Ex-CIA Spy John Kiriakou on Israel, Double Agents, and Direct Energy Weapons (Podcast Interview)

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]knocks on the door. I go, "Come in." He comes in. I come out of the bathroom. I grab him. Our colleagues bust in from the next door room. And I said, "Did you really think I was soing stupid that I didn't know that you were a double agent this whole time?" He had been ordered to shoot me in the next meeting.

[00:00:17]>> I spent a lot of time thinking about Israel, but I thought maybe is it possible that I'm overfocusing on them?

[00:00:22]>> You're not overfocusing. The Israelis really believe that they're alone in the world, even though they're not. They treat everybody else with disrespect.

[00:00:31]>> If any other country, if Chinese flags are planted outside of a lot of politicians doors, if Russia, I any one of those countries, you would say it's pretty easy to say that that is a a one weird and twoird a concerning.

[00:00:45]>> Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, served in the military, the Israeli military, not the American military. Like we're >> Boy, do we have an episode for you today. My mission is to talk with one of one characters walking this planet. And the guy that we are having a podcast interview with is John Keryaku, the ex CIA agent, the guy that blew the whistle on the torture program that the CIA was running. And guess what? He was the only one to go to jail from exposing that information as a whistleblower. This is a guy with extensive experience running in the CIA overseas in the Middle East.

[00:01:18]Uh he speaks very bravely and boldly about Israel, their influence on us and also how it is working with MSAD from personal experience. This guy has stories for days and this is just a treat to listen to. So whether you're working in an office doing chores at your house, kick back, relax, and listen to John Keryaku tell his stories. Uh by the way, we had a problem with the sun creeping onto his face about 20 30 minutes into the episode. Apologize about that. Sometimes you got to contend with the room that you're in. But man, this guy is an absolute treat to listen to and I hope you enjoy. But first folks, a quick word from the sponsor of today's episode. Folks, if you are a small business owner, you know perfectly well the challenges, responsibilities that comes with that job. Some days you're accounting, some days you got to be a website builder. Other days you got to know about inventory. It is a lot to handle. Luckily, there is Odo. Odo is a one-stop shop platform for optimizing your business. Let me highlight two tools on their platform that can help you immensely. First is a CRM. You can build a custom CRM on ODO that can help keep track of your current clients and also your hottest prospects you want to chase. Another important tool odo has is their expense tracker. As a business owner, you need to know your overhead.

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[00:02:53]Thank you to ODO. And now, back to the episode. John, I appreciate you joining me. There's a lot of people that I get excited to interview and you are the top of the list. You've lived a very interesting life and there's so many places we're going to go with this, but I want to start off with a ripper of a question, which is right now as you see the global politics sphere, who is the single greatest threat to the United States of America.

[00:03:17]>> I think over the long term, it's got to be China.

[00:03:20]>> For a bunch of different reasons. Number one, they are an economic powerhouse.

[00:03:26]>> There's no stopping them for a couple of reasons. One, we spend all our money on defense. We our defense budget is a little bit more than1 trillion dollars right now.

[00:03:36]>> That's bigger than the next eight largest countries combined because we've taken on this role as the world's policeman. So the Chinese aren't spending that kind of money on defense.

[00:03:46]Instead, they spend it on development and they go around the world and they buy airports and ports and they build interstate highway systems and they build hospitals and they build bridges and they instill this goodwill toward China uh from the locals in these different countries. It's called in part the Belt and Road Initiative. And you know, we send battleships around the world and threaten people to do what we want or what some of our friends want and the Chinese just sit back and wait for us to destroy ourselves. That's one thing. The second reason the Chinese are, I think, our most serious threat is that they're very, very good spies.

[00:04:29]Whether it's stealing intellectual property to make knockoffs of important brands or it is uh stealing technology which they do each and every day all across the United States. Uh they collect this information right under our noses and there's almost nothing we can do about it. I've been studying a lot of how they're progressing, just what the state of their manufacturing is, how competitive it is. And I guess I was thinking a lot about there's I've been focusing a lot of attention on Israel lately. They just been for there's only so many issues you can focus on at once.

[00:05:03]And to me, what they're doing in the West Bank, what they've done in Gaza, and how they're influencing American politics. I spent a lot of time thinking about Israel, but I thought maybe is it possible that I'm overfocusing on them?

[00:05:13]>> You're not overfocusing. This is a problem with American foreign policy right now is it's not really American foreign policy. In many cases, it's Israeli foreign policy that's been imposed on the United States. For example, Iran is not a direct threat to the United States. It's just not. even if the Iranians had a nuclear weapon, which they don't. We know that because the CIA has told us in two different national intelligence estimates that the Iranians not only don't have a a nuclear bomb, they don't have a nuclear weapons program.

[00:05:48]So why would we want to bomb Iran? Why would we send two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf? Because the Israelis asked us to. Well, as we speak right now, Trump has sent a beautiful armada to surround Iran. I thought that the attack would have already happened by now. Some of the reports that I read said that it was imminent.

[00:06:09]>> What's your pulse on the situation right now? We cannot launch an attack on a country of 92 million people with one aircraft carrier battle group. One aircraft carrier carrier battle group is the carrier itself and the and the planes on the carrier and 11 support ships. You can't overthrow a country of 92 million people with that. So, we've sent a second carrier battle group.

[00:06:36]Well, we haven't even sent it. We're the president's thinking about sending it.

[00:06:40]It's off the coast of Norfick, Virginia right now. It would take weeks to get there. And um and third, you know, we've got our own Arab allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman begging us not to do this. So, we had the first round of talks with uh the Iranians hosted by the Omani government last week, just the first round. We did not meet directly with the Iranians. We were in one room, the Iranians were in another room, and the Omani foreign minister was just shuttling between the two rooms.

[00:07:14]>> Why do you think it was set up like that?

[00:07:15]>> Because we refuse to meet directly with the Iranians. Because >> that's just the policy.

[00:07:21]>> You think it's because of Israeli influence?

[00:07:23]>> Absolutely. 100%.

[00:07:24]>> And the guy is in town right now, Benjamin Netanyahu. He's been prolifically visiting the White House. I guess >> a lot of people >> Let me Let me interrupt you. You're right. He's been prolific in his visits to the White House. Donald Trump has been president for what, 13 months? This is Netanyahu's seventh visit to Washington in the last 13 months.

[00:07:49]>> Which goes back to my point like why we don't Iran is no threat to us. It's a threat to Israel maybe, but maybe it's because Israel is a threat to Iran. So why do we have to go talk to the Iranians and say no nuclear program, no missile program whatsoever, which is ludicrous. No country on earth would agree to something like that. and you're not allowed to support your friends and allies in the region, Yemen, Hezbollah, you know, whomever else, Hamas, whomever. Why would we why would we carry Israel's water like that? Why don't the Israelis do it?

[00:08:27]>> Well, Israel supported us a lot in the past. They had a lot of troops come fight for us in Afghanistan.

[00:08:32]>> Exactly. Yeah.

[00:08:33]>> Because they're our greatest ally, >> right?

[00:08:35]>> So, what is it though? I mean, because it's almost like politicians are afraid to talk about it. Um, I was just in a lot of senators and Congress people's offices and they can talk about the Epstein files. They can talk about what's going on overseas, but the second you mentioned the Israel connection, all of a sudden they have this wave kind of jumping around that. What do you make of that kind of behavior?

[00:08:58]>> Well, look at Senator Tom Cotton, the senator from uh Arkansas who's always rumored to be in the hunt for Secretary of State or CIA director, director of national intelligence. He has the Israeli flag outside his office door.

[00:09:13]Why?

[00:09:14]>> A lot of them do.

[00:09:15]>> Well, what what's their loyalty? Are they loyal to the United States or are they loyal to another power, a foreign power?

[00:09:23]>> Uh cuz we just we talked with Eric Swallow who will likely be the California governor. He had Israeli flag outside of his door.

[00:09:30]>> Outrageous.

[00:09:31]>> We just presented uh Debbie Wasserman with the hedge fund award because she's outraded hedge funds. We brought a plaque to her office today. She had an Israeli flag outside her door. And I think it's pretty obvious that if you quantify it like this, if any other country, if Chinese flags are planted outside of a lot of politicians doors, if Russia, I any one of those countries, you would say it's pretty easy to say that that is a a one weird and two weird a concerning.

[00:09:57]>> But Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, served in the military, the Israeli military, not the American military. So, is he is he loyal to Israel or is he loyal to the United States? Because you can't be completely loyal to both. There's going to have to be a departure.

[00:10:13]>> Have you done much diving into the Epstein files recently?

[00:10:16]>> Yeah, I have. And I and I think I found something that nobody else found.

[00:10:20]>> Uh Barack Obama's White House council, the most important lawyer in America when you're White House counsel, a woman named uh Katherine Rumler. She's now the general counsel for Goldman Sachs.

[00:10:34]pretty serious position. She was very, very close to Jeffrey Epstein, emailing constantly back and forth. She emailed him one day, and this is revealed in the latest trunch, and she said, "John Brennan, the director of the CIA, gave me the CIA's highest honor this morning." Pretty neat, huh?

[00:10:56]And then there were a couple of other cases where she wrote to Epstein saying, "You're going to be in Washington next Tuesday, right? How about if I set up meeting with John Brennan? He would love you."

[00:11:09]Did he? Was there contact between Jeffrey Epstein and John Brennan?

[00:11:14]Because John Brennan is not talking. And we know that there is still three million more documents that have not yet been released.

[00:11:20]>> And of the ones that haven't been deleted, possibly.

[00:11:23]>> Yeah. Right.

[00:11:24]>> Permanently. supposed to take their words for it.

[00:11:27]>> So, one thing is I think we can hyperfocus on some parts of the files where there's sex trafficking going on, the billionaires are doing things with kids, but I think if we zoom out, there's arms deals, there's definitely collaborations across intelligence, >> and that's that's the theme that I think everybody should be focusing on. I've been saying for years Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli access agent. I'm 100% certain that I was right. Why not KGB, CIA or mixture?

[00:11:55]>> And that's what I'm getting to with this next trunch, this second trunch of 3 million. It actually was like 2.7 million documents. Um, it was clear that Epstein was trying to work for the CIA and may have done something with the CIA. We don't know yet, but he >> You authorized that, didn't you?

[00:12:14]>> I would have put a bullet in his brain if it had been up to me. Um but he was also working with MI5 and MI6 in the UK.

[00:12:23]Um possibly the Germans and definitely the Israelis. And then he tried repeatedly to get a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin. He was denied repeatedly and finally they offered up a meeting with Putin and three other people and he said no, he wanted just Putin himself one-on-one and the Russians walked away from it. So it it looks like he was trying to be some sort of an intelligence broker >> where to the highest bidder.

[00:12:53]>> Yeah.

[00:12:54]>> He gives the the scoop.

[00:12:56]>> That's right.

[00:12:56]>> But I guess can you dive into the Israeli connections? Because when I asked Congress people this today and yesterday, >> they run screaming from the room.

[00:13:03]>> Oh, like I didn't see that in the file, but what I did see was Trump. So they kind of would turn it into a Democrat versus Republican thing rather than >> And it's not. They're both corrupt. Both parties are corrupt. Both parties should be ashamed of themselves. They all knew exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was. And I don't want to hear, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, but I don't want to hear the Democrats crowing that Donald Trump appeared in the Epstein files 3,800 times. How many times did Bill Clinton appear in the in the Epste?

[00:13:33]Probably more than Donald Trump. This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of the the elites being corrupt and jumping into bed, no pun intended, with a convicted child molester.

[00:13:46]>> So, I want to hear this from the perspective of an intelligence operator.

[00:13:50]Um, as someone that has worked in the CIA, has field experience, >> how do you think MSAD is working with Jeffrey Epson, >> and what's the process? How does this all look behind the scenes? I'm I'm going to tell you a story as a preamble to my answer. So, when I was in training, you're taught to recruit spies to steal secrets. At its most elemental, that's what that's what espionage is. It's recruiting spies to steal secrets.

[00:14:20]One of my instructors told me that every case officer, every operations officer who's starting out fantasizes about recruiting, you know, the prime minister of a country or a guy who becomes the prime minister. And sometimes that happens, usually not. But he said sometimes you have to look beyond the obvious. And he said the best recruitment that he ever made was of a copy machine repair man. And I laughed when he said it and he said, "Hear me out. Everybody wants to recruit the prime minister. I recruited the copy machine repair man who fixed the copier in the prime minister's office." And so we waited until it needed servicing. And when it needed servicing, he went in there to service it. And he installed a device so that every time somebody made a copy on the machine, it would transmit a copy to CIA headquarters. He said, 'I essentially did recruit the prime minister because we got literally everything that the prime minister got.

[00:15:25]Well, if you're the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, you're not going to recruit Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or Prince Andrew or any of these other, you know, giants of Western politics. So, you do the next best thing. You recruit You recruit the guy who has access to them and you give him plenty of money.

[00:15:45]So he has his own island. He has the the widest townhouse in Manhattan. He throws the most lavish parties. And while you're at it, have him add some 14, 15, 16 year old girls to the mix who can give massages to these broken down old men. Plenty of alcohol. And then you put hidden cameras and hidden microphones in every single room, including the bathrooms, which we now know is what he did. So, you don't need to recruit Bill Clinton or Bill Gates. You essentially have recruited them in that everything that you might need, you can get from Epstein. That's what Epstein did. I saw a recent drop that well we've known for months now that Ad Mubarak or Ad Bark had we kind of had a monthly check-in with Epstein at this Manhattan place but then also a spy by the name of Yoni Corin >> uh if you are familiar with this he also would pay visits and so I guess it seems like the Israeli ties are pretty firm. I mean he also in introduced Benjamin Netanyahu to Chase Bank for relations.

[00:16:58]Um, but how do you conclude what what are the other details you say that makes it conclusively MSAD? And also, how do you think they approached him? How do you think they worked with him? How does that look from the intelligence operator perspective? Well, the circumstantial evidence is convincing. Peter Mandelen, the former British ambassador to the United States, who claimed at first that he had never met Epste. Then he said, "Well, yeah, I may have met him once. I I think it was at a party." and then was shown a picture of himself in his underwear with a 16-year-old girl on Epstein's island said, "Okay, all right. You got me." All right. We know that Mandlesen gave Epstein classified documents from the from the UK's Defense Ministry. We learned just a few days ago that former Prince Andrew also gave Epstein classified documents from the Defense Ministry. We also know that the Israelis spy on the US and the UK. So why would Epstein be collecting classified defense documents? The last time an Israeli spy in the United States was was caught was Jonathan Pard, right? Jonathan Pard ended up getting 30 years in prison, of which he did all 30 years. What was he spying on? He was spying on the Pentagon and he was passing DoD, top secret DoD information back to the Israelis. To make it worse, the Israelis, who have no love of the United States, then traded that information to the KGB in exchange for a plain load of Russian Jews being allowed to resettle as refugees in Israel. So, this is exactly what the Israelis have collected through history.

[00:18:44]Why would today be any different?

[00:18:47]So, if I'm Epstein and you're a Msad agent, how does this process work?

[00:18:51]>> Oh, we know that he was in touch with so many people in so many different places.

[00:18:55]That would be the easy part. You know, you invite somebody over to your house or you invite somebody to your your mansion in Manhattan or to your house in London or >> New Mexico.

[00:19:06]>> New Mexico. He had this big spread.

[00:19:09]Invite them anywhere. Call it a, you know, dinner party or, you know, a Super Bowl watch party. call it whatever you want. Just pass the information. Now, if the Israelis wanted to be a little bit more clandestine about it, they could do what they do normally and have what's called non-personal communications. So, let's say you've got a you've got a chest of drawers over here. Well, one of the drawers has a false back and inside the false back is a transmitter and then you can take pictures of the documents, feed it into the transmitter and just have it do what's called a burst transmission. It just takes a fraction of a second. So it's almost impossible to intercept. That way you don't have to meet with anybody.

[00:19:49]>> So tell me more about the gadgets and the I'm I'm just trying to picture the the level of technology that the top spying agencies have at their fingertips. Like what what is the technology that we are currently dealing with in that sphere?

[00:20:04]>> I'm going to tell you an an introductory story there too. When I was a little kid, when I was nine years old, I went to an auction with my dad and there was a box.

[00:20:15]It was just a box full of junk that hadn't otherwise sold. They just put all the junk in the box. And my dad bid 50 cents. I still remember it. And he he got it for 50 cents. And so it had a shortwave radio in it. And he just handed me the radio. That opened up an entire world to me. And I told him and my mother when I was nine that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up because I'm listening to Radio Moscow, Radio Havana, Cuba, BBC, transmissions from all over the world. Well, when you're you're slowly scrolling through the dial in the middle of the night because it's hard to pick up stations during the day. Every once in a while, I would come upon a transmission and it would be a man's voice just saying 8 3 6 9 1. And I'm like, what is this? Like for years I thought, what what was that? Just reading numbers.

[00:21:14]That was a spy reporting back to the KGB using something called a one-time pad.

[00:21:21]So the KGB knows that in your next transmission you're going to use page, you know, 165. So they're looking at 165. You're looking at 165. And each one of those numbers means a different letter.

[00:21:35]>> Meaning the same page of the same book you guys are looking at.

[00:21:38]>> Correct.

[00:21:38]>> To kill a mockingb bird, page 165.

[00:21:40]>> They call it a it's a one-time use pad.

[00:21:42]So once you've used page 165, you burn it and you never use it again. It doesn't even exist anymore because you've burned it. But that's how they transmit back when their other modes of communication aren't secure or aren't safe.

[00:21:58]So, if you don't need to use a one-time pad, and that was really a last resort, a one-time pad, you can use, as I said a moment ago, a burst uh transmission where you feed everything into your transmitter, you hit a button, it bursts in its transmission, and they're able to pick it up on the other end and then decrypt it. There's kind of a famous uh spy, the Israelis, when Israel first became a country. Um, there was a an Egyptian Jew who left from Cairo and moved to I think it was Hifa and he volunteered to this new organization called Mossad. He's like, "Look, I'm ethnic Egyptian, but I'm Jewish. I speak fluent Arabic." They said, "Yeah, thanks. We're not interested." And he went back a couple of times and said, "I really, really want to work for Mossad. I really want to want to work for Israel." Finally, they were like, "Okay, okay. uh you can go to Damascus, we'll give you documents and you can pretend to be Syrian. So he was able to put on a Syrian accent which is notably different from an Egyptian accent.

[00:23:06]>> So this guy was skilled.

[00:23:07]>> He was skilled. He was a barber but he was self-skilled, self-taught.

[00:23:14]He ended up being named the deputy minister of defense of Syria and he gave the Israelis literally everything that the Syrians had. Thus allowing the Israelis to defeat the Syrians in 1956, in 1967, in 1973, and take the Golan Heights and flatten half of Damascus. There are parks and streets named after him. There's a big statue of him now in Tel Aviv. I've seen it myself. He was transmitting with a burst transmitter. And the way he got caught, they executed him. They hung him publicly in Damascus.

[00:23:51]He didn't realize that at a party he let his Egyptian accent just slip just a little bit. And somebody that was at the party thought, "Huh, I thought he was Syrian. That sounded like an Egyptian accent." And they told the Syrians. And the Syrians asked the KGB for help. And so there was a KGB electronic monitoring truck that was just driving around his neighborhood when he happened to hit the burst transmission button and they got him. So there are other ways you can do I I mentioned uh it's something called non-personal communication.

[00:24:33]Um, let's say you've got a package of documents and you don't want to take the risk of a burst transmission and you certainly can't take the risk of meeting somebody in person, right? Because maybe you're under surveillance or they're under surveillance. So, you take your package, you put it in something called a um a CD, a a what what the heck does CD? A concealment device.

[00:24:57]It could be something that looks like a rock, but really it's hollow. I once used a dead rat.

[00:25:02]A friend of mine had gutted this dead rat and uh and we just stuffed documents inside it. Left it on the side of the road. Nobody's going to touch a dead rat.

[00:25:12]Nobody. But then what you do is you pick up the rat, you take it back to the office, you open up the rat, you pull the documents out.

[00:25:19]>> One one friend of mine actually um put a a little piece of microfilm in a used condom and threw it in the side of the road. Nobody's going to touch a used condom. Nobody. But all the secrets were in there. And so what you do is you drive around for two or three hours to make sure that you're not being followed. When you're sure you're not followed, you drop it, you know, in the in the pre-planned place. And then you go another two or three hours driving like this to another place where you just take a piece of chalk and put an X on the wall or on the side of a mailbox or whatever.

[00:25:58]So that when the person that you need to drop the information to sees the mark, he knows that the documents are in the other location in the rat or in the condom or in the rock and then he does a 2 or threeh hour route to go pick up the thing >> and how do you make sure that you're not being followed?

[00:26:16]>> Oh, there's a lot of training. I'm going to blow my my own horn. I wrote a book called The CIA Insiders Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection.

[00:26:25]I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA and then um I do private surveillance uh training as well. You know, if you're a let's say you're a corporate CEO or a journalist for that matter and you want to make sure that you're not being followed, maybe it's carjackers or terrorists or the FBI for that matter. Um you want to make sure you're not being followed. You do what's called a surveillance detection route, an SDR, in four phases.

[00:26:55]The first phase is called the red phase, right? So, we're on a main street here in Washington DC right now. That's called a red road. So, if I go outside and I start walking down the street, it is utterly impossible for me to know if I'm being followed or not. But if I'm familiar with the neighborhood, let's say I live in the neighborhood or I work in the neighborhood, it would not be alerting. It would not be unusual for me to get off this main road and start cutting through the neighborhood. That's called a black road. So, I go from here, which is the kickoff point, and I want to draw attention, not draw attention, I want to drag surveillance, let's say, if I have it, into the black area so I can spot them and make sure that that, you know, I'm I'm either clean or we we call it clean or dirty. You either have surveillance or you don't have surveillance.

[00:27:48]So, I don't want to be alerting. I don't want them to say, "Hey, he's doing a surveillance detection route. We we should stay on him. He's probably a spy." So, I would cut through the neighborhood, come out on the other side, and pick up my dry cleaning, let's say, and they'd say, "Oh, that's why he was cutting through the neighborhood. He was just going to the dry cleaners." Then I do a more provocative phase where I'll do something like a technique that's called stairstepping where you go up a block, make a right, go one block, make a left, make go a block, make a right, go a block. So it looks like a stair step on a map. Really what you're doing is every time you cross the street, you're going like this to make sure you're not going to be hit by a car.

[00:28:31]Really, you're looking to see if anybody's following you. Or you can window shop and you're not really looking in the window. You're looking at the reflection in the window to see if there's anybody across the street who has stopped to watch you look at the window.

[00:28:47]Then you stop at, let's say there's a hardware store and you buy a package of screws or picture hangers or something.

[00:28:55]So they say, "Oh, okay. No, he was just going to the to the hardware store." And then you do the most provocative phase where in this final phase, and you only do this if if you're pretty sure you're clean, you don't have any surveillance. You'll go up half a block, turn around and walk right back to the place where you started. And then you'll walk up to somebody's porch and then come back down. And you know where none of this stuff makes any sense. That's just the final phase to make sure you're 100% sure that you're not being followed and then from there you go the next block or two blocks to your meeting spot or to your pickup spot.

[00:29:40]>> I'm curious about this then. Uh are there parts of your career where you knew you were getting followed and you had to deal with that regularly?

[00:29:48]>> Tell me about that.

[00:29:49]>> Yeah. If you're being followed and it can happen in any country at all. If you're being followed um and you notice you're being followed after that second stop, you just turn around and go home. And I'll give you an example. Um I served for two years in Bahrain. Bahrain is a very very friendly, close ally of the United States. It's the location of uh of the headquarters of the US Navy's fifth fleet, right? But you never know who's going to be watching. Maybe it's the Russians that are following me or the Iranians for that matter or some terrorist group. You don't know. It doesn't have to be the the government.

[00:30:28]But in any event, we're taught in training that if you are being followed, you just end things at that second stop and you turn around, you go home, which is what I did.

[00:30:42]A couple of weeks after I arrived in Bahrain, uh the political officer cycled out and a new political officer came in and she was terrible.

[00:30:52]So she had she had come to Bahrain from Romania and she had no experience in the Middle East. And so they didn't know if she was a legit state department officer or not. And she was she was a legit state department officer, but they put surveillance on her one night after work just to see what she was going to do. She immediately spotted the surveillance.

[00:31:15]So she came in the next morning and she said, "Have you been under surveillance since you were here?" I said, "Ah, once." They were just probably curious to see what I was going to do. And I just I went to the store and then I went home. But I've never been under surveillance since then. I said, "How about you?" She said, "I was under surveillance last night." I said, "Yeah, what'd you do?" She said, "I took them on a 100 mph chase from one end of this country to the other." The whole country is like, you know, 30 miles by nine miles. It's a little teeny island.

[00:31:47]That's exactly what you're not supposed to do.

[00:31:50]>> Why is that?

[00:31:51]>> Because they immediately concluded that she was an undercover CIA officer and they followed her every single day for the next three years. And then I was actually going out meeting, you know, sensitive people because I was the human rights officer. So I was meeting with opposition figures. They never bothered me a single time >> and because they didn't suspect you in the first place >> because they they did follow me and I went to the grocery store and I went to the hardware store and I picked up my dry cleaning and >> but if they're following her and you go to the same office as her every day.

[00:32:23]>> Yeah, but there are a lot of people that work in that embassy.

[00:32:26]You know, 100 people worked in that embassy. Can't follow 100 people. And you're not going to follow the, you know, the admin officer. You're not going to follow the ambassador.

[00:32:36]Everything he does is on the front page of the paper anyway.

[00:32:39]So, you're going to see who's working for him.

[00:32:41]>> What year was your last year in the field or or I guess in the CIA?

[00:32:45]>> My last year in the CIA and the field was 2004.

[00:32:50]>> Okay. So, what was the level of technology then? What were some of the devices or things that would >> Oh, it's it's a totally different world now. Some of it's classified. It's a totally completely different world now.

[00:33:01]Um technology just improves incre incrementally uh exponentially. Uh when I was there, one of the things that was a surprise to me was that most most of the technology that we used like in operations, we would just buy commercially, you know, like today you can get most of it on Amazon. Little listening devices and little hidden cameras. They make cameras like this big now.

[00:33:27]>> Really?

[00:33:27]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:33:28]>> Because I've been looking because I've been trying to investigate different churches and cults and try and go in there with hidden cameras.

[00:33:33]>> Yeah.

[00:33:33]>> I have to ask your recommendation after this. the camera pen. Yeah, they're all different kinds of things. You can you can buy beacons, tracking devices, all kinds of stuff online. But my my uh bosses told me at the time that it's so much faster, easier, and cheaper just to buy it commercially than it is to um to reinvent the wheel. There there used to be this store in London called the Spy Shop. There was one in New York. There was briefly one in Washington, but it was it was headquartered in London. And so every time I'd go to London, I'd go to the spy shop and just see what kind of gadgets they had for sale. And any Joe off the street could walk in and, you know, buy stuff.

[00:34:13]>> Who was the primary buyer from that shop? Was it regular citizens for fun?

[00:34:17]>> Yeah, it was mostly regular citizens for fun. There were a lot of private investigators that used to buy there. In fact, I had a friend, Glenn. Um, Glenn worked at a at a hedge fund in New York.

[00:34:28]He was always fascinated with spycraft all of his life. and he actually left Wall Street to open up his own like spy shop where he just sold gear. Where he made his money was on um like home security systems and hidden cameras and stuff like that. He ended up making a handsome living for himself.

[00:34:53]>> Do you have any idea what is currently available right now out in the field from a technological standpoint?

[00:34:59]>> I don't. I've been out for quite some time now. I will say technology has moved so quickly. I don't have any idea how undercover CIA operatives cross borders or pass through airports with facial recognition software the way it is and AI.

[00:35:17]I I can't even imagine how they do it successfully.

[00:35:21]>> I've been seeing some reports of sonic weapons being used. They said this in Venezuela um that a guy can be posted up on the street, angle it towards your hotel room and they can completely make you ill or even almost pass out.

[00:35:33]>> And they think that's what the Havana syndrome uh is. You know, for a long time I I'll admit to you that I thought I thought these reports of Havana syndrome were manifestations of mental illness. right there. Listen, not a single day goes by, literally that people don't email me, that the CIA is beaming waves at their heads and communicating with them through fillings in their teeth and put a chip in their brains.

[00:36:03]>> You have a lot of schizophrenics emailing you.

[00:36:05]>> There are a lot of mentally ill people out there. In fact, I I did a contract with the American Psychological Association about 10 years ago and we were going to lunch one day. It was 13 of us. I was the only one who's not a psychologist. So, we were going to lunch and I said, "Hey guys, I have a question for you." I said, "Not a single day goes by that I don't get these emails from people." And I I told them what I just told you. And they all started laughing.

[00:36:28]And I said, "Why is that so funny?" And they said this is the most basic entrylevel mental illness that it's well documented that when people feel overwhelmed sometimes their brains kind of reset to the to the easiest explanation of why they're having difficulty in life. And the easiest explanation is that there's secret some secret organization that's targeting them. and the CIA is everybody's secret, you know, boogeyman. So they said just, you know, just hit the delete button. So for a long time, I just believed it was, you know, people have mental illness.

[00:37:10]It's not uncommon in our culture until a friend of mine came down with Vanna syndrome and he was describing to me exactly what a lot of these people were describing.

[00:37:24]>> And what are the symptoms for people not familiar? Oh, it's everything from nausea and ringing in the ears uh to vertigo. And in his case, he actually had an MRI and which showed a traumatic brain injury.

[00:37:38]>> And this is off of just potentially one beam of this weapon.

[00:37:42]>> He said he remembers where he was standing when when he first felt it. He was outside in front of the Russian Foreign Ministry. He had just come out after a meeting and he just felt like something just hit him and he wanted to throw up. He wanted to pass out. He kind of stumbled away, got in a taxi, was able to go back to his house, but his MRI showed a traumatic brain injury.

[00:38:09]Um, I happened to be in Havana when this thing first started and the Cubans, to their credit, they said, "Whatever it is, it's not us." and we welcome the FBI and the CIA if they want to come here and investigate. Welcome to come. Um I think it's probably the Russians or the Chinese, but we shouldn't be we shouldn't consider this to be mutually exclusive. You know, we used one of these weapons in Venezuela when we snatched President Maduro. We know that the Russians have these. We know that the Israelis have them, the Chinese have them. There are a lot of countries that have them. Now, it's a violation of international law to use them on the battlefield, right? But we used it anyway. And that's why we didn't have a single casualty from the night that we snatched Maduro, even though we killed 80 people. We killed um 45 Venezuelan soldiers and 35 Cuban soldiers. Not a single US casualty. And it's because we zapped them with this sound weapon, whatever it was, and just incapacitated them.

[00:39:18]>> It's kind of terrifying.

[00:39:19]>> It is.

[00:39:20]>> And I think that's just the tip of the iceberg of what is out there.

[00:39:24]>> Yeah.

[00:39:24]>> In the world of spycraft.

[00:39:25]>> Well, there was DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Planning Agency, whatever it's called, they're the ones that are doing like the 20 years ahead of time tech experimenting.

[00:39:41]Um, when I was still at the agency, DARPA had had developed this laser that could blind soldiers on the battlefield with the idea being it's more humane to blind them than to kill them.

[00:39:57]>> It's it's a violation of the of the laws of war. You can't blind people. I mean, listen, it's probably is better to blind them than to than to kill them. But we're going to have to renegotiate some of these international treaties because you can't do stuff like that.

[00:40:16]>> Is there someone within the agency that their sole job and probably a whole team is to innovate tech?

[00:40:22]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:40:22]>> Like in all the spy movies, like you go into this cool room and some like mad scientist is cooking up this thing that you attach to your trench coat and this kind of weapon.

[00:40:30]>> Yeah.

[00:40:30]>> Did you get to visit some of those rooms? it well it it's the directorate of science and technology so it's an entire directorate it's one of the four directorates at the CIA and a guy that I sat next to for years and is an old friend of mine is now the uh chief technological officer the CTO at the CIA you know senior intelligence service level four he's really made it but um no there's there's no room like in the James Bond movies where you know you just knock on Q's door and and she lets you in and fit hits you with the latest, you know, miracle pen that shoots bullets and lasers and all kinds of stuff. No, what they'll do is if you need some of this tech in the field, you send a cable saying, "This is the operation I'm doing. This is what I need. Can somebody fly out here and help me?" And they'll fly out with a diplomatic a sealed diplomatic pouch with the gadgets in it. And then they'll demonstrate them and you pick whatever is most appropriate for what you want to accomplish. And did you go through an experience like that where you had to pick through gadgets?

[00:41:33]>> I was chief of of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 911.

[00:41:38]>> And we were going after senior al-Qaeda leaders.

[00:41:44]We knew that we could get them if they would just make one mistake, one electronic mistake. And so these two tech officers flew out with a bunch of gadgets. Nothing was exactly what I needed. And so they just created something from scratch. It took him about a week.

[00:42:02]>> Are you able to explain what this is?

[00:42:05]>> It was something called the magic they called the magic box and it allowed us to zero in on a on a cell phone signal. The problem was that the target would turn on his cell phone just long enough to listen to his voicemails and then he would take the battery out in the days when you could take the battery out of your phone. And so it it ended up not being helpful to us.

[00:42:32]And how often would you say just human skills of being in the right place at the right time, being observant, following up on leads. Was that most of the job? And the tech was just a small little piece of >> That's that's 90% plus of the job.

[00:42:46]>> Yeah.

[00:42:46]>> I think when people picture a CIA agent, they're picturing a Jason Bourne kind of character, karate, chopping people in the neck. Is it a lot of boring field work?

[00:42:56]>> Oh my god. Yes.

[00:42:58]>> I was just talking about this yesterday.

[00:43:00]There's a lot of hurry up and wait like like in the military. Surveillance for example, there's nothing more boring than surveillance where you might be sitting at a window looking at the apartment across the street for days.

[00:43:16]And I mean like you know maybe somebody will relieve you after 6 hours, but you're just kind of just sitting there just looking at this apartment across the across the street. So, do a lot of agents have back issues from all the sitting and just >> a lot of a lot of CIA officers have mental ill uh illness from some of the things that they have to go through.

[00:43:37]>> Like what would give them mental illness?

[00:43:42]>> It's the pressure in a job like this is overwhelming at times and it's not unusual for someone to to crack overseas >> because this is your whole life. It's not like you have a family out there.

[00:43:57]>> Oh, no. We're all divorced like multiple times. I was only divorced twice and that was like the record least number of divorces.

[00:44:05]>> It's the highest divorce rate anywhere in government.

[00:44:08]>> And um it's not unusual for guys to be married four or five times. Uh but I'll give you two quick examples. We were we were strapping on our weapons and body armor to go after this al-Qaeda leader.

[00:44:22]And there was a guy in my branch. Um Mark, I liked Mark. He was a little bit tightly wound, but he was a nice enough guy. So I said, "Mark, let's go. Strap up." And he he said, "I I can't uh I can't go on the operation." I was like, "What do you mean you can't go?" He's like, "I beat my wife." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. We have this rule at the agency that if you've been convicted of domestic violence, you can't carry a gun. And if you can't carry a gun, you can't go on the armed operation, right? Cuz when the shootout starts, what are you going to do?

[00:44:58]So, that was one. There was another one where I was at headquarters. I was in the uh I was chief of the counter intelligence branch in the Osama bin Laden group and the head of the Hezbala division was a buddy of mine and he said to me, "Hey, can you do me a favor?" I said, "Sure." He says, "Can you go to Beirut for a couple of days?" I said, "Sure, but why don't you just ask Allan to go to Beirut? Allan's the Beirut guy." And he said, "Now Allan's nuts.

[00:45:26]He's on psychiatric uh no travel order."

[00:45:29]And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, he is kind of nuts." Okay, sure. I'll go. But you just never know when people go nuts.

[00:45:36]And when they go nuts, you have to worry. Are they going to come and shoot the place up? Are they going to go out on their meeting and shoot the source?

[00:45:43]Or are they going to shoot themselves?

[00:45:45]>> Yeah. It's a very dangerous person with a lot of skills to be setting loose in the world.

[00:45:50]>> Yeah, it is. And the pressure is otherworldly.

[00:45:56]>> Did they teach you ways to deal with the pressure?

[00:45:58]>> No.

[00:45:59]>> Breathing techniques, yoga, stretching?

[00:46:01]>> No. on my own, I I took Taichi, which helped me immensely. Uh, but no, that's why alcohol is such a problem at the agency.

[00:46:11]>> So, a lot of agents are dealing with this overwhelming storm of anxiety that pretty much a constant tightness in the chest of pressure that they have to deal, but then they also have to go into these life or death situations while dealing with that stress and somehow execute flawlessly.

[00:46:28]>> Yeah, I'll give you a story there, too.

[00:46:31]Um, I was handling a double agent case in the Middle East. Very, very dangerous kind of operation. The the agent, CIA people are officers. The people we recruit are agents. So, the agent did not know that I knew that he was a double agent. And so, he thought he was pulling one over on me. It's a very long story. I'm going to make it very short.

[00:46:56]Um, we ended up snatching him. He he had been ordered he had been ordered to shoot me in the next meeting. And so I was >> by the other country that he was working for >> and you that's classified >> cannot say it.

[00:47:13]>> Okay.

[00:47:13]>> And so I happened to be at headquarters. I got a call from NSA and they said, "Are you handling this double agent case?" And I said, "Yeah."

[00:47:22]And the analyst there says, "He was just ordered to shoot you in the next meeting." I said, "Oh, please." I said, "This guy's not going to shoot me in the next meeting." Then my boss runs out of his office. "OH MY GOD, I JUST got a call from NSA and the agent was ordered to shoot you in the next meeting." I said, "I know. They just called me." I said, "This guy's afraid of his own shadow. He's not going to shoot me in the next meeting. The guy's like 25 years older than I was or 20. He was 50 pounds overweight. Afraid of his own shadow. He's not going to be Joe Hero and shoot me in the next meeting. Well, they convene this meeting of all the big mucky mucks. And they're going around the table. This is like the chief of counterterrorism, the deputy chief, the deputy chief for operations, my division chief. So I said I said, "Please hear me out." I said, "The guy's 20 years older.

[00:48:15]He's 50 pounds overweight. He's he's afraid of everything. He's out of his element, you know. How about this? I said, "Let's do the next meeting at the Marriott in this foreign country." I said, "Every Marriott on Earth is exactly the same. As soon as you walk in, the bathroom is right there next to the entrance." I said, "Let's get adjoining rooms. We can have security and our liaison partners in the adjoining room." When he calls me to tell me he's entering the hotel, I would never tell him what room I I was in because I didn't want him to sneak up and and shoot me. I would meet him at the elevator lobby where there are people around. I'd give him a big bear hug and pat him down.

[00:48:57]>> So I said, I'll tell him when he calls me from the lobby, I'll tell him the room number. He comes up to the room and I'll have the door propped open and when he knocks, I'll say, "Come in." He comes in, I grab him, I'll take him down. you guys bust in from the next door room and everybody's happy. They were like okay only if you wear a bulletproof vest. I said fine.

[00:49:21]So we did that. Remember this story is about the pressures that we face.

[00:49:29]We had security in the lobby, like a half a dozen guys, all heavily armed.

[00:49:35]And then the enemy country sends their half dozen security guards, which we didn't expect.

[00:49:41]>> And they're in the lobby and our guys are kind of looking at their guys.

[00:49:47]So the agent calls and he says, "I'm walking in the lobby right now." And I said, "Okay, I'm in room whatever it was, 610."

[00:49:56]So he comes up and knocks on the door. I go, "Come in." He comes in. I come out of the bathroom. I grab him around his arms and his and his chest and I threw him to the ground. Our colleagues bust in from the next door room. I'm sitting on him. I have him pinned to the ground. He was trying to get the gun out of his out of his belt and I'm sitting on him and he's just looking up at me and I said, "Did you really think I was so stupid that I didn't know that you were a double agent this whole time? I'm I'm offended that you think so little of my abilities." And he's like, "Allah Akbar," he keeps saying.

[00:50:43]And I said, "Did you think I was such an amateur that I didn't know you would be armed?"

[00:50:51]And my leazison colleagues jab a needle into his into his leg and he's out unconscious.

[00:51:01]A dirty little secret of the hotel industry. People die every single day in hotels. And so it's not unusual to back up an ambulance to the back, you know, to the loading dock. And we put him on a gurnie, covered up like he was dead, put him in the ambulance, and we took him to the intelligence service headquarters.

[00:51:22]When he woke up two hours later, he's tied to a chair, >> zip tied.

[00:51:27]>> Mhm.

[00:51:28]>> He's a very uncomfortable position.

[00:51:30]>> Very uncomfortable. And my liazison colleagues are beating the out of him.

[00:51:37]So I said, 'Look, we can make this easy.

[00:51:43]We know who you are. We know what group that you're the head of. We want to know where your weapons cash is. It's as easy as that. And he's like, I'll never tell you. I'll never tell you. This went on for hours. Finally, I said, "Guys, I got to go to a wedding. Let's wrap this up."

[00:52:00]They were just beating the out of him. But I went to the wedding and it was a wedding of it was a wedding of the crown prince's fourth son.

[00:52:14]And so uh I get there and one of the and the crown prince's eldest son was sitting next to me. He and I really hit it off. He's sitting next to me. He says, "So what's your day been like?" I said, "Ah, you know, little bit of this, little bit of that. I went to the to to the bazaar to buy some uh souvenirs for my kids. But it's kind of a normal day.

[00:52:37]There was a lot on my mind that day. And as soon as that reception was over, I had to go back to the intelligence service headquarters to resume the interrogation. And I'll tell you, at about 2:00 in the morning, we had their entire weapons cash.

[00:52:52]Everything.

[00:52:54]>> Was it just from a standard beating continuing or did you have to change tactics?

[00:52:57]>> Oh, no. I ran into I ran into one of one of the agency guys years later. Let's see. So, this was in like early 2001.

[00:53:06]I'm going to say in like 200 seven. I ran into him uh at the mall in Tyson's Corner and I said, "Whatever happened to that guy?" And he goes, "Oh, he's still in prison. He'll die in prison.

[00:53:24]>> He's never going to get out."

[00:53:27]I said, "Good.

[00:53:29]He needs to be in prison."

[00:53:32]>> The conditions that a caught spy must face, I just can't even imagine how awful. Um, I want to ask you about your experience because you were kind of in the right place at the right time for the global war on terror and >> Americans got the narrative that we were liberating people and fighting terrorism.

[00:53:52]>> Yeah. How has that shifted your global perspective or how the American media tells us things? I guess do you feel like you were truly fighting terrorism >> for a while?

[00:54:02]>> Sure. 9/11 impacted me like it impacted everybody. I was in the building that day. You know, we no uh the CIA's headquarters. We we had to evacuate. We were ordered to evacuate twice before anybody left. I finally I I was able to drive halfway home and then I had to abandon my car on the side of the road because >> No, it was just chaos. It was it was like that movie World War Z where it's just chaos and everybody has to just get out of their cars and run for their lives. I got up to the uh Teddy Roosevelt bridge. I lived right near the bridge. So I was I was seven miles from CIA headquarters. I got about three and a half miles and then just abandoned my car and had to walk the rest of the way.

[00:54:44]When I got to the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, I saw the deputy national security adviser and he had no shoes.

[00:54:52]And I thought, "Oh my god, he's the deputy national security adviser. He's the guy that's supposed to be protecting us today." And he was so frightened that he ran from the White House with no shoes.

[00:55:06]Like, we're So, I met up with my girlfriend. She later became my wife. She was also a CIA officer um at my apartment. We went to the roof. We watched the Pentagon burn for a while. And then I said, "Finally, this this is ridiculous. We we have to go back to work." So we walked back to my car. I drove across the grassy median, drove back to headquarters, and then I didn't leave for 4 days. I just slept under the desk. So I volunteered over and over and over again to go to Afghanistan. Finally, they sent me to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations and um and I was a true believer. Listen, we caught guys, we caught this one Saudi guy. Um well, let me back up very quickly. We filled the Rahul Pindi jail. Every every al-Qaeda operative that we caught, we would put in the Rahul Pindi jail. Rahul Pindi is a huge city that's grown so big that it's kind of connected itself to Islamabad the capital of Pakistan and Rahul Pindi is where the where the Pakistani defense ministry is based right the army is based there gigantic city so the PS came to me and said look the jail's full you got to do something with all these prisoners we can't hold anymore So, I I called headquarters and I said, "The pack said that the jail's full and they want these guys out. What do you want me to do with them?" And they said, "Put them on a C12 cargo plane and send them to Guantanamo." And I said, "Guantamo, Cuba." And they said, "Yeah." I said, "Why would we send prisoners to Cuba?" And they said, "We've come up with this idea. We're gonna put them in Cuba for two or three weeks until we figure out which federal district court to try them in and then we'll just send them to Boston, Washington, New York and put them on trial there. I said, "Oh, that's a great idea." So, we put these guys, this first load of prisoners on a C12. Um, we ran out of handcuffs, so we had to use flexi cuffs, right? Well, the co-pilot of the plane, the plane would land in in Oman for refueling and then it would land somewhere in like Ghana or something for refueling again and then go the rest of the way for uh to Cuba.

[00:57:32]So, the co-pilot had to pee. He goes back in the hold where we have all the prisoners. And one Saudi al-Qaeda fighter had broken his flexi cuffs and he was on his hands and knees and he was chewing on the hydraulic cable to crash the plane into the ocean. That's how serious these guys were.

[00:57:54]>> You almost have to admire in a weird sick way how dedicated some of these guys are.

[00:58:01]>> They I've said this before, they hate us more than they love life itself. And you have to appreciate that to really understand what you're up against.

[00:58:12]>> Do you think America created these people by how we perform polic if we had just been better to people overseas?

[00:58:21]>> I guess I don't feel like a terrorist is born in a vacuum. Would you >> that's absolutely true.

[00:58:26]>> So Abu Zubeta was the first high-value target that we captured. highest ranking terrorist captured in America in American history, CIA history up to >> 911 mastermind >> up to that point. We thought he was the 911 mastermind. He was not.

[00:58:42]>> Um, Khalik Muhammad was, but he and I were talking about this one time and he said, you know, cuz I I said to him, he was crying and I said, "You're not the victim here. There were 50,000 people in those towers. What did you think we were going to do? did you think we wouldn't try to hunt you down to capture you or or to capture Bin Laden or kill him? And he said, I never wanted to attack the United States. I wanted to attack Israel. And he said, I never had anything against the United States until I saw a video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian grandmother.

[00:59:22]How you going to argue with that?

[00:59:24]These are the type of images that I've actually been cataloging on my phone on my Instagram feed. When I see an example of Israeli brutality in the West Bank or Gaza or a lot of places nowadays, I save it into my Israeli atrocity real. And I guess I'm it makes me wonder what is your take on Hamas? Are they freedom fighters? Are they terrorists? Or is there a yin and yang to what they do?

[00:59:48]That's actually a tough question.

[00:59:51]For many many years from the founding of Hamas, I I believed Hamas to be freedom fighters, not a terrorist group. I took exception with October 7th. They killed a lot of civilians on October 7th. If you're going to attack an Israeli, you know, arms depot or a a base or a police station. I I fully understand. You know, killing is it's a terrible thing, but I understand the the liberation aspect.

[01:00:20]It's people in the field, warrior against warrior, not innocent.

[01:00:23]>> That's right. But, you know, a a pop music concert and you just kind of slaughter everybody.

[01:00:29]I I just couldn't I couldn't abide that.

[01:00:33]The Israelis, however, a viable policy cannot be to kill everybody. And that's what the Israeli policy is. And the Israelis just in the last couple of weeks have finally admitted that the the numbers of Palestinian dead as reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas, that those numbers are correct. The Israelis finally admitted that the numbers are correct. So >> after saying for months that that was >> Hamas, anti-semitic, >> yeah, anti-semitic lies, propaganda, oh no, the numbers are correct. So officially we're talking about something like 68 or 69,000 dead. Unofficially it's probably closer to 200,000 dead because we don't have any idea how many bodies are still buried in the rubble.

[01:01:24]>> How many bodies got vaporized?

[01:01:26]>> How many bodies were vaporized? That's exactly right. How many people were disappeared?

[01:01:31]>> How many people are rotting away getting tortured in some prison right now that on the charge of throwing a rock?

[01:01:36]>> That's right. What got me interested in it, there was an American, Palestinian-American dad whose boy got beaten to death, a Florida resident um in the West Bank by a mob of Israeli settlers. And then his nephew, >> I know what you're talking about.

[01:01:50]>> His nephew got taken to Israeli prison on the charge of throwing a rock where he started out 110 lbs, 15 years old, uh spent his 16th birthday in in Israeli prison, military prison, and lost 27 pounds, had scabies, um and this type of stuff. Even Mike Huckabe, who's one of the chief scientists you can imagine, the >> worst of the worst.

[01:02:10]>> Even he he added Israel on Twitter and said, "This is a murder that we need to investigate. Someone needs to be held accountable." And of course, like most settler violence, >> no one >> gets charged with anything. And I guess this is my predicament that I'm in and I'm curious and from your side of working with uh MSAD agents and I don't know how much IDF soldier contact you had, but I've interviewed a lot of IDF guys at this point and some of them I think if we to take the Israeli issue off the table, we'd actually be friends.

[01:02:39]We would agree on a lot of things.

[01:02:40]They're good guys. But when it comes to what Israel is doing, it's like we are living on opposite planets. Everything I say that I feel like is it's on my phone. I see it. I I see what's happening. They make you question your own reality and act like even just saying your reality that what you see um is somehow hateful.

[01:02:57]>> But they've overplayed their hand since October 7th. You can only call so many people anti-semitic, right? And you can only call so many people who are not anti-Semitic anti-semitic before the term loses all meaning. I said to Tucker Carlson recently, I said, "You know, this the political director to the Israeli foreign minister wrote an article and called me noted anti-semite John Kiryaku." I was I was offended.

[01:03:25]>> It's a badge of honor now, I think.

[01:03:27]>> Well, now it is. And he said, "Oh, that's nothing." He said, "I'm anti-semite of the year."

[01:03:32]>> And I said, "Okay, I feel better." How has it been dealing with MSAD? I guess like to me, my stereotype of as an Israeli is a very belligerent. They try and steamroll you. You ask them one question, they go for 10 minutes in different directions, they change the game. Like it's not Palestine, it's Judy and Samra.

[01:03:48]>> Yeah, >> that's my experience with these guys.

[01:03:50]>> Yeah, they do that a lot. I only dealt with the with Mossad once and it was I was only six weeks into the job.

[01:03:57]>> 1990.

[01:03:59]They were so offensive and so aggressive that I went back to headquarters and I told my boss, "Never again. I will never work with the Israelis ever again." They weren't helpful.

[01:04:11]>> And I never did. Oh, they were hostile.

[01:04:14]They were actively hostile. And the one guy says to me, he's he he has his glasses like this and he's like, "How do you spell your name?" So, because I was overt at the time, I spelled it for him.

[01:04:26]And he goes, "You are Jewish." And I said, "Oh, don't you dare." I said, "I am not recruitable.

[01:04:36]Don't even think about it."

[01:04:38]And then later on, colleagues of mine had very like seriously negative experiences in um in Israel. And these are pro-Israel CIA officers.

[01:04:49]>> Mhm.

[01:04:50]>> A married couple with whom I worked very very closely.

[01:04:55]They got assigned to um the consulate in Jerusalem when it was a consulate and the embassy was in Tel Aviv.

[01:05:01]They were invited to a hail and farewell party welcoming them to Israel by the US ambassador and you know farewell to the people that they're replacing. So when they got back to their house in Jerusalem at the end of the party, all of their living room furniture had been rearranged >> to send a message >> with the the message being we can do whatever we want and there's nothing you can do about it. And I think that's the general attitude that they've been operating with since I've noticed really because I didn't think about Israel before October 7th. I just kind of thought I don't know maybe there's some good hummus over there whatever. I didn't even really think and all of a sudden it seems like they have this attitude they do whatever they want. There's nothing you can do about it >> and they are getting away with it.

[01:05:48]>> Mhm. Well, the second time this happened, they were invited to the ambassador's Christmas party and they went to the Christmas party and they came back and people had taken shits in all of their toilets. Right? We all have big houses overseas because you have to entertain. It's part of the job.

[01:06:04]>> So, they had four bathrooms and people had taken shits in all four of the toilets and left it unflushed.

[01:06:11]>> And then finally, as they were leaving, um the ambassador had a farewell party for them. They got back to the house and somebody had broken in and cut the dog's tail off and wrapped it in gauze and medical tape. The dog was whimpering under the dining room table. So, you know why? We're supposed to be allies and God knows the Israelis ask us for everything under the sun and then that's how you treat our people. There was another guy I worked with who was very excited to go to Israel. I never went to Israel while I was at the CIA. I actively avoided it. And because I was an Arabist and an an Arab specialist and I spoke Arabic, I went to the all the other countries. I didn't go to Israel.

[01:06:52]I never went to Israel until 2022 for the first time. So, um, this friend of mine that was one of our our colleagues went to Israel for an exchange. He went to Mossad and he said, "This is what we're doing on XYZ issue." And then Mossad said, "Oh, this is what we're doing on XYZ issue." And that it's a normal intelligence exchange. It was Christmas and so he had spent like $1,000 on Christmas presents and when he went back to his hotel room, all of them had been stolen and the uh the suitcase that he had them in was just empty.

[01:07:29]>> So based off your experience with these guys, what can you say about their culture?

[01:07:33]>> The Israelis really believe that they're alone in the world even though they're not. And because they've convinced themselves that they're alone in the world, they treat everybody else with disrespect. You know, we should we should make our own conclusions about Israeli policy by watching the implementation of Israeli policy. If the Israelis say, "We want peace. We love peace. It's all about peace." And then they murder 200,000 people, mostly women and children and elderly, and almost all of whom are civilians.

[01:08:07]you know, we should believe what we see, not what we're told.

[01:08:12]>> So, how is it that they've crafted this narrative that politicians seem to be believing that they are our greatest ally, they always have our back.

[01:08:19]>> Oh, that's that's simple. Um, it's it's through the use of Apac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It's the most powerful lobbying uh firm in the world. And not just on Capitol Hill where literally every member of Congress isn't is assigned an Apac lobbyist, right, to craft policy, but at the at the state and the local levels. Even I have a friend I have a friend who uh lives in Texas and a member of the Texas state legislature called him and said we decided to to sponsor a resolution making it, you know, John Smith Day in honor of you.

[01:09:03]And he was like, "Oh, that's awesome."

[01:09:05]He said, "Uh, we do this, you know, couple of hundred times a year. Uh, somebody has done some great thing in the community. we make it John Smith Day. It has the the big seal. It's signed by the governor. Couple of weeks pass and they called and said, "Listen, the John Smith Day uh named after you, it's not going to happen." He was like, "Why? What happened?"

[01:09:29]>> The Israelis uh objected >> in Texas in Austin, Texas. What Israelis objected? Well, the Apac representative in Austin. And he's like, "Apac has a representative in Austin." and he said they have representatives in every one of the 50 state capitals.

[01:09:46]>> When you tell this to a Zionist or to an IDF soldier, they will say that that's a anti-semitic trope going back to the Hitler days that the that you know Jewish Zionists have their tentacles and everything and that they control everything and that's just uh anti-semitic slop.

[01:10:02]>> Yes. And I would say, and that attitude is going to lead to the destruction of Israel because you've alienated now even your friends and one of these days you won't have any friends because you've called them all anti-semites.

[01:10:16]>> Don't you think the United States is on a similar trajectory that we're trying to almost eliminate our friends right now?

[01:10:21]>> Yeah. Yeah. Like we're actively working to make it so that we have no friends.

[01:10:25]Yes.

[01:10:26]>> We're we're pushing people like we're pushing Canada to trade with China.

[01:10:29]We're pushing Europe. I mean, people that were always our buddies.

[01:10:34]>> Um, do you think this is a on purpose effort to weaken or collapse the the American empire, or is this just serious miscalculations from the top?

[01:10:43]>> I think it's serious miscalculations from the top.

[01:10:45]>> Trump thought he throw his weight around. Thought that he could just play chicken with the economy to the point where everyone just uh goes to with what he's saying, but his bets are not paying off. You think that's what it is?

[01:10:56]>> I think that's what it is.

[01:10:57]>> And do you think he has the humility?

[01:10:58]Well, does he have the humility to realize that and and course correct?

[01:11:03]>> I I don't think so. I think that he genuinely believes in in his own personal strategy and in his abilities to best represent the country and I somebody asked him just a week or two ago who his closest advisers are and he said he doesn't have any adviserss. He just goes with his gut and I think that's true.

[01:11:24]>> Uhhuh. I think he was telling the truth.

[01:11:26]So when you calculate how things are re-shifting right now, a lot of people are saying this is the the dying breaths of the American empire.

[01:11:37]>> Do you think that's accurate?

[01:11:38]>> I do. If you just look at the defense budget visav the national debt, we cannot afford like literally we can't afford to keep this up indefinitely. It just it's untenable. We're getting to the point where we're approaching we're approaching the point where 50% of our GDP is going to >> servicing the debt.

[01:12:04]>> That's it.

[01:12:05]>> And in five or 10 years it'll be 100%.

[01:12:07]>> Yeah. It >> it's a runaway train.

[01:12:09]>> And then we have no country.

[01:12:11]>> Yeah. We're going to have to do something drastic. And I think at the very least, you know, Donald Trump said, I don't know, six months ago that he wanted to cut the Pentagon budget 50%. I was like, "Oh my god, he does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize." 50%.

[01:12:27]I celebrated it. And then a couple of weeks later, no, I think I'm going to increase it 50% to 1.5 trillion, which would be bigger than the next 15 largest countries in the world combined.

[01:12:42]>> It's untenable. Even Even The Onion had this uh hilarious headline. Uh, China content to sit and watch US destroy itself. Yeah, there it is.

[01:12:56]>> I guess what gives me a little bit of hope is that the pendulum does swing back and forth quickly. Um, it is possible that there's a blue wave in 2026.

[01:13:05]>> Wow. They're all the same. That is the thing.

[01:13:08]>> It's two sides of the same coin.

[01:13:11]>> So, we're But you don't think anyone is going to step in to save the day?

[01:13:14]>> No, I do not.

[01:13:15]>> What if we all vote independent?

[01:13:17]>> Okay. then then we can have that conversation. Yes.

[01:13:20]>> Okay. But if we follow, you know, Vance or Newsome, it's obviously the two sides of the same coin.

[01:13:26]>> Absolutely. Yes.

[01:13:28]>> It's depressing.

[01:13:28]>> It's depressing. Yeah.

[01:13:31]>> Yes. And you know, people say, "Well, who did you vote for?" I voted for the Libertarians. I proudly traveled to 12 states with Gary Johnson, and I introduced him at all of his campaign stops in 12 Western States. I love the guy. I I love what he stood for. And Ronald Reagan was right. I know I'm gonna take for saying this, but I'm gonna say it again. Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem. It's not the solution to the problem.

[01:13:58]>> So, are you kind of in the Ron Ron Paul camp as well?

[01:14:00]>> I am.

[01:14:01]>> Okay. That's been one of my favorite politicians of our era. I voted independent my entire life except for this last election. I voted for Trump because I thought, you know what, he's coming in a second time. The system was a little bit against him with all the courts. They tried to crush him.

[01:14:16]>> And Biden was an utter disaster as president.

[01:14:18]>> And Camala, you know, is a >> a worse. Yeah. Exactly.

[01:14:21]>> So, I thought, you know what? If there's actually a chance that someone might shake things up, it's going to be Trump.

[01:14:26]So, ashamedly, I switched my libertarian vote, my independent vote, and went to Trump. And he only he doubled down. He made it like he became the establishment and some to a level that I didn't anticipate. And so to me, the only vote for the foreseeable future that is even a a worthy vote is an independent.

[01:14:45]>> I said to Ducker Carlson the other day, I said, "Please, I'm begging you. You have to run for president." And he's like, "Oh my god, bite your tongue and don't ever say those words again."

[01:14:55]>> You don't think he'll do it?

[01:14:57]>> I don't.

[01:14:57]>> Okay. So, >> although I think he'd win if he did.

[01:15:01]>> He has a lot in his favor. Um, plus, you know, without the constraints of Fox News, he's the most visible truth teller out there. He really is.

[01:15:12]>> Do you think Dave Smith is VP?

[01:15:16]>> Why not?

[01:15:17]>> Mhm.

[01:15:18]>> I have respect for him.

[01:15:22]>> So, are you optimistic for the future of this country?

[01:15:25]>> No. Not with the system that we have in place. No. No. You know, time was in my lifetime when the Democrats really were a progressive party and now, you know, it's all about the surveillance state. It's all about the Pentagon budget. It's there's just no difference between Democrats. I mean, there are little little minor differences around war differences.

[01:15:55]>> Yes, exactly. That's the best way to say it. microculture war differences >> to give the illusion of opposition, but really they come hand in hand and skip down the street of everything that is against what the average American wants.

[01:16:07]>> That's right. That's right. Yes.

[01:16:11]>> Folks, I'm going to leave you with this message. I do think there is hope and I do think we have to consider the power we have collectively. And I don't mean if this I don't know if this means not paying taxes or maybe just amassing at the ballot box, but I don't think we should give our country I don't think we should give up on it. Yeah, >> it's too remarkable. I mean, when you read >> fighting for >> when you read the history of the founding fathers, you know that this is a special special place. And >> there are people that throughout its history have really been uh to me inspiring like Teddy Roosevelt. I would love to have a guy like him come along.

[01:16:43]True principles, true determination to do what's good for the country. And so while it is depressing to look at what our leaders are doing and to know that no matter what happens in 2028, it's likely going to be the same story just as it has been the last few years. Um I don't know is an do we need a riot in the streets? Do we need to shake the trees? Um is there a viable way for us to change the the trajectory?

[01:17:05]>> I'm I'm one of those people who believes we need to take to the streets. We need 1968 all over again.

[01:17:12]>> We really do. folks. Uh when the time comes to march in the streets together, be willing to be whether whatever side of the spectrum you're on, um squash little culture stuff and be willing to shake the hand because at the end of the day, affordable living, affordable health care, not being horrifically in debt, not bombing children. This is a there should be a common sense platform that we all can get behind and um I hope it's possible. But um John, it's been an absolute uh treat listening to your stories. Um, thank you for joining me.

[01:17:43]>> Good to meet you.

[01:17:44]>> Yes.