#356 - CIA Spy on Nuclear War, Vault 7 Tech, Mossad in Iran & Death Rituals | John Kiriakou

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #356 – Summary & Key Takeaways

Guest: John Kiriakou (Former CIA Officer, Whistleblower, Author)

Date: November 18, 2025

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Main Theme

A dynamic, deeply candid exploration of nuclear war risks, intelligence operations, US-Israel-Iran relations, surveillance tech (Vault 7, Palantir), Middle East geopolitics, and the often-unseen realities within the intelligence community. Kiriakou shares firsthand insights—including espionage tactics, historical anecdotes, modern surveillance threats, and his personal journey from CIA history to whistleblowing and beyond.

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Key Segments & Insights

Nuclear Threats & Middle East Powder Keg

[00:00–10:53]

• Israeli Pressure on U.S. Presidents:

  • Every president since George H.W. Bush has been pressured by Israel to bomb Iran, arguing Iran is an existential threat.
  • Trump eventually relented, allegedly after Israel threatened an unprecedented move: using nuclear weapons if the U.S. refused to act.
    • "The reason, though, that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said, if you don't bomb Iran... we’re going to use nuclear weapons."
      — John Kiriakou [01:02, 18:03]

• Aftermath & Precedent:

  • Previous U.S. reluctance was rooted in fear that bombing Iran would trigger WW3.
  • Bombing took place without immediate escalation—possibly indicating China/Russia’s unwillingness to intervene.

• Technological & Espionage Escalation:

  • Israel orchestrated targeted assassinations of Iranian military leadership, using innovative HUMINT—including recruiting desperate Afghan refugees inside Iran.
    • "Those are the guys that the Israelis recruited... you see this general drive by, make a note and transmit it back to us. Here’s $100."
      — John Kiriakou [11:14]

• Spycraft Details:

  • Israeli methods involve using non-Israeli operatives, sometimes even local minorities.
  • Novel Israeli tactics: When Iran banned generals from carrying phones (to prevent targeting), Israeli intel simply targeted their bodyguards’ phones instead.

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Surveillance Technology: Palantir & Vault 7

[01:02, 181:09–185:44]

• Mass Surveillance Infrastructure:

  • Gigantic NSA data centers can store “every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years.”

  • The legal boundaries against domestic spying exist only on paper; metadata is openly bought, and agencies (including Palantir) push the bounds of what’s accessible.

    • “I worry about the violation of our civil liberties… It is against the law to spy on Americans. Period. And that’s practically all they do.”
      — John Kiriakou [01:02, 181:14]

• Palantir’s Government Ties:

  • Palantir, started with CIA venture capital (In-Q-Tel), is now a major government/intel contractor.
  • Its data aggregation and “stovepiping” practices mean that even other governments hiring Palantir risk inadvertent CIA exposure or conflict of interest.
    • “That’s a whole nother level… What do you think China’s doing?”
      — Julian Dorey [01:25]

• Vault 7 Revelations:

  • Kiriakou stunned by CIA-developed hacking tools: simulated foreign fingerprints in cyber-ops, remote vehicle control, turning smart TVs into stealth bugs.
    • “Vault 7 showed the CIA had hacking capability... leave traces of the hack... written in Cyrillic or Mandarin... the CIA can take over your car and drive you off a bridge.” — John Kiriakou [171:43–172:49]

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Geopolitics: Israel/Palestine, Gaza, Saudi, Jordan

[07:57–54:16]

• Endless Complexity—State of Play:

  • “Ceasefires” never touch core issues; underlying problems (water, power, sovereignty) persist, guaranteeing future flashpoints.
  • Right-wing Israeli leadership (finance and security ministers with hate crime convictions) makes real peace currently impossible.
    • “There’s going to have to be an independent Palestine. There just has to be, because the current situation’s untenable.”
      — John Kiriakou [27:01]

• Regional Players' Dilemmas:

  • Egypt won’t open Rafah to avoid a Palestinian refugee surge; Jordan, with half its population Palestinian, refuses refugee influx to avoid Israeli ethnic cleansing.
  • Saudi Arabia floated as Gaza administrator—an old idea, historically blocked by Israel.

• Political Will:

  • Both Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are entrenched, and their people are used as proxies by neighboring regimes who feign concern for propaganda.
    • “The bottom line is... they [Arab regimes] don’t really care about the Palestinians so terribly much.”
      — John Kiriakou [39:33]

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Espionage, Double Standards, and CIA/Mossad/MI6/Military Culture

[21:50–25:23; 38:54–40:10; 158:29–160:08]

• Israeli Nuclear Ambiguity:

  • Israel’s nuclear capability is an “open secret”—blatantly omitted from official discourse, even censored at the CIA’s Publications Review Board.

  • South African nukes possibly transferred to Israel post-apartheid; evidence suggests deep Israeli-South Africa defense cooperation.

• Allies Spy on Allies:

  • Israel, China, and France routinely cited as top espionage threats to the US.
  • Even the Five Eyes alliance is an exception; most intel-sharing relationships retain “compartmentalization and distrust.”
    • “You can add Cuba and France [to espionage top threats list].”
      — John Kiriakou [107:04]

• Mossad in Iran:

  • Israeli HUMINT leans on desperate populations and non-natives; disguise, deceit, and local recruitment are key.
  • Key espionage anecdotes: French intelligence “murderous,” top-tier, especially in Africa.

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Civil Discourse, Media Manipulation, and Political Retribution

[54:16–66:58; 128:09–139:44]

• Weaponized Division in the U.S.:

  • Escalating political polarization provoked by media, bots, propaganda, and labeling every criticism as racist or antisemitic.
    • “A divided society is a compliant society… If you can divide people on really emotional issues… you can distract from everything else…”
      — Julian Dorey [55:27]

• Whistleblowing and Lawfare:

  • On cases like John Brennan, Kiriakou cautions against political prosecution as vengeance, warning of a dangerous precedent.
    • “If he has legitimately committed crimes, and I believe he has, he should be prosecuted. If they’re just scouring the law books… I would prefer not to see something like that happen.”
      — John Kiriakou [136:24]

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Death Rituals, Cemeteries, Mafia, and The Human Condition

[76:41–97:47]

• Whimsical, Macabre Interlude:
  • Kiriakou is releasing books on historic cemeteries and mafia graveyards—a passion that leads to colorful tales about mob hits, bone boxes in Greece, and quirky historical characters.
  • Greek burial traditions: renting graves, exhuming bones, ossuaries, and death rituals—“none of these rules are actually based in religion.”
    • “I've got a book coming out called Remains of the Day... a definitive guide to Washington D.C.’s historic cemeteries… next one is Whispers in the Dirt, a guide to the Mafia graves of New York City.”
      — John Kiriakou [76:41]
    • “…They take the skeleton apart, wash it with red wine, the priest blesses it, and then they put it in a little bone box.”
      — John Kiriakou [93:07]

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Nuclear War: Likelihood, Aftermath, and Human Nature

[99:06–119:47]

• The Grim Reality:

  • Kiriakou sees increased danger of nuclear weapon use (India/Pakistan, Israel/Iran) and acknowledges the world’s old safeguards have eroded.
  • Strong doubts about the world’s (or UN’s) ability to respond effectively to a nuclear strike: “What can the world do? A strongly worded statement?”

• Human Foibles & Future Risks:

  • Discussion touches on mutually assured destruction, societal breakdown, and the uncomfortable fact that political/military leaders might not be able to control cascading chaos in a crisis.
  • References to post-apocalyptic literature and media (Star Trek, Soylent Green) underscore uneasy parallels with current trajectories.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Israeli pressure for war:
  “The Israelis asked us to bomb Iran. Every president said no—our position was that that would be the start of World War Three... the reason Trump decided to bomb Iran was Israeli threat to use nuclear weapons.”
  — John Kiriakou [01:01–18:03]

• On Palantir & mass surveillance:
  “Now Palantir is a trillion dollar company... the metadata from your communications is for sale.”
  — John Kiriakou [181:14]

• On Israeli HUMINT in Iran:
  “They recruited thousands of these guys (Afghan refugees). Stand on this corner and every time you see this general drive by, make a note... Here’s $100.”
  — John Kiriakou [11:14]

• On Israeli nuclear ambiguity and censorship:
  “They only took out three words – ‘Israeli nuclear program’ – from all his books.”
  — John Kiriakou [22:05]

• On the Five Eyes/Allies espionage:
  “You can add Cuba and France to [top espionage threats].”
  — John Kiriakou [107:04]

• On CIA ethics and compartmentalization:
  “What they want you to do: be compartmentalized, so you’re not wondering what Fred’s doing down the hall… I’ve been shocked… Vault 7 was shocking.”
  — John Kiriakou [171:28]

• On French intelligence tradecraft:
  “I don’t work for you, and you’re not using tradecraft on me... You’re not recruiting me.”
  — John Kiriakou [108:51]

• On political retribution in prosecutions:
  “It is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and looking for the man… it’s a question of picking the man and then searching the law books to pin an offense on him.”
  — Quoting Justice Robert Jackson [134:44]

• On hope and reform:
  “The founding fathers gave us a system that is perfect for resolving those problems... It always does.”
  — John Kiriakou [143:10]

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Other Noteworthy Threads

• Humanizing global and political conflict: Juxtaposes the horrors of history with personal anecdotes—bread innovators, mafia graveyards, and Greek death rituals.
• Closed with optimism: Despite all, Kiriakou expresses faith in American resilience, civil institutions, and the ability to reset from even the worst political excesses—if Congress and political leadership can reclaim courage and independence.

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Structure of Episode Flow (Approximate Timestamps)

• Nuclear War Risks & Israel/Iran [00:00–18:37]
• Spycraft (Mossad, CIA, Humint Tactics) [11:00–16:00, 21:50–25:23]
• Israeli Nuclear Arsenal & Global Nonproliferation [19:04–26:12]
• Palestine, Peace Process, Regional Actors [27:01–54:16]
• US Political Divides, Discourse, Propaganda [54:16–66:00]
• US Lawfare, Brennan, Political Retribution [128:09–140:58]
• Surveillance Tech, Palantir, Vault 7 [171:43–185:44]
• Death Rituals, Cemeteries, Book Projects [76:41–97:47]
• Global Wealth, Elites, Tech, Power Structures [191:42–195:53]
• Closing Reflections & Optimism [143:10–151:34]

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Final Thoughts

Julian and John deliver a spellbinding, wide-ranging discussion—the kind only possible with a guest whose life traverses the shadows of espionage and public scrutiny. If you want an unvarnished look at the world behind the headlines—through the eyes of a CIA whistleblower—this episode is required listening.

“Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.” — Julian Dorey [197:05]

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Transcript

[Julian Dory]

We were talking about nuclear war.

[John Kiriakou]

I think it's something that we do have to fear. It's very complicated, as you said. Listen, every president from when I joined the CIA, the Israelis asked us to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. And every single president said no. Our position was that that would be the start of World War Three. The reason, though, that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said, if you don't bomb Iran, they had never threatened that before. It's the most extreme right wing government in the history of Israel. One other thing, too. I have a friend, he was first boss of the CIA. In his retirement. He writes books about these little niche foreign policy issues. I couldn't put the book down. And it's not just Gaza, it's Libya, Yemen and Iran and Iraq. It could be a disaster. I could see the Israelis using one, on Iran, the Indians and Pakistanis using them against each other.

[Julian Dory]

Two questions. How realistic is that? And two, what is the aftermath of that look like?

[John Kiriakou]

It's frightening.

[Julian Dory]

So Palantir themselves.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

I mean, that's a whole nother level. What kinds of things right now are you most concerned about?

[John Kiriakou]

I worry about the violation of our civil liberties. It is against the law to spy on Americans, period. And that's practically all they do. Where they had to build this new facility out in Utah that can hold every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years. And now Palantir is a trillion dollar company that makes most of its money contracting with the CIA. How about this? The metadata from your communications is for sale.

[Julian Dory]

Mike Yagley, he bought a bunch of data in North Carolina and tracked a bunch of phones leaving Fort Bragg, go across to Syria for five days. Realized they were special forces for some undercover oper they were doing, and he went to the government and showed them, and he said, I did this in my bedroom. What do you think China's doing?

[John Kiriakou]

So espionage work in the United States. We'll talk about that. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you.

[Julian Dory]

Johnny K. Superstar. You get bigger and bigger every time you come back here.

[John Kiriakou]

I was pumping gas yesterday and two guys at different pumps asked me for selfies.

[Julian Dory]

You love that. That's awesome.

[John Kiriakou]

I do.

[Julian Dory]

Where is it, though? I haven't. Is it under there? I haven't found it yet. Steve, have you seen it?

[John Kiriakou]

What's that?

[Julian Dory]

Your pardon, John.

[John Kiriakou]

What's your pardon? Oh, man.

[Julian Dory]

Where the fuck is your pardon?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, man.

[Julian Dory]

I've been waiting. I've been looking at. Daryl Strawberry got pardoned for three decades ago.

[John Kiriakou]

The other day, Darrel Strawberry, the Binance guy, hurts because he didn't even apply for a pardon. And he said on the radio the other day he's never met Donald Trump.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Donald Trump said he has no idea who the guy is. It's like the auto pen all over again. Donnie. Donnie, baby. Pardon. Let's go.

[John Kiriakou]

I will say I have very strong, deep support in the Trump administration for pardon. And I don't want to say too much, but, like, everybody who I have asked to help me has helped me. And I know that. I was told that my file is literally on the pardon attorney's desk. So I just have to hope for the best.

[Julian Dory]

We got to take his little finger there and fucking sign.

[John Kiriakou]

Donald J. Trump.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Let's go. I don't care if it's. I don't care who it is. Whatever it is that gets it through, gets the document. You deserve it.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you.

[Julian Dory]

I think it's. It's awesome to see you finally getting, like, the widespread recognition you've deserved for a long time.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, you know, in great part, I have you to thank for that. I mentioned to you two years ago. Was it two years ago? No, it's about a year and a half ago, that in short order, I did your podcast. Dalton Fisher and Danny Jones, one right after the other, over the course of maybe two months. And for whatever reason, the three of you together talking about these issues just allowed me to hit the YouTube algorithm sweet spot.

[Julian Dory]

Well, that's great to hear. And, like, I think. I think what was good is you had a couple years there going on Danny Jo on Danny Jones's show, where I think you did a few episodes before you did Dalton's and mine with Danny. And you got to go through not just your full story, but then show your foreign policy chops now and how you look at the world. And I think people got to see a nuanced view in you, because when you just hear the story, you're like, okay, obviously he's pissed off at CIA or whatever. But then you hear you, like, talk about things and talk through issues and the complexity of these things and your ability to be purely analytical rather than, you know, injecting in some of your old annoying. You know.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

People that obviously did some horrible things to you that could bias your opinion. Like, you do an amazing job of just saying, well, here's A, here's B, here's C, here's D. That's why it's E. And I like that a lot about you.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you. You know, when I was still in the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytic directorate of the CIA, I was asked to mentor this new hire. Young woman, fantastically smart. She had gone to, like, Dartmouth. No, no, no. Her brother went to Dartmouth. She went to uva. Very, very bright. So they assigned her to work on just kind of an entry level account. It was the United Arab Emirates. Like, learn the politics and the economics and then, you know, you can write something, whatever. So one day, Iran sent like five troops to this little uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf called Greater Tunb. T, U, N B. It's even hard to say there's Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunbar.

[Julian Dory]

Is that where the shy used to vacation?

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, there's nothing there. A couple of goats, literally, that's it. That's all that's on this island. So they moved into the tun. There are the tuns.

[Julian Dory]

And that doesn't even look real.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, it's. It's terrible. And so we're talking about it in the morning meeting that the Iranians invaded Greater Tun, and they're occupying. It's like, like I said, five guys just, you know, got off the raft and, okay, they put the Iranian flag. So afterwards, after the meeting, we went back to our cubicles and we were talking about it, and I said, the Iranians never get. Never going to leave this island. She said, why not? It's, you know, with relations with the uae, they have so much, so much to lose. I said, but that's the thing. Their relations are with Dubai. The Tunbs are owned by Sharjah. And the Dubaians don't care if the Sharjahs lose a couple of square feet of sand. It doesn't make any difference because their relationship with the Iranians is so strong economically that they're willing just to overlook it. Later in the afternoon, she came back from wherever she had gone and she said, I resigned. And I was like, what? Why would you do that? She was great. And she said, after we talked about the Tunbs, she said, I realized I'll never know the Middle east like you do. And so I just quit. And she became a real estate agent.

[Julian Dory]

She quit because you were so smart.

[John Kiriakou]

She quit because she was like, too much detail. Too much detail. I don't want to learn it. I don't care to learn it. Nobody's going to give a shit about it. She quit I felt so bad. I really did.

[Julian Dory]

I hope she found happiness in real estate.

[John Kiriakou]

I hope so too. Right? Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

I mean, that is the thing though, when you look at even just one part of the world, and I say just one part of the world, Middle east is a big part, but like that particular segment of the world, the number of moving pieces there and the smallest little thing.

[John Kiriakou]

Very complicated.

[Julian Dory]

Isn't it unbelievable that we don't have. I mean, obviously we've had a terrible war going on in Gaza that she is ending now. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. But isn't it crazy that we don't have like literal bombs going off every day there? When you consider just how tenuous every.

[John Kiriakou]

Relationship is, you're absolutely right. And it's not just Gaza, it, it's Libya, it's Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen. I mean, it could, it could happen pretty much anywhere besides Syria and Iran and Iraq and Lebanon. And it could be, it could be a disaster. Yeah. And it's not quite a disaster maybe with the exception of, of Gaza and the, the Sudans.

[Julian Dory]

Well, the last time I had you here was back in February. So this is before the whole attack on Iran and what seemed to die down after that. But I don't know, some of that feels like a little bit of eerie silence. I hope I'm wrong about that. What, what is the, the standing there? Obviously most of the Iranian population doesn't support their current leadership. But you had Israel, who clearly wants regime change. They pulled us into it to basically like bomb for, to the nuclear sites. And luckily, like, nothing kind of happened after that. And it's been pretty quiet since. But am I missing something there? Is there more of that story at this point?

[John Kiriakou]

There's more. It's very complicated. As you said a second ago, the whole region is. The Iranian government has practiced a policy called strategic patience. That's what they've described it as in the Iranian media, strategic patience. And that's manifested itself in a couple of different ways. When the Israelis first attacked, the Iranian response was to not strike back. And then the Israelis attacked a second time. And the Iranian response was to send drones. Drones move very slowly. And so the Iranians actually warned the Israelis in advance, we're sending drones. Almost all of them were shot down. Something like seven got through, which is a learning experience because it shows that the Iron Dome is not perfect even against slow motion drones. Then the Israelis, you know, killed essentially the entire Iranian military leadership. Just took them all out. You know how they did that? Very precise strikes by the way, very, very precise.

[Julian Dory]

They didn't.

[John Kiriakou]

Not. Not that they even needed to be precise, because the Israeli policy is if they want to kill you and you're in an apartment block, they'll take the entire city block out and kill 2,000 people if they think they can get you.

[Julian Dory]

That's a policy they have.

[John Kiriakou]

That's a policy. And that's why Hezbollah, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. It will again in six months.

[Julian Dory]

An attitude. I just want to be clear. Is it like an attitude that their military has to say, fuck it, we're going to do whatever we want?

[John Kiriakou]

An actual written like, no, it's from the Israeli political leadership.

[Julian Dory]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. So what they did is there are hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran, right? They'll never get Iranian citizenship, and because they don't have paperwork, they're not entitled to free medical, to food, aid, welfare, nothing. And they're desperate. Well, those are the guys that, that the Israelis recruited. It's like, we want you to stand on this corner and every time you see this general drive by, make a note of it and then transmit it back to us. Here's $100. They recruited thousands of these guys.

[Julian Dory]

How would they. Could you walk me through some common tactics and ways that they would recruit someone like that? Like, where are they meeting them? How are they meeting them?

[John Kiriakou]

Sure, this is an easy recruitment that any brand new case officer can do. It's essentially a cold pitch, but you're cold pitching someone who's so desperate that they'll do anything. There's no love of Iran among these Afghans because the Iranians haven't given them anything. There's no hatred of Israel because maybe these guys don't even know it's the Israelis that are asking them to work. They could be saying, oh, we're from the Mujahideen, Khalk mek. Or we're from Iraq, or we're from, you know, Pakistan or whatever. They don't have to say, we're Israeli intelligence officers.

[Julian Dory]

Might some of these spies who are Israeli intelligence officers, to be clear, not be native Israelis?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I would suspect that almost none of them are native Israelis.

[Julian Dory]

Meaning they're not undercover, trying to pose like Ellie Cohen did, as another.

[John Kiriakou]

Correct. Okay, Correct. These are probably Iranians who have been recruited by the Israelis overseas. Or what would be even better for the Israelis is if they are Iranian Jews who maybe emigrated and can be sent back.

[Julian Dory]

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[John Kiriakou]

Interesting.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so they would get a lot of these guys easy approaches, like the street type Taskers, easy approaches because they got nothing going for them.

[John Kiriakou]

And then what they end up getting is, you know, jobs in these generals houses as a te walla, a tea.

[Julian Dory]

Boy, or that could mean a Few things.

[John Kiriakou]

Sweep the floor. And oftentimes it does mean a few things. Sweep the floors, wash the car, whatever. Then you get the general's cell phone number. Well, we know that the Israelis targeted each individual cell phone number so they could track it as it's moving around town and fire rockets directly at whoever happens to be holding the cell phone. So the Iranian government then said, as a new policy, no generals and no nuclear scientists can carry cell phones. So you know what the Israelis did? Because the Israelis ended up killing them all.

[Julian Dory]

What'd they do?

[John Kiriakou]

They realized that the Iranians never told the bodyguards that they can't carry cell phones.

[Julian Dory]

Somewhere Mike Yagley's just hitting the table right now. God damn it.

[John Kiriakou]

I will say the one thing that I was really, really worried would lead to something terrible was when we decided to bomb Iran at the Israelis behest.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Now, why would we do that, John?

[John Kiriakou]

Well, there's a good reason why we would do it before it was done, I would have thought it was insanity. After it's been done, I think I've come to the conclusion that. All right, that wasn't so bad after all, really. So, yeah, listen. Every president from when I joined the CIA and George H.W. bush had just become president, the Israelis asked us to bomb Iran. Every single president, no matter who the prime minister of Israel happens to be, you gotta bomb Iran. You gotta bomb Iran. You gotta bomb Iran. And every single president said, no, we're not bombing Iran. I remember a couple of times when Obama. Was it. Obama. Obama and Netanyahu got into shouting matches.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

That we didn't have an understanding or an appreciation of what a an existential threat Iran was or a nuclear Iran was. You got to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. We would never bomb Iran because our position was that that would be the start of World War Three. Because if we bomb Iran and maybe you know, weakened the hold that the government has on the country, then the Chinese may have to come in or the Russians may have to come in.

[Julian Dory]

That was going to be my next question. Did this just prove that this situation, seeing as we did bomb sites there and nothing happened, did this prove that the Chinese and the Russians actually don't really give a shit about Iran? Or is that a little premature to say?

[John Kiriakou]

Maybe just a premature. But I would say, as things stand right now, yeah, that's. That's the initial conclusion we can draw. The reason, though, I'm told that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said for the first time, if you don't bomb Iran to take out these deep bunkers. We're going to use nuclear weapons. And they had never threatened that before. And so Trump said bombing Iran might actually save us from the start of World War 3 if it keeps the Israelis from using nuclear weapons.

[Julian Dory]

So according to your source, the Israelis told the President of the United States that if he did not use the United States military power to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran, Israel, acting on its own, would use nuclear weapons.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Do you see why there's a problem with that statement, John? Yeah, because they've never fucking admitted that they've had them.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

You're telling me that they just admitted to the President of the United States that they have nuclear weapons and we still do not have them in the IAEA treaty?

[John Kiriakou]

I mean, if. If Israeli nuclear whistleblowers are to be believed. Yeah, they've had them. They started working on them in the 50s. They got them around the late 60s or the early 70s. Look at. Look at Mordecai Vanunu. You know, he wasn't charged for treason for nothing.

[Julian Dory]

That's a guy they hid in Rome with the honey pot. Yeah, yeah. 86.

[John Kiriakou]

No, he friended me on Facebook. I rejected the friend request.

[Julian Dory]

That's not what I asked, but.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay, I know you said, was he. Was he 86? No, no, he's alone.

[Julian Dory]

No, no, no, not 86. I think they got him in 1980.

[John Kiriakou]

In 86. Yeah, they got him in 86.

[Julian Dory]

That's right. He friend requested you on Facebook.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And I was like, yeah, no, thank you. I have enough problems in my life.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Anyway, I was on. I was on Piers Morgan Show a couple of months ago, and I'm on with a retired Mossad general. Danny.

[Julian Dory]

I alone.

[John Kiriakou]

I alone. Thank you. So. Alan Dershowitz was on, and I just can't help myself sometimes when Alan Dershowitz and I are in the same room, I just can't help it. He's just such a. On the one hand, he's a very kind and generous man. On the other hand, when it comes to Israel, he's. He's irrational.

[Julian Dory]

How so?

[John Kiriakou]

There's literally nothing that the Israelis can do that's wrong. Nothing. And he won't let you get a word out. If he thinks that you might possibly criticize Israel, he's going to interrupt you until you just give up and move on. So I'm arguing. I'm arguing with him about. About whether or not Israel spies on the United States. I said, of course they spy on The United States. They're prolific in their espionage work in the United States, especially as it relates to American defense contractors. Right. And. And Pierce finally interrupts Dershowitz and asks General Ayalon if. If it's true that. That the Israelis spy on the United States. And he just laughed. He goes like that. And he says, my position is whatever the Prime Minister's position is. Okay, well, thank you for confirming that Israel spies on the United States. It's the same thing with the nuclear program. Pierce came right out and asked him, does Israel have nuclear weapons? And he said, well, the Prime Minister hasn't confirmed that there are nuclear weapons. So I'm just going to go with what the Prime Minister says.

[Julian Dory]

But breaking news you just reported here today, based on your source, that not only has the Prime Minister confirmed it, he confirmed it to the President of our country.

[John Kiriakou]

One other thing, too. I have a friend. He was my first boss at the CIA. He's a really, really great guy. He retired years ago.

[Julian Dory]

John Brennan.

[John Kiriakou]

No, he's not a really great guy. No, we'll talk about that. Yeah. So in his retirement, he writes books about these little niche foreign policy issues that you might say, well, who gives a shit about that? And then you read the book and you can't put it down. Like US Indian relations during the Kennedy administration. I couldn't put the book down or some obscure little window in the 70s of US Saudi relations, stuff like that. So anyway, he told me, but like we all do, he sent his book into the CIA's Publications Review Board for clearance before he sent it to the publisher. And he said that in all the books he's written, he's written at least a half a dozen. They only took out three words, Israeli nuclear program. And I said, why? It's not up to us to protect the fact that there's an Israeli nuclear program. We didn't classify any Israeli nuclear program that was improperly classified. And he said, yeah, I knew it. But then I thought, ah, it's easier just to. Just to take it out.

[Julian Dory]

I don't have any problem. I mean, if it were out to me, nobody in the world would have nukes. But seeing as that's not the case, I don't have any problem with them having nukes. I have a problem with the fact that every country around the world who even might have nukes has to admit to it and register and they don't.

[John Kiriakou]

And sign the non Proliferation Treaty afterwards.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. And it's like, it's insulting to hear that. And you see the same reaction that you just described over and over again. Anytime a spokesperson of Israel is being asked about it, I mean, they sweat like a. In church. When you ask them about nuclear weapons, they all know.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

But they're like, yeah, now we don't have.

[John Kiriakou]

They all are compelled to play this silly game. Yeah, it's like, exactly.

[Julian Dory]

But it's been 50. It's been almost 60 years.

[John Kiriakou]

And there are credible reports that when the apartheid regime fell in South Africa, they had nukes and they gave them to the Israelis. Like, why. Why aren't we talking about that?

[Julian Dory]

They gave them.

[John Kiriakou]

Huh?

[Julian Dory]

I don't know anything about this.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Can we Google that? Oh, that was. That's been around for decades. South African nuclear program, Israel, something like that.

[Julian Dory]

Interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

I mean, there. There was a period in the 70s when Argentina and Brazil were going at it and they were both starting to develop nukes, and then they both backed off. Can you imagine?

[Julian Dory]

All right, deep scout it. So Israel and South Africa had a secret defense and nuclear cooperation, particularly after the 1975 Israel South Africa agreement. While Israel reportedly provided South Africa with technology, knowledge and equipment to help with its armaments needs, there is no conclusive evidence of significant assistance in developing South Africa's nuclear devices. However, documents from 2010 suggest Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to Africa. And then there's like a lot below here as. Or to South Africa. There's a lot below here. So this is like this is going.

[John Kiriakou]

For the vela incident.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

1979 satellite detected a double flash of light, which is why they believe to have been a nuclear explosion.

[Julian Dory]

A joint South African Israeli test. So. So at the least what it would appear is that there was some cooperation on development or at least working with the materials, which also would signify that you have them.

[John Kiriakou]

I mean, and remember at the time, the. The regime in South Africa was staunchly pro Israel, especially in the United Nations. It was one of the few countries that Israel could routinely count on.

[Julian Dory]

That's interesting. So back then in the 70s and 80s, you're saying, yeah, this whole peace deal that just went down.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Which is tenuous.

[John Kiriakou]

It's not a peace deal.

[Julian Dory]

It's not a peace deal.

[John Kiriakou]

It's just a ceasefire. It doesn't address a single one of the core issues. Not a single one. You know, stop shooting. Is not a peace deal. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Do you see? Like, I am rooting for it. I'm rooting for. So. And obviously there's been some now, like, they're fighting over what dead bodies look like when they got like, fucking Exchange and all that. And there's. There's been some funny business going on on both sides, but like I said, I'm rooting for a ceasefire to continue.

[John Kiriakou]

Me too.

[Julian Dory]

And I will commend, even if I don't like the leadership of both sides, which I don't, I will commend the people for at least trying to do that.

[John Kiriakou]

See, that's exactly my position.

[Julian Dory]

Right, yeah. Do you have faith that something like this could be sustainable, though not with.

[John Kiriakou]

The current Israeli government in place. No. It's the most extreme right wing government in the history of Israel to the point where the Minister of Finance, who oddly, yes, Motrich Audley also has jurisdiction over the west bank. And Itamar Ben Gavir, the Minister of. What's his title now? National security. I guess it is. They both have felony convictions for anti Muslim hate crimes. Felony convictions for hate crimes, not for, you know, failing to fill out an Internet form or something like that like we have here. And they're in charge of the Palestinians. So as long as those guys are in place, there's no possible way that there can be a lasting peace. And listen, the bottom line too is there's going to have to be an independent Palestine. There just has to be, because the current situation's untenable. The Israeli press has been talking a lot over the last several weeks, maybe over the last month, about an idea where Israel would technically continue to own Gaza, but the day to day life of Gaza would be administered by Saudi Arabia, which would also then invest in things like an electrical grid, water desalination plants, a port. Yeah. And it would have to be disarmed. There would have to be no Palestinian military. Great. Right. It's a great idea and I've said it a couple of times in podcasts. In 1991, I was on my very first overseas tour in Saudi Arabia, brand new CIA officer and I was working for an ambassador who really became legendary. Chaz Freeman. He went on to be Ambassador to China and Assistant Secretary of Defense. The guy is brilliant. He floated the idea with the Saudis. What if we were to ask you to build a port and an airport and a water desalination plant and an electrical grid? And they said, yeah, we would do it in Gaza. And then we went to the Israelis and the Israelis said, absolutely never. That was 1991 and before October 7th, they only had but five hours of, of water every day. Then the Israelis would shut it off, they would have a few hours of electricity, then the Israelis would shut it off. The situation's untenable because another, another October 7th is going to happen if there's not a sort of a pressure release valve. You know, what was it Martin Luther King said? Never underestimate a man's desire to be free. Yeah, well, they've got to concede something.

[Julian Dory]

I've actually never thought about. Not what you just said, but like an idea I'm getting from that. And I'm just thinking about this live and out loud. So this might be the dumbest thing I've ever said. Or it could be like something that's worth kicking around.

[John Kiriakou]

What?

[Julian Dory]

Obviously Palestinians and Saudi Arabians are different. Sure, they're different groups of people, but they're both a part of the Arab population, if you will.

[John Kiriakou]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

What if like a two state solution involved Palestine becoming a part of Saudi Arabia?

[John Kiriakou]

Off the top of my head, my guess is the Saudis would find that workable and the Israelis wouldn't.

[Julian Dory]

But the Saudis and Israelis are starting to get somewhat along now.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, but we should also not underestimate the Israelis desire for a biblical Greater Israel.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

And to give away land is not in the Israeli playbook.

[Julian Dory]

And that's, that's the problem here because like you saw the day after the cease fire, Hamas started executing people in the streets because they're, they're a terrorist group and that's what they do. They, they're, they're evil and they're going to do stuff like that. They exist because there's a vacuum in a place that's not allowed to have a military, not allowed to have a state government run government, not allowed to economically vie for itself. It's Locke basically, on all four borders. We've gone through that ad nauseam before, you and I on podcast. What do you expect there to be?

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly, Exactly. Right. And it's even more complicated than that. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Right. We put together one of the greatest, albeit temporary, military alliances in, you know, since the Second World War. And we went to the Palestinians and said, you better be on the right side of this thing. Right. We also said the same thing at the time. The United Nations Security Council happened to include Cuba and Yemen as two of the states. So we weren't sure what they were going to do, which way they were going to vote. It didn't matter because they didn't have veto power anyway. But we wanted as united an international front as we could come up with with.

[Julian Dory]

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[John Kiriakou]

And we went to the Palestinians, all the way to the top to Yasser Arafat and said, you better be on the right side of this. And they jumped in with Saddam Hussein. The thing is, is half the population of Kuwait was Palestinian and Bahrain and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. And Saudi Arabia, well Saudi Arabia was half. Half the population was Yemeni. And so when Arafat took a position, well first Saudi Arabia expelled literally every Yemeni I flew into Yemen as that was happening in very early. It was like February or March of 1991. I flew from Jeddah and as you're coming into Sana', a, I mean for 15 minutes before you, you get to the airport, all you could see were people living in cardboard boxes or tin, you know, lean tos and shanties. They had expelled half the population of Yemen back into Yemen, where there was no food and no water, no work in the first place. I was in Kuwait, I've mentioned before, on Liberation Day. We went in with the Marines and a senior Kuwaiti prince told me, and I reported it at the embassy team meeting the ambassador. I still remember the ambassador just shaking his head like, oh my God. The senior Kuwaiti prince told me, in a year there will be no Palestinians in Kuwait. None.

[Julian Dory]

What was his reasoning?

[John Kiriakou]

They had sided with the Iraqis. They were all traitors and they had to pay for it. So the problem with that is the Palestinians are the middle class of the Middle East. They're the professors, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the public school teachers. They're the ones that make the economy run. You want Palestinians, they're all educated. You want them in your country until their leadership turns on you. And so they started replacing them with Filipinos and Thais and Pakistanis, lots of Egyptians, because the Egyptians are well educated too. So you have lots of Egyptian engineers. All the pilots at Gulf Air, for example, Kuwait Airways, were all Egyptians after that. And the Palestinians were left out on their ears. Where do you go? You can't go back to your country because you have no country. So what do you do? It was the stupidest decision that Yasser Arafat ever made in his life. Look, this was an easy win, you.

[Julian Dory]

Know, that's what I'm saying. These are the types of leaders that they've had over the last 75 plus years. Who are these upstart black hand organizations, not run by the best people at all. You know, and like that's the thing, like when the Israelis will say, like, oh, Yasser Arafat was a terrorist, that you could disagree with them. They have a case there.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure. And so was Menachem Beginning. Yeah. And you know that. And they, you can move on from that and win the Nobel Peace Prize, for what that's worth. I'm sorry. Two other issues that make this more complicated. Egypt. Okay. The Palestinians desperately want the Rafah border crossing open. Okay. The Egyptians are not going to open the Rafah border crossing. They're just not.

[Julian Dory]

Why?

[John Kiriakou]

Because it'll result in a flood of Palestinians leaving Gaza and entering Egypt. And the Egyptians can barely feed their own people or provide work for their own people. They're like 120 million Egyptians. And what, they're going to have to worry about another 2 million Palestinians and feed and clothe and employ them. They can't do it. Right. They just can't do it. The other one is Jordan. Most people now are Too young to remember that in 1968, the Jordanian military was literally fighting the Palestinians on the steps of the palace as Black September. The Palestinian group was trying to murder King Hussein and his family and take over Jordan and make it Palestine. Well, they have long memories in Jordan. Yeah, half the population is Palestinian because they're the children, the grandchildren, the great grandchildren of 1948 refugees.

[Julian Dory]

So is half the royal couple.

[John Kiriakou]

And so is half the royal couple. Absolutely true. But, but the thing is they'll never be fully Jordanian. In fact, Jordanians have, you know, carry a green passport and if you're Palestinian born in Jordan, you carry a black passport. So you don't even get first class rights. So it's very complicated. Like people say the right things, governments in the Middle east say the right things about Palestinians, but when it comes time to put their money where their mouths are, not a whole lot gets done.

[Julian Dory]

So putting Jordan aside for a second because there's another layer there that maybe we can come back to that you and I have talked about before. One argument that the Israelis have made over the years that I think really does have some weight to it is that a lot of the Middle east and the Arab countries don't really give a shit about the Palestinians. They're just a useful, you know, tool of propaganda to be able to say, oh, look what the Israelis are doing. But they don't really care about that. The people. And I would argue even today, even after the last two years and what we've seen in some cases, I, I think they're right about that.

[John Kiriakou]

I think so too. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Abraham Accords have been so popular and so well received around the Middle East. Just in the last week, Kazakhstan of all places, joined the the Abraham Accords to include Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, you know, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan. I may be missing one or two. And the crown jewel is going to be Saudi Arabia. And I think eventually Saudi Arabia joins as well. Because the bottom line is it'll be good for the Saudi economy and they don't really care about the Palestinians so terribly much.

[Julian Dory]

There's been, obviously MBS is where it starts and ends with the block in Saudi Arabia 100%. But there's been some mixed messaging from the extended royal family. When they talk publicly about Israel, Palestine, there's some who are clearly supporting Israel and others who are like, no, we need to figure out Gaza here. What they're doing to the Palestinians is wrong.

[John Kiriakou]

Remember that the king's title is not just King Malik, it is king and custodian of the two holy mosques. So he has to have pristine Islamic credentials as well. None of them do. I mean, King Fahad took it on the chin for, you know, coming here when Reagan was president. And, you know, there were pictures from the Associated Press of him toasting Reagan with a glass of wine. You're not supposed to drink wine. They were ready to overthrow the government. They were so upset. But, but MBS is a. Is a unique case. He's not afraid to kill people who he thinks are going to stand in his way, including people named Al Saud. And. Well, I'll tell you, Julian, I. I went to Saudi Arabia in 2021 or two. I went, I went to cover Biden's trip there.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, you were covering it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I was there in 2022. I think it was the summer of 2022. And I hadn't been back to Saudi Arabia since like 1996. Right. So it had been a long time since I had been in Saudi Arabia and I didn't recognize the place. Women driving. I was like, oh, my God. Windows down, music blasting, their movie theaters. I'm like, what happened? And here I've been yelling about the Saudis being, you know, from the Stone Age, and it's just not true. Under mbs, his murderous, you know, Jekyll.

[Julian Dory]

And Hyde, little murder for personality.

[John Kiriakou]

It's a good trade. Yeah, yeah. When he said he was gonna. He was gonna bring Saudi Arabia into the 21st century, he meant it.

[Julian Dory]

He did.

[John Kiriakou]

And it happened quickly. You know, I remember bowling when I was living there in 91, I went bowling at the Hilton, right? It was a group of us from the embassy. There was a. There was a two lane bowling alley on the roof of the Hilton, and they had to put a big curtain in between us. It was a curtain that was hanging from the ceiling. So the men bowled on one side and the women bowled on the other side. And we could hear each other, but we were forbidden from seeing each other.

[Julian Dory]

Like your own women.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, from the embassy. Because, you know, if men and women bowl together, the next thing you know, they're gonna be having sex in the bowling lane.

[Julian Dory]

Wouldn't want that.

[John Kiriakou]

Of course.

[Julian Dory]

Wouldn't want that. So I say, hey, look, you know, they're moving up to the modern day.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Now it's like, you know, they're blasting Tupac from the car and women driving, they're hanging out of the window. It's like I remember standing at the window of my hotel like, like I was in The Twilight Zone.

[Julian Dory]

That's. So they get to relive the 90s, too, while they're getting their pop culture. Seriously good time to be alive. Good for them. Wow. Do you. Going over the whole Middle East. Maybe we should go back to Jordan for a sec. Just because I said. I put a pin in that. You and I have talked about this before, but like the Jordanian king, who I actually kind of like, he's very, very interesting guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, He's. He's the right leader for that country.

[Julian Dory]

He. When you look at his foreign policy predictions over the last 25 years, I mean, people should just listen to that guy. Like, he's almost never.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I would go so far as to say of everybody in the region or everybody who studies the region, no one knows as much as King Abdullah.

[Julian Dory]

I think you have a good argument there. I mean, he's. He's this. It's a guy who never wanted the job. He's been Western educated as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Never expected to get the job.

[Julian Dory]

Never expected to get. His dad was dying and said, it's going to be you, not the other son. He was like, what?

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, it was. It was the king's brother that was the crown prince. And they had thought he was getting.

[Julian Dory]

Skipped over and it was going to be the oldest son that was going to get it. And then he said, no, I'm going to give it to the second son.

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, he is. He's the oldest.

[Julian Dory]

He is, yeah. Okay.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. The brother got a little too big for his britches. King Hussein had cancer, and his death was a slow one. And he was universally loved. My wife cried when he died. We were stationed in Athens at the time.

[Julian Dory]

My second wife.

[John Kiriakou]

My first wife.

[Julian Dory]

First wife.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. He was universally loved, and his death was a slow one. And so as he was approaching death, the crown prince decided, I'm going to start making some preliminary changes. I'm going to make this change and that change. I'm going to restaff the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And King Hussein's like, whoa, I'm not even dead yet. We're not going to do this. You're fired. My son Abdullah is going to be the crown prince. And Abdullah is like, what? I never wanted to be crown prince. Next thing you know, he's crown prince. And then his dad dies a couple months later.

[Julian Dory]

Now he. I've talked about this before with you, but he was asked at some conference in the weeks after October 7, 2023, among many questions, he was being obviously asked about the. About the conflict that was going on and, and what this looked like and all that. But then he of course was asked, will you accept Palestinian refugees? And he said, I'm glad you asked that question, and I will not. Not because I don't want them, not because I don't like them. My wife is Palestinian. That's not the issue here. If I do accept them, though, I will give Israel exactly what they want. They will be able to ethnically cleanse the whole area. They'll go to countries like mine.

[John Kiriakou]

There it is.

[Julian Dory]

And the problem will be taken care of. And I then fast forwarded and saw a press conference with him and Trump in the Oval Office. When Trump got back in here, where Trump's talking about sending some Palestinians in there and you just see the King sitting there like, God damn it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yep, not gonna happen. It's just not. And you know, if, if Donald Trump's idea to develop Gaza and make it better than Monte Carlo, which is what he said, go with God, the Palestinians could use the influx of cash.

[Julian Dory]

Sure.

[John Kiriakou]

Make it better than Monte Carlo. I think that would be a wonderful thing.

[Julian Dory]

I don't think he has them in mind running it, though.

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, he never did.

[Julian Dory]

He never did. And that's like, you know, that's the thing you, you talk about it as the obvious point that, like, you got to be able to give people a state. There has been so much hatred built up on both sides over all these years since, you know, Israel began to exist and all that, that the unfortunate reality to me is that if you were actually, as a world going to commit to a two state solution, you would need to accept the fact that you're going to have what's called the bloody generation. Which means, all right, let's say tomorrow I put in a two state solution for the next 20 to 25 years, I'm going to have all the young blood of people who grew up hating each other, wanting to kill each other and completely disagreeing with this solution. And every time there's some sort of attack from one side or the other, instead of being like, well, nope, can't do a two state solution war, someone attacked the other one and that's it, you have to be able to say, no, we're going to keep the two state solution and it's not going to be war which goes against every law.

[John Kiriakou]

Guarantee it. They have to guarantee peace.

[Julian Dory]

How possible is that even remotely possible?

[John Kiriakou]

It's possible, I suppose. I mean, pretty much anything can be negotiated if the two sides are serious enough about it. Let me give you an Example of why I think what you said just now can be overcome. I was having lunch one day with a Greek diplomat at this outdoor cafe in D.C. and some guy comes up and he says, hey, you know Aphrodite, or whatever name. I think her name was Aphrodite, how are you? She gets up, oh, Uzgun, how are you? And I was like, uzgun, that's a Turkish name. She gets up and kisses this guy on both cheeks. And he introduces himself. I say hi, I shake his hand. He walks away. And I asked her, what the fuck was that all about? You kiss a Turkish? And she said, only you Greek Americans have that position. On the Turks, we have to live with them. And after all these centuries of fighting, we just decided it's better to be nice.

[Julian Dory]

Interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

And I've noticed that, I mean, leader to leader, sure, there are problems, right? Or intelligence service to intelligence service, even military to military sometimes. But on the people to people level, they really don't have any problems.

[Julian Dory]

That's interesting. Some of my buddies in Greece, though, I'm thinking about this. They all did serve in the military, though.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, mine, too. In fact, I took my son to Greece in January. We were at my cousin's house. We're from the island of Rhodes, which is considered a border island because, I mean, you can hear the Turks playing their music at night. That's how close it is. And we're in a house, my cousin Chris's house, that's been in my family for 175 years. So he's the recipient of the house. So we're sitting in there, and I kind of look past him, and I said, chris, is that a machine gun? And he said, yeah. I said, why do you have a machine gun? How do you have a machine gun? And he says, john, I'm former Special Forces. You see how close these Turks are to us? They could swim here by the time I get to the gun. He said, we have to protect ourselves somehow. That is one thing. So that aside, you know, on the mainland, they don't really care so much. That's good. Yeah, it's good. That's a long way of saying the Palestinians and the Israelis can get there someday. And, you know, people say all the time, too, that there can't be an independent Palestine. It's just never going to happen. I went to school with this kid, Remus Pescurius. I still remember his name. Shout out to Remus Pescurius. What a name. Yeah, he's Lithuanian, and we went to GW together. And he used to. He was a militant Lithuanian. He used to say, someday Lithuania will be free. And we were like, dude, you have to get past this free Lithuania thing. The Soviets are never going to allow Lithuania to be free. And like, six years later, yeah, there's a free Lithuania. So you never know. You know, when an issue is ripe, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

[Julian Dory]

I like your optimism. I hope that's the case. I think in this particular situation, because you also have religion.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

In the middle of it.

[John Kiriakou]

See, this is a very important beef that I have. I hope you'll let me vent for a minute.

[Julian Dory]

You can do whatever you want, John.

[John Kiriakou]

One of the biggest problems that we have in this entire Israel, Palestine situation is the problem of Christian Zionists, most of whom are American Evangelical Christians. Palestine used to be 10% Christian. It's now more like 2 or 3% Christian. And most of those Christians have moved to the United States. Well, evangelical support for the Israeli government has resulted in an ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Christian communities in historic Palestine. So what side are you on? Are you trying to save Christianity or are you trying to destroy Christianity because you're destroying it right now? And listen, and I'm going to take a lot of shit in your comment section for saying this, but listen, if your religion was created in somebody's basement in the 1800s, I don't want to hear your position on Israel and Palestine. I don't find it valid.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. I think that there's been people overlooking things. And I think that the saddest part of this whole struggle is that in society, we seem to have an inability to separate people from their governments. Just at the simplest level. I mean, you spelled it out before. You're like, netanyahu's government wins with, fuck, 27% of the vote. It's all the Orthodox Jews over there.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Julian Dory]

There was a borderline. They were very close to civil war in the summer before October 7, which is quite interesting timing, by the way, where Netanyahu seized control of the judiciary.

[John Kiriakou]

Five weeks before they were read, people were in the streets. We were. We were seeing. We were seeing demonstrations, especially in. In Tel Aviv and Haifa, that were unprecedented in scale. He was this close to being overthrown and having to call new elections.

[Julian Dory]

That's the thing, John. It's like we've. On every angle of this, we've sacrificed humanity. Right. We've watched thousands of people be killed, and we fight about it over tweets. Let's call it what it is. Yeah, I'm guilty I mean, I don't fight a lot on Twitter, but, like, I'm watching these tweets too, so I'm guilty of it just like everyone else. And we also generalize all the people involved. And these are such. This is such a nuanced situation when it comes to the people involved and who it is. And like you've now seen, you know, I have so many Jewish friends in America who don't with what Israel is doing at all. And yet they get dragged into this because, yes, like, you know, that's true.

[John Kiriakou]

It leads to anti Semitism. Yeah, I was having lunch in New York. I'm going to say the weather was nice, so it must have been like May or June, sitting with a buddy of mine at an outside cafe. And he happens to be Jewish. He's not Zionist, or fist in the air. He just happens to be Jewish. So we're talking about this, about October 7th and the war, about Israel's response to October 7th. And he said, as a Jew, I really fear that Israel's heavy hand is going to result in increases in antisemitism, especially in the United States. Well, There were these two women sitting next to us, both in their 80s. They told us later, and one of them finally said, excuse me, but I couldn't help but to overhear your conversation. The one said, we're both Jewish too, and we have the same fears. We are seeing an increase in anti Semitism, especially in New York, but it's because of the Israeli government's actions. Otherwise, most people wouldn't pay any attention to what's going on in.

[Julian Dory]

In Israel, wouldn't care, and, and that.

[John Kiriakou]

Wouldn'T register with them.

[Julian Dory]

That's what's so like sometimes it feels like society is just being manipulated to break at all times. I've. I've, for a long time had this quote. I'm sure someone else came up with it at some point. I've just never cared to Google it. But. But, you know, at least it sounded smart the first time I said it. A divided society is a compliant society. And when you can divide people on one or two really emotional issues, you know, four or five years ago, it was Covid and the vaccine, and now it's Israel, Palestine. You can distract from everything else that you don't want them to know about or you don't want them to focus on. And it's like, you know, I talk with people who are very hardcore Zionists, and I talk to people who are very hardcore anti Zionist. And the commonalities I see in Those conversations is that they will each make a separate point that is like, yes, agree 100%, but they're pointing at a problem that's over here.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And I'm like, yes, I agree with you. Now come back here. See how it works this way too, right here at home. And they're like, well, no. Whenever it comes to their issue, whatever it is, they're unwilling to see it there, but they'll see it everywhere else. And I'm like, guys, if we're. Especially from an American perspective, this is my issue with this. You should be worried about the interests of Americans first and what's going on here first. It doesn't mean separate from the world. It doesn't mean become an isolationist. But like you should worry about what are the downstream effects here. So if China, Qatar, Iran and Israel are all doing propaganda campaigns that involve body counts in the United States, I don't make a distinction between any of them. It's all the same thing. Why is it so hard for you Zionist and you anti Zionist to see. You only see these three and you only see that one. It's the same shit.

[John Kiriakou]

It's the same thing. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, one of the things too, that has been a surprise for me, even if it shouldn't be a surprise, is, is the difficulty that Americans have in even listening to people who. With whom they disagree. Yeah. Growing up, my. Just like on my dad's side for an example. As an example, when my dad's parents came to the United States, my, My grandmother was a royalist. Right. She supported the Greek royal family, which wasn't Greek, it was Danish. And the king couldn't even speak Greek, so he was overthrown, which he deserved. So. So my grandfather was a. Was a Republican with a small R. He supported the establishment of. Of the Hellenic Republic. And, and that's what the Greeks have now, politically. They both somehow became Democrats on my mom's side. My grandparents didn't give two shits about politics in Greece and they became Republicans. And most of their kids were Republicans. My mom was a Democrat, but my uncles voted for Wallace in 68, very, very happily. And I remember my. And I won't even say it because tough vote. Yeah, it involves some not very nice words, but they voted for Wallace, my two uncles. And then I still remember being a little kid and seeing the Nixon now buttons that they had on. So it just never occurred to me that there were people out there who wouldn't speak to other people just because they believe in one thing or don't believe in another. My best friends from high school, best friends. I mean, we're all in each other's weddings. We're godfathers to each other's kids. Dave McCracken. Dave's passed away, but Dave was a, Was a Republican. Gary Senko, Republican. Guy Cabela's a Democrat, and Russ Colette a Democrat. And it never mattered to any of us. And I just don't, you know, people say all the time, I can't believe you would go on Fox News. Why wouldn't I go on Fox News? I have a position on an issue like John Brennan. It happens to fit in with Fox News's editorial position. But maybe I can educate a FOX News viewer.

[Julian Dory]

Sure.

[John Kiriakou]

If I go on tonight and I have my 20 seconds to speak my piece.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I think, I think it's very deliberate from.

[John Kiriakou]

They, yeah, they, they don't want us to talk to them.

[Julian Dory]

They don't want us to do it.

[John Kiriakou]

Like, for example. I'm sorry to interrupt you. No, I'm fascinated by this fissure that we're seeing right now among conservatives about Tucker Carlson's decision to interview Nick Fuentes. Okay, okay. Why wouldn't you interview Nick Fuentes? If you think he's a turd with repulsive positions, then expose him as a turd with repulsive positions. Don't say, oh, my God, I can never talk to him. No. Writing him off. Can't talk to him. Talk to him and let him destroy himself with his repulsive positions. But this idea now, well, they have to cut off Tucker. He's no good anymore. And, oh, the head of the Heritage foundation said something nice about him, so now he has to resign. It's like, what's wrong with you people?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I think that part, I think that part's crazy.

[John Kiriakou]

I, I do.

[Julian Dory]

I would love to get your thoughts on this, though, because I look at this whole Tucker situation. It's very fascinating to me. Watch it, watching it happen, because I think you're seeing a lot of laws of human nature play out. And what I mean by that is Tucker raised some points a year ago, year and a half ago, whatever that were. Valid points, yes. Apolitical in a lot of ways. We're talking foreign policy, things going on in the Middle east, asking, yes. Very valid questions.

[John Kiriakou]

And he's very well informed.

[Julian Dory]

He is well informed and he got viciously attacked by people for it who sought to destroy him.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Julian Dory]

And silence him. And one thing about Tucker is he's an emotional guy. Takes one to no one. You know, and so he reacts to those things and he fights fire with fire. And then the fire gets bigger and the fire gets bigger and the fire gets bigger. And pretty soon, you know, you end up saying things just to set each other off. And I think we've gone far past that point. I thought the attacks on him, calling him anti Semitic were fucking.

[John Kiriakou]

He's not anti Semitic. See, but this is the thing. This is where that propaganda that you talked about a few minutes ago enters in. It is that many Americans have been convinced that if you are anti Netanyahu or if you are opposed to the present policies of the current Israeli government, you are anti Semitic. In fact, an Israeli friend of mine, a close Israeli friend of mine who served in the IDF and everything, told me that they're actually taught to do that at school, that any criticism of Israel they're supposed to label as anti Semitic so that people back off. And people generally do back off.

[Julian Dory]

So I can criticize any government around the world, even China. Now, remember when that was a thing, you were racist. If you criticize China, they love you criticizing China.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

Like you can criticize any country around the world and it's not racist when you criticize their government, but when you criticize this one, it's racist. Yes, that's wrong. And you know, here's the thing about Tucker and Fuentes, because I am a free speech absolutist, right? And I think everyone should be allowed to talk. I think Nick Fuentes, I wildly disagree with who he is as a person, everything.

[John Kiriakou]

But he's got a right to say whatever he wants to say.

[Julian Dory]

Free speech. He has a say what he wants to say.

[John Kiriakou]

100% agree.

[Julian Dory]

The question here, John, is if people just look at it on just this situation, don't look at the whole build up to it, which is absolutely relevant, but just look at it in this situation with Tucker, people are looking at Tucker going, why are you using your platform to talk to a guy like that? And I want to be careful how I say this. As someone who has a platform and talks to people from all ends of the spectrum, I think that when you do something like that, when you're Tucker Carlson, you are doing it and giving your enemies exactly what they want.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. But on the other hand, too look at this way he does how many of these a week? 1, 2, 3? I don't even know.

[Julian Dory]

A lot, I'm sure.

[John Kiriakou]

A lot. This is just another one in a long line of guests. He's Going to have somebody on that's going to be the exact opposite he's going to have on the nun from Jerusalem. George Stephanopoulos.

[Julian Dory]

Is that actually his sister?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I actually googled it and it said that she is. I don't know. I don't see any kind of family resemblance. And you know, funny little, funny little, small world tidbit. George Stephanopoulos, grandfather was my parish priest when I was a little kid and he baptized me. And I remember George from Sunday school. He was a year too older than I was.

[Julian Dory]

No shit.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Small world.

[John Kiriakou]

Small world. Yeah, but. And actually his dad married my brother and his first wife. Wow. Yeah. He was a priest here at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in New York. We all stick together. Yeah. We're all pariah. We all enjoy each other's company. So anyway, for me, personally, I wouldn't have invited Nick Fuentes just because I don't think I would have much to say to somebody like Nick Fuentes. But. But Tucker feels liberated since he left Fox News. He feels unencumbered by corporate structures and policies. And he just decided that he was going to have on anybody who he thought would give him two or three hours of interesting conversation.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. And I also. Because I'm also not a believer in bringing someone in there just to stick them through the wringer. And you know, CBS News. Right, Agree. Which is why I wouldn't talk with.

[John Kiriakou]

Me except for Ted Cruz.

[Julian Dory]

That was pretty funny.

[John Kiriakou]

That was funny.

[Julian Dory]

That was kind of funny. Apac, Ted.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

By the way. By the way, trivia question. Who would. Who did Alan Dershowitz say was the most talented law student he ever had?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it has to be Ted.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I always thought that was interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, so many people believed that Ted was destined for the Supreme Court, not for Capitol Hill. He was a real thinker at Harvard Law School.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, he's. Listen for as much as he got body bagged and thrown down the fucking river. See, the River Sticks by Tucker Carlson right there. Like, he's a very smart guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Very smart, very smart. He was wrong on those issues, which is why Tucker beat him about the head and face.

[Julian Dory]

It was funny.

[John Kiriakou]

Who I'd like to see next is Lindsey Graham.

[Julian Dory]

It will never happen.

[John Kiriakou]

We'll see if he even survives his primary.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I hope not. I don't know how that guy's ever survived any election.

[John Kiriakou]

But Matt State.

[Julian Dory]

But, like, maybe people wanted to see. And I actually, I haven't watched the Tucker Fuentes sit down yet, so I really can't comment on It. So I, I don't want to.

[John Kiriakou]

It was a normal Tucker interview. It was a normal conversation. And Tucker fully, freely disagreed with a lot of what he had to say.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so.

[John Kiriakou]

But let him speak.

[Julian Dory]

Let him speak. The, the thing that I think about here because of how hot button the issue is and how much there is pieces of information that can be used to label going on. Like, let's look at who you might look at as, as people that are cringe and annoying, which might be like the hardest core Zionists who anything that they don't like is labeled anti Semitic, which is a woke tactic. It is for them to use. If I were those people, what would I want Tucker Carlson to do?

[John Kiriakou]

I would want him to interview Nick Fuentes.

[Julian Dory]

Because now all I got to do is post that screenshot of that. Regardless of context, regardless of intention.

[John Kiriakou]

You're absolutely right.

[Julian Dory]

What it is. And it's like, I read this thing recently. I was talking about it with Mike Ritland. But I recently read that in. At the height of the Roman Empire's power, when the generals would be at war in the midst of battle and the night before or the morning of a battle, they'd be gathered in their tent, you know, the three to five highest ranking generals, to make a decision. They would have this exercise where they would ask themselves if we were our worst enemy right now, meaning the guys across the battlefield who are going to fight us. If we were our worst enemy right now, what decision would we want us to make?

[John Kiriakou]

That's brilliant. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And they would think of it would always land on like the most emotional, fuck you eye for an eye type decision. They'd be like, okay, let's do the opposite of that. And they won again and again and again and again. And it is so easy now to get angry at. It's human nature to get angry at people who attack you incessantly with lies and propaganda and bullshit. You want to punch these people. I'm from New Jersey, trust me. Like, I would not deal with it well. Yeah, but you gotta like go into a room, scream into a pillow and think, what am I gonna do with this so that I can rise above it? Do I want to be more Malcolm X or do I want to be more Martin Luther King? All due respect to Malcolm X obviously had certain stances and whatever. Very interesting guy in history. The more effective one was Martin Luther King. And he deserves all the credit in the world for that because he rose above stuff at the. In the hardest way as well. And it's like, I Get it? Everyone has a right to speak. I'm not saying don't go speak with Nick Fuentes or something like that, but when you do that, you have now opened yourself up to a whole new round of attacks that could have.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree.

[Julian Dory]

A period. Credibility.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree. The reason why I wouldn't have had Nick Fuentes, well, it's several fold. And you know, a part of this is obviously my own bias. I see him as just some kid. He's just some loudmouth kid. And many of his positions have been definitively debunked by historians over the years. I mean, there are still people alive who liberated Dachau, for example, or Bergen Belsen or whatever. And I just don't see how it's possible that his base of support grows from what it is. And what it is is a bunch of angry white guys in their 20s. So I just don't see what good it would do me to interview somebody like him. That's why I wouldn't do it.

[Julian Dory]

He's, if you look at it objectively, just like 30,000 foot view of why he's risen or whatever it is. Obviously he is a very good speaker.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, he's very bright.

[Julian Dory]

He's very bright, for sure. He has a sense of humor as well. He can talk to the camera for hours.

[John Kiriakou]

Disarming, actually.

[Julian Dory]

Yes, yes.

[John Kiriakou]

That's the first time I ever saw him at any length in an interview. And I was like, oh, he's. He's actually a likable guy at first glance.

[Julian Dory]

At first glance, yeah. Yeah. So there's ways like if you wanted to look at it, like, oh, the wolf coming in the hen house or something. That's how it happens when you have those other talents. But when society gets to a point, this is just my macro theory on it, but you look at a middle class that has been legislated away economically like that in a graph since the beginning of the 1980s.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

And you see chaos and chaos and chaos and chaos and chaos and lack of hope and people who are upset about their lives, they're carrying around college debt because they were sold a system when they were 15 and had no idea what it meant. You turn that emotion in somewhere and you turn it into pointed at the fingers of the elite people, regardless of where they stand, that you don't like. And when you have someone like Nick Fuentes, who, regardless of how he does it or what he says, speaks to that kind of yes crowd and does it very effectively, that is how you get something like that. To happen. And also this needs to be said because we've seen this on every side of all these issues, whether you're pro or anti. Pick your favorite issue here. There are massive propaganda bot campaigns supporting both sides.

[John Kiriakou]

You're absolutely right. Yes. Which is also dangerous and completely unregulated.

[Julian Dory]

What do we do about that?

[John Kiriakou]

I don't know. Can you do anything about it? Like, you can pass a law saying, you know, no more about. No more bots, and the Chinese are going to laugh and laugh. The Russians. Yeah. I don't. I don't know if there's anything you can do.

[Julian Dory]

Remember Elon was, like, looking at that when he was trying to buy Twitter? They were right.

[John Kiriakou]

I remember. Yeah. He said it was like 40% of Twitter users were actually bots or something like that.

[Julian Dory]

I think it was. I think it was like 60.

[John Kiriakou]

Was it?

[Julian Dory]

We could check it. It was a high percentage. And I haven't heard him talk about it at times. No, but it's like, I'm always clicking that on Twitter. That's the one where. Because, like, that's always just been my little private platform that no one.

[John Kiriakou]

I used to get most of my news from Twitter.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. I mean, it's. It's interesting, but, like, when you just look at the following, I'll click someone and I'll just be like, huh, November 20th.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. Up to 64%.

[Julian Dory]

Yep. Deep Scott.

[John Kiriakou]

It.

[Julian Dory]

Up to 64% of the accounts were bots. So it's like you also have massive. And I see it on both sides of the issue. You will see. You will see Ayal Yakobi tweet something out pro Zionist, and it's got 10,000 likes in 10 minutes. You will see Ian Carroll tweet out something. Ian's been on my show. And I'll tweet out something that has 10,000 likes in 10 minutes. Neither of these make sense. Sorry, it doesn't make any sense.

[John Kiriakou]

That doesn't make sense.

[Julian Dory]

Right. And that's. And by the way, that's neither of their fault, which everyone likes to try to say, like, oh, you can prove that they're, like, running. They don't know. Yeah. I don't know. These accounts that touch my.

[John Kiriakou]

I don't even manage my own Twitter account. I have a guy that does it for me. He called me last week. He said, hey, you crossed 100,000 subscribers. I said, hey, great.

[Julian Dory]

Is that okay?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Simon doing that.

[Julian Dory]

Damn it. So it's always Simon tweeting. I knew that already. That's kind of Funny.

[John Kiriakou]

It's just when Simon sends his best regards. He called me in the car.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, he did? He's a good guy. I like Simon, but, like, you know, to your point, bringing up, like, the whole thing, we now make these. We make content, like, you know, the NFL playoffs or something.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And like, so and so talk to so and so. And I fall in the trap too, sometimes.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, man. When I was in prison, people used to get this, this magazine, like Hip Hop Weekly or something like, I think that's what it was called. And I mean, it's clearly just a made up tabloid, you know, with these fake feuds and somebody was in the club and they threw money in the face of somebody else because of something that happened in Atlanta, I got kind of a kick out of it. But these articles sometimes led to bloodshed. I remember two guys beating each other to the death over who had more money, Kanye or Jay Z. It's like, seriously, you guys are going to go to solitary for that. There are no better reasons to go to solitary. That's what you chose. Oh, my God.

[Julian Dory]

I mean, there's not a lot to do in prison.

[John Kiriakou]

No, I'll give that. I saw a fist fight once over whether they should watch Love and Hip hop Atlanta or 110th and park or whatever the show was called. 120th and Park.

[Julian Dory]

Did you have to make your bones in a fistfight?

[John Kiriakou]

No.

[Julian Dory]

You didn't?

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, I minded my own business. I. I made alliances with all the mafia, the racial groups. The mafia was the most important, Right? Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Who were you? I. I always forgot who. Who did you have a moment of silence for outside the house in Atlantic City after you were in prison?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it was Scarfo. Yeah. I was like, come on, guys, come on. Stand here all day, you're like, I.

[Julian Dory]

Was in Pakistan 15 years ago taking down Al Qaeda.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm actually stopping in Philly on the way home. We're going to meet up for dinner.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, that's awesome. You going to Dante and Luigi's?

[John Kiriakou]

Most likely.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, my God, that's funny. Can't. Your life, you can't make it up. That's.

[John Kiriakou]

See, I'm friends with everybody.

[Julian Dory]

That's right, Everybody.

[John Kiriakou]

Everybody's got something redeeming. Everybody.

[Julian Dory]

Everyone does.

[John Kiriakou]

Not everyone. Okay, I will say, I'll tell you a story. And I'm going to plug my latest book as part of the story.

[Julian Dory]

Plug away.

[John Kiriakou]

So I've got a book coming out called Remains of the Day, A definitive guide to Washington D.C. 's historic cemeteries. Go to rarebirdlit.com rarebirdlight.com for the advanced autograph copies. So Simon and Schuster's publishing it. They liked it so much, they commissioned four more. I'm almost done with the next one, which is Whispers in the Dirt, a definitive guide to the Mafia graves of New York City. Okay. So I'm about 70% done. It's gonna. I'll be done. I'll be done by the end of the year and send it to the editor. So I'm in the Bronx about two months ago, just taking pictures. I'm with my girlfriend. We're taking pictures of different graves so I can put them in the book. And this was supposed. The first one was supposed to be a field guide. It was. It was supposed to be 8 inches by 5 inches so that you can stick it in your back pocket. But they liked it so much, they made it a coffee table book. So you're gonna have to, like, lug it into the cemetery with you. Anyway, back in prison, I said to one of the mob guys, so, you mind if I ask you, what are you in here for? And he goes like this. He goes, they found a body in a barrel in my storage unit. I don't know how that body got in there. A hundred people had access to the storage unit. I said, no, no. No judgment from me. I was just curious. No judgment. And I kind of laughed it off. So I'm in the Bronx six weeks ago. Whatever it is.

[Julian Dory]

No.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'm like, who is this guy again? I had. I had his name. I needed to take a picture of the grave. His name was Bon Ventri. The tall guy, Right? He was like, Gennaro Bonventry. Gennaro, the tall guy Bon Ventri. I forget his first name. So my girlfriend said, who is this guy again? And I said, you know, I can't remember. He was a driver, but I don't remember the story. So I pull up my manuscript, and I said, the tall guy, Bon Ventri was a driver for this guy. He took the boss out for whatever. The boss was killed. Bonventri was initially assumed to have been the hitman because they couldn't find him. They found his body six months later in a barrel in a storage unit in New Jersey. And I said, oh, my God. It was the first time I put it together. It's the body from the barrel. But he didn't tell me the full story. The full story is the tall guy was too tall to fit in the barrel.

[Julian Dory]

Have to hack a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

So he sawed him in half. He Sawed him in half.

[Julian Dory]

That's what we do in Jersey, John. We saw in half.

[John Kiriakou]

And the barrel was full of glue. And it took the coroner something like four months to get the glue off to do the autopsy, which he's already sawn in half. So how much more of an autopsy do you need? But then they. They sort of pieced them together to put them in his coffin. And I was like, oh, dang. He was telling me the truth.

[Julian Dory]

Ah, where is this? Is this guy still in prison?

[John Kiriakou]

No, he's out, which is why I didn't use his name.

[Julian Dory]

Right. Where in Jersey? Do you remember?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah, it was in Newark. But he was not a New Jersey Italian. He was a New York Italian.

[Julian Dory]

Got it. So they brought him over here to.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. I have a chapter at the end of the book. I go cemetery by cemetery by cemetery, and there are some, like, you know, St. Stephen's or Holy Cross or whatever that are just, like, overflowing with mob guys going back to, you know, Joe the Boss Masseria or the Clutch Hand or Lucky Luciano, who's got a magnificent private mausoleum. But I have a chapter at the end of the book on non traditional burial grounds like the Gowanus Canal. Oh, where they're pulling bodies out of all the time. Or there's this. There's. In the Bronx, there's this vacant lot that they called the Mafia graveyard.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I got one in the Meadowlands here.

[John Kiriakou]

The Meadowlands is a great example. So I've got like 4, 5, 6 of those that I'm gonna. I'm gonna add at the end.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, I'm in for that book.

[John Kiriakou]

It's gonna be fine. I think it's gonna be a good seller already. For the one in Washington. I just love cemeteries. And I've talked to you about this before. I think if it's sunny out, I'll just go hang out in a cemetery for hours.

[Julian Dory]

You love cemeteries. You love Abraham Lincoln shit. Yeah. What else is on the list?

[John Kiriakou]

I lost the shit, though.

[Julian Dory]

You did lose the shit?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Thank God. It was way too expensive. Anyway, I'm gonna go visit my son tomorrow. And he said he loves the Lincoln stuff as much as I do. He said, dad, there's this enormous antique mall in Indianapolis, and I think they have Lincoln stuff there. So we're going Indianapolis on Saturday.

[Julian Dory]

Have fun.

[John Kiriakou]

But anyway, I was shocked when I went to Amazon and found that nobody had ever written a book on the cemeteries of Washington, D.C. there are like a dozen books on Arlington Cemetery. But I thought, well, I'll write One.

[Julian Dory]

That's cool. Yeah, right up your alley.

[John Kiriakou]

And it's. I did purposely, I did the biographies. Not of the most famous people in the cemeteries. Everybody knows about the famous people in the cemeteries. I chose the most interesting people in the cemeteries.

[Julian Dory]

Now, how do you define interesting?

[John Kiriakou]

If John says they're interesting, they go in the book.

[Julian Dory]

So would you, how would you go about your research with this? Did you go to the cemetery and like, go read a name and say, well, let me google this guy, and then eventually come up with something that.

[John Kiriakou]

Was part of it. I'm a big fan of the website findagrave.com which is immensely helpful. But what I did is if somebody looked like they might or could be interesting, I would just go to the Library of Congress and look up their original obituary.

[Julian Dory]

Meaning when you say look like they might be interesting, not just you're standing at their grave site and you're like, I like the way they wrote the name.

[John Kiriakou]

No, Like, I Google a guy that I've never heard of and it says he was a Revolutionary War veteran. It's like, oh, that could be interesting. I'll check it out. I write it, write myself a little note. There's a guy, just as one random example, I'll give you two random examples. But one, this little overgrown gravestone at Congressional Cemetery. The guy's all by himself. There's no wife, there's no kid. It's just him. The stone is old. He died in 1838. Born in 1778, died in 1838. And he's among like a bunch of, you know, Vice Presidents and Speakers of the House. I'm like, who is this guy? I never heard of this guy. I don't even remember his name. Now he's in the book. I have to look it up. So I went to the Library of Congress and I, and I looked him up and oh my God, what a story. This guy was a mid level nobody at the Department of the treasury, right? He would just sit at his desk with his big ledgers and he would just write numbers. And then in 1812, the British invade Washington. They set the Capitol on fire. They set the White House on fire. It's chaos. The president runs to McLean, Virginia on a horse. The first lady gets on a horse and she runs to Leesburg, Virginia, just to save themselves. The whole city's in flames. And this guy had the presence of mind to say, I wonder if anybody's thought to rescue the Declaration of Independence.

[Julian Dory]

Nicholas Cage, before Nicholas Cage, he gets.

[John Kiriakou]

On a horse while the British are Shooting everybody, you know, Gets on his horse, rides over to the building that housed the National Archives. There's the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's military Commission. And he rolls them up into a sheet, tucks them under his arm, and he rides out to Loudoun County, Virginia, and puts them in the rafters of a friend's barn. For three years.

[Julian Dory]

They were there for three years.

[John Kiriakou]

For three years. And then when the British are finally pushed out, he goes and gets them and he brings them back and, oh, my God, he's a big national hero. Except what's his name again? I have to look it up.

[Julian Dory]

God damn it, John.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right? I kicked myself. I can find it while we're talking. So the problem was that as a person, he was just a dick. And everybody hated him. All of his co workers hated him. He had no personality. He was just not Stephen Pleasanton. Stephen Pleasanton. That is him right there. Thank you.

[Julian Dory]

He looks like a dick. I'm not gonna lie. Look at that picture.

[John Kiriakou]

So a group of people went to the Secretary of the treasury, and they said, look, we know he's a big national hero and all, but we just can't work with this guy. And if you don't fire him, we're gonna. We're gonna resign.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, he got fired.

[John Kiriakou]

So they didn't want to fire and fire him, so they made him the director of the U.S. commission on Lighthouses. And so he ended up not only helping to invent the Fresnel lens which we use today, which is, like, makes it 10 times brighter as the. Because back then, they were using candles, Right? You can't see a frigging candle from a mile away in a ship. But with this Fresnel lens that he helped to develop, and for the first time since the founding of the country, he actually balanced the budget of the US Convention of Lighthouses. See? Saving the Declaration of Independence.

[Julian Dory]

He sounds a little honest. He's a dick, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Like what? A dick. Shout out.

[Julian Dory]

Stephen Pleasanton.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Good for Stephen Pleasanton. 1776. I. I found 1778 that he was born. Oh, 1855. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Disagreeing with ciapedia.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I'm doing my. Hey. And I just read my bio from Simon and Schuster the other day. Yesterday, for the first time.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And it said journalist and historian John Kiriaka. And I was like, oh, okay.

[Julian Dory]

That's great.

[John Kiriakou]

I'll take that. Yeah. So get this. I'm at. I'm at Rock Creek Cemetery, which is the biggest and the nicest cemetery in Washington. 60, 70, 80,000 graves there. It's a good sized cemetery. And all the rich people are buried in the front. Like, you know, the, the Woodwards and the Lothrops and the Bloomingdales and the, you know, Gold Finkels, whatever their name was, whatever, whatever the name was. All the people that, that were rich in the 19th century, that nobody can remember why they're important. So I go to the very back of the cemetery. I go to the very back of the cemetery, and there's a traffic island there that has this magnificent private family mausoleum. So I just wrote myself a note. It was the Butler family. And I went to look in the door of the mausoleum, and the tomb was glass inside, so you can see these very expensive bronze coffins that had the two Butler brothers, their wives, a daughter and a grandson who was like six when he died. So I wrote myself this note, went to the Library of Congress. Turns out these guys were fascinating. They wanted to be chemists. They wanted to go to college and be chemists. They were born right after the Civil War ended. Butler was their name. And when they got to be, you know, high school age, almost high school age, their dad was like, yeah, you're not going to be chemists. You're going to be bakers.

[Julian Dory]

Bakers.

[John Kiriakou]

Bakers, yeah. We don't have money to send you to college to be fancy chemists. You're going to be bakers. And he arranged for them an apprenticeship at a local bakery. They hated it. So when the baker finally retired, he turned over the business to them. They just hated. They hated every act of being a baker. So they said to each other, what if we invent this machine that will mix all this shit for us so we don't have to do it?

[Julian Dory]

Oh, shit.

[John Kiriakou]

So you power it with your feet like the old time sewing machines. So they invented the first mixer and they patented it. And they were able to sell it all the way out to the frontier, which at the time was Cincinnati. So they start making some. Making some money thanks to this newfangled mixing machine, right? And then they said, what if we invent another machine that cuts the dough so that every loaf is exactly the same size, shape and weight? And they made a conveyor belt with a. An arm that came down and cut the dough. Revolutionized baking nationwide. They were able to sell that all the way out to, like, you know, St. Louis and then later on to, to Denver. And then they said, what if we, instead of using water to make the bread, what if we use milk? What would that taste like? It made it very fluffy and light. Then they came up with this idea. Newspapers were becoming popular, and there were young boys that would actually deliver your newspaper to your house, called a paper boy, Right? And they said, what if we hire boys to deliver bread to the houses? If you make an order by 3 o', clock, we'll deliver the bread so you could have it on your dinner table while it's still warm. And then they started making cakes and making pies and this and that. By the turn of the 20th century, they owned the entire city block behind what is today Union Station train station. And they were millionaires many times over. Israel Butler, the older of the two brothers, decided to retire, like, right around the start of the First World War. His brother stayed on for another couple of years, but they finally sold the business to the national biscuit company, Nabisco. And the only thing that they changed, the bread itself was very, very popular. But it had this terrible name. I forget the name. It was like Mrs. McGillicuddy's delicious bread. That's not it. But it was something like that. So they. They sold it to Nabisco. And the only change that Nabisco made was they changed the name of the bread to Wonder Bread, and everything remained the same. Wow. Yeah. Like, whoever heard of these people?

[Julian Dory]

Never in my life.

[John Kiriakou]

I found the NFL's first black quarterback. Like, you wouldn't even know that there was a black quarterback in the 50s.

[Julian Dory]

In the 50s. Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

He only threw, like four passes. But still, why aren't we celebrating this guy?

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yeah, yeah, Absolutely.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

How often do you go to cemeteries?

[John Kiriakou]

At least weekly. If I'm overseas, I go almost every day.

[Julian Dory]

See, like, the overseas cemeteries are actually interesting because they're always so different.

[John Kiriakou]

So completely different. I have this wonderful book I bought at. At some obscure flea market or used bookstore. It's called Death Rituals of Rural Greece. So there are almost no cemeteries in Greece because the. The country is only like 2% arable. And so the. The land that's good, they need to grow food on it. So there's this practice, it's been a practice for hundreds of years that you rent a grave for five years. So they don't embalm in Greece. They'll put you in the ground for five years, and then on the fifth anniversary of your burial, they dig you. The women of the village dig you up with the priest, the village priest, and then they take your. By then you're just a skeleton. If you're not just a skeleton by then that means you went to hell.

[Julian Dory]

Oh.

[John Kiriakou]

And so they put you right back.

[Julian Dory]

I thought you were going to say it means you were buried alive.

[John Kiriakou]

It means you went to hell. But just about everybody is just boned by then. So they take the skeleton apart, they wash it with red wine, the priest blesses it, and they put it in a little bone box. And then in an ossuary, a bone house just on here. I'll show you a picture. Just on. On shelves until. Until it's time to build a new church. And then they take all the bones out and they put them underneath the church under the foundation, because.

[Julian Dory]

Can't we just cremate at that point?

[John Kiriakou]

No, cremation's forbidden. Strictly forbidden. You can't cremate because.

[Julian Dory]

Put the bones in a box, but you can't cremate.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right?

[Julian Dory]

You know, these. These rules that humans invent.

[John Kiriakou]

And you know what's funny is none of these rules are actually based in religion.

[Julian Dory]

No, it's. It's. Some guy one day had a bright idea and said, this is what we're gonna do now as a religion.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it is.

[Julian Dory]

That's real. Oh, my God.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, there you go.

[Julian Dory]

Deep scotted up. Can we blow up one of those pictures? Whatever one you want. Thief.

[John Kiriakou]

The one. Oh.

[Julian Dory]

Oh. So they put like the skull.

[John Kiriakou]

The top. Top left is. Is more accurate. The one with the skulls is in Italy. That's an ossuary in Greece.

[Julian Dory]

That's so.

[John Kiriakou]

And, you know, I've. I've struck up a friendship with the guy. There's this. Well, the nice way of saying it these days is he's on the spectrum.

[Julian Dory]

But he's an artist.

[John Kiriakou]

He's. He's not able to care for himself. And so they gave him as a job, just take care of the bone house. Right. So I go over there every time I go back to my ancestral island. I go to the village where my family's from, and he lets me go through the boxes and see if they're my grandparents, my great grandparents or whatever.

[Julian Dory]

You opening them up?

[John Kiriakou]

No, I mean, if it's somebody that I know or I'm related to, I take a picture of the box and then I'll open it up just to, you know, give them a kiss on the skull or something.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, God.

[John Kiriakou]

All right. It's my great grandparents.

[Julian Dory]

All right, all right, so. So just cut it. Cut it.

[John Kiriakou]

You see the floor? You see the floor there? At the ossuary in our village, there's a kind of a Trap door, and there's an area underneath the floor. So he let me go down there last time. And it goes back to the 19th century down there, but, I mean, I can't go any farther than that. The Turks burned all of our records, so we don't know really anything about where we come from. And then, you know, people are buried under churches. I did find one relative. This is my great, great grandfather's brother that I found in an ossuary in Rhodes on the southern tip of the island. Come on, where is he? He was a priest. And so they kept him. They didn't bury him under the. There he is.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, the perks of being a priest in this life, huh?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And then the next picture is a picture of him. So you. Can he get lucky sometimes?

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yeah, yeah. High priest kind of guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah. He was a. He was a big deal. Yeah. I said to.

[Julian Dory]

Looks like you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I said to my cousin, who. Who also has an interest in our family genealogy, I said, yeah. You know, my grandmother told me he was eaten by a shark. He was diving for sponges and he was eaten by a shark. No, my cousin said, that's not true. I said, oh, that's always the story we heard. He said the Turks executed him because he was teaching children how to speak Greek during the Ottoman occupation, and they threw his body in the sea and the sharks ate him. But he said the Turks murdered him, which gives me just another reason to hate Turks. Wow. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

The Ottoman Empire is one that's overlooked.

[John Kiriakou]

And people are like, oh, no, it was okay in the Ottomans because if you just paid your taxes, you could freely practice Christianity. Bullshit. Yeah. What country are you from where they were so kind to you that if you paid your taxes, you could do your thing? What a joke.

[Julian Dory]

You're funny. You're just funny. Like how you get so upset and then you go back to laughing right afterwards? Well, I don't know how we got on that tangent.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I'm not sure.

[Julian Dory]

Skulls and cemeteries.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it was my book. My book.

[Julian Dory]

It was very, very interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

The tall guy.

[Julian Dory]

But, you know, back to the. To the world of the living, at least for now.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

You know, in. In some of our earlier conversations, we were talking about the different countries of nuclear weapons and obviously the. The bombing that happened of Iran's facilities in June and everything. But what.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, may I add one other thing about.

[Julian Dory]

Please. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

So this is something that most Americans don't understand or haven't thought about and which most Israelis just deny because it doesn't fit into their worldview. But these Israeli attacks on Iran have now forced the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon. They had no uranium that was, that was weapons ready or weapons capable. And besides that, they don't have a delivery system. I would bet my next paycheck that that's what they're going to start developing now. Because if all they have to look forward to is continued Israeli bombing and assassination and infiltration, you know, the threat is existential for them too. And so they're going to have to do something to defend themselves. And the only thing that they can do at this point is to develop a nuclear deterrent.

[Julian Dory]

Now why did you say earlier? Because we got off this. That in hindsight then you think that, that when the US ended up bombing, this was okay?

[John Kiriakou]

Because I think that the Israelis really would have used a nuclear weapon. That's the, that's, that's where the word existential comes from.

[Julian Dory]

Meaning you don't think that was just like a threat.

[John Kiriakou]

I think that they really intended to do it.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so this is something I've been thinking about a lot more recently. And I hate that I have to think about it, but I used to have this picture in my first studio at my parents house. There were two pictures on one of the walls. The top picture was of the nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

[John Kiriakou]

And It's a famous one.

[Julian Dory]

47.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, something like that, something like that.

[Julian Dory]

And the one below it was the picture of Adam and the hand of God, but instead of the hand of God, it was a robot. And the idea is it was like a juxtaposition in my head of like the ability we invented to wipe ourselves out as a species at the time, you know, 80 years ago, whatever, versus the ability that's coming now where, you know, with AI and we don't know what it could be, if that is another threat we build for ourselves that that could wipe us out. And part of it was I was looking at AI as like, maybe we can be hopeful here because for all the problems in the world, people have been prudent enough, even in the worst of situations for 75, 80 years to not hit that red button with a nuke. And we all have this mutual destruction kind of thing going on because so many countries have them. I will admit that over the past couple years I've thought more and more and more about just how tenuous that might be and how realistic. I hate even saying this, but how realistic it could be that at some point, somewhere in the not so distant future, somebody uses A nuclear bomb. So two questions. One, how realistic is that? And two, if that does happen, and I guess it would depend on where as well, what is the aftermath of that look like?

[John Kiriakou]

Right. I think it's something that we do have to fear. I could see the Israelis using one on Iran. I could see the Indians and Pakistanis using them against each other. What does the aftermath look like? I suppose it depends. You know, we talk about tactical nuclear weapons, Battlefield battlefield nuclear weapons that supposedly, you know, aren't going to have the catastrophic fallout that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had or that a modern full sized nuclear weapon would have. But I'm not sure that it really matters. You know, if, if we were having this conversation right after the Second World War, I'd say, wow, the world has learned its lesson. It's going to be mutually assured destruction. This is going to be a policy that's adopted by every country. Then we negotiated the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Those days are gone. You know, you got the North Koreans, the Indians, the Pakistanis, now maybe the Iranians, the Israelis. Do you trust any of those countries? Not really. None of them. So I'm not sure what the aftermath would be. I suppose if the Indians and the Pakistanis went at it, they'd lob one on each other and that would be the end of it. Right.

[Julian Dory]

What do you think the world would do in the aftermath of that?

[John Kiriakou]

What could the world do? What, are going to run to the United nations and issue a very strongly worded statement and that's really what it comes down to.

[Julian Dory]

That's it.

[John Kiriakou]

What are you going to do? Overthrow a government? Attack a government because it's used a nuclear, a nuclear weapon? What if it has more nuclear weapons and then they use it against you or against your troops as they're landing or. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

[Julian Dory]

I guess size of country obviously matters a lot too. So, like, if North Korea used one, all due respect, you know, which is a concern, I mean, they're gone.

[John Kiriakou]

I would. I think so, yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And that, like, that's the one saving grace I think of in my head. I'm like, if someone tried to do it to us, we'd have to, goodbye, respond, you're done. Like, like, if they did one here, which would be catastrophic, to be very clear, they're gone.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I can't help but to think that if, if we were to be attacked with nuclear weapons, we would have to respond using nuclear weapons. Terrible, terrible thing. But you have to respond. And I agree with you. If it were to be the North Koreans Tomorrow, North Korea wouldn't exist.

[Julian Dory]

Right. Which is a. You know.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

It's impossible to fathom something like that. And, you know, World War II, people re. Litigate that all the time. And I understand that.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure.

[Julian Dory]

I do.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure. I get it.

[Julian Dory]

Certainly. I mean, that's. That's a. That's a crazy thing that had to happen. It hasn't happened since, you know, and. And that's why, like, when, you know, you have Israel threatening to use nuclear weapons, like, you know, they're a powerful country, but they're the size of New Jersey. Like, how. I don't understand why they'd be so careless as to do that. Because it doesn't take much for them to be gone. No, you know, what is the. What is the thought process there? And, like, now you even have insult to injury. You got, like, Jonathan Pollard running for Knesset.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. How do you like that?

[Julian Dory]

On a. On a platform which should be able to use nukes. Like, are you.

[John Kiriakou]

Which was another issue that every single Israeli Prime Minister lobbied for with every president. You got to release Pollard. You got to release Pollard. No, he's doing every day of the 30 years, and he did. Every single day.

[Julian Dory]

But then we let him go back or not back. We let him go there, and they.

[John Kiriakou]

Gave him a parade and a hero's welcome and an Israeli passport, and now he's running for the Knesset.

[Julian Dory]

Does that just, like, piss you off to no end?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, very much so.

[Julian Dory]

I was having lunch with a guy, nice guy, a few weeks ago, who was, like, asking me about different things on this issue.

[John Kiriakou]

And.

[Julian Dory]

And at one point, he said. He said, well, doesn't Mossad have a. Have a policy that they don't spy on Americans? And we were in Cipriani, and I. You know, that's a very tightly packed place, and I just, like. I was very hungover, but I literally, like, fell off my chair laughing. And other people were looking at me, and I'm like, yeah, no, they totally have that policy. And he's like. He's like, yeah, no, they don't do. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? They're like the number one threat of spying. He's like, name one.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'm like, jonathan Pollard.

[Julian Dory]

And he wasn't even Mossad. He was military intelligence. It was like, below Mossad.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, very much below Mossad.

[Julian Dory]

I'm like, what the fuck? You know? And he was handled by. What's his name? The dude who did the Eichmann drop.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. I didn't know that.

[Julian Dory]

Yo. Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck is that guy's name again?

[John Kiriakou]

My God.

[Julian Dory]

Raf. Rafi. Ravi Itan. Rafi Eitan.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Julian Dory]

I think that is his name. That was like his hand. That was Pollard's handler, who was, you know, a long time Mossad guy and everything. But I'm like. I was like, all right. So that was right. I'm like, dude, you know, one of the most compelling things you'll ever see is when. When you and Boost Amonte were on Danny Jones together, and you were talking about that you two are from different eras at CIA, and you both had the same experience of one of the first days. Once you're in there and have your job, whatever it may be, they take you to a room, you're not allowed to say what it's called, but call it the Red Room. They're like, here are the number one espionage threats. And it's like Israel, China, and Russia. That's wild. You know, it's wild.

[John Kiriakou]

And you can add Cuba and France.

[Julian Dory]

I've heard France goes crazy.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, the French, we had. We had a little kerfuffle in the early 90s with the French.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And they were very angry with us about what? Deservedly so. One of our young junior first tour guys got caught just going pushing a little too far. So they expelled him, they expelled the chief, and they expelled a whole bunch of people. And so for three, four years, we had a tough time. But the French were just such dicks about it that we ended up getting orders that we weren't even allowed to transit De Gaulle Airport. And that was the only reason I was ever in France, was just to catch a connecting flight at De Gaulle to go here or there, wherever in the Middle East. But a buddy of mine was. I forget where he was going somewhere in the Middle East. And he went, no, it was in Africa. He was going to Africa. And the only way to get to Africa was through Paris at the time. Now you can just go directly to Morocco and then onward from there. But they took his laptop. He had a. He had a secure laptop. So they're like, turn it on. So he turns it on. Open it up. He's like, I'm not going to open it up. I have a diplomatic passport. I'm on the diplomatic business of the United States. This is the. The possess the property, rather, of the US Department of State. I'm not opening it up. So they took it in a back room. He said they had a railroad spike fastened to a table and they just slammed it down on the railroad spike. Went all the way through the laptop. And then they pulled it off and gave him his laptop back. So headquarters was like, okay, nobody can transit De Gaulle Airport anymore. Wow.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

They're just jerks about it.

[Julian Dory]

I've heard that they are incredibly talented.

[John Kiriakou]

They're very talented. When I was overseas in Pakistan, my boss asked me if I would meet with a French intelligence officer. I said, sure. I was meeting with foreign intelligence officers almost every day. And you just trade, you know, hey, I heard there's a safe house over here. I heard, hey, they give me Al Qaeda safe house over there, and we just trade some information. So this French guy calls me and he says, meet me at the corner of, you know, A and B. I'm like, okay, you don't just want to meet at a restaurant or something? No, no. Meet me at this corner. So I go to this corner. It's in a residential neighborhood. I'm like, what, does he live here? Like, why would he want me to come here? And I'm standing on the corner, and he comes peeling down the street, makes a quick right, reaches over and opens my door, and he's like, get in. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I said, I don't work for you, and you're not using tradecraft on me. I said, I parked right over here. I'll meet you at the Pearl Hotel Restaurant coffee bar. Not gonna fucking let you do a. There's a term of art for the. For the kind. That kind of a pickup. No, no, no, no. You're not recruiting me. Yeah, we're gonna have a cup of coffee, and that's it. And then I never saw him again after the coffee.

[Julian Dory]

So they're tough.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And they're murderous, too, you know.

[Julian Dory]

Murderous?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. If you're a member of, for example, of Greenpeace, they're going to blow your brains out if you try to, you know, take over a ship or throw paint on a ship or whatever. They kill a lot of Greenpeace activists.

[Julian Dory]

The French intelligence?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Like, not the paramilitary.

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, no, no, no. They're happy to go out and kill people. And that's why. Well, that's one of the reasons why we're not. We don't have more of a presence in the Sahel right now in Africa, because it's all French. They were all French colonies. The French are there just killing all kinds of Al Qaeda people. Yeah, sure.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, so they're killing Al Qaeda people.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

I have no problem.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

So they're like, The French hit squad's nice.

[John Kiriakou]

I mentioned in a podcast the other day that I was giving a series of speeches all around the UK at the beginning of the year and I had five speeches with my conversant being a professor of English literature. I had five speeches with a kind of a B list actor and then five speeches with a retired MI6 officer. And one of the things he said unprompted by me was, you know, we, we really loved working with you guys until 9 11. And they said you all became serial killers after 9 11. And I said yeah, unfortunately that's true. A lot of guys just went out to just kill as many Al Qaeda people as they could find. Nobody was charged with a crime or I mean none of the Al Qaeda people were ever charged with a crime. They were just taken care of. And then he says, yeah, you and the French, my God, the French love killing people. And I said that was kind of my understanding as well.

[Julian Dory]

It obviously is a slippery slope because.

[John Kiriakou]

Then you start because remember you're the good guy, right. And you're thinking I'm the good guy. God and country. I'm going to protect my country from the terrible Muslim terrorists. And you go blowing brains out. And here you end up killing women and children and taking out the whole village.

[Julian Dory]

And that's the problem. Like I like as a tax paying citizen that pays into these organizations. I will admit I wouldn't have a problem with, you know, very tactical strike.

[John Kiriakou]

Killings of very well clear and present danger. Yes is the criterion.

[Julian Dory]

But when you're blowing up a wedding because maybe two people are there, that's where I go.

[John Kiriakou]

Or because there's a tall guy wearing white. And then you blow up the funeral.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

The next day just to make sure you got everybody.

[Julian Dory]

See that's, that's what I'm saying. It human nature every time doesn't matter who you are leads to strange slippery slopes. You hindsight 2020 at every time.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

People die. And then you create propaganda, then you become the bad guy and then there's situations where There it is.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, right there.

[Julian Dory]

You now you were in trying to remember your exact timeline because you were working at Langley. You were the chief historian for Saddam Hussein leading into.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh yeah, that was my first, my first assignment. Yeah. In the Directorate of Intelligence.

[Julian Dory]

And then you were still there for a few years and then what year again did you hit the farm?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I didn't go to the farm until 1997.

[Julian Dory]

Okay. That's what I was going to say.

[John Kiriakou]

I was halfway through My career.

[Julian Dory]

And they. Did they send you to Greece first?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Julian Dory]

Okay. When did you get to Greece? In 97 as well.

[John Kiriakou]

98.

[Julian Dory]

Okay. All right. So that kind of takes away the. Because what I'm, what I'm interested in is like the French intelligence is. You're not the first guy to say that. Like so many people are like, yo, look out for them. They're good. But like, first question, how well did they get along with MI6? There's always been a strange rivalry between France and England. How well did those intelligence.

[John Kiriakou]

It extends, it extends to the, to the organizations themselves. Everybody knows by now what the five eyes countries are. Us, uk, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. We have given each other literally carte blanche to do anything, to see anything, to go anywhere. We don't spy on each other. We literally had people sitting next to us from other intelligence services, foreign intelligence services from those countries. So that's a very special relationship. And it's even more important at some place like NSA than it is at CIA or FBI. But there are no other countries like that. You know, the French. France is a NATO country, it's in the European Union. There's close cooperation, we're good friends, but we don't give them everything like we do with the five eyes.

[Julian Dory]

So you weren't on the ground in Europe till 98.

[John Kiriakou]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

But when you look at an event like Princess Diana's death in. On August 31, 1997, it happened in Paris, it happened in France. Is there any way the French intelligence doesn't know what happened there? I'm not saying they did it. I'm just saying like, they gotta know.

[John Kiriakou]

I would say they probably do. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

What do you think happened there?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I really, I really believe it was a series of fuck ups. The driver was drunk, being chased by the paparazzi. The paparazzi were overly aggressive. One thing led to the other. I don't remember if she was wearing a seatbelt or not. Crushed chest. I think she wasn't. Yeah, I think it was just a. One mistake after another. It's possible, but I don't think the royal family assassinated her. I agree. Yeah, I just, I never saw the.

[Julian Dory]

I, I never saw that either. And also like, I, I don't, I don't think Prank Prince, now King Charles is that good of an actor. Like, I mean, you know, that was very.

[John Kiriakou]

No way.

[Julian Dory]

When you look at that, obviously they had their differences for sure, but as a mother of his kids and everything and there was definitely some human going.

[John Kiriakou]

On there, I think so.

[Julian Dory]

Believe it or not. I know it's very easy to like dehumanize the royal family just because, you know. Yeah, royal family. Right, right. They are humans, so.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they are.

[Julian Dory]

But what's the, you know, we're talking about nuclear war. If you mentioned the Indian, Pakistan example, where maybe that would just be isolated, which, you know, be for the best for everyone else. But if there was something where it wasn't something like that and the US got involved, what is the protocol in a situation like that? We all see the guy with the football carrying around the nuclear codes with, with the President. Obviously the president has the say, he makes the decision and then it's done. But is this something that happens in 60 seconds?

[John Kiriakou]

If it needs to, yeah, it is. It's. This is a much easier question to answer if, if you're asking about a situation in which the United States is not directly involved. So, yeah, we've got underground facilities. Like there's one called Mount Weather that is, that's on the Virginia, West Virginia line. There's another one in Colorado where the president, the vice president, their families, the cabinet, congressional leadership, their families can be whisked away. Everybody else, it's every man for himself. For the rest of us. Yeah, yeah. I live three miles from the White House, so I don't think I'm going to make it out. What are you going to do?

[Julian Dory]

You won't feel anything?

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, It'll be fast. If there's a threat to the United States like we believed there could be on 9 11. Yeah. They'll implement that plan where the nuclear football goes with the President, just in case we have to launch something, the codes are in there and, and he can launch from Mount Weather or from Colorado, wherever he happens to be. Air Force One, just flying in circles someplace.

[Julian Dory]

The thing that I wonder in the event of like mass nuclear strikes around the world happening, is if the story of society completely breaks down and none of this stuff happens. Meaning.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

It starts and there's such chaos that people are like, there is no president, including the people around. I'm like you. Who are you?

[John Kiriakou]

You have to expect that that would be a real possibility. Yeah, I would think so. I mean, look, we've all, we've all seen these post apocalyptic movies or read the books. What was the. The Irish? The. The Long Road, the something road. The Road. That's what it was called. The Road, yeah. There's been a nuclear conflict. It's every man for himself. And it's just a story of this man and his son. Just Walking down this road, you don't know where it goes, where they came from. Is it what it is, the road? Cormac McCarthy. That's right. They stumble on an underground bunker and they find a bunch of canned soup and then the dad dies and then the kid just keeps walking. That's how the book ends, huh? Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Very Irish.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Yeah. It's like the good guy always loses. And the moral of the story is there's no hope for anybody.

[Julian Dory]

We got a pub right down the street.

[John Kiriakou]

There you go.

[Julian Dory]

Live that out. Yeah, I, I, I hate that. Like I said earlier, I hate that we even have to think about that.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

But it does feel like, you know, you look at these different conflicts around the world, including the ones people don't talk about.

[John Kiriakou]

By the way, did you ever see the episode of the original Star Trek where Kirk and Spock, they beam down to this planet and this planet, the planet's leaders are yelling because the next door planet, they're having a war with them. And there's this announcement that everybody in group A has to go to the incinerator. Right. So you go to the incinerator and you get incinerated. And Kirk is like, whoa, what's going on here? And they said, oh, we came up with this treaty with the next door planet that since we hate each other, we're always fighting wars, there's no sense in blowing up all the buildings. So we have computer models that tell us how many people would have died if we launch, you know, XYZ weapon. And so then we just summon that number of people to the incinerator and then they get incinerated so at least we don't mess up our, our planets. And he's like, no, that's not a good idea. You have to negotiate peace. And of course he ends up negotiating peace, but it's like we're headed there. This is all predicted in 1968.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Art following life, following art. Something I think about a lot. It does. It's just human nature, like that imagination comes from something that, that's based in reality of how we think.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, you know, exactly. Right.

[Julian Dory]

I was talking with someone recently, I think it was Mike Rlin about like seeing the Nolan Batman series recently. I hadn't watched it in years, but the things that Christopher Nolan in a superhero series, it's like supposed to be very fake and not of this.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

The, the pulse that he had his finger on with society. Think about the years he filmed those movies, 0407 and 2011. They came out in 0508 and 20 2012. The themes, elites versus the everyman. Social chaos. People out for themselves. Gotham falling, falling inside.

[John Kiriakou]

Tell me that you've seen Soylent Green.

[Julian Dory]

Soylent Green?

[John Kiriakou]

No, Soylent Green is people. So Soylent Green came out in the early 1970s. It's one of the great science fiction films of all time. Stars Charlton Heston.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, I love Charlton.

[John Kiriakou]

He's a cop in the megalopolis. We've had such a. An explosion in population that From Boston to D.C. it's just all one giant city. It's just all connected. So he's a cop in what used to be called Philadelphia. And eggs are 100 bucks a piece. A jar of jelly is 150 bucks. There's one tree left in New York City, and they had to build a fort around it so it could be protected. It was the only tree that's left on the East Coast. And like I say, he's a cop, and he lives with this old man who was a professor. So nobody can afford to eat, so the government provides these little nutritional chips. There's Soylent Green, which is colored green, Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and it's like $1.98 a pound. So that's what everybody eats, what everybody lives on. In the meantime, there are such huge riots of hungry people that they have these big earth movers that just go scoop people up during demonstrations and it. It throws them into the back of a dump truck, and then they just disappear. You don't know what happened to them. So Charlton Heston, he's barely able to make a living. At least you know, he's got Soylent Green, he can eat. And the professor decides he's 70 years old, he's sick. They have these suicide centers that you can just go. You lay in a bed and they show you a film of just nature. Deer running around and butterflies and birds tweeting. You've never seen anything like this before. So as they give you the lethal injection, that's what you get to see. And there's classical music playing, so it's all very nice. He runs to the Charlton Aston, runs to the suicide center to stop his friend from committing suicide. And he has to break into the place. He's too late to save him, but he follows the trail that they've taken the body to. And they take the body to a processing center where they're making Soylent Green out of all these people that are scooping up at the demonstrations. And he's as they're arresting him and Beating him. He shouts, soylent Green is people.

[Julian Dory]

Oh my God.

[John Kiriakou]

We used to do this thing at the CIA. We used to this thing at the CIA just for fun. Like every, every time you have an operational meeting, you have to write a very detailed, like blow by blow, minute by minute account of the meeting. And CIA cables by nature are written only in capital letters. It's like some thing from the 50s. They just never changed it. So what people would do is they would make these random lowercase letters. But they did it so it would spell out Soylent Green as people in the cable. We would always get such a kick out of it because it was all. It would always make its way through the system. Nobody would pay any attention until like the one guy is reading it, he's like, oh, oh, they did it again.

[Julian Dory]

That the scary part about that is I'm gonna look for it. Reminds me of that kind of story. Doesn't seem far. It seems far fetched for tomorrow, but it doesn't seem far fetched for somewhere in the future.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, this Soy lent green. It's 1973. I said 72. It's 73 lotted.

[Julian Dory]

70S was unbelievable.

[John Kiriakou]

It is on Amazon prime right now for 3.99.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, I'm definitely watching.

[John Kiriakou]

Don't miss it. It's one of the great, one of the greatest science fiction movies.

[Julian Dory]

I can't believe I haven't seen that.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm surprised I've watched. He did another one at the same time called the Omega man where he was the last man on Earth. There was some kind of pandemic and a handful of people survived, but as like monsters, like Walking Dead kind of people.

[Julian Dory]

Like, I am legend almost.

[John Kiriakou]

In fact, I am legend. Was the reboot of the Omega Man. Yes, yes, exactly.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Awesome. Love. Charlton Heston. Met him once on the street in London. Couldn't have been nicer.

[Julian Dory]

Is there anyone you don't know or you haven't bumped into at some point?

[John Kiriakou]

I was with my girlfriend, we were spending junior year abroad and I took her to see a play called the Caine Mutiny Court Martial and it starred Charlton Heston and he was brilliant in this play. And she says, let's go around to the stage door and see if we can meet him. I said, no, that's. It's such a cliche. No, I don't want to bother the man. He's not going to want to be bothered after working for two hours on stage like that. She's like, please, I love Charles Neston. So we ran around back and it was I don't know half a dozen other people back there. And he came out and. Could not have been any nicer. More cordial. Just a lovely guy.

[Julian Dory]

Moses right there.

[John Kiriakou]

I know, right? That's Moses. And that voice, like, who in America doesn't know that voice? Yeah, yeah. Pretty cool.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Again, can't believe I. I have watched a fuck ton of movies from the 70s. The 70s was an unbuttoned. The 70s and the 90s for movies.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yes. My kids even got me a coffee table book called. Called the Stewardess Is Flying the Plane. Movies of the 1970s.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Loved it.

[Julian Dory]

It's. It's awesome stuff. Real quick, John. I just gotta use the bathroom.

[John Kiriakou]

Of course.

[Julian Dory]

So we'll be right back. All right, we're back. I haven't gotten your thoughts on your very good friend John Brennan. Now being in the crosshairs of.

[John Kiriakou]

He is. That's the way to say it. He's in the crosshairs of the Trump Justice Department. A couple things I've noticed about John Brennan over the last couple of weeks. So he was challenged at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, by a Republican congressional candidate who I had never heard of and who didn't come close to winning anything, but the guy legitimately challenged him over his role in the memo on a couple things. The memo on the Hunter Biden laptop, or the letter, I guess it is. And. And on the CIA's analysis that Russia was behind the Trump election. In the video that was shared widely on Twitter, Brennan actually pokes the guy in the chest several times. Besides that being assault, that was the first time in the 35 years that I've known John Brennan that I ever saw him lose his composure. Ever.

[Julian Dory]

It's getting to him.

[John Kiriakou]

It's getting to him. He went on MSNBC that night looking exhausted and old beyond his years, and he disingenuously said, I don't know why they're doing this to me. I don't understand. I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, even by MSNBC standards, it was not believable or credible. And then just a few days later, somebody, some reporter shouted a question at him. It wasn't a reporter. It was in the metro. It was a guy who may have been a reporter. Now, in retrospect, anyway, whoever it was, it was a guy in the metro and Brennan, like, went after him, went up to him with his finger and raised voice. A buddy of mine called, who's an attorney and said, what do you make of, you know, the John Brennan of the last couple of weeks. And I said, he's scared. Yeah, that's what this is. He's scared because they're going to find something to charge him with. And not only will they charge him, they have moved the case to the Southern District of Florida. Now, remember, you have to charge the case in the federal district where the crime was allegedly committed. But what they did, I'll give you an example. In the case of Jeffrey Sterling, the CIA whistleblower, they said that he had leaked classified information to James Risen of the New York Times. Risen then wrote a book. A CIA secretary bought the book in Virginia, so charged him in Virginia. While Jeffrey lived in St. Louis, Risen worked in Bethesda, Maryland. And the New York Times is in New York. They charged him Virginia. So they play these little games all the time. Well, guess what? The game can be flipped. And so the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump just fired recently said, oh, I'm not seeing a crime, I'm not seeing a case. The investigation's not going anywhere. We're going to drop it. Okay, you're fired. And we're transferring the case to Florida. Because all you have to do is say, yeah, John Brennan coordinated that Hunter Biden laptop memo. I was in Miami when I read the memo on the MSNBC website. So it's that easy. It's that easy. But they never think about it coming back and biting them in the ass.

[Julian Dory]

And that's the thing, John. Like, I think it's well documented, long before I ever knew you, like, looking at John Brennan's career and the kinds of things he did, to say nothing of the stuff that you've illuminated for many of us since then. There's no doubt in my mind that he's not a good guy and that he has done a lot of things that could absolutely be taken into court and have a case made against it. And the anger at some of the things that he's done, of course, makes me want that to happen. What I worry about is all the cases that I think I righteously criticized that they were using with lawfare to make against Trump and people around him for years there.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Strictly because they didn't like him. I now have to be consistent in my criticism of the lawfare because it feels like we have now the pendulum is swinging. The pendulum is switching, swung. And we are setting dangerous precedents of political retribution. So much so that you have guys like Steve Bannon.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Coming out and saying to people, if we don't win in 2028, people in this room are going to prison. And this is the same guy who's trying to go on there and talk about doing a third term for Trump, which is, like, against the whole fucking.

[John Kiriakou]

Can't do it. I want to. I want to read to you just a couple of sentences from former Attorney General of the United States and Associate justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson. He said something that was very famous. He was also one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials. This is, like, one of the most important judges we've ever had, ever. Actually. Let me find it. But he said something in. In a dinner, at a dinner event for attorneys. His speech was called the Federal Prosecutor, and I think I found it. He said a couple things in this speech. He said, it is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling to error. It is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling to error. And to me, this is the most important thing he said. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. Yes. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it. It's a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, that's the Stalin bar. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

[John Kiriakou]

And there it is.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, my God.

[John Kiriakou]

And here we are, 85 years later, still having the same debates.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, wow.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Now, let me make that personal for a minute. You hate that guy. I do, and righteously so. I hate him for you.

[John Kiriakou]

He ruined my John Brennan.

[Julian Dory]

You ruined your life. He, I believe, committed crimes, by the way, to. To ruin your life. If you look at the emails with him and Eric Holder and just some of the stuff he did, it's a guy who runs out and says, yeah, we shouldn't torture people. When he wrote the Torture, he was the Godfather. Yeah. Is there a part of you that would just love vengeance there?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. I would love, love to see John Brennan go to prison, even if it was just for a day or a week, just to be dragged down into the muck like he did to me and to Jeffrey Sterling and to Ed Snowden and so many of the rest of us. On the other hand, I believe in Robert Jackson and what he said, and I think that's what makes America great. That's what makes us the greatest country in the world, is we're governed by the rule of law. If he has legitimately committed crimes, and I believe he has, he should be prosecuted. If there are others who are under investigation, who are subject to prosecutors scouring the law books looking for a crime, I would prefer not to see something like that happen.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels very scaring me a little bit, the vitriol and anger, and it's human.

[John Kiriakou]

I asked a friend of mine, I have a friend at the Justice Department who's not working on the Brennan case, but who has friends and colleagues who are. And I said, why hasn't Brennan been charged yet? I mean, they charged Comey with some silly crime that's probably going to get thrown out. Why haven't they charged Brennan? And he said, because they want to get that one right. Yeah, they have an interesting perspective on Brennan. You know, most federal crimes have a five year statute of limitations. Most what we've heard Brennan would be charged with has either a five year or a one year statute of limitations. They're talking about contempt of Congress. Big deal. The federal sentencing guideline calls for no prison time. Right. So who cares if he, if he was in contempt of Congress? I don't care. Lying to Congress, he probably has crossed the statute of limitations. They probably can't charge him. But what their idea is is that the Hunter byte laptop memo, the Russia nie, the Russia analysis was all part of an ongoing conspiracy to deny American voters their duly elected president. So the statute of limitations keeps restarting itself every day so long as this, this conspiracy continues. And honestly, I think they've got him on that.

[Julian Dory]

I, that's the thing. I think they might too. And this is where, this is where it gets weird for me because no man's above the law. Right?

[John Kiriakou]

I mean, it should be. We sent a vice President, United States to prison.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. That was Spiro Agno.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

They got the Greek guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. But he wasn't Orthodox, so it doesn't count. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

But like, I look at that and I go, is the slippery slope of letting a man like John Brennan be above the law worse than the slippery slope.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

Of the precedents that we are setting across the board right now. And it's almost like. And people at home don't want to hear this. I don't want to hear this either. Especially when it comes to a guy like John Brennan. But it's almost like somebody here, we use this example for something else earlier, but someone here has to be to Martin Luther King and just be like, we're big.

[John Kiriakou]

We're bigger than this.

[Julian Dory]

We're not doing this because it's making, you know, we're othering each other in this country. I see.

[John Kiriakou]

And that's exactly why Joe Biden should have pardoned Donald Trump. So many people believed he. That's what he was going to do. Just like Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for the. For the betterment of the country. Yes. Bring the American people back together again. Joe Biden should have pardoned all of those Republicans.

[Julian Dory]

I agree.

[John Kiriakou]

And he didn't.

[Julian Dory]

I agree.

[John Kiriakou]

I agree with you really very much on this issue that at the end of the day, what's more important is the strength of the country and the unity of the country. It was a mistake to charge Donald Trump with 34 felonies for not filling out a frigging form for the State Business Commission or whatever the heck it was. That was dumb. It was a mistake to charge him. I don't even remember what the crime was alleged in Georgia. What was that? Oh, he called the sec, Georgia Secretary of State and said, find the votes. Okay. He was excitable that day. It was the election. That. That's. That's not a crime. That's just a guy having a bad day. Yeah, Comey, I understand. They hate Comey. Comey's an idiot, frankly, for being as smart as he is. He's really stupid at the same time. Yeah. Like to take a picture of the shells. 86, 47. What the fuck are you thinking? You. Brennan, however, is different. In my mind, I believe Brennan was trying to enact a coup. I really believe it.

[Julian Dory]

I think there's evidence that, you know, even if. Even if you wanted to dress it up and call it like a shadow coup or something like that. Well, however you want to say it. When you look at all the things that were disproven that were happening on his watch.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

One plus one plus one plus one plus one.

[John Kiriakou]

Seriously. And look at it this way, too. There were a lot of bad guys at the CIA at the time that I was there in those circles. Right. I mean, we can say terrible things about George Tenet and John McLaughlin and Mike Morell and Jose Rodriguez and Rick Prado and a lot of people. We can say there were a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security. Brennan's different. Brennan plotted against an elected president of the United States, and he tried to use this, you know, the intelligence community and this lawfare against him. And we can't risk that happening again.

[Julian Dory]

That it. That is, when you put it like that, it's. It's about as sinister as it gets.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Now, now here's the thing, John. I think about this a lot. We've been the power in the world for a long time. We have always had people in different parts of power, be it government, bureaucracy, corporate, which, you know, sure, one feeds the other. There's a lot of cross elites etc where there are some awful people and people who do corrupt things, people who get away with it sometimes because the issue becomes bigger than the person and they're connected enough so we slight, we swipe it under, sweep it under the rug. But I get this strange feeling that there is this deliberate movement now to paint everything that America has ever done as evil. It's all bad.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Every single fucking.

[John Kiriakou]

I hear that a lot.

[Julian Dory]

So I say this to a guy who was legitimately over by the United States government and the worst types of people in it, who knows where evil happens and knows that we're not perfect and knows we've done evil shit around the world for sure. You know. Do you have a problem with, with that narrative?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh my God, yes. You know, I, I, I go to bed at night watching TikTok videos. I'll watch a hundred of them before I finally fall asleep. And you know, they lead me to mostly first amendment auditors who I just love, I just love them. And conservative YouTubers who will go out on the street and say, you know, what's the best country in the world? And you know, do you believe the United States is the best country in the world? And they say, you know, I would like to live in Denmark or whatever. This is the best country on earth, period. I've been to 72 countries. I'm going to add another five more by the end of next year. This is the best country on earth. Of course we have problems because we're human, but, but the founding fathers gave us a system that is perfect for resolving those problems. Right? The three co equal branches of government. It's a little askew right now, but it's gonna return to where it should be. It always does.

[Julian Dory]

You think so?

[John Kiriakou]

I do. It always has through history and it will again.

[Julian Dory]

But what has to happen for it to return there?

[John Kiriakou]

Congress needs to find. What happened to its ball sack?

[Julian Dory]

Did you ever have one?

[John Kiriakou]

It vanished once upon a time. I remember Jimmy Carter complaining. I was a kid, I was in high school, Jimmy Carter complaining that he couldn't get anything done because Congress wouldn't do what he told them to do. And the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And they were like, we don't work for you. Co. Equal branches of government. Well, we've forgotten that. And so the Democrats are in lockstep with Joe Biden. The Republicans are in lockstep with Donald Trump. That's not the way it's supposed to be. Yes. Work together. But look at the 80s under the Reagan presidency. The Democrats controlled the House, the Republicans controlled the Senate for the first four years or six years of the. Either four or six. I can't remember anymore of the Reagan presidency. But the speaker of the House was a Massachusetts liberal named Tip o'. Neill. And what happened? The President would invite him over for breakfast and they would sit and hash things out because they were both gentlemen. And that's how you got business done in Washington.

[Julian Dory]

Let's make a deal.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. Everything is open to negotiation. Everything. So let's negotiate.

[Julian Dory]

And you think we can get back to that?

[John Kiriakou]

I do. I think we can get back to that.

[Julian Dory]

Besides, you know the broad general point, which is appreciated if Congress has to find their balls again.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they're all bums.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, but so how do you flush out the attitudes that have formed on both sides within Congress and Senate at this point where they don't want to do that?

[John Kiriakou]

I think that we need to elect more independent thinkers. Listen, I made fun. For example, I made awful fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was first elected. You know, the Jewish space lasers and cheating on her husband. And I find myself agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene like 80% of the time now.

[Julian Dory]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

It's nuts. I haven't changed. I see Marjorie Taylor Greene as having matured in her role as a member of Congress. Yeah, like, wait a minute, wait a minute. This isn't how Congress is supposed to work.

[Julian Dory]

What do you like about what she says?

[John Kiriakou]

I see her as something of a, of a very out there civil libertarian in the, in the mold of, of Tom Massey, Thomas Massie, let's say. She's not as smart as Thomas Massey, of course, but they take a lot of similar positions. Like Rand Paul is another example. Bernie Sanders on the, on the Democratic side is another one. But I think we need more people like that. There's a guy who's been running in the Democratic primary against Nancy Pelosi for years. I met him in like 2016. I don't remember his name. It's an Indian name and I just don't recall what it is. The guy's an attorney. He's very smart, very bright guy. He's an activist. We need for him to run against people like Nancy Pelosi. I I think my lucky stars that Nancy Pelosi is not running for reelection. Of course, she's so young at 82. Right? Yeah, that's the guy. That's the guy. I met him at the San Francisco Film Festival. We, we stopped and chatted. I had never heard of him before.

[Julian Dory]

You say that name, I just butchered that.

[John Kiriakou]

Chakrabarti.

[Julian Dory]

Chakrabarti.

[John Kiriakou]

Chakrabarti. I've got a friend. He's an originally Indian, naturalized American. Bert Thacker. Shout out to Bert Thacker.

[Julian Dory]

Shout out Bert.

[John Kiriakou]

Bert. Bert's two time Jeopardy. Champion, number one. Number two, he is a former Republican congressional candidate in Southern California, moved to Texas, got himself elected to the city council in the city he went to and is already planning his congressional campaign. We need to have 435 people like Bert Thacker because then we would get stuff done in this country. Bert cares almost not at all about party affiliation. He happens to be a Republican, but he just wants to get stuff solved, get things done.

[Julian Dory]

I think a big difference today that's causing a huge problem which should be like the biggest benefit ever, is the fact that all of us have a voice behind a keyboard online and we police each other for thought. Then where does that sound very familiar from? Dangerous online, that then forces its way towards the ballot box and the people who get elected there who are from that same world and understand it, or if they're not from that world, understand that they have to live in it. So for example, your Nancy Pelosi, you can't possibly make a deal with Donald Trump. That won't play well on TikTok. It won't. No, you could. It won't play well on Instagram, it won't play well on Twitter and you're going to be viewed as a traitor to your people for doing that. Whereas Nancy Pelosi could have tied one off, you know, fucking 25 years ago if Donald Trump were president and you know, come up with a deal at a fucking K Street steakhouse and shit could have actually happened.

[John Kiriakou]

Which is exactly how Washington used to work. Yes, you're exactly right. You knew that if you went to the oval room at 9 o' clock on a Tuesday night, the entire Senate leadership was going to be there having stakes and trying to figure out what to do about the budget. Right at the Trump Hotel, when there was a Trump Hotel in Washington. I went with friends a couple of times, more than a couple of times, and we joked that like, my God, is there a single member of the Republican House leadership who's not at the bar right now. Literally every single one of them. But that's how you get stuff done.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

When I was in college, it was quite common for members of Congress to share group houses up on Capitol Hill. You'd pack six, seven, eight guys in a house because it's expensive in Washington. You have to maintain a house in your district. Right. And your family's probably in the district. You still have to have somewhere to live in Washington, so. And they don't really make any money. Well, they do now.

[Julian Dory]

Great stock pickers.

[John Kiriakou]

220. It's like a miracle. Like a miracle.

[Julian Dory]

They're incredible at it.

[John Kiriakou]

Crystal ball. So it wasn't unusual to have, you know, three Dems and three Republicans in a House or four and four. They'd play poker on Fridays. They'd go to church together on Sundays, and then, you know, they would argue in committee. But they're all friends, and they knew that at the end of the day they could negotiate a deal. And that's just not the case anymore.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. That's why. That's where I'm having trouble seeing how that becomes the case again.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Because of how people have just been. So, you know, and I stay in this kind of job. I see it all the time.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Julian Dory]

How much people just jump to conclusions on. The minute they hear an opinion they don't agree with, they're gone.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

They're really not. But they say that.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I get that all the time. Listen, I'm going to say something that's going to cause me trouble, but I'm going to say it anyway. I gave an interview to an Indian news outlet two weeks ago, and I didn't say anything that I haven't said a thousand times for whatever reason. And this is why, as a matter of policy. Listen, I'm serious. No more interviews to any Indian or Pakistani news outlets ever again. Okay. John's policy done. Because they just make shit up and put it in a banner headline with two exclamation points and say that the CIA, this CIA officer finally reveals the truth behind, you know, like, now, I told you, my information's 25 years old. Okay? So I said one thing. I said, in a conventional conflict, India would beat Pakistan because it has five times the people. Yeah. The death threats. I've lost count of how many death threats I received. And then the best of all, like, my lawyer's like, got to keep a low profile. Just be aware. Aware of your surroundings. I know, right?

[Julian Dory]

John's like, yeah, you.

[John Kiriakou]

So I get a letter from the President of Imran Khan's political party. Right, whatever it's called, the Pakistan Whatever party. You got a letter, a letter in the mail. And he says that they condemn in. In the strongest possible terms what I said to the Indians. And they demand an immediate apology to His Excellency, the former Prime Minister, to the members of the party and to the people of Pakistan for giving an opinion. Yeah. So my lawyer is like, just throw it away. Just throw it away. So I didn't throw it away. I sent him an email and I said, oh, my God. In regards to your demand for an apology, I wipe my ass with your demands for an apology. And I hit send. And that's how I left it. And I haven't heard back from them. So my, my, My lawyer is like, well, that speaking offer at the Pakistani military academy. Yeah, you're not going to be doing that. And I said, no, no, I'll never go back ever again. But they don't, they don't treat me with, with respect anyway.

[Julian Dory]

You could have just said, explain Bin Laden.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, exactly.

[Julian Dory]

I mean, yeah, like it would appear mathematically India would. Yeah, would body bag Pakistan. Pakistan. No disrespect, it would, you know, and.

[John Kiriakou]

You know why they hate each other so much? Because they're exactly alike. That's why. Really? It used to be one country, right? India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was one country called. Called the Indian subcontinent, Right. And then in 1947, India and Pakistan had a brutal, bloody war and they split off. So all the Muslims went west to Pakistan and all the Hindus went east to India. But now there are more Muslims than there are pretty much anybody else, and they have a higher birth rate in India. But anyway. And then by 1971, I think it was, Bangladesh is like, screw this. They're part of Pakistan. They were called East Pakistan. And they're like, pakistan's all the way over there. We disagree with everything. So we're going to be independent too. And they created Bangladesh. Okay, well, India has five times more people than Pakistan does. And the Bangladeshis like the Indians and the Afghans like the Indians and hate the Pakistanis. So if you're Pakistan and you're outmanned and surrounded by your enemies, you gonna win that fight? Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

They don't seem to have, like, a lot of friends.

[John Kiriakou]

No, right. No, because they write threatening letters and expect immediate action.

[Julian Dory]

I love that. They wanted a retraction.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, retract.

[Julian Dory]

Last time I was in your country, I land. I ran the greatest targeting mission in modern history.

[John Kiriakou]

Don't with me. That's right. And he wants a. He. He neglected to say in the letter that his prime minister is in prison right now.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, he's in prison?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Why is he in prison?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, for all kinds of reasons. Reasons. Treason.

[Julian Dory]

And he's still prime minister?

[John Kiriakou]

No, no, they deposed him.

[Julian Dory]

So he's not running it from the prison cell?

[John Kiriakou]

No. Well, he's trying. He's running the party from his prison cell.

[Julian Dory]

Got it.

[John Kiriakou]

They got a new prime minister.

[Julian Dory]

It's so awkward. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And he wants an apology from me. No, I think you should apologize to all of the people of Pakistan for being a, you know, corrupt. Typical corrupt leader. In Pakistan, they're all corrupt. Listen, one time I was with, with a colleague, a more senior colleague. We went to see Benazir Bhutto. Went to see Benazir Bhutto. She was in exile in Dubai and her husband was this guy Zardari, I think his first name is Hussein, something like that. And so we're at the word, her beachfront mansion, her 10 million dollar beachfront mansion in Dubai. This is a woman who was making, you know, 60 grand a year as Prime Minister.

[Julian Dory]

Hey, listen, good investor, right?

[John Kiriakou]

So we hear a car pulling up outside and she said something offhandedly that has just been ingrained in my mind ever since. She says, so help me God, if he's pulling up in another Bentley, I'm going to lose my mind. And my boss and I kind of look at each other, like corrupt a little bit. Yeah. You make 60 grand a year. How many Bentleys do you have with your $10 million beachfront house in Dubai? And then she went back, became prime minister again, got shot in the head. Now he's the President of Pakistan. Her husband. Her corrupt husband.

[Julian Dory]

Funny how the world works.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

You know, that is the thing. The patterns are the same everywhere in different, different societies. Nature, it's human nature. You get people that get into powerful positions that have connections to be able to do things that the average person can't. Whether it's legal or not, they do it. It's. You're 100. It's, it is human nature. And like now in the Internet era, we can just see it more. Right?

[John Kiriakou]

I think you're exactly right about that. Yeah. The, the information is much more readily, readily available for us. It's just, just there almost instantaneously.

[Julian Dory]

How much in your career at CIA did you either see directly or get an inkling or a vibe of, say, elite forces that were not a part of CIA playing roles or having, say or having some Sort of influence over decisions that the agency was making.

[John Kiriakou]

I didn't never. No, it was always the other way around. After 911 we were short on Special Forces guys. You know, we had this thing called the Special Activities Division. And then within the counterterrorism center there was the Special Activities Group. But we needed operators like not the ones like John that were gonna, you know, whine and dine the guy and recruit him. Exactly. And so we just borrowed people from the Special Forces. So all of a sudden, I mean like in, in the matter of a week or two after 9 11, we've got seals, we have delta, we have Rangers, we have all these people and they're all. They're not what you might imagine. They're not, they're not these buff, you know, he. Men that stepped out of a magazine. They had five days beard, a little bit of a gut. They could do some heavy drinking and then get up and run five miles, which I never understood. But they, they knew exactly what the mission was. And by God they were happy to get on a plane, jump out the back of it and then do the mission and then figure out how to rescue them later.

[Julian Dory]

I've had a couple of those guys sitting here.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they're very, very tough guys.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, they're built a little different.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they are. I've never understood how. I've never understood how guys like that can negotiate the psychological weight of what comes with their jobs.

[Julian Dory]

It is a. The fact that you haven't figured that out is not reassuring because I sit here and wonder the same thing. Sometimes there is. The only thing I can come up with is there's just a different gene.

[John Kiriakou]

I think that's it. I've got two friends. One was a medic on SEAL Team 2. He's an older guy. He's about eight years older than I am. So this is when the SEAL teams were first created out of what used to be called the Underwater Demolition Teams. And I've got a buddy who's currently a seal. I won't say which team. He's the son in law of a very close friend of mine. He does struggle with these issues. My, my older friend from SEAL Team 2 sleeps like a baby every night. No problem.

[Julian Dory]

I think it's person to person.

[John Kiriakou]

I think it is.

[Julian Dory]

Right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

But also they pick certain guys for certain teams or certain missions.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

Who maybe they've tested under scrutiny and stress. Not to say, by the way, that sometimes once the guys are done their career and come home, they don't bring it home with.

[John Kiriakou]

And they, and they frequently do. Oh yeah, they frequently do. It's, it's a sad thing to see.

[Julian Dory]

Sad. But when, when they're in there, there's something about like reach go mission. And that's all about the mission. Yeah. You know, Glad they're on my side though.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, me too. Right, Yep, got that. Right.

[Julian Dory]

So they were just. And I mean I've talked with guys about this before. It was obviously like a Show right after 9 11. Sure. Hands on deck. But basically a lot, the way you're explaining it is a lot of these guys minus just some of the like on the ground forces we know from the paramilitary operation that happened right away in Afghanistan. A lot of these guys were literally like, hey, you're in, you're ready, you're in. They're done.

[John Kiriakou]

They just showed up one day. I'm telling you, at, at the counterterrorism center, we, we more than doubled in size within two, three days. Wow. And then even after that all these, all these special forces guys just, just arrived like, okay, where do we go? And then they started doing their thing.

[Julian Dory]

And how soon was it after the towers came down that you were first approached about with the enhanced interrogation?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it was quite some time. Towers came down on September 11th. We started bombing Afghanistan in early October. It was in late October that Mitchell and Jessen were introduced to George Tenet. At a, at a cocktail party they pitched the so called enhanced interrogation techniques. I think we signed the contract in January and then we were just waiting to see who's the first guy we're going to catch. We caught up as a beta in March.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I was going to say, and then we're going to Pakistan.

[John Kiriakou]

And then I was approached the first week of May of 2002. Okay.

[Julian Dory]

And then you were still in there for a few years afterwards. I mean, obviously that is the core part of your story. We've told that on episode 249 and 250 a bunch before. We don't have to go through all that.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure.

[Julian Dory]

But that was a disturbing thing that you saw at CIA.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Are there other things now, years later that you're willing to talk about that you came across that maybe didn't involve you directly like that, where people were like, hey, we want to actually bring you in on this that you just found viciously disturbing that they were doing?

[John Kiriakou]

No, I. All throughout my CIA career I worked with people who were doing their jobs to the highest ethical standard. It was because post 911 and everybody just kind of went Nuts. Because this was the greatest intelligence failure in the CIA's history and because it was specific to the counterterrorism center. I think that's why there was so much that was sort of revealed to me. But otherwise, no. In fact, one time, one time, I was the note taker. I was living in Bahrain at the time. And Ambassador David Ransom, just an absolutely lovely guy, one of the finest human beings I've ever worked for. He was a terrific ambassador and just a. Just a really great guy. He would frequently ask me to be the note taker in his meetings with the Minister of Foreign affairs. And the minister liked me and I liked him. His English was better than mine, crazy as that might sound. But if there was something sensitive that the ambassador needed to raise, he would always mention to me in the car on the way to the Foreign Ministry, like, don't let me forget to say X, and I jot down a note. So we went to see a foreign minister one time, and. And he did forget to say X. And so at the end of the meeting, these meetings would go two hours, he turned to me and he said, is there anything else? Is there anything that I'm forgetting? And I said, yes, there's the issue with Ambassador so and so. And he said, oh, that's right. And he said. He said to the foreign minister, one of my predecessors here in Bahrain, it's come to my attention, is now working for the Bob Dole campaign. And we understand that he may come out here and ask you for money. It is illegal for a foreign national to contribute money to an American political campaign. So I just wanted to give you a heads up. And the minister says, oh, he's already been here. We gave him $50,000. We didn't realize it was illegal, but he went to see the Amir, and the Amir gave him $50,000. So we get back in the car, and the ambassador says, listen, that last part, don't put that in a cable. He said, that's a hornet's nest that I don't think either one of us want to be involved in. Involved in. So I didn't put it in the cable. You break the cable out by issue. Like the ambassador's meeting with the foreign minister, Middle east peace, the ambassador's meeting with foreign minister, the military agreement with the United States, ambassador's meeting with the foreign minister, Iran, and the threat from, you know, whatever. He told me not to write that. This was like a month or two or three before I. I left to go back to headquarters. And I thought about it. And thought about it and thought about it and I thought, you know, for my own selfish reasons, what happens if I go for my next polygraph and they ask me if I'm aware of a crime that I didn't report? Then it's me. Then I get fired. So I just pick up the phone one day and I call the general counsel's office. A guy answers the phone, George. And I said, hi, my name is John kiriakou. I'm in the office of near eastern south asian analysis. He goes, wait, kiriakou, are you from farrell, Pennsylvania? And I go, what? I go, yeah, I was born in farrell, Pennsylvania. He said, is your dad Chris? And I said, yeah, you know my dad. And he said, your dad was the best man in my in laws wedding.

[Julian Dory]

Oh my God.

[John Kiriakou]

And I said, oh, cool. He says, let's have coffee. I said, okay. Better than just reporting this crime over the phone to a stranger. So with me in the cafeteria, nice guy. We're still friendly. Not friends, but we're friendly. So. So I said, you know, there's something I. I'm aware of. I don't know if it's a big deal or not. It kind of feels like it might be a big deal, but I don't want it to trip me up on the polygraph. So I told him. He's like, oh, yeah, that's a felony. And I said, okay. So, like, so I'm done. I don't have to write it, write it down or anything. He said, put it in an email and send it to me. He said, I'll send it over to doj, but at the very least we have to report it. Because if word gets back to doj that you knew about it or I knew about it or your ambassador knew about it, we're all liable to be prosecuted. So I sent him an email. And I don't know, a year later or so, since he was greek and we had this Greek american kind of group at the agency, we'd have lunch together once a month. After that, once george tenet became director, I asked him, whatever happened to that thing? He said, they didn't give a shit. Nothing ever happened. I said, okay, well, we did the right thing.

[Julian Dory]

You did the right thing. I wonder if it had had two zeros at the end of that, Two extra zeros, if they would have given a little more of a shit, right? I mean, 50k from the Amir feels like. Grab. Grab that change off the ashtray. Listen, you know what I mean?

[John Kiriakou]

The. The dcm, the deputy chief of mission Another good guy. His wife developed a very serious case of breast cancer while, while we were there. And she had to be medevaced back to the United States and the DCM went to curtail his his position. He had to go back, take care of his wife, et cetera, et cetera. They had a nine year old daughter at the time. This box arrives from the Royal Diwan. It's just a box wrapped in brown paper and. And he said to me, I got something from the Royal D1. And I said, well that's kind of cool. I never got anything from the Royal Diwan, the Royal Palace. And he says, don't leave. I'm thinking I might need a witness. And I said okay. He opens it up. $50,000 in cash with a get well card to his wife. That's what lovely people they were, they are, they remain lovely people. We can't accept $50,000. So I walked 20ft to the ambassador's office, knocked on the door and I said, Ambassador, you're going to want to see this. So he comes over, he's like, oh for God's sake. And he said, I just got it from the Royal Dewan. And he said okay, we need to count it. We need witnesses. So we counted it all out. It was 50,000. And then I wrote a cable to the Treasury Department saying we're pouching back $50,000 that's from the Amir and it just goes into the treasury.

[Julian Dory]

With our tax dollars. Well, I guess thank you for the donation to our tax revenue. Yeah, there's something gets used, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, it gets used, sure.

[Julian Dory]

Do you think that have you discovered things in the years since being out of CIA, which has been a long time now, been out a long time, that shocks you? And before you answer that, the reason I asked that is because whether it's CIA, nsa. Sure, wherever. A brilliant tactic that all these bureaucracies use is they compartmentalize people to work on what they're working on.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right. And that's what want you to do. They want you to be compartmentalized. So you're not wondering what Fred's doing down the hall?

[Julian Dory]

That's right.

[John Kiriakou]

Because it's none of your damn business what Fred's doing down the hall.

[Julian Dory]

So question remains, are the things that you've discovered that CIA does, that doesn't have to be a fair bad reason either, but.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh yeah, I've been shocked.

[Julian Dory]

Shocks you?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I've been shocked. I was shocked with the Vault 7 revelations in 2017, the WikiLeaks stuff. Yeah, that was shocking.

[Julian Dory]

Now, what Was that?

[John Kiriakou]

Vault 7 is very complicated. Among other things, Vault 7 showed that the CIA had. Had developed hacking capability where they could hack into, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Cubans, whomever, hack the system, and then leave traces of the hack on purpose, but with the traces written in Cyrillic or Mandarin. So that once they were discovered by the IT security guys in those countries, they'd say, oh, it was the Russians that did it. They left. Look, they left one little line of code, and it's all written in Russian. Conveniently, yeah. So that was one thing. Another thing that Vault 7 taught us was that the CIA developed the capability to take over your car remotely by hacking into the car's computer system to drive you off a bridge or into a tree.

[Julian Dory]

Now, did we discover examples of where this was used?

[John Kiriakou]

We did not. But the conventional wisdom among the blogosphere is that, you know, we should ask Michael Hastings what happened to him.

[Julian Dory]

Whoa.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Vault 7 also told us that the CIA is able to take over a smart TV to turn the. The speaker into a microphone so that it broadcasts everything taking place in the room with the TV still off.

[Julian Dory]

Well, the TV's on, so. Hello.

[John Kiriakou]

Pretty impressive.

[Julian Dory]

Hello, Langley. Yeah, how are you?

[John Kiriakou]

So what that told me. Those are very cool. And there were a dozen more things that were part of Vault 7. But what it also told me is that the CIA is running parallel operations with nsa. Why is the CIA developing this stuff? This is NSA and DARPA that should be doing it, and NSA and DARPA are doing it, but the CIA also it.

[Julian Dory]

How do you like what.

[John Kiriakou]

Because on the one hand, they have so much money that they can't spend at all, so they just make their own nsa, make their own darpa. I have a buddy, I sat next to him for the first three and a half years of my career. He's now the Deputy Director of the CIA for Innovation. What's that? He was always a computer nerd. Yeah, And I remember he got a. He got an Award, like, 1991 because he came up with a program to make a very crude family tree. Like, computers were new to us at the time. When I first started, I had this big box that had a green screen. It was about that big, called the Delta Data. And I had an IBM Selectric 3 typewriter next to me because half of what we did was on the typewriter still. So he came up with this crude family tree so we could do the Saudi royal family, the Kuwaiti royal family, Bahraini royal family. Just. Just so it's clear when you're doing your analysis. And they were like, wow, you did that on this new computer? That's amazing. Here's $500 and an exceptional performance award. Now he's the Deputy Director of the CIA for Innovation, which tells me that he's in charge of all this crazy shit that we're reading about at WikiLeaks.

[Julian Dory]

That's what I don't understand though. Like, why even have DARPA or NSA if it's not just a department of like CIA or. And the other way around with CIA being a department, you know what I mean? Like, why do you even have separation? Because the same, you may, I'll give you an example. You may call on Tim Cook and Apple to take care of something they need. If you're darpa, it's like, CIA can call them too.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, sure.

[Julian Dory]

So why aren't they all just under one rule roof?

[John Kiriakou]

Oftentimes it's a bureaucratic pissing match where the Secretary of Defense will say, well, CIA does its own thing for its own reasons. We are very specific. Our mission is, you know, to protect the homeland and our troops and whatever CIA is like, we don't really give a. About the troops. We don't have any, anything to do with the troops, except maybe we'll see them in the cafeteria when we're at some base somewhere. So we want it for CIA reasons. And NSA is like, whoa, wait a minute. It, we're nsa, this is exactly what we're supposed to be doing. So we're going to be doing it. But again, when you have so much money that you can't spend it all in a fiscal year, you end up just replicating what the other guys are doing.

[Julian Dory]

And does Congress even actually know what kind of money that CIA has?

[John Kiriakou]

No. How does that get. Every single year, year after year after year after year, Congress appropriates more money than the Defense Department asks for.

[Julian Dory]

I wonder why.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, because then you're, you're not weak on defense, those pinkos otherwise, you know? Yeah. And there's how many trillions of dollars missing and after how many years of, of internal audits? PricewaterhouseCooper just gave up and said, we don't know where this money went. It's just gone.

[Julian Dory]

How do you, like what, what kind of, I guess, look through, see through, work with however you want to say it did you have with NSA during your career for things you did? What was that like?

[John Kiriakou]

I had a good relationship with nsa. I made a point of making that long drive out to NSA at least once a year just to say, hey, how you guys doing? What are you working on? Let's go have a coffee in the cafeteria. And then we would invite them to come over to the agency. They would always come like six or eight at a time. And we'd spend the day and take them to the gift shop and whatever.

[Julian Dory]

You got along?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, always got along. And then they would, they would call and say, listen, we're going to publish something in about an hour, but you need, you need to know what this is because you work on XYZ issue. And they would give me a heads up so I could call the seventh floor and say, listen, NSA is coming out with something big. This is what they're going to say. And that was a valuable relationship, even operationally. I had a good relationship with NSA to the point where in one of my overseas tours, I worked closely with an NSA officer and he really did me a solid. There were a couple of phone numbers. I asked him to just start intercepting and tell me if there's anything interesting and just to be a nice guy. He also began intercepting the phone of one of my sources. And so he said to me one day, hey, I have a present for you. And he gives me this file, and it's a transcript of everything that my source has said. And I was like, this is fucking brilliant. So now I can say, hey, do you ever talk to so and so? Because I know it's there. I know he does. And then if he says, yeah, actually, I talked to. I talked to him on Tuesday. You did? What did he say? And then he'll just pair it back so I know he's telling the truth. That's called operational vetting. And so I can write to headquarters and say, I know for 100% certainty that he's telling me the truth.

[Julian Dory]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

So there.

[Julian Dory]

That's interesting because you always hear about, like this interagency rivalry and stuff, and you would think that when CIA has their own innovation and technology design, that's going to be like, oh, we're going to come up with a first or they're going to come up with a first. But you guys are still working together. It's just.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, and then throw in, throw in the whole nonsense about In Q Tel and Palantir, where.

[Julian Dory]

Please do throw it in, John.

[John Kiriakou]

Where the CIA now is in the venture capital business for a profit, which is illegal. They.

[Julian Dory]

If you're writing the laws.

[John Kiriakou]

Not. Not if you're writing the laws, where the CIA, in the immediate aftermath of 911 created something called In Q Tel, which is a cutesy, you know, play on intel with Q from the James Bond movies in the middle. Like, I hope they didn't pay somebody to come up with that. But anyway, it's like the kind of famous story that the.

[Julian Dory]

The.

[John Kiriakou]

That the Tourism Board of Scotland spent $150,000 hiring a consulting firm to come up with a tourism slogan. And for $150,000, they came up with Visit Scotland. It's true.

[Julian Dory]

Google, that's the consulting class for you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. So anyway, they came up with In Q Tel. In Q Tel's very first investment was not a lot. It was like, I can't remember if it's a million and a half. I think it's a million and a.

[Julian Dory]

Half to Palantir in, like, 03, something like that.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, two. Yeah. And now Palantir is a trillion dollar company that makes most of its money contracting with the CIA. It's a publicly traded company, and everybody listen. I subscribe to Barron's every week. It's like, buy Palantir. Buy Palantir. Buy Palantir.

[Julian Dory]

What do you think of their capabilities and what they're trying to do just right now?

[John Kiriakou]

The agency.

[Julian Dory]

No, Palantir. Which is the agency.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Which kind of is the agency. You know, I worry very much about. About. It's even too weak to say encroachment on our civil liberties. I worry about the violation of our civil liberties liberties very much. It is against the law for the CIA to spy on Americans. Period.

[Julian Dory]

Period.

[John Kiriakou]

That's it. It's against the law, but they do every day. It's against the law, and it's actually a part of NSA's charter that they cannot spy on Americans. You cannot intercept the communications of Americans. And that's practically all they do. Right? Where they had to build this new facility out in Utah in the desert that can hold every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years.

[Julian Dory]

500 years.

[John Kiriakou]

500 years. How about this? Even the FBI no longer has to get a warrant to take your communications, right? The metadata from your communications is for sale. All they have to do is call T Mobile and say, hey, I want Julian Dory's communications. Here's the five grand that you charge.

[Julian Dory]

That's the thing. What Palantir does is a whole nother level, and I want to stay with that for a second. But I've had Mike Yagley, who I mentioned earlier, sitting in this chair twice in the past two months, and the way that he Got back in the crosshairs of the government, where they went, what the fuck was. He was working on amalgamating marketing data, and he realized what you could just buy publicly legally. And so he bought a bunch of data in North Carolina, around Fort Bragg and tracked a bunch of phones leaving Fort Bragg, going to a neighborhood about 45 minutes away that was a little bit higher income, meaning these are most likely Special Forces. Tracked down the names of everyone who lived there, where they went, what they did. Realize they were Special Forces, then watch them and charted them go across to Syria once every other month for five days to Lafarge Concrete company or lafarque Concrete Company, which was obviously a cover for some undercover operation they were doing.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And he went to the government and showed them and he said, I did this in my bedroom. What do you think China's doing?

[John Kiriakou]

Jason Leopold, who is an investigative journalist for Bloomberg, formerly of Vice, buzzfeed, the LA Times. Absolutely brilliant journalist. He was once called a FOIA terrorist by the Pentagon spokesman because he has filed more FOIA requests than any other person in American history. He broke the Hillary Clinton email story just by sending in a FOIA request. Well, he. He revealed the location of the CIA's secret at drone surveillance base in Baluchistan, Pakistan. And you know how he did it? He read somewhere that drones use a certain kind of aviation fuel. And so he just did a Freedom of Information act request to the Pentagon for the locations of. Of all of the deliveries of this aviation fuel. And like millions of dollars of fuel were going into this, you know, desert base in southwestern Pakistan, this top secret base that's not top secret anymore because the Freedom of Information act has told us. So.

[Julian Dory]

For all the smart guys in government who are supposed to keep a secret and claim to be able to keep the secret and whatever, they literally write stuff in the modern metadata that someone at home can get.

[John Kiriakou]

That's it.

[Julian Dory]

That's right. That's why it gets hard to. Certain secrets. I wonder. It gets hard to believe that they wouldn't be able to be uncovered in some ways. And that gets to some of the weirdest shit if you start to think about it. Yeah, but we got. We got off. We're talking about the regular public metadata right here. But Palantir themselves, I mean, that's a whole nother level.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

So what kinds of things right now are you most concerned about? With what they're.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, we, we don't really know a lot of what Palantir does. Most of it is classified. And even then it's classified at the top secret level because it involves technology. And we know that they have massive contracts with the CIA. And it's not just the CIA. They work with darpa, they work with the Pentagon writ large. They work with NSA. They're all over government now. They didn't even exist 20 years ago practically.

[Julian Dory]

That's a Peter Thiel company. Yeah. Very, very powerful guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Very powerful.

[Julian Dory]

What do, what do you think of the Alex Garp guy who runs a it?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I did a little. I was, I was hired by an interest group to do a little biographical mockup of the two of them. And they're exactly the kind of guys that the CIA would want to be doing business with. They're conservatives, they are religious, they are extremely patriotic, but driven by profit, and they'll do as they're told and they'll keep their mouth shut.

[Julian Dory]

Karp is militarily, industrially conservative, but he's technically a Democrat, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I think he never switched his party affiliation.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, he's like a little hard to put in a box with some things.

[John Kiriakou]

And he has said that in interviews where, yeah, party politics don't hold any interest for him. Right. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

It's tough when you start talking about surveilling citizens though, at like a protest you don't like or something like that.

[John Kiriakou]

With drones the size of a, of a bumblebee or a, or a wasp.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, no one can even see it. Yeah, we're getting to the birds aren't real territory very much.

[John Kiriakou]

Very much. Yes, we are. Yes. It's frightening.

[Julian Dory]

What about when they're a company that is contracted by CIA and for all intents and purposes, created by CIA? How about that? They funded them. How about them working on other conflicts around the world though? Isn't that like a conflict of interest for other countries?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, I would say it is. But they would probably argue that they've stove piped everything and that there's no crossover. That if they're working on a CIA project, it's just these people in this box working on the CIA project. If they have an MI6 project, it's over here, and never the two shall meet. But what about Abraxas Corporation? Here's, here's another one. So right around the time that I came home From Athens in 2000, there was a kind of a wave of senior level retirements. And these were all pretty important guys. You know, the head of European operations had a Near east operations, the head of domestic operations, whatever, and they decided to just create an LLC where They could go, you know, smoke cigars and drink coffee and hang out and play pinochle all day and take a tax deduction. And so you gotta show. You gotta show a gain in two out of five years in order to keep your llc. So they put in for a couple what they call butts in seats. Contracts where you just take anybody who's got a security clearance, put them in these seats, let them do data entry for six months, and then the contract's over and they all get fired. They all have 1099s anyway. So you don't care. Well, now they're like a, you know, $20 billion company. Because at headquarters, I remember this happening at the time. They're like, oh, we have a real need for xyz. And somebody says, what about Jack? Jack's got this Abraxas thing. Now we know everybody. They're all friends of ours.

[Julian Dory]

Greatest shell company of all time.

[John Kiriakou]

And then there you go.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And it was taken over once, twice, three times. Changed its name a couple times. I think it's still known as Abraxas. Based in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. These guys never expected to be billionaires. They were just looking for a tax deduction on their coffee and cigars.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, that's the definition of finding money. It's like, oh, there it is.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, there it is.

[Julian Dory]

Turned up.

[John Kiriakou]

I might as well take it. Yeah. Ooh.

[Julian Dory]

But like, back to Palantir, though, they are. So you would imagine they're compartmentalizing for different countries. Doesn't it get weird, though, when you have an organization that. That has intel about every one of these countries individually themselves, that allegedly they're not passing back. The CIA? Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Especially when the conventional wisdom is that this is a CIA company.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Like, wouldn't. Doesn't that feel a little bit like it could be the start of a 1984 novel?

[John Kiriakou]

I would guess that, okay, if they're working for the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, we don't care. Care.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, okay.

[John Kiriakou]

Because Five Eyes, we're all sharing everything anyway. Okay, but let's say they're working for the French, the Germans, whatever, the Hungarians, who knows? I don't know. I am going to say that an officer from the CIA's National Resources Division, those CIA officers around the United States, The National Resources Division was created just so when a corporate CEO or other officer went to a denied area, say he went to Moscow for a meeting or Beijing for a meeting, somebody from the NR division would go and say, hey, you know, I'M from the CIA. You're a patriot. Can I ask you some questions about your trip? They always, always say yes because they're patriots. I would guess that with Palantir, there are regular routine meetings within our division saying, ah, you know, I was in the United Arab Emirates the other day and I ran into so and so and this is what he's interested in. And you know, something like that.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, that one just scares me. I don't know. It's also like the guy who did the biography on him, but the guys who are in charge just seem a little teal and carp when they talk, they seem a little divorced from reality, particularly of the Everyman, to be clear. I think that strongly starts. Yeah, right.

[John Kiriakou]

Totally agree. Look at Elon Musk, you know, what about Elon? I mean, he's not the same elon Musk from 10 or 20 years ago. I told you my, my Elon Musk story.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Back when you met him at the, across the street from the White House at the hotel.

[John Kiriakou]

Hey, Adam's hotel.

[Julian Dory]

When you say he's not the same guy, like just normal personality changes or.

[John Kiriakou]

I think it's a combination of things. You know, he just signed a $1 trillion contract with Tesla. He's going to have to make a bunch of targets to collect that money. But it's no longer about the technology. It's no longer about, for example, when was the last time you heard him talk about colonizing Mars? Time was you couldn't get him to shut up about colonizing Mars. What about the high speed vacuum tube that we were supposed to go from, from LA to San Francisco in 45 minutes? What happened to that, John?

[Julian Dory]

Men, I, when I saw that trillion dollar deal, I had a thought that I was like, damn, I should have had this thought 15 years ago. Like when you look at the math, because it was already true then. But men are becoming countries.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Julian Dory]

He's a country.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

It's about to be worth a trillion dollars.

[John Kiriakou]

And you know, if I were Elon Musk, I would worry about, you know, and eat the rich movement. Of course. I really would. I would worry for my own safety.

[Julian Dory]

Well, he has positioned himself. I'm not even saying this is wrong at all. I'm saying it's just interesting. He's positioned himself as the man of the people who saved free speech and is speaking for the everyman and, and funded Trump who represents the everyman and stuff like that. But you are absolutely right that who said this the other day. I want to give him credit, but it's like it should be the Captain Obvious point, but they just put it so beautifully. And it's exactly what it is. They're like, the future is in a division of left, right, problems. That's just what we're looking at right now. It's up, down, it's elite and everyone else. And when you look at any empire that has fallen around the world, one of the, the many traits of the falling of the empire, and I would argue it's probably the most important trait, is a severe separation and disagreement in future and hope as it pertains to the lower classes and the elites. And we talked about earlier with something else, but you see that wealth, captivity, this is something that's happening around the world and you are getting people who are getting so wealthy that, you know, chump change of their wealth could solve world problems. And I say this as someone who is in no way a socialist or anything like that. I don't agree with that ideology, but, you know, does a person need a trillion dollars? No. The fuck they don't. Sorry.

[John Kiriakou]

Nope.

[Julian Dory]

Sorry. I don't, I don't think, I think it's a slippery slope to say, oh, you make that illegal, but like, you got to have some self awareness or something. I don't know, give some of it away. I, I don't know. It's easy for me to sit here as a guy who's Warren Buffett.

[John Kiriakou]

Warren Buffett has famously said that he's leaving his children literally nothing.

[Julian Dory]

Respect that a lot.

[John Kiriakou]

I do too. Every cent of it goes to charity.

[Julian Dory]

And you know, what if I don't know how his kids or grandkids feel about that? But I would imagine if they get older and wiser, especially like the grandkids and the ones who are younger, they'll, they'll thank them for that.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, they will.

[Julian Dory]

You're not, you, you don't have any fulfillment in life when you're just given money. I, I always, in my old career, I, I saw that, you know, the kids that had the trust funds, they were just dead.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, they were dead. Yeah. And they never really reached any kind of potential. Nope.

[Julian Dory]

They were always living in the shadow of something that wasn't theirs. And I felt, I actually felt bad for a lot of them, you know, like they didn't choose to have that happen, you know?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

But agreed. I just think there's something about the purpose of life that like, you make your own way, whatever that is, you know, I do something public. I want to be the greatest in the world. At it. I will be one day, you know, I'm gonna have kids. Yep. I want them to go do their own thing. I don't want to worry about, like, what their dad did and have.

[John Kiriakou]

None of my kids, none of my five kids have any interest in doing what I did, which I think is wonderful. And they've all done things completely different from each other. My oldest is a bond trader in Chicago. My second is an elementary school music teacher in North Carolina. My third is getting a degree in supply chain economics. My fourth changes her mind, but right now she's studying engineering. And my fifth is. Is in eighth grade. But they're all. They have completely different interests, which I think is the. The best and the healthiest.

[Julian Dory]

And that's. And. And that, that, you know, I just think that leads to more happiness that way too. And that's great that you support that as well. Also, not for nothing, I wouldn't want to follow in your footsteps after what they did to you as well. So maybe that was one good no.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right. That's right.

[Julian Dory]

John is always a pleasure man pleasures again.

[John Kiriakou]

Always enjoy coming here and seeing you.

[Julian Dory]

Love talking with you about world events. You have such a good outlook on stuff. So until next time.

[John Kiriakou]

Good.

[Julian Dory]

All right, we'll have everything linked down below for you. Your ex, your sub stack, your new show, all that.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Okay, great. I look forward to it. Thank you.

[Julian Dory]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below. It's okay not to be perfect with finances.

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