Link: https://youtu.be/wwn5GUgcq80

Duration: 156 min

Transcript: Download plain text

Short Summary

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who spent his first seven years working on Iraq, joins for a wide-ranging interview covering his career, agency tradecraft, the U.S. torture program and its consequences, Saddam's inner circle, walk-in handling, and assorted side topics from Christa Pike's botched execution to his personal hobbies like astronomy and a New York Fashion Week walk.

Key Quotes

1. "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." (00:04:01)
2. "His position is that fully 3/4 of classified documents ought not be classified." (00:17:17)
3. "We murdered people with that technique. Murdered them. And the Justice Department never allowed anybody to murder a prisoner." (01:41:09)

Detailed Summary

The Modern Wisdom Interview: Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou

Guest Profile and the Pardon Quest

• John Kiriakou is a 62-year-old former CIA officer who has been out of the agency for 22 years, speaks Greek and Arabic, and spent his first seven years at the agency working exclusively on Iraq. He also served as a senior investigator on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to 2011.
• Kiriakou is currently seeking a pardon from President Trump but does not expect to receive one; ~3 weeks before recording he was told a pardon will not happen because "the CIA hates me."
• A cabinet member framed the institutional opposition bluntly: a pardon could encourage other whistleblowers to expose waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality.
• Kiriakou ranks himself and Edward Snowden as the CIA's two most persona non grata figures; he claims he was number one before Snowden's 2013 disclosures.
• He currently teaches a graduate course on terrorism history at the University of Salamanca's intelligence studies program, where he noted his students had never heard of Carlos the Jackal.

The "Deep State," Presidential Power, and CIA Culture

• Kiriakou argues career federal bureaucrats serve 25–35 years while presidents rotate every 4–8 years, meaning presidents are not the definitive authority over the CIA.
• He cites a colleague who served 37 years and rose into the top 4–5 agency positions as evidence of careerist entrenchment.
• Career officers can effectively ignore presidential orders with a polite "Yes, Mr. President" followed by inaction, per Kiriakou.
• The President's Daily Brief (PDB) is the CIA's hook for new presidents: delivered 6 days a week by the deputy director for intelligence and/or the director of the PDB staff, starting the day after the election — especially powerful on presidents with no foreign policy experience.
• On the morning of the 1992 presidential election, Kiriakou's CIA branch of 8–9 people split 3 Clinton / 3 Bush / 2 Perot; in 1996 a woman in the same branch was reprimanded and made ineligible for promotion for a year by HR for having a Bob Dole bumper sticker in her cubicle.

Intelligence Oversight and the Classification System

• After 1975, the Church and Pike Committees became the Senate Select and House Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence, but oversight staffs of 40–50 people cannot meaningfully oversee a CIA of 20,000–40,000 and rely heavily on self-reporting.
• Kiriakou cites an example where a station chief instructed him not to report a lost source to Congress and he complied.
• The U.S. classification hierarchy runs: unclassified → sensitive but unclassified → confidential → secret (serious damage) → top secret (grave damage), with compartments above that.
• Standard CIA clearance is TS/SCI including TALENT, KEYHOLE, and GAMMA (the highest day-to-day tier); operational code names like Zarf, SITK, and Jelly Jar are computer-generated and ephemeral, though Zarf dates back to the 1950s.
• The president is the only person who can access any compartment on request and can declassify anything unilaterally; former classification czar J. William (under George W. Bush) argued 3/4 of classified documents should not be classified.
• DARPA's work is so highly classified that even CIA officers lack access; Kiriakou speculates reported UFO sightings could be DARPA experimental aircraft.
• The White House and Pentagon "leak like sieves," but leaks are typically authorized for political purposes, technically breaching the Espionage Act.

Foreign Threats: China and Israel

• Kiriakou views China as the primary nation-state threat, noting it has no real history of imperialism except Tibet, a brief North Vietnam conflict, and two India border skirmishes.
• China's strategy is purchasing, co-opting, and economically integrating with countries while isolating the U.S., aiming for containment-style collapse under U.S. debt.
• He reports a deep-cover Chinese intelligence cell in New York City threatening dissidents' relatives in China, and that China is actively recruiting Capitol Hill staffers, FBI agents, hard-science PhD students, and trying to infiltrate the CIA itself.
• Kiriakou calls Israel the greatest immediate infiltration risk; ~35 years ago the FBI identified 187 undercover Israeli intelligence operatives in U.S. defense contractors.
• He says the DIA director sent an all-hands email ~3 weeks before recording warning that Israel has ramped up intelligence operations against DIA, now aided by collocation in the Pentagon and CIA under the National Defense Authorization Act.
• Kiriakou stated that, per person, Israel's intelligence service is the most effective in the world because of a permanent existential threat driving intensity, citing Parkinson's Law.

Defense Spending, Tech Industry, and the Surveillance State

• The U.S. defense budget runs $1–$1.5 trillion/year, more than the next 8 largest countries combined, and the U.S. maintains 210 military bases across 144 countries.
• The F-35 is dismissed as a one-size-fits-all system nobody wanted, contrasted with the beloved phased-out A-10; U.S. national debt has crossed $40 trillion with defense as the #1 expenditure and interest on debt as #2.
• Oracle's name comes from a CIA project its founders previously worked on, and post-9/11 the CIA received a Congressional waiver to invest in tech startups — becoming the very first investor in Palantir (Kiriakou says he worked there 15 years).
• Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey with the tagline "Fight Unfair," is cited as a U.S. defense-tech firm that must embed with government or risk selling to the highest bidder (possibly not the U.S.).
• From 2009–2011 on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou's first investigation traced a tip about U.S. passports being made in China: passports are printed in Thailand, but embedded chips with source security codes are made in China, giving China control over American passport efficacy.
• The NSA and CIA are forbidden by their founding charters from collecting data on American citizens, but Kiriakou claims both do so daily.
• Pre-9/11, the FBI had to convince a federal judge to investigate a person; post-9/11, the FBI can issue a National Security Letter under the Patriot Act with a gag order, demanding all data from service providers.
• A Cato Institute 2023 survey of 2,000 Americans found only 14% support government-installed surveillance cameras in every household, 75% oppose (68% strongly), 10% no opinion; among Americans under 30, ~30% support in-home cameras.

Vault 7, WikiLeaks, and the Snowden Era

• In 2017, WikiLeaks published Vault 7 documents allegedly leaked by CIA engineer Joshua Schulte, who represented himself and was sentenced to 40 years without parole.
• The documents allegedly showed the CIA can remotely take control of vehicles to crash them, hack smart TVs to turn a speaker into a microphone while the TV is off, and had hacked allied classified systems leaving code written in Cyrillic or Farsi.
• The then-CIA director called the Vault 7 documents "the crown jewel of everything the CIA was doing."
• Ed Snowden's June 2013 revelations disclosed the NSA was intercepting Angela Merkel's cell phone — Kiriakou argues this is desirable for national security.
• Kiriakou names passage of the Patriot Act as the most successful mass behavioral campaign in history, trading civil liberties for inconveniences like removing shoes at airports.

MK Ultra, Brainwashing, and Historical Operations

• The CIA, KGB, Chinese, and North Korean governments worked on brainwashing operations from the early 1950s, and the "Manchurian Candidate" concept is based on fact.
• An early-1950s CIA-recruited Soviet source reported the KGB ran a remote-control brainwashing program — later found to not exist at the KGB, though China ran a similar program.
• MK Ultra ran 1952–1975 and was a complete failure resulting in deaths; records were destroyed after Senator Church told the CIA director at the 1975 Church Committee not to destroy documents — the director returned to HQ and ordered everything shredded, with only 15% surviving.
• MK Ultra activities included dosing CIA employees with LSD, dosing San Franciscans with LSD while releasing germs to track upper respiratory infections, and an officer putting LSD into a French village bakery's flour.
• The 1996 Bojinka plot in Manila was masterminded by Mukhtar (later identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, who attended high school in North Carolina); the plan was to hijack 14 Boeing 747s from Manila and fly them into West Coast buildings.
• The Bojinka plot was discovered when Mukhtar's cleaning lady found the plans on his dining room table and called Manila Police, who escalated to Philippine Intelligence and the CIA; Mukhtar fled.

Walk-Ins, Tradecraft, and Lie Detection

• Internal CIA studies cited by Kiriakou: ~95% of walk-ins are "crazy people" and not credible; ~1% are intelligence brokers selling small nuggets; ~2% are hostile-service probes (Iranians, North Koreans, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIS) mapping embassy vulnerabilities; ~1% are genuine high-value sources like the KGB counterintelligence directorate chief.
• After returning from Yemen and landing at Dulles at 10:00 a.m., Kiriakou was once ordered to fly to Sudan at 3:00 p.m. the same day to debrief a walk-in because of a shortage of Arabic speakers.
• CIA instructors taught that the greatest sources ever recruited were walk-ins, including the KGB counterintelligence directorate chief and the director of the North Korean nuclear program, who might approach embassies in cities like Mexico City or Vienna.
• One colorful walk-in wore a Greek naval officer's uniform, claimed Revolutionary Organization 17 November leadership was a triumvirate of Queen Elizabeth, Jacques Cousteau, and Frank Sinatra per an angel's vision, and demanded a $10 million reward.
• The best interrogation tactic per CIA trainers: treat the person with respect and kindness, build a relationship over weeks or months — contrasting with both the CIA's torture program and the FBI's rapport-based method dating to the 1940s.
• A peculiar piece of operational training: CIA trainees were taught to urinate before meetings so they wouldn't have to excuse themselves.
• From Kiriakou's book, liars blink less; looking up tends to indicate truth-telling, looking down can indicate lying.
• CIA training used a video of Whitey Bulger's brother (then president of the Massachusetts state senate) denying contact with his fugitive brother as a textbook example of a non-blinking liar.

The Capture in Pakistan and Interrogation Philosophy

• Kiriakou's first capture in Pakistan was a Jordanian national who had escaped into Pakistan from Tora Bora when U.S. bombing began, with a valid Jordanian passport, no Afghan language skills, and a story of opening an orphanage in 1996 for children orphaned by the Soviet invasion.
• The detainee's account was independently verified through cables to the American embassy in Amman, CIA headquarters, and the Jordanian embassy in Islamabad; Kiriakou sent him back to Jordan rather than to Guantanamo.
• The CIA had no trained interrogators and took over interrogation from the FBI after Kiriakou cabled headquarters asking for instructions; Kiriakou cited inter-agency rivalry between the CIA and FBI, who refused to share information, as a cause of the 9/11 attacks.

The CIA Torture Program: Techniques and Abuses

• Kiriakou states it is a "100% proven fact" that torture does not work for obtaining truth, citing John McCain naming the Green Bay Packers' offensive line under duress; the Federal Torture Act of 1946 specifically forbids the techniques the CIA used, and the U.S. was a signatory and writer of the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
• In 1945 the U.S. executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs; in January 1968 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation after a Washington Post photo showed a U.S. soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, and the soldier received a 20-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth.
• During CIA waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, enough water entered his lungs to stop his heart, requiring revival so he could be tortured again.
• The "cold cell" technique involved stripping a prisoner naked, chaining them to a ceiling eyebolt, chilling the cell to 50°F, and pouring a bucket of ice water on the prisoner each hour.
• The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for 12 days under industrial-strength lights and looped music at volume 11; American Psychological Association studies find people begin losing their minds at day 7 and start dying at day 9.
• Donald Rumsfeld publicly mocked the leaked sleep-deprivation program, saying he works 24-hour shifts at a standup desk.
• A secret-prison cable reported a prisoner named "Ahmed" "didn't survive the interrogation"; the Counterterrorism Center's suggested response was to "dig a ditch behind the building and put him in the ditch."
• CIA officers placed a diaper on Abu Zubaydah, put him in a coffin with a box of cockroaches and a fan for oxygen, and closed the lid while he screamed.
• "Walling" was meant to use a rolled bath towel against plywood, but in practice no towel was used and the wall was concrete block, causing traumatic brain injuries.
• The "enhanced interrogation" ladder escalated from the attention grab/grasp, to the belly slap, attention slap, forced nudity, and waterboarding as the harshest approved technique.
• Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian detainee and Kiriakou's friend, was held 14 years at Guantanamo despite being innocent and subjected to mock executions.

Consequences of the Torture Program: Guantanamo and 9/11 Tribunal Fallout

• A military tribunal judge recently threw out Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's confession and those of two codefendants because they were obtained through CIA torture — meaning they likely will never be executed and 9/11 families will never get closure.
• Guantanamo peaked at 770 detainees, with Kiriakou claiming almost every single one was innocent; he cited a scenario in which personal vendettas could lead to wrongful capture (someone reporting a debtor as Al-Qaeda to have them disappeared).
• Current detainee population is ~17, down from 34, including KSM, Abu Zubaydah, Ammar Baluchi, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
• A long-standing executive order authorizes the CIA to kill a foreign national posing a "clear and present danger," but if captured the suspect has the same constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen and must face accusers in court.

Saddam's Inner Circle and Iraq Operations

• Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed in the same gunfight; Uday allegedly drove around Baghdad snatching women to rape, throwing them off hotel balconies, and raping brides at weddings.
• Hussein Kamel al-Majid (Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization) and Saddam Kamel al-Majid (head of the Special Security Organization, Saddam's innermost security ring) were married to Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rana.
• Fear of Uday drove the two Kamel brothers to defect to Jordan; upon return, Uday met them at the border and shot them both dead.
• When the CIA met with the Kamel brothers in Jordan, they demanded air cover, heavy weapons, and secure communications to take over Iraq, while the CIA wanted WMD information; the talks failed.
• A recurring PTSD dream Kiriakou reports: he was a chef in Saddam's palace planning to poison the family, only to be confronted by Uday asking, "Do you really think we're that stupid?"
• Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un traveled on fake Brazilian passports (issued via the Brazilian embassy in Prague) to visit Disneyland.

Rendition, the Kansi Attack, and Major Captures

• After DEA agent Kiki Camarena was kidnapped, tortured, and executed by a Mexican cartel in the mid-1980s under Reagan, Congress legalized extraditing foreign nationals to face U.S. trial; Kiriakou distinguishes rendition (sending someone to their home country) from extraordinary rendition (sending someone to any country like Syria, Morocco, Algeria to be tortured, with no records).
• Pakistani intelligence built a new HQ with the $10M bounty on Abu Zubaydah and $25M bounty on KSM; Brigadier General Muhammad shook down the CIA for night vision goggles, 9mm guns, office carpeting, and a refrigerator.
• In 1993, Mir Amal Kansi drove to CIA headquarters' main gate, parked, and shot car-to-car with an AK-47, killing CIA colleagues Lansing Bennett and Frank Darling, then fled to Pakistan on a one-way ticket with no luggage.
• The CIA located Kansi in a "flea hotel" in Quetta, Pakistan; proposals included renting an Ottoman fort on a Pakistani mountain to intercept village phone calls and building a 600-foot fake radio tower. An agent lured Kansi out; he was handed to the FBI because the CIA is an intelligence agency, not law enforcement.
• Time magazine ran a cover with FBI agents leading Kansi away under "How the FBI got its man," which still angers CIA team members.

Famous Cases: Carlos the Jackal, Eichmann, and the Athens Assassination

• Adolf Eichmann was located working in a car factory in Argentina in the early 1960s; kidnapped by Israeli operatives despite no Israel-Argentina diplomatic relations, transported to Israel, tried in a televised proceeding in his Nazi uniform, convicted and hanged.
• Carlos the Jackal (Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez), a Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist and "Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and 80s," orchestrated the OPEC ministerial leadership kidnapping in Vienna, ransoming them for billions (Saudi payment).
• CIA contractor Billy Waugh (WWII/Korea/Vietnam vet, Florida license plate "seven hits" with purple heart insignia, 7 Purple Hearts) spotted Carlos at a vegetable souk in Khartoum, Sudan, while contracted under Cofer Black.
• Billy paid two Sudanese men a few dollars to stage a fist fight so he could photograph Carlos; HQ confirmed the sighting.
• CIA operatives broke into Carlos's home, laced his toothpaste with ground glass, then recruited his dentist to anesthetize him and render him onto a French military transport plane to Paris, where he faced 7 counts of murder and remains imprisoned.
• April 2000: British defense attaché Brigadier General Stephen Saunders was shot and killed in Athens by Revolutionary Organization 17 November; Kiriakou was his neighbor.
• Months later, an uneducated Greek farmer walked into the U.S. embassy claiming he witnessed a van-and-car exchange ~40 minutes after the assassination; under hypnosis his left arm remained raised for 4.5 hours with no visible muscle strain, and he described a motorcycle, two men, and a license plate that traced to a stolen police car — everything he said later proved true.
• Juan Pujol García (Garbo) was a Spanish double agent rejected by British intelligence, trained at the Royal Poultry School, unsuccessful chicken farmer; he invented a fake 28-agent network using newspapers and travel guides, brought to Britain in 1942 as a double agent central to Operation Fortitude (D-Day deception).
• Eli Cohen, an Israeli Mossad agent, posed as a barber in Damascus, hosted senior Bath party officials and exiled Nazis, and was caught when a KGB signals van detected his transmissions to Tel Aviv.
• The Hezbollah pager operation took ~10 years to plan, controlling the supply chain across ~5–6 countries; it killed or injured civilians, including children, which Kiriakou acknowledged was technically a war crime and crime against humanity.

Covert Action, Psyops, and Manipulation

• The CIA's first-ever covert action was influencing the 1949 Italian elections, giving $150,000 to the Christian Democratic Party to rent journalists and place pro-conservative articles; communists were defeated.
• 2011: Before the U.S. closed its Yemen embassy, a defense attaché described a psyop running a pirate radio station playing jazz mixed with call-in shows injecting pro-American messaging; cost $150,000, which Kiriakou called the stupidest idea he'd ever heard.
• A WWII-era psychological assessment (per John Lyon's The Dirty Tricks Department) described Hitler as having a fragile hold on his masculinity; Allies recruited the Eagle's Nest gardener to inject female sex hormones into Hitler's vegetables (effectiveness unknown).
• Abu Zubaydah's interrogation by FBI agent Ali Soufan connected him to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; pre-9/11 the CIA had no file on KSM.

Hereditary Succession and Leadership Theory

• Hereditary succession is psychologically appealing due to kinship loyalty but almost guarantees incompetent successors within a few generations; Kiriakou cited Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families losing wealth within roughly three generations, plus the Medici.
• Leadership through dominance/fear is contrasted with leadership through prestige/competence, framed as evolutionary sociology research; in wartime, societies reportedly prefer more authoritarian, decisive leaders willing to color outside the rules.
• Dominant/tyrannical leaders are protected by a ring of sycophantic enforcers; Hitler is cited as an example.
• In chimpanzee pods, if the number one is an "asshole," numbers two, three, and four can band together to remove them.
• Prestige-based leadership has a weakness: a leader's compassion becomes a vector of fragility.

AI Risk and Historical Moral Panics

• Kiriakou likens AI risk debates to historical panics about the printing press, television, social media, and phones, each claimed as "different."
• Thomas Blackmore in England was cited as the first to translate the Bible into the common language, prompting contemporary warnings that it would pervert common minds.
• Saudi Arabia had no television until the 1970s over whether it constituted a "graven image"; when introduced, the only stations broadcast Quran continuously.

Christa Pike's Botched Execution

• Christa Pike, sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slmer, survived Tennessee's lethal injection attempt on Wednesday with two ostensibly fatal doses of pentobarbital and was on a ventilator in a Nashville-area hospital.
• She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years; her attorney said in a Friday court filing she is receiving life-saving care, including significant injuries to both arms.
• Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (Republican) announced he would call off the state's last remaining execution this year pending a third-party review.
• The Slmer family was reportedly not informed of next steps; representative Bracewell said they are devastated, exhausted, and upset with the state for not being helpful or forthcoming.
• Pike's reported last words: "Is it really supposed to hurt this much?"
• Reconstruction timeline: first dose administered at ~7:41 CT; a 100 mg second dose is given 5 minutes later if the prisoner is still alive; curtain closed at 7:46 with Pike visibly breathing, reopened at ~7:49 with witnesses reporting loud snoring and mouth open.
• Tennessee normally establishes two IV lines as redundancy; it is unknown whether the second dose used the same line or the backup IV.
• One plausible explanation: the IV was improperly placed, delivering the drug intramuscularly rather than intravenously; Pike reported her arm felt like it was going to burst.
• The lethal injection protocol uses three drugs in sequence (one paralyzes the heart, one paralyzes respiration, and a finisher); together they cause severe pain but the patient is already paralyzed and cannot express it (per a Malcolm Gladwell discussion cited on the show).
• As of October 2, 2026, eight people have survived a modern U.S. lethal injection execution attempt; seven prior to Pike survived because teams could not establish a usable IV line, and Pike is apparently the first to survive after lethal injection drugs were actually administered.

Personal Hobbies and Quirky Side Topics

• Kiriakou still practices surveillance countermeasures daily, checking mirrors and using encrypted apps — 22 years out of the agency.
• He plays Angry Birds immediately after waking, once maintaining a 9-year consecutive streak with no missed days, ending when he upgraded his phone.
• He uses a telescope with a built-in camera to take deep-space photos from Washington, DC, including a photo of the Whirlpool Galaxy with no editing; for darker skies he drives ~1 hour 15 minutes to Gettysburg, PA, parks in a lot where the owner shuts off a security light, and shoots for two or three hours.
• At age 62 he walked the catwalk at New York Fashion Week for a neo-goth designer, presenting two different looks with 90 seconds to change; the show ran from 11:00 AM to 9:30 PM, and friends later sent him six emails claiming the footage was AI-generated.
• Nestle hired psychoanalyst Clor (Clair) Rapai to crack the Japanese coffee market in the 1970s; his insight was that childhood food memories create lasting consumer bonds, leading to a yearslong campaign seeding coffee-flavored desserts to children. Rapai's background included years working with autistic children.
• Coffee-flavored KitKat bars in Japan likely did not appear until the 2000s, per the New York Times, even though Japan's KitKat market is large and varied; by 2014 the Japanese coffee market hit record highs per the Japan Times.
• In the mid-1970s U.S., more people drank Coca-Cola in the morning than coffee, prompting coffee producers to switch from cheaper Robusta to more expensive Arabica beans.