Valuetainment - July 10, 2025


＂Sociopathic Tendencies＂ - CIA Whistleblower REVEALS The Disturbing Mindset Of Agency Operatives


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

181.23729

Word Count

1,664

Sentence Count

171

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

In this episode, I sit down with a former CIA agent who served as a counter-espionage officer for over 30 years. He tells us about how he became a spy, why he joined the agency, and what makes a good spy.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I asked Jonah a question right in front of the White House when we did the interview.
00:00:04.440 This is when she told me about, she was the chief disguise officer of the CIA.
00:00:07.540 She's a giant, by the way, at the CIA.
00:00:10.160 She is a giant.
00:00:10.660 Everybody loves and respects her.
00:00:12.320 Really?
00:00:12.700 Yeah.
00:00:12.820 So she's somebody that's admired.
00:00:15.060 She's the real deal, yeah.
00:00:17.040 Yeah, and she's the one that held the mask in front of President Bush and, hey, this is not really me.
00:00:21.620 Look what we have.
00:00:22.460 We have capabilities, a building.
00:00:23.780 I asked her, what is the profile of a great, successful CIA agent?
00:00:27.400 Okay, and she gave me her criterias.
00:00:29.880 What would you say?
00:00:31.660 What makes, because you know you hear about what types of people they recruit, and you said earlier, you said, I apply to work at CIA, and you change it.
00:00:38.840 You're like, I was recruited, right?
00:00:40.200 Because you get recruited to the CIA.
00:00:41.500 Yeah, my grad school advisor recruited me.
00:00:44.280 Great.
00:00:45.240 But what would you say are the top qualities that help you have a successful 20, 30-year career at the CIA?
00:00:52.460 Yeah, I could give you four or five.
00:00:53.480 Especially somebody like you that's going to 70.
00:00:55.320 Now, not the ones that work at the office.
00:00:56.920 The guys on the road is on top, like you.
00:00:58.620 Yeah, the guys in the field.
00:01:00.700 A CIA psychiatrist once told me what's probably the most important attribute, you have to have what they call sociopathic tendencies, not a sociopath.
00:01:11.880 Because sociopaths don't have a conscience, and you can't control them.
00:01:16.020 And they blow right through the polygraph because they don't feel guilt.
00:01:19.300 You want to hire somebody who feels guilt but is happy to break the law because we're the good guys, right?
00:01:25.540 And I'll give you an example if we have a minute.
00:01:27.860 When I was going through the process, the hiring process, I was with four other people, three guys and a woman.
00:01:36.480 And the interviewer said, let's say you are a CIA officer in the field.
00:01:42.540 And you get a cable from headquarters and they say, we need for you to get the new classified Indonesian economic figures.
00:01:52.740 And then you go out and target the Indonesian economic secretary.
00:01:59.280 Okay.
00:02:00.040 So you take him to lunch.
00:02:02.960 You take him to dinner.
00:02:04.240 You hit it off.
00:02:05.440 Your wives become friends.
00:02:06.940 You go on weekend vacations together.
00:02:09.260 Your kids are playing together.
00:02:10.780 Six months pass.
00:02:11.780 You realize he's not recruitable.
00:02:14.140 But headquarters says, hey, we need those figures.
00:02:16.900 What do you do?
00:02:18.060 One guy raises his hand.
00:02:19.620 He says, you double down.
00:02:21.660 You spend more money.
00:02:24.280 The woman says, maybe you can run it through the wives.
00:02:27.280 Maybe the wives get even closer.
00:02:29.880 And I'm looking around like, what?
00:02:31.540 So I raise my hand.
00:02:32.600 I said, you break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it.
00:02:35.420 He says, that's exactly what you do.
00:02:37.740 That's a sociopathic tendency.
00:02:39.320 A normal person wouldn't say, I need something that Patrick has.
00:02:44.020 I think I'm going to break into his house and steal it.
00:02:46.460 Normal people don't do that.
00:02:48.080 But remember, we're the good guys.
00:02:50.800 So sociopathic tendencies, an ability to work alone without having to be motivated by an outside factor.
00:03:00.240 I loved that job so much.
00:03:03.820 I hated to leave at the end of the day.
00:03:05.960 And then I couldn't wait to get back in in the morning to see what I had missed from overnight.
00:03:12.120 You have to be able to work for much of your career without any rewards.
00:03:19.760 Right?
00:03:20.800 You catch Abu Zubaydah.
00:03:23.580 You can't then call your friends and say, hey, I caught Abu Zubaydah.
00:03:27.820 Or call your hometown radio station.
00:03:30.560 I caught Abu Zubaydah.
00:03:32.660 You can't tell anybody what you did.
00:03:34.500 My first wife was a ballet teacher.
00:03:37.180 And I would get home and she'd say, how was work?
00:03:40.360 I'd say, great.
00:03:41.980 What'd you do?
00:03:42.920 Nothing.
00:03:44.020 Who'd you talk to?
00:03:45.320 Nobody.
00:03:46.580 And then my phone would ring at midnight and I would speak in Arabic.
00:03:51.140 And then I would leave to do a meeting in the middle of the night after a two-hour surveillance detection route to the meeting and a two-hour surveillance detection route from the meeting.
00:04:02.920 Get back home at six o'clock in the morning.
00:04:05.560 And then she says, so what was her name?
00:04:08.360 And I'm like, no, I was working.
00:04:12.340 Uh-huh.
00:04:13.500 In the middle of the night.
00:04:15.140 Have a good time?
00:04:16.980 Well, I mean, what are you going to do?
00:04:18.620 I can't tell her.
00:04:19.640 I was, you know, at some clandestine meeting with the ambassador.
00:04:24.000 She didn't know she was a CIA officer.
00:04:26.220 She knew I was CIA, but that was literally all that she knew.
00:04:29.840 She had no idea what I did for a living.
00:04:32.960 So number one is sociopathic tendencies, but not a sociopath.
00:04:36.140 You have to understand to make a decision without feeling guilty.
00:04:38.880 Yeah.
00:04:38.960 Number two is a level of work that you came in without any outside motivations to get you to go to work.
00:04:47.140 Yeah.
00:04:47.320 Like you sincerely love the game.
00:04:49.600 And they give you an assignment and they say, do it.
00:04:52.260 And that's it.
00:04:53.140 Nobody's going to call and say, hey, can I help in any way make this easier for you?
00:04:57.760 Do it.
00:04:58.640 I got a cable.
00:05:00.240 Patrick, they said, Abu Zubaydah is somewhere in Pakistan.
00:05:03.160 Go catch him.
00:05:03.980 Like, go catch him.
00:05:05.080 This country is the size of Texas and it has 220 million people.
00:05:09.480 What do you mean go catch him?
00:05:11.040 But by God, I set out to catch him and I did.
00:05:15.180 Pretty wild.
00:05:15.980 When you think about what the one thing that she said is similar to what you said.
00:05:19.540 She says, when you do save the free world from the next World War III and you're watching TV and you know they're reporting and you know that you're the one that did that, you don't need the recognition.
00:05:30.920 No.
00:05:31.340 You know, the day I got back from Pakistan, there was this kid in the office.
00:05:35.700 He was an intern, a graduate fellow.
00:05:39.040 And he had been reading the cables from Pakistan.
00:05:42.160 So I walk in and I've been gone for six, seven months.
00:05:45.540 I walk in and he sees me and he goes, he goes like this.
00:05:49.240 And I said, no, no, no, no.
00:05:52.060 It was a team effort.
00:05:53.660 And he said, dude, I read the cables.
00:05:55.440 I said, don't say a word because not everybody here in the office is cleared for what happened.
00:06:01.140 So now you got to just eat it.
00:06:03.020 That's wild.
00:06:03.500 But to me, when I, a few good men, code red, you want the truth.
00:06:09.880 I deserve it.
00:06:10.840 You can't handle the truth.
00:06:12.340 You know, and he gives that whole speech, right?
00:06:14.580 Yeah.
00:06:15.220 I got to, I got to say that if I got a job at the CIA, it's almost naive to believe there isn't code red type of tendencies, right?
00:06:26.680 Because you have, you have the what?
00:06:28.480 You have the official budget for the CIA that we all know about.
00:06:32.800 Right.
00:06:33.560 Then you have the official black, you know, budget that operations that not everybody will know about.
00:06:41.200 And then you have the unofficial black budget.
00:06:44.760 So there's three different tiers.
00:06:46.160 So you have to know that if you're in this game, listen, we do certain things that the average person is just never going to understand.
00:06:54.580 So don't act like we have to do this and we have to do that.
00:06:58.600 Don't be naive, John.
00:07:00.340 This is what we do.
00:07:01.280 You know what you signed up for.
00:07:03.340 I would assume that's a norm, isn't it?
00:07:06.440 Now, yes.
00:07:07.480 But remember, at the time of the 9-11 attacks, executive order 1-2-3-3-3 was the law of the land.
00:07:15.340 The CIA cannot murder people.
00:07:17.300 President Ford signed that executive order.
00:07:21.800 It had the force of law.
00:07:22.580 It would have signed, but that means nothing.
00:07:24.380 Oh, no, but you'd be surprised.
00:07:25.820 I had a friend, Bob Baer.
00:07:27.460 Bob Baer is a pretty famous former CIA officer.
00:07:30.180 He's written many books.
00:07:31.320 One of his books became the film Syriana with George Clooney.
00:07:34.820 He was serving in Iraq and came up with a plot to kill Saddam Hussein, and they threatened to arrest him for attempted murder.
00:07:46.520 He had to resign from the CIA.
00:07:49.040 You're in violation of executive order.
00:07:50.740 From the moment it became public?
00:07:52.200 No.
00:07:53.840 NSA heard somebody talking about the CIA guy is going to come up with a plan.
00:07:59.380 But it became public.
00:08:00.020 That's a form of becoming public.
00:08:01.340 It became public.
00:08:01.780 But to me, that's like him being sloppy.
00:08:03.600 To me, you know.
00:08:04.960 No, no, no, what it was was he was working with a group of Kurds, and the Kurds are on the phone saying, hey, so how do we do this?
00:08:10.880 We're going to figure out a plan.
00:08:12.160 And NSA called the White House and said, hey, one of your guys is out there trying to come up with a plan to kill Saddam Hussein.
00:08:18.320 And they said, you can either resign or you can be prosecuted for attempted murder.
00:08:23.520 He resigned.
00:08:24.180 He resigned.
00:08:25.460 It was a ridiculous slap.
00:08:29.040 Interesting.
00:08:29.600 Okay.
00:08:29.820 But anyway, on September 12th, all that changed.
00:08:33.240 Yeah.
00:08:33.480 Hi, everybody.
00:08:34.020 I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer.
00:08:37.300 Please find me on MNECT.
00:08:38.580 We have a lot to talk about.
00:08:40.280 CIA, FBI, DOD, torture, secret prisons, international renditions.
00:08:46.300 Maybe you or your child want to apply for a job at the CIA and are looking for some tips.
00:08:51.260 Let me know.
00:08:52.100 There's a lot we can talk about.
00:08:54.220 You pick the subject.
00:08:55.200 We'll make it happen.
00:08:56.260 Again, it's on MNECT.
00:08:57.820 Thanks, and I'll see you soon.
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00:09:05.220 Thank you.
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00:09:08.820 We'll see you soon.
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