The CIA, from its inception, carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including of US citizens, many of which were exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House. Congress attempted to enact laws to curb the widespread criminal activity by the CIA. Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were created, and after the Iran-Contra scandal a statutory Inspector General at the CIA was appointed. But this oversight has largely collapsed following the attacks of 9/11 and the so-called war on terror. The activities of the CIA have once again reverted to the shadows. The CIA, at the same time, has transformed itself into a paramilitary organization, with its own armed units and drone program. The US allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress.
Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou discuss the CIA, how it has evolved, how it sees its mission, what it does, how it works, and the effects of its clandestine operations around the globe.
John Kiriakou worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, first as an analyst, and later as a counterterrorism operations officer overseas in Bahrain, Athens, and Pakistan, where he was the CIA’s chief of counterterrorist operations. He led a series of military raids on Al Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan, capturing dozens of suspects, including the 2002 raid that captured Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda. He was also the first CIA officer to publicly confirm that the CIA waterboarded prisoners, and that such an action was torture. He also confirmed that torture was an official US government policy, rather than wrongdoing by a few rogue agents. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration and was sent to prison for two and a half years.
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
Welcome to The Chris Hedges Report. The CIA from its inception carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including of US citizens, many of which were exposed in 1975 by the church committee and the Senate and the pike committee in the house. Congress attempted to enact laws to curb the widespread criminal activity by the CIA. Senate and house intelligence oversight committees were created and after the Iran Contra scandal, a statutory inspector general at the CIA was appointed. But this oversight largely collapsed following the attacks of 9/11 and the so-called war on terror. The activities of the CIA of once again reverted to the shadows. The CIA at the same time has transformed itself into a paramilitary organization with its own armed units and drone program. The US allocates a secret black budget of about 50 billion dollars a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the national security agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress.
John Kiriakou worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004 first as an analyst and later as a counterterrorism operations officer overseas in Bahrain, Athens, and Pakistan, where he was the CIA’s chief of counter-terrorist operations. He led a series of military raids on Al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan, capturing dozens of suspects, including the 2002 raid that captured Abu Z beta, then thought to be the third ranking member of Al-Qaeda. He was also the first CIA officer to publicly confirm that the CIA water boarded prisoners and that such an action was torture. He confirmed that torture was an official US government policy rather than wrongdoing by a few rogue agents. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted under the espionage act by the Obama administration and was sent to prison for two and a half years.
Joining me to discuss the CIA, how it has evolved, how it sees its mission, what it does, how it works and the effects of its clandestine operations around the globe is John Kiriakou. So John, in theory, the CIA is subject to oversight by Congress and the inspector general throughout the intelligence community. But this oversight has been weakened almost to the point of non-existence. And I wondered if you could talk about the nature of the oversight and the consequences of the lack of oversight.
John Kiriakou:
Sure, Chris. First of all, thanks for having me. You’re right about oversight. Oversight was a very serious thing beginning in 1975, and it was certainly serious through the Reagan administration into the end of the 1980s. There were members of the Senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on intelligence that took their oversight duties very, very seriously. And that began to weaken in the nineties. And then it changed utterly when the 9/11 attacks took place. Now we’ve got these oversight committees that really act as little more than cheerleaders for the CIA. It’s up to these members of Congress to tell the CIA, “No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t have a torture program or an illegal rendition program or an archipelago of secret prisons around the world. You can’t transform yourself without congressional approval into a paramilitary organization. You can’t set up an assassination squad that travels around the world to just carry out hits of people whose politics you don’t like.” And we just don’t get that kind of oversight anymore.
Chris Hedges:
We had the Feinstein report and the CIA really effectively railroaded her didn’t they?
John Kiriakou:
Oh yeah, they did. You’ll recall too, that John Brennan, when he was the CIA director, as that report was being researched and written, ordered CIA officers or CIA contractors, it’s never really been clear, to hack into the Senate intelligence committee’s computer systems to see what it was that these investigators were gathering. And even though that was referred to the justice department in a crimes report, there was never any investigation and certainly never a prosecution.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I remember she was quite shaken by Feinstein by that.
John Kiriakou:
Oh yes.
Chris Hedges:
And gave a kind of very chilling press conference that basically said these people are unaccountable, if I remember correctly.
John Kiriakou:
Yeah, you’re exactly right. In fact, Diane Feinstein had a reputation as being one of the most pro CIA members of the US Senate and for her to go onto the floor of the Senate and accuse, in very plain English, the CIA director of committing a crime, a felony, was a very big deal. It was a turning point for her.
Chris Hedges:
And so what are the consequences of essentially removing this kind of oversight?
John Kiriakou:
Yeah. The consequences of removing real oversight, true oversight is you end up with a rogue organization. The nature of the CIA is to push the envelope. The nature is to see what it is that they can get away with, on the one hand. On the other hand, the nature is to try to recruit these members of the oversight committees, to make them feel like they’re one of the guys, they’re part of this secret team, they’re insiders, everybody’s working together. And that way you can get away with things that you otherwise wouldn’t get away with or wouldn’t attempt. Well, that’s not what the role of an oversight committee is supposed to be. The role of the oversight committee is to say, “No.” The role of the oversight committee is to say, “You can’t do that because it’s illegal.” And the committee just doesn’t do things like that.
I’ll give you one example. When I got home from prison, I was invited to a reception and there was a democratic Senator at this party. He was a member of the Senate intelligence committee. And he was not really happy to see me. And I was perfectly happy making him feel uncomfortable. So I walked right up to him and he said, “Hello.” And I said, “Hello, Senator.” And I knew him from when I was on the Senate foreign relations committee staff. I said, “Senator, I got to tell you I’m disappointed that I couldn’t count on your support when all of this went down.” And he got very angry and he said, “Look, it takes all my energy just to not lose my security clearance.” And man, that made it completely clear to me that they’re afraid of oversight. They’re afraid of being threatened by the CIA. They’re afraid of losing their security clearances. And so they carry out this charade where they pretend to conduct oversight and then really behind closed doors, they just do what the CIA tells them to do. That’s what it’s come down to.
Chris Hedges:
I just have to go a little off topic because I thought you might know and it’s always fascinated me why they took down Petraeus. Because it appears he was clearly taken down.
John Kiriakou:
Yeah. I’ve gone over this in my head many, many times. Petraeus was not a political figure. And I’ll tell you, there’s kind of a history at the CIA of having weak directors who used to be generals or admirals. And the way it was always told to me was you don’t want a military man in a position like that because military people have gotten where they have gotten with four shiny stars on their shoulders by saying, “Yes, sir,” for the previous 30 or 35 years. And you don’t want somebody to say yes, sir. You want somebody to say, Mr. President, let me tell you what it is we want to do and why we want to do it. Where you are telling the president what intelligence policy is going to be. And generals and admirals normally don’t do things like that. They don’t stand up to presidents. And I always wondered if that plus the fact that he was just not a political player, was what eventually did him in.
Chris Hedges:
Well, having spent a lot of time in the military, I found the IQ levels diminished the higher you went up. The CIA functions is both an intelligence gathering organization and an organization that carries out operations. And I wondered how this dual focus affects the kinds of intelligence it gathers.
John Kiriakou:
Yeah. Good question. Before 9/11, the whole purpose of operations was to gather intelligence. You implemented an operation because it was going to provide you with a new line of information because the job of a CIA officer is to recruit spies, to steal secrets. And then you pass those secrets to the analysts so that they can provide the best possible analysis to the policy makers to make the best possible policy. In a perfect world, that’s why the CIA exists. But that changed after 9/11. So you’ve got a handful of analysts now whose job it is to recruit spies to steal secrets to influence policy. And then most of the director of operations to do counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, counter proliferation to go out there shooting people up or snatching people off the streets to render them to third countries.
It’s just a completely different place. You mentioned in your intro that the CIA is now a paramilitary organization. I’ve been making that complaint for many, many years. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a paramilitary organization. And so the people that the CIA is hiring now, most of us used to be hired right out of graduate school because we had advanced degrees from good schools and we spoke foreign languages, that’s really not who they’re looking for anymore. They’re looking for people who were Navy Seals, Green Berets, special operations forces, they may did a rotation to the CIA on loan from special operations command. You’re looking for people who can jump out of planes, rough it in the jungle or the desert, kill people and then exfiltrate themselves. So the CIA really has changed quite dramatically since 9/11.
Chris Hedges:
So I’m wondering if there isn’t a danger that intelligence gets distorted and contaminated to justify operations.
John Kiriakou:
Oh, very, very much so. The night that we captured Abu Z beta, that was obviously the biggest night of my career. And it was one of the most important nights of my life to tell you the truth, not just because of the excitement of capturing someone that we had hunted for six weeks. And this is going to sound kind of silly. But what I was the most excited about was in the Abu Z beta raid, we had confiscated a copy of the Al-Qaeda training manual in a safe house that was occupied by three members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Pakistani militant terrorist group. This was the very first time that we were able to tie Lashkar-e-Taiba to Al Qaeda. So analytically, this was a gigantic leap forward in our understanding of how terrorist groups worked. I was the only person who cared.
Nobody cared. All they wanted to know was who we caught and who they were with when we caught them. That was it. Now, the analysts were very, very excited because this answered so many questions. Where was Lashkar-e-Taiba getting their weapons and ammunition? Who was funding them? We always feared it was ISI. It turned out it wasn’t ISI. It turned out it was Al Qaeda. But how did they make the connection? What was the rat line between the two organizations? The analysts were fascinated by this. But in the directorate of operations, nobody cared. So there was this move away from analysis. There was a move away from understanding the enemy and the goal really was to just kill or capture and then move on to the next target.
Chris Hedges:
So the national security act 1947 that established the CIA defined its function as compiling and analyzing raw intelligence to make it useful to the president, the CIA reports to the president. It was supposed to be civilian nonpartisan free from the vested interests of the military industrial complex. Can you explain how it evolved into what’s become the executive branch’s private army?
John Kiriakou:
Oh yeah. When I first started at the CIA, I was told what you just read. Nonpartisan in all capital letters. I sat near a woman in 1995, 1996, who had a Bob Dole for president bumper sticker very discreetly in her cubicle. And not only was she ordered to take it down, but she was reprimanded for bringing politics into the office. I sat next to people for years and never had the foggiest idea if they were Democrats or Republicans or independents or whatever they were. It was never raised. It was never important because we had the mission. And I don’t mean to keep coming back to 9/11, but on the day that the attacks took place, everything changed. Everything. And so it really did become the president’s private army.
I remember executive order 12333 being written in stone. It was one of the very first things we were briefed on when we were hired into the agency that we cannot kill people. We do not and will not kill people. And we will not task others with killing people. Well, within just days of the 9/11 attacks, 12333 was rescinded. And all of a sudden we started setting up assassination squads. When I was in the CIA’s counter terrorism center, I sat, I don’t know, 20 feet away from a guy who was very friendly. He would come in and say, good morning every day. “Morning, guys.” I’d say, “Good morning, morning, Rick. How are you doing? How was your weekend? How are your kids?” And then he would disappear for a week, two weeks at a time. And we just all assumed he was going TDY, temporary duty. Like we all did. I made 25 international trips in the one year after the 9/11 attacks.
And then finally one day I said to the guy I sat next to, “What exactly does he do here? Like, I see him all the time. He’s very friendly, but I don’t really know what he does.” And my friend was kind of exasperated. He said, “John, he’s in charge of the special activities division. You get it? Special activities.” And I said, “Oh, of course.” So he would just get on a plane, go to some foreign country, kill people, get back on the plane and come home and just wait for the next assignment.
I had worked in the middle east for a little while with a contractor, an old timer, legendary figure by the name of Billy Waugh. Books have been written about Billy. He’s such a legendary figure in the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the guy had been around for decades. And then he just kind of dropped out of sight. So I ran into him in the hall about six weeks after 9/11. And I said, “Hey, Billy, haven’t seen you in ages. Where have you been?” And he looked around and he said, he whispered to me, “I’ve been in Afghanistan.” I said, “Yeah? What are you doing in Afghanistan?” And he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, “I’ve been killing people. What do you think I’ve been doing?”
And see, I had been volunteering to go to Afghanistan repeatedly. Like every few days, I’d go into the deputy director of counter terrorism, the counterterrorism center’s office saying, “I really want to go to Afghanistan. You have to send me to Afghanistan. My Arabic is fluent.” And I’m thinking, who do they have? I mean, there are only half a dozen of us that spoke Arabic. Who do they have doing these interrogations? Well, it was that conversation in the hall that made me realize they’re not interrogating anybody. They’re just killing them. So they didn’t need linguists and former analysts like me. They needed people who could pull a trigger, have zero remorse, and then go to the next target and pull the trigger there too.
Chris Hedges:
So after 9/11, I was based in Paris covering Al-Qaeda in Europe and north Africa. And I worked a lot with French intelligence. I’m only good repeating what they said. Having spent 20 years abroad, I can tell you once an intelligence service resorts to torture, its intelligence functioning has broken down. That’s what you do as a last resort. The French argued that they were the only intelligence service that had human assets inside of Al Qaeda and that the United States was completely blind, that it relied primarily on electronic eavesdropping, but had not built up the kind of human capital that the French had built up. And therefore, really didn’t know what was going on. I don’t know if that’s a critique you would agree with.
John Kiriakou:
Yes, I would agree with that utterly. I have a passage in my first book where I talk about a team of middle Eastern intelligence officers who came to headquarters, CIA headquarters on July the seventh, 2001. This was a completely normal routine visit where they come for a day, we exchange gifts, we give them a day of briefings, they get a photo op with the director, I take them to Morton’s steakhouse at the end of the day, and then we do it with somebody else the next day. So July the seventh, I set up a series of briefings. And one of the briefings for them was on Al Qaeda was supposed to be conducted by a junior analyst and much to my shock into the briefing walks, Cofer Black, later Ambassador Cofer Black, the director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, and a woman we used to call the redheaded devil. I ought not to say her name, but she was the chief of operations in the Osama bin Laden group.
And I said, “Oh, welcome. I was so surprised.” I said to these middle Easterners, “Gentlemen, this is Cofer Black. He’s the director of the counter-terrorism center.” And Cofer sat down and cut right to the chase. And he said, “Something terrible is going to happen. We don’t know when we don’t know where, but we know it’s going to be huge. We’re picking up chatter where Al Qaeda’s camp commanders are on the phone with their students and they’re crying and saying, ‘I’ll see you in paradise.’ We’re hearing code words for a major attack. There’s going to be a great soccer match. There’s going to be a huge wedding. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey.”
These are all codes for a major attack. And he said, “I beg you. If you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us.” So afterwards, at the end of the day, I sent these guys back to their hotel before the dinner and I went to Cofer’s office to thank him for taking the time. And I said, “Cofer, I’ve got to ask you,” because I wasn’t working on Al Qaeda at the time, I said, “Was that for their benefit? Or were you serious?” And he said, “Oh no, I was serious.” He said, “We don’t have any sources inside Al Qaeda. And we know that something terrible is coming.”
Chris Hedges:
I covered the war in Koslow and made first trip with members of the coast of a liberation army and then met with Wes Clark afterwards, who was the head of NATO, and he was asking me what kind of weapons they had and how many there were. And he slammed his hand down on the desk and he said, “Langley doesn’t have anybody on the ground.”
John Kiriakou:
Nope, Nope. That’s quite common. And they rely far, far too much on electronic eavesdropping. You can’t have NSA do all of your work for you. That’s not a full complement of intelligence.
Chris Hedges:
So Frank Church, this is after going through the heavily redacted CIA documents that were provided the church committee in 75. This is how he defines covert activity, quote, “A semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.” Is that accurate?
John Kiriakou:
Unfortunately, yes, that is accurate. I’ve got to give credit to Bill Clinton in this question because when Bill Clinton was elected president, you remember the 1992 election, it was all about the economy, stupid. Remember? So Bill Clinton really had very, very little interest in the CIA and in foreign policy. Foreign policy just was not his thing. And we were used to briefing the president every single day, six days a week with the president’s daily brief, George H.W Bush had been the CIA director. He had been ambassador to the UN, ambassador to China and he relished these briefings. And even Ronald Reagan, even as he became dim in the last two years of his presidency, he got the briefing six days a week. Well, Bill Clinton was briefed twice over the course of his eight year presidency.
He just was not interested. Al Gore was interested, but Clinton wasn’t. Well, the one thing that Bill Clinton did at the very start of his presidency was he initiated something called a cult. So he ordered the CIA to identify every recruited asset who had some sort of a human rights problem in his background and to fire that source, right? Throw him off the payroll, no more meetings, no more talking. We’re not dealing with human rights violators. And I remember my bosses laughing in the beginning, like this is never ever going to work. And sure enough fully one third of the CIA’s recruited assets were fired in that call. And for all those eight years of the Clinton presidency, there really was respect for human rights. It was something that nobody thought would work. It actually did work. But then, and I hate to keep repeating myself, 9/11 hit and then all the rules just went right out the window.
Chris Hedges:
So I want to talk about blow back, Afghanistan being perhaps the prime example of that 1979, when we were supporting the Mujahadeen later became the Taliban. Richard Clark argues, I’m quoting again, “The CIA used its classification rules, not only to protect its agents, but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations.” Peter Tomsen, the former ambassador to the Afghan resistance during the eighties said that quote “America’s failed policies in Afghanistan float in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work.” I was in the Balkans when the CIA was kidnapping all sorts of Mujahadeen. Many of them were from Egypt. They were sent on black flights back to Egypt. I think almost all of them were killed. And then we saw, of course, the US embassy bombings in Kenya, Tanzania in 98, that was 224 dead. The attack on the USS coal. To most Americans that came out of nowhere. To those of us who were overseas, we saw this as blowback. Can you talk about that phenomena?
John Kiriakou:
Yeah. This was truly blowback. Blowback is essentially an unintended consequence, but really what it is is the consequence of poor planning and poor execution. The CIA, one of the things that the CIA is always guilty of is poor planning. It was drilled into us as soon as we went into operations that you have to have a plan and then you have to have a plan B, C and D. And that’s great when you’re sitting in a conference room or writing it in a report, but it’s just not really the way things work in real life. And even if you do have a plan B, C and D, that’s not necessarily to say that the policy makers do and that they’re going to do something that you think is the right thing to do.
Afghanistan is probably the worst example of blowback in our modern history where we had this obsession with communism. I think most Americans don’t understand really the governments and the CIA’s obsession with communism right up until the end of communism in Europe. And so in this obsession with communism and this willingness or readiness to drive out the Soviets to drive them out of Afghanistan at all costs, we made a deal with the devil. And then when the Russians were finally driven out of Afghanistan, rather than to try to work with a new Afghan government to enhance infrastructure or agriculture or education, we just walked away. It was as simple as that. There was no plan B or the plan ended with the defeat of the Soviet union in Afghanistan.
And so here we’ve radicalized these people. We’ve pumped hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars worth of weapons and ammunition and minds and rockets, and you name it into this country and then we just abandoned them. So there should have been no surprise when they morphed into the Taliban with the help of the Pakistani government and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Like what did we think was going to happen? And then by the time 9/11 happened, it was just too late.
Chris Hedges:
Senator Daniel Patrick Monahan argued that the agency should be dismantled because as he wrote, “It produced catastrophically wrong national intelligence estimates, including of course, failing to predict the fall of the Shaw, collapsed with the Soviet union. Throughout the Reagan and Bush administration overstated the size of the Soviet economy by at least 50%. It led the government on a weapons spending spree that left us the world’s largest debtor nation.” And then of course, we had the disastrous intelligence on Iraq and non-existence of weapons of mass description. I wonder if, do we need a CIA that’s so regularly underperforms in comparison to what’s often available from scholars and journalists. And if we do, what should be done to reform the CIA?
John Kiriakou:
I feel very strongly that we do not need a CIA. I think that if we ever did need a CIA, it’s long overstay its welcome. And you look at redundancy in intelligence around the US government, too, Chris, you’ve got the state department’s bureau of intelligence and research, which does all kinds of intelligence analysis. You’ve got the defense department’s DHS defense human services. They recruit spies to steal secrets, just like the CIA does. You have NSA doing all of the electronic eavesdropping. You have DARPA developing the next generation of whatever it is that they do, it’s so secret we don’t even know what it is that they’re working on. We’ve got think tanks, most of which are funded and financed by the big defense contractors. We don’t need a CIA. And to tell you the truth, there’s a major book waiting to be written on the CIA’s analytic failures.
We talk all the time about the CIA’s operational failures. Those are very well documented. Legacy of ashes is one of the best books I’ve ever read. But what we don’t talk about is the CIA’s analytic failures. And if you go back really to the founding of the CIA in 1947, they’ve either missed or gotten the analysis wrong on every major event. I mean, we can go back to the Suez crisis. We can go back to the Berlin airlift through the Iraq war and everything that came after it. They’re wrong about everything and there’s never a price to pay for that. They just move on to the next crisis and then get that wrong.
Chris Hedges:
Well, my favorite obsession is they trialed the Cardinal and Prague who’s been, of course, worked over to say what the communist regime wants him to say and everybody in the CIA thinks that those Soviets have figured out the drugs for mind control, which sends them off on dropping even to their own agents, giving them LSD tabs, some of whom jump out of hotel windows and kill themselves. Steve Kinser wrote a good book on this called Poisoner in Chief. But I think that’s what comes when there’s no accountability and also the kinds of figures, Dulles, these are very problematic people.
John Kiriakou:
Oh, problematic people who do not have the country’s best interests at heart. Dulles is probably the best example of this. Dulles saw the CIA as his own fiefdom. And what president Eisenhower wanted from him was immaterial. He and his brother colluded and conspired on myriad operations and foreign policy issues. And they didn’t care what Eisenhower had to say about it.
Chris Hedges:
Well, they were just gangsters for wall street. Weren’t they?
John Kiriakou:
That’s exactly what they were. Yes.
Chris Hedges:
So I have to ask this question since I know Oliver Stone, he’s convinced the CIA killed JFK. I’ve never seen, so is David Talbot and others. I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up, but what do you think?
John Kiriakou:
Oliver once yelled at me that I was full of shit because I said, “I don’t know, Oliver. I just can’t wrap my brain around it. I hope not. I hope you’re wrong.” I said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of it. It’s certainly an interesting story.” But I said, “Maybe you should look at the Santo Traficante and the role of the mafia and the death of Kennedy.” And then he exploded. “You’re so full of shit.” So I never.
Chris Hedges:
I’ve never bought it, but I was curious what you thought. All right. I want to thank the real news network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
