'm the enemy. And he said, I've been here five years and you're the first person who ever asked me about my family. So I said, best of luck. Never saw him again. That's the job.
12:26 Steven Bartlett? I have to ask you. Take me on the journey of you being a young man in West Pennsylvania.
12:36 Speaker 00 Right.
12:37 Steven Bartlett? To becoming a spy. What happened? Because I'll be, I'll be honest, and I don't really know what my perception of spies is, but it's not you.
12:47 Speaker 00 That's good. That's good. See, because I kind of work under the radar.
12:51 Steven Bartlett? Hmm. So it's really interesting is I, there's, there's so many, um. Once you learn about spies as a podcast, like, so if you go back a couple of years and someone had told me about spies, I wouldn't believe them. I wouldn't believe that these things actually happened.
13:05 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
13:06 Steven Bartlett? You know, you hear about people going undercover and going to other countries and getting secrets and, and all of these things. And it's not until you meet the people that said, yes, that's me, I used to do that, that you'll sort of, you have this paradigm shift in your mind and you go, oh my God, what else might be going on?
13:24 Speaker 00 Right.
13:25 Steven Bartlett? Because I lived in this world, probably up until the age of, I don't know, 30 years old, where I kind of just assumed things are what they are. Like as I see them. And then, you know, you start to discover that there's layers of secrecy. Nations are against each other. They're doing all of these covert operations. And even like as a podcaster now, I have moments where I go.
13:45 Steven Bartlett? Like, how do I know that you're not here to steal secrets from me?
13:49 Speaker 00 Right.
13:50 Steven Bartlett? So you know what's funny? When I had Andrew Bustamante on the show, the comment sections are always the same. They're always like, once a CIA spy, always a CIA spy.
13:58 Speaker 00 I hate when people say that. It's so intellectually lazy.
14:02 Steven Bartlett? But I do wonder, and I go, okay, here's a super conspiracy theory. What if the CIA have made spies do really well in the YouTube algorithm? So that all of us as long form podcasters invite them on and then they...
14:16 Speaker 00 You know what? I would agree with that. I would have agreed with that a year ago because Andrew Bustamante has really made a handsome living out of selling his experience. And he's on every podcast.
14:28 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
14:28 Speaker 00 But I am the most anti-CIA, former CIA person that's out there.
14:36 Steven Bartlett? But wouldn't that be the perfect CIA agent?
14:40 Speaker 00 I mean, if I weren't constantly criticizing the CIA as an organization that's just out of control.
14:47 Steven Bartlett? Do you think the CIA have a strategy for podcasters and for podcasting?
14:51 Speaker 00 I think yes, now they do. It took them a little while to get current. But just like they, over time, developed a strategy with Hollywood? Sure, they're developing a strategy with podcasters. You know, it was only in the last 10 years that the CIA opened a branch within the Office of Public Affairs, whose job it is solely to liaise with Hollywood studios. The FBI's been doing this since the 40s. And the goal is that everything that comes out of Hollywood should be pro-CIA. And, you know, we end up with Zero Dark Thirty and, you know, The Recruit and the CIA Argo. The CIA is always the hero in these movies.
15:35 Steven Bartlett? If you were still at the CIA now and your job was to infiltrate and use creators or podcasters as an asset for the CIA's objectives, how might you design that plan if we were just hypothesizing?
15:53 Speaker 00 You would have to have...
15:56 Speaker 00 A goal that would be specific enough that you could actually track the progress to it. So you can't just say, well, I'm going to pay this podcaster X amount of money and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna do something with the algorithm to make him vastly popular among men, you know, 18 to 30, let's say. There's got to be more to it than that. It has to be a message. You've got to be able to get a specific, well honed message out there. And the message can be anything. It could be, you know, love the CIA, we're the good guys. It could be support the overthrow of the Iranian government.
16:40 Speaker 00 It could be, you know, any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu is antisemitism. It could be anything you want it to be. You just have to make sure that it's repeated enough. See, this was the danger with the torture program. This is one of the very important reasons that I went public when I did, because my colleagues, my superiors at the CIA kept repeating this lie over and over and over again that torture worked and that torture got us information that saved American lives. And that was just simply not true. It was a lie, besides being illegal, immoral, unethical. It just wasn't true. And so I decided, before we go down this road anymore, I'm going to go public.
17:25 Steven Bartlett? So can you take me back then? We've got a little bit sidetracked there, but John, how did you come to be a CIA spy?
17:34 Speaker 00 When I was nine years old, I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. It came time to apply for college, and I only applied at one university, George Washington University in Washington, because it was two blocks from the White House, and it was one of only three schools in America that offered a Middle Eastern Studies program. I was one of only four people in that brand-new Middle Eastern Studies program. I stayed for a master's degree in Legislative Affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis. I was taking a class in that program called "The Psychology of Leadership." It was taught by an eminent psychiatrist named Dr. Gerald Post.
18:18 Speaker 00 And he gave us an assignment one day where we had to shadow our bosses. We had to just follow our bosses for a week. Your bosses? Yeah, I worked at a labor union called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. And so, we were just supposed to follow our boss around for a week and then write a psychological profile. I used dozens of footnotes from psychology texts. And I ended up saying that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. And I had these citations. I passed the paper in. Dr. Post gives it back to me a week later, gave me an A, and then he wrote, "Please see me after class."
19:02 Speaker 00 So I went up to him after the class, and I said, "Dr. Post, you wanted to see me." He says, "Come to my office." So we went down there, he closed the door, and he says, "Listen, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here, and I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a spy?" And I said, "Yes, I would." He picked up the phone and called a number, and he said, "Bob, this is Jerry. I've got a good one for you. Do you have some time?" And he said, "Sure."
19:45 Speaker 00 He writes an address on a scrap of paper, and he says, "Be at this address in 20 minutes." It was only one subway stop away, so I jumped on the metro. I went to Roslin, Virginia, just across the river. I had to buzz to be let in, and a woman opens the door. She says, "Are you here for Bob?" And I said, "Yes." She says, "Come on in."
20:05 Speaker 00 I'm sitting there for a moment and then this like six foot six, 350 pound giant barrels out of his office and he says, John, Bob, how the hell are you? I want you to be at the George Washington University Medical School Saturday morning at eight o'clock. We've got some tests for you. I said, okay. And then we shook hands and I left. So Saturday morning I went to the GW Medical School Auditorium. There were like, I don't know, 200 people there and they hand us a test. My wife picked me up. She said, how did you do? I said, I have no idea.
20:42 Steven Bartlett? Does your wife at this point know that you're applying for the CIA?
20:45 Speaker 00 Yes, and that was going to be pretty much the extent of what she ended up knowing. Cause once I got in.
20:52 Steven Bartlett? But you were allowed to tell her?
20:54 Speaker 00 I was not allowed to tell her. No.
20:57 Steven Bartlett? So you told her anyway?
20:58 Speaker 00 Yeah. When I first applied, they said, listen, don't tell anybody because you may go undercover, you may go under deep cover and we can't have people out there who know that you're a CIA officer.
21:11 Steven Bartlett? Presumably the CIA are smart enough to be able to check if you've told her.
21:15 Speaker 00 Yeah. And they ask you on the polygraph, did you tell her?
21:18 Steven Bartlett? Really?
21:19 Speaker 00 And I said, yeah, I told her. She's my wife. What am I gonna do? You know? But it got to the point where I'd get home from a day where, you know, I broke into some guy's house and planted a camera on a bug and I'd get home and she'd say, how was your day? I'd say, great. What'd you do? Not a darn thing. And then my phone would ring at, you know, midnight and a guy would say, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain. And I'd say, uh, mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. And that means meet me at the yacht club parking lot in three hours. And then I'd leave. She's, she would say, where are you going? It's midnight. I gotta work. So I'd leave, I'd do my meeting, I'd come home, six o'clock in the morning, just in
22:04 Speaker 00 time to shower and shave and get dressed to go to work. And she would say, what was her name? And I, I remember this one terrible time, that's what she said to me, what was her name? The truth is, I had been sitting in a garbage dumpster, waiting for a guy to drive by down the alley and throw a bag of documents in. And I stunk of garbage and I said to her, do I seriously smell to you like I've been with a woman? Seriously.
22:35 Speaker 00 So we ended up getting a divorce.
22:41 Steven Bartlett? So you do the assessment, presumably you get in.
22:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, he called me like two weeks later. Bob did. And he said, you blew the doors off those tests. I said, oh, great. Okay. So a month later, they summoned me to headquarters. And I was interviewed by the Office of Near Eastern Operations, the Office of Near Eastern Analysis and the Office of Leadership Analysis. I was offered the analysis job on the Iraq desk.
23:12 Steven Bartlett? And what is the sum total of the training you were given in the variety of different roles that you had? Like, how do they train this?
23:20 Speaker 00 That's a good question. And the answer is vastly different depending on where you start your career. So because I started mine in analysis, the immediate training was in mastering the CIA's writing style. So the most important product that the CIA writes every day is the PDB, the President's Daily Brief.
23:43 Steven Bartlett? And it tells the president what?
23:45 Speaker 00 What you think he needs to know.
23:48 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
23:48 Speaker 00 So for example, when the Iraqis began moving to the Kuwaiti border,
23:55 Speaker 00 we had this big debate, are they gonna, are they gonna cross the border? Yes or no? So I said, listen, why don't I call the American Defense Attache in Baghdad? And I'll just ask him to drive down there and look and tell us what he sees. He drives down there, drives back, he calls me and he says, literally, the entire Iraqi military is on its way to the Kuwaiti border. So we wrote a thing for the president saying Iraq is gonna invade Kuwait and it's probably gonna happen in the next 48 hours.
24:27 Steven Bartlett? And when, when did the president see that particular briefing?
24:29 Speaker 00 At 7:00 AM the next morning.
24:31 Steven Bartlett? Okay. And is there ever situations where the president would get it in the middle of the night?
24:35 Speaker 00 Yes. Yeah.
24:37 Steven Bartlett? And be told in the middle of the night that.
24:38 Speaker 00 Yes. There are these levels of immediacy. There's routine, which is like, who cares? And then there is priority, which means, eh, I'll get to it sometime today. Then there's immediate, which means you should probably read it first. But then there's flash, which means, oh, my God, something terrible just happened. You should probably wake the president. And then there's critic, which means they're coming over the embassy walls. We're at war. Wake up the president. Scramble the jets.
25:14 Steven Bartlett? 9/11.
25:15 Speaker 00 9/11. That's a critic.
25:20 Steven Bartlett? So going back to this question of your training.
25:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:23 Steven Bartlett? What is it that the CIA teach you about human nature? And how to use human nature to your advantage? That could be transferable to other disciplines in life, like business or?
25:37 Speaker 00 Well, this is gonna sound not very nice, but it's real life. It's everyday life, especially in business. The CIA actively seeks to hire people who have what they call sociopathic tendencies. Not sociopaths. Sociopaths have no conscience. They'll just blow right through a polygraph exam. But they're impossible to corral. They're impossible to, you know, keep under rein. And it's because they're not able. Their brains won't allow them to feel regret or remorse.
26:20 Speaker 00 Now, in business, most CEOs are sociopaths. Most, not all, but most, especially in big companies, because they claw their way to the top, usually on the backs of the people around them. They don't feel bad screwing the next guy to get that next promotion. The CIA wants people like that. Because those are the people who are gonna break into a foreign embassy. A normal person would not advocate breaking into a foreign embassy. That's sovereign territory of a foreign country. I would. I'd be glad to do it.
26:54 Steven Bartlett? Why?
26:55 Speaker 00 Because we're the good guys.
26:58 Steven Bartlett? So do you have sociopathic tendencies?
26:59 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
27:01 Steven Bartlett? And what are your sociopathic tendencies?
27:04 Speaker 00 My sociopathic tendency was to operate in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas. Specifically, that's what it was.
27:16 Steven Bartlett? I'm really curious about what we can learn about human nature from someone whose job was to meet strangers and to get them to basically, sometimes, to turn against their own country. I'm really interested in, and I think, I think it's informative because so many of us, you know, when we think about what good leadership is, or what good salesman or womanship is, it seems like there's transferables. I guess for some people it's family, I guess for some people it's something else, that hook, that you're talking about, that thing that gets them.
27:48 Speaker 00 And the word that they use at the CIA for the hook is a vulnerability. And it's not really a vulnerability in every case. Now, 95%, studies have been done about this internally at the CIA, 95% of the people who agree to become spies for us do it for the money, right? It's, it's a simple cash transaction. You give me money, I'll give you secrets. 95%.
28:17 Steven Bartlett? So you're telling me that you think human motivation is 95% driven by money?
28:22 Speaker 00 Yes.
28:23 Steven Bartlett? Really?
28:23 Speaker 00 Yes. The rest was love and family, ideology, revenge, and excitement. You're gonna get a handful of people who are hooked on James Bond movies and they will do it, I mean, you're gonna pay them anyway, but they will do it just for the adrenaline rush.
28:45 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting, because when I look at this list of things and I compare it to business, it, I would say it's slightly different from my experience of hiring people, specifically of hiring people. I tend to think that You know, you could, one would ask themselves, like, why would someone leave a company right now? Like, I don't know, OpenAI and go work at a startup? They're going to get paid way more at OpenAI. You've got these equity and these grants, but people are en masse doing that. And even when I think about the early days of Google, people left the big conglomerates that would pay them more and they went and worked for Larry and Sergey, getting paid way less.
29:22 Speaker 00 Right.
29:23 Steven Bartlett? But to be involved in something small, exciting. And, and so I, and this is what, what I think about when I sit, you know, probably I've had thousands of people in my life now across my businesses and money is a factor, but it doesn't tend to be the biggest factor. It tends to be, in my experience, there's a particular hero's journey in their mind that they want to be seen through, they want to complete. You know, there's a particular way that they see themselves and they want to fulfill that.
29:55 Speaker 00 Oh, I could get that. I, I work with a, with a very, very tiny startup right now called Ivy Cyber and it focuses on privacy software, you know, things like, you know, scrambling your data so it can't be intercepted, that, that sort of thing. And I've participated in a couple of pitches to, to angel investors and they all say exactly the same thing that you did.
30:22 Steven Bartlett? And this is why I was confused when I had that money was 95% because I just think, especially in the work that you, I don't know, especially in the work that you do, I would assume.
30:32 Speaker 00 But look at it this way, and I think this would explain the discrepancy. You're comparing people who are making a life versus people who are betraying their country.
30:42 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm. Sure. And what's interesting as well is in those examples that you've given, money is actually a proxy to be able to take care of my family. And to be able to, you know, fulfill my ideology and maybe to get excitement and revenge. Do you know what I'm saying? So even that guy that wanted the plane ticket so he could fly home. Yeah, he could, he could have, the money could have got him home if you just given him. But the reason why he wanted to go home was because his family.
31:11 Speaker 00 His family, that was it.
31:13 Steven Bartlett? What's the extent of the things that the CIA can get as a incentive for someone to turn against their nation to give secrets?
31:22 Speaker 00 Quite literally, anything you can imagine.
31:24 Steven Bartlett? Even if it's against the law?
31:26 Speaker 00 Well, they're not going to get like drugs or, you know, child prostitutes or no, not stuff like that.
31:34 Steven Bartlett? What if someone said, I want you to, um, get me a green card?
31:43 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, sure.
31:44 Steven Bartlett? What if they said?
31:44 Speaker 00 If the information is good enough, not a problem.
31:47 Steven Bartlett? What if they said, I want you to, I've got this tax bill. I want you to make the tax bill go away.
31:53 Speaker 00 Okay, give me the plans that Russian tank, we'll make it happen.
31:57 Steven Bartlett? What if it was an American, would they speak to the IRS here and just get rid of it?
32:01 Speaker 00 Oh, if it was an American citizen, you mean?
32:03 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
32:04 Speaker 00 Uh, no.
32:06 Steven Bartlett? But they, why?
32:08 Speaker 00 No. We normally don't recruit American citizens. By law, the CIA can't operate domestically, although they have offices all over the country. Those offices are generally to, to debrief business leaders, C suite officers, who travel to denied areas. For example, if, if you take a trip to North Korea, let's say, I'm going to call you and I'm going to say, you don't know me, but I'm from the CIA and I understand you just went to North Korea and I was wondering if I could come over to your office for an hour and just ask you about your trip. Ninety nine point nine nine percent are going to say yes, because they're patriots.
32:49 Speaker 00 So I go to your office, I give you my business card and we just chat about, you know, your impressions of the place and that kind of thing.
32:59 Steven Bartlett? Just to close off on this point, are there any skills that the CIA taught you or trained you in that you think are transferable for business that we haven't talked about?
33:10 Speaker 00 They trained us also in lying and lie detection. That was actually quite important. You know, at the CIA, you're a trained liar. And this is why the divorce rate is so high. It's the highest divorce rate of any entity in the US government. It's upwards of 80%. Trained to lie. How do they train you to lie? Hi, my name is Dave Phillips. I work for an import-export company. But do they teach you the art of lying? Oh, yeah. And what is the art? You know, it's hard to pin down. You just sort of have to have it. You have to have that ability. But the hard part is, you have to keep the lies straight. I'll give you another example.
33:53 Speaker 00 I've never told this story before. I was asked by headquarters, I was overseas in the Middle East, and I was asked by headquarters to target one specific officer of this foreign country. Target? Yeah. "Hi, how are you? Oh, we've never met. I'm John. So nice to meet you. Let me take you to lunch." He had access to information that we really needed. So they told me to accidentally bump into him. So I surveilled him for a week. And he was single, and on Saturday morning, he went to a coffee shop. So I go into the coffee shop, and I'm looking at him, and he's looking at me, and I said, "I know you.
34:38 Speaker 00 Ministry of Foreign Affairs?" He said, "Yes, do I know you?" I said, "I am John from the American Embassy." "Oh, nice to see you." I said, "Hey, good to see you too. Do you live in the area?" "Yes, I do." I said, "Oh, so do I." I didn't. I lived, like, across town. "Oh, fancy meeting you here at this coffee shop." "I come here all the time." "Do you?" "Yeah," he says. "I come here all the time." "Why don't you have a seat?" He says. So I sit down. At the end of the conversation, I go back to the embassy, and I read a cable, and I said, "He's gay. I'm 100% sure he's gay." So then we started this conversation, headquarters and I. How can we use that to our benefit? Did he have a wife? No. He was single? Which was unusual at his age. How did you know he was gay? Oh, I just, it was a vibe. Okay. So, headquarters says...
35:27 Speaker 00 We want you to pretend that you're gay. I said, oh, come on, you guys. No, we really need the information. You gotta pretend that you're gay. I said, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it for Uncle Sam. So I call him and I said, hey, I have two tickets to this show and I was hoping maybe you'd be free. Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards. He said, yeah, I'd love to. So we go to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it. And we go for sushi afterwards. And then we go out again and he says, why don't you go over to my place some night and I'll make dinner. I said, great. So I go over to his place. He made a lovely dinner. And then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place.
36:12 Speaker 00 So I told my wife, you're gonna have to like get out. So she left. I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together and we had just gotten married. So we had like our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me and I instinctively backed off and he said, oh my God, I'm sorry. I thought you're gay. And I said, oh, no, I am gay. I'm, I'm, I'm not into hairy guys. And he's like, oh, okay. I said, I'm sorry. I think you're great, but I'm, I'm not feeling it.
36:51 Steven Bartlett? You didn't kiss him?
36:51 Speaker 00 No. So we remained friends and in the end he gave me the information because we were friends. And then he, he opened up. He's like, I can't tell anybody I'm gay. They suspect I am and they passed me over for promotion and my boss asked me, is there something in your personal life that you're not telling me? He knows I'm gay. I said, listen, your culture's backwards. Don't tell them you're gay. Just say that you've just never met the right woman and inshallah, the right woman is coming, you know, in your life at some point. And I actually Googled him a couple of years ago and he did become an ambassador finally.
37:30 Steven Bartlett? And he's still working in that country now?
37:31 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
37:32 Steven Bartlett? Does that kind of still happen a lot in the CIA where you have to take one for the team?
37:36 Speaker 00 Yes. Have you ever taken one for the team? No. I'm not sure you're telling the truth. Well, it came close. When did it come close? So I was overseas. I was a brand-new operations officer. And there was a woman in this foreign intelligence service who was the ugliest woman I've ever seen in my life. Like, you want to avert your eyes. Like, she came off the side of Notre Dame. She was a, you know, a stone gargoyle with a giant mole right here with a giant hair coming out of it. That kind of ugly.
38:14 Speaker 00 So...
38:17 Speaker 00 So I took her to lunch, and she was very nice. And then I thought, I did something kind of gutsy by CIA standards, because it was early on in our relationship. I invited her to go to lunch on a Saturday. Now, as a rule, the people in this country were not allowed to socialize with us privately. It had to be, like, their whole office, you know, or several of them together. So I asked her just to meet me privately for lunch on Saturday. Don't tell anybody. So she was someone from the Middle East? Yes. And she agreed. And I was like, oh, my God. She said yes. And I ran back to the office. I was like, she said yes to a lunch on Saturday alone. And my boss says, okay, here's what I want you to do.
39:03 Speaker 00 I want you to fuck her. And I said, what? I said, have you ever seen her? And he said, I know, but we're the good guys, and you're going to have to take one for the team. And I go, oh, my God, I said. I go,
39:19 Speaker 00 okay, I'll do it. And he says, no, you're not gonna fuck her. We don't do that. I said, I don't know. I just started this. I've never been an operations guy before. How am I supposed to know? He said, come on. He said, just develop her like a normal person. You don't have to fuck her. I said, oh, my God, you almost gave me a heart attack. But they, they might not be mad if you did. So long as I reported it and I got the recruitment out of it.
39:47 Steven Bartlett? It wasn't illegal to, you know, sleep with assets?
39:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're not supposed to sleep with assets. It has happened to a couple of people I know. And they end up being pulled back to the United States. You have to sit in the penalty box if you do that. You're not supposed to do that. But yeah, it happens sometimes.
40:04 Steven Bartlett? So extortion isn't a real thing?
40:06 Speaker 00 It can be. We don't.
40:10 Speaker 00 When I first got hired, one of the old timers told me the story of about an ayatollah that they were trying to recruit. And they set this ayatollah up with a prostitute. And it was, he had sex with this prostitute in a room where they had cameras everywhere. And so they bumped him afterwards. They bumped into him and said, hey, we have all these pictures. And they laid out the pictures of him, you know, butt naked with this prostitute. And he said, yeah, give me that one an eight by 10. Give me two five by sevens of that one. How about some wallet size for this? He's like, get out of here. And he said, you know, after that, we just stopped doing that. It doesn't work.
40:51 Speaker 00 When you recruit somebody, you really do need the relationship to be based on mutual trust.
40:56 Steven Bartlett? Not coercion or pressure or threats?
40:58 Speaker 00 Threatening somebody, it's not going to result in a productive relationship. The Russians do it. The Israelis do it. But most intelligence services around the world don't.
41:09 Steven Bartlett? Because you've been in this world. What is it that you know about the nature of the reality that we all live in? That the average person really has no idea about?
41:22 Steven Bartlett? Do you know what I mean?
41:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:23 Steven Bartlett? Because, you know, going back to what I said earlier, three years ago, before I started doing all this podcast stuff and started interviewing people that had been involved in spy work and CIA and all this, I was kind of like naive to the way that the world worked. I thought, I thought if I have a password on my device, my device is secure. And I thought that, you know?
41:42 Speaker 00 Right.
41:42 Steven Bartlett? All these kinds of just simple things. But what is it that you know about the nature of reality that most people don't?
41:48 Speaker 00 Well, I guess it's a couple of things. You know, John Kennedy called the CIA the best and the brightest.
41:58 Speaker 00 And we're not. We're just average people.
42:02 Speaker 00 And we're not as smart as we think we are. We're not as worldly as we think we are. We've pretty much missed every major global development since 1947. From the, you know, the rise of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the fall of the Soviet Union, to the Suez Crisis and the Iran hostage crisis and 9/11 and everything else. We missed it. We're really good at day-to-day, you know, updates for the president. We're really good at recruiting minor hangers-on around terrorist groups, but the big-picture items, we're just not good at it. Number one. Number two, until 9/11, it was against the law, like in stone, to spy on Americans.
42:47 Speaker 00 And now billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans, whether it's NSA, or CIA, or FBI, or intelligence community contractors. Nothing is secret. Nothing. And to make matters worse, let's say maybe you did do something that law enforcement might be interested in. They don't need a warrant anymore. They don't need to go to a judge and say, "Well, we have reason to believe, you know, blah, blah, blah." All they have to do is just buy your metadata, because it's for sale. Just go to the carrier. Just buy it. They don't need a judge's order to do that. It's all out there. We've made ourselves vulnerable.
43:31 Speaker 00 All of our lives are out there, whether it's on Facebook, or X, or Insta, or whatever. If they really want to get you, they're going to get you. Which reminds me of a book written by Dr. Harvey Silverglate. He's a professor of law at Harvard, and it's called Three Felonies a Day. And he argues in this book that we are so over-criminalized, so over-regulated in this country, that the average American, on the average day, going about his or her normal business, commits three felonies. Every day. You may not mean to, but you do. Every day.
44:10 Speaker 00 So if they decide they want you, they don't like your politics, they can get your metadata, they can go through that metadata, find crimes that they can charge you with, and ruin your life, and there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
44:28 Steven Bartlett? To some extent, they did that to you.
44:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, they did. They did that to me.
44:32 Steven Bartlett? Because you spoke out about a torture program that was happening in the CIA.
44:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, John Brennan wrote a letter to Eric Holder and said, "Charge him with espionage." And Holder wrote back, Eric Holder was the Attorney General, Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And John Brennan wrote back to Holder and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." So they arrested me, charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. Espionage can be a death penalty case. Charged me with espionage. They waited until I went bankrupt 10 months later with $2 million in legal fees. And then they dropped the espionage charges. And they said, "We can re-add the espionage charges, or you can take a plea to this lesser charge."
45:22 Speaker 00 What are you gonna do? Roll the dice, knowing that the government wins 98.2% of its cases, according to ProPublica? Or do you just take the deal and make it go away? And that's what I did.
45:34 Steven Bartlett? And you got roughly two years in jail?
45:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, I ended up doing 23 months.
45:40 Steven Bartlett? And for anyone that doesn't know, this was because at some point in your career, you spoke out about torture programs that were happening in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
45:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, and at secret prisons that the CIA had set up around the world, right?
45:55 Steven Bartlett? And going back up to the top of my question here, I'm really trying to speak to Jane, Dave, who's listening to this right now.
46:02 Speaker 00 Sure.
46:02 Steven Bartlett? They have a normal life.
46:03 Speaker 00 Yep.
46:04 Steven Bartlett? They're not really aware that spies exist in the extent of the work they do. They kind of assume that everything they see and people they interact with are normal, and they think their devices and everything else is secure. What message do you have for them, a word of warning or caution about the reality?
46:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a good question. Elliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, when he was Attorney General of New York, he said...
46:30 Speaker 00 Don't nod when you can motion. Don't speak when you can nod. And don't ever put anything in a text message. At the CIA on our very first day, they told us not to ever say or do anything that we would be ashamed to see on the front page of The Washington Post. I took that seriously. The truth of the matter is, because of technology, the way it is today, our whole lives are out there, potentially, for someone to see, for someone to use against us. So be careful what you say, be careful what you write, even in jest,
47:14 Speaker 00 because it can be taken out of context to target you.
47:21 Steven Bartlett? And what about digital security? You talked about the fact that it's possible for these forces, and not just the US, but other countries, to be able to hack and crack your devices and see anything on your devices. I think we will go around assuming that our devices are secure.
47:36 Speaker 00 They're not secure, at all. At all. It's not just NSA, CIA, FBI that you have to worry about. It's the British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians. I mean, everybody has these capabilities, everybody. So you've got to be very, very careful.
48:00 Steven Bartlett? Capabilities to do what?
48:02 Speaker 00 To intercept communications.
48:04 Steven Bartlett? I've heard you say that they can hack car systems. So they could theoretically hack into my car?
48:10 Speaker 00 Yes, we know that from WikiLeaks. There was something in 2017 called the Vault 7 revelations. There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled. And instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks. And he downloaded thousands, tens of thousands of pages of documents classified above top secret. And they became what WikiLeaks called the Vault 7 documents. So they included things like... The CIA, for example, will hack into, let's say, the Iranian Ministry of Interior computer system.
48:54 Speaker 00 But they'll leave little electronic clues, all written in Cyrillic.
48:58 Steven Bartlett? Cyrillic as what?
49:00 Speaker 00 Cyrillic is the alphabet, the Russian alphabet.
49:03 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
49:04 Speaker 00 Yep. Or they can take control of your smart TV remotely, and they can make the speaker turn into a microphone. So even though the TV is off, it can still hear everything that's being said in the room and broadcast back to the CIA.
49:23 Steven Bartlett? Can they do that with
49:24 Speaker 00 Ingenious.
49:25 Steven Bartlett? Devices?
49:26 Speaker 00 Oh, they could do that. When I first got hired, they were able to do that.
49:29 Steven Bartlett? So they could be doing that right now with
49:31 Speaker 00 Oh, totally.
49:32 Steven Bartlett? My iPad.
49:33 Speaker 00 Absolutely, yes. That's old technology. And then the thing about the car, this was revelatory. They can take control, again remotely, of a car's computer system in order to, well, I mean, in order to kill you.
49:51 Steven Bartlett? Crash the car.
49:52 Speaker 00 Crash the car, take it off a bridge, take it into a tree, sure.
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51:50 Steven Bartlett? I've heard you talk about sleeper agents before.
51:52 Speaker 00 Yes.
51:52 Steven Bartlett? What is a sleeper agent?
51:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, the Russians are very good with sleeper agents. We Americans don't have, no other country that we know of uses sleeper agents. A sleeper agent is someone who is taken virtually from birth and trained to be of another nationality. For example, let's say you're born in Russia and from the age of, you know, two, they take you from your family with your family's acquiescence and they take you to an American style town that they've built out in the hinterland in Russia. And they teach you to speak English with an American accent.
52:39 Speaker 00 You watch American TV shows, you watch American movies, you eat American food, you get an American-style education. So I have no idea that you're not American. You speak English just like I do. You know all the same, you know, social references that I make. You follow the Philadelphia Eagles, you know, or the, you know, the San Francisco 49ers or whatever. And then they send you to the United States on a fake, with a fake ID. What they'll do is they'll go through, I was born in 1964. So they'll go through death records from 1964 and they'll look for deaths where the person was only a day or two old.
53:25 Speaker 00 And they'll take that name and the birth date and they'll get a social security card with the birth date. And then they'll use the social security card to get you a passport, an American passport. So you come here on your American passport. Everything's legit. Now your name is, you know, Bob Smith, which was really that baby's name that died. And you get a job, let's say, as a travel agent. And you may work as a travel agent for 20 years and never hear from them. But then they'll activate you and they'll say, we want you to go take care of this target over here.
54:05 Steven Bartlett? Kill him.
54:05 Speaker 00 Yeah. Or we want you to get a job at the Defense Department and give us everything that you can steal. Whatever. There's a woman in my neighborhood who was outed as a sleeper about a year ago. She was an elementary school teacher and they grabbed her and they ended up trading her back to the Russians for two Americans. So they're out there. I interviewed a sleeper, a former sleeper on my own podcast a couple of weeks ago. He was from the East German Intelligence Service and he was raised as an American and sent to New York.
54:45 Speaker 00 He got a job, I forget doing what, like restaurant supply company or something like that. And he got married and he had a daughter. And he told me, as soon as I looked at her face the day she was born, I realized this life wasn't for me anymore. So they...
55:09 Speaker 00 Send him an activation. What they do is listen to your radio message. And he didn't respond to it. And he told me he was on the subway one day. He's just standing there, holding the strap. And this guy came up to him and the guy grabs the strap next to him and whispers in his ear, "If you don't report back, I have to kill you." And so he ran straight to the FBI field office in New York. And he said, "I'm an East German sleeper and I want to turn myself in." And he became a prolific source for the FBI.
55:42 Steven Bartlett? So he was taken as a young person?
55:46 Speaker 00 Yes.
55:46 Steven Bartlett? What was his story?
55:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, taken as a young person, sent to Russia to become American. They set him up with this phony identity. And then after he had gone through all the training, he came over here young. He was like 20 or 22 and did this for 25 years. And then he said as soon as his daughter was born, he was like, wow, this is what life is for, not being a sleeper.
56:15 Steven Bartlett? Do you think the average person listening to this conversation right now is interacting in their life at this exact moment in time with someone who is involved in espionage, spying, the CIA, or some international equivalent?
56:32 Speaker 00 Probably not. Because they're mostly focused. Foreign intelligence officers are going to be spread out all over America. If a listener of this podcast is working in a defense company, a defense contractor, anywhere in America, then my answer is yes. Yes, you're probably encountering espionage of some sort or somebody committing espionage, whether it's Russian, Chinese, or Israeli. They're the three biggest ones that go after us. In Washington?
57:14 Speaker 00 I mean, foreign spies, there could be as many as 10,000 in Washington. I remember my first wife, she was teaching ballet at a small private school. And one of the students there, they were all like four, five and six years old. One of the students there, her father was a Belgian diplomat. And so we would sit and talk and, oh, aren't the kids talented? And, oh, this is so much fun. They look so cute in their little tutus. And then I went to work one day and as I was walking in, he was walking in. And I said, oh, come on, Peter. And he's like, you know, I thought you were a spy. And I said, I actually didn't think you were a spy. And he was just going for a liaison meeting.
57:59 Speaker 00 And we had a good chuckle about it. And I said, listen, don't tell anybody, right? Right, right, right, sorry.
58:08 Steven Bartlett? So I'm trying to figure out, how many spies do you think there are in the United States? If you think about-
58:14 Speaker 00 Foreign spies?
58:15 Steven Bartlett? Foreign spies, domestic spies, people that are basically undercover.
58:20 Speaker 00 Including Americans, you mean?
58:21 Steven Bartlett? Including Americans.
58:22 Speaker 00 The number of CIA employees is classified. The number of CIA employees undercover is actually even more highly classified. I can give you a guesstimate-
58:33 Steven Bartlett? But also, you know, Russia, China-
58:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, 50 to 60,000 altogether?
58:38 Steven Bartlett? 50 or 60,000 in the United States. So by a couple of degrees of separation, if you know 100 people-
58:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're probably gonna know one. Sure.
58:51 Steven Bartlett? You said there's probably about 50,000 in the United States. So I've just done some quick math on my notepad here, which means that in order to know one, you'd need to meet 6,600 people.
59:05 Speaker 00 Okay.
59:05 Steven Bartlett? Because the US population is roughly 330 million people.
59:07 Speaker 00 That's right.
59:08 Steven Bartlett? And then I did some other maths and did some research. And I asked, the question I was trying to figure out is how many people does the average person meet a year? And it's roughly about 3 to 10,000 people. So-
59:21 Speaker 00 So the chances are good?
59:23 Steven Bartlett? Every year, statistically.
59:27 Steven Bartlett? According to my napkin math, you're meeting one of these undercover spies. One a year.
59:37 Speaker 00 There it is. Now, that number I gave you is I'm lumping like all CIA people and all foreign intelligence officers in the United States.
59:47 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
59:49 Speaker 00 But again, if you work for an American defense company, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, any of them, your chances of encountering a foreign intelligence officer are even money.
1:00:04 Steven Bartlett? Can't you, as a spy with the United States, ask the United States to give you loads of money? Like, can't you say, "Oh, you really want me to go do that? Can I have a million dollars?" Because you're giving, you're potentially giving away a lot of money to other people.
1:00:16 Speaker 00 Oh, my God, giving away like unlimited amounts of money.
1:00:19 Steven Bartlett? Because your budget, when you were a spy, how much was it?
1:00:22 Speaker 00 After 9/11, it was unlimited.
1:00:23 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean? It means you can basically give away as much money as you need to.
1:00:27 Speaker 00 If I approached somebody and he says, "I can give you this terrorist, I want 10 million," I'm like, "Done."
1:00:36 Steven Bartlett? What was the most you ever gave in 10?
1:00:38 Speaker 00 10 million.
1:00:39 Steven Bartlett? You gave someone 10 million? For what?
1:00:41 Speaker 00 Abu Zubaydah.
1:00:43 Steven Bartlett? Who's Abu Zubaydah?
1:00:45 Speaker 00 We believed that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al Qaeda. He wasn't the number three, but he was a very bad guy. I led the raids that captured Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March of 2002. And the State Department had a $10 million reward. We ended up giving the 10 million to the Pakistani intelligence service. It wasn't...
1:01:08 Steven Bartlett? A person.
1:01:09 Speaker 00 A person. It was just really great analysis that led us to him. But there were others in the so-called War on Terror.
1:01:22 Speaker 00 Who got more than 10 million? And got it like within 24 hours.
1:01:31 Steven Bartlett? Individuals?
1:01:32 Speaker 00 Individuals.
1:01:34 Steven Bartlett? How much?
1:01:35 Speaker 00 One got 25 million.
1:01:37 Steven Bartlett? Just a person?
1:01:38 Speaker 00 Uh huh. And the thing is, you know, there's a lot of danger there. If you're a, if you're a, you know, a shepherd or a T boy, and you make $40 a month, and all of a sudden you have 25 million dollars, something, something's up.
1:01:56 Steven Bartlett? And what was the 25 million for?
1:01:59 Speaker 00 It was for a very high ranking foreign terrorist who was brought to justice. I, I can't, I can't say. Cause it was never publicly disclosed. But what we would have to do in a situation like that is we would have to tell the, the source, you can't live here anymore. Pick a country and that's going to be home from now on. And then we go to that country and say, hey, can you do us a solid? We've got this guy who, you know, he really came through and he's not going to be a burden on your economy.
1:02:37 Steven Bartlett? Cause he's got 25 million dollars. Which country did he pick?
1:02:40 Speaker 00 Oh, I can't, I can't tell you that. He wanted, he wanted to stay in the region. He, he wasn't willing to move to the United States, for example. Cause we're happy to take him. You're welcome to come to the United States. He's like, absolutely not.
1:02:55 Steven Bartlett? He went to Dubai.
1:02:57 Speaker 00 I would.
1:02:57 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, with the tax code. Interesting. Hmm. I think I'm, I think I'm, yeah, I'm, you can tell my bias from the questions that I ask about the things that fascinate me about espionage and spies. It's just, it's the, their understanding of human nature and what motivates us and the psychology of humans that you can learn from spies and the nature of human beings, I guess.
1:03:24 Speaker 00 Right.
1:03:25 Steven Bartlett? And also I get the other thing that really fascinates me is just.
1:03:29 Steven Bartlett? I've had so many mind blowing moments where I've learned just how fragile the reality that I believe is. Like, I thought things were secure and I thought they were as they are, but it just doesn't appear to be that way. There appear to be lots of secrets. And, you know, conspiracy theorists get a hard time. But actually, the more I've done this as a job, the more I go, hmm, conspiracy theorists are right more than I expected them to be.
1:03:53 Speaker 00 See, and that's an important point. I hate conspiracy theories that run amok. But you know, the, the, a former CIA director is the one who came up with the term conspiracy theory. And it was, it was a way for the CIA to discredit people by making them sound like crazy people, when in fact, there was such a thing called MKUltra. There was such a thing called, you know, Operation Grasshopper, or, or MKChickWit, or, you know, the CIA did crazy, crazy stuff from roughly 1952 to 1975. For example, they experimented with
1:04:36 Speaker 00 a virus that they, that they released in San Francisco. They waited for an unusually foggy, like heavily foggy day. They released it into the atmosphere, just to see if it would make people sick. And 11 people went to the emergency room with this rare upper respiratory infection. And then they were like, you know, high fives. Yeah, it works. And then they, they started experimenting with LSD. LSD was a big thing at the CIA in the early days. We were convinced, see, and this, this is, this is where counterintelligence is important. The Chinese
1:05:20 Speaker 00 Told us in like 1951 that the Russians were using LSD to try to engineer it to be used as a mind control drug. That wasn't true. That was disinformation. The truth was the Russians had no LSD program. The Chinese did. So they tried to throw us off the scent by blaming the Russians. We panicked. And by 1952, we started this program called MKUltra, which began by using LSD experimentally.
1:06:01 Speaker 00 What the CIA did was they started by dosing their own employees without telling them. Several committed suicide. One jumped out of a hotel window.
1:06:12 Steven Bartlett? With the hope that?
1:06:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, we'll just see what happens. See what they say, see how it feels, you know, see if we can control them, see if we can plant memories that didn't actually happen. And then they decided, no, it's not a good idea to dose our own people. Let's just dose strangers out in public. So they went to San Francisco. They rented a safe house and they hired prostitutes to go out on the street, pick up Johns, bring them back to the safe house.
1:06:42 Steven Bartlett? Johns?
1:06:43 Speaker 00 Johns, people who hire prostitutes, men who hire prostitutes. Dose the Johns with LSD and just see what happens. But I mean, these are like serious crimes you're committing against people.
1:07:00 Steven Bartlett? Just reading about it here, it says, "Under Operation Midnight Climax." Interesting name. Operation Midnight Climax. The CIA paid sex workers to lure men to safe houses where agents drugged them and then watched them through one-way mirrors and recorded their behavior.
1:07:17 Speaker 00 Exactly.
1:07:19 Steven Bartlett? They tried to erase their personality.
1:07:22 Speaker 00 Nice, huh?
1:07:24 Steven Bartlett? The goal was often to break and rebuild the human mind. In 1973, the CIA director ordered mass destruction of the MKUltra files. What we know comes from accidentally surviving documents, meaning this is a sanitized version.
1:07:39 Speaker 00 That day, he testified before the Church Committee. The Church Committee specifically told him, "Do not destroy any documents." He went back that afternoon to the CIA and said, "Destroy everything."
1:07:57 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:07:58 Speaker 00 Because it was damning. They were experimenting on American citizens. They were experimenting by spreading diseases in American cities. And so, he was held in contempt of Congress. He was fined like $150. And about 15% of the documents were overlooked and survived. We'll never know exactly what happened under MKUltra.
1:08:31 Steven Bartlett? As we sit here now, there's people on the streets of Iran that are protesting the leadership there. And the CIA are often associated with some of the coups going back to the 1950s.
1:08:45 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:08:45 Steven Bartlett? And other countries toppling elected leaders to protect US interests.
1:08:50 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:08:51 Steven Bartlett? Do you think the CIA are involved in Iran at the moment?
1:08:54 Speaker 00 Probably. I think the Israelis are heavily involved in Iran at the moment. I'll tell you why, for a couple of reasons, more than a couple. Number one, in the so-called 12-day war that we saw last year, the Israelis were absolutely masterful in the way they went after the Iranian leadership. What they did was they...
1:09:17 Speaker 00 Focused on recruiting Afghan refugees. Iran was home to more than 2 million Afghan refugees. And as essentially illegal aliens, they could not avail themselves of medical care, the welfare system. They're starving. You're right, they only eat if they can beg for enough to buy food. And so the Israelis went to these people very discreetly and said, hey, you know, we'll give you $200 a month if you tell us where the generals live. In which apartments do the generals live? Where do the nuclear scientists live?
1:09:56 Speaker 00 The Israelis killed the top 12 generals across the entire Iranian military and killed almost every Iranian nuclear scientist. Because what they were able to do was to recruit these Afghans, to not just tell them where they were living, where the generals and the scientists were living, but what their cellphone numbers were. And so the Israelis were able to geolocate the cellphones, and then that's where you fire the missile. They killed all of them. And then after the Iranians finally realized it's the cellphones, they ordered that no senior military officials and no scientists could carry cellphones.
1:10:39 Speaker 00 But it never dawned on them to tell the bodyguards not to carry cellphones. And so the Israelis started rocketing the bodyguards and just killed everybody else.
1:10:49 Steven Bartlett? Have you ever killed anybody?
1:10:50 Speaker 00 No, thank God. My children asked me that. And I told them very proudly that I have never taken any action that resulted in the death of another human being. There's one kind of half exception. And I think about this all the time. In 1993, I guess it was.
1:11:12 Speaker 00 I was sitting in the morning meeting. I told you earlier that every unit meets every day at 9 o'clock and you just talk about what happened in the country that you cover overnight. I was in the morning meeting and the secretary came in and she said, "John, General Powell is on the phone for you. Call him Powell." And I said, "General Powell? How does he know who I am?" And she said, "I don't know, but he asked for you by name." My boss is like, "Well, go answer the phone." So I went to my desk and I said, "Good morning, General Powell. This is John Kiriakou." And he says, "John, if the Iraqis were going to kill the president, who would actually be in charge of that operation?"
1:11:53 Speaker 00 And I said, "Well, if you're talking about the attempt to kill President Bush, George H.W. Bush, he had been visiting Kuwait." I said, "Kuwait operations are run from the Iraqi intelligence service's Basra Station, but Basra Station is headed by Sabra Abdelaziz Adori, the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service." He says, "Where does he sit?" I said, "Baghdad." "Where exactly in Baghdad?" I said, "If you hold on a second, I'll look up the address." So I looked it up. I gave him the address. He says, "Thank you," and he hangs up the phone. I go back in the meeting. They were like, "What did he want?"
1:12:32 Speaker 00 I said, "He wanted to know about Sabra Adori and the attempt to kill President Bush." I'm like, "Okay." Eight hours later, we fired 47 cruise missiles into Iraqi Intelligence Service Headquarters. But by then, it was the middle of the night in Baghdad and we killed the janitor. So the next day, I said to my boss, "I killed that janitor." And he said, "I knew you were going to say that. You didn't kill the janitor. You had no idea what Powell was going to do with the information." I said, "I know, but I still feel guilty about it."
1:13:09 Speaker 00 Other than that, thank God, I never had to do it. I'm not sure how I would sleep at night.
1:13:16 Steven Bartlett? Do the US still assassinate people by the CIA?
1:13:20 Speaker 00 Absolutely, yes. When Barack Obama was president, John Brennan, in the first term, was the Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism, and he started something called the Tuesday Morning Kill List Meeting. So it would be Brennan, it would be the National Security Council attorney, somebody from the CIA General Counsel's Office, and a representative of the Director of the Counterterrorism Center. And every Tuesday morning, they would meet at the White House, come up with a list of people to kill that week. The teams would fan out around the world, kill their targets, and then go back and meet next Tuesday morning.
1:13:58 Steven Bartlett? And are these world leaders, or are they normal people?
1:14:01 Speaker 00 No, these are, these are ground-level terrorists.
1:14:04 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so it could be someone that appears to be a normal civilian, but is doing something that they don't like.
1:14:13 Speaker 00 The law is pretty clear on this. It's supposed to be somebody who poses a clear and present danger to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation.
1:14:27 Steven Bartlett? Which can be quite a vague brief.
1:14:30 Speaker 00 See, that's the thing. It sounds like it's clear. It's actually not at all clear. And when they get back from these missions, we just have to take their word for it.
1:14:40 Steven Bartlett? Which spy force around the world did you think was the most impressive?
1:14:47 Speaker 00 Oh, the Israelis.
1:14:48 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:14:49 Speaker 00 Yeah. The Israelis have no rules. They'll kill anybody. What was it, three years ago? This uh, this pager operation?
1:15:02 Steven Bartlett? Oh, it's so fascinating.
1:15:03 Speaker 00 Good lord, it was, it was a work of genius.
1:15:06 Steven Bartlett? It is genius. It is.
1:15:08 Speaker 00 It was totally illegal.
1:15:10 Steven Bartlett? Totally illegal.
1:15:10 Speaker 00 But it was genius. The, the moving parts.
1:15:14 Steven Bartlett? I, I didn't believe it was real. I had to like re, I was like, there's no way that this is real. This is the stuff of movies.
1:15:20 Speaker 00 It is.
1:15:21 Steven Bartlett? For anyone that doesn't know, what was the story?
1:15:24 Speaker 00 Ah, yeah. Okay. So, the Israelis knew that Hezbollah, the terrorist group Hezbollah from Lebanon, was communicating using pagers. They didn't want to use cell phones because they didn't want the Israelis to intercept their phone calls. And they thought, oh, pagers, those are safe. So the Israelis bought a company in like Hungary, I think it was, that made pagers. And they got Hezbollah to order the pagers from this company.
1:15:59 Speaker 00 They were able to insert explosives in the pagers and the pagers went to like Taiwan and from Taiwan to Thailand and then from Thailand to, I forget where, Syria, I guess, and then from Syria to Lebanon. And so what the Israelis did was they were able to activate the explosives in all the pagers simultaneously.
1:16:23 Steven Bartlett? Killing people?
1:16:24 Speaker 00 They killed everybody of any import in Hezbollah. They essentially decapitated Hezbollah. And then the ones they didn't kill in that operation, they bombed the apartment buildings where they lived. See, this is the thing too about the Israelis. If they want to kill you, they won't, they won't like just do a close in hit. They'll blow up the entire city block where you live. They'll kill a thousand people just to get you and they don't care. And then, then they say, what are you gonna do about it? You're gonna go to the International Court of Justice?
1:17:00 Steven Bartlett? Did they, did they really do this?
1:17:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:17:04 Steven Bartlett? Did, did you ever interact with them?
1:17:05 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:17:07 Steven Bartlett? And how did you find them to be?
1:17:08 Speaker 00 Miserable.
1:17:10 Speaker 00 My very first briefing that I ever gave as a junior analyst was to the Israelis. My boss said, "Okay," he says, "you're gonna give your first classified liaison briefing. So it's gonna be the Israelis, and there are a couple of things you should know." I said, "Okay." He said, "We don't allow the Israelis into the building, ever." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Because they spy on us." Not only do they spy on us, they would always bring gifts. Like, "Oh, we brought this wonderful gift for you." And then you, every time somebody tries to bring something in, you have to x-ray it. And it's got like listening devices, and it's packed with two years' worth of batteries. We're like, "You guys, you have to stop doing this. Every time you come here, you try to bug our conference rooms.
1:17:55 Speaker 00 It's bad form. You have to stop doing it." And then they're like, "Oh, okay, okay. We knew you would find it. We're just kidding." Come on. So we have to meet them miles away from headquarters, in a place that we rent. So he said, "Nothing over the secret level. No top-secret information, just up to secret." I'm like, "Okay." So I go with like a dozen analysts. And because I'm the junior-most analyst, I've only been on the job at this point, I'm gonna say six weeks or so, I went last. So the first analyst says, "I'm the chief analyst, and this is my briefing."
1:18:37 Speaker 00 And then the next guy says, "I'm the political analyst, and I'm the econ analyst, and I'm the military analyst, and I'm the oil analyst, and, you know, the tech analyst." And it comes to me. So I said, because I was overt at the time, I was not undercover, I said, "My name is John Kiriakou, and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's psychological state of mind." Well, there were two Israelis there. One was from Mossad, and one was from Shin Bet. Shin Bet is the FBI of Israel, and Mossad is the CIA of Israel. So the Shin Bet guy, he has his glasses down like this, and he goes like this, he says, "Spell your name." So I spell it, K-I-R, I spell it.
1:19:22 Speaker 00 And he goes, "You are Jewish?" I said, "Don't you dare. I am not recruitable. Don't you dare even try it."
1:19:34 Speaker 00 I was furious. We went out of the briefing. I was gonna explode. Everybody started laughing at me. They're like, they do that to every one of us. Every one of us. They try and regroup you? Yeah. To turn against the United States? Yeah. On my very first day at the CIA, we got a briefing from the CIA's Director of Security. And he said that all of us have to have, in the very front of our minds, the concept of counterintelligence. For example, he said, there's a steakhouse right down the road on Route 123. It's the nearest restaurant to the CIA. He goes, don't ever eat there.
1:20:17 Speaker 00 Why? Because the KGB thinks we all eat there. So all the customers are KGB officers, waiting for CIA people to walk in and start talking about work. Don't ever eat there. I've never eaten there, to this day. Because they're potential Russian spies? Mm-hmm. So, he said, our Israeli friends have two officers in their embassy, one from Mossad, one from Shin Bet. The FBI has identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers, spread all across the United States, mostly at defense contractors, trying to
1:20:57 Speaker 00 steal our secrets. Now, we give the Israelis 95% of our defense secrets. You want the F-35? Done. Here's the F-35. You want this advanced missile? Here you go. It's on us. So they steal the remaining 5%.
1:21:16 Speaker 00 Do you think Jeffrey Epstein was a spy? I believe very strongly he was a spy, yes. And who'd you think he was working for? The Israelis. I'm confident it was the Israelis. Why? Jeffrey Epstein...
1:21:33 Speaker 00 Is kind of the stereotypical example that they give you in training for what's called an access agent. This is a different kind of recruit. So, for example, if you're a foreign intelligence service and you want information, like close-in information from a former president, from the CEO of the biggest company in the world, from a member of the British royal family, you're not going to recruit these guys. You're not going to recruit Bill Clinton, or Bill Gates, or Prince Andrew. So you do the next best thing. You recruit somebody who has regular access to them. And that person that you recruit is going to need to make these people feel comfortable
1:22:18 Speaker 00 and appreciated. And so you give them plenty of money, so he has this house on an island, or he has the whole island, and maybe you bring in young girls, you get them in compromising positions just in case you need to use what's called compromat, compromising pictures. We know, we know now that Jeffrey Epstein's house on the island had video cameras, hidden video cameras, in literally every room, including the bathrooms. Why?
1:22:58 Speaker 00 Why would he care what was going on unless it was to use that information against people? As I said, only the Israelis and the Russians use extortion as a motivator.
1:23:14 Steven Bartlett? So would they have made Jeffrey Epstein rich?
1:23:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:23:19 Steven Bartlett? In order to give him that access?
1:23:20 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:23:21 Steven Bartlett? How could they have done that?
1:23:22 Speaker 00 Oh, that's easy. I mean, you do, I mean, governments are the only ones, really, that can money, that can launder money unfettered. And you can also do it through real estate, through fine art, and through horses. Those are the three easiest ways to launder money today. Fine art, real estate, and racehorses.
1:23:45 Steven Bartlett? But presumably, he would have spoken out at some point, no? He would have said something?
1:23:50 Speaker 00 No, but it would explain why he got a sweetheart deal in 2006. I mean, this is a guy that's been convicted of child sex crimes. And he gets six months of house arrest with an ankle bracelet? We have mandatory minimums in this country. That's a five-year mandatory minimum, first offense.
1:24:08 Steven Bartlett? He definitely had some interesting power, didn't he?
1:24:11 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm. And Alex Acosta, who was the prosecuting attorney at the time, and then later became Secretary of Labor under Trump, Trump won. Alex Acosta said that he was ordered by the Attorney General to give Epstein the sweetheart deal. Well, who's the only person that can order the Attorney General to do something? It's the President. So was it because Epstein was working on Clinton? Most of the people down there were Democrats? I mean, what was the reason?
1:24:50 Steven Bartlett? Maybe he was working for the US government.
1:24:53 Speaker 00 It's possible that he could have been doubled against the Israelis or others? Sure, sure, that's possible.
1:25:00 Steven Bartlett? If you had to bet, what would you say? If you had to bet everything you have on either him being a spy or not a spy?
1:25:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:25:10 Steven Bartlett? What would you bet on?
1:25:11 Speaker 00 He was a spy. I feel very confident in that assessment. I debated Alan Dershowitz about this on the Pierce Morgan Show one time. It was Scott Horton and me who said that he was an Israeli spy. And it was Alan Dershowitz and General Danny Ayala, the former head of Mossad. Ayala was kind of into it in terms of having a fun time. He was just having a fun time with the conversation. He wasn't going to admit to anything. Dershowitz was Epstein's attorney.
1:25:46 Speaker 00 So I said that that I believed Epstein was an Israeli spy. And Dershowitz interrupts me, like attorneys do. And he says, "That is outrageous. If he had been a spy, he would have told me, because I was his attorney, and I could have gone to the White House and I could have gotten him a better sentence." And I said, "Wait a minute. You could have gone to the White House to say, 'Go easy on Jeffrey Epstein because he's an Israeli spy, collecting information from American politicians? If I were the president, I would have hung him from a tree.'" And then Piers Morgan said, "General Ayala, was he a spy?"
1:26:27 Speaker 00 And he goes, "Who knows?"
1:26:32 Steven Bartlett? Who knows?
1:26:34 Speaker 00 It's like, "Come on, man."
1:26:36 Steven Bartlett? Who do you think is the real adversary of the West? Because we often talk about it being Russia or...
1:26:42 Speaker 00 I think it's China.
1:26:43 Steven Bartlett? Why? What is it that we don't realize about China and their agenda?
1:26:47 Speaker 00 Oh, wow, so much. The Chinese are so good at what they do. And the Chinese are so patient. You know, in the United States, we don't have long-term timelines for anything. When we want something, we want it now.
1:27:04 Steven Bartlett? Is that in part because we have this four-year election cycle?
1:27:05 Speaker 00 Yes, I believe that it is. The Chinese will plan for something 25 years down the road.
1:27:12 Steven Bartlett? Because they'll still be in power then?
1:27:14 Speaker 00 Yeah. And so, you know, they're really good at stealing technology. There are more Chinese PhD students in the hard sciences here in the United States than you can shake a stick at. They're everywhere. They're at every major university, and they're really, really smart. And then oftentimes, they'll say, "Oh, you know, I've had such a great experience here. I'd like to stay in the United States." Yeah, I bet you would. I bet you would. So you can spy for China.
1:27:45 Steven Bartlett? Do you think that's happening?
1:27:46 Speaker 00 Every single day.
1:27:48 Steven Bartlett? You think that Chinese students are in America spying on behalf of China?
1:27:53 Speaker 00 Yes. Yes.
1:27:56 Steven Bartlett? How could you be so sure?
1:27:57 Speaker 00 I'm 1,000% sure.
1:27:59 Steven Bartlett? How could you be so sure?
1:28:00 Speaker 00 Because we frequently arrest them and then trade them for Americans who are in Chinese prisons.
1:28:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:28:10 Steven Bartlett? And they're masquerading as students.
1:28:13 Speaker 00 Mm hmm. PhD candidates, always in the hard sciences, always.
1:28:19 Steven Bartlett? So China are the long-term adversary? And what is it that China want? What is it they're doing? And what is the outcome?
1:28:27 Speaker 00 I think they want a couple of things. I think that on a more immediate basis, they want reunification with Taiwan. It's going to happen someday. Even the Taiwanese will tell you, yes, we're a part of China, but we're kind of not a part of China. We're not really independent, but we are kind of independent. Even American policy is that Taiwan is a part of China. And eventually someday they'll be reunited.
1:28:51 Steven Bartlett? Do you think with everything that's going on at the moment with Trump and Venezuela and Greenland, this is going to create cover for?
1:28:58 Speaker 00 Oh, I was hoping you would ask me a question like that. I think that's a very important issue that the media really aren't talking about. So let's put it in the context of what happened last week in Venezuela. Because they're all moving parts of the same of the same policy. So we sent a Delta Force squad into Venezuela a week ago, and we snatched President Maduro. And he faces international narcotics trafficking charges in New York. Okay, some people are for that, some people are against it. Whether you're for it or against it, it's happened, there's nothing we can do about it now.
1:29:42 Speaker 00 But that operation may have inadvertently given the green light to something that both the Russians and the Chinese have long sought. The United States really is the only true superpower in the world. You know, the Chinese have a lot more people, they have lots of nuclear missiles, but they have one aircraft carrier. We have 12, soon to be 14. We have way more long-distance bombers. We have way more fighters. The Russians are bogged down in a war in Ukraine. They're winning the war, but they're bogged down nonetheless. So.
1:30:19 Speaker 00 Did this reinstitution of the Monroe Doctrine, saying that, you know, from 1814, that the Western Hemisphere is the territory of the United States, it's up to us to protect it from foreign powers? Well, in 1814, that meant the British Navy. We don't really need a Monroe Doctrine, and it's not up to us whether the Argentines want to have good relations with China, for example. We invoked the Monroe Doctrine in this operation to snatch Maduro. So, does that mean, then, that if we have a sphere of influence, that is, the Western Hemisphere, that the Chinese have a sphere of influence that includes Taiwan?
1:31:03 Speaker 00 That the Russians have a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine? Because that's kind of what it seems. It looks like we've given the green light to both of those countries. And that we're conceding the fact that it's a unipolar world, right now, in favor of a multipolar world. Now, personally, I think a multipolar world is safer. What's a multipolar world? Multipolar world is where there's not just one superpower. There are three or more. So, in terms of policy, this simple act of just sending a team in to grab Maduro has turned international diplomacy on its head. What do we do if the Chinese invade Taiwan?
1:31:48 Speaker 00 Do we really want to send American soldiers to, you know, to fight and die for Taiwan? What do you think would happen if China tomorrow said, "You know what? We're going to take Taiwan"? You know what? Honest to God, I think nothing would happen. I think we would rush to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand. We'd rush to protect them. Why? Because they're major non-NATO allies. They're good friends, close friends. But in terms of going to Taiwan to fight Chinese soldiers?
1:32:22 Speaker 00 I can't imagine it.
1:32:23 Steven Bartlett? Trump told the New York Times that whether China moves on Taiwan is ultimately up to Chinese President Xi Jinping, not the USA, adding that he's told Xi he would be very unhappy if China changed the status quo. He claimed he doesn't think Xi will act while he's president.
1:32:41 Speaker 00 See, and that is actually what the long-term policy is. The long-term policy is, sure, someday, to be determined later, you guys can unify.
1:32:52 Steven Bartlett? Just don't do it while I'm here.
1:32:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, don't do it today.
1:32:56 Steven Bartlett? Maybe when Trump goes.
1:32:58 Speaker 00 God forbid.
1:33:00 Steven Bartlett? So going back to this point, you said they want Taiwan. What else do you think China want?
1:33:04 Speaker 00 Well.
1:33:07 Steven Bartlett? Do they want to see the US fall?
1:33:09 Speaker 00 Yes, sure.
1:33:11 Steven Bartlett? And are they actively doing things to encourage that?
1:33:14 Speaker 00 Yes, but not the things that, that you would expect. Instead of running around the world, you know, overthrowing governments, invading countries, which is what we do,
1:33:29 Speaker 00 they go to countries and say, hey, you need a new highway system? We'll pay for it. You need a new airport? No problem. You need a new hospital, electrical grid? We have plenty of money from our gigantic trade surplus. We'll pay for it. We just want to have really good, friendly relations with you. And that's what they do. The Chinese essentially own Africa right now.
1:33:52 Steven Bartlett? What are you most concerned about in the world at the moment? What, what does actually keep you up at night?
1:33:57 Speaker 00 What frightens me the most is that the US government, over the last,
1:34:09 Speaker 00 well, really, over the last 50 years, or 55 years, has so inflated its military budget that what we spend on the Pentagon is now more than the next eight largest countries combined. Right?
1:34:31 Speaker 00 Donald Trump, right now, spends a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon budget. He's asking for next year to be a trillion and a half. We can't afford it. Our interest on the national debt is now the third-largest expenditure in government, between the Pentagon and Social Security, and then the net, the interest on the debt.
1:34:53 Steven Bartlett? And why does this bother you?
1:34:54 Speaker 00 Because we're going bankrupt. And all the while, the Chinese, the Chinese are letting us spend ourselves into oblivion. The Chinese don't spend that kind of money. How come I can't have a bullet train that goes 400 miles an hour? How come I can't get to Chicago in three hours by train? You know? How come the airports in my country look like shit? And you go to Chinese airports and they're pristine with like the most amazing services and the best restaurants? How come Chinese roads don't have potholes? And in my town, it's like driving across Bosnia. It's because they decided not to spend their money on weapons.
1:35:38 Speaker 00 They spend it on infrastructure.
1:35:40 Steven Bartlett? Do you think that's likely, that the US could go bankrupt effectively?
1:35:44 Speaker 00 I do. Yeah, I do. We can't keep up this pace. It's not possible. We're gonna have to, we're gonna have to raise taxes and cut the budget.
1:35:57 Steven Bartlett? What's the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about, John?
1:36:02 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a good question. One of the most important things in my life, to tell you the truth, is the issue of ethics. I love this country more than anything else in the world. And I want it to do the right thing. We're a country of laws. And we have to obey our laws, which is why I blew the whistle on the torture program.
1:36:23 Steven Bartlett? Who's not obeying the laws?
1:36:25 Speaker 00 Our government.
1:36:26 Steven Bartlett? In what way?
1:36:29 Speaker 00 We've gotten to the point, and it started around the year 2000 or 2001. We got to the point where if we want to do something, we just do it. Like what? In 1946, we passed something called the Federal Torture Act, which banned torture. Okay? Also, in 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American prisoners of war. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard someone. All right? In 1968, on January 11, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front page photograph
1:37:13 Speaker 00 of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. When the picture ran, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an immediate investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture, and he was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at Leavenworth. And then in 2002, it's legal. We can do it. We can do it because we're the good guys. The law never changed. We changed. And my point was always, either we're going to be the good guys or we're not. Either we're going to be what Ronald Reagan called "a shining city on a hill", or we're not.
1:37:57 Speaker 00 When I was stationed in Bahrain, I was the human rights officer. So I had to write the human rights report every year that we sent to Congress. Well, imagine if John goes in to see the Minister of Interior, and I say, "Your Highness, you cannot pick up a 15-year-old kid for marching in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration and then murder him, beat him to death in the police station and call his parents to come and pick up the body. You can't do that. I have to report that to Congress, and you're going to lose your rights to buy American military hardware." But then, the CIA station chief goes in an hour later and says,
1:38:41 Speaker 00 "Don't pay any attention to the human rights guy." I'll give you $10 million. If you set up a secret prison here, we're gonna send you some prisoners. You torture them and then you give us a write-up of everything they say during torture. Who's he gonna listen to? Is he gonna listen to me?
1:38:58 Steven Bartlett? Did that happen?
1:38:58 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:39:03 Speaker 00 He's not gonna listen to me. If all of a sudden torture is legal, just because we say it is,
1:39:10 Speaker 00 and then Congress is like, oh, we don't know anything because it's a secret program, so we can't talk about it.
1:39:15 Steven Bartlett? Do we still torture people?
1:39:16 Speaker 00 No. I am very proud to say that when the McCain-Finstein anti-torture amendment was passed into law in December of 2014, John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said it was because of me, because of my revelations. He said, "If I had not told the American people that the CIA was torturing prisoners in their name, we would never have known."
1:39:46 Speaker 00 That's why I say it was worth it.
1:39:52 Steven Bartlett? Do you think you should be pardoned by President Trump?
1:39:54 Speaker 00 I do.
1:39:55 Steven Bartlett? Have you written him?
1:40:00 Speaker 00 I've... I have to be careful with my language here. I applied. My name is in the system. I have very,
1:40:13 Speaker 00 very high-level supporters who have approached him personally.
1:40:21 Speaker 00 And I'm hopeful that it happens.
1:40:27 Steven Bartlett? John, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're gonna be leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what's something you stopped doing that improved your life more than anything you started?
1:40:41 Speaker 00 Feeling sorry for myself.
1:40:47 Speaker 00 I'll be honest with you. I have struggled with depression my entire life. And after my second divorce,
1:40:57 Speaker 00 I went through this period where I was just, I couldn't pull myself out of bed in the morning because I felt so sorry for myself. Because of the divorce, or because of your life, or because... The whole thing. I believed I was just a loser. I was in my 50s, unemployable, convicted felon, barely able to make ends meet, worried about where my rent was coming from one month to the next.
1:41:28 Speaker 00 And then I thought, "Fuck you. What's wrong with you?
1:41:34 Speaker 00 You don't have to answer to anybody." And I told myself, "No more feeling sorry for myself. I was gonna go make a career on my own." And so I knew I would never work for government again. I knew I would never work in corporate America again. After I left the CIA, I was the head of the competitive intelligence practice at Deloitte and Touche, spying on Ernst & Young and PWC and IBM. And it was great fun. I'll never work in the corporate world again. So I decided, "I'm gonna do what I'm good at." And I'm a terrific writer. And I'm told that I'm a gifted storyteller. So I'm gonna write books. I have two syndicated newspaper columns
1:42:17 Speaker 00 that run in 212 small-town papers around the country. I'm on TV all the time. I have three podcasts, deep-programmed every day on both YouTube and Rumble. Thanks for letting me plug them, by the way. Go ahead. Deep Focus on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts, John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, which is just story after story after story. And now I make a perfectly great living. I'm in a long-term relationship with the woman I'm crazy about. And life is good. And it all started with that decision to stop feeling sorry for yourself? Yes. If people around me keep saying, "You've done nothing wrong. You're a hero for what you did." And deep down, I would do it again, then why am I feeling sorry for myself?
1:43:02 Speaker 00 I'm right. They're wrong. They're criminals. So I'm just gonna go on with my life. And that snapped me out of it.
1:43:13 Steven Bartlett? So don't feel sorry for yourself. Do something about it. Act.
1:43:21 Steven Bartlett? John, you are someone that is very good at storytelling. You are. You've written many books. I'm going to link all the books below. Oh, thank you. There's so many incredible books. I've got some of them here with me on the floor. I could go through all them, but we need another couple of days. John, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your incredible storytelling, your wisdom, but also just giving us a window into a world that most of us know nothing about because there's so many lessons that I think are pertinent. All of our lives riddled amongst there. And I think, you know,
1:43:49 Steven Bartlett? I hope you do get pardoned. Thank you. I hope so. I've got my fingers crossed. And when you do, hopefully we can come back again and have another conversation. I look forward to that. It's been such a pleasure. Pleasure's mine. Thanks for the invitation.
1:44:04 Steven Bartlett? This is something that I've made for you. I've realised that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done is that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these 1% diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to
1:44:48 Steven Bartlett? bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours now at thediary.com where you can get 20% off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.
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