Transcript: Ex-CIA John Kiriakou’s Interview on ANI Broadcast

And I said to my boss afterwards, she makes sixty thousand dollars a year. She lives in a five million dollar house, and he has a collection of Bentleys. Aren’t they ashamed of themselves?

India’s Restraint and Regional Tensions

ISHAAN PRAKASH: India showed restraint after the parliament attacks, showed restraint after the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The Indian government would have been perfectly within its rights to respond by striking Pakistan. And I remember at the White House, we expected the Indians to strike back. And they didn’t.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: During your time in Pakistan, 2002, 2003, 2004, around that time, another very dangerous threat to humanity was Dr. A.Q. Khan.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: We would have just killed him. He was easy enough to find. We knew where he lived, we knew how he spent his day. But he also had the support of the Saudi government. And the Saudis came to us and said, “Please leave him alone. We like A.Q. Khan. We’re working with A.Q. Khan. We’re close to the Pakistanis.” This was a mistake.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Was there ever a fear that these nuclear weapons would fall into terrorist hands?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Musharraf had turned control over to the United States because he was afraid of exactly what you just described.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: A war that happened in May. India, for the first time, escalated it to a level where we had cruise missiles flying into Pakistan.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose. And I’m not talking about nuclear weapons. I’m talking just about a conventional war. The Pakistanis will lose.

Personal Introduction and Whistleblowing

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Before we begin, Mr. Kiriakou, I was wondering if you could introduce yourself to our audience. Your time in Pakistan, in what capacity you were working in Pakistan and then eventually your whistleblowing and then the sort of vendetta that was unleashed against you by the American intelligence setup and where you are right now. Just a quick introduction.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure. Thank you. My name is John Kiriakou. I’m a former CIA officer. I was in the CIA for 15 years. The first half of my career was in analysis. The second half was in counterterrorism operations.

And in 2007, I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. In a nationally televised interview here in the United States, I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US Government policy. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president.

The Obama administration, in the form of John Brennan, went after me and they pursued criminal charges. I was indicted on five felony charges, including three counts of espionage for saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. Of course, I hadn’t committed espionage. Those charges were dropped. But I ended up serving 23 months in prison, something that I would do again today if I had to.

I have no regrets, no remorse. I did the right thing. And I think that we’re seeing now that I did the right thing. It took the American people this long to come around to my way of thinking that torture is wrong, it’s illegal and should be punished.

The last overseas job that I had at the CIA was in 2002. I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. This was the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And in that position, my job was to locate Al Qaeda fighters and leaders and to snatch them.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Where in Pakistan?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, I was based in Islamabad, but I worked all over the country. Peshawar all the way to Karachi. I spent a great deal of time in Lahore and Faisalabad, Quetta, which was a rough place to live and work.

But yeah, I finished that job and went back to headquarters. I was promoted on the strength of my work in Pakistan and I served as the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations. And so it was a real eye opening experience.

Now I’m an author, a journalist. I’ve written eight books, I have two podcasts, I have two syndicated newspaper columns. I speak all around the world and things have worked out.

The Capture of Abu Zubaydah

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Thank God your voice is an authoritative voice because, I mean, you’ve been in the field, you’ve seen geopolitics play out real time, especially in an area like Pakistan. You’re also credited for the first takedowns of, I would think, a high value target of the Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, which eventually led to the actual whistleblowing of torture techniques used on him, which didn’t really work out though. Can you explain how that happened? How did you nab him? And then I’ll go deeper into some other questions I have about Pakistan and terrorists in Pakistan.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure. You’re right that Abu Zubaydah was the first high value target that we were able to track and to find and to capture. We believed wrongly at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al Qaeda. He was not the number three. He had never joined Al Qaeda. He was working in support of Al Qaeda.

Certainly he had founded the House of Martyrs, the Al Qaeda safe house in Peshawar. He had founded and staffed Al Qaeda’s two training camps in southern Afghanistan, one in Kandahar, one in Helmand. So he was a bad guy, but he was not the number three in Al Qaeda.

Nonetheless, we believed that he was. We tracked his movements and we were close, this close a couple of times to capturing him. Finally, we got a beat on him because he made a mistake. We knew that he would make a mistake eventually, but he made a mistake in that he used his cell phone to access his email account. And so when he turned the phone on, we immediately captured its location. We sent teams and we captured him.

He was taken to a series of secret prisons over the course of the next four years. And then finally in 2006, he was taken to Guantanamo. He’s been there ever since. He’s been in American custody now for 23 and a half years. He’s never been charged with a crime.

And I’ve become one of those voices calling for him to be released. He was not the number three in Al Qaeda. He was not guilty of the crimes that we accused him of having committed. He was not involved with the 9/11 attacks. He should be released and he’s not been and he likely won’t be.

Working with Pakistan’s ISI

ISHAAN PRAKASH: You know, I’ve heard this story of yours in various podcasts and appearances that you’ve done. One question that I always wanted to ask you was the sentiment that you have about Abu Zubaydah, is it shared by, I guess, your colleagues at that time in Pakistan? Pakistan’s ISI because you were working with them to nab targets, right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, but it was a little bit more complicated than that. Forgive me for saying this, you’re Indian, of course, you’re not Pakistani. But we didn’t fully trust the Pakistani ISI at the time. So we never told them who the target was.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Okay.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: We never said, “It’s Abu Zubaydah Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: I will take umbrage to that. That’s fine.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because we were afraid that word would leak out and it would get back to Al Qaeda. And so we just called him a big fish, which became Mr. Fish. So we believe that Mr. Fish is at this location. Let’s send teams and we’re going to snatch him.

So the reason why we believed that, the reason why we did that is because we were of the belief, and in all these years of retrospect, I know that this is true, that there really were two parallel ISIs.

There was the ISI that I was working with and these guys were heroes. They were all trained at Sandhurst in the UK. They had taken classes in the US sponsored by the FBI. Their English was as good as mine. Great guys who were willing to put their lives on the line in the name of counterterrorism.

But then there was another ISI made up of people with long beards who gave you a dirty look when you were walking the halls there. These were the members of ISI who had created these Kashmiri terrorist groups or Jaish-e-Muhammad or other groups that were blowing up Shia Muslim mosques and were attacking Americans.

So we did not have rose colored glasses on at the time, thinking that everybody in ISI is wonderful because our relationship with the counterterrorism units was wonderful. It was far more complicated than that.

The Tora Bora Escape

ISHAAN PRAKASH: You did have a lot of leverage over Pakistan. That’s why I want to rewind a little bit back. You know, I had a conversation with Mr. Scott Horton who’s written…

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, he’s wonderful.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yes, he’s written extensively about the war in Afghanistan. So I want to talk about the months immediately after 9/11 where you had the first response by America to corner these Al Qaeda terrorists and you had them holed out in the Tora Bora Mountains, and there was extensive bombing that was going on. And you had one of these high value targets that were identified, but they just went over the passes into Pakistan and just dissolved into the ether over there. Why didn’t America go into Pakistan then and get this done if you had such a close relationship with their intelligence?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, that is such a good question. And I have several answers for you. First, the United States was reactive at the time rather than proactive. You remember we waited for more than a month before we started bombing Afghanistan. We were trying to be deliberate. We were trying to not let emotion cloud our judgment.

And we waited a month until we had proper buildup in the region. And then we began attacking known Al Qaeda sites again, mostly in the Pashtun areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

We believed in October of 2001 that we had Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership cornered at Tora Bora. We did not know that the translator for the commander of Central Command was actually an Al Qaeda operative who had infiltrated the US Military.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Oh, wow.

The Tora Bora Escape and Pakistan’s Double Game

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And so we knew we had bin Laden cornered. We told him to come down the mountain. And he said through the translator, “Can you just give us until dawn? We want to evacuate the women and children and then we’ll come down and give up.” The translator convinced General Franks to approve this idea.

What ended up happening was bin Laden dressed as a woman, and he escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan. And so when the sun came up at dawn, there was no one in Tora Bora to give up. They had all escaped. And so we had to move the fight to Pakistan proper.

Now, you’re right. Our relations with the Pakistani government were very, very good. It was General Pervez Musharraf at the time. And look, let’s be honest here. The United States loves working with dictators because then you don’t have to worry about public opinion and you don’t have to worry about the media.

And so we essentially just purchased Musharraf. We gave millions and millions and millions of dollars in aid, whether it was military aid or economic development aid. And we would meet with Musharraf regularly, several times a week. And essentially he would let us do whatever we wanted to do.

But Musharraf also had his own people that he needed to deal with. He had to keep the military happy. And the military didn’t care about Al Qaeda, they cared about India. And so in order to keep the military happy and keep some of the extremists happy, he had to allow them to continue this dual life of pretending to cooperate with the Americans on counterterrorism while committing terror against India.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: December 2001 was when the Parliament attack also happened in New Delhi. So this is kind of coinciding also with your presence in Pakistan as well?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, I got there three weeks, two weeks later.

Operation Parakram and the Brink of Nuclear War

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Okay, so you’re running ops now, you’re giving all this aid to Pakistan, but you’re also seeing a lot of this being routed to terrorist groups active, basically propped up by Pakistan and Pakistan’s ISI. What was the situation like when you were in Islamabad or wherever you were in your position when Operation Parakram happened, where India and Pakistan were almost at the brink of a nuclear war back then in 2002?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’ll tell you a funny story about that. Family members had been evacuated from Islamabad. So everybody who was working in Islamabad was working alone. There were no family members there. Well, then there was a second evacuation. So it was only essential personnel.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Why were they evacuated?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because we believed India and Pakistan would go to war. So we just evacuated. This is actually not uncommon in the American foreign service. I worked in the Middle East for years and we went through at least five evacuations over the course of my career. Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. We were constantly evacuating family members.

So I had a very young, first tour female officer working for me as my assistant. And we went to lunch one day in the embassy cafeteria. The cafeteria was enormous. It probably held 400 people. Gigantic. And in fact, on weekends it would double as a nightclub. There would be bands that came in and would play cover songs and a disco ball would come down and spin around and people danced.

We went down at 12 o’clock noon one day for lunch. And when we got into the cafeteria, we were the only ones in the cafeteria. And she said to me, “Where is everybody?” And I said, “Are you kidding?” And she said, “No, where is everybody? It’s 12 o’clock.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I said, “They’ve been evacuated.” And she said, “Why?” I said, “Because India and Pakistan are going to go to war with each other, like at any minute now.” She said, “They are?” And I said, “Didn’t you notice the helicopter in the parking lot?” And she said, “Yeah.” I said, “And you didn’t wonder what it was there for?” She said, “I didn’t think of it.” I said, “It’s there to rescue us.”

And then the Deputy Secretary of State came in and shuttled between Delhi and Islamabad and negotiated a settlement where both sides backed off. And then everybody came back.

But the moral of the story is that we were so busy and we were so focused on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, we never gave two thoughts to India.

The First Smoking Gun: Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I’ll tell you another thing. Just a couple of months later, in March of 2002, we raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Lahore. And in that house, we captured three Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters who had with them a copy of the Al Qaeda training manual.

And it was the first time, analytically, that we were able to connect Lashkar-e-Taiba with Al Qaeda. The very first time. I remember receiving a cable from the Deputy Director of the CIA for Intelligence congratulating us on finding this training manual, saying it was the very first time that we could attach the Pakistani government to Al Qaeda.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: What stopped you from going after Pakistan then? You have the first smoking gun of ISI, because the LeT, or the JeM, JuD, the various names that they come up with, essentially ISI proxies propped up by the Pakistani government. And now they have a direct link to Al Qaeda. Why didn’t you ever bring this up?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That was the decision that was made at the White House. And the decision was that the relationship is bigger than India-Pakistan, at least temporarily. The relationship, we needed the Pakistanis actually more than they needed us at that point. We were happy to throw money at them. That’s what they responded to.

But we really needed them to let us base our drones in Baluchistan, for example, have what’s called a picket line, CIA officers all the way up and down the border with Afghanistan from Waziristan.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: All the way down to Balochistan.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: To Balochistan. We needed a presence in Peshawar. We needed a presence in Quetta. We needed a presence in Karachi and Lahore. We needed for them to say yes to everything that we wanted to do.

And so a decision was made at the White House that if we strategically ignore this terrorism problem vis-à-vis India, the relationship would be much easier to negotiate. And so that’s what we did.

The Mumbai Attacks: Getting It Right When Everyone Else Was Wrong

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’ll tell you one other thing. Years later, in 2008, I had left the CIA. I had blown the whistle already, and I was working as a counterterrorism advisor to ABC News, one of the big news networks here in the United States. And I got a call saying, “Are you watching the news?” I said, “No.” It was the night before Thanksgiving. So it’s a major American holiday. I said, “No, I’m not watching the news.”

“There’s been an enormous terrorist attack in Mumbai. They’re attacking hotels, they’re attacking Jewish centers, they’re attacking this and attacking that.” I said, “Oh my God.” They said, “Can you come into the studio and talk about this?” I said, “Of course.” Everybody else was on vacation because it’s the eve of a major holiday.

So I jump in the shower, I shave, and as I’m getting dressed, my wife, who was still in the CIA at the time, she said, “You should watch while you’re getting dressed, you should watch what the other networks are saying about this.”

So I go to CNN, they said, “Al Qaeda.” I go to Fox, “Al Qaeda.” MSNBC, “It’s Al Qaeda.” And these are all friends of mine who are saying it. And I said to my wife, “I don’t think this is Al Qaeda.” She said, “Wow, you better really be sure of yourself if you’re going to put your reputation on the line and tell the entire country that this is not Al Qaeda.”

So I drove down to ABC News to the studio and they wired me up and I was talking to the reporter in New York and I said, “Listen, I don’t think this is Al Qaeda. I think this is the Pakistani-supported Kashmiri groups. I said, Al Qaeda doesn’t care about India. They don’t have any problem with the Indians. Their fight is with us.”

And he said, “Oh my God. You’re going to need to be 100% sure because everybody is saying it’s Al Qaeda.” And I said, “I was in the CIA long enough that I can say that I feel strongly this is not Al Qaeda.”

And so I went on the air and I was the only person that said, “I believe that these are Pakistani Kashmiri separatist groups supported by the Pakistani ISI.” And that turned out to be exactly the case to the point where ABC News made television commercials saying, “ABC News, the Mumbai attacks, we were the only ones that got it right.”

But there was a bigger issue here, bigger story here. And the story was that Pakistan was committing terrorism in India and nobody did anything about it.

Strategic Patience vs. Strength: India’s Evolving Response

ISHAAN PRAKASH: In your experience, India showed restraint after the Parliament attacks, greatly showed restraint after the Mumbai attacks of 2008. But they didn’t show any restraint this time around when Operation Sindur happened in Palgam where it was a four-day high intensity sort of war that happened. What do you think changed over the course of these two decades?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: At the CIA, we called the Indian policy “strategic patience.” The Indian government would have been perfectly within its rights to respond by striking Pakistan. And they didn’t. And I remember at the White House, people were saying, “Wow, the Indians are really exhibiting a very mature foreign policy here. We expected the Indians to strike back, and they didn’t.” And that kept the world from what might have been a nuclear exchange.

But India has gotten to the point where they can’t risk strategic patience being misunderstood as weakness. And so they had to respond. Now, the question that CIA analysts are likely asking themselves is, did the Pakistanis learn their lesson not to keep poking the hornet’s nest and expecting to not be stung?

A.Q. Khan’s Nuclear Proliferation Network

ISHAAN PRAKASH: I’m glad that you brought up the nuclear angle, Mr. Kiriakou, because during your time in Pakistan 2002, 3, 4, around that time, another very dangerous threat to humanity was Dr. A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation network. So we got to know that nuclear material was being smuggled out to the North Koreans. There was proliferation going on with Libyan nuclear material as well going into Pakistan. All of that started coming out when you were there in Pakistan. When you got this on your desk, what was the first thing you thought? You guys are going after terrorists. Here’s Pakistan assembling nuclear bombs and selling it in the gray market or black market.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s an outstanding question and a very important one. It never crossed my desk. I was specifically counterterrorism. But a colleague of mine, this was his entire life, was dealing with A.Q. Khan.

Well, if we had taken the Israeli approach, we would have just killed him. He was easy enough to find. We knew where he lived, we knew how he spent his day. But he also had the support of the Saudi government. And the Saudis came to us and said, “Please leave him alone. Please. We like A.Q. Khan. We’re working with A.Q. Khan. We’re close to the Pakistanis. They even named Faisalabad after King Faisal. Just leave him alone.”

This was a mistake that the U.S. Government made, not confronting A.Q. Khan head on.

And I’ll add, too, later on, when I went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff as the chief investigator, I worked for a man who was a journalist before going to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. And he and his wife wrote a book that was first titled “The Man from Pakistan,” and the title was changed in the paperback version to “The Nuclear Jihadist.”

It was the most detailed book ever written about A.Q. Khan. And they asked more than two dozen CIA officers and United Nations IAEA officials exactly the same question that you just asked me. I was surprised that they got so many people to speak with them freely and openly.

But they all told the same thing. They said that there were instructions from the White House not to attack A.Q. Khan and it had to be because the Saudis were demanding it, insisting on it.

We often wondered, and I have no proof, this is just my own speculation, we often wondered if it was because the Saudis were also building a nuclear capability. I think that’s something we should probably be thinking about.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Well, when you put this into context and you talk about the Saudi-Pakistan mutual defense pact that was just signed a few months ago, is Saudi Arabia basically calling in its investment?

Pakistan’s Military Composition and Nuclear Umbrella

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I think yes. But I have to laugh about this mutual defense pact. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time in Saudi Arabia, but almost the entire Saudi military is Pakistanis. No Saudi is going to join the military unless they’re going to make him a general.

There are a lot of Bedouins in the Saudi military, but you go straight in as an officer. If you’re a Saudi citizen, you’re going to start as an officer. There are no privates or corporals who are Saudi. There are all Pakistani. All of them. It’s the Pakistanis that protect Saudi Arabia.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: But how realistic is on the ground. But how realistic is a nuclear umbrella, though? That’s what is. I mean, that at least some of the doomsayers in India think of it like that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. I don’t think it is realistic.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. So I don’t think it’s realistic.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: When this AQ Khan thing happened and it was brought up, what was this? Saudi Arabia. Hold on, America. Now you have Saudi terrorists taking out the 9/11 towers.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Maybe we are actively lobbying to protect one of the most dangerous men, at least in the last quarter century, at least in this region. And then eventually also pardoning AQ Khan, therefore ending all investigations. What is this compulsion that America has with dictators and this love story that is?

America’s Foreign Policy Pragmatism

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That is one of the most difficult questions that you could ask. We like to try to convince the world that we are a shining beacon of hope for democracy and human rights and equality, and it’s just simply not true.

Our foreign relations are based on our national needs at any given moment. We don’t do things because they’re the right thing to do. We do them because they happen to be good for us that day, which is why we get into bed with so many dictators around the world, which is why we get into bed with so many politicians who are so extreme in their personal politics that it makes no sense to the American people.

Why are we in bed with Benjamin Netanyahu right now when we’ve known Netanyahu since the 1980s as an extremist?

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because it’s the easy thing to do, and it serves our purposes today. That may change tomorrow, but today it’s okay. I worked for an ambassador in Bahrain who was an absolutely lovely man. And he said one day, I still remember this, I was young and impressionable. And he said, “Our foreign policy in Saudi Arabia really is as simple as we buy their oil and they buy our weapons.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: That’s it. That’s it.

The Reality of US-Saudi Relations

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s it. That’s the basis. He said, “You spend your career in the Middle East. I’ve spent my entire adult life in the Middle East.” He said, “I don’t like the Saudis. They don’t like us. But we pretend to have this special relationship, right?”

Even in the American embassy. My first overseas tour was in Saudi Arabia, and I remember an enormous photograph. It had to be 2 meters across, and it was President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdelaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, in the back of a car together. And this was supposed to be emblematic of our special relationship with the Saudis.

But when I first arrived in Saudi Arabia, I was placed in embassy housing. So I was living in an apartment in the diplomatic quarter, and I would walk a block or two to the embassy and go in the back entrance of the embassy. And every day, my first three days, I would say to this Saudi National Guard officer standing there, “Salaamu alaikum.” The response, of course, is, “Walaikum as salaam.” He would ignore me.

So the next day I went in and I said, “Salaamu alaykum.” And he ignored me. The third day, I went in and I said, “Good morning and peace be upon you.” He ignored me, and I stopped and I said to him, “What’s your problem?”

And he said to me in English, he said, “You are hired help. We paid for you to come here and defend us. We are not friends.” And I said, “You know what? You’re right. We aren’t friends. I don’t like you, and I don’t like any of your compatriots. None of them.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then I never spoke to him again. But that was the US-Saudi relationship in a nutshell.

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Hedging

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Do you think Saudi Arabia knows this now? Because with this mutual defense pact, again, I bring, I keep coming back to the nuclear thing and them sort of basically seeking nuclear deterrence with the help of Pakistan.

Then it appears with the new, with this Trump regime, that a certain amount of American retrenchment has happened in the region where it’s almost like a hemispheric defense now that America is focusing on. So Saudi Arabia always had the US for its back. Now that US is not, at least it appears that it’s not highly dependent on Saudi oil, Saudi energy. Do you think Saudi Arabia is doing this as an insurance pact?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, yes. And it’s not just Saudi Arabia, it’s Kuwait as well. Kuwait last year made a purchase of, not made a purchase, made a sale of oil to China and for the very first time ever, took payment in yuan. Yeah, first time ever. That payment was not in dollars.

So I think everybody is coming around to the notion that here in the United States we’re sitting on an ocean of oil. Okay. We have shale oil enough to last us 500 years. We don’t need Middle Eastern oil. We buy it because it’s good for relationship, because we buy it. And then they buy our weapons systems.

So we continue to do that, but when push comes to shove, we don’t need the Saudis anymore. We don’t. And so they’re hedging their bets. They’re improving their relations with China, they’re improving their relations with India, which is a huge market and in need of oil.

And if the Indians are going to have problems, especially from the United States buying Russian oil or Russian natural gas, they should just buy it from Saudi Arabia. Makes it even easier, right?

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yeah, absolutely.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I think we’re seeing a transformation here in the way the world…

Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal: Control and Concerns

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Very dynamic geopolitical shift is being viewed here. That’s why conversations with you, someone in the field and who has historical context, I mean, it’s fantastic.

We had this hot war with Pakistan in May and it happened. And the nuclear question came up again. And I thought, what better person than you to sort of illuminate a little bit more about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and everything.

So you were there on the ground in Pakistan in 2002, 2003. We also saw Pakistan sort of lurch into almost like a civil war with the various terrorists it had propped up in its backyard. Was there ever a fear that these nuclear weapons would fall into terrorist hands?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Musharraf had turned control over to the United States because he was afraid of exactly what you just described.

But the Pakistanis, in the intervening years and remember, I was there 23 years ago. Over the last 23 years, the Pakistanis have come to say that is absolutely not true. The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Pakistani generals are the ones that control it.

So I don’t know. If that’s true, then I would be very worried about who is in charge politically in Pakistan. For example, Imran Khan. I can’t believe that I forgot his name.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Who’s in jail?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Who’s in jail.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, right. And still wildly popular.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Wildly, yeah.

Pakistan’s Political Instability

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He told us when he was still the Prime Minister, he said, “Listen, I’ve got this political situation here domestically, I’m going to start blaming you for everything.” And the ambassador laughed and said, “We get blamed for everything anyway, so we don’t care.”

So everything that happened, it was the United States’ fault and it was the US, they turned their backs on us and the US did this and the US did that, and then they arrested him anyway. So he got a message out to the US government saying, “Can you help me get out of this?”

And we went to Jemima Goldsmith, his ex-wife. And she went to Pakistan and asked them if they would release him. And they said no.

So, like you, I’m worried about continued disagreement in Pakistani politics that has the potential to spill into the streets because the Pakistanis have a tendency to get themselves spun up and people die during demonstrations. And there are attacks against political figures and assassinations. And the country is not known for its transformative leaders making positive decisions.

I’ll tell you another thing. When Benazir Bhutto was in exile in Dubai, I went to see her with another, a senior officer. I went as the note taker. And she lived in this $5 million palace on the Gulf. And we were sitting in the front room, the salon of the house, and we heard a car pull up. And she said her exact words, so help me God, “If he came home with another Bentley, I’m going to kill him.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Zardari. Yeah, her husband.

Corruption in Pakistani Leadership

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I said to my boss afterwards, “She makes $60,000 a year, she lives in a $5 million house and he has a collection of Bentleys. Aren’t they ashamed of themselves?”

Like, how can they go back to Pakistan and look the Pakistani people in the face when their people don’t even have shoes and enough food to eat? Like, I understand corruption is a problem there, but that level of corruption. Come on. Well, those are the kinds of politicians that the Pakistani people have to deal with.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: You talked about Benazir Bhutto. You talked about Zardari, the current president over here.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

India-Pakistan Nuclear Dynamics

ISHAAN PRAKASH: And now going back to the nuclear issue. In this war that happened in May, India for the first time escalated it to a level where we had cruise missiles flying into Pakistan with direct hits at the time. And from the Indian side, this constant line is said right from the Prime Minister level up, he says that we call their nuclear bluffs.

You said that you were told unofficially that you knew that America knew where the nukes were. Do you think Americans told India that the control of Pakistani nukes also lies in America?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I doubt it. I doubt it because of the vociferousness with which the Pakistanis have come out publicly and said that they control the nukes.

But I can tell you definitively that the State Department was telling both sides, “If you’re going to fight, fight, keep it short and keep it non-nuclear. If nuclear weapons are introduced, the whole world is going to change.”

And so I think there was restraint on both sides. The Pakistanis need to come to a policy conclusion that there’s nothing positive for them in fighting India. Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Mm.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It’s as simple as that. They’ll lose. And I’m not talking about nuclear weapons. I’m talking just about a conventional war. The Pakistanis will lose.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And so there’s no benefit to constantly provoking the Indians.

US Investment in Pakistani Nuclear Security

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right. Last question on the nuclear issue. I promise I’ll move on after that. Okay, let’s nix the control part. You doubt that the actual control. But there was a New York Times article written by the New York Times editor at that time for National Security, that President Bush had folded in hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to Pakistan to safeguard their nuclear assets.

The New York Times knew about this program, but decided to sit on it for a number of months before they finally published it. So even if they don’t control it, did they give technology to safeguard it?

The New York Times and Classified Information

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Most likely, yes. I don’t know. It’s not my area of expertise. I couldn’t speculate. But I will tell you that the fact that the New York Times sat on the article is a way of confirming its truth.

And what I mean is, when one of the big outlets—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, or one of the big broadcast news networks—when they come across information like this that’s really big and it involves classified information, they always ask the White House to confirm or to deny.

If the information is truly classified and it’s sensitive, the national security advisor will ask for a meeting. Sometimes the meeting is with the president and the head of the newspaper. Usually it’s the national security advisor. And they’ll say, “Look, yes, it’s true, but it’s so sensitive that if you publish it, it will put lives in danger.”

Almost always they’ll sit on the article until enough time passes that people aren’t in danger anymore. The fact that they sat on the article is confirmation that it was true.

Capturing Abu Zubaydah and the Aftermath

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Now, let’s go back to your time when you were there and you caught Abu Zubaydah. I’m sure you would be in line for promotion after capturing number three in al Qaeda, right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: What happened after that? What’s the story after that?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, I got a medal, I got a huge award, and then I was denied promotion. And I was shocked. And I shouted at my boss, “What do I have to do to get promoted around here? Do I have to catch bin Laden? I just caught the number three in al Qaeda and I’m denied promotion.”

Well, it turned out that the reason why I was denied promotion was that as soon as I got home from Pakistan, they asked me if I wanted to be trained in the torture techniques so I could be used to torture prisoners. And I said no. I have a moral and ethical problem with it. I believe it’s illegal. I want nothing to do with it.

Of the 14 people that they asked, I was the only one who said no. And so the director of the counterterrorism center, Jose Rodriguez—a monster—said that I had, his words, “displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.”

So in the meantime, I got the job of a lifetime. And I became the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations. And I said I was passed over for promotion. He said, “What? How?” And I said, “Jose said that I, because I wouldn’t torture these guys.” He said, “I’ll promote you.” And he just signed a promotion. And so I was promoted instantly.

So there were those in the chain of command that were thinking correctly on this issue of torture.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: But at the end of the day, they were shunted aside and a decision was made that torture was going to be an official policy.

Blowing the Whistle

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Right. But you blew the whistle on it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I did. The truth, though, is that I just assumed somebody else would blow the whistle. And so I remained silent. And then I resigned from the CIA in 2004. My resignation was effective in 2005, and still nobody would blow the whistle.

And so finally, in 2007, a reporter called me and I decided I was going to do it. I was just going to just tell the truth.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: And so that’s—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s what I did.

The Obama Administration’s Prosecution

ISHAAN PRAKASH: And then one would think that you would be a hero for free speech and blowing the whistle. But then the Obama administration, ironically, a campaign that was run on hope and change and maybe shedding some light and some transparency—they are the ones who actually went ahead and prosecuted you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. Yes, indeed. For a number of reasons. First of all, it was John Brennan. John Brennan, who at first was the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, and then the CIA director in the Obama administration. It was John Brennan who specifically went after me.

John and I always hated each other. I’ve known John Brennan for 35 years. I’ve always hated the guy. I thought he was in over his head intellectually, and he was one of the founders, one of the fathers of the torture program.

And so you had a president who had two years of experience. Can you imagine that? Think about that for a moment. He was in the US Senate for two years. That was his only qualification to be president of the United States. And so he was very susceptible to the advice and the biases of the people around him.

Well, John Brennan was his lead intelligence advisor. And John Brennan said, “We need to stop these leaks because we’re going to start doing things like using drones to kill people. We need to put this guy Kiriakou in prison.” And so that’s exactly what they did.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: He didn’t have any experience. He was in Saudi Arabia as well when he was in the CIA, right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, Brennan had lots of experience. Obama had no experience. Obama was in the senate for two years before he was elected president and had never, ever read a classified CIA document. He had never seen one. Utterly unprepared to become president.

The Path to Prison

ISHAAN PRAKASH: And what led to eventually you spending 24 months in jail? I know I’m fast forwarding a bit, but that’s okay.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: What they started doing was they knew I hadn’t committed espionage. And so the espionage charges were dropped eventually. They waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the charges.

But what they did is they tapped my phones and they went through my emails, three years worth of emails, and they were able to find one single email where I confirmed the surname of a former colleague. And they said, “Aha, that’s a crime.” And so that’s the crime that I pleaded guilty to.

So they offered me 30 months in prison. I would serve 23. And I said to my attorneys, “I’m going to turn it down. I want to go to trial. I haven’t done anything wrong.” And they said that if I went to trial and I was convicted, it would be a lot longer than 23 months.

I said, “Realistically, how much time am I looking at if I lose?” They told me 12 to 18 years. And so I took the deal.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Where would they bring the trial though? In America?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, it was in the Eastern District of Virginia. And this was another thing.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: This would be a jury in Eastern District of Virginia.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, so Washington, D.C. insiders—CIA, Pentagon, FBI, DIA. This is where they live and work.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So that would have been my jury.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: So the chances are that you could face conviction if you’ve ever heard of—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, oh yeah. If you’ve ever heard of O.J. Simpson. Yes, he was—so I hired O.J. Simpson’s jury consultant.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Okay.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And we got him a security clearance. He went through 10,000 pages of documents. And finally we had a meeting with all the attorneys. I had 11 lawyers and O.J. Simpson’s jury consultant.

And he said if we were in any district in America other than the Eastern District of Virginia, I would say let’s do it, we’re going to win. But the Eastern District of Virginia, your jury is going to be CIA, DIA, FBI, Pentagon. He said, “You don’t have a prayer, take the deal.” And so I took the deal.

Life After Prison

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Now that you’re out, you’re independent and you are a renowned commentator who has first hand experience. Does the CIA look at you with some trepidation? Are they happy when you talk about all these things? What’s life after prison, after blowing the whistle and talking about your experience?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, I still have friends inside the CIA and we’ve talked about that. The truth is most of my detractors are either dead or retired because we’re talking about—my actions were 20 years ago. So they’re mostly dead or retired. And now that they’re retired, nobody pays any attention to what they say.

The position inside the CIA has changed about me. A friend of mine told me just a few weeks ago that she was participating in a briefing, a security briefing, and they showed a slide with my picture and it said “the insider threat.” And she said, everybody started booing, “Boo, boo.”

And the instructor said, “Wait, why is everybody booing?” And she said, “He’s not a threat. He’s the whistleblower. We should aspire to be like him.” And she said in the next running of the briefing that they had taken the slide out. That’s the win. It took 20 years.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Yeah, but we just celebrated Diwali over here in India. The triumph of good over evil.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: This is it right here.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s exactly right.

Seeking a Presidential Pardon

ISHAAN PRAKASH: I’m sure you’re now trying to get a pardon.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I am actively, yes.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: How’s that going?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And frankly, Donald Trump is the only president who would have the guts to do it. The rest of them are just in the grasp of the CIA. I have very, very important Republicans who support me. Tucker Carlson, Judge Napolitano, Dr. Phil, if you know who Dr. Phil is, and Republican political figures. The governor of Texas, for example.

And so I’m told that my file is literally on his desk. It’s just a question of whether he signs it or not. And every day I wake up and I say, “I hope today is the day.”

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Prayer for you as well over here.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you so much.

Who Benefited from the War on Terror?

ISHAAN PRAKASH: And I’m glad you brought up Tucker Carlson, because I was going through his documentary series. I saw you there too.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: He ended the series by asking a sort of predicate question or just a fundamental question about the towers that went down as the eventual war on terror, the trillions spent. He asked which countries benefited in the end. You’ve seen it all. You lived those years. What’s your guess?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Almost no countries benefited. Israel benefited. But a lot of individuals became very, very wealthy because of the so-called war on terror. We spent more than $1 trillion. We killed as many as 2 million people.

And the ones who benefited were the defense contractors and the intelligence contractors, the Erik Princes of the world, and the people at the top of organizations like Blackwater or the defense manufacturers. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing—they all got rich.

But we’re no safer now than we were on September 10, 2001. And we’ve lost freedoms and civil liberties here in the United States. So I’m not sure anybody really benefited except for those who provided hardware and services. They all got very rich.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: May I add one thing. I feel that Pakistan groups with an eye towards India, they benefited because those American defense contractor monies, those defense parts were all turned towards—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, and I’ll add something. We paid tens of millions of dollars in cash as rewards to the Pakistani intelligence service. And God knows what they did with that money.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Excellent. Mr. Kiriakou, thank you for your time.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you. Good to meet you.

ISHAAN PRAKASH: Good to meet you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Great questions.

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