All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, guys, on the line is John Kiriakou, former CIA officer and host of Loud and Clear on the Sputnik Network.
And he is the author of the books Doing Time Like a Spy and The Reluctant Spy, and also the CIA Guide to Surveillance, and his latest with the great Gareth Porter, the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From CIA Coup to the Brink of War.
And yeah, hey, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
Doing well, thanks.
Appreciate you having me.
Yeah, good times.
So I'm sorry, I gotta find which tab to click on.
Here we go.
I'm sorry, I didn't even see it.
All I know is that a friend mentioned that you had made a comment that was interesting enough to build on for an interview, I think, about this recent Michael Isikoff story in Yahoo News, that in court filing, FBI accidentally, maybe wink, wink, nudge, nudge, accidentally reveals name of Saudi official suspected of directing support for the 9-11 hijackers.
So first of all, I guess, did I hear it right?
You had a comment about this?
And then, first of all, I guess, tell us the story, if you can, take us through the reporting and then let us know what you think it all means.
Sure.
The the surviving family members of the 9-11 victims have have filed numerous lawsuits against the Saudi government and other entities stemming from the 9-11 attacks.
And this has been dragging on for a decade and a half now.
There are a lot of classified documents involved in this related to the FBI's investigation, both pre and post 9-11.
So this was this was just kind of a standard turnover of documents that was supposed to be made with no fanfare at all.
The documents are heavily redacted.
But lo and behold, one of the redactions was missed.
And the redaction that was missed exposes the name of a Saudi diplomat for the very first time who was a middleman between the Saudi government and the 9-11 hijackers.
His name was Musa'id al-Jarrah.
Musa'id al-Jarrah was the representative in the Saudi embassy in Washington of the Saudi Ministry of Al-Qa'af and Islamic Affairs.
Al-Qa'af means religious donations, religious programming, religious charity, that kind of thing.
It's not the actual translation of Al-Qa'af, it's the plural of Waqf, which means charity.
So so for the very first time, we we get this name, Musa'id al-Jarrah.
And what Musa'id al-Jarrah did was he provided money from allegedly the Saudi embassy, perhaps even from the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, good friend of President George H.W. Bush, provided it to a cutout, that is a middleman in Los Angeles, who in turn used the money to procure an apartment for two of the 9-11 hijackers.
So this is the first time in a public venue, the first time in an unclassified fashion that we've seen a direct connection between the Saudi government and the 9-11 hijackers.
I think the comment that you're referring to is I said the other day in an interview that I don't think this leak was an accident.
There are literally two dozen different people who pour over these documents with a Sharpie to make sure that no classified information is released, especially names.
And I think, frankly, that there are a lot of people at the working level in the FBI, where the document originated, that are just tired of our government, whether it's led by a Democrat or a Republican, covering for the Saudis.
The Saudis were involved in 9-11.
We all know they were involved in 9-11.
Now we have actual proof that they were.
The American people have a right to know that, and especially the families of the 9-11 victims have a right to know that.
And the Saudis need to be called to account.
Now, do you write about this in the Reluctant Spy?
I'm trying to remember.
To tell you the truth, every mention that I made of Saudi Arabia in the Reluctant Spy was redacted.
And so it's not in there.
None of it is.
Okay.
Now, there's been so much great work on the 28 pages.
Yes.
From the original Congressional Joint Committee investigation of the September 11th attacks.
And the 28 pages were redacted for so long, and they were finally released, what, two years ago.
And I've heard it said by a lot of different folks.
In fact, someone just recently said to me that they think my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, that her article about the 28 pages at Antiwar.com is still the single best one to explain, you know.
What it all means, and in context with what we already knew.
And so what puzzle pieces are being filled in, and this kind of thing.
And so, you know, essentially the narrative is that the, essentially, Saudi intelligence officers were helping to pay for these guys, helping them to survive when they first got to California.
This would be the Flight 77 hijackers, the San Diego cell.
And with the others too, I'm not exactly sure the different extent of the different accusations, but essentially paying their way into flight school and all of these kinds of things.
But I wanted to bring up a counterpoint to that, which is our friend Phil Giraldi, who, you know, he doesn't pull punches.
You know Phil.
Phil's a terrific writer and a great CIA officer.
Yeah, well, and a PhD, right?
And a vociferous critic when he feels like criticizing.
But he said, you know what, I kind of am not feeling it on the 28 pages.
I think that, you know, if you look at it in a bad light, it looks pretty bad.
But if you look at it in context, this is the kind of thing that the Saudi embassy and Saudi government officials inside the U.S. do for Saudi immigrants or, you know, students or whoever, temporary, you know, green card holders or whoever, Saudi nationals who come to the United States, that they do this kind of thing all the time.
And if you look at it in the broader context, there's hardly anything that really stands out from standard operating procedure.
What do you think about that?
There's something to be said for that.
But at the same time, though, you know, the Saudis have thousands and thousands of students here.
There's literally no oversight.
There was an incident about a year ago, for example, where two Saudi students flew into the United States.
They were supposed to be on their way to a small mining college in Montana.
And when they landed at JFK in New York, they just walked out of the airport.
Nobody ever saw them again.
Well, you know, it's up to the Saudi embassy to keep track of their students.
We don't have the manpower or the wherewithal to to track every single student from Saudi Arabia or any other country who has an education visa to come to the United States.
Sure.
I can see what Phil is saying, that this is just what the Saudis do, which is true.
But it's also incumbent upon the Saudis to keep track of their people and to make sure that they follow the law.
So you can't say, well, sure, there were these guys, these Saudis in 1999, they did a dry run on an America West flight.
It was a dry run for the 9-11 attacks.
But it's not the Saudi embassy's fault that these guys were getting money from the embassy because the embassy didn't know what they were up to.
Well, you know, they should know what they're up to if they're financing these people.
Another thing about the Saudi embassy, too, and at the very least, this is irresponsible.
At the very worst, it's a danger to American national security, is that the Saudis, and specifically at the time, Moussa Adel Jarrah being the representative of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, they finance Islamic centers and mosques all over the country.
We have several major mosques here in the Washington area built by the Saudi government.
Oftentimes they're named after whoever happens to be ruling Saudi Arabia at any given time.
There's a big one, the King Fahd Mosque in California, for example.
And it's not just here.
It's all over the place.
I mentioned the other day on my own show that the largest place of worship in Guatemala is a Saudi mosque that was built right in the center of Guatemala City.
And across Latin America, the fastest growing religion is Islam.
That's thanks to the Saudis.
Another thing that the Saudis do is they supply all of the Korans to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
So these Korans are translated into English.
And what they do is you open up a Koran.
On one side is the actual Koran, the text of the Koran.
On the other side is commentary telling you what these words mean and how you're supposed to interpret them.
Well, that commentary is Saudi.
And being Saudi, it's fundamentalist.
Some would say even radical.
The Saudi government would tell you that it's a fundamentalist Muslim country, that they're the guardians of the two holy mosques.
That's the king's official title, is protector of the two holy mosques.
So they serve to radicalize people in U.S. prisons and jails.
So when they get out, they're self-radicalized.
They gravitate toward these Saudi-built mosques and Saudi-built Islamic centers.
And you know, you've got automatically made followers.
So the Saudis like to dabble in this kind of radicalization.
And then they're shocked.
Shocked, I tell you, when something bad happens.
So I just don't trust them.
And I don't I don't trust their admonition that that they're innocent in the whole 28 pages or that they're innocent in in the transfer of money to 9-11 hijackers.
I just don't buy it.
But now, so you were an analyst before you were a field officer there.
So if this was your group of analysts at the CIA and you were looking at all of this as the investigation, you would say that even without the audio of the phone calls that, you know, as a professional CIA conspiracy kook, you would judge with high confidence that they were helping these guys with a purpose.
And that purpose then must have been to successfully carry out this attack.
Is that correct?
I would think, yes.
Not necessarily that this was a plot hatched by the Saudi king and the Saudi crown prince and the Saudi defense minister at all.
But what the Saudis do is they donate billions and billions of dollars through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs to organizations purport to that purport to be NGOs like the the World Muslim Organization or the Organization for Muslim Youth.
And there's no accountability for that money.
A lot of these groups are based in Jeddah or Mecca or Medina.
And the money just goes out.
Well, the Saudi intelligence service uses those same organizations to launch operations.
And I think that if there was cooperation between the Saudi government and the 9-11 hijackers, and I believe that there was, I believe it was probably done through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and the Saudi intelligence service without perhaps direct knowledge and direct involvement of the highest levels of the Saudi government.
Well, you know, it makes sense to me that the Saudis, you know, particularly the government at the intelligence services and whoever, allowing all of this money and participating and delivering this money in some cases to al-Qaeda as protection money to just keep it outside the kingdom, pal, and that kind of thing.
And yet and, you know, by all means laundering money through whammy or whatever, all of that.
But providing direct assistance to actual hijackers in the U.S. is a little bit more specific than paying protection money at a hotel in France.
You know, so- It sure is.
And look, and we're talking about Prince Bandar, who's no dummy, who's running Saudi intelligence here and all roads seem to lead back to him.
And so- It sure seems that way.
Are you saying that their support would stop short of them, you know, knowing that there was an actual attack on the U.S. at the end of the road?
Even though knowing that they are real ass al-Qaeda guys in this country?
You know- I mean, buying them flight lessons?
My gut says guilty.
And then my head says we would have to be living in the twilight zone if Bandar himself, who was supposed to be so close to American leaders that he was nicknamed Bandar Bush here in Washington.
I can't imagine Bandar being behind this attack.
But then- Look, all the truthers listening to this are saying that we're just being, you know, deliberately obtuse and naive and that obviously this was all a plot to allow one through and to even help it so that they could go to Iraq and the rest.
And it's possible.
It's possible.
I think we don't have all of the intelligence and I'm sure that the FBI does.
They haven't released it.
But yeah, I'd love to see it because it's entirely possible.
So my thing about that was this, was that- so how would that work, right?
You know, Bandar would have had to have had explicit permission from Dick Cheney that you promise you're not going to nuke Riyadh now if I do this, right?
And then, yeah, no, please go ahead.
And at the same time, then Bandar would have to have the confidence that no general down at the Pentagon is going to cross the river and shoot Dick Cheney in the head for the highest treason, for orchestrating this plot and take his place.
Right.
Right.
Which if I was- and then nuke Riyadh, right?
Like if I was Prince Bandar, I would be concerned about that.
Right?
I mean, you're going to fly a plane into the Pentagon, huh?
That's pretty brave, Mr. Head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence.
So I just don't- and, you know, it's funny because I was a truther before it happened and I quit being one shortly after it happened because it just- all the different narratives behind all of that, they just don't gel together, you know?
They don't gel together.
And there are so many moving parts that if there were such a conspiracy, everything would have had to have gone perfectly, you know?
And I know that most people are idiots, at least when you're in this world of intelligence where there are so many different people involved.
There's going to be one bonehead who screws something up and things aren't going to work.
That's why you always have to have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D. And this makes it look like they're all geniuses.
And I'll tell you something else, and I think I've probably mentioned this on the show in the past.
I still remember the date.
This was July 6th, 2001.
I was working in the CIA Counterterrorism Center.
I was in charge of a group that trained Middle East intelligence services in counterterrorism operations.
And we would do a lot of liaison exchanges.
We would have officers from Middle Eastern services come to visit.
We'd give them a day of briefings.
We have a photo op with the director, and I take them out to a nice dinner and send them on their way.
And on July 6th, 2001, I had just such a group, mid to high level intelligence officers from a Middle Eastern service.
And I had asked a junior analyst to come in and give them a briefing on Al Qaeda.
Instead of a junior analyst, Kofra Black, the director of the Counterterrorism Center, came in with the director of operations for the Counterterrorism Center, two of the four highest ranking people in the center.
And Kofra cut right to the chase.
He said, something terrible is going to happen.
We don't know exactly what or exactly where, but we know that it's going to be big.
He said, we're hearing a lot of chatter.
We're hearing conversations between would-be terrorists and their trainers, where the instructors are crying on the phone and saying, I'll see you in paradise.
We're hearing code words for a massive attack.
There's going to be a great football match.
There's going to be a great wedding.
The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey.
They're all code words for an attack.
And he said, please, I beg you, if you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us.
Well, at the end of the day, I went to Kofra's office to thank him for coming and talking to these guys.
And I said, Kofra, I got to ask you.
I'm not an Al Qaeda expert.
Were you just making that up for their benefit, or were you serious?
And he said, I was dead serious.
Something terrible is going to happen.
And sure enough, nine weeks later, that's exactly what happened.
We knew something big was coming.
We didn't know where.
You had Dick Clark at the White House, who was the counterterrorism czar, shouting it from the rooftops, and nobody would listen to him.
George Tenet doing the same thing.
He said, Condi Rice and Dick Cheney just ignored him every time he went down there.
And then this happened.
OK, so then you have to ask, why did they ignore him?
Did they ignore him because the plan had already been laid, or did they ignore him because they thought he was overreacting and they just didn't think something like this would happen on U.S. soil?
I don't know.
Well, the answer is Paul Wolfowitz, right?
Like the obvious.
If you're trying to be Occam's razor about it, right, it's not that they were trying to deliberately create the Pearl Harbor event necessarily.
It's that they wanted to go to Baghdad and they viewed Kofor Black and the rest of the CIA guys saying that the problem is Osama in Afghanistan as a giant diversion from the figuring out a way to start a war with Iraq.
And so that was the neocons argument every time was, oh, shut up about that Osama bin Laden stuff.
It's it's Saddam Hussein is the real problem.
And Osama just works for him anyway.
And this kind of I'll go further than that.
I was my my last job at headquarters was I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
And we were getting ready.
This was just two or three days before the Iraq war started.
I was the note taker in a secure video teleconference and it was a principal's meeting.
So it was being chaired by the vice president.
Condi Rice was there.
George Tenet was our representative.
Colin Powell was on.
The commander of CENTCOM was on the head of NSA.
It was all the big muckety mucks that everybody who was who was a principal was on this call.
And so we're sitting there.
I'm sitting directly behind George and I'm taking notes.
And the vice president asked the commander of CENTCOM to give us a briefing.
So he started this thing off by saying that we're going to cross the border in two days.
You know, this division's moving here and elements of this core moving up this way.
And it was all military mumbo jumbo.
And then he said.
If all goes according to plan, we can be in Tehran by August.
And George leaned forward and he turned off his microphone and he turned around and said to me, did he say Baghdad or did he say Tehran?
And I said, he said Tehran.
And George said, have these people lost their minds?
And what was the date of this again?
This was two days before we invaded Iraq.
OK.
Yeah.
And then he he very casually turned back around, turned his microphone back on and just sat there.
So I think that the plan all along, you remember the famous story that that Richard Pearl just a day or two after the 9-11 attacks went to the White House and said, we have to attack Saddam Hussein.
He didn't care about Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda.
This was how we attack Saddam Hussein.
And that was just step one, with step two being to overthrow the Iranian government.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Back to these hijackers inside the country.
You know, for someone who was predicting this attack for a long time before it ever even happened.
The day that it happened, I says, well look, you got what, at least 20 real ass suicide terrorist hijackers inside the country for some extended period of time.
How could this be possible that the FBI wouldn't know exactly who they were and be following every step that they take?
And then the official explanation for that is because the CIA refused to show them all the information about this cell.
In fact, let me go ahead and recommend this for people if they haven't seen it.
And I don't know about you, but there was this great little clip of, it's by Alex Gibney, the documentarian.
Oh yeah, he's great.
Yeah.
And so he's interviewing Lawrence Wright that wrote The Looming Tower and he's interviewing Doug Miller and Ali Soufan from the FBI from their side of the story about the CIA not being fair and sharing with them before the attack.
And Ali Soufan says he was in Yemen investigating the coal attack on the, on September 11th.
And then when, once the attack took place, they called him and said, you better come down to the embassy.
He's the FBI agent and the CIA says, okay, come here, we have something to show you.
And they open up the Manila envelope and there is the Malaysia meeting where the USS coal attack that he's investigating was planned.
And so was September 11th.
And so here's two halves of the same big plot.
And he says, and he can just read it, you know, decode it with a glance that this is what happened today.
Is that what the CIA hadn't shared with us, you know, is what, what unfolded there.
And then I wanted to mention this guy, Ray Nowaleski.
And he was the major producer of 9-11 Press for Truth, which is a really great documentary that my wife helped work on as well.
And also he did the Rich Blee podcasts one and two, and these are about Rich Blee was a guy at the Alex station, the CIA Alex station there.
And just to boil all of this down, I, what Ray said to me, and I went out to dinner with him at one point and, and asked him about all of this.
And he said his best explanation.
And that Richard Clark also believed was that Alex station thought that they were going to be able to recruit the San Diego cell and have then, you know, undercover double agents inside Al Qaeda.
And that either they didn't ever recruit them at all, or they recruited them, but really they were triple agents, not double and ended up betraying them.
And that that was why they didn't share the information with the FBI.
And then again, Michael Shoyer, who married the lady who in the FBI's version, wouldn't let them share the data.
He says, that's all BS.
The CIA gave the FBI everything.
They're all in one big counterterrorism center together there.
And if the FBI's email system didn't work as of circa the summer of 2001, that's their fault.
So I don't know.
No, that's not true.
He's being disingenuous.
Look, one of the things I think people need to understand is the depth of hatred between the CIA and the FBI.
We freaking hated each other to the point where we wouldn't even work together.
We wouldn't even cooperate with one another.
Not necessarily on a on a man to man basis.
I actually liked the FBI agents that I worked with in Pakistan.
But institutionally, the CIA and the FBI hated each other.
Going back to the founding of the CIA.
The worst part of this is that the CIA database and the FBI database were not compatible.
So while there were people from the FBI sitting in the CIA's counterterrorism center, not many, two or three at the time of the 9-11 attacks, there was no way to share information from one agency to the other, nor was there a political will to share information from one agency to the other.
It only came after the 9-11 attacks when the American people finally had had enough.
And President Bush ordered us to integrate our computer databases.
That was it.
It was a petty.
It was a petty bureaucratic fight that resulted in 9-11.
Now, Mike Sawyer is not telling the truth when it comes to to the Southern California cell.
There was talk of trying to recruit those guys.
They weren't recruitable.
It just and we didn't really try hard to recruit them.
This is Alex Station wouldn't have had the talent to recruit some guys like that anyway.
Right.
That would have been somebody else's job.
Certainly not.
Yeah.
That would have been somebody else's job.
I don't want to get into the details because they're probably still classified.
But yeah, that would that would not have been Alex Station's mission.
They could have.
Well, might they have done it anyway?
I mean, I think this is part of the theory that they were out over their skis getting involved in something they shouldn't have.
These women analysts at Alex Station who had no business trying to recruit anybody.
Yeah.
Women analysts who had no operational expertise or experience whatsoever.
Yeah.
I don't want to sound too sexist.
I just meant that was who happened to be running the thing.
Yeah.
They just happened to be all women.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They thought they were smarter than everybody else.
And we ended up with 9-11.
All right.
Now, so what about on September 11th and shortly after the word around the office?
I mean, I know there's compartmentalization and all of that kind of thing.
But would you really have us all believe that you guys were essentially taken by surprise?
As you said, knew something's coming, but no more specific than that.
Well, I can tell you that even in Alex Station, I was absorbed into Alex Station on on September 12th.
Even in Alex Station, we knew that it was going to be massive.
Nobody believed they had the balls to pull it off inside the United States.
The conventional wisdom was it was going to be another multiple embassy attack, probably somewhere in in Africa.
But we thought, well, if they're really if they're really going to try to take us by surprise, it'll be somewhere we don't expect, like East Asia.
But everybody expected an embassy attack, not on U.S. soil.
Well, I'll go ahead and bring this anecdote up.
I keep thinking of it.
So I might as well say it.
I met a guy, I was just a cab driver at the time, and I met these guys and, you know, I did not verify their credentials or whatever, but they all they sure seemed to be who they said they were, three guys who were military intelligence.
And what they said was essentially what you said, that we knew that something was going to happen, but we didn't know enough to stop it.
Although, you know, in this guy's telling of it, which, again, it just seemed credible to me at the time, but take that with a pinch of salt or whatever, but that, oh, they knew it was going to be inside the United States, but they just didn't know which guys from which airports or any of those kind of details that they could have intercepted them.
But that they didn't know that it was going to be here.
I don't believe that just because if we knew that it was going to be in the United States.
Remember, we had the information as far back as 1996, that that Al Qaeda wanted to use planes as missiles, right, from the Bojinka operation in the Philippines.
So we knew that they wanted to use planes.
But if we had known it was going to be somewhere in the United States, all of the FAA would have been on high alert.
The National Guard would have been called out.
Now, if the CIA and the FBI had been cooperating and had been sharing the intelligence that they had collected, I think we would have come to the conclusion that it was going to be inside the United States.
And to me, that's what makes this not just an intelligence failure, not just really the most important intelligence failure in American history, but one that reaches a level of criminality.
This just isn't, it's not just a bureaucratic pissing match.
It's a criminal action, in my view.
Yeah.
And, you know, so back to the Saudi angle here, too.
I mean, if, you know, presuming some kind of actual coordination with American officials to allow it to happen, you know, forgetting all of that and just looking at, again, not just protection money paid, but money paid by whichever Saudi princelings and or Saudi intelligence to Al Qaeda terrorists who are extremely dangerous to American assets in this country or elsewhere around the world.
They're supposed to be our friends.
We're sure theirs.
And yet, what a terrible risk they're taking to, they would be taking to help Al Qaeda get away with even an Africa embassy attack against American targets.
And that could get an American invasion of Saudi.
You think you don't like our bases there now, bombing Iraq at the invitation of your king.
How the heck do we occupy your country in vengeance against you letting your princelings attack us?
So what would be the interest of the, again, protection money is one thing, but actually helping them attack their ally like this seems like an especially, you know, an insanely risky move for somebody like Bandar.
It seems like he would have, at least when it comes to attacking the Americans, an extremely strict deal with the Al Qaeda guys, right?
He's paying protection money to protect the kingdom.
That should apply to us too, right?
I don't know.
You would think.
Yeah.
You know, one of the things that I learned early on in my career at the CIA was that the Saudis are not our friends, not even a little bit.
But aren't they scared?
I guess they're not scared either.
They know that they got so many people in their pocket that they can attack Washington.
They can attack the Pentagon and not get carpet bombed.
Isn't that?
I don't know.
It's kind of a crazy conclusion, but yeah, I mean, I think that's what it comes down to.
Yeah.
We just send them to Iraq.
That'll divert everybody away from the money behind this thing and all of the rest of that.
I told a story on my show yesterday or the day before about my first trip to Saudi Arabia.
It was in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
So I went out to provide analytic support and I was so excited because I was a young guy.
I was I guess I was 25 at the time.
I had never been to the Middle East before.
And so this was my first official CIA trip.
So I go to Saudi Arabia and I was immediately struck by how rude the Saudis were to us, like actively hostile.
And finally, I confronted one of the Saudi guards outside the U.S. embassy and I said, What's your problem, man?
And he looked at me right in the eye and he said, We are not friends.
You are hired help.
We paid for you to come here and to protect the oil fields.
We will never be friends.
And I felt stung and I walked away and I realized that he's right.
He's right.
You go to any other country in the Gulf, you go to the Kuwait or Bahrain or the Emirates or Oman or Qatar, and people fall all over you.
They want to be so friendly and nice and come to my house for dinner and let's go camping in the desert for the weekend.
The Saudis wouldn't give you the time of the day.
And they're all like that.
Well, imagine George Washington inviting the French to stay after helping to keep the British away and that they get to have military bases here and attack our Canadian friends across the border for a decade and all this craziness.
How would we feel about that?
Yes, you're right.
And that's the deal, right?
Like, I guess you can't do the counterfactual.
But what if we only ever occupied Saudi Arabia with civilians in white button up shirts with handshakes instead of military forces?
And in fact, you know, mass murdering the people on the other side of the imaginary line in the case of Iraq War One and Iraq War One and a half all through the 1990s there.
That's right.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
In fact, in those early days, right after Operation, what they call it at first, Desert Shield, before we actually attacked the Iraqis, Al Qaeda got a lot of really great PR benefit, propaganda benefit by spreading rumors that we had female soldiers driving, which we did.
We had female soldiers taking showers with male soldiers on the military bases that we were occupying, that there were soldiers having sex in front of the holy Kaaba in Mecca.
That stuff wasn't true, of course, but people believed it.
People believed it and they became sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
I remember once a senior CIA officer talking about democracy, that he wished the State Department would stop talking about democracy.
He said, I don't want democracy.
If there was democracy in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden would be the president of that country.
We don't want democracy.
And man, that just laid it bare right there.
Yeah.
Well, and then you look at Mohammed bin Salman's reforms and it's like, hey, everybody, R-rated movies is at the highest order.
This is the freedom and the reform that we're bringing you is just licentiousness, essentially, rather than actual property rights and markets and freedom.
That's not going to play well.
So, you know, giving liberty a very bad name in a very conservative society like that.
And getting on the plane and going straight to Tel Aviv and bending the knee to Benjamin Netanyahu.
I mean, you know what I mean?
This guy, MBS, could be bin Laden's propaganda dream come true.
I'm sure that there's a podcast by Ayman al-Zawahiri called See, I Told You So.
Look at this guy.
You know, absolutely, man.
So now, but you know what?
So we got into some of the truth or stuff a little bit earlier, but so I wanted to go back to the way I had set that up about in the days after this at CIA headquarters.
No one was saying, man, I think Cheney deliberately let that happen somehow or anything along those lines at all.
Or I think the boss did.
No.
I never, ever heard that inside CIA headquarters.
Never.
You know, I remember there was a lot of crying, people walking around crying.
I say in my own book, they forced us to evacuate on 9-11.
I ended up abandoning my car on the GW Parkway because I couldn't get I couldn't get all the way home.
All the roads were closed and hundreds of thousands of people were just walking on the highways to try to get home that day.
And finally, I said to my girlfriend, who became my wife, was also a CIA officer.
I said after about six hours, this is ridiculous.
We need to get back to work.
So we walked back to my car, drove back to headquarters, and I didn't leave for another four days.
I just slept under my desk with my jacket balled up as a pillow and I'd sleep an hour or two hours at a time.
And everybody did that.
We actually got a bolt cutter and we we cut the chain and the and the lock off the cafeteria door.
And we took ten thousand dollars worth of food from the Marriott, which had the catering contract and cooked it up ourselves and just had this these folding tables in the hall outside the counterterrorism center where people could graze.
Afterwards, we had to write the Marriott a check for ten thousand dollars and apologize to the looters.
But unbelievably, yeah, we we looted the place.
We truly did.
We just looted it.
We took everything.
But no, I never heard any of those like not even not even people speculating, not even the more suspicious colleagues of mine.
Nobody talked about it being.
What about pointing fingers at each other?
This was somebody's fault.
And I think my understanding is that Sawyer had been banished to the library and was not running Alex station at the time.
But so was anybody mad at anybody or just just like they told us on TV?
Hey, this is nobody's fault now.
You know, the funny thing is that we all thought has blamed the FBI, right?
And they did that.
They blamed the FBI without a doubt.
But they couldn't pretend that that we didn't fall asleep at the switch, too.
And so we we all believed that at the highest levels, heads were going to roll.
Tenet had to had to be out and have it had to be out.
And that just never happened.
Heads didn't roll.
John McLaughlin had to go.
Nobody.
Nobody went.
If anything, these guys became somehow seen as as heroes in the public.
But yeah.
Michael Hayden, you exactly.
Nobody ever cut his head off either.
No, no, no.
And he fell asleep at the switch at both NSA and CIA.
You know, there's a whole book about that.
The Shadow Factory by James Bamford.
Have you ever read that?
Right.
Absolutely fantastic.
That's one of the best books that's ever been written on intelligence.
It really is great.
And what they say in there is that the FBI and the CIA hated the NSA just as much as each other and vice versa, too.
We used to laugh at the NSA.
Yeah.
I can't tell you how many people would show up as new employees at the CIA.
And I'd say, so are you just out of grad school or where you come from?
No, I'm coming from NSA.
It's like everybody at NSA was trying to transfer to the CIA.
It was ridiculous.
Hmm.
And yeah.
So why?
Because it was such amateur hour under Michael Hayden over there at NSA?
Truly.
It was amateur hour.
Nobody liked working for Hayden.
He was a he was an egomaniac.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that book actually begins with him telling Bamford, well, you see, if Osama bin Laden himself walked across the bridge from Canada, I would have to stop surveilling him at that point, which is absolutely not the law.
Right.
And Osama bin Laden.
We have a reasonable suspicion that he is tied to a foreign terrorist group.
That's all you need to monitor for the NSA, not just the FBI, but for the NSA to continue to monitor him inside the country as long as they want.
We all know that.
That was the law before September 11th, not after when they changed with the Patriot Act and so forth.
So I don't know if he was really running his agency that way or if he was just making excuses or what.
The biggest story that and I think Scheuer told me this story himself is where I got this from, if I remember right, was that the CIA tried to get oh, and I guess this is in the book, too, that the CIA tried to get the intercepts from the Yemen switchboard house where Hani Honjour's father in law, the Flight 77 hijacker, San Diego cell guy, his father in law ran the switchboard house where they would field the calls between Afghanistan and Europe and the U.S. and so forth.
And the NSA would not share the intercepts with the CIA, even though the director of the CIA at that time was also the director of Central Intelligence, which meant the boss over NSA as well, like the current National Intelligence Director job is.
And so George Tenet had every authority in the world to represent his own home team at CIA and say to NSA, give me the damned intercepts.
I'm not asking you.
That's an order.
Give them to me now.
And that Tenet wouldn't do that.
And so instead, the CIA had to build their own listening station on Madagascar and for however many million dollars and that then they could still only intercept half of the call.
They couldn't hear the guys in Afghanistan.
They could only hear what the people on the other side of the call were saying.
This was this major detriment.
And so, you know, it sounds like making cheap excuses, but essentially all these guys might as well be a bunch of deputy sheriffs, right?
Like, there's no reason to think that they would be talented or intelligent or caring or have anything but the most superficial kind of knowledge about what's going on or why it should matter and why they don't have a profit and loss motive.
In fact, the more they fail, the better they do, as you just pointed out.
And so, you know, it sounds like really the default would be, of course, they fail.
It would be a miracle if they scored a touchdown on something like this.
And I'll give you another example, too.
When I was in Pakistan, I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, and I was working very closely with the FBI, obviously, because 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation.
And finally, the president had ordered us to work together.
So we decided to we decided to raid the Taliban embassy.
The Taliban still had an embassy.
It was in Peshawar, Pakistan, not in Islamabad.
And we drove up there with a small team of guys.
There were six of us.
And we knew that the Taliban would lock the door around five o'clock and they would just go home.
So we waited until sunset.
We picked the lock.
We went in and we stole literally everything.
We stole all of their files, the filing cabinets.
We stole their computers.
We stole everything.
We packed it literally to the ceiling of two vans that we requisitioned from the American embassy.
And then the rest of the night, we just drove it all back to Islamabad.
So we unloaded it all into the into the embassy.
We put it in the hallway where the FBI offices were located.
And then I went home, not home, but back to my guest house to get a couple of hours of sleep.
Finally, I go back into the embassy late morning and one of the FBI agents comes up to me and he says, hey, I think we've got a problem.
I said, yeah, what kind of a problem?
He says, wait till you see what we confiscated in some of their hard copy files.
You got to come down and take a look at this.
I go down there.
And in one of the files we had stolen, it was a collection of telephone bills.
And in Pakistan, for whatever reason, the phone bills are written in English, right?
Not in Urdu or Pashto or any of those other languages.
They're all in English.
And what these bills showed was that there were hundreds of telephone calls from the Taliban embassy in Peshawar to numbers all over the United States.
Buffalo, New York, Kansas City, Atlanta, Georgia, Colorado, California, hundreds and hundreds of calls.
So I send a cable to CIA headquarters, to the counterterrorism center.
And I said, be advised, this is what we found.
I documented the calls.
And I said, you know, we're deeply troubled by this.
I get a cable back a couple of hours later saying, good catch.
Give it all to the FBI.
Give the originals to the FBI copies to us and copies to the Pakistanis.
Because this was still an open criminal investigation.
So I did that.
I gave all the originals to the FBI.
The FBI agent I was dealing with boxed it up and sent it back to Washington.
OK.
Six months later, I come back to headquarters.
I transition into a new job.
I happen to be at the mall one day with my wife just walking around the mall.
I run into this FBI agent.
I said, hey, whatever happened to those numbers that we found in the Taliban embassy?
And he said, you know, I'm embarrassed to even tell you.
They never even opened the box.
The box was sitting in this office for months.
And then they just sent it out to a storage facility in Greenbelt, Maryland.
And I said, you know, that that may have been the smoking gun for 9-11.
He said, I know, man.
He said, I I screamed until I couldn't scream anymore.
Nobody would pay any attention to me.
Another year passes and I run into the guy who was the head FBI agent in Pakistan.
He had transferred back to the United States.
And I asked him the same question.
Whatever happened to those telephone numbers that we confiscated?
And he said, buddy, have you ever seen the movie Raiders?
Harrison Ford.
Yeah.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I said, oh, come on now.
He said, yeah, it's like the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
They put it on a shelf in in some storage facility out in Maryland and nobody ever saw it again.
And we still don't know what was in those phone bills.
Yeah.
And, you know, and this goes back to the thing, the overall thing about CIA and FBI, where the FBI is trying to prosecute these guys.
And so everything that they get, they lock up behind a grand jury.
Yes.
And so then the CIA can't have it.
But the CIA presumably is in the middle of giving Bill Clinton 10 different chances to kill Osama bin Laden.
They need they're not trying to arrest and prosecute the guy.
They're trying to have him dead.
There's a huge conflict there.
I don't know if you've ever seen this, but I want to go ahead and play it just because in a dark way, it's kind of hilarious.
And in the aftermath of all of this.
But this is a very short clip of Michael Shoyer testifying before Congress under oath about his true feelings for John O'Neill, the head of FBI counterterrorism.
I think I also said that the only thing good thing that happened to America on 11 September was that the building fell on him, sir.
So there you go.
The only good thing that happened on September 11th was the building fell on John O'Neill, who is the new head of security at the World Trade Center.
I tell you, there was not a more unpopular person in CIA headquarters than John O'Neill.
I remember I remember hearing on September 11th that that he had died.
And I remember a lot of people just kind of shrugging their shoulders.
Man, that's really something else.
That whole story, which, you know, part of his story.
Well, this comes from front line.
So who knows what kind of propaganda.
But in their special about John O'Neill, they talked about how he got Kobar Towers right and that he tried to tell Louis Freeh.
It was Al Qaeda that did this, the Bin Ladenites that did this, while the Saudis were trying very hard to convince Louis Freeh and the rest of the Americans.
It was John Brennan at the time that it was Iran and Iranian backed Saudi Hezbollah.
What did it for apparently no reason at all?
Yes.
Yeah.
Absolutely right.
And now Shoyer was good on that one, too.
He said he agreed that it was Bin Laden and not Hezbollah, the Saudi Hezbollah that did that.
Yes.
It never made sense to me that Saudi Hezbollah was responsible for that.
I was there at the time.
The the explosion from Kobar Towers shattered all the windows in the front of my house.
I thought my house was under attack.
Yeah, it was a massive, massive bomb.
And and so it never made any sense to me that it was Saudi Hezbollah because they didn't have those kinds of explosives.
You know, the the the pit that the bomb made in the ground was thirty five feet deep.
It was so deep that water from the Persian Gulf was seeping into it.
And Hezbollah just didn't have that kind of firepower.
But Al Qaeda sure did.
And the motive.
And, of course, Bin Laden himself took credit for the attack, which they ignored.
Yeah, you never heard it.
You never heard anything about that, but he did indeed take credit for it.
Yeah.
And Gareth Porter, by the way, your co-author, has done probably the best work on that two or three articles on the Kobar Towers there on that attack.
But, you know, the secretary of defense, Perry, at the time also said it was Bin Laden that did it.
But Louis Freeh was determined, the head of the FBI, was determined to go along with the Saudis and blame it on Iran.
Indeed.
Yeah.
And, you know, by the way, I don't know about the counterfactual.
Maybe it wouldn't have made that much difference.
But what if it had been very clear that it was right wing, radical, religious nuts in Saudi Arabia who did it and their choice of target was explicit and clear?
They were killing American airmen who were based in Saudi so that they could regularly bomb Iraq and enforce the blockade against Iraq.
Now, once you introduce Iran into the story, now you just have mud.
Why would Iran want to blow up the Kobar Towers?
It makes no sense.
And so the story just kind of evaporated.
But what if they had told the truth and they had taken the death of those 19 airmen as all the September 11th you need to understand that these people want our troops to hell off of their holy peninsula?
And actually, there was an earlier incident in 1995.
I just happened to be in Saudi Arabia when this happened, too.
This was the attack on OPM saying the Saudi National Guard.
It was a U.S. base where we trained the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh.
And the Saudis arrested a whole cell of people.
I don't remember what it was, a half a dozen, a dozen, all Saudi nationals.
They beat confessions out of them.
Those confessions were televised and then they beheaded all of them.
And I remember that the official response from us was like, OK, well, the Saudis got them.
They beheaded them.
They're not going to be a problem for us anymore.
But that was al Qaeda.
It was this group that we just had never heard of.
We had heard of this guy, Osama bin Laden, and we knew that he was a bad guy and he was dangerous.
The word al Qaeda, the base, it meant nothing to us in 1995, but we could have and should have acted then.
And we didn't.
Yeah.
Well, never even mind, you know, and it depends on exactly how you want to categorize it.
But I think it's fair to say that the New York cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad was essentially, you know, they were already merging Islamic Jihad with bin Laden's group at that time.
And for the very same cited reasons, they had killed Rabbi Kahane in 1990 and had tried to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.
Oh, there was a failed attack at a hotel, I guess, the Radisson or something in Aden in Yemen in 1992.
That was the first time that at least the FBI had connected bin Laden's name to these attacks.
And then I'm probably skipping a couple, the National Guard and Khobar Towers and the Africa embassies, of course.
Right.
And all that.
So, you know, in fact, go back to the first World Trade Center bombing.
If they'd only parked that truck a few feet to the right or the left or whichever it was near that retaining wall, then they very well could have succeeded in knocking one tower over into the other, which would have, you know, destroyed them both instantaneously and probably killed 50,000 people a month and a week into the Bill Clinton administration.
That's right.
The FBI, the ATF and the FBI started their terror war against the Branch Davidians the next day seemed to distract them a little bit from the fact that somebody just launched an attempted murder on 50,000 people in New York.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
They kind of just let that slide.
Right.
It was just a thing that happened.
Yeah.
Six people died.
No big deal.
But man, only by the hairs of your chinny chin chin.
There's a famous story that once Ramzi Ahmed Youssef was was arrested for the first bombing of the World Trade Center, he was under arrest and he was on a on an FBI jet with John O'Neill.
They were taking him to a prison.
And as they flew past the World Trade Center, O'Neill said to him, it's still standing.
And Ramzi Ahmed Youssef responded, it wouldn't be if I had had another five thousand dollars.
And, you know, we should have listened back then.
And we didn't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK, you guys, that is John Kiriakou, the Reluctant Spy.
Great book.
My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Doing Time Like a Spy.
And of course, the latest with the great Gareth Porter, the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis from CIA coup to the brink of war.
Thank you again, John.
Thanks.
It's always a pleasure.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
