EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,275 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- NANarrator
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays)
- JRJoe Rogan
So you're saying you pro- replaced Mike Baker?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah. Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer. He was, uh ... He doesn't really talk about his work a lot. Maybe it's 'cause a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal. I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens. Athens was a tough place. At the time, uh, w- the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
There ... It was a combination of two things. There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. They had killed the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, just bad guys all around. The other was called, um, Popular Revolutionary Struggle. And then on top of that, you add Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLPGC, the DFLP. Everybody was there, because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of, uh, Andreas Papandreou at the time, and these terrorist groups that, if you don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JKJohn Kiriakou
But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal, so it was every man for himself.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Your story is pretty nuts, man.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
And your story-
- JKJohn Kiriakou
... twisty.
- JRJoe Rogan
... of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was com- what they were doing, what you reported on, was completely illegal.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you were completely honest about it. Um, and it was essentially about the US torture program.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Tell us how this all started. Like, how long had you been involved in the CIA?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Oh, by then I had been in the CIA ... Well, by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of, uh, counter-terrorism operations after 9/11, I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years. And, um, and I was responsible for all counter-terrorism operations in the country. W- a- Al-Qaeda was, was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them. And so my job was to find them and grab them, and then just hold them, or send them to trial was the original idea. And, um, we, we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right? W- uh, bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri. We had killed, uh, Mohammed, um, Atef, he was the head of what they called Military Affairs for Al-Qaeda. We killed him at Tora Bora. But then there was Abu Zubaydah, and then there was this unknown person that we later learned was Khalid Sheik Mohammed. So we were looking for any of these four or five people, and then there were, there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, uh, the USS Cole bombing. So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah, and, um, and we captured him. It took us six weeks to track him down, and we were close a couple of times. Close where we would bust down the door, and there's, like, an uneaten, like half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning. Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking, and he knew we were close. So we finally got him, and then the question is what do you wanna do with him? And they, uh, they told me, uh, "Hang onto him. We're gonna send out a plane, and, uh, we'll take it from there." So they did, and I wasn't cleared to know what they were gonna do with him, just like the guys on the plane weren't cleared to know who it was we had captured and, and who, why they were taking this guy where they were taking him. But, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
That, is that all just need to know?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah, it's all need to know. In fact, w- when I got onto the plane, w- we, uh, three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane. We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane. Then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down. And, um, one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on, and he says, "John?" And I said, "Who are you?" And he lifts up his mask, and he's, uh, an old boss of mine. And I said, "Hey, what are you doing here?" He said, "Oh, I came to, uh, take your prisoner." I said, uh, "Where are you taking him?" And he said, "I can't tell you. You don't have a need to know." I said, "No, that's cool." He said, "Who is he anyway?" I said, "Oh, dude, I'm sorry. You don't have a need to know." And he says, "Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough."
- JRJoe Rogan
Crazy.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
"Okay, safe travels." And then, you know, your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and, you know, get his family story.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he's going. (inhales) And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria, and one of the senior guys from the counter-terrorism center came up to me very casually, and he said, "Oh, hey. I'm glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you, do you wanna be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" And I had never heard that term before. This is May of 2002. I said, "Enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean?" And he goes, "We're gonna start getting rough with these guys," like that. And I said, "What's that mean?" So he describes these 10 techniques, and I said, "I don't know, man. That sounds like a torture program." And he said, "It's not a torture program. We got it cleared by the Justice Department, and the president signed it." He says, "Think about it." I said, "Yeah, give me an hour. I need an hour to think about it." I walked out of the cafeteria, I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor-And, um, there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East. Knocked on his door, no appointment or anything, and I said, "Hey, I need some advice. I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think of that?" And he said, "First of all, let's call a spade a spade." He said, "This is a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program, and torture's a slippery slope." He said, "You know how these guys are. Somebody's gonna be a cowboy, they're gonna go overboard, and they're gonna kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's gonna be a Congressional investigation, then there's gonna be a Justice Department investigation, and somebody's gonna go to prison. Do you wanna go to prison?" I said, "No, I don't wanna go to prison." As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, "No, I don't wanna go to prison." I went back downstairs. I said, "Listen. I have a, a moral and ethical problem with this. I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it." The funny thing is, I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in Al-Qaeda, and I got passed over for promotion, and the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training. The head of the Counterterrorism Center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
And then the guy who had given me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he promoted me out of cycle. So, I, I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough. And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years. We, we were in the same men's group. We went to the same church. And he happens to be both a brigadier general in the Army and a CIA psychiatrist, and he said to me one day, "Buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back?"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 15:00 – 30:00
Oh, yeah, Manson. Exactly.…
- JRJoe Rogan
by the CIA, which is so crazy. And it's totally connected to Manson, the Manson family.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Oh, yeah, Manson. Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Manson was a part of it as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so nuts. And they wouldn't have even known about that until they found the stash of documents that connected it all together.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm. Just think of what's been destroyed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
What we could have learned.
- JRJoe Rogan
Exactly. We only know a small fraction of what was done. So is it a case of just they're, they're not elected, they're put into power, presidents come and go, and over the course of their career, 20 years plus, they just have so much power and so much ability to get things done that they just bypass the law?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I, I think that is ... That's the whole story right there in a nutshell. When I was there, I remember being shocked by some of the old-timers who had been there for as long as 40 or 42 years. There was one in particular, he was the national intelligence officer for warning, so he was the one that was supposed to say, "You know, I'm worried about what Libya's gonna look like 10 years from now," and then somebody writes a paper about it. He had been there for 42 years. He had to get a, a waiver from the director because he had aged out. Well, these guys make no secret of, of their belief that they can outwait pretty much any president. Presidents come and go. And these guys are there forever. And so if the president wants them to do something that they don't want to do, they just slow roll it. Just wait until he leaves. And that's the end of it. You know, that's why I say, I, I've said this in interviews a lot. Y- there is a deep state. You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to. You can call it the state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. You can call it whatever you want. The fact is, it exists, and it's unelected, and it's generally unaccountable to anybody, and they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ugh. So, you find out about this torture program. You won't participate, so that puts you on the outs, and when do you know that this is gonna be, like, a significant problem in your career?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency. You know, o- once I, I turned this down, um, and I got this out-of-cycle promotion for the Abu Zubaydah operation, I was, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site, and people are saying, like, "Whoa, I didn't sign up for this. Nobody said we're gonna torture people. I quit," and then they come home. Or there was a secretary who fainted once when she happened to be in the room while Abu Zubaydah was being tortured, and she, uh, curtailed her, her assignment. That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, "I'm coming home. I'm not doing this anymore." That is a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment. And I remember thinking, "So I'm not the only one who thinks this is, this is illegal. Certainly somebody's gonna come out and say something."... and nobody did.
- NANarrator
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- JKJohn Kiriakou
The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal, and when that finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, made a statement that, that still kinda sticks in my mind. He said, "There is no such thing as sleep deprivation." He said, "I have a stand-up desk in my office. I don't even have a chair in my office, and sometimes I'll work 24 hours, and then into the next day, 36 hours." But that's not what we're talking about here. We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep, and they begin to die, their organs begin to shut down at day nine. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days, and that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die. They would have heart failure, you know? Or-
- NANarrator
How'd they keep 'em awake?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
You chain them to that eye bolt in the ceiling again. You have these industrial-strength lights on them 24 hours a day and, like, death metal 24 hours on volume 11. And, um, and they just can't sleep because if they, if they collapse, they'll pull their arms out of their sockets. They're chained to that, to that eye bolt.
- NANarrator
Jeez.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It was bad. And then when people would die, they would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building, put them in the hole, cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.
- NANarrator
No report? No nothing?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Nothing. There was one guy they reported on, and, and headquarters wrote back and said, "Just put him on ice until we can figure out what to do." And they let, literally just put him in a bathtub and filled it with ice, and then just decided a couple of days later, he started to turn, "We should probably bury this guy."
- NANarrator
Wow.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah, it was ugly. And, and the Justice Department never said anything about that. They're like, "Oh, listen, uh, you know, you can do these techniques and if you kill them, just bury them out back." Nah, that wasn't the, that wasn't the approved operation.
- NANarrator
Was any of it effective? Like, was there any actionable information?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
That's, that's the worst part of this. It, uh, it... No, none of it was effective. You know, eh, I say this all the time, Joe, i- i- it's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI, but if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations. They've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg Trials in '45 and '46. These guys know what they're doing. And so with Abu Zubaydah as an example, we captured Abu Zubaydah, and normally overseas, the CIA has primacy. Domestically, the FBI has primacy. But 9/11 was still an open criminal investigation, and so we sent Abu Zubaydah out to the secret site and the FBI took over. The CIA was furious about this, but there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Soufan who did exactly as he was trained to do, and he began to engage Abu Zubaydah in a conversation. And Abu Zubaydah just gave him the silent treatment for weeks. This went on for weeks. But you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange. If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever. And finally, he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives, and I'll give you two examples. Number one, we had no idea what the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. We knew it was Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and then we just didn't know h- what, what the organization was, was like, how it was built. So, he explained to us how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized. So, cell A had no idea what cell B was doing. And, um, and Ali said, as an example, "If you want to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf, how would you do that?" And Abu Zubaydah said, "Well, there's this guy, Mohammed, and here's his, here's his phone number. Mohammed lives in Dusseldorf and he has a cousin, Abdullah, and Abdullah has access to weapons, and here's Abdullah's email. And then Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid. They meet at the coffee shop, and Rashid has, has access to explosives." And then we're able to call the Germans and say, "Hey, listen. You have a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need to do." And then they kick down the door and they grab these guys. That saved lives. The other thing that he told us (laughs) , and he, he laughed actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about. He was talking about Mukhtar, a, a guy using the nom de guerre Mukhtar. We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there.... who called himself Mukhtar, who was a very bad guy. In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka Operation. It was supposed to be carried out, uh, in the Philippines and the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s and then fly them into buildings all up and down the West Coast of the United States. It just so happened that one day Mukhtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch. And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment. And she sees all this stuff laid out and she said, "That looks like a terrorist attack being planned." She calls the cops. The cops come and say, "Ooh, this looks like a terrorist attack. We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service." They come and look at it and somebody says, "We should probably call the CIA on this." And so we confiscated everything and Bojinka was disrupted. Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's crazy.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It's crazy.
- JRJoe Rogan
A cleaning lady?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
You never know. You just never know. And-
- 30:00 – 45:00
Why did you, why…
- JKJohn Kiriakou
so now I- I'm out of the agency three and a half years, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News and he said that he had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, "That was absolutely false." I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. I said, "I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or any other prisoner." And he said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." Well, I had never spoken to an- uh, uh, uh, a reporter before.I, I didn't know that was a reporter's trick, so I said, "I'll think about it." In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday, President Bush gives a press conference and the International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners. Uh, Human Rights Watch said CIA's torturing prisoners and Amnesty International said CIA's torturing prisoners. So, a reporter says, "Look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners. What's your response to that?" And the president looks right in the camera and he goes, "We do not torture," like that. And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people right in the eye and he's lying to us." And she said, "Are you surprised?" Well then, on Wednesday, two days later, um, he gets another, a similar question and he said that there is no torture. I knew he was lying. And then another two days later, it's Friday, and he's walking from the south portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend and a torture shouts... Uh, torture. A reporter shouts another question about torture and this time, he stops and he turns and he says, "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer." And I said to my wife, "Brian Ross has sources at the White House and they're gonna pin this on me." So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided in the, whatever it was-
- JRJoe Rogan
Why did you, why did you think they were gonna pin it on you?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
'Cause I was the only one who said no.
- JRJoe Rogan
Because they were calling you the human rights guy?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So did, you were gonna be a patsy?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm. And I was not willing to be a patsy.
- JRJoe Rogan
You just assumed that that was gonna happen?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I assumed, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause that's just your experience with the organization?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Oh, yeah. They're gonna leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JKJohn Kiriakou
So I called Brian Ross, I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided that whatever he was gonna ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was gonna ask me, I was just gonna tell the truth. And so he met me at, uh, the ABC News, um, studios on Desail Street in Washington and, um, and I said three things in that interview that changed the course of the rest of my life. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy, it was not the result of any rogue officer. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had revealed classified information. The FBI then investigates me from December of '07 to December of '08. And then they send my attorney a letter called the declination letter declining to prosecute. They said that they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there because of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Red Cross, but most importantly, torture is a crime and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people. So, no charges. My wife and I went out to celebrate that night, we went to dinner. Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan, at first CIA director, but the liberals went crazy because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program. Everybody seems to forget that now. And we can get into that if you want, but, um, but he then names Brennan the deputy national Security Advisor for Counterterrorism. Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new attorney general, and says, talking about me, "Charge him with espionage." And Holder writes back, we, we got these memos in discovery when I went to trial, um, Holder writes back and says, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan writes back and says, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage, they waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped the espionage charges.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- JKJohn Kiriakou
(laughs) yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, God, that's so gross.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
That's Washington.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's just so hard to believe that the United States of America government works like that. I believe it, I believe it-
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... but it's, it's hard to swallow.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University. The book is called Three Felonies a Day and he says that we are so over-regulated, so over-criminalized in this country, that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal daily business commits three felonies every single day. So if they wanna get you, they're gonna get you and there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) So what was Brennan's beef with you?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Was it just because of the fact that you did that interview or was there underlying tension?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
(laughs) We were never pals. I've known John Brennan for 35 years. We never really cared for each other. To tell you the truth, I, I thought the guy was in over his head intellectually. Uh, he, when, when I first started there, he was a deputy group chief. He was a GS-15, nobody, journeyman, you know, first line, second line manager. No big deal. There are hundreds of them.And he worked for this really wonderful woman, a- a great intellect, uh, named Martha Kessler. And Martha was so highly respected. She had written this book, I still remember the title, called Syria: Fragile Mosaic of Power. And when you got hired, you got her book and you had to read the book 'cause, like, "This is what we do. This is the perfect example of what we do." So he was her deputy. One day, he went to her and he said, "Martha, you know, I've been your deputy for X number of years. I think I'm ready for promotion into the Senior Intelligence Service." And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a couple of weeks ago about this, Martha said, "Not only will you never be a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, I don't even want you working for me anymore. You're fired." Well, you're not really fired at the CIA. If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job. If you can't find a jo- another job in six weeks, then they escort you to your car, they take your badge and, you know, "So long. Good luck." Well, it's, the normal job turnover is in the summertime. This is the week before Christmas 1993 or '4, I can't recall now. And, um, there are no jobs open at Christmas. So he finally finds one job. It is in the PDB staff, the President's Daily Brief, and it is as a, a morning briefer giving the President's daily brief briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing. So that's the National Security Council's Director for Intelligence Programs, who happened to be this guy named George Tenet. And so they immediately hit it off. Two alpha dogs, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking. There used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue a- adjacent to the White House that sold cigars. Tenet had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke, and his wife would yell at him. So they would, after the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand there and laugh and, you know, talk about chasing women or whatever. Totally hit it off. Then Tenet becomes the Deputy Director of the CIA. So he brings, he brings Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh. (laughs)
- JKJohn Kiriakou
... Deputy Director of the office that Martha's working in. He calls Martha Kessler in and says, "Now you're fired." And so she just elected to retire. Well, he ended up being identified by Tenet as the guy. Like, "This is my guy. He- this guy's going places. He needs operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years. I'm gonna make him the station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia." He's an analyst. He's never served overseas before, never recruited a spy, ever. It wasn't his job. Now all of a sudden he's the, the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world. So he does that for a long time, by the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9/11 hijackers. And, uh, then he comes back as the Deputy Executive Director of the whole CIA, right? So it's Director, Deputy Director, Executive Director, and then the Deputy Directors for Operations Intelligence, Science Technology Administration, and they're, they're dotted lines. So he's now one of the five most senior people in the entire CIA. He does that for a couple of years and then becomes the Executive Director. By the time I get promoted to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant, I'm throwing all these stupid terms out, executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations, I'm meeting with Brennan every single day. So we're, we're doing the Iraq War, we're doing terrorism and Al-Qaeda and all this stuff. He didn't like me and I didn't like him, and then when I became the quote/unquote human rights guy, eh, that just kind of sealed it for me. But I didn't care 'cause I didn't respect him anyhow. Uh, I will say that, that Jim Pavitt, the Deputy, uh, Deputy Director for Operations, r- legendary officer and a really great guy, he hated Brennan more than I did. And he used to mock Brennan because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, "I wanna head my own agency. I wanna head my own agency." And they finally put him in charge of this thing that was temporarily called the TTIC, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center. It later became the National Counterterrorism Center. Um, and he, they sorta, sorta shunted him off there. And it was a nothing analytic organization not even in the, in the headquarters building. It was out in one of the outlying buildings. And then he kind of went away. But where he really did right for himself is in 2007, there was this, there was this wave of retirements, right? We're, we're enough now beyond 9/11 that people can begin to retire. So this huge wave of senior level retirements in '07 and then once these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
And he saved himself.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. So, how did you wind up going to prison?
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Section 4
- JKJohn Kiriakou
idea how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you, cold pitching me like that." And I got up indignantly, and I walked out, and I walked, and I mean directly without stopping, to the office of the Senate Security officer. And I, I knocked on the door, I went in, I said, "Hey, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer." And he goes, "Was it that damn Russian again?" And I said, "No, it was Japanese." He goes, "Japanese?" I said, "I know, right?" He goes, "Well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information." I said, "This didn't have anything to do with trade information, I don't think. I don't know. We didn't even get that far." He said, "Okay, do me a favor." He said, "I've got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the internet. Write it up as a memo, and I'm gonna courier it over to the FBI." So I sat there, and I wrote the whole thing blow-by-blow. The next day, he calls me, and he says, "Two FBI agents are gonna come up and talk to you." And I said, "Okay." So they come up, I recount the whole, the whole lunch, and they said, "All right, here's what we want you to do. We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it." And I said, because I'm a patriot, I said, "You want me to wear a wire?" And they said, "No, we're gonna be at the next table. We're, we're gonna listen to everything." I said, "But he only speaks Arabic." "That's okay. We got a guy who speaks Arabic. Don't worry." I said, "All right." So I call him. I invite him to lunch. We go to lunch, do the whole thing. But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called, and they said, "Operation came up. Just write us another, another memo. Do the lunch, and write us another memo." I said, "Fine." So I wrote another memo. They asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time. The fifth time, he says to me, "I have great news." He said, "I got my dream job. I've been promoted, and I'm gonna be the deputy ambassador in Cairo." And I said, "Congratulations." I shook his hand. Never saw him again. So I've written all this to the FBI. One day, in January of 2012, so I've been out of the Senate for about nine months, the FBI calls. And I look at my phone, and it says Federal Bureau of Investigation. I was like, "Huh, I wonder what that's all about." So I answer, and they said, "Hey, you remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago?" And I said, "Yeah." And they said, "We've got a similar situation, and we need your help." And again, because I'm a patriot, I said, "Anything for the FBI." I kick myself now for saying it. I said, "Anything for the FBI. What do you want me to do?" They said, "Come down to the Washington field office Thursday morning at 10." I said, "Done." I go down there the next Thursday, and, uh, they're waiting for me at the entrance, which I thought was odd, and we go up to a conference room, and they said, "We're both cleared SI, TK, gamma," and then there were two compartments above top secret that I was cleared for that they said they were cleared for. And it... So if the, if the conversation necessitated it, we could go into that area. So they said, "Well before, before we start, just wanted to ask you, just read your book. It was great. I loved it. Hey, what about this that you said in your book?" And I was like, "Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was a cool story." "What about this other thing?" "Yeah, I had fun." I said, "It was kind of hard, you know, it took me nine months to write the book, 22 months to get it cleared." "Oh yeah, you got it cleared?" "Yeah, of course, I got it cleared. 22 months it took me to get it cleared." And I'm thinking, "What an odd question." Then they start asking me about something called the Sam Adams Project, and I said, "I'm sorry, I don't know what that means."And then the bad cop of the two says, "We know you've been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys." I said, "What are you talking about?" And then I said, "Wait a minute. Are you investigating me?" And they said, "Yeah, and we're raiding your house right now as we speak." And I said, thank God, I said, "I want to speak to my attorney right now." That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me. And one of the things that I learned, and this became painfully evident when they started arresting January 6th people, was the FBI in Washington likes to make its arrests on Thursdays because there are no federal arraignments on Friday. So you're in the DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you. And then they arraign you on Monday, and then you want to make a deal just so you don't ever have to go inside that prison again. But because I asked to see my attorney, they let me go. So I called the attorney as soon as I, I got out of the office. Actually, when I was walking out, one of them went over to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was Peter Strzok. And Peter Strzok says, "Tell me he implicated himself." And the guy said, "Not really, no. We have to let him go." And so I grabbed my cellphone and I left, went to the attorney's office. They had already called my attorney and said they were charging me with espionage. I hadn't committed espionage. They knew I hadn't committed espionage. And in fact, since then, I'm fast-forwarding a lot, three FBI agents have reached out to me, well, two to my attorneys, one reached out to me directly, to apologize, saying that this came from the top, they thought it was a BS case, they were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they could do. One guy reached out to me through eBay, of all things, like, to try to cover up the, uh, the trail. He's like, "Listen, I've, I've been losing sleep over this for the," excuse me, "for the last 13 years. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am." Blah, blah, blah. It's like, "Well, I hope you feel better. My whole life fell apart, but I'm glad you got that off your chest." So, um, it became a matter of, of just survival after that, you know? You have to take it seriously. I was facing 45 years in prison, and then when the Justice Department, um, made a, a request for a proffer meeting, the proffer meeting is they'll give you a little idea of what they have against you, and then they make an offer. You can take it or leave it. And they offered me 45 years, and I said, "I'm not doing 45 minutes. I didn't do anything wrong." And this woman, she became Deputy Attorney General, uh, for the Criminal Division under Biden, she said, "Take this deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren." Oh my God. Oh, it was... I went home that night and I went home, I'm, I'm ashamed to even say it. That night we, we put the kids to bed. And my wife and I were watching TV and she said, "Come on, let's go to bed." And I said, "I can't sleep. I, uh, there's no way I'm gonna be able to sleep." And she said, "No, come on. Let's go to bed." She knew I was gonna go down into the garage, turn the car on, and just lay across the back seat. And she said, "No, come on. You need to try to get some sleep." Uh, she saved me that night, but 45 years? And so they waited 10 months before they were even willing to engage in a conversation, and then they offered 10 years on a Monday. On Wednesday they offered eight, and on Friday they offered five. My lead attorney was this legendary guy named Plato Cacheras. And Plato said, "You know, I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years, and this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time." He said, "Usually they offer you 10, you say no, the next offer's 15, then the next offer's 20." I said, "Why are they coming down in time?" He said, "'Cause they have a shit case and they know it's shit, and that's why we're gonna go to trial and we're gonna win this thing." I said, "Great." Well, they s- they, they stayed at five, and then they came back and they said three and a half. And I said, "I'm going to trial. I'm gonna win this thing." Turned out at the time, my best friend, his wife had an uncle who was O.J. Simpson's jury consultant, and she called him for me and she said, "Hey, my friend John, he's in this situation." He's like, "Yeah, I read about this in the papers." "He could use your help." He came up, didn't charge me a cent. He came up to Washington, we got him a security clearance, and, uh, which was another thing. We asked for a security clearance and then, uh, the oth- the, uh, Justice Department called and said, "The White House said Kiriakou's attorneys have enough security clearances." And I said, "Who at the White House said we have enough security clearances?" Well, they had to tell us that it was John Brennan. No more attorneys for Kiriakou. Fish are cut bait. We're like, "It's not up to John Brennan to decide if I have enough attorneys." You know, th- they have an unlimited number of attorneys, an unlimited budget. As it turned out, they spent $6 million to put me in prison. Was society really better off spending $6 million to put me in a low security prison for, for 23 months? So in the end they said, "Best and final offer, 30 months, you do 23."Well, I was only the second American who had ever been charged with this crime of, um, violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Uh, th- the only other person that was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scranage. She was a CIA secretary in Ghana in the '80s, and she was having an affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service. And in the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers in the station and the names of the sources they were running, and so the Ghanaians executed these guys. Oh my god. She got nine months in prison, nine months, and they offer me 45 years- Exhales. ... for blowing the whistle on the torture program. So my wife and I stayed up all night, literally all night, and because Sharon Scranage had taken a plea, there was literally no case law. So what we found, we found several things. Um, we found several articles from the Harvard Law Review saying, "This law is unconstitutional. It- it violates the first amendment, and it is prior restraint," right? Like, it tells you in advance you can't say X, Y, and Z. But because there was no case law, you c- you couldn't challenge it in court. And I said, "Well, can't we just appeal, appeal the charge and maybe, you know, all the way up to the Supreme Court?" And they said, "Yeah, we can do that post-conviction, and then you're gonna be 45 years waiting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing. We can't do that." So, um, so I decided by 6:00 AM I'm gonna turn it down. I believed in my heart I hadn't done anything right. This was political. It was a vendetta by John Brennan. And Obama, by all accounts... I had friends, of course, who were still working at the agency and working at the, uh, at the CIA- or at the, uh, White House, and they said that Obama had this Nixonian obsession with national security leaks, and it's because it- that came from Brennan. Obama was a senator for two years. He didn't have any experience doing anything, so he did what John Brennan told him to do, and Brennan said, "You gotta crack down on these leaks. They do nothing but embarrass us." So, um, I decided I'm gonna turn it down. 6:00 AM, I send an email to my attorneys. I had 11 attorneys. I was paying half of them, five of them, and, um, and then one of them writes back and says, "Put on a pot of coffee. We'll- we'll be at the house by 7:00." So they come to my house (laughs) . The- the four main ones came to the house. Plato was the first one in. Now, imagine this, a- an 80-year-old, 6'2", 280-pound, mean old man. He comes in, and I said, "Good morning, Plato," and he said, "You stupid son of a bitch. Take the deal," like that. I said, "Take the deal? You're the one that told me not to take the deal. You're the one who told me we're gonna go to trial and win this thing." And he says, "I only told you that to keep your spirits up." Oh, god. And then the second one, his partner, Bob Trout, a sweet gentleman, a Southern gentleman, he says, "If you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal." And I'm like, "Wha- now what do I do?" And then the third, who was the guy... E- Mark McDougal, o- one of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life, and- and the one that I l- liked and respected the most out of all of them. I liked all of them and respected all of them, but- but I felt a connection to this guy. He pulls me aside. He was a little bit angry, and he said, "You know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal." And I looked at my wife, and she's just like, "What are we gonna do?" So I took the deal, and I got two and a half years in prison, and they made me do every single day of it. In fact, we went to sentencing, and, um, this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the- the espionage court, and the reason why we didn't go to trial in the end was the- the- the OJ Simpson, uh, jury consultant said, "If we were, if we were in any other district in America, I would say, 'Let's go for it. We're gonna win this thing.' But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire jury is gonna be people from the CIA, from the FBI, from DOD, from intelligence community contractors." He said, "Buddy, you don't have a prayer. Take the deal." Exhales. Yeah. Exhales. It was bad. Wow. So I, at sentencing, my attorney said, "Your Honor, we request that Mr. Kiriakou be sent to a minimum security work camp." She says, "Any objection from the Justice Department?"
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
And so what kind…
- JKJohn Kiriakou
They said, "No objection." She goes, "Okay, minimum security work camp." No bars on the windows. No locks on the doors. You're free to come and go as you please. You're just on your honor not to abscond. And most of the guys work. There's a little college in town. You go sweep the floors or whatever. So I got to the prison three months later, and, uh, it's- it's weird, the system that we have, Joe. You just, you walk up, and you knock on the door, and you say, "Hi, I'm- I'm John Kiriakou. I'm here to turn myself in." That's all you do. And your friends and family just drive away. And so they said, "Yeah, uh, you gotta go across the street to the actual prison. They'll process you, and then they just bring you back over here." And I said, "Okay." So I go across the street, and, uh, I said, "I'm- I'm John Kiriakou. I'm here to turn myself in." And, uh, and the guy takes me by the arm. We go outside, and we start walking around to the back of the prison, and I said, "No, no-"... I'm supposed to be at the, at the minimum security camp across the street." And the guy laughs at me and he goes, "Not according to my paperwork you're not." And I was like, "Oh my God. Take it easy." We later learned Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, "Make it as difficult as possible." So I told myself, "Take it easy. If you make any ruckus, they're gonna put you in solitary. Don't say a word." So I didn't say a word. It took them about 40 minutes to process me, then they walked me to my cell. The only thing the cop said to me, he says, "A word of advice, buddy. If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression." And I said, "Great. Thanks. I'm here 40 minutes, and now I'm gonna get my ass kicked. I appreciate it." And then I started that whole odyssey.
- JRJoe Rogan
And so what kind of prison were you in?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I was in FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, which is a low security prison. But it's called a low-medium, and then there's a high-medium, so this was a low-medium. It took me five days to get access to a phone, and I called Mark MacDougall, the, the attorney that I liked so much, and I said, "Mark, they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins." I said, "What do I do?" He says, "Oh my God. Well," he said, "we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing, and you'll be home by then." He said, "Buddy, I'm sorry. You're gonna have to tough it out." And so that's what I did.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. (exhales) So you have this long career working for the government.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
They put you away. And what is it like for you to feel so betrayed, and to get out, and what- what do you- what do you- what do you do when you get out?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I was, frankly, very angry when I got out. I didn't realize how angry I was. Like, people would mention it to me. Like, "Maybe you should talk to somebody. Maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option." And I was like, "Why? There's nothing wrong with me. I'm ready to fight and march, and, you know, raise my fist against the Obama administration." And so, um, I was wrong, of course. I was, I was so angry that, that it, it wasn't even healthy for the people around me. But I'll tell you, Joe, the hardest thing is you think you can just step back into your life again, and you'll never be able to step back into your life. So I thought, "Okay, well, I'm, I'm highly educated. I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. I have a master's degree in legislative, uh, policy analysis. I finished my PhD case, uh, uh, classwork in, uh, in international affairs." I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber. "We don't hire, uh, felons." I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you're broke.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
And I was broke. Bankrupt. Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you couldn't even get a job driving for Uber?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
(laughs) No, Uber turned me down.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. But you know what, though?
- JRJoe Rogan
What did you do?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Well, I was confident that I was right and they were wrong. And my, my wife, she, unfortunately she's now my ex-wife, but she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever gave me. She said, "You have to keep telling your side of the story, because eventually they're gonna move on to their next victim, and if you keep talking, your side of the story is gonna be the side of record, and eventually the truth is gonna come out." And sure enough, six weeks before, um, before I, uh, was released from prison, I called her. I was, I was allowed to call her every other day for 15 minutes. So I called her and I said, "How was your day?" And she said, "It was great." And I said, "Really? Great? Why was, why was it so great?" And she said, "Because the Senate Torture Report was released today, and it proved that everything you said was true." And I said, "That is great." And she said, "John McCain stood up on the floor of the Senate and said if it weren't for John Kiriakou, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name." And so when I got home, God bless him, I, the, one of the first calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff, and he said, "Senator McCain says welcome home, and he wants to know what he can do to be helpful." And I said, "Oh my God." I said, "Tell him I said thank you." I had liked McCain very much from when I was working on Kerry's staff. Kerry was a little jealous of McCain. Um, and McCain would go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi. Kerry said to me one time, "Why don't you two get a room or something?" And I said, "No." I said, "It's, we have this connection over torture." I said, "McCain takes me seriously, and I take him seriously." And so when I, when I spoke to McCain, I said, "These damn Obama people, they confiscated my pension, and I'm gonna have to work until the day I die. They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension." So (laughs) he came up with this idea, it was a great idea, to write an amendment. My attorney wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, and it said that every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012 shall hereby have his pension reinstated.So, of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to. So he, he said, "Nobody reads these 1,500-page bills. We're gonna slip it in there." And he said, "I'm gonna be on the conference committee. We'll get it taken care of." And then he got sick. He got a brain tumor, and he wasn't named to the conference committee, and so they pulled it back out again.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
And then he died. And so here I am, 10 years later, the only way that this can be made right is with a presidential pardon. And that's what I've been working on e- for years now.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what did-
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Years.
- JRJoe Rogan
... what did you do for money?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I was offered a job at a small think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies. And they said, "We'll give you an office, but you're gonna have to raise your own salary." And so it was just, like, constant GoFund Mes. I did that for a year. I made $20,000 for the year, and I said, "I can't do this. It's untenable." And so I just decided, "Look, no company is gonna hire me, right? I can't go back into government again. And so I'm gonna have to work for myself." So I, uh, s- uh, I had already written my first book, made number, number five on the New York Times Bestseller's list. My second book, I wrote longhand from prison. I ended up winning two literary awards for that book. I won the pr- uh, the PEN First Amendment Award, which along with the PEN/Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe, is one of the big four, and then I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year that year. I thought, "I'm gonna keep writing books." I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium for Independent Journalism. So it's, like, 200 small-town papers around the country. And, um, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting, and then the Greek government. I'm- I happen to be Greek American. My grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes. As soon as I was arrested, like, within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, "What can we do to be helpful?" And I said, "You can give me citizenship." And man, (snaps fingers) like that, I got Greek citizenship. And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law. And then they passed it quickly, the parliament passed it into law, and then the European Union adopted it. So I went to Brussels and I testified there, and then they repackaged it. Now it's the law of the land in all of the European Union. And then people in the States began taking me more seriously. I started doing some paid speaking gigs. I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple of different universities. And then, you know, after a while, you can make an okay living. I'm still gonna have to work until the day I die because I have literally nothing saved. It all went to the attorneys. And, uh, you know, hope for the best. I will say that I was a third-generation Democrat. I left the Democratic Party ages ago. Um, John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions convinced me that I had done the right thing. And now I have found common cause with populist Republicans. You know, you don't have to agree on every issue, right? You don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe in and everything they stand for. But I've struck up a, a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson, sweetest guy in the world and a great supporter of mine, and Judge Napolitano. It's a love fest every time the, the two of us get together. And I realized that, you know, this thing, this, th- this political system we have, it's antiquated. It doesn't work. You have to, you have to engage with the individual. Like, I, I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene on some of these, these civil liberties issues, right? Or Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders for that matter. But I've realized that, yeah, I've go- I've gotta, I've gotta stand up for what's right, not what the DNC happens to think what's right or some politician that I used to, you know, think I had respect for thinks is right. Y- a couple of nights before I left for prison, the director, the former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who later became the deputy director for operations and was very close to Brennan, he was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA, he tweeted at me and he said, "Don't drop the soap," with a, a laughing emoji. I gave myself a couple hours to cool off, and then I texted back and I said, "Jose, I'm on the right side of history, and you are not." And that gave me such peace. I knew I could go to prison, survive this just fine, and come out and still make an impact. And, you know, knock on wood, that's how it's worked out.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whew. (exhales deeply)
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It's, it's ugly. You know, and you get to prison. Uh, one of my attorneys said, "Hey, I've had, I've collected a, a list of 600 emails, email addresses from people who wanna know how you're doing. Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send me a, a letter and I'll send it around to these people." I said, "Okay, great." It took me... Y- you don't realize it, but you're in shock for the first week or two, and then I started settling into the routine.And it was kinda ... I mean, it was pretty screwed up. That first day, uh, 20 minutes after the cop warned me about people coming into my room unannounced, these two guys just walk in boldly, just walk in. I jump up, I put my fists up, I go, "What do you want?" One of them has a swastika on his neck. It took up his entire neck. It came up onto his face. The other one had "fuck you" tattooed on his eyelids. So I go, "What do you want?" And, and the swastika guy says, "You the new guy?" I said, "Yeah, so?" And he says, "You a fag?" I said, "No, I'm not a fag." He said, "You a rat?" I said, "No, I didn't have anybody else in my case. I'm not a rat." And he says, "You a Chomo?" I go, "I don't know what that word means." He goes, "Chomo, child molester." I said, "No, I'm not a child molester." And he goes, "Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." And I was like, "Oh, mm, I guess I'm with the Aryans now."
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh boy.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Grand. Yeah, and then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the Banano family, and, uh, one day he said to me ... I, I, I would get The New York Times and he would get the New York Post, and we would trade at the end of each day. He asked me, "Let me ask you something," he says. "Why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria?" I said, "I don't know, Pete. My f- my first day here, they told me to sit with them." He goes, "From today, you're with the Italians." And I said, "Awesome," and they became my closest friends. I mean, I got a book out of it. They were absolutely wonderful, honorable, honest, fun, the smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most respect. And once word was out that I was
- 1:15:00 – 1:27:40
God, it has to…
- JKJohn Kiriakou
with the Italians, it was hands off. And it was thanks to one guy. Shout out to Mark Lanzillotti. Mark was from Philly, and he saw in The New York Times I was gonna be assigned to that prison o- on a Sunday. I was assigned on Thursday, and he took it upon himself to go to every one of the Italians to say, "There's a CIA guy coming here. He's not an FBI agent. The FBI are cops and rats. The CIA protected us from the Muslims." And they're like, "Oh, okay," and so it was, you know, welcome. (exhales) No problems.
- JRJoe Rogan
God, it has to be insanely stressful.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It was like, it was like living in the Twilight Zone. The stress, the stress will kill you. It's incredible. You see people break down all the time. They just lose it. And it's not like you're gonna, you know, be taken out to some medical unit someplace. You go to solitary, and you can live or die down in there. Yeah. Oh, so I was telling you, so I, I, I waited about six weeks before I was comfortable enough to, to write a, a letter. So I, I very arrogantly called it Letter from Loretto because I had such respect for Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. And so I said two things in this. I mean, I talked about the food, and I talked about the Italians, and ... But I said two things. I said, um, there was this one guard who was really abusive. She was absolutely horrible. You know that phrase, "Rode hard and put away wet?"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
That was this, that was this woman. All tatted out from, you know, the neck down, and just a nasty, mean, old, awful, awful person. So, I was walking through the hall one day and she said, "Hey, are you that motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce at mail call?" And I go, "Kiriakou," just like it's spelled. She goes, "How about if I call you fuck face?" Like that. So I said, "Classy," and I walked away. Somebody later told me they're not allowed to talk to us that way. That's a violation of, you know, code 11.8 subsection, you know, B whatever. So I wrote it in the, um, in the letter, and I was just like, you know, life in prison. What am I gonna do? This, this woman swears at me. There's nothing I can do. The other thing was more important. I'd been there three days, and one of my cellmates was an Australian arsonist, and he said, "Let me walk you around and introduce you to the guys." I said, "Okay." We go to this other housing unit, and there's a little tiny guy there who didn't speak any English, and he said, "This is ..." I forget what his name is. Ahmed or something. He's from Iraq. And I said, (Arabic) "It's very nice to meet you." And he says, (Arabic) "I said, 'Yeah, great, you're from Iraq. I was in Iraq. It's very nice to meet you.'" Turns out he was there on a terrorism charge. He was the imam of some mosque in New York, and somebody was trying to sell a Stinger missile to somebody, and he translated the, the document, the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in this terrorism case. So I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day, and usually if you're being called into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary. So I hear my name, "Kiriakou, lieutenant's office immediately." Always with immediately. And they know you can't do it immediately 'cause all the doors are locked. So I wait for a 10-minute move period. The, the bells ring, and I go to the lieutenant's office. I said, "You wanted to see me?" And they have th- this guy's picture on a, on a computer screen. "You know this guy?" I said, "I don't know him. I met him yesterday." "What'd you say to him?" I said, "I said nice to meet you." "What did he say to you?" "He said nice to meet you too." "Oh yeah? Well, after you walked out, he called a number in Pakistan, and they told him to kill you." I said, "Get the fuck out of here. I could kill this guy with my thumb." "No, no, no, don't do that. We've been looking for a reason to, to transfer him out."... I'm like, "Okay. So, every time I see this guy, I give him the stink eye, right? And then he gives me the stink eye back." But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "That doesn't make any sense. He's Kurdish. He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish. Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan?" It just didn't make sense. So I saw him in the yard, and I went up to him, and he got kinda scared, like he was gonna try to defend himself, and I had, you know, six inches and 100 pounds on this guy. So I said, I said, "Wait a minute. I just wanna ask you a question. Did the cops say anything to you about me?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "What did they say to you?" And he said, "They told me that after we met, you called a number in Washington and they told you to kill me." And I said, "Oh, they did, did they?" So I went back to the law library, and I looked this up, and this was a Class D felony. It was conspiring to commit violence in a federal facility. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. So I wrote it in my letter, and I sent it to my attorney. And I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't know my attorney was friends with Arianna Huffington, who then put it on Huffington Post with this banner headline. Millions of hits. The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me, and it's in, I mean, it's everywhere from, from CNN to Playboy to The Economist and, and Time Magazine, when Time Magazine was a thing, and NPR is calling the prison to interview me, and the next thing I know, I'm called to the warden's office. Well, that's in an off-limits part of the facility. So the warden calls me in, he's like, "I'm gonna send you to solitary right now." And I thought, you know, "Is now the time to be, to be humble before the warden? Or should I state my claim?" And I said, "Warden, with all due respect, I've gone nose to nose with Al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you? Give me some credit." He said, "Yeah? We'll see what you say when you've spent some time in solitary." I said, "I've lived in Yemen, in Pakistan. I'm not afraid of your Loretto, Pennsylvania solitary. Besides," I said, "go ahead and send me to solitary. CNN's gonna be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot." And I just looked at him. I never went to solitary, not for a minute.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Jeez. So they're just trying to set you guys up.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Trying to get you guys at each other's throat-
- JKJohn Kiriakou
They-
- JRJoe Rogan
... and hopefully-
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... one of you will do something.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
They did it one other time. W- my, one of my attorneys-
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you know who orchestrated that?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
No. That would be t-
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think it was the warden himself?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
No?
- JKJohn Kiriakou
I don't think he was smart enough. I don't think he cared enough. It had to come from the agency.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
There was one other incident, too. Um, uh, I lived in the same block of cells with a, with an Afghan American pharmacist who had an oxy problem. Nice guy. And he came up to me one day and he said, "Hey, um, the spokesman for the Taliban is here now, and he wants to meet you." I said, "The spokesman for the Taliban?" I said, "Are you talking about that case in New Jersey?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "I don't have anything to say to the spokesman of the Taliban. I don't wanna meet him." And he said, "Oh, okay, I'll tell him." So, I'm out in the yard one day, and my attorney had warned me, "They're, they're upset at the shortness of your sentence, so be very careful. They're gonna try to set you up and add years on." So I'm out in the yard, and here comes this guy with a beard down to his waist and he's got his hand out to shake my hand. And I put my hands up so as not to touch him, and I look just past him, and there's a guard in the woods outside the thing with a long-distance camera lens, and he's going click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click. And I said, "Don't you even think about touching me." And he said, "Aw, come on, man. Come on. We have a lot in common." I said, "We have nothing in common. I spent half my career trying to kill people like you." I said, "Get away from me. Don't touch me, or you're gonna end up unconscious on the ground." And he walked away, and then he got transferred out. And I said, "Isn't it interesting that the spokesman for the Taliban was sent to our prison and was only here for four days? Isn't that interesting?" And then they just gave up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
This kinda stuff is so hard to believe.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
It's America.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right? Yeah.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
You, you don't wanna believe this about America.
- JRJoe Rogan
You don't wanna believe it. You wanna believe we're the good guys.
- JKJohn Kiriakou
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you wanna believe that we would never turn on our own like that over something-
Episode duration: 2:31:05
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