John Kiriakou is a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and the first U.S. official to confirm the agency's torture of detainees. Punished for being a whistleblower, he served nearly 2 years in a federal prison. www.johnkiriakou.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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So you were saying you replaced Mike Baker?
Yeah, Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer. 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. Why? 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 U.S. defense attachés, just bad guys all around.
The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. And 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. Oh, boy. Yeah.
But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal. So it was every man for himself. Wow.
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, right? Tell us how this all started like how long had you been involved in the CIA?
Well by then I had been in the CIA Well by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations after 9-11 I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years and and I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country and 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 Mohammed 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 killed.
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.
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