Speaker 1: I want you to just for a second look around
the room. You're in your living room. Maybe do you
have a smart TV on.
Speaker 2: The wall, or maybe one of those digital assistants on
the counter.
Speaker 1: Okay, good, Now, I want you to really consider this fact,
which has been confirmed by a CIA insider, that tele
division even when the little red light is off and
you think it's sleeping, it can be taken over.
Speaker 2: Remotely by an intelligence agency.
Speaker 1: And they can flip the speaker the thing that's designed
to push sound out, and turn it into a microphone.
Speaker 2: A very sensitive microphone listening to everything you're saying.
Speaker 1: This isn't some movie plot. This is the reality of
modern espionage. The surveillance device is the one you bought,
you installed, and you plugged into the wall yourself.
Speaker 2: It's a whole new world, far beyond invisible ink or
exploding pins.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, where we unpack the world's most
complex and consequential stories. Today we are pulling back the
curtain on the Central Intelligence Agency, the ultimate black box
of US intelligence.
Speaker 2: And we're doing it through the eyes of a true insider.
We've been completely immersed in this incredibly candid discussion with
a former CIA counter terrorism officer named John Kyriaku.
Speaker 1: Right, and this all comes from a video shared by
the led Bible Stories channel on YouTube. Kiriaku was not
just any officer. He was also a senior investigator for
the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Speaker 2: He gives this just unprecedented look into what the agency
is really for, how they recruit, the tech they use,
and the ethical lines they just completely obliterate.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is to really unpack this testimony.
We're going to pull out the operational truths and maybe
more importantly, the ethical tightropes from a man who didn't.
Speaker 2: Just work there, No, not at all. He paid a
huge personal price for his principles.
Speaker 1: And that's maybe the most important part of this. Kiriaku
isn't just a former officer telling stories. He's a convicted whistleblower.
Speaker 2: He served twenty three months in federal prison for what.
Speaker 1: For exposing the CIA's torture program.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so his testimony, you know, carries this incredible weight.
It's from someone who chose his conscience over loyalty to
the agency, which makes his perspective incredibly sharp and frankly
very credible.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into it. Let's unpack this reality,
starting with the very reason the CIA exists in the
first place, it's legal mission, and how that mission just
collides with what the president wants.
Speaker 2: Officially, you know, on paper, the CIA's role sounds almost
well bureaucratic.
Speaker 1: Like a government research agency or something exactly.
Speaker 2: Their legal tasking is basically three things. Recruit spies that's
what they call human intelligence or human anti steel secrets,
and then analyze those secrets. The whole point is to
give the president and other policy makers the absolute best
information so they can make smart, informed decisions.
Speaker 1: So an information broker, a very very high level research
firm for the White House. But Kyriaku says right away,
that's just the textbook definition.
Speaker 2: That's the paper mission, right, and then there's the real world,
the operation.
Speaker 1: Warw So what does the job actually become.
Speaker 2: The defining reality, he says, is that the CIA is
a direct tool of the president. So it's mission in
practice becomes, and I'm quoting him here, whatever the President
tells it to do.
Speaker 1: Whatever the President tells it to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that is the exact point where the agency
stops being just an intelligence analyst and becomes, you know,
an instrument for covert action all over the world.
Speaker 1: So you go from being an analyst to an operative.
The people gathering the facts are suddenly the ones executing
these these massive global acts of interference.
Speaker 2: That's it. It goes way beyond just gathering facts. The
scope of what a presidential directive can authorize.
Speaker 1: It's staggering, like what specifically.
Speaker 2: Well, once the president signs what's called a covert action finding,
the CIA can be told to do anything from overthrowing
foreign governments.
Speaker 1: Which we know has happened. History is full of examples.
Speaker 2: Countless times, yeah, Latin America, in the Middle East, or
they can be told to implement these huge, systemic covert
programs designed to destabilize a country or install a friendlier government.
Speaker 1: And it's not always the big dramatic stuff, right, The
subtle interference can be just as powerful, influencing public opinion
without leaving any fingerprints.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, they can influence foreign media, they can plant stories
or disinformation to shape a political conversation in a way
that helps us interests. And then, of course there's the.
Speaker 1: Most controversial part, the lethal component.
Speaker 2: Lethal component state sanctioned assassinations, targeted killings. The agency completely
shifts from being a collector of information to being a
direct implementer of deadly force.
Speaker 1: The gap between those two things is just mind blowing.
It's the difference between being the smartest person in the
room and being the person in the room who's allowed
to kill someone.
Speaker 2: Or over three a government, it all depends on the
policy goals of whoever's in the White House at that moment.
The CIA becomes this incredibly adaptable shadow extension of American power, and.
Speaker 1: That flexibility, I guess, is where all the ethical problems start.
Speaker 2: That's the core of it. I mean, the US military
operates under much clearer rules of engagement, there's public accountability.
The CIA operates in that gray, shadowy space of presidential.
Speaker 1: Findings, and that kind of space requires a very specific
kind of person.
Speaker 2: A very specific and often morally compromised person.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the next logical question, who on
earth are they recruiting for this job? If the mission
is to break international law, maybe even take a life,
you're not looking for a boy.
Speaker 2: Scout, definitely not. The agency is looking for a very
distinct psychological profile, and Kiryaku makes us really clear they're
explicitly not looking for that. You know, stereotype from the movies,
the square jawed, big buff guy who's at the gym
every day.
Speaker 1: So what are they looking for?
Speaker 2: He says, they look for people with and this is
his term, sociopathic.
Speaker 1: Tendencies, tendencies, not full blown sociopaths. That distinction seems really important.
It's critical because you'd think, if the job requires you
to be ruthless, don't hire someone with no conscience at all.
Wouldn't that be the most efficient spy?
Speaker 2: It seems logical, But the reason is control. A full
sociopath has no conscience, which means they are fundamentally uncontrollable.
They operate completely outside of any moral framework and more importantly,
outside of a chain of command.
Speaker 1: They won't take orders, they.
Speaker 2: Won't take orders reliably. And Kyriaku also pointed out something fascinating.
A full sopiopath can, as he says, blow right through
a polygraph because.
Speaker 1: They don't feel any stress when they lie.
Speaker 2: Exactly, there's no remorse, no physiological response, So they're useless
from a security standpoint. But someone with sociopathic tendencies, they
still have a conscience. It might be faint or bury deep,
but it's there.
Speaker 1: So they still react to a polygraph test.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they still feel regret or remorse or at least
that little spike of stress when they're being deceptive, and
that tiny flicker of a conscience means they can be managed,
they could be disciplined, and most importantly, they will follow order.
Speaker 1: So they're looking for someone who is ruthless enough to
do the job, but just human enough to be controlled.
Speaker 2: Calculated ruthlessness paired with compliance. That's the magic formula.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, So how do they even test for something
like that? During recruitment?
Speaker 2: They use these very specific scenarios. Yeah, they're designed to
force a recruit to just prioritize the mission outcome over
everything else. Legality, diplomacy, you name it. The classic example
he gives is the Indonesian economy scenario.
Speaker 1: Right, set this up for us.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you're a new recruit. You're giving a hypothetical task.
You need to get specific intelligence on the Indonesian economy.
You've spent months targeting the Indonesian Economic Secretary. You've done
the whole cycle, spot assess, develop.
Speaker 1: Use the unlimited budget.
Speaker 2: The unlimited budget. You've gone on vacations together your wives
or friends. You've been to a thousand expensive dinners. But
after all that time and money and this deep personal relationship,
the target is still not repruitable. He just won't give
up secrets.
Speaker 1: So the instructor turns to the recruit and asks, what
do you do now exactly?
Speaker 2: And the answers tell you everything. The traditional buy the
book intelligence answer was you double down, you work the
case for another six months. You played a long game.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Another answer, a bit more creative, but still within the lines,
was you work it through the wives, use that friendship
to get the information. Both of those answers respect the rules.
Speaker 1: But Kuriaka's answer was different.
Speaker 2: His answer just threw the whole diplomatic playbook out the window.
His immediate, unfiltered response was you break into the Indonesian
embassy and you steal it.
Speaker 1: Wow, just straight to the felony.
Speaker 2: A direct, illegal, non diplomatic solution that gets the mission
done instantly, and the instructor's reaction he confirmed that this
was the desired sociopathic tendency. It showed that Kuriaku would
put the mission's success above everything else, international law, personal risk,
all of it.
Speaker 1: The mindset is crystal clear. If the normal path is blocked.
You don't find a detour, just crash right through the wall.
Speaker 2: That says so much about who they need to execute
those presidential directives we were talking about.
Speaker 1: So once they find someone with that mindset, they have
to teach them the process, the trade craft of actually
acquiring human assets.
Speaker 2: I'll say, yeah, Kiriaku lays out this really rigorous four
step cycle. It's the absolute foundation of UMANT. It's spot, assess, develop,
and recruit.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's start with spotting. This sounds like, I don't know,
professional networking, but for spying, that's.
Speaker 2: A great way to put it. It starts with the
CIA officer just circulating in places where you'd find high
value targets, so diplomatic cocktail parties, embassy events, certain conferences.
The goal is just to identify someone whose job gives
them access to valuable secrets.
Speaker 1: So you just walk up and say hi.
Speaker 2: Pretty much. The officer introduces themselves as you know, the
new guy at the American embassy, maybe covering political or
economic issues. You've changed business cards. It's that simple first handshake.
Speaker 1: Step two is assess. This is the filtering process.
Speaker 2: This is where you figure out if the person you
just met is actually useful. If headquarters needs intel on
say Uran's nuclear program, and this person is an engineer
working at a sensitive site, well that's a high value target.
Speaker 1: But if there are a landscape architects.
Speaker 2: Probably not so useful. So the assessment phase is quick,
it's critical, and it saves a ton of time and resources.
Speaker 1: And then comes the developed stage. Kyriaku called this the
fun part, but honestly, it sounds like the most psychologically
manipulative part of the whole thing.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. This is where the CIA officer systematically
builds an entirely false, but deeply emotional personal relationship, and
it's all funded by what he called a literally unlimited budget.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have to unpack that. How is an unlimited
budget weaponized? In this context?
Speaker 2: It's used to eliminate every single inconvenience or desire the
target might have. For example, if the target mentions they
love fishing but could never afford a real deep sea trip.
Speaker 1: The officer doesn't just offer to go fishing.
Speaker 2: No, the officer charters a four thousand dollars vote for
the weekend. They'll cover luxury vacations, They'll help the target
out if they have financial problems, and they make sure
the officers' wives become best friends with the target's wife.
It creates this multi layered dependency.
Speaker 1: It's transactional friendship on a massive scale. The target gets
this amazing lifestyle they could never afford on their own,
all thanks to their new best friend who just happens
to be a CIA officer exactly.
Speaker 2: The officer is creating a relationship that is so strong,
so reinforcing, that when the time comes to actually ask
for something, the target is already heavily compromised. They've accepted
huge favors, they shared personal secrets. They have this seemingly
unbreakable bond.
Speaker 1: Which dramatically lowers the chance they'll say no.
Speaker 2: It makes saying no almost impossible, which leads directly to
the final stage recruit.
Speaker 1: So how do you make that transition from best friend
to asset handler?
Speaker 2: It starts small, with a little, non threatening request. The
officer I say something like, hey, the Russians just rolled
out this new tank. I know you have the blueprints
at work. Could you could you just make me a
copy of those plans?
Speaker 1: Downplaying it, making it seem like no big deal.
Speaker 2: Right, Maybe offer a little cash for the trouble. The
goal is just to get the target to cross that
ethical line one time.
Speaker 1: And once they've copied those plans, they're hooked, they're compromised.
That's when the big reveal happens.
Speaker 2: That's when the officer comes clean. Listen, I haven't been
totally honest with you. I'm actually a CIA officer working
under cover. Are you okay with that? But at this point,
what can the target say? They've already committed a crime
for their friend, they're emotionally invested, and now they're legally trapped.
Speaker 1: And then comes the formal offer.
Speaker 2: Then the officer formalizes it offers a big continuous salary
kiriaku throughout a number like five thousand dollars a month. Yeah,
just for continued access to information. It's a masterful and
frankly a deeply cynical execution of psychological warfare.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move from manipulating people to the technology
they use spy tech, and the reality here is way
less glamorous than what you see in the movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Curiak who drops what he calls the dirty little
secret of spy tech, which is at ninety five percent
of the technology they use in the field is bought
off the shelf, mostly from Amazon dot Com.
Speaker 1: From Amazon, seriously.
Speaker 2: Seriously, it just completely dismantles that whole image of a
government funded Q branch lab inventing everything from scratch.
Speaker 1: But why, I mean, why not custom build everything for
maximum secrecy and capability.
Speaker 2: It's all about speed and cost. It is so much
cheaper and faster to buy existing highly advanced consumer tech
which already has computers, GPS and tiny cameras built in,
and then just adapt it for their own purposes.
Speaker 1: Right, Developing new tech from the ground up would take
years and billions of dollars exactly.
Speaker 2: The real genius isn't in the invention. It's in the
clever modification and deployment of what they call cootess or
commercial off the shelf equipment.
Speaker 1: And that adaptation is where the real trade craft comes in.
History about the listening briefcase in Pakistan is a perfect
example of this.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's one of the best stories he told. The
starting point was just a cheap leather briefcase. They bought
it in a local market in Pakistan for the equivalent
of about ten US.
Speaker 1: Dollars, so it looks completely unremarkable. Local something you'd see anywhere.
Speaker 2: Exactly something nobody would look at. Twice. Then a technical officer,
one of these highly skilled gadget guys, meticulously unstitched the
seams of the briefcase.
Speaker 1: And what did they put inside.
Speaker 2: They installed a very fine wire all the way around
the perimeter of the briefcase. That wire, hooked up to
some specialized electronics in what he called little teeny tiny
batteries packed into the lining, turned the whole bag into
a giant listening device.
Speaker 1: And then he sewed it all back up perfectly.
Speaker 2: Perfectly, so it just looked like an empty, cheap briefcase again.
Speaker 1: And in the field, how did it work.
Speaker 2: The agent just hands the briefcase to the target. The
target opens it up, sees that it's empty, and puts
it on the table between them, and the whole time,
that ten dollars bag is broadcast their entire conversation to
a CIA team sitting in a car half a mile away.
Speaker 1: It just proves that success depends on cleverness and deception,
not just raw power and money.
Speaker 2: Right, But then the conversation pivots and it moves into
the really frightening stuff, the realm of digital surveillance. Specifically
the Vault seven disclosures.
Speaker 1: This was that massive leak back in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, gigabytes of top secret documents were leaked by
a CIA technology engineer and they revealed capabilities that before
then were just paranoid speculation. Yeah, Kyriaku confirmed. Yeah, they're
real and they are terrifying.
Speaker 1: So what were the key capabilities from Balt seven that
just changed everything we thought we knew about privacy?
Speaker 2: Okay, First, just the sheer scale of it. The CIA
can intercept and I quote anything from anyone, so global
widespread digital surveillance is a fact. Second, and this is
maybe the most chilling part, is the ability to remotely
take control of a modern car through it's built in
computer systems.
Speaker 1: You mean they can cause a fatal accident whenever they want.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it means. They can steer the car
remotely off a bridge into a tree and make the
assassination look like a tragic accident or even a suicide.
It turns your car into a potential weapon under state control.
Speaker 1: And third, the one we started with the smart.
Speaker 2: TV hack, curning a consumer product that's in millions of
homes into a persistent high quality listening post.
Speaker 1: And the really scary part, as Kiryaku pointed out, is
that this is just what we know about, right.
Speaker 2: He says, God knows what else that they can do
that hasn't been leaked. The rule is if it has
a computer in it, your car, your phone, your TV,
maybe even your pacemaker, it is potentially hackable and weaponizable.
Speaker 1: So how do they use all this to actually track threats?
Speaker 2: They use what's called the terrorist matrix, which just means
using all source intelligence, integrating every single form of intelligence
gathering they have.
Speaker 1: So that's the traditional human human spies on the ground, right.
Speaker 2: But that's now heavily supported by vast electronic surveillance. But
they call sigant or signals intelligence that cell phones emails
any kind of electronic message.
Speaker 1: But he mentioned two surprising sources that people might not
think about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was fascinating. First, terrorist groups literally giving press
interviews basically announcing or telegraphing their next attacks. The CIA
just monitors the open media. That's osen open source intelligence.
Speaker 1: And the second one, which really highlights how young and
tech savvy some of these guys.
Speaker 2: Are intercepting messages from game platforms.
Speaker 1: Like Xbox Live exactly.
Speaker 2: They discovered that operatives were using encrypted channels or coded
language within these global gaming networks, probably thinking nobody would
ever look.
Speaker 1: Thet night were wrong.
Speaker 2: They were very wrong. Those channels are fully monitored. But
you know what the ultimate act of self sabotage is
for these targets, social media, right.
Speaker 1: He was just amazed by this.
Speaker 2: He said, they'll put their entire lives on LinkedIn and Facebook,
their jobs, their travel schedules, their family photos, their political views.
They're basically doing the CIA's research for them. His advice
was blunt. If you value your privacy and you want
to stay off the radar of a global intelligence service,
stay off social media.
Speaker 1: We have to turn now to what is probably the
darkest reality that Kiriaku discussed, one that really shows the immense,
unchecked power of that presidential mandate, the formalized business of killing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the most shocking part of it is how
bureaucratic it is, how mundane it sounds. This isn't some
rogue agent. This is a state sanctioned, highly structured, weekly
administrative procedure.
Speaker 1: So describe this weekly killing agenda. Where does this process
even begin?
Speaker 2: Kiriaku confirms that every single Tuesday morning at nine o'clock,
a committee meets at the National Security Council the NSC,
and at that meeting, At that meeting, they finalize and
in his words, drop, the kill list. They literally list
the people identified as the world's most dangerous terrorists, or
at least deemed so by the CIA, who they want killed.
Speaker 1: Like a standing weekly meeting.
Speaker 2: Just like any other business meeting, but the agenda is well,
it's a kill list, and as soon as that list
is finalized, it's immediately send over to a dedicated unit
at the.
Speaker 1: CIA, and that unit just works its way down the
list sequentially.
Speaker 2: Like checking off items on a to do list. The
process he described is chillingly simple. Number one, drive to
the airport, get on the plane, go out to that country,
kill the person, come back. They go to number two
on the list.
Speaker 1: And this happens every single week.
Speaker 2: Every single week. It removes all the drama and just
replaces it with logistics. It's treated like a production line.
Speaker 1: Which raises this huge ethical question, how does the agency
justify this internally and action that just completely bypasses due
process and international law.
Speaker 2: The justification is always the same, It's pragmatic. It's a
fear based utilitarian argument. They tell themselves, they tell policy makers,
there hasn't been another nine to eleven? Has there? Maybe
it's because we're out there killing people.
Speaker 1: The ends justify the means.
Speaker 2: The argument is that the means, even if they are
illegal and immoral, are justified by the goal of preventing
another catastrophic attack on US soil. But Kuriaku himself refuses
to let that stand. He acknowledges that while it's ordered
by the President, the process is quote certainly immoral and illegal.
Speaker 1: So there's this internal friction, the knowledge that they're committing
crimes in the name of security.
Speaker 2: That's the heart of the agency's moral crisis. And beyond
the kill lists, they also have other ways of literally
making people disappear.
Speaker 1: Right which can be either lethal or protective.
Speaker 2: In the wake of nine to eleven, the most infamous
method was the creation of what he called an archipelago
of secret prisons, the black.
Speaker 1: Sites, undisclosed locations all over the world where they would
take detainees.
Speaker 2: They would just disappear people, snatch them from a safe
house in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and remove them entirely from
any legal system, any human rights oversight any public knowledge.
Speaker 1: And the secrecy around these places was insane. He said
that in many cases, the presidents or prime ministers of
the countries where these prisons were located didn't even know
they existed on their own soil.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible level of operational security. The second method,
of course, is just lethal disappearance assassination, where they just
bury them in some crazy foreign land and nobody would
ever know.
Speaker 1: But then there's the other side of the coin, disappearance
as a form of protection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is basically the witness protection program on steroids
for high value defectors. If say a KGB officer decides
to come over to the West, the CIA will give
them a completely new life, a.
Speaker 1: New identity, a new backstory.
Speaker 2: A new name like John Smith, and a huge financial package,
more money than you could ever count. He says. The
goal is just to make them and their family completely untraceable,
so they can live happily ever after vanished from their
old life.
Speaker 1: Executing these missions, whether it's recruiting an asset or carrying
out something from the kill list, obviously involves intense, constant
personal danger. Kurioku's career was filled with close calls.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he talks about two active assassination attempts against him.
Really underscores that constant threat from hostile intelligence services or
terrorist groups, and.
Speaker 1: The attempt in Athens is just it's so tragic because
it shows how random the threat can be.
Speaker 2: It really is the ultimate nightmare for an operative. Kiriaku
was the intended target, but because of some small change
in his routine or just blind luck, they killed his
next door neighbor instead. The British Defense Attache Brigadier General
Stephen Saunders wow and Kyriaku says that this tragedy haunts
the agent every single day. That's the psychological toll of
this work, knowing that what you do for a living
can get an innocent person, a friend, a neighbor killed.
Speaker 1: And the second attempt was only stopped because they had
a HEAs up from an asset.
Speaker 2: Right they got advanced warning so they can neutralize the threat,
as they say in the movies. But that level of
constant threat management must be absolutely exhausting.
Speaker 1: It creates the state of permanent hypervigilance.
Speaker 2: Which she illustrates perfectly with this story about being under
surveillance in Pakistan. He was staying in this small secure guesthouse,
which was a good call because the big fancy hotel
down the street was later blown up, killing forty five people.
Speaker 1: And he was a pro right. He changed his route
to work every day, left at different times to make
it hard to tail.
Speaker 2: Him, but he still noticed something. He kept seeing the
same guy on a motorcycle wearing a red helmet, always
trying to stay in his blind spot.
Speaker 1: And as an operative, you have to recognize that pattern immediately, you.
Speaker 2: Do, and he identified it based on the classic intelligence
definition multiple sightings at time and distance. He was seeing
the same person multiple times at different places over several days.
He knew he was being followed.
Speaker 1: So he reports it to his chief and the chief
gives him the brutal expected.
Speaker 2: Order, Well, you know what you have to do, neutralize
the threat, kill him.
Speaker 1: And this is where the human element really comes through.
He was scared.
Speaker 2: He was terrified not just as being caught, but of
the actual act of having to kill someone. He was
preparing himself for a gunfight on the street because that's
what the missie and required eliminate the threat.
Speaker 1: But the story has this incredible twist. He doesn't go
through with it.
Speaker 2: No, instead of ambushing the guy. He took a huge risk.
He drove to a safe house and he confronted a
general from the local intelligence service directly. He just asked him, general,
are you following me? The general denied it, and then
the man in the red helmet disappeared.
Speaker 1: And he found out the real story later, and.
Speaker 2: It's an amazing story. The local service had decided to
test the new American guy because Kiriaku had a reputation
for being too nice.
Speaker 1: So they put their worst guy on him.
Speaker 2: Their absolute worst surveillance office, with the red helmet staying
in the blind spot. It was all amateur hour. Kiriaku's
direct confrontation saved that man's life. He says, if he
hadn't spoken up, that incompetent officer would be dead today.
This is a credible moment. We're just talking to somewhat
overrode protocol and prevented a killing.
Speaker 1: And that story really brings us to the ultimate ethical
conflict of his career, the thing that defined his life.
Kiriaku says the the CIA trains its officers to see the
world in shades of gray, to believe there are no absolutes.
Speaker 2: But he argues that some things are just definitively black
and white, right or wrong.
Speaker 1: Period, And he doesn't base that on philosophy.
Speaker 2: He bases it on the law, on clear established US law.
He points out that the legal framework banning torture has
been in place for decades. It starts the Federal Torture
Act of nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: Six, and internationally, the US isn't just a signatory to
the UN Convention against Torture.
Speaker 2: It wrote the convention, the US has historically been the
standard bearer against these practices.
Speaker 1: That historical consistency is key to his argument.
Speaker 2: It is he brings up these powerful historical examples. In
nineteen forty six, the US executed Japanese soldiers who had
waterboarded American prisoners of war. In nineteen sixty eight, an
American soldier who waterboarded a North Vietnamese prisoner was convicted
of torture and got twenty years at hard labor. The
legal line has always been absolute.
Speaker 1: So if the law never changed, how did torture become,
as he puts it, magically legal from two thousand and
two to two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: His conclusion is that it wasn't the US was committing
crimes against humanity. The law didn't change the executive policy,
and the little arguments they used, the infamous torture memos,
were just designed to redefine the word torture so that
what they were doing didn't technically count.
Speaker 1: It was a massive institutional failure, built on a semantic loophole.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and feeling that the American people had a right
to know what their government was doing in their name,
he made a choice that would completely destroy his life.
Speaker 1: In December two thousand and seven, he went on ABC
News and.
Speaker 2: He stated three simple facts. The CIA was torturing prisoners.
Torture was official US policy, and that policy was personally
approved by the President. It was a direct moral challenge to.
Speaker 1: The entire system, and the system's reaction was predictable retaliation.
Speaker 2: The FBI investigated him, and initially they concluded he hadn't
committed a crime, but after the administration changed, the case
was secretly reopened. It became this obsessive prosecution. He was
indicted on five felonies, including three ounce of espionage.
Speaker 1: Which can carry the death penalty.
Speaker 2: A death penalty charge, he was facing forty five years
in prison. He was going bankrupt from legal fees. He
had five kids. He was forced into this horrifying choice.
Speaker 1: He took a plea deal.
Speaker 2: He took a plea deal. He agreed to serve twenty
three months in prison on a lesser charge, just to
end the nightmare that was destroying his family. A staggering
price to pay for telling the truth.
Speaker 1: And yet he says I would do it again today.
That level of conviction is just It's incredible, and his
sacrifice wasn't.
Speaker 2: For nothing at all. His revelations created a political and
ethical firestorm. It forced Congress to act because he spoke out.
The McCain Feinstein Amendment was passed into law, which formally
and permanently banned torture. He literally traded his freedom to
force the government to codify what the law should have
protected all along.
Speaker 1: And finally, he makes this powerful argument that beyond being
illegal and immoral, torture is also just ineffective.
Speaker 2: It is the evidence shows that people will say anything
to make the pains, So the intelligence you get is unreliable,
but even more critically, it's the single most powerful recruiting
tool you can hand to your enemy.
Speaker 1: And the example he gives is the photos from Abu
Grebe prison, the prisoners in the orange jumpsuits.
Speaker 2: The whole world saw those photos, and when ices started
kidnapping journalists and aid workers.
Speaker 1: They bought the exact same orange jympsuits.
Speaker 2: They did it deliberately to mimic what the US had done.
They broadcast the beheadings as a direct act of retaliation
and a recruitment video torture Kuriak, who argues doesn't work.
It just pours gasoline on the fire of global conflict
and strips the US of any moral high ground.
Speaker 1: Let's zoom out a bit now to Kyriako's broader views
on geopolitics, starting with his critique of US foreign policy,
this idea of a permanent wartime economy.
Speaker 2: When he's asked for his frank opinion on US global activism,
he just goes straight to the numbers. He points out
that the US defense budget is bigger than the next
eight largest countries combined, and that.
Speaker 1: Kind of spending creates its own momentum.
Speaker 2: It does. He argues that since nine to eleven, the
US has basically entered a state where the defense and
intelligence industries need a conflict to fight and to finance.
If they don't have one, the economy or at least
that massive sector of it would go into a recession.
Speaker 1: So that economic need drives an activist foreign policy. It
pushes the US into places where it's not wanted or welcome,
and then, as he says, it forgets to leave.
Speaker 2: That whole sentiment is just perfectly captured in this little
internal CIA joke he shared about Iran.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 2: Why would Iran put its country right in the middle
of all of our military basis?
Speaker 1: Wow? Yeah, that cuts deep. It just completely reverses the
narrative and highlights the massive US military footprint.
Speaker 2: And he also had a pretty sharp critique of a
recent administration's foreign policy, calling it a complete and utter disaster.
Why because of how hard it worked to offend and
alienate traditional allies. He gives these examples like threatening to
invade Canada, a member of the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance,
threatening Panama, or proposing to annex Greenland. He just calls
it craziness. You can't undermine your closest partners and expect
to be effected globally.
Speaker 1: And in terms of pure operational danger. He visited seventy
two countries. He said most of them are awful. Which
places really stood out as the most dangerous.
Speaker 2: He listed Yemen, Somalia, Gaza, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan
places where you have to, as he says, sleep with
one eye open. His experience in Yemen was particularly harrowing.
Speaker 1: Right on his last trip there, the threat was so
high he had to stay in a hotel that was
only considered safe because it had a thirty foot blast
wall around it.
Speaker 2: And the danger was immediate. The day after he got there,
six South Korean diplomats were ambushed and killed on the
road from the airport. A few days later, the South
Korean intelligence officers who flew in to investigate those murders
were also ambushed and murdered.
Speaker 1: So South Korea has closed its embassy and left.
Speaker 2: They had to. That's the kind of constant lethal threat
that agents are facing every single day in these places.
Speaker 1: Now shift to our allies. He compared the massive CIA
to the UK's six. He calls them both top tier,
but they work in completely different ways.
Speaker 2: The CIA is all about scale. It's budget absolute dwarfs six.
It has satellite spyplanes, all the high tech toys. But
he said that CIA officers often wish they could be more.
Speaker 1: Like six because six is small and lean.
Speaker 2: Small and lean, and the key difference is bureaucracy versus agility.
To get a major operation approved to the CIA, he says,
you need six layers of bureaucratic approval, you need lawyers
to sign off, and often you need the president's signature.
It's slow and rigid. Whereas six six reports directly to
the Prime Minister. They can just get things done with
incredible speed and efficiency. So the CIA has size and tech,
but six has speed and agility.
Speaker 1: Finally, he gave this assessment of the China threat that
really goes against the common narrative you here in the West.
Speaker 2: His argument is purely historical. He says China simply does
not have a history of expansionism, with the exception of Tibet,
which they claim with their own territory. Anyway, he points
to only minor border skirmishes, you know, with Vietnam in
the seventies and Indian the sixties.
Speaker 1: And their military footprint today backs.
Speaker 2: That up absolutely. China has only one military base outside
of its own borders. It's in Djibouti, and ironically they
share it with the United States.
Speaker 1: So he's saying the Chinese are just confused by all
the suspicion.
Speaker 2: He says they're genuinely perplexed as to why the US,
Australia and the Philippines distrust them so much. While he
acknowledges the political threat to Taiwan is real because China
sees it as a part of China, he maintains there's
no indication that China is actually preparing for a large
scale invasion. It suggests the current threat level might be
driven more by strategic competition than actual Chinese aggression.
Speaker 1: So this whole deep dive shows that the CIA needs
these ruthless operatives, but they also need people with just
exceptional and sometimes very unique skills. It's clearly a merit
based system.
Speaker 2: Oh completely. He says. Your background doesn't matter at all
if you have a talent that can be weaponized for intelligence,
and that leads to some hires you would never.
Speaker 1: Ever expect, like the director of Disguise.
Speaker 2: An incredible example, CIA hired a woman who's only credential
was that she graduated from the Falls Church, Virginia Academy
of Beauty.
Speaker 1: A beauty school graduate.
Speaker 2: Her skills with hair, makeup, wigs, and facial prosthetics made
her the agency's master disguise maker, a talent she developed
for proms and weddings was directly applicable to the highest
levels of espionage.
Speaker 1: And the master forger came from a college newspaper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a cartoonist who drew a popular comic strip.
But his artistic ability, his eye for detail, his skill
in perfectly replicating tiny visual details, that's exactly what you
need to be a master forger of passports, documents and
official seals.
Speaker 1: It just shows they'll find talent absolutely anywhere. Now, since
we all watch spy movies, we have to ask how
accurate is Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Kiriakou confirms that all CIA officers watch every spy movie
and TV show. He's even consulted on a few. He says,
in terms of TV, Homeland is very accurate. Really procedural stuff,
the internal politics, the operational tension. That's all real, with
one big exception mental health. If an agent had a
breakdown like the main character does, they would be sent
to a hospital until they were stable. They would not
be sent right back into the field.
Speaker 1: And what about movies. He mentioned the Recruit from two
thousand and four.
Speaker 2: He said, the first half of that movie, the part
that shows the training process at the farm is one
hundred percent accurate, the psychological manipulation, the stress tests, all
of it, except, he adds, they didn't beat us in training.
Speaker 1: Good to know. So, is there a giveaway a piece
of jargon that tells you if a movie is legit
or not?
Speaker 2: There is if you hear anyone in a movie or
a TV show referred to the CIA as the company,
turn it off. He says, that's completely inaccurate, outdated jargon.
That's a dead giveaway that the writers didn't do their homework.
Speaker 1: Okay, good tip. Shifting back to real world trade craft,
he says Russia is still the undis world leader in
using sleeper agents.
Speaker 2: It's a specialty they have that the US and other
Western countries don't really do. Their program is incredibly sophisticated.
They train agents, send them to a country like the
US or the UK, and tell them to just get
a normal job, build a life, assume a complete national identity.
Speaker 1: And those arrests in Northern Virginia a few years ago
really brought that home.
Speaker 2: They really did. This group of Russian sleepers they arrested
had lived these totally normal lives for years. One was
an elementary school teacher. Another was an airline worker. They
were completely blended in and their job was just to
quietly collect classified information, mostly from the fence contractors in
the area, and secretly send it back to Moscow.
Speaker 1: They're so hard to detect because they're not doing anything dramatic.
They're just living and waiting and watching exactly.
Speaker 2: And finally we have to come back to where this
modern intelligence state really began. September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Kiriaku was at CIA headquarters that morning.
Speaker 1: The emotional impact of that day on the intelligence community
must have been immense.
Speaker 2: You described the moment they realized what was happening, just
the immediate thought we knew we were at war, and
then this chilling second thought that followed. Does Osama bin
Laden have any idea what he's done? Does he have
any idea how many people are going to die? Now?
Speaker 1: He knew the American response was going.
Speaker 2: To be merciless, immediate and merciless. And now, almost twenty
four years later, we are all still living with the consequences.
The security state is just a permanent part of our lives.
Trillions of dollars spent, the way we travel, the way
our foreign policy is shaped. That permanent wartime economy he
talked about born on nine to eleven is probably never
going away.
Speaker 1: This whole journey inside the CIA has been well, it's
been terrifying, enlightening, and ultimately deeply sobering. We've seen the
calculated ruthlessness they recruit for, the way COTS technology turns
your smart TV into a microphone, and the just the
bureaucratic banality of a weekly kill list.
Speaker 2: And we've also seen the immense human cost of trying
to maintain your integrity inside that black box. Kiriku's life
style is a testament to his belief that the law
never changed on torture, that some things, even in the
world of espionage, are just black.
Speaker 1: And white, right or wrong, and he sacrificed his freedom
to prove that point. He endured prison and financial ruin,
but he got the McCain Feinstein Amendment past, which permanently
banned torture. That act of defiance speaks volumes about the
need for a personal moral compass even when you're ordered
to operate in a grey zone.
Speaker 2: And all of these systems we've discussed, from Volt seven's
power to hack your car to the NSC's killless procedure.
They're always justified by the need to prevent the next
nine to eleven. D rationale is always security, but the
cost is always privacy and due process.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final provocative thought for you
to consider, now that you've heard this reality from a
true insider, Given the scope of these state sanctioned surveillance
powers and lethal capabilities, and knowing that the security state
is always pushing that ethical.
Speaker 2: Envelope, how much of your own personal privacy are you
willing to sacrifice for the promise of avoiding the next
nine to eleven? And where do you you personally draw
the line between what is an operational necessity and what
you believe is an unacceptable ethical failure. It's a tough question,
and we encourage you to reflect on where that boundary
should truly lie.