S3E32 Spy Stuff

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the dads from the Crypt podcast. [00:00:10] Speaker B: We fool you good, eh? Gentlemen, gentlemen. What is this? [00:00:23] Speaker A: This is spy stuff. Hello and welcome to another episode of the how not to make a movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Gil will join us momentarily. Our guest today is both a friend and a co worker. John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer. After 911, John was part of the CIA's covert team tasked with tracking down al Qaeda's leadership. In March 2002, pakistani forces with CIA support captured the man we thought was al Qaeda's number three, a man with the non Daguerre Abu Zubaydah. For the next 60 hours that we held Abu Zubaydah as he recovered from severe wounds suffered during his capture, John Kiryanku was his handler. He built up a relationship with Abu Zubaydah, a degree of trust. Ultimately, Abu Zubaydah provided significant intelligence, though, in the end, he wasn't the number three at al Qaeda, despite those two facts that he told us everything he knew, and he wasn't the leader we sought. We went on to waterboard Abu Zubaydah 83 times. When John learned what we had done to him, John ratted out our torture program and spent 18 months in federal prison for doing it. John's written a number of books about his CIA experiences. He's done a couple of tv shows. And here's where the co worker part kicks in. He and I are about to drop a new podcast together called Prisoner X. Prisoner X is about people who are in prison here in America and around the world, but who shouldn't be. The podcast's mission is to tell all these stories, but more importantly, its mission is to empower the audience and tell them specifically what they can do to help make these prisoners ex prisoners. A quick note for those who watch us on our YouTube channel. Alas, our visual elements this week beyond this intro are going to be kind of sparse merging on non existent. We only ever think we have the technology. In point of fact, the technology always has us. I apologize. But hey, on the bright side, if you experience this podcast sonically, you'll never know the difference. So if you like spies and spy stuff, boy, is this episode right in your wheelhouse. Even if you don't especially like spots, this episode will open your eyes. Here's John. World gets crazier and crazier, doesn't it? [00:03:03] Speaker B: It does, indeed. I think we're in for a big weekend. [00:03:06] Speaker A: I think so, too. The game keeps changing. [00:03:09] Speaker B: Maybe we can save ourselves. Hey, you know, you know, it's funny to me, too, Alan. The Republicans have been, the mantra has been Biden is demented and he's got Parkinson's and he has dementia, and he has this. And then last night, Matt Gates said, this is an insurrection. La Civita, the Trump campaign manager. This is a coup. You can't just overthrow the president. And who was the third one? It was like Bannon or somebody said, yeah, this just isn't fair. You can't just decide to run somebody else. It's like, you morons, their utter lack of. [00:04:00] Speaker A: Well, first of all, clearly they can see no irony. They are incapable, which is a sign that they have no sense of humor, I think, whatsoever. I don't think everybody has a sense of humor, and I think Donald Trump does not have a sense of humor. If you can't laugh at yourself, you don't have a sense of humor. You're actually a bully who can laugh at other people. But if you can laugh at yourself. [00:04:25] Speaker B: Yes, yes. [00:04:27] Speaker A: Then you can see irony because you appreciate the absurdity of it all. Whereas Donald Trump, he can't see absurdity. He can only, you know, it's one of his. [00:04:42] Speaker B: I think that's exactly right. [00:04:44] Speaker A: But we're not here to talk about. [00:04:46] Speaker C: We're not going to be talking about that guy. We have to talk about the sense of humor of Marjorie Taylor Greene. [00:04:52] Speaker A: There you go. [00:04:54] Speaker B: That's right. That's true, too. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Now, among the things that we'll talk about today is we will get to your showbiz career and we'll talk about your books. You just keep writing these damn books and podcasts. [00:05:11] Speaker B: Somebody would read them. Sounds good. [00:05:17] Speaker A: I read the article that Steve call wrote about in the New Yorker. But no, no, no. There's a lot of stuff there. [00:05:30] Speaker C: Talk about sense of humorous. [00:05:32] Speaker A: But, but there are a couple things there that I had to grab from them. And so that's, I want you to know where it was coming from. He says that you had the exuberance of a labrador retriever. [00:05:44] Speaker B: Yes, he did. And you know what? And that was while I was depressed. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Regardless of anything else he said. That's true. And it's one of the loveliest things about you. [00:05:59] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you, sir. [00:06:01] Speaker A: Steve call, you know, he, but he did. There's a lot of terrific background on you, and it saves me having to ask you all these questions. You came from around Pittsburgh. You grew up western Pennsylvania. You loved listening to the BBC radio monster. [00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. Yeah. My dad bought me. I went to an auction with my excuse me with my dad when I was eight years old, and he, I still remember, he bought a box of junk. It was filled with junk for fifty cents. And in this box of junk, there was a shortwave radio, and he just handed it to me. So I put some batteries in it, and it changed my life. And I mean that quite literally. It changed my life. I grew up in amish country. And then to have the BBC beaming in and Radio Moscow and Radio Havana and, you know, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and, I mean, dozens of countries from around the world, it, it opened up a world for me that, that I barely had known existed. [00:07:22] Speaker A: But the, it didn't just open a world to you. I mean, sure, you weren't, you didn't just sit there listening. You reacted, because then you write letters to world leaders. You got an autographed portrait from the Shah of Iran. [00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. I did. I read a letter to the shop, Iran and son of a gun, if he didn't write me a letter back. Yeah. Crazy. I still have it. [00:07:52] Speaker A: You should have warned him. [00:07:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Geez. [00:07:56] Speaker A: Politics were always really, really your thing when you got a partial scholarship to GWU and you enrolled in Middle Eastern studies. So that was always a part of the world that attracted you. [00:08:11] Speaker B: Why, I was fascinated by, when I was, how old was I, 14 or 15? The, you know, the shah had been overthrown in Iran, and these students had taken the american embassy, and I was just fascinated. You might remember, that's when Nightline was created, and Ted Koppel would give the country these updates every night at 1130. Absolutely captivating for me, I'd stay up late and watch Ted Koppel. To me, that was the most interesting place in the world. I wanted to learn the language. I wanted to study the religion. I wanted to learn about oil and how oil made the economy run. And so I did. I devoted my life to the study of the Middle east, and then got a degree in Middle eastern studies with a focus on islamic theology, got a minor in oil economics, learned how to speak Arabic, and then thought, maybe I'll go to the foreign service or I'll end up on Capitol hill. [00:09:21] Speaker A: You already spoke Greek because you grew up in a very tight knit greek family. [00:09:26] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:27] Speaker A: Household. [00:09:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:28] Speaker A: So you were multilingual already. [00:09:33] Speaker B: Yeah. It's kind of a strange thing. I can't really explain it, but I've always had a knack for foreign languages. In fact, I remember, I remember my first trip to Saudi Arabia. I asked a guy who spoke Arabic, am I going to be able to pick it up a little bit. And he said, no, no, you won't know where to even begin. And then I thought, well, I better start studying it now, then. So I did. And I did pick it up. In fact, an odd thing happened when I finally joined the agency. I had been there three years, and then I applied for a job in Bahrain, a little tiny country in the Persian Gulf about 12 miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia. And my office said that they were willing to sponsor me for a year of full time Arabic. I said, great. So I went to the CIA's language school, and on the first day, they make you take this test in gibberish. It's a gibberish language just to see what kind of ability you have to learn a foreign language. So, first of all, my office had already spent $100,000 to send me to the language school. So it wasn't up to these clowns to decide if I was going to get to learn how to speak Arabic or not. Secondly, it's gibberish. You can't learn anything by testing a person's ability to speak gibberish. [00:11:03] Speaker A: Was it authentic frontier gibberish or just straight gibberish? [00:11:07] Speaker B: Just nonsense. So I'm looking at it like, I don't know what the fuck this means. I'm filling out the little ovals, like, whatever. The next day, I get called into the director's office, the director of the language school, and she says, listen, we're thinking of rejecting your language training and just sending you back to headquarters. And I said, why? And she said, because you just failed this language test. And I said, with all due respect, it's not up to you to decide if I get to learn a foreign language. I've been assigned to the language school for an operational purpose, right? You don't even have a need to know what the operational purpose is. Your job is just to teach me how to speak Arabic. So, you know, tough luck. So I started Arabic, immediately picked it up. It's the most mathematically constructed language you can possibly imagine. Every single word in Arabic comes down to a three letter root, right? And the verb is always the first word in the sentence. Went jack to the store. Right. Walked the boy, the dog. So on the very first day, the Arabic teacher said, I'm going to teach you 30 verbs, and you're going to learn that there are ten cases for every verb. If you learn the 30 verbs and you learn how the ten cases are constructed, you're going to speak Arabic. So I learned those 30 verbs, and I mastered the ten cases now, I sat next to a guy who was like the archetypal CIA spy. He was handsome, built. His dad had been the deputy director of the CIA 20 years earlier. And this guy would make three by five cards every day of vocabulary words. Now, I wasn't focused on the vocabulary words. I was focused on the 30 verbs times ten, right, because the teacher said, the rest is going to come naturally. So this kid would come in and the. The teacher would say, um, how was your night last night? And you would have to speak in complete sentences. We only spoke English the first two weeks and this was a twelve month class, so you would have to say, I had a good night. When I went home, I studied Arabic and then I did my homework and then I ate dinner. I ate chicken and potatoes and salad, and then I read a book and then I went to sleep. Right, so that's how you learn. He would come in and use these words. I would look at him like, what in the world are you talking about? He used. I'll never forget this, Alan. He used a word once. And the Arabic teacher was the only time in the year the Arabic teacher went into English and he said, there's no way you know what that word means. And he said, yes, I do. What is it? He says, it means to tin or to can. And I remember saying, oh, my God, I'm never going to speak this language. And at the end of the year, I was the only one of six students who tested with fluency. I tested three plus, three plus, three plus. And I became the ambassador's translator. In fact, I was in Bahrain my first week and we went to see the minister of Alqaf, the minister of muslim charities, and he didn't speak any English in Bahrain. He didn't speak any English. And on the way out he said, compliments on your Arabic, it's beautiful. And I said, oh, thank you. And the ambassador had spent 30 years in the Middle east. He said, your Arabic's better than mine. I said, I kind of have a knack for it. [00:15:21] Speaker A: They're rather protective of their language in the arab culture. [00:15:26] Speaker B: They are. They are their language. I've never met a people who so loved the beauty of their own language. And it really is beautiful. You know, there are many, many different forms of Arabic. There's something called fusha, which is high standard Arabic. It's like shakespearean Arabic. And everybody has to learn fusha because the dialects, there are twelve separate dialects in Arabic are so vastly different that somebody from Libya, for example, can't understand what somebody from Kuwait is saying, or somebody from Tunisia can't understand somebody from Saudi Arabia. There are a couple of dialects that are common to everybody because all the movies are made in Syria and all the tv shows are made in Egypt, so everybody understands those dialects. But otherwise, in North Africa it's mixed with French or Berber, and in the gulf it's mixed with Farsi. And in Yemen, they were so isolated that it was never mixed with anything. So everybody speaks fusha, but with fusha they add these little, like curlicues, these verbal curlicues, onto every word. So it sounds very poetic and pretty. And that's why if somebody's giving a speech, like you go to see a speech at some awards ceremony or, you know, a college graduation or whatever, you listen to speech, and then everybody goes like this, the speaker will get a standing ovation in the Middle east because his Arabic was so beautiful that it made them proud to be Arabs, that somebody could impart such beauty in his spoken tongue. [00:17:18] Speaker A: You tell a story in your, I think it was your first book, the one about Abu Zubaydah. We tell it, no worries, no worries. We tell it in the podcast. When you first encountered Abu Zubaydah, after we captured him and he finally roused from these, he had been sedated because he'd been operated on, terribly wounded. But when he first came to, you said, you tried to talk to him, you tried to speak to him, you spoke to him in Arabic, and he said to you, in perfect English, he. [00:18:02] Speaker B: Said, I will not speak to you in God's language. I said, that's okay, Abu Zubaydah, we know who you are. But I said to him, shuzmek, which is actually palestinian dialect, because I knew he was Palestinian, so I didn't use, I said, in Palestinian Arabic, what is your name? And he shook his head. I said it again, shismek. And he said, I will not speak to you in God's language. [00:18:32] Speaker A: There's a perfect example. One of the, when we were introduced to each other, right, one of the things that I'll confess I got absolutely fanboy about is the fact, well, is the fact that you, you were a spy for a living. [00:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:53] Speaker A: And I was. I'm a huge John le Carre. I every fucking as am I. Smiley's world, man. George Smiley, I love that. And I love, love that world. One of the fascinating things that he writes about is just the nature of the people that aren't just drawn to that particular line of work, but who are good at it. [00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:23] Speaker A: Were you when you went you were 25 when you first went to work. It was in 1990 when you first got your first job at the CIA. [00:19:32] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:33] Speaker A: Did you seek employment there because you wanted to be a. One of a better spy? [00:19:43] Speaker B: No, actually, it was quite accidental. It's sort of a funny story. It wasn't meant to be funny, but I was in graduate school at GW, George Washington University here in Washington. And I was working on a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis. And I was studying under an eminent psychiatrist by the name of doctor Gerald Post. Jerry just died, I don't know, a year ago, a year and a half ago. And, I mean, this was a guy with an MD, a PhD in psychology, and a PhD in political science. He was teaching a class called the psychology of leadership. Fascinating class. But as an assignment, he gave us this directive to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our bosses. So I was working at the United Food and Commercial Workers union in Washington, and I was working for a guy who was this old school union organizer, mean, tough. He had had his back broken during a strike. He was attacked by scabs, and they beat him. And I was actually a little bit afraid of it. So I'm shadowing him. And during the course of the week, we had an argument, and I called him a racist, which he was. And he got so angry, he set a stance, and he put up his fists. I remember this like it was yesterday. I put up my hands to block the punch that I knew was coming. And I remember thinking, oh, man, you went too far this time. So I put up my hands, and with his fists clenched, he says, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, what? And he says, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, you know what? You're nuts. And I quit. And I walked out. I went back to my apartment, and I wrote the paper, and I said that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. I footnoted it. I gave examples. I pass in the paper. A week later, I get the paper back, and I get an a. And in the margin, doctor post wrote, please see me after class. So I go to see him. I said, doctor post, you wanted to see me? And he says, come down to my office. It was in the same building. So we go down to the office. He closes the door, and he says, listen, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be in the CIA? [00:22:44] Speaker A: It was that direct of recruitment. [00:22:47] Speaker B: The truth is I was getting married in six weeks and I didn't have a job. And I always wanted to be involved in some aspect of foreign policy. So I said, yeah, I'd be interested. Well, he picked up the phone. Do you remember the days of Rolodexes? [00:23:03] Speaker A: Oh my God. Oh my God. [00:23:06] Speaker B: So he had a Rolodex on his desk and he was flipping through it and for 1 second I saw Oliver north home. And I thought, who is this guy? So he calls a number from the Rolodex and he says, bob, I've got one for you. Can you take him? And Bob says, yes. Hangs up. He says, he writes on a paper, go to this address, be there in 20 minutes and ask for Bob. So I said, okay. So I jump on. The subway was one stop away. I go to this completely nondescript building with no signage or anything, go up to the 6th floor and there's a security guard there and he stands up and he says, are you here for Bob? And I said, yeah. He said, it's in that door. So I go to the door, I open it up. There's a little vestibule, like six by 6ft. I go in there, but the second door had this big spin lock, like at a bank. So I ring a buzzer, this woman opens it in a crack and she says, are you here for Bob? And I said, yes, come on in. So I go in like, what? What is this place? And then this guy comes out, six 6350, just bounds out of his office. Loud, friendly. He said, are you John? I said, yes, I am. He says, I'm Bob, how the hell are you? And he puts out his hand, he shakes my hand. I go into his office and he says, listen, here's what you got to do. I want you to go to George Washington University Medical School auditorium Saturday at eight. You're going to take some tests. I said, okay. He said, somebody will be in touch with you. I said, okay. And then I left. And so the next Saturday I went to George Washington Medical School auditorium. There were, I don't know, hundred, 150 people there. And they hand out these tests. So the first one was, was a map of the world, but it was blank. It was just the outline of the countries. And you had to write in the names of all the countries in the world. And I was always a map nut when I was a kid. So I just filled it out, handed in. The second one was, was a multiple choice test, current events. Simple. All you had to do is, I mean, you didn't even have to read the paper. If you just looked at the front page of the paper or weren't half brain dead, you could answer these questions. So I blew right through that. The third one was several thousand questions long and you had to just say, agree or disagree. So I'm looking at this, and one of the questions that I recall I wrote in my first book was, I like boxing. I honestly don't have an opinion on boxing, but you have to say one way or the other. And I remember thinking, well, I like Mike Tyson. He's exciting and interesting to watch. So if Tyson's on, I'll watch. So I wrote agree, I think. But then like 348 questions later it says, I like boxing. And I was like, crap. What did I say the first time? I think I said yes. So I answer that. But then like 800 questions later it says, I like boxing. I was like, don't go on it. [00:26:45] Speaker A: Is that deliberate? [00:26:48] Speaker B: So what? [00:26:49] Speaker A: What? [00:26:50] Speaker B: They want to see if you're lying. They want to make sure that there's a pattern there because they would also say, I would like to conduct a symphony. I would like to punch a criminal in the face, you know. So I handed it in. My wife picks me up, she said, how'd you do? I said, I have no idea. I have no idea what they're looking for. I said, I answered all the questions, but I genuinely don't have any idea how I did. Another week passes. I get a call from Bob. He says, you blew the doors off those questions. It was incredible. Listen, you got a pen? Here's an address. I want you to go to this address Tuesday at four, and then somebody's going to be in touch. I said, okay. So Tuesday, four, I drive to this address in Vienna, Virginia, across the street from the. I shouldn't say where it is, but anyway, I drive to this address and I ring the buzzer and they let me in and there's a table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other, and in the three chairs are a psychiatrist, a psychologist and an anthropologist. So I sit on the other side. So I say, hello. They don't ever give me any names, not even fake names. They just say, hello, sit down. So I sit down and I'm just looking at them and they're looking at me. And then one of them says, describe your relationship with your mother. And I said, oh, yeah, I'm close to my mother. She was very nurturing. And loving. And I was the first born. She was 24 when I was born. And there it is. Was your father, the disciplinarian in the family? And I kind of laughed, and I said, no. I said, my dad's a big, strong guy, and I think he probably was always afraid that he would hurt us. So he's also a fan of the three Stooges. So when we were kids and we would do something wrong, he'd say, why Ayata? And they look at each other, and they're nodding. And then one of them says, have you ever betrayed a friendship? And I said, oh, geez, I hope not. I don't think so. Let me think about it for a minute. And then the psychiatrist says, no. That's the response we were looking for. And I said, okay. And then one of them says, go into the next room. They're going to want some hair, some blood, and some piss. So I got up, there's a nurse in there. She took my hair, my blood, and my piss, and I left. My wife says, how'd you do? I said, I don't have any idea. I said, it was like going into the twilight zone. And I told her what happened. Bob calls me, oh, my God. You blew the doors off that interview. Now it's going to be the polygraph. I said, okay. Now, this one I was nervous about, because everybody knows polygraphs aren't reliable, right? So I go, this one was at CIA headquarters and just walking into the lobby with the seal on the floor and the stars on the wall, and people are whispering about, you know, Berlin or Moscow. I'm like, oh, my God. They're talking about Berlin and Moscow. I wonder what's happening there. So I go to the polygrapher. Now, I was very, very fortunate in that later on in my career for polygraphs, I would get these grizzled, mean old white guys, but this first, who were just rude and horrible and try to provoke you. This I got this young african american woman. She was about my age, totally respectful, very calm. But polygraphs are very. They're very nerve wracking, right? You've got blood pressure cuffs. Your fingers have these leads attached to them. You have a tube around your chest and around your ankle. And it's just. And you're practically tied to this chair. You can't move. You have to be as still as possible. [00:31:19] Speaker A: And, you know, you're being judged as you're answering these questions. It's not like answering questions in a. In a. In a conversation. In a casual conversation. You know, there's a gun to your. [00:31:30] Speaker B: Head and there's a. There's a two way mirror across from you. You know somebody's back there looking at you. You don't know who or how many. So I go through this thing, and at one point she said, I'm going to shut this off for a minute because you need to relax. You're going to have a stroke. And I said, I'm sorry, I've never done this before. My heart rate was like 180. I'm drenched in sweat. She's like, just relax. Now. Doctor post had given me advice. He said, I'm going to give you some advice that's going to help you pass this polygraph. First of all, tell the truth. And this woman said to me in the beginning, we're not looking for perfect people, we're looking for honest people. I said, great. So he said, tell the truth. But secondly, he said, you're going to be in a small white room. There's invariably going to be a speck on the wall. Maybe it's a little nail hole or a scuff mark or whatever. He said, I want you to focus on the speck and think only about the spec. Now, when the question comes, answer it as soon as it's posed. Don't think about it. Don't think about what it would feel like to steal office supplies worth more than $15, which was one of the questions. Have you ever stolen office supplies worth more than dollar 15? No. Focus on the spec. And so I did, and I passed. And, I mean, there was one little hiccup that I write about in the book. She said to me, you're reacting to one of the questions. And I remember my heart, like, wanting to beat out of my chest. And I was thinking, oh, my God, don't let it be the gay question. I'll never be able to explain this to my buddies from high school, you know, have you ever had a sex? Had sex with a man? No. Have you ever had any youthful experiment with a member of the same sex? No. And my heart's going like this. So she says, you're reacting to the question about credit card usage. And I go, credit card usage? I said, I have two credit cards and I pay them off at the end of every month. And she said, okay, I'm going to hook you back up and I'm going to ask you that question again. So she asked me and I answered and I passed. And the next thing I knew, three different offices were fighting over me. And I ended up going into the office that doctor post had founded at the CIA. It was the political psychology division, the office of leadership Analysis, and I became Saddam Hussein's classified biographer. So for the next three years, I wrote about the psychological motivations of Saddam Hussein and the iraqi leadership as it led first to the invasion of Kuwait and then to the first Gulf war. [00:34:35] Speaker C: Can I ask you, how did you know that the gentleman, that when you went into that first room, that one was a psychologist, one was a psychiatrist? [00:34:43] Speaker B: Because you said they. They told you. That's all they told me. They wouldn't tell me their names. They wouldn't tell me if they were employees or contractors or outsiders or anything. That was it. [00:34:56] Speaker A: Right. [00:34:56] Speaker B: Just. Just their roles. And I never understood the anthropologist. A sociologist I get. Yeah, but the anthropologist, I don't know. [00:35:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a curious job description to have in that particular room. [00:35:15] Speaker C: Okay, let me ask you, as you got further involved, did you ever have to go back or. [00:35:24] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. Yes. You go back after three years and then every five years for the rest. [00:35:30] Speaker C: Of your career and take the same kinds of tests. [00:35:34] Speaker B: Take the same kinds of tests. But after. After the three year exam, which is a complete exam, the polygraphs focus only on counterintelligence. Right. They don't care about your, you know, who you're having sex with. [00:35:50] Speaker A: Right. [00:35:51] Speaker B: They don't care if you get, you know, speeding tickets. They want to know if you spoke to the Mossad without permission or if you maybe provided documents to the French without getting them cleared in advance or if the Russians rang your doorbell one night, the other day. That's what they're interested in. [00:36:15] Speaker A: You ultimately became a case officer. [00:36:19] Speaker B: Yeah. The funny thing about that, Alan, is as soon as I started as an analyst, several of the branch chiefs, they were the first level of supervisors mentioned to me, you know, you would be a good case officer. I'm surprised you're not a case officer. And I was like, why? I didn't want to be a case officer. Oh, because you're clearly an extrovert. And most of the analysts are introverts. It's unusual to have an analyst who's an extrovert. And then one woman said to me that one of the female branch chiefs had a crush on me. And I said, oh, come on. She's married to a guy who's like 50 years older than I am. And she said, no, that's not it. What I'm saying is if you were a case officer, you could recruit her. She wants to be in your circle. She said, you have an ability to draw people into your circle, and I think you don't even realize that you do it. And that stuck in my mind so that when I got bored with analysis seven years later, I thought, you know what? Maybe I will be a case officer. That might be fun. [00:37:33] Speaker A: In Steve Coles piece, he points out that a case officer's most important task is to recruit foreign agents. [00:37:39] Speaker B: That's it. Recruit spies to steal secrets, period. [00:37:42] Speaker A: It's a sales job. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Yes. [00:37:45] Speaker A: Carried out through bribes, manipulations, appeals to patriotism. [00:37:49] Speaker B: Yes. [00:37:51] Speaker A: He quotes you, steve Kulda, as saying, I had a knack for it. [00:37:57] Speaker B: I did have a knack for it, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. A CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have what he called sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths. Yeah, sociopaths have no conscience, and so they're impossible to control, and they just blow right through the polygraph because they don't feel regret or remorse. But people who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but are still willing to work in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas. And I'll give you an example. When I was first hired, I was in this training class, and the instructor said, let's say you're overseas and you get a cable from headquarters saying that they really, really need these indonesian economic figures before they're released. So your task is to go out and recruit the indonesian second secretary for economic affairs and get the numbers. And you start working on this guy, and you take him out to lunch, you take him out to dinner, you introduce your wives, they hit it off. You become best friends. Maybe you even vacation together. But you realize that this guy is just not recruitable. He doesn't have any vulnerabilities. So what do you do? So this guy puts up his hand. He said, you double down, you keep working on them, you start buying them gifts. Okay, maybe this other guy, what do you do? He said, well, maybe you get your wife involved. Maybe you can get it indirectly from the wife. And I'm looking at these guys like, what are you talking about? And I raised my hand. He said, what do you do? I said, you break into the embassy and steal it. He says, that's exactly what you do. That's a sociopathic tendency. That's not a normal person's reaction. [00:40:00] Speaker A: Well, as Steve Cole quotes you as saying, that good case officers love dealing with people. They're very comfortable operating in gray areas. They're very comfortable breaking the rules if they have to. [00:40:12] Speaker B: And I believed we were the good guys. So I was happy to break the rules. Yeah. And I also found, you know, all through my career, I was always the good cop. Only when I had absolutely had to be the bad copy did I allow myself to turn that on. But I found that if you treated people with respect and dignity and befriended them, they would do anything for you. And there were times when you don't have the luxury of being the good cop. Usually it's because of timing or maybe because of the target. I say, in my first book, when I was stationed in Athens, there was a very high level target, very dangerous intelligence chief for one of our primary enemies, and we couldn't figure out how to get to him. He wasn't at these diplomatic cocktail parties that we're all going to, sipping champagne. So how do you get to this guy? So I came up with an idea. I knew where he lived. I didn't have gray in my hair then. I looked young. And so I put on a t shirt and jeans, and I put some books in a backpack, and I went over to his car, which was parked in front of his house. And I took my book bag, and I broke off the side view mirror of his car. And then I picked it up, and I took the mirror to the next door neighbor's house, and I did this as a cover move. So I rang the doorbell, and I said to the woman, you know, in Greek. I said, is this your car out here? I just accidentally bumped into it, and I broke the mirror. She said, no, it's the guy next door. I said, oh, okay. Sorry. Thank you. Sorry to bother you. I go next door, knock on the door. The target answers the door. I recognized him immediately. And I said to him, and he puts up his hands. He says, I don't speak Greek. He says, in English, I don't speak Greek. I said, oh, you speak English? I speak English. I said, listen, I'm so sorry. I'm so clumsy. I was walking down the street, I was thinking and not paying attention, and my book hit the side view mirror of your car, and I broke it off. And I feel awful about it, so please let me pay for it. You have my deepest apologies. He's like, ah, this is going to cost. This is going to cost €200. I said, I'm so sorry. I'll pay for everything. I said, your English is very good. Where are you from? And he tells me the name of the country. I said, ah, I'm from America. I hope someday our people will be friends again. This recent situation, it's very bad. And he's looking at me like, what? And I said, may I have a glass of water? Because in arab culture you can never deny a request for hospitality. He's like, wait here. So he goes into the kitchen to get water. Now in the meantime, the door looks straight into the living room and his little daughter is playing with toys on the floor. She looked to be about four. So I walked in and I got on my knees and I said to the little girl, shuaismic, what is your name? And she says, what her name is? And I said, how old are you? So he comes back with the water and he hears me speaking Arabic, and he says to me, what exactly can I do for you? I said, listen, I'm not going to waste your time. I'm from the CIA in Washington. I know who you are, I know what you're doing here. This is my business card. I said, you have one opportunity, one, your leader, he's going to die and you can die with him or you can come to the side of the good guys. Now, I'm going to sit by my phone until 10:00 tomorrow morning. You have until 10:00 tomorrow morning to make the right decision. Otherwise things are going to get very ugly, and you wouldn't want your beautiful little girl to see something ugly. And I walked out the next morning, everybody's gathered around my desk, we're just sitting there. And at 945 the phone rings. And I said, you made the right decision. Meet me in the coffee shop of the Hilton Hotel in 2 hours. Come alone and come unarmed. So we put, we had like eight security guys. We literally took every table in the Hilton coffee shop and everybody's got, you know, multiple guns and bulletproof vests. So here he comes. And I gave him a bear hug to frisk him and he was unarmed. And I said, have a seat. And he said, were you serious yesterday? I said, deadly serious. He's going to die and you can die with him. To make a long story short, he made the right decision. We gave him seven figures worth of money. We set him up in a peaceful third country where he's wildly successful and wealthy, and he gave us the crown jewels of his government's intelligence service. That's what a case officer does. [00:45:58] Speaker C: How did you know when you went into the house and you exposed who you really are, that he wouldn't arrange to have you killed before the next morning? [00:46:08] Speaker B: Yeah, we talked about that at length. In the station we have these things called operational planning meetings, and so you have to come up with your plan. And then plan B, plan C and plan B. And those other plans usually involve teams of security officers. I was driving an armored car. I was heavily armed. I was highly trained, and I had essentially my buddies acting as bodyguards. And so it's honestly, it's just a risk that you have to take. Yeah. [00:46:41] Speaker A: I hope you wrote it all down, John, because it would make for some great storytelling. [00:46:48] Speaker B: One of these days, you. [00:46:51] Speaker A: Know, your willingness to color outside the lines ultimately, is why you, when you got involved, you ultimately ended up in Pakistan. And then Abu Zubaydah dropped into your, you were his first handler for the first 60 hours or so that we held him. And then when we sent him off, and eventually when John Yu and Dick Cheney's mentality took over the CIA and torture became acceptable, we water bordered Abu Zubaydah 83 times. [00:47:34] Speaker B: Correct. [00:47:35] Speaker A: When we captured him, we thought he was the number three at al Qaeda. He was no saint, but he was not the number three at al Qaeda at the end of the day. [00:47:41] Speaker B: That's correct. Yes. [00:47:43] Speaker A: We had gotten all of the useful intelligence out of him via conventional conversational means. [00:47:51] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. There was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan. I've worked with Ali multiple times over the years. He's a wonderful interrogator, one of the best FBI interrogators I've ever encountered. And Ali used the FBI's tried and true interrogation method, where you just simply establish a rapport with the prisoner. You treat him with respect, you sit across the table with him, you talk about his family, you offer him a cigarette or a cup of tea or an orange or some dates or whatever. And sometimes it takes a day or a week or a month or a year, but eventually hes going to open up to you once he realizes hes not going anywhere. And youre treating him with respect. And so hell begin to answer your questions. And sure enough, it took about six weeks in the case of Abu Zubaydah, maybe eight weeks. But Abu Zubaydah did open up to Ali, and he gave us several pieces of actionable intelligence that saved american lives. In fact, there were two things, two things that were just critically, crucially important that Ali was able to elicit from Abu Zubaydah. The first was, as silly as it might sound, the al Qaeda wiring diagram. We didn't know anything about the structure of al Qaeda. We knew that Osama bin Laden was at the top. Ayman Zawahiri was the second. [00:49:28] Speaker A: By wiring diagram, you mean the command structure, correct. [00:49:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, we thought, well, there was Mohammed atef whom we had killed in Afghanistan in October of zero one. But we didn't know. We literally didn't know anything else. And so he explained to us how it was structured to the point where Ali asked him, as an example, if you wanted to do an operation in Dusseldorf, how would you do that? And Abu Zubaydah said, well, there's this guy Mohammed, and Mohammed's in Duesseldorf, and here's his phone number. And Mohammed has guns, and Mohammed's got a cousin, Abdullah, and Abdullah has guns, too. And here's Abdullah's email address. But Abdullah's roommate is Rashid, and Rashid knows how to make explosives, and this is his address. So then we went to the Germans and said, look, you have a problem in Duesseldorf, and here's the information. And then they bust down the door and they grab Mohammed and Abdullah and Rashid, and there is no more al Qaeda cell in Duesseldorf. So he did that for us all around the world. And that's how they were able. That's how al Qaeda was able to do these operations independently, where cells were doing them independently of one another and weren't ratting each other out because they couldn't rat each other out because Dusseldorf didn't know what Salzburg was doing. [00:51:05] Speaker A: There was no central command. [00:51:06] Speaker B: It was spin laden. That was it. That's how secret it was. The second thing he told us, we knew that there was a very bad guy out there who went by the nom de Guerre Mukhtar. Right. In 1996, a housekeeper in an apartment building in Manila accidentally stumbled on what looked to be the plans for the greatest terrorist attack in world history. She went in this apartment to clean it. And the person who was in the apartment, who turned out to be this person, Mukhtar had left maps and journals indicating that he intended to have a group of people hijack 14,747 SDE and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States. So she didn't fully understand what it was that she had found, but she had the presence of mind to call the police. They recognized what it was, and they called the Philippine Intelligence Service, which called the CIA, and the plot was disrupted. It's called the Bojinka operation. So we knew that there was this guy somewhere in the world calling himself Muhtar, and we really should try to catch him. Yeah. So there are 8 billion people in the world, so good luck. Abu Zubaydah laughed, and he said, you don't know who Mukhtar is? And Ali said, no, who is he? And Abu Zubaydah said his name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We had never heard the name before. And then when we started looking at Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, we said, holy shit. This guy graduated from North Carolina A and M with a degree in agriculture. He lived as a foreign exchange student in the United States. And then we were able to piece two and two together. Within two months, he was in the cell next to Abu Zubaydah. But that was Abu Zubaydah giving us the information just because Ali Sufan asked him to. And they respected each other. And then it all went down the toilet from there. [00:53:40] Speaker A: We waterboarded him 83 times. [00:53:44] Speaker B: Yes, just because. Yeah, you know, that's a really. That begins what became a very slippery slope. There were two contract psychologists at the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen, James Mitchell and Bruce Jess, and they were the ones that came up with the torture program by reverse engineering the Air Force Sear program. And they were able to sell this program, literally and figuratively, for $108 million of the taxpayer's money, I might add, to the CIA's leadership. And they kept saying, let us, Adam. Let us, Adam. Let us Adam. Well, there was really no reason to let them. Adam, because Ali Sufan was collecting this gold day in and day out. And so for reasons that have never been explained, they convinced George Tenet, who was the CIA director, to go to the White House and ask George W. Bush to remove the FBI from the secret site and to allow the CIA to take primacy of the case. Now, the CIA almost always has primacy of cases overseas. The FBI always has primacy of cases domestically. But even though this was overseas at a secret site, 911 was still an open criminal investigation. And so the FBI had taken the lead. The FBI knew exactly what was going to happen. And so not only did they just cede control to the CIA, Robert Mueller, who was the FBI director at the time, removed every FBI agent from the country that the secret site was in, not just from the secret site, from the country, because he said, the CIA is going to start doing some crazy shit. It's all illegal, and we are not going to be involved. So the FBI withdrew. Within 24 hours, Mitchell and Jessen began to torture Abu Zubaydah mercilessly. Now here, this was a very specific criminal act that I believe they committed. The Justice Department, under the president's signature, gave the CIA the authority to begin these torture techniques. They called them enhanced interrogation techniques. But you were supposed to begin, at the least, offensive. And if the prisoner remained uncooperative, then you gradually work your way to the. To the most offensive. So the least offensive was called the attention grab. You grab them by the lapels and say, dog on it. Answer my question. Okay, but that's not. That's not torture. It's just meant to get their attention. Okay, the next one is the belly slap, right? You smack them in the bare belly. It leaves a little handprint, makes a loud cracking sound. It's a little bit embarrassing. The third one was an open handed smack across the face, and then it went down that list to what was supposed to be the worst, which was waterboarding. I was always of the belief that there were two techniques worse than waterboarding, but we'll get to that. Good. They started with waterboarding. It was the very first thing they did on the very first day, and they drowned him. His heart stopped beating, and they had to revive him so that they could torture him more. Now, there were a couple of other things. One was called walling. They did this to half a dozen prisoners. They're supposed to take a bath towel and roll it into a roll and put it around your neck, and then shove you hard into a plywood wall, because plywood has a little bit of give. The towel is there so you don't get whiplash. But, oops, they forgot the towel. And by the way, the wall wasn't plywood. It was concrete block. And now we have prisoners at Guantanamo that have such severe brain damage that they're unable to participate in their own defenses. Nobody said you could give them traumatic brain injury and make them so that they don't even understand who they are and where they are and why they're there. Another thing that we did was called the cold cell, where you chill a cell to 50 degrees fahrenheit. You chain the prisoner to an eye bolt in the ceiling. [00:58:32] Speaker A: Oh, jeez. [00:58:33] Speaker B: So he can't kneel or sit or lay or get comfortable in any way and then strip him naked. They were all naked all the time. And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him. Okay, we murdered two people using that technique. They died of hypothermia. Nobody was authorized to murder anybody by throwing ice water on them. But no one was ever charged with a crime. Another one was sleep deprivation. So Donald Rumsfeld, who was the secretary of defense at the time, famously said that there was no such thing as sleep deprivation. He said he works 24, 48 hours straight without taking a break, and he has a stand up desk with no chair, and all he does is just lift up his legs, to stretch his legs. And, you know, screw those people. Well, we know from the American Psychiatric association, the APA, and the American Psychological association, two groups here in Washington, that people begin to lose their minds. At day seven, with no sleep, they begin to die at day ten, the CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for twelve days, and people did die. You go into organ failure again, you chain them to an eye bolt in the ceiling, strip them naked, industrial strength lights beating on them all the time, and acid death metal, hard rock on a loop at a volume of ten, just blasting at them 24 hours a day. Many went insane, and some just died. Their organs just shut down. [01:00:30] Speaker A: I imagine you lose your will to live when you've been subjected to that. After a while, you do. [01:00:35] Speaker B: You do. [01:00:36] Speaker C: How does that compare to what other countries do to people that are spies for our country or assets that they want to turn from our country? How does that relate to that? [01:00:49] Speaker B: In the 15 years that I was at the CIA, no country dared torture an American who had been picked up. Nobody would dare. In most cases, they would have their government reach out to the american embassy and say, we scooped up one of your guys, come and get them, and get them the hell out of here. Or in the case of the Russians or the Chinese, you keep them in a cell until there's a trade. There's a lot of torture that. That goes on in these other services, but in almost all cases, it's torture being done on our behalf. So this is an important point that you raise, Gil. It's relative to the issue of extraordinary rendition. But there are different kinds of renditions. Rendition means, let's say I'm in Pakistan working for the american embassy and you are from Tunisia, and I catch you one night and I say, what's your name? Gil. Where are you from? Tunisia. Okay. I send you back to Tunisia. That's a rendition. I've rendered you to Tunisia, and then you can deal with your own government, and screw you, maybe they're going to arrest you or whatever extraordinary rendition is. I'm in Pakistan. I catch you. Where are you from? You from Tunisia, I send you to Syria or Algeria or Egypt, and I don't tell the syrian. I don't tell the tunisian embassy. They say, oh, did you catch one of our guys? Say, nope. What's his name? Gil. Never heard of him. And then. So you're just. You've been disappeared. They're going to pull out your fingernails, and they're going to rape you, and they're going to electrocute you, and they're going to write down everything you say while you're being tortured, and they're going to send it to us in a report. And then after a year, we'll say, yeah, this is pretty good. You could probably let them go now. Or not. We don't care. We don't care what you do with them. That's an extraordinary rendition. That's illegal. And we were doing it every single day. [01:03:06] Speaker C: And what made it stop? Or hasn't it stopped? [01:03:10] Speaker B: A whistleblower made it stop. Yeah, there was. We still don't know who the whistleblower was. There was a woman who was escorted out of the White House, told that they were taking her badge. She was a senior CIA officer. She had her security clearance stripped. But they never prosecuted her because they could never exactly say that she was the one who told the New York Times about these extraordinary renditions. So those ended in like, let's see, I blew whistle in zero seven. This must have been like zero five or zero six. And they just came to a halt. [01:03:48] Speaker C: Well, they probably didn't want a prosecutor as well, because more evidence. [01:03:52] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Gray mail at the end of the. [01:03:57] Speaker A: Day, they prosecuted you for giving information to journalists. [01:04:01] Speaker B: Right. Right. I can tell you exactly what that was. So in 2008, in the summer of 2008, I got an email from a guy who was writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition. Abu Omar was an egyptian cleric in Milan, Italy, and he would give these fiery sermons after Friday prayers. And there were rumors that he may have something to do with al Qaeda. So you know what we should do? We should kidnap him. We'll kidnap him and we'll send him back to Egypt. So we kidnapped him. Right off the street, there was a woman walking her dog who saw the whole thing go down. She called the cops. So all the CIA people got caught. There were like ten of them. That's a different story. Anyway, he was writing a story about this Abu Omar who turned out to be the wrong guy anyway, and he sent me an email saying, I'm writing this book about Abu Omar for Simon and Schuster. Can you introduce me to any of these twelve names? And I looked at these names, I said, I don't have any idea who these people are. I don't know anything about the Abu Omar rendition other than what I've read in the Washington Post. He sends me another list of twelve names. He said, well, I need to interview people for this operation. Do you know any of these twelve people? And I said, look, kidnapping was not my thing at the agency. I didn't work with the kidnappers. I don't know who these people are. I said, clearly, you know this issue far better than I do. I can't help you. And then he sends me a third email, and he says, well, what about the guy on page 200 and whatever of your book, I think his name might be John. And I said, oh, you mean John Doe. I don't know. Whatever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. They got me. I had confirmed the last name of the guy. Now, here's where it gets ugly. The name was never made public. Never. But it turned out there also was never any Abu Omar book that was covered, right? This journalist was secretly working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys. And the attorneys put the name in a classified filing, saying, we want to depose this guy, John Doe. The judge said, how the fuck did they get that name? He turns it over to the FBI. The FBI goes to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. Where'd you get this name? They said, oh, we got it from John Silber, the head investigator for Human Rights Watch. They go to John Silber. Where did you get this name? I got it from Matthew Cole. I sub out my investigations to him. They go to Matthew Cole. Where'd you get this name? John Kiriakou gave it to me. So the FBI broke down my door, put cuffs on me, and the rest is history. [01:07:38] Speaker A: Kathleen McClelland, one of the attorneys at the Government accountability project, said if John had tortured people, he would be safer than if he blew the whistle. [01:07:48] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I've always believed that to be true. Not a single torturer was ever investigated or prosecuted for any crime. And I'm including the ones who tortured to the point of murder. Yeah, we murdered dozens of people. None of them were ever prosecuted. [01:08:11] Speaker A: We're going to turn from. Because we could go so much darker. [01:08:17] Speaker B: Boy, you should see the pictures I have on my phone. [01:08:20] Speaker A: But at last, we're going to come to the business of show because you got through all that. And, hey, we'll come to you. John and I are doing a podcast called Prisoner X with John Kiriakou, where these are the kinds of stories we tell. We'll talk about that. Anyway, so, after retiring, you meet a guy named Richard Klein, and he kind of gets you involved in companies that they're looking for, consultants for projects. And the first one you do in 2007, you worked on, consulted on the kite runner. [01:09:02] Speaker B: Right, right. That was so interesting to me on that one. I actually brought rich in. I had met Rich a year earlier through a mutual friend. I had left the agency, and I was working for the consulting firm Deloitte and Touche, now called Deloitte. I was the deputy chief of the competitive intelligence practice. And so one of the guys that worked for me said, hey, I have this friend, Rich Klein. He's an awesome guy. He does a lot of stuff in Hollywood, and he's looking to talk to people who have actual on the ground CI experience for a movie. Would you be willing to meet with the writer? So I did. And we had a rich, and I just hit it off immediately. He's just such a great guy with a big, beautiful heart. And nothing ever came of that. That movie. It was never made. But we established a friendship. And so I got a call from a former boss of mine in zero seven who said that he had gotten a call from a vice president at Paramount Studios, and she asked him to do something on behalf of Paramount. And he said, this is definitely not for me, but I've got a friend, John Kiriakou, and this is definitely for him. So she called me and she said, I'm the head of legal affairs at Paramount Studios. We're making this movie called the Kite Runner. I said, oh, my God, I read the book. It's incredible. Oh, the movie is going to be beautiful. She said, but we've run into a problem. She said a rough cut of the movie has already been bootlegged in India and DVD's have made their way to Afghanistan. The problem is that Afghans, many Afghans, are so not worldly that they don't realize that this is fiction. And there are two scenes in the movie that are very objectionable to them. One is that one of the twelve year old boys is raped by a 15 year old boy, and the other is a member of the Taliban. Makes one of the boys do what can be construed as a homoerotic dance. And she said, now there are threats against the lives of the child actors and we have to get them out of Afghanistan. And I said, oh, I'm your guy. So I flew to Afghanistan. I took vacation. I took two weeks vacation. I didn't tell them where I was going to vacation, that it was in Kabul, Afghanistan, but I flew to Afghanistan. I had made arrangements for a security team from a british company, former SAS company, before I left. And I went with a furaya phone and an emergency satellite phone in case, God forbid, something terrible were to happen. And it's a long story. I'm going to make it very short. I found the kids and their families and I told them that they were in danger. They knew they were in danger. They had already received the threats. And I said, listen, the studio has given me a budget to get you out of here. We're going to go to Dubai. Well, you can't just take the kids and the parents. You have to take the aunts and the uncles and the grandparents and the neighbors and this one and that one. There are 27 people. So I go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I bribe this guy to give me 27 passports with exit visas. We go to the airport, and, you know, Cabo airport. You've never been to Afghanistan? Yeah. [01:13:02] Speaker A: No. [01:13:03] Speaker B: So Kabul airport's like the size of my living room. It only has but a couple of gates, because who's flying in and out of Kabul? Nobody. So I go to the desk and I said, I need 28 one way tickets to Dubai. And she's like, well, there's an Emirates flight, or you can go the other direction through Delhi on Air India. I said, whatever the next flight is, just give me 28 one way tickets to Dubai. So she says, well, the next flight is cam airtainous. I said, cam air? What is that? She said, it's the Iran airline. It stops in Tehran. I was like, oh, shit. Literally nobody knows that I'm here except my wife and the studio. That's it. But nobody's going to know if I'm in Iran. Do I risk it? Do I get pulled off the plane? And then I just get disappeared in Iran. I'm doing kind of a clandestine thing, but without any diplomatic protection. The CIA doesn't know I'm here. I said, give me the tickets. So I get these 28 tickets. I hand out the 27. I said, we're going to Iran. So we get on the plane, we come in to land in Tehran, and I'm looking out the window, like, I can't believe I'm doing this. And we waited and waited and waited, and a couple of dozen more people got on the plane. And then we taxied out, and we get up and land in Dubai an hour later. I was like, oh, my God. I can't believe I pulled it off. So rich was waiting for us in Dubai. [01:14:45] Speaker A: So because you didn't transit into the country, it probably made life a lot easier. [01:14:51] Speaker B: Yes. I didn't have to go into the terminal. Nothing. It worked. So rich. [01:14:59] Speaker A: A worthwhile risk. [01:15:00] Speaker B: I'm glad that I took it. Rich is waiting in Dubai, and he had rented houses for the three families. He got jobs for the dads, and he enrolled the kids in Dari language, private schools. And I thought, great, I'm done. Success. They paid me very handsomely. And then I get a call a year later from this vp for legal affairs at Paramount. She said, you're not going to believe this, but the families are trying to shake us down. They want like a million bucks each, or they're threatening to go back to Afghanistan. Would you give an interview to the New York Times and NPrdemen and just tell the truth about what we did to help these people? I said, of course. So I talked to the New York Times, and then I gave a. I gave a shorter interview to NPR and I said, listen, the studio really did the right thing here. They really did. They've been serious about the safety of the actors and their families from the very beginning. They went to immense expense to make sure that they were all safe. I'm sad to tell you that at the end of the day, every one of the 27 returned to Afghanistan. Dubai wasn't for them. One of the dads said to me that he was offended that rich had gotten him a job as a cook at an afghan restaurant. And he says, I was the chief mechanic at the Mercedes Benz dealership in Afghanistan. I said, do you think I'm fucking stupid? There's no Mercedes Benz dealership in Afghanistan. I said, you can't even read and you're telling me you're the chief mechanic? You're lucky that you're here. You have any idea the trouble that we went to get all you guys here? And then he said, well, I'm going to go back to Afghanistan. I said, valla contios. I'm done. And that was it. And they all went back, and now they're stuck and living under the Taliban. [01:17:07] Speaker A: You had better success working on Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat movie? [01:17:15] Speaker B: No, it was Bruno, actually. [01:17:19] Speaker A: I'm sorry, Bruno. I meant Bruno. But what I meant is, so you had better success working on Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno movie? That's what I meant to say. [01:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I sure did. And I'll preface this by saying that Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. And that's not a word that I throw around easily. I think the guy's a genius. Listen, like everybody else in the world, I saw Borat and nearly peed my pants. It was so doggone funny. And I get that. It's, you know, it's male humor, whatever. It's mean spirited. I don't care. I laughed until I was practically ready to throw. Grow up. So Rich says to me, hey, I want you to do a conference call with Sacha Baron Cohen. He's going to do another movie. And I said, oh, tell me it's going to be with Bruno, because I loved Sasha from HBO. And he said, it is. It's Bruno. I said, great, let's do it. So we got on a call with him and with a bunch of people that he has, assistants and producers, and I. I don't know who they were. And he said, he's very. He's very formal when you first meet him. And he said, I don't know if you know my characters, but I have one called Bruno. I said, oh, I know all your. I said, I've been watching you since season one of Ali G. I know Ali G and Bora and Bruno. I said, they're wonderful. I said, I'm honored just to meet you. And he said, well, Bruno, of course, is a gay, austrian fashion journalist. And for the part of the movie that I want to talk to you about, he said, I want to get him in front of bona fide terrorists, Hezbollah or al Qaeda. I want to show them polaroids of men having hardcore anal sex. And I want to ask them if this constitutes torture and should these men be sent to Guantanamo. And I said, oh, Sasha, that is an exceedingly bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Listen, just as a general rule of thumb, don't mess with the religious types. They'll kill you. They'll kill your crew. Then they'll go out onto the street and kill people who remind them of you. It's not a good idea. And he said, but I have to have the shock value. And I said, well, one thing you could do is there are bona fide terrorists, guys who shot up airports in Austria and Germany and hijacked planes and took hostages who were communists or arab nationalists, and they're retired. And I said, they all live in Damascus. It's the only country that would have them. And he said, can you get me in touch with them? I said, I think so. I can sure try. So he said, well, the other issue is where we film this. And I said. He says, I have an idea. I think we should do it in Jordan. And I said, ooh. Well, I said, we could do it in Jordan, but you're going to have to bring the jordanian intelligence service in on it. I said, they're among the best services in the world. They'll be on you like white on rice. You won't be able to do anything without them knowing about it. He said, no, nobody can be in on the gag. Nobody. He said, we can't tell anybody what we're doing. The COVID was, he's a journalist from Austria and he's doing a documentary on the Middle east peace process, period. That's it. So I said, well, here's what. That's a bad idea. I said, we could do it in. In Libya. I said, I ran be an ambassador the other night at a dinner and they're dying to do Hollywood movies. And this is when Gaddafi was first sort of coming out of his shell and wanted to be more western oriented, to be holly. And that's exactly what he wanted to be. And his son Allah was in charge of this. So he said, as a jew, I can't do Libya. He said, I can't even wrap my head around it. And I said, we could do it in Syria. I know the syrian ambassador. I can raise it with him. And he said, oh, you know what? He said, I'm going to Newport beach tomorrow and there's a syrian consulate there. And I said, no, no, no. This is what you're paying me for. Let me go to the syrian embassy in Washington and I'll take care of it the next night. It's like 1130 at night. And my wife and I are laying in bed and we're reading and the phone rings. And I look at the phone and I said, it's Sasha Baron Cohenous. So I answer, I said, hello, sasha, how are you? And he says, john, I think I fucked up, mate. And I said, ah, don't tell me you went to that syrian consulate in Newport beach. And he said, he did. He walked in. As soon as he walked in, the guy came out from behind the glass and pointed at him and said, I know who you are. I know what you do, and you are not welcome in Syria. And he walked out. So I said, you know, we could do Morocco. Morocco would work. But the architecture is very uniquely moroccan. It's obviously not going to be, you know, the West bank. He said, no, we got to do Jordan. I said, okay, but you got to tell the Jordanians what you're doing to. And he said, absolutely not. So a week later, he and a cameraman fly out to Jordan. I was to follow the next day. He told me later that when he landed, they got off the plane. It's just the two of them with the equipment and some luggage. And there's a guy there holding up a sign that says Sasha Baron Cohenous. And he turns to the cameraman and says, john got us a limo. John didn't get him a limo. So he gets in the car. They're driving through Amman. He's never been to Amman before. And it's a beautiful, historic city with greco roman ruins and a theater. It's beautiful. And after about ten minutes, he says to the driver, excuse me, where are we going? And the driver says, we're going to the royal palace. His Majesty is a big fan. And he said, just then, these enormous iron gates open. They go onto the palace grounds. And there's the king standing there waiting for him with a guy that he didn't recognize. He gets out of the car and the king says, sasha Baron Cohen, I am your biggest fan. He says, borat, I thought I was going to die. He says, I want to tell you, this is the director of the Jordanian Intelligence Service. If you need anything at all, you call him directly and he's going to take care of you. And I said, do you see what I mean? I said, sasha, how do you think it looks when you have these bona fide terrorists flying from Damascus to Oman on the same day to go to your hotel room? Do you think that they weren't going to notice? He's like, well, you were right. I said, okay. So the next day we have these guys. These guys were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And there was one from the Popular Front general command. So these were bona fide terrorists, murderers. But they're also like 80 years old. And you know how I found them, Alan? I looked in the Damascus telephone book. It was as easy as that. You know, he told this story on the David Letterman show. And David just kept shaking his head like he couldn't believe any of it was true. I got him from the Damascus telephone book. I went to the library of Commerce. I said, do you have a library? Do you have a telephone book for Damascus, Syria? They said, actually, we do. I said, great. May I see it? It's all in Arabic. Easy. I found the names. Oh, there he is. Oh, he's still alive. Here's another one I call on Skype. I speak to them. I said, you know, all expenses paid. We'll give you $500 for the day. We'll fly you into Amman. They were like, yeah, why not? It was as easy as that. So the next day we're with these guys and he's wearing pink hot pants and you know the character. You know what he's like. So he pulls out the Polaroids. And he told me in advance what he wanted was for them to become so enraged that they leap across the table to strangle him. He wanted them to strangle him. And then, you know, they would roll around on the ground. So he hands them the Polaroids and he's like, is this torture? These guys are adjusting their trifocals and trying to, you know. And then one of them holds up the. The picture. He's like, way out here. And he says, oh, oh, no, no, no. This haram, this not good. And then he sets it down on the table and the other guy picks it up and he looks at it and he's like, oh, not good for Islam. This not good. And then they just sit there. And then one of them, like, takes a sip of his coffee and literally nothing happened. They had to delete the scene from the movie because literally nothing happened. And so I flew back to Washington. He went on to Jerusalem the next day, and this became the biggest problem in the entire shoot. He went to the western wall, also known as the wailing wall, in the pink hot pants with leather boots up to his knees and a leather vest with no shirt underneath. And he's like totally covered in hair like a gorilla, right? And he goes to the western wall. And there was a group of american yeshiva students with a rabbi, an orthodox rabbi, and the rabbi called him a dirty faggot. And the yeshiva students just sat on him and they beat the shit out of him. And it was the only time during the weeks of shooting that he broke character. And he said, no, no, it's a movie. It's a movie. It's just a joke. I'm Sacha Baron Cohen. I'm just doing it for a movie. They didn't care about his movie. Beat the shit out of him. And they had to take time off shooting because he had a black eye. And then they were able to finish it and come back. But the Middle east part of this thing, I tried hard, but like I say, as a general rule, just don't mess with these people. [01:29:41] Speaker A: There's so much more that we have to talk about. Your books, our podcast. We've been talking for an hour and a half, John. [01:29:49] Speaker B: Oh, my God. We have, haven't we? [01:29:53] Speaker C: And before we sum this up, where can people purchase your books? [01:29:57] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Well, I've got seven of them out. The 8th is coming out soon and they're all on Amazon. [01:30:04] Speaker A: What's the 8th going to be called, John? [01:30:06] Speaker B: You know, I decided to do one for myself. The other seven are about CIA and intelligence related to, you know, the first two are memoirs. Well, the first one is what's the name of my first? I got it right here. It's the reluctant spy, right? The reluctant spy. My secret life in the CIA's war on terror. That was my first memoir. Then I did a second one called doing time like a how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison, which was. I actually won two literary awards for that. I won the pen First Amendment award, which, along with the pen Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe, are the big four, crazy as it sounds. And the third was the convenient terrorist Abu Zubaydah and the weird wonderland of America's secret wars. And then I was commissioned to do a series of four. The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, the CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection, the CIA Insider's guide to lying and lie detection, and the CIA Insider's guide to disappearing and living off the grid. And so I decided to write one for myself, just something I love. And I decided to write one called remains of the the ultimate guide to Washington, DC's historic cemeteries. Nobody has ever written a book about the cemeteries of Washington, DC and the fascinating people buried in them, none of whom you've ever heard of. The publisher liked it so much, they commissioned four more. They commissioned the mafia graves of New York City, which I'm about 40% done with. They commissioned the historic cemeteries of Chicago, the country western graves of Nashville, and the graves of America's worst serial killers. Most of those are prison graveyards. [01:32:11] Speaker A: Wow, what a great series of books. It sounds. They sound awesome. Man. [01:32:15] Speaker B: I love cemeteries. So I'm on substack on Kiriakou. You can find the books on Amazon and Twitter and Facebook and whatever. [01:32:23] Speaker A: You also have a tv show, although it's on. Where is your tv show? [01:32:28] Speaker B: It's hard to find. It's syndicated. It's on something called Sovereign, which is one of these social platforms, these video platforms, but it's called the whistleblowers, and it runs in 33 countries around the world. So every week I interview a different international whistleblower, whether it's us national security, british national security, swiss banking, french banking, south african corruption, russian military, you know, whatever. It's turned out. Well, we're halfway through season three now. [01:33:02] Speaker A: Wow. And how many episodes are in a season? [01:33:05] Speaker B: 50, if you can believe it. I'll tell you, I write constantly. Constantly. [01:33:11] Speaker A: Holy shit. [01:33:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:14] Speaker A: And then on top of that, all you want to throw podcasting in this mix? Are you out of your fucking mind? [01:33:20] Speaker B: It's because I like you so much. That's what this is about. [01:33:23] Speaker A: You're a poor judge of character, John. [01:33:25] Speaker B: I remember when you and I first met, and we were throwing around these ideas of ways that we could work together. And I remember going back, I was staying at my brother's house in Studio city, and he said, how did it go? And I said, you know what? I'm embarrassed. I came up with ideas that are so bad that I'm embarrassed to even repeat them. I can't believe that he even finished having dinner with me. I don't know if you remember any of those stupid ideas we were talking about, like vampires being in the basement of the CIA. And, oh, that was. [01:34:00] Speaker A: There was a lot of other stuff happening back then. [01:34:03] Speaker B: That's right. [01:34:04] Speaker A: But then we came to our senses, and we came up with the idea to do Prisoner X. [01:34:09] Speaker B: That's right. [01:34:10] Speaker A: And the whole thrust of Prisoner X, it is a prisoner X with John Kiriakou, is that it's about people who are in prison in America and around the world, but who shouldn't be. [01:34:20] Speaker B: That's right. [01:34:21] Speaker A: The mission of the podcast isn't just to tell their stories. It's to tell the audience what they can do to help make these people ex prisoners. [01:34:29] Speaker B: Ex prisoners. And, you know, we have a rough cut of our first episode, and I know you've circulated it, and I've circulated it, and people are loving on it. They like the content. They like the pace. They like the story. I think this is going somewhere. [01:34:47] Speaker A: The first episode is about your involvement with Abu Zubaydah and the fact that he is still at Guantanamo Bay, which they are beginning to negotiate. So we hear that maybe if they could find a third country to take him, that he might not, as the CIA intended, die in Guantanamo, at Guantanamo Bayou, be cremated and his ashes tossed into the ocean as he never existed. [01:35:16] Speaker B: That's exactly right. You know, I was giving an interview about this very subject just a couple days ago, and somebody said, well, but he's Palestinian, born in Saudi Arabia. How's he going to go back to either one of those places? And I said, no, no, that's not even under consideration. What we've done with most of the 700 plus people that we've released from Guantanamo is if they can't go back to their country of origin, we negotiate with another country that will take them. And the countries that have taken people are as varied as the Netherlands and Albania and Tahiti and Belize and Switzerland. So in the event that he's released, and I pray that he is released, he's going to be okay. He'll end up somewhere where he can actually begin to build a life. [01:36:05] Speaker C: How old is he now? [01:36:08] Speaker B: Let's see. He's 51, 52. Yep. [01:36:16] Speaker A: But whatever is left of him psychologically. [01:36:19] Speaker B: And emotionally, I can't even begin to speculate. It's got to be just awful. [01:36:27] Speaker A: But the fact that we know about him is really a testament to you and your courage as a whistleblower. John. [01:36:33] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Thank you. You know, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I absolutely, positively would. The price was high. I went to prison. I lost my family, I lost my pension. I lost. I had to file for bankruptcy. I lost everything, literally everything. And I would absolutely do it again in a heartbeat. It was the right thing to do. [01:36:56] Speaker A: It can suck to be a hero, but at the end of the day. [01:37:01] Speaker B: Or as Steve call said, the spy who talked too much. [01:37:06] Speaker A: And on that note, thank you so much for sitting in. [01:37:12] Speaker B: John, thank you. Great to see you both. [01:37:15] Speaker C: And Alan, thank you. Because you said to me this would be a very interesting interview that I would find fascinating and make me think about a bunch of stuff which it totally. I'd love to do this again sometime. [01:37:26] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [01:37:28] Speaker A: Did we just take your places? Anyway, thank you again, John, and we'll see you next time, everybody. The how not to make a movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, by Gil Adler, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster and Jason. Jody, along with Mando, are all the hosts of the fun and informative ads from the crypt. Podcast follows up for what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called terror crypt content.