Ex-CIA Agent John Kiriakou on the CIA’s Most Successful Lying Techniques

0:03Well, the CIA has a well-earned reputation for dishonesty. Of course, the agency lies for a living. That's what they do. So why would you listen to former CIA officers to hear the truth? Well, you wouldn't, except if the CIA officer in question had gone to prison for telling the truth. People willing to suffer for telling the truth are the ones you listen to. And no CIA officer in recent memory has spent more time in prison for telling the truth than John Kiriakou, our friend. Well, he has written a brand new book on what he learned serving for so long as an operations officer at CIA, and it's called The Ultimate Guide to CIA's Skills, Tactics, and Techniques.

0:45And it's a fascinating read. We are proud to be selling it right now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com. Here is part of our conversation with John Kiriakou. John, thank you so much for doing this and congratulations on the book, which is absolutely awesome. I'm looking at a copy right now. So I can ask you a million questions. I'm just going to ask you one, and it's about deception. So the business to some extent of intelligence is deception. It's being deceptive, but it's also detecting deception in others, which is a really important skill, I think. How have you been trained to tell when other people are lying?

1:22Well, there are a couple of different levels of training for those of us who are just going out into the field as operations officers or case officers. You're given some some basic training in how to read body language. You know, when you ask someone a question and he looks up, for example, into the air as if he's trying to picture what it is that that you're you're asking, that's that's usually OK. If he looks down, for example, that's supposed to be alerting to you that that perhaps he's coming up with with a lie. And sometimes I catch myself doing things like that. I actually do tend to look up into the air as if I'm working out a formula or something.

2:05But then we can ask you to pause. So if you if someone looks up, he's likely telling the truth. If he looks down, he's likely lying. It's crazy, right? No, it's interesting. It's one of these these odd. Telegraphed behaviors that are just built into us unless somebody is suffering from, let's say, autism. You have to watch the eyes because the eyes, if if a person averts his eyes. Unnecessarily or or regularly looking away, looking away constantly, that's usually a sign of deception as well. Now, if you're going into the office of security, you're going to be a polygrapher, you're going to be an investigator, something like that.

2:54You get all kinds of training, training that lasts the better part of a year in how to detect deception. And if I could, Tucker, I wanted to add one thing. One of the ongoing problems at the CIA is that you're trained to lie all the time. You're living a lie in most cases, but a lot of guys just can't turn it off. So I had this boss who acknowledged to me one time as a junior officer that we all lie. We're trained to lie. You lie every day, all day. But some guys don't know how to turn it off or when to turn it off. One of the things that this boss told me was, I want you to lie all day. That's the nature of the job.

3:36But don't ever lie to security, finance, or medical, because they're the ones who can ruin your life or send you to prison. And I also don't want you ever to lie to me. And that always stuck in my mind that, yes, we lie all day long in that job. And when you're serving overseas, your job is to break the laws of that country, which, of course, involves lying. But you really do have to turn it off. And then, you know, it's no wonder that so many people at the CIA are married three, four, five times. Exactly. I was just thinking that exact thing. I mean, how easy is it to turn off if you're living undercover during the day?

4:18It's a pretty short step to having a mistress now. Oh, my gosh. Yes. I worked for a deputy director, Tucker, who had been married five times and every single one of his five wives had begun as his secretary. And this is a guy who made it right up to the top, but he couldn't turn it off. You know, you lie to people all day long and then you go home and you lie to your wife. So did, when that guy, your supervisor who married five of his secretaries, when he advertised for a new executive assistant, did they know that a marriage was part of the deal? You know, here's how sick the culture can be sometimes.

4:58Because the answer is yes, they knew. But they also saw this as a way to get ahead. There was one woman in particular, and I'm sorry to get a little far afield, There was one woman in particular who was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, which is a very big deal. You belong when you when you get promoted above GS-15 and you enter the Senior Intelligence Service, you belong to the entire intelligence community. So you can go to the White House, you can go to state, you can go to DOD, all over the place. She had begun as his secretary. And as soon as she married him, she began getting promoted.

5:36and then as part of the deal that she struck with him so he could marry the new secretary, she was promoted into the senior intelligence service. Well, I mean, from a theological, religious, human point of view, that's all pretty evil. I mean, right, so on a basic level, it's rotten, exactly. That's got to affect the behavior of the entire organization after a while. Oh my gosh, yes. I can't tell you how many times, starting around the GS-13 level, people would complain to me quietly, sotto voce, that they had been passed over for promotion, not because they hadn't met all the criteria for being promoted, but because they weren't sleeping with one of the people on the promotion panel.

6:27I don't know why I'm laughing. We used to have this joke at the CIA, Tucker, that when you go into a conference room for briefing, never touch the table because you don't know who was having sex on it last night. So basically the CIA is just like Hollywood with guns. Yeah, that's a really great way to say it. Hollywood with guns. I'll tell you what I did. And this is how I chose to live my life from the beginning of my career. My first wife was a ballet teacher. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA. And so I would spend the day, you know, guns drawn, bulletproof vests, making high threat pitches.

7:07And I would go home and she'd say, how was your day? And I'd say, great. What'd you do? Nothing. See anybody? Nope. Exactly. And why lie? Just, I mean, that is a lie. But, you know, why go into the whole thing about, oh, listen, the meeting that I have tonight, it's going to be an important meeting, so I'm going to have to be out all night long. Come on. Come on. That's ridiculous. That you have to be honest about. It's interesting if you take three steps back that you're describing a culture that is based on lying, that abets lying, that really is just itself a lie. And you thrived in that culture.

7:51It was when you told the truth that they sent you to prison. I assume that's occurred to you. Yes, it has. And it actually stings to tell you the truth. Because you and I have had this conversation a number of times. I devoted my life to the CIA. I got divorced because of the CIA, because I chose that life over my ex-wife wanted me to move back to Ohio and sell insurance with her cousin. And I said, I would rather cut my throat than move to Ohio and sell insurance with your cousin. So, yeah, I chose the CIA over my first wife. I believed that, you know, this was God's work. I was working hard to keep the country safe and to protect Americans and to disrupt terrorist attacks and infiltrate terrorist groups.

8:46And, you know, at the end of the day, I realized that it was really every man for himself and everybody was lying.

8:55And not just lying, but actively punishing those who decide not to lie. I mean, that's kind of the crux of it. It's like it's one thing to tell transactional lies because you think you're serving a greater good. But to hunt down and imprison truth tellers is active evil. I mean, there's a difference, I think. It really is. And it's not just me. This happens every couple of years at the CIA. There was a very brave operations officer named Jeffrey Sterling, for example. and Jeffrey just happened to be African-American, but he had a law degree from a terrific school and he spoke fluent Farsi, went through all of the training, certified at or near the top of his class and everything.

9:47And they assigned him to a station in the Middle East. And then after all of his household effects were shipped out, they said, oh, listen, Jeffrey, we decided not to send you to the Middle East. We're going to send you to Europe instead. And he said, why? All my stuff is gone. And they said, well, we were thinking it would just look weird for a big black guy to be speaking Farsi. And Jeffrey said, when did you realize I was black? So he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency. If you're working on Iran and you speak Farsi and you're not allowed to be assigned to the Middle East because you happen to be black, well, that's a violation of the law.

10:35And so he filed this lawsuit. James Risen at The New York Times wrote about the lawsuit. And Jeffrey and Risen would speak occasionally about the lawsuit. Interestingly enough, they had 50 calls over the course of a year. None of the calls was longer than two minutes. And so later on, Risen came out with a book called Bush at War. And there was a chapter in there about a failed operation to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program. Immediately, they arrested Jeffrey. And they charged him with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage. They said he was speaking to Ryzen 50 times over the course of a year.

11:22The entire case was based on metadata. That's it. No witnesses, no recordings, no proof, no nothing. Even the judge, a hanging judge, my judge, Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia, Jeffrey was convicted on all counts. And she gave him three years. on seven counts of espionage, three years, because even the judge didn't believe he had done anything wrong. But the CIA does this to its truth tellers. It destroys them. May I ask you, this is far exceeding the time limit, but I just, I can't resist and editors can take this out if they want.

12:09I know someone who serves in CIA currently who told me recently that a co-worker had killed himself. And this person, which I don't think is that uncommon. No, it's not, unfortunately. This person suggested that the co-worker got sideways with the agency and the agency used his psychological profile, which they were obviously familiar with, to drive him to suicide. Do you think that that's plausible? Yes, I do. One of the very first things that I saw when I first got to the CIA, well, not saw, I overheard. I overheard two psychiatrists from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, OMS, talking about how to push an employee over the edge because the guy just would not resign.

13:03And so a decision was made to make him crazy or to make him go crazy. And so they were discussing in the cafeteria, no less, how to push this guy over the edge so that he would either resign, have to go on a mental leave or commit suicide. It's awful. And these are licensed physicians talking about this? We used to call a lot of them Dr. Mengele. Yeah, for good reason. We did. I mean, has there been no effort for the AMA to revoke their medical licenses? Well, see, everything's classified. And so you couldn't report it if you wanted to. It's kind of the perfect system. So you set up this impenetrable barrier, enforceable by prison terms, of secrecy around you.

14:04And it's like you can do whatever you want. No one's allowed to know. Anyone who talks about what you're doing goes to prison. Where's the oversight? You can do anything. That's a beef that I have. I feel very strongly about that. The Congressional Oversight Committees, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, were created exactly for that purpose, to provide true oversight. Our elected officials should have oversight over all aspects of government, yet they don't. They act really just as cheerleaders. And we see it with the Armed Services Committee and to maybe a slightly lesser extent with the Foreign Affairs or Foreign relations committees.

14:46But the intelligence committees, forget it. They're just cheerleaders. Almost every single member of those committees, I know a bunch of them, has a dark personal life. And so it's impossible when Tom Cotton runs the Senate Intel Committee not to think like, maybe there's a right, maybe these are people who are utterly controlled by the people they're Tucker, I'll tell you something funny. A sitting senator, a committee chairman, called me a few weeks ago and asked if I would come up for a private meeting. I said, of course. I'm a patriot. I want to serve my country. And if the senator needs my help, I run to Capitol Hill.

15:27and he told me that he was in a dispute with Tom Cotton. And I said, why don't you go to Leader Thune? And he said, I went to Thune. And Thune said he didn't want to get in the middle of a fight between two committee chairmen. I said, well, what the heck do you want me to do about it? I mean, seriously, who am I? I'm nobody. And he said, well, I was kind of hoping maybe you could write something, maybe for the Post or the Times, calling him out. I said, why don't you write something for the Postal Times calling him out? I've had enough trouble in my life. You want me to take on the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee?

16:08No, thank you. I've done that. Was he afraid, do you think, the senator? Yes, I do. Of course. I do. The only reason we know that a lot of this stuff is real is because of you. And so I'm just so, so grateful. because of you, the truth cannot be dismissed automatically as a conspiracy theory. So that is a huge contribution to mankind. Thank you. Thank you. John Curie. Thank you. Great to see you. All the best.