Transcription
I'll never forget his words. He said, "Something terrible is going to happen. We're hearing Camp Commanders on the phone with their students and they're crying and saying, 'I'll see you in paradise.'" And he said, "I'm begging you, "if you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us."
I was recruited by the CIA beginning in the late 1980s, but in a very odd way that is no longer legal. I was in graduate school at George Washington University in Washington DC and I was taking a class called the Psychology of Leadership that was taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Gerald Post. Dr. Post gave us an assignment one day where we had to shadow our bosses and write a psychological evaluation of our bosses. And I was shadowing my boss and he was a very difficult, mean, unpleasant, strong, brutish kind of person. And I went back to my apartment and I wrote my paper and I said that he was, a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. I gave Dr. Post the paper, and a week later he gives it back to me and he gave me an A, and underneath the A, he wrote, please see me after class." So I went to see him and I said, "Dr. Post, you wanted to see me?" He said, "Come to my office." We went downstairs in the building into his little academic's office. He closed the door and he said, "Look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer, undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit in. Do you wanna be a CIA officer?" And I said, "Yes." And so he made some calls. It was up to me to pass all the tests and there were a lot of tests, but that's how I got into the CIA.
[Erin, producer] And I guess when you first joined the CIA, what was the global political landscape like and what was the US' stance with their foreign policy?
When I joined the CIA, the Soviet Union was literally in the process of collapsing. And so all eyes were on Eastern Europe. My expertise was in the Middle East. I had a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. I had studied Islamic theology with one of the leading Muslim scholars in the West. And my master's degree was focused in foreign policy analysis. So, I was very specific about the Middle East. And so I was assigned to Iraq and I immediately became Saddam Hussein's classified biographer in the intelligence community. So while the Soviet Union is falling apart and those analysts are becoming big stars, I focused on Iraq. And then much to my shock and the world's shock, nine months later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and overthrew the Kuwaiti Royal family and seized Kuwait's oil fields. This was a naked act of aggression and war. And so, I walked in that morning, I got up early because we knew that the invasion was coming. We predicted 30 days before that Saddam would invade Kuwait. But, I got into the office early and my boss sort of intercepted me and said, "Don't take your jacket off, "we're going to the White House." And I had never been to the White House before. So we got in a car, we drove to the White House, and we were escorted into the Oval Office. And keep in mind, I was 25 years old at the time, and you walk into the Oval Office and here's the President, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the CIA Director, my boss and me. And the mood is very heavy. So everybody sits down and the President says, "Well, now what do we do?" And then everybody turns and looks at me, and it took me a second to get my bearings. And I said, "Well, the Kuwaiti government's been overthrown. The Iraqi government announced this morning that they had installed Ahmad Al-Khatib as the occupation governor of Kuwait." I said, "Unfortunately, we happen to know a lot about Ahmad Al-Khatib. He got a medical degree at the American University of Beirut, and his college roommate was George Habash. And together they created the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." And the Vice President says, "Jesus Christ!" And I thought, "Wow, this is bad." We finished the briefing, got up and walked out, and two things happened. My boss said to me, "There's something you need to understand." He said, "I'm not sure that you're appreciating the importance of what's happening. "It's not unusual for a country that we cover to go to war. It's highly unusual for a country that we cover to go to war with us." And then later that afternoon, Margaret Thatcher, who at the time was the British Prime Minister, called the President, it was George H.W. Bush, and famously told him, these were her words, "Now's not the time to go wobbly, George." And that call was like a wake up call for George H.W. Bush. And so, we sent the largest army deployed since the end of the Vietnam War. We invaded Kuwait, we liberated it, and then, the rest is history.
[Erin] You were then stationed in the Middle East. What was your role out there?
I served first in Saudi Arabia, then in Kuwait, and then I went back to headquarters for a while and decided that I so loved serving overseas, that I wanted to do it on a longer term basis. So I applied for, what's called a rotation at the State Department. And I mean, this was an honest to God State Department job where I left the CIA and I went to the State Department. I was sworn in as a foreign service officer, and I became the economic officer at the American Embassy in Bahrain for two years, and then back to headquarters to work on Iraq again. But, I did get bored after seven and a half years of Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, every single day, Iraq. And so I made a very unusual transition from intelligence to operations and specifically to counter-terrorist operations.
[Erin] And what does that mean?
So as an analyst, your job is to sit in a cubicle, read all source intelligence that's coming in from all over the world, think the big thoughts, write papers that probably nobody will ever read. Once or twice a week, you write something for the President if it's important enough to merit his attention and then you go home at the end of the day. Counter-terrorism operations was what you see in the movies. I went straight into weapons. And then after weapons, I went into explosives. After explosives, I went into counter-terrorist driving and then advanced counter-terrorist driving, which was out in the desert out west. And then you learn how to, spot, assess, develop, and recruit spies to steal secrets.
[Erin] And what year was this?
That was 1997.
[Erin] And was there any other time in these years that you were questioning the ethics of the Agency and the work you were doing?
No, I didn't question the ethics of the Agency at the time for a very specific reason. When Bill Clinton was elected President, he issued an order, that the CIA had to what they called cull their recruited assets. Anybody who had what the White House described as a human rights problem was to be fired, right? So we didn't wanna do business anymore in the 1990s with death squad leaders or assassins. And Clinton was serious about that. And I remember saying to a colleague at the time, I can't believe they're actually serious about human rights. This is really a very pleasant surprise for me. But Bill Clinton wasn't President forever, he was only President for eight years. And then 9/11 happened, and literally everything changed in the blink of an eye.
[Erin] So in 2001, where were you working? What was your role at that time?
In 2001, I had just returned from my first overseas operational tour in Athens. And I was working in headquarters, and my job was to train Middle Eastern Intelligence Services in how to carry out counter-terrorism operations. And so I had to go to the White House on the morning of September 11th, 2001, with the Director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Centre, Ambassador Cofer Black. And I walked over to his office to tell him that our car was ready to take us to the White House. And when I got there, his secretary had a small TV on her desk, because you couldn't watch TV on your computers back then. And the news was on, and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was burning. And I said, "What happened to the World Trade Center?" She said, "A plane had flown into it." And I said, "Ah, well, you know, that happened once before. In 1932, a plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really raining and very foggy that day. It's so clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?" And as soon as I said it, the second plane hit and she turned to me and she said, "Did you see that? Or did I imagine it?" And I ran back to my office and I said, "Guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center, I think we're under attack." And then everybody ran up to the director's office, TVs all over the place, and we're all just standing there. And then the third plane hits the Pentagon. There was an officer from the CIA police force, we have our own internal police force. And he came in and he said, "Everybody evacuate right now. Everybody evacuate." Nobody budged. We just stood there. And then finally somebody shouted behind me, somebody shouted, "Will someone please lead?" And Cofer said, "Oh yeah. "You, go to the Director's office and tell him this. You, go to security and tell him that. You, go up to operations." And so everybody started to scramble. The rest of us are just standing there. And then finally, a guy said to me, a guy I was standing next to, he said, "There's still a plane in the air, and I think we should probably assume that it's coming here." So my girlfriend, who later became my wife, she was also a senior CIA officer, she met me at my apartment, and we went to the roof and we watched the Pentagon burn for an hour. And then she said, "We should try to donate blood." So we went, there were blood mobiles all over the place, but the lines were so long, they told us it'll be 24 hours before they could clear the line. And I said to her, "This is ridiculous. We have to go back to work." So I walked back to my car, drove across the grassy median, drove back to the CIA, and then I didn't leave for four days. I just balled up my jacket and I slept under my desk.
[Erin] And I guess from that point, it changed everything?
It changed literally everything. I remember saying to a colleague, "Do they realise what they've done? I mean, I get that this group wants to strike a blow to US hegemony and the empire, I get it. But do they know nothing from history? Do they not know that our response is gonna be a thousand times what they did to us?" And certainly, you know, we spent altogether in the so-called War on Terror. We spent $23 trillion and we killed as many as 2 million people. Did they not see that coming? Osama Bin Laden said later, that he wanted to damage the US economy. He failed. And he was responsible then for, you know, the deaths of an untold number of people. What did he think he was really going to accomplish? So it was a failure all around and changed the world permanently.
[Erin] And who was Osama Bin Laden and what was his intention?
The Bin Laden family is a very honourable, very highly respected family. Dozens of them live permanently in the United States. They have billions and billions of dollars, and they have made that money through Bin Laden Industries. So Osama Bin Laden, who had vacationed as a teenager in the United States and all over Western Europe and was very Americanised, self-radicalised after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He went to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the Soviets. He was the only member of his family that self-radicalised, everybody else, you know, lived a good life, in France, in the UK and in the United States. And so, he came up on our radar as somebody who was potentially dangerous. I sat next to a guy when I first got hired, and in the summer of 1990, he wrote a paper saying that he believed Osama Laden was the most dangerous man in the world. And I remember saying, "Who?" I'd never heard of this guy. And he said, "Buddy, this is one bad guy. Watch and see, watch and see." Well, five years later, I'm living in Bahrain, I'm at lunch in the embassy cafeteria and the TV is on. And here there's a terrorist attack in Dhahran Saudi Arabia at a facility called OPM-SANG. This was a joint facility of the US military and the Saudi Arabian National Guard and terrorists had gotten onto the base and had killed something like five people. And I think they were all third country nationals. I think they were Indians. So, this group called Al-Qaeda, took responsibility for this attack. Nobody had ever heard of Al-Qaeda. So, the Saudis did what the Saudis do, and they rounded up a dozen and a half people. They all confessed using the identical language on national TV, and they were all immediately beheaded. Some of them may have had something to do with the attack, some of them probably didn't have anything to do with the attack, but certainly the masterminds of this attack got away. Bin Laden being the one, then he went to Afghanistan. Well, in Afghanistan, with the fall of the pro-Soviet Communist government and the advent of a Taliban government, he was free to do anything he wanted. And so he ordered that his underlings create two training camps in southern Afghanistan, one in Kandahar Province, and one in Helmand Province. By 2001, Al-Qaeda had carried out several large-scale attacks, and we said, "Wow, we've gotta get on the stick and we have to find this guy, and we have to stop him." So the FBI began investigating so that he could be charged with a crime. The CIA began looking for him. We knew that he was somewhere in Afghanistan, probably in Kandahar, but it was impossible to really find him. And then on July the sixth, 2001, I was at CIA headquarters and I was entertaining a delegation from a Middle Eastern intelligence service. We did this literally every single day. I had arranged a briefing on Al-Qaeda with a young, like 23-year-old analyst. So I said, "Well, we're gonna start off today with a briefing on Al-Qaeda." The door opens and Ambassador Black walks in with the Chief of Operations for the Osama Bin Laden group. And I was so shocked. I stood up and I said, "Oh!" I said, "Gentlemen, this is Ambassador Cofer Black. He's the CIA's Director of counter-terrorism, and this is the Director of Operations for our Osama Bin Laden group." And he sat down, and I'll never forget his words, he said, "Something terrible is going to happen. We don't know when, and we don't know where, but we know it's going to be an attack on a massive scale. We're hearing code words for a huge attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey. There's gonna be a great wedding, there's gonna be a great football match. These are all code words for an attack." He said, "We're hearing Camp Commanders on the phone with their students, and they're crying and saying, 'I'll see you in paradise.'" And he said, "I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda, please help us." They were just as shocked by this briefing as I was. They didn't say anything. He got up, he shook their hands, they walked out. At the end of the day, I sent these guys back to their hotel, it was gonna be a few hours before dinner. So, I went to Cofer's office to thank him for spending the time. I said, "Cofer, I have to ask you. I'm not working on Al-Qaeda. Did you say that just for their benefit? Or were you serious?" And he said, "Oh, I was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen." And then sure enough, two months later, there it was.
[Erin] From that moment after September 11th, you were very involved in tracking down senior members of Al-Qaeda. How did that work?
Well, like everybody in the building, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan on September 12th. And I volunteered again and again and then again, four times. And they kept putting me off. Well, I was one of only 16 fluent Arabic speakers at the CIA at the time. I had worked years earlier for the Deputy Director of the Counter-Terrorism Centre. So, I considered him to be a friend, I went into his office and I made a bold and completely empty threat. And I said, "If you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am going straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I'm not looking back." And he says, "Take it easy. Take it easy. Can you go to Pakistan?" And I said, "Yes. When?" He said, "Tomorrow." I said, "Yes. What do you want me to do there?" He said, "I want you to be the Chief of Counter-terrorism Operations." I said, "Fine." And so I left the next day. I arrived in Islamabad at four o'clock in the morning, and then the driver said, "I'll pick you up at seven to take you in the office." And I said, "Oh my God, please, I can't sleep on planes. I haven't slept since I left Washington. It's been 24 hours. Let me have another hour pick me up at eight." So he picked me up at eight, I was like a zombie. And I went in and introduced myself to the chief and I said, "I'm your new Chief of Counter-terrorism." And he said, "Okay, have a seat." So he said, "Here's what I want you to do today. "I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure to take down a terrorist safehouse." And I said, "Okay." So I went back to my office and I sat with a legal pad and a pen, and I thought, "Okay, if I were going to take down a terrorist safe house, how would I do that?" And then I thought, "Hmm, I would want it to be dark. I wouldn't want anybody to see me." So I wrote, 0200 at the top of the paper. And then I thought, "I need weapons, like lots of weapons." I bought guns, ammunition, night vision goggles, battering rams, bulletproof vests, knives, walkie talkies from scratch, we started this thing. And I thought, "Well, 9/11 is an open criminal investigation, so I have to invite the FBI. "And this is Pakistan, it is their country, after all. So I have to invite the Pakistanis." So I wrote, you know, joint team, CIA, FBI, ISI with a list of weapons. I ordered the weapons, they were there, in days. So a week later we did our first test raid, we caught two Al-Qaeda fighters. Another few days later, we caught an actual mid-level guy from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, it worked. And then finally, six weeks later, we get word from a sister agency in the Washington suburbs that Abu Zubaydah, who we believed at the time was the number three in Al-Qaeda, was somewhere in Pakistan and we had to catch him. That was all we knew, he was somewhere in Pakistan. And I said, in our morning meeting, I said, "This country is the size of Texas. It has 220 million people. And what do you mean he's in Pakistan, go catch him?" But we came up with a plan and we caught him. He was shot three times and severely wounded. So I sat with Abu Zubaydah for 56 hours after we shot him. The Pakistani doctors there saved his life, pumping blood into him as quickly as they could. It was just oozing out of him, pooling underneath the bed. He was soaked in blood, we were soaked in blood. It was like a scene out of a horror movie. But he lived. And then finally he asked me, "What's gonna happen to me?" And I said, "Honestly, I don't know, but I'm gonna give you some advice." I said, "I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. So if you do one thing, it's that you have to cooperate." And he said, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate." Finally, a CIA jet flew in and three FBI agents, and I picked up his gurney and carried him out to the plane. He was crying. He asked if I would hold his hand, which I did. We had to manoeuvre him, we had to stand him up on the gurney, he was strapped down to manoeuvre him onto the plane, we laid him on the luggage rack at the back of the plane and tied him down. And he squeezed my hand and I said, "Remember, you have to cooperate." And then he flew off. Well, a few weeks later, I flew back to headquarters and I was in the cafeteria one day just standing in the sandwich line, and a senior officer walked up to me and said, very casually, "Hey, I'm so glad I ran into you. Do you wanna be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" And I had never heard that term before. This was May of 2002. I said, "What's that mean?" And he says, "We're gonna start getting rough with these guys." And I said, "Well, what does that mean?" And he described these 10 techniques. And I said, "That sounds like a torture programme." And he said, "It's not torture. The Justice Department approved it, and the President signed it. We're gonna start soon. You wanna be in?" And I said, "Ah, let me think about it." I consulted, a very senior officer, went back downstairs, and I said, "This is a torture programme. I have an ethical and moral problem with it. I think it's illegal and I'm not interested." Well, of the 14 people that they approached, I was the only one who said no. And on August the second, 2002 CIA began to torture Abu Zubaydah. And they tortured him mercilessly.
[Erin] And what method of torture were they?
Well, they were supposed to start off with the least dangerous and least offensive technique, which was called the attention grab, where you grab him by the shirt and give him a shake and say, "Answer my questions." And it gets gradually worse from there. But they didn't do that. They started with the worst technique, waterboarding. They strapped him down to a board, his feet were elevated compared to his head. They put some material cloth around his face and in his mouth, and then started pouring water on his face. They did this 87 times and he actually drowned. At one point his heart stopped, and then they revived him just so that they could torture him more.
[Erin] Was Abu Zubaydah the first?
Abu Zubaydah was the first, he was the test case. And in a very rapid succession, we caught some of the most important leaders of Al-Qaeda, we caught Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who was the mastermind of the 911 attacks. He was waterboarded a hundred... Abu Zubaydah was 83 times up. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 187 times. We used other techniques that I even believed were worse than waterboarding. We used one called the cold cell where we stripped the prisoner naked and then chain him to an eyebolt in the ceiling so he can't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way. And we chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour, a CIA officer throws a bucket of ice water on him. We murdered two prisoners with that technique. They died of hypothermia, and then were just buried there on the grounds, unmarked. There was another technique called, sleep deprivation, right? We all know what sleep deprivation is, but what they did in this case was they strip you naked, chain you to that eye bolt in the ceiling again, and then have these industrial strength lights on you and loud acid rock, death metal music 24 hours a day. We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven. And they begin to die at day nine. Your organs shut down. The CIA kept people awake as long as 12 days, and people did lose their minds. So it just got worse and worse and worse and I kept waiting for somebody to say something.
[Erin] These techniques were successful in gathering intelligence?
Well, see, that's the thing, is all of these techniques were unsuccessful in gathering intelligence. The intelligence that we gathered successfully was intelligence gathered by the FBI in the person of Ali Soufan, who was an FBI agent, who used the tried and true FBI technique of establishing a rapport with a prisoner, a relationship. You offer him a cup of tea, a cigarette, an orange, a piece of paper to write a letter to his mother. You don't beat him and torture him and kill him. And so under Ali's, you know, guidance Abu Zubaydah gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives. And the CIA would start torturing him, and he would go completely silent. So it was not just wrong ethically and legally, but it didn't work. If anything, it just made the situation worse.
[Erin] What was the turning point that made you decide to go public about this torture programme?
This programme was so clearly wrong to me that I anticipated someone going public and no one went public. Well, I resigned from the CIA, effective the spring of 2005 and went into the private sector. In December of 2007, I got a call from a reporter from ABC News, which is one of the major networks in the United States, the American Broadcasting Corporation. And this journalist said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said, that was absolutely not true. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. And he said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." I didn't know that was a reporter's trick. I'd never spoken to a reporter before. I said, "Yeah, I'll think about it." Well, two days later, President Bush gives a press conference in which he looks in the camera and he says, "We do not torture." Like that. And I said to my wife, "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people in the eye, and he's lying." And then two days later, he was walking to the helicopter to fly to Camp David and reporters always shout questions at the President when he is walking in helicopter. And usually he just goes like this, like he can't hear and waves, they can always hear. So a reporter shouts a question about torture, and he turns and he says, "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer." And I said to my wife, "Brian Ross has sources at the White House, and they're gonna try to pin this on me." Because they were angry that I was the only one that declined. So I called the reporter Brian Ross, and I said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided in the days leading up to it, that I was simply going to tell the truth. No matter what he asked me, I was just gonna tell the truth. And that's what I did.
[Erin] And what truth was that?
The truth was the CIA was torturing its prisoners, torture was official US government policy, it was not the result of a rogue. And the policy had been personally approved by the President. So the FBI began investigating me, at the CIA's behest. They investigated me for an entire year from December of 2007 to December of 2008. And they determined that I had not committed a crime. That torture was illegal and it is illegal to classify an illegality. And so they said, "Nope, you're free to go." So my wife and I actually went out that night to celebrate. Three weeks later, Barack Obama became President, and he named John Brennan as the Deputy National Security Advisor for counter-terrorism, John and I always hated each other. And I didn't know, that John asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. So for the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were intercepted, and teams of FBI agents followed me everywhere I went. Finally, in January of 2012, I was arrested and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. Espionage can be a death penalty offence. And so, I had to fight. I was confident in my heart that I had done nothing wrong. The espionage charges were thrown out, I hadn't committed espionage. But I had five children at home and I had gone bankrupt because of the legal fees. I actually still owe my attorneys $1,150,000 that they'll never see. I'll never have that money to pay them. And so the Justice Department does what it does, and they offered me a deal. I was facing 45 years, they offered me 23 months, and I actually turned it down. And my lead attorney got right in my face and he said, "You know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice, it's about mitigating damage. Take the deal!" Well, I had done some research and I found a study by ProPublica that found that the government wins 98.2% of its cases. And he said, "Do you really wanna roll the dice?" So I took the deal.
[Erin] And you served those 23 months?
I served every single day of those 23 months, every day. Well, first of all, I should say, I have zero regrets. Somebody had to say something. Zero regrets because, I wanted to be able to sleep at night. I wanted my children to be proud of me. And I didn't want future generations to say, "You know, that Kiriakou guy, he could have stopped this and he didn't. What kind of person is that?" I wanted to be on the right side of this. I knew what was right and wrong. It was clear, it was obvious. There were a lot of bad guys, in very senior important roles at the CIA, I had to counter that. And you know, I said also that, these CIA people, if they thought that prison was going to cow me, it was going to silence me, they didn't know me at all. So in my view, I won.
[Erin] And you think it's had an impact on the way the CIA operates now?
It has absolutely, definitely had an impact. In fact, when Gina Haspel became the CIA director during the first Trump administration, we used to call her Bloody Gina, because she was the godmother of the torture programme. In her confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, she said that the torture programme was wrong and that she wished she had nothing to do with it. And I said, "I call that a victory."
[Erin] Any intelligence officer or anyone that kind of witnesses wrongdoing and they want to speak out, what advice would you give to someone?
You have to go with your conscience. The CIA likes for its officers to believe that everything in life is a shade of grey. And that's just simply not true. Some things in life are black and white, right and wrong, and deep down we know what's right and what's wrong. So trust yourself. Trust your judgement, even if you know there's going to be fallout. We knew that we were being hunted by the Special Branch Secret Police, and also by MI5. We were pretty high level targets at that point. So we knew the extent of the resources they could use against us. We knew that the flat was probably bugged, electronic communications were bugged. Computers, phones, that sort of thing. We knew there was a possibility we might be followed around on the streets. And we also knew there was a possibility that some of our friends would be recruited to report back.