John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. John was responsible for the capture in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda. In 2007, he blew the whistle on the CIA s torture program. Telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was officially U.S. government policy, that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designated to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of that revelation. In 2012, John was honored with the Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who, quote, advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates, end quote. And by the inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly s series of Americans Who Tell the Truth, which features notable truth-tellers throughout American history, John won the Penn Center USA prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the First Blueprint International Whistleblower Prize for bravery and integrity in public interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity Intelligence also in 2016. He s an incredibly prolific writer. He s the author of The Reluctant Spy, How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, and The Weird Wonderland of America, A Guide to the Iran Crisis, A book about the CIA's War on Terror. In this episode, John talks about how the CIA overthrew the first democratically elected government in the 8,000-year history of Persia, and why the Iranians hate the United States. And why they had a strong alliance with the USSR. And that they had to be overthrown by the Nazis. It s not crazy, right? John s a story about the Iranian leadership is not crazy. And he s a history of the Iranian leader, not just because they don t like the Soviets. What s crazy? And that s crazy, you don t have a point of view on the Iranians are a communist party? The story is that s not a communist? -- John s story is by John s -- . -- What s the point of the Iran story in Iran s in this episode is that we ve been mucking around in that country?
00:00:00.000John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.
00:00:11.000John was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda.
00:00:22.000In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.
00:00:28.000Telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was officially U.S. government policy, that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush.
00:00:41.000He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designated to punish spies.
00:00:50.000He served 23 months in prison as a result of that revelation.
00:00:57.000In 2012, Kiriakou was honored with the Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who, quote, advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates, end quote, and by the inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly's series of Americans Who Tell the Truth, which features notable truth-tellers throughout American history.
00:01:24.000He won the Penn Center USA prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International whistleblowing prize for bravery and integrity in public interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity Intelligence also in 2016. and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity Intelligence also in You are an incredibly prolific writer.
00:01:47.000I spent a summer vacation in 2001 in maximum security prison in Puerto Rico, you know, for my litigation against the Navy for the bombing of Vieques.
00:02:21.000He's the author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life, and the CIA's War on Terror.
00:02:26.000Another book, Doing Time Like a Spy, How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, The Convenient Terrorist, Abu Zubadah, The Weird Wonderland of America, The Secret Wars, and The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
00:02:43.000That must have been a retrospective because that was a long time ago.
00:03:28.000I think it was in 2016, that was one of the most read articles in the year in Politico.
00:03:33.000And I went through that history, and I was talking about, the article was about how the CIA had essentially orchestrated The war in Syria, which was a pipeline war, because the agency and the State Department wanted to build a pipeline through Syria to bring natural gas from Qatar, which would have put the Russians out of business.
00:04:02.000Bashar Assad, the ruler of Syria, was blocking it because he had a strong alliance with the Russians.
00:04:15.000We've tried to overthrow a third of the countries in the world.
00:04:19.000And one of the worst things that we ever did as a nation was to overthrow the first democratically elected government in the 8,000-year history of Persia.
00:04:32.000And Mohamed Mossadegh, who was this incredible...
00:04:37.000A beloved leader in Iran and all over the developing world who figured out that when he tried to nationalize the holdings of BP oil company, which was stealing from Iran, and Winston Churchill tried to overthrow him, he expelled the British.
00:04:57.000All of his advisors told him, you've got to expel the United States.
00:05:06.000They're the fathers and the founders of the democracy that we want to create here.
00:05:11.000And he trusted in Truman and when Eisenhower came in, Allen Dulles, We sent Kermit Roosevelt over there and they brutally overthrew him and installed the Shah and we've been living with the blowback of that for the last 50 years.
00:05:32.000Nobody in America knows that story and every single person in Iran knows that we overthrew their democracy.
00:05:40.000You know, and we accused him for decades of being a communist.
00:05:45.000Not only was he not a communist, but the Communist Party of Iran, the Tudai Party, actively opposed him because who are the most anti-communists?
00:06:00.000And he had worked for years to deny the Soviet Union a foothold in Iran.
00:06:09.000And then we just turned it all on its head.
00:06:11.000You know, Bob Shear, the eminent journalist from the L.A. Times, told me that when he was a young, aggressive journalist, he wanted to write an article about Mossadegh and the overthrow.
00:06:24.000And so he said he just looked in a Washington, D.C. telephone book and found Kermit Roosevelt.
00:06:30.000And Roosevelt, of course, was retired from the CIA by then.
00:06:34.000He was living in a nursing home in northwest Washington, and he called him.
00:06:39.000I think he went to work for the oil companies He did.
00:06:49.000Roosevelt had never given an interview and Bob has a very persuasive way about him and Roosevelt ended up speaking to him and Roosevelt told him That at the CIA, everybody knew that Mossadegh wasn't a communist.
00:07:03.000They did this for the British, and more specifically, they did it for British Petroleum.
00:07:08.000And he said it was the gravest mistake he had ever made in his career.
00:07:13.000I mean, words are nice after the fact, but here we are, what, 80 years, 75 years, 70 years, I guess it is, this year, after the overthrow.
00:07:24.000And relations with Iran have never recovered.
00:07:30.000And one of the things that Americans don't understand is the hostage crisis was prompted because Kissinger persuaded Jimmy Carter to allow the Shah to come to our country.
00:07:46.000And then I think to get cancer treatment.
00:07:50.000And at the same time, Clinton, if I remember this directly, Richard Bissell, who was this abysmal CIA officer who had been part of the original overthrow, in his ambassador to Iran.
00:08:06.000So everybody in Iran thought we were about to overthrow them again, and that's why they invited the embassy.
00:08:14.000We don't understand that there's, like you said, the Iranian people are more like Americans and more aligned in their values with Americans than probably any population in the Mideast, with maybe the exception of Israel.
00:09:58.000You know, one of the things, a criticism that I long had of Dianne Feinstein was that she was too much of a cheerleader for the CIA.
00:10:05.000You know, to me, oversight, congressional oversight is Daniel Patrick Moynihan kind of oversight, real oversight, where you know what's going on, you follow covert action, you go through the budget line by line and provide real oversight That's what the committee was originally intended to do, or the committees, I should say.
00:10:25.000Let me interrupt you for a second to tell people what this is about, because a lot of people are listening to this and they have no idea what we're talking about.
00:10:38.000The report is a film written and directed by Scott Z. Burns about the investigator on the Senate Intelligence Committee who was tasked with writing what became the Senate Torture Report.
00:10:52.000Now, there were three investigators in the beginning.
00:10:54.000One resigned and the other one just kind of fell by the wayside.
00:11:01.000And it took years and years to investigate.
00:11:03.000And not just that it took years to investigate, but that the CIA was actively working to dissuade, to discourage, or even to send these investigators off on tangents in the wrong direction.
00:11:17.000And one investigator saw it through, was able to.
00:11:22.000The torture report was during Immediately after 9-11, the United States, which had this long, long history of creating the Geneva Convention, which actually Abraham Lincoln framed, you know, of Washington saying during the Revolutionary War,
00:11:42.000When the British were torturing American prisoners and killing them in prison ships off Manhattan, and a British officer suggested to Washington, we can torture some of these guys and find out what their plans were.
00:11:54.000And he said, if we have to do that, it would be better that, you know, that this nation doesn't exist.
00:12:00.000Because this nation is going to be based on idealism.
00:12:03.000Lincoln said the same thing during the Civil War and then created the documents and the protocols that ended up becoming the Geneva Convention, which we pushed everybody in the world to say we're not going to torture people anymore.
00:12:17.000And during the Bush administration, a number of people, these neocons in the White House, Jonathan Yu and Wolf, yeah, all developed these really twisted legal theories that it was okay to, you know, basically nearly kill somebody.
00:12:49.000We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946 which specifically prohibited us from carrying out exactly those actions That we carried out in 2002 to 2005, following the 9-11 attacks.
00:13:03.000In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner of war.
00:13:14.000On the day that that photo ran, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered an investigation.
00:13:20.000Well, in 2002, we're torturing three dozen different people.
00:13:46.000Now, these 10 techniques were supposed to start with the least offensive.
00:13:51.000The least offensive was they would grab him by the lapels and give him a shake and say, answer my questions.
00:13:58.000And then it would go down from there to, you know, a slap in the face, a slap in the belly, something called walling, where they would shove him up against the wall, but he was supposed to have a towel wrapped around his neck and the wall was made of plywood.
00:14:12.000They started with the most severe technique.
00:14:28.000And he got permanent brain damage from that.
00:14:33.000And there were other things, too, things that were never authorized and for which no one was ever brought to justice.
00:14:40.000During the course of his interrogation, the FBI agent that interrogated him at the time, Ali Soufan, found that Abu Zubaydah had this irrational fear of insects.
00:14:52.000They put him in a coffin for 11 days and And they poured a box of cockroaches on top of him before they closed the coffin, just to make him crazy, to drive him crazy.
00:15:05.000It got to the point where he would start to cry and curl up into a fetal position just when his interrogator walked into the room.
00:15:39.000Congress has mandated that Every country with which we have diplomatic relations have a human rights report written about them by a State Department officer or somebody in the embassy.
00:15:53.000And I would go to the Minister of Interior and say, Your Highness, you cannot pick up a 15 year old boy for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration peacefully and beat him to death and then call his family to come and pick up the body.
00:16:10.000But how much authority then do I have when the CIA station chief goes in an hour later and says, don't listen to the human rights guy.
00:16:20.000We want you to open a secret facility here where we can take people to torture them, or better yet, you torture them so we can deny it, and then you give us a transcript of everything we say.
00:16:33.000We're either going to be that shining beacon of light that respects human rights and civil rights and civil liberties, or we're not.
00:16:43.000We're either going to be a country that's governed by the rule of law, or we're not.
00:17:33.000And people on this show I don't know her because she was one of the major players in a simulation, a coronavirus simulation, Old Event 201, that took place in October of 2019, two months exactly before people realized there was a pandemic loose.
00:17:54.000The Chinese knew it as of mid-September 2019, so they knew it a month before, and George Gayo Who's director of the Chinese CDC was at Event 201 in New York City where they modeled a coronavirus pandemic that killed 65 million people, supposedly.
00:18:13.000And they weren't modeling medical protocols.
00:18:18.000In other words, there was no interest in public health.
00:18:20.000It was how do we use a pandemic as a pretense for eliminating constitutional rights and clamping down totalitarian controls.
00:18:30.000And one of the contributions that April Haynes made was to tell people we need to not only to censor, they were all agreeing we need to get the social media to start censoring dissent about criticism of government policies needs to be abolished from the internet.
00:18:46.000And she said we need to also create a unity of opinion, an orthodoxy, flooding the zone with authoritative voices.
00:18:57.000So then two months after she simulates a coronavirus pandemic, we then get the coronavirus pandemic that they simulated.
00:19:05.000And then at the Munich Security Conference, which is the International Annual Conclave of Spies from all the Western nations, the World Economic Forum modeled a monkeypox epidemic that is supposed to hit in May of 2022.
00:19:23.000And then exactly on time, two years later, May of 2022, the WHO announces a monkeypox pandemic.
00:19:33.000Monkeypox has never spread from human to human before.
00:19:36.000You know, but Avril Haines' role in all of these things, and then when President Biden directed all of the spy agencies to find out whether The coronavirus had come from Wuhan.
00:19:54.000He put Avril Haines in charge of the investigation.
00:19:58.000And Avril Haines, and by the way, the CIA, Tony Fauci had funded a lot of the gain-of-function in Wuhan, but nowhere near what the CIA had been funding and made.
00:20:09.000The NIH has been running their funding through EcoHealth Alliance, which is a CIA asset, and then tens of millions of dollars through USAID, which is also regarded as a CIA front group.
00:20:23.000Gable Haynes was given 90 days to figure out, did it come from Wuhan?
00:20:29.000And she came back with another whitewash document.
00:20:31.000So she is the goddess of the cover-up.
00:20:59.000It was at least as bad under the Obama administration.
00:21:02.000It continues with the likes of Avril Haines during the Biden administration.
00:21:08.000Gina Haspel, when Donald Trump named her CIA director at the agency, and I've been very public about this, we used to call her bloody Gina because that was her history.
00:21:19.000I mean, she was not just a supporter of the torture program.
00:21:22.000She was one of the creators of the torture program.
00:21:25.000She's the one that destroyed the tapes of Abu Zubaydah being tortured after being specifically told by the White House counsel to preserve the tapes because they may have contained evidence of a crime, which, of course, they did.
00:21:37.000So this is not a Republican or Democratic thing.
00:21:41.000Okay, so Gina Haskell is then general counsel.
00:21:44.000The CIA, she's specifically ordered by the White House, and Congress is saying, we want Congress.
00:23:16.000You know, when this happened, when Gina Haspel was named director of the CIA, the Washington Post called me and they asked if I would write an op-ed in opposition, of course.
00:23:25.000I jumped at the opportunity and I said in this op-ed, what kind of a message does this appointment send to the CIA workforce?
00:23:33.000To me, the message is, don't pay attention to the law.
00:23:55.000And that's why it's up to the rest of us to hold their feet to the fire.
00:23:59.000You know, I say all the time, when I put my right hand in the air on my first day at the CIA, and I swore to uphold and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I hate to think that I was the only person who actually meant it that day.
00:24:58.000And he then has himself appointed to the Warren Commission and then steers all the debate away from the CIA. And American people never find out that Lee Harvey Oswald, since 1959, was a CIA asset.
00:25:16.000He was recruited out of the Marine Corps.
00:25:19.000Sent on a mission to Russia by James Jesus Angleton.
00:25:23.000You know, those are things we should have known about.
00:25:26.000People should have known about that and been able to question, but would nobody find out about it because he was there running the committee.
00:26:13.000He liked and respected her until she started to ask questions.
00:26:17.000And when Senator Feinstein ordered her investigators to do the right thing and to get to the bottom of this torture program and whether or not the CIA had violated the law, it got too close for comfort for John Brennan.
00:26:34.000And Brennan, in what I think is probably unprecedented, maybe, what do I know, action, ordered the CIA to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.
00:26:47.000To see what it was that they were working on, to see what it was that they had uncovered in this investigation.
00:27:27.000And in unofficial Washington, we really didn't know what it was at the time that had spurred this on.
00:27:34.000So word finally got out that Brennan had ordered his people to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.
00:27:42.000Feinstein, to her credit, reported this to Eric Holder as a crime.
00:27:46.000She filed a crimes report with the Justice Department.
00:27:50.000And then Brennan filed a crimes report against Feinstein's investigators, saying that they had illegally obtained highly classified national defense information, and he wanted them charged under the Espionage Act.
00:28:04.000What was the information they obtained that they were being spied upon?
00:28:09.000That they had a torture program that was patently unconstitutional.
00:28:26.000And they had uncovered the torture program.
00:28:28.000And the details of the torture program.
00:28:30.000When I went public on torture, I said, well, I said what you said.
00:28:34.000I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy.
00:28:40.000And that the policy had been personally approved by the president.
00:28:43.000And then I also outlined the torture techniques.
00:28:46.000Later on, thanks to Senator Feinstein, we learned things like rectal hydration using hummus, for example.
00:28:55.000We learned about using a power drill to threaten to lobotomize prisoners.
00:29:02.000Russian roulette being played against prisoners.
00:29:05.000We learned about all these things that were extrajudicial, that were never approved, and for which nobody was ever prosecuted or even investigated.
00:29:15.000And then, like I said a moment ago, the sad postscript to all this was Eric Holder just said, now, now, everybody go back to your corners.
00:29:23.000Nobody's going to be investigated or prosecuted.
00:29:36.000This report, we have to constantly remind ourselves that what was released by the Senate, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not the torture report.
00:29:45.000The torture report is more than 5,000 pages long.
00:31:17.000The person who made that call to not release the 5,000 page report, then even to redact the executive summary, that again was Averill Haynes.
00:31:30.000Okay, so Avril Haines, for covering up this crime, is now the number one spy in America.
00:31:37.000And she is, President Obama is one of his, probably his top three advisors.
00:31:42.000Let me tell you something else that Avril Haines did.
00:31:46.000To know fanfare two weeks ago is she announced, conveniently on a Friday afternoon, when nobody's paying any attention, that the CIA is in the process of opening its first ever laboratory.
00:32:05.000It was announced by the University of Virginia, CIA, to open first ever research and development laboratory.
00:32:14.000Now, they won't tell us what it is they're going to be doing in this laboratory.
00:32:21.000But, I mean, all we have to do is think back to MKUltra and experimentation with LSD and, you know, all of these horror stories from the 50s to the mid-70s.
00:32:59.000I think they had 178 universities at one point that were doing...
00:33:04.000You know, these mind control experiments and biological warfare experiments illegally, Operation Artichoke, I'm MKUltra, all of the other MKs and professors who are dreaming up new ways of killing people and controlling their minds and torturing them.
00:33:22.000It pains me as an American to agree with you on this issue, but everything you've said is true.
00:33:27.000Here's an announcement from the University of Virginia, of all places.
00:33:30.000It says, today the Central Intelligence Agency launched CIA Labs, a federal laboratory and in-house research and development arm for CIA to drive science and technology breakthroughs for tomorrow's intelligence challenges.
00:33:45.000CIA Labs joins the community of more than 300 U.S. federal labs, and it establishes CIA as a research partner for other labs, academia, and industry in disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence to biotechnology to quantum computing and advanced materials.
00:34:07.000There's also this, and I don't know if you know about this, but if you start looking at the kind of stuff they're researching, the synthetic biology and the AI stuff, there's kind of a fascination with transhumanism, you know, that is shared by the Silicon Valley companies, which are all linked in one way or the other to CIA, either through in-cutel investments...
00:34:31.000Or through state security agreements or through contracts.
00:34:35.000I mean, all these, you know, Microsoft and everybody else are all taking billions of dollars from CIA contracts for spying on everybody.
00:34:47.000And, you know, that's another thing, too.
00:34:49.000You mentioned a few minutes ago that the CIA is statutorily prohibited from spying on Americans.
00:34:55.000Of course, it's always spied on Americans.
00:34:57.000But the same thing is true of NSA. It's not just...
00:35:01.000It's a part of NSA's charter that NSA is not permitted to spy on Americans.
00:35:06.000And in fact, they spy on every single one of us.
00:35:09.000That's why they have that enormous facility in Utah that has enough memory storage space to save every phone call, voicemail, email, and text message for the next 500 years.
00:35:22.000Why do we need our intelligence services to have that kind of capability?
00:35:27.000Why does the CIA need a lab to do experimentation on God knows what new MK program they may be coming up with?
00:35:37.000You know, I spent two years working for John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we had oversight, of course, of the State Department.
00:35:44.000Well, the State Department has, what, 10,000 employees?
00:36:45.000You know, for me, I wrote out 20 life lessons that the CIA taught me, and some of them were all in fun, like, admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.
00:37:00.000They told me to get out and didn't bother me again.
00:37:03.000But it was things like making strategic alliances.
00:37:07.000The moment I got to prison, the guard who was processing me told me that if somebody comes into my room uninvited, that's an act of aggression.
00:37:18.000I've been here 20 minutes and I'm going to get my ass kicked.
00:37:22.000So I got to my cell and sure enough, two Aryans just walked into my room and I jumped up and I put my fists up and I said, what do you want?
00:37:31.000I was trying to be as tough as I could.
00:37:32.000And one of them said, are you the new guy?
00:39:07.000But he told all the other Mexican drug lords that I was a good guy and I didn't charge him anything.
00:39:14.000So that kept the Mexicans off my back.
00:39:17.000And then the Nation of Islam guys, it was just the craziest thing.
00:39:21.000A couple of days before I went to prison, Louis Farrakhan said that I was a hero of the Muslim people because I had respected human rights.
00:39:29.000And so one of these Nation of Islam guys gingerly handed me a copy of the Nation of Islam newspaper and told me that I wouldn't have any trouble with them because Farrakhan said I was okay.
00:41:22.000I was lucky because there was 140 men on my cell block, and most of them were people who had done pretty bad crimes.
00:41:31.000And there was a lot of gang people, because it was a federal offense.
00:41:35.000But when I went in, there were about 60 political prisoners of the 140 who were in jail for the same reason I was, because they were opposing Vieques, and they were doing some of them one year, some of them only a few months.
00:42:36.00035 pounds because we ate like kings every single night.
00:42:40.000Other than that, it could be a little bit tough.
00:42:43.000There was one incident where I had an empty bunk in my cell and this guy wanted to move into our room because we didn't have pedophiles in our room.
00:42:51.000And I said, well, what are you in for?
00:46:20.000First of all, to go to Vietnam and to accompany the combat troops, but also then to write the history of the Vietnam War, which was the Pentagon Papers.
00:46:31.000And at one point, and he was very pro-war when he started, and he ended up turning against it.
00:46:40.000And he, at one point, decided to risk his freedom and his relationships, his livelihood.
00:46:46.000He became so angry at what was happening in Vietnam that he went and mimeographed.
00:47:01.000They brought a mimeograph machine in and mimeographed it, and they took the copies out and then distributed them to the New York Times, the Washington Post.
00:47:09.000And it blew the whistle on the Vietnam War and went to fraud the whole thing.
00:47:40.000And they had gone to Vietnam, and they had been at Da Nang, and they had seen the French Foreign Legion being overwhelmed by the Viet Congen.
00:47:49.000And they saw these men, these Vietnamese, willing to just laying down their lives in droves.
00:47:56.000And they said, how are you ever going to conquer that?
00:47:59.000You know, they're coming out of the woods.
00:48:01.000They're willing to die for their country.
00:48:02.000They're fighting for what they believe is their freedom.
00:48:06.000You know, they wouldn't want a foreign country running their country any more than we would.
00:49:34.000But Tom Drake from NSA and Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe from NSA, Jeffrey Sterling from CIA, a whole cast of characters from FBI. We get together for dinner.
00:50:58.000I still stay in touch with a dozen or so former colleagues.
00:51:02.000Before my father was killed, you know, his first instinct when his brother was killed, the day I was at school and I was brought home from school that day early.
00:51:12.000And when I got home, my father was walking in the yard with John McComb, who was the director of the CIA. The CIA, you know, we lived in McLean, so we were only a half mile from Langley.
00:51:56.000My father then runs for president in 68.
00:52:00.000He was asked about, like Pete Hamill, who was one of the reporters who was covering him, who was also a confidant.
00:52:07.000And Pete Hamill asked him a week before he died, he said, what are you going to do about the CIA? And my father said, he said the only way, and of course there's a famous story that my uncle, you know, Alan Dulles lied to him.
00:52:23.000And Bissell and Cadell had lied, or Charles Cadell, the three guys they fired, had lied to him about the Bay of Bigs to try to, you know, because they said, yeah, the whole island's going to rise up and go after Castro, overthrow him as soon as they hear about the Bay of Bigs.
00:52:42.000And they thought, if we can get those guys on land, President Kennedy is a young guy and he's not going to be able to tolerate politically their defeat, so he'll send in the Essex, the aircraft carrier, and that will do the work of wiping out Castro.
00:53:05.000And so, in the middle of the night, my uncle...
00:53:10.000When the men were dying on the beach, and he had to deny them air cover, my uncle came out and said, out to his aides of the Oval Office, and he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind.
00:53:27.000And then he subsequently fired the three top guys, and he brought in McComb.
00:53:32.000My father was asked, and he initially asked my father to run the CIA, but my father didn't think it would be right for the brother to be running a secret police organization with all this power.
00:53:43.000So my father, but it was always on the top of his mind, what do you do about the CIA? Because they become this government, this parasitical government.
00:53:55.000Organism that is devouring our democracy.
00:53:58.000You know, this secret government that is manipulating everything and subjecting Americans to this constant barrage of PSYOPs propaganda in order to maintain permanent wars and all this kind of stuff.
00:54:13.000So my father said the only way to solve the problem is to separate the clandestine activities, the kind of paramilitary branch, from the espionage function.
00:54:25.000And espionage means information gathering.
00:54:31.000And analysis, and that's why the CIA was originally created.
00:54:34.000It was not supposed to be doing, you know, overthrowing governments and fixing elections and running around and shooting and torturing people.
00:54:43.000Dulles added that function subsequently through a little tiny loophole, and what had happened is the paramilitary tail began to wag the espionage dog, and the function of the espionage section becomes justifying all these aberrant actions by the clandestine services, and then creating new actions for them to go.
00:55:07.000My father said, The agency that is doing the espionage, doing the actual information gathering, should be looking over the shoulder of the clandestine services and holding them accountable and making sure that the blowback does not, the cost of the blowback does not exceed all the benefits of the action in the first place.
00:56:10.000And as you correctly said, the purpose of the CIA was to recruit spies to steal secrets so that analysts could analyze those secrets and allow policymakers to make the best informed policy for the country.
00:56:23.000But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.
00:56:24.000But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.
00:56:29.000Now that Executive Order 12333 has been, well, altered, recalled, changed, whatever you want to say, and the CIA can freely fly around the country and either murder people in cold blood or snatch them and the CIA can freely fly around the country and either murder people in cold blood or snatch them off the streets and send them to secret
00:56:54.000Well, this is exactly what we were fighting against in the 70s with the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.
00:57:01.000We're back to the bad old days again with little or no oversight.
00:57:05.000We've got people, for example, like Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, who wants so much to provide the kind of oversight that the law called for in 1975, 1976.
00:57:23.000And he just doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.
00:57:25.000I sort of confronted him at a dinner party one night.
00:57:29.000And I said, it was right when I got out of prison.
00:57:31.000And I said, Senator, I got to tell you, I was kind of disappointed.
00:57:34.000I kind of expected a little bit more from you in the way of support.
00:59:39.000You know, in your past, because they've been very clear, particularly the European intelligence agencies, which, of course, all the 5i groups are sharing their intelligence with the U.S. And they've been very clear, the Germans and the MI5 and MI6, that they consider anti-vaxxers.
00:59:59.000Figures to be the equivalent of terrorists.
01:00:48.000I think that they're disturbed by what you stand for.
01:00:51.000And do you, is there a way, I mean, I should probably talk to you about this offline at some point, but it's an interesting issue that people are interested in.
01:01:00.000Is there a way to thwart that or to find out about it or to find out any more information about it?
01:01:09.000It's been my experience and the experience of many of my friends and former colleagues that you would be pleasantly surprised what you can get through the Freedom of Information Act.
01:01:18.000And while you may have to wait for five years doing it through the CIA, the wait at the FBI is about six weeks.
01:01:26.000So, you know, I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI on everything they have on me from the day I got out of prison until whatever the day was that I filed.
01:01:38.000And sure enough, six weeks later, they sent me a CD-ROM that just completely exposed that.
01:01:45.000We parked a half a block away from his house and we had eyes on and he left for work at 7.15 and then he came back from work at 2.35 and Why are you wasting the taxpayers' money watching me come and go from my house?
01:02:00.000But they'll tell you the truth, even if it makes them look silly.
01:02:04.000You know, I'll tell you a funny story.
01:02:07.000I was doing something, having a conversation with my uncle, Teddy Kennedy, at one point.
01:02:13.000And I was planning on doing something that he didn't want me to do.