#2392 - John Kiriakou

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in.

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
So you were saying you replaced Mike Baker?

**John Kiriakou** (0:14)
Yeah, Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer. He was, he doesn't really talk about his work a lot. Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal. I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens. Athens was a tough place. At the time, the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.

**Joe Rogan** (0:42)
Why?

**John Kiriakou** (0:43)
There, it was a combination of two things. There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. One was called Revolutionary Organization, 17 November. They had killed the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, just bad guys all around. The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. Then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLP GC, the DFLP. Everybody was there because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreou at the time, and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone.

**Joe Rogan** (1:27)
Oh boy.

**John Kiriakou** (1:28)
Yeah. But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal, so it was every man for himself.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:34)
Wow.

**Joe Rogan** (1:35)
Your story is pretty nuts, man. And your story of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was, what they were doing, what you reported on was completely illegal, and you were completely honest about it. And it was essentially about the US torture program.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:56)
Right.

**Joe Rogan** (1:57)
Tell us how this all started. Like, how long had you been involved in the CIA?

**John Kiriakou** (2:03)
Oh, by then I had been in the CIA.
Well, by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counter-terrorism operations after 9-11. I had been in the CIA almost 13 years, and I was responsible for all counter-terrorism operations in the country. Al Qaeda was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them. And so my job was to find them and grab them and then just hold them or send them to trial was the original idea. And we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right? Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri. We had killed Muhammad Atif. He was the head of what they called Military Affairs for Al Qaeda. We killed him at Tora Bora. But then there was Abu Zubaydah. And then there was this unknown person that we later learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So we were looking for any of these four or five people. And then there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole bombing. So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah. And we captured him. It took us six weeks to track him down. And we were close a couple of times, close where we would bust down the door. And there's like an uneaten, like half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning. And sometimes we were a day or two behind him. But he knew we were looking. And he knew we were close. So we finally got him. And then the question is, what do you want to do with him? And they told me, hang on to him. We're going to send out a plane. And we'll take it from there. So they did. And I wasn't cleared to know what they were going to do with him. Just like the guys on the plane weren't cleared to know who it was we had captured and why they were taking this guy, where they were taking him.

**Joe Rogan** (4:08)
But is that all just need to know?

**John Kiriakou** (4:11)
Yeah, it's all need to know. In fact, when I got on the plane, three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him on the plane. We had to stand him up and maneuver him on to the plane. Then we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and tied him down. And one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on. And he says, John, and I said, who are you? And he lifts up his mask and he's an old boss of mine. And I said, hey, what are you doing here? He said, oh, I came to take your prisoner. I said, where are you taking him? And he said, I can't tell you, you don't have a need to know. I said, no, that's cool. He said, who is he anyway? I said, oh dude, I'm sorry, you don't have a need to know. He says, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, safe travels. And then, you know, your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and get his family story. Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy and it's none of my business where he's going. And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria and one of the senior guys from the Counterterrorism Center came up to me, very casually, and he said, oh hey, I'm glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? And I had never heard that term before. This is May of 2002 I said, enhanced interrogation techniques, what's that mean? And he goes, we're going to start getting rough with these guys. Like that. I said, what's that mean? So he describes these 10 techniques. And I said, I don't know, man, that sounds like a torture program. And he said, it's not a torture program. We got it cleared by the Justice Department and the president signed it. He says, think about it. I said, yeah, give me an hour. I need an hour to think about it. I walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor. And there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East, knocked on his door, no appointment or anything. And I said, hey, I need some advice. I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think of that? And he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade. He said, this is a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program and torture is a slippery slope. He said, you know how these guys are. Somebody's going to be a cowboy. They're going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation. Then there's going to be a justice department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. I went back downstairs. I said, listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this. I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it. The funny thing is I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in al-Qaeda, and I got passed over for promotion. And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training. The head of the Counterterrorism Center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.