#11 Inside the CIA: Whistleblowers, War Crimes And Blind Spots with John Kiriakou

They were ambushed and murdered on the road to the hotel. It was a human rights investigation into a massacre. That's dangerous nationalism. 2,000 people suffocated. Guys, it was a little bit of a miracle that we even get this interview edited and out. John was dealing with like a 1 megabyte upload. So, pardon all of the pauses. Matt couldn't take part in this conversation. But if you like hearing John Kuryaku, and I know that's why you're here, this is another fun one. So, uh, one last note before you start listening. We get shadowbanned whenever we talk to John like no one's business. Every every little clip that we try to make is is tough. So, we introduce a new sort of way to cover up some of the things he says, you'll notice it. Uh, you know, we're doing our best. If you have any suggestions, let us know. But welcome to the Awesome Map podcast. And here's John Kuryaku. John, good to see you again. Good to see you. Did you you were just out of town. What were you doing? Oh, I I've been very very fortunate in that um a production company in London has uh signed me to do a hundred speeches over the next year all around the world. So, this was the second leg. No way. Of my speaking tour. Yeah. Yeah. We're We have 38 dates. What's it focused on? My career. It's funny that they saw they saw one of these podcasts that I did that went viral. It was Danny Jones. And then Danny Jones led to Daltton Fischer. And then Daltton Fischer led to Julian uh Dory. And they said that I was a good storyteller. And they the these guys um sent uh the the two DEA agents who killed Pablo Escobar on a speaking tour and they made bank all around the world. So they asked if I wanted to do something similar. I said yes. and uh and we've started. So, it's been great. Is this with Unified TV or is it is it someone else? That's a completely different thing. U this is with it's a thing called Tigers Lane Studios. Unified TV is where I have this uh this TV show once a week. It's uh CIA declassified. It's uh we take these declassified CIA documents and tell like historical stories um using the documents. the Berlin airlift and the Aende overthrow and the Iran coup and stuff like that. What has anything popped out that's been really surprising as you've been going over? Are these recently released documents or these older ones? Some of them are recent. Most of them are older. Uh but they're buried in places like the National Security Archives at George Washington University or at presidential libraries. You know, if if a president takes documents with him for his presidential library, those documents don't go to the national archives. So, there's no centralized repository for any of these things. You have to just go to one after the other. Especially if you're a PhD student and you need something that's comprehensive, it's hard to do. So, there there really are libraries that you have to go to to get valuable documents. Is that right? Yeah. You have to physically go there. That is. And then for the National Archives, um, most of what somebody working on a PhD would need is at this gigantic storage facility in Green Belt, Maryland. So, you've got to make an appointment, go out there. Uh, you can't bring your phone in. You have to use their copy machines. They charge a lot of money. It's It's not easy. I've I've been diving deep into like Thomas Townson Brown. Are you familiar with Thomas Townson Brown? No, I sure am not. He He was a guy that was working with the National Research Labs of the Navy, the Navy Research Labs, I guess, on anti-gravity tech. And the author of one of the books I'm reading had to go to all of these libraries. And I started wondering like, is the truth actually just hidden in plain sight? I I think everyone wonders about the Illuminati, you know, hiding everything from us. But I wonder if it's more of just bureaucracy hiding it from us. I'll tell you a story. Yeah, you probably know it, but after we captured Abu Zuba in Pakistan, a buddy of mine and I were driving from Pashaw to uh Islamabad. It was late at night and we drove past the Taliban embassy. It was the last remaining Taliban embassy in the world. It was in Pashaw even though Pashaw is not the capital of Pakistan. And um and my friend said my friend was a detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was on loan to the FBI. And he said he said, "Look at these look at these [ __ ] They have the they have the nerve to fly the Taliban flag like they're sticking it in our face." And I said, "Yeah, can you imagine?" And he said, "You know what we should do? We should break in there and we should steal everything that they have." And I said, "Oh my god, that would be so much fun." And then I thought, no, you know what? That's exactly what we should do. So we drove back to Islamad. I went on the computer. I wrote a cable to headquarters, request permission to raid the Taliban embassy in Pashawer and steal everything. The next day they said, "No way. Go with God. Go with God. We requisitioned a couple of vans." We drove back to Pashawer, middle of the night, picked the lock in 5 seconds, busted in, and we stole everything that wasn't bolted to the floor, which was everything. And we stole everything. And the reason I'm telling you this is much of what we we took, it filled two of the vans, uh, were documents. About 4 days later, my buddy comes up to our floor and the embassy and says, "Um, hey, we found something that's very disturbing." And he hands me this file folder and it's full of phone bills from the from the Taliban embassy. And these bills show dozens, hundreds of calls to numbers all across the United States. Bethesda, Maryland, Kansas City, Fargo, North Dakota, LA, all over the country. And they stop on December the 10th, and then they start up again slowly on December, I'm sorry, on September 16th. So, I send a KO to headquarters. I said, "Be advised. We found this. It's very disturbing." Um, and they said, "Make sure the FBI has the original. send a copy to us and give a copy to the Pakistanis. So I did because 911 was still an open criminal investigation and so the FBI got the originals. I go back to CIO in May of um of uh 2002 and I run into one of the FBI guys and I said, "Hey, what happened to the uh what happened to the um phone bills, the Taliban phone bills?" And he said, "Uh, you know what, man? We haven't done anything with them because we can't find a Poshtu translator. I said, "A posashtu translator? They were in English. That's how I knew that they were phone bills. I don't speak Poshtu." He's like, "Oh, right." Yeah. Nobody's even opened the box. He said, "This is like six months later." So, another And for real, they just hadn't opened the box. It He wasn't covering for it. He for real, no one had opened this box. No, nobody had opened the box. So I resigned two years later. 5 years after the raid, I run into one of the FBI agents that went with us at the at the mall at Tyson's Corner Mall in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. And I said, "Hey, whatever happened with those Taliban numbers?" And he said, "You know what, buddy?" He said, "I hate to tell you, but nobody ever opened that box." And they sent it out to a FBI um storage facility in Maryland. And just like the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's sitting on some shelf somewhere in this storage facility. Nobody's ever opened it. They could have been living among us, these cells all across America. and the FBI never even opened the box. So, no, I to answer your initial question, I think that most of what we see is incompetence. It's not conspiracy conspiracy. It's just booery, you know, that's what it comes down to. Yeah. Well, it means there's infinite content to be discovered by people just going in the National Archives. This is a this is really a call to arms for journalists, isn't it? It's like go sit in the libraries. Go figure this out. You can say that again. Wow. You know, I was going Well, I want I would love to I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say I was going through Greek archives on this last trip and I find this document. It was a property dispute that involved my my greatgrandfather. And at the bottom of the property dispute, it says that his first wife, and it named her, has no claim. I'm like, what do they mean his first wife? Are they saying he was married twice? Like, nobody in my family knows. Yeah, it sounds like it. So, it's all, you know, the truth is out there. You just have to look for it. That's interesting. Your your parents came from Greece, is that right? Was your dad Giannis car? That was my grandfather. Your grandparents did. Oh, okay. Okay. They all came from the other. Oh, so he was the one. It was his father. And he's the one that you were finding maybe was married twice. No, it it was his father. Um, and the funny thing is my grandfather was one of 18 children. And so how my great-grandfather had the time to be married before that, I I have no idea. No idea. Yeah. Set the bar high. Yeah. Yeah, I that kind of I was wondering about you yesterday and I was thinking like John sort of comes from a different heritage and yet it seems like you sort of embody American exceptionalism. Oh, thank you. In in your life in my eyes, how do you how did that happen? How how did a a Greek family come over and produce you who's who's very much uh rooting for America? Oh, yeah. my um my grandparents my dad's parents came in 1931 and my mom's parents came in 1934 and um to hear my grandfather my dad's father tell the story Franklin Roosevelt was like personally standing there at Ellis Island to shake his hand and give him an American passport and a job at US Steel in Pittsburgh. And so until he died in 1978, he had a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on top of the TV. I still have it. I have it in my den. And so he was so grateful for the opportunities that he had coming to America that that he wanted all of us in the next two generations to be grateful. And that's why I only considered public service. I didn't I never ever gave any thought about going into the private sector. It was all about public service. But my grandfather my grandfather was like my best friend when I was a little kid. And um he was grateful of course, but he also believed that it was up to all of us to keep our leaders on the straight and narrow. He told me a story once about about calling in sick once to the mill in Pittsburgh and secretly attending a Sacko and Venzetti rally. I don't know if you guys know who Sacko and Benzetti were, but they were two anarchists, two Italian anarchists from Massachusetts who were wrongly accused of robbing a payroll and they were convicted and sentenced to death because a a policeman was shot. Well, in the course of appeal after appeal after appeal, it became clear that they hadn't done this. They were anarchists, but they hadn't committed this crime. Uh but the public wanted blood because they were so afraid of communism and anarchism at the time that they were executed uh in Massachusetts and their bodies shipped back to Italy. Well, you know, being a working man and a and a an economic refugee just like Sacko and Venzetti were, um my grandfather felt it was important to risk everything. He could have been deported for going to a meeting like this, but it was that important to him that we that we hold our leaders to account. And so he made sure that I understood the the reason and that I understood the issue behind the reason. Do you think that there's like a losing sense of nationalism these days that is actually required to keep a country together? Oh, you know what? I think it's the opposite. I think we're seeing this this uber nationalism to the point where it's it's actually dangerous. I think it's dangerous. Uhuh. You know, when when people can be prosecuted for their political beliefs, when when when a federal government can shut down or or attack a university because they allow constitutionally protected freedom of speech. That's dangerous nationalism. I'm I'm genuinely worried about it. You know, it comes in in waves and cycles. We saw this with uh let's say Huey Long and Father Cochland in the 1930s. Um we saw probably the the lowest point of it uh after the assassination of of JFK, but it's back with a vengeance and it makes us more divided. Well, it almost becomes authoritarian. Yeah, exactly. If you start monitoring what people can say, what universities are allowed to think. Yes. Yeah. It's a very slippery slope. Yeah. I'm curious how you see that. Like where where do you think are the lynch pins that that hold the freedoms together? I guess what are the most necessary things that we we keep going as the American experiment is is surging forward. It's all about presidential respect for the Constitution. We can't even trust the the Supreme Court anymore to respect president. Um, so I'm I'm genuinely worried about that. But, you know, I Why do you say that? I'm I'm a little bit I'm a little bit less informed about Supreme Court decisions. Time time was when you know, the Supreme Court made a a ruling that was it. It was the law of the land. Not that we would keep chipping away at it year after year after year until it was overturned. Now, if we're talking about something like pie versus Ferguson, yeah, of course. Well, I mean, some decisions are just clearly wrong, wrong, wrong. Or Koramatsu, wrong, wrong, wrong. But otherwise, you know, this this idea of appointing not just not guardians of the constitution but political ideologues to the Supreme Court, I think is very very dangerous. And and it encourages separatism and division. And look at look at the political system we've given ourselves as recently as a 100 years ago. And in political terms, that's pretty recent. We had viable third parties like multiple third parties where where you know the progressive party was getting people elected to Congress uh or getting people elected governor. Um before that going back to the civil war there were six different political parties represented in Congress. One of my favorite examples is Solomon P. Chase. He was he was Abraham Lincoln secretary of the treasury and he had been the governor of Ohio. He was a Democrat. He was a Republican. He was a radical Republican. He was a states rights. He was a no nothing. He was in he was in all six different parties. Every time he got pissed off or every time he had a a policy difference with the leadership of his party, he would switch parties. And we we don't and can't do that anymore because we've whittleled ourselves down to two parties, which in my mind are just two sides of the same coin. And we we shun third parties. We've got third parties. We've got the Libertarians and the Greens. We've got the Reform Party, the Unity Party. But, you know, people will tell you, "Oh, you're just wasting your vote. You're throwing away your vote. Oh, I just vote for the lesser of two evils." Well, my god, the lesser of two evils is still evil. I don't want to vote for evil. And so, yeah. And that coin seems to be driven by sort of corportocracy, doesn't it? It feels like the corporations Exactly. Have just taken over the both sides. Both sides. They're both corporate parties. How do you undo that? Yeah, I know. I don't know if you can unless you you overturn Citizens United and institute uh public financing of political campaigns. That's one way of doing it. But otherwise, you have to buy your way onto the stage, and that just doesn't work. I campaigned with Gary Johnson um in 2016. We went to 12 states together. He he was he used to be the Republican governor of New Mexico, but then he was the Libertarian uh nominee for president. And he told me that that the Libertarians could never compete because they have one benefactor. He's like the the canned tomato king of California, whoever he is. And he gave the party enough money that they bought this Winnebago. and we drove to these 12 states in the Winnebago and then that's it. You can't buy TV advertising. You can't buy social media advertising. You ne you can never get on the debate stage. You guys are probably a little bit too young, but the debates used to be the presidential debates used to be run by the the League of Women Voters. Okay? And it was always the Democrat, the Republican, and whatever independents were able to get onto the ballot. So you'd have three, sometimes four people up there in the presidential debates. Well, the two parties colluded to cut out the League of Women Voters and to make the Presidential Commission on Debates, which is three members of the DNC and three members of the RNC. and they decided that unless you poll, I think it's 15% in three national recognized polls, you can't get invited. Well, nobody's going to pull 15%. Not unless you're you're, you know, a a billionaire who's financing his own campaign like Ross Perau was back in ' 92 and 96. You can't compete. And they did that on purpose to keep third parties down. Well, what that says to me, normally in any complex system, when you have like a bottleneck of power, whoever is on that committee deciding who's allowed to be on the debates, that would be a high area of corruption just just from my study of complex systems because it'd be very soughta. Have is there any evidence of corruption in specifically in those debate processes? You tell me if this is corruption. So, there's this kid named David Hog you probably have heard of. He's one of the Parkland uh mass shooting survivors. David Hog, God bless him. He went to Harvard, graduated from Harvard, and jumped right into politics. Got himself elected one of the vice presidents of the DNC. and he announced that, you know, the whole party's corrupt and he wants to start running young young Democrats in primaries against older established Democrats because it's time for new blood, right? Congress is grossly older than the than the national average. Time for new blood. So, what did they do? They said, "Oh, you know what? We just realized that the vice presidential spot that David Hog ran for and won was supposed to be reserved for a lesbian. And so, uh, oh my gosh, they threw him out last week and now they're having a reelection. He's not allowed to run for his seat. Only lesbians can run. I would call that corruption. Is that that's real? This Yeah, this is the president of the Democratic National and And this is the president of which No way. No way. Yeah. Okay. I thought the Democrats were were shaping up. I had been getting the impression that they were going back, licking their wounds and and reorganizing. It sounds like they're just doubling down on terrible policy. They don't stand for anything. That's the problem. The Democrats don't stand for anything. And when they do stand for something, it's just kind of a variation of what the Republicans stand for. I I joke all the time when I give um interviews to the foreign media that we have in the United States, we have a right-wing party and we have a farther right-wing party and they're constantly competing. I spoke with a Frenchman. The French, you know, they claim to be the sort of like they own debate. debate is there is there seen in world history and this Frenchman was telling me he said in the United States you don't even have a left he said you don't have a proper left or a proper right you have a a center and a center right and that's it that's it true it's true yeah makes yeah it's interesting well I want to hear more about about can you tell us about some of the um documents you've been finding in the archives that that sounds so interesting to me to know that there's documents about almost like conspiracies, but they're just sitting in national archives that no one goes and looks at because no one looks at real paper anymore. The the the best one was the Iran coup of 1953, right? The conventional wisdom is that we we overthrow we overthrew Muhammad Wasadc, the democratically elected uh president of of Iran. We we replaced him with the Shaw of Iran who was eventually overthrown in 1979. and that we did this as a favor to the British because the British were stealing Iranian oil and they wanted to continue to steal Iranian oil. So you go into the archives and you realize that we were actually a little bit late to the game. See the the history that everybody, you know, knows is that Kermit Roosevelt uh who was the uh what was Kermit? He was the the fourth son of Teddy Roosevelt, the fifth son of whatever he was. He was a son of Teddy Roosevelt, highly highly honored and decorated CIA officer. Um that he engineered the coup that overthrew Mosettic. That's what he told everybody until he died. That's not what the documents show. The documents show that this was an MI6 operation, but the British weren't sure that they could pull it off themselves. And so they needed American money. American money to finance riots, anti-government riots, and to arm people who wanted to overthrow Mosadic. So, the brainchild of this whole plan was an MI6 officer who never ever gave a single interview ever. And then he died in the 70s or the 80s. Um, in the meantime, Kermit Roosevelt, as soon as he retired, just started yakking and then wrote a book like how I overthrew the Iranian government. It's like, dude, I understand you want your own place in history, but you didn't overthrow the Iranian government. Not according to the CIA documents. You wish you did. You tried to help to overthrow the government, but this was a British operation. The thing is is that Kermit Roosevelt was so successful in convincing people that the CIA overthrew Mosadic that when the Iranian revolution finally took place in uh well beginning in February of 1979 um it was the American embassy that was stormed. It they were American diplomats that were that were captured and held hostage for 444 days. And here we are 46 years later and we still don't have diplomatic relations with Iran. In the meantime, the British are perfectly good to go. No, no worries. Yeah. Why is it that America can't establish relations with Iran? Is is Russia involved? Is it is it left over from the Cold War? Like what's going on? In part, well, the the Iranians hate us not as as a people. They they hate us as a government. Um and they distrust us. They have good reason to. U they're not innocent because we hate and distrust them too also with good reason. But at a higher level, Iranian relations with Russia and China are excellent. And neither Russia nor China respect US sanctions on Iran. So they're helping to upgrade the Iranian uh oil uh oil sector. They're dredging Iran's harbors. The Chinese are buying whatever goods the Iranians can produce and vice versa. I have a very close friend who goes to Iran twice a year and she was there just a month ago and she tells me every time she comes back, the Iranians lack for nothing. Nothing. Our sanctions on them, zero effect. Nothing. They don't need us. Wow. So every time you hear, "Oh, we're putting new sanctions on Iran." First of all, there are no new real sanctions you can put on Iran. Everything's sanctioned. So when we hear Treasury saying, well, we're going to put new sanctions on Iran. Those sanctions are like, if Matt ever tries to open a checking account, he will be denied. He's under sanction. Okay. Matt doesn't give a [ __ ] to open a a checking account in Iran, you know. In Iran. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's what the are they fired. I I have a friend who's a banker and he always says, "Show me the rules. I'll show you how to break them." Like the rules were made by the rich people and the smart people and they're always broken by the rich people. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Precisely. So it's just one of these things where sanctions don't work because simply because they just don't work. It's not because no one involved wants them to work. It's because there's always a way around it. and and to that Austin, I think this is this is important. Um Barack Obama negotiated the JCPOA with Iran, okay, the Iran nuclear deal and many of the sanctions were lifted. So as part of that um the European Union also lifted their sanctions not just the European Union but the UK and Japan, Germany and and uh France which are in the European Union. So um everybody started trading with Iran. Donald Trump pulls out of the JCPOA. So we're we don't have any trade with Iran at all. Nothing. But we also have a law in this country that says that if you do business with Iran, we have to sanction you. Okay? He unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA. So now legally we have to impose sanctions on the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and every other country that does business with Iran. We're not going to do that. Not ever. And so that makes our sanctions and our silly secondary sanctions law moot and the Iranians laugh at us because we've put ourselves in a corner that we can't get out of more bureaucracy. How much of this is really actually about them having nuclear weapons or or how much of it is about something else? The CIA has published three national intelligence estimates over the last 25 years. All three concluding that the Iranians do not want and are not seeking a nuclear weapon. That's what the intelligence Why is that the only thing on the news about Iran? I know. I I don't understand then. Well, because it's constantly about, you know, yeah, they they they are um enriching uranium. Uh, first it was 3 and a half%. Now after we pulled out it's 67%, well you need like 95% for for a weapon. Well, yeah, but they could turn the 67% into 95% in a matter of weeks. Yeah, but they haven't. And our politicians have been saying for the last 30 years that the Iranians are are six months away from a nuclear weapon. For 30 years, you know, the Trump has an offer on the table that uh that the Iranians can continue to enrich uranium for the purpose of a civilian nuclear power program if the uranium is kept in a third country, probably the United Arab Emirates. I think the Iranians would agree to that. We're we're going to have to wait and see, but I think that that is going to be good enough. Can I ask you a really ignorant question? Do they is does Israel have nuclear weapon capabilities? Thousand% yes. Yes. Okay. It seems like they're always left off the list when Yeah, they are. They're they're not people consider that. Okay. They're not signitories to the non-prololiferation the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty. They just told the UN go [ __ ] themselves over non-prololiferation. And not only did they develop their own nuclear uh weapons program, but when South Africa fell, when the when the apartheid government in South Africa fell, um they gave the Israelis all of their nuclear weapons so as not to h to fall into the hands of black people. Oh yeah. So, you know, this is something that the Israelis have never admitted to. Everybody knows they have nuclear weapons. I was on the Pierce Morgan show a couple of weeks ago um debating Alan Dersowitz and a guy named Danny Atome, the former head of Mossad. And Pice asked him, "Does Israel have nuclear weapons?" And he smiled and he said, "All I can tell you is what the prime minister has said." And the prime minister has said that we will not comment on nuclear weapons. So there it is. So we have a very clear double standard with Iran and Israel. It's like Israel, everybody knows. Okay. I I still can't understand the problem with Iran. No, it's it's irrational. We also have a double standard with both Pakistan and India because we have good relations with both Pakistan and India and and very significant trade relations with Pakistan and India. They built nuclear weapons with the help of allegedly with the help of North Korea um to shoot at each other. And we're like, "Yeah, we don't want you guys to shoot at each other these nuclear weapons, but we really like both of you, and we'd like to trade with both of you, so we're going to pretend everything's fine. What about sanctions on that?" Gosh, you don't hear about it at all. It's not Iran, so we don't talk about it. That's it. There's no process. There's no consistency. No, none. None whatsoever. None whatsoever. It's like I'm I mean my thesis is that the US is now a multi-headed beast. Like there is no centralized power. The president doesn't have all power anymore, which is, you know, it was never designed to have all power, but there's not even like a level of government that feels like it's a consistent deciding force. Yeah. Yeah. This just kind of fits in with it. There's multiple heads probably have multiple motives and they're not really coordinating too much. It makes me wonder, is the United States too big? Is it too big to have a government of the size of the US? Yeah. How does it how do you fix it? Yeah, I I think it's the the political process that's broken. We need to have a robust and healthy civil service. Donald Trump has been attacking that and I understand why, but we need to have a a non-political or apolitical uh civil service. Um but you're right. You know, we have three equal branches of government and right now it's offkilter. They aren't equal. You've got a very strong executive. you have a very weak legislative and then you have a a judicial that's trying to to fill the void. I think it's going to go back to its its you know its uh equality but it's going to it's going to take a long time. And again I think another part of the problem is this this phony two-party system that we have. It just doesn't allow for for disscent. It doesn't even allow for for investigation. I'll give you another example. Um, I used to be the I used to be the senior uh investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when John Kerry was the committee's chairman and I did an investigation. It was a human rights investigation into a massacre that took place in Afghanistan called the Dash Delele Massacre. And I had evidence that two CIA officers were were present at the massacre when 2,000 Taliban prisoners were suffocated. 2,000 people suffocated. Yeah. At once. So I wrote, "How do they suffocate? I mean, how do you suffocate 2,000 people?" two on on October, I'm sorry, on November 30th and December 1st of 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave themselves up to the to the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance called us and said, "They just on Moss, they just gave up. What do we do?" Well, there there were no prisons in Afghanistan big enough to hold 2,000 people all at once. So we told them, "Put them on trucks and take them out into the desert and hold them there until we can divide them up and send them to different prisons around the country." So what they did is they put them inside container trucks, but they didn't poke any arrow hose and they didn't give them any food or water. Oh no. Of the 2,000 people that were boxed up, the 14 survived. And one of the survivors told me that the bodies fell out of the trucks like sardines from a can. But I learned that there were two CI officers on site at the box up. So I wanted to know were were they ordered to kill these 2,000 Taliban soldiers or was this an accident or a [ __ ] or what was this? So I wrote a letter. Carrie signed it and I sent it to the CIA asking for class for uh clarification. About six weeks later, a colleague of mine came into my office and said, "Oh, hey, uh, you got a you got a response from the agency to your letter." And I said, "I didn't see any response from the agency. I just checked my mail an hour ago." He said, "Yeah, they classified it top secret." And at the time I only had a secret clearance because I was waiting for my upgraded clearances to come through. And I said, 'What's it say? He says, uh, it says, 'Go [ __ ] yourself. So Carrie came down to my office and he's like, yeah, you need to end this, uh, this investigation. And then my my immediate boss came up to me. He's like, you don't understand. You're not really here to investigate stuff. You're here to help John Kerry become Secretary of State. But I kept investigating [ __ ] that was uncomfortable for the Obama administration. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Well, c can I ask you a personal question? Like you're you're going on TV no fear. You're telling even a story like that I would imagine could be potentially construed as a war crime if if you know if if it were investigated further. Who knows? Yes. What? What is your stance? I I mean, how how do you not have you already were thrown in jail once. How how do you not have fear of of talking about these things anymore? There is a legal definition of whistleblowing. It is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety. And so, I embrace it. I have no reason to try to protect the war criminals that I've worked for or worked with or people perpetuating crimes against humanity. I have a I have a very what's the word? I believe that the United States is special. I believe in the idea of American exceptionalism. I'm not an American exceptionalist, but I believe that the country was created so that it it could be exceptional. And I view these people as anti-American, unamerican, where they're more concerned for their own well-being and their own, you know, attaining higher office in life than they are for what the Constitution laid out for us. You know, Ronald Reagan said at the 1984 Republican convention that the United States is a shining city on a hill, and I believe that he was right. It it should be a shining city on a hill. And many people overseas see us as a shining city on a hill. That's what we should strive to be. And so, yeah, if I if I see waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety, I'm calling it out. And I I concluded years ago that that if I do it all the time, people will miss me if I somehow disappear. I love that. Please keep doing it and thank you for doing it because if it weren't for people who had the information sharing it, we would never we would never be able to know about these things. Yeah. Where are some areas right now in the world where maybe uh like like the Taliban and things going on in Afghanistan were very hot back, you know, it was a very hot zone back in like the early 2000s. Where are those hot zones right now? Oh, now it's mostly the Sahel and uh and Somalia. People, the American people have no idea we are at war in the Sahel and Somalia. The the Sahel is that that I didn't know that that strip along the uh the Sahara Desert. It's like um you know Moretania, Chad, Nishair, places like that. We are at war fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda. There we have we have untold number of special forces that are active in in actual combat on a day-to-day basis. And in Somalia, we're at war with the Somali mostly using drones which we fly out of Djibouti nearby. But that's another place that people just don't realize we're actually fighting. Every once in a while, you'll see a little blip in the New York Times, the Washington Post, saying that, "Oh, this Navy Seal was killed in a training accident." There are no training accidents. They're being killed in combat. We just don't want to admit that there's combat ongoing. If there were people over there that were witnessing atrocities, do you open up your door to allow people to come and and reveal that to you first and get help with with breaking out into the public? Literally, how would that how would that work if you were special forces right now? Right. So, literally every single day, literally, I get emails from people, potential whistleblowers, who want to know where to go, who they should talk to. And the answer should be easy, and it's not. You should be able to go through your chain of command and be protected by the National Whistleblower Act or the Federal Whistleblower Act. But whistleblowers in national security are exempt from its protections. And so if you report, oh, you know, on on illegalities, your career's over. There's a good chance you're going to go to prison. You have to seriously weigh the consequences here. But what you should do, if you could, in a perfect world, is go to your supervisor, then the the um uh inspector general, then the uh congressional oversight committees. And most of the time, I'll give you an example. Tom Drake, heroic whistleblower from NSA, great friend of mine. Tom reported um illegality first to the first to his his boss. His boss told him, "You're new here. You need to mind your own business." Then he went to the inspector general. The inspector general wasn't read into the compartment. And so he he's like, "I I don't know what you're talking about." Then he went to the general counsel. The general counsel said, "Buddy, this is way over your pay grade. You need to stop." Then he went to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA is a DoD agency. The Pentagon Inspector General reported him to NSA and said, "You have a rogue employee you need to watch out for." Then he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee. No way. the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and reported it and they arrested him and charged him with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage. The whole case fell apart the night before the trial began. But he lost his job. He lost his pension. He lost his clearance. He lost his wife. He ended up spending the next eight years at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland, working in the Genius Bar. This this guy was one of the country's leading experts in internet privacy. That's what they do to you. And this is really concerning. Like how do we open up the doors? Does it have to be through grassroots like YouTube channels or does a person need to start a YouTube channel to get out in front of the message? I think it has to be that way. I think yes. I think yes. And another thing that has to be done like right away is that Congress needs to rewrite the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboturs during the First World War. It has never been meaningfully updated. Never. It doesn't even mention classified information because the classification system wasn't created until the 1950s. It just talks about national defense information without actually explaining what that means, national defense information. And so we need a new espionage act that allows for what's called an affirmative defense that would allow whistleblower to say, "Yes, I released the information, but here's why I did it. I did it in the public interest, and now you can't do that. Straight to prison." Is there a system in place where private contractors are being sent into battle zones so that secrets could be held better because they're in private companies as opposed to in the in the official military? Um, yes. Yes. And that's a problem because the um Federal Documents Act mandates that all documents be preserved, right? You have to preserve everything. That's why if it's a private company talking to a member of a private company, what where's the document? The government doesn't have it. It's it's a corporate document. Even worse, when the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Intelligence are using a commercial chat app like Signal, that's a violation of the Federal Documents Act. You can't do that because people have to be able to file a Freedom of Information Act request on the record, but the record's not on a commercial app. It's not a document. So, the Espionage Act needs to be include needs to include the secrecy levels and stipulations for private corporation communication. Oh, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Okay. Do you see yourself as being a part of a group that would help rewrite that at any point? like how how do we how do we get the people like you who are interested to actually rewrite this? Honestly, Austin, I would jump at the chance if if a if a president were to call me and say, "Hey, help us, you know, rewrite this." Every national security whistleblower I know, you know, Jeffrey Sterling, Bill Benny, Kirk Web, Tom Drake, Justin Raak, everybody that I know would jump at the chance to do something like that. Ilhan, Omar, and it's a perfect group to do it. Yeah, it's perfect time. Elhan Omar is the only person with the guts to have proposed an updated um espionage act. She did it in the current Congress and in the previous Congress and they just go to subcommittee to die a quiet death. You know, she said to me one time, she said the reason why she can't get any co-sponsors on these bills, she goes, "Can you imagine going back to your home district and saying, I'm going to make it more difficult to prosecute people for espionage. Come on." Yeah. Vote for that. That's not a good narrative. Yeah. She's like, "You and I both know it needs to be done. It needed to be done 75 years ago, and nobody's done it. But you're not going to win any votes that way. What What was her interest in it? Was she appointed to a committee or was it a personal interest that she just took on? A personal interest in whistleblowing that that she she just believes that national security whistleblowers have taken it on the chin and that the entire system needs to be changed. Let let me add something to that actually. So Ed Snowden once told me that he would be willing to come home and go to prison if he could stand up in the courtroom and explain why he did what he did. So I I introduced him to my attorneys. Oh my gosh. He hired my attorneys and they negotiated a deal with the Justice Department. But Ed insisted he's he's willing to come home and go to prison, but he wants to explain why he did what he did. And DOJ said absolutely not. And so he's never come back. And here we are, what, 12 years later, and nothing has changed. No way. Yeah. And when the power of your words are more powerful than the punishment they're going to bestow upon you, that means it needs to be said. It has to be said. That's right. That's a lot, man. That's a lot to think about. Awful. Uh, can you help can you help walk us through what's going on in the Red Sea? I keep seeing all these headlines like US battleships lined up in the Red Sea. What what what exactly is going on in that part of the world and and especially on the water? Why do we have so many battleships over there? That's actually a very complicated question. So that there are two policy reasons why we're in the Red Sea. One is the Houthis in Yemen. We can talk about them pretty quickly. The other is Israel. So the Houthies. So Yemen has been a a basket case of a country for the last 35 years. When I when I first started at the CIA, there were two Yemens. There was the Yemen Arab Republic, also called North Yemen, and then there was the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, which was South Yemen. It was a communist satellite state during the Soviet days. Um they uh they merged in April of 1990. People were literally dancing in the street. Um it was a very exciting time to be in Yemen. It really was. I've been to Yemen five times. And then afterwards, uh, things weren't really working out the way they were hoping things would work out. Like, there's no real economic benefit to the two of them merging together. They're still like the third poorest country on Earth. Nothing's really happening. Then they did something so colossally stupid that all these years later, I still shake my head 34 years later. On August 2nd, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Yemen happened to be on the United Nations Security Council at the time in one of the rotating positions. So, Secretary of State James Baker said, "Look, we are going to attack Iraq. We're going to force them out of uh out of Kuwait, and the Russians are with us and the Chinese are with us on a use of force vote. So, there's not going to be a veto. Either you're with us or you're against us." What would possess them to join Cuba as the only other country in the world to vote no on a use of force to liberate Kuwait? What ended up happening was within 24 hours, the Saudis expelled all six million Yemeni guest workers. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates did the same with another million. People were living in cardboard boxes. I saw this with my own eyes. Living in cardboard boxes, in shanties with tin roofs, starvation was a problem. Couple that with the fact that until the late 1970s, Yemen was a net food exporter. But then in the late 70s, the government began to subsidize water. And so literally everybody changed their crops from food to gat. Gat is a shrub that people chew like the cocoa leaf and it gives you a jolt. Yeah. It's like the national thing. Everybody in the country chews gut. That's fine. But your children are starving and they have no shoes. So maybe you should grow tomatoes or corn or wheat or something instead of got. So 7 million people literally overnight re-enter the the country. It's already the poorest country in the world. There's no water because it's all going to gat. There's no food because it's going to go. There are no jobs. There are no schools. I was there one time and the American ambassador told me there are 14 million people in this country. There are two dentists. Two. Oh my gosh. That's the kind of country it is, dude. So then a little bit later, they're deciding, you know, we don't really like being one Yemen. We kind of preferred things when it was two Yemens. And they start launching Scud missiles on each other and they had a civil war. And then the North defeated the South and said, "No, you're not going to break away. We're still one Yemen." Well, then the strong man Ali Abdalis in in North Yemen, but he was the president of unified Yemen. He was a Saudi puppet and I I went to Yemen in 2011 and man, it was rough. There was a group of Korean Yeah, there was a group of Korean diplomats that flew in a day after I did. We're only allowed to stay in in one hotel, right? There's this one. It's got 30 foot walls with barbed wire all around the hotel. It's fortified. So, I had this armored car. I had two chase cars and they carried me from the airport to the hotel. The next day, six South Korean diplomats flew in and they were ambushed and murdered on the road to the hotel. A few days later, the South Korean Intelligence Service sent a group of investigators to figure out who did this, and they were ambushed and killed on the road to the hotel. So, it's rough. In the meantime, then the Were they going after South Koreans in particular? No, just going any after anybody who's not a not a Sunni Muslim. Yeah. So, um Okay. Yeah. In the meantime, the Shia are a minority in uh Yemen. They're about 25 or 30% of the population, and they get funding and weapons from Iran. And they decided, you know what, this country is so weak. This government is so weak, we could probably take it over. And so they started using drones to attack the capital. That was in 2009. Then finally in like 2016 they were successful in overthrowing the government and they blew up President Salah. The the pictures are gruesome from the from the uh the assassination and the Houthis have taken over now. Really the Houthies only control Sana the capital and some of the countryside around Sana. The rest of the country is just in a state of chaos. But the Houthis decided to pledge their their um support for Hamas, which is all fine and good. But in that decision, they decided their words to fire on any ship owned by Israel, controlled by Israel, on its way to Israel, or on its way from Israel. Okay. Wow. Well, these guys, like I said, these guys don't even have shoes. How are they going to know which ship has what and is doing what and is coming from where and going where? So they said, "Ah, what the hell? We'll just fire on every ship." Well, some of those ships are painted gray. Wow. And have a US flag flying on them and have 50 caliber guns. If it's a US Navy ship, why in blazes are you firing on a US Navy ship? So we we bombed the living daylights out of the Houthies, but said privately, reportedly, "How long do you spend $100,000 to blow up a $10,000 drone? Right? Our missiles are expensive." So, he negotiated this deal about three weeks ago that they're just going to stop firing on US ships. The Israelis were infuriated because we didn't say anything about not firing on Israeli ships, but that's Israel's problem. So we've got the Houthis and we've got Israel and that's why we're in the Red Sea. Okay. So it's uh I I guess we're still over there just in case Houthies are firing on people to try to keep peace. Yeah. Because the what the Israelis keep threatening to do is is to launch um missiles on Iran and they want to launch bunker busters because the Iranian nuclear program is deep underground. Even the Israeli bunker busters, oh, are probably not strong enough or heavy enough to destroy the Iranian facilities. And if the Iranians don't have a nuclear weapon, by God, they're going to have one quickly once they're attacked. And uh and the Israelis, you know, want us to be there to rescue them. Well, from a policy perspective, that's a terrible idea because it would essentially give them the green light to go ahead and attack Iran if they know definitively that we're going to protect them or we're going to support them. Yeah. So, on the other hand, just in case to go it alone, right, we want to be in the region close enough that we could respond if we have to. Man, I don't like that. It sounds like a a tinder box waiting to explode, doesn't it? It is. You know, I remember a a senior military analyst at the CIA once told me, "If you really want to know if a war is going to happen, watch naval maneuvers, especially the relocation of carrier battle groups." He said, "If we start moving carrier battle groups, then we're serious." When the Gulf War first started in 1990, um, up until then, we had never put a a an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. We always said it was too shallow and it wasn't big enough big enough for us to turn around. Well, once the war started, we had six carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf. So, there's a carrier battle group. So shallow. Yeah, there's one in the Indian Ocean. There's one in the Red Sea. There's one in the Eastern Mediterranean. That's That's bad. If we send one into the Gulf or we send a fourth out, I'm going to be worried. Yeah, these are basically like mobile fighting bases that we can move around. They're whole communities. They're like cities of terror that are floating on the water. That's exactly what Yeah. It's very important to know where those are. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would never shoot at one of those. That's That's insane. No. Well, no way. I wouldn't either. Not a chance. What What's going on with Taiwan? Like two years ago, all the ships, all all the maps I was seeing was was these sort of like people ideulating on where the ships were, how they were going to head towards Taiwan, and how Taiwan was going to defend itself. Now, it seems like everything shifted over to the Red Sea. At least on my newsfeed, and I know everybody has different news feeds, but what's what's going on with Taiwan still? Well, you know, the thing is what's going on in Taiwan really is what's going on in the United States because Taiwan's not worried about any imminent Chinese threat. We've always recognized Taiwan as a part of China. And both the Taiwanese and the Chinese say that someday eventually through negotiations they will rejoin, reconnect. We're the ones that keep yelling about the Chinese threat. And and listen, I'm I'm no fan of China, believe me. Truly no fan of China. But the Chinese do not have an imperialist history. The Chinese fought a a couple brief border skirmishes with the Indians. They fought a brief border skirmish with the Vietnamese. Aside from Tibet, which they've always claimed as theirs, the Chinese don't go around invading people. They really don't. They never have. And so, I'm not worried about a Chinese invasion of uh of Taiwan. I think that this is a a creation of the Pentagon uh for for the purpose of garnering annual budget increases. I just don't see any problem with Taiwan. The Taiwanese don't. They don't see any problem. Okay. Speaking of budget increases, can you touch on Ukraine for a moment? What what's Last time before you came on, we were we were preaching getting elected. We were making some guesses about what might happen with Ukraine. Seems like the war is dragging on. Yeah. I don't know if there's any any hope of it ending soon, to be honest. What are you seeing? I don't either. You know, everybody was Trump said he was going to he was going to settle this conflict in 24 hours. Nobody believed that. But what people thought that he would do would be to cut off uh aid to Ukraine. And um even that hasn't happened. Trump, I think, genuinely believed that Putin would just do what he told him to do. That the Russians could keep Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea and uh Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO, although they would probably be fasttracked into the European Union and everybody lives happily ever after. And that just hasn't happened. The the Russians just haven't accepted that deal. And certainly the Ukrainians haven't accepted that deal. Trump thought he could force the two sides to there was a two-hour phone call between Trump and Putin a couple of days ago and um and the White House released a statement saying, "Oh, it was such a beautiful call. It couldn't have been any more beautiful and there was love and respect and and Putin Putin's office released a statement saying, "Yeah, it was a good call. We agreed on nothing." And so now Trump, whether he likes it or not, is kind of being forced to continue supplying weapons uh to Ukraine. And the Germans and the British and the French are also supplying weapons to Ukraine. Uh just yesterday um the the Germans announced that they would put um that they would put no restrictions on how deep into Russian territory the the Ukrainians could go with German weapons. That's a that's a serious uptick. So there there's no quick down to this war. Uh it's not good news. No. Is the is the technology sometimes when I think of wars and I look back in the history of wars, I I follow the technology like who has the ACE? Who who has the SR71 spy plane or who has what's the deal with the drones going on over there? feels like a totally new battleground with drone warfare now because you can launch a drone for $1,000. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're in the midst of a of a real uh shift in war fighting where we're going to eventually get to a point where we are, aren't we? Troops Yeah. troops aren't going to be necessary anymore. It's all going to be drones. The thing is, we've got these big badass drones that carry thousand pound missiles and, you know, all this stuff. But but the Iranians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese, there are 16 countries that make drones right now and they make something called suicide drones. So it's the drone itself that's the weapon and the they just fly the drone to crash into a target. Well, those drones are cheap and they're small and they're devastating. So, yeah, it's cool to have these giant, you know, the Reaper, the Predator, but uh it's kind of just as just as good to just crash the drone in and blow something up. Well, and you know, I was reading uh the other day that the Ukraine has actually gified their drone warfare and that different teams are getting points. And so they you get one point for uh you know getting a single person, you get 50 points for getting a tank, you get 20 points for getting different buildings. And they said that they actually I think they tripled the points for individual uh targets from two points to six points. And they saw that they saw a doubling in that week of actual attacks on individuals to where because then they're giving the public scores of all the different drone teams. And so the drone teams are trying to win in the public's eye of who has the most points. And I thought that is just what a world that we're living in right now where we are giving points away. Gamifying war. We're giving war. Just wait until the PTSD sets in. Then we'll see how everybody's doing, man. Yeah. How do you gamify PTSD? That's not going to be fun. Seriously. Yeah. It's it it's sort of like Thomas I think Thomas Jefferson, if I remember, he was writing about mosquito boats back when they were trying to figure out how big of a navy they wanted and he wanted tiny little boats. It's like the the technology finally caught up to where he could have his dream. We can have these. They're basically ICBMs that are slow and they don't hold as much as much power, but they're just flying kamicazi explosives. They're cheap. Program them and have thousands of them. I mean, it's it's a swarm method. We we you now have a hive of bees. That's actually a better way to do war now is with a a beehive than one big sort of hit. That's right. Seems like it may it makes me wonder if communities will have to have their own like like maybe it'll come to the point where having a country to have huge country weapons really isn't what you need to protect your state or your community. You need small uh swarms of drones like is that where we're headed? And are we moving into it reminds me of the Matrix where you have EMP defense weapons? Basically, we all have to start building EMPs cuz if a swarm of 10,000 100,000 drones is coming at your city, you can't take them all out with with with metal. You have to actually blow an EMP to try and take them all out as much as possible. And even the the much vaunted Israeli uh Iron Dome when when the Iranians launched, I don't know if you guys remember, this was the first Iranian response to the Israeli assassination of a Palestinian leader in in Tehran. Um, they launched these drones, but the drones are like flying in slow motion and they warned the Iraqis and the Jordanians about overflight. So, the Israelis had like six hours before the drones actually arrived and still seven of them got through. Seven of them. So, you're right. This it's the swarm uh the swarm that is going to win the war. It sounds crazy that you'd have to have communities with little drone swarms to protect you, but it it makes me wonder like is this what the military is practicing over in the Sahara when you're saying that we're at war? Is it that we need we're going to need practice with small sort of civilian forces that are using cheap technology because it's actually a big threat. Yeah, that's a good question. We don't know what's going on in Africa. The Pentagon won't tell us. So, it's it's entirely possible. Why are we fighting in Africa? It doesn't even make Yeah, I guess I guess I just I'm not educated on world events, but it's all about seems like a lot. Yeah, fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here as they say. Although although we are starting our own cartel war perhaps. Yeah. What's the scuttlebutt on what's going on at the border? Well, you know, yeah, Trump did that on purpose. I I was surprised that so much of the media just missed it. They they said, "Oh, Trump named the Mexican cartels terrorist groups. Oh, the how stupid. Now it's going to go on this list for sanctions." Now, that wasn't it at all. He did it because it triggers a release of federal funds of counterterrorism funds. And so we weren't allowed to spend money on drones, on listening devices, on video intercepts, on tasking NSA. We weren't allowed to do any of that stuff without a determination that the cartels were a terrorist group. And so this isn't about sanctions. It isn't about border security. It's about infiltrating these groups with new federal authorities. I wouldn't have realized that, John. You always paint things in a different light that seems much more informed. Can can you just can you give like a rundown of Kil's first 100 days now that we're past the 100 days? There was so much speculation on it. Like what do you see as key failures, key successes, or just things that he put in motion that will be long lasting and their effects just from like the his first few months as president so far? Well, I think the thing that's going to be long lasting is is the advent of the imperial presidency. We've never had a president claim so much unfettered power in government ever as Donald Trump has. No, it started with those executive orders that first round, didn't it? And you remember they used to criticize Obama. They said, "Oh, he ruled by executive order. Uh, what about Congress? He can't do that." Well, Trump is dwarfing the executive the number of executive orders that Obama ever signed or any other president in American history. So I I think this imperial presidency is something that is here to stay because unless the Supreme Court starts striking things down, authorities down, um no president is going to voluntarily give up power, you know, voluntarily weaken the office of the presidency. Um, so that's I think that's the big that's the big get that Trump um has achieved. In other in other things, man, it's just so much going on. I I fear for the First Amendment because of the way he's gone after freedom of speech in um in universities on the universities. Yeah, this is very very troubling to me. But then at the same time, at the same time, he's done a lot of things that I wish Democrats had done. He talks to our enemies. We used to, we used to mock George W. Bush at the CIA because we had never seen anybody work so hard to not speak to our enemies. He talks to everybody, the Iranians, Hamas, the North Koreans. He's happy to have a conversation with everybody. And that makes the world safer when he does that. He unilaterally came to an agreement with the with the Houthies over the course of a weekend that essentially ended all attacks on American shipping. That's incredible. How come Joe Biden didn't do that over four years? So I also like Yeah, it does feel more like there's a CEO as president, like someone who just is used to having board meetings and getting things done. Grab the bull by the Yep. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm willing to give the guy the benefits of uh Doge. Oh, I don't think Doge We heard a lot about it, you know, for the first hundred days and now it's just not It feels like it, you know, I know I think Elon got in trouble because Tesla's stock went down by 35% and so he kind of got called back to his corporate overlords in some capacity. But so with him not tweeting about it, I mean, what's your perspective of it? uh what was your perspective of it while it was going on and now that it's sort of, you know, died down in the media, how do you think it's going now? I got a kick out of, you know, CIA officers being escorted out of the building. That was kind of funny to me. Um, but we've got the Civil Service Act, which protects federal workers from exactly this kind of thing. And they all the people fired under DOJ have sued. They're going to win. You can't just fire people just wantingly. You can certainly have reductions in force, but that that has to be governmentwide. Um, and it has to be, not has to be, but it's almost always related to the economy. We haven't had a layoff, a federal layoff since 1979. That was the last one, 1977. Um, so he went about it the wrong way. First of all, people are like, who is this guy? This autistic South African guy is going to come here and tell me what to do. And uh people got tired of that very very quickly. So I don't think Doge had any impact on anything or anybody in a year. People aren't even going to remember what Doge is. And you're right has to go back to to uh protect his $446 billion uh personal wealth.