5/8/17 John Kiriakou on the CIA’s illegal torture program and his time in prison for blowing the whistle on it

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And on the line, I've got John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, the only one to go to prison over the George Bush administration's torture program, not for being a torturer, for talking about it.
And since then he has become an author and oh, did I say, yeah, he went to prison for two years and now he's got two books, The Reluctant Spy, which I wish I'd known about.
I would have read it already by now, I think.
And there's a brand new one, Doing Time Like a Spy, that's coming out here any day now, I guess.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Hey, thanks.
Thanks.
Happy to do it.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here.
And then, oh, May 15th.
So here in just a week, your book will be on the shelves at amazon.com, their virtual shelves here, Doing Time Like a Spy.
Okay, good.
And yeah, we can talk about that.
So geez, there's so many different things I want to ask you about.
First of all, I don't think I know the answer to this because I haven't read your book.
I know that you were there, I know that, I think we even talked about this before when you were on the show once before, about how you were involved in the arrest of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, and you're, to some degree, and I'm not sure the timeline or what have you on it, you're witness to his interrogation by the FBI agent Ali Soufan, and then also to some degree by the CIA officers who tortured him.
But I guess I don't know whether you were involved in his torture or even his transport to Thailand.
I don't know really much about that other than what I just sort of outlined.
So could you really fill us in about what all exactly you know about the torture of Abu Zubaydah in Thailand and how you know?
Sure.
Starting in January of 2002, I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Islamabad, Pakistan.
And in that capacity, I led a large team in a series of raids on the night of March 22nd, in which we captured Abu Zubaydah, and I'm not allowed to say the exact number, but many dozens of other Al-Qaeda fighters and two camp commanders, as well as others, people even involved in the Kashmiri separatist movement.
Abu Zubaydah was shot and severely wounded the night of his capture.
He was shot by a Pakistani policeman.
And we rushed him to a hospital for emergency surgery.
And from there, we airlifted him to a Pakistani military base nearby.
I sat with him for the first 56 hours of his captivity and spoke to him at length after he came out of his coma, after about 24 hours.
After the 56 hours were up, the CIA landed a private jet at this Pakistani military base.
Three FBI agents and I put Abu Zubaydah onto the plane, and he was taken to his onward location, which was a secret prison.
You mentioned Thailand.
I'm not even allowed to confirm or deny that it was Thailand, but certainly that's what's been in the press.
So I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism ops in Pakistan until around the first of June 2002.
I went back to headquarters, and I was in the cafeteria one day, and a senior counterterrorism center CTC officer approached me and asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
I had never heard that term before.
So I asked him what he meant.
And he said very excitedly, he said, we're going to start getting rough with these guys.
And I said, well, what does that mean?
So he delineated these 10 torture techniques for me.
I said, that sounds like a torture program.
But let me think about it for an hour.
Why I consulted with a senior officer, like a very, very senior officer, who said, listen, this is a torture program.
You know how these guys are.
Somebody's going to go overboard.
They're going to kill a prisoner, and someone's going to go to prison.
You want to go to prison?
I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
And as you said, I was the only one who went to prison, as it turned out.
But of the 14 people they approached asking if we wanted to be trained in these torture techniques, I was the only one who said no.
And so I was removed from the compartment.
So there was a period where I didn't have access to any of the Abu Zubaydah information.
But on the strength of that capture, I got promoted, and I was named executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations.
And then I got access to the Abu Zubaydah information again.
Well, what was happening was there was an FBI agent at the secret prison by the name of Ali Soufan, who was using a tried and true FBI method of interrogation, where he builds a rapport with a prisoner and a relationship.
And little by little, Abu Zubaydah began to open up.
And Abu Zubaydah gave Ali Soufan actionable intelligence that disrupted attacks and saved American lives.
It is well documented in the Senate torture report using primary source CIA documents.
But the CIA hated the fact that overseas the FBI had primacy in the case, where normally the CIA has primacy overseas and the FBI has primacy domestically.
So George Tenet, who was CIA director at the time, went to President Bush and asked President Bush to remove the FBI from the country.
And for whatever reason that's never been explained, that's exactly what Bush did.
And so that happened on August the 1st, 2002.
And within hours, the CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah.
And immediately he clammed up and never again provided any actionable intelligence.
Well, you know, I read a thing there, and I guess I don't know if you count this.
This is what you mean or not.
But I read a thing that said that the first thing that they did was they just threw him in one of these little boxes and left him more or less in solitary for three months.
They actually even quit interviewing him at all.
They said, well, the first thing we have to do is break his entire humanity.
And so we'll lock him in the dark for three months and no one's asking him anything at that point.
And no one ever bothered to even discuss the legality of this kind of thing.
I mean, back at headquarters, certainly people were talking about the legality or the illegality.
And we know that that Bybee and you, the two attorneys at the Justice Department, were doing somersaults to try to to make this legal, despite the fact that it had been illegal since the end of the Second World War.
You know, in in 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war.
That was an executable war crime in 1946.
In 1968, the Washington Post ran.
It was January 21st, 19 or I'm sorry, January 18th, 1968.
The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
And the day that that photo was published, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered an investigation.
The soldier was arrested.
He was tried on charges of torture.
He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years.
Well, the law never changed.
We changed.
So my question back then, as it is today, is why was this torture program illegal in 1946 and illegal in 1968, but then not illegal in 2002 if the law never changed?
Well, of course, Ronald Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted the Texas sheriff for waterboarding in 1983 as well.
You're absolutely right.
That's that's different than a national security circumstance.
But I don't know if that makes it different under the law or not.
I don't think it does.
But in our law, though, there is no national security exception.
And you know, this is one of these issues where I really believe that reasonable people can agree to disagree.
But torture is clearly illegal.
It's always been illegal.
And if you want to make it legal, then you have to change the law.
Plain and simple.
You can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist.
Well, and the thing is about it, too, is that in U.S. law, it's the U.S. Constitution.
The first law bans torture.
The Bill of Rights bans it twice in the Fifth Amendment, the self-incrimination clause and the Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment clause.
That's right.
Right then and there.
And then.
So this is my question, too, is, well, you ask it rhetorically, but I guess I'm asking it more lawyerly.
It's the other Scott Horton who actually really knows the answer to this stuff.
It seems to me like it doesn't matter what any of those memos said.
It doesn't matter what any executive order said that the law, I mean, never even mind the U.S. Constitution, that you had federal laws from the 1980s and the 1990s enforcing the War Crimes Act and enforcing the Anti-Torture Convention.
And it seems like, well, as you said, there's no national security exception.
The Anti-Torture Convention explicitly says, and there shall never be.
And we don't want to hear it.
And any one that you try to make is hereby null and void before you try it, etc. like that.
So.
But then there's the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.
And then now there's the Feinstein-McCain Amendment of just last year, am I right?
That rebans torture, except that I guess I'm not really altogether clear on how that is.
I mean, I know in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, they left the loophole.
They said, and I guess this is what I read about the 2017 amendment to the, it's the Appropriations Bill, an amendment to the Appropriations Bill, is that they say that you can't torture, you have to follow the Army Field Manual.
But the Army Field Manual now allows torture.
They rewrote it as a loophole.
So John McCain has now passed two different things, one in 05, one in 2016.
But apparently they don't make any difference because they're still allowed to use all this other stuff.
Yeah.
Techniques.
In fact, he wrote an op-ed in today's New York Times saying exactly that.
That he knows what an abomination this is.
And if we're going to be serious about being this global leader in human rights that we like to tell other countries we are, then we really do have to be serious.
The first thing we have to do is to ban torture outright.
I mean, I think that it actually is already banned.
That's certainly what previous Congresses have voted and what past presidents have signed into law.
And as you pointed out, not only are we signatories to the International Conventions Against Torture, we were the primary drafters of that international law.
And there are federal laws that enforce them too.
That's right.
It's not just that, oh, there's this international treaty, it's that then in accordance with that treaty, the Congress has then passed laws that the presidents have signed enforcing those treaties.
Precisely.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
We're up against where we started here, where you're the one who went to prison for telling the truth about it.
And that's because there actually is no such thing as law at all.
That all there is, is power.
And these people do whatever they want.
And in fact, the lady that destroyed all the tapes of the torture is now the deputy director of the CIA.
Right, right.
Exactly.
There's no accountability at the CIA.
There never has been.
And I don't think that there ever will be.
It's just the nature of the of the organization.
But the reason why it's allowed to be that way is because there hasn't been leadership on the oversight committees on Capitol Hill since Frank Church was in the Senate.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Feinstein is relatively good on torture, but that's it.
And she she doesn't seem to take the rest of her job very seriously.
Yeah, I feel the same way, Scott.
She's good on torture, but otherwise she's been nothing but a cheerleader for the CIA on Capitol Hill.
She's exercised no oversight at all.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, when they were acting as though they were a co-equal branch with the Senate over there spying on her staffers and all of that, she should have stomped them into the ground.
And instead, she basically accepted their role.
OK, I guess you guys are a co-equal branch with the Senate by now.
Who's kidding who here?
It's 2017.
This is the CIA.
They're a lot more powerful than the Senate.
That's just a ceremonial thing for C-SPAN.
And if you recall, both the CIA and the Senate filed crimes reports against each other.
And in the end, they had the effect of basically canceling each other out.
There was never any serious Justice Department investigation.
And what we have is the CIA spying on elected officials and their staffs.
Nothing short of that.
Right.
Well, and then, of course, the whole thing is, well, who do you think you are?
Oh, they're the CIA.
Of course.
You know, I forgot if this was from the movie about James, Jesus Angleton, the Matt Damon movie, The Good Shepherd, where they say, how come you guys always say CIA instead of the CIA?
And he said, because you don't say the God.
In other words, that's the real government of America.
It's out in Langley.
And all this stuff, all this white marble in Washington, D.C., is just for the rubes.
Yeah.
Sad, but true.
Man.
All right.
Well, I overstate the hell out of it.
And then the former CIA officer says, yeah, no, you're right.
That's about that's about the shape of it.
All right.
So let me ask you this, then.
I count five murdered by the CIA in the torture program in the George W. Bush years, three at Penny Lane at Guantanamo Bay, one in Abu Ghraib prison and one in the salt pit north of Kabul.
But there must be more than that.
So tell me.
I don't know.
To tell you the truth, I know that there are at least five Joe Hickman, who's a former Guantanamo guard and a friend of mine and who has written about this, believes that there are more.
And I've seen I've seen press articles indicating that there may be dozens.
I think it's one of those things we're just never going to know.
Now, Larry Wilkerson has said that one hundred and eight different people died in military custody.
Right.
So we can separate those out.
But you're saying that you've heard that dozens perhaps died in CIA custody.
Yeah.
And again, there just hasn't been any accountability on the Hill.
Why?
Why are the oversight committees not not demanding this kind of information?
Why aren't there investigations to get to the bottom of these questions?
All right.
So now Donald Trump years, he says, hey, no law can stop me.
And the tougher, the better.
That's just the way he looks at all of this stuff.
They say that old mad dog Mattis talked him out of reinstituting a torture program.
I guess they do have McCain breathing down their neck about some of this stuff.
So but that obviously just raises the question of whether they're just going to ship them all off to Field Marshal Sisi in Egypt and have him try them all to death.
See, that's the wild card right there.
That's the wild card.
I really do believe that Mattis and General Kelly at Homeland Security are going to be the adults in the room on this issue.
Mike Pompeo is not.
Mike Pompeo is a follower.
But I think that Trump was serious when he said that Mattis had talked him out of it.
And then Kelly sort of reiterated what Mattis had to say.
With that said, what's to stop the CIA from sending prisoners to places like Egypt where they are routinely tortured?
And the way that works, too, is the CIA will always will always tell these third country partners.
Now, remember, you're not allowed to torture them.
So you have to promise us that you won't.
And then there's a smile and they say, yes, yes, we promise we won't torture.
Well, of course, I mean, that's that's why we send them there.
We send them there to be tortured.
Right.
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Well, yeah, I mean, geez, there was that kid in Saudi Arabia where the FBI agents even sat there and watched him be tortured.
Abu Ali and his fake confession, his obviously laughable confession that he was plotting to murder George W. Bush.
And they sat there feeding the Saudis the questions and watching through the one way glass, according to the reports they were in on that one.
And that was the so-called pure as snow FBI agents.
Right.
Right.
They were the ones that are supposed to be so clean that they can't even be in the country when such a thing takes place.
And then that was the one to where they let all his testimony be read out before the jury, but they didn't let the defense explain that it was tortured out of them by Saudi secret police or anything like this.
So the jury went along with it.
That was one I actually forgot about for a while.
For some reason, that just reminded me about the oh, yeah, the turn and look away.
Right.
Like my friend's dad letting me steal a cigarette out of his pack when I was a kid.
You know, go ahead and torture him to death and we'll pretend to not notice pretty much the same thing.
Right.
All right.
Now.
So who else might they rendition these guys to then if they're not going to do if we're presuming for the sake of argument that they're not reopening CIA black sites around the world.
Who else other than Egypt would we look at for possible rendition trips?
You know, to tell you the truth, that's one of the CIA's holy of holies.
That's one of the things that we can never, ever talk about in our lives.
Liaison relationships, sources and methods and anything having to do with NSA.
So I think I'm going to have to take a pass on that one.
Well, yeah, I don't want you to go back to prison.
No, but if I said to you, though, but, you know, I read in the papers, in fact, my wife nailed down one of these stories about the former.
Nazi then Soviet, then CIA base in Poland.
That's kind of nice.
And then there was Morocco and Romania, Thailand and boy, the stories of what they did to poor Binyam Mohamed in Morocco.
Can you confirm those things or you say you're not even allowed to say that what I read in the papers is right on those questions?
Yeah.
In fact, I've written about this a couple of times.
And because I'm a former CIA officer, I have to send everything I write into the CIA's Publications Review Board for clearance.
And they routinely redact all of it.
All of it, even if it's been reported in the press, even if it's been confirmed by, you know, quote unquote sources.
They redact it.
Yeah.
When I write it.
All right.
Well, I don't want to want to get you in that much trouble.
OK, so let me ask you this.
The story of Jeffrey Sterling.
This guy doesn't seem to get too much attention.
I'm not really sure why.
But there are a couple of big aspects to his case.
One of them is he's accused of leaking the Merlin catastrophe story, right?
Well, it didn't turn out to be much of a catastrophe because the Iranians never wanted to make nuclear bombs anyway.
So it was all stupid.
That's right.
What could have been a catastrophe?
The giant botched Merlin plot to James Risen of The New York Times.
But then also there's all these accusations of racism and racial discrimination.
And I guess one thing that I read said, you know what, they didn't even care about the Merlin thing.
It was that he was suing them and calling them suing them on the basis of discrimination, but that was why they went after Jeffrey Sterling and persecuted him.
And I wonder if you can explicate that for us a little bit.
Yeah.
And in fact, they never even bothered to defend themselves in in Sterling's suit.
What they did is they went before Judge Leanne Brinkema, who ironically ended up being Jeffrey Sterling's trial judge and sentencing judge.
And they said, your honor, we can't defend ourselves in this suit.
National security issues.
We can't talk about it.
And she says, dismissed with prejudice, just like that.
So Jeffrey Sterling never got his day in court.
I know Jeffrey Sterling very well, and I'm confident that he was a victim of racism.
I'm confident that he was passed over for promotion and eventually fired just because the color of his skin.
And I don't say that lightly.
I believe that to be the case, truly.
So Jeffrey Sterling ended up in prison, convicted on seven counts of espionage for allegedly having conversations with Jim Risen of The New York Times.
There's been literally zero proof that he ever talked about Operation Merlin with Jim Risen.
The only evidence against him was metadata of 52 telephone calls between Jeffrey and Risen over a two and a half year period.
But it was the same period during which Jeffrey had his civil suit pending against the agency.
And that was a story that Risen was covering.
But the judge didn't want to hear that.
And the prosecutors called Condoleezza Rice to the stand to to have her talk about what a catastrophe this was for national security, that that this Operation Merlin was blown to the Iranians.
There was never any evidence that Jeffrey Sterling did that.
And indeed, you know, Jim Jim Risen is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner.
He's even said no New York Times reporter is going to take one source and just run with it.
You have to have multiple sources.
And in fact, he has said that he spoke to current and former foreign and domestic intelligence officers.
Well, and that's part of that story, too, is for people who aren't familiar.
This was the thing where they accidentally gave nuclear bomb blueprints to the Iranians because they were trying to entrap them with it, basically, and catch them having it in their files.
But this was a huge freaking thing.
So there's no mystery why Jim Risen had multiple sources for this.
It's not like this was some tiny little deal.
This was I mean, not that I doubt anybody actually got in trouble for it, but it's the kind of thing where if it wasn't the CIA, somebody would have gotten in trouble for that one.
That was a big screw up.
So it was the idea that it was all him, even if he was I mean, he might have been a confirming source or maybe he was the original one.
But still, that would be far from the whole story.
You're absolutely right.
And so here's Jeffrey Sterling just just stuck sitting in prison.
Now, thank goodness he's going to he's going to come home at the end of this year.
But this is a guy who I read somewhere.
He was really sick, too.
He very sick.
He had a heart attack about six months ago and has had multiple heart episodes is what they're calling them ever since.
And again, right now, as we speak, he's being denied his his heart medication.
So the only thing that saved him is being denied his heart medication.
Oh, yeah.
This is an ongoing issue.
He's filed multiple suits.
He's filed complaints with the regional and national offices at the Bureau of Prisons repeatedly.
They've denied him his his medication.
And then last weekend, they put him in solitary confinement for three days because they said that he was he was rude to a guard, which is ridiculous.
I wonder if they're trying to kill him.
You know, he thinks they are.
He thinks they are.
That's kind of one of the things that I know you were in prison.
So you have experience.
I was going to say, gee, I wonder how that works.
But I could ask you how that works.
I hate to say it, but it doesn't really sound that different than probably how most people with heart conditions are treated.
Right.
You might get your medicine if we feel like it, say the guards.
Oh, no.
Let me tell you.
My my bunkmate in prison was the former mayor of Cleveland.
Right.
Awesome guy.
I love the guy.
Frank Russo.
Terrific guy.
In on a corruption charge.
They gave him 28 years.
He was 65 years old.
He had congestive heart failure, a history of heart attacks, and they give him 28 years in prison.
So we're sitting in our cell one day just talking.
And he says that he's having such terrible chest pains, he feels like somebody sitting on his chest.
I said, Frank, you're having a heart attack.
Let me walk you down to the CEO's office and maybe we can get you down to medical.
So we go to the CEO and he says, I think I'm having a heart attack.
The CEO says, tough luck, buddy.
He said, sick call is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from six to six, 15 a.m.
You're going to have to wait and go down tomorrow.
So he went down the next day.
They gave him Tylenol, which is what they always do.
They always give you Tylenol.
And this went on for a period of about four weeks.
Well, finally, he just collapsed of a massive heart attack in while standing in insulin line one morning and ended up spending 11 days in a hospital.
He had open heart surgery while he was chained to a hospital bed.
And then just today that that was three years ago.
Just today, I got a text from his one of his daughters saying that he had another heart attack.
He's now at a at a prison hospital in Massachusetts.
He had another heart attack and another surgery yesterday.
So they don't care if you live or die.
There were four people who died while I was in prison.
Every one of them from a treatable illness or a treatable malady.
You know, the real scary part of that is they don't care if you're a mayor and nobody is good enough in the club.
Oh, yeah.
Even deserve the slightest like, you know, you would like to think that, jeez, if you're a mayor, at least you get off easy.
But no, in fact, that's what I hate about mayors, is that they always get off easy.
But now it sounds like not so much, you know, not at all system.
It's not at all.
What it is, is it's impersonal enough, right?
Either either this guy's sentence was personal or it was completely impersonal.
But either way, it's pretty bad.
That's seems like a pretty stiff sentence for an old man and his brother's a federal judge.
And even his brother can't exert any influence to try to get medical treatment for him.
Wow.
That's just no.
There's no hope.
Literally, when it when it comes to medical treatment in prison, there's just no hope.
And now with Trump wanting to to revive the the policy of contracting with private prisons, it's just going to make it worse, because the only way those prisons can make money is by not spending money on prisoners.
And the number one cost is health care.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, Shane Bauer really embarrassed the hell out of himself promoting war with Syria a couple of weeks ago, but his undercover report on the incentive systems in the private prisons being even worse than in the government run ones is really something to behold.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, it's un-American.
Yeah.
And the part that that really sticks out in my mind about that was, I guess, what seemed to me the most innocent person in there that he profiles that I remember was a man, woman, whatever, named China, who was in there on a prostitution charge in prison on a prostitution charge and then who ended up dying of, I believe, medical neglect.
This is a death sentence for someone in the prime of their life over something that's not even a crime in the first place.
And just, boy, she might as well have been a fly on the wall that got swatted for all it mattered to anybody.
You know, that's our system.
It's all you got to do is just stop and think for a minute.
What would our government say if it was one of their enemies that they wanted to destroy?
Just think about all the hype that Kenneth Roth would put out about why we need a regime change him for running this system.
The same way we have.
I had a I had a cellmate who was a homeless man.
He was living in a cardboard box under a bridge in Pittsburgh and it started to get cold.
So he purposely violated the terms of his probation so that he could spend the winter indoors.
And on the first day in our cell, he said, guys, I got to be honest with you.
He says, I am severely mentally ill, but I'm on my medication right now.
I'm afraid they're not going to give me my medication.
And if they don't, I'm going to go nuts and I want to apologize in advance.
And sure enough, they took him off his medication.
And a week later, he was certifiably insane.
And because he was insane, they put him in solitary because they treat mental illness as a disciplinary problem, not as a medical problem.
Well, he was only supposed to be in prison until until April.
This was October to April for violating the probation.
But because he went so nuts and got so violent that they ended up keeping him for a full year just by adding time, because every time he did something, they called it a new crime.
You end up having people in prison who are only supposed to be there for short periods of time and who end up spending the rest of their lives or big chunks of their lives incarcerated.
Just because of infractions over nothing.
Yeah, that was Nathaniel Penn's recent piece about solitary, too, where, oh, you bump my shoulder.
Oh, yeah.
Now you're into the hole with you for 10 years because some guard claims you brushed into him, you know?
Yeah, we there was a doctor on my in my unit.
He was a Medicare fraud guy and he got 12 years and he literally just brushed up against the guard in the cafeteria.
The cafeteria is very crowded.
You know, you get fourteen hundred guys coming and going all at the same time, just barely brushed up against him and ended up costing him four weeks in the hole.
And he apologized.
It was an accident.
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to touch you.
Yeah.
Four weeks in solitary.
Man.
Well, all right.
So talk about your book, then a little bit here, Doing Time Like a Spy.
This is advice for the millions and millions and millions of Americans yet to be caught up in our criminal justice system, basically here.
Yeah, in a way.
You know, when I was sentenced, my attorneys asked the judge.
I had Judge Brinkman, just like Jeffrey Sterling did, to send me to a minimum security work camp.
And the minimum security camps have no bars on the windows.
There are no walls or concertina wire.
You're free to come and go as you please.
You're on your honor not to abscond.
So she agreed and the prosecution had no objection.
So I got to the prison and and turned myself in.
And they start walking me around to the back of the prison.
I said, no, no, I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street.
And the cop kind of chortled and said, not according to my paperwork, you're not.
So I told myself, take it easy.
There's nothing you can do.
Just wait until you get a phone.
So it took me about five days to get access to a telephone.
I called my lawyer and he said, he said, man, we can file a motion, but it's going to be two years before we get a hearing date and you're going to be home by then.
He said, I'm sorry, you're going to have to tough it out.
And so I decided on that very first day that I was going to use these 20 life lessons that the CIA taught me in training in order to keep myself safe and to keep myself at the very top of the social heap in prison.
I asked several A-list Hollywood people to write blurbs for this book, and a couple of them declined because they said I come off as such an asshole in this book that they didn't want to be associated with it.
But I wanted to, I wanted to be utterly truthful.
You know, prison is a nasty place.
It's nasty and it's dangerous and it's ugly and you're in there with murderers and pedophiles.
A third of the prison was pedophiles and organized crime and drug kingpins.
And so I really tried to make it as bare and as raw as I could.
And so, in other words, well, I mean, I guess give us a few not don't list the whole 21 or anything, but give us an idea what you mean.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, well, the first one is is recruit spies to steal secrets or anything else that you need.
And the bottom line there is you just have to be very adept at manipulating people to get what you want.
And in prison, I mean, this is going to sound stupid because we're not in prison, we're in real life.
But you might need a paperclip or a pen or a highlighter or an envelope.
And all those things are contraband.
And so you've got to recruit somebody, let's say somebody who mops the supply room or somebody who sweeps the warden's office to steal it for you.
And maybe he's going to steal it because you're going to give him stamps that he can use to gamble or because he likes the thrill of it or because he hates the warden.
You have to figure out his vulnerability, figure out his motivation and then use him to do your dirty work.
There were others like when calm is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend about stirring up the pot.
Seek and utilize available cover.
There was one that we treated as a joke at the CIA that actually was very serious in prison.
It was admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.
I use that all the time.
And so I tell I tell stories associated with just about all of these rules and and how I use them to to get through two years in prison.
Yeah, well, I mean, since so many of us, I mean, really all of us are living under the threat of such a fate at any moment, it sounds like there's that book Three Felonies a Day about how you can't get out of bed without violating one kind or another.
Yeah.
And that's a very important book.
Three Felonies a Day by Harvey Silverglate, who's a Harvard Law School professor.
So he says that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal business commits three felonies because we're so over criminalized in this country.
Well, and I think this one is apocryphal.
I've heard it so many times as, you know, first person or second or, you know, second hand told where FBI agents say.
In fact, I'm confused as to whether one of them actually told me this, like someone in my cab at some point or something like that back when that just look at just pick a random person on the street.
If I want to, I can put them in prison for 20 years.
And that's the way that they can start.
They can just start with their target.
Whose life do they want to destroy?
And then that's it.
You just grab anyone at random, just point at someone and they can do it and they'll brag about it and not even think it's wrong.
Absolutely true.
If they really want to get you, they're going to get you and there's almost nothing you can do to protect yourself.
Man, it's funny, because when I started doing this show, I was like, man, we better hurry up and stop the police state for it gets so bad that I can't do this kind of thing without really being afraid to go into prison.
And now it didn't work.
And here we are.
And I'm afraid of going to prison.
Yeah.
Not that I'm a criminal, but, you know, anyway, I guess I'll you send me your book.
If ever comes to that point, I'm going to start knocking on wood and hang up this call.
Seriously.
Thank you very much for coming on the show, John.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That is John Kiriakou.
And he's got a couple of books here.
The first one is The Reluctant Spy and the brand new one coming out in a week is called Doing Time Like a Spy.
How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison.
I'm Scott Horton.
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