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thank you. You are an ex CIA operative.
>> Why should I believe anything that
you're going to tell me?
>> Well, you know that that's a good
question. And I get it with some
frequency. And all I can say is I have a
very long track record. And my track
record is one of telling the truth. So I
can't force people to believe what I
say, but they can certainly choose to
believe me or choose to not believe me.
I won't lose sleep over it either way.
>> You've mentioned that you're looking for
a pardon from Trump.
>> How's that going? Do you think you're
going to get it?
>> No. If I'm if I'm being fully honest,
let me let me back up by saying that I
have fantastic support from people in
the inner circle around Donald Trump and
I'm very grateful for it. Household
names,
but I am told by one of those household
names that it's not going to happen
because the CIA hates me. And I
responded, this is just three weeks ago.
I responded by saying that I've never
met John Ratcliffe, the CIA director.
I've never exchanged a harsh word with
John Ratcliffe.
>> And this cabinet member said it's not
about John Ratcliffe as a person. It's
institutional.
They fear that if you get a pardon,
it'll open the door for other would be
whistleblowers who want to go public on
issues of waste, fraud, abuse,
illegality,
>> and um and they're not willing to
entertain that. Is there anyone else
that is more persona nong grata than you
do you think?
>> Ed Snowden.
>> Okay. So that's the sort of one and two.
Yeah. Of
>> Yeah. You know, when I was still at the
CIA, Philip Agi was still being talked
about.
>> Who was that?
>> Philip Ag was a CIA case officer in the
1960s
who was um serving in South America. I
think it was Chile or Peru, one or the
other. and he walked in on a torture
session that the CIA was doing with the
host government intelligence service and
decided to resign from the CIA. But more
than just resigning from the CIA, he
wrote a book called Inside the Company
in which he documented in an appendix
the names of every undercover CIA
officer that he ever met. And it was
something like 1,200 names that he came
up with. They wanted to execute Philip
Ag. Even years and years later when I
was at the agency, the old-timers were
still talking about, you know, how do we
get AG? He ended up fleeing to uh Cuba
and lived most of his life in Cuba.
>> But uh yeah, until until Snowden, AG was
number one.
>> He could give Andrew Tate some advice. I
think he needed
>> Seriously, Tate, at least if you're
going to get caught, don't be got don't
be caught wearing those silly clothes.
Well, I think he was actually uh the
reason that he was taken away was for
crimes against fashion.
>> There you go. That that actually makes
sense to me.
>> Correct. Yeah. How much speaking so
president CIA, how much oversight does
the president have over the CIA? How
compartmentalized are those?
>> Well, you know, that's that's an issue
that is debated.
It it shouldn't be because the president
should be the definitive word and the
the president's not the definitive word
because
because there really is such a thing as
the deep state. And I say this all the
time. You don't have to call it the deep
state. You can call it the federal
bureaucracy. You can call it the state.
Whatever you want. But the fact is that
it exists. And presidents come and go
every four years or every eight years.
and the deep state, you're there for 25
years, 30, 35 years.
>> I used to sit next to a guy who's now
one of the, you know, top four or five
officers, he's been there for 37 years.
>> So, they know that if a a president
orders them to do something they don't
want to do, they just say, "Yes, Mr.
President," and then they ignore him.
It must feel a lot like uh being a
hotelier and having guests that come and
go, mediumstay guests compared with you
who's been there for decades
>> forever. Uh-huh. That's exactly right.
And there's a bigger problem, too. Um
and that's the the lack of congressional
oversight between well, starting in
1975, the Church Committee in the Senate
and the Pike Committee in the House,
they transformed into oversight
committees. So it became the church
committee became the senate select
committee on intelligence and the pike
committee became the house permanent
select committee on intelligence. But
the thing is is
how how does a staff of 40 50 people
oversee
an organization of 20 30 40,000 people?
>> Mhm. That's how many are in the CIA.
>> Can't Well, the number's classified. Um
and my information is so old. I I don't
know how many people, but it's got to be
a lot more than it was when I was there.
So, how do you oversee that huge of a
bureaucracy? You can't.
>> And you rely on self-reporting. And I'll
give you an example.
>> Um,
and this was not unusual in any way. I
was involved in an operation that at the
very end went bad.
And when an operation goes bad
and a life is lost, you have to report
it to Congress, to the congressional
oversight committees.
I was with the station chief. We were
driving back to our office and he says
to me, "You're going to write the
cable?" And I said, "Yep, I'm going to
write the cable." And he said, "Yeah,
listen. um
don't send that to Congress.
And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "No,
don't don't send it to Congress." And
that was not unusual. Like, "Oh,
Congress has enough to worry about.
They're working on the budget right now.
We don't want to just throw this wrench
into the works by telling them we just
lost a source."
>> And I said, "Okay, you're the boss." And
so I didn't report it to Congress.
>> Does that make the CIA a kind of shadow
government? Oh yeah, I think that's very
much what it is. Yes.
>> So, who is really controlling what
happens behind the scenes in America?
>> It's that layer right below the
political appointees. So, it's that
layer right below the director and
deputy director of the CIA, the
secretary and deputy secretary of state,
secretary and deputy secretary of
defense.
>> Mhm. It's it's those
it's those career government bureaucrats
that aren't going anywhere.
>> I'm going to make an analogy between the
CIA and running nightclubs and I'm going
to try and see if I can bring this into
land. So, uh, I ran events for a very
long time in the north of the UK, and I
had this very big events company. And
one of the things that the managers of
the nightclub wanted to see were the
owners of the events company standing on
the front door next to them. Where you
stand is typically on the door. Make
sure that the queue's moving nicely,
that the door staff aren't beating
anybody up, people are paying the right
amount of the till, etc., etc. Pop your
head downstairs. Is everything going all
right inside? Outside is where the
action is. And one of the things that
was interesting, you would assume, well,
if you're the owner, you have this more
cubrious like, you know, opulent, you
just sit in the car or go for a coffee
or, you know, don't even leave. Like,
it's 1:00 in the morning and it's cold
in the northeast of the UK. Why do you
even need to be there? Like, you're
functionally not doing anything. All of
the action is happening downstairs. All
of the managers that work for me and my
business partner, they're the ones that
actually know everyone that's going in.
By this point, I was 24, 25, 26, 27.
Most of the people that were in the club
were 19.
>> Mhm. But what we found was that in other
events companies who decided had less of
a Puritan work ethic than me and my
business partner did, when the owners
started to leave the front door, the
managers for the events company and the
manager of the venue would start to
develop a tighter relationship. And I
think that we usually assume the person
who has the most seniority
is the one that's got the that's closest
to the information that has the most
respect. But it's quite reliably it's
not. It's the enforcer. You know, even
if you look at the mafia, how many times
was the boss overthrown by one of the
second in commands or one of their
lieutenants? Because it's it really is
the enforcer that is kind of at the
coldface dayto-day. They've got
sufficient seniority to be seen with
respect, but they're also grinding away.
They're stood on the front door of the
nightclub and that was we could predict
very reliably that particular events
company, the owners stopped going out on
a nighttime. We give it 3 months, 6
months before one of their managers
goes, "Well, hang on a second. I'm mates
with the guy that runs the venue and the
dude that runs the company, like he's
not even here. Like, why don't we just
cut him out? I'll backhand you a little
bit and we can go direct. And I think it
sounds somewhat similar here. Not only
that, but it would be as if me and my
co-founder were being replaced every so
often. So, not even was the loyalty not
to the person who's more at the coldface
doing the work, but who are you being
loyal to? You're being loyal to an
appointee that's going to [ __ ] off at
some point in the next few years. So, it
makes it makes complete sense.
>> And they have they have a vested
interest in maintaining the status quo
>> because they don't want to lose their
job.
>> They don't want to lose their job. But
even more importantly, they're the ones
that make the trains run on time.
They're the ones that that are foreign
policy and defense and intelligence
policy.
>> And they don't want some bombthrowing
new president to come in. I I've said
this a number of times before, but I
think it bears repeating. One of the
things that the CIA generally loves is
when a new president is elected and he
has no foreign policy experience
whatsoever. because from the day after
the election, he's entitled to a PDB
briefing, president's daily brief. And
so, it's usually the deputy director for
intelligence or the director of the PDB
staff or or sometimes both of them
together that will go brief the new
president-elect. And I always say as
soon as they lay out the first like blue
border report or black border report,
it's like six levels above top secret
and they say, "Mr. President-elect, just
wait until you see the cool things we're
doing all over the world. So highly
classified, everybody else has to step
outside. Just wait." H they've recruited
him. They made him one of the guys.
>> They just sucked him right in. and every
day, six days a week, he can't wait to
get that briefing. But somebody who has
foreign policy experience and maybe, you
know, might be a little bit jaded about
CIA failures, whether analytic or
operational, isn't going to just succumb
to the allure of inside information.
>> What are the levels of security
>> classification?
So, it starts with unclassified. the the
New York Times is unclassified.
Everybody can see it. Then there's
something called sensitive but
unclassified.
So it's usually
like an internal memo or something, you
know, uh the uh this the the Dunkin
Donuts in the CIA cafeteria is going to
close for two weeks for renovation. It's
sensitive because it's inside the CIA,
but it's unclassified. Then there's
confidential. Most of what the uh State
Department does is confidential where if
it's exposed, it would be embarrassing
to the federal government. Not
dangerous, but it would be embarrassing.
Then there's secret. Revelation of
secret information would cause serious
damage to the national security.
>> Then there's top secret. revelation of
that information would cause grave
damage to the national security. That's
the terminology in the in the espionage
law.
>> But then there are compartments, dozens
and dozens of compartments that are in
addition to top secret. For example,
when you get hired by the CIA, you don't
just get a top secret security
clearance. You go in with what's called
a TSSCI
SITK gamma clearance.
>> I know it's crazy. So, it's top secret
special intelligence, meaning you're
allowed to see uh NSA reporting.
Uh, and the compartments are talent,
keyhole, and then gamma is above talent
and keyhole. I remember laughing out
loud in the first classified briefing I
ever participated in because the guy
starts the briefing off by saying the
word Zarf when standing alone is
unclassified.
And I laughed out loud like what the
[ __ ] are you talking about? Zarf is a
compartment that is no longer used at
NSA where they say we have top secret
information. You can see it, but he
can't because it's top secret. Zarf,
what the heck does that mean? That
doesn't mean anything. And then he's
telling us you can say the word Zarf,
but you can't say what Zarf is,
>> right? Fantastic. And then so that's
what's the what's the gamma is the
highest.
>> Um, on sort of a day-to-day basis, gamma
is the highest. So, if I if I'm a CIA
analyst, let's say, and I'm I'm getting
all source intelligence and and I'm
giving a briefing and I'm going to go to
some, you know, I'll go to central
command to give a briefing.
>> The guys who have the highest level
security clearances are going to be up
to gamma.
>> So, I can talk about gamma. Gamma is
going to be sensitive to the point
where, let's say it is uh, you know,
we've intercepted the cell phone of some
foreign leader. That's that's going to
be gamma because it's particularly
sensitive. Mhm.
>> But then there's a lot above gamma.
Yeah.
>> Do you know what that called?
>> Oh, sometimes they'll they'll come and
go in a matter of months depending on
the operation.
>> Zaf.
>> Yeah. Like Zarf. Zarf was around though
for a long time. It was from like the
50s. But um let's say um
let's say there's a specific operation.
We're going to we're going to try to
locate you know the Ayatollah of Iran.
And so we have we have access to a
certain, you know, electronic
>> in his cell phone or the cell phone of a
bodyguard or whatever.
>> That could be, you know, top secret sitk
gamma
jelly jar.
>> I'm just making that up.
>> Yep. Yep.
>> Uh the the code names are
computerenerated at random, so you never
know what they're
>> Can you can you think of a hypothetical
situation that would be the most high
security
that you can think of?
>> Oh, yeah. Pretty much anything that
DARPA does, the Defense Advanced
Research Program Agency, DARPA is
working on things
that you and I see only in science
fiction movies. That's why so many
people believe that that the UFOs that
we've been seeing all these years are
not actually UFOs. their experimental
DARPA aircraft or the Chinese version of
DARPA or something like that. But DARPA
is so the work that DARPA does is so
highly classified. I never met a CIA
officer that had access to that.
>> Do you think the president even knows
about that stuff?
>> I think that if he asked he would be
read into the compartment and told, but
I think on a daily basis probably not.
So does he have is it right to say that
the president is the person who if they
wanted to could get access to the most
information across the board generally
>> the only person Yeah. And he's also the
only person in government that can just
declassify literally anything he wants
with a stroke of a pen,
>> including gamma, zaf,
>> all of it.
>> Jelly jar. Right. Okay. Uh do you think
that they abuse classification to hide
embarrassing things?
>> 100%. Yes.
>> How much of it needs to be classified?
That stuff.
>> There's a guy named
Jay William J. William. I forget his
name. Anyway, there's a guy who was the
classification zar
under George W. Bush and now he has
become an anti-classification
activist.
>> Mhm.
>> His position is that fully 3/4
of classified documents ought not be
classified.
>> Politically inconvenient, personally
revealing, embarrassing.
>> Yeah. The White House and the Pentagon
especially leak like sibs, but they're
almost always authorized leaks. Like
you'll leak something for a political
purpose. You'll leak something to
embarrass a foreign leader. You leak you
leak something to try to get a sense of
where the public might be on a on an
issue.
>> Well, that I mean technically that's all
a violation of the Espionage Act. You
can't leak information like that, but
they do it literally every single day.
Every day.
Federal judge just approved the
Paramount Warner Brothers merger.
>> Larry Ellison's Oracle helps to secure
Tik Tok's USA data and their algorithm.
And then his son, David, runs Paramount,
including CBS News.
>> Pretty convenient, isn't it?
>> Oracle's name,
>> Yeah.
>> actually comes from the CIA project that
its founders worked on.
>> Yeah.
>> Do you think that private data and media
companies
>> could potentially become as powerful as
an intelligence agency?
>> Oh, I think it already is. And and I'll
tell you what makes it worse, too. In
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11
attacks, uh the CIA sought from Congress
a waiver allowing it to invest in tech
startups. Unprecedented in American
history, right? As a government, you
can't
act as as, you know, a private investor,
as an angel investor.
>> What if you get great returns?
>> Did and they did. The CIA was the very
first investor in Palunteer.
>> Mhm.
>> And Palanteer now is a global security
software uh concern to the point where
there's credible information indicating
that it's it's infiltrated governments
around the world. I was just in Sweden a
couple of weeks ago and there's this
huge national debate in Sweden
>> about whether or not to use Palunteer to
um to install and maintain their
governmental security databases
>> and Palunteer got the contract. So I
mean do we trust Palunteer not to just
feed everything to NSA and CIA? I don't.
I worked there for 15 years. I know how
it works.
Literally everything is going to NSA and
CIA.
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checkout. That's ei.com/modernwisdism
and modernwisdom a checkout. Is there a
philosophical justification for having
an organization like that which gives
your home countries and the country of
its origins national security
competitive advantage.
>> That's the bottom line. And I would say
of course for example when Ed Snowden
went public with his revelations in June
of 2013 one of the things that the that
the press really seized on was the fact
that NSA was intercepting Angala
Merkel's cell phone. Okay. I want NSA to
intercept Angala Merkel's cell phone.
>> I want to know what the German trade
positions are. I want to know what the
Germans are saying about the United
States. Right?
I don't want the CIA and NSA to spy on
me.
>> It's a part of NSA's charter, its
founding charter, that it is forbidden
from collecting data on American
citizens. Same with the CIA. It is
patently illegal for the CIA to collect
information on Americans. Yet, they both
do that every single day. Do you think
that companies like Flock, which there's
a lot of controversy around at the
moment, are private companies being used
to get around surveillance protections
that are meant to restrain the
government by just getting private
organizations to do it on their behalf?
>> Oh, yeah. and and 911 changed changed
that in a terrible way where you know
until 911 if the FBI for example wanted
to investigate you they would have to go
to a federal judge and say we want to
investigate Chris because of these four
reasons and then the judge would sign
you know a warrant.
Now, all they have to do, literally all
they have to do is write up a letter
called the National Security Letter,
take it to your service providers and
say, "Give us everything that you have,
and you are forbidden by the Patriot Act
from even telling anybody that we gave
you this letter."
>> What do you do? How do you defend
yourself? You can't. You don't even know
you're being investigated. And there's
no judge to say, "Wait a minute, guys.
You're going too far here. There is no
safety.
Where do you come into land on private
companies that develop technology that
can be beneficial for a country
and the inevitable relationship that's
going to come along? Like I've spent
time with Palmer Lucky. What he's trying
to do with Angel like I mean what's the
tagline of that? Fight unfair.
>> Yeah. Isn't that great?
>> I I want a clever guy a clever guy
that's on my side with a gun as opposed
to a clever guy that's on their side
with a gun. And I understand that the
issue is well if that gun is uh
distributed around this country enough
then it can be used to enforce me. I am
in the closest proximity to the gun.
Hopefully for a long time I shouldn't be
the person that's on the receiving end
of it. But there is a risk. This kind of
feels a little bit like uh the
organizational uh geopolitical systemic
equivalent of the debate that British
people have around Americans having guns
full stop.
>> Mhm. that hey yeah it's great that you
can defend yourself with it but also you
can be on the receiving end of it.
>> How do you square that circle in a a
country like this where organizations
can do it and if you don't decide to
embed them with the government they just
go to the highest bidder which might not
actually be you. Is it not better to
have eyes inside of that than it is to
let it just be a free-for-all?
>> Sure. In a perfect world yes and that's
why we need such robust oversight in
this in this area. I'm a firm believer
in the rule of law. I really am. And so
if uh why are you smiling?
>> This thought that came across I'm sorry
my fa my face betrays what I think
inside of my head. Um what I thought
inside of my head is the war the the law
can be [ __ ] with to just make it
whatever you want.
>> And that's the point I was going to
make. That's why we need
>> we need the real force of law. We we we
can't just change the law just to suit
the whims of of the political winds. We
need to be
uh see this is kind of my soapbox here.
I this is part of my standard speech at
universities.
>> Either we're going to be that shining
city on a hill that Ronald Reagan talked
about in 1984 or we're not. either we're
going to be a a nation that respects the
law and international law and treaties
or we're not. We can't just pretend to
be this this shining beacon of hope for
human rights and civil rights and civil
liberties
except when it's expedient to not be.
You know, so if if we're serious about
privacy, for example, then by God, let's
be serious about privacy. At the same
time, these companies, I think, can
perform a great national service because
if their technologies are used to keep
us safe, to keep Americans safe, then
God bless. I wouldn't want them selling
the technology to the North Koreans
>> or to the, you know, pick your enemy.
But then at the same time, if we're
going to be the good guys, let's by God,
let's be the good guys and be serious
about it.
>> Geopolitical climate's pretty chaotic at
the moment.
>> It is.
>> Who are you most worried about foreign
nation state being an American?
>> China. That's an easy one for me. Um,
the Chinese, first of all, the Chinese
do not have a history of imperialism.
They just don't. They don't invade other
countries. They never have. I mean,
sure, we can make an argument about
Tibet, but that's that's a separate
argument. But except for, you know, a
brief conflict with North Vietnam back
in the day, uh, and two border
skirmishes with the Indians, the Chinese
just don't attack other countries. They
purchase them. They co-opt them. They
there was a there was a headline on the
onion a couple of weeks ago that was
funny because it was so true. It it said
China content to sit back and watch us
destroy itself.
>> Mhm.
>> Because that's what we're doing when
we're spending between 1 and$1.5
trillion dollar a year on the defense
budget and the Chinese aren't. We're
spending more than the next eight
largest countries combined. Is it being
spent effectively?
>> No, it's not.
>> What's it mostly being wasted on?
>> I think it's being wasted on 144 what it
No, 210 bases in 144 different
countries. Number one, um I think that
it's being wasted on the development of
inefficient and inappropriate weapon
systems like the F-35. Nobody wanted the
F-35.
>> Why? Because you can't have a
onesizefits-all
aircraft when one size can never fit
all. And then we phase out the A-10.
Everybody loved the A-10. The A the A10
can go so low that you can practically
reach up and touch it as it's firing a
missile to destroy a tank. The F-35
can't do that.
So in the meantime,
the Chinese have enough money to buy
ports and airports and factories and
desalination plants and anything their
hearts desire in countries all around
the world
>> because they're not spending as much.
>> They're not spending it on on implements
of war.
>> Does that not make them more vulnerable,
though?
>> I don't think so. It buys them friends.
It tends to isolate the United States
and it frees up cash.
>> They're flexing economic power. they are
and then they can use that free cash to
promote the development of new
technologies that they can use against
us.
>> What is the end goal of China?
>> Oh, I think the end goal of China is
exactly what the American goal toward
the Soviet Union was during the cold
war. It's it's containment and
isolation, hoping that the US will
eventually collapse on itself. you know
this year uh we crossed the national
debt
border what's the word I want to use of
$40 trillion
>> so now the the number one expenditure in
government is defense and the number two
is interest on the national debt
>> I once I did an episode with the uh the
first long form episode with any dojo
pointy and uh it's Wow a guy called Sam
Caucus
>> needs to be at levels which is a glucose
monitor and he is now the chief
information officer at the Treasury.
>> Good grief.
>> And uh we did this episode in front of a
huge LED wall and we put the US debt
calculator up behind us as it was going.
And you know, he's seen everything. He's
seen where all of the bodies and buried
in the spiders webs are. And he was
like, "Yeah, it's it's a like
Frankenstein's monster thing that
there's not just one database for tax.
There's you've got to do lookups across
eight different multiple databases and
not everybody's information is held. not
all of the information is held in the
same format and so on and so forth. So
yeah, it's it's a a big sort of unwieldy
megalopouloolis of of information that's
that he's trying to navigate. But I
guess
>> well may I interrupt you for a second
too? Uh continuing on with China for a
second. Yeah.
>> All the while that this is happening,
the Chinese are actively committing
espionage against us and not just
against us but against all of our allies
as well. Just recently, there was even a
a deep covered Chinese intelligence cell
that was uncovered in New York City
where these Chinese intelligence
officers were threatening uh Chinese
dissident in greater New York and
threatening to then harm their relatives
in China. Wow.
>> If they didn't stop their activism
against um against the government in
Beijing. Uh but they're they're
recruiting Capitol Hill staffers.
They're recruiting FBI agents. They're
trying to infiltrate the CIA. They they
have intelligence officers spread out in
hard science PhD programs all across the
United States. This is a serious problem
for us.
>> How many spies do you think are in the
CIA and US government right now?
>> God, I hope the answer is zero. I mean,
we wouldn't have a counter intelligence
center if it really were zero. Uh, it's
impossible to say. I guess
>> is it easier to ask how many departments
haven't been infiltrated by foreign
intelligence than how many have?
>> Yeah, but now you're going to get me on
my high horse. Um I think the the
greatest
threat
the greatest immediate threat in terms
of infiltrating the government like
today right now is Israel.
>> Would they be doing that covertly or
overtly?
>> Covertly. They're being colllocated in
this new national defense authorization
act, colllocated in the Pentagon and in
the CIA. But I mean, as long as 35 years
ago, there were the FBI was able to
identify 187 undercover Israeli
intelligence operatives infiltrating or
having infiltrated American defense
contractors around the country. Just
three weeks ago, the Defense
Intelligence Agency director sent an all
hands email to every officer in DIA
saying, "Be particularly aware the
Israelis have really ramped up their
intelligence operations against us and
they're trying to infiltrate DIA." That
was three weeks ago.
>> How does a foreign nation get a spy
inside of US circles of power? What's
what are some of the roots in?
>> It's called the asset acquisition cycle
and it's four parts. Spot, assess,
develop, recruit. So, I spot you. Who
are you? Oh, you work for DIA. I'm going
to want to get to know you. I assess
you. I assess your access to information
that I want. If I determine that you do
have access to information I want, then
I begin to develop you. In the
development uh portion of this, I have
to identify a vulnerability. And a
vulnerability might be an easy one, like
you're a gambler and you have a lot of
debt, but it might be something more
difficult, like you really, really love
your wife and maybe she has breast
cancer, or you really love your kids,
but you don't make enough money for them
to go to a top tier school. I can pay
for them to go to a top tier school. And
then finally,
when you test the person and they're
willing to give you information in
exchange for something, usually money,
then you make it official and you
recruit them.
>> So most of the foreign assets that are
inside of the US government are not
foreign nationals. They're probably not
people that even started. How many
people do you think began their career
inside of the CIA, National Defense, US
government under the pretense of doing
it on behalf?
>> How many have been turned?
>> I I feel pretty comfortable saying it's
probably zero.
>> Really?
>> Probably.
>> That they wouldn't have said, "Hey,
let's get this person started from
fresh, get them into university."
>> No, the the Soviets had great success
doing that in the UK. um the the likes
of um
um oh for heaven's sake uh Kim Philby
for example and the Cambridge
>> get that have two massive sips of that
and I promise you your brain will start
functioning for it's good Kim Philby
>> Kim Philby and uh and his cohorts at
Cambridge they were recruited at
university and
>> directed
>> and was he a British national
>> yeah he became the uh the chief of
counter intelligence in MI6,
>> but would have maybe shown some sort of
sympathies toward the Russians early on
in his life.
>> He was an overt communist when he was at
university, but I mean there were a lot
of communists in the
>> So during the spot assess phase, this
guy's already aligned with our
>> ideologically.
>> Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Mhm. Mhm.
>> Kim Philby, it's such an interesting
story. Um,
Kim Philby's best friend, the best man
in his wedding was James Jesus Angleton,
who was the chief of counter
intelligence at the CIA. So, you have
the chief of counter intelligence at the
CIA, the chief of counter intelligence
in MI6, and they are best friends. But
the entire time, Philby was actually a
deep cover KGB agent.
>> Was the US guy legit?
>> Oh, yeah. Right. And it actually
>> would have been hilarious if one had
been secretly working for the Russians
and another had been secretly working
for the Chinese.
>> Oh my god, could you imagine? But it had
such an effect on Angleton that it sort
of pushed him over the mental edge and
he began a mole hunt that just destroyed
the lives and careers of dozens of
people. when he found out that the guy
that he the best
>> when he found out that Philby had had
been a KGB um agent the whole time he
just leapt to the conclusion that there
must be
>> they're everywhere
>> dozens they're everywhere.
>> Do you know how Philby got rumbled?
>> Yeah. The CIA was able to develop a
source inside the KGB that said, "Hey,
listen. This Brit Philby, this guy's a
problem. He's been with us since the
30s." And so Philby was tipped off. He
happened to be at a Christmas party at
the home of the British ambassador to
Lebanon.
He got a signal that he had been made
and he excused himself to go to the
bathroom. He climbed out the window,
made his way to the Soviet embassy. They
put him in a coffin
and shipped him to Moscow. And days
later, he just shows up at a press
conference in Moscow saying, "I'm a
communist. I've always been a communist.
Long live the Soviet Union.
>> Wow.
>> The number four in MI6.
>> And he lived out the rest of his days in
>> fact he became a lecturer in the KGB
training center.
>> [ __ ] me.
>> Well, look, I mean, he's got he's got
field experience for a few decades or
whatever. He knows everything about
everything. Yeah.
>> I I'll tell you, there's a postcript to
that.
My first uh overseas service was in
Riyad, Saudi Arabia during the first
Gulf War.
>> And I met a Saudi national named
Abdullah Philby. And I said, "Abdullah
Philby, what an unusual name. It's kind
of like Kim Philby. You're no relation
to Kim Philby." And he said, "Kim is my
halfb brotherther. We don't speak about
him." So I asked the US ambassador, uh,
Chaz Freeman at the time. I said, "I met
this Saudi guy named Abdullah Philly,
and he's Kim Phil's halfb brotherther."
And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I've
bumped into him a couple of times." I
said, "How how's that possible?" It
turned out Kim Philly's father was a
physician and he became the personal
physician to King Abdul Aziz Iban Saud,
the founder of Saudi Arabia.
>> Yep.
>> And served his entire career as the
king's personal physician. And so the
king gave him Saudi citizenship. He had
divorced his British wife, married a
Saudi woman, had an entire second family
named K named Philby, but they're all
Saudis.
>> It's a family affair.
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Going back to the Chinese, does the fact
that the Chinese control the companies
that make all of our chips help them
with spying?
>> I think it does. Um, when I was the
senior investigator in the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, I was there
from 2009 to 2011. Um, literally the
very first investigation that I did was
um
was based on a tip that US passports
were being made in China. They weren't
being made in China. They were being
made in Thailand, but the chips are made
in China, which is just as bad.
>> Mhm.
>> And so I
>> the fundamental source security codes is
embedded into these chips.
>> Exactly. the the Chinese control the
efficacy of of all American passports.
That doesn't make any sense.
>> I saw a a comment on one of your reels
that said, "Fun fact, without him, US
torture would probably still be just a
conspiracy theory." Given that you went
to prison for revealing CIA secrets,
what secrets do you think whistleblowers
from inside the CIA might be leaking in
10 years time?
Oh man, that's a good question. Nobody's
ever asked me that question before.
On the fun side,
you know, maybe we'll finally get to the
bottom of this UFO thing. I think that
would be fascinating.
On the serious side,
I I really fear the the infiltration of
technology companies in our everyday
lives. I I really believe that our civil
liberties are being violated every
single day by tech companies. And either
the government denies it or we just
pretend it's not happening. But I think
I think there are going to be
whistleblowers in the future that come
out and explain to us, explain to the
American people just how deeply
infiltrated our lives are.
>> Give me some examples of what it might
be. Postulate for me.
>> Okay,
I'll postulate going back to the 1970s.
My first boss at the uh at the CIA,
lovely, wonderful guy. He joined the CIA
through something called the graduate uh
the graduate program. So it was for
people working the graduate fellowship
program. People working on master's
degrees. You do a semester at the CIA,
then you do a semester in school, a
semester at the CIA, a semester at
school, and then you join the CIA as a
staff officer. So his very first
assignment at the CIA was in the counter
inelligence center of James Angleton.
He was a kid in his 20s, so he wasn't
important enough to actually meet
Angleton. So on his very first day,
Angleton's secretary took him aside and
showed him around the office and said,
"Listen, in the unlikely event that you
find yourself in the office alone,
don't ever look at these files that are
on the wall. Those are off limits to
you." He said, "Okay." And of course,
the moment he's alone in the office, he
runs directly to the files.
>> It's a marshmallow test for intelligence
officers.
>> Exactly. Don't eat that.
>> Don't eat that marshmallow.
>> Yeah.
>> He told me that there were thousands of
Manila folders on the on the wall and
that every single one of those folders
was a file on an American citizen.
Well, those files are all electronic
now. And as I said, there are no court
orders allowing the CIA, NSA, FBI to
just wantingly collect information on
Americans.
Somebody said to me the other day,
um, well, if you have nothing to hide,
then what do you care if they're
gathering your information?
>> And my response was, do you know who
first posed that question in a public
forum? It was Joseph Gerbles in 1933.
Yeah.
>> Well, if you have nothing to hide, what
do you care if the SS is gathering
information or if the Gestapo is
gathering information? It's a slippery
slope. And once we just concede our
civil liberties to the federal
government, to any government,
then we lose everything.
>> How infiltrated do you think our
technology is now
>> by surveillance? Any kind of
surveillance?
>> I think it's they're working handin
glove, government and uh and private
industry. I think it's completely
completely infiltrated.
>> TVs, phones,
>> everything. We know thanks to the Vault
7 uh revelations.
>> I know what that is.
>> Vault 7. In in 2017,
uh Wikileaks published thousands and
thousands of documents classified far
above top secret that were allegedly
leaked by a CIA engineer by the name of
Joshua Schulty. Uh Joshua Schulty made
the very um ill-advised decision to
represent himself in court and is now
serving a sentence of 40 years without
parole. He'll likely die in prison. But
he released allegedly released these
documents indicating, for example, that
the CIA can take control of your car
remotely.
Why?
to send you over a bridge or to send you
into a tree or into a bridge abutment.
Um, he released information indicating
that the CIA had successfully hacked
into the classified systems of our
allies and then left code behind, but
the code was written either in Cerillic
or in Farsy.
He said that the CIA had developed
technology to take over smart TVs where
they could turn a speaker into a
microphone. How's that even possible?
But the CIA is able to do it so that
they can tap a room with the TV still
being off.
>> Mhm.
>> There are thousands of documents all
freely available now on the Wikileaks
website. Um, these are documents that
the CIA director at the time called the
crown jewel of everything that the CIA
was doing.
Nearly a third of Gen Z favors the
government installing surveillance
cameras in homes. KO Institute 2023
central bank digital currency national
survey 2,000 Americans. We asked
respondents whether they favor or oppose
the government installing surveillance
cameras in every household to reduce
domestic violence, abuse, and other
illegal activity. Not surprisingly, few
Americans, only 14% support this idea.
75% would oppose government surveillance
cameras inside the home, including 68%
who strongly oppose and 10% don't have
an opinion either way. This is
presumably across the top. And then if
we go down, I imagine they're going to
break this out by age.
Three and 10 support.
>> Good lord.
>> There it is. Would you favor or oppose
the government installing surveillance
cameras in every household to reduce
those things? And uh
yeah that age 30% under 30 basically 30%
under 30 and the justification for this
or the reason for this I think is that
generation has grown up with the trade
that well I give my data to Facebook and
Apple and these
>> companies online and for it in return I
get services and stuff. So the
means of exchange, the expected
>> in their minds there's a quid proquo
>> and that's just that's how I've grown
up. Yeah. Like that's and already I mean
part of it might be a kind offormational
nihilism like confidentiality fatalism
or it's like dude they [ __ ] they've
got it all already. Like why not just
put you know turn the cameras around.
>> You have to ask yourself though what if
you've got a secret boyfriend or
girlfriend? What if you're
calling the doctor to talk about, you
know, oh maybe uh maybe I've got herpes
or something.
>> My chronic flatulences.
>> Yeah. Right. Exactly. What if you're,
you know, calling an abortion provider?
What if you need to get in touch with a
psychiatrist?
>> Like, is nothing sacred anymore? Is
nothing private? Are we not entitled to
any privacy in our own lives? That
number shocks and sickens me to tell you
the truth.
>> Yeah. I mean, I wonder whether it's
going to get better or worse. There is
always the
there is the potential of that
continuing and that sort of being passed
down generation to generation or having
some sort of a a counter veiling
revolution that goes against it.
>> Is brainwashing real? Like what's true
and fake about that idea?
operationally. Yeah. I mean, the CIA,
the KGB, the Chinese, the North Koreans,
they worked on brainwashing operations
going back to the early 1950s. You know,
this whole notion of a Manurion
candidate, for example, this was based
on on fact, on truth. There was a in the
early 1950s, there was a source inside
the Soviet Union that the CIA recorded,
uh, I'm sorry, that the CIA recruited.
Um, and this source reported that the
KGB was working on um on a brainwashing
operation, something that would even
allow them to control somebody remotely
from a long distance. The CIA panicked
at the notion. The truth is that there
was no such KGB operation. There was a
Chinese operation, but there was nothing
that the KGB was doing. So the CIA
decided it was behind the eightball. It
had to play catch-up. And it then
created and implemented what became
known as MK Ultra. So MK Ultra ran from
1952
to 1975.
It was a complete and utter failure. It
resulted in the deaths of, you know, a
number of people. We'll never know what
the real number was. Where the CIA was
dosing its own employees with LSD. It
was dosing people in San Francisco with
LSD and and pumping germs into the air
to see who got upper respiratory
infections. A CIA officer broke into a
village bakery in in a little village in
France and put LSD in the in the
bakery's uh flower one morning and
everybody in the literally everybody in
the village when they ate their bread
that morning went nuts on an LSD trip.
And then they're like, "Okay, so what do
we do with this information?" Now we
have people jumping off, you know, roofs
and jumping off balconies. What do we do
with it?
>> You call MK Ultra a failure?
>> Oh, yeah. It was failure.
>> Mhm.
>> So, it didn't not only was it damaging,
but it also didn't achieve anything.
>> Literally nothing.
>> I've had Do you know John Lyall? You
familiar with him? He wrote the Dirty
Trixs department and he also wrote he's
done a lot of um research. she's here uh
in Austin and he goes into the National
Archives and the most ground floor
research of anybody that I know around
this and he's written two books on it
and he's he's really really great and uh
yeah, that was kind of his uh summary as
well.
>> You know, one of the real shames about
this whole thing is in 1975 at the
Church Committee, Senator Church told
the CIA director, do not destroy the
documents. and he went straight back to
headquarters and told people shred
everything.
15% of the documents survived.
>> So that's what we know.
>> That's all we know. 15%.
>> Okay. That would suggest brainwashing
isn't real.
>> Right. It could I I believe that they
tried they tried to do it and it and it
failed.
>> Right.
>> Yeah.
>> We've got new technology now, new
substances, more advanced understanding
of human behavior. Everything's changed.
>> Do you think that's unlocked some new
capacities?
>> Oh, probably.
Probably.
>> I tell you kind of a funny story. I've
told once or twice in podcasts.
Something that I witnessed at the CIA
that I had never seen before and I've
never seen since. It was absolutely
fascinating to me. In April of uh 2000,
my next door neighbor was assassinated
in Athens. He was the British defense
ates Brigadier General Steven Saunders.
and he was shot and killed by an
assassin for a group called
Revolutionary Organization 17 November.
It's it's kind of a long story and I'll
I'll skip the the most of it.
Several months after the assassination,
we had what's called a walk-in. A
walk-in is somebody who literally walks
into an American embassy and says, "I
have intelligence information that I'm
going to give to a CIA officer." It just
so happened that day that nobody was
available
>> and so an FBI agent in the embassy took
the walk-in.
She assessed that he was a nut and she
said, "Thank you very much." and sent
him on his way. And then she wrote up a
little memo and sent it to us. We were
fascinated by it.
>> So we called him back. So a colleague of
mine and I, he only spoke Greek, this
guy. And this colleague of mine and I
were the two Greek speakers. So we
called him back and we said, "Why don't
you come on in and we'll have a cup of
coffee in the cafeteria." So he came in
and we said, "What did you want to tell
us?" And he said that about 40 minutes
after the assassination,
the source happened to be driving down
the National Highway and he had to take
a leak. So he gets off the exit and
there's a little chapel off to the side
of the road that's locked up and there's
a large banyan tree in front of the
chapel. He goes behind the b the banyan
tree to take a leak and as soon as he
does that a van pulls up and then a car
pulls up behind the van. The back doors
of the van open and there's a motorcycle
in the back of the van. The man in the
car says to the two men in the van,
Akumazi, is he still alive?
And one of the men says he should be
dead by now.
Okay, that's worth investigating to me.
The British defense at just been
assassinated and this guy may have seen
the assassins, right? And the the guy in
the van gave a a brown paper bag to the
guy in the car. Did it have the murder
weapon in it?
>> It might have. Worth investigating.
>> This source was a simpleton. You could
tell by his language. His grammar was
terrible. He was uneducated. He was a
farmer from central Greece. He just
happened to be driving down the national
highway.
So we decided to debrief him as
extensively as possible. But it was
>> you mean debrief
>> uh interview,
>> right?
>> But it was clear to us that the guy
really was just a simpleton. He just
couldn't really answer these questions.
And so somebody at headquarters came up
with the idea to hypnotize him.
I had never participated in a hypnosis
uh hypnosis session before. So we flew
him to a third country where we wouldn't
be interrupted
and my Greek speaking colleague and I
went um to this country. We were met by
a psychologist and a psychiatrist
from headquarters. The psychiatrist was
a s a certified hypnotist. So he said,
"Here's what we're going to do. We're
going to turn all the lights off. We're
going to have the guy sitting in a
chair. We're going to make him as
relaxed as we possibly can and we're
going to count backwards from 10 and
when we get to one,
he's going to be hypnotized and then we
can ask him questions. I said, "Okay,
this seems kind of nuts to me, but
okay." So, we did that. He's in the
chair sitting there very comfortably
like this. The lights are all off. I'm
counting backwards in Greek Y from 10.
In the meantime, the hypnotist says, "I
want you to put your right arm up in or
left arm up in the air." And the guy
does. So, I go backwards. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
3 2 1. And his hand goes like this. But
his arm is up in the air.
He kept his arm in the air for 4 and a
half hours. I had never seen anything
like it. There was no muscle strain,
anything. It was just frozen there for 4
and a half hours. So, I'm asking him
questions. What do you see? I see the
van pulling up. How many people are in
the van? I see two men. Now, what's
happening? The driver got out. He opened
the back door of the van. What do you
see inside the van? I see a motorcycle.
Can you see the license plate on the
van? And he goes like this.
And then he reads the license plate. I
write it down. I hand it to my
colleague. He runs into the adjoining
room. He calls Athens. Run a run a trace
on this license plate. It's a freaking
stolen police car license plate.
Now, how would he know that?
The FBI thought we were nuts.
What ended up happening?
The guy, the source, so wanted to
impress us that he started making things
up in subsequent meetings,
>> right? And we knew he was lying, but
everything that he said in that initial
hypnosis session
>> turned out to be true.
We ended up having to cut him off
because he was just unreliable.
But, you know, is brainwashing possible?
Yeah, I think probably. Can you get
anything out of it? Maybe something
limited. If there's a way to harness it
and focus it, then sure, maybe something
good can happen.
>> I wonder how many people could use that
as an opportunity to sew discords
>> exactly right
>> in the other direction.
>> And that's the flip side. That's why you
have to have strong counterintelligence
because you have to expect that your
enemies are going to do exactly that.
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You know the story of the chicken farmer
that brought down Adolf Hitler?
>> No.
>> Okay, Mark, can you just search uh chat
GPT um who was the chicken farmer that
brought down Adolf Hitler? So, I'm
pretty sure it was uh uh Juan Pyol,
a Spanish guy, and he knew that he was
going to be able to help the allies. Uh
so he walked into one of the embassies
and they said, "We don't need you. We
can't help you. You're a chicken
farmer." this guy and he had some
information or maybe he knew that he
could get some and he goes back again
and they say no and he goes back a third
time and they say no. He goes [ __ ] it.
Walks into the opposite walks into the
German one or the Italian one perhaps
and spends a couple of years
infiltrating them. You're thinking of
Juan Pyol Garcia, better known by his
British code named Agent Garbo. His
story is remarkable because he
essentially talked his way into becoming
a spy despite having no espionage. Py
was a a Spaniard who trained at the
Royal Poultry School.
>> Oh my god.
>> Unsuccessfully tried his hand at chicken
far. He was an unsuccessful chicken
farmer. Sorry, I' I'd fleshed out his
credentials too much. Lived through the
Spanish Civil War. Dislike disliked both
fascism and communism and developed an
intense hatred of Hitler and Nazism.
Later described his motivation as
wanting to wage his own personal war
against Hitler using his imagination.
The crazy part is how he got the job. He
and his wife initially approached the
British and offered their services as a
spy. The British rejected him. Rather
than give up, Pyol decided he would make
himself valuable enough that Britain
couldn't ignore him. So, he called the
German embassy in Madrid and volunteered
to spy for the Nazis. He pretended to be
an enthusiastic Nazi supporter with
connections that would allow him to
travel to Britain. The Germans were
skeptical, so Pel forged documentation
to make himself appear credible.
Eventually, German intelligence
recruited him, gave him money, secret
codes, and invisible ink, and instructed
him to establish an espionage network in
Britain. Except he didn't go to Britain.
He moved to Lisbon and began pretending
he was operating from London using
newspapers, magazines, maps, travel
guides, and his imagination. He sent the
Germans intelligence reports supposedly
gathered by an expanding network of
informants. The network eventually
contained 27 agents, none of whom
existed. He invented personalities,
jobs, relationships, and entire
backstories for them. If one of his
reports turned out to be wrong, he could
conveniently blame the imaginary
subordinate who had supplied the
information. The Germans became
convinced that Pyle was running an
enormous intelligence operation inside
Britain and that's when British
intelligence finally started to notice
him. MI5 initially intercepted his
reports and thought there was an
unidentified German spy operating in
Britain. Eventually they discovered what
Py was doing and realized this seemingly
crazy Spaniard was extraordinarily
talented. 1942 he was brought to Britain
and became a British double agent
receiving the code name Garbo. He became
uh central to Operation Fortitude. the
Allied deception surrounding D-Day. So
he uh the network reported where they
were going to go. Failed chicken farmer
rejected by British intelligence.
Volunteers to spy for Hitler. Invents an
entire fake spy network. Becomes one of
Germany's most trusted agents. Secretly
works for Britain. Feeds Hitler false
information. Plays a major role in
D-Day.
>> Oh my god. Both sides decorated him,
>> dude.
>> Oh my god. It's like this guy
>> one of the very few people in history
who managed to receive military honors
from both sides in the same war. What
was what was the Israeli name? The
Israeli guy's name, Levy, that became
like the deputy defense minister of
Syria. He was a he was a Mossad uh
agent. He was a barber and he kept
offering and offering and offering. His
Arabic was excellent and they kept
saying no, no, no. Finally, they were
like, "Okay, okay."
He he was so good at throwing these
parties in in Damascus where senior
government people would come, see their
senior bath party officials would come,
exiled Nazis would show up and the way
he got caught is he was secretly
transmitting his reports back to uh Tel
Aviv
and there happened to be a KGB
uh signals van driving through the
neighborhood. neighborhood and they
picked up the signal and they told the
Syrians there's a spy in this
neighborhood
>> and the Syrians got him. Now there are
like town squares named after him and
schools are named after him in Israel.
It's the same thing.
>> Enthusiasm counts for an awful lot. It
can really compensate for ability.
>> See, but part of the problem is you get
so many people who want to do this kind
of thing and they're legitimately
insane.
>> It's that it's that one out of a hundred
that's
>> you need to check it. You need the the
Cristiano Ronaldo of of Chicken Farmer
Secret Agents.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah. I I think stuff like that's so
fascinating to me. Uh what do you make
of the Beeper Pager
>> operation?
>> Absolutely brilliant.
>> Well, you you must have had a
professional interest from the sidelines
with regards to give me give me your
assessment of of that particular
operation. Well, that the day that that
operation took place, I got a call from
a Russian television news network and
they said, "Can you come on and talk
about this pager operation?" I said,
"Sure." They said, "Can you say that it
was a it was a war crime and a crime
against humanity?"
>> And I said, "Well, yeah, sure.
Technically, it was a war crime, right?
Technically, it was a crime against
humanity because, you know, civilians
were injured or killed, children were
injured or killed. But this was an act
of genius." I said, 'Can can you imagine
the moving parts involved? It it took,
we learned later, it took a decade to
come up with this idea. You had to
control the entire supply chain over the
course of something like five or six
countries and then actually get the
pages into the hands of Hezbollah
operatives. And they said, "Yeah, but
can you just say that it was a war crime
and a crime against humanity?" And I
said, "No, I I got to explain what a
brilliant operation it was." You can
disagree with it and and say it was this
is a terrible thing. All these people
were killed. But this was this was
genius. I said, "Intelligence services
around the world are going to study this
for years to come." It was incredible.
And they were like, "Thanks. We'll uh
we'll call you.
>> We'll go with someone else." It's the
equivalent of being asked to denounce
Kanye West's political views, but being
unable to say that he doesn't make
bangers.
>> Yes.
>> You know what I mean? dude Jesus walks
is still it's still crushes as a tune if
you hear that you're like I'm I can't
and my feet are moving a little bit you
know you could say what you like about
the ethics but the end result you know
they're here they're here to blow their
enemies up and they managed to do that
>> it was incredible you know it's one
thing to to locate to geollocate a
Hezbollah operative and then blow up the
entire apartment block right anybody can
do that
>> it's an entirely different thing to take
10 years and take over a dozen companies
in a half a dozen countries, control the
entire global supply chain, and then
have people on the ground to actually
pass out the pagers to the intended
targets and then it works the way you
wanted it to work. Incredible.
>> What is the operation that you think is
the most impressive or complex that you
can talk about? I'm presuming that would
probably be up there. Are there any
others that come to mind?
>> That's got to be the most complex. The
other one that comes to mind immediately
is the hunt for um a terrorist named
Miral Kanzi. Have you ever heard of him?
One day in 1993,
I used to I used to take the the back
gate into the CIA because it was a
little bit more convenient for me based
on where my house was.
>> Mhm. And what you used to do back in
those days is you just drive up and the
CIA guard is going like this and you
hold your badge up and then he goes like
this meaning come in, right? And you
just drive in before 9/11, before you
know terrorism. Yeah. Just Yeah. Come on
in. You just hold your hold your badge
up.
This morning I drive into the CIA and
the guard goes like this and I hold my
badge up and then he kind of makes this
shocked look and he runs out of his
guard booth and I was like, "What in the
world is that about?" And I thought,
"Eh, not my problem." And I drove to my
parking space. I get to my desk and my
outside line rings, my unclassified
phone, which never rang. And it's my
mother and I said, "What's up?" And she
said, 'Are you okay? I said, 'Of course
I am. Why? She said, ' Somebody's at the
front of the CIA shooting people. I was
like, what? So I hang up, turn on CNN to
see what the heck is happening right
here at the front gate of the building.
>> And a Pakistani man by the name of Mir
Amal Kanzi drove his car right up to the
red light where you make the left to go
into the main gate of CIA. put the car
in park as other cars lined up behind
him to make the left, got out with an
AK-47 and just went car to car shooting
people. He only shot men. He killed two,
including a a colleague of mine, uh,
Lancing Bennett. Lancing and I were
halfway through a paper together and he
just murdered him right there in broad
daylight and cold blood. shot a
communicator, Frank Darling, and then
shot five other men going door todo, car
to car, calmly walked back up to his
car, made a U-turn, drove straight to
Dallas airport, got on a plane to
Pakistan with no luggage, one-way
ticket, and nobody ever questioned him.
So then the hunt was on.
I I I smile because
the CIA
there was a psychologist in the
counterterrorism center where I worked
and I worked very closely with her. I
liked her a lot. We did some cool stuff
together and she happened to be sitting
on my promotion panel one day and they
were deciding, you know, should we
promote Kiryaku or not promote Kiryaku.
They decided, thank God, to promote me.
But she said, and it was because of her
that they promoted me. She said, "John
Kuryaku will come up with 35 ideas for
an operation. 30 of them are crazy, but
five of them are really good."
Well, as soon as Kzi killed, you know,
Frank and Lancing,
the CIA's counterterrorism center was
happy to listen to any crazy idea. And
so we all had crazy ideas.
things like renting an Ottoman fort on
the top of a mountain in Pakistan so
that we could intercept all of the
telephone calls coming from the village
below or setting up a fake radio station
with a 600 ft tower so we could
intercept everything in the entire
region. To make a long story short,
we found Kanzi initially in a in a flea
hotel in Quera, Pakistan. Uh we were
able to recruit an agent who then lured
him out.
The CIA is not a law enforcement
organization. It's an intelligence
organization. So we had to tell the FBI,
"Listen, we found Kanzi. Here he is."
The FBI goes in and grabs him. And the
reason I even raised that is because
years later,
a station chief for whom I was working
had been part of the team that that
caught Kanzi and he was still angry
10 years later because Time magazine
came out with a picture on the cover of
two FBI agents leading Kanzi away in
handcuffs. And the headline on the cover
was how the FBI got its man. And it's
like they had nothing to do with getting
Kanzi. We got Kanzi. But that was one of
the most complicated and sophisticated
operations
I ever heard of.
>> Can you talk about how it happened?
>> It was a not really. It's a combination
of
those intercepts in order to sort of
narrow the the field and then human
intelligence.
>> Yeah.
>> And most most people in countries like
that are willing to sell their mothers
for $500. There's an old joke at the
CIA, a post 911 joke that you can't buy
an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly
rent one.
And that's what we did.
>> What is the
prevalence or legality of taking someone
who has committed an act on your home
turf from
>> Yeah.
>> either a third party country that is not
their home destination or you or from
their home destination cuz
>> that's an easy one.
>> Okay.
In the mid 1980s during the Reagan
presidency, a DEA agent named Kiki
Kamarena was kidnapped and tortured and
executed by a Mexican drug cartel.
Congress acted very quickly in response
to that uh that terrible incident. and
Congress passed a law
making it legal for the United States to
kidnap foreign nationals
extrajudicially
and bring them back to the United States
to face trial.
>> So even though it's a it's a violation
of the law in all of those other
countries,
>> we don't care.
>> I mean like it legal here but it's not
happening here, right?
>> It's happening there.
>> Yes.
Do you think it's more is it more or
less illegal to do it in a third party
nation or to do it in the person's home
nation?
>> That's the debate. So there's a
difference between rendition and
extraordinary rendition. Do you know the
two?
>> Uh I mean when I think rendition I think
of a play.
>> Oh no. So a rendition is
let's say I'm a CIA officer in Pakistan.
Okay. and you are an Egyptian
and you are a member of al-Qaeda.
>> Okay.
>> I break down the door of your safe house
one night at 2 a.m. and I grab you and I
say, "Oh, you're Egyptian and you're
here without a visa. I send you back to
Egypt and I don't care what they do to
you." That's a rendition.
An extraordinary rendition
is nasty.
I break down the door of that safe house
and I grab you and I say, "Oh, you're
Egyptian."
And I send you to Syria, Morocco,
Algeria,
anywhere in the world I want. And
nobody's ever going to have any idea
what happened to you.
>> And they're going to torture you until
you take your last breath. And then
they're going to send us a transcript of
everything you said up until you took
your last breath. That's an
extraordinary rendition.
>> That again is the nation that is the
enforcement organization of the nation
that the person is in because I can add
an additional level of complexity here.
Let's say that the Egyptian is in
Pakistan,
>> right?
>> But the people who have an issue with
him aren't the Pakistanis. They're the
Americans.
>> So now Oh, okay. Right. Right. And in
most cases, the Pakistanis don't have an
an issue with him.
>> But does Pakistan not have an issue with
America going and taking people that are
inside of their country?
>> No. Because remember, intelligence is a
cash business and there's a lot of cash
changing hands. So we say, listen, we
have this giant sack of money in the van
outside. You don't care if we take these
Egyptians, do you?
>> And who's being paid off? Local, low
level, high level?
>> No, it goes all the way up to the very
top. When when we when we captured Abu
Zuba, which is kind of what I became
known for, um there was a $10 million
bounty on Abu Zubeda. There was $25
million bounty on Khaled Shake Muhammad.
And the Pakistani intelligence service
built a new headquarters with the cash.
Even at a lower level, I was working
with this brigadier general,
>> General Muhammad. And um
this guy, what a piece of work this guy
was. we'd be ready to do the uh
operation and he'd say, "Uh uh before we
go, um can we keep all those uh night
vision goggles?"
>> And I'm like, "Sure,
just sure. Just keep them." Now, can we
go do the raid? Um the guns that you're
using
>> bartering before you get started.
>> Yeah, those 9 mm. We We have 38s. We
could really use those 9 mm. Okay, I
I'll get you some 9 mm. Can we go do the
operation now, please?
The carpeting in my office is really He
actually said that to me and I said,
"General,
>> I'm a generous person by nature, but
don't shake me down."
>> And then we went out and did our
operation,
>> carpeting for your office. I did get him
a refrigerator at one point.
>> That's nice. That's good.
>> Just wouldn't leave me alone.
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interesting when I said most complex uh
impressive intelligence actions of all
time that you didn't say 9/11.
Oh, I thought you meant CIA operations.
911 was incredible. And 9/11 really came
out of something earlier called the
Bojinka plot. You ever heard of Bojinka?
B O J I N K A.
So
in 1996
in Manila,
a very bad man who we knew only as
Mkhtar, Mu Kh a r was plotting something
that became known as the Bjinka plot.
The idea was to hijack 14 747 jumbo jets
from Manila and to fly them into
buildings all the way up and down the
west coast of the United States.
Crazy as it sounds,
Mkhtar went out one day to get lunch and
while he was out at lunch, his cleaning
lady went to the apartment to clean it.
and she sees all these plans and
photographs and drawings laid out on the
dining room table and she said, "This
looks like a terrorist plot and she
calls the Manila Police Department."
They come,
we presume that Mhdar saw what was
happening and ran away. He just
absconded. The police came and
recognized it as a a potential terrorist
plot. They called the Philippine
Intelligence Service who then called the
CIA. and the CIA came in and said, "Oh
my god, this this was a massive
terrorist attack being laid out."
>> Yeah.
>> So, we knew that there was this bad man
out there named Mkhtad who meant us harm
and intended to use uh aircraft as
missiles.
After we captured Abu Zuba, one of the
two most important things that he told
us was the identity of Mktar. His
debriefer, his interrogator, Ali Sufan,
an FBI agent, asked him about Mktar. And
Abu Zuba actually laughed and said, "You
don't know who Mktar is?" And Ali said,
"No." And Abu Zuba said, "His name is
Khaled Sheh Muhammad.
I was at headquarters that day and the
word came in like we know who it is.
This is the mastermind of 9/11.
So everybody was running name traces.
We had never heard of him. We didn't
have anything. There was literally no
file on anybody named Khaled Shake
Muhammad. And then the FBI called us and
said, "Oh my god, he went to high school
in North Carolina."
And we were like, "What? He lived here?"
And then he stayed and went to like
North Carolina&M
or ENT or whatever it is and then
self-radicalized and moved overseas and
started plotting what became 911.
It was ingenious. And talk about a lot
of moving parts.
>> Where was he from originally? Where was
what was his birthplace?
>> Where was his birthplace? Was it
>> Kuwait? I was going to say Saudi Arabia.
Abu Zabeta was Saudi Arabia. Yeah,
Kuwait. He's a Palestinian born in
Kuwait,
>> the
>> best of my recollection.
>> But yeah, when I think
>> Pakistani born in
>> Again, if if I uh expand the
intelligence operation outside of the
CIA, is there anything? Obviously, the
pager thing was
>> incredible.
>> Anything else come to mind that would
make your greatest hits of all time?
>> Yeah, the uh the location and kidnapping
of Adolf Ikeman.
>> I don't know that.
>> The Nazi war criminal. He escaped from
Germany and in the early 1960s the
Israelis found him working in a car
factory in Argentina
and they kidnapped him, took him all the
way back to Israel,
>> put him on trial. It was a it was a
televised trial. They forced him to wear
his old Nazi uniform during the trial
>> and he was proud to put it on. He was
convicted and then he was hanged.
That was an incredible operation,
especially when at the time the Israelis
didn't even have diplomatic relations
with Argentina. How you going to get in
a get a plane in there? Kidnap this guy
>> managed to do it with Maduro.
>> Yeah. Well, that's with the entire force
of the US Army behind you.
>> It's interesting. There seems to be
broadly two categories of these kinds of
operations. And I've had people like DJ
Shipley on the show, you know, exals.
And um some are some are brain and some
are broad and some are uh precise and
surgical and and and well thought out in
advance and sort of occur without much
fanfare. And then others are much more
kinetic.
>> And uh I think the Maduro one is an
example of something that's surgical but
incredibly kinetic as opposed to we
lured Maduro to a Formula 1 driver's
house that he's a massive fan of and
then secretly drugged him with this
thing that was in a vape that he smoked.
And I
>> Well, you know the story of Carlos the
Jackal. Have you heard of Carlos the
Jackal? You know, it's funny to me. I I
teach a graduate school course at the uh
University of Salamanca in Spain. They
have a an intelligence studies program.
I teach a course on the history of
terrorism. And literally none of my
students have ever heard of Carlos the
Jackal,
>> the Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and
80s. His name was Ilitch Ramirez
Sanchez. He was a Venezuelan national,
an ardent communist, Marxist Leninist,
but he was the Osama bin Laden of the
70s and 80s to the point where he did
one of the ballsiest operations in
modern history.
OPEC was meeting in Vienna, right? So he
and his gang go to Vienna and they
kidnapped every minister of oil from
every OPEC country, kidnapped the entire
OPEC leadership.
>> Mhm.
>> And then held them for billions of
dollars in ransom, which the Saudis
gladly paid. And then they just
scattered. Alers,
Benghazi, you know, all over the world,
Moscow, Baghdad. Anyway, Carlos was a
ghost.
We searched the world for Carlos and we
had no idea where he was. We assumed
that he was either in Iraq or in Libya
or maybe Algeria. We weren't sure.
>> There was a legendary
CIA contractor named Billy Wah. Billy
was a one of the most highly decorated
war heroes in American history. Fought
in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, doing
the things that years later people don't
talk about. And then uh he became a CIA
contractor.
I was I was blessed to work with Billy
Wah in the Middle East before 911. We
did some really fun stuff together. But
the guy is legendary. Seven purple
hearts. Seven. His license plate. It was
a personalized Florida plate that said
seven hits and it had the purple heart
next to it.
So Billy was
working contract at the agency running
surveillance teams and he happened to be
in Hartum Sudan working for
>> Kofheer Black who became the director of
the CIA's counterterrorism center and
then became Ambassador Kofer Black the
special envoy for counterterrorism.
Billy takes a day off, which was very
rare, and he and a colleague go to the
vegetable market to buy vegetables for
the week, and they're there in the in
the vegetable souk. And Billy says to
his colleague,
"That's Carlos the Jackal." And the
guy's like, "Get out of here." He said,
"I'm telling you, that's Carlos the
Jackal."
And he runs back to the station. The way
he told the story, Kofheer was on an
elliptical machine in his office and
Billy says, "Kofheer, I just saw Carlos
the Jackal in the vegetable souk and
Kofheer says, "Get the [ __ ] out of here,
Carlos the Jackal." And he said, "I'm
telling you it was Carlos." And he said,
"Well, I can't go back to headquarters
and say, "We saw Carlos the Jackal in
the vegetable market and he walked away.
You got to go take a picture of him."
Billy went back to the vegetable market
every day for a month
and then he sees him again. So, real
quickly, he paid these two Sudin guys a
couple of dollars to get into a fist
fight. In the Middle East and in North
Africa, fights are so rare
>> that as soon as one happens, everybody
just forms a circle around them to to
watch. Carlos runs right up to the
circle and he's craning his neck to see
if he can watch the fight and Billy has
his camera. Click, click, click, click,
click, click, click, click, click. And
then they do surveillance on him and
they follow him all the way back to his
house.
Headquarters confirms, oh my god, it's
Carlos the Jackal. So they come up with
this idea.
They break into his house and they put
ground glass in his toothpaste.
And then they recruit his dentist.
And so when he brushes his teeth, his
gums start bleeding. He says, "Oh my
god, I must have gum disease. I should
go to the dentist." Go to the dentist.
The dentist dentist gives him some gas,
puts him out, and when he wakes up, he's
on a French military transport plane on
his way back to Paris to face seven
counts of murder. And he is still in
prison today.
Wow. Wow. It takes patience.
>> So, John Ly's first book, The Dirty
Tricks Department, one of the
psychological assessments that was done
of Hitler was that he had a very fragile
hold on his masculinity. I don't think
that they needed to get psychiatrists in
to work that one out. But the the one
testicle in the whole thing
>> uh uh they
had this idea that if they could change
Hitler's hormonal profile that he his um
hold of his masculinity would be so
tenuous
>> Wow.
>> that he would go completely insane and
that the allies would win the war. So
they found the gardener
who grew the vegetables that were put
into the food at the eagle's nest.
>> Oh yeah.
>> And they found him, recruited him, and
gave him uh female sex hormones to
inject into the vegetables. And the goal
was Hitler's going to ingest these and
his voice will go soprano and his
mustache will fall out and it'll grow
man boobs and and then we'll something
something something will win the war. I
don't know what the something something
was, but um that they don't know whether
or not that worked, but uh that was yeah
I some of the inventive as you said.
It's kind of a shame the whole torture
principles prison thing because the CIA
actually sounds like quite a lot of fun.
Oh my god. I have to admit I I loved
every second of it. I went to 72
countries when I was at the agency. I I
was in the room with kings and
presidents and prime ministers and did
things that
you know I I still can't talk about. It
was exciting every single day. I
remember
especially when I was working on Greek
terrorism. I couldn't wait to get to the
office in the morning. I couldn't wait
>> to see what I had missed overnight. It
was so exciting.
>> Just loved it. What do you think is the
most effective mass behavioral
engineering campaign in history?
>> That's a hard one.
>> The most successful mass behavioral
campaign?
>> You know, frankly,
I think it probably has to be passage of
the Patriot Act because
it convinced all Americans to just
voluntarily give up their civil
liberties just like that. And what did
we complain about? Having to take our
shoes off at the airport.
>> We didn't complain about the fact that
we were, you know, losing our our civil
liberties. That the FBI could go, you
know, see what books you take out of the
library without a warrant or or
intercept your emails or your text
messages or your phone calls without a
warrant. They just have to go to the ISP
and say, "Give it to us." Or even more
cynically,
just buy it. just buy the metadata from
one of these collection companies.
>> How does mass persuasion work at scale?
>> Mass persuasion
at scale was really a function of the of
the early cold war era. The the first
covert action program that the CIA ever
implemented was to essentially steal the
1949 Italian elections away from the
communists. The communists were ahead in
all the polls. It's not a very
sophisticated operation. All they did is
they gave $150,000 to the Christian
Democratic Party and told them to spend
it by renting journalists. And then the
CIA would write up pro-onservative
articles and the journalists would place
them in these newspapers and then the
communists lost. That was it. But that
was the first one.
>> Mhm.
>> It it it's really all about the media.
I'll tell you something funny. When I
was with the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee years after I left the agency,
I went to Yemen and I used to go to
Yemen with some regularity. So this was
in 2011 just before we closed the
American embassy there
and I had a meeting with the defense
attaches.
None of the agency people would meet
with me but that was fine. I didn't
care. So I met with the state department
people and the defense people. So the
defense ates was so excited to tell me
about this cool scop that he was running
psychological operation. It's a
propaganda operation. I was like okay
I'm all ears. And I was working for John
Krey at the time. I said, 'He's going to
be happy to hear whatever successes
you've had. So he said, 'We running a
pirate radio station.' I said, ' Okay,
so what are you what are you doing with
it? And he says, we're playing jazz
and then we intersperse the jazz with
callin shows. So, we're getting young
Yemen
to like jazz, which makes them like the
United States. And then when they call
in to talk about the jazz, the host says
pro-American things.
I said, "I'm sorry, that's the stupidest
[ __ ] idea I've ever heard of in my
life. How much are you spending on
that?" "Oh, uh
150,000." I'm like, "Yeah, I think
they're not going to like you spending
150,000 on that."
>> So, sometimes it works. Most of the time
it doesn't. Usually it's money down the
drain,
but once in a while you get lucky. Have
you seen Mark? Can you look for was it
Nestle that
coffee wasn't selling in a country in
the Far East?
uh or some sort of confectionary wasn't
selling in a country in the Far East.
So, they changed the flavor of the
children's sweets so that when those
children would grow up to become adults,
>> they would love the flavor. It would be
reminiscent of their childhood.
>> Oh my god.
>> And uh yeah, there was they were really
struggling to sell I want to say it was
coffee or maybe like caramel or
something like that. And um by by
seeding it to children,
>> they knew they were able to project two
decades out into the future when you
were in charge of your own groceries.
>> Talk about the long view, huh?
>> You would you would be able to come up
with that. What have we got, Mark?
>> Japan.
Here's There it is.
>> Oh my goodness.
>> Here's how Nestle convinced people in
Japan to drink coffee. In the 1970s,
Nestle were hustling to sell coffee in
Japan. And this uh was a fascinating
time for Japanese cuisine. Japan had
recently established its first
McDonald's franchise. Style of Japanese
food that plays off popular western dish
dishes had been developing for decades.
This was the moment for Western
companies looking to market their
products in the East Asian country. But
Nestle wasn't finding much success
according to better marketing. Unlike
coffee ccentric countries like Italy or
Costa Rica, Japan has a rich history
with tea, not coffee. So Nestle enlisted
the help of Cler Rapai, a psychoanalyst.
Nestle, what can I do for Nestle? Rapai
responded. According to PBS, he'd spent
years working with children who had
autism, a far cry from corporate
marketing. Nevertheless, he headed to
Japan where his expertise in psychology
and memory allowed him to crack an
important code. When consumers have a
childhood memory of something like
chicken noodle soup or mom's hot cup of
coffee, that long embedded memory
creates a bond between the consumer and
the product. He deduced when he
interviewed and tested consumers in
Japan, he found many didn't have fun
childhood memories of coffee, tea simply
wasn't is a much larger part of the
culture. He aimed to change it. Nestle
engaged in a yearslong campaign. It
started with sweet coffee flavored
products for kids. We started, for
example, with a dessert for children
with a taste of coffee. We created an
imprint of the taste of coffee. However,
it's unclear whether Nestle whipped out
the coffee flavored KitKat bars
immediately. They most likely started
with other coffee flavored candies.
Judging from his PBS interview, while
Japan's KitKat market is off the charts,
intricate and popular, the Japanese
flavors didn't really emerge until the
2000s, according to the New York Times.
It's more likely that espresso and cafe
Kit Kats popped up around that time.
Still, while they may have not been Kit
Kats, Nestle's coffee flavored desserts
made a difference. According to Better
Marketing, those early coffee flavored
treats likely created an imprint on
children. And by the time those young
consumers were older and interested in a
real drink, Nestle coffee was ready for
them. By 2014, the coffee market was
hitting record highs in Japan according
to the Japan Times. And by the time
coffee flavored KitKats were intro
introduced, consumers were well
acquainted with the drink and flavor. We
can thank Clair Rapai who knew early on
that food and memory go hand in hand.
>> Incredible.
>> Isn't that cool?
>> Incredible. You know, in in the 70s, um,
in the mid70s, we got to a point in the
United States where more people were
drinking Coca-Cola in the morning than
we're drinking coffee. And the reason
why that was happening is because most
coffee producers used something called
raustoto beans. Robustto beans have that
magnificent coffee smell, but they taste
like they taste like [ __ ] And it's
Arabica beans that have the great coffee
taste but don't smell as wonderful as
Robustto beans. Um, and so they had to
switch to the more expensive Arabica to
save the coffee industry here in the
United States.
>> How paranoid does making working for the
CIA make you?
>> Oh, you have to be paranoid. I've been
out of the CIA for 22 years. I've been
out longer than I was in
>> and I still am constantly scanning my
side view and rearview mirrors looking
for surveillance.
>> I still
couch my my language in emails and in
text messages. I use encrypted apps for
what that's worth. They all have back
doors in them anyway, but I figure, you
know, why make it easy?
>> So, yeah, it it's sort of uh it's sort
of instilled in you. you you never lose
it.
>> I've noticed that you haven't taken a
drink of anything today. Is that part of
that?
>> Yeah, actually, it's funny. It's funny
that you've even noticed one of the very
first things that they taught us very
first like on the first day of
operational training is to always pee
before you go into a meeting so that you
don't have to get up and excuse yourself
and disrupt the meeting.
Um, and also it's distracting if I'm
opening cans and I'm drinking a sip over
here and maybe I'm making a little ring
on the table over there and
>> No, this way I can look you directly in
the eye. We can carry on our business
and then I can drink something later. M
what have you I've had a lot of people
on that are communications experts that
are talking about the effectiveness of
understanding someone detecting lying
manipulation stuff like that. What's
realistic and true about working out
whether someone's lying to you?
>> You know, I I wrote a book called The
CIA Insiders Guide to Lying and Lie
Detection.
It's funny, too. I'm I'm not the expert.
that wasn't the focus of my career, but
it's something that I knew as much as
any other, you know, normal CIA officer.
It's almost it's it's little things.
It's the frequency of blinking. For
example, uh when people lie, they tend
to blink less frequently.
Um when when when
you ask somebody a question and they
look up as they're thinking about it,
they're likely going to give you the
truth. If they look down,
that could be an indication of uh of
lying. It's a lot of different things.
One of the things that they showed us
that was so fascinating to me at the
time, you remember Whitey Bulier, the
the Boston mob leader. Whitey Bulier had
two brothers. Uh one was the president
of the University of Massachusetts.
Um
before that he had been the president of
the Massachusetts state senate and his
other brother was a a state judge. So
these are like serious people. Well, one
of the things the CIA showed us in
training was a video of the brother who
was the president of the university at
at the time he was the president of the
Senate uh being grilled before Congress
about whether or not he had any contact
with his brother. His brother was on the
run right on the lamb
>> and he kept saying, "No." Just staring,
"No, I've had no contact with my
brother. I haven't seen my brother in
years. He's embarrassed our family.
We're ashamed of him. I don't know where
he is. But not blinking at all.
>> And so they would show us this video of
his testimony as an example of what to
look for in a liar.
>> I mentioned to you um walk-ins earlier
when I was when I was overseas
operationally. Not a single day went by
that I didn't have a walk-in. Not a
single day. And the curse for me was
that I spoke both Greek and Arabic,
right? And so, uh, there was one time
where I had flown in from Yemen and and
I was exhausted. And I land at like
10:00 in the morning at Dulles airport.
And I thought,
I'm going to go into the office. I'm not
going to tell anybody that I'm there.
I'm just going to do my accounting
paperwork and then I'm going to go home
and go to sleep. So, I I go in and my
boss sees me and he says, "Hey, I didn't
know you were back." back. And I said,
"I'm actually not back. I just came in
just to do my paperwork and then I'm
going to go home and go to sleep." And
he goes, "Okay. Um,
can you go to Sudan?" And I said,
"Sudan?" I said, "I was just there 1
hour from Sudan." I said, "What do you
want me to do in Sudan?" And he said,
"Well, they they have a walk-in and they
don't have any Arabic speakers right
now."
I said, "When when do you want me to go
to Sudan?" and he says like 3:00. And I
was like, "Are you are you kidding me?"
I said, "All right, let me just at least
go do some laundry." And I went home, I
did the laundry, repacked, went back to
the airport, and flew to Sudan. Anyway,
>> um, not a day went by that I didn't have
a walk-in. And that's the best possible
on the job training for determining
who's lying and who's telling the truth.
Now, like I said earlier,
95%
there there have been actual studies
done internally, 95% of walk-ins
>> are crazy people.
>> I had a guy guy came in in a in a Greek
naval officer's uniform. So I was like,
"Oh, okay. Serious guy." He says, 'I
know I know who's the the head of
Revolutionary Organization 17 November.
I was like, great. We've been working on
that since 1975.
Lay it out. Well, is there a reward? I
said, yeah, there's a $10 million reward
and if your information is correct, and
we're able to to grab him, I'll give it
to you anyway. Cash, gold, diamonds, I
don't care.
>> He says, it's actually a triumvirate of
people. I said, "Really? And who is this
triumvert of people?" Queen Elizabeth,
Jacqu Kustoau,
and Frank Sinatra.
I said, "Okay, and how did you determine
this?" And he said that an angel told
him in a vision. I was like, "Okay,
thanks for coming in." But that was
happening every single day.
>> Decided against investigating that one
further.
>> Yeah. you have to write it up in case he
walks into another American embassy
somewhere and they know off the bat that
he's a nut.
>> But of the remaining 5%,
about 1%
are what are called um intelligence
brokers. They actually do have a little
nugget of of intelligence. Maybe they
overheard it in a restaurant or they've
got a cousin who's a member of some
group someplace. And so they'll come to
you and give it to you and then they
want $100. Give me $100.
>> And you give them $100. But then they go
to the British embassy and then the
French embassy and then the Chinese and
then the Russians and then anybody else
they think is going to give it and then
that's that's a handsome month salary in
many countries.
>> Y
>> then about 2% are um
what are called probes.
the Iranians, the North Koreans,
Hezbala, al-Qaeda, ISIS, they'll send
people into American embassies to
pretend to be walk-ins just to look to
see where the cameras are,
are you armed,
are the windows bulletproof,
where's the steel reinforced hardline
door, just in case they decide to attack
the embassy later, they can identify a
point of vulnerability.
>> And then that last 1% is the real deal.
In training, our instructors taught us
that the greatest sources ever recruited
in the history of the CIA were walk-ins
because
the chief of the KGB's, you know,
counterintelligence directorate is not
going to come up to you and introduce
himself at a diplomatic cocktail party,
right? He's going to go on vacation
somewhere and he's going to walk into
the American embassy in say Mexico City
or the
director of the North Korean nuclear
program.
You're not going to bump into him in a
restaurant somewhere, but he's going to
go to some seminar in Vienna and he's
going to sneak out of his hotel in the
middle of the night and go to the
embassy and there's going to be a marine
there on duty 24 hours and he's going to
leave a phone number
>> and those will be the best recruitments
of your entire life.
>> You see the story of when uh Kim Jong-el
and his son went to Disneyland.
>> Yes. Can you pull up the
>> How crazy is that?
>> Pull up the the passports behind that.
Like they had fake passports. They
wanted to go to Disneyland real bad.
>> And yeah, they flew on fake passports so
that they could I mean, look, you've not
got Disneyland in North Korea.
>> No,
>> say what you want about the country of
America. Even if they are your mortal
enemy, they make great theme parks.
>> And that's why he's such a film buff. He
and his father both loved American
movies. Look at that. Look at that. That
is ridiculous. The most [ __ ] Kim
Jong- ill looking photo as well.
>> Josie Pag
Sao Paulo.
>> Sao Paulo.
>> Is that where they're saying they're
from?
>> Yeah. Brazil. Embassy of Brazil in
Prague.
So it's the Brazilian embassy in the
Czech Republic. How do you like that?
>> Unreal. So, what is
what are some of the best ways to get
the truth out of someone? You're uh
speaking to them. You want to try and
determine whether or not they know
something about something. Uh
what are some of the best tactics?
>> It's not very sexy, but it's very simply
to treat a person with respect and
kindness and show great patience.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh I'll give you an example.
You know, the CIA's torture program was
just to
turn people's lives into hell, a living
hell.
The FBI
modus operandi is completely different.
You know, the CIA and the FBI hated each
other for decades and decades. Hated
each other.
>> That's why we had 9/11
>> because they couldn't even share
information with one another.
But the FBI is really really good at
interrogation and they have been since
the 1940s.
The FBI method and and they train their
officers very well in this method is to
simply engage people in a friendly
conversation. You you treat them with
respect even if they're the enemy, you
know, the enemy or a terrorist.
um you offer them a cigarette or an
apple or if they're really uh
cooperative a piece of paper and a pen
to write to their parents or whatever.
Sometimes it takes weeks or months but
eventually they're going to open up to
you if you are able to establish that
relationship. The very first person that
I caught in Pakistan was a Jordanian
national who had escaped into Pakistan
from Tora Bora when we started bombing
it.
And um
I cabled headquarters beforehand and I
said I I'm not I'm not trained in
interrogation.
I'm not an interrogator. We didn't have
interrogators at the CIA. That was the
FBI's job. We're in charge now. just
interrogate him however you want. And I
was like, "Okay, all right. Well, I'm
going to wing it." We have the guy
chained to an eyebolt in the table. So,
he's got handcuffs on and the cuffs are
chained to the table. And I said to him,
"What's your name?" I knew what his name
was. I knew the answers to most of the
questions because we had confiscated his
paperwork and his passport and all that
stuff. And it was a legitimate Jordanian
passport.
So
he answered my questions. I laid out a
map of the Afghan Pakistan border
and I told him to show me exactly how he
got from Tora Bora to I think we caught
him in like Raul Pindi or something like
that. I don't remember anymore.
I knew I knew how he got there. I mean
those mountains are so forbidding and so
steep. there's pretty much only one way
to get in. We called it the rat line.
And so he showed me the rat line. I knew
he was telling the truth.
>> And um
and I said, "What in the world were you
doing in Afghanistan?
You're you're a Jordanian national. You
don't speak any of Afghanistan's
languages. You don't have a visa, a
valid visa to be in Afghanistan. What in
the world were you doing there?"
And he said, 'I went to Afghanistan in
1996
to open an orphanage. He said, 'I' a
very pious, practicing Muslim,
and there were so many children
um who were orphaned from the Soviet
invasion and occupation.
I wanted to do something to help the
children. So as he's saying all this, I
have colleagues that are running it out
running outside
cabling back to, you know, wherever the
American embassy in Aman or CIA
headquarters or calling the Jordanian
embassy in Islamabad
to ask, you know, is this stuff true?
Can we identify the orphanage? Is it
true that he left Jordan on this date
and arrived in Afghanistan on that date?
Everything this guy told me was true.
So finally I said to him, I have one
last question for you. I said, I know
that what you've told me is true, and I
want to thank you for being honest with
me, but why were you honest with me? Why
did you tell me the truth? And he said
to me like I'm nuts. He's like, I'm your
prisoner. It doesn't help me in any way
to lie to you.
And I thought, well, that's that's a
legit answer.
>> And then he says, now may I ask you a
question? And I said, sure. And he says,
I would like to invite you into the
embrace of Islam and I will be your
godfather.
I said, "Thank you for that. I'm a
Christian. Um, but I appreciate the
gesture. I really do." I said, "I've
studied Islam. I have a degree in Middle
Eastern studies. I speak Arabic. I
appreciate the gesture." And I said,
"And I wish you the very best." But he
was telling the truth about that that
orphanage. He was telling the truth
about being caught up. And he's like,
"Oh crap, now the Americans are bombing
now. What am I going to do? I got to
run. It's all these al-Qaeda guys.
They're going to think I'm al-Qaeda."
Which we did. But we ended up rather
than sending him to Guantanamo, we just
sent him back to Jordan.
I had uh well I really should not forget
this guy's name um
not the manurion. What is the country in
the middle of the Middle East that begin
that's begins with man?
Um god damn it. It was the dude that had
Osama bin Laden's cousin's number on his
phone. He was detained in Guantanamo.
They made an entire movie about him.
>> Oh the Mortanian.
>> The Mortanian. Thank you. That's
Muhammadu Slahi. He's a good friend of
mine.
>> Yes. Yeah. He's been on the show. Friend
of the show.
>> He's great.
>> He's It was a long time ago.
>> I called him last time I talked to him.
He lectured in my class at Solomon. And
I said I said, "Muhammadu, you are the
Martin Luther King of our time."
>> Crazy. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. I mean,
wild story. You ever tell you about how
much he needed the bathroom on the
flight over?
>> We put diapers on them, but no, he
didn't.
>> He said that he couldn't go. I don't
know why, but he had the fullest
bladder. He said the the most pain of
the entire everything the mock
executions you know the the the
sustained what like the most pain was
the fact I don't think he'd been able to
go to the bathroom for a very long time
and he was strapped in some plane and
then taken out there maybe the angle
that he was the angle that he was at he
couldn't or something like that and uh
that was one of the things that stuck in
his mind
>> that poor guy how he is able
14 years in Guantanamo, like three three
or four mock executions. Uh like sexual
>> completely innocent.
>> Yeah. Just the most innocent and now
just chill.
>> A beautiful human being.
>> Yeah.
>> He's married now. He has kids.
>> Unreal.
>> Yeah.
>> Does torture work for getting the truth
out of people?
>> It does not. It it 100% proven fact it
does not work.
>> Why doesn't it work? Because the person
being tortured will tell you anything he
thinks you want to know just to get you
to stop torturing them. John McCain, for
example, when he was tortured in the
beginning of his torture, they kept
asking him who were the members of his
unit and he gave them the names of the
starting offensive line of the Green Bay
Packers
>> and they didn't know. They just they
said, "Good, good. you get an extra
ration today, extra food for
cooperating. He didn't cooperate,
>> but they will tell you anything. And the
thing is is then you have to take all
this garbage that they gave you, give it
to your analysts who have to separate
the wheat from the chaff. It's going to
take six years, sorry, it's going to
take 6 months for them to go through all
this nonsense. And by then, you know,
the bomb that you're trying to uh to uh
disrupt has already gone off. Would
torture be worth it if it led to the
discovery of someone like Osama bin
Laden?
>> See that it comes back to that issue
that we talked about at the very
beginning of our conversation? Maybe.
>> But is that the country we want to be?
Listen, if you want to be a country that
tortures,
best of luck, but you have to change the
law because torture is illegal. I don't
care what John and Jay Bbeby and Dick
Cheney say. It's illegal. We have the
Federal Torture Act of 1946, which
specifically forbids exactly those
techniques the CIA used. We have the
United Nations Convention Against
Torture, which not only are we
signitories to, we wrote it.
>> We wrote it. And then like magic in
2002, huh, it's all legal cuz we're the
good guys.
>> So, we say it is. I'll tell you another
thing. In 1945, we executed Japanese
soldiers who had waterboarded American
PS. That was a death penalty offense to
waterboard somebody. In January of 1968,
the Washington Post ran a front page
photograph of an American soldier
waterboarding a North Vietnamese
prisoner.
The Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamera, that day ordered an
investigation. The soldier was arrested.
He was convicted on a charge of torture
and sentenced to 20 years at Fort
Levvenworth. The law never changed.
>> We changed.
So if you want to torture, if that's the
country you want to be, okay, you can
have that position, but you have to
change the law. And again, we're either
going to be that shining city on a hill
that Ronald Reagan talked about,
>> or we're not. We're either going to be
the country that that writes the human
rights reports for Congress every year
for every country in the world with
which we have diplomatic relations or
we're not. But we can't pretend to be
one while really being the other.
>> Is there a level of either threat or
aggression and unfairness in
interrogation from other countries? Is
there a level of intensity that that
could get to that would cause you to
think, okay, we actually need to take
the gloves off with regards to some of
the uh rules that we're adhering to if
everybody else is not.
>> I think it was appropriate to take the
gloves off after 9/11, but I I think
that there's a disconnect here over what
taking the gloves off meant.
There's a long-standing American policy
enshrined in um in an executive order
that says that the CIA may kill a
foreign national if he presents a clear
and present danger that's the
terminology to the United States to an
American citizen or to an American
installation.
So if you are Osama bin Laden or Iman
Zawahi or Khal Shake Muhammad, you pose
a clear and present danger. And so we
need to kill you to protect Americans.
But if we have the wherewithal to
capture you,
you have the same constitutional rights
that I have,
>> right? And so if you are the bad guy
that we say you are,
then you have to face your accusers in a
court of law and be judged by a jury of
your peers. Just because I don't like
your politics
doesn't mean that I can do mock
executions on you and waterboard you and
put you in a coffin for two weeks with a
box of cockroaches or or put a drill
against your head or keep you naked and
chained to, you know, an eyebolt in the
ceiling or throw ice water on you every
hour until you die of hyperothermia.
The law doesn't say you can do those
things.
So, you know, we we've we've got to
respect the rule of law and we have to
have appropriate congressional oversight
because the CIA
will push and push and push the envelope
until somebody pushes back.
>> But the problem is after 9/11, nobody
pushed back.
>> What are some of the physical and
psychological techniques that get used
have been used during interrogations
that normal people would find most
shocking?
I think there are three that had been
approved by the Justice Department that
would be shocking to people. There were
myriad that were not approved that the
CIA did anyway, right? We can have a
whole separate conversation about that.
But the three worst ones,
water boarding gets all of the the
press, right? Waterboarding is you're
you're on a board, you're strapped to
the board, your feet are slightly
elevated, so your head is is lower,
right? You're at an angle. They put some
kind of material in your mouth, cloth,
burlap, something like that, a a
pillowcase, whatever, and then they pour
water on your face. It gives you a sense
that you're drowning. In fact, enough
water gets gets through the material
that you do drown. Abu Zuba actually
drowned. His heart stopped. He had to be
revived in order for him to be tortured
again. Okay, that's not You can't do
that. That's not legal.
Um, but water boarding is kind of the
famous one. There were two that I always
believed were worse than water boarding.
One was called um the cold cell. Uh,
you're stripped naked. You're chained to
an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't
sit or kneel or lay or get in any
comfortable position.
And
every hour your your cell is chilled to
50° F, which is really cold. And then
every hour a CIA officer comes in and
throws a bucket of ice water on you. We
murdered people with that technique.
Murdered them. And the Justice
Department never allowed anybody to
murder a prisoner.
>> That was never approved. The third one
um was sleep deprivation. I feel very
strongly about this one. When someone
leaked that the CIA was carrying out
sleep deprivation against prisoners, the
Secretary of Defense at the time, Don
Rumsfeld,
mocked the revelation in the press and
he said, "Sleep deprivation." He said,
"I don't even have a chair in my office.
I have a standup desk and I'm well known
for working 24 hours at a time." But
we're not talking about 24 hours in your
Pentagon office with your secretary
bringing your meals in.
>> The American Psychological Association
has published studies showing that
people begin to lose their minds at day
seven with no sleep, right? They begin
to die at day nine. Their organs begin
to shut down. The CIA was authorized to
keep prisoners awake for 12 days. You
can't live for 12 days with no sleep and
industrial strength lights on you and
music playing just on a loop at a volume
of 11 like you know BG's 247
with you know earsplitting volume. You
can't survive that. You lose your mind
and then your organs stop working.
I remember when I was after Pakistan, I
was the executive assistant to the CIA's
deputy director for operations. And in
that position, you get to see literally
everything that the CIA is doing around
the world.
And we got a cable one day from the
secret prison and it said, "Hey, we were
interrogating
Ahmed Ahmed over here." And
unfortunately,
he didn't survive the interrogation.
And I was like, "Uhhuh.
And now what are you going to do?" And
so the counterterrorism center sends a
cable out saying, "Well,
dig a ditch behind the building and put
him in the ditch. What are we going to
do?"
>> Justice Department never authorized
that. What are you are you going to rat
yourself out to the Justice Department
now? You just murdered this prisoner in
cold blood and then you put him in a
ditch that you dug behind the building?
What are you going to do? You going to
send a memo to John U and J Bby saying,
"Oh, by the way, listen, uh, you know,
it didn't work out like we thought it
was going to on paper,
but that's the country we became after
9/11."
>> What about the unauthorized ones?
>> Oh, well, those were just
mo most of them were laid out in the uh
in the Senate torture report. Abu Zuba,
for example, had this irrational fear of
of bugs. And so they put a diaper on
him. They put him in a coffin. They
dumped a box of cockroaches in on him.
And then they closed the coffin, you
know, and you got a fan in there to give
him oxygen. You could hear him
screaming, screaming. They did it just
to make him insane.
Another one was called Walling.
Walling was kind of a big deal and it
was controversial at headquarters
because the idea was
the idea was you start at the least
offensive
technique. The least offensive technique
was called the attention grab or the
attention grasp where I grab you by the
shirt and I say, "Answer my questions,
you."
That's not torture.
The next one was the belly slap. Okay.
Makes that cracking sound. It's a little
bit humiliating. Makes a handprint.
>> That's not torture either. The next one
was the attention slap, which was a slap
across the face. Not a hard one that's
going to break your jaw, a slap. It was
meant to humiliate.
Then there was forced nudity, right? And
it they graduated up to what was
supposed to be the harshest penalty of
them all, water boarding. And I told you
there were those others that were worse
than waterboarding. But then you had the
the bugs in the coffin. You had stress
positions. You had walling. Walling was
I grab you by the shirt and I slam you
into the wall behind you. Now what they
were supposed to do is to roll up a bath
towel and put it around your neck. And
the wall had to be made of plywood. So
it had a little bit of give to it. So I
slam you against the wall, but the towel
prevents you from getting whiplash.
Okay.
except they didn't use a towel and the
wall was made of concrete block.
And the next thing you know, they all
have traumatic brain injuries and now
they can't participate in their own
defenses because they're like drooling
and you know what is that? Nobody said
you could give them brain damage
and smash their skulls into the wall.
Just a couple of weeks ago,
um
the judge of the military tribunal at
Guantanamo threw out Khales Shake
Muhammad's confession and two other
codefendants throughout their
confessions because
they were they were gathered as a result
of CIA torture.
Okay, now what do you do? Now you can't
try them.
>> They're never going to get out because
they have no rights at Guantanamo. The
Supreme Court's already decided that.
But there will never be closure for the
9/11 families. These guys will never be
executed
because the CIA tortured them.
>> What do you think's going on in
Guantanamo now?
>> Pretty much nothing.
Um they're down to a small fraction of
the number of people. I think altogether
it's like it was 34 for a while. It's
it's lower than that. Now it's like 17.
Why was Why was it at its max?
>> 770.
And almost every single one of them was
innocent. The place was full. Get this.
Let's say you and I live in the same
village in Afghanistan and you borrow
money from me. You don't want to pay it
back. So you go to the Americans and you
say, "Hey, that guy, Al-Qaeda."
And so the CIA grabs me in the middle of
the night. I disappear to Guantanamo.
Nobody ever sees me again. and you don't
have to pay the loan back.
770
people and almost every single one of
them was innocent.
>> You got any idea who's still there now?
>> Yeah, kind of the worst of the worst. Um
KSM, Abu Zabeda, Amara Baluch, um KSM's
nephew, not nephew, son-in-law, um
Ramsey Benib,
uh who else?
It's been so many years now their names
are starting to escape me.
>> Did we ever get Uday Hussein?
>> Oh yeah, we killed him. We killed Kus in
the same gunfight.
>> He's one of the I agree with you. I
think that there are rules and it's
pretty important to abide by them.
>> But he
>> there are some extenduating
circumstances.
>> If I could find a person from history, I
think Ud Hussein would probably be top
of my list. You know, the first seven
years of my career, I worked exclusively
on Iraq.
And I used to dream about Uday. Uh, one
of my colleagues,
psychologists that I worked with in the
counterterrorism center later told me,
"Oh, that's a classic sign of PTSD." I
had a dream. It was a recurring dream
that I had gotten a job as a chef in
Saddam's palace. And I was standing
there in the kitchen saying, "I can't
believe I made it through the process.
I'm a chef. I'm going to poison them.
>> I'll kill all of them." And then I
turned around and Uday is there and he
says, "Do you really think we're that
stupid?"
>> And then I would wake up.
>> I had that dream a dozen times.
>> He was this sort of pinnacle peak evil
doer. He was a true psychopath.
>> He would drive around in his limousine,
>> point out an attractive woman on the
street,
>> have his bodyguard snatch her. He would
rape her, and then throw her off the
balcony of the hotel.
Who does that?
>> I'd heard that he turned up at weddings
>> to rape the bride. Yeah.
>> So he could have her first.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Uh I had a guy on the show
who I can't even remember technically
what his job was. Some form of fixer and
Uday Hussein went to Vegas.
>> Oh my god.
>> He wanted to go to Vegas. And this guy
was tasked with being Uday's handler for
a while getting him cocaine, getting him
women. And I asked sort of all of the
people that you had to look after and
smoo and who was the most difficult
client? You said Uday Hussein was
>> without a doubt.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Without a doubt. Uday's brothers-in-law,
Hussein Kamel Almajid, the minister of
the minister of industry and military
industrialization,
>> and Saddam Camel al- Majid, his brother,
>> who was the head of the special security
organization, the innermost ring of
Saddam security. They were married to
Saddam's two daughters,
>> Raged and Rana.
And they were so afraid of Uday that
they defected to Jordan
>> rather than be married into the family
or stay married into the family.
>> Yeah. But they went with their wives.
>> Oh, so they saved Oh, interesting.
>> Well, it didn't work out that way. So,
they immediately made contact with the
CIA. We sent a delegation out to meet
with them. My boss was a part of this
delegation.
And um
he said that
as soon as they sat down, Hussein camel
said, "Okay, here's what we need. We
need we need air cover. We need heavy
weapons. We need secure communications."
And my boss is like, "Whoa, wait a
minute. We didn't come out here to make
you the president of Iraq.
>> We came out here for you to tell us
where the weapons of mass destruction
are." And that conversation went
nowhere.
So
in the end they decided to go back. They
they publicly begged Saddam's
forgiveness.
>> Refected.
>> Refected.
>> Yeah,
>> we should we should coin that. We should
take credit for that word.
>> Mine yours now.
>> So
>> Williamson 2026. Yeah,
>> I like it. So they they publicly begged
Saddam's forgiveness. Saddam said all is
forgiven. Come back. I know how this
story ends already.
>> Uday met them at the border and shot
them both dead.
>> Yeah. I mean, U is going to Uday, isn't
he?
>> Yeah. It's his nature. It was his
nature, you know? It's like the the frog
and the scorpion. It's strange. As you
were talking about that, I was thinking
about, you know, sort of dynasties and
hereditary monarchies and stuff like
that. obviously British uh but also um
thinking about the Medici stuff like
that. Medici is probably a pretty good
pretty good example when you think when
you think about Italy. The reason I was
thinking about it was if your lineage is
highly predictive of who ends up being
in power in some ways, great because
kinship is perhaps the closest loyalty
that you can have from a like human
psychology perspective. But the issue
that you have is that if you manage to
have a a particularly competent,
successful, decisive,
wise, whatever grandfather, the
likelihood that you get two or three
more generations without hitting someone
who's highly [ __ ] is very, very low.
Like you
>> you're absolutely right. And you see it
with financially successful families,
too.
>> It takes on average, I think, three
generations to blow it all. You look at
Vanderbilt, you look at Rockefeller, you
d like it's very Yeah. And and with
this, you're almost guaranteeing because
it's so unmmerritocratic.
>> And Yeah. I I the line between genius
and madness or whatever it might be, the
person, the unbelievably assertive,
fantastic grandfather had the
constitution genetically and with with
the upbringing to then really take
advantage. But you only need to make a
few little adjustments from a
disposition standpoint to go from
benevolent, decisive, wise leader into
like narcissistic,
anxious
tyrant.
>> And um yeah, it doesn't surprise me when
you have situations like that. You go
who like what for all that U Hussein was
successful at being evil, I I don't look
at him and think that he's competent in
any other area. I don't think that he
would make a great leader of a country.
Just because you're able to do things
that are more ruthless than other people
doesn't mean that you can actually do
stuff that's more productive than the
average person. Like pick a a dude off
the street,
>> right?
>> And he would probably be better.
>> Mhm.
>> Yeah. So, I just I was thinking about
that as you talked about it.
>> And if fear only goes so far, you can
only cow so many people for so long
before they rise up and dispose of you.
It's one of my favorite areas of
research sort of I guess you would call
this sociological like evolutionary
sociology in one form which is looking
at the two forms of leaders that we had
ancestrally. So one is uh prestige
through dominance and another is
prestige through competence or one would
be uh like leadership through prestige
and another would be leadership through
power and fear. And what's interesting
is that if you look at the most
effective leaders in times of war,
societies actually prefer, they lean
more authoritarian. They actually want
more of a tyrant,
>> more decisive, going to either run close
to the rules or maybe color outside of
the lines a little bit. And you want
that. People seem to think that the more
dominant side is going to be better
during war. And I think it actually
might be. The problem is that when you
go from wartime to peace time, you still
have a very dominant leader. And the way
that they get protected was that you
need a ring of sycopants around them and
they end up being the enforcers. And
that's kind of an interesting um like
finding that you can't have a tyrannical
leader at the top. This is why uh in
chimp pods number one might be an
[ __ ] Number two, three and four can
band together and then number one's
gone.
>> But if you can do more coordination
Hitler style, right? You know this ring
of sycopants that are around him, you
then start to distribute the power a
little bit more. you've got some
protection. You can have more people
working to get them on. Ah, I he didn't
really mean to kill your brother. Don't
worry. You know, uh you just you do like
assholeery at scale basically. Um but
then on the other side, the prestige
thing is is good, but it's got
weaknesses because although people might
love you, like your compassion becomes a
a vector of fragility in some ways. So
yeah again you know looking at who is it
that you want to lead what's the
situation in which it would be most
optimal to have it what are you thinking
about like let's say that the outcome
that you want occurs you almost get a
pirick victory which is like one more
victory will cause us to be ruined
because if you do win what are you
locked into what's the the civilization
the the the socioultural situation that
gets carried forward in this newly
peaceful time
>> I think I think you're exactly right
yeah I think you're right it's Funny too
that
this is one of those things that's been
studied for decades, for generations,
and yet it seems to be a lesson that
leaders either don't know, don't
understand, or don't implement. I think
we all have a degree of
historical narcissism or soypism or
something that I'm aware that this might
be some of the most well re watched
wisdom of the ages but not for me
there's something special about my time
and there's always a justification as
well you know we we see this with uh the
current discussion around AI and it is
an existential risk and what's it doing
to us you can go back and look at um
some of the sort of lites against the
printing press, right? Saying that the
common folk being able to read or even I
think it was uh Thomas Blackmore in
England who was the first person to
translate the Bible into the common
language so that priests didn't have to
be the only conduit between the common
folk and God. You could read it as your
own. And this this is going to pervert
the minds of the proletariats that you
know the the the common people, the
surfs, the whatever. They're going to be
distracted. their minds are going to be
turned and at each different point I can
make the case for why television was
different and I can make the case for
why social media and phones are
different and I can make the case for
why AI and VR is different and I'm
saying that to me right now being the
person that has read the stuff around
what happens when you get the first
common language translation of the Bible
>> you know along the same lines there was
no television in Saudi Arabia until the
1970s and it was because there was this
debate at the time about you know graven
images And is this a graven image? A
form of graven
>> graven? Yeah. What's that?
>> Uh it's a like an idol, like idol
worship. Okay. Right. So,
one of the ten commandments is uh is to
issue graven images. Um
>> but then somebody got the idea that wait
a minute, wait a minute, what if we have
television but we just read the Quran
for 24 hours a day?
>> Okay. and they said that's a good idea.
And so when I moved to Saudi Arabia,
there were two stations, one in Arabic,
one in English, and it was just Quran
all day and all night. That was it.
>> One hell of a party.
>> That worked for them.
>> Did you see that Christa Pike lady? Have
you been tracking this story?
>> Uh the lady who got the death lady who
got the death penalty.
>> Oh my god. In Tennessee.
>> And they failed to kill her twice. So,
as I was walking in here, they said that
she is on life support and unresponsive.
>> Oh, there it is.
>> Christa Pike is on a ventilator and
unconscious after surviving lethal
injection. This was an hour ago.
>> Twice they tried to kill her.
>> Christa Pike survived Tennessee's
attempt to execute her via lethal
injection on Wednesday, but her medical
and legal future remain remarkably
unclear. She's incubated on a ventilator
and remains unconscious in a Nashville
area hospital. Her attorney said in a
court filing on Friday, receiving
life-saving care, lifesaving care
>> after being injected with two ostensibly
fatal doses of pentarbital.
>> Pentabarbital.
>> Yeah.
>> Her attorney said on Friday she's being
treated for the serious effects. Yeah, I
bet.
>> Yeah. Serious effects
>> of the pentabarbital administered during
the execution attempt, including
significant injuries to both arms. I
guess that might be from just the IVs
going in. Uh, a legal team filed an
emergency motion Friday asking a court
in Nashville to require Tennessee
Department of Correction to protect and
preserve all evidence. That makes sense.
They've also asked for an expedited
hearing on the motion. The state
department of correction, declined to
comment on the pending litigation. Pike,
who was sentenced to death for the 1995
murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slmer, was
set to become the first woman executed
in Tennessee in 200 years. Now her legal
case will be at a standstill. Bill Lee,
governor, Republican, announced he would
call off the state's last remaining
execution this year while a third party
review takes place to determine exactly
what happened in Pike's case. According
to the Associated Press, the governor
has appropriately called for an
investigation. We need to know what
happened. The administration has not
informed Slmer's family of what might be
next for Pike. They're devastated and
exhausted. Oh, so this is the
>> the family of the victim.
>> Family of the victim. Bracewell, who
helps Slammer's parents navigate the
process, said the family is mad at the
state for not being helpful or for
forthcoming as to what is next. Like,
look, you're the parents of this person.
I imagine it's absolutely horrible. But
like, what do you mean mad for not being
helpful or forthcoming as to what is
next? Like, we just failed a thing
that's literally supposed to be final
twice. It's slightly unprecedented.
>> Her last words were, "Is it supposed to
hurt this much?"
>> Is that true?
>> So, I remember watching a Who was it? It
was Malcolm Gladwell. So Malcolm
>> Oh, I love Malcolm Gladwell.
>> But he's very against capital
punishment. And we had this
conversation. I think the start of our
conversation probably half an hour the
first time he came on the show was
around that. And I said, "Well, is it's
humane way to kill people?" And he said,
"No, no, no. Sequence of drugs. Do you
know much about this?"
>> Yeah, I've followed it closely.
>> Can you explain?
>> It's it smothers you uh slowly. Uh the
petrotoarbital
>> is that the big mover because there's
three, right?
>> Yeah, there are three exactly
>> in sequence.
>> But the problem is well one one
paralyzes the heart, one paralyzes the
uh the respiration and the other is
supposed to be the sort of the finisher.
But the thing is is when they're taken
altogether, they cause an inordinate
amount of pain, but because you're
paralyzed by then, you can't express the
pain,
>> right? And no one's ever I mean wouldn't
it be interesting if this person becomes
conscious again and is now a landmark
case for this is what a two time
survivor
>> punishment yes
>> of lethal injection is. I wonder, Mark,
can you try and find out how many people
in history in America have survived?
>> Good question.
>> Uh, a lethal injection because if they
have and they're still functional,
uh, they would be a pretty good
uh campaigner for, hey, you we think
that we found a humane way to take a
life,
>> right,
>> and bring back the [ __ ] guillotine.
>> Yeah. You know like really because what
you've done is you've traded something
which is painless apart from for one
second
>> millisecond. Yeah micro second. Oh here
we go. As of as of October 2nd 2026
there are two ways to answer this. Eight
people have survived a modern US lethal
injection execution attempt. Death
penalty information sent seven people
before Christa Pike survived failed
attempts because execution teams could
not establish a usable IV line. Pike
became the eighth. Oh, c can you ask?
Oh, but look at the bottom. There's a
remarkable distinction. Pike is
apparently the first person in the
modern US death penalty era to survive
after the lethal injection drugs were
actually administered. In the previous
seven cases, officials abandoned the
execution because they couldn't
establish the IV access necessary to
administer the drugs.
>> So, if by survived lethal injection you
mean actually received the lethal drugs
and lived, the answer appears to be one.
Christa Pike, can you ask how did she
get both doses?
Did did they do it back to back? Did
they, you know, like when you take uh
MDMA and they're like, "How you feeling?
Do you want to reup? Do you want to take
half a dose after 90 minutes to like
incre increase the high or whatever?" I
don't know whether
>> but that's insane. It totally makes
sense. Like if you've got someone that's
been living on death row, maybe they're
not in great health and finding an IV
line isn't necessarily easy. The exact
timing is a little murky because they
closed the execution chamber certain
during injections but witness accounts
that has reconstructed slowly. The first
dose appears to have been administered
at about 7:41 CT. Uh if the protocol
says that if the prisoner is still alive
5 minutes after the first dose,
officials administer a second 100
millgram dose. So at 7:46 from 7:41,
she's still alive and visibly breathing.
Officials closed the curtain. It
reopened 3 minutes later. Witnesses then
saw her loudly snoring with her mouth
open. Multiple accounts indicate that
this approximately 3minute interval is
when the second dose was administered.
So the best reconstruction 7:41 first
dose 5 minutes 746 to 749 curtain
closed. Second dose administered 749
curtain reopened. Pike still breathing/s
snoring. One particularly important
detail Tennessee normally establishes
two IV lines as a redundancy. We do not
know yet whether the second dose went
through the same IV line as the first or
whether officials switched to the backup
IV and that is one of the major
unanswered questions in this
investigation. The report saying the
second dose was administered later. So
public timeline is inconsistent. The
really strange part is why two doses
failed. There are a few plausible
explanations including the IV and drug
delivery. Pike's complaint that her arm
felt like it was going to burst bust is
potentially significant. So maybe if
they just fitted the IV line incorrectly
and it's just in the the tissue. It's an
intramuscular rather than intravenous
injection. But
>> yeah, dude, this could be huge.
>> Yeah. And I mean it is still crazy.
First woman to bear.
>> First woman to be executed in 200 years.
>> Do you know what she did as the crime
though? Yeah.
>> Took a box cutter to
>> Grizzly. And she kept a piece of the
skull with hair on it and was showing it
around to friends. She broke the girl's
skull into asphalt when she was 19 or
something. So
>> yeah, I mean it's strange with
situations like this, right? This I've
thought a lot about retribution um as it
means to capital punishment and sort of
especially if you've taken some of the
determinism red pill and thought what
does free will consist of and like how
culpable are people for their actions? U
Hussein like do we hold him culpable?
like morally, legally, what does this
but we do have humans have this
reflexive instinct for
retribution.
>> We do. We do. And that's why we still
execute people in so many states. I
mean, it's about half now. And even of
of the states that have the death
penalty, uh, many of them just don't
carry it out. Like, uh, California, for
example. I wonder what you would need to
do in California in order to get the
death penalty. Can you work out when the
last death in uh California was?
>> It's a great question, too.
>> Uh, while we're looking for that, what's
your relationship with Angry Birds? Man,
I love my birds
so much I can't even tell you. No,
seriously. I I wake up an hour earlier
than I need to every day, seven days a
week, just to play Angry Birds and not
lose a productive hour of the day. It's
the very first thing I do. As soon as my
alarm goes off, I put my glasses on,
pick up my phone, and start playing
Angry Birds. I love it. Why?
It's just so mindless, and it gives me a
sense of accomplishment,
you know?
I have no hobbies. Well, until very
recently, I I had no hobbies. All I do
is work. And I love it. It's great. It's
fun. It's now, thank God, beginning to
be, you know, kind of lucrative. But,
um, but I don't really do anything but
work.
>> And so, Angry Birds was like my only
vice. I did buy a a telescope with a
built-in camera. So, I I've taken some
awesome deep space pictures, and that's
fun. Tuesday and Wednesday in DC, I'm
gonna be back in DC completely cloudless
nights. I'm going to be out all night
taking pictures. But, uh,
>> and I'll show you some. Um, but Angry
Birds, it just it gives me such
satisfaction. I just
>> You had an insanely long streak.
>> Nine consecutive years. I didn't miss a
single day. And then I got screwed when
I upgraded my phone.
Um,
this is the first picture I took.
And then if you leave through, I took
one on the harvest moon a month later.
And uh, yeah, that's the harvest moon.
That was a pretty good one. And I
haven't done any editing to that at all.
That's just the picture. No editing. And
that's the Whirlpool Galaxy.
And you did this in DC?
>> Uhhuh. With all that ground light.
Imagine what it would look like if I
actually had a dark place to go.
>> Wow. That is impressive.
>> It's fun. But I mean, you can only do
this when there are no clouds in the
sky. Sometimes I'll drive up to up to
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Uh it's about
an hour and 15 minutes north of me just
cuz they've got dark sky there. And uh
there's a guy that lets me that lets me
just kind of park in his parking lot. He
shuts the security light off and I'll
sit there for two or three hours and
just take pictures
>> saying that you've got no hobbies. What
happened at New York Fashion Week?
>> So, I get a call from this awesome
designer. Um,
Elena, she's like a neo goth.
Everything's black.
>> I do, when I look at you, I do think neo
goth actually. You're
>> right. See
cuz
>> I'm I'm with it, right? So, she asked me
if I would have any interest in walking
the catwalk at New York Fashion Week.
And I said, "Oh, hell yes." Cuz look,
I'm 62 years old.
>> Here you are.
>> With the dog tags of my victims.
>> Oh, that's nice.
>> I was the only person that that got two
different uh
>> You had two looks.
>> Two looks. I had 90 seconds to change.
>> Oh yeah, I did. I spent for a very very
long time in my 20s doing uh fashion
shows and I know how horrendous that
backstage
>> I was surprised at how much work was
involved.
>> We started at 11:00 that morning and the
thing wasn't over until 9:30 at night.
>> Yeah. Justice for We talk about the
perils of being at Guantanamo Bay. No
one's talking about how painful it is
for the models at New York Fashion Week
>> and they're all naked most of the day.
>> Justice for New York Fashion models.
That's what I say.
>> And they don't get paid. Another thing,
too, um the next day I had six emails
waiting for me from friends of mine
saying, "Buddy, there's this AI video of
you going."
And I was like, "Nope, nope. It's not
AI." It is a good get out of jail free
card now for anyone who gets rumbled to
just say, "Hey, like AI is getting
really, really crazy." It's really
crazy. What, you know, thinking about
your career and and sort of what you're
doing now, what is the most interesting
thing about your work and that world
that you've learned after spending so
much time in it that that people from
outside don't really appreciate or don't
understand? Oh, you know, I think it is
that
most of the people involved in the
intelligence community are very very
bright,
very um patriotic people who want to do
nothing more than to serve the American
people.
And they're not right-wing ideologues.
I'll give you an example. the 1992
election was it was the morning of the
election. So, we all voted in the
morning. I was in a branch of um eight
people, nine people, including the
branch chief. And at the end of our 9:00
morning meeting, he said, "Listen, I I
know we're not supposed to do this, but
I'm just really curious as to who who
voted for whom."
>> It turned out it was three for Clinton,
three for Bush, and two for Perau. And I
remember thinking, "Wow, I'm not the
only Democrat in this office." But back
then, you had no idea
who the person sitting next to you voted
for because it was irrelevant. In 1996,
there was a woman in my branch that got
in trouble. She was reprimanded by HR
and had a letter put in her file that
made her ineligible for promotion for a
year because she had a Bob Dole bumper
sticker in her cubicle. And now it's
just like all gone nuts. But um but I
think what most people don't understand,
especially especially on the political
left, they just say CIA evil, you know,
and that's just not the case. There are
bad people at the CIA. There are evil
people at the CIA,
>> psychopaths in some cases, sociopaths,
murderers,
>> but most of them are are good, decent,
smart, hardworking people. If you were
to rank the intelligence agencies around
the world, who do you think per person
is most effective, most advanced?
>> Easy. That That's the Israelis. They're
the best in the world. They're [ __ ]
don't get me wrong, but they're the best
in the world.
>> Why?
>> I think because they've convinced
themselves that they have to be or
they're done.
>> It's permanent existential threat,
>> right? You know Parkinson's law work
expands to fill the time given for it.
It's like intensity expands to give to
uh fill the existential threat against
it.
>> There it is.
>> Yeah.
>> That's Israel.
>> Yeah.
>> John Kiryaku. Ladies and gentlemen, I uh
I am endlessly fascinated by what you're
doing. Where should people go? You got
book. You got all sorts of other stuff
going on.
>> I've got a bunch of books. They're all
on uh on Amazon. I have a new one that
came out a couple of weeks ago. I have
one that's coming out in
10 days, I guess.
>> Yeah. How to live off the grid. We
didn't even We need to do that next
time.
>> We didn't do that one. Um and I've got
um John Kiryaku's Dead Drop on Apple
Apple Podcast and Spotify and uh John
Kuryaku's Briefing Room on YouTube.
>> Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Until
next time.
>> Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a
lot of fun. Good to see you.
>> All right. Until next time. Goodbye, my
beauties. Dude.