No wonder China has no qualm exporting Fentanyl precursors to Mexico…
USAID is distinct from the CIA, yet potentially more troubling. While the CIA must secure presidential approval and brief a few select members of Congress before embarking on any covert operation—be it military, paramilitary, or civilian, such as color revolutions—USAID does not for the latter. This does not mean all USAID initiatives are covert, but rather that USAID has served as both the pay-master and executor of missions the CIA would otherwise need congressional approval to pursue. A nice and practical way to circumvent oversight, thus facilitating corruption.
John Kiarakou is a high level CIA veteran who worked for close to 15 years at the agency. He was recruited directly from college as an analyst and later transitioned to the operations division. While leading the U.S. intelligence agency's counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan in 2002, he captured Abu Zubaydah, who was ranked as number three in Al Qaeda. After leaving the agency, he took on the role of a senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
During an interview with ABC in 2007, he exposed the CIA's extensive torture program, confirming that it had been directly approved by the White House. Despite the Department of Justice rejecting five times the CIA's criminal complaint, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Espionage Act, threatening him with 35 years imprisonment. He accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. To date, he remains the only CIA officer to have been imprisoned due to the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" policy, even though he himself never tortured anyone.
Pascal Clérotte: John Kiriakou, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Just to start the conversation, what's your take on what has been going on since January 20th this year?
John Kiriakou: I have to admit to you that when I wake up in the morning and look at the Washington Post and the New York Times, I'm usually in a state of disbelief. It's amazing to me what is happening in this country so quickly. Today, we're speaking on the 13th of February, and the headline on The Washington Post is about how there are going to be massive layoffs among the federal workforce. The federal workforce hasn't had layoffs since 1977. We're in really uncharted territory in the last two generations. And we don't really know who's in charge in Washington. Is it Elon Musk, who's not an elected official of any kind? Is it Donald Trump? And what is the end game? And that's just domestically.
The other headline is that Israel is planning to attack Iran but can only do so with U.S. help, which makes me wonder if Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have already had that conversation and the United States is prepared to go to war, but the American people don't know it yet.
Renaud Beauchard: Well, yeah, I mean, it's been quite a ride since January 20th. And I must say, I mean, I'm totally like you, although what I see is quite extraordinary on another end. Just the fact that Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed yesterday for national intelligence—such great news. Apparently, RFK Jr. is pretty much assured now to be confirmed very soon. So it's a lot of changes. It's actually difficult to process. My wife calls Trump "Santa Trump" now because every day we receive some news which are actually quite encouraging, but I think you're right to point to the dark aspect of the foreign affairs announcement, including the Gaza one and the noise of boots on the ground again in the Middle East, particularly going into a conflict with Iran.
Pascal Clérotte: Could you please tell us about your tour de force that was the arrest of Abu Zubaydah?
John Kiriakou: Certainly. It's a long story, but I'll make it short. I was stationed in Islamabad, Pakistan at the very start of 2002. In January 2002, I went to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations for the CIA. We started off just trying to hit one Al Qaeda safe house at a time, one a night. After I had been there about six weeks, we got word that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in the country. At the time, the CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al Qaeda. We came up with a plan to capture him with the help of a CIA targeting analyst. A team of CIA, FBI, and Pakistani ISI officers struck 13 sites simultaneously in late March 2002. At one of those sites, Abu Zubaydah and two others tried to jump from the roof of the house to the neighboring house. They were shot by a Pakistani policeman, and we caught him.
I received direct orders from headquarters, from the director of the CIA, George Tenet, to remain by his bedside. We flew him to a Pakistani military hospital about an hour away from where we found him in Faisalabad, Pakistan. I sat with him for the next 56 hours until he was finally sent to a secret prison. A CIA plane flew in, and three FBI agents and I loaded him onto the plane. He and I talked a great deal while we were waiting. He said he didn't want to attack the United States that day; he wanted to kill Jews, but that he had been overruled. He said he would never know the touch of a woman, never know the joy of fatherhood. And we got into several arguments. I told him, "You're not the victim here. There were 50,000 people in those towers. What did you think we were going to do?" I gave him advice: "I'm the nicest person you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues are not nice like I am. If there's one thing I would recommend you to do, it is that you have to cooperate." He said, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate."
He actually did cooperate with an FBI agent, Ali Soufan. Soufan was withdrawn from the secret site and replaced by CIA torturers, who immediately began torturing him. They almost killed him—actually stopped his heart from beating and had to revive him just so they could torture him more. He went from secret prison to secret prison over the course of four years. He went to six different sites and then has been in Guantanamo since 2006.
Renaud Beauchard: John, apparently, I think your fate and Abu Zubaydah are very linked because, in fact, it is what led you to that fateful interview on ABCin 2007, which made your life take a turn for the worse with the US authorities in 2007. Would you actually have denounced the torture program if you had not experienced something very strong, very primordial, during these 56 hours, as you just mentioned? Was the fact that Abu Zubaydah was tortured, what really triggered your will to actually denounce the torture program?
John Kiriakou: That's a good question. The easy answer is yes. I would have denounced it regardless. But I wouldn't have had a platform. It was only because I was the capturer of Abu Zubaydah, because I was the first one to sit and to speak with him that it got the entry to the American media that I needed to spread the story. I'm ashamed to tell you that of the 14 CIA officers who were asked if they wanted to be trained in the use of the torture techniques, I was the only one who said no. Even after all these years, that so disappoints me that so many of my colleagues were willing to become monsters. Yeah. I'll tell you, the price was high, but I'm glad I did it and I would do it again. In a moment, I would do it again. On the one hand, I was fortunate that I had that access to the American media back in December of 2007 to say that my government was torturing its prisoners. On the other hand, if I hadn't been involved with the capture of Abu Zubaydah, I don't think anybody would have paid any attention to me. If I had gone to the media and criticized torture, and, you know, there's a postscript to this story as well. I've been in touch with Abu Zubaydah's attorney. And at the very end of the Biden administration, it seemed like there was a possibility that he could be released. He's never been charged with a crime. And whatever he said couldn't be used against him in court because it was collected through torture. And so what his attorneys were waiting for was for a country to come forward that was willing to accept him. Well, no country came forward. And now Donald Trump is president. And Donald Trump said that nobody will be released from Guantanamo. Indeed, he's begun sending undocumented refugees to Guantanamo by the plane load. And so I fear that Abu Zubaydah is going to remain at Guantanamo illegally for the next four years at least.
Renaud Beauchard: I think it's a good transition to something else. There is someone in the Abu Zubaydah story related to you, who also played a very strong part, and it's someone who's very much now in the know with the new Trump administration, and that's John Brennan. From what I understand, he is an accuser a little bit like the accusers of Edmond Dantes in the Count of Monte Cristo in your existence. Could you expand on the role that John Brennan played in your drama?
John Kiriakou: I'm so glad that you brought up John Brennan because this is something that most Americans have no idea about. John Brennan and I were at the CIA together through my entire career. I've known John Brennan for 35 years and I've disliked him for 35 years. John Brennan made a very, very interesting and for him, very important political decision in 2007. He retired from the CIA in 2007. And there was a large number of people who retired that year. About half of them went to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to be advisors. The other half went to the John McCain campaign to be advisors. John Brennan was the only one who went to the Obama campaign. And so when Barack Obama won that election, John was a star and he became the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. Later, he was appointed CIA director. Well, because Barack Obama was supposed to be a left-of-center Democrat, a progressive Democrat, most Americans just assumed that he appointed other progressive Democrats as his advisors. That's just simply not true. John Brennan has long claimed to be apolitical, not at all interested in politics. In fact, he was very, very conservative, and he was one of the fathers of the torture program. So here, for years, the American media were saying that these torturers, they were all George W. Bush’s people. No, that's just simply not true. They were George W. Bush’s people. They were Hillary Clinton’s people. They were John McCain’s people. And they were Barack Obama’s people. And John Brennan happened to be the one who slipped through the cracks and rose to the top, becoming eventually the CIA director in Barack Obama's second term, never having to pay the price for his position on torture. And again, it's something that the American people don't know, but they should know because they should understand who it is that's representing them in the most important positions in government.
Pascal Clérotte: Likewise, if we could jump on to USAID, when you were working for the US Congress, you did witness the funding of irrigation of poppy fields, didn't you, in Afghanistan?
John Kiriakou: I did. I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and I wanted to do this study on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. So I flew to Bagram Air Base, and because I was a senior staff member, I had the rank equivalent of a brigadier general. That meant I could just commandeer a helicopter, so I did. I said, we're going to Kandahar and then to Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. I wanted to look at the poppy fields.
They said, "Oh no, we can't do that." I said, "Oh yes, we can." I demanded it, I ordered it, and we flew first to Kandahar and then to Lashkar Gah. When we landed in Lashkar Gah, for as far as your eye could see, it was poppy. So I told my military handlers, "I want to go into the poppy fields and interview a poppy farmer."
Where we landed was something called a PRT, a Provincial Reconstruction Team, an organization run by the State Department. It included the State Department, the military, USAID, and other organizations. They were not happy that I was there interfering, but I insisted. We finally went out into the poppy fields with a security team and a translator, as I don’t speak Pashtoun.
We encountered a poppy farmer, and I naively asked him, "Why don’t you grow things with two growing seasons instead of poppy? You could grow tomatoes, onions, or pomegranates." In a frustrated tone, he said, "The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were hiding, I could grow all the poppy I wanted."
I asked, "What Americans told you that?" As soon as I asked the question, my handlers said, "The interview is over. Security is at stake. We have to go back." I never got an answer. But I knew what the answer was. It was clear who was giving the orders in the poppy fields.
I flew back to the United States and told John Kerry, "I developed some very interesting and important information." I told him what the poppy farmer had said, and Kerry killed the report. The reason? Afghanistan was producing 93% of the world's heroin, and almost all of it was going to Russia and Iran. We wanted them to be addicted to heroin because it weakened them and gave us a leg up. So I never published that study.
Pascal Clérotte: Were you aware that at the same time, USAID was also running a poppy eradication program whose contract went to DynCorp?
John Kiriakou: Yes, isn’t that funny? DynCorp essentially ran Afghanistan on behalf of the U.S. government.
Pascal Clérotte: Just for our listeners, DynCorp is one of the major defense contractors in the U.S.
John Kiriakou: It sure is. It employs tens of thousands of people. Just as an aside, the Washington, D.C. area now has the most millionaires per capita in America. It used to be Silicon Valley, but now it's D.C. due to the post-9/11 money spent on so-called national defense. Trillions of dollars—by one estimate, $23 trillion since 9/11—have gone into defense contracting, enriching people who invest in DynCorp, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and others.
Renaud Beauchard: Just to come back to Afghanistan and the poppy fields, what Kerry told you about the U.S. wanting Russia and Iran to be addicted to heroin—that's exactly what the British Empire did in China with opium, which launched the Opium Wars.
John Kiriakou: The Opium Wars, exactly. History repeats itself. And those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
Renaud Beauchard: But with my superficial knowledge of Russian and Iranian society, they don’t seem like societies with rampant heroin addiction. So, is it actually working?
John Kiriakou: It’s wishful thinking on the part of the American government.
Pascal Clérotte: Can we go back now to the history of the CIA, starting in the 1920s, leading to the OSS during World War II, and then the CIA in 1947?
John Kiriakou: Beginning in the 1920s, the idea of creating an intelligence agency started on Wall Street with the Dulles brothers, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the father and grandfather of George H.W. Bush. Most Americans don’t realize that these conservative, white, rich businessmen promoted the idea of an intelligence service. Nothing came of it until World War II, when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created.
The OSS took American soldiers or civilians with native-level foreign languages—Greek Americans went to Greece to spy on Nazi troop movements, German Jews were sent to Germany. After the war, President Truman believed we needed to formalize this, and in 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, creating the CIA. The goal was to centralize intelligence.
However, by 1963, Truman, in retirement, realized he had made a terrible mistake. He wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post after Kennedy’s assassination, criticizing the CIA. Allen Dulles and others tried to suppress it, delaying its publication.
Pascal Clérotte: The OSS was also built by the British, wasn’t it?
John Kiriakou: Oh, yeah. For all intents and purposes, the OSS was created by the British. British MI6 officers in Washington and New York helped establish the OSS and later consulted on the creation of the CIA.
Pascal Clérotte: One funny story is about James Jesus Angleton, whose mentor was none other than Kim Philby.
John Kiriakou: Exactly. Angleton was so close to Philby that when he found out Philby was a KGB agent, he became paranoid, ruining the lives of many CIA officers. He also targeted intelligence services in France, the UK, Germany, and Italy, accusing loyal officers of being KGB moles.
Pascal Clérotte: When it comes to intelligence operations, one of the most potent levers in the MICE acronym is money. So, is it fair to say that one of the most potent levers of the CIA is a form of corruption?
John Kiriakou: Oh, it is. The nature of the CIA is to promote corruption.
Pascal Clérotte: Between 1947 and 1975, the CIA was its own paymaster. Did the Church Commission prompt the emergence of USAID as its paymaster?
John Kiriakou: No, it happened earlier. A letter from Senator Ted Kennedy in 1973 asked Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA director if USAID was acting as a cutout for the CIA. The response was "yes." USAID funded CIA operations in Laos in 1969–1972 and has continued acting as a CIA front to this day, including in Afghanistan, Bolivia, and Cuba.
John Kiriakou: And there were dozens of operations in between. USAID was all over Afghanistan for all those years. They were supposed to be working to build an electrical grid, to build hospitals, to build schools, to promote democracy. And all they did was act as a cutout for the CIA all those years.
Renaud Beauchard: One question I'm burning to ask you is when things went completely off course at the CIA, after you started working at the agency. You were actually recruited into the CIA by one of your former professors at George Washington University. You started at the CIA in 1990, and if I remember correctly, your first assignment as an analyst was in Iraq a few months before the invasion of Kuwait. And then you stayed at the CIA until 2004. You resigned when you were pretty much at your peak. I think at the time you were deputy director of operations, if I'm correct. When did you think that the whole thing unraveled? What led you, as a young idealist who wanted to do something, who wanted to embrace a career in the civil service, to decide to leave and take a job at Deloitte?
John Kiriakou: When I was in graduate school, I wanted nothing more than to enter public service. I come from an immigrant family. All four of my grandparents came from Greece, from the island of Rhodes, and they were all so grateful for what this country had given us. I wanted to pay the country back for what we had received. So I only considered jobs in public service. When I was recruited into the CIA, I saw this as a way to offer my thanks to the country and also a way to see the world. I really wanted to see the world.
In retrospect, there was only a very brief time during the Clinton administration when Americans, I think, could really be proud of what the CIA was doing because they were focused on things like combating AIDS or working against climate change, in addition to trying to keep the country safe. I believed that we really were trying to keep the country safe. That changed after 9-11. The CIA became little more than a paramilitary organization focused solely on counterterrorism. Instead of operating within the confines of the law, the CIA began undertaking criminal actions like torture programs, kidnapping programs, and secret prisons based all around the world. In my mind, that was just wrong. We're supposed to be a nation of laws. We're supposed to be a nation that's governed by a constitution. We can't just pretend that the laws don't apply to us because it's expedient to torture people. Once I realized that my own personal ideology was no longer in line with those around me, I realized I had to leave.
Pascal Clérotte: So you are an island Greek. I guess you must have faired well with George Tenet, who is supposed to be a Greek-speaking Albanian from the mountains, isn’t he?
John Kiriakou: Well, I'm glad you said it because if you hadn't said it, I would say it. Yes, George was a Greek-speaking Albanian from the mountains. He and I had this odd relationship. George never liked me, which was sad because I always liked him. But he didn't like me because my family was from an island, and he believed that island Greeks looked down on mountain Greeks, which is true. I admit that. But I didn't look down on him. He was the director of the CIA. He was my boss. George surrounded himself with Greek Americans at the CIA. But to a man, every one of them was from the mainland. There were no islanders.
Pascal Clérotte: Before you entered the CIA, you must have known about its history. I mean, Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and so forth. Do you mean that once the wall fell, there was a shift towards becoming an intelligence-gathering and analysis organization, and paramilitary operations were set aside?
John Kiriakou: Yes, that's exactly right. When I was considering the CIA job, I was dating a woman who had a friend who worked at the CIA, and she set up a dinner for all of us to get together. I asked him exactly those kinds of questions. What about Iran and Mossadegh1? What about Arbenz2? What about the coup in Athens in 1967? And he said, oh, those days are long gone. He said, now the job of the CIA is really to recruit agents to provide us with intelligence and then to analyze that intelligence so that our policymakers can make the best-informed policy. Through the Clinton administration, there really was what they used to call the peace dividend. We were engaged in warming relations with Russia, for example. We had no real problem with China in the 1990s. There was talk about initiating talks with Iran again. We had a problem with Iraq, certainly, but that was just about it. I supported American intervention to protect Kurds and Shia Muslims and religious minorities in Iraq. So I gladly took the job and proudly served through the 1990s. And then, oh boy, did things change on 9-11.
Pascal Clérotte: I mean, this change did happen before. I'm thinking about 1999 and Serbia, didn't it?
John Kiriakou: Oh, yeah. I was stationed in Greece at the time. Oh, it was just nightmarish. Greece is an Orthodox Christian country, Serbia is an Orthodox Christian brother, and I'm an Orthodox Christian. So to go to work every day and have to defend Bill Clinton's attacks against Serbia, it was just a nightmare. There were demonstrations at the American embassy almost every day. They would smash the windows, throw coins to break them, fire balloons of red paint at the embassy. It was just terrible. And then there were attempts on the lives of Americans, official Americans in Athens, just in protest. You're exactly right about Serbia. Bill Clinton was 100% wrong on that issue.
Renaud Beauchard: You are talking a lot about the Clinton administration. But don't you think, as it was brilliantly put in a recent article by Nathan Pinkowski on First Things, that it was the origin of all what has gone wrong since then? Pinkowski argues that the Clinton administration, by adopting a substantive vision of the good, abolished the separation between State and society, which was perfectly coined by Obama with his “whole of Society” vision. Central to what Clinton did were the sanctions program. First they started to sanction unsavory leaders like Milosevic and his entourage. Then, they started to target countries, such as Libya and Iran, to force them into obedience. Then, they started to target superpowers like Russia, and now the sanctions program are applied to domestic targets, that means us, US citizens. Don’t you think that it was then that the US got on a slippery slope, leading to surveillance, repression, and mass censorship?
John Kiriakou: Yes, it was. This is the problem with the lack of congressional oversight. It was a very slippery slope. So many American politicians don't know when to stop. Now we have sanctions on everybody. In my view, the proliferation of American sanctions all around the world is what led to the creation of BRICS. We have sanctions on Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela—every time we don't like somebody's political views. The establishment of BRICS has changed that, allowing financial transactions to bypass the US system. Sanctions have weakened the US and will relegate us to simply being a regional power.
Pascal Clérotte: And if sanctions were working, Cuba would have experienced regime change a long time ago.
John Kiriakou: Exactly. Ask the Cubans about sanctions. They’ll tell you everything you want to know. I went to Cuba last year, and while they lack certain things, their economy is resilient. Sanctions are not the answer.
Renaud Beauchard: I just wanted to go back to what’s going on since Trump was inaugurated for a second time...
John Kiriakou: Gentlemen, I beg your forgiveness, but I have another interview starting in less than two minutes.
Renaud Beauchard: No problem, John. That was perfect. Thank you.
John Kiriakou: Thank you. Let’s do it again sometime.
Mohammad Mosaddegh was an Iranian politician, author, and lawyer who served as a democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, until his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état aided by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom (MI6) and the United States (CIA), led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr, which re-installed the brutal regime of the Iran Shah.
Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as the 25th president of Guatemala, from 1951 to 1954. His presidency represented some of the few years of representative democracy in Guatemalan history. Alas, Árbenz’s program of agrarian reforms ran afoul of the United Fruit Company, which lobbied the United States government to have him overthrown, pretexting the presence of communists in the Guatemalan government. Árbenz was ousted in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état engineered by the U.S. government through the U.S. Department of State and the CIA.
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