John Kiriakou: "He Sold Us Secrets!" How Jefferey Epstein Ran Mossad, MI6, and The CIA│Jack Neel

-John, in the 1960s, the CIA spent $20 million surgically implanting microphones inside of live cats. They sold antennas through their spines and out their tails. The first cat was sent on a mission outside the Russian Embassy in Washington to see. What happened next? -Next they experimented by putting microphones and cameras on pigeons and tried to train them to land on the window sills of the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Those experiments failed. I mean, they were able to get the pigeons and the cats to go over to the Soviet compound, but they couldn't pick anything up that was meaningful. -Did you know the first cat got hit by a bus? -No, that's just perfect. Have you ever thought that an animal was spying on you? -An animal, no. But I did go to a demonstration in 2018 in Washington, where there seemed to be an inordinate number of dragonflies around the speakers. And then when I got up to the dais, the stage, I realized that they were drones, little teeny tiny drones. I thought that was just scandalous. -What was this? -This was 2018. -Dragonfly drones. -They're that small. -Yeah. They're big enough only to hold a microphone. That's it. But I mean, it's a public speaking event. You can just listen. You don't need to fly a dragonfly drone up to the podium. There's no secret taking place. And I wondered if it was like a training exercise. -That's really fascinating. Have you ever inserted a microphone inside of an animal? -No, not inside of an animal. I was very conventional in that respect. I only broke into houses to plant bugs three or four times over the course of my career. And it was always very conventional, you know, in an ash tray under a flower pot, something like that. Not in an animal. -That's fascinating. Yeah, I-- for people who are unfamiliar with your story, so you spent 14 years at the CIA. That's right. You helped capture some of the most dangerous terrorists alive than a single interview on TV in 2007 ended your career, your marriage, and sent you to federal prison. What exactly did you say that made you go to prison? -I said, what did I say that made me go to prison? Well, it depends on your point of view. What I said that started the whole slow motion chain of Domino's falling was that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. What they ended up getting me on was something much more innocuous. Say, charging me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. The espionage charges all came from that interview and a subsequent interview that I did with The New York Times. But what they got me on was in the summer of 2008, a journalist wrote to me and said, "I'm writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition." Abu Omar was a cleric in Milan, Italy, that the CIA kidnapped and sent to Egypt to undergo torture. Can you introduce me to any of these 12 people so I can interview them for my book? I said, "I don't know any of these people." And then he wrote me back and said, "What about these people?" And I said, "I don't know these people." Kidnapping was not my thing at the agency. I didn't work with the kidnappers. And I said, "You clearly know this issue better than I do. All I know is what I've written in Washington Post." And then he said, "What about the guy that you mentioned on page 100 and whatever of your book?" I think his name is John. And I said, "Oh, you're talking about John Doe." I don't know whatever happened to him. He's probably retired in living in Virginia somewhere and that's where they got me. I confirmed the last name of that former colleague and that's what they hung me on. And how long were you sent to prison? 23 months, I was sentenced to 30 months, I did 23 months. And how many people actually involved in the torture program, like the creation of it, enacting out specific torture, covering up the program, were sent to prison? Exactly zero. I was the only person in any way associated with the torture program who went to prison. And I was the one who blew the whistle on it. Can you give me an example of someone who is directly known to have done something? Is there any example of that? Like something that's been declassified? That someone did, but they weren't held responsible? At the highest levels, yes. The people who conceived of the torture, who approved of the torture, who planned the torture. So James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are probably the most infamous. They were two contract psychologists that were brought into the CIA to actually create the torture program. And then after we captured up with Zubeta and Pakistan and sent him to the first secret prison, they were the ones that went out to the secret prison and actually tortured him. And what they ended up getting was $108 million of the taxpayers' money for their program that they created. I know it's like a bizarre world. It's fun that really fascinating. There's not a lot to say about it. But I think an interesting way to ask you about some of this stuff is now that people know you were once an enemy of the CIA for exposing such a dark secret and are a person who values truth. What does going to prison teach you about how the world actually works? Oh, wow. That's a good question and a very difficult one to answer. I learned so much in prison. I learned that really our entire system is broken. You know what? I'm going to throw a statistic at you. Just to try to put it into context, the United States has 5% of the world's population. We have 25% of the world's prison population, worse than China, Russia, Iran. We lock up everybody. Congress creates 500 new felonies every decade, 50 new felonies every year, these are new laws that are passed, where something that was legally year ago is suddenly illegal. And I'll give you an example. I've written about this a couple of times. There was a woman working for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Hawaii. She was a GS-12 mid-level nobody. Honolulu is very expensive to live in. So to make some extra money, she and a business partner bought a boat and they would take tourists out on the weekends to go whale watching. So they're out there whale watching one day and they come up on a pod of orcas and the orcas are feeding on a seal carcass. So everybody runs over to the side of the boat. They're taking pictures and video. Somebody whistles at the whale to, I don't know, keep it near the surface. I don't know, nobody knows. A couple of weeks later, FBI. She answers the door. Do you have this boat? Yes, you take the boat out with tourists? Yes, did you see some orcas a couple of weeks ago? Yes, did you whistle at the whale? She said, no, somebody did. But you know what? I videotape everything and I sell the DVDs to the tourists. So she gives the FBI the DVD. A couple of weeks later, they raid her apartment. They take every DVD. They take her computer. They take her phone. They seize the boat. And after an investigation, they charge her with one felony count of interfering with the feeding of a wild animal, which is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. She fought this thing for years. They ended up knocking it down to a misdemeanor. She took a plea to make it go away, but she lost her job. She lost her pension. She lost her boat. She lost her friendship with her business partner. She lost literally everything. Is society better off? Because she was prosecuted? Are we safer as a people? This kind of thing happens all the time. You know, there's this joke that everybody in prison is innocent. Well, you know what? I found that a lot of people actually are innocent. The thing is, and I'll recount an important conversation that I had with my attorneys. I was given a best and final offer from the Justice Department. 30 months I do 23, and I had until noon of the next day to decide. My wife and I stayed up all night long discussing this all night long, and at 6 a.m. I emailed the attorneys. I had 11 attorneys, attorneys that the Washington post called legal titans, the best attorneys money could buy. And I said, we've been up all night. We've been talking about this. We decided to turn it down. I'm going to trial. I didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to go to trial. As soon as I get in front of a jury, they're going to see how ridiculous this is. The attorneys come straight to the house. They get their seven o'clock in the morning. The oldest Plato-Cacherus, a legendary figure in law in Washington, gets right in my face and he says, you stupid son of a bitch, take the deal. And I said, you're the one who told me not to take the deal. He says, I only said that to keep your spirits up. The second one, total Southern gentleman. He said, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take the deal. I had five kids at home. I didn't want to go to prison. The third one, the one that I liked and respected the most, pulls me aside. And kind of angrily says to me, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice. And it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. So I asked, if I don't take the deal and I'm convicted, what am I realistically looking at? And they said 12 to 18 years, take the deal. What am I going to do? Like I say, I have five kids at home. So I took the deal. One of them said to me, before I made the final decision, this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event in your life. Make it the blip. So I did, I took it. When you think about the reason so many people are incarcerated, would you say it's mostly incarceration as an excuse for something that wasn't a crime? Or would you say it's that the people who do the incarceration have incentive structures to do as many as possible? Oh, we have a robust private prison system in the United States. The biggest company is geo solutions. And they build and manage prisons all across America. They're doing all of the immigration prisons right now. And so they have an incentive to make sure that every single bed is occupied. If there aren't people in those beds serving long sentences, they don't get paid. And once those people are in beds, they maximize their profits by cutting medication and food. On my very first full day in prison, I got to prison on a Thursday at 11. Friday was my first full day. And one of the guys across the hall from me said, Friday, fish day, and I said, oh, okay, I like fish. And one of the Italians stopped me and he said, you're not going to want to eat this fish. We call it sewer trout. And I said, oh, okay. So I go down to the chowl and behind the the chowline where they're just sloping food onto your tray, they're these boxes stacked up. And they're clearly marked and out in public. And it says Alaskan cod, product of China. So it's not Alaskan cod. And underneath it says feed use only not for human consumption. And they're just slopping it onto every tray. And that became the norm. You only have a handful of choices of what to drink, water, coffee or cool aid. The coffee's just brown water. So must everybody drinks cool aid. Well, one day everybody's drinking cool aid, cool aid, cool aid, cool aid. And there's a dead rat in the cool aid. And God knows how long it was in there. One time we got an all hands email from the warden. There was this internal prison email system, core links. And the warden says, so sorry, but a few weeks ago on Wednesday taco night, we accidentally fed you dog food. It's not our fault. It was miss marked at the meat plant. So the dog food was marked ground beef. And the ground beef was marked dog food. The company has been fined, whatever it was, $15,000, $19,000, whatever it was. So sorry, I wrote about it at the time. And I said, the shame wasn't even that we were fed dog food. The shame was that we didn't even realize it was dog food because it tasted exactly like the ground beef that they fed us every day. If you had to give me one sentence or phrase to describe how people empower, make sure they stay in power. What would be that one phrase? You know what? I would call it official corruption. Corruption that may not be illegal, but is still corrupt, where this is the system that we've given ourselves. 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Again, that's forthepople.com/jackneil. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. It was finalized with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, the Citizens United case, which found that corporations are people, right? So corporations can give literally unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, right? Individuals can give up to I think it's 4,000 in the primary, 4,000 in the general, but corporations can give unlimited amounts of money. People can give unlimited amounts of money to political action committees. So all you do is you just fill out the paperwork and you set up a pack. It only takes 15 minutes. And so look at this race, this Thomas Massey race the other day. This is for a position that pays $180,000 a year. And the two sides spent $35 million for one seat that pays $180,000. That's corrupt as far as I'm concerned. And it was almost entirely outside money. What do you think they were buying? Oh, they were buying. I'm going to take a lot of heat for this. They were buying a seat for APAC. That's really what it comes down to. APAC, APAC spent millions and millions of dollars just on that one seat because Thomas Massey does not support Israel's political agenda. Yeah. And we see this actually all over the country. If you are not 100% pro-Israel, they'll primary you and they'll try to replace you with somebody that is 100% pro-Israel. It's something like 90%, 88% of members of Congress have taken money from APAC because it's better just take the money, just vote pro-Israel so you don't have to worry about reelection. I want to ask you something that you've said that really struck me was the selection process for people in intelligence and I know we'll talk about that. But why do you think you were selected for the CIA? A CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths because sociopaths have no conscience. And while they can blow right through a polygraph exam, they are impossible to control. People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience. They do react in a polygraph, but they're willing to work in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas. And as an example, when I was going through the interview process, there were two other men and a woman in my little group. And the instructor said, let's say you're a CIA officer undercover overseas, you get a cable from headquarters saying we really, really need the latest Indonesian economic figures. You call the Indonesian economic officer, you invite him to lunch, you have a great time, you invite him to lunch again, you have an even better time. You take him to dinner. You get together with your wives over dinner, the kids begin playing together, the wives become friends. But six months into this, you realize this guy's not recruitable. He doesn't have any vulnerabilities that you can latch onto. So what do you do? Because headquarters really needs those numbers. So one guy raises his hand and he says, you double down and you work on him another six months and maybe something will come up. And the woman raises her hand and she says, maybe you work it through the wives, maybe your wife can convince his wife to convince him to give you the numbers. And I'm like, what? I raised my hand. I said, you break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it. And he says, that's exactly what you do. You break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it. A normal person rather isn't going to break into a foreign embassy and steal classified documents. I would, but that's what a sociopathic tendency is. So I think that was one thing that they saw. The other thing that they saw that was very specific was that I was a good writer. And when I was in graduate school, my grad school advisor was a CIA officer undercover as a grad school advisor. He really liked my writing style. And so he kind of plucked me out of the crowd and put me in the system. And the next thing I knew, I was at the CIA. How do you think you write that is so interesting? Well, it's different now, wildly different now. But at the time, my writing style was very punchy and concise and directly to the point. And that's really what they wanted the CIA. My boss told me one time when I first got hired, he says, listen, the president doesn't give a shit about your opinion on an issue. He wants to know the facts. And then he wants to know exactly what the facts mean. And then he'll make his own opinion. So I cut to the chase. Now my writing style is completely different. That's a fascinating one. I've been shocked listening to some of your interviews at how solid your memory is of being able to recount certain events and specific details. I have a very sharp memory. But I want to ask you on the sociopathic tendencies portion. I've heard some people discuss this idea that maybe some colleges, universities, intelligence agencies select people not based on sociopathic tendencies, but maybe some form of like dissociative personality disorder. Have you heard of this? No, that would scare me. Yeah. Well, you know, it's possible that there could be something to that. The CIA is part of the MK ultra program in the 60s up until about 1975. They did MK ultra related experiments at universities all around the country. There were a lot of universities in California where they did these kind of experiments. And there are rumors that, for example, Charles Manson may have been part of these experiments. Sir Han, Sir Han may have been a part of these experiments. We don't know because when Senator Church told the CIA director, do not destroy the documents. He went back to headquarters and ordered all the documents to be destroyed. They destroyed about 85% of them. So we only know a little bit of what MK ultra actually did. On that one specifically, did you ever meet someone you suspected had been MK ultra. No, but I met, I have met a lot of people who believe they had been MK ultra. Yeah. You know, this is one thing that the CIA actually counts on. There are a lot of crazy people out there. When I first got out of prison, virtually the first bit of work that I did was I got hired by the American Psychological Association, the APA, to go to Brookline, Massachusetts and it was like an offsite. It was me and 12 psychologists and we were supposed to come up with a new set of protocols by which APA member psychologists could conduct custodial interrogations. We went to lunch one day and I said, guys, I was the only one who's not a psychologist. I said, guys, I have a question for you, a serious question. I said, not a single day goes by that I don't get emails from people who say that the CIA planted a chip in their brain or the CIA is communicating them with them through a filling in their tooth or the CIA's beaming waves at their head. I get that a lot and a couple of them started to laugh and I said, why is that so funny? And one of them said, this is the most common entry-level mental illness that we diagnose. Oftentimes when people feel overwhelmed in life, their brains need to blame somebody or blame something and they default to the to the thing, the entity that is the easiest to blame. That's a secret organization, one that they don't understand and we all know what the CIA is. We've all heard stories about what the CIA does. So a lot of people just default to the idea that the CIA is somehow interfering in their lives. It's very common. They're not dangerous. They're just going through something right now. That's why you get so many emails. But then I got an email from a woman. She was the wife of a foreign ambassador in the United States and she said she wanted to hire me because she believed she was under electronic surveillance. I wrote this book called the CIA Insiders Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection. I was a surveillance instructor at the CIA. I said, okay, great. This is what I'll charge you. Let's meet and we'll figure out if you're under surveillance. I had a bunch of equipment that I had bought online to detect different waves and different transmissions and stuff like that. So I met with her at the Tyson's Galleria Mall in suburban Virginia and totally normal like 65 year old woman and she was adamant that she was under surveillance and I said, okay, I wasn't under surveillance coming here and I don't notice anybody around us that wasn't here when we arrived and we just picked the place by random. So why don't you start walking home? I'm going to follow you from a discrete distance and I'll be able to do counter surveillance and see if you're being followed. So I let her get pretty far ahead of me and she wasn't being followed. So I go up to her apartment and knock on the door, I open the door and literally the entire apartment floor walls ceiling is covered in aluminum foil and I go, what is this? I know exactly what it was and she's like, it's to reflect the waves and I was like, fuck, she's insane. And then she would call me in the middle of the night and say they're beaming the waves at me. My brain feels like it's going to explode and like those aren't waves. Those are your neighbors put Christmas lights on their balcony. It's just Christmas lights. They're spying on me. They don't care about you. They're not spying on you. In good conscience, I couldn't take her money and I told her I said, listen, I can refer you to a couple people who are experts at this sort of thing. She was furious, wanted no part of it and ended up leaving the country. But then I had a former CIA colleague tell me somebody's beaming waves at me and I'm like, dude, not you too. And he said, I'm serious, man. He said, I went for an MRI and it shows a traumatic brain injury and all of a sudden I'm nauseous and I'm dizzy. Next thing you know, it's called Havana syndrome. And I was like, I've known this guy for 35 years. And if he says he's got Havana syndrome, he's got Havana syndrome. It's a real thing. I had a colleague at the time. We were doing radio show together and he's making fun of it and it's caused by crickets or we're doing it to ourselves or whatever. And I'm like, I know these people. These are serious people and they're showing traumatic brain injuries in MRIs. There's something to it, whether it's the Russians or the Chinese or us, I have no idea. But that is real. So her concerns would be valid if she was a different person, perhaps? Yeah. And you know what, one of the psychologists, one of the CIA psychologists said something to me that has really stuck with me. He said, always ask them if the waves follow them when they travel. Because the equipment that the Pentagon has developed, which has to be nearly identical to what the Chinese, the Israelis, the Russians and others use, it's not portable. And so if they say no, you know, when I go to my sister's house, I feel better. That might be something. If they say everywhere I go, they follow me and they're beaming the waves. No, that's a mental illness. Have you ever given someone DMT as a CIA spy? No. No. One of my colleagues did, got arrested for it. Spent six and a half. and a half years in prison for him. Oh, what's someone do that? He was a sick SOB. And it's funny, I was like the last one to see that he was truly sick. It was the women in the office who used to say, there's something wrong with that guy. And I was like, he's getting promoted pretty quickly. They're like, nah, something's up. Next thing you know, he's under arrest, it's on the front page of the post, and that's exactly what he was doing. Have you ever heard any stories of friends or maybe people in other countries giving people ketamine to spy on them? No, never from inside the CIA, outside the CIA, people talk about ketamine a lot. You know, the CIA experimented with drugs from roughly 1952 until 1975. I get a lot, a lot of people who say, MK Ultra never ended, they just changed the name. Okay, if you have evidence of that, lay it out. Let's blow the whistle on it, and we'll get the FBI involved and get people arrested. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Because there's not enough time in the day to chase these silly rumors. Right. Ketamine is something that keeps popping up. I will say that the CIA spent a lot of time and a lot of money experimenting with LSD. But that seems to have gone away around 1975. When I was there, I started in January of 1990. I never ever heard anything about any drugs. There was some talk about truth serum, but that was used during the Vietnam War against prisoners. And during the course of my career, I never encountered it. Before we get into some of the other past projects, I wanna ask something about you. Can you tell me two truths in one lie? Two truths in one lie, about my career? Just anything. At one time, I was a licensed pilot. I was the fencing champion of Bahrain. And let me think of something else I can say. I got into a terrible, terrible fight with Alec Baldwin. And the last thing we said to each other was, "Fuck you!" Okay, let me do it again. I'm gonna guess the first one though. I said the license pilot's a lot. - Do you wanna say? - What was it? I was not the fencing champion of Bahrain. I took fencing lessons in Bahrain town. That wasn't the most realistic, 'cause you were the pronunciation. Okay, that's interesting. And Alec Baldwin and I hate each other. Wait, so you actually got into a fight with him? Oh yeah, he's a total asshole. Tell me about that. When I got out of prison, a buddy of mine who's an Academy Award-winning writer said that he wanted to do an off-broadway play based on my case. And he said, "Alic Baldwin and I have been looking for something to do together for years." And he said, "Let's get together for lunch the three of us in New York." I said, "Great, I take the train up to New York. Go to this little place on the west side." And my friend says, "Tell him the story about this. Tell him the story about that. Tell him the story, the story from Kuwait, from your book. Tell him some telling stories. He's just sitting there looking at me, listening to the stories." And finally I said, "Listen, if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them." And he goes, "I think you're full of shit." I said, "Excuse me?" He said, "I think you made all this shit up. I think you're full of shit." I said, "I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a liar." And I said, "If you think I'm a liar, then fuck you." And he goes, "Fuck you." I said, "Fuck you." And I got up and I walked out and my friend's like, "No, no, wait, guys, no, wait, stop, stop." I was so mad, I walked all the way back to the train station. So then, I don't know, six, eight, 10 months past, whatever it is. And my friend and I had come up with this idea for a show. And we had a bunch of pitch meetings set up, so I flew out to L.A., and we pitched it to Fox. And they said, "Nah, you know, it's kind of interesting, but it's not really for us." And maybe if you had somebody important attached to it, you know, it might be a little bit more palatable. So we go back to Soho House. He was a member of Soho House. And he said to me, "You know what we need? We need to attach an A-list star." And I said, "Don't even say it." And he said, "He's an A-list star." I said, "All right." So we go into this little breakout room, and he calls him, he puts him on speaker, and he said, "Alic, I'm here with Kiryaku." And he goes, "What's that asshole one?" (laughing) And I said, "Yeah, nice to talk to you again, too, Alec." And he says, "Well, John's got an idea, so I gave him my idea." And he goes, "Actually, that's a good idea. You can attach me." So we attach him. The next meeting was at AMC. And he came into the meeting on Zoom. And they were like, "Wow, that's a cool idea. We'll take it." I said, "Great." They said, "Have your attorneys called business affairs, and we'll get this thing squared away." Great. Well, like weeks pass. And I haven't heard anything from business affairs. So I called my attorney and I said, "Hey, have you heard anything from AMC business affairs?" He said, "Geez, I forgot all about that. Let me call over there." He calls over. And they said, "Oh, we walked away from that project." And he's like, "Why?" Oh, Alec Baldwin dropped out. And he went to do some project at HBO. He played the C.I. director or something like that. So I called him and I was like, "You know what?" I said, "Fuck you, Baldwin." I said, "You didn't even have the booth to call and say, I'm going to drop out." Just like that, he goes, "Fuck you!" And he hangs up on me and we never spoke again. You know, a few months ago, I realized something terrifying. I was spending more time managing this podcast than actually filming with guests, answering, responding to emails, moving data, video files around, and rewriting the same documents over and over. And meanwhile, everyone online is screaming about how AI is some futuristic thing that's gonna take over the world. But in a way, it kind of already is if you know how to use it. And that's when our team started using Zapier. And what that means for you is instead of just talking about AI, you can actually reap the benefits that it has to offer. Like was Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the value of AI to your work. It lets you connect top AI models like ChatGBT and Claude to the apps your team is already using. So you can add AI exactly where you need it. Whether that's automatically enriching leads, coaching your sales rep, resolving IT tickets or something else, you can do it all with Zapier. Zapier is for everyone. Tech expert or not, no complexity, no bottlenecks, no AI hype, just results. And teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the 3.4 million companies already automating with Zapier and transform how you work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com/jack. Again, that is zapir.com/jack. But anyway guys, back to the podcast. I don't mean to be insensitive, but how's he doing? I understand that he's doing better. I'll tell you, when he got arrested, my friend called, our friend called me and he said, you know, it would probably mean a lot to Alec, if you called him and just kind of walk him through this. And I said, fuck him, I don't care. I said, he killed that woman. Somebody's got to pay for this. Even if it was an accident, the buck has to stop somewhere. I said, no, I'm not calling him. That's fascinating man. (laughs) Yeah, I mean, for the record, I don't consider you to be a liar, but that's just because. That's solely just an energy thing. You know, it's like, you can see people talk online all day, but when you meet them in person, that's a totally different experience. I completely agree. Until 1995, the CIA paid people to spy using their minds with Project Stargate. Correct. One operator claimed to have done over 400 psychic missions. Did you ever sit in a Stargate briefing? Never sat in a Stargate briefing, but did participate in a, in a long session where the subject was under hypnosis. Stargate was weird to me, and that was managed through the Office of Medical Services. I only worked with OMS, and it wasn't even the physician so much as it was the psychologist when we needed to use the psychologist operationally to help us get the most that we could out of the source. The Stargate stuff was just so- out there to tell you the truth. I remember saying to a guy, "I don't have time for this." I need to hear it from the sources mouth. I can't sit in a room where some guys going into a trance, looking off into space and then tells me something that he probably just made up. So I never worked with it. Hypnosis was different. That was, I've never seen anything like it before. It was the real deal. - Have you been hypnotized? - I've never been hypnotized. - Yeah. - I'd like to try it. - I've been hypnotized a few times. - Yeah. - Did you know that you were under hypnosis when you were under? - That's a really good question. A couple times, yeah, I'd say so. Not every time. Yeah, some people have a really masterful skill when it comes to hypnosis, I would say. Would you say that's the case? - I never saw anything like it before in my life. I flew out to Europe with a psychologist from the CIA and a guy who was a psychiatrist and a hypnotist. And he was president of the American society of hypnotists or some such thing. We had a walk-in in a different country. And a walk-in is somebody who literally walks into an American embassy and says, "I have information. "I want to see a CIA officer." 95 times out of 100. And I mean that literally there've been studies done. They're crazy people just walking off the street and they want to yell 'cause the chip in their tooth is telling them to kill the prime minister or whatever. And you say, "Okay, I'm so sorry to hear that." And you write it up and say, "It's a crazy person." Send it in just so it's on the system, in the system. So we had this guy come in and he says, "I think I witnessed the aftermath of an assassination." And the assassination was like a major front page like global assassination. So we were like, "Okay, we turn him over to the FBI." The FBI says, "Eason nut, we're not interested." But then he said something to me that I thought, "How could he possibly know that?" And what he said was that he was driving down the highway and decided he had to take a leak. So he pulls off some exit. And the only thing at this exit is a church. And it's just a little teeny tiny chapel. He goes behind the chapel and there's a big banyan tree, you know, the giant trunk, right? So he's behind the banyan tree, taken a leak. And this van pulls up and two motorcycles pull up. The van pulls a ramp down and they drive the motorcycles into the back of the van. And the two guys on the motorcycles get out. The guy who's driving the van says is he's still alive and one of the motorcycleists says he has to be dead by now. It'll be on the news. Well, that was the day of like an hour after this major assassination. That was it. He didn't say, you know, I heard them say, "I did it and my name is," you know, something nutty like that. So we flew him to this other country. We flew out there and met him. And I asked him, "What do you want from us?" 'Cause clearly he's not doing this out of the goodness of his heart, right? And he says, "My wife has breast cancer. "I can't afford treatment. "She's gonna die. "I wanted to have cancer treatment in the United States." I said, "Done." So another case officer and I flew out with a psychologist and a psychiatrist. And the guy didn't speak any English. So we translated and we turned all the lights off in the room, he's sitting in a chair like this the psychiatrist is sitting right behind him and we're translating, you know, we told him, put your hand up in the air and he goes like this and we're gonna count backwards to 10, from 10. And when we get to zero, you're gonna be out. And he's like, "Okay, as soon as we get to zero, "his hand goes like this." But his arm stayed up in the air. For four and a half hours, I never saw anything like it. So I'm asking him, can you see the license plate on the van and he's like this, he goes, "Yes." And I said, "Can you tell me what the letters are?" And he goes and like reads off the letters like he's squinting to look at the plate. I give the numbers to my colleague, he runs into the joining room, calls headquarters, they call the station, the station calls liaison, liaison calls back, they say, "It's a stolen plate." I couldn't believe it, it was a stolen plate. So, after four and a half hours, we count back from 10 again, his hand is like this and we get to zero and his hand drops down and he opens his eyes and he says, "What happened?" And then he goes, "Blah!" And he just vomits all over himself and then runs to the bathroom. And the psychiatrist said, "I've read about this in the literature, but I've never actually seen it happen." And I said, "Do you believe what he said?" And he said, "I believe that he believes what he said." So, it didn't bring us any close to the killers, but in the end, we all came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth. The whole case fell apart later where he got back and touched with us. He triggered this emergency meeting. I met him at this crazy place outside of town and he said he had been kidnapped. But he happened to have a little recorder in his pocket and he recorded the kidnapping and I'm like, "Oh my God, that sounds kind of nuts, but okay, let me have it." So, he gives me the recording and it's him and he goes, "Wait, what are you doing?" And then it's also him saying, "I am kidnapping you. "I am the minister of interior "and I am involved with a terrorist group." And I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" So, after words I was like, "Listen, you had me for a minute. "I believed you, but this. " - And this is the same guy from the initial case? - Yeah, I said, "I'm offended by this." And he says, "Well, you guys weren't making any progress." And I said, "You can't just call me and say "that the minister of interior "is the leader of the terrorist group that we're after." With your voice on the tape, just to clarify on the story. So, you're saying that this guy witnessed a major assassination in person. - He witnessed the aftermath of the assassination. - So, he witnessed that specific, okay, God. - He witnessed them hiding the getaway motorcycles. They shot the guy on motorcycles, went up over the mountain to the highway, got away, and then put the motorcycles in the van, and then did whatever with them. - To kind of close the loop on the psychic question and ask about this in general, because my takeaway from what you just said is that some people can be under hypnosis and do things that they believe are true or ripe. - That was the whole Manchurian candidate thing. And that's really, that was the whole basis of MK Ultra. You know, it's funny, the way MK Ultra started, we had a source who said that the Russians were doing the same kind of thing, that they were experimenting with, remote viewing and ESP and all this stuff. That actually wasn't true. What was true is that the Chinese were doing it. We didn't have any sources in China at the time. And so we were like, oh my God, we're behind the April. Mind you, the CIA's just five years old at the time. And China had only been communist for three years. So we haven't quite gotten our footing in China by 1952. And so we panicked. And we were like, oh my God, the Chinese are ahead of us. Or I'm sorry, the Russians are ahead of us. We've got to catch up. Let's make this thing called, well, we'll call it MK Ultra. You know, it's funny, the diagram MK just meant that it was a scientific operation. Like you can have QR, MB, AR, AL, whatever. And each one means something. It means a country. It means a domestic operation. It means, you know, terrorism or proliferation or whatever. And then the, after the diagram, the word is just ginned up at random by a computer. So they just picked out of a hat Ultra MK being this experimentation thing and it became MK Ultra. - Do you think anyone is actually psychic, personal? - My friends are gonna laugh at me. When I say, I think some people probably have some sort of abilities that others don't have. Yeah, I'm not saying that I would hang my hat on. it or live my life based on it. I had this friend who went to a psychic once and she told me he was going to live to 88. And he was, he started just J walking all over the place. Because he was like, no, I'm going to live till I'm 88. I'm not going to get hit. I said, you may live like as a quadriplegic until you're 88. He's like, I hadn't thought of that. Um, but yeah, I think there are probably some people who are more sensitive to these kinds of things than others. This is an interesting one. I talked with the Zhang about this briefly, Professor Zhang. Oh, yeah. Great. I have great respect for him. This is all public. Uh, so the government once had a DARPA program called Life Log built to track every email, every photo, every location, every purchase, a person made all in one place. They killed it on February 4th, 2004. The next day, Mark Zuckerberg filed the LLC for the Facebook Incorporated scale 1 to 10. How much of a coincidence is that a one or two? Um, you know, there's some people. I'm not one of them. Maybe you're not one of them who are constantly thinking about how to monetize literally everything. They also have very deep connections in government. Well, we've known since Tom Drake went public, uh, in 2002, that NSA is intercepting every phone call, every text message, every email. Okay. Why not go farther than that and intercept everything else. If DARPA was doing it, he knew DARPA was doing it because he has contracts in government, sensitive contracts. And he knows that they dropped it. Why not pick it up and figure out how to monetize it? I believe that's what happened. If you ever worked for Facebook, but a guy that I worked with, my first job at headquarters after I got back from Athens, guy had been chief of a gigantic station. So he was well up there in the senior intelligence service. He resigned and we're like, what? What do you mean you resigned? He's like, you guys, he goes, this thing, this Facebook thing. And I had like vaguely heard of it. He said they made me an offer that was ridiculous. And then I never saw him again. So there are a lot of senior CIA FBI NSA people that went to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and everywhere else. Open AI. Open AI. Will heard. I don't know if you've ever heard of Will heard. He was the former director of NSA. No. No. Will was, I mentored Will at the CIA. He was a junior case officer, had a gift for convincing people to commit espionage, a gift. Fun guy, sweet guy, really smart, funny. He's half black, half white, decided to resign from the CIA to run for Congress in a Supreme Court mandated majority Hispanic district. And he won three times. The races were close. But I tell you, Will and I disagreed, like had serious discrements on politics, but the guy is as honest as the day is long. He ran for president for about a minute and then dropped out in 20, well, yeah, 2024. And gave up his congressional seat to run for president and ended up being on the board of open AI. So yeah, he, he authored multiple cyber security bills in Congress, parts of which were classified. So he keeps one foot in the game and one foot in business. I'm not sure what he's doing. I know he's making more money than he can count. And I think is also indicative of or an example of the two worlds coming together. Keep in mind also that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the CIA got a waiver from Congress to open a venture capital arm called in Qtel. How they're able to, how this is legal. I have no idea. But their very first investment, $1,500,000 was to Palantir. And now Palantir is a multi billion dollar company. It's involved in cutting edge technology, almost all of which is classified. A lot of people got very rich going into Palantir and similar high tech slash cyber organizations. There's another company called a Braxis corporation. A Braxis was formed in the 90s by a bunch of guys that I used to work for. And they set it up as a tax pass through. They didn't expect or intend to make any money. They just wanted a place where they could hang out and drink coffee and smoke cigars and talk about what great former CIA officers they were. And then they started putting in for CIA contracts since their friends with everybody who was making the contracting decisions. They started getting contracts. And the millions turned into tens and then hundreds of millions and then billions. And now everybody's rich beyond his wildest dreams. On the Palantir portion. Why does Palantir scare you? Because there's no oversight of it. We don't really know what Palantir does. It's all secret. It's more than secret. It's top secret. It's more than top secret. It's top secret compartmentalized. So are the top secret compartmentalized? Spread that down for me. Yeah. So there are many levels above top secret. They're their compartments. For example, when you join the CIA, everybody gets a TSSCITK gamma clearance. So it's top secret, special intelligence, which is NSA, talent, keyhole, gamma. Those are three compartments that everybody gets. So let's say most everybody in the military has a TSSCI, top secret, sensitive compartmental information or SI, special intelligence. So if NSA just picks some phone call out of the air, you're clear to see it. If it is sensitive, it's going to be talent keyhole. So the military guy's not going to see it. You get to see it. If it's gamma, somebody with a special clearance gets to see it. So maybe I'll see it, but you won't see it because maybe it's an intercept of a phone call from some world leader, right? And then as another example, when I got back from Pakistan, I was promoted to be executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, you see literally everything that is happening around the world. I had TSSCITK gamma. And then I added six more compartments on top of that. So in fact, there was one morning. I was briefing the deputy director, the associate deputy director and all of the associate deputy directors for counterterrorism, proliferation, counterintelligence, budgets. So I said, we have a very important cable. It's part of my normal morning briefing. We have a very important cable in the such and such compartment. And the deputy director says, stop. You and I are the only ones cleared for that. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And he says, just give me the hard copy. So I gave it to him. And I said, none of the associate deputy directors for operations are cleared for the compartment. And he said, no, they don't have a need to know. I want to ask so badly, what is the degree that like someone like a Tulsi Gabbard has, but well, that's a great question. Tulsi Gabbard is supposed to have everything of everything. She's the director of national intelligence. So she's the overall director of all 18 intelligence agencies in the US government. Most countries have one or two with 18, but it's it's a four year term, right? No. So you can be in that position for you can be so long as you serve at the pleasure of the president is the language that they use. So you can be there for a day. You can be there for eight years or for 20 years if the president decides you're doing a great job. The truth is until very recently, the DNI was really in charge only of budgets. That's it. And even then, not really, because most of the intelligence agencies in government are agencies within the Pentagon. NSA belongs to the Pentagon Army intelligence Navy intelligence Marine Corps intelligence Air Force intelligence Coast Guard intelligence. They're all Pentagon. So they're part of the Pentagon budget. So the DNI is in charge. of intelligence, but no, actually no. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research reports to the State Department. They sit in the State Department. There's an Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research. So the DNI doesn't even really control that. How often would you say Trump gets asked something and someone says that's classified? I would really hope that that would never happen. I will tell you though that there were times in my career where something would happen. Not a lot of times, two or three, something would happen and either the station chief or the DDO deputy director for operations would say, you know, let's not put that in writing. And so there was no written record of it. I'll give you an example. I worked a case where we recruited this guy. He was incredibly dangerous. He was a career criminal, a heroin addict. But he did this really cool thing for us. And so we paid him very handsomely. And I said to him, don't spend all the money in one place because it's going to raise eyebrows and people are going to think you're probably taking, you know, CIA money. And he said, I'm going to use it to marry my girlfriend. I said, oh, that's terrific. That's a great idea. Congratulations. A couple of weeks later, I worked my normal day. I get home. I turn on the news. I see the guy on the news. He's in cuffs. He just shot his girlfriend's father. It turned out he went to ask the old man's permission to marry his daughter. And the guy's like, I'm not marrying. I'm not letting my only daughter marry a heroin addicted career criminal. And the guy just shot him in the face. And he got arrested. I called the station chief. And I was like, are you watching the news? He's like, no, I said, AB Grasshopper. I'm just making that up. There is no such thing as AB Grasshopper. AB Grasshopper just shot his girlfriend's father in the face. He killed him. It's on the news. He's like, oh, my God, we have to inform Congress. So I said, okay, I just got home. I'm going to get back in the car and go straight back to work. I get back to work. He gets to work. And he's like, you know, on second thought, let's not put that in writing. I said, are you sure? Like the rules are pretty clear. You got a recruited asset who's just committed a cold blooded murder. He's like, they wouldn't understand the nature of our relationship with the guy. I was like, you're the boss. So I didn't put in writing. I'd assume that's where though. I would hope it's rare. Like I say, it only happened to me one or two times and I had kind of a career that was out there. Another program that you've talked about quite extensively. So I'll ask about it in a different way. Project Malkingbird, the CIA paid journalists, news anchors maybe to report on what they wanted them to or change stories, something along those lines. I can't remember the exact details, but if you had an unlimited budget and a running project Malkingbird right now, where would you make sure you put that money overseas? It should be patently illegal to propaganda as the American people. It was until Barack Obama changed his mind in 2015. Oh, so that's reset. Oh, yeah. It's recent. You know, since since 1975, we haven't been allowed to we, I say we like I'm still there. The CIA has not been allowed to recruit journalists, American journalists. So the church committee was appalled that the CIA was was running this thing project Malkingbird. And the church committee made it illegal to to do that to to recruit American journalists. It is perfectly legal. It is actually encouraged for you to recruit foreign journalists with the idea being that you paid these guys a handsome wage and they're going to plant pro-American stories. And also they're going to tell you what it has ended up on the cutting room floor that might be important for, you know, the CIA analysts or for an operation that might be ongoing or whatever. The first time the CIA ever did this was in the Italian election of 1949. It was the very first covert action operation. The CIA spent $150,000 to bribe Italian journalists because the Communist Party was ahead in the polls and they bribed these journalists to write articles that were in support of the conservative Christian Democratic Party and the Christian Democrats won by a whisker. So the CIA essentially stole the 1949 Italian elections. The CIA then began recruiting journalists all around the world. Malkingbird was different in that it was geared toward recruiting American journalists. Well, it was illegal to propagandize the American people. Americans weren't even allowed to listen to the voice of America. I mean, you could if you had a short way radio, you could hear it, but it's propaganda. It's pro-American propaganda. It's a government's own radio voice. Until 2015, in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, that was rescinded and it was rescinded for the worst reason. Have you ever heard of radio TV marty? So in the 70s, what became known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors created a radio and TV station radio marty and tv marty to beam anti-communist propaganda at Cuba. So radio marty was broadcast from a plane. I actually went up in the plane in 2011 when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and they just fly back and forth in international airspace between Florida and Cuba and they broadcast radio marty. Radio marty is mostly baseball games in Spanish. The Cubans love baseball even more than we do. And so everybody tunes into the baseball game. Sometimes the Cuban government will jam the frequency, but most people listen to it just for the sports coverage. TV marty is almost always jam. You can watch it in the waiting room at the American Embassy when you're waiting for your visa and it's, you know, Miami Cubans yelling about communism and silly stuff like that. So nobody watches it. Well, in the early Aughts, it was picked up by the Dish Network and the way the Dish Network broadcasts, there's this little tiny sliver right along the coast of southwestern Florida where if your dish is like just right, you can pick it up, but it's illegal to properly analyze the American people. And so the Obama administration said, you know what, rather than make the Dish Network change their frequency or whatever, let's just make it legal to propagandize Americans. And so in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, they make it legal to propagandize Americans. And so now you're if you're on that little strip of coast of southwestern Florida, you can watch TV marty, not that anybody would want to, but it also gives the government the right to essentially recruit American journalists again. And I'll give you another example. I have a friend who is an absolutely fantastic investigative journalist, Jason Leopold. He's now at Bloomberg. Jason is the king of the Freedom of Information Act. He was once called by the Pentagon's spokesman during the Bush administration. He was called a FOIA terrorist because he has filed more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other person on earth. So he told me he's actually the guy who broke the Hillary Clinton email story, right? So he told me that he was bored one week between Christmas and New Year's and he has this masterful way of doing this. The Freedom of Information Act says that when you file the request, the government has 60 days to respond. Okay, I filed a request in 2015. I'm still waiting for the response. They never respond. So on day 61, you have to file a lawsuit against them. And they always lose and they always have to pay your legal fees. But nobody thinks to do it and people are too busy. I'm too busy and I don't really care at the end of the day. It was about one guy who was a science fiction writer. So anyway, Jason has an attorney on staff, not staff, on retainer. And every time he files a FOIA request on day 61, they sue. They sue the CIA every time. So he said he's bored one Christmas and he files a Freedom of Information Act request for All communications between the CIA and all reporters over the previous year, day 61. He sues. He wins the judge orders the CIA to release the information and to pay his legal fees, which is the way it always is. And he says he got back this mountain of emails between the CIA's office of public affairs and journalists from all around the world. He said there were a couple that were especially interesting. What year was this? This was twenty eleven, twelve. He said one of them was an exchange between the CIA and KendoLenian of NBC News. KendoLenian is the chief national security correspondent for NBC News and MSNOW. KendoLenian was writing articles and sending them to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor. So the CIA could say, "Yeah, take that line out. You might want to change this paragraph. Don't say that. Say this instead. That's propaganda." They're propagandizing the American people. I don't want to know what the CIA's official line is. I want the news. The other thing he found was there was this young, hungry, independent journalist who actually had stumbled onto a real story. And he wrote up the story. He sent it to the CIA. Please comment. I'm going to post it, you know, the next day. And they wrote back and they said, "So help us God. If you publish this, you will never be invited to the CIA Christmas party ever again. And we will never give you any background information." And so he killed his own story. So you don't need to recruit American journalists anymore? They do it for free. Some of them do it just because they want to be, you know, insiders with the guys. Some do it because they're afraid. So you don't need to recruit him anymore. That's an interesting one. I guess. I don't know why I'm even thinking about defending the original position of it. But just the only thing that would make sense to me is if the foreign people are trying to get our journalists, then we might as well try to get our journalists to to kind of balance that out. Like, did you think that's fair or? See, that would be an FBI program. Right. That's what's strange to me. That would be an overlay of those two. The CIA is forbidden from operating domestically unless it's overt. Certainly, the CIA has offices all around the country. It's called National Resources Division. But their job is, let's say you're the CEO of a company and you go to China and you're negotiating with these Chinese government people. The CIA is going to call you and say, "Hey, Jack, we know you went to China recently. Do you mind if we come by the office and ask you a couple of questions about these Chinese people you were dealing with? You know, tell us about their personalities or do you know anything about their backgrounds?" And because you're a patriotic American, you say, "Of course, come on over." And then they go and they write everything down. That's overt. There's nothing secret about that. But otherwise, they're not allowed to operate on American soil. That's up to the FBI. Maybe I haven't been looking for it. But I feel like I haven't seen as much about the FBI as I have the CIA. No, you're right. What's with that? It's funny. I think because so much of what the CIA does is secret, people's imaginations kind of start working. And they're more likely to go down a rabbit hole on the CIA than the FBI. I think that's what it is. People are always intrigued by what they're not supposed to know. And so they want to get to the bottom of things. Which do you think is the more interesting rabbit hole? Within the CIA? Just between the CIA and the FBI. Hmm. Counterintelligence, definitely. Definitely. With the CIA and the FBI have gigantic counterintelligence organizations. In the CIA, it's the, well, now it's, well, at the time that I was there, it was called the Counterintelligence Center, CIC. Its job is to find moles inside the CIA. It's the most highly classified work that's done, period. The FBI has what's called the National Security Division. And their job is also to look for moles. And there are more people in government working for foreign governments than you might think. It wasn't just Alder James and Robert Hansen, two traders working for the Russians. Both of whom were the chief of counterintelligence for Russian operations. By the way, the Chinese are all over us, you know? The mayor of Arcadia was just arrested for being an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and planting pro-Chinese propaganda in Arcadia's newspaper. What's up with that? The other one is all these Chinese PhD students that are getting degrees in the hard sciences here. And then they say, oh, we love it so much here, we're going to get green cards, we're going to get American citizenship, we're going to apply for jobs at DARPA. Come on. Come on, they do it all the time. They pay extra for the universities, so they pay full price. Yeah, there's some incentive. Oh, yes, there is. You said Epstein was likely an asset from Assad. Based on what you actually know about how the CIA and intelligence agencies work, is it more likely that Epstein was an asset for an intelligence agency or that the intelligence agencies were working for him? Mmm, I hadn't thought of it like that. I hadn't really thought of it like that. With this most recent tranche of documents, it solidified my belief that at the very least he was working for Mossad. What we learned in this, let me explain that, I've explained it in other podcasts, but if you're a foreign intelligence service and you want to know what the most important people in the country are thinking, the multibillionaire businessmen, the former presidents, the number six in line to the British throne, et cetera, you're not going to recruit those people. They don't want or need your money, they're not going to tell you what you want to know. So you do the next best thing and you recruit a person with ready access to them. If they've got a weakness, like we've heard, for example, Bill Gates has, even better. So you recruit somebody like Jeffrey Epstein, keep in mind we don't have any idea the source of his money, no idea at all. I talked to a former journalist for the New York Post and she said the first time Jeffrey Epstein ever popped up in her career was in the 1990s. He had agreed to finance the purchase of the newspaper, The New York Sun. And her editor at the post said, figure out who this guy Epstein is, we don't have anybody, we don't have any information about him in our files. So she said she called him and asked for an interview. She hung up on her, she called other rich people around town, they were like, we never heard of this guy. This is in the, this is like the 1997, 1996, whatever it was, she couldn't find anything. And so finally in the article, she told me she wrote that the deal was backed by financial mystery man, Jeffrey Epstein. And then she forgot about him until he got in trouble and was in the papers for that reason. So could the money have come from a foreign intelligence service? Of course it could have, could it have come from Les Wexner? Certainly it could have or from the Rothschild family, of course, but we don't know for sure. We know from this latest trunch of documents that Epstein was working on behalf of the Israelis, but he was probably working on behalf of the CIA as well, the FBI, MI5 and MI6 in the UK, the Germans, we think. And he had tried repeatedly to get in front of Vladimir Putin, to the point where the Russians offered him a meeting with Putin and two other officials and he said no, it has to be just Putin, they said forget it, and so he never met with Putin. So I think he was more likely than being an access agent that he was an intelligence broker. Somebody who collects intelligence and then sells it to different intelligence sources, intelligence rather agencies. Would you say the wealthiest people in the world do the occupation? Yeah, sure some of them look at Galen Maxwell and her family her father had all the money in the world And he was an vowed acknowledged Israeli spy But did they start off an intelligence typically no No, they're brought in typically Although I will tell you That a lot of them have a very deep Interest in intelligence when I was at the CIA I was married to another for another senior CIA officer. We got invited To dinner at the five-story Park Avenue home of a fortune 50 CEO And I was like why in blazes would this guy want to have dinner with me? So we went to dinner And it was perfect in every respect he had this staff of like 12 just standing there like to be your personal slave for the whole dinner and at the end of it he walked us out and And I thanked him I shook his hand and I said I've got to ask you Why did you want to have dinner with us? And he says Every CIA officer probably wishes he was a billionaire I can tell you every billionaire wishes he was a CIA officer And I thought huh you learned something new every day He just wanted to hear stories You know layout a couple of ideas of his own Mm-hmm the money after a while it's not so important to them They start thinking back about all the things that they could have done Something that was more exciting Have you ever spied on a secret society? No, I could actually get that question a lot. Really? Yeah, I have a good friend who's an investigative journalist But she's and she's an independent investigative journalist making a handsome living for herself But she kind of tends toward conspiracy theories And I always try to make her back down And then she always proves that she was right and I was wrong tries me crazy So For the last couple of years she's been all about The mason's and I'm like well you leave the mason's alone I know a couple of masons and all they do is raise money for scholarships That's it. It's just a bunch of old men that get together once a month and play poker and raise money for scholarships And then and then she starts developing some information that I'm like oh really? Really and then she'll lay it out and then she goes deep Into the histories of some of these organizations They were all founded by the same circle of people You know on Wall Street or in the immediate aftermath of World War One And then I have to admit that okay there may be something to it But now I never had to try to infiltrate a secret society On the contrary There were a lot of guys at the agency who were members of secret societies I'll tell you one funny aside I happen to be Greek Orthodox and I went to That there's what there's a peninsula northern Greece called Mount Athos Iyon Oroz the holy mountain and it's the home of 32 Monasteries It's the only place in the European Union that is exempt from European Union laws and no women are permitted there They even remove female animals that they capture So I went there and I went to the first monitor you're allowed to go for four days and three nights You have to get a special visa from the Ministry of Religious Affairs or whatever it's called So I went I wanted to see the the place check it out So get my visa I go And as soon as you get to the first monastery this priest comes out and says have you had confession today I said I said no I just got here okay confession I'm like okay won't in Greek Orthodox churches in America You just sit there and you tell the priest I did this I did that I did the other thing and he says okay You're forgiven you know go about your business It's different in Greece They read a list of sins and it starts with murder have you committed murder? I'm like no rape no robbery no and I'm thinking what's he doing So he says I have to read the list of sins. I said oh okay So he's reading this whole list. I'm like no no no at the end. He says are you a member of any secret societies? And I said no well I'm a member of a fraternity And he says is it secret? I said well, we've got a silly you know secret handshake He said that's a sin. I said come on father. I said the archbishop some member And he says then the archbishop needs to go to confession So I'm like okay. I'm a member of secret society Want to join the CIA? They ask me are you a member of any secret societies and I said no But then they specifically ask me are you a member of any fraternities? Hmm and I said yeah, I'm a member of this fraternity. We never heard of that one I said it's just a bunch of guys we play poker once a month We order pizzas and then we throw in you know a hundred dollars for for scholarships for poor children And they're like okay, all right, and then they left it And I wonder if there was more to it now in retrospect You know what were they getting at did they want me to be a member of a secret society? I don't know Those people that were Were they when they joined? Yeah, yeah because they they have these like degrees, right? So they're like, you know 60th degree whatever And it takes you a lifetime to get up to that position on your Past relationships. Uh-huh. Do you think angry birds led to your divorce? No, I think angry birds was a convenient excuse for divorce You know In defense of angry birds And my obsession with angry birds. I'm proud to say I have not missed a single day in almost nine years I'm coming right up on nine years of angry birds every single day. I for your day 3000 yet I'm two thousand eight hundred. I can show you on my phone two thousand eight hundred seventy nine Something like that. What is it the original angry birds? No, it's angry birds - I love the original. What's your favorite words angry birds - is better You know, it's hard to say what my favorite bird is Um, I always love the black one because he explodes But um, but there are a couple of new ones one that sucks everything up and then spits it out That's a good one And the latest one that spins around and knocks stuff down very powerful bird So I'm I'm devoting all my new feathers to him so I can get him up. I'm I'm Obsessive in the respect that I need for all my birds to be exactly the same level And so um, I'll focus just on this specific bird. Do you know what you're ranked in the world? um It's it's high up there Yeah, I'm I'm at the point where I'm not ranked by stars anymore I'm in the like senior global senior league That was the most interesting thing I saw when I started seeing you talking about angry birds I was like I haven't played that game in a while. I hope they sponsored this guy You know what? He seems like he loves it. I love it. I love it um Angry birds did not lead to my divorce I woke up I wake up an hour earlier than I need to every day just so I can play angry birds for the first hour I don't even get out of bed as soon as I wake up I put my glasses on I pick up my phone I go to angry birds and it takes me an hour to do all the daily games Um, that was just an excuse that a former spouse used To try to justify you know The current situation Yeah, that's some that's some bullshit my wife and I we we have arguments of course like any couple but uh She does not talk about me playing. I play this game called clash royale. Yeah, it's kind of like clash of clients Have you heard of this one? Yes, do you play it? No, but it looks good I actually downloaded it and I never started it you got to get into it. It's it's like chess But there's a little more luck involved so you don't have to You can have it excuse for losing pretty much you know what I mean um, but You've been married in divorce twice twice Do you ever wonder if the CIA played a role in anyone's divorce the CIA played a role in my divorce I apologize that by court order. I'm not at liberty to explain that But the CIA had an active role in my divorce What did you say to your wife the night before you went to prison? I apologize. I probably shouldn't say um Yeah, I shouldn't say That was a that was a terrible night. I barely slept a wink 'Cause you know, we all have this natural fear of the unknown. And I didn't know what I was getting into. At my sentencing, my attorneys asked that I'd be sent to a minimum security work camp. And at the minimum security camps, there are no fences, no bars on the windows, the doors are unlocked. You're free to just come and go as you please. You're just on your honor not to abscond. And most of those guys work in town at the university. There's a small university and they're janitors or what have you. The judge asked the Justice Department if they had any objection. They said no objection. The judge says minimum security work camp. So I got to the prison and I went to the camp, knocked on the door. It's weird, unless they just take you into custody and ship you to a prison, they send you a letter and they say, "Report to this prison on this day at this time." And you just drive up there and knock on the door and turn yourself in. So I knock on the door. I said, "I'm John Kiriak, I'm here to turn myself in." The guy says, "Oh, you got to go across the street to the actual prison." Then they put you through the metal detector and then they walk you back over here. I said, "Okay, great." So I go across the street, knock on the door, I'm John Kiriak, I'm here to turn myself in. He puts me through the metal detector and then starts leading me around to the back of the prison. And I said, "No, no, I'm at the camp across the street." And he goes, "Ha, not according to my paperwork, you're not." And I was like, "Take it easy, don't say anything, they'll put you in solitary." I didn't say a word. So it took me four days to get access to a phone. And I called my lead attorney and I said, "Hey, they put me in the actual prison with the mafia dons and the drug kingpins and the pet house." I said, "What do I do?" He's like, "Oh my God." He said, "Buddy, we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then." He said, "I'm sorry, you're going to have to tough it out." I was like, "Dang it." I said, "Okay, I'm trained for this, I've lived in way worse places than this. I can do it." And so I did it. I used my CIA training to keep myself safe and at the very top of the social heap. What do you think no one ever made you disappear? I'm not really sure, but I have a theory. I have a theory that I'm so high-profile that it would just be too obvious what happened. I'm not blind. I saw what happened to Charlie Kirk. So I've taken steps to protect myself certainly, and I get death threats like a lot of other people do, and I take them seriously. This is one of the reasons why I really want and need a presidential pardon. I've applied for one, but in addition to losing my federal pension, which I really, really would like to have back, I want my guns back. I need to protect myself. And so, you know, when people write me emails saying, "I can't wait to see your brain splattered out in front of, and then they give me my home address." I have to take that seriously. So I don't know. I think that it's a combination of things. I think I'm too high-profile that I would be missed. And to tell you the truth, all of my detractors are either dead or retired. I have a young friend who's at the CIA now. I try to advise a lot of young people who apply for the CIA. I'm a realist. I know the CIA is not going anywhere. And so, you know, if there's going to be change, it has to be changed that comes from the inside. So I'm proud to say that there are six people who have been students in college classes that I've taught who have successfully applied at the CIA they've gotten in. One of them told me a couple of weeks ago that she was in a counterintelligence class. And there was a slide that said, the insider threat, and it had a picture of me. And she said, "Everybody in the class started to boo." And the instructor said, "Are you booing him or are you booing the slide?" And they said, "The slide, he's not an insider threat. He was the whistleblower. It was the agency that was the threat." And she said that in the next running of the class, they took the slide out. So I think that they probably thought that prosecuting me would silence me forever. And in fact, my ex-wife said to me one time, "Boy, if they thought this was going to silence you, they didn't know you at all." And I said, "No, they've given me a reason for being. Now this is going to be my thing. This is going to be my life, civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights." And it has. It's been my life. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'll tell you what. If they had called me after my initial ABC News interview, which I blew the whistle. And if they had said, "Dog on you, you need to shot the fuck up." I probably would have said, "I'm sorry, you're right. I'll drop it." And that would have been the end of it. But no, they had to be dicks about it, and they had to prosecute me. And so now look what happened. John Brennan was the one who insisted that I be prosecuted and go to prison. And now he's going to be prosecuted and he's going to go to prison. Mm-hmm. When you think about your work, the missions you've done, some of the more emotional this rule, things you've seen, is there any one person or one face that you see in your sleep? Yeah. I mean, it may sound cliché at this point, but it's Abba Zabeta. Abba Zabeta, the night that we captured Abba Zabeta, my entire life changed. The entire course of the rest of my life changed. This was the highest level terrorist up until that point that we had ever captured. And he just turned out to be not the guy we thought he was. Part of the problem was we didn't know. We believed he was the number three in al-Qaeda. We didn't know that he had a cousin who went by the same name, Abba Zabeta. Abba Zabeta's real name is Zain al-Abadin Muhammad Hussein. He just goes by Abba Zabeta. And his cousin went by Abba Zabeta. So we're getting these reports. Abba Zabeta is planning an attack in Aman. Oh, okay. We better inform the Jordanians. Abba Zabeta is planning an attack in Charlotte, like Charlotte. How do you get to Charlotte? Abba Zabeta is planning an attack in Riyadh. Abba Zabeta is in Billings, Montana. Planning an attack. Oh my god. This guy's a terrorist Superman. There were two of them. So the one that we were after, he was a bad guy. He had founded al-Qaeda's two training camps in Southern Afghanistan. He had founded the House of Martyrs al-Qaeda safehouse in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was a logistician for al-Qaeda. If you wanted to get into Afghanistan and fight the Americans, he would get you in, smuggle you in. If you wanted to leave and go home, you're tired of the fight. He would get you a fake passport, get you home. But he was not the Superman that we thought he was. He was not the number three in al-Qaeda. He was never even in al-Qaeda. And we tortured this guy to within an inch of his life. To the point where there's a footnote in the Senate torture report saying that Abba Zabeta will never be released. He will never have access to the outside world ever. And when he dies at Guantanamo, we'll cremate his body and throw the ashes into the Caribbean as if he never existed. That's not the American way. If this guy was really who we said he was, charge him with a crime and make him defend himself. But we can't charge him with a crime because we tortured him. And so literally nothing of what he said is, is we're able, are we able to use in court? None of its admissible in court. I was the first CIA officer, former CIA officer, to call for his release. I did it on the BBC in 2015. And now I'm in touch with his ad. turnies, wanting to know how I can help, because he should be released, even if he's guilty. He has done 24 years in the worst possible prison conditions, having been tortured almost to death, even if he's guilty of crimes, he's done his time. Let him go. This could be a dumb question. What's the Arabic word for "terrest"? Well, we always just use jihadi, which isn't really "terrest", it's "struggler". But do they call us "terrest"? Probably. Probably in relation to our Israel-Palestine policy. Yeah. Have you spoke to him? No. No, and I've not written to him either, because he's not permitted to have access to the outside world. It's almost impossible even for his own attorneys to meet with him. They can only meet with him in the presence of either a CIA officer or a Pentagon official or both. He's an accomplished artist. The night that we captured him, we also confiscated his diary. It's a whole different topic, but in the diary where his sketches and drawings, he's a gifted artist. Gifted. I remember leafing through it that night thinking, "Wow, this guy's really talented." So he drew pictures of his own torture and the things that they did to him and the CIA classified all the pictures top secret. So nobody's ever seen them. What would you guess would be the worst one? Well, you know, the conventional wisdom is the worst one is waterboarding, and certainly it's horrible, but I didn't think it was the worst. I thought there were two that were worse. We never killed anybody by waterboarding them. His heart stopped at one point and we revived him so he could be tortured more. But there were two techniques that I always believed were worse than waterboarding. One was the cold cell where we would chain a prisoner to an eyeball in the ceiling. So he couldn't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way and strip him naked and chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour a CIA officer would go in the cell and throw ice water on him. We killed people with that, with hypothermia. We killed them, we weren't authorized to kill people in these sessions. We get these K was like, uh, I've been schmack mid unfortunately didn't make it through the night. He was in the cold cell. What do we do? You dig a whole barium. That's awful, but that's what we did. The other technique was sleep deprivation. People don't think that sleep deprivation is any big deal. You know, again, you're chained to that eyeball in the ceiling and you've got these industrial strength lights right on you. And then you've got, you know, death metal on a loop at a volume of 10, 24, seven. We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. Day seven, they begin to die at day nine because your organs start to fail. The CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days, 12 days. We murdered people with that murdered from lack of sleep. Have you ever met anyone that you suspect enjoyed torture? Yes, I have. I've met a number of people over the years who enjoyed torture. One of them ended up becoming the director of the CIA. Gina Haspel was a senior counterterrorism official who flew out to the secret site just to sit in on a torture session because it got a rocks off in the hallways to call her bloody Gina. Bloody Gina, can you imagine being a woman known through your career as bloody Gina because you're such a psychopath that you enjoy watching other people be tortured and humiliated? Kind of person is that. No, yeah. There were others that they would come out of these sessions like energized, like, "Woo!" You know, USA. That's not normal. That's just not normal. But there were a lot of people like that. What's the comment section of a XCIA officer look like? You know, normally people are wonderful. They really are, normally. And then every once in a while, I'll just get an asshole. And I'm like, "Guy, it's my fucking page. You can't come on here and say I'm a traitor and I need to be put to death." So, I block people almost every day. Really? Yeah, I have to. If you want to engage in debate and disagree with me, awesome. I look forward to it. But don't say that, you know, you're going to spread my brains on the sidewalk, for example. We're not going to have that conversation. I do get a lot of, I can't possibly answer all the DMs. I can't. Like, hundreds a day, in addition to the hundreds of emails. And most of them are, most of them are people who just are, they're in need of psychiatric intervention. Yeah, there are a lot of people like that out there. You get a lot of cameo requests too. Oh, my God. I think you broke the record. I broke the record. Five years ago, my brother and I bought my sister a cameo. She watches the real housewives of something or other. And she loved it. So I was like vaguely aware in the back of my mind there's this thing called cameo and it's fun. So within like a day of my explosion on TikTok, cameo reached out and said, Hey, have you ever heard of cameo? I said, Oh, yes. My sister had this cameo from my brother in law. Would you like to do it? I said, Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Why not? And I said to my sister, I make $400 for an op-ed. If I could make $400 a month to replace the op-ed, that would be good. The first month I was on cameo, I broke the all-time record for the number of cameos. How much you charge? It's really cheap, bro. I charged $49 and then they told me to raise it to $99. But the algorithm changes the price every 15 minutes, depending on how busy you are. How many requests you're getting. So I don't think it's ever actually been at $99, even though that's what I have it set at, right now, as we're sitting here speaking, I will tell you real quickly, it is $159. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. I'm sure you do a lot. Like, most people, like, they just charged $10,000 or $5,000 and then they just do like, if it hits, but like, you want to do a lot of that. I think you like it a lot. I do. I enjoy it so much. The CEO of cameo, who's an awesome guy, Steven, Steven fluted DC to take me to dinner that first night and they gave me this cameo jacket that I was wearing today. And it's just so much fun. But they told me in the beginning, most cameos are between like 60 seconds and 90 seconds. I can't possibly do one so short. So minor like between three minutes and four minutes. And there are people like in the top 10 that I'm not competing with, but comparing with. So I looked at some of them, their rappers and reality TV stars and stuff like that. And some of them like their average cameos 15 seconds, 20 seconds. But then they have like 2.3 stars out of five. And I have 4.98 stars out of five because they'll do cameos like in the backseat of the car at night. So it's just completely black and you can't see. And you know, people are spending hard on money. And they're asking mostly for well, about 50% of them are birthday wishes. And tell me a story. But the others are asking for advice or pep talks. And I'll tell you one thing that's really been touching to me is three or four times a week. Somebody will message me or email me and say that I said something or I messaged them and I talked them out of committing suicide, which is just mind blowing to me. You know, it's funny. We get to wrap up in our own lives. We don't really think about other people suffering. And you know, if somebody reaches out and says, let me back up, I've got a friend every time we'd have a conversation. He would say, I'm going to, I'm going to self and I'd say, dude, you've been telling me for a year. years that you're going to kill yourself. You're not going to kill yourself. Then he got in trouble. He decided, OK, he's going to do it. He's going to kill himself. He drives to a Walmart because he doesn't want to mess up his mom's house. It has a gun. He puts the gun in his mouth just as an off-duty ATF agent is pulling into the parking lot to do his grocery shopping. Season with a gun pulls his gun, drop the gun, drop the gun, arrests him. Now, my buddy had a felony conviction at some point. Years and years ago, they got him for felon with a gun, mandatory minimum five years. So he calls me one night. I get this call from a jail in Wyoming. I was like, what? Who in the world would be calling me from a jail? So I'm intrigued enough. I answer the call. It's him. I said, what the fuck are you doing in a jail in Wyoming? And he tells me I was going to kill myself when I went to the Walmart parking lot. So I find him a lawyer. The lawyer gets him out on bail. He had a son with his girlfriend. And she was just so appalled that he had gotten himself into trouble again. She wouldn't let him see the child. So he's depressed and he's calling me every day. I'm going to kill myself. I said, James, you're not going to kill yourself. You're going to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and you're going to fight this thing. And then he called me one day. And he said, hey, I got bad news. My sister lit off a firecracker and she blew three fingers off. I was like, oh, my God, that's terrible news. Oh, she was in surgery for like 14 hours and they touched her fingers back. I said, oh, my God, what a terrible thing. Two days later, she calls me. And I said, hey, how are your fingers doing? And she said, the fingers are fine. I got to tell you, James killed Delph last night. And I was like, what? I just talked to him. Two days ago, he sounded great. And she said, he sounded great because he finally made the decision to do it. And he was at peace with himself. But she said, the reason I'm calling is he left a note. And he said, please tell John that I said I was sorry. And the reason why I'm still so mad about this, have you ever heard of the folk singer Pete Seeger? Pete is one of the giants of 20th century American history. And one of my idols and role models. This land is your land. Pete made that famous, what a Guthrie song. Anyway, Pete wrote dozens of songs that you know every word to. He told me one time a story about Phil Oaks, who was also a gigantic folk singer of the '60s and '70s. Pete said he was finishing up a concert at a folk club in Grange Village one night. And he had to literally run to Grand Central Station to get the last train of the night back to Beacon, New York, which is where he lived. And as he's packing up his guitar, one of the waitresses said, Pete Phil Oaks is on the phone for you. And he grabs the phone. He said, Phil, I can't talk right now. I got a run to catch the last train to Beacon. Call me tomorrow and hung up. And Phil Oaks killed himself. And he said that selfish prick will never know how many people he hurt by taking his own life that night. And I never understood that anger until my friend James came to himself. And I'm furious with him five years after he did it. I don't-- gone you? Why didn't you call me? Yeah. Anyway, because you answered so many times. So many times. I went on Facebook and I said, my friend James killed all the last night. And I said, please call somebody. Call me if you're thinking of yourself. And three of my Facebook friends called me that night. I had no idea so many people were suffering, no idea. So you know, I think we always have to be-- we have to remind ourselves to be more aware of the feelings of others and not be so wrapped up in our own lives. It's easy to be wrapped up in your own life. But we really have to be cognizant of what other people are suffering through. This society cannot function unless you're-- You're absolutely right. John, you've spent a good majority of your life serving America, not just the country, but our people. You've exposed a dark part of the system when you thought that we've gone too far. Many agreed, even when it cost you everything. If every interview, every TikTok, every book you've written, every cameo, was erased from the face of the earth, what is the one story from your life that you would want to leave with the world? Oh, that's an easy one. Thank you. That I told the truth. If we don't have the truth, we don't have anything. We really don't. The truth always has a way of coming out. Sometimes it takes a long time, years, decades. But the truth always comes out. And we should want to be on the right side of it. If there's one thing that my children can be proud of, it's that I told the truth. I have lots of faults, just like every other human. But at least I want to be known for telling the truth. And one more. Aside from the truth or maybe on that vein, what's the best piece of advice someone has given you? When I was in college, somebody told me that Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia was listed in the Washington DC telephone book. And I looked, and there he was, and I called him. And I said, Senator Randolph, you don't know me. I'm a student at George Washington University. And I just wanted to thank you for your 50 years of service to our country. Going back to Franklin Roosevelt, he was elected in the election of 1934, the Senator. And he said, why thank you, young man? And he said, may I offer you some advice? And I said, Senator, anything you have to say, I'd love to hear it. And he said, always do the right thing. This city is too full of people who are willing to do the expedient thing. And I said, I'm going to write that down. And he says, you have a good night, and he hung up. And I've always remembered, I actually did write it down, and I stuck it inside a book, which I still have. And it's funny. I was a little bit star struck at the time. But as I've aged, and I've accumulated life events of my own, I realized that just those few words were really, really important. It's so much easier to do what's expedient. It's easier to do what might make us a little bit of money. And you come to realize, life's not about the money. You know, we're all going to end up at the ground someday. I read something that was very depressing in the Washington Post the other day. It said, we all die two deaths. We die when we take our last breath. And we die when our name is spoken for the last time. Well, I don't want my name spoken for the last time. I want to be remembered for something. What I want is to be remembered as someone who told the truth. Beautiful. Well, everyone, this has been your guest, John Kerriaku. John, is there anything, any platforms you want to shout out specifically? Thanks for asking. Yeah, I'm on Instagram, Facebook, and X, and LinkedIn. But I'm launching a new podcast in July on YouTube. If you go to Real John Kerriaku, I'd really appreciate it if you would subscribe so that when we hit the ground running the first week of July, you're on and you don't miss an episode. Number one podcast in the world. I hope I hope so. This is the Jack Neil podcast. I appreciate you coming home. Thank you so much for the invitation.