The Cost of Telling the Truth | John Kiriakou | Ep. 446

Summary

Cleared Hot Ep. 446 — The Cost of Telling the Truth | John Kiriakou

Host: Andy Stumpf
Guest: John Kiriakou (former CIA officer, whistleblower)
Release Date: May 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the personal journey, ethical dilemmas, and systemic issues encountered by John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower who publicly exposed the CIA’s torture program in the post-9/11 era. Through candid storytelling and reflective analysis, John and Andy explore intelligence work’s murky realities, the human and societal costs of telling hard truths, the post-9/11 transformation of US security, and the ongoing struggle for oversight and accountability within American intelligence institutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mentorship, Tradecraft & the Culture of the Agency (00:51–12:00)

• John shares vivid stories about his mentor, "Gus" (Gust Avrakotos, immortalized in Charlie Wilson’s War), illustrating how personality, background, and a flair for rule-bending shaped successful careers at the CIA.
  • “His nickname was Dr. Dirty. And I said to him one time, why, Dr. Dirty?...cause I'll stab you in the back, just like everybody else ... but then I'm gonna spin you around and stab you in the front.” — John (02:28)
• Anecdotes about Gus's unorthodox methods, loyalty, and eventual decline due to illness provide a window into the toll such work takes.

2. Operational Tales & Spycraft Realities (12:05–29:30)

• John recounts a tense and creative recruitment operation in Athens involving cultural awareness, psychological tactics, and directness.
  • “I said, sir, I was walking down the street and my bag accidentally got caught on the mirror and I broke the mirror off...I'm from the CIA in Washington. I know who you are. I know what you do here.” (09:25)
• Reflections on surveillance detection, the "provocative phase," and how fieldcraft sometimes overlaps with ordinary life—providing comic relief as Andy jokes about his wife's accidental mastery of SDRs.

3. The Double-Edged Sword of Agency Work (29:34–37:22)

• John details the impossibility of maintaining normal relationships as a CIA officer, especially when operational demands lead to secrecy, erratic hours, and compartmentalized lives.
• The impact spills over into family life and marriages, often leading to misunderstandings and estrangement.
• Early expectations: John anticipated a classic “do 25 years, retire, consult, live quietly” trajectory—upended by unforeseen events.

4. Corruption, Oversight & The Erosion of Liberty (37:37–52:01)

• Disillusionment with Congressional oversight: John recounts a contemporary senator (35:29) unable to access key 1975 documents—underscoring institutional barriers to transparency.
  • “I said, you're a senator, you're a committee chairman...Pick up the phone and tell them, bring the documents by noon...I've been trying that for the last seven years, and they tell me to go fly a kite.” (35:29)
• The birth and misuse of expansive surveillance (Patriot Act, FISA, Section 702), as government powers inch toward the unchecked.
  • “Section 702 directly takes our constitutional freedoms away from us in the name of national security.” (40:06)
• High rates of approved (and misused) FISA warrants, Snowden revelations, and how innocent people (like Mohamedou Slahi, subject of “The Mauritanian”) are victimized by intelligence dragnets.

5. Systemic Mission Creep & Intelligence Community Power (52:05–80:45)

• Ongoing debate: Is meaningful oversight even possible, or have agencies become independent power centers?
• Agency budgets ballooned after 9/11—fueling a “cash business” atmosphere and driving a rise in contractors and a DC-centric “war profiteer” class.
  • “I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all.” — John, quoting Kofer Black (58:43)

6. Tactical Success, Strategic Failure: The Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq (63:10–67:35, 125:58–135:33)

• Intelligence/law enforcement/military culture: exceptional at breaking things, abysmal at planning effective exits or post-conflict stability.
• Both reflect on Afghanistan/Iraq—how initial objectives were achieved, but strategic vision (and plans for exit/blowback) vanished early.
  • “The mission was to defeat Al Qaeda, and we destroyed them by the end of 2001...Then we stayed in one for about 20 years.” (65:00)
• Led by policy arrogance and a lack of historical/cultural context, U.S. military adventures too often result in lasting chaos.

7. Torture, Rendition, & The Ethics of National Security (85:43–105:10)

• John recounts the internal post-9/11 “shame” at CIA, leading to the push for harder measures and the slippery slope to torture and rendition.
• Academic and practical analysis of the “ticking time bomb” scenario reveals deep moral and practical flaws. Torture’s real-world utility is debunked—victims say anything to stop pain, not necessarily the truth.
  • “If you apply pain to people, they will talk. What they say? That’s the issue, will have almost nothing to do with reality.” — Andy (92:45)
• The personal consequences of whistleblowing are explored, from legal repercussions to family estrangement.

8. Surveillance, Privacy, and the Technological Abyss (148:42–152:47)

• Discussion of technological overreach: Vault 7, universal data collection, and the impossibility of true electronic privacy.
  • “In an electronic world...how does someone survive?...You gotta all turn into Ted Kaczynski...” — John (149:11)
• Resignation to being constantly monitored, but insistence that the Constitution (and honest self-reflection) must remain anchors for national identity.

9. Personal Cost, Optimism & the Cost of Telling the Truth (154:22–162:47)

• John describes the enduring cost of his decision to speak out: deep family estrangement, lost pension, public vilification.
• Despite the pain, he maintains optimism for reconciliation and the future, urging others—especially Gen Z—to “tell the truth.”
  • “The truth really does set you free. There are some contentious issues you’ll confront; be on the right side. In the long run, it’s worth it.” (200:32)
• Discussion closes on hope in the next generation’s skepticism and independence, and the essential nature of changing institutions from the inside.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Cause I'll stab you in the back, just like everybody else in this building will. But then I'm gonna spin you around and stab you in the front.” — Gust, via John (02:28)
• “Every American convicted ... between October 1 and October 31, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated. Because I was the only person in the world.” — John, on McCain's effort to help (94:51)
• “Section 702 directly takes our constitutional freedoms away from us in the name of national security.” — John (40:06)
• “If you apply pain to people, they will talk. What they say? That’s the issue, will have almost nothing to do with reality.” — Andy (92:45)
• “Telling the truth cost me my pension, my job and my family. But I think it was still worth it.” — John (paraphrased thread throughout)
• “It’s easy to invade a country. It’s easy to overthrow a government. The rest of it is really, really hard.” — John (131:44)
• “Either the Constitution matters, or it doesn’t.” — Andy (151:15)

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Important Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | |----------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:51–12:00 | Mentorship, Gus, and Agency culture | | 12:05–29:30 | Operational tales, Athens recruitment, spycraft lessons | | 29:34–37:22 | The double-edged sword: marriage, relationships, the job | | 37:37–52:01 | Oversight: golden age myth vs. present reality, FISA abuse | | 52:05–80:45 | Mission creep, contractors, budgets, intelligence community | | 85:43–105:10 | The dark side: torture, rendition, whistleblowing | | 131:08–135:33 | Iraq & Afghanistan: causes and “blowback” | | 148:42–152:47 | Surveillance state: privacy, technology, and acceptance? | | 154:22–162:47 | Family cost, optimism, telling the truth | | 200:32 | Closing message to Gen Z: “Tell the truth” |

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rare, unvarnished view from someone who has paid dearly for choosing truth over comfort. John Kiriakou’s journey sheds light on the often invisible personal and societal costs of America’s secret wars—abroad and at home. Through dry humor, powerful stories, and frank confession, John and Andy urge listeners to resist cynicism and embrace the courage—and cost—of telling the truth.

Closing Message:
"Tell the truth because the truth really does set you free. There are some very contentious issues you’ll experience and confront in your lifetime. Be on the right side of those issues. In the long run, it’s all worth it." — John Kiriakou (200:32)

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For Further Listening/Reference

• John’s books: “The Reluctant Spy”, “Doing Time Like a Spy,” upcoming: “Whispers in the Dirt”
• “The Mauritanian” (film)
• Vault 7 (Wikileaks/CIA leak)
• “Charlie Wilson’s War” (book & film)

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This summary is intended for those seeking a detailed understanding of the episode’s themes and arguments. For the full stories, humor, and nuances, listen to the complete conversation.

Transcript

[John Kiriakou]

Okay, I got the red smoke.

[Michael]

Sun runs north to south west of the smoke.

[John Kiriakou]

West of the smoke.

[Michael]

Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. It's been. It's been like, fascinating to watch your journey over the last couple years.

[John Kiriakou]

It's been kind of like that.

[Michael]

Well, that's. I think, just life. Um, I was thinking about really looking forward to sitting down and talking with you.

[John Kiriakou]

Same here.

[Michael]

We originally, obviously linked up over a Change Agents episode. They had a full page of production notes. I don't think I even asked you a single question because we just started talking about other stuff from, like, the global war on terror time.

[John Kiriakou]

I remember it was fantastic.

[Michael]

And then I was like, oh, my God, we have to get this person in person. And I was thinking about it.

[John Kiriakou]

I have.

[Michael]

I have to ask a question tangential to your old job. Based off of my understanding of the Agency, based off of movies. I love the movie Charlie Wilson's War.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh.

[Michael]

And I heard you talking one time about a particular character in that movie, and I am hoping that you actually got to work with this person. Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

This is my mentor.

[Michael]

Okay.

[John Kiriakou]

And one of my closest friends.

[Michael]

Did he actually break somebody's office glass with a hammer or wrench?

[John Kiriakou]

He used his fist, first of all. And I'll tell you what, they. They sort of eased off in the movie, because in the movie, the. The window that he was breaking.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Was the division chief, which is a career ending 100%. In real life, it was the deputy director for operations of the whole CIA.

[Michael]

So it was the boss's boss.

[John Kiriakou]

I said, how did they not take you out in handcuffs? I asked him one time, and he said, everybody's afraid of me because they think I'm crazy. And there's something to be said about that. He. His nickname at the Agency. We're talking about Gustavus, who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Charlie Wilson's work.

[Michael]

Such a spectacular actor as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh. What? They could not have found a more perfect actor.

[Michael]

Did he nail it pretty well?

[John Kiriakou]

No. Gust was far filthier than.

[Michael]

So this is the point where the reality of it wouldn't even have been made. Was he as much of a legend as he came off to be in that movie?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

That is unbelievable.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. And, you know, I'll tell you. Well, I could tell you a lot about Gus. His nickname was Dr. Dirty. And I said to him one time, I said, why, Dr. Dirty? I've found you to be anything but dirty. And he said, cause I'll stab you in the back, just like everybody else in this building will. But then I'm gonna spin you around and stab you in the front.

[Michael]

Was he just a spy's spy?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, he was a mean son of a bitch.

[Michael]

Is that what they're looking for? Did that place turn him into that or was that just who he was?

[John Kiriakou]

No, that's what that was the draw to bring him in. I'll tell you why he was so unique and he was very, very proud of this. He came into the agency in those early days when everybody was coming from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton. And he was from Pitt. He had a degree in Soviet studies from Pitt. And he was kind of an ethnic full blooded Greek from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, which was another reason why we hit it off. I went into operational training at the sort of halfway point in my career. And he says to me, are you Greek? And I said, yeah, where are you from? Where's your family from? And he said, oh, we're from. I think it was Sparta, which makes sense. And so we started talking and I said, you. You speak with a Pittsburgh accent. You from Pittsburgh? And he said, yeah, I'm from Aliquippa. You? And I said, yeah, I'm from Newcastle. Go Steelers. Right? And I pulled out my Steelers credit card that I still have in my pocke. It. Right, yeah, I got my. There it is. I should probably cover up the numbers totally. But yeah, my Steelers credit card. So we hit it off on the very first day. So he got me assigned to him as his student, his underling.

[Michael]

As you switched over to operations?

[John Kiriakou]

As I switched over to operations. And the cool thing about that was I was already mid career. Everybody in the class was mid career. It was called the operations course. Accelerated oca. And so if you are just joining the CIA and you're going into operations, you got to go to this desk for six months and learn what that desk does. And then you go to this office for six months or six weeks or whatever and learn what they do. We didn't need any of that stuff because we had already been in for six, eight, ten years. So we went straight into ops. And he used to say, the job of an operations officer is to recruit spies to steal secrets. That's what you're going to learn to do here, recruit spies to steal secrets. And you know, one of the things that I remember about him in training was that the other trainers didn't like him. And some of them were like openly rude to him. And he just took it. And I said, why are these assholes so Mean to you? He's like, mean? That doesn't even. The word doesn't even register in my brain. You want to see mean? You get to know me. He says, And I thought, that's kind of cool. I'll tell you another thing about Gus. Gus was incredibly generous to me with his time and his expertise. So I finished the class. I go out to Athens in counterterrorism. And this is gonna sound kind of silly. We had just gotten this newfangled thing called electronic mail, Right. E mail.

[Michael]

I remember this when this occurred as well, too. Something I have to tell my. But they're like, what are you talking about?

[John Kiriakou]

We were all, like, gathered around the computer, like. And I remember the station chief says, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you saying that my people can just write one of these emails and it goes back to somebody at headquarters, and then that person can respond? And the tech guy says, yeah. And he goes, I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.

[Michael]

Like, don't worry, sir. One day, the agency will develop the ability to read everybody. So it's gonna be fine.

[John Kiriakou]

Imagine so. Which came, like, a year.

[Michael]

Oh, I can only imagine. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So Gus and I. He was the very first email I sent. So I said, gus just arrived in Athens. Just wanted, you know, I'm in place. And he was like, great. Let's talk every day. Great. So we would do things like, I got to be. Look, I got to be careful. So I'm going to tell you one thing. I said, gus. I emailed him one day. I said, gus, there's. There's a guy just arrived here, and this guy's got to be, like, target number one for me. But he's from this outcast country, so he's not showing up at the diplomatic cocktail parties. How do I get this guy? I just got to get in front of him. I know he's not going to accept a pitch, but I want to scare the shit out of him is what I want to do. And he's like, you know what? I did something in the Middle east once, back in 68 or whatever. Whatever the year was. Here's what you do. And I even say in my first book, I wish I had thought of it because it was so brilliant. It was so simple, so brilliant. What I did. I looked much younger then. I was 35 years old, didn't have any gray hair. And I loaded a book bag, like a gym bag full of books. And I went to this guy's house. He lived in a very Close in suburb. And I knew what car was his, and so I took my book bag and I broke the side view mirror off of his car. Just broke it, Snapped it right off. Then I picked it up and I went to his next door neighbor's house. A Greek lady.

[Michael]

Grab that thing.

[John Kiriakou]

Sorry, Greek lady. And I said to her, is this your car? I broke this off by accident. And she says, no, no, it's not my car. It's the guy next door. And she says to me, he's not Greek. I was like, okay, sorry. Thank you. Sorry to bother you. So I go next door, knock on the guy's door, he answers the door, and I said, mesi juri te quiria la es pasato zamisas. He's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, I don't speak Greek. I said, oh, you speak English? He said, yeah. I said, oh, I speak English too. I said, sir, I was walking down the street and my bag accidentally got caught on the mirror and I broke the mirror off. And the lady next door told me that it was your car. And I wanted to say how sorry I was. I wanted to. I want to pay for it. He's like, oh, man, now, now I got to take it to the shop. And nothing but trouble. I said, I am so sorry. Please allow me to pay for it. May I have a glass of water? In his culture, you can't decline a request for hospitality. And he goes, wait right here. Well, I could see inside the house, his little girl was playing on the. On the carpet. She looked to be about 4. So I walked inside the house and I get down on my knees and I said to her, shoismik, what is your name in Arabic? Shoismik. And she said, my name is Miriam. And I said, how old are you, Miriam? I'm four. He comes back in with the water and he says to me, what exactly do you want? And I said, I'm not going to insult you. I'm from the CIA in Washington. I know who you are. I know what you do here. And I'm here to tell you that your leader, he's going to die. You can die with him, or you can come on the side of the good guys. And I'm not going to ask twice. You have until 10 o' clock tomorrow morning to make your decision. I said, this is my business card. It's my true name. 10 o', clock. And I set it down and I'm looking at him and he says, I admire your courage in approaching me. Very creative. But I'm Offended that you would do it in my own home, in front of my child. And I said my apologies, and I walked out.

[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

The next morning, everybody's gathered around my phone. We're all just sitting there looking at the phone, like, one minute to ten rings. I was like, I knew I scared him. I knew I scared him. And so he said, I've given your offer some thought. When can we meet? I said, in two hours. At such and such a hotel. The lobby had a coffee shop. We. We had every table. We took every table. Every table had an armed CIA officer there. And I said, come alone and come unarmed. And he came alone. And I got up, I gave him a big bear hug to make it look normal. And I patted him down for weapons. He was unarmed, and he sat down and asked me what I wanted. I was very specific with what I wanted, and I said, what do you want? He said, what are you offering? I said, relocation, if you want it. I mean, not tomorrow. We're gonna have some work to do, but if you want to move to the United States, he didn't. He wanted to move to another Arab country, which was fine. We gave him more money than one person can carry at a time. And even my station chief came up to me and he said, I've been here for 25 years. This was the most creative operation I've ever seen. And this was my first tour. And I said, you know, I wish I could take credit for it. What do you mean? He says. I said, gus told me to do this. It was his idea. And he's like, fucking Gus. He hated him. He hated him. And then poor Gus. The older he got, the sicker he got, as you might imagine. He had a blood pressure problem. Yeah. And that led to a series of mini strokes. And every time he would have a mini stroke, he would get meaner to the point.

[Michael]

One time, an actual personality shift.

[John Kiriakou]

It was a personality change. It got to the point where he somehow got it into his head that I told somebody that I had seen him escorted out of the building with the cops. I said, what are you talking about? Three weeks ago, you told Alan that. I said, gusta, I've been in Pakistan for six months. I don't know what you're talking about. I just got back from Pakistan a couple days ago. I haven't seen Alan in years. I don't know what you're talking about. But someone actually called security because the way he was screaming at me in the hallway, and a mutual friend of ours was like, look, he keeps having these mini strokes. He's not himself. And then it got to the point, and this is kind of a sad, sort of ignominious way to end such a proud career. He got it into his head that George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time, had denied him a good parking space. And he started emailing George. Yeah, directly. Because everybody in the agency knows George's email address. I mean, it's, you know, George tenantia.gov say georgeia.gov exactly.

[Michael]

George.tenant.

[John Kiriakou]

exactly. It's not hard to figure out. It's not like he's an alias or something. And so he was like, you know, why'd you take away my parking space? And of course, nobody ever responded to him. But it got to the point where Tenet finally said, it's time for Gus to go. And that's how his career ended.

[Michael]

You know, the worst part about that is I've been around some people now. Stroke and also the early onset of dementia. They don't realize, to them, what they are experiencing is real. They're their own worst enemy because they don't see the personality shift. And everybody. They think that everybody else has gone crazy.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

Good luck having that conversation with you.

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely. Right. My dad, God rest his soul, I had the best dad anybody could ever hope to have in life. He was a very gentle soul. PhD in music education, 44 years as an elementary school principal in the public school system, just an all around good guy. And he got Parkinson's disease. And sometimes Parkinson's is also associated with Parkinsonian dementia. So I used to, I was working at the United nations at the time. My kids were living in Ohio with my ex wife. So I used to drive either from Washington or from New York every other weekend, pick up the kids, go to my mom and dad's house. So my dad had to have back surgery. And he came out of the surgery with something called hospital psychosis, which is an actual thing where if you're already prone to dementia, it's the, the stuff that they give you to knock you out for the surgery. You had the anesthesia. It, it makes you crazy.

[Michael]

It doesn't sound awesome.

[John Kiriakou]

No. And sometimes you can finally come out of it over a period of weeks or months. Sometimes you never come out of it. So he calls me, I'm in New York. He calls me at like midnight one night and he said, I need for you to call the congressman. I said, which congressman? My congressman. I said, why? He said, al Qaeda was in my, my hospital room. And they tried to recruit me. And I got a tip off the congressman, but I knew what he was talking about because that day on the news, we had disrupted the FBI. Disrupted. What was the name of that attack? Fort something Attack in New Jersey. Before it took place, they grabbed these six Al Qaeda guys. So their pictures were on the news all day that day. And he imagined that they were in the room. The hospital room.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So he said, if you don't call the congressman, I'm calling the sheriff. I said, dad, we're all over these guys. It's all part of the operation. I said, don't worry about it. He goes, oh, you're out. You're on it. And I said, I'm on it like white on rice, dad. And then he backed off.

[Michael]

You should have told him, we need you, though. We need you to be a triple guy. We need you to go undercover.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. Just be totally silent.

[Michael]

Yeah. Listen, take notes, tell me everything. You are the linchpin to this operation.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I went to see him at the hospital that next weekend. And I was with my mom and my mom and dad. I say this all the time. They were deeply in love with each other, like all my life. And so it was time to leave. It was like, you know, 9 o' clock and visiting hours were over. So he walked with us to the elevator and then he tried to get into the elevator and my mom said, honey, you can't go home. With us. And he got mad. And he says, stella, that girl at the hotel told me I could go home anytime I wanted. And she said, you're not in a hotel, you're in a hospital. He got out and he looks at me and he says, good night, buddy. And I said, good night, dad. And then he looks at my mom and he says, I can't even say with a straight face. He goes, as for you, I'm done with you. She cried all the way home. And I was like, mom, he's not in his right mind. He can't help it. But then he would have a good day. Then he would have two good days. And then finally after a while, he snapped out of it and he was his normal self again. And then couldn't believe the stuff that we were telling him he had said. Couldn't believe it.

[Michael]

If I hadn't been around people now who have experienced that, I wouldn't believe it either. But now, having seen it, what a. How can you win a battle against your own brain?

[John Kiriakou]

I've got a friend, a very dear friend whose dad just passed away in his 90s and he had a stroke. And so his short term memory was just gone. Well, my buddy's Brother died in 1991. He was young, he was in his 20s. Died in 1991. And every single day his dad would say, where's Billy? I haven't seen Billy. Why hasn't he come to visit me? And every day they had to say, Billy died 35 years ago. And then he would just burst into tears. So finally they just said, billy. Billy was just here two hours ago. You don't remember? Oh, okay. Okay. When's he coming again? He's coming tomorrow. Don't worry about it.

[Michael]

I think that's the move.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, but getting back to Gust. Gust was like one of the most. One of the manliest men. I'll tell you what. And this is what a dear friend he was. I'll tell you two more Gus things. What a dear friend he was. I was going through a divorce coming out of Athens, and I was just. Just wrecked.

[Michael]

I've been through on myself. I know what you're talking about.

[John Kiriakou]

It's bad. I've been through two. The second one was worse. Yeah, but the first one, I'm like, my life is over at 36. I couldn't believe it. And he said to me, this is going to sound so crude, but this is just the way. This is just the way Gus used to talk. He says, don't worry about that. You're going to get more than you've ever had in your entire life. You're going to have more pussy than you're going to know what to do with. I'm like, gus, I feel old and broken and I'm 20 pounds overweight. And he said, my wife left me when I was stationed in Athens. He said, I was 44 years old. Next thing I know, I'm on top of a 20 year old. And I said, I said, well, how the heck did you do that? Like, you know, share, right? So I can try to make a comeback. And he says, he said, I said to her one time, why are you with an old man like me? And she said, because guys my age want to talk about their stereos and you want to talk about how beautiful my tits are.

[Michael]

I mean, that's not a bad selling point.

[John Kiriakou]

Lesson learned, Gus. Thank you.

[Michael]

Write that down in the notebook of life.

[John Kiriakou]

And then one time. This is my last Gus story. Unless you have questions. He. He emailed me and he said, listen, I'm going to be out of touch for 10 days, so keep on keeping on. I'll drop you a line when I'm back. I'm like, okay, figuring vacation, family, something. I'm going to meet with a particularly sensitive source one day, and I'm doing a three hour surveillance detection route, and I'm way down south of Athens and I make this turn, and as I turn, I happen to turn and look and there's Gus. He's standing on the street corner. And I was like, no, no, no, it's my imagination, because I've been thinking about him, right? And I carry on with the sdr. And then he emails me like four or five days later, hey, I'm back. So I said, I go, gus, by any chance four days ago, did I see you standing in front of the steakhouse in Anaglifada? And he writes back, tell anybody and I'll fucking kill you. So afterwards, when I got home from the tour, I was like, way back, what in the world were you doing in Glyfada that day? Why didn't you tell me you were in Athens? We could have, you know, met up or had dinner. And he says he loved the junta, the military dictatorship, his fascist dictatorship that just terrorized Greece for seven years, murdered thousands of people. He was like this with those guys. So he said, and the dictator, the head of the junta was a guy named Colonel Papadopoulos, George Papadopoulos. And he said, you know, I'm. I'm godfather to Papadopoulos's. Son. I was like, what? It's like being godfather to Hitler's son. Yeah, right?

[Michael]

Not a good look.

[John Kiriakou]

No. And he says, he's my godfather. I take our religion seriously. I'm like, okay, okay. He said, well, that's why I didn't tell anybody. They wouldn't understand. I go, gus, I love you and I don't understand. Yeah, yeah. He made no excuses.

[Michael]

The old sdr.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

My wife has no natural sense of direction.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my gosh. I. We.

[Michael]

We share life. 360.

[John Kiriakou]

Right? I do too.

[Michael]

I will find her. We'll talk on the phone. And she coaches at a jiu jitsu gym. Literally blown literally one block away down the alley by the police station. I know roughly how long it takes to get from there to where we live. And we'll have 20 minute conversations on the phone. And I'll ask her, where the fuck are you? And she's like, oh, I missed the turn. Just. And so I've taught her the term sdr. I'm like, are you on another sdr? She goes, yes, I definitely am. I actually think that if she was being observed by an intelligence agency, that they would think she is actually got an exceptional level of field craft. She just has no sense of direction whatsoever.

[John Kiriakou]

Wow.

[Michael]

She would accidentally be confused with somebody with a high level of tradecraft. I find her miles on life. I'm like, you're four miles from where we live and the gym is three. She's like, ah, I just took a wrong term. I'm just gonna see where this goes.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. Gps. She has vented. And. And they do great work.

[Michael]

John. It's. It's. It's less than a dozen turns to get to our house. I. Now I think it's fantastic because she. At first, I'm like, oh, you're on an sdr. She's like, what does that mean? I'm like, well, you know, surveillance detection route, this, that, or the other. And she's just like, yeah, that's what I'm doing. So now she just goes with it. She's like, oh, hey, I'm on an sdr. I'll be home in a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

When Gus was training me and we were doing SDRs, you know, the final phase in an SDR is called the provocative phase.

[Michael]

Yeah. We start making the aggressive less. Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

Just crazy. No, no, it's more provocative than the aggressive.

[Michael]

You're talking like throwing a U turn.

[John Kiriakou]

U turns. Pull into somebody's driveway, go the wrong way down a one way street. That's to be just 1000% sure that you're clean. But usually, you know, if you're clean before you get to that final phase, and the final phase can. It could be two blocks. You know, you don't have to drive the wrong way down the one way street for very long, but if you realize you're being followed, you just abort the meeting. I never met anybody that ever had to go into a provocative phase. I don't know, because it's so provocative that there could actually.

[Michael]

You could draw attention to yourself.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. And the conclusion would be like, oh, he's doing an sdr. We got to put a double team on him. I worked with this woman in Bahrain. She was a State Department officer. She was so fast freaking arrogant. She had no reason or right to be arrogant. She was just arrogant. She had come from Romania, had never served in the Middle east before. I had already been there a year when she arrived. She replaced a friend of mine who went on to be a young ambassador. And she came to the office one day and she said, have you had surveillance here? And I said, no, not a single time. She said, I had surveillance last night. I said, it's because you're the political officer. They just assumed that everybody who's the political officer is a CIA officer and she wasn't. I said, what'd you do? And she said, I took them on a high speed chase from the top of this island to the bottom. And I was like, good for you. Which of course is exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

[Michael]

Just go about your normal business, maybe act normal.

[John Kiriakou]

Because then they're going to say, oh, she's just acting normal. She went to the grocery store and she went to the dry cleaners, and then she went home. She must not be CIA. And then they move on to the next guy. She was so provocative that literally every meeting she went to for the next two years, she dragged surveillance to. And as a result, she pulled surveillance off of me. I never had it. Never.

[Michael]

Yeah. I worry about an intelligence agency seeing my wife's driving. They'd be like, she is definitely a sleeper cell. She's constantly looking for. It's like, no, she's not. John, did you ever think that your life was going to look like what it does right now?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, no, no. I can tell you exactly what I thought my life would look like. My wife and I used to talk. My second wife and I used to talk about it. She was a senior CIA officer as well. I believed very firmly that I would do my 25 years because I had five years overseas. You can get 30 years pension after 25. And then I would retire on a Friday, start up the following Monday with a contractor, do another five years, and live happily ever after. You know, we had a. I won a big award at. After the. I was a beta operation. Big award. And I used it to buy a piece of land in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I bought a third of an acre. Loved it. Love. I still love. It's so clean and pristine. It's just wonderful there. So it was 10ft above sea level, four lots back from the ocean. Perfect. And I just thought, well, I'll retire and we're going to build our house there and, you know, live happily ever after. And no such thing happened.

[Michael]

How is it even possible for people who do or did what you did for a living to have relationships or be married to somebody who also doesn't work in that agency?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it's. It's not possible. I hate to say it, but it's just not possible.

[Michael]

Because I'm assuming there are. I mean, obviously, if you both work there, I'm assuming things are obviously still compartmentalized. But I don't know how you would even bridge that gap.

[John Kiriakou]

You can't.

[Michael]

You'd have to start off with a lie. I'm assuming the initiation of the relationship.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, the only thing my first wife knew was that I worked at the CIA and that she couldn't tell anybody that I worked at the CIA. That was it. I would come home, especially once I went operational. I would come home and she'd say, how was your day? I'd say, great. What'd you do? Nothing. Who'd you see? Nobody. Yeah, like, okay. Yep. How's your day? Good. And then the phone would ring at 11. I had seven cell phones and I had a. They always give you a bigger house than you need because you. You need space to entertain and you need space for privacy. So I. One of the little bedrooms I had is a den, and I kept the door locked. And I had seven cell phones, all burners, all registered to fictitious names. And 11 o', clock, the phone would ring and I would say, you know, Lilac Personal Shopping. I didn't. That was from the Sopranos, but you get the idea. And the guy would say, you know, whatever the code was, and I would respond with my bona fides. And, like, he would say, hey, Billy, I just got back to town. And I would say, how was your vacation? And he would say, you know, it rained the whole Time I was gone. That means meet me at the hotel coffee shop in three hours. And we, we had previously arranged, we found a, I, I was able to identify a 24 hour coffee shop. So I would leave at 11 and she'd be like, where are you going? It's 11 o', clock, I have a meeting. You know, just like in the Sopranos, I got a meeting, I gotta make my collections. And so I would do a three hour sdr, I would do the meeting, the meeting would last an hour, two hours, and then I would do two hours back to my house, which maybe gave me an hour to sleep. And then I'd get up, shave, shower, go back to the, to the office and work my normal day and just hope I didn't have to do the same thing again that night. But she was convinced I was cheating on her.

[Michael]

Well, I mean, how could she not think that? I mean the unregularity of the hours and all of those things.

[John Kiriakou]

My second wife though, I'll give you an example. It was the day I was leaving Pakistan. I had been there six months, Abu Zubayda was behind us, I had complete and total success in Pakistan. And she and I had been arranging, planning a week long vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Neither one of us had ever been to Santa Fe. Two hours before I left for the airport, I get this cable and it says, don't come home. Instead go to this other country because we want you to break into a house and plant a bug. And I was like, fuck.

[Michael]

So I called her, it's like, then can I go to Santa Fe?

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right? I called her and I said, I am so sorry but. And then she said, no, no, I saw the cable, go do your break in, we'll go to Santa Fe some other time. So she understood what the job entailed and we two, three months later we went to Santa Fe and had a great time. But she understood, I think that's the

[Michael]

only way it could work for people in your line of work. Do you think it's possible for agencies like the CIA to exist and not become corrupted?

[John Kiriakou]

No, I don't. That's a great question and it's an important question. And the reason why I don't think it's possible is because we will never have appropriate oversight. Oversight just will never happen. There was this like golden age, we like to think this golden age of congressional oversight from 1975 until about 1982 when Iran contra started coming out of the church Committee, the Pike Committee, the creation of the House And Senate Intelligence committees. Real oversight with giants sitting on them. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Barry Goldwater. Serious people, heavyweights in 20th century American politics who were serious about, you know, the constitutionally mandated oversight authority of Congress. And then that just kind of went away, and now they're just cheerleaders. I got a call from a senator a week ago last Friday, and he said, hey, would you come up to my office? There are a couple of issues I want to talk to you about. This has happened a few times in the last 10 years, and I drop everything. And I, anytime a senator calls me, drop everything and just go straight up to the Hill. And he pierced this notion that I had of the golden age from 75 to 82. So I said, senator, what can I do for you? We had chit chat.

[Michael]

Baseball.

[John Kiriakou]

And he's a baseball fan, so am I. I said, what can I do for you? And he said, I need your help. There are some documents that I need from 1975, and I just can't get access to them. I said, you're a senator, you're a committee chairman.

[Michael]

Yeah. You should be the one with the keys to the drawer.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, Just pick up the phone and tell them, bring the documents by noon, have them in my office. He said, I've been trying that for the last seven years, and they tell me to go fly a kite.

[Michael]

What was the topic he was looking for?

[John Kiriakou]

Well, that's what it was. He said, there's a classified Annex to the 1975 report. I said, there can't be. The whole point of the 1975 report was that it was unclassified and released to the public. And he said, right, that's what they want everybody to believe. He said, I found a classified annex. He said, they denied for seven years that it existed, and then we found it in a storage area in the basement of the Senate. And I said, and you can't just open the box? He said, no, it's covered with decades worth of dust and it's sealed and they will not let me see it. And I said, have you gone to leadership? And he said, yeah. And leadership said, I don't want to get involved in a dispute between two committee chairmen. I said, this is. This is outrageous. And because they're congressional documents classified by a congressional committee, they're not subject to the Freedom of Information act because in its infinite wisdom, Congress exempts itself from all of the laws that it passes.

[Michael]

Convenient.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And so I said. I said, listen, just off the top of My head. I think your only strategy here is to go public. That's it. Go public. Scream it from the rooftops and say you're going to raise hell on the floor of the Senate every single day until they open that box. So the way we left it was. He was going to think about it.

[Michael]

Yeah. Why would an agency allow a hard copy like that to exist?

[John Kiriakou]

Right?

[Michael]

I mean, it's like, guys, here's what we're gonna do. Print out everything, put it in this box.

[John Kiriakou]

Nobody will ever find and just hope nobody ever finds.

[Michael]

No, it's like. And again, I'm not trying to give anybody, like, policy approaches here, but it's like, you know, there's. There's some truth to the. You know, the only way you can keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Michael]

Why would you have a written hard copy? If, like, if somebody in charge somewhere is like, this has to be destroyed? Well, then go fucking destroy it.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, you've heard the story about Dick Helms and MK Ultra.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So Senator Church told him, do not destroy the documents. And he went back to headquarters from that meeting and said, destroy all the documents.

[Michael]

He understood the assignment.

[John Kiriakou]

And they find him, like, $100. And everybody was chipping in a buck, two bucks in the hallway to pay the Director's congressional fine. But that's why we only have 15% of the MK Ultra documents, because the agency destroyed everything.

[Michael]

Well, there's definitely nothing good in that other 85%. Yeah, for sure. You know, the reason I asked you the question about the agency corrupting itself is I started looking at, you know, just publicly disclosed, like, MI5, MI6, any intelligence agency that, you know, we asked people and countries ask people, your job is to lie, cheat, steal, win at all costs. And people get really, really, really good at that. And over enough time, it seems like. And the charter of the CIA, to my understanding, is to be externally focused. But even when I was just looking at it this morning, MI5 and MI6, you see the same similarities. Those incredible tools of what are supposed to be external protection start getting oriented inward. And once that starts, how do you correct that?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, right. It could take a generation to correct that.

[Michael]

Is it even possible? In a generation, Is it. Is it possible? In our case, no organization gets so corrupted and politicized. And it's like, I believe the CIA, we need an entity like that. But how do we fix the entity that we have without burning it to the ground and losing that capability?

[John Kiriakou]

I'm not sure it's possible.

[Michael]

Well, you would know more than I would. I mean, my access to information comes from Google. Right.

[John Kiriakou]

You know what really wrecked it for us was 911 and passage of the Patriot Act.

[Michael]

So, you know, right now, great branding, by the way.

[John Kiriakou]

Seriously, right?

[Michael]

People have no idea the freedoms that they gave away.

[John Kiriakou]

They have. No, no. Even after all these years, they have no understanding.

[Michael]

FISA right now is currently being argued about.

[John Kiriakou]

You took the word 702. You took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say section 702 is coming back up for reconsideration yet again, like it does every two years. This is a section that directly takes our constitutional freedoms away from us in the name of national security. And Donald Trump ran in 2016 against Section 702. Now, 702 is what Ed Snowden told us about for the first time in

[Michael]

the summer of 2013, they were using Right Pegasus. Yeah. So Michael, Google this one. How many illegal FBI queries have there been in section 702. And the number is going to be over 200,000. And that's the issue that nobody wants to talk about.

[John Kiriakou]

I want to show you a number too, that I've written about a couple of times as soon as he finishes this one. But it's along the same lines. And this is why we're in such

[Michael]

a hundreds of thousands.

[John Kiriakou]

Each One of those 78,000 misused queries

[Michael]

in two years, constitutional violation. Every single one of those.

[John Kiriakou]

Every single time. Brennan center for Justice. If your audience doesn't know the Brendan center for justice, you got to go there. They're all geniuses. If you don't mind, Michael, how many FISA warrant applications have been denied?

[Michael]

Oh, is this a literal and figurative round number?

[John Kiriakou]

Check this out. 34,000 requests.

[Michael]

Estimates ranging from 11, 11 or 12.033.

[John Kiriakou]

100 of 1% have been denied. Ask Carter Page how that worked out for him.

[Michael]

And here's what's crazy. I agree with the argument that we need to keep track of people who are malaligned with the morals and interests of this country. But this is a bigger net than that.

[John Kiriakou]

It is.

[Michael]

And that query system, way bigger that Snowden was talking about between you and I. Well, you were from the intelligence world. I wasn't. I was from the lack of intelligence world based off my high school gpa. But I am sure, even just in the social contacts that I have, if you go six rings farther than that, I am peripherally associated with the cell phone tree to criminals of some kind. And who knows, depending on how that goes. And what those people know.

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely.

[Michael]

And that's the issue that people are losing in this, is that this net not only captures the person that they may be targeting, but all the other people that are upstream and downstream of that thrown into a database that can be queried unconstitutionally. And the next thing you know, our government is looking at your personal information, which they shouldn't be able to do. And then let's be real honest here, too, if they worry about the legality of that, they'll just go across the pond and ask. Those people use the same tools and

[John Kiriakou]

they do it every skin word. Have you ever heard of Muhammadu?

[Michael]

I can't believe you would even ask me a question like that because the answer is obviously no.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay, Muhammadu. Muhammadu is, is the Nelson Mandela of, of our age. This is a guy. A movie was made of him, an A list Hollywood movie called the Mauritanian. So Muhammadu was a Mauritanian citizen. He was in medical school in Germany and his cousin was getting married in Mauritania. So Muhammadu had another cousin in Lebanon who was a member of Al Qaeda. And the Mauritania cousin called and said, are you in touch with our Lebanon cousin? He said, rarely. Once a year, maybe we talk. He said, can you call him? I can't get in touch with him. Tell him his dad had a stroke. His dad's in very poor health. Muhammad, who calls his cousin, your dad had a stroke. Oh, my God. Thank you for telling me. Yeah, I'm going to go to Mauritania to go to the other cousin's wedding. I'll check in on your dad. That was it. That was the conversation. He goes to Mauritania to go to the wedding. The CIA says, hey, wait a minute. There's this guy in Germany, he's talking to Al Qaeda. Lebanon, he's going to Mauritania, which is full of Al Qaeda. Oh, my God. It's a giant meeting of Al Qaeda. No, it was a family wedding. So we asked the Mauritanians go to this event, whatever this. They're calling it a wedding. Probably a code name for operational planning meeting. It was a wedding. Go to the wedding and grab this guy. So they do. They grab him. They turn him over to the agency. He spent 14 years at Guantanamo undergoing merciless torture. And after 14 years, the CIA said, you know what? This is probably the wrong guy. We'll just let him go. Well, by then he's been identified as a Guantanamo al Qaeda terrorist. No country would take him. The Mauritanians would kill him if we sent him back to Mauritania. So he bounced around. He went to Italy. He went to, I think, Switzerland. Now he lives in the Netherlands. He never finished medical school. He couldn't. So now he teaches. He's married to a Dutch woman. They have a couple of kids. We've become good friends. When he was released from Guantanamo, he went on Twitter and I tweeted at him. I had just gotten out of prison. I tweeted at him and I said, my country will never apologize for what it did to you. So I will. I said, I'm ashamed at what the CIA did to you, and I'm sorry. And he DMed me immediately. And we've been friends ever since. I teach at a university in Spain, the University of Salamanca, a course on the history of terrorism. And every semester he does one of the lectures for me. And his story has gotten out, thank God, with the release of the movie the Mauritanian, which you can see on a transatlantic flight near you. You know, everybody's got it. His ability to forgive is incredible to me. I've tried to emulate that. I lay in bed at night still, you know, fantasizing about the executions of everybody who's wronged me.

[Michael]

But he doesn't.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right? And in some cases, they actually used to share the bed. Anyway, that's a different issue.

[Michael]

I've had that experience as well.

[John Kiriakou]

So how this guy has been able to become the. The man that he is, he's a. He's a. He's a role model for all the rest of us. But he's the first guy we should talk to about Section 702 and how it's abused. Abused to target innocent people. Oh, I remember the point I was going to make. Donald Trump campaigned against the reauthorization of Section 702. And then last week said that he talked to three dozen generals and admirals, and every single one of them said, we have to have 702 to keep America safe. So I support the reauthorization of Section 702. Okay, that's exactly the opposite of what you ran on and how 702 keeps us safe when we have other electronic means to keep us just as safe without spying on American citizens unconstitutionally. Nobody's ever explained why. Why do we need 702? You know, when. When Ed Snowden went public, the whole goal was to have 702 repealed, to have the Patriot act repealed eventually, but. But to start with 702 and every two years, when it comes up for a vote, a couple more people will go over to the no side, but not in any numbers to actually mean something.

[Michael]

Yeah. Then if you look at it, you. If you read four paragraphs down in the articles, it says, well, even if they say no, the system's already set up so it can continue for another.

[John Kiriakou]

Gonna do it anyways. Yeah.

[Michael]

Which. So again, how do. How does the cart or the horse go back in the barn?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I. Honest to God, you know, when we've got. When we've got the likes of Lindsey Graham and Mark Warner, and this is not a partisan issue, both parties are equally complicit in stripping us of our civil rights and civil liberties. When you've got these guys who are, as I said a few minutes ago, just cheerleaders for the intelligence community, there is no going back.

[Michael]

I mean, does that essentially mean then that the intelligence community is becoming the power broker in this country, not the elected officials?

[John Kiriakou]

I think so. I really believe it. You know, on the Republican side, Rand Paul is really good. Not perfect, but he's good. On the Democratic side, Ron Wyden is good, also. Not perfect, but good. But you can't win these things with two senators.

[Michael]

Yeah, you can't.

[John Kiriakou]

You need 51. And then the House is a lost cause.

[Michael]

Yeah. I mean, so how do we. How do we maintain our capability but put it into a system where we actually have oversight? Or is that even possible now? And if it's not possible, what does that mean for our country and the future of where we're headed?

[John Kiriakou]

Tom Drake, the NSA whistleblower will tell you that the systems already exist to spy on our enemies, protect Americans and preserve civil liberties all at the same time. They existed. And then on the morning of 9 11, Mike Hayden, who at the time was the head of NSA, became the head of the CIA. Said that NSA had been waiting for a 911 so that they could implement the bigger program and grab everybody's electronics. Not only is it illegal for NSA to intercept the communications of American citizens or U.S. persons, which is anybody in the country legally on a green card, it is a part of NSA's founding charter forbidding them from intercepting the communications of Americans or U.S. persons. And they just say, tough. 911 national security.

[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

What are you gonna do? You gotta start from scratch.

[Michael]

How do we do that?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

When we. I mean, I'm at the place now where. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a geopolitical expert or an expert of our political system. I don't think it's correctable from the top down anymore. I think it's only.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree with you.

[Michael]

I think it's only can be from a bottom.

[John Kiriakou]

The bottom up.

[Michael]

But. But that's generational.

[John Kiriakou]

It's generational. And you're talking about people en masse going into the streets, and we're not there.

[Michael]

This is not going to the streets. I had a different. I call it the passive aggressive revolution.

[John Kiriakou]

You're not. You're not talking about summer of 68, you know, millions of people marching in the streets, people getting shot at universities.

[Michael]

I hope not. Because people aren't ready for that. The people who are calling for civil war. I always try to just tell them, please be careful what you wish for.

[John Kiriakou]

Mm.

[Michael]

Because if you think could get way

[John Kiriakou]

worse than what we're seeing.

[Michael]

Well, if you think the answer is banging it out with your neighbor because they have a different political sign in their front yard and your cul de sac.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Michael]

You are not ready for what this actually looks like. The passive aggressive revolution, which this wouldn't work either, is we all stop paying taxes.

[John Kiriakou]

Ah.

[Michael]

Here's the problem, though. Most people's taxes are paid through their employer. So we'd have to get the employers on board.

[John Kiriakou]

That's true. That. I like that idea.

[Michael]

How does all this stuff function? Money, I mean, at the end of the day. And this. This is an interesting one. I know you have talked openly about your thoughts about Epstein. I look at it from like an Occam's Razor approach. Could he have been a triple agent? Sure, maybe. I think the guy just helped any intelligence agency that wanted with the ability to move money.

[John Kiriakou]

That's kind of the way things are looking now with the release of the second tranche of documents.

[Michael]

Well, here's the thing. I don't know anything.

[John Kiriakou]

But you know what I mean.

[Michael]

I don't really know anything about the world that you operate in, but it's a very uniquely U.S. viewpoint. The agency is. We are. You guys are the shining star of freedom. You are part of our umbrella.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, to the rest of the world,

[Michael]

I'm pretty sure they look at you guys like an illegal organization full of gangsters. And I've never been on an intelligence operation with you. Guys. But I feel like when the, if you're at a dinner and the bill comes in, you don't put down the CIA credit card or write a check that says Central Intelligence Agency. So the whole mechanism and ability for you to be able to do your job is through money.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

So you need to be able to launder and move money. Epstein was a really shitty trader.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

But if you're not worried about an roi, who gives a shit?

[John Kiriakou]

You can do anything you want, just

[Michael]

pass the money through. Was he into some really horrendous stuff? Yeah. Do I think that the government knew that? Yeah. Did they turn a blind eye? Would they be willing to turn a blind eye? 100%. I think he was a useful idiot that helped any intelligence agency fund their operations wherever that he wanted to.

[John Kiriakou]

I think that's good analysis. It checks all the boxes and would explain a lot. It would explain why he was volunteering to the CIA and the FBI, to MI5 and MI6, to the Germans, to the Russians, to the Israelis. It would explain those relationships. And then with the Rothschilds.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I mean, this is a guy who never went to college. He was a. I mean, I can't

[Michael]

judge that too deeply, John. No.

[John Kiriakou]

But how do you end up with the widest townhouse in Manhattan and a multi billion dollar portfolio when you were a seventh grade substitute math teacher?

[Michael]

Because you're willing to do anything for money. And people know that.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

And I wish, I wish that I could say that the government, whatever people would define that as deeply cares about their citizens. And to a degree I think they do. But if you think for a second that they won't allow people to get victimized to achieve the end state that they want, you're living in a fantasy world.

[John Kiriakou]

I think you're right.

[Michael]

And then I think he becomes interesting too. Right. He gets to this level of affluence and wealth.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

That'd be an interesting guy to, you know, like, oh, that's interesting. You're friends with this person in a digital age. It's like, I don't know how any of this works, but if like Rogan's a good friend of mine and I worry about him because he sits down and he talks with a lot of people. I'm like, listen, man, I know you well enough that like you're a UFC commentating like stand up comedian probably not going to be a good asset. But if there's a way to bug your phone and then anybody who comes in proximity to you, their stuff gets attached to it. As well. That's very valuable. Yeah, that would be my concern for him.

[John Kiriakou]

You're exactly right.

[Michael]

So Epstein. Not to try to attach Joe to Epstein at all, departing here, he fits into that category of. Well, you're around rich people, and in my experience, there's a level of wealth where people start getting a little bit weird. Not all of them, but if you can have everything and anything, it starts to fray at the edges a little bit. And, you know, that's great leverage.

[John Kiriakou]

Let me ask you, and I know you don't have any inside information, but this is something that has perplexed me from the start of this whole case. What do you make of Les Wexner? I mean, could it be. Could this have been romantic at its core?

[Michael]

I think anything like that is possible.

[John Kiriakou]

Why would Les Wexner have showered Jeffrey Epstein with so much money over such a long period of time? What made Epstein, of all people, stand out to him? This is the richest man in the state of Ohio. Yeah, right. He's a billionaire and he earned every dollar of it himself.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So of everybody else in America, why does he pick Epstein?

[Michael]

Maybe he knew what Epstein was really up to and he supported it. I mean, maybe Epstein was just like, hey, man, just so you know, I actually really suck at trading, but you and I are going to change the world.

[John Kiriakou]

I've got a really dear friend who was a deputy Attorney general. He's my friend and my attorney, and he maintains that at an individual level, the only real way, if you're not a government or connected to a government, the only real way to launder large amounts of money in this digital age that we're in are through high end real estate, luxury watches and jewelry, fine art and racehorses. Those are the only. The only ways in which cash, large scale cash transactions can be affected. And that's always stuck with me since he said that.

[Michael]

Yeah. I mean, the high end art world is an interesting one. You could travel the world with something worth 50 million. Who pays for it, how, where it goes, who knows?

[John Kiriakou]

It's anonymous half the time.

[Michael]

The money stuff gets. It's fascinating to me. And again, I don't have. I don't. I didn't come from that world. But at the end of the day, I'm like, what makes all this tick? It's the money.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Like, if you really want to shut down the CIA, like, oh, it just. By the way, you guys have no money. What are you gonna do?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I.

[Michael]

You've.

[John Kiriakou]

You've heard me say. You've heard me Say that in the days after 9 11, I went up to Kofer Black, who is the head of the counterterrorism center, and I said, kofer, I have a. I have an idea for an operation I want to run by you. And he put up his hands and he said, whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all.

[Michael]

Yeah. And we wonder why.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay.

[Michael]

These agencies can't pass an audit. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And the. And the CIA is essentially a cash business. Everything's in cash.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

You're just on your honor to sign the receipt again. It has to be.

[Michael]

It's a uniquely u. S. Optic to think that you're out there with the stars and stripes on your shield. Everybody else is trying to kill you guys. You're a criminal everywhere else. Of course, you're paying in cash.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael]

I don't think they would take a company check. Even though Harrison Ford did buy a helicopter.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, he did. With a check. But he had his business card.

[Michael]

He did. Do you take a company. The man was like, yes. I mean, it's. That. That one's probably not going to bounce for sure, but you're gonna have some questions from your boss. Yeah, indeed. I don't know what to do, because at this point, there's no way you're shutting off the money to any of these organizations.

[John Kiriakou]

Not a chance. Not a chance. And institutionally, 911 happened, like, you know, last week.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

It's not 25 years ago. It just happened. And so nobody's given up any authority, nobody's given up any budgets. Nothing's going to change.

[Michael]

Where does that leave us if we can't change it and we can't even hit the pause button and our government continues to grow and our deficit continues to grow, even though, again, that was kind of the opposite of the platform that was run upon. But here we are again, and we can't account for where the money went to even include inside of the dod.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Michael]

The Marines are good. They have actually been like, hey, this is the money you gave us. This is what we have. Every other branch. They're like, we don't really know.

[John Kiriakou]

No. I mean, J. Edgar Hoover famously went 48 consecutive years with a budget increase. All he had to do is go in front of Congress, which he did every year, and he would say communism. And they're like, oh, my God, here's

[Michael]

more money that even came up with Gust and Charlie Wilson's war, how they would go in the appropriations.

[John Kiriakou]

Communism.

[Michael]

Well, he explained it. I don't have to tell him what it's for. I just have to tell him the number. And what did they start with? 10 million. And they ended up at over a billion, obviously over a course of a period of time.

[John Kiriakou]

He said he was very clear. We, we talked about when they first, when, when the book was first optioned and the writers, the writers were coming to Virginia to have dinner with Gus and just get some ideas for how they wanted to adapt the script or adapt the book into a script. And he would tell them these stories. He, he was very clear. He said he never had a mind for budgets. All he ever wanted to do was kill Russians. And so when he went to the director or the deputy director, they said, well, what's your idea for the operation? My idea for the operation is we kill as many people as we possibly can kill. And they said, okay, what do you need for that? And he said, stinger missiles. And then years and years later, I'm in Pakistan and I get a call from the front gate, from the Gurkhas or whoever we had at the front gate. They're like, john, there's a guy here in a pickup truck and he's got a missile in the back. I said, is it a Stinger? They said, looks like a Stinger. Okay, I'll be right down. So I go down with a camera in the days before phones had cameras. And I say hi to the guy. He's just some, you know, Afghan refugees got a missile in the back of the, in the bed of the pickup truck as they do. Yep. And I, I roll the missile over and it's got the little tag on it, and I take a picture of the tag and I said, let me take the missile. We're going to put it in this, in this little building over here. Come back in 24 hours. If this is one of ours, I'll give you your money. So I send the picture to headquarters. I said, this guy drove up today, he had a missile. I have the missile in the walk in room, and here's the information that's on the little tag. They write back. They say, yep, it's one of ours. So I go to the cash room, I pull 100,000 out in cash. The guy comes back the next day. I make him sign a receipt. He writes, you know, Muhammad and give him his 100,000. And there's one fewer Stinger missile that's out there to be used against us.

[Michael]

You're making a difference, John.

[John Kiriakou]

That was gust. It's like, Gus, you had to give them like all the Stinger missiles, dude.

[Michael]

I mean, look at our exit from Afghanistan.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, what a shit show.

[Michael]

What was it the day later? They had a dude hung around the neck underneath a Blackhawk flying. I mean, if you don't think that all of our near peer adversaries were surging into that, looking at the equipment we left behind, all of those things, like you're living in a fantasy.

[John Kiriakou]

What were you doing for the last 20 years?

[Michael]

We're good at breaking things and entry. We suck at exit. And that's what scares me about Iran as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. Yes, Andy. When I was, I was the senior investigator in the Senate Foreign relations committee from 09 to the end of 11. And I went to Afghanistan with John Kerry early. I think it was in 09. He had just become the chairman. And we go into this briefing and I'm sure you've sat through a thousand of these. So it's like 10 generals.

[Michael]

Oh, I don't go into rooms with 10 generals. I was like enlisted or very junior officer. I was like, if the door opened and there's that many call, I'm like, I have a dental appointment. No.

[John Kiriakou]

So they're between like one and four stars. They're all sitting around the room and, and Carrie and another colleague of mine and I go in and we sit there and they have this, this slideshow ready for them. And they're like, you know, elements of this. The 2nd Mountain Division are moving here and the Armored Corps. And we come out of it and carry, who should know better. He says to me, we may actually win this thing.

[Michael]

Oh, God.

[John Kiriakou]

And I go, we're not going to win this thing. They've been given the Same briefing since 2001.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I said, seriously, Senator, I said, hamid Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. That's it. Why do you think we have to do these corkscrew takeoffs and landings? Because these guys still have Stinger missiles and they're going to use them against us. We're not going to win this thing. It's like, my God, like, does nobody think these things through?

[Michael]

I don't know the answer to that. I mean, we strategically achieved our objectives in Afghanistan in about 90 days.

[John Kiriakou]

I say the same thing all the time. By the end of 2000, then we

[Michael]

stayed in one for about 20 years.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, exactly.

[Michael]

That's where it all falls apart.

[John Kiriakou]

The mission was to defeat Al Qaeda, and we destroyed them by the end of 2001.

[Michael]

We were actually too good at it. Because if you look at it, I mean, the last not intel, but articles I've read on it now, Al Qaeda or isis, which, you know, we call them branches of the same tree. I mean, if you would get two or three of those people together, oh, you're gonna have a bad day because we were gonna come knock. Well, we weren't gonna knock on your door. That wouldn't be true. We might take the door off the hinges in a man who may not appreciate, but they learn real quick. Like we have to be disaggregate. So we actually were so effective that we pushed that at least from a senior leadership level, that ideology into 60 plus different countries.

[John Kiriakou]

Look at this. To hell right now. It's, it's a hellscape. Yeah.

[Michael]

And what does it even mean to win in Afghanistan? And this is one of the things that I worry about with Iran. What are our, what are the measurable strategic objectives that we are trying to achieve?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

How are we going to measure them?

[John Kiriakou]

Vocalize.

[Michael]

You'll hear other people vocalizing what they believe the beliefs to be. But I'm yet to hear it from the administration. And I don't feel like these are heavy lifts or high asks for the administration. There's, there's a reason why people don't have an appetite for this. We're going to do some stuff and we'll leave and we're ready. Like we tried that. We had 20 years of G what in both Iraq and Afghanistan where that didn't work well. And so other people have verbalized, you know, their thoughts on it. But no, the administration hasn't. Like what are the metrics? I mean even it like reduce military capability by 80% like I'll accept that, that's fine. And what are our criteria for exiting? Because that's the question. And that didn't exist in Afghanistan.

[John Kiriakou]

You're right.

[Michael]

I mean, my first deployment to Afghanistan was in 2002 was shortly after Hamakarza. I had the assassination attempt on him. We augmented their security detail before they turned it over to a civilian contractor. And then my last one was there in 2010 and the war looked very different. But even then, I mean, it was just. We could have a tactical influence in the locations. We could physically go in touch. But we also. One of the first operations we did was into a province where U.S. forces hadn't been in 10 years. And we almost got our shit pushed in, I betcha. I mean they like, well, thank you that we have overhead assets. You know, my rifle can shoot a little bit more accurately at a farther distance than yours. But to think that we were going to win in Afghanistan. What does that mean? And still democracy. That didn't work. Didn't work in Iraq. They didn't want that in the first place. It's never happened there.

[John Kiriakou]

No. They had no history.

[Michael]

But how do we learn our. From our mistakes.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I don't understand.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, you know, look at our. Look at our political leaders. Our political leaders. Again, this is not a partisan issue. Pick either one of the two major parties. They think they're the smartest guys in the room.

[Michael]

That's always the most dangerous person.

[John Kiriakou]

It is dangerous. That's right.

[Michael]

They have no demonstrable proof that that's true either.

[John Kiriakou]

No, no. You know, I mentioned before we started filming that I did a series of speaking engagements around the UK a year ago. Well, I had a. A conversant. So it's like an evening with John Kiriakou. I'm sitting on a stage with a conversant. And the first five, it was like an English lit professor. The second was an actor. At the end, it was a retired member of MI6. And he said something to me one night that it kind of hurt my feelings a little bit as an American former intelligence officer. But he said, you know, we've always loved you guys. In fact, we created the CIA. I said, oh, I know. I've written about it. It was you guys. You know, your station in New York helped us create the OSS. And then President Truman specifically asked MI6, can you set something up that would be a Central Intelligence agency? So he said, we always saw you as our little brother. And then after the empire fell apart, you became our big brother. And then after 9, 11, you became strangers because your policy was just simply to kill everybody. And that can't be a policy.

[Michael]

Well, it can be a policy, but where does it lead you?

[John Kiriakou]

Where does it lead you? Yeah. I mean, look at Iran right now. You brought up Iran a moment ago. I see Iran in the same basket as Gaza and Lebanon. I understand your need for security, truly. But your policy can't be just to kill everybody. That's not a viable policy. And it's going to turn generations of people against you.

[Michael]

Which we have.

[John Kiriakou]

Which we're already seeing.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, how many times are we going to see these lists of the 10 worst anti semites in America? And seven of them, you're like, they're not. They're not anti Semites. I know these people. I know that they're not anti Semites. It ends up not having an impact anymore, not having an effect.

[Michael]

It's a sticky political tool, and people won't read past the headline. Unfortunately, I. It's exhausting to listen to people who think that they're well informed, but they get all of their information from the same oh, man. Sources and all. They really are in an echo chamber.

[John Kiriakou]

You're 100% right.

[Michael]

Yeah, it's.

[John Kiriakou]

People ask me a lot, and I'm sure they ask you, where do you get your news? And the answer has to be from everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. And then you have to decide what's true and what's not true.

[Michael]

With a heavy dose of skepticism and a constant reminder to myself, do not rush into an emotional reaction to this and don't leap to a conclusion.

[John Kiriakou]

Yep. And you have to rely on your own analysis. Like, for example, this shooter at the White House correspondence dinner the other day. Immediately, a buddy of mine sends. Sends me a picture of the shooter from his whatever, Instagram page. He's wearing an IDF sweatshirt. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense at all. I get that it fits your ideology. Yeah, but not you. But him. But that doesn't make any sense at all. If he's supposed to be this lefty, you know, Trump hating, why would he be wearing an IDF sweatshirt? And then, of course, two hours later, somebody comes out and says, there's this image going around. He's in an IDF sweatshirt.

[Michael]

It's.

[John Kiriakou]

It's AI. It's disinformation. Well, of course it is, but how many people didn't realize it was disinformation? How many people saw it?

[Michael]

How many? That's even worse, because it was to hear. That's the world that we're in. It's not a search for truth. It's a search for what helps me believe deeper in what I already believe.

[John Kiriakou]

People seek out echo chambers.

[Michael]

I think we need to test that guy for metahuman abilities. Have you seen the security footage?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. I've never seen a person run so fast.

[Michael]

Now, for clarity, I'm not sure the frame rate the camera was shooting at Michael. Have you seen this? He could be the first metahuman.

[John Kiriakou]

It was the first thing my son said to me is, can you. Have you seen how fast this guy runs?

[Michael]

And I'm not trying to make light of this at all, but I think this might be like Flash Jr. With the shotgun. And since everybody's okay, and I know a lot of people were, I like Flash. God, the Secret Service is getting just shit on right now. And, yeah, the reality is this, they

[John Kiriakou]

did what their job was.

[Michael]

They did they're supposed to and that, like, first off, stop going to that hotel.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay. Yeah. That's where Reagan was shot.

[Michael]

That's what I'm saying.

[John Kiriakou]

Feet away.

[Michael]

Yeah. It's like, listen, this one is on the no Fly list now. Okay?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And as much as people hate to say. To say it or agree with it, because this goes directly into political teams, what happened there is the best argument for an actual ballroom at the White House.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I have to say, as soon as Trump said it, I was like, you know what? He's. He's right.

[Michael]

Well, we live in a free society, and freedom comes with risk. That hotel, they can only lock down a certain area. I mean, I. Sure, I guess they could take over the whole thing.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah. But it's before that.

[John Kiriakou]

It's before this.

[Michael]

You might not even see a. Michael, look at this guy. He's the flash. That's slowed down a little bit. It is.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael]

Have you ever seen.

[John Kiriakou]

That's pretty quick.

[Michael]

It's amazing when it's in real quicker than you, Michael. It's ridiculous. Obviously. Yeah. Thankfully, it appears that the agent was bladed a little bit. I guess the guy was shooting a slug. It went off his vest. Everybody's okay.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Thank goodness.

[Michael]

People think and looking at this like, the Secret Service sucks at the job. Like, no, this was an. This is where they were used to doing the magnetometers. They were breaking it down. He would have had to make it down a set of stairs through a set of double doors. The ballroom had 2600 people in it. The president was on the far end.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. He couldn't have gotten to him. Oh, not possible.

[Michael]

And I think he had had seven slugs. The knife choice is a little bit more interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

That was weird. Yeah.

[Michael]

Well, normal people don't do this. So a lot of the weird things, I'm like, okay, we'll put that in the weird bucket. But freedom, the freedoms that we have come with, with a risk involved. We can't. I guess we could. You could tell the Hilton, I guess you could write him a check. Like, you're shutting down for the entire week. But that's not the world that we live in.

[John Kiriakou]

No.

[Michael]

So there was a. There was a distinct security bubble and then people living their stuff, civilian lives. And if that's how we're going to do this, then this is possible.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, a friend of mine, God bless her, she doesn't know anything about intelligence or law enforcement, anything. She's like, I think the Hilton was in on it. I said, why why would. What could possibly lead you to conclude that? And she said, how. How was he able to get in? I said, he went on orbits or hotels.com made a reservation, and chicked in a couple of days early. It was literally as easy as that.

[Michael]

And again, what is more dangerous than putting on a calendar? Probably a year out.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Michael]

This is what we're going to be doing, and this is where we're going to be.

[John Kiriakou]

You're exactly right.

[Michael]

The Hilton. I saw a YouTube video this. I didn't believe it. I went to the Hilton website. They probably have changed it. Even though this should be on the no Go list. Anybody out at the Secret Service, don't go back to that Hilton. There was a 360 virtual tour. You could click here.

[John Kiriakou]

Are you kidding me? No.

[Michael]

Every.

[John Kiriakou]

I bet it never occurred to anybody.

[Michael]

Every square inch of the public areas, obviously it's not going to go into the individual hotel room. Sure. This guy was breaking down the exact place where he accessed the gap, the bubble between security and the civilian portion of it, and could walk the entire steps. He was panning, showing the doors that was in the security footage, and then walked the whole way. This is the. He would have had to go. There's a glass barrier that thankfully absorbed the rounds that the agent shot at him. Everybody's, like, talking, you know, how could that agent miss? I'm like, I've never tried to shoot at somebody after you've just been shot with a pistol.

[John Kiriakou]

And they're running, and he's running at

[Michael]

double human speed because he's a metahuman, allegedly. Around to go down the stairs. And then he, on the 3D tour, goes down the stairs into the doors, and it opens into the ballroom. And you can see on the far end where the President was. And he starts, you know, click, click, click, click, like hundreds of clicks to cover the distance. And showed. Yeah. Although the news is like, the Secret Service sucks, and we need to redo this.

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, listen, I. I love criticizing everybody. Right. I do. It's. I make a living criticizing people, and I can tell you about that in a minute. But. But they. They did exactly as they were supposed to have done. They did exactly what they're being paid to do. They protected him. The guy. The guy wasn't there, apparently. Allegedly, just to kill Trump. He wanted to kill every administration official he could get into proximity to. And. And he didn't get anybody.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So they. They did a good job. Yep.

[Michael]

And then he got all his clothes cut off him. So. Yeah, you're welcome I saw that.

[John Kiriakou]

It's like, that's kind of odd. But what do I know? I'm not a law enforcement guy.

[Michael]

Well, we. They needed to see if he had a flash suit on underneath his clothing at first. I mean, obviously I'm an in many ways, but I saw that footage, like, hit play on that again.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, seriously, I did exactly the same thing.

[Michael]

Nobody runs at that speed. And I'm like, okay, hold on. You know about cameras a little bit. I'm like, okay, it's probably a frame rate issue, but there's a chance it's the first metahuman ever.

[John Kiriakou]

Superman.

[Michael]

I would worry about him having that ability and not the cognitive horsepower to go with it. But that's a different issue, right? Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Very impressive.

[Michael]

I don't think we're done with stuff like that. It's a long two and a half years left.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I agree. I agree.

[Michael]

I don't know.

[John Kiriakou]

Half years is a lifetime.

[Michael]

I don't know what it's going to look like. I'm thankful that the people who have seemed to take action like this so far have been very disorganized and unprepared.

[John Kiriakou]

I have. I had a friend, he since passed away. He. He was a 25 year Secret Service veteran. Mike Mastro Vito. Mike was an awesome human being. He. He retired while he was told, you need to retire, like this afternoon.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And so he came over to the agency as a contractor and became a specialist in Greek terrorism. So we worked very closely together in Athens. And Mike told me that he started at the very end of the Eisenhower administration. He was in Dallas with Kennedy, had an incredible scrapbook of all the stuff that he'd done over the years. But he was finally able to convince the Secret Service leadership to create an intelligence division. And he became the very first director of the Secret Service Intelligence division. And for a while, it was just him. He was the intelligence division. So anytime somebody would write a threatening letter and send it to the White House, it would be routed to him. And he said that what ended his career was he went to San Francisco with a letter from Sarah Jane Moore. And the letter said things like, you know, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. You know, she was writing to President Ford. So he knocks on her apartment door and he said, sarah Jane, I'm Mike Mastro Vito from the Secret Service. I got this letter that you wrote to the President. What's going on here?

[Michael]

Got a few questions.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And she's like, oh, my Social Security check was late. And I was really mad. So I wrote the President a letter. And he's like, well, you threatened to kill the President in the letter. No, I'm not going to kill the President. He said, okay, you're promising me now. He says, you're not going to kill the President. No, I was just angry. It was a bad day. Ford goes to San Francisco. Two weeks later, she's standing on the side of the street, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, with a. Whatever it was a.44. And then she ended up spending almost the rest of her life in prison. They finally released her when Ford died. And then Mike was said, it's time for you to go. But, you know, we have to remind ourselves that the Secret Service is not always good. Reagan got shot. Ford was subject to two assassination attempts in three weeks. Yeah. Kennedy was killed. Excuse me. Thank you. So, you know, sometimes we get lucky.

[Michael]

It's just people doing the best.

[John Kiriakou]

Just people. That's it.

[Michael]

You know, on that note, how does somebody. It's so easy to judge entire communities by the actions of individuals.

[John Kiriakou]

Isn't that the truth?

[Michael]

Yeah. And I know we're talking a lot about where the agency is now, or even just intelligence apparatus. I have to believe that there are still people working for that agency who are there for what I would consider to be all the right reasons. But how do you operate inside of a system that has oriented yourself in a different direction, called a true believer? Somebody who truly believes in what, the cause, the mission, and they want to have a positive impact and they get put into this system. How do they operate inside of that system when they are noticing that it's now moving in a different direction?

[John Kiriakou]

That's a great question, man. There are a lot of people I would. You know what, I'm going to go out on a limb, and I'm going to say most of the people who work at the CIA, just like the ones that work at the FBI or NSA or DOD or Secret Service or whomever, are there for altruistic reasons. They want nothing more than to serve the American people. Certainly that's why I was there. And I met very, very few people in my time at the agency who were there for any other reasons to enrich themselves or access to power. I mean, there are a couple of sociopaths who are going to rise to

[Michael]

the top and, oh, I've heard you talk about how they select for sociopath tendencies.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

That's why I could never work there is. Because I have none.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah,

[Michael]

Special operations might.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, that, that, that House that I needed to. To break into and plan a bug.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Secretly I was like, woohoo.

[Michael]

Yep, now's my time.

[John Kiriakou]

I'll tell you a funny story about that. We get to the house and there's like a $20,000 German security door on it. And the locks and picks. Guy says, it's going to take me two weeks to break into this. He goes, we can't break into this. I was like, I flew all the way out here for nothing. And they're. They're looking at the doors like, yeah, this is. This is in, you know, AL512. This is like state of the art. So while they're talking about how this is a state of the art security door, I walk around to the back of the house and there's a $5 Yale lock on the back door.

[Michael]

That's what I'm talking about.

[John Kiriakou]

And I was like, guys, guys, we're going in the back.

[Michael]

It's like being. I was a breacher for a little bit and, you know, guys would call for the breacher, and one of my favorite things to do would be to come to a door just to check to see if it was locked.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, God.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Oftentimes, filing cabinets are the same way.

[Michael]

Oftentimes it wasn't. And you know, it's. You just take your hand and these are on us. Doors where we were training, but even in training runs, you could tell that it would move. And you're just like, hey, just make nice eye contact with him. Turn the lock, open the door. Like, there you go, buddy. Just to twist the knife a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

In training, you got to look around. Yeah, we did extensive training in crashing through roadblocks and getting away from shooters on the side of the road and stuff like that. And what they, what they started with was you're in the car. A quarter of a mile up is the roadblock. The instructor's in the passenger seat with you, and he's like, okay, you ready to go? You ready to go? We're gonna do this, right? Yeah, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do this. And then very quietly, there's a shooter right there outside your door. You're so laser focused on what's ahead. And he opens the door because you forgot to lock it, and then shoots you with a paintball. And he's like, well, you. You flunk. We're going to try it again tomorrow.

[Michael]

Yeah, you have to have those experiences, though.

[John Kiriakou]

You have to.

[Michael]

It reorients your optic on. Oh, God.

[John Kiriakou]

Does it? Yeah, we, we did this one exercise one time. Oh, I'll never forget. Was at the. It was at. It was at a training facility here in the United States. And so you have to go into this house. Not. It wasn't a house. It was supposed to be a. A hotel. A cheap fleabag hotel in Central America. Okay? And you're sitting at a table with a chair, and you've got your gun. And then they say, okay, let's begin. So there's a knock on the door. I. I volunteered to go first just because I wanted to get it over with, right? So everybody else are like, seven of us. Eight of us all together. The other seven are in the van waiting outside with music blasting so they can't hear, like, gunshots and stuff. So I'm sitting at the table. My gun is on the table. There's a knock on the door, and I said, who is it? I didn't say, come in. I said, who is it? And the door opens, and it's these two guys dressed as maintenance, and one of them's holding a vacuum cleaner, and they're speaking really quickly in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. And so I was like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm such an idiot. So I was like, I didn't ask for maintenance. And so I got to stand up. And one of them drops the vacuum cleaner, and he's got a gun, and he's like, bang, bang, bang. And I get paint, paint, paint. I'm like. And he goes, you flunk next. And don't tell anybody in the van what happened. So I go to the van, and they look at me, and they were like, what happened in there? What are they doing? What's the exercise? And I just. I go like this. And every single person came back with three. Paintball. Yeah. Hits every single one of us. But I'll tell you what. I learned a very valuable lesson that night, that if you're in some shithole and you think that maybe, possibly there could maybe be a threat to your security, you go guns blazing and work out the paperwork later.

[Michael]

That is an important mindset to have. But I think that mindset also is what led the agency to torture people.

[John Kiriakou]

I think you're exactly right.

[Michael]

You. There's a parallel there. When did the agency shift in your mind from not or maybe they were always willing to do that. And for clarity, there's the agency being directly involved in torture, and then there's our rendition program that will just take you to, I don't know, Jordan, as a random, allegedly place on the map where they might hook your testicles up to a car battery or strip a mattress of everything except for the springs and put the car battery on that. Allegedly.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Michael]

When has that always been there in the agency? Or is it that. And here's the thing, you can't. For what you did, you can't have somebody that doesn't have that mentality.

[John Kiriakou]

Correct.

[Michael]

But if you do, that can be the natural byproduct. Because shooting yourself out of that situation, the knock on the door, an argument can be, baby, like, well, you know what? I'm actually going to go hot before they open the door. Well, it might be the mate. Right?

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Michael]

And that's. And that's where, you know, you have to develop some tactical competence. You can set yourself up a little bit, but you have to let it play out just a little bit. But that mentality of, we are going to fight our way through this and we'll handle the paperwork later is. I know, because I've seen this firsthand, the justification for we need an answer from this person right now. Go get it.

[John Kiriakou]

I have to tell you, I taught this class at Liberty University, which is the largest evangelical Christian university in the world. And I taught there from 2008 to 2012. When they first called me, I said, are you sure you're looking for me?

[Michael]

What course do you want me to teach?

[John Kiriakou]

Right. And they said. I said to them, I said, we probably disagree on 99% of the issues. Why do you want me? And the dean, the dean of the Jesse Helms School of Government says, torture is not Christian. And I said, oh, okay, you know what? I said, I'll take it. And I enjoyed every minute that I was working with these guys. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up is there was one professor in particular that I became very close to. He spent a very brief period of time from like 1958 to 1960 at the agency, and then went into academia. And he's very old now. He's in his. In his 90s. But he sent me his final exam 11 semester. He said, what do you think of this final? I'm going to give my students this final. And here I've got this final. It's going to take them hours, and they're going to fill three blue books. And it's all these essay questions. His was four questions, and it was live. So he had the first question on the board. The other three questions were covered. And the first question is, you are a CIA case officer. You have just Captured a major al Qaeda leader. You know that there is a bomb somewhere in the United States set to go off. You know that he knows the location of the bomb. Do you torture him to get the information? Yes. Know and explain your reasoning. Okay.

[Michael]

Basically, this is the plot of the TV show 24.

[John Kiriakou]

That's exactly what it is. It's the ticking time bomb scenario. Yeah. So the second question was, he didn't say a word. But you have his wife in custody. Do you torture his wife to force him to give you the information? Remember, he says, remember, American lives are on the line. Yes. No. Explain your decision. And then the third question was, the wife is a true believer. She didn't give you anything. But you have their kids in custody. Do you beat the kids? Do you torture the kids in front of them? Yes. No. Explain your reasoning. And the fourth question you could only ask at Liberty University, you've died, and you're standing before the judgment seat of Christ. And he says, explain your actions. What do you tell him?

[Michael]

What you've just laid out is a

[John Kiriakou]

very difficult test, and everybody would have failed it.

[Michael]

Yeah,

[John Kiriakou]

yeah. This is tough.

[Michael]

I understand. I understand the underlying motivation. The first three questions. I'm not a religious person. It's never just really landed with me fully supportive of people being religious. So I don't know what the hell happens at the end of this track. You know, the lap around the track. So focusing on.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm hoping for the best.

[Michael]

Same. Focusing on the other three.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I.

[Michael]

I understand both answers. And arguments can be made for both answers.

[John Kiriakou]

That's why this is such a difficult proposition.

[Michael]

But who do we want to be?

[John Kiriakou]

That's the question. That's where I took the most shit back in 2007. We're supposed to be better than that. You know, I remember being in fundamental disagreement with something that Dick Cheney said at the. At the time. He said he would rather imprison a hundred innocent men than to let one guilty man go free. And I was exactly the opposite.

[Michael]

That's not what freedom is.

[John Kiriakou]

That's not what freedom is.

[Michael]

Freedom isn't about perfection. It's about possibilities. And it's not. You know, I used to have, as dumb as this sounds, but when I was in the military, maybe it doesn't sound dumb. Deeply, I still feel this way. Over my door, I had a sticker that said, freedom isn't free. And that cost is borne by very few people. And it's a heavy. It's a heavy burden to carry at times, and it can change who you are. And how you view the world, but it's not perfect. And those, the academic questions, they capture a lot of the weight of those questions. But I tell you what, you know, we had the special operations community, had a battlefield interrogation program called Bit that had to be brutal sometimes. But if you want. If you wanted to see a real world case study that if you apply pain to people, they will talk about what they say. That's the issue, will have almost nothing to do with reality, or they will tell you what they think you want them to say to make whatever it is is happening to them stop. And I'm not saying I witnessed torture, because I didn't. I witnessed what I would call very, very aggressive interrogations. And honestly, I'm not a legal expert on where that falls. I was never involved in the program as a part of a program. This was all after, you know, target secure. And then we're going through looking for sensitive information that we can turn upstream to intelligence organizations. But, you know, follow on targets are a real thing as well, too. And a lot of the times we were driving that through electronic means. But every once in a while, you know, somebody would be there. And I've seen it in real life, it doesn't work the way people think.

[John Kiriakou]

It just doesn't.

[Michael]

Doesn't. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I. I say all the time that when I was working for Carrie, his office was in the Russell Building, right near John McCain. So whenever Kerry and I would be walking out of the office, like for a vote or something, McCain would be coming out of his office to go to the same boat. And McCain would always go out of his way to shake my hand and say, hello. Hey, John. Hey, Senator, good to see you again. Finally, Kerry said to me one day, why don't you and McCain get a room or something? And I said, no, no, he's. This is. This is heartfelt. This is the kind of person he is. It's about torture. I said, it's all about torture. And then when I got out of prison, I was home, I don't know, maybe four days or so, and I got a call from his office, and the guy says, Senator McCain says, welcome home. And he wants to know how he can be helpful. And I said, he can help me get my pension back. I said, these Obama people took my pension, and unless I get a pardon, I just can't get the pension back. So this friend of mine who had been the deputy attorney general and I went up to McCain's office to meet with his legislative people, and what we decided to do it was brilliant. My attorney wrote a one sentence amendment. It was. Every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection act between October 1 and October 31, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated. Because I was the only person in the world.

[Michael]

Oh. I was gonna say this is like writing a sole source contract for, like, the one contractor you need.

[John Kiriakou]

It's called a specific purpose bill. So McCain said, I'll just stick it into the National Defense Authorization Act. He says, those things are like 3,000 pages long. Nobody reads them. He said, I'll stick it in. I said, yeah, but then in conference committee, somebody's gonna take it out. Somebody on the House side. And he said, I'll get myself named to the conference committee and I'll make sure it stays in. I'm like, God Bless you, Senator McCain. And then he got sick. Yeah. And then he died. And so it never happened.

[Michael]

Do you think the agency has actually stopped?

[John Kiriakou]

Wow. You know, people ask me that and.

[Michael]

And again, there's the agency directly or. I found out about the rendition program. I got into aviation when I was exiting the military, and I got Typewriter to fly a Gulfstream G4.

[John Kiriakou]

No way.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I thought you were gonna say assessment 172.

[Michael]

That's what I started in. Yeah, we all did.

[John Kiriakou]

We all did.

[Michael]

Well, you.

[John Kiriakou]

You went jet.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

That's incredible. Congratulations.

[Michael]

It was. It was fun.

[John Kiriakou]

But I see where you're going.

[Michael]

I started researching Gulf Streams.

[John Kiriakou]

Ah. I see exactly where this is going.

[Michael]

A Gulf Stream came up for sale.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God.

[Michael]

And one of the things that blew the lid off the rendition program is that the people looking to do the purchase of the Gulf Stream dug into its flight history. And they were like, what the actual. Like Afghanistan to Egypt, Afghanistan, Jordan. And that was one of the things that actually brought attention. It was an agency, probably third party, but it was one of their rendition platforms. That's how I heard about it. It wasn't through the military. It wasn't through the intelligence community. It was just a. It was an interest in the airframe that I was flying.

[John Kiriakou]

We used to send a lot of people to third countries to be softened up. And I remember there was a period when I got back from Pakistan, I was named chief of Counter intelligence in Alex Station, the Osama bin Laden group. So my job was to ensure that Al Qaeda couldn't infiltrate American embassies, the embassy staffs, the third country nationals employed in embassies, and that the walk ins that we were getting all around the world were not. Not really dangles. From Al Qaeda. She was a challenging job.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So we grabbed this professor from the University of Toronto named Mahra Arar, and a group of us went to the chief of operations, who we called the redheaded devil to his face. Her face? No. Okay.

[Michael]

That was more of a behind the. The back one.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

She was portrayed by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.

[Michael]

Gotcha.

[John Kiriakou]

She doesn't look anything like Jessica Chastain other than the red hair. So we went to the redheaded devil and we said, this is the wrong guy. We're snatching the wrong guy. And she's like, oh, no, we're not. This is the right guy. He's dangerous. I'm like, this is a. A political science professor in Canada. He's not an Al Qaeda mastermind. We grab him. He had gone to Tunisia to visit family one summer, the summer of O2. And he flew back. He was flying back to Toronto, but he had to transit jfk. And so we asked the FBI, just grab him when he gets off the plane at jfk, Completely off the books. Turned him over to us. We flew him to Damascus, and we said, have at him. The Syrians finally came back. Fast forwarding Syrians finally came back to us like eight or nine months later, and they're like, this is the wrong guy. We've done everything to this guy, and he doesn't know anything. He's just the wrong guy. We denied and denied and denied to the Canadians that he was ever on that plane. What we didn't know was, you know how like an hour before you land, the flight attendants go up and down the thing saying, duty free. Duty free. He bought a pair of sunglasses for his wife and he used a credit card. So a month after he goes missing, and the Canadians are telling his wife he wasn't on the plane. We don't know what you want us to say. He wasn't on the plane. She said, yeah, then why did he use his. His credit card on the plane to buy a pair of sunglasses in the duty free? And the Canadians were like, oh, shit, the Americans have him. And then we had to let him go. So we told the Syrians, just let him go. He flew back to Canada. He sued us in the Eastern District of Virginia. CIA went in to the courtroom and said, you, Honor, national security. And the judge is like, case dismissed with Prejudice. National Security. 9, 11. National Security. So he sued the government of Canada, and he won $6 million. I spoke to him. I'm going to say, it's been a while now. I spoke to him about five years ago. I asked him if he would come on my podcast, and he said he can't. He said, I have developed such agoraphobia, he said, I haven't left my house, the four walls of my house, he said, in 15 years. And he said, even to be on a zoom call, I just can't do it. He said, I'll have a panic attack. I'll have to be hospitalized. I just can't do it. We ruined his life.

[Michael]

Can you imagine if that was a US citizen and a third near peer, can you imagine had done that, we'd

[John Kiriakou]

be bombing them right now for what they did to an American.

[Michael]

Problem is how there was another guy. How many of those stories exist?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, Khalid. Khalid Al Misri, I think his name was. German guy, owned a grocery store. One night he gets in a fight with his wife. He's like, ah, fuck you. He's so mad, he walks out, buys a bus ticket. He's going to go visit his brother in Montenegro. The name Al Misri, it's not really a name. It just means the Egyptian is Arabic for Egypt. So his name is Khaled the Egyptian. Okay. There are only about 150,000 other guys named Khalid Al Misri.

[Michael]

Yeah, like Abu Muhammad. Exactly the number of times I went after Abu Muhammad with a picture of

[John Kiriakou]

a, like basically Muhammad's dad.

[Michael]

Yeah. A green silhouette. I'm like, he's got olive colored skin.

[John Kiriakou]

Skin, yeah.

[Michael]

He has no features to his face whatsoever. He looks like a flat 3D green silhouette.

[John Kiriakou]

So this guy is on a bus and he's in like, Serbia on his way to Montenegro. And a sister agency informs us that there's this Egyptian guy named Khaled and he's going to blow up the American embassy in Tirana, Albania. And we're like, wait a minute. There's another guy named Khaled and he's Egyptian and he's on a bus going in the general direction of Albania. It must be him. So we tell the Serbs, stop the bus, grab him and turn him over to us. And that's exactly what they do. We send him to Egypt and they torture him to within an inch of his life. And they're like, yeah, this is the wrong guy. This guy's just named Khaled. He happens to be Egyptian. When he gets out of the torture chamber in Cairo to return to Germany, he's got a beard down to his waist and he's clutching a copy of the Quran. And a German reporter asked him, what are you going to do? Now. And he said, all I want to do is kill Americans.

[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. It's not a viable program.

[Michael]

It grates against every fiber of who I want us to be as a nation.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree with you. Mm.

[Michael]

How do you think it worked its way through the agency to a place where it was an approved program?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, don't underestimate the level of shame in the agency after 9 11.

[Michael]

Meaning they thought that they had missed something. It was their fault.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, this was all our fault.

[Michael]

Fault?

[John Kiriakou]

We were asleep at the switch, and then it was actually worse than just being asleep at the switch. It was that we knew the hijackers were in the United States. We didn't want the FBI to know.

[Michael]

Yeah. A lot of it was just not being able to share information appropriately. Or not.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Because we wanted to recruit them.

[Michael]

Well, also, if it was anything like the pre 911 seal teams, we wouldn't even share information. Like, I would start off at. On the West Coast, Seal Team 5, 3 and 1 were a shitty 9 iron from each other, but nothing was happening. And we were all afraid if the big mish came up, it would go to somebody else. So we would just. In the absence of an enemy, we had to fight each other. And all we were actually fighting for was relevance. And another word for that is budget.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

So, I mean, I know the world, the pre 911 world, where it's, you know, the agency's got their stuff, and then there's the FBI and the ns. But it's like, we have to protect our budget. We have to protect our relevance. We have. If we share this information, what's going to happen? Look, I don't know. Maybe the US will be a little bit safer and we can put some pieces together. But again, that's judging in hindsight. It's all to say, I understand where that mentality came from.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I can't tell you how many times over the years, pre 9 11, we would either do something or prepare to do something. And at the last minute, the boss would say, don't tell the FBI. It's like, okay, I won't tell the FBI.

[Michael]

Do you think you guys would have been able to actually recruit or turn any of the hijackers? I don't think so either.

[John Kiriakou]

They were true believers. Yeah, true believers.

[Michael]

God, they were. I. I took flight lessons in Montgomery Field where some of them did. Afterwards, obviously there was a little bit more scrutiny of students. Yeah. And.

[John Kiriakou]

And you didn't say, I don't need to learn how to land just to take off.

[Michael]

Too soon, John. Too soon. It was too soon. Yeah. I mean, they were going to. I mean, in the type rating course for the Gulf Stream, it all occurs in a simulator because they are not

[John Kiriakou]

very impressed that you. Oh my God. Got jet qualified. It's incredible to me.

[Michael]

They're not going to throw you the keys to a jet. Even though there are no keys to

[John Kiriakou]

a jet really, except for the door

[Michael]

finding the ignition and just like, oh, you had to put the clutch in and put it in neutral. It doesn't work like that. So it's all done in these sims and it's every phase of flight. It's a Chinese Communist party ticker tape parade of red flags. If somebody goes in and says, can you just have me focus on the phase of flight where I'm flying? Like, what? Nobody thought to run that sucker?

[John Kiriakou]

Literally nobody at any level. Yeah. Nobody thought that was unusual enough to

[Michael]

alert a superior, even in a non 911 world. It's like, hey, make a call. You know, I don't know how you guys work, but maybe have a, an additional sim instructor sitting in there with them. Just like.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Michael]

Putting an eyeball on these guys. Yes. You know it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

Yeah, it's.

[John Kiriakou]

You're like John Travolta, huh?

[Michael]

I don't believe in Scientology, so there's some differences. I'm not an OT7 or an OT8, whatever level.

[John Kiriakou]

Right, right. Well, you got to be careful of those thetans. No, but seriously, he. He even has flown 747s.

[Michael]

I think he owns one.

[John Kiriakou]

He owns a seven.

[Michael]

I believe so.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. Very impressive. But I mean, flying a Cessna 172 is one thing. Everybody can do that.

[Michael]

But they all kind of fly. I mean, the theory of flight is all the same.

[John Kiriakou]

Is the same. And the plane is designed that it wants to stay in the air.

[Michael]

Yes, Right.

[John Kiriakou]

Unless it's breaking apart or something.

[Michael]

Well, then you're screwed.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, then you're screwed. Right. Unless you're in a serious. This SR. SR22 which has a parachute, which are amazing.

[Michael]

I flew those for about 1500 hours.

[John Kiriakou]

You're kidding me.

[Michael]

Yeah, I got into helicopters about two

[John Kiriakou]

Years ago I heard those are especially difficult.

[Michael]

They are very different. I would describe it as this. Flying an airplane is. You have a metal bowl and a BB and you're holding it at the bottom, just trying to keep it right, right, right. Helicopter. You flip the bowl upside down and the BB's on top and you're trying to keep it on top of.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh my God.

[Michael]

So much more handsy footy, if you will. It's. It's fun.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I went to Arlington Cemetery the other day. I, I go every couple of months and I, I live within walking distance of it and it's just such a beautiful.

[Michael]

It's an amazing, humbling place.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. So I went to do a video podcast on CIA officers buried at Arlington. Or two of them were pre CIA, they were oss. But anyway, one of the graves that we went to and I put flags at each one of them was Francis Gary Powers. This poor guy. Besides the whole U2 thing. And we denied that he was not only just denied that he was CIA, we denied that he was USG at all. And then finally had to trade him, you know, in one of these Bridge of Spies situations. But this poor guy, after piloting the U2, ended up piloting a traffic helicopter in LA and then he crashed that and was killed in the crash. A U2 pilot lost control of a traffic helicopter. That's how hard they are to fly.

[Michael]

Well, there are mechanical things that can happen as well where even if you're doing the right thing, you're still gonna crash. Yeah, like the. There was a recent crash, the one in New York, the passenger. It looks like the main rotor blades departed from the aircraft. Yeah, they did. There's nothing you can do.

[John Kiriakou]

No, you're. You're going to die.

[Michael]

You're. You're going to die. That was probably total hypothesis and guess on my side a maintenance issue that was undiagnosed. So when you fire that thing up and you get it off the ground, that day was your day. There's nothing you're going to be able to do.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm sorry to get off topic, but I'm so fascinated that, that you're jet qualified. I've got to ask you. I don't know because I think, because when I went to get my. When I went. I was serving in Athens. We work a full work day one day and all the guys from the counterterrorism group, there was a bar in the. It was like a shack.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

But it's. It served. They served beer in the parking lot of the of the embassy. So we would go there and drink beers, which, believe me, at the time, was better than going home. So one of them said something about, about flying the, the Cessna 172. And I said, oh, I didn't know you were a pilot. He said, oh, yeah, I've been a pilot for years. And then the second guy said, I loved my Cessna 172 so much, I bought one. And I go, you're a pilot, too. And then the third one said, I started on the 172, and then I went to the 182, the twin engine. And I said, come on, you guys, come on, you're putting me on, right? And then the fourth one says, I'm older than you guys. I learned on a Piper Cub and they don't do that anymore. And I said, are you telling me that all four of you guys are pilots?

[Michael]

Yeah, you missed the memo somewhere.

[John Kiriakou]

Seriously. And then one of them, the one I was closest to, he goes, what's the matter, baby? You afraid to get a pilot's license? I said, a few morons can get pilot's licenses. I certainly can.

[Michael]

That's also accurate with me as well, too, so don't be too impressed.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, I, I, I went home on R and R a couple of months later, and I was driving my dad to Walmart in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. And there's kind of a back road, like a cut through, and you go past Newcastle Municipal Airport, which is just a strip, and they have a banner outside, and it says, learn to fly here. So I said, dad, give me five minutes. I just want to run in here real quick. So I pull in, I go up to the guy, I said, how much is it and how long does it take? He said, if you're serious about it, you can do it in six weeks. And mind you, this is 26 years ago. It's a flat $5,000. So I pulled out my credit card, I said, sign me up. And six weeks later, I soloed. But then 911 came. Yeah, and then I just. There's no time to do anything.

[Michael]

No.

[John Kiriakou]

Let alone try to get flight hours in now.

[Michael]

You got time, though, now.

[John Kiriakou]

And in the next couple of months, I'll be able to afford it.

[Michael]

That would be amazing.

[John Kiriakou]

I actually called the airport the other day at College Park, Maryland, and they said, oh, yeah, sure. I said, listen, I want a Cirrus SR22. And the guy said, We've got three of them. Yeah. I said, oh, my God. Okay, I'm gonna do it.

[Michael]

Yep, I have, I got My instrument rating in a cirrus. I have a substantial amount of time in a cirrus. They're a great platform.

[John Kiriakou]

Have you ever flown the diamond DA40?

[Michael]

No, but I know what you're talking about. The school that I was going through my ratings at just didn't have any. Otherwise, from a economic perspective, I probably would have gone that route.

[John Kiriakou]

I heard that they're light as a feather and really easy to fly. They're made in Austria.

[Michael]

Yeah. And economically they're very efficient. So it'll reduce the cost of your training as well, too.

[John Kiriakou]

And my original question to you was going to be, I love going to little airports because they always have coffee shops. Yep. And you can just sit there and have breakfast. I used to take my kids when they were little. Little, and we would go watch the planes take off and land and have pancakes and, you know, whatever, call it a morning. But I would always pick up the used planes for sale. Magazines that are there and invariably in the back, they always have, like, MIGs from the Czech Air Force. And it was mostly MIGs. Yeah. Have you ever flown something like that? Like, is it got.

[Michael]

Is it backseat ride? And a MiG 29 last year. Really? Bozeman, Montana.

[John Kiriakou]

What was that like?

[Michael]

It was like being strapped to two rockets.

[John Kiriakou]

Ah, See, that's. That's what I would be afraid of.

[Michael]

So Jared Isaacman, the now head of NASA, was the guy flying it.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God.

[Michael]

He has a private jet collection because they used to be the op for. They contracted out to be the op for foreign adversaries, for US pilot training.

[John Kiriakou]

That makes sense.

[Michael]

So he had a MiG minus 29 down in Bozeman, and Buddy calls me up, asks me an incredibly rhetorical question of do I want to go on a backseat ride in a mig -29? Like you not know who I am. Of course I want to do that. I tell you what, I can tie this into you with something that I think is the. One of the largest threats to national security. Small private airports.

[John Kiriakou]

Totally.

[Michael]

The next 911 is not going to come from a commercial airport. The completely unregulated, open nature of almost

[John Kiriakou]

all

[Michael]

small municipal city airports would knock people on their ass if they understood how easy it is to just get in and out of and manipulate those systems. I've been like, screaming like, we're up near the northern border. I know if you know this, but we haven't had an illegal crossing in nine months. Somebody said that. And I was like, okay.

[John Kiriakou]

On the Canadian side.

[Michael]

Oh, no, no. Trump put out that we haven't had a single illegal crossing in nine months.

[John Kiriakou]

Come on.

[Michael]

Swear to God, Michael, pull that shit up. So I saw that on Twitter. I was like, so you've never been to Montana? Yeah, I'm like, come on. Like, why, why would you speak in absolutes when that's so demonstrably false? The southern border, I get. What I can't get people to pay attention to is, yeah, say that his administration achieved nine consecutive months with zero, mind you. Z E R O.

[John Kiriakou]

Has he never been to Texas?

[Michael]

I don't understand how any of this stuff makes it out into the world of fact checking. But it. The velocity seems to be increasing. But I have done so many conversations now on change agents about the northern influence and, you know, precursor chemicals going to the port of Vancouver as opposed to places in Mexico and sure, poorest borders. I flew, I was with my buddy John Norris, who was a game warden in California and started an anti marijuana task force there, who now lives 60 miles to the east. And we got in the helicopter and I just, we flew up to the northern border just to get it on video and show it's just mowed grass. And nobody is. I mean, if I was any level of sophisticated individual, first off, the ability to get into Canada on passports is way easier than it is in the U.S. i would 100% go that route, get rid of that stuff, walk across the like. That's what concerns me more. And nobody's. Nobody's paying attention to it, that I can tell. At least it's a huge, huge liability for this country.

[John Kiriakou]

So I think you're 100% right.

[Michael]

I mean, I'm hoping the agency has a northern border task force. I don't think so.

[John Kiriakou]

Not that I've ever heard of. Yeah, you know, it's funny too.

[Michael]

I mean, are they even allowed to. Aren't you guys not supposed to be working in the U.S. what's been forbidden? Okay, I understand it says that on paper. Have they ever not worked in the U.S. well, there's.

[John Kiriakou]

There's a U.S. division called the National Resources Division, but the job of an NR case officer is very simply to call up American CEOs, CFOs, CEOs, and say, Hey, I heard you just went to China. Can I come to the office and ask you some questions? Yeah, that's it. That's all they do.

[Michael]

I feel like the agency is doing more than that in the U.S. well,

[John Kiriakou]

I suspect strongly that they are, and they're not supposed to.

[Michael]

How do we get that under check, John?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, it probably started with these JTTFs, right?

[Michael]

The joint Terrorism Task Force.

[John Kiriakou]

Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

[Michael]

Is that because of the 40s that came with that? Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

They can do anything that they want. And technically, you're. You're. You're on assignment on rotation to a jttf. So it's a CIA guy, an FBI guy, a State Department guy, some DHS people. It's all about keeping America safe. The next thing you know, you have CIA people operating domestically.

[Michael]

And how do you unwind that once that starts?

[John Kiriakou]

Only through robust congressional oversight, which is not happening.

[Michael]

I feel like the agency itself would rebel against that or do everything they could, especially if you have the ability to say national security, like, agreed, done. So then do. Do we build CIA 2.0? Like, what do we do?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. You know, the first time I ever worked with MI5, I'm gonna. I'm gonna answer your question with an anecdote. First time I ever worked with MI5, I was. I was serving in Athens. I was working against a guy that when I teach these classes, nobody's ever heard of. And then when I say he was the Osama bin laden of the 7 70s and 80s, I said his name was Carlos the Jackal. They just look at me with these blank stares.

[Michael]

I've seen the movies, right?

[John Kiriakou]

At least. At least watch the movie. Yeah. They look at me like they've never, ever heard this name before. So what I was trying to do is figure out who the middleman was between Carlos the Jackal and the Greek terrorist group, revolutionary organization, 17 November. So I got a. I got a tip about a guy who was the middleman back in the day, and I found him. And he's living in a housing project in London. So I reach out to my MI6 counterparts, and they said, we'll find him, but this is an MI5 issue. You'll work with MI5. Just let us know what. What you find. And I said, fine. So I fly to London and I did this, like, every few weeks over the course of six months. We find the guy. It wasn't until I was working with them that I learned that they do not have arrest powers. And I said, I always thought MI6 was the British CIA. MI5 was the British FBI. They said, no, Scotland Yard is the British FBI. I said, so what's MI5? He said, we are domestic intelligence. We spy on Britons. And I said, I don't think I like that at all.

[Michael]

Like, by their doctrine and charter, that. Wow. Yeah, I was not aware of that either.

[John Kiriakou]

I never heard that before.

[Michael]

Yeah, I thought they were externally facing an analogous to the agency as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they are, but they're only domestic and they can't make arrests. I said, this, this just turns my worldview on its head. And they're like, yeah, we're even worse than you guys are.

[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, so I think, I fear that that's where we're headed, even if it's in slow motion. Again, it's been 25 years since 9 11, so. But, but I'm, I'm worried that we've got any number of intelligence age. There are 18 intelligence agencies in the US government, which just flabbergasts people overseas when you tell them that. Because Most countries have one, some big countries have two. Like the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians. We have 18. Like, do we really need 18 separate intelligence services? Seriously? Come on.

[Michael]

I mean, I'm sure their budgets are small. You know, I'd be comfortable paying more taxes if they could show me where my tax money money went.

[John Kiriakou]

I, I literally all. I would like that very much.

[Michael]

Yes. Let's just be transparent. Show me where this money is going

[John Kiriakou]

and I won't object.

[Michael]

Yeah, just.

[John Kiriakou]

Just tell me where it's going and I'd say, okay, thank you. Go ahead. Spend. Spend my tax money the way you see fit.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Thanks for being transparent. Yeah.

[Michael]

I'm not a betting man, John, but if I was. We're not getting that.

[John Kiriakou]

I think, I think we're not. Oh, so I was going to make a point, too. I'm not saying that people on Capitol Hill just have their heads up their asses and they're not interested in oversight. A great part of the problem is using just the CIA as an example. I don't know how many people are in the CIA. It's classified anyway. 20, 30, 40,000 people. I don't have any idea. But you can't oversee an agency that has 20, 30, 40,000 thousand people with a staff of 40 on Capitol Hill. You can't do it. It's not possible. And then you've got DNI on top of it. Besides dia, FBI, nsa, Homeland Security, the Uniformed Services, Intelligence Services. You can't do it. It's just not possible.

[Michael]

I think we have to add to that too, the cottage industry of people who leave three letter agencies and start consultancy firms in the D.C. area.

[John Kiriakou]

Or everybody got rich. Well, everybody.

[Michael]

And it's, you know, it's like, okay, cool, these people don't work for the agency. Not meaning necessarily the, we'll just call them the Alphabet soup organizations. Sure. They're not working directly for that, but you're contracting them to essentially do a job that would be what they used to do. And now they can operate outside of certain boundaries because of a tax status.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right. That.

[Michael]

How do you even quantify or calculate that as well too? Because that, although not directly associated with those Alphabet soup agencies are still being paid through the budget of the. You know what I mean? Yes, it's a cottage industry and I know very little about it, but I know that it exists. It's not a revolving door process. But like, hey, we got a problem we need to solve. We can't do it doctrinally here. Who's getting close to retirement? Hey man, here's your greased money train.

[John Kiriakou]

I cannot even begin to tell you how many people, people that I worked with in the CIA's Counterterrorism center that would leave work on Friday with a blue staff badge come back on Monday with a green contractor badge, making three times what they were making on Friday, sitting in the same desk doing the same job. You know, I say all the time too, on podcasts. It's not an accident that before 911 the highest concentration of millionaires in America was in Silicon valley. And after 911 it was Washington DC.

[Michael]

Is it really? Damn. I mean, there certainly is a business around war.

[John Kiriakou]

You got that right.

[Michael]

And it's ugly.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And it goes forever because too many people are getting rich. Why stop it,

[Michael]

man? What are your thoughts on the invasion of Iraq 2004? I argue with my dad on this one. I was a young man in a profession of arms and I wanted what all young men want in a profession of arms, somebody to fight. My dad is a Vietnam veteran and he was like, listen kid, there's something wrong with the smell of this cheese.

[John Kiriakou]

He was right.

[Michael]

He was right. I still haven't admitted that to him because he can be right about nothing. So he will now. It's interesting now looking back at it, that plan to go into that country predated 911 for sure.

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely. Yes. There's a famous story.

[Michael]

Ring binder on the shelf.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh my God. Somewhere, you know, I, I, I blew up on Tick Tock about eight weeks

[Michael]

ago, I would say congratulations, but I'm not sure that's a good thing.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, the jury's still out. But one of the things that really blew up, that's taken on a life of its own is this story. Is this story that I tell about Colin Powell calling me one morning, 1993. You know, every. Every group in the CIA has a morning meeting at 9:00'. Clock. Every single group. And you talk about what happened overnight in the area that you cover. And These meetings last 30 minutes, and then you start your day. And I go into the morning meeting and the Secretary walks in and she says, John. Like with his puzzlement, she says, john, General Powell's on the phone for you. And I said, for me? I said, how does General Powell know who I am? And she said, I don't know, but he asked for you by name. And I look at my boss, and he goes, well, go answer the phone. So I go to my secure phone and I said, good morning, General Powell. May I help you? He was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I think at the time he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Clinton had just become president. I said, good morning, General Powell. May I help you? And without missing a beat, he says, john, if the Iraqis were going to kill the President, who would actually be in charge of carrying out an operation like that?

[Michael]

It's a very pointed question.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Very specific.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And I said, if you're talking about the attempt to assassinate former President Bush, all Kuwait operations are run from Iraq, Iraq's Basra Station, and Basra Station operations are run by the Iraqi Intelligence Service director, Izzat Ibrahim Sabra Abdulazizadori. And he says, where does he physically sit? And I said, in Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad. And he says, thank you. And he hangs up. So I go back in, and everybody's waiting for me. My boss said, what do you want? I said, he had a very specific question. And I told them. And we're like, okay. And then we went on with the meeting. Eight hours later, we fired 47 cruise missiles into Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters. And the reason why this has taken on a life of its own is because the only person we killed was a janitor. It was middle of the night, Iraq time, and we killed the janitor. He was the only person in the building. And I went to the office the next day, and I said to my boss, I killed that janitor last night. And he said, I knew you were gonna say that. You didn't kill the janitor. Powell killed the janitor. You didn't know why Powell wanted the information. And you did what you're trained to do. You answered the man's question. But it's always bothered me, you know, if we had killed Saddam Hussein, I would have said, yeah, I killed Saddam Hussein.

[Michael]

Yep.

[John Kiriakou]

Where's my Presidential Medal of Freedom? But it wasn't Saddam Hussein. It was some poor guy. Probably had a couple of kids at home, never meant any harm to anybody.

[Michael]

Why'd they strike it at night?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, it was this weird, fucked up policy of the Clinton administration that, by God, we're going to show them

[Michael]

how tough we are by doing nothing.

[John Kiriakou]

We don't want to kill anybody because we don't want to be bloodthirsty. So we're gonna do it in the middle of the night. Okay, well, that. They laugh at us when we do stupid stuff like that.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So anyway, there was this. There was this belief all through the eight years of the Clinton administration that we're gonna get these damn Iraqis. One of these days, we're gonna get them. It might take us a while, but we're gonna get these bastards. And then there's a famous story about 12th September, 2001. Richard Pearl being at the White House, telling everybody who would listen, and he was friends with all of them from Scoop Jackson's office when they were young men, telling everybody, you know, we have to attack Iraq, right? You know, we have to attack Iraq, right? So the fix was in from the beginning.

[Michael]

What do they say? Never let a tragedy go to waste.

[John Kiriakou]

There it is. That's. That's the modern history of the United States right there.

[Michael]

I'll be really curious to see how the history books judge our involvement in Iraq. Afghanistan, I think, was at least more altruistic. And why we. Execution. Yeah, arguable for sure, sure.

[John Kiriakou]

But. But Iraq, the reason to go into Afghanistan, that was a righteous war. Yeah, it was righteous. The beginning of it was, you know, we had to destroy Al Qaeda. We had to. They were saying Osama bin Laden said that he was planning another attack that would dwarf 9 11. So we had to stop them. They had murdered 3,000Americans in one day. That was a righteous war. Iraq was not

[Michael]

such a commitment of, like, America's treasure. And I'm not talking about money, just the cascading consequences of two decades.

[John Kiriakou]

See, and that's another thing, Andy, is there's never any. Even after war, after war, after war, there's never any thought to the blowback. Like, why do we never have that conversation? It's easy to invade A country. I said this recently in an interview. It's easy to invade a country. It's easy to overthrow a government. The rest of it is really, really hard. How do you get out? And how do you get out without leaving the place in a state of anarchy? Look at Libya. We overthrew that government in 2009, and it's still in a state of chaos. Yeah.

[Michael]

I don't know why people think that Iran will be any different.

[John Kiriakou]

Iran is the size of Western Europe. It has 92 million people and a forbidding topography. How do we win something like that? Unless you want to commit, you know, 400,000 troops, which we're not going to do.

[Michael]

We tried that on their eastern and western border.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. Yes.

[Michael]

I look back at that and I'm like, okay, not that I am arguing for eating the delicious center of the Iraq, Afghanistan Oreo, but that's probably the time we have had more military firepower and projection of power on their eastern and western border. Yes. They Death to America is a real thing. Yes. Largest state sponsor of terrorism. Yes. We've had issues for five decades. Maybe it would have been a better idea to handle it while we were already there.

[John Kiriakou]

But I'm God, you know, I remember when we first attacked Iraq in early 03, we had to go to the Iranians and say, listen, we're going to cross your border a couple of times. If we do, it's going to be an accident. We don't intend to remain. It might be one plane, it might be one Jeep full of guys. We mean nothing by it. Our fight is with the Iraqis. And the Iranians said, just keep us out of it. And we were okay with that.

[Michael]

Just let us enrich our uranium. Nobody wants a nuclear Iran. I think we can all agree.

[John Kiriakou]

Nobody does.

[Michael]

I thought we destroyed their nuclear capability

[John Kiriakou]

last year and now I think the word was obliterated.

[Michael]

Yeah. And I don't know a lot about big words, but I think I know what that one is hinting at. And then it's like, no, we had to go now because it was at the tipping point. And there's so much. I mean, I can't separate the amount of external control Israel may have over the decision making of the U.S. i don't. I don't know what to make sense of this stew that people are just pouring into with absolute certainty about what it is that they're saying, which anybody who's absolutely that sure about anything already scares me. I love things like I believe, I think, which is not what the terms that the news use. No, I don't know what to make sense of it. I could see other countries having influence and one thing I've heard people say is, well, Israel came to the US and they said, either you do it or we're going to use nukes.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Michael]

So it was this level. I'm like, well, there's other nuclear power. So what if Russia says, hey, you need to smash Ukraine for us or we're going to use nukes? Are we going to go do that next? Right.

[John Kiriakou]

Good question.

[Michael]

India says, you know what? We're tired of these fuckers on our border. You either do something about Pakistan or we're going to. Like, what does that make us? The world's bitch?

[John Kiriakou]

Right?

[Michael]

Like we just go around and play nuclear cleanup. I don't buy that.

[John Kiriakou]

See that? That's an op ed right there. That's an op ed.

[Michael]

I don't know.

[John Kiriakou]

That's a great line. That's a great line of analysis. I might steal it if you're not. If you're not going to publish it.

[Michael]

No, I'm not publishing. Nobody wants me to publish an op ed. First I'd have to look up what the op ed means. But. And how you do that. But that to me, again, it's the same thing as Epstein. The Occam's Razor approach to me is the, is the one that makes the most sense to me.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

I also don't come from the intelligence world, so I'm just trying to look at this realistically. It doesn't make. There's too many other people that could then. And if they saw if that was proven to be true, they'd be lining up at like a lemonade stand to pull that shit.

[John Kiriakou]

To me, the saddest part of this whole thing is that the jcpoa, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it was working. You know, whether or not two thirds of the Senate ratified it, the answer is no, they didn't. Whether or not it became partisan, it was working. It was almost exactly the same deal that we had through the United nations with Saddam Hussein's government, through the UN Security Council Resolution 986. Right. Unannounced inspections by United nations weapons inspectors, lead seals cameras going in every direction 24 7. It was actually working. I get that Donald Trump didn't want Barack Obama to have that kind of a foreign policy win. I get it. But withdrawing us unilaterally from the JCPOA put us back at square one again. And what we're hoping to get now is the exact Same language that was in the jcpoa, no uranium enrichment. And we want to inspect the nuclear sites and we want them to be sealed. Okay, we already had all that and we withdrew. So now you want to renegotiate the same agreement and how many. What with 13 people have died on our side already?

[Michael]

For what?

[John Kiriakou]

For nothing. For literally nothing. This is why. Now you're going to get me started now, here. We need to operate utterly independently of the Israelis. I've said a million times. I'm going to repeat it. Starting in the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, every single Israeli prime minister, no matter who it was, when they came to the United States, and they come all the time, they would say, please attack Iran. Please attack Iran. Please attack Iran. And every single president said, I'm not going to do it. Obama said, what two weeks ago that Netanyahu came and said, if you don't attack Iran, we're going to use nuclear weapons. And Obama said, go ahead, go ahead, use them. He called the bluff, and they didn't use him. Since 1986, the Iranians have been six months away from a nuclear weapon. Well, guess what? No, they're not. That's a lie. There have been two, count them, two National Intelligence Estimates. What a National Intelligence Estimate is, is it's a sense of the community. Of the intelligence community. Formal paper. And this is important. If the CIA writes a paper. Oh, okay. Congratulations. This is. The CIA believes this, or DIA believes that, or State Department believes this other thing. An NIE National Intelligence Estimate is you have all 18 intelligence agencies sitting around a giant table in the offices of the National Intelligence Council, and they're going to sentence by sentence, okay? The first sentence is. And the. The National Intelligence Officer reads it. Anybody have any objections? And all 18 people get to weigh in. It takes weeks normally to coordinate a paper like this. All 18 intelligence agencies concluded decisively twice that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program.

[Michael]

How recent were these?

[John Kiriakou]

The first one was 2003, and the other one was like 2009, something like that. And in addition, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa saying that it was a sin to develop a nuclear weapon, and that's why they were not enriching to weapons grade levels. Yeah, and the Israelis said they didn't give a shit. They want us to bomb, bomb, bomb. Finally, we did the meeting that you're

[Michael]

talking about, where they're first off. I'm surprised that any. You fill a room with 18 different agencies. I'm actually surprised Anything ever in the world gets accomplished.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you I never hated anything in my entire career as much as coordinating in nie. I was the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for a while, and then to get promoted to GS14, I had to write an NIE. So I wrote this NIE in 1997, and it was called Iraq Saddam's Next 12 Months. And we coordinated it in eight hours. And the National Intelligence officer, Ben Bonk, God rest his soul, terrific guy, he came to me afterwards and he said, that was the fastest coordination session for an NIE that I've seen in 25 years. And I said this one was actually pretty easy, Ben. Saddam could threaten Kuwait. Saddam could threaten the Kurds. Saddam could threaten the Shias. Saddam will probably try to violate sanctions. Yeah, big deal.

[Michael]

So are those nies in layman's terms? Are they a way to assess risk and then you can brief policymakers?

[John Kiriakou]

That's exactly what they're for.

[Michael]

And so the reason I asked this is it's listening to Tulsi Gabbard testify. And she said, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, Michael, if you could pull it up that Trump is the single or sole individual that determines the immediacy of the threat. I feel like that premise is incredibly dangerous.

[John Kiriakou]

It is dangerous, but.

[Michael]

And I also don't know, is that. Is that a real assessment? Because wouldn't an organization or organizations create something like an nie and he would be able to. I'm assuming that that is the role of intelligence organizations. And, and, and maybe this is a gross misunderstanding of what she was saying, but if that's the case, what if one day after we're done with Iran, he goes, mexico is an imminent threat? Like, is it really like that? Like, the guy sitting in the chair with the Diet Coke button gets to just determine it like that?

[John Kiriakou]

This.

[Michael]

Am I a misunderstanding?

[John Kiriakou]

No. You're not saying no. No. You. You've hit it on the head. The answer to the question is very complicated. So the CIA, really, Any intelligence service,

[Michael]

sole individual authorized to determine what constitutes an imminent threat. I thought that that was the role of the intelligence apparatus.

[John Kiriakou]

The intelligence apparatus will say, the intelligence community does not believe that Iran is an imminent threat. The President can elect to ignore that. So technically, sure, he's the decision maker. He's the one that's going to make the final call. Any other president in modern American history has been surrounded by, you know, the best and the brightest. And this guy was a professor at Harvard, and this guy was the Deputy Assistant Assistant Secretary of whatever. And this guy, you know, whatever. You surround yourself with people who know these things. The Henry Kissinger's of their day. Although I hate to use that example, but you know what I mean. So technically, the President is the final authority on these issues. But any other President will ask the Secretary of State, what do you think? Secretary of Defense, what do you think? National Security Advisor, what do you think? CIA Director, what do you think? And everybody's going to weigh in. And then these are his top people. He's going to, in concert with them, come to a policy decision.

[Michael]

Collaborative effort.

[John Kiriakou]

Collaborative effort. And remember that the CIA is not a policy organization. It is a policy support organization. George W. Bush did something that was very, very controversial. Just as I was leaving the Agency. In the President's daily brief, which is six days a week, 16 pages, the first article is a full page. After that, there are a couple of articles of a paragraph of fact and a paragraph of analysis. He ordered the CIA to put a paragraph of fact, a paragraph of analysis, and a paragraph entitled policy recommendation. Well, that flies in the face of everything that the CIA is. You're supposed to be the one that makes the policy, not the CIA. The CIA can tell you what the facts are and what the facts likely mean. But then you make a decision that only lasted for George W. Bush's second term, and then it went back to its normal state of equilibrium. My point being, sure, Donald Trump is the last person. But then Trump told 60 Minutes, not most. In the most recent interview, the one before, when asked, who are your closest advisors, he said, I don't have any. I just go with my gut. And we've not had a president like that before.

[Michael]

God, that is a bold mission statement. Yeah, it is.

[John Kiriakou]

It's very, very bold. Very gutsy. Yeah.

[Michael]

Another thing to see.

[John Kiriakou]

What do you mind searching to see? When those NIEs were NIE on Iran, the Iran nuclear program.

[Michael]

I tell you what I would like to have looked at very deeply, perhaps rewritten, is the authorized use of military force.

[John Kiriakou]

That's a tall order. See, but here again, you've talked to

[Michael]

this power manipulated and bent.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God.

[Michael]

President since its inception.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. And you've got these cowards on Capitol hill. We got 2000, 2007 and 2003.

[Michael]

Okay.

[John Kiriakou]

I thought it was three and nine. Three and seven.

[Michael]

Yeah. The AUMF provides some immense latitude. It's. Sometimes I'll get online and people think I'm arguing or. What was the term somebody used? They called me pedantic. So I Don't. I had to look that one up because they're like, we're at war. I'm like, no, we're not.

[John Kiriakou]

No, we're not. And we're not.

[Michael]

And the point is, isn't that fucking ridiculous?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

That we can do this. What they think again. I had to look up the word pedantic, and now I try to use it every day because it's really good.

[John Kiriakou]

But somebody called me mercurial the other day.

[Michael]

That's a good one, too.

[John Kiriakou]

I had to look it up. Yeah.

[Michael]

But it's. It baffles me that we can do every action that looks exactly like warfare.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

But not as a country declared as war. And again, it's. It's a way where actions can be taken without the oversight that I want.

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely unacceptable.

[Michael]

But. And then people like, oh, it's a political issue, but guess what? Your team captain did the. He bent the out of this, too. That's right. Blue and red both manipulated the out of this.

[John Kiriakou]

We have not declared war on. On anybody since Vietnam. No, we never declared war.

[Michael]

No. I'm sorry. Since before Vietnam.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was World War II. Yeah. On December 8th, we declared war on Japan, and the next day we declared war on Germany. And that's it. That was the last time. Even Korea wasn't a war. It was a police action.

[Michael]

What do you think it would take to change that thing? I don't think. Well, first off, I don't think people realize the powers that it provides and the off ramp, at least in the short term, to oversight that our foundational documents were written upon. Why would we want that?

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right? The Constitution is so crystal clear on these issues. Makes the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of government co. Equal branches co. Equal. And then you have these clowns like Lindsey Graham saying, I want to make Congress weaker. It's like, are you out of your mind?

[Michael]

An argument can be made.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. There's a lot of stuff that we could say about Lindsey Graham.

[Michael]

For clarity, an argument can be made about me as well, that it's. You know, there's strong arguments and weaker arguments, but I don't.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I. And people. National security safety. What's the saying? Somebody willing to sacrifice liberty for security is.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Deserves. Neither.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I have never seen the government give the power back.

[John Kiriakou]

No. Ever. Ever. We have to come to some catastrophe like that which resulted in the. In the church committee before there's any real change, like structural change.

[Michael]

Yeah. And then is the system so far outgrown or so Far outside of the lines that they're supposed to color in. Could it even be put back in or reoriented back in? I don't know the answer to that.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, it's different now, too, than it was in 1975, just because of the state of technology. Like, how do you put that genie back in the bottle?

[Michael]

I love the shorts of you on the Diary of the CEO. Just blowing people's minds with what the Agency can do. I mean, Vault 7, all of that's public.

[John Kiriakou]

How is it that nobody paid any attention to that? It's all public.

[Michael]

Only think that they're doing it to our enemies.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And then the reality is that's not true.

[John Kiriakou]

No. They can do it to all of us. How did.

[Michael]

Okay, how does somebody survive in an electronic world? Like what. How does.

[John Kiriakou]

You know we gotta all turn into Ted Kaczynski is what is. When it comes down to you live in a shack in Idaho.

[Michael]

Yeah. No, I think it was Montana.

[John Kiriakou]

Montana.

[Michael]

Yeah. Somebody bought his shack. They have it, I think is like lawnmower storage.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. Can you imagine?

[Michael]

Yeah. I can't get behind the bombing campaign.

[John Kiriakou]

No.

[Michael]

Under, like, going on, like, a little tech break. I totally understand.

[John Kiriakou]

I get it.

[Michael]

But even then, in a world where everybody is defined by their technological usage, just like my wife doing accidental SDRs, you might end up on their radar because, like, this guy has got some amazing field craft. He's a ghost. Like. No, he just hates.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, he's a Luddite.

[Michael]

That's all.

[John Kiriakou]

He's a Luddite.

[Michael]

But I mean, how do. How do you operate in a world where they can reach into basically anything

[John Kiriakou]

that is powered and take it over?

[Michael]

I mean, is it just forced acceptance? I mean, it's not like you and I can stop it. You can tell as many people that it has happened as possible.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm sitting on my cell phone right now. And I know you are, too. Oh, yeah.

[Michael]

And I say is with us.

[John Kiriakou]

Right?

[Michael]

Hello, nsa. I. You guys should get a budget increase. Good job.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Yeah. I. There are a couple of little things that I've done. Like, you know, Tucker Carlson's got this. Or he advertises this cell phone. Like, encrypted cell phone.

[Michael]

Yeah. But I could point you back to the agency making a cell phone.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

The specific usage of invading drug cartels.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, I don't. I don't have one of his cell phones. You're exactly right. I don't want to have his cell phones. But it got me to thinking, and so I Went. I went to an electronic store in Europe and I just bought a cell phone and I was able to register it in another name. And I have a spare SIM card. I can pop out my SIM card, pop this one. And this is registered in a Middle Eastern country. So wherever I happen to be, I'll just go into the local version of Radio Shack or. Or Best Buy or whatever. Yep. And I'll buy a. I'll buy a burner phone or I'll buy a SIM card and swap them out. But even that's not gonna.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Really protect me in the long run.

[Michael]

That'll give you that. Give you a little bit of a head start. They're gonna find you a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, they'll find you. Yeah.

[Michael]

Especially with the computing power. That's another one.

[John Kiriakou]

Like, I mean, 25 years ago, that's how we got. I was a beta.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

He. He made one single mistake. He. He accessed his emails with a landline.

[Michael]

John.

[John Kiriakou]

That was it.

[Michael]

I was killing people because of their SIM cards. See, 2005, I mean, they learned though. They learned quick.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they did.

[Michael]

And we adapted. But yeah, it's, you know, these NSA databases and. And just data farms that are showing up and odd locations and it's like. Oh, every single electric. Like we're not looking through it though, we're just storing it.

[John Kiriakou]

Right? Yeah.

[Michael]

You're not looking just in case now.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Then why do you need this gigantic facility in Utah that you've built?

[Michael]

Because we might need to look at it later.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And then depending on who's throwing.

[John Kiriakou]

Without a warrant, by the way, that's

[Michael]

the biggest thing that bugs me that I. Either the Constitution matters or it doesn't. Either. It means something to be an American and I truly still believe that we can be a beacon to the world. But we don't do that by hiding our missteps. We have to be honest about where we have fallen short and we have to learn from our mistakes. And that last one right there, I'm not so sure that we're actually doing.

[John Kiriakou]

I have to agree. I have to agree. It's like we reinvent the wheel every time we elect a new president.

[Michael]

Yeah. And that's where I landed. I don't think this is a top down fix. I think it's a bottom up fix.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree with you.

[Michael]

Generational. And I have three children. I have my daughter. I'm getting ready to get into birthday season, so I'll have 18, 21 and 23.

[John Kiriakou]

Wonderful.

[Michael]

They're fantastic. I'm loving their Skepticism and good. Yeah, it's. It's healthy. I don't. I don't like, throw fire on it and like, fashion them like tinfoil berets or anything like that, but I. I like it. Michael's an example, too. I mean, he's 23 years old. He's, you know, his views of the world and the way he thinks about things and his response to what he is seeing being put out nationally and globally. I ask him about it all the time because he also has a different optic than you and I have had based off of our previous careers. And the answers are very informative. The pendulum. I don't know if we have, like, bounced off of where it's swinging to, but it is going to come back.

[John Kiriakou]

It has to.

[Michael]

And I think the country will survive. I'm not saying a tire or two might not go off the track. Right. I think we're going to be okay.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Michael]

Because of what I see from the younger generation.

[John Kiriakou]

Good.

[Michael]

I'm hopeful.

[John Kiriakou]

I am, too.

[Michael]

Maybe I'm being too incredibly optimistic. Dude. On that note, I mean, there's such a difference between the price and the cost. I mean, when you signed up to serve at the agency, you pay that price and it's the same thing as military service. You know how long you're going to enlist for, and you know that there's risk associated with that. The cost, though, is everything. You can never calculate the strain on family that. The time away. How has everything that has happened to you, like, and I'm sure it's changed over time, but, like, with your children, how did it impact them or do your relationship with them?

[John Kiriakou]

It was devastating.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I have five children. I have four boys and a girl. Boy, boy, boy, girl, boy. Four of them don't speak to me

[Michael]

still to this day.

[John Kiriakou]

1 I'm very close to. We speak almost every day.

[Michael]

And then start at the time where you.

[John Kiriakou]

I mean, yeah, I was still in.

[Michael]

Well, and the reason. I mean, you have talked on so many large platforms about a lot of the things that you did in the agency. So I'd rather just talk to you as a person. You know what I mean? And so people can go and go watch Diary of the CEO and just watch when you talk to them about how they can turn the speaker on a TV into a microphone, I'm like, oh, yeah, they definitely can do that. And he's just like, what? I'm like, yeah, dude, they got you.

[John Kiriakou]

I thought everybody knew that you and

[Michael]

I knew that a lot of people don't want to believe they have those abilities. So people can go reference that. But you know, to me, I had a time period when I was going through my divorce where I lost 18 months with my oldest son. Very close. Now I think our relationship is better, thank God. Well, and I hope that that can be the case for you with your other kids.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm optimistic.

[Michael]

Did the relationship break when things started becoming public about what had happened with you at the agency?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. God damn, yes. Yeah, I'll get there. I'm optimistic.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

People often accuse me of being irrationally optimistic, overly optimistic, but I prefer to live my life like that.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And I, I'm, I'm hopeful and relatively confident that things are going to work out.

[Michael]

How old are they?

[John Kiriakou]

33? 30, 21, 19 and 14.

[Michael]

I think sometimes they have to get their own laps around the sun.

[John Kiriakou]

It's agreed.

[Michael]

There are. I understand. Yet don't agree with the criticism of what you did by coming forward. I understand the people that say that. In my opinion, I wish that were more people who were like you, who are serving in the agency.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you very much.

[Michael]

Because I saw it firsthand, you know, and we were oftentimes the action arm of the intelligence in air.

[John Kiriakou]

Very much so.

[Michael]

And you were. And it's not perfect and everybody's doing the best that they can, but to me it's, it's a rare thing to be issued the flag of your country and not rented, you know, or go buy it on a T shirt, which everybody can do what they want to, but it has to mean something to me. And, and from people the outside, they can criticize what you did because they don't have an understanding of it. And more importantly, they don't have a skin in the game.

[John Kiriakou]

No, they don't. And you know, I say I'm not, I'm not trying to on people, but any slob can roll out of bed and write a nasty comment on a YouTube page. Yeah. So I, I try hard just to ignore all that noise.

[Michael]

Remember this. Joe has said this many times. He's never encountered somebody in life who is living an enriching, successful, joy filled life that spends their time being an on the Internet.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, that's, that's great.

[Michael]

I mean it really helps you recenter.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And oftentimes now I will respond to people and just say, listen, I don't know what's going on in your life, but I truly hope that whatever it is that you're dealing with gets better. Because people who are doing well, they don't act like this Most of the time you'll get a middle finger emoticon. But I hope that it's. I hope that it sticks with them and it goes to the point.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

About the kids. More laps and more context. If you can keep showing them who you are, I think you're gonna be.

[John Kiriakou]

I think you're right. And, and I'm very hopeful in that respect. And I've. I've also made very clear to every one of them that I'm a phone call away. That's all they have to do.

[Michael]

I did the same thing with my son too. And one day the phone rang and it changed everything.

[John Kiriakou]

That. That's what I'm hoping for.

[Michael]

That 18 months felt like about 18 decades.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

For clarity.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Michael]

And it was, it was all tied around the time period of that divorce. But, and I get it, he was the oldest, probably the most impacted by it. Had a processing ability that probably let him go down. Just a mental rabbit holes of the wise and the hat. That's just the five W's, you know.

[John Kiriakou]

Good. I'm glad that happened for, for both of you.

[Michael]

All you can do. And the only thing I could do was consistently be the best version. Try to be the man that I wanted to be, which I still fall short every day. But to show him that example. They'll come back around, man. They'll come back around.

[John Kiriakou]

God willing. I'm hopeful.

[Michael]

Families are a bastard, you know.

[John Kiriakou]

I wonder too, if it's something about this generation specifically. I've tried to do as much reading about family estrangement as I can. There are a lot of really good books out there right now.

[Michael]

It's a really common issue, actually.

[John Kiriakou]

And that's exactly what I was going to say. I saw something on the news just yesterday saying that 25% of all American families are experiencing some level or form of family estrangement. And it's easy to think you're alone. I have a friend, she used to write to me when I was in prison. She was a Broadway star from the 60s. And now she's almost 90 years old and we call each other every few weeks, her son. She has one child, her son, who's now well into his 50s, just cut her off like 10 years ago, 12 years ago now, just cold turkey, cut her off. She doesn't have any idea why. She called me one day and she asked me if I knew of a good private investigator. I said, oh yeah, I know a very good private investigator. And I connected them and she hired him. I didn't ask her why she wanted him. It was her business. But he told me all she wanted was a picture of her granddaughter. She had never met her granddaughter. And so he kind of, you know, be parked across the street from the school and figured out who her granddaughter was and took a picture. But not a minute goes by that she's not thinking about the son that she doesn't understand how she lost or why she lost, and the granddaughter that she's never met. She doesn't have very much more time left on earth.

[Michael]

Kind of the harder realization in that too, is that the situation may not change. It may never change, I suspect, if

[John Kiriakou]

it hasn't by now. Her husband died, the guy's father, and. And the guy never reacted or responded in any way. Yeah, yeah, it's a real shame, but it's not uncommon is the point I wanted to make. It's not uncommon. So I hope for the best.

[Michael]

Yeah. It's the only advice. I'm not somebody to give advice, but it's the only advice I can give based on my own experience is just keep you in you.

[John Kiriakou]

Glad that it worked out for you.

[Michael]

It doesn't work out for everybody. For sure. That was. You want to talk about a humbling experience that makes you question who you are as a human being?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

People think buds is hard. I'm like, so here's what you want to do. You want to be tougher than a seal. Go through a contentious divorce, Right.

[John Kiriakou]

Seriously.

[Michael]

Oh, my God, like, stop researching these selection courses to go through. Just get a divorce. It's way harder. Not actual advice that I'm giving to anybody. This is. Is completely sarcasm and tongue in cheek, but, God, it will destroy you. It's really the hardest thing I've ever done, though.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God, me too.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

[Michael]

I would agree with that. I would agree with that. It's. Man, there's not the hard drive long enough or big enough to encapsulate my thoughts on that process. But.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'll tell you another thing, Andy is, you know, when you go some through something like this, you really get to see who your friends are.

[Michael]

Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

Including people that you share blood with. You know, including people that you may be married to or otherwise, you know, engaged to in some way. I had one. I have one cousin. He's. He's a good 10 years older than I am. And when I was a little kid, I always looked up to him. He was like, you know, the. The big kid, good looking Navy pilot. And when I got arrested he called me and he said, listen, I gotta cut you off. I was like, what? What are you talking about? He said, you brought shame to our family. And I said, you think I didn't read about you in the Washington Post that you were the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia's coke dealer? You think I didn't know that you and your guys are standing on the beach in Florida waiting for the Colombians to drop the bales of. Of. Of weed out of the plane? I know all about you, and I brought shame to our family. I said, fuck you. And I've cut him off. Well, now he's, like, sending me Facebook friend requests. Hey, cuz, you're really famous now. Yeah, fuck you. I haven't forgotten about 2012. Yeah, asshole.

[Michael]

I have shifted years ago. Family, actually, to me, is. Has nothing to do with DNA. Treats you.

[John Kiriakou]

You got that right.

[Michael]

Plus, if you go deep enough, if people are like, oh, our family's perfect. I'm like, tell me about your grandparents. Yeah, deep enough.

[John Kiriakou]

In every family, they're like, oh, we

[Michael]

don't really talk about Uncle Bob that much because he's crazy. I'm like, we all got crazy.

[John Kiriakou]

I had an uncle like that, my grandmother's brother. I. I remember meeting him. I must have been, like, 12 the first time I met him. And I was like, how come I never heard of Uncle Bill? Like, I said this to my mother. How come I never heard of Uncle Bill? How is he my uncle? Oh, he's your grandmother's brother. How come I've never met him? He lives here in the same town. How come I never met him? And she said, when you get a little older, I'll explain it to you. Well, I'm, like, 15. And she finally explains to me he was one of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau concentration camp at the end of the Second World War. And it made him nuts, Right?

[Michael]

See how it couldn't.

[John Kiriakou]

So, yeah, seriously. So he came back with what today we know as ptsd. Back then, they called it shell shock and all different kinds of things. In 1953, he had been home for eight years. He somehow got it into his head that Richard Nixon, who had just been elected vice president, promised him a job at the post office in Steubenville, Ohio.

[Michael]

Sounds reasonable.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. So he puts on his suit. Monday morning, he goes to the post office. He's here for his job. It's very sad. I mean, I laugh, but it's sad.

[Michael]

I'm laughing with him, not at him, sort of.

[John Kiriakou]

And they're like, who are You. He said, I'm Bill. I'm here for my job. They're like, we don't know what you're talking about. And he said, that damn Nixon, I'm gonna get him. Six months later, Nixon comes to Steubenville to give a speech. Complete serendipity. And Uncle Bill tries to get into the Civic center with a.45. And they get him. And my mom said, I'll never forget these words. She said, there but for the grace of God, our name could have been Oswald. And then how did Uncle Bill die? He got hit by a train. And I said to my mom, I was in college at the time. It was on the front page of the paper. I was like, how do you not hear a train coming? And she's like, you know, this is one of those things that's better just left unresolved.

[Michael]

Yeah, trains are really deadly. But also, if you don't go on the tracks, you have a real good chance.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Maybe stay off the tracks. Especially when those arms come down and the red lights are flashing. You might want to stay off the tracks.

[Michael]

Indeed. Have you heard the latest narrative around the ex CIA? I don't know what they call officers, agents. This is a new one. I heard you guys. At first, the CIA was like, oh, no, they're telling all the secrets. But now people think. Some people think that the CIA is actually trying to help you get on

[John Kiriakou]

shows because, oh, we're friends again, are we?

[Michael]

You can so misinformation. So now you're not a whistleblower anymore. Now you're a knowing and witting mouthpiece of the agency.

[John Kiriakou]

Wow. And they came up with that all by themselves.

[Michael]

Somebody did. On the Internet. His name was in there as well. And some. A couple of other people. I didn't recognize their names as much, but that's an interesting shift in thought process.

[John Kiriakou]

I'll tell you. There is literally nothing that I hate more than when people say, once CIA, always CIA. Okay.

[Michael]

I'm very movie based.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I'm going to call Ed Snowden and the sons of Philip AG and Ray McGovern and tell them that you think because of your incredible intellect that they're still in the CIA and I'm in the CIA. That was that prison sentence. That was cover. That was. That was so you could establish cover. It's like, that is just great.

[Michael]

And then go on a podcast circuit. So you. Yeah, just be the mouthpiece for the agency.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Michael]

Do you think the agency. But it's crazy.

[John Kiriakou]

No, not anymore.

[Michael]

Do you think that they have people who pay attention or. Sean Ryan posted a picture that he got.

[John Kiriakou]

They.

[Michael]

He got an advertising request for the agency.

[John Kiriakou]

Are you kidding me?

[Michael]

I swear it was on his social media. It was an ad buy request from the agency. I'm like, you should definitely take that money.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And do the shittiest read.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, terrible. I'll tell you, just in the last eight weeks, I mean, on my own podcast, I've been doing a lot of, you know, do you have gold in your IRA? Go to johnlovesgold.com or running low on ivermectin. All family pharmacy. John, you get 10% starting the deal, man. What are you gonna do?

[Michael]

Yeah. So when lights don't pay for themselves.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So eight weeks ago, when things started going nuts for me, all of a sudden I'm getting calls from, you know, Tom Ford eyeglasses and. And this company and that company and a vineyard in napa. It's very cool. There was one I turned down out of hand. It was for a generic maker of viagra. Okay. No big deal. People take viagra. I don't, but maybe some people do. But they wanted me to do this commercial with an only fans model. And they wanted.

[Michael]

Tell me more.

[John Kiriakou]

They wanted me to say, being with her's not torture. And I said, hold on.

[Michael]

How much were they offering? Don't actually say I'm joking.

[John Kiriakou]

I said. I said, am I a clown for you? That's what you think this all boils down to? I'm here for your amusement.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

To them it was a joke.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. It's all a big joke.

[Michael]

The moral stand that you took to them.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

For clarity, I did do some funny ads for bluechew dick pills because they gave me full creative license. And I did like a 13 minute ad read one time. I wove it into a story. It was like the end of it was. It was like, oh. And then an Amazon guy rung the doorbells like, ding dong. I'm like, if your dong isn't being the ding that you wanted to be, that's awesome. It was based in real life. It was the opening of it. I just completely lost myself in the story and I just left it in there. That's a gift.

[John Kiriakou]

That's a gift. I will say this cashmere sweater is by Quince.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And quince, this is one of my sponsors on John kiriakou's dead drop, which you can find on apple podcasts. I'm proud to say I am in the top 1/10 of 1% of all of the 2 million podcasts on Apple podcasts.

[Michael]

That's amazing.

[John Kiriakou]

It's fantastic. I don't know how it happened.

[Michael]

In fact, you kept getting your message out there and you kept being yourself.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you for that.

[Michael]

I mean, honestly, that's the answer to it.

[John Kiriakou]

So Quince reached out to me and said, you know, we want to give you $150 to buy whatever you want on the Quint's webpage. And then just be honest and just talk for 60 seconds about. About what? What you think about the product. So I go online. I didn't have this color of olive green. This is the nicest cashmere anything that I've ever owned. Sometimes cashmere is very thin. There's not much to it because it's so soft. This is substantial. It's thick, and it's the softest thing I've ever owned. I wear it all the time. And now I've gone back to the Quint's website with my own money. Yeah. And spent another thousand bucks just because I can't believe how high quality these. These clothes are.

[Michael]

Plus, when you think cashmere, you think CIA officer.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, I'll tell you what, a lot

[Michael]

of you need to have some other.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, the patches. That's only if you're an animal analyst. A lot of cashmere around the world comes from Pakistan. And so when I was in Pakistan, I'm getting, you know, emails from everybody in my family. Can you get me a cashmere sweater? Can you get me a cashmere scarf? So I come up with a suitcase full of just cashmere to give away to people. Well, I can't go to Pakistan and buy cashmere. I gotta pay, you know, US prices. I'm happy to pay it if it's this kind of quality. Yeah.

[Michael]

When brands reach out to me like that, what I always do is I never take their 150 or whatever it is. If it's a brand that I'm interested in, I'll make my initial purchase with my good idea just because I want to be clean.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And then I can actually give them legit feedback. And later on, if they want to enter into an advertising relationship, I'll take your money.

[John Kiriakou]

That is a very good idea.

[Michael]

It's like, I'll take your money. But I. I'm going to enter into this, like, let me. Let me be a paying customer first. Let me get that experience. How's the last eight weeks been when it just. Did you just wake up one morning and you're like, I. Somehow I'm sitting on a Rocket ship, quite literally.

[John Kiriakou]

I happen to be in Dubai, and my niece called me from New Hampshire and she says, uncle John, you're blowing up on TikTok. I said, why? And she said, I don't know. And then one day later, I get a call from a major global talent agency, and the guy says, tell me you're not represented. And I said, I'm not represented, but I don't understand why this is happening. And then a couple days after that, I get a call from a reporter at Wired magazine and she wants to interview me about my new newfound TikTok fame. I said, how did this start? I don't really understand why you have

[Michael]

to go upstream and actually figure out that origin as well, too.

[John Kiriakou]

She figured it out. It was Diary of a CEO, which is funny because, well, first off, they

[Michael]

could make his facial expressions to. Some of your answers are memes in and of themselves. It's like, Stephen pick the job just a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

He was so much fun. First of all, he's so incredibly bright and had such insightful questions. It wasn't just John telling stories. He posed questions that I had never been asked to answer before. It was much more philosophical than a normal John telling stories kind of podcast. But there was a kid, there's a sophomore at the University of Texas, who took that interview and chopped it up into shorts so that each short was a story. He gave me an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice, and then the punchline would be in this ogre's voice, you know, and then I killed the janitor, that kind of thing. And then laser beams are shooting out of my eyes. And, you know, for a second I thought, should I be offended? Offended that they're like, they're turning this into something so light hearted. I was talking about serious issues here. Torture. This whole thing about hummus. This was about a torture technique. And then I thought, now I've got a sense of humor, too. I'm going with it.

[Michael]

It'll lead more people to your actual message.

[John Kiriakou]

And that's exactly what has happened. And then I was approached literally the next day by Cameo. It's an app where, you know, you can commission D list celebrities like me to say happy Birthday or, you know, I have endorsed more kids for 11th grade class president than you can shake a second stick at.

[Michael]

Do you have. Do you end everyone with, remember, the agency is always watching?

[John Kiriakou]

Sometimes I just go,

[Michael]

if they only knew the truth.

[John Kiriakou]

But I gotta say, it has been so much fun. It has opened up doors for me that I never imagined would Ever open. And I, you know, I like to write books. My ninth book is coming out in. In June.

[Michael]

And how do you enjoy them? I just had a book come out April 14th.

[John Kiriakou]

Congratulations. It's hard work.

[Michael]

I was gonna say, how did you possibly enjoy that process enough to do it nine times? You know what it is?

[John Kiriakou]

I stopped writing for other people and started writing for myself. My first makes a lot of sense. My first seven books were about the CIA, and a whole bunch of them were commissioned. I wrote the first two. The first two was Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. Did really well. Made number five in the New York Times bestsellers list. The second one was Doing Time Like a Spy, how the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. And that won two literary awards. I wrote it in longhand on. On legal pads at prison and at the end of each day of writing, because the guards would tear them up and throw them in my face, I would mail them back to my attorney and mark them. Legal mail so they couldn't intercept them.

[Michael]

Yeah, the agency was definitely reading them before 100. 100. It would look like a clean envelope by the time it got to your attorney, but, well, you know, there's gonna be some eyes on those things.

[John Kiriakou]

A couple of people wrote back to me and said, hey, your last letter was discreetly slit on the side of the envelope. So I went down the lieutenant's office, one guy one day, and I said, you guys, you act like you're fucking geniuses. And you're not. You're dopes. I said, listen, if you want to read what I have to say, you don't have to slit the side of the envelope open and then tape it up like nobody's going to notice that. What you do is you unfold a paper clip, you put it in the top of the envelope so that it hooks the paper, and then you just turn the paper clip so that it's a nice tight roll. And then you pull it out, then you can read it, and then you roll it back up and put it back in the envelope. I said, seriously, I have to explain it to you? Yeah.

[Michael]

These are rookie techniques. You guys are trash. Rookie Day one.

[John Kiriakou]

Shit. But you know what? That reminds me of something I wanted to tell you. Something I wanted to tell you. Saturday, I'm driving. It's early in the morning. I'm driving to George Washington University. It was a day of TED Talks, and I love TED Talks. I did one there years ago. It was so much fun. So I'm going to the TED Talk. My phone rings and it's kind of early. It's like 8 o' clock or just before 9. And it's a. It's a number I didn't recognize. So I answer it and the guy says. He gives me his name. And he is a. He's the head of a. Okay, I'll just say it. So he's the. He's the Director of the Bureau of Prisons. And I said, oh. I said, to what do I owe the pleasure of a call from the Director of the Bureau of Prisons? He says, you have been talking shit about the Bureau of prisons for 10 years. And I go, correction. I've been talking shit about the Bureau of prisons for 13 years.

[Michael]

Yeah. Get your numbers straight.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, buddy. Yeah. And he says, thus the reason for my call. He said, when you talk shit, you always follow it up with a proposed solution. And I said, yeah. I said, you're corrupt and your people are stupid and your entire bureau is broken. And he says, the president has mandated that I completely recreate the Bureau of Prisons. I want to reorganize it. I want to revamp it, and I want to know if you would be willing to be a member of an advisory committee.

[Michael]

I think we call that coming full circle.

[John Kiriakou]

I think so, too. I jumped at it. I said, absolutely, yes. When do you want to see me? He says, Wednesday. I said, done. I'll be there. And then he says, can you recommend somebody who would be really good? And I said, absolutely, yes. I said, he's got an Italian last name that is going to be easily recognizable, but he did 17 years and he shouldn't have done 17 days. And how he's been able to maintain his humanity, I have no idea. I said, he'll. He'll set you straight.

[Michael]

Yeah, man. What do you want to do with the notoriety as it builds? Like, what are you looking at in your Runway in front of you? What do you want to do with the attention? Having a platform is an amazing thing.

[John Kiriakou]

It's amazing. I can't believe it. Yeah, thanks for that question. A couple of things. Number one, I've been talking about these same issues since 2007. Yeah, they're really, really important to me. Human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, transparency in government.

[Michael]

I think they're gaining traction.

[John Kiriakou]

I think so, too. So number one, I want to keep talking to increasingly large audiences. I really love writing. I love it. And I love that people enjoy my books. I love that people enjoy hearing the stories. The stories are all true, which is why They've gained traction, I think. So I want to continue writing for bigger and bigger audiences. Since 2007, I've had a hobby where I write television pilots. It's fun. And I've been blessed since 2007 to have sold eight of them in Hollywood. Yeah. And so now I've got, I've got meetings scheduled over the next two or three weeks with household names.

[Michael]

Well, now that you have representation and

[John Kiriakou]

now I have representation. I mean, these are like multiple Oscar winners.

[Michael]

Oh, that's amazing.

[John Kiriakou]

Reaching out, exchanging ideas. I'm all in. I love it. And you know, I'm not ashamed to finally, for the first time in my life, make a couple of bucks. I, I'm tired of being poor. I'm tired of renting. It's, it's time to, it's time to ramp up my, my level of existence.

[Michael]

I don't think anybody out there is not involved in that struggle too. Some of them talk about it a little bit more than others, but yeah, everybody is trying to make as much as they can in a world that seems where the scarcity model is approaching for everyone.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. Yeah, I'm tired of it.

[Michael]

Yeah. It's. Oh, man. People think, you know, say, don't join the military. I mean, financial stability. Yes. For the 1st and the 15th. Like your check is going to come even when the government shuts down.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah. But that check may not be as big as you want it to be.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. And you know these fucking Obama people, they confiscated my pension in 2012. So I've got nothing. I have literally nothing.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And so I've got to make that up now.

[Michael]

I think you're on a trajectory though, where you might look back at the number of that pension.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And even if they offered it to you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Maybe it's better that I don't take it.

[Michael]

If you're in a, if you're in a place where it was offered to you, I think the more powerful move

[John Kiriakou]

is to say you and your measly $3,000 a month, you can, I mean,

[Michael]

it's one of the misconceptions or the things that maybe not a misconception, but people don't realize, especially coming out of the world that I was in, in the military, this is all I'm going to do. This is all that I can do. And that's a very self limiting ideology.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, you're exactly right.

[Michael]

But then you get out and if you can break yourself from that ideology, the opportunities that present themselves to you, you would. Of all the things I do now. Literally. People don't believe me. If you had given me an unlimited amount of time in the years before I exited the military, not a single thing that I do now. The coffee shop.

[John Kiriakou]

What?

[Michael]

I didn't even drink coffee Till I was 27 years old.

[John Kiriakou]

That was seriously the best mocha I've ever had in my life. When I took the first sip, I was like, oh, my God, this is fantastic.

[Michael]

It's Montana. So we do a sprinkle of meth in there just to get you coming back for the second one. It wouldn't have been on there. Hosting a podcast. The world I came from. Just like the world you came from. Be like, I'm sorry. I'm gonna willingly put myself on camera and put my thoughts out on the Internet to be destroyed by. Nope.

[John Kiriakou]

You are exactly like I was. Where? At the agency. Part of the culture is that they convince you that your skills are so specific that you can't do anything else. For us, you move from the agency into a defense contractor. For you, you move into Blackwater. Some kind of contracting. And that's just simply not true. You and I, when we were walking over here, I mentioned that, first of all, God bless cameo. Seriously, I. Actually, this is how nuts it is. For the last eight weeks, I have set my alarm every morning for 4am every easy jocko. And I answer cameos from four to seven. And then starting at seven, I do my normal day because otherwise I can't catch up.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'm afraid of, you know, this all just going away one day overnight, like flipping a switch. Like somebody flipped a switch to start it in the first place. So my sister and I bought a Laundromat, and now I won't be completely,

[Michael]

you know, poor even if it does go. This is what I have realized in my life through. The technical term would be excessive amount of failures that I have stumbled my way through. Voluminous, if you will. You figure out a way.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I. I've.

[Michael]

I'm finally at a place in my life where I worry less about the opportunities that are going to come, because I know that they will. And I find that I am more receptive to them by just kind of letting go of the reins a little bit and playing the field as it presents itself to me instead of trying to mold the chessboard into the. Which I've been.

[John Kiriakou]

You're so right.

[Michael]

I've been wrong every time I've tried to force the world into the chess moves that I.

[John Kiriakou]

Me, too. Yeah.

[Michael]

I mean, it took me 48 years to figure this out. And for clarity, I haven't figured it out completely. Maybe I'm just learning a little bit more from my mistakes. But, dude, you're going to figure it out.

[John Kiriakou]

Even if I'm.

[Michael]

Tomorrow, you're still going to figure it out because you've put the volume of work in. And that, I think, is. That's the difference between people who are truly. There are, of course, Black Swan events where somebody will become instantaneously famous for something. Good luck scaling that across any generational level.

[John Kiriakou]

Look at this huck to a girl, right? Yeah.

[Michael]

It didn't go too great for her.

[John Kiriakou]

No. She was a giant for like two weeks and then gone.

[Michael]

I don't know why anybody would take advice from her financially. Like the meme coin thing, you didn't. You really thought that one was going to be like a solid 401k investment strategy.

[John Kiriakou]

That's. That's where you want to put your hard earned dollars.

[Michael]

Yeah. I mean, life is self critiquing in many ways. It's like nunchucks. If you're not ready for him, you're going to break your nose.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

[Michael]

You. It's. You're going to figure it out, man. The more work you have put in, it's the overnight 10 years success you're going to start getting. People now like, oh, must be nice, John, must be nice. And it's like first off, a, if you really want to piss him off, say it's actually nicer than you think it could be. And then B, it just, that twists them off a little bit. Like, you actually don't even have the imagination to understand how nice it is. But they're never going to see the hard work. They're just going to see that you have arrived at a place where they want to be and they want to knock it down a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

Several friends of mine have told me that, that they've never met anybody who works as hard as I do.

[Michael]

And it's actually the key to success. It is the hack culture that we live in. You can hack a lot of things, but you can't hack hard work.

[John Kiriakou]

You can't. And I don't sleep very much. I don't really have any hobbies. All I do is work. This started off during COVID Well, I mean, I've always worked hard, but especially during COVID I had a lot of trouble sleeping. And I thought, well, I can lay here in bed and stare at the ceiling, or I can go downstairs and write an op ed and make $400. And so I started with the op eds and then, oh, I started saying most of my books, my first seven books were about the CIA or something having to do with the CIA. And then during COVID I thought, no, you know what? Ever since I was a little boy, I've loved cemeteries. Exploring cemeteries. I love the architecture, I love the symbolism of the stones or what's on the stones. But I especially love the fact that literally everybody has a story. So I'm not talking about the most famous people. I'm talking about interesting people. I was nine years old. I told my mom one day we lived about a mile from the cemetery. And I said, I'm going to go down to the cemetery and look for salamander. So I took an empty shoebox, I went down the cemetery, I found a salamander under a rock. I put him in the box with some grass. And when I got home, she said, did you find any salamanders? And I said, yeah, I found one under a rock. It was next to a gravestone that had a badge on it. And she said, what kind of badge? And I said, it said congressional Medal of honor. And she said, oh, that's a hero. We should go to the library and see what he did. So we went to the library, and we were regulars at the library anyway. But we found that he was a farmer from my hometown. And in the battle of. Oh, shoot. Battle of the wilderness, was it? Battle of Petersburg. He captured the Confederate battle flag.

[Michael]

Damn.

[John Kiriakou]

And got the congressional medal of honor, came back home, farmed until 1878 and died. And she said to me, I'll never forget it. She said, you see, everybody has a story. You don't have to be famous to have a story. So I've been to 73 countries, and probably 70 of those countries, I've been to a cemetery. And I decided to write a cemetery book about the cemeteries of Washington, dc. So I go online during COVID I'm looking and it's. There were like two dozen books about Arlington National Cemetery. And I learned that nobody had ever written a book about the cemeteries of Washington, dc. There are fascinating people buried in Washington.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So I wrote the first book, and it comes out in June. And then I followed it up. A funny thing is I sent it to my publisher, it's Simon and Schuster, And I said, look, I know you guys don't normally publish books like this, but this was important to me. Could you take a look at it? And I told him what it was. The editor and he's like, yeah, we don't really do books like this, but all right, I'll pass it around. He calls me two weeks later and he says, this is the best book you've ever written. And they want to commission four more. I said, oh, what do they want? So I finished. It's in editing now. Whispers in the Dirt. The Mafia graves of New York City.

[Michael]

Oh, damn, I think that's going to

[John Kiriakou]

be a good one. And they went one on America's most notorious serial killers, one on the historic cemeteries of Chicago, and one on the country western graves of Nashville.

[Michael]

That's a real broad spectrum there. I like the serial killers one.

[John Kiriakou]

I think so too.

[Michael]

My wife is slightly disturbed by the number of documentaries that I'll watch about serial killers.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm addicted.

[Michael]

And she's like, what is it? She's like, what is it that you get out of these? I'm like, I'm not sure, but I really can't turn it off, buddy.

[John Kiriakou]

There was a serial killer in my housing unit when I was in prison. We called him Truck. He was a long distance truck driver. And in the days before DNA testing, he would pick up prostitutes at truck stops and have sex with them and then strangle them, drive another hour and then just throw their bodies out of the truck. So he strangled a 16 year old prostitute and she survived and she identified him and the truck and he was arrested. He got 40 years. For reasons that will never be clear to me, he constantly sought my approval. He started off like, so you were CIA? And I said, yeah. He goes, I was CIA too. I was. I used a shrimp boat to smuggle a shrimp. He specifically said a shrimp boat to smuggle weapons to the Angolan rebels. I go, get the out of here.

[Michael]

Take it as a shrimp Forest Gump.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, exactly, a shrimp boat. I go, get the fuck out of here. And that just made him like, seek my approval more. He had these rotten nubs for teeth. So he would say stuff like, hey, John, I know that you like the Steelers, and the Steelers are on TV this Sunday. I saved you a seat in the, in the TV room. I'm like, okay, thanks, Truck. Hey, John, I know you like classic rock. There's a new classic rock station, 1600am I'm like, thanks, Truck. So there was this other guy at the same time we called Cat in the Hat because he had this oddly elongated head. It was like a birth defect, this crazy. Like you could project a film on his, on his forehead, you know, And I had an empty bunk in my Cell. You have to get everybody's agreement to move into somebody's cell. And we had a rule in my cell. No pedophiles. Pedophiles are banned. So I said to him, he wanted to move into the bunk. I said, you a pedophile? And he said, no, I'm not a pedophile. I said, what's your crime? And he says, murder for hire. I said, I don't think I like that any more than I like the pedophiles. I said, what were the circumstances of that crime? And he said, I owed the mob 100 grand. I couldn't pay it, so I took out a life insurance policy on my business partner and I hired a hitman to kill him. And I got caught. And I said, let me guess, you ratted out the hitman. He goes, well, it was either life in prison or 20 years. I said, no pedophiles, no rats. So we wouldn't let him in. Well, he was mad. One day, I hear my name on the. On the PA Kiriakou, Lieutenant's office. Usually that means you're going to solitary. They didn't have the balls to send me to solitary. So it turned out Jake tapper wanted to interview me. And he had come up to the prison and I had to sign a waiver and sit for the interview. So I'm sitting next to truck later that afternoon in the TV room. I am two feet away from cat in the hat. He does not see me sitting immediately directly behind him. He's standing at the computer. There's an internal email system. Him. I'm sitting there. Truck is here. I'm here. Cat in the hat's here. And he says, cat in the hat says to the guy next to him, did you hear that, Kiriakou? He got called down to the lieutenant's office. He goes, that guy's a rat. He went down there to rat us all out. And I just sat there. Listen, if you call somebody a rat,

[Michael]

that's a big deal.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, blood's gonna be spilled.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I didn't react in any way. And truck says, that fucking guy just called you a rat. And I go, an hour ago, I heard him call you a pedophile. Of course he didn't. I just made it up without saying a single word. Truck got up and beat this guy almost to death.

[Michael]

And this is why, john, you were an excellent case officer.

[John Kiriakou]

They had to land a helicopter in the yard to life, flight him to pittsburgh. Truck got five years added to his sentence. Cat in the hat was in intensive Care for like, six weeks. He finally comes back to the prison. He's all up, like, you know, and somebody had told him what had happened. So he comes up to me like this, and he goes, I. I just wanted to say I'm sorry that I called you a rat. I should have never said that. I'll never do it again. And I go, hey, hey. I said, look at me. I said, so help me God, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead. And you're never going to see it coming. And nobody messed with me.

[Michael]

I think we call those soft skills.

[John Kiriakou]

I got called down the lieutenant's office because I just continued watching the Steelers game like this, as. As Truck is beating him to death.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So I get called down. They were like, what the fuck were you doing at that fight? I go, what fight?

[Michael]

Checking the score.

[John Kiriakou]

The fight. You were sitting right next to these guys, the guys beating the other guy to death. I said, I'm watching the Steelers game. What are you talking about? Oh, you're going to tell us that what we saw on four different cameras didn't happen? I go, yeah, maybe you were the ones fighting. Do you ever think of that? Admit nothing, deny everything, counter accusations. Get up the fuck out of my office.

[Michael]

So, you ever miss your old job?

[John Kiriakou]

Very much.

[Michael]

Yeah. I can tell. So that's the thing, though. Millions of dollars spent on people. You can't always put it all down. That stuff will be with you for the rest of your life. And again, they were looking for a particular type of person that they could hone and sharpen those skills in.

[John Kiriakou]

I'll tell you, man, the. The Italians adopted me literally the day I arrived. And, I mean, Italians named Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese. These are serious guys. Yeah, I love them all. I saw two of them last weekend. We have dinner together. They're awesome. And I said to one of them, I said, this fucking guy, Cat in the hat. I said, I'm taking this guy down. And a very senior guy in the Bonanno family, he said, are you crazy? He said, they're going to add years onto your sentence. You're going to end up doing all of them, solitary. And I said, I would never be so crude as to do it with my own hands. Who do you think I am?

[Michael]

Do you not know where I come from?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. You think I don't think about this stuff in advance?

[Michael]

Yeah, there's a difference between brute force.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Michael]

And nonlinear problem solving.

[John Kiriakou]

In my second book, doing Time like a spy. I start off with these 20 life lessons that I learned at the CIA. And one of them is, let others do your dirty work. I would never do it myself. Yeah, why would you? Why take the risk?

[Michael]

It's a good question.

[John Kiriakou]

There was one good.

[Michael]

I gotta get you to the airport here. Oh, yeah, we got time.

[John Kiriakou]

One of the Italian guys, he became my best friend and is still one of my best friends in the world. It's funny, you know, you don't go to prison to make friends, but I made a friend in prison that he's like a brother, a brother to me. And we were talking about, you know, having others do the dirty work. And he said, he said, that's some up kind of sociopath stuff right there. And I said, yeah, okay, yes, you're right. But the thing is, if you want to stay safe, and you don't want to stay safe in solitary, you have to have others do your dirty work. And it took him a little while, but he understood. He mentioned to one of the guards, he said to one of these guards, this was the, the only guard that was like universally reviled. He was the only guard that wore a stab vest because he was genuinely afraid somebody was going to stab him. And he, and my buddy said, where are you going to be? They would do these six month rotations in different housing units. Oh, I'm going to be in Central one. He said, oh, my buddy John's in Central One. And the guard says, the CIA guy, John? And he said, yeah. And the guard says, I never fuck with that guy. And my friend says, yeah, why not? And he said, that's all I need. I work eight hours a day, I go out to my car and CNN standing out there, no, thank you.

[Michael]

I said, exactly, yeah, it's a deep pool. Last question for you. There are people out there who view your old job as their life's calling. What would you say to a young person who wants to have an impact in the intelligence community, given the landscape of where I think we both agree it is at right now? What would you tell them?

[John Kiriakou]

I would give them the same advice that my first deputy office director gave me. He said, you are going to see things during the course of your career that that's going to make your hair stand up. Things that you cannot abide. But understand that around year 10 of your career, you're going to realize that you're in a position of authority. All of a sudden you're a branch chief, a deputy group chief. If your career really takes off, you're going to be a group chief and you can change those things. He said there's always going to be a CIA. There's nothing that anybody can do to make it so that there isn't a CIA anymore. And if you want to change it, you have to change it from the inside. He said around year 10, you can change it from the inside.

[Michael]

It's a bottoms up approach as well. I think that's the way.

[John Kiriakou]

I think so too.

[Michael]

God, that's a tough journey though.

[John Kiriakou]

And there are a lot of very bad people in positions of authority right now.

[Michael]

Yeah, I think there is more out

[John Kiriakou]

there that are good though that I agree with. Yes. And that's why I still have hope there are good people out there. You know, it's funny too. There are a lot of people that just want to go work their day and then go home, make dinner and sit with their family. They don't even realize that they're the kind of people that we need to affect those changes. Yeah. Sometimes an opportunity presents itself and you never saw it coming.

[Michael]

Agreed. What do you want to leave people with? Final thoughts.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I've been the last eight or nine weeks I've been able to connect with Gen Z. And so my message is to Gen Z, it is to tell the truth because the truth really does set you free. There are some very contentious issues that they're going to experience confront in their lifetimes. Be on the right side of those issues in the long run, it's all worth it.

[Michael]

I couldn't agree more. Hell yeah. John, thank you for making the trip out.

[John Kiriakou]

So good to see you.

[Michael]

Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

This was fun.

[Michael]

Great.

[John Kiriakou]

Thanks for the invitation.

[Michael]

Of course, man. My pleasure. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

[John Kiriakou]

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[Michael]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Michael]

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