The Tucker Carlson Show - July 21, 2026


Ex-CIA Agent John Kiriakou on the CIA’s Most Successful Lying Techniques

Hosted by
Tucker Carlson
Mentioned
Jeffrey Sterling John Kiriakou James Rosen Tom Cotton Tucker Farsi Leonie Brinkema John Kerry Mengele Ryzen Thune Bush
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Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

159.05

Word count

2,643

Sentence count

175

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The CIA has a well-earned reputation for dishonesty. Of course, the agency lies for a living. That s what they do. So why would you listen to former CIA officers to hear the truth? Well, you wouldn t, except if the CIA officer in question had gone to prison for telling the truth.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, the CIA has a well-earned reputation for dishonesty. Of course, the agency lies for a
00:00:09.640 living. That's what they do. So why would you listen to former CIA officers to hear the truth?
00:00:15.640 Well, you wouldn't, except if the CIA officer in question had gone to prison for telling the truth.
00:00:22.800 People willing to suffer for telling the truth are the ones you listen to. And no CIA officer
00:00:28.600 in recent memory has spent more time in prison for telling the truth than John Kiriakou, our
00:00:32.620 friend. Well, he has written a brand new book on what he learned serving for so long as an
00:00:38.660 operations officer at CIA, and it's called The Ultimate Guide to CIA's Skills, Tactics, and
00:00:44.500 Techniques. And it's a fascinating read. We are proud to be selling it right now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com.
00:00:51.880 Here is part of our conversation with John Kiriakou. John, thank you so much for doing this
00:00:57.340 And congratulations on the book, which is absolutely awesome.
00:00:59.940 I'm looking at a copy right now.
00:01:02.000 So I can ask you many questions.
00:01:03.740 I'm just going to ask you one, and it's about deception.
00:01:06.260 So the business, to some extent, of intelligence is deception.
00:01:10.140 It's being deceptive, but it's also detecting deception in others, which is a really important skill, I think.
00:01:17.480 How have you been trained to tell when other people are lying?
00:01:22.720 Well, there are a couple of different levels of training.
00:01:25.200 For those of us who are just going out into the field as operations officers or case officers, you're given some some basic training in how to read body language.
00:01:36.020 You know, when you ask someone a question and he looks up, for example, into the air as if he's trying to picture what it is that that you're you're asking, that's that's usually OK.
00:01:48.600 If he looks down, for example, that's supposed to be alerting to you that that perhaps he's coming up with with a lie.
00:01:56.960 And sometimes I catch myself doing things like that.
00:01:59.760 I actually do tend to look up into the air as if I'm working out a formula or something.
00:02:05.340 But then we can ask you to pause.
00:02:07.440 So if you if someone looks up, he's likely telling the truth.
00:02:11.320 If he looks down, he's likely lying.
00:02:14.040 It's crazy, right?
00:02:15.520 No, it's interesting.
00:02:16.180 It's one of these these odd telegraphed behaviors that are just built into us.
00:02:24.460 Unless somebody is suffering from, let's say, autism, you have to watch the eyes because the eyes, if a person averts his eyes unnecessarily or regularly looking away, looking away constantly, that's usually a sign of deception as well.
00:02:46.120 Now, if you're going into the office of security, you're going to be a polygrapher, you're going to be an investigator, something like that.
00:02:54.460 You get all kinds of training, training that lasts the better part of a year in how to detect deception.
00:03:02.380 And if I could, Tucker, I wanted to add one thing.
00:03:05.240 One of the ongoing problems at the CIA is that you're trained to lie all the time.
00:03:11.180 You're living a lie in most cases, but a lot of guys just can't turn it off.
00:03:16.120 So I had this boss who who acknowledged to me one time as a junior officer that we all lie.
00:03:23.220 We're trained to lie. You lie every day, all day. But some guys don't know how to turn it off or
00:03:29.580 when to turn it off. One of the things that this boss told me was I want you to lie all day. That's
00:03:35.720 the nature of the job. But don't ever lie to security, finance or medical because they're
00:03:41.440 the ones who can ruin your life or send you to prison. And I also don't want you ever to lie to
00:03:46.740 me. And that, that always stuck in my mind that yes, we lie all day long in that job. And when
00:03:53.260 you're serving overseas, your job is to break the laws of that country, which of course involves
00:03:58.960 lying, but you really do have to turn it off. And then, you know, it's no wonder that so many
00:04:05.220 people at the cia are married three four five times exactly i was just thinking that exact
00:04:11.780 thing i mean it how easy is it to turn off if you're living undercover during the day
00:04:18.520 it's a pretty short step to having a mistress no oh my gosh yes i worked for a deputy director
00:04:25.420 tucker who had been married five times and every single one of his five wives had begun as his
00:04:33.200 secretary. And this is a guy who made it right up to the top, but he couldn't turn it off.
00:04:39.580 You know, you lie to people all day long and then you go home and you lie to your wife.
00:04:43.340 So did when that guy, your your supervisor who married five of his secretaries, when he advertised
00:04:49.460 for a new executive assistant, did they know that a marriage was part of the deal?
00:04:55.120 You know, here's how sick the culture can be sometimes, because the answer is yes, they knew.
00:05:00.620 but they also saw this as a way to get ahead. There was one woman in particular, and I'm sorry
00:05:06.260 to get a little far afield. There was one woman in particular who was a member of the Senior
00:05:11.720 Intelligence Service, which is a very big deal. When you get promoted above GS-15 and you enter
00:05:18.580 the Senior Intelligence Service, you belong to the entire intelligence community. So you can go
00:05:23.500 to the White House, you can go to state, you can go to DOD, all over the place. She had begun as
00:05:30.180 his secretary. And as soon as she married him, she began getting promoted. And then as part of
00:05:39.420 the deal that she struck with him so he could marry the new secretary, she was promoted into
00:05:46.360 the senior intelligence service. Well, I mean, from a theological, religious, human point of
00:05:53.580 that's all pretty evil i mean that right so on a basic level it's rotten exactly that's got to
00:06:01.420 affect the behavior of the entire organization after a while oh my gosh yes i can't tell you
00:06:06.480 how many times starting around the gs 13 level people would complain to me quietly sotto voce
00:06:15.300 that um they had been passed over for promotion not because they hadn't met all the criteria for
00:06:22.600 being promoted but because they weren't sleeping with one of the people on the promotion panel
00:06:27.180 i don't know why i'm laughing used to have this joke at the cia tucker that when you go into a 0.84
00:06:32.140 conference room for briefing never touch the table because you don't know who was having sex on it
00:06:36.480 last night that's so basically the cia is just like hollywood with guns with same moral structure
00:06:43.560 really great way to say it hollywood with guns i'll tell you what i did um and and this is how
00:06:49.120 I chose to live my life from the beginning of my career. My first wife was a ballet teacher. She
00:06:55.160 had nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA. And so I would spend the day, you know, guns drawn,
00:07:04.040 bulletproof vests, making high threat pitches. And I would go home and she'd say, how was your day?
00:07:09.880 And I'd say, great. What'd you do? Nothing. See anybody? Nope. Exactly. And why lie?
00:07:18.420 Just, I mean, that is a lie, but, you know, why go into the whole thing about, oh, listen, the meeting that I have tonight, it's going to be an important meeting, so I'm going to have to be out all night long.
00:07:33.380 Come on.
00:07:34.780 Come on. 0.99
00:07:35.260 That's ridiculous. 0.98
00:07:37.280 That you have to be honest about. 0.97
00:07:39.640 It's interesting if you take three steps back that you're describing a culture that is based on lying, that abets lying, that really is just itself a lie.
00:07:49.420 And you thrived in that culture.
00:07:51.840 It was when you told the truth that they sent you to prison.
00:07:55.180 I assume that's occurred to you.
00:07:58.020 Yes, it has.
00:07:59.660 And it actually stings to tell you the truth.
00:08:03.140 Because you and I have had this conversation a number of times.
00:08:06.440 I devoted my life to the CIA.
00:08:09.040 I got divorced because of the CIA, because I chose that life over my ex-wife wanted me to move back to Ohio and sell insurance with her cousin.
00:08:19.900 And I said, I would rather cut my throat than move to Ohio and sell insurance with your cousin.
00:08:26.260 So, yeah, I chose the CIA over my first wife.
00:08:33.340 I believed that, you know, this was God's work.
00:08:37.740 I was I was working hard to keep the country safe and to protect Americans and to disrupt terrorist attacks and infiltrate terrorist groups.
00:08:46.100 And, you know, at the end of the day, I realized that it was really every man for himself and everybody was lying.
00:08:55.340 And not just lying, but actively punishing those who decide not to lie.
00:09:01.100 I mean, that's that's kind of the crux of it.
00:09:02.740 It's like, it's one thing to, you know, tell transactional lies because you think you're serving a greater good, but to hunt down and imprison truth-tellers is active evil.
00:09:14.440 I mean, there's a difference, I think.
00:09:16.460 It really is, and it's not just me.
00:09:19.780 This happens every couple of years at the CIA.
00:09:23.420 There was a very brave operations officer named Jeffrey Sterling, for example.
00:09:29.080 and um jeffrey just happened to be african-american but he had a law degree from a terrific school and
00:09:39.180 he spoke fluent farsi went through all of the training certified at or near the top of his
00:09:45.960 class and everything and they assigned him to a station in the middle east and then after all of
00:09:54.720 his household effects were shipped out, they said, oh, listen, Jeffrey, we decided not to send you
00:10:01.160 to the Middle East. We're going to send you to Europe instead. And he said, why? All my stuff
00:10:05.500 is gone. And they said, well, we were thinking it would just look weird for a big black guy to be 0.88
00:10:11.140 speaking Farsi. And Jeffrey said, when did you realize I was black? So he filed a racial 0.65
00:10:21.040 discrimination lawsuit against the agency. If you're working on Iran and you speak Farsi and
00:10:26.900 you're not allowed to be assigned to the Middle East because you happen to be black, well, that's 0.96
00:10:33.640 a violation of the law. And so he filed this lawsuit. James Risen at the New York Times 0.94
00:10:39.300 wrote about the lawsuit and Jeffrey and Risen would speak occasionally about the lawsuit.
00:10:49.800 Interestingly enough, they had 50 calls over the course of a year.
00:10:54.840 None of the calls was longer than two minutes.
00:10:58.300 And so later on, Risen came out with a book called Bush at War.
00:11:03.960 And there was a chapter in there about a failed operation to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program.
00:11:11.580 Immediately, they arrested Jeffrey and they charged him with nine felonies, including
00:11:16.240 seven counts of espionage.
00:11:17.920 They said he was speaking to Ryzen 50 times over the course of a year.
00:11:22.920 The entire case was based on metadata.
00:11:26.060 That's it.
00:11:27.040 No witnesses, no recordings, no proof, no nothing.
00:11:31.860 Even the judge, a hanging judge, my judge, Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of
00:11:37.080 Virginia, Jeffrey was convicted on all counts, and she gave him three years.
00:11:43.720 on seven counts of espionage three years because even the judge didn't believe he had done anything
00:11:50.840 wrong but the cia does this to its truth tellers it destroys them may i ask you this is far
00:12:01.140 exceeding the time limit but i i just i can't resist and editors can take this out if they want
00:12:06.000 um i know someone who serves in cia currently who told me recently that a co-worker had killed
00:12:17.560 himself and this person which i don't think is that uncommon and this is not this person suggested
00:12:25.120 that um the co-worker got sideways with the agency and the agency used his psychological
00:12:32.920 profile, which they were obviously familiar with, to drive him to suicide.
00:12:37.780 Do you think that that's plausible?
00:12:40.120 Yes, I do.
00:12:42.140 One of the very first things that I saw when I first got to the CIA, well, not saw, I overheard.
00:12:50.000 I overheard two psychiatrists from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, OMS, talking about
00:12:56.740 how to push an employee over the edge because the guy just would not resign.
00:13:02.920 And so a decision was made to make him crazy or to make him go crazy.
00:13:11.560 And so they were discussing in the cafeteria, no less, how to push this guy over the edge so that he would either resign, have to go on a mental leave or commit suicide. 0.96
00:13:27.520 It's awful.
00:13:28.760 And these are licensed physicians talking about this?
00:13:31.360 We used to call a lot of them Dr. Mengele.
00:13:34.660 Yeah, for good reason.
00:13:36.500 We did.
00:13:38.380 I mean, has there been no effort for the AMA to revoke their medical licenses?
00:13:44.620 Well, see, everything's classified.
00:13:47.280 And so you couldn't report it if you wanted to.
00:13:53.380 It's kind of the perfect system.
00:13:55.140 So you set up this impenetrable barrier, enforceable by prison terms, of secrecy around you.
00:14:04.240 And it's like you can do whatever you want.
00:14:05.840 No one's allowed to know.
00:14:07.000 Anyone who talks about what you're doing goes to prison.
00:14:10.880 Where's the oversight?
00:14:12.300 You can do anything.
00:14:14.620 That's a beef that I have.
00:14:16.840 I feel very strongly about that.
00:14:18.900 The Congressional Oversight Committees, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
00:14:22.100 The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were created exactly for that purpose, to provide true oversight.
00:14:29.660 Our elected officials should have oversight over all aspects of government, yet they don't.
00:14:35.720 They act really just as cheerleaders.
00:14:38.360 And we see it with the Armed Services Committee and to maybe a slightly lesser extent with the Foreign Affairs or Foreign Relations Committees.
00:14:46.760 But the Intelligence Committees, forget it.
00:14:50.020 They're just cheerleaders.
00:14:52.420 Almost every single member of those committees, I know a bunch of them, has a dark personal life.
00:14:58.680 And so it's impossible when Tom Cotton runs the Senate Intel Committee not to think like maybe there's a right, maybe these are people who are utterly controlled by the people they're supposed to be.
00:15:10.020 Tucker, I'll tell you something funny.
00:15:12.640 A sitting senator, a committee chairman, called me a few weeks ago and asked if I would come up for a private meeting.
00:15:19.300 I said, of course. I'm a patriot. I want to serve my country. And if the senator needs my help, I run to Capitol Hill. And he told me that he was in a dispute with Tom Cotton. And I said, why don't you go to Leader Thune? And he said, I went to Thune. And Thune said he didn't want to get in the middle of a fight between two committee chairmen.
00:15:42.980 i said well what the heck do you want me to do about it i mean seriously who am i i'm nobody
00:15:49.080 and he said well i was kind of hoping maybe you could write something maybe for the post or the
00:15:54.080 times calling him out i said why don't you write something for the post times calling him out
00:15:59.560 right i've had enough trouble in my life you want me to take on the chairman of the senate
00:16:06.880 Intelligence Committee. No thank you. I've done that. Was he afraid, do you think, the senator?
00:16:14.940 Yes, I do. Of course. I do. The only reason we know that a lot of this stuff is real is because
00:16:22.240 of you, and so I'm just so grateful. Because of you, the truth cannot be dismissed automatically
00:16:29.280 as a conspiracy theory, so that is a huge contribution to mankind. Thank you. Thank you.
00:16:34.460 John Curie. Thank you. Great to see you. All the best.