CIA Whistleblower: “The Shadow Government Is Real” - John Kiriakou

Key Takeaway

Treat privacy as a practice, not an abstract right: audit the data you voluntarily expose today. Review one app’s permissions, remove location/microphone access it does not need, and move a sensitive conversation off ordinary email or text where practical. Kiriakou’s broader warning is that convenience-based data sharing can become normalized before people consider its consequences. You cannot control every system, but reducing unnecessary exposure is an immediate, concrete step.

Episode Overview

Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou discusses intelligence bureaucracy, weak oversight, surveillance, foreign espionage, interrogation, and the ethical limits of state power. He argues that durable institutions and private technology firms can accumulate power beyond meaningful democratic scrutiny, while also sharing operational stories about intelligence tradecraft and the failures of torture.

Full Transcript

Transcript of CIA Whistleblower: “The Shadow Government Is Real” - John Kiriakou from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

You are an ex-CIA operative. Why should I believe anything that you're going to tell me? Well, you know, that's a good question. I get it with some frequency, and all I can say is I have a very long track record, and my track record is one of telling the truth. So I can't force people to believe what I say, but they can certainly choose to believe me or choose to not believe me. I won't lose sleep over it either way. You've mentioned that you're looking for a pardon from Trump.

How's that going? Do you think you're going to get it? No. If I'm being fully honest, let me back up by saying that I have fantastic support from people in the inner circle around Donald Trump, and I'm very grateful for it. Household names. But I am told by one of those household names that it's not going to happen because the CIA hates me, and I responded. This is just three weeks ago. I responded by saying that I've never met John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I've never exchanged a harsh word with John Ratcliffe, and this cabinet member said, it's not about John Ratcliffe as a person.

It's institutional. They fear that if you get a pardon, it'll open the door for other would-be whistleblowers who want to go public on issues of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, and they're not willing to entertain that. Is there anyone else that is more persona non grata than you, do you think? Ed Snowden. Okay, so that's the sort of one and two. Yeah. When I was still at the CIA, Philip Agee was still being talked about. What's that? Philip Agee was a CIA case officer in the 1960s who was serving in South America.

I think it was Chile or Peru, one or the other, and he walked in on a torture session that the CIA was doing with the host government intelligence service and decided to resign from the CIA. More than just resigning from the CIA, he wrote a book called Inside the Company, in which he documented in an appendix the names of every undercover CIA officer that he ever met. It was something like 1,200 names that he came up with. They wanted to execute Philip Agee. Even years and years later, when I was at the agency, the old-timers were still talking about, how do we get Agee?

He ended up fleeing to Cuba and lived most of his life in Cuba. Until Snowden, Agee was number one. He could give Andrew Tate some advice. Seriously, Andrew Tate. At least if you're going to get caught, don't be caught wearing those silly clothes. I think the reason that he was taken away was for crimes against fashion. There you go. That actually makes sense to me. Correct. Speaking of the president and CIA, how much oversight does the president have over the CIA? How compartmentalized are those two sides?

That's an issue that is debated. It shouldn't be, because the president should be the definitive word. The president's not the definitive word, because there really is such a thing as the deep state. I say this all the time. You don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. You can call it the state. Whatever you want. The fact is that it exists. Presidents come and go every four years or every eight years. The deep state, you're there for 25 years, 30, 35 years.

I used to sit next to a guy who is now one of the top four or five officers. He's been there for 37 years. They know that if a president orders them to do something they don't want to do, they just say, yes, Mr. President, and then they ignore him. It must feel a lot like being a hotelier and having guests that come and go, medium-stay guests, compared with you, who's been there for decades. That's exactly right. There's a bigger problem, too. It's the lack of congressional oversight.

Starting in 1975, the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House transformed into oversight committees. The Church Committee became the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Pike Committee became the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The thing is, how does a staff of 40, 50 people oversee an organization of 20, 30, 40,000 people? That's how many are in the CIA. The numbers classify. My information is so old. I don't know how many people, but it's got to be a lot more than it was when I was there.

How do you oversee that huge of a bureaucracy? You can't. You rely on self-reporting. I'll give you an example. This was not unusual in any way. I was involved in an operation that, at the very end, went bad. When an operation goes bad and a life is lost, you have to report it to Congress, to the congressional oversight committees. I was with the station chief. We were driving back to our office, and he says to me, you're going to write the cable? And I said, yep, I'm going to write the cable.

And he said, yeah, listen, don't send that to Congress. And I said, yeah? And he said, no, don't send it to Congress. And that was not unusual. Like, oh, Congress has enough to worry about. They're working on the budget right now. We don't want to just throw this wrench into the works by telling them we just lost a source. And I said, okay, you're the boss. And so I didn't report it to Congress. Does that make the CIA a kind of shadow government? Oh, yeah. I think that's very much what it is.

Yes. So who's really controlling what happens behind the scenes in America? It's that layer right below the political appointees. So it's that layer right below the director and deputy director of the CIA, the secretary and deputy secretary of state, the secretary and deputy secretary of defense. It's those career government bureaucrats that aren't going anywhere. I'm going to make an analogy between the CIA and running nightclubs, and I'm going to try and see if I can bring this into land. So I ran events for a very long time in the north of the UK, and I had this very big events company.

And one of the things that the managers of the nightclub wanted to see were the owners of the events company standing on the front door next to them. Where you stand is typically on the door. Make sure that the queue is moving nicely, that the door staff aren't beating anybody up, people are paying the right amount of the till, etc., etc. Pop your head downstairs. Is everything going all right inside? Outside is where the action is. And one of the things that was interesting, you would assume, well, if you're the owner, you have this more salubrious, like, you know, opulent, you just sit in the car or go for a coffee or, you know, don't even leave.

And it's cold in the northeast of the UK. Why do you even need to be there? Like, you're functionally not doing anything. All of the action is happening downstairs. All of the managers that work for me and my business partner, they're the ones that actually know everyone that's going in. By this point, I was 24, 25, 26, 27. Most of the people that were in the club were 19. But what we found was that in other events companies who decided, had less of a puritan work ethic than me and my business partner did, when the owners started to leave the front door, the managers for the events company and the manager of the venue would start to develop a tighter relationship.

And I think that we usually assume the person who has the most seniority is the one that's closest to the information, that has the most respect. But it's quite reliably, it's not, it's the enforcer. You know, even if you look at the mafia, how many times was the boss overthrown by one of the second in commands or one of their lieutenants? Because it really is the enforcer that is kind of at the coalface day to day. They've got sufficient seniority to be seen with respect, but they're also grinding away.

They're stood on the front door of the nightclub. And that was, we could predict very reliably, that particular events company, the owners stopped going out on a night time. We give it three months, six months before one of their managers goes, well, hang on a second. I'm mates with the guy that runs the venue and the dude that runs the company, like he's not even here. Like, why don't we just cut him out? I'll backhand you a little bit and we can go direct. And I think it sounds somewhat similar here.

Not only that, but it would be as if me and my co-founder were being replaced every so often. So not even was the loyalty not to the person who's more at the coalface doing the work, but who are you being loyal to? You're being loyal to an appointee that's going to fuck off at some point in the next few years. So it makes complete sense. And they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Because they don't want to lose their job? They don't want to lose their job.

But even more importantly, they're the ones that make the trains run on time. They're the ones that are foreign policy and defense and intelligence policy. And they don't want some bomb throwing new president to come in. I've said this a number of times before, but I think it bears repeating. One of the things that the CIA generally loves is when a new president is elected and he has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. Because from the day after the election, he's entitled to a PDB briefing, President's Daily Brief.

And so it's usually the deputy director for intelligence or the director of the PDB staff, or sometimes both of them together, that will go brief the new president-elect. And I always say, as soon as they lay out the first blue border report or black border report, it's like six levels above top secret. And they say, Mr. President-elect, just wait until you see the cool things we're doing all over the world. So highly classified, everybody else has to step outside. Just wait. They've recruited him. They made him one of the guys.

They just sucked him right in. And every day, six days a week, he can't wait to get that briefing. But somebody who has foreign policy experience and maybe might be a little bit jaded about CIA failures, whether analytic or operational, isn't going to just succumb to the allure of inside information. What are the levels of security? Classification? So it starts with unclassified. The New York Times is unclassified. Everybody can see it. Then there's something called sensitive but unclassified. So it's usually like an internal memo or something.

The Dunkin' Donuts in the CIA cafeteria is going to close for two weeks for renovation. It's sensitive because it's inside the CIA, but it's unclassified. Then there's confidential. Most of what the State Department does is confidential, where if it's exposed, it would be embarrassing to the federal government. Not dangerous, but it would be embarrassing. Then there's secret. Revelation of secret information would cause serious damage to the national security. Then there's top secret. Revelation of that information would cause grave damage to the national security. That's the terminology in the espionage law.

But then there are compartments, dozens and dozens of compartments that are in addition to top secret. For example, when you get hired by the CIA, you don't just get a top secret security clearance. You go in with what's called a TSSCISITKGAMMA clearance. So it's top secret, special intelligence, meaning you're allowed to see NSA reporting. The compartments are talent, keyhole, and then gamma is above talent and keyhole. What the heck does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. And then he's telling us, you can say the word zarf, but you can't say what zarf is.

What's the gamma is the highest? Let's say we've intercepted the cell phone of some foreign leader. That's going to be gamma because it's particularly sensitive. But then there's a lot above gamma. Do you know what that's called? Sometimes they'll come and go in a matter of months, depending on the operation. Zarf was around there for a long time. It was from the 50s. Let's say there's a specific operation. We're going to try to locate the Ayatollah of Iran. We have access to a certain electronic in his cell phone or the cell phone of a bodyguard or whatever.

That could be top secret SITK gamma. Jelly Jar. I'm just making that up. The code names are computer-generated at random. Can you think of a hypothetical situation that would be the most high security that you can think of? Pretty much anything that DARPA does. The Defense Advanced Research Program Agency. DARPA is working on things that you and I see only in science fiction movies. That's why so many people believe that the UFOs that we've been seeing all these years are not actually UFOs. They're experimental DARPA aircraft or the Chinese version of DARPA or something like that.

The work that DARPA does is so highly classified, I never met a CIA officer that had access to that. Do you think the President even knows about that stuff? I think that if he asked, he would be read into the compartment and told. But I think on a daily basis, probably not. Is it right to say that the President is the person who, if they wanted to, could get access to the most information across the board generally? The only person. And he's also the only person in government that can just declassify literally anything he wants with a stroke of a pen.

Including gamma, zarf? All of it. Jelly jar, right, okay. Do you think they abuse classification to hide embarrassing things? 100% yes. How much of it needs to be classified, that stuff? There's a guy named J. William, I forget his name. Anyway, there's a guy who was the classification czar under George W. Bush. And now he has become an anti-classification activist. His position is that fully three quarters of classified documents ought not be classified. Politically inconvenient, personally revealing, embarrassing. Yeah, the White House and the Pentagon especially leak like sieves.

But they're almost always authorized leaks. Like you'll leak something for a political purpose, you'll leak something to embarrass a foreign leader. You leak something to try to get a sense of where the public might be on an issue. Well, technically that's all a violation of the Espionage Act. You can't leak information like that, but they do it literally every single day. Every day. Federal judge just approved the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. Larry Ellison's Oracle helps to secure TikTok's USA data and their algorithm. And then his son, David, runs Paramount, including CBS News.

Pretty convenient, isn't it? Oracle's name actually comes from the CIA project that its founders worked on. Do you think that private data and media companies could potentially become as powerful as an intelligence agency? Oh, I think it already is. And I'll tell you what makes it worse, too. In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the CIA sought from Congress a waiver allowing it to invest in tech startups. Unprecedented in American history. As a government, you can't act as a private investor, as an angel investor.

What if you get great returns? And they did. The CIA was the very first investor in Palantir. And Palantir now is a global security software concern to the point where there's credible information indicating that it's infiltrated governments around the world. I was just in Sweden a couple of weeks ago, and there's this huge national debate in Sweden about whether or not to use Palantir to install and maintain their governmental security databases. And Palantir got the contract. So, I mean, do we trust Palantir not to just feed everything to NSA and CIA?

I don't. I worked there for 15 years. I know how it works. Literally everything is going to NSA and CIA. Best of all, for the first time, 8Sleep has introduced solo sizes, including single-side options for Queen, King, and California King beds. And they've got a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally, so don't be scared by the currency amount. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8Sleep.com slash ModernWisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout.

That's 8Sleep.com slash ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom at checkout. Is there a philosophical justification for having an organization like that, which gives your home countries and the country of its origins national security competitive advantage? That's the bottom line. And I would say, of course. For example, when Ed Snowden went public with his revelations in June of 2013, one of the things that the press really seized on was the fact that NSA was intercepting Angela Merkel's cell phone. I want NSA to intercept Angela Merkel's cell phone. I want to know what the German trade positions are.

I want to know what the Germans are saying about the United States, right? I don't want the CIA and NSA to spy on me. It's a part of NSA's charter. It's founding charter that it is forbidden from collecting data on American citizens. Same with the CIA. It is patently illegal for the CIA to collect information on Americans, yet they both do that every single day. Do you think that companies like Flock, which there's a lot of controversy around at the moment, are private companies being used to get around surveillance protections that are meant to restrain the government by just getting private organizations to do it on their behalf?

Oh, yeah. And 9-11 changed that in a terrible way. Until 9-11, if the FBI, for example, wanted to investigate you, they would have to go to a federal judge and say, we want to investigate Chris because of these four reasons. And then the judge would sign a warrant. Now, all they have to do, literally, all they have to do is write up a letter called a national security letter, take it to your service providers, and say, give us everything that you have, and you are forbidden by the Patriot Act from even telling anybody that we gave you this letter.

What do you do? How do you defend yourself? You can't. You don't even know you're being investigated. And there's no judge to say, wait a minute, guys. You're going too far here. There is no safety. Where do you come into land on private companies that develop technology that can be beneficial for a country and the inevitable relationship that's going to come along? Like, I've spent time with Palmer Luckey. What he's trying to do with Angeril. I mean, what's the tagline of that? Fight unfair. Yeah. Isn't that great?

I want a clever guy, a clever guy that's on my side with a gun, as opposed to a clever guy that's on their side with a gun. And I understand that the issue is, well, if that gun is distributed around this country enough, then it can be used to enforce me. I am in the closest proximity to the gun. Hopefully, for a long time, I shouldn't be the person that's on the receiving end of it. But there is a risk. This kind of feels a little bit like the organizational geopolitical systemic equivalent of the debate that British people have around Americans having guns full stop.

But, hey, yeah, it's great that you can defend yourself with it, but also you can be in the receiving end of it. How do you square that circle in a country like this where organizations can do it? And if you don't decide to embed them with the government, they just go to the highest bidder, which might not actually be you. Is it not better to have eyes inside of that than it is to let it just be a free for all? Sure. In a perfect world, yes.

And that's why we need such robust oversight in this area. I'm a firm believer in the rule of law. I really am. And so, why are you smiling? This thought that came across. I'm sorry. My face portrays what I think inside of my head. What I thought inside of my head is the law can be fucked with to just make it whatever you want. And that's the point I was going to make. That's why we need the real force of law. We can't just change the law just to suit the whims of the political winds.

We need to be – see, this is kind of my soapbox here. This is part of my standard speech at universities. Either we're going to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about in 1984, or we're not. Either we're going to be a nation that respects the law and international law and treaties, or we're not. We can't just pretend to be this shining beacon of hope for human rights and civil liberties, except when it's expedient to not be. So, if we're serious about privacy, for example, then by God, let's be serious about privacy.

At the same time, these companies, I think, can perform a great national service because if their technologies are used to keep us safe, to keep Americans safe, then God bless. I wouldn't want them selling the technology to the North Koreans or to the, you know, pick your enemy. But then at the same time, if we're going to be the good guys, by God, let's be the good guys and be serious about it. Geopolitical climate's pretty chaotic at the moment. It is. Who are you most worried about, foreign nation state, being an American?

China. That's an easy one for me. First of all, the Chinese do not have a history of imperialism. They just don't. They don't invade other countries. They never have. I mean, sure, we can make an argument about Tibet, but that's a separate argument. But except for, you know, a brief conflict with North Vietnam back in the day, and two border skirmishes with the Indians, the Chinese just don't attack other countries. They purchase them. They co-opt them. There was a headline on The Onion a couple of weeks ago that was funny because it was so true.

It said, China content to sit back and watch U.S. destroy itself. Because that's what we're doing. When we're spending between one and one and a half trillion dollars a year on the defense budget, and the Chinese aren't. We're spending more than the next eight largest countries combined. Is it being spent effectively? No, it's not. What's it mostly being wasted on? I think it's being wasted on two hundred and ten bases in 144 different countries, number one. I think that it's being wasted on the development of inefficient and inappropriate weapons systems like the F-35.

Nobody wanted the F-35. Why? Because you can't have a one-size-fits-all aircraft when one size can never fit all. And then we phase out the A-10. Everybody loved the A-10. The A-10 can go so low that you can practically reach up and touch it as it's firing a missile to destroy a tank. The F-35 can't do that. So, in the meantime, the Chinese have enough money to buy ports and airports and factories and desalination plants and anything their hearts desire in countries all around the world. Because they're not spending as much.

They're not spending it on implements of war. Does that not make them more vulnerable, though? I don't think so. It buys them friends, it tends to isolate the United States, and it frees up cash. They're flexing economic power. They are. And then they can use that free cash to promote the development of new technologies that they can use against us. What is the end goal of China? I think the end goal of China is exactly what the American goal toward the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

It's containment and isolation, hoping that the U.S. will eventually collapse on itself. This year, we crossed the national debt border of $40 trillion. Now, the number one expenditure in government is defense, and the number two is interest on the national debt. I once did an episode with the first long-form episode with any dojo appointee. It's a guy called Sam Korkos. He used to be at Levels, which is a glucose monitor, and he is now the chief information officer at the Treasury. Good grief. We did this episode in front of a huge LED wall, and we put the U.S.

debt calculator up behind us as it was going. He's seen everything. He's seen where all of the bodies buried in the spider's webs are. He was like, it's like Frankenstein's monster thing. There's not just one database for tax. You've got to do lookups across eight different multiple databases, and not everybody's information is held. Not all of the information is held in the same format, and so on and so forth. So yeah, it's a big sort of unwieldy megalopolis of information that he's trying to navigate, I guess.

Well, may I interrupt you for a second, too? Continuing on with China for a second. All the while that this is happening, the Chinese are actively committing espionage against us, and not just against us, but against all of our allies as well. Just recently, there was even a deep-covered Chinese intelligence cell that was uncovered in New York City where these Chinese intelligence officers were threatening Chinese dissidents in greater New York and threatening to then harm their relatives in China if they didn't stop their activism against the government in Beijing.

They're recruiting Capitol Hill staffers. They're recruiting FBI agents. They're trying to infiltrate the CIA. They have intelligence officers spread out in hard science PhD programs all across the United States. This is a serious problem for us. How many spies do you think are in the CIA and U.S. government right now? God, I hope the answer is zero. I mean, we wouldn't have a counter intelligence center if it really were zero. It's impossible to say. Is it easier to ask how many departments haven't been infiltrated by foreign intelligence than how many have?

Yeah, but now you're going to get me on my high horse. I think the greatest immediate threat in terms of infiltrating the government today, right now, is Israel. Would they be doing that covertly or overtly? Covertly. They're being co-located in this new National Defense Authorization Act, co-located in the Pentagon and in the CIA. As long as 35 years ago, the FBI was able to identify 187 undercover Israeli intelligence operatives infiltrating or having infiltrated American defense contractors around the country. Just three weeks ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency director sent an all-hands email to every officer in DIA saying, be particularly aware the Israelis have really ramped up their intelligence operations against us, and they're trying to infiltrate DIA.

That was three weeks ago. How does a foreign nation get a spy inside of U.S. circles of power? What are some of the routes in? It's called the asset acquisition cycle, and it's four parts – spot, assess, develop, recruit. So, I spot you. Who are you? Oh, you work for DIA. I'm going to want to get to know you. I assess your access to information that I want. If I determine that you do have access to information I want, then I begin to develop you. In the development portion of this, I have to identify a vulnerability.

A vulnerability might be an easy one, like you're a gambler and you have a lot of debt. But it might be something more difficult, like you really, really love your wife, and maybe she has breast cancer. Or you really love your kids, but you don't make enough money for them to go to a top-tier school. I can pay for them to go to a top-tier school. Then finally, when you test the person and they're willing to give you information in exchange for something, usually money, then you make it official.

You recruit them. Most of the foreign assets that are inside of the U.S. government are not foreign nationals. They're probably not people that even started. How many people do you think began their career inside of the CIA, national defense, U.S. government under the pretense of doing it on behalf? How many have been turned? I feel pretty comfortable saying it's probably zero. Really? They wouldn't have said, Hey, let's get this person started from fresh. Get them into university. No. The Soviets had great success doing that in the U.K.

The likes of, oh, for heaven's sake, Kim Philby, for example. Get that. Have two massive sips of that, and I promise you, your brain will start functioning. Kim Philby and his cohorts at Cambridge were recruited at university and directed. And was he a British national? Yeah. He became the chief of counterintelligence in MI6. But would have maybe shown some sort of sympathies toward the Russians early on in his life? He was an overt communist when he was at university, but there were a lot of communists in the 1930s.

So during the spot assess phase, this guy's already aligned with... Ideologically. Kim Philby, it's such an interesting story. Kim Philby's best friend, the best man in his wedding was James Jesus Angleton, who was the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. So you have the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, the chief of counterintelligence in MI6, and they are best friends. But the entire time, Philby was actually a deep cover KGB agent. Was the U.S. guy legit? Oh, yeah. Would have been hilarious if one had been secretly working for the Russians and another had been secretly working for the Chinese.

Oh my God, could you imagine? But it had such an effect on Angleton that it sort of pushed him over the mental edge, and he began a mole hunt that just destroyed the lives and careers of dozens of people. When he found out that the guy that he... When he found out that Philby had been a KGB agent the whole time, he just leapt to the conclusion that there must be dozens. They're everywhere. Do you know how Philby got rumbled? Yeah. The CIA was able to develop a source inside the KGB that said, Hey, listen, this Brit Philby, this guy's a problem.

He's been with us since the 30s. And so Philby was tipped off. He happened to be at a Christmas party at the home of the British ambassador to Lebanon. He got a signal that he had been made, and he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He climbed out the window, made his way to the Soviet embassy. They put him in a coffin and shipped him to Moscow. And days later, he just shows up at a press conference in Moscow saying, I'm a communist. I've always been a communist.

Long live the Soviet Union. Wow. The number four in MI6. And he lived out the rest of his days in... In fact, he became a lecturer in the KGB training center. Fuck me. Well, look, I mean, he's got field experience for a few decades or whatever. He knows everything about everything. I'll tell you, there's a postscript to that. My first overseas service was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. And I met a Saudi national named Abdullah Philby. And I said, Abdullah Philby, what an unusual name.

It's kind of like Kim Philby. You're no relation to Kim Philby. And he said, Kim is my half brother. We don't speak about him. So I asked the US ambassador, Chas Freeman at the time, I said, I met this Saudi guy named Abdullah Philby and he's Kim Philby's half brother. And he said, oh yeah, yeah. I bumped into him a couple of times. I said, how is that possible? It turned out Kim Philby's father was a physician. And he became the personal physician to King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and served his entire career as the King's personal physician.

And so the King gave him Saudi citizenship. He had divorced his British wife, married a Saudi woman, had an entire second family named Philby, but they're all Saudis. It's a family affair. A quick aside, you probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Elements in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

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Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. Going back to the Chinese, does the fact that the Chinese control the companies that make all of our chips help them with spying? I think it does. When I was the senior investigator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was there from 2009 to 2011.

Literally, the very first investigation that I did was based on a tip that US passports were being made in China. They weren't being made in China. They were being made in Thailand, but the chips are made in China, which is just as bad. The fundamental source security code is embedded into these chips. Exactly. The Chinese control the efficacy of all American passports. That doesn't make any sense. I saw a comment on one of your reels that said, fun fact, without him, US torture would probably still be just a conspiracy theory.

Given that you went to prison for revealing CIA secrets, what secrets do you think whistleblowers from inside the CIA might be leaking in 10 years' time? Oh man, that's a good question. Nobody's ever asked me that question before. On the fun side, maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of this UFO thing. I think that would be fascinating. On the serious side, I really fear the infiltration of technology companies in our everyday lives. I really believe that our civil liberties are being violated every single day by tech companies.

Either the government denies it, or we just pretend it's not happening. But I think there are going to be whistleblowers in the future that come out and explain to us, explain to the American people, just how deeply infiltrated our lives are. Give me some examples of what it might be. Postulate for me. Okay. I'll postulate going back to the 1970s. My first boss at the CIA, a lovely, wonderful guy, he joined the CIA through something called the Graduate Fellowship Program. People working on master's degrees. You do a semester at the CIA, then you do a semester in school, a semester at the CIA, a semester in school, and then you join the CIA as a staff officer.

His very first assignment at the CIA was in the counterintelligence center of James Angleton. He was a kid in his 20s, so he wasn't important enough to actually meet Angleton. So on his very first day, Angleton's secretary took him aside and showed him around the office and said, listen, in the unlikely event that you find yourself in the office alone, don't ever look at these files that are on the wall. Those are off limits to you. He said, okay. And of course, and of course, the moment he's alone in the office, he runs directly to the files.

The marshmallow test for intelligence officers. Exactly. Don't eat that. Don't eat that marshmallow. He told me that there were thousands of manila folders on the wall and that every single one of those folders was a file on an American citizen. Well, those files are all electronic now. And as I said, there are no court orders allowing the CIA, NSA, FBI to just wantonly collect information on Americans. Somebody said to me the other day, well, if you have nothing to hide, then what do you care if they're gathering your information?

And my response was, do you know who first posed that question in a public forum? It was Joseph Goebbels in 1933. Well, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care if the SS is gathering information or if the Gestapo is gathering information? It's a slippery slope. And once we just concede our civil liberties to the federal government, to any government, then we lose everything. How infiltrated do you think our technology is now? By? Surveillance, any kind of surveillance. I think they're working hand in glove, government and private industry.

I think it's completely, completely infiltrated. TVs, phones. We know thanks to the Vault 7 revelations. I know what that is. Vault 7. In 2017, Wikileaks published thousands and thousands of documents classified far above top secret that were allegedly leaked by a CIA engineer by the name of Joshua Schulte. Joshua Schulte made the very ill-advised decision to represent himself in court and is now serving sentence of 40 years without parole. He'll likely die in prison. But he released, allegedly, released these documents indicating, for example, that the CIA can take control of your car remotely.

Why? To send you over a bridge or to send you into a tree or into a bridge abutment. Um, he released information indicating that the CIA had successfully hacked into the classified systems of our allies and then left code behind. But the code was written either in Cyrillic or in Farsi. He said that the CIA had developed technology to take over smart TVs where they could turn a speaker into a microphone. That's not even possible. But the CIA is able to do it so that they can tap a room with the TV still being off.

There are thousands of documents all freely available now on the Wikileaks website. These are documents that the CIA director at the time called the crown jewel of everything that the CIA. I was doing. Nearly a third of Gen Z favors the government installing surveillance cameras in homes. Cato Institute 2023, Central Bank Digital Currency National Survey, 2,000 Americans, we asked respondents whether they favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity. Not surprisingly, few Americans, only 14% support this idea.

75% would oppose government surveillance cameras inside the home, including 68% who strongly oppose, and 10% don't have an opinion either way. This is presumably across the top. And then if we go down, I imagine they're going to break this out by age. 3 in 10 support. Oh, Lord. There it is. Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce those things? And yeah, that age, 30% under 30, basically. 30% under 30. And the justification for this, or the reason for this, I think is that generation has grown up with the trade that, well, I give my data to Facebook and Apple and these companies online.

And for it, in return, I get services and stuff. So the means of exchange, the expecteds. In their minds, there's a quid pro quo. And that's just how I've grown up. Yeah, and already, I mean, part of it might be a kind of informational nihilism, like confidentiality fatalism. Or it's like, dude, they've got it all already. Why not just turn the camera around and talk? I think you have to ask yourself, though, what if you've got a secret boyfriend or girlfriend? What if you're calling the doctor to talk about, oh, maybe I've got herpes or something?

My chronic flatulences. Yeah, right, exactly. What if you're calling an abortion provider? What if you need to get in touch with a psychiatrist? Is nothing sacred anymore? Is nothing private? Are we not entitled to any privacy in our own lives? That number shocks and sickens me, to tell you the truth. Yeah, I mean, I wonder whether it's going to get better or worse. There is always the potential of that continuing and that being passed down generation to generation or having some sort of a countervailing revolution that goes against it.

Is brainwashing real? What's true and fake about that idea? Operationally, yeah. I mean, the CIA, the KGB, the Chinese, the North Koreans, they worked on brainwashing operations going back to the early 1950s. This whole notion of a Manchurian candidate, for example, this was based on fact, on truth. In the early 1950s, there was a source inside the Soviet Union that the CIA recruited, and this source reported that the KGB was working on a brainwashing operation, something that would even allow them to control somebody remotely from a long distance.

The CIA panicked at the notion. The truth is that there was no such KGB operation. There was a Chinese operation, but there was nothing that the KGB was doing. So the CIA decided it was behind the eight ball. It had to play catch up, and it then created and implemented what became known as MKUltra. So MKUltra ran from 1952 to 1975. It was a complete and utter failure. It resulted in the deaths of a number of people. We'll never know what the real number was, where the CIA was dosing its own employees with LSD.

It was dosing people in San Francisco with LSD and pumping germs into the air to see who got upper respiratory infections. A CIA officer broke into a village bakery in a little village in France and put LSD in the bakery's flour one morning, and everybody in the village, when they ate their bread that morning, went nuts on an LSD trip. And then they're like, OK, so what do we do with this information now? We have people jumping off roofs and jumping off balconies. What do we do with it?

You call MKUltra a failure? Oh, yeah, it was a failure. Not only was it damaging, but it also didn't achieve anything. Literally nothing. Do you know John Lyle? Are you familiar with him? He wrote The Dirty Tricks Department, he's done a lot of research. He's here in Austin, and he goes into the National Archives and the most ground floor research of anybody that I know around this. And he's written two books on it, and he's really, really great. And yeah, that was kind of his summary as well.

One of the real shames about this whole thing is in 1975 at the Church Committee, Senator Church told the CIA director, do not destroy the documents. And he went straight back to headquarters and told people, shred everything. 15% of the documents survived. So that's what we know. That's all we know, 15%. Okay, that would suggest brainwashing isn't real. Right, it could. I believe that they tried to do it, and it failed. Right. We've got new technology now, new substances, more advanced understanding of human behavior. Everything's changed.

Do you think that's unlocked some new capacities? Oh, probably, probably. I'll tell you kind of a funny story I've told once or twice in podcasts. Something that I witnessed at the CIA that I had never seen before and I've never seen since, it was absolutely fascinating to me. In April of 2000, my next door neighbor was assassinated in Athens. He was the British Defense Attaché, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders. And he was shot and killed by an assassin for a group called Revolutionary Organization, 17 November. It's kind of a long story, and I'll skip most of it.

Several months after the assassination, we had what's called a walk-in. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks into an American embassy and says, I have intelligence information that I'm gonna give to a CIA officer. It just so happened that day that nobody was available. And so an FBI agent in the embassy took the walk-in. She assessed that he was a nut, and she said, thank you very much, and sent him on his way. And then she wrote up a little memo and sent it to us.

We were fascinated by it, so we called him back. So a colleague of mine and I, he only spoke Greek, this guy, and this colleague of mine and I were the two Greek speakers. So we called him back, and we said, why don't you come on in, and we'll have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. So he came in, and we said, what did you wanna tell us? And he said that about 40 minutes after the assassination, the source happened to be driving down the National Highway, and he had to take a leak.

So he gets off the exit, and there's a little chapel off to the side of the road that's locked up, and there's a large banyan tree in front of the chapel. He goes behind the banyan tree to take a leak. And as soon as he does that, a van pulls up, and then a car pulls up behind the van. The back doors of the van open, and there's a motorcycle in the back of the van. The man in the car says to the two men in the van, Akomazi, is he still alive?

And one of the men says, he should be dead by now. Okay, that's worth investigating to me. The British Defense Attaché has just been assassinated, and this guy may have seen the assassins, right? And the guy in the van gave a brown paper bag to the guy in the car. Did it have the murder weapon in it? It might have, worth investigating. This source was a simpleton. You could tell by his language, his grammar was terrible. He was uneducated. He was a farmer from Central Greece.

He just happened to be driving down the National Highway. So we decided to debrief him as extensively as possible, but it was- What do you mean debrief? Interview. Right. But it was clear to us that the guy really was just a simpleton. He just couldn't really answer these questions. And so somebody at headquarters came up with the idea to hypnotize him. I had never participated in a hypnosis session before. So we flew him to a third country where we wouldn't be interrupted. And my Greek-speaking colleague and I went to this country.

We were met by a psychologist and a psychiatrist from headquarters. The psychiatrist was a certified hypnotist. So he said, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna turn all the lights off. We're gonna have the guy sitting in a chair. We're gonna make him as relaxed as we possibly can. And we're gonna count backwards from 10. And when we get to one, he's gonna be hypnotized. And then we can ask him questions. I said, okay, this seems kind of nuts to me, but okay. So we did that.

He's in the chair, sitting there very comfortably like this. The lights are all off. I'm counting backwards in Greek from 10. In the meantime, the hypnotist says, I want you to put your left arm up in the air. And the guy does. So I go backwards, 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. And his hand goes like this. But his arm is up in the air. He kept his arm in the air for four and a half hours. I had never seen anything like it.

There was no muscle strain in it. It was just frozen there for four and a half hours. So I'm asking him questions. What do you see? I see the van pulling up. How many people are in the van? I see two men. Now what's happening? The driver got out. He opened the back door of the van. What do you see inside the van? I see a motorcycle. Can you see the license plate on the van? And he goes like this. And then he reads the license plate.

I write it down. I hand it to my colleague. He runs into the adjoining room. He calls Athens, run a trace on this license plate. It's a freaking stolen police car license plate. Now, how would he know that? The FBI thought we were nuts. What ended up happening, the guy, the source, so wanted to impress us that he started making things up in subsequent meetings. And we knew he was lying. But everything that he said in that initial hypnosis session turned out to be true. We ended up having to cut him off because he was just unreliable.

But is brainwashing possible? Yeah, I think probably. Can you get anything out of it? Maybe something limited. If there's a way to harness it and focus it, then sure, maybe something good can happen. I wonder how many people could use that as an opportunity to sow discord. Exactly right. And that's the flip side. That's why you have to have strong counterintelligence because you have to expect that your enemies are gonna do exactly that. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes.

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So I'm pretty sure it was Juan Payol, so a Spanish guy, and he knew that he was going to be able to help the allies. So he walked into one of the embassies and they said, we don't need you, we can't help you, you're a chicken farmer. And he had some information or maybe he knew that he could get some. And he goes back again and they say no, and he goes back a third time and they say no. He goes, fuck it. Walks into the opposite, walks into the German one or the Italian one perhaps, and spends a couple of years infiltrating them.

You're thinking of Juan Payol Garcia, better known by his British codename, Agent Garbo. His story is remarkable because he essentially talked his way into becoming a spy despite having no espionage. Payol was a Spaniard who trained at the Royal Poultry School. Oh my God. Unsuccessfully tried his hand at chicken farming. He was an unsuccessful chicken farmer. Sorry, I fleshed out his credentials too much. Lived through the Spanish Civil War, disliked both fascism and communism and developed an intense hatred of Hitler and Nazism. Later described his motivation as wanting to wage his own personal war against Hitler using his imagination.

The crazy part is how he got the job. He and his wife initially approached the British and offered their services as a spy. The British rejected him. Rather than give up, Payol decided he would make himself valuable enough that Britain couldn't ignore him. So he called the German embassy in Madrid and... volunteered to spy for the Nazis. He pretended to be an enthusiastic Nazi supporter with connections that would allow him to travel to Britain. The Germans were sceptical, so Peierl forged documentation to make himself appear credible.

Eventually, German intelligence recruited him, gave him money, secret codes, and invisible ink, and instructed him to establish an espionage network in Britain. Except he didn't go to Britain. He moved to Lisbon and began pretending he was operating from London, using newspapers, magazines, maps, travel guides, and his imagination. He sent the Germans intelligence reports, supposedly gathered by an expanding network of informants. The network eventually contained 27 agents, none of whom existed. He invented personalities, jobs, relationships, and entire backstories for them. If one of his reports turned out to be wrong, he could conveniently blame the imaginary subordinate who had supplied the information.

The Germans became convinced that Peierl was running an enormous intelligence operation inside Britain, and that's when British intelligence finally started to notice him. MI5 initially intercepted his reports and thought there was an unidentified German spy operating in Britain. Eventually, they discovered what Peierl was doing and realized this seemingly crazy Spaniard was extraordinarily talented. In 1942, he was brought to Britain and became a British double agent, receiving the code name Garbo. He became central to Operation Fortitude, the Allied deception surrounding D-Day, so the network reported where they were going to go.

Failed chicken farmer, rejected by British intelligence, volunteers to spy for Hitler, invents an entire fake spy network, becomes one of Germany's most trusted agents, secretly works for Britain, feeds Hitler false information, plays a major role in D-Day. Oh my god, both sides decorated him. Dude. Oh my god. It's like this guy- He was one of the very few people in history who managed to receive military honors from both sides in the same war. What was the Israeli guy's name, Levy? It became like the deputy defense minister of Syria.

He was a Mossad agent, he was a barber, and he kept offering and offering and offering his Arabic was excellent, and they kept saying no, no, no, and finally they were like, okay, okay. He was so good at throwing these parties in Damascus where senior government people would come, senior Ba'ath party officials would come, exiled Nazis would show up, and the way he got caught is he was secretly transmitting his reports back to Tel Aviv, and there happened to be a KGB signals van driving through the neighborhood, and they picked up the signal, and they told the Syrians, there's a spy in this neighborhood, and the Syrians got him.

Now there are like town squares named after him, and schools are named after him in Israel. It's the same thing. Enthusiasm counts for an awful lot. It can really compensate for ability. See, but part of the problem is you get so many people who want to do this kind of thing, and they're legitimately insane. It's that one out of a hundred that's going to be- You need the Cristiano Ronaldo of chicken farmer secret agents. Exactly. I think stuff like that's so fascinating to me. What do you make of the Bipa Pager operation?

Absolutely brilliant. You must have had a professional interest from the sidelines with regards to that. Give me your assessment of that particular operation. The day that that operation took place, I got a call from a Russian television news network, and they said, can you come on and talk about this Pager operation? I said, sure. They said, can you say that it was a war crime and a crime against humanity? I said, well, yeah, sure. Technically it was a war crime, right? Technically it was a crime against humanity because civilians were injured or killed, children were injured or killed, but this was an act of genius.

I said, can you imagine the moving parts involved? We learned later it took a decade to come up with this idea. You had to control the entire supply chain over the course of something like five or six countries, and then actually get the Pagers into the hands of Hezbollah operatives. They said, yeah, but can you just say that it was a war crime and a crime against humanity? I said, no, I got to explain what a brilliant operation it was. You can disagree with it and say this is a terrible thing.

All these people were killed, but this was genius. I said, intelligence services around the world are going to study this for years to come. It was incredible. They were like, thanks. We'll call you. We'll go with someone else. It's the equivalent of being asked to denounce Kanye West's political views, but being unable to say that he doesn't make bangers. Yes. You know what I mean? Exactly. Dude, Jesus Walks, it still crushes as a tune. If you hear that, you're like, my feet are moving a little bit.

You can say what you would like about the ethics, but the end result, they're here to blow their enemies up and they managed to do that. It was incredible. It's one thing to geolocate a Hezbollah operative and then blow up the entire apartment block. Anybody can do that. It's an entirely different thing to take 10 years and take over a dozen companies in a half a dozen countries, control the entire global supply chain, and then have people on the ground to actually pass out the pagers to the intended targets, and then it works the way you wanted it to work.

Incredible. What is the operation that you think is the most impressive or complex that you can talk about? I'm presuming that would probably be up there. Are there any others? That's got to be the most complex. The other one that comes to mind immediately is the hunt for a terrorist named Mir Emal Kanzi. Have you ever heard of him? One day in 1993, I used to take the back gate into the CIA because it was a little bit more convenient for me based on where my house was.

What you used to do back in those days is you just drive up and the CIA guard is going like this and you hold your badge up and then he goes like this, meaning come in, and you just drive in. Before 9-11, before terrorism, just come on in. You just hold your badge up. This morning, I drive into the CIA and the guard goes like this and I hold my badge up and then he kind of makes this shocked look and he runs out of his guard booth.

I was like, what in the world is that about? I thought, eh, not my problem. I drove to my parking space. I get to my desk and my outside line rings, my unclassified phone, which never rang. It's my mother. I said, what's up? She said, are you okay? I said, of course I am. Why? She said, somebody's at the front of the CIA shooting people. I was like, what? I hang up, turn on CNN to see what the heck is happening right here at the front gate of the building.

A Pakistani man by the name of Mir Amal Kanzi drove his car right up to the red light where you make the left to go into the main gate of CIA, put the car in park as other cars lined up behind him to make the left, got out with an AK-47 and just went car to car shooting people. He only shot men. He killed two, including a colleague of mine, Lansing Bennett. Lansing and I were halfway through a paper together and he just murdered him right there in broad daylight and cold blood, shot a communicator, Frank Darling, and then shot five other men going door to door, car to car, calmly walked back up to his car, made a U-turn, drove straight to Dulles airport, got on a plane to Pakistan with no luggage, one-way ticket, and nobody ever questioned him.

So then the hunt was on. I smile because the CIA—there was a psychologist in the Counterterrorism Center where I worked, and I worked very closely with her. I liked her a lot. We did some cool stuff together. She happened to be sitting on my promotion panel one day, and they were deciding, should we promote Kiriakou or not promote Kiriakou? They decided, thank God, to promote me, but it was because of her that they promoted me. She said, John Kiriakou will come up with thirty-five ideas for an operation.

Thirty of them are crazy, but five of them are really good. As soon as Conzi killed Frank and Lansing, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center was happy to listen to any crazy idea, and so we all had crazy ideas. Things like renting an Ottoman fort on the top of a mountain in Pakistan so that we could intercept all of the telephone calls coming from the village below, or setting up a fake radio station with a 600-foot tower so we could intercept everything in the entire region. To make a long story short, we found Conzi initially in a fleabag hotel in Quetta, Pakistan.

We were able to recruit an agent who then lured him out. The CIA is not a law enforcement organization, it's an intelligence organization, so we had to tell the FBI, listen, we found Conzi, here he is. The FBI goes in and grabs him. The reason I even raise that is because years later, the station chief for whom I was working had been part of the team that caught Conzi, and he was still angry ten years later because Time Magazine came out with a picture on the cover of two FBI agents leading Conzi away in handcuffs, and the headline on the cover was, How the FBI Got Its Man.

It's like, they had nothing to do with getting Conzi. We got Conzi, but that was one of the most complicated and sophisticated operations I ever heard of. Can you talk about how it happened? It was not really. It's a combination of those intercepts in order to narrow the field and then human intelligence. Most people in countries like that are willing to sell their mothers for $500. There's an old joke at the CIA, a post 9-11 joke, that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one.

That's what we did. What is the prevalence or legality of taking someone who has committed an act on your home turf from either a third party country that is not their home destination, or you, or from their home destination? That's an easy one. In the mid-1980s, during the Reagan presidency, a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and tortured and executed by a Mexican drug cartel. Congress acted very quickly in response to that terrible incident, and Congress passed a law making it legal for the United States to kidnap foreign nationals extrajudicially and bring them back to the United States to face trial.

Even though it's a violation of the law in all of those other countries, we don't care. It's legal here, but it's not happening here. It's happening there. Is it more or less illegal to do it in a third-party nation or to do it in the person's home nation? That's the debate. There's a difference between rendition and extraordinary rendition. Do you know the two? When I think rendition, I think of a play. No. A rendition is, let's say I'm a CIA officer in Pakistan, and you are an Egyptian, and you are a member of Al-Qaeda.

I break down the door of your safe house one night at 2 a.m., and I grab you. I say, oh, you're Egyptian, and you're here without a visa? I send you back to Egypt, and I don't care what they do to you. That's a rendition. An extraordinary rendition is nasty. I break down the door of that safe house, and I grab you, and I say, oh, you're Egyptian, and I send you to Syria, Morocco, Algeria, anywhere in the world I want. Nobody's ever going to have any idea what happened to you.

They're going to torture you until you take your last breath, and then they're going to send us a transcript of everything you said up until you took your last breath. That's an extraordinary rendition. That again is the nation, that is the enforcement organization of the nation that the person is in. I can add an additional level of complexity here. Let's say that the Egyptian is in Pakistan, but the people who have an issue with him aren't the Pakistanis. They're the Americans. That's it. That's it. Right, right, right.

In most cases, the Pakistanis don't have an issue with him. Does Pakistan not have an issue with America going and taking people that are inside of their country? No, because remember, intelligence is a cash business, and there's a lot of cash changing hands. We say, listen, we have this giant sack of money in the van outside. We don't care if we take these Egyptians to you. Who's being paid off, local, low level, high level? No, it goes all the way up to the very top. When we captured Abu Zubaydah, which is kind of what I became known for, there was a $10 million bounty on Abu Zubaydah.

There was $25 million bounty on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the Pakistani intelligence service built a new headquarters with the cash. Even at a lower level i was working with this brigadier general general muhammad and. This guy what a piece of work this guy was we'd be ready to do the operation and he'd say before we go. Can we keep all those night vision goggles and i'm like sure just sure just keep him now can we go do the rate. The guns that you're using bartering before you get started yeah those nine millimeters we we have thirty eight we could really use those nine millimeters okay i'll get you some nine millimeters can we go do the operation now please.

The carpeting in my office actually said that to me and i said general. I'm a generous person by nature but don't shake me down. And then we went out and did our operation carpeting for your office i did get him a refrigerator one point that's nice. Just wouldn't leave me alone you're a good friend the supplement industry is full of products making claims that i can't back which is why i'm such a massive fan of momentous that co-founder jeff byers played in the nfl and saw first hand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary so he built the mentors around a higher standard every.

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Check out at live momentous dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom checkout it's interesting when i said most complex impressive intelligence actions of all time that you didn't say nine eleven. Oh i thought you meant cia operations nine eleven was. Incredible and nine eleven really came out of something earlier called the budget cut plot. You ever heard of the jay i n k a. So in nineteen ninety six in manila. A very bad man who we knew only as muhtar m u k h t a r.

Was plotting something that became known as the budget cut plot the idea was to hijack fourteen seven forty seven jumbo jets from manila and to fly them into buildings all the way up and down the west coast of the united states. Crazy as it sounds. Muhtar went out one day to get lunch and while he was out at lunch his cleaning lady went to the apartment to clean it. And she sees all these plans and photographs and drawings laid out on the dining room table and she said this looks like a terrorist plot and she calls the manila police department they come.

We presume that muhtar saw what was happening and ran away just absconded the police came and recognized it as a potential terrorist plot they called the philippine intelligence service who then called the cia. And the cia came in and said oh my god this is a massive terrorist attack being laid out so we knew that there was this bad man out there named muhtar who meant us harm. And intended to use aircraft as missiles. After we captured abu zubaydah one of the two most important things that he told us was the identity of muhtar.

His debrief for his interrogator ali sufan and fbi agent asked him about muhtar and abu zubaydah actually laughed and said you don't know who muhtar is and ali said no. And abu zubaydah said his name is khaled shaykh muhammad. I was at headquarters that day and the word came in like we know who it is this is the mastermind of nine eleven. So everybody was running name traces. We'd never heard of him we didn't have anything there was literally no file on anybody named khaled shaykh muhammad and then the fbi called us and said oh my god he went to high school in north carolina.

And we're like what he lived here and they stayed and went to like north carolina a and m or a and t or whatever it is and then self radicalized and. Moved overseas and started plotting what became nine eleven. It was ingenious and talk about a lot of moving parts where was he from originally was was his birthplace. Where was his birthplace was it. Wait i was gonna say saudi arabia abu zubaydah was saudi arabia yeah kuwait he's a palestinian born in kuwait. That's my recollection but yeah when i think of pakistani born again if if i expand the intelligence operation outside of the cia is there anything obviously the pager thing was.

Incredible anything else come to mind that would make your greatest hits of all time yeah the the location and kidnapping of it off like men. I don't know that the nazi were criminal he escaped from germany and in the early nineteen sixties the israelis found him working in a car factory in argentina. And they kidnapped him took him all the way back to israel put him on trial so it was a televised trial. They forced him to wear his old nazi uniform during the trial and he was proud to put it on he was convicted and then he was hanged.

That was incredible operation specially when at the time the israelis didn't even have diplomatic relations with argentina how you gonna get in a get a plane in there. Kidnap this guy i should do it with maduro. Yeah well that's what the entire force of the us army behind you it's interesting this seems to be broadly two categories of these kinds of operations and i've had people like dj shipley on the show you know excels and some are some a brain and some abroad and summer. Precise and surgical and and and well thought out in advance and sort of a car without much fanfare and then others are much more kinetic and i think that maduro one is an example of something that's surgical but incredibly kinetic.

Very close to you we lured maduro to a formula one drivers house that is a massive fan of and then secretly drugged him with this thing that was in a vape that he smoked and i got. Will you know the story of carlos the jackal. Have you heard of carlos the jackal he is funny to me i teach a graduate school course at the university of salamanca in spain they have a an intelligent studies program i teach a course on the history of terrorism. And literally none of my students have ever heard of carlos the jackal the osama bin laden of the nineteen seventies and eighties his name was ilia ramirez sanchez he was a venezuelan national.

Ardent communist marxist leninist but he was the osama bin laden of the seventies and eighties to the point where he did one of the balls east operations in modern history. OPEC was meeting in vienna right so he is gang go to vienna and they kidnapped every minister of oil. From every country kidnapped the entire leadership and then held them for billions of dollars in ransom which the saudis gladly paid. And then they just scattered algeria's benghazi you know all over the world moscow baghdad anyway. Carlos was a ghost we search the world for carlos and we had no idea where he was we assumed that he was either in iraq or in libya.

Or maybe algeria we weren't sure there was a legendary. CIA contractor named billy wall billy was a. One of the most highly decorated war heroes in american history fought in world war two korea vietnam doing the things that years later people don't talk about and then he became a cia contractor. I was i was blessed to work with billy wall in the middle east before nine eleven we did some really fun stuff together. But the guys legendary seven purple hearts. Seven his license plate was a personalized florida plate that said seven hits and had the purple heart next to it so billy was.

Working contract at the agency running surveillance teams and he happened to be in khartoum sudan working for. Kofor black who became the director of the cia's counter-terrorism center and then became ambassador kofor black the special envoy for counter-terrorism. Billy takes a day off which was very rare and he and a colleague go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables for the week and they're there in the in the vegetable souk and billy says to his colleague. That's carlos the jackal and the guys like get out of here he said i'm telling you that's carlos the jackal.

Any runs back to the station the way he told the story kofor was on an elliptical machine in his office and billy says kofor i just saw carlos the jackal in the vegetable souk. And kofor says get the fuck out of here carlos the jackal and he said i'm telling you it was carlos and he said well i can't go back to headquarters and say we saw carlos the jackal in the vegetable market and he walked away you gotta go take a picture of him. Billy went back to the vegetable market every day for a month.

And then he sees him again so real quickly he paid these two sudanese guys a couple of dollars to get into a fist fight in the middle east and in north africa. Fights are so rare that as soon as one happens everybody just forms a circle around them to watch carlos runs right up to the circle and he's. Craning his neck to see if he can watch the fight and billy has his camera click click click click click. And then they do surveillance on him and they follow him all the way back to his house.

Headquarters confirms oh my god it's carlos the jackal so they come up with this idea. They break into his house and they put ground glass in his toothpaste. And then they recruit his dentist and so when he brushes his teeth his gums start bleeding he says oh my god i must have gum disease i should go to the dentist. Go to the dentist the dentist gives him some gas puts him out and when he wakes up he's on a french military transport plane on his way back to paris to face seven counts of murder and he is still in prison today.

Wow wow it takes patience so. John lyle's first book the dirty tricks department one of the psychological assessments that was done of hitler was he had a very fragile hold on his masculinity i don't think that they needed to get a psychiatrist into work that one out but the one testicle in the whole thing. They had this idea that if they could change hitler's hormonal profile that he his hold of his masculinity would be so tenuous that he would go completely insane and that the allies would win the war so they found the.

Gardner who grew the vegetables that were put into the food at the eagles nest. Yeah and they found him recruited him and gave him a female sex hormones to inject. Into the vegetables and the goal was it was gonna ingest these is voice will go soprano and his mustache will fall out and i'll grow man boobs and and then we'll. Something something something will win the war i don't know what the something something something was but i'm that they don't know whether or not that work but that was yeah i did some of the inventive as you said it's kind of a shame.

The whole torture principles prison thing cuz the CIA actually sounds like quite a lot of fun. Oh my god i have to admit i i loved every second of it. I went to seventy two countries when i was at the agency i was in the room with kings and presidents and prime ministers and did things that. You know i i still can't talk about it was exciting every single day i remember. Especially when i was working on greek terrorism i couldn't wait to get to the office in the morning i couldn't wait to see what i missed overnight it was so exciting.

Just love it what do you think is the most effective mass behavioral engineering campaign in history. The most successful mass behavioral campaign. You know frankly i think it probably has to be passage of the patriot act because it convinced all americans to just voluntarily give up their civil liberties. Just like that and what did we complain about having to take our shoes off at the airport. We didn't complain about the fact that we were. You know losing our our civil liberties that the FBI could go you know see what books you.

out of the library without a warrant or intercept your emails or your text messages or your phone calls without a warrant. They just have to go to the ISP and say, give it to us. Or even more cynically, just buy it. Just buy the metadata from one of these collection companies. How does mass persuasion work at scale? Mass persuasion at scale was really a function of the early Cold War era. The first covert action program that the CIA ever implemented was to essentially steal the 1949 Italian elections away from the communists.

The communists were ahead in all the polls. It's not a very sophisticated operation. All they did is they gave $150,000 to the Christian Democratic Party and told them to spend it by renting journalists. Then the CIA would write up pro-conservative articles and the journalists would place them in these newspapers. Then the communists lost. That was it, but that was the first one. It's really all about the media. I'll tell you something funny. When I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, years after I left the agency, I went to Yemen.

I used to go to Yemen with some regularity. This was in 2011, just before we closed the American embassy there. I had a meeting with the Defense Attaché. None of the agency people would meet with me, but that was fine. I didn't care. I met with the State Department people and the Defense people. The Defense Attaché was so excited to tell me about this cool PSYOP that he was running, psychological operation. It's a propaganda operation. I was like, okay, I'm all ears. I was working for John Kerry at the time.

I said, he's going to be happy to hear whatever successes you've had. He said, we're running a pirate radio station. I said, okay, so what are you doing with it? He says, we're playing jazz. Then we interspersed the jazz with Colin shows. We're getting young Yemeni men to like jazz, which makes them like the United States. Then when they call in to talk about the jazz, the host says pro-American things. I said, I'm sorry, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. How much are you spending on that?

Oh, 150,000. I'm like, yeah, I think they're not going to like you spending 150,000 on that. Sometimes it works. Most of the time, it doesn't. Usually it's money down the drain, but once in a while you get lucky. Have you seen, Mark, can you look for, was it Nestle? Coffee wasn't selling in a country in the Far East, or some sort of confectionery wasn't selling in a country in the Far East. They changed the flavor of the children's sweets so that when those children would grow up to become adults, they would love the flavor.

It would be reminiscent of their childhood. They were really struggling to sell. I want to say it was coffee, or maybe like caramel or something like that. By seeding it to children, they were able to project two decades out into the future when you were in charge of your own groceries. Talk about the long view. You would be able to come up with that. What have you got, Mark? Japan. There it is. Oh my goodness. Here's how Nestle convinced people in Japan to drink coffee. In the 1970s, Nestle were hustling to sell coffee in Japan.

This was a fascinating time for Japanese cuisine. Japan had recently established its first McDonald's franchise, a style of Japanese food that plays off popular Western dishes had been developing for decades. This was the moment for Western companies looking to market their products in the East Asian country, but Nestle wasn't finding much success according to better marketing. Unlike coffee-centric countries like Italy or Costa Rica, Japan has a rich history with tea, not coffee. So Nestle enlisted the help of Clotaire Rapai, a psychoanalyst. Nestle, what can I do for Nestle?

Rapai responded. According to PBS, he'd spent years working with children who had autism, a far cry from corporate marketing. Nevertheless, he headed to Japan, where his expertise in psychology and memory allowed him to crack an important code. When consumers have a childhood memory of something like chicken noodle soup or mom's hot cup of coffee, that long embedded memory creates a bond between the consumer and the product. He deduced when he interviewed and tested consumers in Japan, he found many didn't have fond childhood memories of coffee.

Tea simply was and is a much larger part of the culture, and he aimed to change it. Nestle engaged in a years-long campaign. It started with sweet coffee-flavored products for kids. We started, for example, with a dessert for children. With a taste of coffee, we created an imprint of the taste of coffee. However, it's unclear whether Nestle whipped out the coffee-flavored KitKat bars immediately. They most likely started with other coffee-flavored candies, judging from his PBS interview. While Japan's KitKat market is off the charts intricate and popular, the Japanese flavors didn't really emerge until the 2000s, according to the New York Times.

It's more likely that espresso and cafe au lait KitKats popped up around that time. Still, while they may have not been KitKats, Nestle's coffee-flavored desserts made a difference. According to Better Marketing, those early coffee-flavored treats likely created an imprint on children, and by the time those young consumers were older and interested in a drink, Nestle coffee was ready for them. By 2014, the coffee market was hitting record highs in Japan, according to the Japan Times. By the time coffee-flavored KitKats were introduced, consumers were well-acquainted with the drink and flavor.

We can thank Clotaire Rappet, who knew early on that food and memory go hand-in-hand. In the mid-1970s, we got to a point in the United States where more people were drinking Coca-Cola in the morning than were drinking coffee, and the reason why that was happening is because most coffee producers used something called Robusto beans. Robusto beans have that magnificent coffee smell, but they taste like shit. It's Arabica beans that have the great coffee taste, but don't smell as wonderful as Robusto beans, and so they had to switch to the more expensive Arabica to save the coffee industry in the United States.

How paranoid does working for the CIA make you? Oh, you have to be paranoid. I've been out of the CIA for 22 years. I've been out longer than I was in, and I still am constantly scanning my side view and rearview mirrors looking for surveillance. I still couch my language in emails and in text messages. I use encrypted apps for what that's worth. They all have backdoors in them anyway, but I figure, why make it easy? It's sort of instilled in you. You never lose it.

I've noticed that you haven't taken a drink of anything today. Is that part of that? Yeah, actually. It's funny that you've even noticed. One of the very first things that they taught us on the first day of operational training is to always pee before you go into a meeting so that you don't have to get up and excuse yourself and disrupt the meeting. Also, it's distracting if I'm opening cans, and I'm drinking a sip over here, and maybe I'm making a little ring on the table over there.

This way, I can look you directly in the eye. We can carry on our business, and then I can drink something later. I've had a lot of people on the communications experts that are talking about the effectiveness of understanding someone, detecting, lying, manipulation, and stuff like that. What's realistic and true about working out whether someone's lying to you? I wrote a book called The CIA Insider's Guide to Lying and Lie Detection. It's funny, too. I'm not the expert. That wasn't the focus of my career, but it's something that I knew as much as any other normal CIA officer.

It's little things. It's the frequency of blinking, for example. When people lie, they tend to blink less frequently. When you ask somebody a question and they look up as they're thinking about it, they're likely going to give you the truth. If they look down, that could be an indication of lying. It's a lot of different things. One of the things that they showed us that was so fascinating to me at the time—you remember Whitey Bulger, the Boston mob leader. Whitey Bulger had two brothers. One was the president of the University of Massachusetts.

Before that, he had been the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, and his other brother was a state judge. These are serious people. One of the things the CIA showed us in training was a video of the brother who was the president of the university—at the time, he was the president of the Senate—being grilled before Congress about whether or not he had any contact with his brother. His brother was on the run, right? On the lam. He kept saying, no. Just staring. No, I've had no contact with my brother.

I haven't seen my brother in years. He's embarrassed our family. We're ashamed of him. I don't know where he is, but not blinking at all. They would show us this video of his testimony as an example of what to look for in a liar. I mentioned to you walk-ins earlier. When I was overseas operationally, not a single day went by that I didn't have a walk-in. Not a single day. The curse for me was that I spoke both Greek and Arabic. Right? There was one time where I had flown in from Yemen, and I was exhausted.

I land at 10 o'clock in the morning at Dulles Airport, and I thought, I'm going to go into the office. I'm not going to tell anybody that I'm there. I'm just going to do my accounting paperwork, and then I'm going to go home and go to sleep. I go in, and my boss sees me. He says, hey, I didn't know you were back. I said, I'm actually not back. I just came in just to do my paperwork, and then I'm going to go home and go to sleep.

He goes, okay, can you go to Sudan? I said, I was just there one hour from Sudan. I said, what do you want me to do in Sudan? He said, they have a walk-in, and they don't have any Arabic speakers right now. I said, when? When do you want me to go to Sudan? He says, like 3 o'clock. I was like, are you kidding me? I said, all right, let me just at least go do some laundry. I went home. I did the laundry, repacked, went back to the airport, and flew to Sudan.

Anyway, not a day went by that I didn't have a walk-in. That's the best possible on-the-job training for determining who's lying and who's telling the truth. Now, like I said earlier, 95% – there have been actual studies done internally. 95% of walk-ins are crazy people. I had a guy. Guy came in in a Greek naval officer's uniform. I was like, oh, okay. Serious guy. He says, I know who's the head of revolutionary organization 17 November. I was like, great. We've been working on that since 1975.

Lay it out. Well, is there a reward? I said, yeah, there's a $10 million reward. If your information is correct and we're able to grab him, I'll give it to you any way you want it. Cash, gold, diamonds, I don't care. He says, it's actually a triumvirate of people. I said, really? And who is this triumvirate of people? Queen Elizabeth, Jacques Cousteau, and Frank Sinatra. I said, okay, and how did you determine this? And he said that an angel told him in a vision. I was like, okay, thanks for coming in.

But that was happening every single day. Decided against investigating that one. Yeah. You have to write it up in case he walks into another American embassy somewhere and they know off the bat that he's a nut. But of the remaining 5%, about 1% are what are called intelligence brokers. They actually do have a little nugget of intelligence. Maybe they overheard it in a restaurant, or they've got a cousin who's a member of some group someplace. And so they'll come to you and give it to you, and then they want $100.

Give me $100. And you give them $100. But then they go to the British embassy, and then the French embassy, and then the Chinese, and then the Russians, and then anybody else they think is going to give them $100. And then that's a handsome month's salary in many countries. Then about 2% are what are called probes. The Iranians, the North Koreans, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS, they'll send people into American embassies to pretend to be walk-ins, just to look to see where the cameras are. Are you armed?

Are the windows bulletproof? Where's the steel reinforced hardline door? Just in case they decide to attack the embassy later, they can identify a point of vulnerability. And then that last 1% is the real deal. In training, our instructors taught us that the greatest sources ever recruited in the history of the CIA were walk-ins, because the chief of the KGB's counterintelligence directorate is not going to come up to you and introduce himself at a diplomatic cocktail party. He's going to go on vacation. somewhere, and he's going to walk into the American embassy in, say, Mexico City.

Or the director of the North Korean nuclear program, you're not going to bump into him in a restaurant somewhere. But he's going to go to some seminar in Vienna, and he's going to sneak out of his hotel in the middle of the night and go to the embassy, and there's going to be a Marine there on duty 24 hours, and he's going to leave a phone number. And those will be the best recruitments of your entire life. You see the story of when Kim Jong-il and his son went to Disneyland.

Can you pull up the passports behind that? They had fake passports, they wanted to go to Disneyland real bad, and they flew on fake passports so that they could... I mean, look, you've not got Disneyland in North Korea. Say what you want about the country of America, even if they are your mortal enemy, they make great theme parks. And that's why he's such a film buff. He and his father both loved American movies. Look at that. That is ridiculous. The most fucking Kim Jong-il-looking photo as well.

Josie Puog. Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo. Is that where they're saying they're from? Yeah. Embassy of Brazil in Prague. So it's the Brazilian embassy in the Czech Republic. How do you like that? Unreal. So what are some of the best ways to get the truth out of someone? You're speaking to them, you want to try and determine whether or not they know something about something. What are some of the best tactics? It's not very sexy, but it's very simply to treat a person with respect and kindness and show great patience.

I'll give you an example. The CIA's torture program was just to turn people's lives into hell, a living hell. The FBI modus operandi is completely different. The CIA and the FBI hated each other for decades and decades, hated each other. That's why we had 9-11, because they couldn't even share information with one another. But the FBI is really, really good at interrogation, and they have been since the 1940s. The FBI method, and they train their officers very well in this method, is to simply engage people in a friendly conversation.

You treat them with respect, even if they're the enemy, or a terrorist. You offer them a cigarette, or an apple, or if they're really cooperative, a piece of paper and a pen to write to their parents, or whatever. Sometimes it takes weeks or months, but eventually they're going to open up to you if you are able to establish that relationship. The very first person that I caught in Pakistan was a Jordanian national who had escaped into Pakistan from Tora Bora when we started bombing it. I cabled headquarters beforehand, and I said, I'm not trained in interrogation.

I'm not an interrogator. We didn't have interrogators at the CIA. That was the FBI's job. You're in charge now. Just interrogate him however you want. And I was like, okay, all right, well, I'm going to wing it. We have the guy chained to an eyebolt in the table. So he's got handcuffs on, and the cuffs are chained to the table. And I said to him, what's your name? I knew what his name was. I knew the answers to most of the questions, because we had confiscated his paperwork and his passport and all that stuff, and it was a legitimate Jordanian passport.

So he answered my questions. I laid out a map of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and I told him to show me exactly how he got from Tora Bora to, I think we caught him in Rawalpindi or something like that. I don't remember anymore. I knew how he got there. Those mountains are so forbidding and so steep, there's pretty much only one way to get in. We called it the rat line. And so he showed me the rat line. I knew he was telling the truth. And I said, what in the world were you doing in Afghanistan?

You're a Jordanian national. You don't speak any of Afghanistan's languages. You don't have a visa, a valid visa to be in Afghanistan. What in the world were you doing there? And he said, I went to Afghanistan in 1996 to open an orphanage. He said, I'm a very pious, practicing Muslim, and there were so many children who were orphaned from the Soviet invasion and occupation. I wanted to do something to help the children. So as he's saying all this, I have colleagues that are running outside cabling back to wherever, the American embassy in Amman or CIA headquarters, or calling the Jordanian embassy in Islamabad to ask, is this stuff true?

Can we identify the orphanage? Is it true that he left Jordan on this date and arrived in Afghanistan on that date? Everything this guy told me was true. So finally I said to him, I have one last question for you. I said, I know that what you've told me is true, and I want to thank you for being honest with me, but why were you honest with me? Why did you tell me the truth? And he said to me, like I'm nuts, he's like, I'm your prisoner.

It doesn't help me in any way to lie to you. And I thought, well, that's a legit answer. And then he says, now may I ask you a question? And I said, sure. And he says, I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam, and I will be your godfather. I said, thank you for that. I'm a Christian, but I appreciate the gesture. I really do. I said, I've studied Islam. I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. I speak Arabic. I appreciate the gesture.

And I said, and I wish you the very best. But he was telling the truth about that orphanage. He was telling the truth about being caught up, and he's like, oh, crap. Now the Americans are bombing. Now what am I going to do? I got to run. It's all these Al-Qaeda guys. They're going to think I'm Al-Qaeda, which we did. But we ended up, rather than sending him to Guantanamo, we just sent him back to Jordan. I had, well, I really should not forget this guy's name.

Not the Manchurian. What is the country in the middle of the Middle East that begins with man? God damn it. It was the dude that had Osama bin Laden's cousin's number on his phone. He was detained in Guantanamo. They made an entire movie about him. Oh, The Mortanian. The Mortanian. Yeah. Thank you. He's a friend of mine. Yes. Yeah. He's been on the show. Friend of the show. He's great. It was a long time ago. I called him. Last time I talked to him, he lectured to my class at Salamanca, and I said, Mohammedu, you are the Martin Luther King of our time.

Crazy. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. I mean, wild story. Did he ever tell you about how much he needed the bathroom on the flight over? We put diapers on them, but no, he didn't. He said that he couldn't go. I don't know why, but he had the fullest bladder. He said the most pain of the entire, everything, the mock executions, the sustained, the most pain was the fact that I don't think he'd been able to go to the bathroom for a very long time. He was strapped in some plane and then taken out there.

Maybe the angle that he was at, he couldn't, or something like that. That was one of the things that stuck in his mind. That poor guy. How he is able to forgive- Seven years in Guantanamo? Fourteen. Fourteen years in Guantanamo, three or four mock executions, like sexual- And completely innocent. Yeah. Just the most innocent, and now just chill. A beautiful human being. He's married now. He has kids. Unreal. Yeah. Does torture work for getting the truth out of people? It does not. 100% proven fact, it does not work.

Why doesn't it work? Because the person being tortured will tell you anything he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing them. John McCain, for example, when he was tortured, in the beginning of his torture, they kept asking him, who are the members of his unit? He gave them the names of the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. They didn't know. They just, they said, good, good. You get an extra ration today, extra food for cooperating. He didn't cooperate, but they will tell you anything.

The thing is, then you have to take all this garbage that they gave you, give it to your analysts who have to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's going to take six years, sorry, it's going to take six months for them to go through all this nonsense. By then, the bomb that you're trying to disrupt has already gone off. Would torture be worth it if it led to the discovery of someone like Osama bin Laden? It comes back to that issue that we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation.

Maybe, but is that the country we want to be? Listen, if you want to be a country that tortures, best of luck, but you have to change the law because torture is illegal. I don't care what John Ewing, Jay Bybee, and Dick Cheney say, it's illegal. We have the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically forbids exactly those techniques the CIA used. We have the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which not only are we signatories to, we wrote it. We wrote it, and then like magic, in 2002, it's all legal because we're the good guys, so we say it is.

I'll tell you another thing. In 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that day ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted on a charge of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Fort Leavenworth. The law never changed. We changed. If you want to torture, if that's the country you want to be, okay, you can have that position, but you have to change the law.

Again, we're either going to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked about, or we're not. We're either going to be the country that writes the human rights reports for Congress every year, for every country in the world with which we have diplomatic relations, or we're not, but we can't pretend to be one while really being the other. Is there a level of either threat or aggression and unfairness in interrogation from other countries? Is there a level of intensity that that could get to that would cause you to think, okay, we actually need to take the gloves off with regards to some of the rules that we're adhering to if everybody else is not?

I think it was appropriate to take the gloves off after 9-11, but I think that there's a disconnect here over what taking the gloves off meant. There's a longstanding American policy enshrined in an executive order that says that the CIA may kill a foreign national if he presents a clear and present danger, that's the terminology, to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation. So if you are Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you pose a clear and present danger, and so we need to kill you to protect Americans.

But if we have the wherewithal to capture you, you have the same constitutional rights that I have, right? And so if you are the bad guy that we say you are, then you have to face your accusers in a court of law and be judged by a jury of your peers. Just because I don't like your politics doesn't mean that I can do mock executions on you and waterboard you and put you in a coffin for two weeks with a box of cockroaches, or put a drill against your head, or keep you naked and chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, or throw ice water on you every hour until you die of hypothermia.

The law doesn't say you can do those things. So we've got to respect the rule of law, and we have to have appropriate congressional oversight, because the CIA will push and push and push the envelope until somebody pushes back. But the problem is, after 9-11, nobody pushed back. What are some of the physical and psychological techniques that have been used during interrogations that normal people would find most shocking? I think there are three that had been approved by the Justice Department that would be shocking to people.

There were myriad that were not approved that the CIA did anyway, and we can have a whole separate conversation about that. But the three worst ones—waterboarding gets all of the press. Waterboarding is you're on a board, you're strapped to the board, your feet are slightly elevated, so your head is lower, right? You're at an angle. They put some kind of material in your mouth, cloth, burlap, something like that, a pillowcase, whatever, and then they pour water on your face. It gives you a sense that you're drowning.

In fact, enough water gets through the material that you do drown. Abu Zubaydah actually drowned. His heart stopped. He had to be revived in order for him to be tortured again. You can't do that. That's not legal. But waterboarding is kind of the famous one. There were two that I always believed were worse than waterboarding. One was called the cold cell. You're stripped naked. You're chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't sit or kneel or lay or get in any comfortable position. Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is really cold, and then every hour, a CIA officer comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you.

We murdered people with that technique. The Justice Department never allowed anybody to murder a prisoner. That was never approved. The third one was sleep deprivation. I feel very strongly about this one. When someone leaked that the CIA was carrying out sleep deprivation against prisoners, the Secretary of Defense at the time, Don Rumsfeld, mocked the revelation in the press. He said, sleep deprivation. He said, I don't even have a chair in my office. I have a stand-up desk, and I'm well-known for working 24 hours at a time.

But we're not talking about 24 hours in your Pentagon office with your secretary bringing your meals in. The American Psychological Association has published studies showing that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. They begin to die at day nine. Their organs begin to shut down. The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for 12 days. You can't live for 12 days with no sleep. Industrial strength lights on you, and music playing just on a loop at a volume of 11, BG's 24-7 with ear-splitting volume.

You can't survive that. You lose your mind, and then your organs stop working. After Pakistan, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. In that position, you get to see literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world. We got a cable one day from the secret prison, and it said, hey, we were interrogating Ahmed Shmahmed over here. Unfortunately, he didn't survive the interrogation. I was like, uh-huh. Now what are you going to do? The counterterrorism center sends a cable out saying, well, dig a ditch behind the building and put him in the ditch.

What are we going to do? Justice Department never authorized that. Are you going to rat yourself out to the Justice Department now? You just murdered this prisoner in cold blood, and then you put him in a ditch that you dug behind the building? What are you going to do? You're going to send a memo to you and Jay Bybee saying, oh, by the way, listen, it didn't work out like we thought it was going to on paper. That's the country we became after 9-11. What about the unauthorized ones?

Oh, well, those were just—most of them were laid out in the Senate torture report. Abu Zubaydah, for example, had this irrational fear of bugs, and so they put a diaper on him, they put him in a coffin, they dumped a box of cockroaches in on him, and then they closed the coffin. You got a fan in there to give him oxygen. You could hear him screaming, screaming. They did it just to make him insane. Another one was called walling. Walling was kind of a big deal, and it was controversial at headquarters because the idea was you start at the least offensive technique.

The least offensive technique was called the attention grab or the attention grasp, where I grab you by the shirt and I say, answer my questions, you. That's not torture. The next one was the belly slap. It makes that cracking sound. It's a little bit humiliating. Makes a hand print. That's not torture either. The next one was the attention slap, which was a slap across the face. Not a hard one that's going to break your jaw. A slap. It was meant to humiliate. Then there was forced nudity, right?

They graduated up to what was supposed to be the harshest penalty of them all, waterboarding. I told you there were those others that were worse than waterboarding. Then you had the bugs in the coffin. You had stress positions. You had walling. Walling was I grab you by the shirt and I slam you into the wall behind you. Now, what they were supposed to do is to roll up a bath towel and put it around your neck, and the wall had to be made of plywood, so it had a little bit of give to it.

I slam you against the wall, but the towel prevents you from getting whiplash. Okay? Except they didn't use a towel, and the wall was made of concrete block. The next thing you know, they all have traumatic brain injuries, and now they can't participate in their own defenses because they're drooling. What is that? Nobody said you could give them brain damage and smash their skulls into the wall. Just a couple of weeks ago, the judge of the military tribunal at Guantanamo threw out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession and two other co-defendants throughout their confessions because they were gathered as a result of CIA torture.

Okay? Now, what do you do? Now, you can't try them. They're never going to get out because they have no rights at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court's already decided that, but there will never be closure for the 9-11 families. These guys will never be executed because the CIA tortured them. What do you think's going on in Guantanamo now? Pretty much nothing. They're down to a small fraction of the number of people. I think altogether, it was 34 for a while. It's lower than that now. It's like 17.

What was it at its max? 770, and almost every single one of them was innocent. The place was full. Get this. Let's say you and I live in the same village in Afghanistan, and you borrow money from me. You don't want to pay it back. So, you go to the Americans and you say, Hey, that guy, I'll cut him. So, the CIA grabs me in the middle of the night. I disappear to Guantanamo. Nobody ever sees me again, and you don't have to pay the loan back.

770 people, and almost every single one of them was innocent. You got any idea who's still there now? Yeah, kind of the worst of the worst. KSM, Abu Zubaydah, Ammar Abalouch, KSM's son-in-law, Ramzi bin Hisham. Who else? It's been so many years now, their names are starting to escape me. Did we ever get Uday Hussain? Oh yeah, we killed him. We killed Qusay in the same gunfight. I agree with you. I think that there are rules, and it's pretty important to abide by them. There are some extenuating circumstances.

He was one. If I could find a person from history, I think Uday Hussain would probably be top of my list. You know, the first seven years of my career, I worked exclusively on Iraq. I used to dream about Uday. One of my colleagues, a psychologist that I worked with in the Counterterrorism Center, later told me, oh, that's a classic sign of PTSD. I had a dream. It was a recurring dream that I had gotten a job as a chef in Saddam's palace. I was standing there in the kitchen saying, I can't believe I made it through the process.

I'm a chef. I'm going to poison them. I'll kill all of them. Then I turned around, and Uday's there. He says, do you really think we're that stupid? Then I would wake up. I had that dream a dozen times. He was this sort of pinnacle, peak, evil doer in your mind. He was a true psychopath. He would drive around in his limousine, point out an attractive woman on the street, have his bodyguard snatch her. He would rape her, and then throw her off the balcony of the hotel.

Who does that? CB1 I'd heard that he turned up at weddings. CB2 Mm-hmm. To rape the bride. CB1 Yeah. CB2 So he could have her first. CB1 Yeah. I had a guy on the show who–I can't even remember technically what his job was. Some former fixer. Uday Hussain went to Vegas. He wanted to go to Vegas, and this guy was tasked with being Uday's handler for a while, getting him cocaine, getting him women. I asked of all of the people that you had to look after and schmooze, who was the most difficult client?

He said Uday Hussain was– CB2 Without a doubt. CB1 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. CB2 Without a doubt. Uday's brothers-in-law, Hussein Kamal al-Majid, the Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization, and Saddam Kamal al-Majid, his brother, who was the head of the special security organization, the innermost ring of Saddam's security–they were married to Saddam's two daughters, Raghid and Rana. They were so afraid of Uday that they defected to Jordan. CB1 Rather than be married into the family or stay married into the family. CB2 Yeah, but they went with their wives.

CB1 Oh, so they saved–oh, interesting. Well, it didn't work out that way, so they immediately made contact with the CIA. We sent a delegation out to meet with them. My boss was a part of this delegation, and he said that as soon as they sat down, Hussein Kamal said, okay, here's what we need. We need air cover, we need heavy weapons, we need secure communications, and my boss is like, whoa, wait a minute. We didn't come out here to make you the president of Iraq. We came out here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are, and that conversation went nowhere.

So in the end, they decided to go back. They publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness. CB1 Refected. CB2 Refected. We should coin that. We should take credit for that. CB1 Mine and yours now. Iriaka Williams in 2026. CB2 Yes, I like it. So they publicly begged Saddam's forgiveness. Saddam said, all is forgiven. Come back. CB1 I know how this story ends already. CB2 Uday met them at the border and shot them both dead. CB1 I mean, Uday's gonna Uday, isn't he? CB2 Yeah, it's his nature. It was his nature.

It's like the frog and the scorpion. CB1 It's strange. As you were talking about that, I was thinking about dynasties and hereditary monarchies and stuff like that, obviously British, but also I'm thinking about the Medici's, stuff like that. Medici's probably a pretty good example when you think about Italy. The reason I was thinking about it was, if your lineage is highly predictive of who ends up being in power, in some ways, great, because kinship is perhaps the closest loyalty that you can have from a human psychology perspective.

But the issue that you have is that if you manage to have a particularly competent, successful, decisive, wise, whatever grandfather, the likelihood that you get two or three more generations without hitting someone who's highly retarded is very, very low. You see it with financially successful families too. CB1 It takes on average, I think, three generations to blow it all. You look at Vanderbilt, you look at Rockefeller. With this, you're almost guaranteeing because it's so unmeritocratic. The line between genius and madness or whatever it might be, the person, the unbelievably assertive, fantastic grandfather had the constitution genetically and with the upbringing to then really take advantage.

But you only need to make a few little adjustments from a disposition standpoint to go from benevolent, decisive, wise leader into narcissistic, anxious tyrant. It doesn't surprise me when you have situations like that. Who or what, for all that Uday Hussain was successful at being evil, I don't look at him and think that he's competent in any other area. I don't think that he would make a great leader of a country. Just because you're able to do things that are more ruthless than other people doesn't mean that you can actually do stuff that's more productive than the average person.

the street, right? And he would probably be better. Yeah. So I just, I was thinking about that as you talked about it. And if fear only goes so far, you can only cow so many people for so long before they rise up and dispose of you. It's one of my favorite areas of research. So I guess you would call this sociological, like evolutionary sociology in one form, which is looking at the two forms of leaders that we had ancestrally. So one is prestige through dominance and another is prestige through competence, or one would be like leadership through prestige and another would be leadership through power and fear.

And what's interesting is that if you look at the most effective leaders in times of war, societies actually prefer, they lean more authoritarian. They actually want more of a tyrant, more decisive, going to either run close to the rules or maybe color outside of the lines a little bit. And you want that. People seem to think that the more dominant side is going to be better during war. And I think it actually might be. The problem is that when you go from wartime to peacetime, you still have a very dominant leader.

And the way that they get protected was that you need a ring of sycophants around them, and they end up being the enforcers. And that's kind of an interesting finding that you can't have a tyrannical leader at the top. This is why in chimp pods, number one might be an asshole, number two, three, and four combined together, and then number one's gone. But if you can do more coordination, Hitler style, this ring of sycophants that are around him, you then start to distribute the power a little bit more.

You've got some protection. You can have more people working to get them on. So I didn't really mean to kill your brother. You do assholery at scale, basically. But then on the other side, the prestige thing is good, but it's got weaknesses because although people might love you, your compassion becomes a vector of fragility in some ways. So yeah, again, looking at who is it that you want to lead? What's the situation in which it would be most optimal to have it? What are you thinking about?

Let's say that the outcome that you want occurs, you almost get a Pyrrhic victory, which is like one more victory will cause us to be ruined because if you do win, what are you locked into? What's the civilization, the sociocultural situation that gets carried forward in this newly peaceful time? I think you're exactly right. Yeah, I think you're right. It's funny too that this is one of those things that's been studied for decades, for generations, and yet it seems to be a lesson that leaders either don't know, don't understand, or don't implement.

I think we all have a degree of historical narcissism or solipsism or something that I'm aware that this might be some of the most well re-watched wisdom of the ages, but not for me. There's something special about my time, and there's always a justification as well. We see this with the current discussion around AI, and it is an existential risk, and what's it doing to us. You can go back and look at some of the Luddites against the printing press saying that the common folk being able to read, or even I think it was Thomas Blackmore in England who was the first person to translate the Bible into the common language so that priests didn't have to be the only conduit between the common folk and God.

You could read it as your own, and this is going to pervert the minds of the proletariats, the common people, the serfs, the whatever. They're going to be distracted. Their minds are going to be turned. At each different point, I can make the case for why television was different, and I can make the case for why social media and phones are different, and I can make the case for why AI and VR is different. I'm saying that to me right now, being the person that has read the stuff around what happens when you get the first common language translation of the Bible.

Along the same lines, there was no television in Saudi Arabia until the 1970s, and it was because there was this debate at the time about graven images, and is this a graven image, a form of graven? It's like an idol, like idol worship. One of the Ten Commandments is to issue graven images, but then somebody got the idea that, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if we have television, but we just read the Quran for 24 hours a day? They said, that's a good idea.

When I moved to Saudi Arabia, there were two stations, one in Arabic, one in English, and it was just Quran all day and all night. That was it. One hell of a party. That worked for them. Did you see that Krista Pike lady? Have you been tracking this story? The lady who got the death penalty. Oh my God, in Tennessee? They failed to kill her twice. So as I was walking in here, they said that she is on life support and unresponsive. Oh, there it is.

Krista Pike is on a ventilator and unconscious after surviving lethal injection. This was an hour ago. Twice they tried to kill her. Krista Pike survived Tennessee's attempt to execute her via lethal injection on Wednesday, but her medical and legal future remain remarkably unclear. She's intubated on a ventilator and remains unconscious in a Nashville area hospital, her attorney said in a court filing on Friday, receiving life-saving care, life-saving care, after being injected with two ostensibly fatal doses of Pentobarbital. Yeah. Her attorney said on Friday, she's being treated for the serious effects.

Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Serious effects. Of the Pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms. I guess that might be from just the IVs going in. A legal team filed an emergency motion Friday asking a court in Nashville to require Tennessee Department of Correction to protect and preserve all evidence. That makes sense. But also as for an expedited hearing on the motion, the State Department of Correction declined to comment on the pending litigation. Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years.

Now her legal case will be at a standstill. Bill Lee, Governor Republican, announced he would call off the state's last remaining execution this year, while a third-party review takes place to determine exactly what happened in Pike's case. According to the Associated Press, the governor has appropriately called for an investigation. We need to know what happened. The administration is not informed Slemmer's family of what might be next for Pike. They're devastated and exhausted. Oh, so this is the family of the victim. Bracewell, who helped Slemmer's parents navigate the process, said the family is mad at the state for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next.

Look, you're the parents of this person. I imagine it's absolutely horrible. But what do you mean mad for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next? We just failed a thing that's literally supposed to be final twice. It's slightly unprecedented. Her last words were, is it supposed to hurt this much? Is that true? So I remember watching Malcolm Gladwell. Oh, I love Malcolm Gladwell. But he's very against capital punishment. And we had this conversation. I think the start of our conversation, probably half an hour, the first time he came on the show, was around that.

And I said, well, it's a humane way to kill people. And he said, no, no, no. It's a horrible sequence of drugs. Do you know much about this? Yeah, I've followed it closely. Can you explain? It smothers you slowly. The petrobarbital. Is that the big mover? Because there's three, right? Yeah, there are three. Exactly. In sequence. But the problem is, well, one paralyzes the heart, one paralyzes the respiration, and the other is supposed to be the sort of the finisher. But the thing is, is when they're taken all together, they cause an inordinate amount of pain.

But because you're paralyzed by then, you can't express the pain, right? And no one's ever going. I mean, wouldn't it be interesting if this person becomes conscious again and is now a landmark case for this is what a two time survivor of lethal injection is? I wonder, Mark, can you try and find out how many people in history in America have survived a lethal injection? Because if they have, and they're still functional, they would be a pretty good campaigner for, hey, we think that we found a humane way to take a life and bring back the fucking guillotine, you know, like really, because what you've done is you've traded something, which is painless, apart from for one millisecond, yeah, microsecond.

Oh, here we go. As of October 2nd, 2026, there are two ways to answer this. Eight people have survived a modern U.S. lethal injection execution attempt. Death penalty information says seven people before Christa Pike survived failed attempts because execution teams could not establish a usable IV line. Pike became the eighth. Okay, can you ask? Oh, but look at the bottom. There's a remarkable distinction. Pike is apparently the first person in the modern U.S. death penalty era to survive after the lethal injection drugs were actually administered.

In the previous seven cases, officials abandoned the execution because they couldn't establish the IV access necessary to administer the drug. So if by survived lethal injection, you mean actually received the lethal drugs and lived? The answer appears to be one, Christa Pike. Can you ask, how did she get both doses? Did they do it back to back? When you take MDMA and they're like, how are you feeling? Do you want to re-up? Do you want to take half a dose after 90 minutes to increase the high or whatever?

I don't know whether, but that's insane. It totally makes sense. If you've got someone that's been living on death row, maybe they're not in great health. Finding an IV line isn't necessarily easy. The exact timing is a little murky because they closed the execution chamber certain during injections, but witness accounts that has reconstructed slowly. The first dose appears to have been administered at about 741 CT. If the protocol says that if the prisoner is still alive five minutes after the first dose, officials administer a second hundred milligram dose.

So at 746 from 741, she's still alive and visibly breathing. Officials closed the curtain. It reopened three minutes later. Witnesses then saw her loudly snoring with her mouth open. Multiple accounts indicate that this approximately three minute interval is when the second dose was administered. So the best reconstruction, 741 first dose, five minutes, 746 to 749 curtain closed. Second dose administered, 749 curtain reopened. Pike still breathing slash snoring. One particularly important detail, Tennessee normally establishes two IV lines as a redundancy. We do not know yet whether the second dose went through the same IV line as the first or whether officials switched to the backup IV.

And that is one of the major unanswered questions in this investigation. The reports saying the second dose was administered later as the public timeline is inconsistent. The really strange part is why two doses failed. There are three plausible explanations, including the IV and drug delivery. Pike's complaint that her arm felt like it was going to bust is potentially significant. So maybe if they just fitted the IV line incorrectly and it's just in the tissue, it's an intramuscular rather than intravenous injection. But yeah, dude, this could be huge.

Yeah. And I mean, it is still crazy. First woman to be first woman to be executed in 200 years. Do you know what she did as the crime though? Yeah. Took a box cutter to grizzly and she kept a piece of the skull with hair on it and was showing it around a friend. She broke the girl's skull into asphalt when she was 19 or something. So yeah, I mean, it's strange with situations like this, right? I've thought a lot about retribution as it means to capital punishment and sort of, especially if you've taken some of the determinism red pill and thought, well, what does free will consist of and like how culpable are people for their actions?

Uday Hussain, like, do we hold him culpable, like morally, legally? What does this? But we do have humans have this reflexive instinct for retribution. We do. We do. And that's why we still execute people in so many States. I mean, it's about half now. And even of the States that have the death penalty, many of them just don't carry it out. Like California, for example. I wonder what you would need to do in California in order to get the death penalty and you work out when the last death in California was.

It's a good question too. While we're looking for that, what's your relationship with angry birds? Man, I love my birds so much. I can't even tell you now. Seriously, I wake up an hour earlier than I need to every day, seven days a week just to play angry birds and not lose a productive hour of the day. It's the very first thing I do. As soon as my alarm goes off, I put my glasses on, pick up my phone and start playing angry birds. I love it.

Why? It's just so mindless and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. You know, I have no hobbies until very recently. I had no hobbies. All I do is work and I love it. It's great. It's fun. It's now, thank God, beginning to be kind of lucrative, but I don't really do anything but work. Angry birds was my only vice. I did buy a telescope with a built-in camera, so I've taken some awesome deep space pictures and that's fun. Tuesday and Wednesday in DC, I'm going to be back in DC, completely cloudless nights.

I'm going to be out all night taking pictures, and I'll show you some. Angry birds, it gives me such satisfaction. You had an insanely long streak. Nine consecutive years, I didn't miss a single day, and then I got screwed. When I upgraded my phone, this is the first picture I took. And then if you leaf through, I I took one on the harvest moon a month later and, uh, yeah, that's the harvest moon. That was a pretty good one. And I haven't done any editing to that at all.

That's just the picture, no editing. And that's the whirlpool galaxy. And he did this in DC with all that ground light. Imagine what it would look like if I actually had a dark place to go. Wow. Yeah, that is impressive. But I mean, you can only do this when there are no clouds in the sky. Sometimes I'll drive up to, up to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Uh, it's about an hour and 15 minutes north of me just cause they've got dark sky there. And, uh, there's a guy that lets me, that lets me just kind of park in his parking lot.

He shuts the security light off and I'll sit there for two or three hours and just take pictures. It's saying that you've got no hobbies. What happened at New York fashion week? So I get a call from this awesome designer, um, Elena Velez, she's like a neo goth. Everything's black. I do. When I look at you, I do think neo goth actually. Right. Yeah. See, cause I'm with it, right? So she asked me if I would have any interest in walking the catwalk at New York fashion week.

And I said, oh, hell yes. Cause look, I'm 62 years old with the dog tags of my victims. Oh, that's nice. I was the only person that, that got two different, uh, you had two looks, two looks, I had 90 seconds to change. Oh yeah, I did. I spent for a very, very long time in my twenties doing a fashion shows. And I know how horrendous that backstage. I was surprised at how much work was involved. We started at 11 o'clock that morning and the thing wasn't over until nine 30 at night.

Yeah. Justice for money. We talk about the perils of being at Guantanamo bay. No, one's talking about how painful it is for the models at New York fashion week. And they're all naked. Most of the day justice for New York fashion models. That's what I say. And they don't get paid. Another thing too. Um, the next day I had six emails waiting for me from friends of mine saying, buddy, there's this AI video of you going. And I was like, no, no, it's not a, I, it is a good get out of jail free card now for anyone who gets rumbled to just say, Hey, AI is getting really, really crazy.

It's really crazy. What. You know, thinking about your career and sort of what you're doing now, what is the most interesting thing about your work and that world that you've learned after spending so much time in it that, that you've learned so much about? That you've learned after spending so much time in it, that the people from outside don't really appreciate or don't understand. Oh, you know, I think it is that most of the people involved in the intelligence community are very, very bright, very, um, patriotic people who want to do nothing more than to serve the American people.

And they're not right-wing ideologues. I'll give you an example. The 1992 election was, it was the morning of the election. So we all voted in the morning. I was in a branch of, um, eight people, nine people, including the branch chief. And at the end of our nine o'clock morning meeting, he said, listen, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really curious as to who, who voted for whom, it turned out it was three for Clinton, three for Bush and two for Perot.

And I remember thinking, wow, I'm not the only Democrat in this office, but back then you had no idea who the person sitting next to you voted for, because it was irrelevant in 1996, there was a woman in my branch that got in trouble. She was reprimanded by HR and had a letter put in her file that made her ineligible for promotion for a year because she had a Bob Dole bumper sticker in her cubicle, and now it's just like all gone nuts. But, um, but I think what most people don't understand, especially, especially on the political left, they just say CIA evil, you know, and that's just not the case.

There are bad people at the CIA. There are evil people at the CIA. Psychopaths in some cases, sociopaths, murderers, but most of them are, are good, decent, smart, hardworking people. If you were to rank the intelligence agencies around the world, who do you think per person is most effective, most advanced? Easy. That's the Israelis. They're the best in the world. They're assholes. Don't get me wrong, but they're the best in the world. Why? I think because they've convinced themselves that they have to be, or they're done.

It's permanent existential threat, right? You know, Parkinson's law work expands to fill the time given for it. It's like a intensity expands to give, to fill the existential threat against it. There it is. Yeah. That's Israel. Yeah. John Kiriakou, ladies and gentlemen, I, uh, I'm endlessly fascinated by what you're doing. Where should people go? You got a book, you got all sorts of other stuff going on. I've got a bunch of books. They're all on, uh, on Amazon. I have a new one that came out a couple of weeks ago.

I have one that's coming out in 10 days, I guess. Yeah. How to live off the grid. I haven't, we didn't even get, we need to do that next time. We didn't do that one. Um, and I've got, um, John Kiriakou's dead drop on Apple, Apple podcasts and Spotify and, uh, John Kiriakou's briefing room on YouTube. Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Good to see you. All right. Until next time. Goodbye, my beauties. Yup.

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