CIA Whistleblower: “The Shadow Government Is Real” - John Kiriakou - #1160

You are an XCIA operative. Why should I believe anything that you're going to tell me? Well, you know, that's a good question. I get it with some frequency and all I can say is I have a very long track record and my track record is one of telling the truth. So I can't force people to believe what I say, but they can certainly choose to believe me or choose to not believe me. I won't lose sleep over either way. You've mentioned that you're looking for a pardon from Trump. How's that going? Do you think you're going to get it? No. If I'm being fully honest, let me let me back up by saying that I have fantastic support from people in the inner circle around Donald Trump. And I'm very grateful for it. Household names, but I am told by one of those household names that it's not going to happen because the CIA hates me. And I responded. This is just three weeks ago. I responded by saying that I've never met John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I've never exchanged a harsh word with John Ratcliffe. And this cabinet member said, it's not about John Ratcliffe as a person. It's institutional. They fear that if you get a pardon, it'll open the door for other would-be whistleblowers who want to go public on issues of waste fraud, abuse, illegality. And they're not willing to entertain that. Is there anyone else that is more persona non grata than you? Do you think? Ed Snowden. Okay, so that's the sort of one and two of- Yeah, you know, when I was still at the CIA, Philippe Ji was still being talked about. Philippe Ji was a CIA case officer in the 1960s who was serving in South America. I think it was Chile or Peru, one of the other. And he walked in on a torture session that the CIA was doing with the host government intelligence service and decided to resign from the CIA. But more than just resigning from the CIA, he wrote a book called Inside the Company in which he documented in an appendix the names of every undercover CIA officer that he ever met. And it was something like 1200 names that he came up with. They wanted to execute Philippe Ji even years and years later when I was at the agency. The old timers were still talking about, you know, how do we get AG? He ended up fleeing to Cuba and lived most of his life in Cuba. But yeah, until Snowden, AG was number one. He could give Andrew Tade some advice seriously. At least if you're going to get caught, don't be caught wearing those silly clothes. I think he was actually the reason that he was taken away was for crimes against fashion. There you go. That actually makes sense to me. Correct. Yeah. How much is speaking? So President CIA, how much oversight does the president have over the CIA? How compartmentalized are those? Well, you know, that's an issue that is debated. It shouldn't be because the president should be the definitive word. And the president's not the definitive word because because there really is such a thing as the deep state. And I say this all the time, you don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. You can call it the state, whatever you want. But the fact is that it exists. And presidents come and go every four years or every eight years. And the deep state, you're there for 25 years, 30, 35 years. I used to sit next to a guy who is now one of the top four or five officers. He's been there for 37 years. So they know that if a president orders them to do something they don't want to do, they just say, yes, Mr. President. And then they ignore them. It must feel a lot like being a hotelier and having guests that come and go, medium stay guests compared with you who's been there forever. That's exactly right. And there's a bigger problem too. And that's the lack of congressional oversight between, well, starting in 1975, the church committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, they transformed into oversight committee. So it became, the church committee became the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Pike Committee became the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. But the thing is, is how, how does a staff of 40, 50 people oversee an organization of 20, 30, 40,000 people? That's how many are in this CIS? Can't. Well, the numbers classified and my information is so old. I don't know how many people, but it's got to be a lot more than it was when I was there. So how do you oversee that huge of a bureaucracy you can't? And you rely on self-reporting. And I'll give you an example. This was not unusual in any way. I was involved in an operation that at the very end went bad. And when an operation goes bad and a life has lost, you have to report it to Congress, to the Congressional oversight committees. I was with the station chief. We were driving back to our office and he says to me, you're going to write the cable and I said, yep, I'm going to write the cable. And he said, yeah, listen, don't send that to Congress. And I said, yeah, and he said, no, don't, don't send it to Congress. And that was not unusual. Like, oh, Congress has enough to worry about. They're working on the budget right now. We don't want to just throw this wrench into the works by telling them we just lost a source. And they said, okay, you're the boss. And so I didn't report it to Congress. Does that make the CIA kind of shadow government? Oh, yeah. I think that's very much what it is. Yes. So who's really controlling what happens behind the scenes in America? It's that layer right below the political appointees. So it's that layer right below the director and deputy director of the CIA, the secretary and deputy secretary of state, secretary and deputy secretary of defense. It's those, it's those career government bureaucrats that aren't going anywhere. I'm going to make an analogy between the CIA and running nightclubs. And I'm going to try and see if I can bring this into land. So I run events for a very long time in the north of the UK. I had this very big events company. And one of the things that the managers of the nightclub wanted to see were the owners of the events company standing on the front door next to them. Where you stand is typically on the door. Make sure that the queue is moving nicely, that the door staff aren't beating anybody up. People are paying the right amount of the till, et cetera, et cetera. Poppy had done stairs. There's everything going on right inside. Outside is where the action is. And one of the things that was interesting, you would assume, well, if you're the owner, you have this more salubrious, like, you know, opulent queue. You just sit in the car or go for a coffee or, you know, don't even leave. Like it's one in the morning and it's cold in the northeast of the UK. Why do you even need to be that? Like you're functionally not doing anything. All of the action is happening downstairs. All of the managers that work for me and my business partner. They're the ones that actually know everyone that's going in by this point. It was 24, 25, 26, 27. Most of the people that were in the club were 19. But what we found was that in other events companies who decided, had less of a puritan work ethic than me and my business partner did, when the owners started to leave the front door, the managers for the events company and the manager of the venue would start to develop a tighter relationship. And I think that we usually assume the person who has the most seniority is the one that's got the closest to the information that has the most respect. But it's quite reliably. It's not it's the enforcer. You know, even if you look at the mafia, how many times was the boss overthrown by one of the second in commands or one of their lieutenants? Because it's it really is the enforcer that is kind of at the coal phase day today. They've got sufficient seniority to be seen with respect. But they're also grinding away. They're stood on the front door of the nightclub. And that was we could predict very reliably that particular events company, the owners stopped going out on a night time. We give it three months, six months before one of their managers goes, well, hang on a second. I'm mates with the guy that runs the venue and the dude that runs the company, like, he's not even here. Like, why don't we just cut him out? I'll back hand you a little bit and we can go direct. And I think it sounds somewhat similar here. Not only that, but it would be as if me and my co-founder were being replaced every so often. So not even was the loyalty not to the person who's more at the coal phase doing the work, but who are you being loyalty? You're being loyal to an appointee that's going to fuck off at some point in the next few years. So it makes it makes complete sense. And they have they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo because they don't want to lose their job. They don't want to lose their job. But even more importantly, they're the ones that make the trains run on time. They're the ones that that are foreign policy and defense and intelligence policy. And they don't want some bomb throwing new president to come in. I've said this a number of times before, but I think it bears repeating one of the things that at the C.I.D. Generally, loves is when a new president is elected and he has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. Because from the day after the election, he's entitled to a PDB briefing, president's daily brief. And so it's usually the deputy director for intelligence or the director of the PDB staff or sometimes both of them together that will go brief the new president elect. And I always say, as soon as they lay out the first blue border report or a black border report, it's like six levels above top secret. And they say, Mr. President-elect, just wait until you see the cool things we're doing all over the world. So highly classified, everybody else has to step outside, just wait. Oh, they've recruited him. They made him one of the guys. They just sucked him right in. And every day, six days a week, he can't wait to get that briefing. But somebody who has foreign policy experience and maybe, you know, might be a little bit jaded about CIA failures, whether analytic or operational isn't going to just succumb to the allure of inside information. - What are the levels of security? - Classification. So it starts with unclassified. The New York Times is unclassified. Everybody can see it. Then there's something called sensitive but unclassified. So it's usually like an internal memo or something, you know, the, the, the, the Duncan Donuts in the CIA cafeteria is going to close for two weeks for renovation. It's sensitive because it's inside the CIA, but it's unclassified. Then there's confidential. Most of what the State Department does is confidential. Where if it's exposed, it would be embarrassing to the federal government. Not dangerous, but it would be embarrassing. Then there's secret. Revelation of secret information would cause serious damage to the national security. Then there's top secret. Revelation of that information would cause grave damage to the national security. That's the terminology in the, in the S.P. and Ashla. But then there are compartments, dozens and dozens of compartments that are in addition to top secret. For example, when you get hired by the CIA, you don't just get a top secret security clearance. You go in with what's called a T.S.S.C.I.S.I. S.I.T.K. gamma clearance. Dude, I know it's crazy. So it's top secret. Special intelligence, meaning you're allowed to see NSA reporting and the compartments are talent, keyhole, and then gamma is above talent and keyhole. I remember laughing out loud in the first classified briefing I ever participated in, because the guy starts the briefing off by saying, the word ZARF when standing alone is unclassified. And I laughed out loud. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? ZARF is a compartment that is no longer used at NSA, where they say, we have top secret information. You can see it, but he can't because it's top secret ZARF. What the heck does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. And then he's telling us, you can say the word ZARF, but you can't say what ZARF is. Right, fantastic. And then, so that's what's the gamma is the highest? On sort of a day-to-day basis, gamma's the highest. So if I'm a CIA analyst, let's say, and I'm getting all sorts of intelligence, and I'm giving a briefing, and I'm gonna go to some, you know, I'll go to central command to give a briefing. The guys who have the highest level security clearances are gonna be up to gamma. So I can talk about gamma. Gamma's gonna be sensitive to the point where, let's say it is, you know, we've intercepted the cell phone of some foreign leader. That's gonna be gamma, 'cause it's particularly sensitive. But then there's a lot above gamma, yeah. - Do you know what that called? - Oh, sometimes they'll come and go in a matter of months, depending on the operation. - It's off. - Yeah, like ZARF. ZARF was around there for a long time. It was from like the 50s. But let's say there's a specific operation. We're gonna try to locate, you know, the Ayatollah of Iran. And so we have access to a certain, you know, electronic in his cell phone or the cell phone of a bodyguard or whatever. That could be, you know, top secret SITK gamma jelly jar. I'm just making that up. - Yep, yep. The code names are computer generated at random, so you never know what they're gonna do. - Can you think of a hypothetical situation that would be the most high security that you can think of? - Oh, yeah. Pretty much anything that DARPA does, the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency. DARPA is working on things that you and I see only in science fiction movies. That's why so many people believe that the UFOs that we've been seeing all these years are not actually UFOs, they're experimental DARPA aircraft or the Chinese version of DARPA or something like that. But DARPA's so, the work that DARPA does is so highly classified. I never met a CIA officer that had access to that. - You think the president even knows about that stuff? - I think that if he asked, he would be read into the compartment and told, but I think on a daily basis, probably not. - So does he have, is it right to say that the president is the person who, if they wanted to, could get access to the most information across the board generally? - You're the only person. - Yeah, and he's also the only person in government that can just declassify literally anything he wants with a stroke of it. - Including gammas are. - All of it. - Jelly jar, right, okay. Do you think they abuse classification to hide embarrassing things? - 100% yes. - How much of it needs to be classified? - That's not stuff. - There's a guy named. Jay William, I forget his name. Anyway, there's a guy who was the classification Zarr under George W. Bush. And now he has become an anti-classification activist. His position is that fully three quarters of classified documents ought not be classified. Politically, and convenient, personally revealing embarrassing. - Yeah, the White House and the Pentagon, especially leak-like Sibs, but they're almost always authorized leaks. Like you'll leak something for a political purpose, you'll leak something to embarrass a foreign leader, you leak something to try to get a sense of where the public might be on an issue. Well, I mean, technically that's all a violation of the SB&J Act. You can't leak information like that, but they do it literally every single day, every day. - Federal judge just approved the paramount Warner Brothers merger. Larry Ellison's Oracle helps to secure TikTok USA data and their algorithm. And then its son, David, runs paramount, including CBS news. - Pretty convenient, isn't it? - Oracle's name actually comes from the CIA project that it's found as worked on. - Yeah. - Do you think that private data and media companies could potentially become as powerful as an intelligence agency? - I think it already is. And I'll tell you what makes it worse, too. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA sought from Congress a waiver allowing it to invest in tech startups, unprecedented in American history, right? As a government, you can't act as a private investor, as an angel investor. - What if you get great results? - The CIA did, and they did. The CIA was the very first investor in Palantir. And Palantir now is a global security software concern to the point where there's credible information indicating that it's infiltrated governments around the world. I was just in Sweden a couple of weeks ago, and there's this huge national debate in Sweden about whether or not to use Palantir to install and maintain their governmental security databases. And Palantir got the contract. So, I mean, do we trust Palantir not to just feed everything to NSA and CIA? I don't. I worked there for 15 years. I know how it works. Literally everything is going to NSA and CIA. - A quick aside, if you wanted an eight-sleep, but can never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand new PodSix. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames. And there are nine times more sensors built into it, despite all of these upgrades. The PodSix now starts at just $1,999. The lowest starting price eight-sleep has ever offered. Best of all, for the first time, eight-sleep has introduced solar sizes, including single-side options for Queen King and California King beds, and they've got a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money. only back. Plus, they ship internationally, so don't be scared by the currency amount. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod six by going to the link in the description below, aheading to 8sleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom. Check out that's e-i-g-h-t-sleep.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. A check out. Is there a philosophical justification for having an organization like that, which gives your home countries and the country of its origins, national security competitive advantage? That's the bottom line. And I would say, of course, for example, when N. Snowden went public with his revelations in June of 2013, one of the things that the press really seized on was the fact that NSA was intercepting Angela Merkel's cell phone. I want NSA to intercept Angela Merkel's cell phone. I want to know what the German trade positions are. I want to know what the Germans are saying about the United States. Right? I don't want the CIA and NSA to spy on me. It's a part of NSA's charter. It's founding charter that it is forbidden from collecting data on American citizens. Same with the CIA, it is patently illegal for the CIA to collect information on Americans, yet they both do that every single day. Do you think that companies like FLOC, which there's a lot of controversy around at the moment, are private companies being used to get around surveillance protections that are meant to restrain the government by just getting private organizations to do it on their behalf? Oh, yeah. And 9/11 changed that in a terrible way, where, you know, until 9/11, if the FBI, for example, wanted to investigate you, they would have to go to a federal judge and say, we won't investigate Chris because of these four reasons. And then the judge would sign, you know, a warrant. Now all they have to do, literally all they have to do is write up a letter called a national security letter. Take it to your service providers and say, give us everything that you have and you are forbidden by the Patriot Act from even telling anybody that we gave you this letter. What do you do? How do you defend yourself? You can't. You don't even know you're being investigated. And there's no judge to say, wait a minute, guys, you're going too far here. There is no safety. Where do you come into land on private companies that develop technology that can be beneficial for a country and the inevitable relationship that's going to come along? Like, I've spent time with Palmer Lucky, what he's trying to do with Andrew Rill. Like, I mean, what's the tagline of that fight unfair? Yeah. Isn't that great? I want a clever guy, a clever guy that's on my side with a gun, as opposed to a clever guy that's on their side with a gun. And I understand that the issue is, well, if that gun is distributed around this country enough, then it can be used to enforce me. I am in the closest proximity to the gun. Hopefully, for a long time, I shouldn't be the person that's on the receiving end of it. But there is a risk. This kind of feels a little bit like the organizational geopolitical systemic equivalent of the debate that British people have around Americans having guns full stop. But hey, yeah, it's great that you can defend yourself with it, but also you can be in the receiving end of it. How do you square that circle in a country like this where organizations can do it? And if you don't decide to embed them with the government, they just go to the highest bidder, which might not actually be you. Is it not better to have eyes inside of that than it is to let it just be a free for all? Sure. In a perfect world, yes. And that's why we need such robust oversight in this area. I'm a firm believer in the rule of law. I really am. And so if, why are you smiling? This thought that came across, I'm sorry, my Facebook trays, what I think inside of my head. What I thought inside of my head is the war. The law can be fucked with to just make it whatever you want. And that's the point I was going to make. That's why we need we need the real force of law. We can't just change the law just to suit the whims of the political winds. We need to be see, this is kind of my soapbox here. This is part of my standard speech at universities. Either we're going to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about in 1984 or we're not. Either we're going to be a nation that respects the law and international law and treaties or we're not. We can't just pretend to be this this shining beacon of hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties except when it's expedient to not be. So if we're serious about privacy, for example, then by God, let's be serious about privacy. At the same time, these companies, I think, can perform a great national service because if their technologies are used to keep us safe, to keep Americans safe, then God bless. I wouldn't want them selling the technology to the North Koreans or to the, you know, pick your enemy. But then at the same time, if we're going to be the good guys, let's by God, let's be the good guys and be serious about it. Geopolitical climate's pretty chaotic at the moment. It is. Who are you most worried about foreign nation state being an American? China. That's an easy one for me. The Chinese, first of all, the Chinese do not have a history of imperialism. They just don't. They don't invade other countries. They never have. I mean, sure, we can make an argument about Tibet, but that's that's a separate argument. But except for, you know, a brief conflict with North Vietnam back in the day and two border skirmishes with the Indians, the Chinese just don't attack other countries. They purchased them. They co-opt them. There was a headline on the onion a couple of weeks ago that was funny because it was so true. It said, China content to sit back and watch US destroy itself. Because that's what we're doing. When we're spending between one and one and a half trillion dollars a year on the defense budget and the Chinese aren't, we're spending more than the next eight largest countries combined. Is it being spent effectively? No, it's not. What's it mostly being wasted on? I think it's being wasted on 244. No, 210 bases in 144 different countries. Number one, I think that it's being wasted on the development of inefficient and inappropriate weapon systems like the F-35. Nobody wanted the F-35. Why? Because you can't have a one size fits all aircraft when one size can never fit all. And then we phase out the A-10. Everybody loves the A-10. The A-10 can go so low that you can practically reach up and touch it as it's firing the missile to destroy a tank. The F-35 can't do that. So in the meantime, the Chinese have enough money to buy ports and airports and factories and desalination plants and anything their hearts desire in countries all around the world. Because they're not spending as much. They're not spending it on on implements of war. Does that not make them more vulnerable though? I don't think so. It buys them friends. It tends to isolate the United States. And it frees up cash. The flexing economic power. They are. And then they can use that free cash to promote the development of new technologies that they can use against us. What is the end goal of China? Oh, I think the end goal of China is exactly what the American goal toward the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. It's its containment and isolation, hoping that the US will eventually collapse on itself. This year, we crossed the national debt border. What's the word I want to use? 40 trillion dollars. So now, the number one expenditure in government is defense. And the number two is interest on the national debt. I once did an episode with the first long form episode with any Doge appointee. It's a guy called Sam Korkos. He used to be at levels, which is a glucose monitor. And he is now the chief information officer at the Treasury. Good grief. And we did this episode in front of a huge LED wall. And we put the US debt calculator up behind us as it was going. And he's seen everything. He's seen where all of the bodies and buried in the spider's webs are. And he was like, it's Frankenstein's monster thing that there's not just one database for tax. You've got to do luck ups across eight different multiple databases. And not everybody's information is held. And not all of the information is held in the same format and so on and so forth. So yeah, it's a big sort of unwieldy mega-lopolis of information that he's trying to navigate. But I guess. Well, man, drop two for a second too. Continuing on with China for a second. Yeah. All the while that this is happening, the Chinese are actively committing espionage against us. And not just against us, but against all of our allies as well. Just recently, there was even a deep-covered Chinese intelligence cell that was uncovered in New York City where these Chinese intelligence officers were threatening Chinese dissidents in greater New York and threatening to then harm their relatives in China. If they didn't stop their activism against the government in Beijing. But they're recruiting capital hill staffers. They're recruiting FBI agents. They're trying to infiltrate the CIA. They have intelligence officers spread out in hard science PhD programs all across the United States. This is a serious problem for us. How many spies do you think are in the CIA and US government right now? I hope the answer is zero. I mean, we wouldn't have a counterintelligence center if it really were zero. It's impossible to say. Is it easier to ask how many departments haven't been infiltrated by foreign intelligence than how many have? Yeah. But now you're going to get me on my high horse. I think the greatest threat, the greatest immediate threat in terms of infiltrating the government like today right now is Israel. Would they be doing that covertly or overtly? covertly. They're being co-located in this new national defense authorization act co-located in the Pentagon and in the CIA. But I mean, as long as 35 years ago, there were the FBI was able to identify 187 undercover Israeli intelligence operatives infiltrating or having infiltrated American defense contractors around the country. Just three weeks ago, the defense intelligence agency director sent an all hands email to every officer in DIA saying, be particularly aware the Israelis have really ramped up their intelligence operations against us. And they're trying to infiltrate DIA. That was three weeks ago. How does a foreign nation get a spy inside of U.S. circles of power? What is some of the roots in? It's called the asset acquisition cycle and it's four parts, spot, assess, develop, recruit. So I spot you. Who are you? Oh, you work for DIA. I'm going to want to get to know you. I assess you. I assess your access to information that I want. If I determine that you do have access to information I want, then I begin to develop you. In the development portion of this, I have to identify a vulnerability. And a vulnerability might be an easy one. Like, you're a gambler and you have a lot of debt. But it might be something more difficult. Like, you really, really love your wife. And maybe she has breast cancer. Or you really love your kids. But you don't make enough money for them to go to a top tier school. I can pay for them to go to a top tier school. And then finally, when you test the person and they're willing to give you information in exchange for something, usually money, then you make it official. You recruit them. So most of the foreign assets that are inside of the U.S. government are not foreign nationals. They're probably not people that even started. How many people do you think began their career inside of the CIA national defense, U.S. government under the pretense of doing it over half? How many have been turned? I feel pretty comfortable saying it's probably zero, probably. They wouldn't have said, "Hey, let's get this person started from fresh. Get them into university." No, the Soviets had great success doing that in the UK. The likes of. Oh, for heaven's sake, Kim Philby, for example. And the Cambridge. I have two massive sips of that. And I promise you, your brain will stop functioning. It's got good to do. Kim Philby. Kim Philby and his cohorts at Cambridge. They were recruited at university and directed. And was he a British national? Yeah, he became the chief of counterintelligence in MI6. But would have maybe shown some sort of sympathies toward the Russians early on in his life? He was an overt communist when he was at university. But I mean, there were a lot of communists in the university. So during the spot assess phase, this guy's already aligned with. Ideologically. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Kim Philby, it's such an interesting story. Kim Philby's best friend, the best man in his wedding, was James Jesus Angleton, who was the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. So you have the chief of counterintelligence, the CIA, the chief of counterintelligence in MI6, and they are best friends. But the entire time Philby was actually a deep-covered KGB agent. Was the U.S. guy legit? Oh yeah, right. And it actually would have been hilarious if one had been secretly working for the Russians and another had been secretly working for the Chinese. Oh my God, could you imagine? But it had such an effect on Angleton that it sort of pushed him over the mental edge. And he began a mole hunt that just destroyed the lives and careers of dozens of people. When he found out the guy that he had the best friend. Well, he found out that Philby had been a KGB agent the whole time. He just leapt to the conclusion that there must be dozens, there everywhere. Do you know how Philby got rumbled? Yeah, the CIA was able to develop a source inside the KGB that said, "Hey, listen, this Brit, Philby, this guy's a problem. He's been with us since the 30s." And so Philby was tipped off. He happened to be at a Christmas party at the home of the British ambassador to Lebanon. He got a signal that he had been made. And he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He climbed out the window, made his way to the Soviet embassy. They put him in a coffin and shipped him to Moscow. And days later, he just shows up at a press conference in Moscow, saying, "I'm a communist. I've always been a communist, long live the Soviet Union." Wow. The number four in MI6. And he lived out the rest of his season. In fact, he became a lecturer in the KGB training center. Fuck me. Well, look, I mean, he's got field experience for decades or whatever. He knows everything about everything. I'll tell you, there's a post script to that. My first overseas service was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the first Gulf War. And I met a Saudi national named Abdullah Philby. And I said, "Abdala Philby, what an unusual name. It's kind of like Kim Philby. You're no relation to Kim Philby." And he said, "Kim's my half brother. We don't speak about him." So I asked the US ambassador, Chaz Freeman at the time. I said, "I'm met this Saudi guy named Abdullah Philby and he's Kim Philby's half brother." And he said, "Oh yeah, yeah. I bumped into him a couple of times." I said, "How is that possible?" It turned out Kim Philby's father was a physician. And he became the personal physician to King Abdulaziz Ibn Saoud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and served his entire career as the king's personal physician. And so the king gave him Saudi citizenship. He had divorced his British wife, married a Saudi woman, had an entire second family named Philby, but they're all Saudis. It's a family affair. Yeah. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about element before. And that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a coal glass of water with elements. 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Going back to the Chinese, does the fact that the Chinese control the companies that make all of our chips help them with spying? I think it does. When I was the senior investigator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was there from 2009 to 2011. Literally the very first investigation that I did was based on a tip that US passports were being made in China. They weren't being made in China. They were being made in Thailand, but the chips are made in China, which is just as bad. And so I know that fundamental source security codes is embedded into these chips. Exactly. The Chinese control, the efficacy of all American passports. That doesn't make any sense. I saw a comment on one of your reels that said, "Fun fact, without him, US torture would probably still be just a conspiracy theory." Given that you went to prison for revealing CIA secrets, what secrets do you think whistle blows from inside the CIA might be leaking in 10 years time? Oh man, that's a good question. Nobody's ever asked me that question before. on the fun side. you know, maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of this UFO thing. I think that would be fascinating. On the serious side, I really fear the infiltration of technology companies in our everyday lives. I really believe that our civil liberties are being violated every single day by tech companies. And either the government denies it or we just pretend it's not happening. But I think there are going to be whistleblowers in the future that come out and explain to us, explain to the American people just how deeply infiltrated our lives are. Give me some examples of what it might be. Postulate for me. Okay. I'll postulate going back to the 1970s. My first boss at the at the CIA, lovely, wonderful guy. He joined the CIA through something called the graduate, the graduate program. So it was for people working, the graduate fellowship program, people working on master's degrees. You do a semester at the CIA, then you do a semester in school, a semester at the CIA, a semester at school, and then you join the CIA as a staff officer. So his very first assignment at the CIA was in the Counterintelligence Center of James Angleton. He was a kid in his 20s. So he wasn't important enough to actually meet Angleton. So on his very first day, Angleton's secretary took him aside and showed him around the office and said, listen, in the unlikely event that you find yourself in the office alone, don't ever look at these files that are on the wall. Those are off limits to you. He said, okay. And of course, the moment he's alone in the office, he runs directly to the files. The marshmallow test for intelligence offices. Exactly. Don't eat that marshmallow. He told me that there were thousands of Manila folders on the wall and that every single one of those folders was a file on an American citizen. Well, those files are all electronic now. And as I said, there are no court orders allowing the CIA, NSA, FBI to just want to collect information on Americans. Somebody said to me the other day, well, if you have nothing to hide, then what do you care if they're gathering your information? And my response was, do you know who first posed that question in a public forum? It was Joseph Gerbels in 1933. Well, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care if the SS is gathering information or if the Gestapo is gathering information? It's a slippery slope. And once we just concede our civil liberties to the federal government, to any government, then we lose everything. How infiltrated do you think our technology is now? By surveillance, any kind of surveillance. I think they're working hand in glove, government and private industry. I think it's completely infiltrated. TV's phones. Everything. We know thanks to the Vault 7 revelations. I know what that is. Vault 7 in 2017, WikiLeaks published thousands and thousands of documents classified far above top secret that were allegedly leaked by a CIA engineer by name of Joshua Schulte. Joshua Schulte made the very ill-advised decision to represent himself in court. And is now serving a sentence of 40 years without parole. He'll likely die in prison. But he released allegedly released these documents indicating, for example, that the CIA can take control of your call remotely. Why? To send you over a bridge or to send you into a tree or into a bridge abutment. He released information indicating that the CIA had successfully hacked into the classified systems of our allies and then left code behind. But the code was written either in Cyrillic or in Farsi. He said that the CIA had developed technology to take over smart TVs where they could turn a speaker into a microphone. How's that even possible? But the CIA is able to do it so that they can tap a room with the TV still being off. There are thousands of documents. All freely available now on the WikiLeaks website. These are documents that the CIA director at the time called the Crown Jewel of everything that the CIA was doing. Nearly a third of Gen Z favors the government installing surveillance cameras in homes. Cato Institute 2023 Central Bank Digital Currency National Survey. 2000 Americans, we ask respondents whether they favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence abuse and other illegal activity. Not surprisingly, few Americans only 14% support this idea. 75% would oppose government surveillance cameras inside the home, including 68% who strongly oppose and 10% don't have an opinion either way. This is presumably across the top. And then if we go down, I imagine they're going to break this out by age. 3 and 10 support. There it is. Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce those things? And that age 30% under 30, basically. 30% under 30. And the justification for this or the reason for this, I think is that generation has grown up with the trade that, well, I give my data to Facebook and Apple and these companies online. And for it, in return, I get services and stuff. So the means of exchange, the expected in their minds, there's a quid pro quo. And that's just that's how I've grown up. Yeah, like that's and already, I mean, part of it might be a kind of informational nihilism, like confidentiality fatalism, or it's like, dude, they've fucking, they've got it all already. Why not just put, you know, turn the camera around and ask yourself, though. What if you've got a secret boyfriend or girlfriend? What if you're calling the doctor to talk about, you know, maybe, maybe I've got herpes or something? My chronic flatulences. Oh, yeah, right. Exactly. What if you're, you know, calling an abortion provider? What if you need to get in touch with a psychiatrist? Like, is nothing sacred anymore? Is nothing private? Are we not entitled to any privacy in our own lives? That number shocks and sickens me to tell you the truth. Yeah, I mean, I wonder whether it's going to get better or worse. There is always the, there is the potential of that continuing and that sort of being passed down generation to generation or having some sort of a countervailing revolution that goes against it. Is brainwashing real? Like, what's true and fake about that idea? Operationally? Yeah. I mean, the CIA, the KGB, the Chinese, the North Koreans, they worked on brainwashing operations going back to the early 1950s. You know, this whole notion of a mentoring candidate, for example, this was based on, on fact, on truth. There was a, in the early 1950s, there was a source inside the Soviet Union that the CIA recorded, sorry, that the CIA recruited. And the source reported that the KGB was working on a brainwashing operation, something that would even allow them to control somebody remotely from a long distance. The CIA panicked at the notion. The truth is that there was no such KGB operation. There was a Chinese operation, but there was nothing that the KGB was doing. So the CIA decided it was behind the eight ball. It had to play catch-up and it then created and implemented what became known as MK Ultra. So MK Ultra ran from 1952 to 1975. It was a complete and utter failure. It resulted in the deaths of, you know, a number of people will never know what the real number was, where the CIA was dosing its own employees with LSD. It was dosing people in San Francisco with LSD and and pumping germs into the air to see who got upper respiratory infections. A CIA officer broke into a village bakery and in a little village in France and put LSD in the in the bakery's flower one morning and everybody in the literally everybody in the village when they ate their bread that morning went nuts on an LSD trip. And then they're like, okay, so what do we do with this information now? We have people jumping off, you know, roofs and jumping off balconies. What do we do? You call MK Ultra a failure. I mean, I was a failure. So it didn't, not only was it damaging, but it also didn't achieve anything. Literally nothing. I have had, do you know John Lyle, familiar with him? He wrote the Dirty Tricks Department and he also wrote, he's done a lot of research. He's here in Austin and he goes into the National Archives and the most ground floor research of anybody that I know around this. He's written two books on it, and he's reading. really great. Yeah, that was kind of his summary as well. You know, one of the real shames about this whole thing is in 1975 that the church committee Senator church told the CIA director do not destroy the documents and he went straight back to headquarters and told people shred everything. 15% of the documents survived. So that's what we know. That's all we know. 15%. Okay, that would suggest brainwashing isn't real. Right. It could. I believe that they tried, they tried to do it and it failed. Right. Yeah. We've got new technology now, new substances, more advanced understanding of human behavior. Everything's changed. Do you think that's unlocked some new capacities? Oh, probably. Probably. I tell you kind of a funny story. I've told once or twice in podcasts. Something that I witnessed at the CIA that I had never seen before and I've never seen since it was absolutely fascinating to me. In April of 2000, my next door neighbor was assassinated in Athens. He was the British defense attaché Brigadier General Stephen Saunders and he was shot and killed by an assassin for a group called revolutionary organization 17 November. It's kind of a long story and I'll skip the most of it. Several months after the assassination, we had what's called a walk-in. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks into an American embassy and says I have intelligence for information that I want to give to a CIA officer. It just so happened that day that nobody was available. And so an FBI agent in the embassy took the walk-in. She assessed that he was a nut and she said thank you very much and sent him on his way. And then she wrote up a little memo and sent it to us. We were fascinated by it. So we called him back. So a colleague of mine and I, he only spoke Greek this guy and this colleague of mine and I were the two Greek speakers. So we called him back and we said why don't you come on in and we'll have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. So he came in and we said what did you want to tell us? And he said that about 40 minutes after the assassination, the source happened to be driving down the national highway and he had to take a leak. So he gets off the exit and there's a little chapel off to the side of the road that's locked up and there's a large banyan tree in front of the chapel. He goes behind the banyan tree to take a leak. And as soon as he does that, a van pulls up and then a car pulls up behind the van. The back doors of the van open and there's a motorcycle in the back of the van. The man in the car says to the two men in the van, Aquamanzi, is he still alive? And one of the men says he should be dead by now. Okay, that's worth investigating. To me, the British defense attachees just been assassinated and this guy may have seen the assassins, right? And the guy in the van gave a brown paper bag to the guy in the car. Did it have the murder weapon in it? It might have worth investigating. This source was a simpleton. You could tell by his language, his grammar was terrible, he was uneducated, he was a farmer from central Greece. He just happened to be driving down the national highway. So we decided to debrief him as extensively as possible, but it was, which means debrief interview. But it was clear to us that the guy really was just a simpleton. He just couldn't really answer these questions. And so somebody at headquarters came up with the idea to hypnotize him. I had never participated in a hypnosis session before. So we flew him to a third country where we wouldn't be interrupted. And my Greek speaking colleague and I went to this country. We were met by a psychologist and a psychiatrist from headquarters. The psychiatrist was a sort of certified hypnotist. So he said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to turn all the lights off. We're going to have the guy sitting in a chair. We're going to make him as relaxed as we possibly can. And we're going to count backwards from 10. And when we get to one, he's going to be hypnotized. And then we can ask him questions. I said, okay, this seems kind of nuts to me, but okay. So we did that. He's in the chair sitting there very comfortably like this. The lights are all off. I'm counting backwards in Greek from 10. In the meantime, the hypnotist says, I want you to put your left arm up in the air and the guy does. So I go backwards 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And his hand goes like this. But his arm is up in the air. He kept his arm in the air for four and a half hours. I had never seen anything like it. There was no muscle strain in it. It was just frozen there for four and a half hours. So I'm asking him questions. What do you see? I see the van pulling up. How many people are in the van? I see two men. Now what's happening? The driver got out. He opened the back door of the van. What do you see inside the van? I see a motorcycle. Can you see the license plate on the van? And he goes like this. And then he reads the license plate. I write it down. I hand it to my colleague. He runs into the adjoining room. He calls Athens. Run a trace on this license plate. It's a freaking stolen police car license plate. Now how would he know that? The FBI thought we were nuts. What ended up happening? The guy, the source, so wanted to impress us that he started making things up in subsequent meetings. And we knew he was lying. But everything that he said in that initial hypnosis session turned out to be true. We ended up having to cut him off because he was just unreliable. But, you know, is brainwashing possible? Yeah, I think probably. Can you get anything out of it? Maybe something limited? If there's a way to harness it and focus it, then sure, maybe something good can happen. I wonder how many people could use that as an opportunity to sew discodes? Exactly in the other direction. And that's the flip side. That's why you have to have strong counterintelligence because you have to expect that your enemies are going to do exactly that. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard. So you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction. And this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with function, it is $365 per year, just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body. And right now we can get $25 off, bring it down to $340, get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health.com/modern wisdom. That's function health.com/modern wisdom. You know the story of the chicken farmer that brought down Adolf Hitler? Okay, Mark, can you just search chat GPT? Who was the chicken farmer that brought down Adolf Hitler? I'm pretty sure it was Juan Puyol as Spanish guy and he knew that he was going to be able to help the allies. So he walked into one of the embassies and they said we don't need you, we can't help you are a chicken farmer, this guy and he had some information or maybe he knew that he could get some and he goes back again and they say no and he goes back a third time and they say no and he goes fuck it, walks into the opposite, walks into the German one or the Italian one perhaps and spends a couple of years infiltrating them. You're thinking of Juan Puyol Garcia, better known by his British code name Agent Garbo, his story is remarkable because he essentially talked his way into becoming a spy, despite having no espionage. Puyol was a spaniard who trained at the Royal Paltry School. Oh my god. Unsuccessfully tried his hand at chicken farmers. I was an unsuccessful chicken farmer. Sorry I'd fleshed out his credentials too much. Literally the Spanish Civil War disliked both fascism and communism and developing the intense hatred of Hitler and Nazism. Later described his motivation as wanting to wage his own personal war against Hitler using his imagination. The crazy part is how he got the job. He and his wife initially approached the British and offered their services as a spy. The British rejected him rather than give up. Puyol decided he would make himself valuable enough that Britain couldn't ignore him so he called the German Embassy in Madrid and volunteered to spy for the Nazis. He pretended to be an enthusiastic Nazi supporter with connections that would allow him to travel to Britain. The Germans were skeptical. So Pyle forged documentation to make himself appear credible. Eventually, German intelligence recruited him, gave him money, secret codes, and invisible link, and instructed him to establish an espionage network in Britain, except he didn't go to Britain. He moved to Lisbon and began pretending he was operating from London using newspapers, magazines, maps, travel guides, and his imagination. He sent the Germans intelligence reports, supposedly gathered by an expanding network of informants. The network eventually contained 27 agents, none of whom existed. He invented personalities, jobs, relationships, and entire back stories for them. If one of his reports turned out to be wrong, he could conveniently blame the imaginary subordinate who would supply the information. The Germans became convinced that Pyle was running in a more enormous intelligence operation inside Britain. And that's when British intelligence finally started to notice him. Am I five initially intercepted his reports and thought there was an unidentified German spy operating in Britain. Eventually, they discovered what Pyle was doing and realized this seemingly crazy Spannid was extraordinarily talented. 1942 was brought to Britain and became a British double agent receiving the code named Garbo. He became central to Operation Fortitude, the Allied Deception surrounding D-Day. So he, the network reported where they were going to go. Fail check and farmer rejected by British intelligence volunteers to spy for Hitler, inventing an entire fake spy network becomes one of Germany's most trusted agents. Secretly works for Britain. Feeds Hitler falls information, plays a major role in D-Day. Oh my God, both sides decorated him. Dude. Oh my God, it's like this guy. It's one of the very few people in history who managed to receive military honors from both sides in the same war. What was the Israeli name, the Israeli guy's name, Levy, that became like the deputy defense minister of Syria? He was a, he was a Mossad agent. He was a barber and he kept offering and offering and offering. As Arabic was excellent and they kept saying, "No, no, no, finally, we're like, okay, okay." He was so good at throwing these parties in Damascus where senior government people would come, see their senior bath party officials would come, exiled Nazis would show up. And the way he got caught is he was secretly transmitting his reports back to Tel Aviv and there happened to be a KGB signal van driving through the neighborhood and they picked up the signal and they told the Syrians, there's a spy in this neighborhood and the Syrians got him. Now there are like town squares named after him and schools are named after him in Israel. It's the same thing. Enthusiasm counts for an awful lot. It can really compensate for ability. See, but part of the problem is you get so many people who want to do this kind of thing and they're legitimately insane. (laughing) It's that one out of a hundred, there's maybe-- You need to check it. You need the Cristiana Ronaldo of check and farm a secret agent. Exactly. Yeah, I think stuff like that's so fascinating to me. What do you make of the Beeper Pager? Operation. Absolutely brilliant. Well, you must have had a professional interest from the sidelines with regards. Give me your assessment of that particular operation. Well, the day that that operation took place, I got a call from a Russian television news network and they said, "Can you come on and talk about this "pager operation?" I said, "Sure." They said, "Can you say that it was a war crime "and a crime against humanity?" And I said, "Well, yeah, sure." Technically, it was a war crime, right? Technically, it was a crime against humanity because civilians were injured or killed, children were injured or killed. But this was an act of genius. I said, "Can you imagine the moving parts involved?" It took-- we learned later, it took a decade to come up with this idea. You had to control the entire supply chain over the course of something like five or six countries and then actually get the pages into the hands of Hezbollah operatives. And they said, "Yeah, but can you just say "that it was a war crime and a crime against humanity?" And I said, "No, I got explain what a brilliant operation it was." You can disagree with it and say this is a terrible thing all these people were killed. But this was genius. I said, "Intelligent services around the world "are going to study this for years to come." It was incredible. And they were like, "Thanks. "Well, what can I do with the task?" It's the equivalent of being asked to denounce Kanye West's political views but being unable to say that he doesn't make bangers. - Yes, exactly. - You know what I mean? So Jesus walks, it still crushes as a tune. If you hear that, you're like, I can't, I'm my feet are moving a little bit. You know, you can say what you like about the ethics but the end result, you know, they hit, they hit below their enemies up and they managed to do that. It was incredible. You know, it's one thing to locate to geo-locate a hisbola operative and then blow up the entire apartment block, right? Anybody can do that. It's an entirely different thing to take 10 years and take over a dozen companies in a half a dozen countries control the entire global supply chain and then have people on the ground to actually pass out the pages to the intended targets and then it works the way you wanted it to work. Incredible. - What is the operation that you think is the most impressive or complex that you can talk about? I'm presuming that would probably be up there. Are there any others that come to mind? - That's gotta be the most complex. The other one that comes to mind immediately is the hunt for a terrorist named Mir Amal Kanzi. Have you ever heard of him? One day in 1993, I used to take the back gate into the CIA because it was a little bit more convenient for me based on where my house was. And what you used to do back in those days is you just drive up and the CIA guard is going like this and you hold your badge up and then he goes like this, meaning come in, right? And you just drive in. Before 9/11, before terrorism, just come on it. You just hold your badge up. This morning, I drive into the CIA and the guard goes like this and I hold my badge up and then he kind of makes this shocked look and he runs out of his guard booth. And I was like, "What in the world is that about?" And I thought, "Eh, not my problem." And I drove to my parking space. I get to my desk and my outside line rings, my unclassified phone, which never rang. And it's my mother. And I said, "What's up?" And she said, "Are you okay?" And I said, "Of course I am. Why?" She said, "Somebody's at the front of the CIA shooting people." I was like, "What?" So I hang up, turn on CNN to see what the heck is happening right here at the front gate of the building. And a Pakistani man, by the name of Mir Amal Khansi, drove his car right up to the red light where you make the left to go into the main gate of CIA, put the car in park as other cars lined up behind him to make the left, got out with an AK-47 and just went car to car shooting people. He only shot men. He killed two, including a colleague of mine, Lansing Bennett, Lansing, and I were halfway through a paper together. And he just murdered him right there and broad daylight and cold blood. Shot a communicator, Frank Darling. And then shot five other men going door to door, car to car, calmly walked back up to his car, made a U-turn, drove straight to Dulles airport, got on a plane to Pakistan with no luggage, one-way ticket, and nobody ever questioned him. So then the hunt was on. I smile because the CIA, there was a psychologist in the Counterterrorism Center where I worked and I worked very closely with her. I liked her a lot. We did some cool stuff together. And she happened to be sitting on my promotion panel one day and they were deciding, you know, should we promote Karyaku or not promote Karyaku. They decided thank God to promote me. But she said it was because of her that they promoted me. She said John Karyaku will come up with 35 ideas for an operation. 30 of them are crazy, but five of them are really good. Well, as soon as Conzi killed, you know, Frank and Lansing, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center was happy to listen to any crazy idea. And so we all had crazy ideas. Things like renting an Ottoman fort on the top of a mountain in Pakistan so that we could intercept all of the telephone calls coming from the village below. Or setting up a fake radio station with a 600 foot tower so we could intercept everything in the entire region. To make a long story short, we found Conzi initially in a flea bag hotel in Quetta, Pakistan. We were able to recruit an agent who then lured him out. The CIA is not a law enforcement organization. It's an intelligence organization. So we had to tell the FBI, listen, And we found Conzi, here he is, the FBI. goes in and grabs him. And the reason I even raised that is because years later, a station chief for whom I was working had been part of the team that caught Conzi. And he was still angry 10 years later because time magazine came out with a picture on the cover of two FBI agents leading Conzi away in handcuffs. And the headline on the cover was, how the FBI got its man. And it's like they had nothing to do with getting Conzi. We got Conzi. But that was one of the most complicated and sophisticated operations I ever heard of. Can you talk about how it happened? It was not really. It's a combination of those intercepts in order to sort of narrow the field and then human intelligence. And most people in countries like that are willing to sell their mothers for $500. There's an old joke at the CIA, a post 9/11 joke that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And that's what we did. What is the prevalence or legality of taking someone who has committed an act on your home turf from yeah, either a third party country that is not their home destination or you or from their home destination because that's an easy one. Okay. In the mid 1980s during the Reagan presidency, a DE agent named Kiki Kamarena was kidnapped and tortured and executed by a Mexican drug cartel. Congress acted very quickly in response to that terrible incident. And Congress passed a law making it legal for the United States to kidnap foreign nationals extra judicially and bring them back to the United States to face trial. So even though it's a violation of the law in all of those other countries, we don't care. I mean, like it legal here, but it's not happening here. Right. It's happening there. Yes. Do you think it's more? Is it more or less illegal to do it in a third party nation or to do it in a personal home nation? That's the debate. So there's a difference between rendition and extraordinary rendition. Do you know the two? I mean, when I think rendition, I think of the play. Oh no. So a rendition is let's say I'm a CIA officer in Pakistan. Okay. And you are an Egyptian and you are a member of al-Qaeda. Okay. I break down the door of your safehouse one night at 2 a.m. and I grab you. And I say, Oh, your Egyptian and you're here without a visa. I send you back to Egypt. And I don't care what they do to you. That's a rendition. An extraordinary rendition is nasty. I break down the door of that safehouse and I grab you and I say, Oh, your Egyptian. And I send you to Syria, Morocco, Algeria, anywhere in the world I want. And nobody's ever going to have any idea what happened to you. And they're going to torture you until you take your last breath. And then they're going to send us a transcript of everything you said up until you took your last breath. That's an extraordinary rendition. That again is the nation. That is the enforcement organization of the nation that the person is in. Because I can add an additional level of complexity here. Let's say that the Egyptian is in Pakistan. Right. But the people who have an issue with him aren't the Pakistanis. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's it. Right. Right. Right. And in most cases, the Pakistanis don't have an issue with them. But just Pakistan not have an issue with America going and taking people that are inside of their country. No, because remember intelligence is a cash business. And there is a lot of cash changing hands. So we say, Listen, we have this giant sack of money in the van outside. You don't care if we take these Egyptians to you. And who's being paid off local low level high level? No, it goes all the way up to the very top. When we when we captured Abu Zubayda, which is kind of what I became known for, there was a $10 million bounty on Abu Zubayda. There was $25 million bounty on you, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And the Pakistani intelligence service built a new headquarters with the cash even at a lower level. I was working with this Brigadier General General Mohammed. And this guy, what a piece of work this guy was. We'd be ready to do the operation. And he'd say, uh, before we go, um, can we keep all those night vision goggles? And I'm like, hmm, sure, just, sure, just keep them. Now, can we go do the raid? Um, the guns that you're using bottering before you get started? Yeah, those nine millimeters, we, we have 38s. We could really use those nine millimeters. Okay, I'll get you some nine millimeters. Can we go do the operation now, please? The carpeting in my office. He actually said that to me. And I said, General, I'm a generous person by nature, but don't shake me down. And then we went out and did our operation carpeting for your office. I did get him a refrigerator at one point. That's nice. That's good. You just wouldn't leave me alone. You're a good friend. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that I can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of momentous. That co-founder Jeff Bay has played in the NFL and saw first hand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built momentous around a higher standard. Every product from momentous uses evidence, back ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. So why momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms? It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, momentous office, a 30-day moneyback guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day moneyback guarantee by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to livemomentis.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom. Check out at liveemomentious.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. Check out. It's interesting when I said most complex, impressive intelligence actions of all time that you didn't say 9/11. Oh, I thought you meant CIA operations. 9/11 was incredible. And 9/11 really came out of something earlier called the Bajinka plot. You ever heard of Bajinka? B-O-J-I-N-K-A. So in 1996 in Manila, a very bad man who we knew only as Muhtar, M-U-K-H-T-A-R, was plotting something that became known as the Bajinka plot. The idea was to hijack 14747 jumbo jets from Manila and to fly them into buildings all the way up and down the west coast of the United States. Crazy as it sounds, Muhtar went out one day to get lunch. And while he was out at lunch, his cleaning lady went to the apartment to clean it. And she sees all these plans and photographs and drawings laid out on the dining room table. And she said, this looks like a terrorist plot. And she calls the Manila Police Department. They come. We presume that Muhtar saw what was happening and ran away. He just absconded. The police came and recognized it as a potential terrorist plot. They called the Philippine Intelligence Service who then called the CIA. And the CIA came in and said, oh my god, this was a massive terrorist attack being laid out. So we knew that there was this bad man out there named Muhtar who meant us harm and intended to use aircraft as missiles. After we captured Abu Zubayda, one of the two most important things that he told us was the identity of Muhtar. His debriefer, his interrogator Ali Soufan and FBI agent asked him about Muhtar and Abu Zubayda actually laughed and said, you don't know who Muhtar is? And Ali said no. And Abu Zubayda said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. I was at headquarters that day and the word came in. Like, we know who it is. This is the mastermind of 9/11. So everybody was running name traces. We'd never heard of him. We didn't have anything. There was literally no file on anybody named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. And then the FBI called us and said, oh my god, he went to high school in North Carolina. And we were like, what? He lived here. And they stayed and went to like North Carolina A&M or A&T or whatever it is. And then self-radicalized and moved overseas and started plotting what became 9/11. It was ingenious and talk about a lot of moving parts. Where was he from originally? What was his birthplace? Where was his birthplace? Was it Kuwait? Kuwait, I was going to say Saudi Arabia. I was a beta with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, Kuwait. He's a Palestinian born in Kuwait. That's my recollection. But yeah, when I think of Pakistani born again. If I expand the intelligence operation outside of the CIA, is there anything else? Obviously, the Pager thing was incredible. Anything else come to mind that would make your greatest hits of all time? Yeah, the location and kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. I don't know. The Nazi war criminal. He escaped from Germany and in the early 1960s, the Israelis found him working in a car factory in Argentina and they kidnapped him, took him all the way back to Israel, put him on trial. It was a televised trial. They forced him to wear his old Nazi uniform during the trial and he was proud to put it on. He was convicted and then he was hanged. That was an incredible operation, especially when at the time the Israelis didn't even have diplomatic relations with Argentina. How are you going to get a plane in there, kidnapped this guy? Might have to do it with Maduro. Yeah. Well, that's with the entire force of the US Army behind you. It's interesting. There seems to be broadly two categories of these kinds of operations and I've had people like DJ Shipley on the show, you know, ex-seals and some are some are brain and some are on and some are precise and surgical and well thought out in advance and sort of a co-without much fanfare and then others are much more kinetic and I think the Maduro one is an example of something that's surgical but incredibly kinetic as opposed to, we lured Maduro to a formula one driver's house that he's a massive fan of and then secretly drugged him with this thing that was in a vape that he smoked and I got pa pa pa. Well, you know the story of Carlos the jackal. Have you heard of Carlos the jackal? He is funny to me. I teach a graduate school course at the University of Salamanca in Spain. They have an intelligent studies program. I teach a course on the history of terrorism and literally none of my students have ever heard of Carlos the jackal. The Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and 80s. His name was Iliac Ramirez Sanchez. He was a Venezuelan national and ardent communist, Marxist-Lanonist, but he was the Osama bin Laden of the 70s and 80s. To the point where he did one of the baldiest operations in modern history, Opec was meeting in Vienna, right? So he and his gang go to Vienna and they kidnapped every minister of oil from every Opec country. Kidnapped the entire Opec leadership and then held them for billions of dollars in ransom, which the Saudis gladly paid. And then they just scattered Algiers, Benghazi, you know, all over the world, Moscow, Baghdad. Anyway, Carlos was a ghost. We searched the world for Carlos and we had no idea where he was. We assumed that he was either in Iraq or in Libya or maybe Algeria, we weren't sure. There was a legendary CIA contractor named Billy Waw. Billy was one of the most highly decorated war heroes in American history, fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, doing the things that years later people don't talk about. And then he became a CIA contractor. I was blessed to work with Billy Waw in the Middle East before 9/11. We did some really fun stuff together, but the guy's legendary seven purple hearts, seven. His license plate was a personalized Florida plate that said seven hits and had the purple heart next to it. So Billy was working contract at the agency, running surveillance teams. And he happened to be in Khartoum, Sudan, working for Kofra Black, who became the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center and then became ambassador Kofra Black, the special envoy for counterterrorism. Billy takes a day off, which was very rare. And he and a colleague go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables for the week. And they're there in the vegetable soup. And Billy says to his colleague, "That's Carlos the Jackal." And the guy's like, "Get out of here." He said, "I'm telling you that's Carlos the Jackal." And he runs back to the station. The way he told the story, Kofra was on an elliptical machine in his office. And Billy says, "Kofra, I just saw Carlos the Jackal. In the vegetable soup." And Kofra says, "Get the fuck out of here, Carlos the Jackal." And he said, "I'm telling you, it was Carlos." And he said, "Well, I can't go back to headquarters and say we saw Carlos the Jackal in the vegetable market and he walked away. You got to go take a picture of him." Billy went back to the vegetable market every day for a month. And then he sees him again. So real quickly he paid these two Sudanese guys a couple of dollars to get into a fist fight. In the Middle East and in North Africa, fights are so rare that as soon as one happens, everybody just forms a circle around them to watch. Carlos runs right up to the circle and he's craning his neck to see if he can watch the fight and Billy has his camera. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And then they do surveillance on him and they follow him all the way back to his house. Headquarters confirms, oh my god, it's Carlos the jackal. So they come up with this idea. They break into his house and they put ground glass in his toothpaste. And then they recruit his dentist. And so when he brushes his teeth, his gums start bleeding. He says, oh my god, I must have gum disease. I should go to the dentist. Go to the dentist. The dentist gives him some gas, puts him out. And when he wakes up, he's on a French military transport plane on his way back to Paris to face seven counts of murder. And he is still in prison today. Wow. Wow. It takes patience. So John Lyle's first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, one of the psychological assessments that was done of Hitler was that he had a very fragile hold on his masculinity. I don't think that they needed to get a psychiatrist in to work that one out. But the one testicle in the whole thing. They had this idea that if they could change Hitler's hormonal profile, that his hold of his masculinity would be so tenuous that he would go completely insane and that the allies would win the war. So they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that were put into the food at the eagle's nest. Oh, yeah. And they found him, recruited him and gave him female sex hormones to inject into the vegetables. And the goal was, Hitler's going to ingest these and his voice will go soprano and his moustache will fall out and it'll grow man boobs and then we'll something, something, something will win the war. I don't know what the something, something, something was, but they don't know whether or not that worked. But that was, yeah, some of the inventive, as you said, it's kind of a shame. The whole torture principles prison thing because the CIA actually sounds like quite a lot of fun. Oh, my God. I have to admit, I loved every second of it. I went to 72 countries when I was at the agency. I was in the room with kings and presidents and prime ministers and did things that, you know, I still can't talk about. It was exciting every single day. I remember, especially when I was working on Greek terrorism, I couldn't wait to get to the office in the morning. I couldn't wait to see what I had missed overnight. It was so exciting. Just loved it. What do you think is the most effective mass behavioral engineering campaign in history? Oh, that's a hard one. The most successful mass behavioral campaign. You know, frankly, I think it probably has to be passage of the Patriot Act because it convinced all Americans to just voluntarily give up their civil liberties. Just like that. And what did we complain about having to take our shoes off at the airport? We didn't complain about the fact that we were, you know, losing our civil liberties, the FBI could go, you know, see what books you take. out of the library without a warrant or intercept your emails or your text messages or your phone calls without a warrant. They just have to go to the ISP and say give it to us. Or even more cynically, just buy it, just buy the metadata from one of these collection companies. How does mass persuasion work at scale? Mass persuasion at scale was really a function of the early Cold War era. The first covert action program that the CIA ever implemented was to essentially steal the 1949 Italian elections away from the communists. The communists were ahead in all the polls. It's not a very sophisticated operation. All they did is they gave $150,000 to the Christian Democratic Party and told them to spend it by renting journalists. And then the CIA would write up pro-conservative articles and the journalists would place them in these newspapers. And then the communists lost. That was it. But that was the first one. It's really all about the media. I'll tell you something funny. When I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, years after I left the agency, I went to Yemen and I used to go to Yemen with some regularity. So this was in 2011 just before we closed the American Embassy there. And I had a meeting with the defense attaché. Not only the agency people would meet with me, but that was fine. I didn't care. So I met with the State Department of People and the defense people. So the defense attaché was so excited to tell me about this cool siop that he was running psychological operation. It's a propaganda operation. I was like, okay, I'm all ears. And I was working for John Kerry at the time. I said, he's going to be happy to hear whatever successes you've had. So he said, we're running a pirate radio station. I said, okay. So what are you doing with it? And he says, we're playing jazz. And then we interspersed the jazz with Colin shows. So we're getting young Yemeni men to like jazz, which makes them like the United States. And then when they call in to talk about the jazz, the host says pro-American things. I said, I'm sorry, that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard of in my life. How much are you spending on that? Oh, 150,000. I'm like, yeah, I think they're not going to like you spending 150,000 on that. So sometimes it works. Most of the time it doesn't. Usually it's money down the drain. But once in a while you get lucky. Have you seen Mark, can you look for, was it Nestle? That coffee wasn't selling in a country in the far east or some sort of confectionery wasn't selling in a country in the far east. So they changed the flavor of the children's sweets so that when those children would grow up to become adults, they would love the flavor. It would be reminiscent of their childhood. Oh my god. And yeah, there was they were really struggling to sell. I want to say it was coffee, maybe caramel or something like that. And by by seeding it to children, they knew they were able to project two decades out into the future when you were in charge of your own groceries. Talk about the long view. You would you would be able to come up with that. What have you got, Mark? Japan. Here's, there it is. Oh my god. Here's how Nestle convinced people in Japan to drink coffee. In the 1970s, Nestle were hustling to sell coffee in Japan. And this was a fascinating time for Japanese cuisine. Japan had recently established its first McDonald's franchise, style of Japanese food that plays off popular Western dishes, which dishes had been developing for decades. This was the moment for Western companies looking to market their products in the East Asian country. But Nestle wasn't finding much success, according to better marketing. Unlike coffee-centric countries, like Italy or Costa Rica, Japan has a rich history with tea, not coffee. So Nestle enlisted the help of Clotere Rapai, a psychoanalyst. Nestle, what can I do for Nestle? Rapai responded, according to PBS, he'd spent years working with children who had autism, a far cry from corporate marketing. Nevertheless, he headed to Japan where his expertise in psychology and memory allowed him to crack an important code. When consumers have a child and memory of something like chicken noodle soup on mum's hot cup of coffee, that long embedded memory creates a bond between the consumer and the product. He deduced, when he interviewed and tested consumers in Japan, he found many didn't have fun childhood memories of coffee. Tea simply wasn't as a much larger part of the culture, the aim to change it. Nestle engaged in a years-long campaign at Start With Sweet, coffee-flavored products for kids. We started, for example, with a dessert for children, with a taste of coffee, we created an imprint of the taste of coffee. However, it's unclear whether Nestle whipped out the coffee-flavored Kit-Cat bars immediately. They most likely started with other coffee-flavored candies judging from his PBS interview. While Japan's Kit-Cat market is off the charts intricate and popular, the Japanese flavors didn't really emerge until the 2000s, according to the New York Times. It's more likely that espresso and cafeo-like Kit-Cats popped up around that time, still, while there may have not been Kit-Cats Nestle's coffee-flavored desserts made a difference, according to better marketing, those early coffee-flavored treats likely created an imprint on children, and by the time those young consumers were older and interested in a real drink, Nestle coffee was ready for them. By 2014, the coffee market was hitting record highs in Japan, according to the Japan Times, and by the time coffee-flavored Kit-Cats were introduced, consumers were well acquainted with the drinking flavor. We can thank Clotere Rapai, who knew early on that food and memory go hand in hand. Incredible. Not cool. Incredible. You know, in the 70s, in the mid-70s, we got to a point in the United States where more people were drinking Coca-Cola in the morning than were drinking coffee. The reason why that was happening is because most coffee producers used something called Robusto Beans. Robusto Beans have that magnificent coffee smell, but they taste like shit. It's a rabbit cup beans that have the great coffee taste, but don't smell as wonderful as Robusto Beans. They had to switch to the more expensive arabica to save the coffee industry here in the United States. How paranoid does making working for the CIA make you? Oh, you have to be paranoid. I've been out of the CIA for 22 years. I've been out longer than I was in, and I still am constantly scanning my side view and review mirrors looking for surveillance. I still couch my my language in emails and in text messages. I use encrypted apps for what that's where they all have backdoors in them anyway, but I figure, you know, why make it easy? So yeah, it's sort of instilled in you. You never lose it. I've noticed that you haven't taken a drink of anything today. Is that part of that? Yeah, actually, it's funny. It's funny that you even noticed one of the very first things that they taught us very first like on the first day of operational training is to always people before you go into a meeting so that you don't have to get up and excuse yourself and disrupt the meeting. And also it's distracting if I'm opening cans and I'm drinking a sip over here and maybe I'm making a little ring on the table over there. And no, this way I can look you directly in the eye. We can carry on our business and then I can drink something later. I've had a lot of people on the communications experts that are talking about the effectiveness of understanding someone detecting, lying manipulation stuff like that. What's realistic and true about working out whether someone's lying to you? You know, I wrote a book called the CIA Insiders Guide to lying and lie detection. It's funny, too. I'm not the expert. That wasn't the focus of my career, but it's something that I knew as much as any other normal CIA officer. It's almost it's little things. It's the frequency of blinking, for example. When people lie, they tend to blink less frequently. When you ask somebody a question and they look up as they're thinking about it, they're likely going to give you the truth. If they look down, that could be an indication of lying. It's a lot of different things. One of the things that they showed us that was so fascinating to me at the time. You remember Whitey Bulger, the Boston mob leader. Whitey Bulger had two brothers. One was the president of the University of Massachusetts. Before that, he had been the president of the Massachusetts State Senate. His other brother was a state judge. These are like serious people. One of the things the CIA showed us in training was a video of the brother who was the president of the university. At the time, he was the president of the Senate being grilled before Congress about whether or not he had any contact with his brothers. Brother was on the run, right on the lamb. He kept saying, "No, just staring. No, I've had no contact with my brother. I haven't seen my brother in years." He's embarrassed our family. We're ashamed of him. I don't know where he is, but not blinking at all. And so they would show us this video of his testimony as an example of what to look for in a liar. I mentioned to you walk-ins earlier. When I was overseas operationally, not a single day went by, that I didn't have a walk-in, not a single day. And the curse for me was that I spoke both Greek and Arabic, right? And so there was one time where I had flown in from Yemen and and I was exhausted. And I land at like 10 o'clock in the morning at Dulles Airport and I thought, I'm going to go into the office. I'm not going to tell anybody that I'm there. I'm just going to do my accounting paperwork and then I'm going to go home and go to sleep. So I go in and my boss sees me and he says, hey, I didn't know you were back and I said, I'm actually not back. I just came in just to do my paperwork and then I'm going to go home and go to sleep. And he goes, okay, can you go to Sudan? And I said, Sudan, I said, I was just there one hour from Sudan. I said, what do you want me to do in Sudan? And he said, well, they they have a walk-in and they don't have any Arabic speakers right now. I said, when? When do you want me to go to Sudan? And he says, like three o'clock? And I was like, are you are you kidding me? I said, all right, let me just at least go do some laundry. And I went home. I did the laundry, repacked, went back to the airport and flew to Sudan. Anyway, not a day went by that I didn't have a walk-in and that's the best possible on the job training for determining who's lying and who's telling the truth. Not like I said earlier, 95%. There were there've been actual studies done internally, 95% of walk-ins or crazy people. I had a guy, guy came in in a in a Greek naval officer's uniform. So I was like, oh, okay, serious guy. He says, I know, I know who's the the head of revolutionary organization, 17th of November. I was like, great, we've been working on that since 1975. Lay it out. Well, is there a reward? I said, yeah, there's a $10 million reward. And if your information is correct and we're able to to grab him, I'll give it to you anyway you want it. Cash, gold, diamonds, I don't care. He says, it's actually a triumvirate of people. I said, really? And who is this triumvirate of people? Queen Elizabeth, Jacques Cousteau, and Frank Sinatra. I said, okay, and how did you determine this? And he said that an angel told him in a vision. I was like, okay, thanks for coming in. But that was happening every single day. So I did against investigating that one. Yeah, you have to write it up in case he walks into another American embassy somewhere and they know off the bat that he's in nut, but of the remaining 5% about 1% are what are called intelligence brokers. They actually do have a little nugget of intelligence. Maybe they overheard it in a restaurant where they've got a cousin who's a member of some group someplace. And so they'll come to you and give it to you and then they want $100. Give me $100 and you give me $100. But then they go to the British embassy and then the French embassy and then the Chinese and then the Russians and then anybody else they think is going to give. And then that's a handsome man's salary in many countries. Then about 2% are what are called probes. The Iranians, the North Koreans, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, they'll send people into American embassies to pretend to be walkings just to look to see where the cameras are. Are you armed? Are the windows bulletproof? Where's the steel reinforced hard line door? Just in case they decide to attack the embassy later, they can identify a point of vulnerability. And then that last 1% is the real deal. In training, our instructors taught us that the greatest sources ever recruited in the history of the CIA were walkings because the chief of the KGB's, you know, counterintelligence directorate is not going to come up to you and introduce himself at a diplomatic cocktail party, right? He's going to go on vacation somewhere and he's going to walk into the American embassy in, say, Mexico City or the director of the North Korean nuclear program. You're not going to bump into him in a restaurant somewhere, but he's going to go to some seminar in Vienna and he's going to sneak out of his hotel in the middle of the night and go to the embassy and there's going to be a marine there on duty 24 hours and he's going to leave a phone number and those will be the best recruitment of your entire life. You see the story of when Kim Jong-il and his son went to Disneyland. Yes. Can you pull up through how crazy is that? Pull up the passports behind that. Like they have fake passports. They wanted to go to Disneyland real bad and, you know, they actually want fake passports so that they could. I mean, look, you've not got Disneyland in North Korea. Say what you want about the country of America, even if they are your model enemy, they make great theme parks. And that's why he's such a film buff. He and his father both loved American movies. Look at that. Look at that. That is ridiculous. The most fucking Kim Jong-il-looking photo as well. Josie Pwag. Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo. Is that what they're saying they're from? Yeah. Empty of Brazil in Prague. So it's the Brazilian embassy in the Czech Republic. How do you like that? Unreal. So what are some of the best ways to get the truth out of someone? You're speaking to them. You want to try and determine whether or not they know something about something. What are some of the best tactics? It's not very sexy, but it's very simply to treat a person with respect and kindness and show great patience. I'll give you an example. The CIA's torture program was just to turn people's lives into hell, a living hell. The FBI modus operandi is completely different. The CIA and the FBI hated each other for decades and decades, hated each other. That's why we had 9/11 because they couldn't even share information with one another. But the FBI is really, really good at interrogation and they have been since the 1940s. The FBI method and they train their officers very well in this method is to simply engage people in a friendly conversation. You treat them with respect, even if they're the enemy, you know, the enemy or a terrorist. You offer them a cigarette or an apple or if they're really cooperative, a piece of paper and a pen to write to their parents or whatever. Sometimes it takes weeks or months, but eventually they're going to open up to you if you are able to establish that relationship. The very first person that I caught in Pakistan was a Jordanian national who had escaped into Pakistan from Torah Borah when we started bombing it. And I cabled headquarters beforehand and I said, I'm not trained in interrogation. I'm not an interrogator. We didn't have interrogators at the CIA. That was the FBI's job. We're in charge now, just interrogate him, however you want. And I was like, okay, all right, well, I'm going to wing it. We have the guy chained to an eyeball in the table. So he's got handcuffs on and the cuffs are chained to the table. And I said to him, what's your name? I knew what his name was. I knew the answers to most of the questions because we had confiscated his paperwork and his passport and all that stuff. And it was a legitimate Jordanian passport. So he answered my questions. I laid out a map of the Afghan Pakistan border. And I told him to show me exactly how he got from Torah Borah to I think we caught him in like Raoul Pindi or something like that. I don't remember anymore. I knew I knew how he got there. I mean, those mountains are so forbidding and so steep. There's pretty much only one way to get in. We called it the rat line. And so he showed me the rat line. I knew he was telling the truth. And I said, what in the world were you doing in Afghanistan? You're Jordanian national. You don't speak any of Afghanistan's languages. You don't have a visa of valid visa to be in Afghanistan. What in the world were you doing there? And he said, "I went to Afghanistan in 1996 to open an orphanage." He said, "I'm a very pious practicing Muslim." And there were so many children who were orphaned from the Soviet invasion and occupation. I wanted to do something to help the children. So as he's saying all this, I have colleagues that are running outside, cabling back to wherever the American Embassy in Aman or CIA headquarters or calling the Jordanian Embassy in Islamabad to ask, "Is this stuff true? Could we identify the orphanage? Is it true that he left Jordan on this date and arrived in Afghanistan on that date?" "Everything this guy told me was true." So finally I said to him, "I have one last question for you." I said, "I know that what you've told me is true. And I want to thank you for being honest with me." But why were you honest with me? Why did you tell me the truth? And he said to me, like I'm nuts, he's like, "I'm your prisoner. It doesn't help me in any way to lie to you." And I thought, "That's a legit answer." And then he says, "Now may I ask you a question?" And I said, "Sure." And he says, "I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam and I will be your Godfather." I said, "Thank you for that. I'm a Christian, but I appreciate the gesture. I really do." I said, "I've studied Islam. I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. I speak Arabic. I appreciate the gesture." And I said, "And I wish you the very best." But he was telling the truth about that orphanage. He was telling the truth about being caught up and he's like, "Oh crap. Now the Americans are bombing. Now what am I going to do?" I got to run. It's all these al-Qaeda guys. They're going to think I'm al-Qaeda, which we did. But we ended up, rather than sending him to Guantanamo, we just sent him back to Jordan. I had, well, I really should not forget this guy's name. Not the Manchurian. What is the country in the middle of the Middle East, the beginning that begins with man? God damn it. It was the dude that had some of Bin Laden's cousins number on his phone. He was detained in Guantanamo. They made an in-time movie about him. Oh, the Martini. The Martini. Yeah. That's a good friend of mine. Yes. He's been on the show. A friend of the show. He's great. He was a long time ago. I called him last time I talked to him. He lectured to my class at Salamankhan. I said, "Mahamudu, you are the Martin Luther King of our time." Crazy. Absolutely crazy. I mean, wild story. Do you ever tell you about how much he needed the bathroom on the flight over? We put diapers on them, but no. He said that he couldn't go. I don't know why, but he had the fullest bladder. He said the most pain of the entire everything, the mock executions, the sustained one. The most pain was the fact that I don't think he'd been able to go to the bathroom for a very long time and he was strapped in some plane and then taken out there. Maybe the angle that he was at, he couldn't or something like that, and that was one of the things that stuck in his mind. That poor guy. How he is able to give 14 years in Guantanamo. 14 years in Guantanamo, like three or four mock executions, sexual, completely innocent. Yeah, just the most innocent and now just chill. A beautiful human being. He's married now, he has kids. Unreal. Yeah. Does torture work for getting the truth out of people? It does not. It 100% proven fact it does not work. Why doesn't it work? Because the person being tortured will tell you anything he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing them. John McCain, for example, when he was tortured in the beginning of his torture, they kept asking him, who were the members of his unit? And he gave them the names of the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. They didn't know. They just said, "Good, good, you get an extra ration today, extra food for cooperating. He didn't cooperate, but they will tell you anything." And the thing is, then you have to take all this garbage that they gave you. Give it to your analysts who have to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's going to take six months for them to go through all this nonsense. And by then, the bomb that you're trying to disrupt has already gone off. Would torture be worth it if it led to the discovery of someone like Asama Bin Laden? See, it comes back to that issue that we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation. Maybe, but is that the country we want to be? Listen, if you want to be a country that tortures best of luck, but you have to change the law because torture is illegal. I don't care what John you and J. Byby and Dick Cheney say. It's illegal. We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically forbids exactly those techniques that the CIA used. We have the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which not only are we signatories to, we wrote it. We wrote it. And then like magic in 2002. It's all illegal because we're the good guys. So we say it is. I'll tell you another thing. In 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had water boarded American POWs. That was a death penalty offense to water board somebody. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that day ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted on a charge of torture and sentenced to 20 years at 4/11 worth. The law never changed. We changed. So if you want to torture, if that's the country you want to be, okay, you can have that position, but you have to change the law. And again, we're either going to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about, or we're not. We're either going to be the country that writes the human rights reports for Congress every year, for every country in the world with which we have diplomatic relations, or we're not. But we can't pretend to be one while really being the other. Is there a level of either threat or aggression and unfairness in interrogation from other countries? Is there a level of intensity that that could get to that would cause you to think, okay, we actually need to take the gloves off with regards to some of the rules that we're adhering to if everybody else is not? I think it was appropriate to take the gloves off after 9/11, but I think that there's disconnect here over what taking the gloves off meant. There's a long-standing American policy enshrined in an executive order that says that the CIA may kill a foreign national if he presents a clear and present danger. That's the terminology to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation. So if you are or some have been laden, or I'm in Zawahdi, or Haddad Sheikh Mohammed, you pose a clear and present danger. And so we need to kill you to protect Americans. But if we have the wherewithal to capture you, you have the same constitutional rights that I have, right? And so if you are the bad guy that we say you are, then you have to face your accusers in a court of law and be judged by a juror of your peers. Just because I don't like your politics doesn't mean that I can do mock executions on you and waterboard you and put you in a coffin for two weeks with a box of cockroaches or put a drill against your head or keep you naked and change to an eyeball in the ceiling or throw ice water on you every hour until you die of hypothermia. The law doesn't say you can do those things. So we've got to respect the rule of law and we have to have appropriate congressional oversight because the CIA will push and push and push the envelope until somebody pushes back. But the problem is after 9/11 nobody pushed back. What are some of the physical and psychological techniques that get used, have been used during interrogations that normal people would find most shocking? I think there are three that had been approved by the Justice Department that would be shocking to people. There were myriad that were not approved that the CIA did anyway, right? We can have a whole separate conversation about that. But the three worst ones, waterboarding gets all of the press, right? Waterboarding is you're on a board, you're strapped to the board, your feet are slightly as elevated. So your head is lower, right? You're at an angle. They put some kind of material in your mouth, cloth, burlap, something like that, a pillowcase, whatever. And then they pour water on your face. It gives you a sense that you're drowning. In fact, enough water gets through the material that you do drown. I was a beta actually drowned. His heart stopped. He had to be revived in order for him to be tortured again. That's not. You can't do that. That's not legal. But waterboarding is kind of the famous one. There were two that I always believed were worse than waterboarding. One was called the cold cell. Your strip naked, your chain to an eyeball in the ceiling. So you can't sit or kneel or lay or get in any comfortable position. And every hour, your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is really cold. And then every hour a CIA officer comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you. We murdered people with that technique, murdered them. And the justice department never allowed anybody to murder a prisoner. That was never approved. The third one was sleep deprivation. I feel very strongly about this one. When someone leaked that the CIA was carrying out sleep deprivation against prisoners of the Secretary of Defense at the time, Don Rumsfeld mocked the revelation in the press. And he said sleep deprivation. He said, I don't even have a chair in my office. I have a stand up desk. And I'm well known for working 24 hours at a time. But we're not talking about 24 hours in your Pentagon office with your secretary bringing your meals in. The American Psychological Association has published studies showing that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. Right? They begin to die at day nine. Their organs begin to shut down. The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for 12 days. You can't live for 12 days with no sleep. And industrial strength lights on you and music playing just on a loop at a volume of 11, like, you know, Gs 24, seven with, you know, air splitting volume. You can't survive that. You lose your mind. And then your organs stop working. I remember when I was after Pakistan, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, you get to see literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. And we got a cable one day from the secret prison. And it said, Hey, we were interrogating Ahmed Schmachmet over here. And unfortunately, he didn't survive the interrogation. And I was like, ah, huh. And now what are you going to do? And so the counterterrorism center sends a cable out saying, well, dig a ditch behind the building and put them in the ditch. What are we going to do? Just as department never authorized that. What are you going to write yourself out to the justice department now? You just murdered this prisoner in cold blood. And then you put them in a ditch that you dug behind the building. What are you going to do? You're going to send a memo to John, you and J by be saying, Oh, by the way, listen, you know, it didn't work out like we thought I was going to on paper. But that's the country we became after 9/11. What about the unauthorized ones? Oh, well, those were just, I'm, most of them were laid out in the, in the Senate torture report. I was a beta, for example, had this irrational fear of, of bugs. And so they put a diaper on him. They put him in a coffin. They dumped a box of cockroaches in on him. And then they closed the coffin, you know, and you got a fan in there to give him oxygen. You can hear him screaming, screaming. They did it just to make him insane. Another one was called walling. Walling was kind of a big deal. And it was controversial at headquarters, because the idea was, the idea was you start at the least offensive technique. The least offensive technique was called the attention grab or the attention grasp where I grab you with a shirt. And I say, answer my questions. You, that's not torture. The next one was the belly slap. Okay. Makes that cracking sound. It's a little bit humiliating. Makes a hand print. That's not torture either. The next one was the attention slap, which was a slap across the face. Not a hard one that's going to break your jaw. A slap. It was meant to humiliate. Then there was forced nudity, right? And they graduated up to what was supposed to be the harshest penalty of them all, waterboarding. And I told you, there were those others that were worse than waterboarding. But then you had the bugs in the coffin. You had stress positions. You had walling. Walling was, I grabbed you by the shirt and I slam you into the wall behind you. Now, what they were supposed to do is to roll up a bath towel and put it around your neck. And the wall had to be made of plywood. So it had a little bit of give to it. So I slam you against the wall. But the towel prevents you from getting whiplash. Okay. Except they didn't use a towel. And the wall was made of concrete block. And the next thing you know, they all have traumatic brain injuries. And now they can't participate in their own defenses because they're like grueling and, you know, what is that? Nobody said you could give them brain damage and smash their skulls into the wall. Just a couple of weeks ago, the judge of the military tribunal at Guantanamo threw out Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's confession and two other co-defendants throughout their confessions because they were, they were gathered as a result of CIA torture. Okay. Now, what do you do? Now you can't try them. They're never going to get out because they have no rights at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court's already decided that. But there will never be closure for the 9/11 families. These guys will never be executed because the CIA tortured them. What do you think's going on in Guantanamo now? Pretty much nothing. They're down to a small fraction of the number of people. I think altogether it's like, it was 34 for a while. It's lower than that. Now it's like 17. What was it at its max? 770. And almost every single one of them was innocent. The place was full. Get this. Let's say you and I live in the same village in Afghanistan. And you borrow money from me. You don't want to pay it back. So you go to the Americans and you say, "Hey, that guy, Al-Qaeda." And so the CIA grabs me in the middle of the night. I disappeared at Guantanamo. Nobody ever sees me again. And you don't have to pay the loan back. 770 people. You got any idea who's still there now? Yeah, kind of the worst of the worst. KSM, Abu Zabeda, Amar Baluch, KSM's nephew, not nephew, son-in-law, Ramzi bin Ashib, who else? It's been so many years now. Their names are starting to escape me. Did we ever get Uday Hussein? Oh, yeah, we killed him. We killed Kusay in the same gunfight. He's one of the. I agree with you. I think that there are rules. And it's pretty important to abide by them. But there are some extenuating circumstances. He was one. If I could find a person from history, I think Uday Hussein would probably be top of my last. You know, the first seven years of my career, I worked exclusively on Iraq. And I used to dream about Uday. One of my colleagues, psychologists that I worked within the Counterterrorism Center, later told me, "Oh, that's a classic sign of PTSD." I had a dream. It was a recurring dream that I had gotten a job as a chef in Saddam's palace. And I was standing there in the kitchen saying, "I can't believe I made it through the process. I'm a chef. I'm going to poison them. I'll kill all of them." And then I turned around and Uday is there. And he says, "Do you really think we're that stupid?" And then I would wake up. I had that dream a dozen times. He was this sort of pinnacle peak evil doer. He was a true psychopath. He would drive around in his limousine, point out an attractive woman on the street, ham his bodyguards snatch her, he would rape her, and then throw her off the balcony of the hotel. Who does that? I heard that he turned up at weddings to reap the bride. Yeah, so he could have her first. Yeah. Yeah. I had a guy on the show who I can't even remember technically what his job was. Some form of fixer and Uday Hussein went to Vegas. Oh my god. He wanted to go to Vegas and this guy was tasked with being Uday's handler for a while getting him cocaine, getting him women and I asked sort of of all of the people that he had to look after and shmews and who was the most difficult client he said to Uday Hussein. That is down. Yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt. Uday's brothers in law, Hussein Kamal al-Majid, the minister of the minister of industry and military industrialization and Saddam Kamal al-Majid, his brother, who was the head of the special security organization, the innermost ring of Saddam security. They were married to Saddam's two daughters, Ragged and Rana. And they were so afraid of Uday that they defected to Jordan. Rather than be married into the family. I was staying married into the family. Yeah, but they went with their wives. Oh, so they saved. Oh, interesting. Well, it didn't work out that way. So they immediately made contact with the CIA. We sent a delegation out to meet with them. My boss was a part of this delegation. And he said that as soon as they sat down, Hussein Kamal said, okay, here's what we need. We need we need air cover. We need heavy weapons. We need secure communications. And my boss is like, whoa, wait a minute. We didn't come out here to make you the president of Iraq. We came out here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are. And that conversation went nowhere. So in the end, they decided to go back. They they publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness. Refacted. Refected. Yeah. We should we should coin that. We should take credit for that. Right in yours now. So Riyaka Williamson, 2026. Yes. I like it. So they they publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness. Saddam said, all is forgiven. Come back. I know how this story ends already. Uday met them at the border and shot them both dead. I mean Uday is going to Uday, isn't he? It's his nature. It was his nature. You know, it's like the the frog and the scorpion. It's strange. Yeah, as you were talking about that, I was thinking about, you know, sort of dynasties and hereditary monarchies and stuff like that, obviously, British. But also thinking about the Medici's stuff like that. Medici is probably a pretty good, pretty good example when you think about Italy. The reason I was thinking about it was if your lineage is highly predictive of who ends up being in power, in some ways, great because Kinship is perhaps the closest loyalty that you can have from a human psychology perspective. But the issue that you have is that if you manage to have a particularly competent, successful, decisive wise, whatever, grandfather, the likelihood that you get two or three more generations without hitting someone who's highly retarded is very, very low. Right. Like you are absolutely right. And you see it with financially successful families too. It takes on average, I think, three generations to blow it all. You look at Vanderbilt, you look at Rockefeller, like it's very, yeah. And with this, you're almost guaranteeing because it's so unmarietocratic. And yeah, I the line between genius and madness or whatever it might be, the person that unbelievably assertive, fantastic grandfather had the constitution genetically and with the upbringing to then really take advantage. But you only need to make a few little adjustments from a disposition standpoint to go from benevolent, decisive, wise leader into like narcissistic, anxious, tyrant. And yeah, it doesn't surprise me when you have situations like that. Like what? For all the Uday Hussein was successful at being evil. I don't look at him and think that he's competent in any other area. I don't think that he would make a great leader of a country. But just because you're able to do things that are more ruthless than other people, doesn't mean that you can actually do stuff that's more productive than the average person. Like pick a dude off the street. Right. And he would probably be better. Yeah. So I was thinking about that as you talked about it. And if fear only goes so far, you can only cow so many people for so long before they rise up and dispose of you. So one of my favorite areas of research, I guess you would call this sociological, like evolutionary sociology in one form, which is looking at the two forms of leaders that we had ancestral. So one is prestige through dominance and another is prestige through competence. Or one would be like leadership through prestige and another would be leadership through power and fear. And what's interesting is that if you look at the most effective leaders in times of war, societies actually prefer they lean more authoritarian. They actually want more of a tyrant, more decisive, going to either run close to the rules or maybe color outside of the lines a little bit. And you want that. People seem to think that the more dominant side is going to be better during war. And I think it actually might be. The problem is that when you go from wartime to peacetime, you still have a very dominant leader. And the way that they get protected was that you need a ring of sycophants around them and they end up being the enforcers. And that's kind of an interesting finding that you can't have a tyrannical leader at the top. This is why in chimp pods, number one might be an asshole, number two, three, and four can band together, and number one's gone. But if you could do more coordination, Hitler style, right, you know, this ring of sycophants that are around him, you then start to distribute the power a little bit more. You've got some protection, you can have more people working to get them on side. I didn't really mean to kill your brother. You just, you do like assholary at scale, basically. But then on the other side, the prestige thing is good, but it's got weaknesses because although people might love you, like your compassion becomes a vector of fragility in some ways. So yeah, again, you know, looking at who is it that you want to lead, what's this situation in which it would be most optimal to have it? What are you thinking about? Like, let's say that the outcome that you want occurs, you almost get a peric victory, which is like one more victory will cause us to be ruined because if you do win, what are you locked into? What's the, the civilization, the socio-cultural situation that gets carried forward in this newly peaceful time? No, I think, I think you're exactly right. Yeah, I think you're right. And it's funny too that this is one of those things that's been studied for decades, for generations. And yet it seems to be a lesson that leaders either don't know, don't understand or don't implement. I think we all have a degree of historical narcissism or solipsism or something that I'm aware that this might be some of the most well re-watched wisdom of the ages, but not for me. There's something special about my time and there's always justification as well. You know, we see this with the current discussion around AI and it is an existential risk and what's it doing to us? You can go back and look at some of the sort of luddites against the printing press, saying that the common folk being able to read or even, I think it was Thomas Blackmore in England who was the first person to translate the Bible into the common language so that priests didn't have to be the only conduit between the common folk and God. You could read it as your own and this is going to pervert the minds of the proletariat, that, you know, the common people, the serfs, the whatever, they're going to be distracted, their minds are going to be turned. And at each different point, I can make the case for why television was different and I can make the case for why social media and phones are different and I can make the case for why AI and VR is different and I'm saying that to me right now, being the person that has read this stuff around what happens when you get the first common language translation of the Bible. You know, along the same lines, there was no television in Saudi Arabia until the 1970s and it was because there was this debate at the time about, you know, graven images and is this a graven image, a form of graven? Yeah, it's like an idol, like idol worship, right. So one of the 10 commandments is to issue graven images. But then somebody got the idea that wait a minute, wait a minute, what if we have television, but we just read the Quran for 24 hours a day? Okay. And they said, that's a good idea. And so when I moved to Saudi Arabia, there were two stations, one in Arabic, one in English and it was just Quran all day and all night. That was it. That worked for them. Did you see that Christopheik lady, if you mean tracking this story. The lady who got the death penalty. Oh, my God, in Tennessee. And they failed to kill her twice. So as I was walking in here, they said that she is on life support and unresponsive. Oh, there it is. Krista Pike is on a ventilator and unconscious after surviving lethal injection. This was an hour ago. Krista Pike. They tried to kill her. Krista Pike survived Tennessee's attempt to execute a via lethal injection on wednesday, but her medical and legal future remain remarkably unclear. She's intubated on a ventilator and remains unconscious in a Nashville area hospital. Her attorney said Nicole finally on Friday receiving life-saving care, life-saving care after being injected with two ostensibly fatal doses of pen-to-barbertole. Pen-to-barbertole. Her attorney said on Friday she's been treated for the serious effects. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, serious effects. Of the pen-to-barbertole administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms. I guess that might be from just the IVs going in. A legal team filed an emergency motion Friday asking a court in Nashville to require Tennessee Department of Correction to protect and preserve all evidence. That makes sense. But also, as for an expedited hearing on the motion, the State Department of Correction declined to comment on the pending litigation, Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slammer, who was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Now a legal case will be at a standstill. Billy, a governor, a Republican announced he would call off the State's last remaining execution this year. While the third party review takes place in the term exactly what happened in Pike's case, according to the Associated Press, the governor has appropriately called for an investigation. We need to know what happened. The administration is not informed Slammer's family of what might be next for Pike. They're devastated and exhausted. Oh, so this is the family of the victim. Family of the victim, Bracewell, who helps Slammer's parents navigate the process, said the family is mad at the State for not being helpful or forthcoming, as to what is next. Like, look, you're the parents of this person I imagine, it's absolutely horrible. But like, what do you mean mad for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next? Like, we just failed a thing that's literally supposed to be final twice. It's slightly unprecedented. But her last words were, is it supposed to hurt this much? Is that true? So I remember watching a, it was Malcolm Gladwell. So Malcolm, I love Malcolm Gladwell. But he's very against capital punishment. And we had this conversation. I think the start of our conversation probably half an hour. The first time he came on the show was around that. And I said, well, it's humane way to kill people. And he said, no, no, no, it's horrible. Sequence of drugs. Do you know much about this? Yeah, I followed it closely. Can you explain? It's, it smothers you slowly. The petobarbital. Is that the big mover? Because there's three, right? Yeah, there are three exactly in sequence. But the problem is, well, one, one paralyzes the heart. One paralyzes the the respiration. And the other is supposed to be the sort of the finisher. But the thing is, is when they're taken all together, they cause an inordinate amount of pain. But because you're paralyzed by then, you can't express the pain, right? And no one's ever going, I mean, wouldn't it be interesting if this person becomes conscious again and bright is now a landmark case for this is what a two-time survivor of lethal injection is I wonder, well, can you try and find out how many people in history in America have survived? Good question. A lethal injection. Because if they have, and they're still functional, they would be a pretty good campaigner. For, hey, we think that we found a humane way to take a life and bring back the fucking guillotine. Yeah, you know, like really, because what you've done is you've traded something which is painless, apart from one millisecond, yeah, microsecond. Oh, here we go. Wow. As of October 2nd, 2026, there are two ways to answer this. Eight people have survived a modern US lethal injection at execution attempt. Death penalty information sense that seven people before Christopher Pike survived failed attempts because execution teams could not establish a usable IV line. Pike became the eighth. Okay. Can you ask? Oh, but look at the bottom. There's a remarkable distinction. Pike is apparently the first person in the modern US death penalty era to survive after the lethal injection drugs were actually administered in the previous seven cases, officials abandoned the execution because they couldn't establish the IV access necessary to administer the drugs. So if by survived lethal injection, you mean actually received the lethal drugs and lived, the answer appears to be one, Christopher Pike. Can you ask, how did she get both doses? Did they do it back to back? Did they, you know, like when you take MDMA and they're like, how are you feeling? Do you want to re up? Do you want to take half a dose after 90 minutes to like increase the high or whatever? I don't know whether, but that's insane. It totally makes sense. Like, if you've got someone that's been living on death row, maybe they're not in great health, like finding an IV line isn't necessarily easy. The exact time is a little murky because they closed the execution chamber, certain during injections, but witness accounts that has reconstructed slowly. The first dose appears to have been administered at about 741 CT. If the protocol says that if the prisoner is still alive, five minutes after the first dose, officials administer a second, 100 milligram dose. So at 746 from 741, she's still alive and visibly breathing, officials closed the curtain. It reopened three minutes later, witnesses then saw her loudly snoring with a mouth open. Multiple accounts indicate that this approximately three minute interval is when the second dose was administered. So the best reconstruction, 741 first dose, five minutes, 746 is 749 Curtin closed, second dose administered, 749 Curtin reopened, pike still breathing slash snoring. One particularly important detail, Tennessee normally establishes two IV lines as a redundancy. We did not know yet whether the second dose went through the same IV line as the first or whether officials switched to the backup IV and that is one of the major and answered questions in this investigation. The reports saying the second dose was administered later. The public timeline is inconsistent. The really strange part is why two doses failed. There are fully plausible explanations, including the IV and drug delivery. Pikes complaint that her arm felt like it was going to burst, a bust is potentially significant. So maybe if they just fitted the IV line incorrectly and it's just in the tissue, it's an intramuscular rather than intravenous injection. But yeah, this could be huge. Yeah. And I mean, it is still crazy. First woman to be, first woman to be executed in 200 years. Do you know what she did as the crime though? Yeah. Took a box cutter to, grizzly, and she kept a piece of the skull with hair on it and was showing it around a friend. And she broke the girl's skull into asphalt when she was 19 or something. Yeah, I mean, it's strange with situations like this, right? This, I've thought a lot about retribution, as it means to capital punishments and sort of, especially if you've taken some of the determinism red pill and thought, well, what does free will consist of? Like how culpable are people for their actions? Uday Hussein? Like, do we hold him culpable? Like morally, legally? What does this? But we do have humans have this reflexive instinct for retribution. We do. We do. And that's why we still execute people in so many states. I mean, it's about half now. And even of the states that have the death penalty, many of them just don't carry it out. Like California, for example. I wonder what you would need to do in California in order to get the death penalty. And you work out when the last death in California was? It's a good question too. While we're looking for that, what's your relationship with angry birds? Man, I love my birds so much. I can't even tell you. Now, seriously, I wake up an hour earlier than I need to every day, seven days a week, just to play angry birds and not lose a productive hour of the day. It's the very first thing I do. As soon as my alarm goes off, I put my glasses on, pick up my phone and start playing angry birds. I love it. Why? It's just so mindless and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. You know, I have no hobbies. Well, until very recently, I had no hobbies. All I do is work. And I love it. It's great. It's fun. It's now, thank God, beginning to be, you know, kind of lucrative. But I don't really do anything but work. And so angry birds was like my only vice. I did buy a telescope with a built-in camera. So I've taken some awesome deep space pictures. And that's fun. Tuesday and Wednesday in DC. I'm going to be back in DC completely cloudless nights. I'm going to be out all night taking pictures. But and I'll show you some. But angry birds, it just, it gives me such satisfaction. I just, you had to insanely long streak. Nine consecutive years I didn't miss a single day. And then I got screwed. When I upgraded my phone, this is the first picture I took. And then if you leave through, I I took one on the Harvest Moon a month later and yeah, that's the Harvest Moon. That was a pretty good one. And I haven't done any editing to that at all. That's just the picture, no editing. And that's the world pool galaxy. - And you did this in DC? With all that ground light, imagine what it would look like if I actually had a dark place to go. - Wow, that is impressive. - It's fun. But I mean, you can only do this when there are no clouds in this sky. Sometimes I'll drive up to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It's about an hour and 15 minutes north of me, just 'cause they've got dark sky there. And there's a guy that lets me, that lets me just kind of park in his parking lot. He shuts the security light off. And I'll sit there for two or three hours and just take pictures. - Saying that you've got no hobbies. What happened in New York Fashion Week? (laughing) - So I get a call from this awesome designer, Elena Velas. She's like a neo-goth, everything's black. - When I look at you, I do think neo-goth, actually. - You're right, see? 'Cause I'm with it, right? So she asked me if I would have any interest in walking the catwalk at New York Fashion Week. And I said, oh, hell yes. 'Cause look, I'm 62 years old. - He you are. (laughing) - With the dog tags of my victims. - Oh, that's nice. - I was the only person that got two different-- - You had two looks? - Two looks. I had 90 seconds to change. - Oh yeah, I did, I spent for a very, very long time in my 20s doing fashion shows and I know how horrendous that backstage. - I was surprised at how much work was involved. - We started at 11 o'clock that morning and the thing wasn't over until 9.30 at night. - Yeah, Justice, we talk about the parallels of being at Guantanamo Bay. No one's talking about how painful it is for the models at New York Fashion Week. - And they're all naked most of the day. - Justice for New York Fashion Models, that's what I said. - And they don't get paid. Another thing too, the next day, I had six emails waiting for me from friends of mine saying, buddy, there's this AI video of you going around. (laughing) And I was like, no, nope, it's not AI. - It is a good get out of jail free card now for anyone who gets rumbled to just say, hey, like, AI is getting really, really crazy. It's really crazy. What, you know, thinking about your career and sort of what you're doing now. What is the most interesting thing about your work and that world that you've learned after spending so much time in it that people from outside don't really appreciate or don't understand? - Oh, you know, I think it is that most of the people involved in the intelligence community are very, very bright, very patriotic people who want to do nothing more than to serve the American people. And they're not right when ideologues, I'll give you an example. The 1992 election, it was the morning of the election. So we all voted in the morning. I was in a branch of eight people, nine people including the branch chief. And at the end of our nine o'clock morning meeting, he said, listen, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really curious as to who voted for whom. It turned out it was three for Clinton, three for Bush and two for Puro. And I remember thinking, wow, I'm not the only Democrat in this office, but back then you had no idea who the person sitting next to you voted for because it was irrelevant. In 1996, there was a woman in my branch that got in trouble, she was reprimanded by HR and had a letter put in her file that made her ineligible for promotion for a year because she had a Bob Dole bumper sticker in her cubicle. And now it's just like all gone nuts. But I think what most people don't understand, especially on the political left, they just say CIA evil. And that's just not the case. There are bad people at the CIA. There are evil people at the CIA. Psychopaths in some cases, sociopaths, murderers, but most of them are good, decent, smart, hardworking people. If you had to rank the intelligence agencies around the world, who do you think a person is most effective, almost advanced? Easy, that's the Israelis. They're the best in the world. They're assholes, don't get me wrong, but they're the best in the world. Why? I think because they've convinced themselves that they have to be, or they're done. It's permanent existential threat, right? Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for it. It's like an intensity expands to fill the existential threat against it. There it is. That's Israel. Yeah. John Curriacu, ladies and gentlemen, I am endlessly fascinated by what you're doing. Where should people go? You've got book. You've got all sorts of other stuff going on. Oh, thanks. I've got a bunch of books on Amazon. I have a new one that came out a couple of weeks ago. I've one that's coming out in 10 days, I guess. I live off the grid. We need to do that next time. We didn't do that one. I've got John Curriacu's Dead Drop on Apple Podcasts in Spotify and John Curriacu's Briefing Room on YouTube. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Good to see you. All right. Until next time. Goodbye, my beauties.