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Whistleblower John Kiriakou Critiques the CIA’s Behavior
Joshua Scheer speaks with 15-year CIA veteran and
whistleblower John Kiriakou about the U.S. intelligence
establishment and its claims that hackers interfered
with the 2016 U.S. elections at the behest of the
Russian government.
Posted December 18, 2016
Kiriakou discusses President-Elect Trump’s refusal to
receive daily intelligence briefings, the relationship
between the CIA and the White House and how it may
change under Trump, and the condition of fellow CIA
whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling.
Lastly, Kiriakou talks about his new book, “Doing Time
Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive
in Prison.”
Rushed
transcript:
Joshua
Scheer: My guest right now is
John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, author of three
books, one that is available for pre-order that we will
discuss, “Doing Time Like a Spy,” and we’re discussing,
obviously, intelligent briefing, Russian hacks, and I
want to talk about Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA
whistleblower who is still in prison. Thank you for
joining me.
John
Kiriakou: Oh, very happy to be
with you.
Scheer: Let’s start obviously
with the CIA and there’s been anonymous sources in the
Washington Post, I’m sure you followed the story. Today,
there’s discussion of Vladimir Putin being involved in
hacking our US election. What do you make of all this?
Kiriakou: Honestly, in my gut,
this just feels like a red herring to me. First of all,
nobody has really defined what hacking means. Are the
Russian being accused of having hacked in the voting
machines to steal the election? I’ve not seen that yet.
Have they been accused of hacking emails? Yes, but if
so, what was the fallout? I mean, this is something that
the big powers do to each other all the time, and God
knows the United States has a very long history, a rich
history of interfering in the elections of other
countries. I’m not really sure what the outrage is. To
your first point, I’m not sure why we should really
care. This is just something that the KGB does to the
United States and that the CIA does to the Russians, and
it’s just one of those dirty little poorly kept secrets
and it has been for decades. I’m just not getting the
outrage.
Scheer: It’s very interesting,
yeah. This is obviously causing, like many of the issues
of this last presidential election causing a divide
within the Liberal community. A lot of Liberals,
surprisingly enough, have defended the CIA.
Kiriakou: Right.
Scheer: I’m sure, for them,
it’s strange ground. Strangely, in the Washington Post
this October, same paper that had these allegations from
the CIA that broke the story, talks about that, the long
history of CIA involvement in elections. I mean,
certainly off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Iran
the ‘54 coup in Guatemala, Vietnam, and the list goes on
and on. I mean, yeah, you’re part of this organization.
You’re a whistleblower. You blew the whistle on the
torture program, and every morning, when I read these
stories, the first thing that comes to my mind is
certainly the movies that have been about the CIA, but
certainly is the torture program that you exposed and
involvement in elections and gathering information and
undermining, even if not involved, undermining foreign
interests for US power, right?
Kiriakou: Yeah, and when you
look back through history, you can see that even where
the CIA, I’m going to use the word in quotation marks,
“successfully” influenced foreign elections, almost
uniformly, those have turned out to be disasters over
the long term. We still had never recovered. At least
our policy has never recovered from the Mossadegh
overthrow in the Iran in the 1950s. Look at Latin
America, it’s still a mess, largely because what the CIA
has done there over the years, even in Greece where the
CIA, it wasn’t an election, but the CIA supported the
overthrow of the Greek government in 1967 by a military
junta. Even in Greece, people still hate and distrust
the United States because of that. It’s like the CIA
does these kinds of things, they carry out these kinds
of covert action operations without any thought to
long-term policy, and like I said, uniformly, the policy
has turned out to be a disaster.
Scheer: I want to get into
something, because obviously this is the Washington Post
and people have written about this, about Philip
Graham’s involvement in the CIA Operation Mockingbird,
talking about the use of journalist, Jason Leopold, who
we both know wrote about this a few months ago for VICE
News, about Leon Panetta getting information into
mainstream media into popular shows certainly about the
CIA or other intelligence information. There’s a long
storied history of the combination of the press. There
was a great piece by Philip Giraldi. This is before a
lot of this Putin stuff had come out, before the CIA
allegations, but discussing his role and a member of the
CIA placing fake news articles across the world.
You take all
these things into consideration, is it just some people
can’t get over the fact that Donald Trump despite not
winning the popular vote by millions is the president?
Is that really what you think, it comes down to? I mean,
certainly China has hacked us and all of this, and I’ve
had Malcolm Nance on, who wrote the book about hacking
our election. Certainly, this malfeasance shouldn’t go
uninvestigated, but when you’re talking about anonymous
sources ... As you pointed out, I mean, this is a very
confusing time for a lot of people. Do you even get what
it is, this red herring with the CIA and Putin?
Kiriakou: I think that’s a
part of it. I think the issue is deeper, but first let’s
talk about the Washington Post. It’s funny to me that
the Washington Post and elements of the Democratic Party
have flipped sides, flipped positions with the
conservative movement in this country. The Washington
Post, for example, last week, listing websites that
they’re accusing of being Russian influenced without any
proof at all. That bothered me very much. In fact,
several are websites that I write for regularly,
including Truthdig. I happen to know the proprietors of
Truthdig and I know that they’re not Russian agents.
That was very disappointing to me.
I would also
say that Donald Trump aside, I have found that the
Washington Post has made a very dramatic move to the
right over the last couple of years. Fred Hiatt, the
editor of the editorial page is a well-known
conservative and ideologue here in Washington, and he
has moved the editorial page pretty solidly to the
right. Now, they happen to not like Donald Trump, and
because they don’t like Donald Trump, they have taken
this misinformation of disinformation that’s been handed
to them by the White House, and presumably from the CIA
originally, and they just publish it as fact.
You mentioned
this report that came out the other day citing anonymous
sources or unnamed administration officials or unnamed
intelligence officials. Well, my god, if you’re going to
accuse a major presidential campaign, and indeed the
president-elect of being in the pay of the Russians or
being a dupe of the Russians, then show us the evidence.
I pointed out in an article just a couple of days ago,
and by the way, it was illegal to leak that report to
the Washington Post. That meets the Obama
administration’s definition of espionage. See, you can’t
have it both ways.
Scheer: Certainly, you would
know about the Obama administration’s dealings with
espionage and the double standard. My guest is John
Kiriakou. You could find his work at JohnKiriakou.com.
He’s written a number of books, three books. The one
that’s available now is “Doing Time Like a Spy,” about
the CIA and about his time in prison. I want to ask you
a question about the CIA because there’s a lot of talk
of the Koch brothers, their role in the Senate now. Mike
Pence is really running government. We kind of know
that.
What I think
what a lot of people can understand is happening, Donald
Trump is looking at this as a certain kind of job, and
the Koch brothers have long disdain for the CIA and the
FBI. How much of this could be protectionist? Certainly,
the Trump administration has made dangerous picks for
certain cabinet positions, the EPA. A lot of the guys
who he’s picking don’t even like the agencies they’re
being task to run. Is this something where the CIA might
be afraid of what Trump might do to the CIA?
Kiriakou: Yeah. You know Josh,
I think that’s a very important point, and I think the
answer is yes. I still stay in touch with a lot of CIA
people, and just across the board, their opinion is that
this is bad. I think most Americans don’t realize how
bad this is, if you’re in the CIA, because for the first
time, really, since John Kennedy was president, you have
a president-elect who just simply doesn’t trust the
organization.
Now, Kennedy
famously wanted to break up the CIA. Trump hasn’t said
anything like that, but ignoring the CIA and its
analysis is just about as bad if you’re on the inside. I
think the CIA now is flailing around and reacting or at
least trying to react to Trump’s position on them, and
they don’t know where to go. I mean, if the president
won’t see you in the morning and won’t read your
publication and won’t let you brief him on what
operations you want to run, then you’re out of luck.
You’ve been marginalized, and the CIA has never been
marginalized. This is something that’s quite new for
them.
Scheer: Yeah. I want to ask
another thing, because Michael “Mad Dog” Flynn, for
those who don’t know, is the President-elect Trump’s
nominee for Defense Secretary, and this is a man, he
like brawling and killing the animal and battle in
everything else. To be fair, this quote is from last
year, so it’s not from this particular runabout with the
CIA, but he talked about, basically, the CIA is no
longer working for the American people, that it’s a wing
of the Obama administration.
I have read
that elsewhere, the CIA tends to go with the people who
are in power, I guess, to maintain their power, but
we’ve seen this in this election. James Comey in the FBI
being very anti-Obama, anti-Hillary leaked information
saying that they wanted Trump to win. They talked about
their email issue and the CIA. What is the political
role of the CIA for those who may not know? I mean, when
you were in the CIA, I mean, you heard things like
you’re very astute students of politics, but what is the
role of the CIA in terms of the current administration,
and then, as we just discussed, the incoming
administration?
Kiriakou: You know what? Let
me go back a little further than that. When I first
joined the CIA in 1990, I just kept my politics to
myself and I just assumed was a Conservative Republican.
Then on Election Day 1992, my branch chief asked our
little group of, I guess, it was eight people who we
were voting for, for president that day. He said, “I
know I’m not supposed to ask, but I’m just curious. Who
are you voting for?” It was three for Bush, three for
Clinton, and two for Perot. I remember thinking, “Wow, I
guess I’m not the only Liberal at the CIA.”
What I learned
was that you just said, that the CIA really adapts
itself to each administration. It doesn’t matter if it’s
a Democrat or Republican. The first thing that the CIA
does as an organization is to try to win that person
over, to win over that new president, because once you
bring that president into the fold, you make him one of
the guys, you tell him the cool operations that you’re
running, and you show him these special, classified,
above top secret reports that you’re preparing, you win
him over. Once you’ve done that, he’ll do anything that
you want him to do. He’ll raise your budget. He’ll
approve risky operations. Anything you want, he’ll do.
The CIA has had
a very close relationship with Barack Obama, not just
because John Brennan was a campaign official and was
Obama’s counter-terrorism czar on the NSC for four
years, but also because of Leon Panetta and the personal
closeness between Panetta and Obama. Sure, the CIA is
very close to Obama personally and to the Obama
administration, but it was also very close personally
and organizationally to the Bush administration before
it.
Scheer: It’s interesting you
bring that up because there’s a lot of talk about that.
Certainly, you could talk about this personally because
of your experience with it, with the Espionage Act and
the harshness that Obama has done to whistleblowers is a
lot of his relationship with the National Security
establishment and his respect or devotion or whatever
you want to call it. The use of Espionage Act, the
keeping of Gitmo open, the drone warfare, all of these
were example of his, again, respect, for a lack of a
better word, of the National Intelligence establishment,
the apparatus that they got on his good side and they’ve
convinced him that the use of ... How many times he’s
used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers as a good
thing?
Kiriakou: Eight so far.
Scheer: Eight, yeah.
Kiriakou: Yeah, and in my own
case, we’ve received some documents from the Justice
Department in discovery when I was gearing up to defend
myself, and one of those was a memo from the CIA to the
Justice Department saying, “Charge him with espionage.”
The Justice Department responded, “He hasn’t committed
espionage,” and then the CIA responded back, “Charge him
anyway and make him defend himself.” That’s exactly what
they did. It’s because of the tone set by the Obama
White House, it’s the policy set by the administration
to target whistleblowers and to use the Espionage Act to
clamp down on defense and to make sure that would-be
whistleblowers decide in the end to keep their mouth
shut.
Scheer:
I want to let our listeners know we are speaking with
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. You can find his work
at JohnKiriakou.com or across the internet, and his
third book that is coming out that you could pre-order
now is “Doing Time Like a Spy” about his time in prison
and how the CIA, I guess, inadvertently trained you to
take on that harrowing experience.
Kiriakou: They did indeed. I’m
calling it “Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me
to Survive and Thrive in Prison,” and really, that’s
what they did. I took these 20 life lessons that I
learned in CIA training and applied them to life in
prison from my very first day there, just to make sure
that I ensured my own safety and remained at the top of
the social heap.
Scheer:
We’re definitely going to want to talk about that. We’re
also going to talk about Jeffrey Sterling who is another
whistleblower who is still in prison. I believe he is
the, at his time, was the fifth person used in history
the Espionage Act by President Obama. I want to talk
about this intelligence briefing because the
president-elect said on Fox News this Sunday, he’s a
pretty smart guy. We’ve discussed it in brief.
I want to let
our listeners know what this president intelligence
checklist was. It started with Kennedy in ‘61. It was
typewritten. It’s stamped for president only. It has
gone through, obviously, technological innovation. Obama
gets it on an iPad, and Trump has kind of said, “I’ll
get it when anything is new. It’ll go through Mike
Pence. It’ll go through my generals.” He said, this is
his quote, “If something should change from this point,
immediately call me. I’m available at one-minute’s
notice, but eight years, I don’t need that. If something
should change, let us know.” Talk about this, because
I’m sure you’ve been involved in briefing the president
and certainly writing these reports.
Kiriakou: Sure.
Scheer: How important are
they? Some of the intelligence community, one David
Bass, I’m thinking, worked for the-
Kiriakou: Priess.
Scheer: Beast, yes, worked for
the State Department, worked for Bush and Clinton as a
CIA intelligence officer and talks about how important
it is to be informed, and that you’re making these
decisions and you want to know all the information. Talk
about this a little bit, about the president-elect
rejecting these intelligence reports.
Kiriakou: Yeah, we’ve never
had a president since Kennedy who just outrightly
rejected his intelligence briefings. Bill Clinton
famously was not briefed by his PDB briefer. PDB is
President’s Daily Brief, but what the briefer would do
is that he would go to the White House every morning at
7 a.m. and drop it off, and Clinton would read it at his
leisure. He was only briefed in person twice during his
presidency, but Gore was briefed six days a week.
Clinton read the briefing later in the day, and so he
was informed.
Now, each day’s
PDB is specifically tailored to the president and to his
interests, and so what Trump is reading right now, or
what Trump would be reading if he were being briefed is
really Obama’s briefing. Obama has been steeped in these
issues for eight years. I can see how they might seem a
little too tactical, too detailed for Trump, but that’s
not just what Trump said. He didn’t say they were too
detailed and too tactical. He said he was a smart guy
already and he didn’t need to be briefed. That’s a
mistake, unless he is going to just wholesale turnover
foreign and intelligence policy to Mike Pence. If Mike
Pence is going to be the de facto president on these
issues, then okay, I guess there is really no reason to
brief Trump. If Trump is going to still have the final
word on foreign defense and intelligence policy, I think
this is a big mistake.
Scheer: Yeah, go on on that a
little bit. Obviously, Mike Pence, this guy ... Trump is
acting as if this is not even a job. This is something
where it’s one of the many things he will be doing,
certainly has given Pence a lot of power, which is
scary. Jeremy Scahill has written about this de facto
Christian fascist in power. There has been others who
have written about that. What do you make of this? I
mean, you’ve obviously followed politics a long time.
Certainly, we’ve talked about this earlier in the
interview, the CIA is probably scared about this, but is
to be expected both on ... Obviously, we all have other
people on to talk about, the EPA.
We’re talking
about scared agencies. The EPA right now is ... The
Department of Energy, I’m sorry, is hiding people’s
names who have worked on climate science. They’re not
codifying the data they have gathered over a number of
years to try to say that US States like California
saying they’re going on alone on immigration, on climate
change. I mean, this is a really tumultuous time for
everybody. I mean, we talked about it a little bit
earlier, but I can’t imagine that this is ... I mean,
this must be the most experience you’ve ever seen,
right?
Kiriakou: Yeah, I’ve never
seen anything like this, and I’ve been close to several
presidents from my CIA time. Even my wife was a senior
CIA officer and has been even closer in some cases to
presidents than have, and he’s never seen anything like
this either. I had dinner with a great friend of mine on
Saturday night. He was my first boss at the CIA, and he
goes back to the Carter administration, and he was of
the opinion that this is utterly unprecedented. What
makes is so dangerous is that this is not a weak
president giving a strong president the authority to
handle intelligence policy. This is a strongman who has
surrounded himself with generals who is giving a weak
vice president the authority to lead intelligence
policy.
He said, “It’s
a disaster waiting to happen,” and he feared that the
only time the American people are going to understand
what a terrible mistake this is, is when we’re the
victims of a terrorist attack on American soil, and
people are going to want to know why the president
wasn’t up on this, why the president didn’t order
countermeasures, why the president dropped the ball. I
fear that’s the direction we’re going in.
Scheer: Well, it’s a scary
time to be an American, obviously. I want to let our
listener know we’re speaking with John Kiriakou. We’re
going to have him about Jeffrey Sterling and his book. I
just want to take a quick break and we’ll be right back.
My guest is
John Kiriakou. He is a CIA whistleblower. He is a
author. His third book is “Doing Time Like a Spy.”
Before we get into the book, because I do want to talk
about the book a little bit, but I want to talk about
Jeffrey Sterling. For those who don’t know, Peter Maas,
for The Intercept, wrote a piece last October, posted
along with this on SoundCloud, which is really
remarkable about Jeffrey’s life, but talk about Jeffrey
a little bit. This was someone who James Risen wrote a
book called State of War. There was a mention of
Operation Merlin. Now, he’s doing time. He’s still in
prison and he’s not in good health, right?
Kiriakou: He’s not in good
health. First, just real quickly about his case, as you
did, I followed Jeffrey’s case very, very closely,
day-to-day, blow-by-blow. I think that the government
charged Jeffrey ... He was charged with seven counts of
espionage and two counts of thefts of government
property, with the property being the information. He
stole it in his head. I think they charged him with
those crimes. In the Eastern District of Virginia,
despite the fact that Jeffrey was living in Saint Louis
at the time and Jim Risen was living in Maryland and
working in Washington, DC. They charged Jeffrey in
Alexandria, Virginia because the Eastern District of
Virginia is known as the Espionage Court, and no
national security defendant has ever won a case there.
The fix was in from the beginning.
If you read the
transcripts or even the reports about the trial, and
Jeffrey did go to trial, because he believed that once
he could get in front of the jury, the jury would see
how ridiculous this whole case was. In the Eastern
District of Virginia, juries are made up of current and
former FBI, CIA, DOD, Homeland Security, intelligence
contractors. They would convict a baloney sandwich.
Jeffrey really never had a chance being tried in the
Easter District of Virginia.
The government
asked for, I believe it was 20 years in prison.
Jeffrey’s attorneys told him to be prepared to get as
much as 45 years in prison, but serendipitously,
Jeffrey’s sentencing was scheduled for the day after
David Petraeus’ sentencing. David Petraeus got a
sweetheart deal for committing major crimes. He outed
the names of 10 covert operatives. He gave his
girlfriend the presidential black books with highly
classified information in them. The judge said that in
good conscience, after Petraeus got 18 months of
unsupervised probation, she couldn’t give Jeffrey 24
years in prison, and she gave him what she called
Kiriakou plus 12 months. I got 30 months. Jeffrey got 42
months.
He’s actually
going to be released in November and sent to a halfway
house. He’ll likely only be in that halfway house for a
matter of hours before being transferred to house
arrest, but his health is so bad that he and his wife
Holly are genuinely worried that he’s not going to live
for 11 more months until his release date in November.
He’s already had one heart attack in prison. He’s tested
positive for the protein, I think it’s called troponin
that the body produces when it has a heart attack. He
was never treated. He was only given beta-blockers four
weeks after the fact. He’s very weak. He has a heart
arrhythmia, and the Bureau of Prisons is just refusing
to treat him, not just are they refusing to treat him,
they’re refusing to even allow his transfer to a nearby
hospital for tests, not even shackled and bound. They
won’t even let him go for tests. He’s got some real
worries.
Scheer: Yeah. It’s really
important to know that this, again, is a whistleblower
who talked about Operation Merlin. This is not giving
away troop movements. This was about a program under
Clinton and endorsed by Bush giving false information to
Iran about how to build a nuclear weapon, but it turned
out, because of the fact they have smart people over
there that they actually were able to figure out it was
not, and then it accelerated the program. I mean, that’s
the gist of why he’s serving 42 months in prison, right?
Kiriakou: Yeah, and to make
matters worse, they convicted Jeffrey based solely on
metadata. He had exchanged 52 telephone calls over the
course of several years with Jim Risen, but the reason
that he exchanged those phone calls with Risen is that
Risen had been writing a long article about Jeffrey’s
lawsuit against the CIA for racial discrimination. They
refused to send him overseas because they said that, and
this was a quote, “A big black guy speaking Persian
would stand out,” and his response to his boss was,
“When did you realize I was black?” He ended up not
being sent overseas. He filed a complained against the
agency. They trashed him in his performance evaluation,
and he resigned. After he resigned, he filed this suit.
Risen was covering the suit for the New York Times, and
so it stands to reason that they were speaking on a
regular basis.
Now, the suit
was dismissed with prejudice by the Eastern District of
Virginia on national security grounds, so he never got
his day in court. Then the CIA went to the Justice
Department and said that they thought Jeffrey was the
source of the leak to Risen. Well, no multiple Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist is going to use one person to
write a book about an intelligence operation. Risen
himself has said has said that he spoke with dozens of
former and current domestic and foreign intelligence
officers for that book, but the government only went
after Jeffrey. They didn’t go after anybody else. There
were no emails between them. There were no recordings
between them. All we knew was that they had exchanged 52
phone calls over the course of, I think it was four
years, and that was enough to convict him in the Eastern
District.
Scheer: Again, the backstory
on Jeffrey is pretty amazing, and there is a piece that
will be attached to this on SoundCloud, and I posted it
a couple of times, but Peter Maas from The Intercept
wrote a really wonderful piece about that, about racial
discrimination, his life. He has clips that I’ll
probably try to intersplice, and certainly also, after
he left the CIA, he went into investigating medical
fraud and to save the American people, I believe,
upwards of $40, $50 million.
Kiriakou: Oh yeah.
Scheer: Yeah.
Kiriakou: In fact, he was
honored by Blue Cross Blue Shield for the millions and
millions of dollars that he saved in uncovering medical
fraud.
Scheer: This man is
imprisoned. I want to know what we can do John. I can’t
do a call to action, but certainly there are thing that
people can do if they hear about this case. Is there
anything that we can do for Jeffrey?
Kiriakou: Yeah, there is. His
wife, Holly, has been really, really diligent and great
about gathering support. What people have done in the
past is they’ve called the prison and ask the warden to
allow Jeffrey to go to a hospital for medical treatment.
That didn’t work. One of the things that I think we can
all do now that does seem to be working in that the
prison has given a little bit is go to our elected
representatives and ask them to inquire as to his
well-being. Holly has spoken with Senator Bennet’s
office in Colorado, and Senator Bennet’s office has
actually been good about pushing the BOP to do something
for the guy. It was only after this inquiry from
Bennet’s office that Jeffrey was prescribed
beta-blockers in the first place.
Scheer: Wow.
Kiriakou: That would be very
helpful.
Scheer:
Yeah. Also, I mean, again, this not a call to action,
but this is a questioning as a journalist. You sit as
David Petraeus who is doing no time. He had asked his
probation officer. He was considered for Secretary of
State. He’s been considered for Cabinet position, and
here you have someone who saved American people millions
of dollars and everything, and John, obviously. My guest
is John Kiriakou, CIA whistleblower, who now that you
have a whole thing named after you, the John Kiriakou
sentence. The fact is these guys are doing this time,
it’s pretty haphazard. It’s disgusting, really, because-
Kiriakou: It is.
Scheer:
Yeah.
Kiriakou: You see a trial ...
Not a trial, you see a sentencing like Petraeus’. Now,
all the rest of us were charged in the Eastern District
of Virginia. Petraeus was charged in the Western
District of North Carolina. When the judge finished his
sentencing, the judge came down from the bench to shake
his hand and thank him for his service to the American
people. I mean, Judge Leonie Brinkema in EDVA, she
certainly didn’t come down from the bench. What she said
was, “Mr. Kiriakou, if I could have, I would’ve given
you 10 years.” That’s what she said to me. I didn’t get
that kind of treatment in court.
Scheer:
I want to let our listeners know we’re speaking with
John Kiriakou. He’s the author of three books. You can
find more at JohnKiriakou.com. He writes for Reader
Supported News among many other different sites,
including Truthdig. For the last, maybe, five minutes
here, I want to talk about your book, because you can
pre-order it now, but it’s “Doing Time Like a Spy.”
Certainly, this is something I just was having
conversation with my father, Robert Scheer, because one
of the Truthdig people was arrested and he’s talked
about his time being arrested is that you really don’t
know how you’re going to react until it happens.
Kiriakou: Yeah.
Scheer: Talk about that a
little bit and how CIA trained you and helped you in
this situation.
Kiriakou: Right. When you
first arrive in prison, you’re in a state of shock. You
don’t even realize that you’re in shock until weeks or
maybe even months later. I was in prison for about two
hours. The only thing that any of the guards had said to
me while I was being processed was that if somebody came
into my cell uninvited, that was an act of aggression,
and I was going to have to defend my territory. I
thought, “My god, I haven’t even been here one hour and
now I’m going to have to fight somebody and probably
going to get my butt kicked,” but I took in on board.
A couple of
hours later two Aryans just walk right into my room, and
I jumped up and I put up my fists and I said, “What do
you want?” One of them said, “Are you the CIA guy?” I
said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you a fag?” I said, “No.”
Are you a rat? I said, “No.” He said, “Are you a chomo?”
I said, “I don’t know what that word means.” Like I’m
stupid, he said, “Chomo, child molester. Are you a child
molester?” I said, “No, I’m not a child molester.” He
said, “Okay, you can sit with us in the cafeteria then.”
I thought, “Oh, well, okay, I guess I’m with the Aryans
now.”
What I did was,
to make a long story short, I came up with these ...
Looking back on my career, I came up with these 20 rules
and decided to apply these rules to prison, because
prison, there was no way prison was going to be worse
than living in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Iraq
or someplace like that. God knows I’ve been through
rougher times than prison, so I started things down
like, “Recruit spies to steal secrets,” right? That was
... The CIA, rule number one, recruit spies to steal
secrets. I didn’t need to steal secrets, but maybe I
needed somebody to steal a couple of hard boiled eggs
for me. That was one.
Another one was
everybody is working for somebody, which is true.
They’re working for themselves. They’re working for the
cops. They’re working for a gang leader. In the event of
violence, seek and utilize available cover. That’s the
first thing they teach you in weapons training at the
CIA. Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter
accusations. I actually used these rules every day that
I was in prison, and they really did keep me safe.
Scheer:
You could read all about those rules in the new book,
“Doing Time Like a Spy.” Again, my guest has been John
Kiriakou. I would love to talk to you. The next time
we’re going to talk about Yemen and Saudi Arabia,
because I know there’s a lot of issues there certainly
with your time and certainly what’s going on there right
now, but again, John Kiriakou. You could find his work
at JohnKiriakou.com, and you could pre-order the book
“Doing Time Like a Spy,” how those 20 rules helped him
survive prison. Thank you so much for joining me.
Kiriakou: Very, very happy to
do it. Good to talk to you again.
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