Valuetainment - July 11, 2025


＂Israel Tried To Bug The CIA＂ - Ex-CIA Whistleblower CLAIMS Mossad Was BANNED From Langley


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

164.6679

Word count

2,142

Sentence count

195

Harmful content

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Former CIA analyst John Kiriakou talks about his experience working with the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and why he doesn t trust them. He also talks about some of the things that happened to him while working with them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 When you were a CIA officer and you guys worked with Intel,
00:00:02.420 you're like, hey, when I was going to Sudan or I don't know,
00:00:04.200 whatever city, Kirak or Kirak, where were you?
00:00:06.540 Cartoon, yeah.
00:00:07.340 Hey, you're going there at 3 p.m. today.
00:00:09.020 Oh, shit.
00:00:09.580 Okay, I'm going there.
00:00:10.360 Boom.
00:00:11.040 Okay.
00:00:12.520 And we got an Intel from a Saudi Intel, you know, from this, from that.
00:00:16.520 What other Intel agencies did you guys work with
00:00:20.020 that collectively amongst each other, you're like,
00:00:22.840 dude, I work with those guys.
00:00:23.920 I don't trust them at all.
00:00:26.380 And which Intel agencies did you work with?
00:00:28.580 You're like, you know, I think those guys are fair.
00:00:30.420 Who did you not at all trust, even though you had to work with them?
00:00:32.940 The Israelis. 0.50
00:00:33.820 You didn't trust them?
00:00:35.320 Not as far as I could throw them.
00:00:37.040 You, or was that a cultural thing?
00:00:38.700 It was cultural.
00:00:39.480 But my very first encounter with the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad,
00:00:44.540 was I was a brand new analyst.
00:00:46.500 This is like March of 1990.
00:00:49.940 And I was instructed to participate in a large-scale briefing
00:00:55.740 of the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet representatives in Washington.
00:01:01.120 And we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters 1.00
00:01:08.180 because they would always come with GIFs,
00:01:10.300 and the GIFs had always listening devices packed inside them.
00:01:13.940 And, you know, if somebody brings you a GIF, you X-ray it.
00:01:15.920 It's a normal process.
00:01:17.000 And we're like, you guys can't keep coming back here
00:01:19.360 every single time trying to bug our conference rooms.
00:01:22.520 So no more.
00:01:23.460 And was it easy to X-ray and see that they had bugs in them?
00:01:26.120 Yeah.
00:01:26.440 What percentage of the time did GIFs have bugs in them?
00:01:29.080 100%.
00:01:29.400 Be quiet.
00:01:30.120 No, seriously.
00:01:30.640 Are you kidding me?
00:01:31.620 Absolutely not.
00:01:32.220 I wish I was.
00:01:33.120 100% of the time they brought GIFs that had bugs in them.
00:01:35.040 Yeah.
00:01:35.500 And we're like, okay, no more.
00:01:36.660 You can't come on campus anymore.
00:01:37.680 Will you guys joke about it with them?
00:01:39.100 You're like, dude, what are you doing?
00:01:39.960 What is this?
00:01:40.580 So was it like a joke?
00:01:41.680 Come on, you guys.
00:01:42.540 No, no, they were serious.
00:01:43.600 They were hoping one would slip through.
00:01:45.580 So we had a safe house in Virginia,
00:01:50.080 and we would meet with them there.
00:01:51.300 So I'm one of like eight analysts at the time.
00:01:55.700 And because I was the junior most analyst, I went last.
00:01:58.920 So the political analyst, the econ analyst, the oil analyst, the military analyst,
00:02:04.160 they all take their turns.
00:02:06.360 And it comes to me.
00:02:08.580 And because I was overt at the time, I used my true name.
00:02:11.960 So I said, my name is John Kiriakou,
00:02:13.940 and I'm going to brief you today on Saddam Hussein's state of mind.
00:02:17.220 And the Mossad guy, his glasses were like this.
00:02:20.160 And he says, spell your name.
00:02:22.620 So I spell it.
00:02:23.740 And then in front of all my colleagues, he says to me, you are Jewish?
00:02:30.040 And I said, I am not recruitable.
00:02:33.380 I am not recruitable.
00:02:34.740 Don't even think about it.
00:02:36.400 I was so furious that he was ready to cold pitch me right there in front of all my colleagues.
00:02:42.000 Like, let's have lunch afterwards.
00:02:44.300 Get out of here, moron.
00:02:46.900 Try to recruit me in front of everybody.
00:02:48.440 John, was that across the board with everybody that didn't trust them the most?
00:02:54.500 Oh, yeah.
00:02:55.240 What percentage of guys you work with didn't trust Mossad?
00:02:57.820 A hundred percent.
00:02:58.640 I'll give you another example.
00:03:00.420 So when I went on a tour to Bahrain,
00:03:05.040 the guy I sat next to at headquarters and his wife went on a tour to Jerusalem.
00:03:10.660 They were absolutely lovely people.
00:03:14.060 Husband and wife tandem team.
00:03:16.080 They were declared to the Israelis.
00:03:19.020 So the Israelis knew that they were CIA officers and they went to Jerusalem for a two-year assignment not to work against the Israelis.
00:03:26.380 We don't work against the Israelis.
00:03:27.600 So when they arrived, the chief took them to Mossad and said, you already know them, but now they're going to be here for two years.
00:03:35.660 She's going to work on Palestinian issues and he's going to take Arabic classes at the university.
00:03:41.180 Easy.
00:03:41.660 So they're there for a few weeks.
00:03:45.000 The ambassador has a welcome party for them and they go back to their house after the party and all the living room furniture had been rearranged while they were gone.
00:03:55.240 And they're like, okay, the Israelis break into the house. 0.99
00:03:59.820 We get it.
00:04:00.680 It's your country.
00:04:01.940 All right.
00:04:02.380 You don't have to be jerks about it.
00:04:03.720 That December, they go to a Christmas party at the ambassador's residence and when they get back to the house, people had taken shits in all their toilets and left it unflushed.
00:04:17.440 What?
00:04:17.860 Yeah.
00:04:18.600 Why?
00:04:19.400 It's just an intimidation thing.
00:04:23.940 They do their two years there.
00:04:26.020 The ambassador has a going away party for them.
00:04:28.220 So they drive back home and when they get home, the dog is whimpering under the dining room table.
00:04:36.880 Somebody had cut his tail off and wrapped it in gauze and medical tape.
00:04:43.400 Like, why?
00:04:44.660 So when this happens, and it happens all the time, we have to go to the Israelis and say, stop harassing our people. 0.99
00:04:51.600 And they're like, okay, okay.
00:04:53.320 And then they stop for a year or two and then they start doing it again.
00:04:56.600 Why do you – okay, give me one you trusted the most.
00:05:06.240 The Brits.
00:05:07.040 I worked very, very closely with the Brits.
00:05:09.180 Why were they easier to work with?
00:05:11.420 Because our national interests are so closely aligned, especially on the issues that I was working on, terrorism,
00:05:20.580 that everything we wanted to do, they wanted to do as well.
00:05:27.900 And one of the great things about MI6 and MI5, frankly, is that their bureaucracy is a fraction of what ours is.
00:05:37.400 And so let's say I want to do something against Hezbollah. 1.00
00:05:40.180 It's going to take six months of paperwork for five different layers to approve.
00:05:46.500 The Brits want to do something against Hezbollah. 0.99
00:05:48.620 They just go out and do it.
00:05:50.140 And then they'll call us and say, hey, we're going to do this thing against Hezbollah. 0.94
00:05:53.120 You want in?
00:05:53.680 I say, heck yeah, I want in.
00:05:55.020 They fly out to London and implement it together.
00:05:58.740 So I worked closely with them in different countries all around the world.
00:06:03.220 Who would you put second on who you guys didn't trust?
00:06:05.840 Didn't trust?
00:06:06.560 Behind Israel. 0.86
00:06:06.900 Well, you can't trust, obviously, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Cubans, you know, the usual cast of characters. 0.96
00:06:13.340 I will say I had a serious problem with the French. 1.00
00:06:18.140 Yeah.
00:06:18.780 Why?
00:06:20.320 The French? 0.80
00:06:20.800 Because they're just dicks.
00:06:22.680 You know, in the 90s, we had this period where we were forbidden from transiting Charles de Gaulle Airport
00:06:31.160 because laptops had just become a thing in the 90s, right?
00:06:38.280 And so a lot of us had work laptops that were double, triple secured.
00:06:43.940 They were tempested.
00:06:45.160 You couldn't break into them.
00:06:46.320 And so you transit through Paris and you have a diplomatic passport and they say, okay, come into secondary.
00:06:55.440 And they take the laptop and they say, open up the laptop.
00:06:58.600 And you say, no, I'm a diplomat on a diplomatic passport.
00:07:03.420 The laptop is the property of the U.S. government.
00:07:06.200 Well, they used to have this spike, like a railroad spike in a piece of wood.
00:07:10.980 And they would take the laptop and slam it down on the spike and destroy the hard drive and then give you your laptop back.
00:07:17.800 It's like, why?
00:07:19.100 We're supposed to be allies.
00:07:20.460 What are you doing?
00:07:21.060 Didn't France help Israel get nuke? 0.95
00:07:26.160 Or what's the relationship between France and nukes?
00:07:28.780 That's the rumor.
00:07:30.360 Yeah.
00:07:31.080 The rumor is it was the French and the South Africans.
00:07:34.680 That worked with them.
00:07:35.760 Yes.
00:07:35.980 So, okay, so do you trust Russia's intel agency more than you trust Israel?
00:07:44.900 No, I don't trust either one of them.
00:07:46.640 I will say that both of them are outstanding services, but I think the Israelis are probably the best in the world.
00:07:53.040 And is that an element of how dirty they are, or is that an element of envy that they're actually better than us and intel?
00:08:03.420 It's a combination of the two.
00:08:05.080 You know, I'll give you an example, Patrick.
00:08:06.440 This thing with the pagers last year, oh, my God.
00:08:12.620 Can you imagine the complexity of an operation like that where you have to control literally every step of the way from production,
00:08:23.040 through the supply chain?
00:08:26.460 It's insane.
00:08:27.180 That's insane.
00:08:27.460 I got a call from a Russian TV network the next day, and they said, would you come on and talk about this pager operation?
00:08:34.920 I said, sure.
00:08:35.760 And they said, it's a war crime, right?
00:08:38.300 And I said, it might be, because there were innocent people.
00:08:40.960 But I said, it was frigging brilliant.
00:08:42.880 I said, I can tell you, even after 15 years at the CIA, nobody at the CIA would have come up with an operation that was this incredible and outside the box.
00:08:53.760 Deep respect to the Israelis, whether it was legal or illegal, deep respect.
00:09:00.320 Well, yeah, but can't you say it was a war crime or a crime against humanity? 0.89
00:09:04.020 And I said, no, I'm not going to say that.
00:09:05.840 And I'm going to say, somebody at Mossad's getting promoted today because that's the most incredible operation I've ever seen in my life.
00:09:15.940 Kudos to them.
00:09:16.740 Yeah, so to me, I wonder if what they've done is they've been able to infiltrate and outmaneuver our agency, our intel, our politicians, and now a lot of Americans are annoyed and a lot of leaders are annoyed that they outmaneuvered them.
00:09:42.680 I think you've hit it on the head.
00:09:44.420 I think that's exactly it because it's not just intel.
00:09:49.100 It's politics as well.
00:09:50.620 Right.
00:09:51.340 But guess what?
00:09:52.800 You can be as angry as you want.
00:09:54.420 You could have stopped it.
00:09:55.820 You fell for it.
00:09:57.600 You can say whatever you want about them.
00:09:59.240 They outdid you.
00:10:01.080 Yes.
00:10:01.320 They outstrategized you.
00:10:02.980 Exactly right.
00:10:03.500 They outmaneuvered you, and you fell for it.
00:10:06.460 You know, after I left the CIA, I went to the private sector for a few years, and then I went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
00:10:13.880 I was the senior investigator, and I was on the job for like three days, and these two lobbyists come to the office, and this would happen all the time.
00:10:24.180 You know, lobbyists come in for, you know, whatever, international shipping or whatever.
00:10:28.720 These guys were from APAC.
00:10:29.920 I said, congratulations on your new position.
00:10:34.100 I said, oh, thank you very much.
00:10:35.800 We would like to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land.
00:10:41.160 I said, oh, thanks.
00:10:42.880 No, no, not for me, but I appreciate it.
00:10:46.080 Well, you know, we're taking a large group of people, and we're going to take you to all the Christian sites.
00:10:51.040 I said, thank you.
00:10:52.200 I can pay for my own vacations.
00:10:54.000 I'm not interested.
00:10:56.080 And, you know, I'd always heard that they did things like that because they want to get you right off the bat.
00:11:03.420 Let me tell you, though.
00:11:03.680 But so public and obvious and blatant about it.
00:11:07.140 Guess what?
00:11:07.780 I wish we would do that.
00:11:09.220 And we should be.
00:11:10.140 I wish Christians would do that.
00:11:11.500 I wish America would do that.
00:11:13.740 I wish we were, in the same way, proud to indoctrinate our kids to be proud to be Americans, as proud as they are to be Israelis.
00:11:23.080 And that's an extension of soft power.
00:11:24.820 It works.
00:11:25.960 You know who else does that?
00:11:27.760 Muslims do that. 0.99
00:11:28.720 Yeah, very much.
00:11:29.420 We're very good at indoctrinating and getting the mindset and shape the mindset so well.
00:11:36.160 America's gotten so soft in shaping the mindset because of how divided they are.
00:11:40.900 One side is proud to be an American.
00:11:42.260 The other side is constantly talking about the level of proudness in other countries are higher than ours.
00:11:52.960 And you saw some of the data that came out from Pew Research.
00:11:55.400 Just this week?
00:11:56.180 That's right.
00:11:56.700 Yeah.
00:11:57.040 Yeah?
00:11:57.460 Yeah.
00:11:57.620 You're seeing that kind of stuff happen.
00:11:58.860 Hi, everybody.
00:11:59.620 I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer.
00:12:02.520 Please find me on Manect.
00:12:03.840 We have a lot to talk about.
00:12:05.540 CIA, FBI, DOD, torture, secret prisons, international renditions.
00:12:11.580 Maybe you or your child want to apply for a job at the CIA and are looking for some tips.
00:12:16.520 Let me know.
00:12:17.360 There's a lot we can talk about.
00:12:19.480 You pick the subject.
00:12:20.460 We'll make it happen.
00:12:21.520 Again, it's on Manect.
00:12:23.080 Thanks, and I'll see you soon.
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