Epstein Cover-Up, Ghislaine Maxwell & Israel's Role w/ CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | PBD Podcast | Ep. 612

Summary

PBD Podcast Episode Summary: "Epstein Cover-Up, Ghislaine Maxwell & Israel's Role w/ CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou | Ep. 612"

Host: Patrick Bet-David
Guest: John Kiriakou
Release Date: July 9, 2025

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1. Introduction and Guest Background

Patrick Bet-David welcomes John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and one of the first whistleblowers to expose the agency's use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Kiriakou shares his deep connection with the CIA, reflecting on his two-decade career and the pivotal moments that led him to become a whistleblower.

Notable Quote:

• John Kiriakou [01:00]: "I think about it still every day. I've been out for 20 years. I still think about it every single day."

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2. John Kiriakou's CIA Career

Kiriakou recounts his extensive travels, having visited 72 countries over 15 years, and shares anecdotes from his early days at the CIA, including a memorable visit to the Oval Office during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Notable Quote:

• John Kiriakou [04:38]: "I remember thinking nobody would believe me if I told them what I was doing right now."

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3. The Enhanced Interrogation and Torture Program

The discussion delves into the CIA’s development and implementation of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT), commonly known as torture. Kiriakou explains how psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created waterboarding methods, which were then sold to the CIA for upwards of $100 million.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [18:21]: "They charged the CIA... we can implement it. And we're going to call it Enhanced Interrogation Techniques."
• John Kiriakou [20:41]: "These two guys out at the secret site actually carry out the torture. At the CIA, we were never trained in this kind of thing."

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4. Refusal and Repercussions

Kiriakou stands out as the sole member among 14 approached CIA officers to refuse participation in the EIT program. His ethical stance leads to severe consequences, including being passed over for promotions and eventually facing arrest under the Espionage Act for speaking to the press.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [19:46]: "I was the only person who went to prison."
• John Kiriakou [19:52]: "I want no part of it."

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5. The Epstein Cover-Up Connection

The conversation shifts to the Jeffrey Epstein case, with Kiriakou speculating on possible intelligence agency involvement. He posits that Epstein could have been an "access agent" for foreign intelligence services like Mossad, leveraging his connections to influential figures for intelligence gathering.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [62:38]: "Jeffrey Epstein, in my view, is a textbook case of an access agent."
• John Kiriakou [62:50]: "And we know that Prince Andrew was implicated. So somebody would have to seriously take a risk by releasing that information."

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6. Trust and Relations with Other Intelligence Agencies

Kiriakou discusses the dynamics between the CIA and other intelligence agencies, expressing distrust towards Mossad and the French intelligence services while praising the collaboration with British MI6 and MI5 for their efficient operations.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [80:15]: "I have a serious problem with the French. They destroy laptops to bug us."
• John Kiriakou [85:43]: "We don't trust the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Cubans... but the Brits, MI6 and MI5, they're the best."

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7. Lawfare and Political Manipulations

The episode explores the concept of "lawfare," where legal systems are used as weapons against political adversaries. Kiriakou shares his personal experience of being targeted through legal manipulations, leading to his imprisonment and the erosion of his career and personal life.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [105:25]: "This judge defined espionage as providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it."
• John Kiriakou [105:40]: "John Brennan was testing lawfare on me. He ruined me."

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8. Current Implications and Speculations

Kiriakou expresses skepticism about the likelihood of further revelations or accountability within intelligence circles, particularly concerning high-profile figures like John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey. He emphasizes the entrenched power and secrecy within these agencies, making whistleblowing exceedingly difficult.

Notable Quotes:

• John Kiriakou [107:36]: "I thought you were the Congressional overseers. You're afraid of them."
• John Kiriakou [113:56]: "The Tuesday morning kill list meeting... one of the most incredible operations I've ever seen."

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9. Conclusion and Final Remarks

Patrick and John wrap up the discussion by reflecting on the pervasive issues within intelligence agencies, the challenges of exposing corruption, and the personal costs of whistleblowing. Kiriakou underscores the importance of one person’s moral courage in the face of systemic wrongdoing.

Notable Quote:

• John Kiriakou [121:22]: "I was terribly disappointed that you didn't stand up for me. I expected more from you."

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Key Takeaways

• Ethical Dilemmas in Intelligence: Kiriakou's refusal to participate in torture highlights the moral conflicts faced by intelligence officers.

• Systemic Corruption and Accountability: The episode sheds light on the challenges whistleblowers encounter within powerful intelligence structures.

• Epstein and Intelligence Agencies: Speculative connections between Jeffrey Epstein and foreign intelligence services raise concerns about unchecked power and covert operations.

• Lawfare as a Tool for Political Gain: The use of legal systems to target and silence dissenters showcases the manipulation of justice for political ends.

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Further Engagement

Listeners are encouraged to follow John Kiriakou’s platform, Deep Focus, for more in-depth discussions on intelligence, international affairs, and criminal justice.

• Deep Focus on YouTube: Deep Focus with John Kiriakou

Connect with John Kiriakou:

• Manect Handle: @JohnKiriakou (Link available in the podcast description)

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This episode offers a compelling insight into the inner workings of the CIA, the ethical challenges within intelligence operations, and the profound personal sacrifices made by whistleblowers like John Kiriakou.

Transcript

[Patrick Bet-David]

Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Race the sails.

[John Kiriakou]

Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Over. Roger.

[John Kiriakou]

Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit.

[John Kiriakou]

On your next campaign.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Get started today at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply.

[John Kiriakou]

Did you ever think you were made? I know this life, Adam. What's your point?

[Patrick Bet-David]

The future looks bright.

[John Kiriakou]

My handshake is better than anything I ever saw.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's right here. You are a one of one. My son's right about. I don't think I've ever said this. Okay, so I've been obviously following your story for many years. I'm glad we're finally doing this.

[John Kiriakou]

The pleasure's all mine.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Trust me, it is. I'm excited about this, of having you on, you know, as your story. CIA officer. You went in, you were one of the first to come out and blow the whistle on waterboarding. You know, they came after you. The FBI came after you. I mean, I want the whole audience to hear the story. The timing of it is kind of weird because we're live right now. We decided to go live with all this stuff coming out with Epstein, with all the stuff that's going on. So many different things to discuss. So great to have you on the podcast.

[John Kiriakou]

Pleasure's mine. As I said, I'm so happy to be here, and. And it's great to meet you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Likewise. So if you don't mind, take a moment and share your background, because based on, you know, what I've read and what I've seen and what I've heard you say in the past, you were the first ever officer, CIA officer, to get arrested. How did that happen?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, arrested for speaking to the press.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The whistleblower blowing the whistle. Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So.

[John Kiriakou]

I had an absolutely wonderful career at the CIA. Absolutely wonderful. I think about it still every day. I've been out for 20 years. I still think about it every single day.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Miss it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Actually, really, I do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What part of it.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm not supposed to say that in public, really, Because I'm supposed to be this dissident.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

But, you know, I really felt like I was serving the American people, and that's what I set out to do. From the day I applied to the CIA, or I didn't even really apply, I was recruited, but from the day I went into the process, my desire was to serve the American people. And there were a couple of things I really, really loved. Besides feeling like I was seriously making a contribution, I loved the travel. Man. I went to 72 countries.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, my God.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In how many years?

[John Kiriakou]

In 15 years, 72.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Were you married at the time or single?

[John Kiriakou]

Married twice.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Married twice. Got it.

[John Kiriakou]

So it's in part because I'm going to 72 countries.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's why I'm asking the question. Yeah, yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

But I'll tell you, there was one time I was in Yemen and I flew back and I got back to Washington at like 10 o' clock in the morning, and I thought, very stupidly, I thought, you know what? I'm going to go into the office just to do my accounting. So I go to the office and my boss sees me and he says, hey, I didn't know you were back. And I said, actually, I'm not really back yet. I just wanted to do my accounting and I'm going to go home and go to sleep. And he says, okay, well, can you go to Khartoum? And I said, what? When? 3:00 clock today? Yeah. And he says, well, it's the curse of speaking Arabic. And I said, all right, let me go home and do some laundry at least. And I went home, did my laundry, repacked back to the airport and fly to Khartoum.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's insane. And was that like, on any given day, anything could happen and you could be on the road.

[John Kiriakou]

You never knew what was going to happen that day. And that was one of the things that I loved, was that it was completely different every day. When I was a little kid, my dad was a public school principal and he had the same job for 44 years. And I remember thinking when I was little, wow, I hope I can have a job that I love as much as my dad loves. Loves his job. And then as an adult, I thought I would cut my own throat if I had to do the same thing every day for 44 years. But that was the great thing about the CIA, was every day was different. One day, it was the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, August 2, 1990. We knew that they were going to invade. So I got up really early, took a shower early, get into the office around 6, and my boss is already there and he says, don't take your jacket off, we're going to go to the White House. Well, I had never been to the White House other than as a. As a tourist.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This is 1990, so it's senior.

[John Kiriakou]

1990. It was senior. That's right. So we go into the oval office. I'm 25 years old. It's the President, the vice president, the national security advisor, the CIA director, my boss and me. I'm 25. The president sits down. So we all sit down. And then the President says, well, now what do we do? And everybody turns and looks at me. And it took me a second to snap into it. I said, well, Mr. President, as you know, Iraqi troops crossed the border at 2 o' clock this morning. They took the whole of Kuwait. The royal family fled to Saudi Arabia, blah, blah, blah. But I remember thinking nobody would believe me if I told them what I was doing right now. And that was one of those incidents where it was different every single day. I was the note taker once in a meeting between Bill Clinton and the Greek Prime Minister. And it was the prime minister, the defense minister, the foreign minister and the Greek note taker for us, it was the president, Secretary Albright, National Security Adviser Berger, Ambassador Nick Burns, and me. And we go around the room. The President's saying, would you like a cup of coffee? You want something to eat? Can I offer you anything? Everybody's saying, no, no, no. No, thank you. He comes to me and I'm just standing there with my notebook. And he says, may I offer you something to eat? And I said, oh, no, thank you, Mr. President, I'm fine. And he says, oh, are you with me? I said, yes, sir, I'm with you. And he said, I thought you were Greek. I said, I kind of am, but I'm not. But I'm with you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's why he said, may. I like talking slowly. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Like I'm an idiot.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's right.

[John Kiriakou]

I don't speak English.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That is hilarious. So this is. So you're in from when? 90 to 4.

[John Kiriakou]

First of January of 90.

[Patrick Bet-David]

First of January.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Cleared calendar. That's a good way to get started.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Funny, huh? The way that worked out.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Pretty wild.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Literally the first of January.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. So my first work day was like, I think the third or the fourth. It was whatever the Monday was. But my hiring was affected. The first of January and then I. I left officially. I left in April of 05.

[Patrick Bet-David]

April of 05.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So what was it like working under Woolsey?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I actually liked Woolsey. Woolsey was. Woolsey was not a good fit for. For a Clinton White House.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He never talked to him. He never met with them.

[John Kiriakou]

They had literally. Literally. I can tell you that in his eight years as president, Bill Clinton was briefed twice.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I know. He told me this. I talked to Wolsey and he's like, he never talked to me. I never understood that. We never had a conversation.

[John Kiriakou]

We used to joke that he wouldn't recognize.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you think that is? Is that. Was that Clinton's strategy? To say, I don't trust anybody from the CIA to even talk to them because I don't think they're on my team? Why do you think he did?

[John Kiriakou]

I don't think it was that clean. I think that Bill Clinton genuinely didn't care about foreign policy, but he knew that Al Gore did. So Gore was briefed six days a week for eight years.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So Gore spoke to Woolsey, not.

[John Kiriakou]

Not all the time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And then Gore would deliver to Clinton. Is that a strategy sometime with presidents where the President doesn't talk to the Director of CIA and they allow the VP to do the dirty work?

[John Kiriakou]

That was the case under George W. Bush. George W. Bush had zero interest in this stuff. And when it came, for example, there's kind of a famous story that came out of. Of George Tenet's memoir. The torture program was, as you can imagine, it was extraordinarily controversial, but in a very small group of people. In the beginning, it was only something like 16 people on the planet knew that the CIA was doing this waterboarding. Waterboarding.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Only 16 people knew.

[John Kiriakou]

In the beginning? Yes, in the beginning, when they were coming up with a plan. So the way George tells the story in his memoir, he prepared the presidential finding for George W. Bush's signature. And he went to the White House, and when he's in the anteroom of the Oval Office, Dick Cheney walks in and he says, hi, George, what are you doing here? And George says, I have the presidential finding for the President's signature to approve the torture program. And Cheney says, oh, I'll take that. And George said, well, no, I need to get the President's signature. And Cheney said, no, I'll get the President's signature. And then George speculated years later that the President didn't sign it, that it was auto penned, and that when the President later said, look, I had no idea that this was taking place, he was probably telling the truth, that Cheney was the one running foreign policy, intelligence, defense policy, and Bush just didn't have any idea.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He was the front. He was the face.

[John Kiriakou]

He was the face.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Similar to Biden. Right. Because even when they asked him, when Johnson, Speaker Johnson asked him about. I didn't sign that.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Same similar situation.

[John Kiriakou]

I think he probably had no idea.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You think the same applies to Clinton as well with Gore?

[John Kiriakou]

No, because they met regularly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so Clinton was a Hands on, guy.

[John Kiriakou]

A partnership. Yeah, yeah. And then on the big issues, there were two really big issues in the. At the end of the second Clinton tour, Clinton administration, it was talks with North Korea and Middle east peace. I have a very dear friend who was a very senior officer at the National Security Council during Clinton, and he said that in that last week that Clinton was president. They were at Camp David. He was at Camp David with Gore. My friend was. And it was Yasser Arafat and Abbas, and it was Prime Minister. Not Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. And I forget who his number two was. And he said they had this enormous map of Jerusalem and on the table, and with a Sharpie, they were literally dividing Jerusalem block by block. And when they finished, Gore said, my God, we have peace. And Arafat said, I can never sell this to the Palestinian people. And he walked out. And Gore ran out after him and said, wait a minute, after all this, you can't just quit. If there's something you don't like, let's renegotiate it. And Arafat said, I can never sell any deal to the Palestinian people. And then that was the end of it. And Clinton kind of alluded to this in his memoir when he said that he should have pulled Albright out of North Korea because we were getting nowhere with the North Koreans, and he should have put Albright in the room as well to pressure Arafat.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Interesting. Looking back now, when you hear stories like this, how different history could have been, can you imagine totally how different things could have been if managed in a different way? Going back to the waterboarding. So when you're saying 16, who was the original person that proposed the waterboarding idea and said this works? And how did that person even find out how it works? Was it accidental?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, the actual person is still unclear. So listen, I've read all of these guys memoirs, and I was there amongst them, and I didn't know. So as it turned out, about A month after 9, 11, somebody went up to George Tenet at a cocktail party and said, there are these two psychologists who work for the Air Force, and they've reverse engineered the seer training, the survival evasion.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Very intense training.

[John Kiriakou]

Very intense, and a lot of guys don't make it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I was supposed to go to see your training. I never ended up going. I got out of the army.

[John Kiriakou]

It's hideous.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's hideous. Yeah. Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

So they've reverse engine. They broke.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Break small bones. You know, you go through some. The POW type of training, they gas you to make sure you're not going to leak information. It's very intense.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. And for $108 million, they can contract with us and implement it. And we're going to call it Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. And whoever it was, it was somebody either in the CIA's Counterterrorism center or somebody with proximity to the leadership of the Counterterrorism Center. And so contracts were signed. Now, I was in Pakistan at the time as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations. I had no idea, none of us did, that these conversations were taking place at headquarters. And so starting In January of 2002, we began hitting safe houses, Al Qaeda safe houses. And I still remember the first one I did, my first day in Pakistan. I went to introduce myself to the station chief, and he said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an Al Qaeda safe house. I said, okay. I went back to my. My office with a legal pad, and I wrote, all right. I said to myself, what do I need to do to take down a safe house? And I had taken all the classes. Advanced Counterterrorist Operations. All that stuff I wrote at the top of the paper, 0200, because I thought I would want it to be dark, I would want everybody to be asleep, and I want the element of surprise.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Two in the morning.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, two in the morning. I need. I need battering rams. I need weapons and ammunition. I need encrypted walkie talkies, secure comms back to headquarters. You know, we need all this stuff. I just went on to a. On online gauls.com to this police. What do you call it? Supply house in Kentucky. I bought all this crap, put it on my CIA credit card. They shipped it out in the diplomatic pouch. And so the first night that we tried this, we got a tip. We went to the house, broke down the door. We catch two kids, 18 years old. They both burst into tears. One of them asks if he can call his mom. I'm like, no, you can't call your mom. So we cuff him, turn him over to the Pakistanis. They put him in the Rawalpindi jail, Rawalpindi being the enormous city that's connected to Islamabad. We did it again a week later, and we got a tip from a friendly Arab intelligence service and broke down the door. And this time, we got some important people. We got a guy from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and you may recall, they were the ones that killed President Sadat. And then in. I think it was 95 they merged with al Qaeda. And I thought, okay, this is going pretty well. So we started doing this more and more and more. We're catching so many people that one day the Pakistanis come to me and say, look, the jail's full. Like, it's literally full. We can't squeeze one more person into it. You got to do something with these guys. I send a cable to headquarters, and I said, the jail's full. The pacs want them out. What do I do? They call me and they said, we want you to put them on a C12 cargo plane and send them to Guantanamo. And I said, guantanamo, Cuba? Why would we send them to Cuba? And they said, well, we came up with this idea. We're going to keep them in Cuba for two or three weeks until we can decide which federal court to try them in. So it was the eastern and southern districts of New York, the eastern district of Massachusetts, the western district of Pennsylvania, and the eastern district of Virginia. I said, that's a great idea. So we start sending everybody to Guantanamo. But then Dick Cheney says, or somebody close to Dick Cheney. Another one of those things that's never been really revealed. They don't have any rights in Cuba. Why don't we just keep them there forever? Okay? So that's what started happening. In the meantime, we capture Abu Zubaydah in late March of 2002. Now, we were told at the time Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al Qaeda. That turned out to be incorrect. He had actually never even been a member of Al Qaeda. He was a bad guy. He was a facilitator for Al Qaeda. He founded the. What they called the house of martyrs, the Al Qaeda safe house. In Peshawar, he had created and staffed Al Qaeda's two training camps in Kandahar and helmand provinces in Afghanistan. So if you. If you wanted to make jihad, he would get you in to Afghanistan. If you were tired of the fight and you wanted to go home, he would get you out, get you a passport, send you back to your home country. So, bad guy. And then we captured him. I had no idea that at headquarters at the time, there was this debate about what to do when we eventually capture a leader. Now, we had already killed Mohammed Atef, who had been what they called the director of military affairs for al Qaeda. We killed him in. In Tora Bora in October of 2001. So what do we do with this guy, Al Qaeda? I mean, sorry, Abu Zubaydah. I had no idea that these enhanced interrogation techniques had been. Had been in the works. From that cocktail party in October until March of 2002. In May of 2002, I get back home to headquarters, and I'm just standing in the sandwich line at the cafeteria, and a senior officer comes up to me very casually, and he says, hey, I'm glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? I had never heard that term before.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Certified in enhanced interrogation techniques.

[John Kiriakou]

I said, what does that mean? And he says, we're going to start getting rough with these guys like that. I said, well, what does that mean?

[Patrick Bet-David]

He's saying this in the cafeteria in.

[John Kiriakou]

Full view of everybody in there. Now, everybody's cleared, but they're not cleared for that information. It was so highly compartmentalized. So he described these techniques to me, and I said, buddy, that sounds like a torture program. And he said, it's not a torture program. The president signed it, and the Justice Department signed. Approved it. I said, let me think about it for an hour. So I got out of the sandwich line. I went up to the seventh floor of the CIA, which is the executive floor. There was a very, very senior CIA officer up there for whom I had worked in the Middle east ten years earlier, and we loved each other. So I knocked on his door and I said, I need some advice. I was just approached about these enhanced interrogation techniques. And he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade here. This is a torture program, and you know how these guys are. He said, they're cowboys, and somebody's going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation. Then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation, and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. And as it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But.

[John Kiriakou]

But I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. I went back downstairs, I said, this is a torture program. I want no part of it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you never learned, you never went through it.

[John Kiriakou]

I was the only one. They approached 14 people. And I'm sorry to tell you that I was the only one who said no. And the crazy thing is, I knew these guys. I was friends with these guys. Our wives were friends. Our kids played together. I had no idea that they had the ability to become monsters, murderers, you know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But the two psychologists who originally came up with that, where did they take that from? And how do they come up with the Testing.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because you either are taught how to do this or it accidentally happens to you.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right. So they were actually instructors in the Air Force's SEER training program. And they said, hey, this, this turns these guys into babbling, weeping little girls. We should be doing this on prison.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How did they learn, though?

[John Kiriakou]

They were taught by who? The Air Force. They had both been Air Force pilots.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How did the Air Force learn?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, it's a long standing program because the idea is, let's say you're an Air Force pilot and you get shot down over Iran. They want to teach you what presumably the Iranians would do to you and then how you can try to withstand it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And these were what? James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

[John Kiriakou]

And Bruce Jessen, that's correct.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So those are the guys that came up with the waterboarding program.

[John Kiriakou]

That's it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And then you.

[John Kiriakou]

And they got rich.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so how did he get rich, by the way? How do you make money if you come up with that?

[John Kiriakou]

They charged the CIA. The reports are between 47 million and $108 million for their services.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What? Yeah, to teach people how to do waterboarding. They taught them.

[John Kiriakou]

And then to make matters worse, these two guys go out to the secret prison and they actually carry out the torture. At the CIA, we were never trained in this kind of thing. We were never trained in interrogation. When I started interrogating prisoners, I cabled headquarters. I said, look, we have these prisoners. I have to interrogate them or somebody has to interrogate them. What should I do? Should I turn them over to the FBI? They said, no, interrogate them. I said, yeah, but I've never had an interrogation class. Oh, just wing it. You can figure it out.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Even right now it says the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA reported torture identified that they got paid over $80 million for their work. That is pretty. So did you ever see anybody waterboard anybody?

[John Kiriakou]

Well, we waterboarded each other in training, but in terms of prisoners being waterboarded, no. Okay, but I should add, after I turned it down, as crazy as this sounds, I got passed over for promotion. And I went into the deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center's office. He was an old friend of mine. And I said, dammit, we. What do I have to do to get promoted around here? I just caught the number three of Al Qaeda with these two hands and I get passed over for promotion. What, do I have to catch bin Laden to get promoted around here? And that senior officer that I had spoken to that I'd gotten the advice from. He promoted me out of cycle. He said, this is a travesty. But a friend of mine who was in my promotion panel said that the chief of counterterrorism said that I had. His words displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism. Shocking lack of commitment. Man, this thing was so patently illegal. I thought, certainly, I can't be the only person that sees the illegality in this program. But then what happened was, when I got promoted, I also became the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, I got to see everything that the CIA was doing around the world. And then the cables started coming back from the secret site saying, we're waterboarding him. And this is what's happening. So.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you're seeing this communication every single day. But. But let me ask you. This is. Isn't there a. Don't they expect you to get in? And then there comes a moment where they talk to you, where it's the wink, wink, conversation, nothing. Email, nothing. Text, nothing. On WhatsApp Signal, where it's like, what do you think we do here, bro? Like, you think we follow the law?

[John Kiriakou]

But that was okay for me, for the most part. I'll give you an example.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I sat next to this guy who was a friend of mine, and we would have lunch together. We traveled together a couple of times. And then there was another guy who sat 20ft away in one of the very few private offices. And this third guy would come in every day. Hey, guys. We'd say, hey, man, how you doing? Hey, guys. How was your weekend? Hey, it was great. How are you? How was your weekend? Hey, how are the kids? Good. You know, Merry Christmas, whatever. Finally, I said to my buddy, you know, he is the nicest guy, and I don't have any idea what he does here. And my friend says, dude, he's the head of the Special Activities Division. And I said, okay. That was cool to me, because there are very bad people out there who present a clear and imminent danger to the United States and to American citizens and American facilities. And sometimes you have to do some ugly things. But the torture program was a crime of choice. We didn't have to do that. In fact, we were so deeply at odds with the FBI over this that the FBI actually removed all FBI personnel from the country where the secret prison was located. They didn't even want to be in the same country while the torture was going on. Listen, Patrick, it is like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI. But if there's one thing that they are really good at, it's interrogation. And we should have just let them do their job.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Legal interrogation.

[John Kiriakou]

Correct.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not creative. CIA. The stuff that you guys.

[John Kiriakou]

Precisely.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Really, so you give them credit on.

[John Kiriakou]

So they've been doing it since the Nuremberg.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What is the difference? Tactics they use Interrogation from the CIA.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. Well, that's a good question. It's the most basic one. Their tactic is to sit across the table like you and I are doing right now. Treat each prisoner with respect. Maybe you give him an apple or a cup of tea or a cigarette, and you establish this rapport, this relationship. Eventually he's going to talk to you. Eventually. For the CIA, there was this element of revenge. 911 was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the Republic. And so there was this idea that we had to avenge the deaths of 3,000Americans. We had the deaths of 3,000Americans on our shoulders. And so you want to go in there with fists flailing and that just didn't accomplish anything besides the fact that the CIA did not stop at those 10 techniques. They did things that the Justice Department had never approved, that nobody had ever been trained in. You know, things well beyond waterboarding. Things that I thought were worse than waterboarding.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Like what?

[John Kiriakou]

Like. Like, for example, what they called the cold cell. A cold cell, you're stripped naked, you're chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way. Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour a CIA officer throws a bucket of ice water on you. Okay. We killed prisoners with that technique. They had hypothermia and they died. And what do we do? We just dig a hole outside the interrogation room and put them in the hole and cover it up.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Literally.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. You can't send the body back to their families. You don't even know where they're from half the time. The other one was sleep deprivation, which sounds kind of silly, but, for example, Don Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense at the time, and he pooh, poohed this whole thing, thing in the press saying, I have a stand up desk in my office and sometimes I work for 24 hours standing there. Sleep deprivation doesn't hurt anybody. Well, we're not talking about standing for 24 hours at Don Rumsfeld's desk. We're talking about something far worse. The American Psychological association, the apa, was on contract to the CIA at the time. They told us that people begin to Lose their minds. At day seven, with no sleep, they begin to die of organ failure. At day nine, the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days. Now imagine again, you're chained to that eye bolt in the ceiling with industrial strength lighting on you 24 hours a day and death metal at volume 11 in your cell 24 hours a day. And then your organs just shut down and you die chained to that eyeball.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you heard and saw many stories of people that died that didn't make it last night.

[John Kiriakou]

We would get cables the next morning saying, unfortunately, prisoner so and so passed away as a result of interrogation. We will dispose of his body in this way. And I'm like, and all this stuff.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is being documented and communicated. How does the CIA protect that? Somebody right there doesn't take a screenshot and keep it in their phones for later on in case, if the CIA flips and comes after them for them to say, let me tell you what I have on you guys. Leave me alone.

[John Kiriakou]

I don't mean to smile, but the CIA would tell you that that's an easy answer. It's called the Espionage act because if you breathe one word, one word to the press, we're going to charge you with espionage.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is that what happened to you?

[John Kiriakou]

Three counts.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So walk me through it when this happened, because from the moment you left, it didn't happen eight years until after you left the CIA, right? Seven or eight years.

[John Kiriakou]

I wish I could tell you that I took a moral stand and I went up there and I told them that wasn't it at all. It was actually selfish on my part. So I'm seeing these cables come back from the secret sites and I'm thinking to myself, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. This is absolutely illegal. Listen, we've got a law in this country called the Federal torture Act of 1946 that specifically outlawed these techniques. And not only are we signatories to the United Nations Convention against Torture, we wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which again, specifically outlawed these techniques. And then, like magic, in 2002, it's all legal. Well, the law never changed. Let me add, before I get to your specific point, in 1946, 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. That was a death penalty crime to waterboard somebody. In January of 1968, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara saw a front page photograph in the Washington Post of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. He ordered that the soldier be investigated. That soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sent to Leavenworth for 20 years. And as I said, the law never changed. We changed. And so like magic in 2002, because we didn't like that law, we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. So I'm seeing all these cables come back. I'm thinking, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Certainly somebody's going to say something. And then I'm seeing cables from people who were out there at the secret site saying, whoa, I never signed up for this. I think this is illegal.

[Patrick Bet-David]

People are saying that in the. In writing, in the cables, and you're seeing people quitting?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How often did that happen?

[John Kiriakou]

With regularity. I'm going to say at least a dozen people either resigned, retired or curtailed because of this specific reason. We had a secretary who passed out while. While watching somebody be tortured. We had doctors. There was a doctor who revived abu zubaydah when his heart stopped during waterboarding. Revived him so he could be tortured more. And he's like, look, I took a hippocratic oath. First do no harm. I'm not doing this. That's a career ending decision to curtail an assignment and come back. But they did, they quit, they retired or they curtailed. So I thought, well, certainly somebody's going to say something. And then I left. In 2004, my resignation was effective 2005. I went into the private sector. And then in 2007, December of 2007, I get a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. And he said he had a source who said that I had tortured abu zubaydah. I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to abu zubaydah. I said, I never laid a hand on him or on anybody else. And so he said. And I didn't know this was an old reporter's trick because I had never spoken to a reporter before. He said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I said, yeah, I'll think about it. So a couple of days pass, we get to Monday and there's a presidential press conference and a reporter asks president bush about these reports from amnesty international, human rights watch and the international committee of the red cross saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. And the president looks right in the camera and he says, we do not torture. And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, he is a bald faced liar. He's looking the american people in the eye and he's lying. Now, in retrospect, he may not have known, but he said, we do not torture. Two days later, he's walking out of the south portico of the white House to go to the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is this it, by the way? Is this when he says we don't torture people?

[John Kiriakou]

Played rap, Something else. There's been a lot of talk in the newspapers and on TV about a program that I put in motion to detain and question terrorists and extremists. I have put this program in place for a reason, and that is to better protect the American people. And when we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we're going to detain them, and you bet we're going to question them. Because the American. American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence, so we can help them, help protect them. That's our job.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But it doesn't say, secondly, this government.

[John Kiriakou]

Does not torture people. You know, we stick to U.S. law.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And then go to the other clip I just sent you. Is this your interview with Brian? This is you.

[John Kiriakou]

That's the Brian Ross interview.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So press play, just to see the first 30 seconds.

[John Kiriakou]

You were involved in the capture of Abu Zubaida. I was.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And tell me about that, how it happened.

[John Kiriakou]

It was quite a long process. We had information that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan.

[Patrick Bet-David]

At what point of this interview do you say that we do waterboard? How far along?

[John Kiriakou]

It was pretty well into the interview. And, you know, I made a very serious mistake in that interview. When Mitchell and Jessen were out in. This requires a little bit of background when they were out at the secret site. Okay, so there's this CIA team and an FBI team. The FBI interrogation team is headed by an FBI agent named Ali Sufan. Ali and I worked together in Pakistan, and he was what every FBI agent should be, right? This guy was a professional from the word go. And he established this relationship with Abu Zubaydah. So that opposubeidah was giving him actionable intelligence, like real intelligence that saved American lives. On August 2, 2002, for reasons that have never been clear, George Tenet asked president Bush to move primacy of the Abu Zubayd operation or Abu Zubayd interrogation from the FBI to the CIA. And that day, August 2nd, the CIA began torturing upu Zubaydah. He immediately went silent. Okay, now, the mistake I made in the. In the Brian Ross interview is I said Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded once. I said it was torture and it was wrong and it was illegal, but I said that it worked because he had been waterboarded once and he gave us actual intelligence that was not true. Now, the reason I said that was because Mitchell and Jessen reported that he had been waterboarded once. Now, how did they get away with that? The CIA and the FBI historically had hated each other so much that even their computer systems were incompatible with one another. And so Ali Soufan every day is interrogating Abu Zubaydah, and then he's writing up these cables saying he said this and he said that and he said the other thing and this thing, and, you know, we need to talk to this country and talk to that country. That information was never making its way back to the CIA because the systems were incompatible. Mitchell and Jessen take over. They waterboard Abu Zubaydah. He clams up, stops talking entirely. They waterboard him 83 times, and he still says nothing. So they go into the FBI system, they pull out Ali Soufan's cables, they retype the cables in the CIA system, and they say, we waterboarded him once, and oh, my God, look what he told us. And I said to my boss, the deputy director, I said, maybe I'm wrong about this. Right? I still think it's crime, but maybe it actually works. Well, it wasn't until 2005 that the CIA inspector general found in an investigation that this had happened, that they had faked the intelligence, essentially. And it wasn't until 2009 that it was finally declassified.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And in 2005 was when they destroyed all the evidence.

[John Kiriakou]

Right, exactly. So the White House counsel, Harriet Meyers, told Jose Rodriguez, who was the deputy director for operations, and Gina Haspel, who was the head of counterterrorism at the time and later became the CIA director. Don't destroy the videotapes of the torture sessions. As soon as they got back to the building, they put them all in an industrial grinder and they destroyed everything.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you feel about Gina?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, I wrote an op ed in the Washington Post when her appointment as director was announced. And I said, in the halls at the CIA, we used to call her bloody Gina Haspel because she went out to the secret site to observe the torture, just for the kick of watching.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The torture get out of here.

[John Kiriakou]

She was 1000% pro torture. And the other thing is, we talk a lot nowadays about the deep state. She was the definition of the deep state.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

She was 30 plus years at the CIA. Like, wouldn't you want an outsider to be the adult in the room?

[Patrick Bet-David]

So, okay, so then you go out there, you know, you talk to Brian Ross. Now that's out there right now, they're coming after you. Now the eight years takes place. Do you end up doing time or you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I did 23 months.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You did 23 months. And where were you at?

[John Kiriakou]

I was at the federal correctional institution at loretto, Pennsylvania.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who else is in that facility? Who is getting arrested there? Who's doing time there?

[John Kiriakou]

A third of the prisoners are pedophiles, okay? Mafia dons. There were a lot of mob guys.

[Patrick Bet-David]

A third of the people there are pedophiles.

[John Kiriakou]

Pedophiles.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So why would they put you there with.

[John Kiriakou]

Ah, I'm glad you asked me that question. And I swear we didn't plant the question at my sentencing. My attorneys asked the judge to put me in a minimum security work camp. Okay? There are no bars on the windows. The doors are unlocked. You're free to come and go as you please. You're just on your honor not to run away. And most of those guys work at a. There's a university in the town, the little village nearby, and you sweep the floors or whatever the judge says to the prosecutors. Any objection? They said, no objection. She says, okay, minimum security work camp. Well, the strange thing in our system is if you're sentenced to prison and you're free until the date of your incarceration, you physically drive to the prison and knock on the door and say, I'm here to turn myself in. It's weird, right? So I got up that morning and a couple of my lawyers, my cousin and his son, a documentary film crew, we drive to the prison and I go to the camp, minimum security camp. And I knock on the door and I said, I'm john kiriakou. I'm here to turn myself in. They said, oh, you have to go across the street to the actual prison. They'll process you and then they'll just bring you back over here. I said, okay. So I go across the street to the prison and said, I'm here to turn myself in. The guy says, okay. They put me through a metal detector. And then he starts to lead me around to the back of the actual prison. And I said, wait a minute. I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street. And he goes, and not according to my paperwork, you're not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

And I told myself, take it easy. There's nothing you can do. They'll put you in solitary if you say anything. So I didn't say a word. It took me about 45 minutes to get processed. And then they put me in a cell, like an actual cell. It was a Four man cell, but they squeezed six guys in there because of overcrowding. It took me four or five days before I got access to a phone.

[Patrick Bet-David]

To call your lawyer.

[John Kiriakou]

I called my lawyer and I said, hey, they put me in the actual prison with the mafia kingpins and the. And the Mexican drug cartel guys and the pedophiles. What do I do? And he said, oh, my God. He said, well, we can make a motion, but. But it'll be two years before we have a. A court date. He said, buddy, I'm sorry. You're going to have to tough it out.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Get out of here. 23 months. Two years.

[John Kiriakou]

And I told myself, you've lived in far worse places than this.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you married at this time or. No. What is your wife doing? Because I know your wife was also in the CIA.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, she was fired from the CIA on the day of my arrest just because she was married to me.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No other reason.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And is that common etiquette? Because married, they're worried you're gonna unprecedented? Well, because Jonah Mendez and Tony Mendez were in it together and they were married for 28 years or something like that.

[John Kiriakou]

The CIA encourages agency romances because you're both cleared so you can talk about work. We used to have this joke at the agency that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Marry another CIA.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everybody's married. We had this joke at the CIA that when you go into a meeting, don't touch the conference room table because you don't know who was having sex on it last night.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, seriously. Yeah, yeah, because they're married and they're just.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

I worked for. For a deputy director of the CIA who had been married three times, and all three of his wives had been his secretary.

[Patrick Bet-David]

All three of his wives had been a secretary. So. The place smells like bedusi. It's just a terrible. Wow. Yeah, it's not good. Some people like that.

[John Kiriakou]

And that's why you've got a 75% divorce rate? Because they're all banging each other.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, I mean. Okay, so. And. And are they banging each other and, like, dropping intel? You don't even know what I learned yesterday. Oh, tell me. Sometimes. Yeah, that's pretty nasty.

[John Kiriakou]

And then they'll ask you about that on the polygraph.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. Interesting. So, okay, so now you're going through things to any famous people you weren't there that we would know about? Any king. Any bosses that we would know about?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, the boss of the Gambin was there.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Which one?

[John Kiriakou]

Little Nikki Carozo.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay.

[John Kiriakou]

And the number three in the Bananos.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you're. You're hanging out with them?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, in fact, they, the Italians adopted me. So I was with, I was with the Italians the whole time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And were they. Did they know what your background is? Oh yeah, they all know.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh yeah, they all.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And how did they.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'm still friends with all of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did they treat you as a. Were they afraid of you? Did they respect you? Did they hate you? Did they want to kill you?

[John Kiriakou]

It was all respect. And I owe the easy time that I had there, I owe to Mark Lanzilotti. So Mark was from Philadelphia with scarf on those guys. Exactly. And then he saw in the New York Times an article saying that I was coming to that prison. And God bless him, on his own volition, he went to every one of the Italians to explain to them this CIA guy is coming. He's not a cop. The FBI are cops. The CIA protect us from the Muslims. That's what he told them. And so when I arrived, they had been told, I hate the FBI as much as they do. And so.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Interesting.

[John Kiriakou]

We were all one big happy family.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Ok, so, so let me, let me. I asked Jonah question right in front of the White House when we did the interview. This is when she told me about. She was a chief disguise officer.

[John Kiriakou]

She's a giant, by the way, at the CIA.

[Patrick Bet-David]

She is a giant.

[John Kiriakou]

Everybody loves and respects her.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Really. So she's, she's somebody, she's the real deal.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, yeah. And she's the one that held the mask in front of President Bush. And hey, this is not really me. Look what I. We have, we have capabilities of building. I asked her what did the profile of a great successful CIA agent. Okay. And she gave me her criterias. What, what would you say, what makes. Because, you know, you hear about what types of people they recruit. And you said earlier says I applied to work at CIA and you change it. You're like, I was recruited. Right. Because you get recruited to the CIA.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, my, my grad school advisor recruited me.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Great. And. But what would you say are the top qualities that help you have a successful 20, 30 year career at the CIA?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I could give you four, especially.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Somebody like you that's going to 70 now. Not the ones that work at the office. Guys on the road or something like you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, guys in the field.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes.

[John Kiriakou]

A CIA psychiatrist once told me what's probably the most important attribute you have to have what they call sociopathic tendencies. Not a sociopath, because sociopaths don't have a conscience. And you can't control them. And they blow right through the polygraph because they don't feel guilt. Okay, you want to hire somebody who feels guilt but is happy to break the law because we're the good guys, right? And I'll give you an example if we have a minute. When I was going through the process, the hiring process, I was with four other. Four other people, three guys and a woman. And the interviewer said, let's say you are a CIA officer in the field and you get a cable from headquarters and they say, we need for you to get the new classified indonesian economic figures. And then you go out and target the indonesian economic secretary, okay? So you take him to lunch, you take him to dinner, you hit it off. Your wives become friends. You go on weekend vacations together, your kids are playing together. Six months pass, you realize he's not recruitable. But headquarters says, hey, we need those figures. What do you do? One guy raises his hand, he says, you double down, you spend more money. The woman says, maybe you can run it through the wives. Maybe the wives get even closer. And I'm looking around, like, what? So I raised my hand. I said, you break into the indonesian embassy and you steal it. He says, that's exactly what you do. That's a sociopathic tendency. A normal person wouldn't say, I need something that patrick has. I think I'm going to break into his house and steal it. Normal people don't do that. But remember, we're the good guys. So sociopathic tendencies, an ability to work alone without having to be motivated by an outside factor. I loved that job so much, I hated to leave at the end of the day. And then I couldn't wait to get back in in the morning to see what I had missed from overnight. You have to be able to work for much of your career without any rewards, right? You catch up with zubaydah. You can't then call your friends and say, hey, I caught up with zubaydah. Or call your hometown radio station. I caught abu zubaydah. You can't tell anybody what you did. My first wife was a ballet teacher. And I would get home and she'd say, how was work? I'd say, great. What'd you do? Nothing. Who'd you talk to? Nobody. And then my phone would ring at midnight and I would speak in arabic. And then I would leave to do a meeting in the middle of the night. After a two hour surveillance detection route to the meeting and a two hour surveillance detection route from the meeting, get back home at 6 o' clock in the morning. And then she says, so what was her name? And I'm like, no, I was working. Uh huh. In the middle of the night, have a good time? Well, I mean, what are you going to do? I can't tell her I was, you know, at some clandestine meeting with the ambassador.

[Patrick Bet-David]

She didn't know she was CIA officer.

[John Kiriakou]

She knew I was CIA, but that was literally all that she knew. She had no idea what I did for a living.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So number one is sociopathic tendencies, but not a sociopath. You have to understand to make a decision without feeling guilty.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Number two is a level of work that you came in without any outside motivations to get you to go. Go to work.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Like you, you sincerely love the game.

[John Kiriakou]

And they give you an assignment and they say, do it. And that's it. Nobody's going to call and say, hey, can I help in any way make this easier for you? Do it. I got a cable, Patrick. They said, abu Zubaydah somewhere in Pakistan, go catch him. Like, go catch him. This country's the size of Texas and it has 220 million people. What do you mean go catch him? But by God, I set out to catch him and I did.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Pretty wild when you think about what the one thing that she said is similar to what you said. She says, when you do save the free world from the next World War 3 and you're watching TV and you know they're reporting and you know that you're the one that did that, you don't need the recognition.

[John Kiriakou]

No. You know, the day I got back from Pakistan, there was this kid in the office. He was, he was a, an intern, a graduate fellow, and he had been reading the cables from Pakistan. So I walk in and I've been gone for six, seven months. I walk in and he sees me and he goes, he goes like this. And I said, no, no, no, no, it was a team effort. And he said, dude, I read the cables. I said, don't say a word because not everybody here in the office is cleared for what happened. So now you got to just eat it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's wild. But to me, when I A Few Good men code reg, you want the truth I deserve? You can't handle the truth. You know, and he gives that whole speech, right? Yeah. I gotta say that if I got a job at the CIA, it's almost naive to believe there isn't code red type of tendencies. Right. Because you have the, what you have the official budget for the CIA that we all know about, then you have the Official black budget that operations that not everybody will know about. And then you have the unofficial black budget. So there's three different tiers. So you have to know that if you're in this game. Listen, we do certain things that the average person is just never gonna understand. So don't act like we have to do this and we have to do that. Don't be naive, Jon. This is what we do. You know what you signed up for. I would assume that's a norm.

[John Kiriakou]

Isn't it now? Yes. But remember, at the time of the 911 attacks, Executive Order 12333 was the law of the land. The CIA cannot murder people. President Ford signed that, that executive order. It had the force of law.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What a sign. But that means nothing.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, no. But you'd be surprised. I had a friend, Bob Baer, Bob Bear's pretty famous former CIA officer. He's written many books. One of his books became the. The film Syriana with George Clooney. He was serving in Iraq and came up with a plot to kill Saddam Hussein. And they threatened to arrest him for attempted murder. He had to resign from the CIA. You're in violation of executive order.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The moment it became public.

[John Kiriakou]

No. NSA heard somebody talking about the CIA guy. He's going to come up with a point.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It became public. That's a form of becoming public.

[John Kiriakou]

Became public.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But to me, that's like him being sloppy to me.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, no, no, what it was, was he was working with a group of Kurds, and the Kurds are on the phone saying, hey, so how do we do this? We're gonna figure out a plan. And NSA called the White House and said, hey, one of your guys is out there trying to come up with a plan to kill Saddam Hussein. And they said, you can either resign or you can be prosecuted for attempted murder.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He resigned.

[John Kiriakou]

He resigned. It was a ridiculous slap.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Interesting. Okay, well.

[John Kiriakou]

But anyway, on September 12th, all that changed.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. So President Trump. Okay, let's go through today the Epstein fumble. That just the biggest fumble of the administration so far. He's being interviewed by Rachel Campos Duffy. She asks in the interview, are you gonna release the John F. Kennedy files? Yes. Are you gonna release the 911 files? Yes. Are you gonna release the. This isn't it. Because somebody was sitting to her, Right. I don't think that's the one. It's a different interview. Are you going to release the Epstein files? And then she said, that's the one. Let me see if that's the one, Rob. No, no, that's not the One. Are you going to release this? Are you going to release that? And then that's it right there. So if you can play this. I don't know if you've seen this or not. Okay. So if you've seen this, you know which one it is once we get the video to work. And then he finally, when they ask him about Epstein, he hesitates. Okay. And he doesn't want to release it for whatever reason. Now, we don't know what the reasoning may be. He says, well, you know, sometimes, you know, stories like that get other people involved, and we don't want to do that. Great, then. Now, Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, all of these guys who have talked about Epstein, There's a video of a Dan Bongino who is on Tim Pool podcast, and he's being asked about. And you've been on Temple before. And he's on the Temple. You have been on there, right? Yeah, I think you have been. Yeah. And he's being asked about, you know, well, I'm in the waiting room of Fox News, and this guy's telling me that, you know, Epstein was Mossad and Papa. Pa, pa, pa. And that's exactly what happened. Okay. And then now, all of a sudden, we get the report three days ago, no client list, no this, no that. And yesterday, when they're being asked about it, Pam Bondi says they found child porn. That's what they found, and that's what they don't want to release. Is that the video, Rob? The one that President Trump is asking about Epstein? I think you just had the video. How long is that video, by the way?

[John Kiriakou]

This one is the shorter version.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, you need the other one to find a bonding one.

[John Kiriakou]

I have the entire one right here.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, play that one. Play that one. Because I want her answer to also be in it. And I got so many questions with this on the CIA side. But go ahead and play this clip here. Go for it.

[John Kiriakou]

Jeffrey Epstein left some lingering mysteries. One of the biggest ones is whether he ever worked for an American or foreign intelligence agency. The former labor secretary who was Miami U.S. attorney Alex Acosta, he allegedly said that he did work for an intelligence agency. So could you resolve whether or not he did? And also could you say why there was a minute missing from the jailhouse tape on the night of the 7th? Yeah, sure. If I. Pam, could I just interrupt a little second?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[John Kiriakou]

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You're asking.

[John Kiriakou]

We have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And do you feel like answering?

[John Kiriakou]

I don't mind answering. I mean, I can't believe you're asking.

[Patrick Bet-David]

A question, Epstein, at a time like this where we're having some of the.

[John Kiriakou]

Greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But you go ahead. Sure, sure.

[John Kiriakou]

First to back up on that, in February, I did an interview on Fox, and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it's sitting on my desk to be reviewed, viewed, meaning the file, along with the jfk, MLK files as well. That's what I meant by that. Also to the tens of thousands of video, they turned out to be child porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein. Child porn is what they were never going to be released, never going to see the light of day. To him being an agent. I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that. And the minute missing from the video. We released the video showing definitively that's a fumble. The video was not conclusive.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But why would you release that video?

[John Kiriakou]

Evidence prior to it was showing he committed.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You've seen this, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay. Body language. Your job is body language. You have to. As a sociopathic tendency, you have to be able to size up the other person's body. Absolutely. When you see this here, you see the President, you see Bond, you see the way they're handling this topic?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In your mind, what are you speculating?

[John Kiriakou]

That they're deflecting.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why?

[John Kiriakou]

I think that this is one of those things where they just don't want people to go deeper. And I don't think it has to do with, like. I don't think. I don't think people are going to be implicated if the people in the White House are going to be implicated in anything. I think it's more. I think it's more about protecting the Israelis, actually.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why?

[John Kiriakou]

Jeffrey Epstein, in my view, is a textbook case of an access agent. I've said this before, but I think it's important and it bears repeating. If you are a foreign intelligence service and you want information from Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or, you know, Alan Dershowitz or important people, you want the secret information from them. You're not going to recruit them. They don't need anything from you. They don't have any financial vulnerabilities. So you do the next best thing and you recruit somebody who has access to them, and you finance this person. He has a private island. He's got a private jet. He flies these people down. All the bedrooms and bathrooms we learned this week were wired for video and for sound. And then you can get them. You can catch them in these compromising positions, just in case you need to squeeze them a little bit. There's no evidence that any of them were squeezed. But just in case. And then you pass it back to your handlers. I had a trainer, one of my. One of my operational trainers, who told us when we were going through the process that the best recruitment he ever made was a copy machine repairman. And I laughed when he said it. And he said, no, I'm serious. Hear me out. He said, all of us want to recruit the Prime Minister. We're not going to recruit the prime minister. We're not even going to have access to the Prime Minister. But the Prime Minister's got a copy machine in his office. And every once in a while, that machine is going to need to be cleaned and serviced. So you recruit the copy machine repairman. And when he goes in there to make his repair or to clean the drums or whatever, he installs a little device that we give him so that every time somebody makes a copy, it transmits a copy back to the CIA. He said, I got a promotion. I got a medal. I got a photo op with the director. It made my career because every sheet of paper that went through that prime minister's office went straight to the CIA.

[Patrick Bet-David]

One little chip was doing that.

[John Kiriakou]

That's it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So now. So how do you use. So what do you do with those assets? Now you're getting. You know what the communication is. You know what they're thinking about. You know what their next move is. You know who their enemy is. You know who their ally is.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly. Maybe it's what their position's gonna be on trade negotiations. Maybe it's, you know, the Prime Minister's got some kind of health problem that you need to know about for planning purposes. You never know. You never know what's gonna pop. Maybe it's just, you know, spam, or it's a rent a car application or stupid stuff. You just throw it in the shredder or in the burn bag. But you know that that one nugget might come through. And I think that that's what Jeffrey Epstein was. Now we know all about Ghislaine Maxwell's father. Having had this long relationship with Mossad, I believe that he was a Mossad access Agent, it makes perfect sense to me.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So, you know, in this situation with Epstein and what's going on, who knows exactly what happened? The FBI or CIA?

[John Kiriakou]

Well, see, that's really the $64,000 question right there. One thing that didn't surprise me at all was the conclusion that he committed suicide. I've always said he committed suicide, and I say that only because of my own experience in the prison system.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You don't think someone killed him?

[John Kiriakou]

No, I don't.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You think he committed suicide? Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And I'll tell you why.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Please.

[John Kiriakou]

Because the Federal Bureau of Prisons is the biggest repository of semiliterate boobs anywhere in government. If you are. If you have an IQ of 65 and you want to work in government, straight to the Bureau of Prisons with you, right? Every flunky who couldn't make it through the local police academy, or every loser who left the. The. The military and couldn't find a job because he lives in some rural area and there are no jobs. Unless you want to be a farmer and live in a double wide. They go to the Bureau of Prisons. The guards, so many of the guards were so stupid where I was that they couldn't even read. So they couldn't do mail call because they couldn't read the envelopes. And so prisoners had to do the mail call for them. The only qualifications to be a prison guard are you have to have a GED or be working on a GED and no felony convictions. That's it. That's all. And you're in. So, number one, they're all morons. Number two, the cameras never work. Never. I wrote a blog. I used to smuggle out this blog, and my attorney would publish it, and it became my second book, Doing Time Like a Spy. But I wrote this blog about how I was working as a janitor in the. In the chapel.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And this is when you're doing your 23 months.

[John Kiriakou]

When I was doing my 23 months, I was Jan. I offered to teach a class because I, you know, did my PhD coursework in international affairs. And they told me if they wanted me to teach an effing class, they would ask me to teach an effing class. Now pick up the sweeper, the. The broom, and, you know, sweep the floors. So that's what I did. I said, fine for 16 cents an hour. So anyway, every time I'd go to the chapel in a period where there wasn't some sort of religious service scheduled, the guys are having sex in there, and I'd have to chase them out and the reason they had sex in there all the time is because the cameras never worked. And everybody knew where the cameras didn't work. They didn't work in the stairwell that led down to the mail room, for example. They didn't work in the hallway that led to the, to the laundry. And so people are constantly having sex in there. So when they say, oh my God, the cameras weren't working, it's a conspiracy. No, the cameras weren't working because they never work. And then they said, oh, the guards were asleep. Yeah, because the guards are always asleep. Right. They're supposed to work eight hours, no more than eight hours. These guys were doing it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This is so hard to believe.

[John Kiriakou]

It's awful. It's awful.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, no, no. This is naive to believe that. For me, my opinion, you got a guy this, this heavyweight of a guy that's got access to this information.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You're gonna allow something like that to happen? There's a lot of guys that have.

[John Kiriakou]

But you're gonna trust, you're gonna trust in your people that they realize he's a high profile prisoner, he's a suicide risk.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This makes me also, this, what this makes me also think about is the following. So what did you say? You call them stupid people, right. People who work there. Okay, but what did you call the other guy that was able to put a chip on the printer to get all the intel? Right. If you're able to con a prime minister to get all the facts and stuff that's coming in, how much easier is it if I'm dealing with stupid men to go and kill a guy that I want to kill? It's the easiest person to kill. I mean, cameras don't work. The prisoners are lazy guys. This is like Easy job where a brand new elementary guy can go and take him out.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes, but then the FBI et al are going to investigate that and they're going to look at everybody's financial records. Has anybody made a big deposit, bought a boat, moved into a bigger house? You know, and there's no indication that anybody profited in any way?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not yet. We don't know yet because it's not. And even if you, you know, there's many ways of doing it with, if a person wants to take them out, they're not going to have a hard time taking them out. But go back to this year. So you said Israel.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So do you think, you don't think anybody from the administration is being implicated, that they're on that list? I don't think so either. I'm not there. But who actually knows what happened? That's what I want to know. You know, cuz in the CIA you said something. I talked to Woolsey Wolsey. Like I never talked to the President Clinton. He was, you know, it's like I was there for two visits or two this. And nothing ever happened. Literally. Like now you're saying Gore was the one that would talk five, six days a weekend, the briefing. But who are the people that actually know the client list?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That actually have seen the videos, that actually have access to those who have actually seen it. How many people you think know exactly what happened? How big's that number?

[John Kiriakou]

I think it's actually more than most people realize. Because you figure Ghislaine Maxwell. 100% sure. But you figure Virginia Giuffre told us and actually five other young women in their statements in their lawsuit told us that there were rooms with banks of monitors. Right. And they were monitoring every room and every bathroom. So if there were clients, and I believe there were, and they were having sex with minors and I believe they were, every single person who was hired to monitor those screens would have known. I believe that there was a list, a client list. There had to have been. We know that there was a black book. It sold at Sotheby's. For heaven's sake. So where is it? Was it destroyed? And even if it was destroyed, why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell try to use it to save herself?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs.

[John Kiriakou]

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[Patrick Bet-David]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Patrick Bet-David]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Patrick Bet-David]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Patrick Bet-David]

Turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month [e-mail] specialoffer yeah. So now out of all these people that have access to it, say somebody is. Did you say it's sold at Sotheby's or Christie's or. Actually they both declined to handle it.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In a 2024 Maryland auction house attempted to sell one of Epstein's address, the little black book. But it failed to meet the reserve. But it did not sell. The book had been offered privately earlier with bids exceeding a hundred thousand. If that book is still out there, I'd buy it myself for that number. Is that it? Where's that at?

[John Kiriakou]

Rob Alexander historical office. That's what it was on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can you send me that link, Rob?

[John Kiriakou]

Yep.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is that the original book?

[John Kiriakou]

The original book. And you know what, I actually bought something from them. There was something that passed and I, I emailed them after the auction and I said, hey, I'd really like to have it. And they gave it to me for the, the minimum.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Send that to reserve. Just text it to me if you could. So, okay, so. So going back to it, but how many? So the number has to be in the thousands. Fair to say it's in the thousands because all the clients, all the employees, all the people that set up the cameras, all the girls that were involved, how many people they told. Yeah, but then, but then there were hundreds at least. Okay, but then here's, here's, there's the people that were friends with Virginia who they told. So you're secondhand, Right?

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But she knows, knows because she had the experience with Andrew and whoever it is, whatever the individuals were. So how many people have seen, have files, have information, have communication where 100% they know not. I have faith in Virginia telling me the truth. I have like how many Virginia's are there?

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How many of those is that? 50.

[John Kiriakou]

It's gotta be, right? Okay, 50.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So out of the 50, out of the 50, if I'm somebody that wants to get that intel. Okay, if I'm somebody that wants to get that intel and I want to get the next John, who is a FBI agent, CIA, who is conflicted. You were conflicted with waterboarding and that person's conflicted with the fact that they have access to this information. We're a bunch of minors, but.

[John Kiriakou]

Right. Where's the whistleblower?

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you get that person that has access to that information to be coming out to public? How do you get access to that person?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, in the CIA, 10 years ago I would have said WikiLeaks, they can protect your identity. They're the only ones who will protect your identity. Go to WikiLeaks today. I mean, for all intents and purposes, WikiLeaks doesn't really exist anymore. But you need somebody with a strong moral compass who's willing to take a serious risk because again, you're going to be prosecuted, you know, maybe even under that Espionage Act. The judge in my case, Judge Leonie Brinkama, set two precedents in espionage related cases. First of all, she ruled that she would not respect other district courts precedents that there had to be harm to the national Security for an espionage act prosecution. Secondly, she ruled that a person can accidentally commit espionage without the intent to commit espionage, without any criminal intent. And she defined espionage very simply as providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. People could argue that the Epstein files are national defense information, especially if they have something to do with a foreign country or with a foreign leader. And we know that Prince Andrew was implicated. So somebody would have to seriously take a risk by releasing that information.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so you're familiar with the Franklin coverup? You know the whole Larry King that story, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Rob, do you have the two? Actually, you know what, I want to text it to you. The book opens up with a story of what happened there. And the Franklin cover up is the child prostitution ring allegations. The guy actually ended up going to prison for different reasons. He didn't end up going to prison for that. He ended up going to prison. He was like a. Epstein is who he was Right back in the days. If you can pull out what I just sent you in this book. I think the book is called the Franklin Cover Up. I want to give credit to what the book is. Here's what it reads in the first two pages, if you can go. Yeah, right there. What do Ronald Reagan president George Bush fan, or CIA director William E. Colby, Democratic presidential candidate Bob Carey, billionaire and second richest man in America and now head of Salman Brothers, Warren Buffett and Ronald Roskins, the current administration of the Agency of International Development, all have in common? I asked my close friend and advisor William Kobe One day, 1991 I give up. Fanner, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Kobe said. What could that group have in common? Three things, I replied. All of them a burden at times for those who have to carry. The three things are me, John de Camp, a case called of Franklin and a man named Larry King. Are you serious? Dead serious, I responded. And I hope that word dead does not turn out to be a prophetic pronouncement as it has for at least 15 other Franklin related personalities. My statement to Bill Colby was not made lightly. Colby and his wife Sally Shelton Colby, a United States ambassador under President Carter, were at that very. Were at that very moment warning me to get away from the Franklin child abuse investigation, Larry King and anybody else linked with the Franklin as quickly as possible. For the sake of my own life and safety. Sally and Bill had never talked to me like this before. They sat me down, made it clear that this was not one of our routine discussions about life and health and happiness, and emphasized to me the serious Nature of what and whom I was dealing with. What you understand. What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes you can go to the next page. Sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions that you cannot deny, do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are, and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are, how much evidence you have, this is simply one of those hard facts of life you have to face. You have done your part. You've tried to expose the evil and wrongdoing. It has hurt you terribly, but it has not killed you up to this point. I'm telling you, get out of this before it does. Sometimes things are just too big for us to deal with and we have to step aside and let history take its course. I can read the rest. I think kind of get the idea of what's going on here.

[John Kiriakou]

That's absolutely true.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is that absolutely true right now with Abs?

[John Kiriakou]

Okay, yes, it's absolutely true. I got lucky. I only got 23 months in prison. Big deal. I came out stronger on the other end. But there are some people who have paid with their lives.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So the idea is the people that the 50 people that know, who have seen the tapes, who have access to the information, who know for a fact. It's not like they are speculating. If a person had the resources, could offer the freedom, could offer all of that to you. So I'm trying to think. Let's just say this is us and Israel, okay? And it's CIA and Mossad working together. And I had Jeffrey Epstein's brother. He did a two hour podcast with me, came to the cigar lounge. We sat there, met. He ended up leaving an hour later. And he came back, walked back to tell me one other thing. I'm like, why did you come back to tell me this one other thing? And then he left. And I'm trying to find out what the hell is going on with this case here, right? But to me now, let's say Mossad and CIA know everything. But say, I hate Mossad and I hate the CIA and I'm an enemy of those two guys. You can call me kgb, you can call me any other intelligence agency that's out there. What would be my creative methods to get access to that? Or do I also have that?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, no, that's a good question. So what you do is what the CIA calls the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit. You have to identify people who would have access to the information that's spotting them. You assess whether they have ready access to the information that you want, then you develop them. And when I say develop, I mean maybe you start schmoozing. But really what you're doing, it's not just schmoozing. It's. You have to identify of vulnerability. And the vulnerability in 95% of the cases is money. Everybody wants money. I shouldn't say everybody, almost everybody wants money. Some people might do it because they hate what the CIA and the FBI have done or what they think the CIA and the FBI have done. They may do it for the thrill, the clandestinity of it. They may do it because their wife has cancer and you can provide them money to take her to the Mayo Clinic. Let's say if there is a vulnerability, you move on that vulnerability, you act on it. Otherwise you're out of luck and the information's just never going to get out there.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I don't know about that.

[John Kiriakou]

I don't know if I hope you're right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, I don't know about the fact that it's that hard to get the information. I don't know about that.

[John Kiriakou]

You need one person to do the right thing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I did the right thing. Or somebody that's sick of it.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Somebody that's angry, somebody that's agitated, Somebody that's. Because, okay, when you were a CIA officer and you guys work with intel, you're like, hey, when I was going to Sudan, or I don't, whatever, city cartoon. Yeah, hey, you're going there at 3:00pm today. Oh, okay, I'm going there. Boom. Okay. And we got an intel from a Saudi intel, you know, from this, from that. What, what other intel agencies did you guys work with that collectively amongst each other? You're like, dude, I work with those guys. I don't trust them at all. And which intel agencies did you work with? You're like, you know, I think those guys are fair. Who did you not at all trust, even though you had to work with them? The Israelis, you didn't trust them?

[John Kiriakou]

Not as far as I could throw them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You or was that a cultural thing?

[John Kiriakou]

It was cultural, but my very first encounter with the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad was. I was a brand new analyst. This is like March of 1990. And I was instructed to participate in a large scale briefing of the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet representatives in Washington. And we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters because they would always come with gifts and the gifts had always listening devices packed inside them. And you know, somebody brings you a gift, you X ray It. It's the normal process. And we're like, you guys can't keep coming back here every single time trying to bug our conference rooms. So no more.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And was it easy to x ray and see that they had bugs in them?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What percentage of the time did gifts have bugs in them?

[John Kiriakou]

100%.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Be quiet.

[John Kiriakou]

No, seriously.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you kidding me?

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I wish I said it. 100% of the time. They brought gifts at bugs. And yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

And we're like, okay, no more. You can't come on campus anymore.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You guys joke about it with them. You're like, dude, what are you doing?

[John Kiriakou]

What is this?

[Patrick Bet-David]

So was it like a joke?

[John Kiriakou]

Come on, you guys. No, no, they were serious. They were hoping one would slip through. So we. We had a safe house in Virginia and we would meet with them there. So I'm one of like eight analysts at the time. And because I was the junior most analyst, I went last. So, you know, the political analyst, the econ analyst, the oil analyst, the military analyst. They all take their turns and it comes to me. And because I was overt at the time, I used my true name. So I said, my name is john kiriakou and I'm going to brief you today on saddam Hussein's state of mind. And the mossad guy, his glasses were like this and he says, spell your name. So I spell it. And then in front of all my colleagues, he says to me, you are jewish. And I said, I am not recruitable. I am not recruitable. Don't even think about it. I was so furious that he was ready to cold pitch me right there in front of all my colleagues. Like, let's have lunch afterwards. Get out of here. Moron tried to recruit me in front of everybody.

[Patrick Bet-David]

John, was that across the board with everybody that didn't trust them the most?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What percentage of guys you work with didn't trust Mossad?

[John Kiriakou]

100%. I'll give you another example. So when I went on a tour to Bahrain, the guy I sat next to at headquarters and his wife went on a tour to Jerusalem. They were absolutely lovely people. Husband and wife, tandem team. They were declared to the israelis, so the israelis knew that they were CIA officers and they went to Jerusalem for a two year assignment. Not to work against the israelis. We don't work against the Israelis. So when they arrived, the chief took them to mossad and said, you already know them, but now they're going to be here for two years. She's going to work on palestinian issues and he's going to Take Arabic classes at the university. Easy. So they're there for a few weeks. The Ambassador has a welcome party for them, and they go back to their house after the party, and all the living room furniture had been rearranged while they were gone. And they're like, okay, the Israelis break into the house. We get it. It's your country, all right? You don't have to be jerks about it. That December, they go to a Christmas party at the Ambassador's residence, and when they get back to the house, people had taken shits in all their toilets and left it unflushed. What? Yeah. Why? It's just an intimidation thing. They do their two years there, The Ambassador has a going away party for them. They drive back home, and when they get home, the dog is whimpering under the dining room table. Somebody had cut his tail off and wrapped it in gauze and medical tape. Like, why? So when this happens and it happens all the time, we have to go to the Israelis and say, stop harassing our people. And they're like, okay, okay. And then they stop for a year or two and then they start doing it again.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you. Okay, give me one you trusted the most, the Brits.

[John Kiriakou]

I worked very, very closely with the Brits.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why were they easier to work with?

[John Kiriakou]

Because our national interests are so closely aligned, especially on the issues that I was working on, terrorism, that everything we wanted to do, they wanted to do as well. And one of the great things about MI6 and MI5, frankly, is that their bureaucracy is a fraction of what ours is. And so let's say I want to do something against Hezbollah. It's going to take six months of paperwork for five different layers to approve. The Brits want to do something against Hezbollah, they just go out and do it. And then they'll call us and say, hey, we're going to do this thing against Hezbollah. You went in? I say, heck, yeah, I went in. They fly out to London and implement it together. So I worked closely with them in different countries all around the world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who would you put second on? Who you guys didn't trust?

[John Kiriakou]

Didn't trust behind this wall? Well, you can't trust, obviously, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Cubans, the usual cast of characters. I will say I had a serious problem with the French. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why? The French are just dicks.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, in the 90s, we had this period where we were forbidden from transiting Charles de Gaulle Airport because laptops had just become a thing in the 90s, right. And so a lot of us had work laptops that were double, triple secured. They were tempested, you couldn't break into them. And so you transit through, through Paris and you have a diplomatic passport. And they say, okay, come into secondary. And they take the laptop and they say, open up the laptop. And you say, no, I'm a diplomat on a diplomatic passport. The laptop is the property of the U.S. government. Well, they used to have this spike, like a railroad spike in a piece of wood. And they would take the laptop and slam it down on the spike and destroy the hard drive and then give you your laptop back. It's like, why we're supposed to be allies. What are you doing?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Didn't France help Israel get nuke or what's the relationship between France and nukes?

[John Kiriakou]

That's the rumor, yeah. The rumor is it was the French and the South Africans that worked with them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So, okay, so do you trust Russia's Intel Agency more than you trust Israel?

[John Kiriakou]

No, I don't trust either one of them. I will say that both of them are outstanding services, but I think the Israelis are probably the best in the world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And is that an element of how dirty they are or is that an element of envy that they're actually better than us in intel?

[John Kiriakou]

It's a combination of the two. I'll give you an example, Patrick. This, this thing with the pagers last year. Oh, my God. What. Can you imagine the complexity of an operation like that where you have to control literally every step of the way from production through the supply chain? It's insane. I got a call from a Russian TV network the next day and they said, would you come on and talk about this, this pager operation? I said, sure. And they said, it's a war crime, right? And I said, it might be because they were innocent people, but I said it was frigging brilliant. I said, I can tell you, even after 15 years at the CIA, nobody at the CIA would have come up with an operation that was this incredible and outside the box deep respect to the Israelis, whether it was legal or illegal. Deep respect? Well, yeah, but can't you say it was, it was a war crime or a crime against humanity? And I said, no, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say somebody at Mossad's getting promoted today because that's the most incredible operation I've ever seen in my life. Kudos to them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways.

[John Kiriakou]

To tell you that Mint's offer of.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun.

[John Kiriakou]

If we made $15 bills, but it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

[John Kiriakou]

Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com yeah. So to me, I wonder if what they've done is they've been able to infiltrate and outmaneuver our agency, our intel, our politicians, and now a lot of Americans are annoyed and a lot of leaders are annoyed that they outmaneuvered them.

[John Kiriakou]

I think you've hit it on the head. I think that's exactly it. Because it's not just intel, it's politics as well, right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

But guess what? You can be as angry as you want. You could have stopped it. You fell for it. You can say whatever you want about them. They outdid you.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They out strategized you.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They outmaneuvered you and you fell forward.

[John Kiriakou]

You know, after I left the CIA, I went to the private sector for a few years and then I went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was the senior senior investigator and I was on the job for like three days. And these two lobbyists come to the office and this would happen all the time. You know, lobbyists come in for, you know, whatever international shipping or whatever. These guys were from apac. Congratulations on your new position. I said, oh, thank you very much. We would like to offer you an all expenses paid trip to the Holy Land. I said, oh, thanks, no, no, not for me, but I appreciate it. Well, you know, we're taking a large group of people. We're going to take you to all the Christian sites. I said, thank you. I can pay for my own vacations. I'm not interested. And you know, I had always heard that they did things like that because they want to get you right off the bat. But so public and obvious and blatant about it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Guess what? I wish we would do that.

[John Kiriakou]

And we should do that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I wish Christians would do that. I wish America would do that. I wish we were in the same way proud to indoctrinate our kids to be proud to be Americans, as proud as they are to be Israelis.

[John Kiriakou]

And that's an extension of soft power. It works.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know who else does that? Muslims do that.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, very much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They're very good at indoctrinating and getting the mindset. They shape the mindset so well. America's gotten so soft and shaping a mindset.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because of how divided they are. One side is proud to be an American, the other side is constantly talking about the, the level of proudness in other countries are higher than ours. And you saw some of the data that came out from Pew Research just this week. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're seeing that kind of stuff happening. So, okay, so. So let me ask you on the CIA side, you know how CIA has the CIA that we see, is there a shadow CIA agency? Is there like a, is there like a layer below the layer below the layer that it's such a small group of people that there's a group of people that are in it that none of us know about who really, really, really have the intel?

[John Kiriakou]

You could argue. Yes, yes and no. Yes. In that there are people under what is called deep cover. So deep cover cover is, you know, maybe you go overseas and you, you say you have a job at, you know, the State Department or whatever, the defense or whatever. There's deep cover, though. Emerilis Fox Kennedy, who I believe now is on the National Security Council, she is Bob Kennedy's daughter in law and she was a CIA officer. She was under deep cover and her cover was that she was a museum curator and advisor. An art advisor. That's kind of cool. Maybe your cover is you're a wildlife photographer or you're a mutual fund manager. So you do your mutual fund managing job for eight hours and then at night you're doing your CIA job for eight hours. That's hard work. And the problem that you're going to run into is you don't have any support on site. I'm a CIA officer. You're a CIA officer. I have no idea that you're a CIA officer. I went to a party one time in Europe and I met this guy and we started talking and he said, oh, I work at the port. And immediately I perked up because you know what's coming in at the port. Oh, I work at the port. And you know, it's so interesting. We get ships from all over the world every day. And I said, oh, let me give you my card. You're so interesting. I would love the opportunity to take you to lunch. And so he gives me his card. I go in the office. The next day the station chief walks in and he says, stay away from my port guy. And I said, oh my God, is he one of us? And he's like, yeah, deep cover. Stay away. I made that up about the port. It was something else, but you get the idea.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of course. Yeah. I wonder, because, you know, we. I've talked to so many of these guys. I talked to the former director of MAD. What was his name?

[John Kiriakou]

Danny.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Old. Old. From 40 years ago. We're talking from 35. 40 years ago.

[John Kiriakou]

Wow.

[Patrick Bet-David]

If you pull up their names, I'll tell you exactly which one it is. Rob, zoom in a little bit. Boom, boom, boom. Go to Shabtai. Shavit. Go to that one right there. Yeah, that one right there.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Zoom in a little bit.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, he's an old timer.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, I. I think it was him.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can you. Can you google his name and put it with my name and see if you'll find it on YouTube? Just go to YouTube. If you could go to YouTube and type in his name and my name. Yeah, I'm trying to go a little bit lower. Go a little bit lower, Rob. Is that it?

[John Kiriakou]

Yep.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is that a clip or is that the actual interview? Skip, go for it.

[John Kiriakou]

I think that's a clip because it's only seven seconds.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Fast forward a little bit. I just want to see his face. Yeah, that's him.

[John Kiriakou]

Yep.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, we had the conversation. Yeah. Do you remember him?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What do you know about him?

[John Kiriakou]

He. He was very highly respected. He's from the best of my recollection during the Clinton administration.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He could have been.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, I remember him.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What time was he in? So if you look at direct director Mossad from what year to what year? I'll go a little bit lower.

[John Kiriakou]

64 to 96 is the years of service. Okay, so say at the end of his career, he would have been. He would have been the director.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[John Kiriakou]

So. Yeah, so it was very interesting. From Harvard, no less.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, very interesting. Talking to him on their methods and what they did and what things they came up with and who trained them.

[John Kiriakou]

And remember, these are the guys who. Who got somebody placed as almost as the deputy minister of defense of Syria or as the advisor to Gamal Abdel Nasser. I mean, these guys shot for the stars in those early days of Mossad. They were brilliant, but they had to be brilliant because what's the alternative? Death? So you've got to be at the top of your game all the time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So America is a little bit more casual because we have a little bit too easy here with not enough tensions around us. Yeah. For us to be tougher and more paranoid. Yeah. We have two. We're so, so comfortable and casual in America, what do you worry? When was the last time anybody went to sleep worried about Canada attacking us?

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Mexico attacking us. Nobody thinks about that, right?

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But these guys go to sleep every night worried about everyone around them that hate them. So their element of survivalness is a lot higher than Americans. Americans are softer because of how much more. There's a reason why we're the greatest country in the world, not only due to our Constitution, not only, but a part of it is also geography. We don't give geography enough credit.

[John Kiriakou]

You're absolutely right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We don't give geography enough credit. When I lived in Iran, it was like, holy shit. On any given day, you know, someone's crossed the border, planes crossed the border from Iraq, and you're going back 78 to 89. So when I lived there. So that builds a certain level of resiliency in these guys. And when you want to go up against an enemy like that, like, I remember one time, Joker. What's his name? Jokic. I don't know if you follow basketball or not.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This guy from the Denver Nuggets.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They asked him a question afterwards. They're like, so how do you feel about all the hate you got? And, you know, and all the screaming and the fans were screaming at your face? And he says, brother, have you ever been to a game in Serbia? Have you seen this? Have you seen what?

[John Kiriakou]

He says, see, the Serbs are our Orthodox brothers.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He says, have you ever been to a Serbia game? No, I haven't.

[John Kiriakou]

They threatened to kill you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This is nothing. This is nothing. When he talks about Serbian fans and is this it? I believe so. Yeah. Go play this. Play. That's. I can't hear any of it, Rob.

[John Kiriakou]

There we go.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The boots from Serbia, brother.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, my God. They're gonna collapse the stadium like that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's a basketball. Wow.

[John Kiriakou]

Basketball.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And his brothers. I don't know if you've seen his brothers, what his brothers look like. Type in Joe Kicks Brothers, okay? When they walk in, everybody gets out of the way. Joe Kicks Brothers, okay? This is his brothers. If you see how massive they are.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And they're all tough guys, so nobody messes with their younger brother, with the Joker. But no, I think. I think what happens when you're raised in streets of slums or gangs or you. You create a certain element of where the other side just is not going to have it. It becomes a luxury.

[John Kiriakou]

Have you seen the Netflix series Fouda?

[Patrick Bet-David]

No.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, you've got to check this out. It Is a, it's an Israeli series, but it's done jointly with Palestinians. And it is like deep inside Shin Bet and their war against Hamas. It is so well written.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can you text it to me, Rob?

[John Kiriakou]

Can you repeat the name?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Father? I just found it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, that's it. Oh, my God. You're not going to be able to pull yourself away.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is it a movie or is it.

[John Kiriakou]

It's a series and it went three seasons, I think. Absolutely incredible. And the reason why it's so successful is that it actually humanizes the Palestinians. And so you have to keep reminding yourself, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm sympathizing with Hamas here. I gotta, I gotta stop. And then it gives you the Israeli side again. And then you're like, yeah, go Israelis. And then you're like, no, I hope the Palestinian guy escapes. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute, what am I saying? That's how well written it is.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Send that to me, Rob, as I send that to me, I'd like to take a look at that. Yeah. To me. I, I. When you're in a game, when you're in, in space of competition and you watch everybody and you size people up and you try to do it in a non emotional way as possible, and I size you up and I say, okay, number one, what bias does John have?

[John Kiriakou]

Right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

All right, I get it. He is biased. Is going to be here. I don't blame him. That's the life he lived. He went to jail 23 months, CIA, boom, boom, boom. You know, waterboarding. Totally get it. He's got bias. Who offended him? Quite a lot of people have offended you. So what happens when somebody offends you? You're going to have a lifelong internal desire for vengeance. By the way, we all have an element of that. It's not like anybody is innocent.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, I wear mine on my sleeve. I want to tweet, God bless Donald Trump and his war against John Brennan. And Jim Comey.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Go talk about that. Because that story comes out with Comey and Brennan just yesterday. Yes, right. So FBI launches probe into a former FBI, CIA directors. Fox News reports with go a little bit lower for me to read.

[John Kiriakou]

How many years have we said John Brennan has to be investigated? Finally he's being investigated.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you think all these years nothing happened? And why do you, why are you happy about the investigation? Why are you glad this is finally happening?

[John Kiriakou]

Because I believe that John Brennan has come as close to agitating for a couple as we have ever had in our country. Everybody knew that this Russiagate thing was fake. I had a radio show at the time and my co host was a communist, an actual registered member of the communist party. And we were in full agreement about this for different reasons. I said, look, when I was at the CIA on the analytics side, they taught us that we could not make an analytic decision or judgment unless we had evidence. And I said, I'm not seeing any evidence of any Russian involvement with the Trump campaign. Just because John Brennan and Hillary Clinton and comey get up and say he's with the Russians, that's not evidence. There's no evidence there at all. If you've got evidence and you can't say, you can't go in front of a camera and say, oh, if you could see what I see, cuz I have clearances. If you could, oh my God, you would know. Adam Schiff, what bullshit is that? If you have evidence, lay it out. The American people are intelligent. We can figure it out for ourselves. So those of us who actually dug a little deeper knew that this was BS from the very beginning and it should have been criminal at the time. So finally, finally an investigation is taking place. Having been through the justice system here, I am not one to celebrate prosecutors going out and targeting people. But this. Imagine the danger involved in what we almost saw was essentially the denial of democracy, the potential overthrow of a democratically elected president of the United States. It's shocking to me. I get chills just thinking about it. That's how close he came. Let me add one other thing. Let me add one other thing. Talking about Lawfare, the former U.S. attorney for the state of Utah in the first Trump administration very, very graciously agreed to be one of the signatories on a letter to president Trump asking him to. Pardon me, Tucker Carlson, Judge Napolitano, two former deputy attorneys general and attorney, U.S. attorney Holman. And what he said. He said this on Fox. I think it was the Kiriakou case was the template for the Democratic party's policy of lawfare. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I was arrested, we got discovery from the Justice Department. 15,000 pages of classified documents. In that tranche we found three memos. One was from John Brennan to Eric Holder, the attorney general saying, charge him with espionage.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes. And Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who wrote back? Holder.

[John Kiriakou]

Holder?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Eric Holder?

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Really?

[John Kiriakou]

And Brennan wrote back again and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's documented.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's still technically classified. It's not been declassified, but there it is. So this is a guy that I think was testing Lawfare on me. He ruined me. I went bankrupt. I lost my wife and kids. I lost my job. I lost my freedom for two years. And they said, ha, it works. And then they went after Donald Trump.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So what do you think is going to happen here? Do you think anything's going to come out?

[John Kiriakou]

No.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. I hate to say I know. So, so, But. But the part about the no is. Here's where my no goes. So, you know, it's like, wow, the reason why President Trump is, you know, Epstein, because he's. He's implicate, he's in it.

[John Kiriakou]

I don't believe that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, no, but of course I don't believe that. What I'm saying is that argument is out because the left would have used it against them the last eight years.

[John Kiriakou]

Exactly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And they would have had no problem because Epstein hooked out with all of.

[John Kiriakou]

That, and they would have leaked it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of course. They would have done that to destroy him. So that's out. So then for me, it's maybe one of Trump's biggest allies. Donors, money, somebody. And that was one of their favorites. Yeah, I got you. Don't worry about it.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay. I believe that because Trump's a favorite guy and he, you know, Roy Cohen. Okay, sure. Number three is holding people hostage because you got the intel. Blackmail. That's my number one reason why they're doing that. That's about most people's pay grade, that they don't know about this kind of stuff. So, okay, so they're not going to do that. So now, how much dirt has John Brennan have on the people that have helped Trump? How much to say, like, what are you guys doing? We're all in this thing. We're all pigs, so relax. Nothing ends up happening to him, Nothing ends up happening to Comey, because they all have dirt on each other. If Comey was there for as many years as he was, and he's an ally of Hillary, and Hillary's not happy about what Comey did, because Comey could have waited one more week.

[John Kiriakou]

One more week.

[Patrick Bet-David]

If you remember when Pfizer came out and said the vaccine is ready three days after Biden won, if Pfizer could have announced that the vaccine is ready a week prior, Trump won. Right. So. But there is a lot of timing, and Comey effed up a little bit for Hillary, if you think about it.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But we know how dirty he is and we know how Much. His tentacles are still everywhere. Do you really think they're gonna be able to do anything for this guy? No, I think, I think a part of the timing is also interesting. So the moment Epstein comes out, biggest fumble of all time. Oh, shit, we got a distraction. We got to get the media to talk about something else. Yeah, you know what? Let's go after Brennan and this is the time. Let's go after Brennan and Comey. Strategically, I get it. Strategically, I fully understand it. To distract the podcasters, the media, the X community. Hey, What? Epstein, number one trending topic. Oh, shit. Next story. I forgot about this. It happens all the time, and it happens very effectively.

[John Kiriakou]

People. Americans underestimate the power that these Washington people have. They underestimate it. I'll tell you something else, too. The files that J. Edgar Hoover had at the FBI were legendary, right? And everybody knows that the night of his death, his secretary burned the, the most damning files. But that's not to say that there aren't files on everybody. Now, a very close friend of mine, senior CIA officer, 32, 33 years, told me that his very first job at the CIA as a 22 year old guy was in the office of counterintelligence. So on his first day, he went in and they give him a tour of the office. Here's where you're gonna sit. Here's your desk. This is your computer. Whatever. We didn't have computers back then. It was typewriters. But he said there was an entire wall of paper files. And the secretary told him, whatever you do, don't go into those files. He said, well, of course, the first night that he was there. Yeah, he went straight to the files. He said every single file was on an American, which is patently illegal, but every single file. And he said there were thousands of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you surprised?

[John Kiriakou]

Absolutely not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I'm not, I'm not surprised. So to me, I don't, I don't, I don't think much is going to happen with this part. I think this was just a immediately. Hey, guys. You know, and, and, and I, I don't know what's going to happen with Bondi because this was a, you know, what happened with o' Keefe Media Group, that they caught her saying what she said and then afterwards she comes out and says that. And it's not like o' Keefe doesn't like Bondi, like, you know, trying to protect her. Hey, guys, you guys been. So I think her timeline is numbered. I don't know how much longer it could be. She May stay there for the rest of the time, but. And not because she's a bad person. I've met her, I've spoken to her a couple of times. I just think this was a big mishandling. And now they got to distract and go to the next thing. Couple other things. CIA. What is the plumber squad? What is a CIA plumber squad? You know, Nixon, 70 something and. Yeah, hitman. Was that a real thing?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. Crazy as that sounds, yes, it was. So there are sort of two CIAs. Maybe we could even say three. There was the pre 1975 CIA, which just did anything it damn well pleased. Going out, killing heads of state and importing, you know, heroin from Vietnam and doing anything it wanted. The Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the house ended that. 1975. They created the Senate and House Intelligence Committees to oversee the CIA, especially its covert action.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is this the John Perkins economic hitman pre era where.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They would go out there and say, here's what we're going to Wild west, right?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And they could get away with it. Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. And they did get away with it. Then from 75 to September 11, the CIA very gradually reassumed some of its power and authority, but especially under Ronald Reagan. Then there's post 9 11, and the CIA just does anything at once again, you know, I'll give you a little bit of a side.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Patriot Act.

[John Kiriakou]

All that opened up. Oh, yeah, yeah. Opened up everything. When I got out of prison, I was invited to dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence in Washington. So I went and there was a senator there who's a member of the Intelligence Committee. And he came up to me and he said, hey, welcome home. So glad you're back. Sorry things played out the way they did. And I said, I appreciate it, but, Senator, I gotta be honest with you. I was very disappointed that you didn't stand up for me. I really expected more from you. And he got angry and he goes, look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance. And I said, oh, you're afraid of them. Like, now it makes sense. I thought you were the Congressional overseers. You're afraid of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

It put things into perspective.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. So. But to go back to this, the White House plumbers. Yeah, the unit that they had.

[John Kiriakou]

Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Actual fixers.

[John Kiriakou]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Like actual, actual fixers.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, actual fixers. And in, by some accounts, even assassins.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right, yeah. Does that still exist today or. No.

[John Kiriakou]

Well, you know, in a more formal way, I would have to say yes because they've got organizations like Global. What do they call themselves now? Global Services or whatever. The assassination squad. And John Brennan used to do this. The Tuesday morning kill list. Did you hear about that?

[Patrick Bet-David]

No.

[John Kiriakou]

He would meet at the White House with CIA reps every Tuesday morning and they would come up with a list of people to be killed that week.

[Patrick Bet-David]

John Brennan had a Tuesday morning meeting to go through with CIA, who they're gonna kill that week.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What an interesting meeting.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. The Tuesday morning kill list meeting.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Seriously?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I think it was first reported in the Boston Globe.

[Patrick Bet-David]

There it is.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, there it is.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The New York American government can decide whom to torture. San Brennan is the President Obama nominee. Director of General Taylor, last time they named came up on one Twitter. He didn't get it because he seemed so close to the torture program perpetrated while he was senior official of CIA. If he was as great a distance, it's only because the time passed. Questions about those years.

[John Kiriakou]

There it is, the kill list. One of them is crafting the president's kill list and then taking it to him for final approval. So they come up with a list of names. Obama would sign it, and then Global Resources and Special Activities would send their teams out, kill people, come home, wait for the next Tuesday meeting. It's pretty sick.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did you ever work with them?

[John Kiriakou]

I worked in the same office, but we didn't do operations.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did you meet him?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What was he like?

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, Brennan.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[John Kiriakou]

I've known Brennan since 1990.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What was he like? From the lowest in the 90s where he didn't yet have a lot of power. Maybe he did.

[John Kiriakou]

Okay, I'll tell you a story that I've never told publicly.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Go for it.

[John Kiriakou]

So when I got hired, John was a GS14 nobody. He was the deputy director of the Arab Israeli Analysis Group. And he worked for a woman who was really one of the great minds, the great thinkers on Syria. And they didn't get along. He had been sort of imposed on her. And so he went to her one day and said, I think I'm ready for promotion, I'm ready for the senior intelligence service, and I'd like your blessing. Her name was Martha Kessler. Martha. Yeah, Kessler. So she said, not only are you not ready for the senior service, I don't even want you to work for me anymore. You're fired. Well, at the CIA, if you're fired, you're not really fired. You have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job. And if you can't find A job in six weeks, any job. Then they escort you out, they take your badge and you're actually fired. So this happened right around Christmas. There are no jobs open at Christmas. The job turnover is in the summer. So he's having a heck of a time finding a job. Finally, he goes to the PDB staff, the President's Daily Brief. And it just so happens that they have an opening for a briefer, for the lowest ranking person on the National Security Council who's entitled to a PDB briefing. That is the Director of Intelligence Programs. That just happened to be at the time, George Tenet. So Brennan and Tenet immediately hit it off. They are both alpha dogs. You know, cigar smoking, hard drinking, pockmark faced, you know, guys hit it off totally. And wouldn't you know, George gets promoted to become the Deputy Director of the CIA. He becomes the Deputy Director and he names John the Director of the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, Martha's boss. He calls Martha into the office and he says, now you're fired. And she retired. The office was reorganized and so John got squeezed out, but George made him station chief in Riyadh. Now this is a guy who has not had five seconds of operational experience in his life, who's now the station chief in one of the most important countries in the world for the CIA. It was John Brennan who oversaw the granting of the visas to the 911 hijackers, for God's sake. So John comes back and becomes the Executive director of the CIA, the number three ranking official in the CIA. When George becomes the director. So it's George, John McLaughlin, John Brennan. Well, I'm the executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations at the time. So John is in my briefings every single day and John was just, torture, torture, torture. We gotta torture these guys, we gotta do this, we gotta do that. We need to start killing more people. We need to get out there and start shooting.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He's talking like this.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh yeah. He never got along with the Deputy Director for Operations. And the Deputy Director went to George and said, come on, man, you gotta get him out. So George made him the head of what was called the ttic, the Transnational Terrorist Information center that became the nctc, the National Counterterrorism Center. And John wanted to be the head of his own, his own agency because he was telling everybody who would listen at the time that he wanted to be Secretary of Defense. So he goes to the T tick and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. And so he retires a year before George W. Bush finishes his second term. Well, then. And this is the role of serendipity almost. There was a huge wave of retirements in 2008, and about half the people at the senior level who retired went to the McCain campaign, and the other half went to the Clinton campaign. John was the only one who went to Obama. And so Obama won. So John's the guy. John says, I want to be CIA director. The liberals went crazy. They said, absolutely not. He was one of the godfathers of the torture program. Obama says, okay, I'm going to make him deputy director of the National Security Council, deputy national security advisor for counter terrorism. Then he started doing the kill list. Well, by 2012, the Liberals forgot or didn't care or whatever, were distracted. They make him CIA director, and then he starts just wreaking vengeance on all of his enemies. Wow, this is a bad guy. John Brennan's a very bad guy. From day one, he was a bad guy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who liked him in the CIA that work with him? Who was he liked? Who was he like?

[John Kiriakou]

You know, there was a group, even on the analytics side, there was a group of guys who were, you know, these, these hard drinking. Most. Most of them were single, but hard drinking, you know, tough spy wannabes. And they gravitated toward John and he took good care of a lot of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In what way?

[John Kiriakou]

He got them promoted into the senior service. Like, we would get these promotion lists, and I would say, you've got to be freaking kidding me. So and so got promoted to the senior intelligence service. Seriously. But, you know, they were proteges of John's. It's an ugly story.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, he just doesn't look like a friendly guy.

[John Kiriakou]

He's not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He looks like a. He. He looks like exactly what you read about him. Like, that's the guy.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah, the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The look fits the profile of how it would be.

[John Kiriakou]

That's right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, the picture right there. The third one, not the first, the second, the third one. That kind of gives me the vibe of who he is.

[John Kiriakou]

That's him. Yeah, that's him.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So, yeah, when you. By the way, if you listen to this, folks, I'm sure a lot of you guys are enamored by the conversations we're having. You can manect John. John's officially on manect. You can ask him questions. I'm sure the audience got a lot of other questions.

[John Kiriakou]

I'd be delighted.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Rob, if you can put the manect handle somewhere QR code so that it can go to him. And if it's in the description, you can go ask him questions, but let me continue with this. So he is now where he's at today, where all this stuff's about to come down. The world knows, the public knows. Where is Obama and all of this stuff right now?

[John Kiriakou]

That's a great question, too. You know, Obama, I never understood why Obama was always so untouchable. First of all, one of the things the CIA loves. I say this all the time. They love when a new president is elected and he doesn't have any intelligence experience, because they just suck him right in. Right. They make him one of the guys. And Obama was one of those guys who thought he was smarter than everybody else in the room. And so people like Brennan were able to manipulate him so that Obama would make decisions and he would think that they were his ideas. And in fact, they were the ideas of people like John Brennan that he had surrounded himself with. And I don't know why there's this weird, inexplicable nostalgia for the Obama years. In my life. The Obama years were a living hell. I lost everything thanks to Barack Obama. Everything. They even confiscated my pension. That's why I'm asking President Trump for a pardon. Yeah, it wasn't just I did 23 months with a bunch of pedophiles.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You lost your pension?

[John Kiriakou]

20 years of proud government service.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You lost that entire pension.

[John Kiriakou]

I'm gonna have to work till the day I die.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, my God. And is it true with the whole you try to get a pardon and you were told it's $2 million?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

When did that happen?

[John Kiriakou]

The very end of the first Trump administration. I had a friend who had a relationship with Rudy Giuliani, and so I called him and I said, hey, can you get me with Giuliani? I want to ask if he can help me get a pardon. So he put me in touch. I talked to one of Giuliani's major domos, and he said, well, we're going to be in Washington next week. Why don't we meet at the Trump Hotel? I said, great, I'm gonna be with my attorney. And my attorney, Bruce Fine, was deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. He's a serious guy, constitutional scholar. So I said, it'll be me with my attorney. I said, how about 2 o'? Clock? And they said, oh, Rudy's not good by two o'.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Clock.

[John Kiriakou]

It's gonna have to be earlier. So I said, okay. So we met at, like, 11. I go to the Trump and Giuliani's there with two other people, and I'm there with my Lawyer. And we're sitting there and Giuliani says, hey, how about those Jets? And I said, yeah, I'm a Steelers fan, but, yeah, the jets are pretty good this year. Okay? He said, you a Mets fan? I said, nah. Yeah, I'm from Pittsburgh originally, so I'm a Pirates fan, but I follow the Nationals, too. Yeah, it's going to be a good year for the Mets. I'm like, all right, what are you talking about? So I said, well, Mr. Mayor, there's this issue I wanted to raise of a pardon. And he goes like this. He goes, anybody know where the pisser is? And he stands up and he walks away. I said, what just happened? His guy says, you never talk to Rudy about a pardon. You talk to me about a pardon. And I talk to Rudy about a pardon. And I said, okay, that's fine. And he says, Rudy's gonna want 2 million for the pardon. And I laughed. I said, first of all, I don't have $2 million. I'll never have $2 million. But even if I did, why would I spend $2 million to recover a $770,000 pension? And I look at my lawyer, and he's like, we got up. Thank you for meeting us. And we walked out that night. Buddy of mine had a book release party at the Republican National Committee. So I go up to the RNC, and there's another whistleblower there, TSA whistleblower. He's a friend of mine, Robert McLean. Awesome guy. And he says to me, just to make conversation, how was your day? And I said, oh, how was my day? Listen to this. So I tell him, and he says, that's a crime. That's a felony. I said, yeah, of course it is, but what am I gonna do? I'm stuck. I don't have $2 million. And he said, did you call the FBI? And I said, no, the FBI is not gonna give a shit about Rudy Giuliani trying to shake me down for $2 million. Like, four or five days pass, I happen to be in my lawyer's office, and my cell phone rings, and it's. It's. It was either Mike Schmidt or Eric Schmidt, I think it was Mike Schmidt from the New York Times calls me, and he says, a little bird told me that Rudy Giuliani tried to get $2 million from you for a pardon. And I said, oh, man, that Robert. I said he was pretty upset when I mentioned to him that I had this meeting. And he said, well, we're actually doing a story because Rudy's trying to get 2 million from a whole bunch of people who are seeking pardons. Would you go on the record? And I said to my lawyer, I said, bruce, will I go on the record? And he said, go on the record. You have nothing to hide. So I went on the record. Well, it was a front page story on the New York Times. And funny enough, Giuliani's response was, I never met this man. I've never heard of this man. None of this is true. And the New York Times called me for a response, and I said, he forgot that we took a picture together that morning. So I sent them the picture, and then they put a little box, and they said, the New York Times has seen documentary proof that the meeting took place. And then, like a year later, two years later, I get a call from Noel Dunphy, who had been his business development director at Giuliani Partners. He told her the day that the New York Times article came out, that damn CIA guy ratted me out to the New York Times. And I said, well, there it is.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's interesting because at one point, pardons for sale.

[John Kiriakou]

Yep. And. Oh, that's me. But it was a front page New York Times article at one point.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This guy was. He was one of the most powerful.

[John Kiriakou]

Could be the king of New York and universally respected.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. He could have been a president. The ideas he had was so ahead of his time.

[John Kiriakou]

Oh, yeah. And he really did clean up New York.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, he. He was a.

[John Kiriakou]

He.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He was great. What New York needs today is a Mayor Giuliani.

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It needs somebody like that to clean up. But it's a shame when it comes down to all these pardons, these stories. You know, we had Blagojevich.

[John Kiriakou]

Sure.

[Patrick Bet-David]

On.

[John Kiriakou]

I wrote him a letter when he was in prison.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did you?

[John Kiriakou]

Yeah. I felt bad for the poor guy. 14 years for a crime that was never consummated.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, that's right. With the whole Obama. And that was. Obama's doing.

[John Kiriakou]

Obama.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Exactly what Obama's doing. And he's out now. He's a. Yeah, he was on Tucker as well. We had him on. We've had him on multiple times, and he's been able to tell his story. His documentary is actually pretty interesting. I don't know if you saw his documentary.

[John Kiriakou]

No, I haven't seen it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Very good documentary. It's old, but it's a very, very good documentary. John, I really enjoy talking to you.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you so much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And I feel like we have. Honestly, like, I'm looking at my time. I'm checking everybody. I'm like, listen, I can talk to him for God knows, so many hours. We have your manact link out there. Is there anything?

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you so much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And by the way, it's priced very reasonably. If you want to have a 15 minute call or video from him or text, 10, 20, 75 bucks, send him a neck to him and have a conversation. Delighted to do it because I'm sure there's a lot of conversations people want to have with someone like you who's experienced. And I'm sure many other people will send messages as well to invite you to their podcast shows. Different things as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Love it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is there anything else you want us? Is this your show? Is this what this is? Deep focus with John.

[John Kiriakou]

Deep focus on YouTube. We get deep into these, you know, Iran and Gaza and criminal justice and stuff like that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Fantastic. Rob, let's put the link of that below as well.

[John Kiriakou]

Thank you very much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I love this. And John, we, we will have you back on. I'd love it very soon because I so enjoyed this. Maybe the next one we do, we'll do like a home team and go through different issues and topics, but this was just for the audience to learn a little bit more about you. I appreciate you coming out. This was fantastic, truly. Thank you.

[John Kiriakou]

I really appreciate the invitation. Thank you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Anytime. Take care everybody. God bless. Bye bye, bye bye.