Episode 206 – Spelunking the Deep State with John Kiriakou

Macro N Cheese – Episode 206
Spelunking the Deep State with John Kiriakou
January 7, 2023

 

[00:00:04.690] – John Kiriakou [intro/music]

People at the CIA are there for 25, 30, 35 years. They’re unelected. There’s no accountability to pretty much anyone, and they know that they can outwait presidents. If there’s a President that they don’t like, like Donald Trump, they don’t have to do what he says. They just slow roll whatever orders come from the White House and end up at Langley.

[00:00:30.090] – John Kiriakou [intro/music]

If there’s one lesson that I learned at the CIA, it’s that the CIA will push the envelope all the way into illegality unless somebody pushes back.

[00:01:35.150] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine

All right. Yes, this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. This week I have another whistleblower. I’ve got a guy who has been on the inside, seen what the belly of the beast looks like, came outside, and has not been able to stop talking about it since. I’m speaking about John Kiriakou, who is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.

He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydahh, believed to be the third ranking official in Al Qaeda. In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, saying the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official US. Government policy and that the policy had been approved by then President George W. Bush.

He became the 6th whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of the revelation. Kiriakou won the Joseph A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 2012, Penn Center USA’s prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint for Free Speech International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence also in 2016.

Kiriakou is the author of “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life In The CIA’s War on Terror”, “Doing Time Like a Spy: How The CIA Taught Me To Survive And Thrive In Prison” and “The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydahh and the Weird Wonderland of America’s Secret Wars”. And without further ado, let me bring on my guest. John, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:46.740] – John Kiriakou

Thank you, Steve. Good to be with you.

[00:03:48.840] – Grumbine

Normally, I’m on the other side of the mic here when I’m with you on Political Misfits.

[00:03:52.950] – Kiriakou

Yeah.

[00:03:53.470] – Grumbine

One of the things that we didn’t say there is that you’re the co host with my dear friend Michelle Witte as well, and that’s always a pleasure. So thanks for having me on all those times.

[00:04:01.760] – Kiriakou

Oh, no, it’s wonderful. We love having you. Thanks for doing it.

[00:04:05.010] – Grumbine

Absolutely. One of the reasons why I brought you in here. I think everybody that has become politically active since, let’s say 2015, because there was a lot of stuff that happened in Occupy. But I think a large group of people that had previously never sniffed the world of politics came alive when Bernie Sanders ran in 2015 against Hillary Clinton. Then we saw the Donald Trump regime.

Then we saw Bernie run again. Joe Biden was selected by the Democratic Party. And I think a lot of people have been through the mill watching their heart’s desires and their dreams and their hopes get smashed along the rocky shores of democracy. And I think people just genuinely believe that this is just the way it is and that there is no alternative, and that people are otherwise just assuming that they have no power.

And part of that is not by accident. Part of that is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes by unelected bureaucrats and other spy like agencies such as the CIA, which you are intimately familiar with, not just in the United States, but globally. In a prior interview with Chris Hedges, that was listened to or seen by nearly half a million people, one of the key things that you brought out was a senator who had kind of left you high and dry during your time when you had come out and been brave and he ignored you.

And when you confronted him with it, his concern was that he was going to lose his clearance, that the CIA had eyes on him, and that terror that he felt, the way I understand it, based on some of your work, seems like that’s not an isolated incident. That seems to be like an unelected body is covering over our elected representatives. And so beyond the idea of democracy failing us, there’s a deep state that control the levers of power that go beyond the theater that is politics.

[00:06:12.390] – Kiriakou

So often, Steve, people believe that this is a right wing trope, and it’s not. It’s a fact of everyday life here in the United States. The week that Donald Trump became president in January of 2017, I got a call from CNN, and they asked if I would come on and talk about this back and forth that Trump had been having with the CIA. And you might remember this. Where Senate Majority Leader what’s his name from New York.

[00:06:48.050] – Grumbine

Chuck Schumer.

[00:06:49.730] – Kiriakou

Yes. Where the Senate Majority Leader had warned Trump not to take on the CIA because he said they have nine ways from Sunday for getting back at you. And so CNN had me on, and they wanted to know what he meant by that. And I said, well, it’s not November 22, 1963, because that’s what people were jumping up and shouting about.

What it was was you look at presidents, presidents are only president for four years or eight years. People at the CIA are there for 25, 30, 35 years. They’re unelected. There’s no accountability to pretty much anyone, and they know that they can outwait, presidents. If there’s a President that they don’t like, like Donald Trump, they don’t have to do what he says.

They just slow roll whatever orders come from the White House and end up at Langley. If they don’t want to do a covert action program, let’s say they just move slowly, knowing that in four years he’s going to be gone. Or worst case scenario, eight years, he’s going to be gone. Now, one of the other things that the CIA does, and they’re very good at this, is recruiting, in air quotes, recruiting new presidents.

The CIA especially loves it when a president is elected who has little or no intelligence experience. Because what happens is literally the day after the election, the PDB staff, the president’s daily brief staff, begins to brief the new president-elect with the same briefing that the president himself gets. Now, when I was there, there were only eleven people who were entitled to a daily PDB briefing.

So it’s the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, a handful of people on the National Security Council, and that’s pretty much it. So when you’ve got a brand new, young, inexperienced president, you go to him the day after the election, or her, whatever the case happens to be, and you say, Mr. President, Madame President, your first briefing, just wait until you see the cool things that we are doing all around the world.

Wait till you see this blue border report that’s classified at four levels above top secret or black border report that’s eyes only for the president. And you’ve sort of sucked them in to this little club that we all had where this stuff is so important and so secret that nobody else can know about it. Isn’t it cool? Isn’t it great to be one of us now?

And you’ve done it, you’ve sucked them in. And as it ends up, they’re the ones running foreign policy, not the president. They’re the ones telling elected overseers on Capitol Hill how things are going to be, not the overseers themselves. The CIA is very good at doing this kind of thing. They’ve been doing it really since the 60s, since the 50s even.

[00:10:05.810] – Grumbine

With the recent non-disclosure of the Kennedy assassination, it was heavily redacted, what little came out. It’s quite clear, regardless of whether or not you believe the CIA was involved in taking out a president and activists and political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Or breaking up the Black Panthers, or whether it be attacking Occupy Wall Street. These people are unelected bureaucrats, they’re unelected soldiers in a sense, right? It explains in many ways why no matter who gets elected, it really all stays the same.

[00:10:45.390] – Kiriakou

Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

[00:10:47.600] – Grumbine

This may seem like a few years late, but I want to get a definitive answer, define what the deep state is and is not.

[00:10:55.970] – Kiriakou

Yeah, to me, it’s actually pretty simple. To viewers of Fox News and OAN and Newsmax, it probably isn’t very simple. To me, it is those unelected officials who run the day to day operation of the country’s foreign policy, defense policy, intelligence policy. It’s really quite easy. The way modern government has been set up is that it’s not supposed to be like that.

You’ve got the executive branch, you’ve got experts within the executive branch, and then you’re supposed to have the legislative branch that is overseeing all of this. And in many cases, especially in that of the CIA, it just doesn’t work that way. But I’m not allowed to say how many people are in the CIA. The number is classified. But it’s tens of thousands of people with a multibillion-dollar budget.

And you’ve got about a dozen and a half people on the Senate side and maybe another two dozen on the House side that oversee this gargantuan organization. And it just simply doesn’t work. Now, the story that you opened with, I think, is an important one, and it bears a little bit of explanation. When I got out of prison, I ran into this senator at a dinner party, and I went up to him and I said, hey, Senator, I got to say I was disappointed that you didn’t come out in support of me.

You should have been, in my view, a natural ally. He got very angry. He got right in my face about it. He goes, look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance. And, boy, that just made everything so clear to me. Here you are, one of the senior-most members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

You’re supposed to be the boss, the one overseeing the CIA, and you are afraid of them. You’re afraid that because you came down on a certain side of a political issue, they’re going to take your security clearance away. That’s just cowardice. But it also goes to show you the long arm of the CIA.

[00:13:13.390] – Grumbine

I’ve been doing a lot of research on everything from the Bolshevik Revolution to present, largely focusing recently on what happened post World War II and the effects of combating then what they saw as Joseph Stalin’s empire building desires and the act of trying to counter Communism became everything. You already had McCarthy you had so many things that had become so toxic to society.

But I think this is not the beginning of the deep state, but I think this is the beginning of seeing it in its nascent state. Truman battling with MacArthur, and MacArthur wanting to take the Korean War into China, into Russia, willing to do whatever it could to put the death stake into the heart of communism. And it took everything Truman had. And I’m not here to defend or celebrate Truman, I think it’s pretty fair to say, he’s a mass murderer.

[00:14:16.540] – Kiriakou

Right.

[00:14:17.240] – Grumbine

But he had to stand up against his general and relieve him of duty. Popular military guy. So Truman says thank you and brings him home, replaces him. But it almost cost Truman his presidency. It definitely cost him a lot of clout, a lot of people really angry at the move. But that was a blatant very visible act of the understate at the time, standing against the sitting president and doing their own thing, behaving as if they’re the kings of the world minus being elected to be in that role. Is that the beginning of this departure, or has this been going on even further back?

[00:15:05.330] – Kiriakou

It started earlier than that. There was a movement within the military in the mid 1930s to essentially overthrow Franklin Roosevelt.

[00:15:15.980] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:15:16.500] – Kiriakou

And then nothing ended up coming of it, and several generals were forced into retirement. You’re 100% right about MacArthur and Truman. There were rumblings during the Vietnam War of Westmoreland. Yes, exactly. Even before Westmoreland. Yes. Westmoreland was one. The other one was George Wallace’s running mate, the general who said he wanted to turn North Vietnam into glass.

[00:15:42.830] – Grumbine

Curtis Lemay.

[00:15:44.450] – Kiriakou

Yeah, we actually had to worry about that kind of thing until the end of the Vietnam War. But now, Steve, it’s as though the deep state has evolved to a point where they’re more sophisticated than that. They know better than to do it publicly out in the open. They know that they’re far more powerful behind the scenes, doing it quietly.

That’s why as recently as 1980, we had people like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsoring votes of no confidence in sitting CIA directors. We would never see something like that today. Now, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are really little more than cheerleaders for the CIA. Post 911. Nobody would dream of challenging the CIA. Let me point to the torture program.

And it’s not just the torture program. We can talk about the rendition program, the secret prison program. We can talk about a whole bunch of different things. But the oversight committees were fully informed that these programs were going on. The oversight committees knew that these programs were illegal, at least. They were also immoral and unethical.

And do you think a single person objected? And I mean from the left to the right and everybody in between? Nobody objected. I’ll add that through much of the torture program, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was Jane Harmon, the progressive Democrat from Venice, California.

[00:17:20.630] – Grumbine

Oh, my.

[00:17:21.400] – Kiriakou

You think she ever objected to the fact that we were kidnapping people and taking them to secret prisons to be tortured, and in some cases, at least two to be murdered? Extrajudicially? The Democrats never objected. Nancy Pelosi, before she was the speaker, was on the Intelligence Committee. Do you think she ever objected? Nobody ever did.

[00:17:44.290] – Grumbine

Is that an indicator of cowardice or the balance of power between the deep state and our elected officials?

[00:17:51.810] – Kiriakou

That’s a great question, and I think it’s a combination of the two. I think that post 9/11 federal elected officials, regardless of their ideology, really believe that we’re the good guys. And if the people who know best, the people who are leading the CIA, the people who are leading DoD, or the people who are leading the National Security Council say that they need X, Y, and Z, well, then, by God, we’re all patriotic Americans and we’re going to give them X, Y, and Z.

And I think that that does a disservice to the American people, because we should question everything. If there’s one thing I learned at the CIA, one lesson that I learned at the CIA. It’s that the CIA will push the envelope all the way into illegality unless somebody pushes back. Unless somebody on Capitol Hill or at the National Security Council or at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel says, wait a minute. You can’t do that. It’s illegal. They’ll do it. They have to be told not to. And almost nobody has the guts to tell them not to.

[00:19:05.470] – Grumbine

That brings up a great point, and I think for those who don’t know this. Let’s get back to the beginning of the CIA. When did the CIA even get spoken into existence?

[00:19:17.890] – Kiriakou

It’s actually relatively recent. The CIA was created with the National Security Act of 1947. And there’s kind of a fun story there too, because J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI since it was created in the Calvin Coolidge administration in the 1920s, he was adamantly opposed to the creation of the CIA. He famously hated general Bill Donovan, who was the founder of the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS.

And Hoover believed, for better or worse, that we didn’t need a CIA, that the FBI could do everything. And they were doing everything as it was in 1947. And so he was actively lobbying for no votes on Capitol Hill that would have defeated the National Security Act of 1947. And besides creating the CIA, this act also created the National Security Council.

So President Truman called Hoover into the Oval Office and said, look, I want you to stop lobbying members of Congress on the National Security Act. We need a CIA. And the deal that they came to was that Hoover would endorse the National Security Act and in exchange, Truman would make the CIA a division of the FBI. That was a lie. He was lying to Hoover.

He never had any intention of making the CIA division of the FBI. And so the bill passed. Truman signed it into law, and after it was all said and done, Hoover realized that he had been duped and the CIA was created. Now, don’t forget, there was no Congressional Oversight Committee to oversee CIA activities. Until 1975, from 1947 until 1975, the CIA did literally anything it wanted to do and there was no one anywhere in government to tell them “no.”

Within months of the CIA’s creation, for example, they stole the 1948 Italian elections. It was the first covert action program that the CIA carried out and then that stretched all the way through the Vietnam War. And it included governmental overthrows and MKUltra experimentation on American citizens with LSD and other drugs, assassinations of foreign leaders, attempted assassinations of others.

There were dozens of assassinations. Dozens. Including of allies like the president of South Vietnam, for example. So yeah, we had decades of just wanton lawlessness.

[00:22:04.630] – Grumbine

I’m going to pull us back to the great financial crisis that just occurred in 2008, 2009. And you had unelected Wall Street oligarchs through the revolving door of what amounts to be these cabinet positions that advise presidents and help create law and create the tools of the trade to regulate Wall Street.

And we saw all these bad actors, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and others, the Obama administration and their staff deeply involved in planting these horrible people that were doing elite control fraud, all with an idea that we would have the Securities and Exchange Committee be able to manage them or these various watchdog groups within the government regulate them. And they underfund them.

They understaff them. I think that to manage all the different businesses. I believe it’s the auditors that would handle that. Professor Bill Black, who famously was the king of bringing down the savings and loan crisis, he identified the elite control fraud to create the environment that allowed everyone to blow the values of these houses up through an extremely intricate web of coercion and corruption.

And then no one gets prosecuted as the entire economy collapses, millions of people destitute losing their homes, and this is in essence an element of the deep state at work while having an oversight group that is supposed to have the teeth to manage it, and yet nothing happened.

[00:23:49.460] – Kiriakou

Yeah.

[00:23:49.910] – Grumbine

So the idea of creating a government so small you can drown it in a bathtub, while having these rogue deep state organizations being able to do whatever the heck they want to do, who are they serving?

[00:24:02.660] – Kiriakou

Yeah.

[00:24:03.710] – Grumbine

The rules of the game that they’re playing by and the people they’re serving are not you and I. There’s someone else somewhere way above our heads. I’m curious what your take on that is in terms of the lack of enforcement and the lack of oversight of the CIA. Very representative of the lack of oversight of Wall Street. It’s always underfunded and understaffed and intentionally weak and feckless.

[00:24:27.750] – Kiriakou

Oh yeah. And then at the same time you’ve got in some cases, one, in other cases, both political parties demanding deregulation of pretty much any and every industry in our economy, whether it’s banking or airlines or trucking or whatever, making it that much more difficult to carry out oversight it just doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like every American would want the most efficient, the most law abiding, the most trustworthy government possible, and instead we’ve implemented national policies that make that just impossible.

[00:25:10.850] – Grumbine

Let’s take a look. Your story with the CIA is remarkable. For the purposes of this program, I’m going to pretend I don’t know any of it, and I don’t know nearly enough of it. So I’d like for you to tell us the story of John Kiriakou. What was your story and what were the results?

[00:25:31.210] – Kiriakou

Sure. Well, I was at the CIA for 15 years. The first half of my career was in analysis solely on Iraq, and the second half of my career was in counterterrorism operations, starting off pre 9/11, fighting euro communist terrorist groups. My real focus was on a Greek group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. And then post 9/11, of course, everybody worked against Al Qaeda.

I ended up going to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations at the station there. And in that position, I led a series of raids one night in late March 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who we believed at the time was the number three in Al Qaeda. We also captured, again, I’m not allowed to say the number, but many dozens of other Al Qaeda fighters that night, and several mid to high ranking leaders of Al Qaeda.

This is a very long story. I’m going to skip 99% of it. In the end, Abu Zubaydahh was sent to a secret prison, and he was tortured there mercilessly. I was opposed to that torture, and when I went back to CIA headquarters from Pakistan, I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

That was one of 14 people who were approached. I’m sorry to say, I regret to say that of the 14, I was the only one who declined. I said that I had a moral and ethical problem with it, and I believed that it was illegal. We have very clear laws in this country, and we have, since 1946, specifically outlawing exactly the kinds of techniques that I was then being told were legal under American law.

I’m not a lawyer, but my god, you have to be a complete moron not to see that this was an illegal program. So I declined. And it was, in my view, so egregiously illegal that I waited for somebody to come out and say so publicly. Nobody did. Two years later, I resigned from the CIA and decided to go into the private sector, and I still waited for somebody to come out and say, look, the CIA is torturing people.

Nobody did. In December of 2007, Brian Ross called me from ABC news. And I knew Brian Ross by reputation. The guy won 14 Emmy awards and was one of the greatest investigative journalists in America. And he said he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.

I said, I never laid a hand on him or on any other prisoner. I said, Your source is either misinformed or he’s a liar. And he said, well, you’re welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I had no idea that was a reporter’s trick, because I had never spoken to a reporter before. Well, a couple of days after he asked me, president George W. Bush gave a press conference in which he was asked about torture.

And he looked right in the camera, Steve, and he said, we do not torture. Like that. I happened to be sitting on the couch with my then wife. She was also a senior CIA officer. And I looked at her and I said, he is a bald-faced liar. Now, at the time, on the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, I had been promoted to be the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director.

And so I’m seeing everything that the CIA is doing everywhere in the world. That’s my job, to keep the deputy director informed. So this made me angry, this statement by Bush, this black and white lie that we don’t torture. A few days after that, it’s a Friday, and he’s walking from the South portico of the White House to get onto the helicopter to fly to Camp David, and a reporter shouts a question at him about torture.

And he turns and he says, well, if there is torture, it’s because of a rogue CIA officer. And I told my wife, Brian Ross’ source is at the White House, and they’re going to try to pin this on me.

[00:30:11.410] – Intermission

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[00:31:02.290] – Kiriakou

So I called Brian Ross back and I said, I’ll give you your interview. And I decided in the days between that phone call and the interview itself that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth. Because I believed that this whole program was illegal. And so in December 2007, I think it was the 11th to the best of my recollection, I went on ABC News in a nationally televised interview, and I said three things that just changed the course of the rest of my life.

I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy, it was not the result of a rogue. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. As you might imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA filed a criminal complaint against me with the Justice Department asking that I be arrested for exposing classified information.

The FBI began investigating me, and they investigated me for a full year, from December of 2007 to December of 2008. And then in December of 2008, they sent my attorney a letter called a declination letter, saying that they had investigated me and they were declining to prosecute because I had not violated the law. The truth is, it is illegal in this country to classify a crime.

If you’re committing a crime, you can’t make that program classified for the purpose of keeping it from the American people, so I hadn’t committed a crime. Four weeks later, Barack Obama takes the oath of office as president, and there’s talk that he’s going to name John Brennan, an old nemesis of mine from the CIA, as the CIA director. In fact, progressives were up in arms about that.

And Brennan had to wait four years for the second term to become CIA director. But for the first term, he became the deputy National Security advisor for counterterrorism. And Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. We learned in discovery later that Brennan sent Eric Holder a letter, and he said, charge him with espionage.

And Holder wrote back and said, my people don’t think he committed espionage. And then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway, and make him defend himself. I had no idea that my phones were tapped for the next three years, that I was being followed by teams of FBI agents, that every one of my emails was being intercepted.

And then finally, in January of 2012, I was arrested and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for speaking to ABC News, and later on for speaking to The New York Times. Now, they knew I hadn’t committed espionage, and those espionage charges were dropped eventually, but not until I went bankrupt. And it’s not because I was special in any way.

They do this to everybody. They do something called charge stacking, where they charge you with as many felonies as they possibly can, and then they come back and say, if you take a plea to this lesser charge, we’ll drop everything else. So I was facing 45 years in prison. Their final offer was 30 months, of which I would serve 23. And it’s funny, they made their best and final offer, and they said I had until noon the next day to give them an answer.

And my wife and I stayed up all night long debating what to do, and I decided to turn it down. I naively said that once I get in front of a jury, they’ll see how ridiculous this is. I even hired O. J. Simpson’s jury consultant, who happened to be the uncle of my best friend’s wife. We got him a security clearance, and he went through 15,000 pages of classified discovery.

And he said, listen, if we were in any other district in America, I would say, let’s go for it. We’re going to win this thing. But the Eastern District of Virginia, he said, Your jury is going to be made up of people from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and intelligence community contractors. You don’t have a prayer. So I still decided, no, I’m going to fight this thing because I haven’t done anything wrong.

Hours before I had to make the final call, three of my eleven attorneys came over to my house. It was 07:00 in the morning, and the one that I liked and respected the most got right up in my face and said, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice. And it’s not about justice.

It’s about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And I said before I took the deal, if I don’t take the deal and I’m found guilty, what am I realistically looking at? And they agreed that I was realistically looking at 12 to 18 years.

[00:36:17.050] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:36:17.820] – Kiriakou

So I took the deal.

[00:36:20.150] – Grumbine

Whew.

[00:36:20.940] – Kiriakou

Man, it was rough. It was bad.

[00:36:24.490] – Grumbine

So in the end, was there any acknowledgement that your findings were factual?

[00:36:31.310] – Kiriakou

Thank you for asking that. Six weeks before my release from prison, I called my wife. I was allowed to call her for 15 minutes every other day. And I said to her, how’s your day going? She said it’s great. And I said, yeah? Great? Why? And she said, because the Senate torture report was released today and proved that everything you said was true.

And John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said that the country owed me a debt of gratitude because if I hadn’t blown the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, the American people would never have known what their government was doing in their name. And Steve, that made it all worthwhile.

[00:37:17.770] – Grumbine

Isn’t it something? You’re not doing it for accolades. You’re not doing it for money.

[00:37:22.690] – Kiriakou

No.

[00:37:23.120] – Grumbine

You’re doing it because you can’t not do it. Inside you. You know, you got to do it.

[00:37:29.310] – Kiriakou

Exactly. Legacy is an important thing to me. I don’t know why I’ve always had this obsession with my legacy. I want my kids to be proud of me. I want my grandchildren, if I ever have grandchildren, to be proud of me. Maybe I’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow and my grandchildren won’t have had the opportunity to meet me. So I want them to be able to look back and say, my grandfather was a standup guy.

He did the right thing. When history asked him to take a position, he took the right position. I wasn’t the only person at the CIA that was opposed to the torture program. There were dozens of people who were opposed to the torture program. So why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t anybody speak out? I will never understand that. But here we are.

Now, all these years later, and the cost has been very, very, very high. But I can sleep at night. I’ll tell you what the biggest cost of this was. After I got out of prison, my wife and I split up. She elected to move on with her life with someone else, so I divorced her. We’ve been involved in a very bitter custody battle ever since. And two years ago, I was on the stand in court right here in Arlington, Virginia.

And my lawyer said: Was she a good wife? And I said, oh, she was an amazing wife. Good mother, good wife. I couldn’t have made it through this ordeal without her. In fact, she went with me to ABC News on the day that I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. She sat just off camera. And when I finished the interview, I said to her, how did I do? She said you did great. I said yeah? I didn’t say anything classified, right? And she said, no, you did great.

So then she gets called to the stand, and her lawyer says, is it true that you went with him to ABC News when he blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program? And she said yes. And her lawyer said, Why did you do that? And she responded, The CIA’s Office of Security asked me to go with him and report back to them on his activities, something that I continued to do for the remainder of our marriage.

[00:39:39.590] – Grumbine

Oh, my God.

[00:39:40.990] – Kiriakou

Dude, we had two kids after that. Wow. And she was ratting me out to the CIA for all those years.

[00:39:51.230] – Grumbine

Oh, my God. This is like Total Recall.

[00:39:54.430] – Kiriakou

Yeah. The cost was very high. Now, again, with that said, I can sleep at night. I don’t know what her situation is. I haven’t spoken to her in three years, but I can live with myself.

[00:40:10.770] – Grumbine

Wow. I just want to put this in context. You uncovered one big – but one lie.

[00:40:22.080] – Kiriakou

Yes.

[00:40:22.730] – Grumbine

One aspect of the CIA that Americans had no idea about. And even if they did have an idea, they couldn’t get past American exceptionalism. They always find a way to make it out to be that the good guys do what they have to do to keep us all safe. But that’s just one lie. How many other state secrets and state lies are happening? And we’re living in this weird world. I hate to pull out the cliches of 1984 and the thought police.

[00:40:54.990] – Kiriakou

Sure. That’s a legitimate question. Because just in that short period from September 11, 2001 until the middle of 2005, we’re talking about a secret torture program, a secret extraordinary rendition program where people are kidnapped and taken to countries not their own for torture, a secret prison program where there’s this archipelago of secret prisons.

There were all kinds of secrets just in that short period of time. We also now know from WikiLeaks, thank goodness, from the Vault 7 revelations that the CIA is able to take control of your car by hacking into its computer system for the purpose of what… Forcing you off a cliff, forcing you into a tree, killing you somehow?

We know that the CIA can hack into your smart TV and turn the speaker into a microphone so they can listen to you and what you’re saying even when the TV appears to be off. And these are just random revelations that we’ve either stumbled upon or that we learned because of whistleblowers. What is it that we don’t know? It’s incalculable. How much is out there that we don’t know?

[00:42:12.570] – Grumbine

That saying, it ain’t what you know, it’s what you think you know that just ain’t so. So much of the narratives that we as activists, media, alt media, families, friends, so many of the things we tell each other, and we are absolutely certain we’re right may have no basis in fact. Or worse, just enough of a basis in fact that it retains that necessary credibility. You got to have a little bit of something that ain’t perfect because otherwise the brain will reject it.

[00:42:50.550] – Kiriakou

Right?

[00:42:51.400] – Grumbine

I hate to say this because I’ve always said there’s no way people are that organized that they can pull this off. I was a serial scoffer. And yet, as we’ve gone through this, my primary area of activist based expertise is on the macroeconomic side, where we’ve been lied to immensely with this false austerity narrative that we talked about so often.

And it’s deprogramming and decolonizing your brain from these lies to get to just a base of neutrality. And it’s so destabilizing to think that there’s no amount of study you can really do to understand what’s being done. A lot of this is happening off the books, top secret that will deny your existence. How in the world could we as concerned individuals as people who are looking for a better world, a better life.

When you see not only the number one military in the world that has global reach, but then you realize that it goes deeper than that in terms of the deep state apparatus and the spy network, how in the world are regular people to come together? It feels almost like hubris to think that we can take on this leviathan and win, and it feels like we’re herded into voting for people that we don’t really select.

[00:44:21.600] – Kiriakou

Right.

[00:44:22.290] – Grumbine

The whole damn thing is a charade.

[00:44:25.670] – Kiriakou

The whole system is broken.

[00:44:28.230] – Grumbine

Is it broken or is that a feature?

[00:44:30.300] – Kiriakou

Well, yeah, that’s actually a better way to say it. The system that we have is exactly the system that the political leaders in this country want. This is the system that they allow us to work in. You’re exactly right. I’m a realist. I know that the CIA is not going away. I would hope that it would. I don’t think we need a CIA. It causes us more trouble than it’s worth.

But I know that it’s not going to be abolished, then the only alternative is to ride our elected officials to conduct true oversight. But if they’re in on it too, and they’re not willing to conduct true oversight, then we’re screwed. There’s this one senator that I mentioned who wants to conduct oversight but is afraid of losing his security clearances.

What about the other six or seven Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee? What’s their position? Their position is that they’re in bed with the CIA. That’s why they’re on the Intelligence Committee.

[00:45:29.930] – Grumbine

Wow. I’ve got a whole analysis that I’m working up for my own purposes as I dig into history and revolutionary minded documentarian type deep dives. And I constantly find myself starting at the Bolshevik Revolution, not because of anything good or bad about the Bolshevik Revolution, but it really took capitalism by storm. They didn’t know what to do with this.

And in a recent interview I did with a brilliant academic mind named Clara Mattei, she breaks out that austerity was the response to that period of time. As World War I showed people that there was an alternative and people started having visions of things other than just this oppressive capitalist system that weighs everyone down, and everything started changing right then. US policy. Since then, almost everything we’ve done has been to directly counter any kind of spread of communism.

[00:46:38.050] – Kiriakou

Oh, yeah.

[00:46:38.990] – Grumbine

Now, I’m not necessarily preaching communism, though I am sympathetic to it. I’m an MMT informed leftist, so my politics are a little different, but not too different.

[00:46:48.950] – Kiriakou

Sure.

[00:46:49.970] – Grumbine

But as I think through this, they had strange bedfellows with Joseph Stalin during World War II. But immediately following that, as they split Korea, as they went through the process of getting Japan out of all these places that their empire had reached, everything that they have done has been with the name of “better dead than red”.

And so I wonder, as a CIA guy, to what degree has the CIA been instrumental in blocking socialism and communism as a construct both internally to the US and abroad? Has this been a driving factor?

[00:47:31.390] – Kiriakou

It’s been THE driving factor. I address this at length in my fourth book. It’s called the CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. We’re in crisis with Iran because of decisions that we made in the middle 1950s to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, just as one example, because of our irrational obsession with communism.

And it happened not just in Iran, but all over Africa, in Southeast Asia, which of course led to the Vietnam War and throughout Central and South America. It was an irrational obsession with communism. That’s what got us into Afghanistan. Even though the Soviet Union was weakened, battered and humbled, we still decided that we would rather throw our lot in with the Mujahideen than with the Soviets. And you see where it got us.

[00:48:33.350] – Grumbine

These are the pieces as I try to make sense of US history, and more importantly, global history because there’s so many interrelated things. The predation on the global south, the Third World that we have created through the programs of oppression that we’ve instituted. I often hear about how the CIA is sent in in advance to destabilize the region, to make it ripe for these moments.

But it seems to me like this is 100% the MO. And if that is the MO, who is this serving? Because communism is people ownership. It’s workers owning their means of production. It’s about an egalitarian society where there aren’t classes and rulers. How much does the CIA play in that?

[00:49:34.230] – Kiriakou

Well, the role used to be enormous in the 50s through the 60s into the mid 70s. As technology has improved, they’ve gotten away from that on the ground impact, and they do a lot of it remotely. A lot of it still happens. But thanks to Matt Taibbi and the Twitter Files we’re seeing now that a lot of it was done through Twitter.

Remember, it was Hillary Clinton that asked Twitter not to do its system upgrade on the night that the so called Green Revolution was beginning in Iran. So the CIA is still in up to its neck. It’s just not necessarily on the ground. The last time I can think of where there was a significant CIA presence physically on the ground is in the six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, where we helicoptered a dozen or so people in.

They met up with the Northern Alliance, which provided horses. We parachuted in, secured communications, millions of dollars in cash, and said, okay, overthrow the Taliban and find bin Laden. And so they set out for Kabul.

[00:50:51.470] – Grumbine

So let’s put a bow on this one. I have so many more questions, but in the spirit of I know you, so I’ll have you back on in the future. If somebody listening to this is saying, wow, oh my goodness, what is the most important thing somebody can take away from not only your experience in jail and your experience as a whistleblower, but overall as they try to process their daily lives, what would you tell them?

[00:51:20.650] – Kiriakou

I would tell them that the CIA et al work for us. The American people own this information, and we have to demand that our elected officials hold every single employee of the CIA, every other intelligence service in our government, to account. We own this information. We are the bosses. And if our elected officials are not going to conduct legitimate oversight, then we’ll elect people who will conduct legitimate oversight. It’s that important to us.

[00:52:02.230] – Grumbine

I want to close off on that note, but I feel compelled to say that watching what happened to Bernie Sanders through the 2015 primary makes the concept of electing other people feel hollow. I’m not voting Republican. It’s not really about voting per se. Every time I see the Democrats rally around a corporate stooge and defend the establishment narratives and realize how many layers of lies are stacked on top of lies.

Look what’s happening with Ukraine and Russia. Just the fact that people are so deprived of understanding history, NATO, the IMF, they don’t even understand any of the games being played on the international stage.

[00:52:54.320] – Kiriakou

Yes.

[00:52:54.970] – Grumbine

And so it feels so hollow to think that a CIA that would run the risk of allowing us to vote for people that are progressives that are going to undo these things. If we can destabilize the world and their elections, how is it that we wouldn’t make sure that we are getting exactly what they want here as well?

[00:53:20.270] – Kiriakou

Yeah, I’m glad you’re raising this because I think we need to make it very clear that the answer to these problems does not lie in the Democratic Party. It just doesn’t. There’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on these issues. They’re just two sides of the same coin. The problem is far bigger than just well, I demand oversight. Okay, great. So do I.

But that’s not going to change anything. We really do need viable third parties in this country. We really do. And God knows that we’ve moved backwards on this issue in the last four decades. I remember when I was a teenager, there was a congressman from Illinois, John Anderson. He ran for president against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, and he got 7%, which was dramatic, but he got 7% because he participated in every one of those presidential debates.

In 2000, Ralph Nader ran for president as an independent. Before that, in 1992 and 1996, Ross Perot ran as an Independent for president, participated in the debates, and got something like what was it, 20%? Well, what happened was those presidential debates used to be sponsored by the League of Women Voters, independently of the political parties.

And in the end, the political parties decided to get rid of League of Women Voters, create the so called Commission on Presidential Debates, which is three members of the Democratic National Committee and three members of the Republican National Committee. And they decided that no Independent will be invited to any presidential debate.

And so ever since that decision was taken, we don’t have third party candidates that can get national exposure. They’re never invited to the debates. Nobody pays any attention to them. And the Democrats and the Republicans just trade the presidency back and forth.

[00:55:21.350] – Grumbine

Doesn’t seem like an election to me. It seems more like a game.

[00:55:25.290] – Kiriakou

Yeah, it’s not a functioning democracy, that’s for sure.

[00:55:28.300] – Grumbine

No, but there in which lies my big rub on third parties, and that is to have a third party, you got to be able to have access. To have access requires the duopoly to concede that and give it over to you. And because they have control over the media, every possible pool that capital and these establishment elites have is used as a weapon to prevent us from having anything other than what they want us to have.

Populism doesn’t do much of anything at this point because we have no real agency to do anything with it. And that led me to that question prior. You got this deep state like this. How would somebody in the modern society even pull off a political revolution, much less a real revolution? We somehow able to compartmentalize things, but we don’t synthesize the knowledge we have and say that isn’t separate, that’s all part of this.

They’ve got the access to everything through them that they’re not going to give up. And you’ve got the deep state that works to create a fake narrative and we have a society that is immune from actually taking action and I’m trying to find my way through this maze and all I do is keep hitting walls. What are your thoughts there? I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. If it is a light, it’s probably a train coming.

[00:56:58.090] – Kiriakou

Yeah, I hate to say that, but I have to agree with you. I want to be optimistic by nature, I am an optimistic person, but I’m just not optimistic. Every time you think there’s forward movement or even momentum sometimes and that we might be able to reclaim our democracy, it ends. I don’t feel like I have anything really to look forward to politically.

[00:57:26.030] – Grumbine

Feels like a big old sham. And Macro N Cheese we’re here to make things happen. I’m a guy that wants to see change. I want to change the world. But you can’t change the world by faking the world around you. You’ve got to address the real problem. And the real problem is we lack agency. We lack the parallel systems to give us a media voice.

We lack the political clout to make a difference. I’m just trying to make the point that you’ve got a deep state, you’ve got a CIA, you’ve got a political machine that is run by a duopoly that doesn’t allow external entrance into its game. And then on top of it, you’ve got parties that are baked into preventing any kind of change to what they would do, baked so far into the rules that short of a revolution, I don’t know how you go anywhere with that. But you’ve also got the CIA and all the other apparatus that keeps the world in check, waiting to keep a revolution in check.

[00:58:39.180] – Kiriakou

Yeah.

[00:58:40.710] – Grumbine

It was wonderful having you on, sir. I really appreciate and I love that we have a good connection. Please let everybody know where we can find more of your work.

[00:58:49.770] – Kiriakou

Oh, thank you. I’m on Substack, so it’s JohnKiriakou@substack.com. Everything I write, I put on Substack. That’s the best place.

[00:59:00.030] – Grumbine

And don’t forget, John is a co host of Political Misfits and definitely one of my favorite hosts. I enjoy the way you do interviews. So with that, thank you, John. I look forward to our next conversation. And for you out there, I feel it’s important to know that while we’re, on one hand, fighting for economic truth. We’ve got an entire political system here geared up to present narratives that just ain’t so to keep us from winning. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. John, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:59:32.980] – Kiriakou

Thank you, sir.

[00:59:34.200] – Grumbine

You’ve got it. This is Steve Grumbine with my guest John Kariakou, from Macro N Cheese we are outta here.

[00:59:47.450] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.