RFK Jr. The Defender - CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou

00:00:00.000 John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.

00:00:11.000 John 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.

00:00:22.000 In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.

00:00:28.000 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.

00:00:41.000 He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designated to punish spies.

00:00:50.000 He served 23 months in prison as a result of that revelation.

00:00:57.000 In 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.

00:01:24.000 He 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.

00:01:47.000 I 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.

00:02:00.000 Yeah.

00:02:01.000 But it was one of the greatest summers of my life because I didn't have a cell phone.

00:02:05.000 I didn't have to make decisions.

00:02:07.000 And I got to sit there and write.

00:02:09.000 I assume some of your writing took place in prison, although...

00:02:12.000 A lot of it did.

00:02:14.000 There's nothing else to do.

00:02:17.000 Yeah.

00:02:17.000 And also, yeah, exactly.

00:02:19.000 There's nothing else to do.

00:02:21.000 He's the author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life, and the CIA's War on Terror.

00:02:26.000 Another 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.

00:02:43.000 That must have been a retrospective because that was a long time ago.

00:02:50.000 Yes.

00:02:51.000 I wrote that with Gareth Porter, the great Vietnam War era historian and author.

00:02:58.000 And what we wanted to do was to counter this narrative that Americans have been so bombarded with over the last 40 plus years.

00:03:09.000 That Iranians hate the United States unnecessarily. 1.00

00:03:13.000 That the Iranian leadership is quote-unquote crazy. 0.86

00:03:16.000 It's not crazy at all.

00:03:18.000 And that we've been mucking around in that country for coming up on a century now.

00:03:24.000 Yeah.

00:03:25.000 I did an article...

00:03:28.000 I think it was in 2016, that was one of the most read articles in the year in Politico.

00:03:33.000 And 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.

00:04:02.000 Bashar Assad, the ruler of Syria, was blocking it because he had a strong alliance with the Russians.

00:04:09.000 And so he had to be deposed.

00:04:11.000 And that was basically the story.

00:04:13.000 But it's the same thing.

00:04:15.000 We've tried to overthrow a third of the countries in the world.

00:04:19.000 And 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.

00:04:32.000 And Mohamed Mossadegh, who was this incredible...

00:04:37.000 A 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.

00:04:57.000 All of his advisors told him, you've got to expel the United States.

00:05:01.000 And he said, no.

00:05:02.000 I trust the United States.

00:05:04.000 They were a colonial nation.

00:05:06.000 They're the fathers and the founders of the democracy that we want to create here.

00:05:11.000 And 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. 0.91

00:05:32.000 Nobody in America knows that story and every single person in Iran knows that we overthrew their democracy.

00:05:40.000 You know, and we accused him for decades of being a communist.

00:05:45.000 Not 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?

00:05:58.000 It's the socialists.

00:06:00.000 And he had worked for years to deny the Soviet Union a foothold in Iran.

00:06:09.000 And then we just turned it all on its head.

00:06:11.000 You 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.

00:06:24.000 And so he said he just looked in a Washington, D.C. telephone book and found Kermit Roosevelt.

00:06:30.000 And Roosevelt, of course, was retired from the CIA by then.

00:06:34.000 He was living in a nursing home in northwest Washington, and he called him.

00:06:39.000 I think he went to work for the oil companies He did.

00:06:43.000 You're exactly right.

00:06:44.000 That's where he went right from Iran to work for Exxon, I think.

00:06:48.000 That's exactly right.

00:06:49.000 Roosevelt 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.

00:07:03.000 They did this for the British, and more specifically, they did it for British Petroleum.

00:07:08.000 And he said it was the gravest mistake he had ever made in his career.

00:07:13.000 I 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.

00:07:24.000 And relations with Iran have never recovered.

00:07:27.000 If anything, they're worse.

00:07:29.000 Right?

00:07:30.000 And 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. 0.57

00:07:46.000 Yes.

00:07:46.000 And then I think to get cancer treatment.

00:07:50.000 And 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.

00:08:06.000 So everybody in Iran thought we were about to overthrow them again, and that's why they invited the embassy. 0.87

00:08:14.000 We 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.

00:08:31.000 But it's the way that they view life.

00:08:34.000 They're open.

00:08:35.000 They're funny.

00:08:36.000 They're competitive.

00:08:37.000 They're irreverent.

00:08:39.000 Normally, they're very irreverent.

00:08:42.000 They were not historically fanatics.

00:08:45.000 They were...

00:08:46.000 No, no.

00:08:47.000 No, not at all.

00:08:48.000 Not at all.

00:08:49.000 They had decades of exposure to Western culture.

00:08:53.000 Funny to say, they had and continue to have one of the most extensive collections of modern art.

00:09:00.000 Anywhere in the world.

00:09:02.000 Now, they're all locked up now because much of it is deemed to be degenerate.

00:09:07.000 But if you wanted to see Picassos and Warhols and Gaugans, they were in the Tehran Museum of Fine Art.

00:09:16.000 That is so ironic.

00:09:18.000 There's so many things I want to talk to you about.

00:09:20.000 Have you seen the...

00:09:21.000 You must have seen the Netflix documentary.

00:09:24.000 It's not a documentary.

00:09:25.000 It's kind of a documentary.

00:09:28.000 Right, I did.

00:09:28.000 In fact, I was the script consultant.

00:09:30.000 It is amazing, really riveting.

00:09:34.000 I recommend it to anybody, but it shows the power that, you know, the CIA had over the United States Senate, that they're all terrified.

00:09:43.000 I think she was the head of the Intelligence Committee.

00:09:47.000 She was.

00:09:47.000 She was the chairman.

00:09:49.000 and that she was taking orders from the CIA and they were in spying on the United States Senate. 0.97

00:09:55.000 There was no fallout for that at all.

00:09:58.000 You 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. 0.99

00:10:05.000 You 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.

00:10:25.000 Let 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.

00:10:32.000 Oh, you bet.

00:10:33.000 You bet.

00:10:34.000 Why don't you summarize what it was about?

00:10:37.000 Sure.

00:10:38.000 The 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.

00:10:52.000 Now, there were three investigators in the beginning.

00:10:54.000 One resigned and the other one just kind of fell by the wayside.

00:10:59.000 It was too much work.

00:11:00.000 It was overwhelming.

00:11:01.000 And it took years and years to investigate.

00:11:03.000 And 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.

00:11:17.000 And one investigator saw it through, was able to.

00:11:22.000 The 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,

00:11:42.000 When 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.

00:11:54.000 And he said, if we have to do that, it would be better that, you know, that this nation doesn't exist.

00:12:00.000 Because this nation is going to be based on idealism.

00:12:03.000 Lincoln 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.

00:12:16.000 Yes.

00:12:17.000 And 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.

00:12:37.000 Yes.

00:12:37.000 And may I add to that?

00:12:39.000 In 1946, We executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.

00:12:47.000 That was a death penalty offense.

00:12:49.000 We 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.

00:13:03.000 In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner of war.

00:13:14.000 On the day that that photo ran, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered an investigation.

00:13:20.000 Well, in 2002, we're torturing three dozen different people.

00:13:25.000 The law never changed.

00:13:28.000 It never changed.

00:13:29.000 It was never amended by Congress.

00:13:31.000 We're the ones who changed.

00:13:34.000 I mean, the worst torture happened to the guy you arrested, right?

00:13:38.000 Yes.

00:13:38.000 He was the guinea pig.

00:13:39.000 He was the first one that we tortured.

00:13:41.000 I think I remember that they waterboarded him over a hundred times.

00:13:46.000 Yeah.

00:13:46.000 Now, these 10 techniques were supposed to start with the least offensive.

00:13:51.000 The least offensive was they would grab him by the lapels and give him a shake and say, answer my questions.

00:13:58.000 And 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.

00:14:12.000 They started with the most severe technique.

00:14:16.000 They started with waterboarding.

00:14:18.000 And when they did the walling technique on him, he didn't have a towel wrapped around his neck and the wall wasn't made of plywood.

00:14:26.000 It was made of concrete block.

00:14:28.000 And he got permanent brain damage from that.

00:14:33.000 And there were other things, too, things that were never authorized and for which no one was ever brought to justice.

00:14:40.000 During 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.

00:14:50.000 And so they slapped a diaper on him.

00:14:52.000 They 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.

00:15:05.000 It 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.

00:15:14.000 They called it learned helplessness.

00:15:17.000 But literally nothing that they did to him was legal.

00:15:21.000 And don't forget, we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

00:15:25.000 I say all the time, too, that when I was on rotation to the State Department from the CIA overseas, I served in Bahrain for two years.

00:15:34.000 It's a little tiny country in the Persian Gulf.

00:15:37.000 And I was the human rights officer.

00:15:39.000 Congress 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.

00:15:51.000 So that was my job in Bahrain.

00:15:53.000 And 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.

00:16:08.000 I have to report that to Congress.

00:16:10.000 But 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.

00:16:20.000 We 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.

00:16:33.000 We're either going to be that shining beacon of light that respects human rights and civil rights and civil liberties, or we're not.

00:16:43.000 We're either going to be a country that's governed by the rule of law, or we're not.

00:16:48.000 We can't be both.

00:16:50.000 So that was a footnote to what happened with the torture tapes.

00:16:57.000 So there were tapes.

00:16:58.000 Now, here's what I want people to understand, because a lot of people who watch this know who Averill Haynes is.

00:17:06.000 And Avril Haines is now the Director of National Intelligence, meaning she's the highest spy in this country.

00:17:13.000 That's right.

00:17:14.000 She was the Deputy Director of the CIA and was in the middle of all this.

00:17:19.000 And then she played a part in the cover-up of a lot of these crimes.

00:17:27.000 Yes.

00:17:28.000 And instead of being punished for it, she was promoted.

00:17:33.000 Yes.

00:17:33.000 And 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.

00:17:54.000 The 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. 0.95

00:18:13.000 And they weren't modeling medical protocols.

00:18:18.000 In other words, there was no interest in public health.

00:18:20.000 It was how do we use a pandemic as a pretense for eliminating constitutional rights and clamping down totalitarian controls.

00:18:30.000 And 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.

00:18:46.000 And she said we need to also create a unity of opinion, an orthodoxy, flooding the zone with authoritative voices.

00:18:57.000 So then two months after she simulates a coronavirus pandemic, we then get the coronavirus pandemic that they simulated.

00:19:05.000 And 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.

00:19:23.000 And then exactly on time, two years later, May of 2022, the WHO announces a monkeypox pandemic.

00:19:33.000 Monkeypox has never spread from human to human before.

00:19:36.000 You 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.

00:19:54.000 He put Avril Haines in charge of the investigation.

00:19:58.000 And 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.

00:20:09.000 The 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.

00:20:23.000 Gable Haynes was given 90 days to figure out, did it come from Wuhan?

00:20:29.000 And she came back with another whitewash document.

00:20:31.000 So she is the goddess of the cover-up. 0.96

00:20:35.000 And she's been put in charge of this.

00:20:38.000 So people know who she is. 0.98

00:20:39.000 So tell her about her involvement.

00:20:41.000 I'm glad you brought this up because this is, I think, a very, very important point.

00:20:45.000 This is not at all a partisan issue.

00:20:49.000 We can't just point at the George W. Bush administration and Donald Trump and say, look what they did.

00:20:55.000 Look what they did.

00:20:56.000 They used the CIA as a weapon.

00:20:59.000 It was at least as bad under the Obama administration.

00:21:02.000 It continues with the likes of Avril Haines during the Biden administration.

00:21:08.000 Gina 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. 0.89

00:21:19.000 I mean, she was not just a supporter of the torture program.

00:21:22.000 She was one of the creators of the torture program. 0.89

00:21:25.000 She'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.

00:21:37.000 So this is not a Republican or Democratic thing.

00:21:41.000 Okay, so Gina Haskell is then general counsel. 0.94

00:21:44.000 The CIA, she's specifically ordered by the White House, and Congress is saying, we want Congress. 0.95

00:21:51.000 Yes.

00:21:51.000 And instead of preserving them, Their evidence of crime, she destroys them, which is a crime.

00:21:58.000 Which is a crime!

00:21:59.000 Right, which is a crime.

00:22:02.000 Who also disingenuously tried to convince people that he wasn't a torture supporter.

00:22:08.000 I was the director's morning briefer during that period.

00:22:13.000 John Brennan was one of the godfathers of the torture program.

00:22:17.000 It's funny how they all try to create these new histories for themselves.

00:22:23.000 And when Gina Haspel should have never been considered, she violated the law.

00:22:30.000 She covered up a terrible CIA crime.

00:22:34.000 Yes.

00:22:34.000 And in doing that, as you know, there's a lot of people like you.

00:22:38.000 Most of the people, the CIA, my daughter-in-law was in the CIA clandestine services.

00:22:46.000 She is the most idealistic human being I know.

00:22:49.000 Most of the people who join the CIA are patriots.

00:22:53.000 They're idealistic.

00:22:54.000 They love our country.

00:22:55.000 They love the Constitution.

00:22:56.000 But the people who get promoted are the outlaws, the criminals, the And that is a bad example to all of them.

00:23:04.000 And when Gina Haspel gets rewarded for her crime by being appointed deputy director of the CIA, Averill Haynes is their supporter.

00:23:15.000 You're absolutely right.

00:23:16.000 You 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.

00:23:25.000 I jumped at the opportunity and I said in this op-ed, what kind of a message does this appointment send to the CIA workforce?

00:23:33.000 To me, the message is, don't pay attention to the law.

00:23:37.000 Go ahead and violate the law.

00:23:39.000 Not only will you not be prosecuted, but you'll be promoted.

00:23:43.000 And you might even become the director of the CIA if you ignore the oversight committees and you ignore the White House counsel.

00:23:52.000 That's Washington.

00:23:53.000 They just don't care.

00:23:55.000 And that's why it's up to the rest of us to hold their feet to the fire.

00:23:59.000 You 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.

00:24:16.000 It couldn't have been just me.

00:24:18.000 So we have to keep fighting them at every step of the way.

00:24:22.000 So now, to go back to the report.

00:24:24.000 Yes.

00:24:25.000 Okay, so after Gina Haskell destroys all of that material illegally, then the Senate starts investigating the destruction. 0.97

00:24:37.000 And the CIA, rather than answering questions, and by the way, this is the same thing they did during the Warrant Commission.

00:24:44.000 Absolutely.

00:24:45.000 They were, you know, Alan Dulles, whom my uncle John Kennedy fired when my uncle was killed. 1.00

00:24:51.000 He said to a young reporter, I'm glad the little shit is dead. 0.99

00:24:56.000 He thought he was a king. 1.00

00:24:58.000 And 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.

00:25:16.000 He was recruited out of the Marine Corps.

00:25:19.000 Sent on a mission to Russia by James Jesus Angleton.

00:25:23.000 You know, those are things we should have known about.

00:25:26.000 People should have known about that and been able to question, but would nobody find out about it because he was there running the committee.

00:25:33.000 So the same thing happens again.

00:25:35.000 You have the CIA, you have the Senate investigating this destruction, this illegal destruction of these documents.

00:25:43.000 And while they're investigating it, We don't know who ordered us that it be bugged.

00:25:51.000 Isn't that what happened?

00:25:52.000 We don't know definitively.

00:25:55.000 We think it was John Brennan.

00:25:58.000 We think something like that would have to go all the way to the top.

00:26:02.000 John Brennan was the director of the CIA. Avril Haines was the deputy director at the time.

00:26:06.000 And the funny thing about that is that John Brennan was always very close to Dianne Feinstein.

00:26:12.000 Personally close.

00:26:13.000 He liked and respected her until she started to ask questions.

00:26:17.000 And 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.

00:26:34.000 And 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.

00:26:47.000 To see what it was that they were working on, to see what it was that they had uncovered in this investigation.

00:26:53.000 Now, the sad postscript to this.

00:26:56.000 I mean, how illegal is it?

00:26:57.000 The CIA by its charter is not allowed to spy on Americans, right?

00:27:02.000 That's right.

00:27:03.000 They weren't just spying on Americans.

00:27:05.000 They were spying on American senators who were investigating them.

00:27:09.000 It's insane.

00:27:10.000 And then when Feinstein found out about it, you probably recall, she took to the floor of the Senate in a very unusual move.

00:27:20.000 And she criticized the CIA and John Brennan by name very specifically.

00:27:25.000 It raised a lot of eyebrows here.

00:27:27.000 And in unofficial Washington, we really didn't know what it was at the time that had spurred this on.

00:27:34.000 So word finally got out that Brennan had ordered his people to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.

00:27:42.000 Feinstein, to her credit, reported this to Eric Holder as a crime.

00:27:46.000 She filed a crimes report with the Justice Department.

00:27:50.000 And 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.

00:28:04.000 What was the information they obtained that they were being spied upon?

00:28:09.000 That they had a torture program that was patently unconstitutional.

00:28:15.000 Can you imagine?

00:28:16.000 And that is why he wanted them investigated.

00:28:20.000 That's why he wanted them charged with a crime.

00:28:22.000 Yes.

00:28:23.000 Because they were doing their jobs.

00:28:26.000 And they had uncovered the torture program.

00:28:28.000 And the details of the torture program.

00:28:30.000 When I went public on torture, I said, well, I said what you said.

00:28:34.000 I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy.

00:28:40.000 And that the policy had been personally approved by the president.

00:28:43.000 And then I also outlined the torture techniques.

00:28:46.000 Later on, thanks to Senator Feinstein, we learned things like rectal hydration using hummus, for example.

00:28:55.000 We learned about using a power drill to threaten to lobotomize prisoners.

00:29:02.000 Russian roulette being played against prisoners.

00:29:05.000 We learned about all these things that were extrajudicial, that were never approved, and for which nobody was ever prosecuted or even investigated.

00:29:15.000 And 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.

00:29:23.000 Nobody's going to be investigated or prosecuted.

00:29:25.000 Let's just move on.

00:29:26.000 Well, the CIA should have been prosecuted.

00:29:29.000 John Brennan should have been prosecuted for breaking into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer systems.

00:29:34.000 And let me add one other thing.

00:29:36.000 This report, we have to constantly remind ourselves that what was released by the Senate, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not the torture report.

00:29:45.000 The torture report is more than 5,000 pages long.

00:29:50.000 It's never been released.

00:29:52.000 What was released- Who wrote the report?

00:29:58.000 Who was the Chief Counselor of Fine State?

00:30:00.000 Yeah, I'm going to look right now.

00:30:02.000 And who plays him in the movie?

00:30:04.000 It was Adam Driver.

00:30:06.000 Adam Driver plays him in the movie.

00:30:08.000 Yeah.

00:30:09.000 What's his name?

00:30:10.000 I'm going to look right now.

00:30:11.000 He really was a hero.

00:30:13.000 And Adam Driver did a great job.

00:30:15.000 Big hero.

00:30:16.000 Big hero.

00:30:17.000 I'm going to look right now.

00:30:19.000 I assume that he had his life totally ruined.

00:30:21.000 Yeah.

00:30:22.000 Daniel Jones.

00:30:23.000 That's right.

00:30:24.000 Dan Jones.

00:30:25.000 Yeah.

00:30:25.000 In fact, he moved on.

00:30:27.000 I think he went to the Pentagon.

00:30:28.000 And he's just kind of living a normal, quiet, middle-class life.

00:30:32.000 But it's enough to wreck your marriage and your family and your career in a place like Washington.

00:30:39.000 But the Senate Torch Report, what was released, was a very heavily redacted 500-page executive summary.

00:30:48.000 We really don't know what was in the report.

00:30:51.000 And I would make one recommendation, too, to people who are listening to this.

00:30:55.000 Read the executive summary, but pay very close attention to the footnotes.

00:31:01.000 Because that's where the real story is told.

00:31:04.000 It's in the footnotes.

00:31:05.000 For example...

00:31:07.000 Even the executive summary, as I understand it, I haven't seen it, is also redacted, right?

00:31:14.000 Oh, heavily.

00:31:16.000 Heavily redacted.

00:31:17.000 The 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.

00:31:28.000 Correct.

00:31:29.000 That was Averill Haynes.

00:31:30.000 Okay, so Avril Haines, for covering up this crime, is now the number one spy in America.

00:31:37.000 And she is, President Obama is one of his, probably his top three advisors.

00:31:42.000 Let me tell you something else that Avril Haines did.

00:31:46.000 To 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.

00:32:00.000 Have you heard this?

00:32:02.000 No.

00:32:02.000 Yeah, they're opening a laboratory.

00:32:05.000 It was announced by the University of Virginia, CIA, to open first ever research and development laboratory.

00:32:14.000 Now, they won't tell us what it is they're going to be doing in this laboratory.

00:32:21.000 But, 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.

00:32:33.000 I mean, in truth...

00:32:35.000 The CIA has been operating laboratories since 1947, because Fort Detrick is a CIA laboratory.

00:32:43.000 You're absolutely right.

00:32:44.000 Nixon closed down Fort Detrick.

00:32:47.000 The army actually destroyed all its stocks.

00:32:49.000 But before they did, the CIA went in there and took a sample of every single pathogen and kept it somewhere that we don't know.

00:32:57.000 But the CIA was also...

00:32:59.000 I think they had 178 universities at one point that were doing...

00:33:04.000 You 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.

00:33:20.000 Yes, yes.

00:33:22.000 It pains me as an American to agree with you on this issue, but everything you've said is true.

00:33:27.000 Here's an announcement from the University of Virginia, of all places.

00:33:30.000 It 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.

00:33:45.000 CIA 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.

00:34:02.000 That scares the daylights out of me.

00:34:05.000 Yeah.

00:34:07.000 There'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...

00:34:31.000 Or through state security agreements or through contracts.

00:34:35.000 I mean, all these, you know, Microsoft and everybody else are all taking billions of dollars from CIA contracts for spying on everybody.

00:34:45.000 Yes.

00:34:45.000 Amazon Cloud Services.

00:34:47.000 And, you know, that's another thing, too.

00:34:49.000 You mentioned a few minutes ago that the CIA is statutorily prohibited from spying on Americans.

00:34:55.000 Of course, it's always spied on Americans.

00:34:57.000 But the same thing is true of NSA. It's not just...

00:35:01.000 It's a part of NSA's charter that NSA is not permitted to spy on Americans.

00:35:06.000 And in fact, they spy on every single one of us.

00:35:09.000 That'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.

00:35:22.000 Why do we need our intelligence services to have that kind of capability?

00:35:27.000 Why does the CIA need a lab to do experimentation on God knows what new MK program they may be coming up with? 0.54

00:35:35.000 And again, where's the oversight?

00:35:37.000 You 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.

00:35:44.000 Well, the State Department has, what, 10,000 employees?

00:35:48.000 12,000 employees?

00:35:49.000 There were 18 of us.

00:35:51.000 Imagine what it's like on the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees.

00:35:55.000 What does the intelligence community have?

00:35:57.000 Maybe 30,000 employees and you have two dozen overseers and half of them aren't cleared for the covert action programs?

00:36:05.000 That's not oversight.

00:36:06.000 That's just make-believe.

00:36:08.000 It's pretend.

00:36:09.000 So I think we're in trouble here.

00:36:12.000 Yeah.

00:36:12.000 What did the CIA teach you about surviving in prison?

00:36:17.000 You know, I started writing that book as a joke.

00:36:21.000 Because G. Gordon Letty wasn't actually in the CIA. Right.

00:36:26.000 FBI. He was a Dutchess County prosecutor.

00:36:31.000 Right.

00:36:33.000 You know, he had all these techniques for prison survival that he used from his intelligence training.

00:36:38.000 Oh, yes.

00:36:39.000 Including lighting his hand on fire to intimidate people or impress them.

00:36:43.000 I remember that in the movie.

00:36:45.000 You 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.

00:36:55.000 Yeah.

00:36:55.000 Which I ended up using with the guards a couple times.

00:36:58.000 And it just so frustrated them.

00:37:00.000 They told me to get out and didn't bother me again.

00:37:03.000 But it was things like making strategic alliances.

00:37:07.000 The 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.

00:37:16.000 And I have to defend myself.

00:37:18.000 I said, great. 1.00

00:37:18.000 I've been here 20 minutes and I'm going to get my ass kicked. 1.00

00:37:22.000 So 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? 0.99

00:37:31.000 I was trying to be as tough as I could.

00:37:32.000 And one of them said, are you the new guy?

00:37:35.000 I said, yeah.

00:37:36.000 He had a big swastika on his neck.

00:37:38.000 It took up his entire neck.

00:37:40.000 I said, yeah.

00:37:42.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:37:43.000 Are you gay? 0.63

00:37:44.000 I said, no. 1.00

00:37:45.000 He said, are you a rat? 0.97

00:37:47.000 I said, no. 1.00

00:37:48.000 Are you a chomo?

00:37:50.000 And my fists are still up.

00:37:51.000 And I said, I don't know what that word means. 1.00

00:37:54.000 And he says, like, I'm stupid. 1.00

00:37:56.000 He says, chomo, child molester. 1.00

00:37:59.000 I said, no, I'm not a child molester. 0.97

00:38:02.000 And then he says, okay, you can sit at the Aryan table in the cafeteria. 0.91

00:38:07.000 And I thought, great, I'm with the Aryans now. 0.98

00:38:10.000 And it just so happened that directly across the hall from my cell was the boss of the Bonanno crime family. 0.95

00:38:18.000 And he walked over to my cell and he says, why are you going to sit with those Nazi retards? 1.00

00:38:24.000 Those were his words. 0.63

00:38:25.000 I said, I don't know what I'm doing here.

00:38:27.000 I don't know where to sit.

00:38:29.000 I don't know who to talk to.

00:38:30.000 I don't know anything.

00:38:30.000 I've never been in prison before.

00:38:32.000 And he says very dramatically, from today, you're with the Italians. 0.99

00:38:37.000 And so that was one of the rules from the CIA. You make these strategic alliances.

00:38:43.000 Four of my five cellmates were members of Mexican drug gangs.

00:38:49.000 And one of them asked me if I was educated.

00:38:51.000 And I said, yes.

00:38:52.000 And he said, would you write my appeal?

00:38:54.000 And I said, well, I'm not an attorney.

00:38:56.000 Well, you said you're educated.

00:38:58.000 I said, sure.

00:38:58.000 I thought, well, how hard could it be?

00:39:00.000 The guy's obviously guilty.

00:39:01.000 They caught him with 50 tons of cocaine, right?

00:39:05.000 So I wrote his appeal and he lost.

00:39:07.000 But he told all the other Mexican drug lords that I was a good guy and I didn't charge him anything.

00:39:14.000 So that kept the Mexicans off my back. 1.00

00:39:17.000 And then the Nation of Islam guys, it was just the craziest thing. 1.00

00:39:21.000 A 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.

00:39:29.000 And 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.

00:39:41.000 Wow.

00:39:42.000 What prison were you in?

00:39:45.000 I was in a prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, FCI Loretto, which is another thing.

00:39:50.000 You know, my judge recommended that I go to a minimum security work camp.

00:39:55.000 And the FBI and the Justice Department were upset that I didn't get 30 years.

00:40:00.000 I got 30 months.

00:40:01.000 And so they determined that I was never going to see the inside of minimum security anything.

00:40:06.000 I went to real prison with the guard towers and the double fence with the concertina wire and all that.

00:40:13.000 And then, you know, my children had to go through that every time they wanted to come and visit me.

00:40:18.000 And they were little, like one, seven, and ten.

00:40:23.000 I was in a maximum security prison in Guaynabo in Puerto Rico.

00:40:30.000 But I saw my child for the first time because my wife had a baby while I was in prison.

00:40:39.000 My youngest boy, Aiden Vieques, was named after the island that we were defending.

00:40:46.000 But the first time I saw him was on Visitor's Day in that prison.

00:40:50.000 And it was a rigmarole.

00:40:52.000 I mean, we had to do, you know, we had to do full naked checks to go back from the visitor's room.

00:41:01.000 Bend over and people putting flashlights, you know, at every place.

00:41:05.000 Oh, yes.

00:41:06.000 So, and then they never turned the lights out.

00:41:09.000 That was one of the things.

00:41:11.000 That's enough to drive you crazy.

00:41:12.000 When they shut the cell doors at night, it was this screaming, which I still don't know who was doing it or whatever, but I had...

00:41:20.000 It was just really eerie.

00:41:22.000 I was lucky because there was 140 men on my cell block, and most of them were people who had done pretty bad crimes.

00:41:31.000 And there was a lot of gang people, because it was a federal offense.

00:41:35.000 But 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.

00:41:48.000 But anyway, it was that...

00:41:50.000 We kind of formed a quirk of people whose kind of ideology and idealism ended up permeating the entire cell block.

00:41:59.000 Yes.

00:41:59.000 And we had dances at night.

00:42:01.000 We had a lot of musicians there who were famous Puerto Rican musicians who were doing salsa and that kind of stuff.

00:42:09.000 So it was very, for me, it was relaxing.

00:42:11.000 It was like being on a Catholic religious retreat.

00:42:14.000 There you go.

00:42:16.000 I made a joke a moment ago about the Italians.

00:42:20.000 I made a joke about the Italians, but they took very, very good care of me.

00:42:25.000 They had a guard on the payroll who would bring in lamb shank and white wine for the Marsala sauce and fresh vegetables.

00:42:33.000 I gained 35 pounds in prison.

00:42:36.000 35 pounds because we ate like kings every single night.

00:42:40.000 Other than that, it could be a little bit tough.

00:42:43.000 There 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.

00:42:51.000 And I said, well, what are you in for?

00:42:53.000 And he said, murder for hire. 0.98

00:42:55.000 And I said, well, I don't think I like that any more than I like the pedophiles. 0.95

00:43:00.000 I said, you can't come into my room. 0.75

00:43:02.000 Well, I made an enemy by saying that.

00:43:04.000 And there was another guy who was a serial killer. 0.99

00:43:07.000 He was a long distance truck driver and he would rape and kill women and just dump them out on the side of the highway. 0.69

00:43:13.000 They finally caught him and he got 40 years. 0.96

00:43:16.000 So for whatever reason, he constantly sought my approval.

00:43:20.000 And I tried to stay away from him because frankly, I was a little bit afraid of him.

00:43:24.000 And so one day we were in the TV room.

00:43:27.000 And the murder for hire guy didn't realize that I was sitting three feet away from him.

00:43:33.000 Earlier that day, NPR had requested an interview.

00:43:36.000 So I was called to the warden's office to sign a release.

00:43:40.000 And this murder for hire guy says, did you hear they called Kiriakou to the warden's office? 0.98

00:43:46.000 It's because he's a rat and he's down there ratting all of us out. 0.99

00:43:50.000 Well, you call somebody a rat and blood's going to be spilled. 0.99

00:43:53.000 But I just sat in the chair and I didn't react.

00:43:56.000 So the serial killer says to me, did you hear? 0.99

00:43:59.000 That son of a gun just called you a rat. 0.99

00:44:01.000 And I said, an hour ago I heard him call you a child molester, which was totally untrue. 0.99

00:44:07.000 But one of the things in my book is, always have other people do your dirty work. 0.96

00:44:13.000 So this serial killer got up and beat this guy to a bloody pulp.

00:44:18.000 He was hospitalized for six weeks.

00:44:21.000 He ended up getting an extra five years for attempted murder on top of his 40 years.

00:44:27.000 And the murder for hire guy was sent to another prison.

00:44:30.000 I was called to the warden's office and he said, you know, I understand that you were the cause of all this.

00:44:37.000 Well, remember, admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations.

00:44:41.000 I said, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:44:43.000 Well, the one called you a rat, and the other one, you said something to him, and he got up.

00:44:48.000 I said, well, maybe you said something to him.

00:44:50.000 Did you ever think of that?

00:44:51.000 Maybe you're the cause of all this.

00:44:53.000 Maybe I was sitting there watching TV, and I don't know what you're talking about.

00:44:58.000 Finally, he told me, just get out of here.

00:45:00.000 This is what the CIA is doing to us every day.

00:45:03.000 Yeah.

00:45:06.000 But it kept me safe.

00:45:07.000 And that was my goal.

00:45:09.000 Just to be safe.

00:45:12.000 So, do you have any relationship with people within the agency or outside or the other whistleblowers?

00:45:20.000 I do.

00:45:21.000 I do, believe it or not.

00:45:23.000 Yes and yes, to answer both of those questions.

00:45:25.000 First of all, the whistleblowers, especially the national security whistleblowers, we're like a family.

00:45:31.000 Beginning with the great Daniel Ellsberg.

00:45:34.000 Daniel Ellsberg is a giant in my life, and he's a giant in modern American history.

00:45:40.000 We're blessed to still have him at the age of 92 years old.

00:45:44.000 I'm so honored to know Dan Ellsberg and to be able to call him a friend.

00:45:49.000 I can't even tell you.

00:45:50.000 I feel the same way about him, and I know him very well.

00:45:54.000 He's been to my house on many occasions.

00:45:59.000 He knew my father, and of course, for those of you who don't know Daniel Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine.

00:46:06.000 He was probably number one in his class at Harvard.

00:46:13.000 He's one of these 180 IQ guys.

00:46:17.000 He was hired by the Rand Corporation.

00:46:20.000 First 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.

00:46:31.000 And at one point, and he was very pro-war when he started, and he ended up turning against it.

00:46:40.000 And he, at one point, decided to risk his freedom and his relationships, his livelihood.

00:46:46.000 He became so angry at what was happening in Vietnam that he went and mimeographed.

00:46:54.000 I think it was six volumes.

00:46:56.000 It was a huge, huge document.

00:46:59.000 And they mimeographed it at night.

00:47:01.000 They 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.

00:47:09.000 And it blew the whistle on the Vietnam War and went to fraud the whole thing.

00:47:13.000 Yeah.

00:47:14.000 But he was in, he knew my dad, and he actually went when he was trying to figure out the Vietnam War.

00:47:21.000 He went to my father, and he said my father had gone with his brother, John Kennedy, when my Uncle Jack was a senator.

00:47:31.000 They had gone to Vietnam, and they had met with De Gaulle, and De Gaulle had said to them, whatever you do, do not go into Vietnam.

00:47:39.000 Wow.

00:47:40.000 And 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.

00:47:49.000 And they saw these men, these Vietnamese, willing to just laying down their lives in droves. 1.00

00:47:56.000 And they said, how are you ever going to conquer that?

00:47:59.000 You know, they're coming out of the woods.

00:48:01.000 They're willing to die for their country.

00:48:02.000 They're fighting for what they believe is their freedom.

00:48:06.000 You know, they wouldn't want a foreign country running their country any more than we would. 1.00

00:48:12.000 My uncle had resisted.

00:48:14.000 All of his advisors were telling him, you've got to send 250,000 combat troops in.

00:48:20.000 And he kept saying, no, no, no.

00:48:21.000 In the end, he sent 16,000 advisors who weren't legally allowed to fight.

00:48:26.000 They were green grays, but he never sent a single combat troop.

00:48:31.000 He resisted literally every single person around him.

00:48:35.000 And Ellsberg went to I interviewed my father and he described to me the interview and he said, how did you know?

00:48:42.000 And my dad started explaining to him kind of the generic reasons why they didn't think it was right to go in.

00:48:49.000 And then he said, but how did you know back then?

00:48:52.000 How were you so prescient to know?

00:48:54.000 And he said, my dad slapped his hand on the table and it went whack.

00:48:59.000 And he said, it was just a resounding.

00:49:01.000 And he said, because we were there, we saw that they were willing to die.

00:49:06.000 And that they didn't care.

00:49:08.000 They were willing to sacrifice every single man, woman, and child in their country for freedom.

00:49:14.000 And we knew you could never beat that.

00:49:17.000 Anyway, it was a beautiful story.

00:49:19.000 That is a beautiful story.

00:49:21.000 Dan is kind of the godfather of the whistleblower community.

00:49:26.000 But we're all in close touch, with the exception of Ed Snowden, because it's just not easy.

00:49:33.000 For Ed to stay in touch.

00:49:34.000 But 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.

00:49:46.000 We appear at the same events.

00:49:49.000 We really do have a community.

00:49:51.000 And then to answer your second question, I stay in touch with a surprising number of CIA people.

00:49:56.000 You know, the day after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a retired deputy CIA director.

00:50:03.000 I had worked for him a couple of different times over the course of my career.

00:50:07.000 He said something that it was just so kind.

00:50:10.000 I saved it all these years.

00:50:11.000 He said, you've chosen a difficult path, but I'm glad somebody did.

00:50:15.000 I only wish that I had had the courage to do it.

00:50:18.000 Wow.

00:50:19.000 And that meant so much to me that I saved it.

00:50:22.000 It was motivating.

00:50:24.000 I'll tell you something.

00:50:25.000 Anthony Fauci said something just like that to me at one point, believe it or not, in 2016 when I went to see him.

00:50:32.000 And I'm sure he would take it back right now.

00:50:36.000 He's taken it back many times since.

00:50:39.000 Wow.

00:50:40.000 That's dramatic.

00:50:41.000 Anyway, go ahead and finish what you were saying.

00:50:43.000 You know, we've got things like Facebook and Twitter and things like that.

00:50:48.000 So CIA people can still stay in touch with me and not have to pass it through CIA security and report contact with John.

00:50:56.000 So it's worked out nicely.

00:50:58.000 I still stay in touch with a dozen or so former colleagues.

00:51:02.000 Before 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.

00:51:12.000 And 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.

00:51:24.000 And McComb came over.

00:51:25.000 McComb used to come to our house every day after work and go for a swim in the pool.

00:51:29.000 And he would often come on his lunch break to eat lunch with my dad.

00:51:34.000 My dad called him up and they had brought in McComb after they fired Dulles.

00:51:40.000 And McComb was a very pious Catholic.

00:51:43.000 He was a Republican.

00:51:44.000 He was a very pious Catholic.

00:51:46.000 And my father asked him, the first thing he said is, did our people do this?

00:51:51.000 That was his first reaction about his brothers.

00:51:53.000 But before he died, that was 63.

00:51:56.000 My father then runs for president in 68.

00:52:00.000 He was asked about, like Pete Hamill, who was one of the reporters who was covering him, who was also a confidant.

00:52:07.000 And 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.

00:52:23.000 And 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.

00:52:41.000 They knew that was a lie.

00:52:42.000 And 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.

00:52:57.000 And he refused.

00:52:58.000 He told them, I'm not going to involve the U.S. military.

00:53:01.000 The U.S. government is not going to attack a sovereign nation.

00:53:04.000 That's right.

00:53:05.000 And so, in the middle of the night, my uncle...

00:53:10.000 When 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.

00:53:25.000 Yes, indeed.

00:53:27.000 And then he subsequently fired the three top guys, and he brought in McComb.

00:53:32.000 My 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.

00:53:43.000 So 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.

00:53:55.000 Organism that is devouring our democracy.

00:53:58.000 You 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.

00:54:13.000 So 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.

00:54:25.000 And espionage means information gathering.

00:54:30.000 Right.

00:54:31.000 And analysis, and that's why the CIA was originally created.

00:54:34.000 It was not supposed to be doing, you know, overthrowing governments and fixing elections and running around and shooting and torturing people.

00:54:42.000 No.

00:54:43.000 Dulles 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.

00:55:07.000 My 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.

00:55:30.000 Nobody does it.

00:55:31.000 There's no accountability.

00:55:33.000 So if he had been elected, that's what he would have done.

00:55:37.000 Can you imagine how different the country would be today?

00:55:40.000 After 9-11, the CIA's Counterterrorism Service received a classified supplemental budget.

00:55:47.000 And I went up to Kofor Black one day.

00:55:50.000 This is about a week after 9-11.

00:55:52.000 Kofor Black was the director of the Counterterrorism Center at the time.

00:55:55.000 And I said, Kofor, I've got an idea for an operation that I wanted to run by you.

00:55:59.000 And he put up his hands and he said, whatever it is, just go do it.

00:56:04.000 I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all.

00:56:08.000 That was the attitude.

00:56:09.000 Yeah, right.

00:56:10.000 And 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.

00:56:23.000 But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.

00:56:24.000 But now the CIA really is little more than a paramilitary organization.

00:56:29.000 Now 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

00:56:54.000 Well, this is exactly what we were fighting against in the 70s with the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.

00:57:01.000 We're back to the bad old days again with little or no oversight.

00:57:05.000 We'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.

00:57:23.000 And he just doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.

00:57:25.000 I sort of confronted him at a dinner party one night.

00:57:29.000 And I said, it was right when I got out of prison.

00:57:31.000 And I said, Senator, I got to tell you, I was kind of disappointed.

00:57:34.000 I kind of expected a little bit more from you in the way of support.

00:57:38.000 And he got a little angry.

00:57:39.000 And he said, look, it takes all my energy just to not lose my security clearance.

00:57:46.000 And I thought, oh, that's it.

00:57:50.000 That's it.

00:57:52.000 I get it.

00:57:54.000 It's terrible, but that's how Washington works.

00:57:57.000 They have no boss.

00:57:58.000 They have no boss.

00:57:59.000 They're their own boss.

00:58:01.000 No accountability.

00:58:02.000 They're a rogue agency.

00:58:04.000 Indeed.

00:58:05.000 John Kiriakou, thank you so much for being yourself, for the way that you live your life.

00:58:12.000 I hope you'll come back and join us again, because this conversation isn't even a tenth over.

00:58:18.000 There's so many things I want to ask you about.

00:58:21.000 Such a treat for me.

00:58:23.000 Thank you so much.

00:58:24.000 You know, I'm a big fan of yours.

00:58:25.000 I want to thank you for what you've done for the country, what you continue to do for the country.

00:58:30.000 And I'm at your service.

00:58:31.000 Anytime you'd like to talk, just let me know.

00:58:34.000 Thank you so much.

00:58:35.000 Thank you.

00:58:36.000 Hey, do you think the agency has a guy assigned to you to watch everything you do at this point?

00:58:42.000 I do.

00:58:43.000 I get letters from them every once in a while, threatening letters.

00:58:46.000 They'll complain about different journalists that I've spoken to and tell me to back off.

00:58:51.000 Or I just sent my eighth book to the publisher, and I had to wait until...

00:58:56.000 The agency cleared it.

00:58:58.000 So I did this book called The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection.

00:59:03.000 And they redacted an entire chapter.

00:59:06.000 And I said, well, I want to appeal this because this is clearly unclassified.

00:59:11.000 I don't have access to classified information.

00:59:13.000 They said, no, what you wrote is currently and properly classified.

00:59:19.000 I said, you realize I got it from the CIA website, right?

00:59:24.000 I mean, you guys published it.

00:59:26.000 I just took it off the website.

00:59:28.000 Oh, give us a week.

00:59:30.000 And then they came back and said, okay, okay, you can go ahead and publish it.

00:59:34.000 But it's just constant harassment.

00:59:36.000 Constantly.

00:59:36.000 Little stuff.

00:59:37.000 Let me ask you something.

00:59:39.000 You 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. 0.89

00:59:59.000 Figures to be the equivalent of terrorists.

01:00:03.000 Domestic terrorists. 0.68

01:00:05.000 And that they are, in fact, they said this specifically, that they are using, they are targeting them with all of their cyber warfare.

01:00:13.000 So do you think, in your best estimate, How much of my life is being monitored?

01:00:20.000 Oh, I would say all of it.

01:00:22.000 I'd be pretty comfortable saying, I think you're constantly being monitored.

01:00:27.000 I mean, do you think they're plugged into my TV set and watching me, you know, that kind of stuff?

01:00:32.000 Probably not.

01:00:34.000 Probably not to that extent.

01:00:37.000 But I would be very surprised if there weren't FBI surveillance teams on you to see who you're talking to, who you're meeting with.

01:00:47.000 Sure.

01:00:48.000 I think that they're disturbed by what you stand for.

01:00:51.000 And 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.

01:01:00.000 Is there a way to thwart that or to find out about it or to find out any more information about it?

01:01:08.000 Yes.

01:01:09.000 It'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.

01:01:18.000 And while you may have to wait for five years doing it through the CIA, the wait at the FBI is about six weeks.

01:01:26.000 So, 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.

01:01:38.000 And sure enough, six weeks later, they sent me a CD-ROM that just completely exposed that.

01:01:45.000 We 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?

01:02:00.000 But they'll tell you the truth, even if it makes them look silly.

01:02:04.000 You know, I'll tell you a funny story.

01:02:07.000 I was doing something, having a conversation with my uncle, Teddy Kennedy, at one point.

01:02:13.000 And I was planning on doing something that he didn't want me to do.

01:02:16.000 And he said, you better not do that.

01:02:19.000 I've seen your FBI files.

01:02:23.000 Anyway.

01:02:25.000 I need to get those myself.

01:02:27.000 Anyway, John, thank you very, very much.

01:02:30.000 Thank you so much.

01:02:30.000 It was a great pleasure.

RFK Jr. The Defender - December 04, 2022

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou

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