John Kiriakou, left, and Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer. (Joshua Scheer)
Read the unedited transcript of the full interview below.
On “Scheer Intelligence,” KCRW’s new podcast with Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, John Kiriakou, author of “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror,” details his 15 years as a CIA analyst and counterterrorism operations officer specializing in the Middle East.
Kiriakou served two years in prison for exposing President Bush’s “lie” about the U.S. torture program. He tells Scheer how the CIA—an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets—evolved into a “paramilitary force,” how the U.S. drone program “creates terrorists” by killing innocent civilians, and how the Obama administration uses the Espionage Act as a political tool to threaten whistleblowers.
Additionally, Kiriakou challenges the government’s claim that Americans have to surrender their civil liberties to fight terrorist groups around the world. “That’s unnecessary, it’s anti-constitutional,” he says. “And I think […] all Americans, should stand up and oppose it.”
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” the podcast I’ve been doing for KCRW. And I have a wonderful guest tonight, John Kiriakou. He was an intelligence operative for the CIA for 14 years, from 1990 to 2004. After the World Trade Center attack, he was involved in Pakistan in the capture of the third-highest-ranking leader of al-Qaida. And he blew the whistle on torture in 2007, in an interview with ABC; and after that, while he was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he ran into some trouble because of an interview he gave to a reporter for The New York Times in which he was said to have revealed the name of another agent to that reporter. It’s ironic, because that’s the sort of thing that Gen. Petraeus, who was head of the CIA, did 10 times in books that he turned over to his mistress, who was writing a book about him. And he got no such penalty. My guest today, John Kiriakou, served over two years in prison. The reason I particularly wanted to interview you today is because we’re speaking a matter of days after the Paris bombing.
John Kiriakou: Right.
RS: And what I want to ask you about, because you know a lot about the so-called war on terrorism; and you know about what works and what doesn’t work. And one of the first things that came up here is that a number of high-ranking officials, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA and the former head of national security, all jumped up before the TV cameras and say, “See? This is why Apple and Google are wrong to have encryption, this is why we can’t have a restraint, this is why Edward Snowden is weakening us with his revelations,” and so forth. What was your immediate response to that?
JK: Oh, it was first a feeling of disgust. And second I wanted to shout, to the nearest person in proximity to me, what nonsense this was. This is exactly what our senior government officials do every time they’re embarrassed by a revelation, is that they try to pass the blame on to somebody else. Ed Snowden is a very easy scapegoat; Google and Apple aren’t going to defend themselves publicly. The truth of the matter is, we can certainly fight against terrorism and fight terrorist groups around the world without having to give up our own civil liberties. They’re not mutually exclusive. And the government, whether it’s a Republican president or a Democratic one, makes no difference—they both want us to give up our civil liberties. That’s unnecessary, it’s anti-constitutional, and I think Americans, all Americans, should stand up and oppose it.
RS: Yeah, the irony, of course, is because it could be Barack Obama, it could be George W. Bush; they all claim they don’t really want us to give up our civil liberties, they say it’s a necessity. And one of the things that happened right away, and within a matter of hours of the Paris tragedy, it was revealed that in fact the terrorists in this case had used unencrypted messaging.
JK: Exactly right.
RS: That they were known to the authorities, that there was no mystery to it. They had telegraphed what they were going to do. Now, you had worked as a key—why don’t you give some of your background, but you had worked as a key—can you take us to that, showing that you, too, have expertise? Because it’s always the experts that get up and say, “No, Snowden is making us weak,” and so forth. Well, you’ve been there on the front line of this war on terrorism.
JK: I have. Yeah, I served multiple tours overseas for the CIA in Bahrain, in Athens, in Pakistan, throughout the Persian Gulf; I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies, I speak Arabic; I spent virtually my entire adult life living in or working on the Middle East. Even after I left the CIA I joined the senior staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; I was the senior investigator for the committee, and I was the intelligence adviser to its then-chairman, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who of course is now the secretary of state. So I like to think that I know what I’m talking about as well. I was assigned at the CIA to the Counterterrorism Center, working specifically on terrorism issues and more specifically on al-Qaida and Sunni extremist groups. So, again, I like to think I know what I’m talking about. One of the things that really drives me crazy when I hear some of the things that our senior officials say—the president, the vice president even, the director of the CIA, the director of the FBI—is that an attack against us is imminent; we have to give up our own liberties or freedoms or rights in order to either forestall or disrupt this attack—that’s nonsense. It’s not up to Google, it’s not up to Apple to turn over our personal communications in order to save the country. It’s up to the CIA and it’s up to the FBI to recruit foreign—I mean to recruit human sources, rather, to penetrate these groups. The CIA was created in 1947 very specifically to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets and send the analysis to policymakers.
RS: And to do it abroad.
JK: And to do it abroad.
RS: Not to spy on the American public—
JK: Certainly not.
RS: —it was restricted by legislation.
JK: It was restricted by legislation, and it’s a part of the charters of both the CIA and NSA, that they are not permitted to spy on Americans. That’s gone by the wayside since Sept. 11. But the CIA has transformed from an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets, into a paramilitary organization, a paramilitary force. It’s not supposed to be a paramilitary force. It’s not good at it. It needs to return to its roots. And if the CIA is going to disrupt future terrorist attacks, it needs to recruit spies to infiltrate those groups in order to disrupt the terrorist attacks. Not to rely on what you and I are putting in chat messages on Google or Apple.
RS: In each case we could have found these people; some of them had been arrested, as in the case of the Boston marathon [bombing]. The fellows now in the Paris bombing had announced on the Internet publicly in unencrypted messages what they were about, and so forth. You were one of the people out there in those U.S. embassies, out there in the field trying to recruit spies. And in fact, that’s how you were instrumental in the capture of the third-most-important member of al-Qaida. Can you take us through that story? What were you doing and how did you do it?
JK: Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in any capacity that the CIA wanted me. Four months passed before I was able to go overseas, just because my skill set was not one that was important in those really early days after the attacks. So finally, in January of 2002, I was sent to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations there. I had been in country for just a couple of weeks when we received word that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in the country. Now, we believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the No. 3 in al-Qaida; I think that’s probably not true, in retrospect. But Abu Zubaydah was a very important facilitator and logistician for al-Qaida. So if you’re an al-Qaida fighter, and you need a false passport, a credit card, a disguise, a safe house, a ticket home—Abu Zubaydah’s the person that you would go to for that. We were able to track Abu Zubaydah over the course of about six weeks, and we were able to narrow down his location to one of 14 separate sites around Faisalabad, Pakistan, and a couple of sites around Lahore, Pakistan, although it was less likely that he was in Lahore. We finally conducted simultaneous raids on all 14 of these sites at 2 o’clock in the morning on March 22, 2002. And sure enough, we found Abu Zubaydah and more than four dozen other al-Qaida fighters in these sites. So Abu Zubaydah was severely wounded in the capture, during the capture; he was shot by a Pakistani policeman in the thigh, the groin and the stomach with an AK-47. We were able to patch him up, or have him patched up; and I sat with him for the next 56 hours before we put him on a plane and sent him off to what it turned out was a secret prison in a third country.
RS: You’re doing what you said the CIA’s function is to do, and you’ve written a book about it, called “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.” And actually, I was amazed that this book, which does discuss this escapade, was actually approved for publication by the CIA.
JK: That was a fight, I should tell you. It took me nine months to write this book and 22 months to get it cleared. And the CIA ended up taking 90 pages out of it. So it was quite a battle.
RS: And you’re not at liberty to really tell us what’s in—
JK: [Laughs]
RS: —in the 90 pages.
JK: I wish I was.
RS: I don’t want to get you in any more trouble than you’ve been in. But it’s interesting, because there’s a foreword by Bruce Riedel, and he was a really top guy in the CIA.
JK: Yeah. Yeah, Bruce was my first boss at the CIA. His career was on a rocket ship straight up. He had a series of senior positions in the CIA; he went on to become an assistant secretary of defense; he became the national intelligence officer for the Near East; and then he finished his career as the senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. He was President Clinton’s top aide for the Middle East, participated in the Middle East peace talks; he really was at the president’s side any time anything in the Middle East was going on. He’s been a very good and very dear friend to me.
RS: When you say he’s—and he wrote a very nice introduction to your book—but that’s before you got in trouble, right?
JK: Ah, yeah. And interestingly enough, not only has Bruce stuck by my side from the minute of my arrest onward, but he has actually, um, met with senior officials at the White House to ask the president to pardon me. And he’s sort of leading a group of former intelligence officers in a coordinated letter to ask for that pardon.
RS: And he has said that you were a very valuable CIA agent.
JK: He has.
RS: Let me ask you a question, because this is part of a series I’m doing with the subtitle that is “American Originals.” And the idea is that this crazy-quilt of a culture of ours—immigration, slavery, everything that’s happened; the American Revolution, everything that’s happened and produced this country—for its ups and downs, its black side and its good side, on the other hand it’s also produced an amazing cast of characters. And I would put you in that category; I’ve interviewed you before, I’ve followed your story. And the only way I can pronounce your name properly is I remember John Kerry, who you worked for; so then my wife keeps telling me, “It’s Kerry-akou!” Right, is that right? Kerry-akou—
JK: [Laughs] Right, that’s right.
RS: What kind of name is that?
JK: It’s a Greek name. Yep, my family’s from the island of Rhodes.
RS: Oh, so that’s why you also know Greek.
JK: Yes.
RS: So I was going to ask you, where did you come from? What led you to be a CIA agent, and what led you, now, to be a whistleblower?
JK: Well, it’s actually kind of a funny sort of romantic story, in that it can’t happen today. I was in graduate school at George Washington University, and I was taking a class called “The Psychology of Leadership,“fantastic class. And so my professor tasked us with writing a psychological profile of our bosses. So I was working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the time, and I worked for a man who I was actually physically afraid of. I saw these outbursts of temper, even violence that frightened me. So I wrote a paper about him in which I concluded, with supporting evidence, that he was a sociopath, and that he had psychopathic tendencies. And I backed this up with evidence. So I handed in the paper, and a week later I got the paper back, and the professor had given me an A. And he wrote in the margin, “I’ve never done this before, but I urge you to quit this job.” In fact, I had quit the week earlier. And then he wrote, “Please see me after class.” So I went to see him after class, and he closed the door of his office, and he said, “Look. I’m actually undercover as a professor here. I’m a senior CIA officer, acting as a spotter, looking for grad students who I think would fit into the CIA’s culture. Would you be interested in working for the CIA?”
RS: [Laughter] This is a scene out of a movie. This really happened?
JK: It really happened. And to tell you the truth, I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job, really—
RS: This was graduation from—
JK: From graduate school, yeah. And so I said sure, I’d be interested in working for the CIA. So—
RS: So that’s how it’s done. There’s a spotter—
JK: Well, now we have equal employment opportunity laws in this country, so you can’t do that anymore. It’s much less romantic in that you have to go to www.cia.gov and click “Apply Now.” So, yeah, for me it was much more clandestine.
RS: Oh, I see. And so then they put you through the tests, and—
JK: I went through the tests. He facilitated that. And you know, the tests are very funny at the CIA in the application process. Because you take these tests and you really have no idea how you’ve done. I’ll give you an example. In my first battery of tests, there was one that had something like 2,000 questions. And you had to answer “yes” or “no” to each question. And I remember, and I recount this in the book, I remember one of the questions was—it wasn’t even a question, it was a statement—it said “I like boxing.” And to tell you the truth, I didn’t have any position on boxing. So I just kind of sat there and looked at this question. And I thought, well—you know, this was the late ‘80s—I said, well, Mike Tyson’s really good, and if I’m flipping through the channels and I see Tyson, I suppose I’ll stay and watch the Tyson fight. So I think I put “yes”—I think. But then, 418 questions later, it says “I like boxing.” And I thought, well, I don’t remember what I wrote the first time. And I don’t have time to go back and look for it. I think I put “yes,” so I put “yes” again. But then, another 345 questions later, it says “I like boxing.” And I thought, oh, for heaven’s sake. So I saw what they were doing. I couldn’t remember what my first answer was; I thought it was “yes,” I tried to be consistent. And then I ended up apparently doing very well on that psychological test. So they called me and said, “We’ve scheduled a second battery of tests; we want you to go to this utterly nondescript building in Vienna, Va., and you’re going to take some tests there.” So I went out to this building, and I was met there by a secretary who took me into a small room. And there was a table, and at the table were a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist. And there was a seat for me on the other side of the table. So I sat down, introduced myself; hello, how are you. And the psychiatrist said to me, “Describe your relationship with your mother.” And I said, “Well, she’s a good mother; I love her; she loves me. She’s—”
RS: What did your mother do?
JK: My mother was an elementary school teacher.
RS: From what background, Greek or—
JK: Ah, Greek. All four of my grandparents are from the island of Rhodes, so we were a very Greek household. And then we went on to the next question: “Was your father the disciplinarian of the family?” And I said, “Uh, not really. I think, you know, my dad’s a big strong guy”—he was a big strong guy; I think he was probably afraid that he would hurt us, so he never really disciplined us; he’d give us a stern look over his glasses, which always frightened us as children. And then they said—and I remember this very clearly—“Have you ever betrayed a friendship?” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think so; I hope not.” I said, “Let me think about it for a minute.” And they said, “No, no. That’s the answer we were looking for.” And they all look at each other and they nod, and nod. And they said, “OK, we’re going to need some hair, blood and urine, and you’re free to go.” So I gave them some hair, blood and urine, and I left. And I got home, and my wife said how’d you do? I said I have no idea; no idea whatsoever. Then I got a call saying, “Hey, you aced those tests; we’d like to see you at headquarters.” And at headquarters I was interviewed by several different officers, both in operations and intelligence. And in fact, I ended up getting one job offer, and it was from the office that was founded by my grad school professor. [Laughs]
RS: Wow.
JK: So I went into the Office of Leadership Analysis as an Iraq analyst in the first week of January 1990.
RS: And you were involved, actually, later, in the planning of the Iraq invasion.
JK: Yeah. Around 1997, I really got very bored with analysis; I had spent the whole—
RS: Had you learned Arabic already?
JK: I had learned Arabic; they gave me a year of full-time Arabic training, and then I—
RS: In the CIA.
JK: —in the CIA, and then I went to Bahrain for two years, I was the—
RS: By the way, I don’t want to be party to your being sent back to jail, so don’t tell me—
JK: No, this is all—[laughs]
RS: —don’t tell me anything that’s going to cause even more problems. OK.
