How I became a CIA whistleblower | John Kiriakou | TEDxFoggyBottom

[Music] so I want to start by saying that I'd like to talk to you about ethics and intelligence operations or even the the lack of ethics and intelligence operations I was very fortunate to have spent 15 years at the CIA and the second half of my career was in counterterrorism operations very tough but fun the most fun I ever had in my life went to 65 countries really felt like I was making an impact for that for the United States September 11th changed all that it became deadly serious on September 11th and was frankly a lot less fun but like everybody else in the building on September 11th I volunteered repeatedly to go to Afghanistan to fight or do whatever was required of me and finally I was sent to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations there about six weeks after I arrived we got word from CIA headquarters that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan and we had to catch him we thought at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-qaeda he was a very big fish well Pakistan is the size of Texas and it has almost 200 million people in it so to say he's somewhere in Pakistan go catch him it's total non-starter I came up with a couple of really bad ideas they resulted in nothing it was a waste of time and finally I told CIA headquarters I needed a targeting analyst a targeting analyst is someone who pours through vast amounts of data and is able to pinpoint the location of a target and so a targeting analyst came worked for another two weeks and finally told me that he just simply could not pinpoint Abu Zubaydah's location to fewer than 14 sites we had never hit more than two sites in one night before and so I asked headquarters to send a large team we ended up flying in three dozen people half CIA half FBI we paired them with Pakistani military officers and on the night of March 22nd 2002 we broke down the doors of 14 safe houses silent I'm not allowed to say how many people we caught that night but I can tell you it was many dozens of al-qaeda fighters he was shot three times while trying to escape a pakistani policeman shot him in the thigh the groin in the stomach and we rushed him to a hospital in Faisalabad to try to save him but word had gotten around the al-qaeda community that we had gotten him and so al-qaeda fighters began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital I said to my pakistani colleague if they realized that were unarmed we're dead can you get a helicopter in here 20 minutes later a helicopter landed we loaded him onto the helicopter we flew to a Pakistani military base he was unconscious for another 24 hours but my instructions that came directly from the director of the CIA George Tenet were 24/7 CIA eyes on I was not to leave his bedside and so I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed because I was afraid frankly that that was gonna fall asleep and he was gonna escape he was really in no condition to escape he was tied like this and he had an oxygen mask on and finally he woke up after 24 hours and he motioned for me to come over to his bedside and I moved his oxygen mask and I said to him in Arabic what is your name show us MEC and he shook his head and I repeated it show us MEC and he said to me in English I will not speak to you in God's language I said that's okay Abu Zubaydah we know who you are he said please brother kill me take the pillow and kill me and I said nobody's gonna kill you we've been looking for you for a long time I said you're gonna get the best medical care that the American government can provide but I'm going to give you a piece of advice I am the nicest guy that you're gonna meet in this experience my colleagues they're not as nice as I am so if there's one thing that you do it's that you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate I said suit yourself another 24 hours later a private jet flew in three FBI agents and I loaded onto the plane we strapped his gurney down on the luggage rack in the back and I whispered to him remember you have to cooperate and the plane took off I never saw him again two months later I was back at CIA headquarters I was in the cafeteria getting lunch and a senior officer in the counterterrorism center approached me and said hey I'm glad I ran into you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard that that term before and so I asked him what he meant and he explained what these ten different techniques were and I said man that sounds like a torture program are you crazy and he said well it's not torture because we had it approved by the White House I said I'm not interested what's the matter with you people I said it's illegal it's immoral it's unethical count me out I'm sorry to tell you that of the 14 people that they were approached that I was the only one who said no and that's a very sad thing when you think about it so that was in May of 2002 on the first of August 2002 Abu Zubaydah was tortured waterboarding was supposed to be the ultimate punishment as part of this torture program in fact the CIA started by waterboarding him and he water he was waterboarded 83 times and never gave any actionable intelligence that saved American lives the waterboarding was a complete failure well I left the CIA two years later and I kept my mouth shut I kept it shut until December of 2007 and finally I decided because President Bush kept saying over and over again there is no torture there is no torture there's no torture I knew that was a lie and so I went on ABC News and I said three things I said the CIA is torturing its prisoners I said that torture is official US government policy it is not the result of a rogue as the president had been saying and finally I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the President himself as you can imagine the FBI began investigating me like five seconds later investigated me for a year from December of 2007 until December of 2008 and in December of 2008 they determined that I had not committed a crime what I didn't know was that three weeks later when Barack Obama was inaugurated the CIA asked him to secretly reopen the case against me and so for the next three years I had no idea that my emails were being intercepted my phone calls were being intercepted and that there were three different FBI surveillance teams following me all the time and in January of 2012 I was finally charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage now espionage is a death penalty case and I hadn't committed espionage you know talking to ABC News of the New York Times is not espionage especially when you're exposing a crime but I was charged with these crimes and was facing 45 years in prison to make a long story short it becomes an economic decision I had five kids at home I had a 1.1 million dollar legal bill and the government came back and said take 30 months and the whole thing goes away like I said it's an economic decision so I took the 30 months and I went to prison by the time I got home the Senate torture report had been released and it proved that everything I said was true and then in the summer of 2015 when Congress passed the McCain fine stein amendment which formally and permanently banned torture Senator John McCain said that my revelations were the inspiration for that law so 23 months in prison it was worth it because torture is finally illegal in this country now that's a thank you I never thought because we already had the the federal torture Act of 1946 and we had the United Nations Convention Against Torture which was ratified by the Senate and has the force of law and I asked rhetorically why in 1946 did we execute Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war it was a death-penalty offense to waterboard someone in 1946 in January of 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner on the day that that photo was published the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation that soldier was arrested he was charged with torture he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in a military prison so why was torture illegal in 1946 and illegal in 1968 but somehow magically legal in 2002 the law never changed we changed so what can we do to make sure that this doesn't happen again I can stand here and tell you we need to write and blog and speak and protest and blah blah blah no that works it makes us feel better but it doesn't work what we have to do is two things we have to write our elected officials to make sure that they do what we tell them to do and if they don't we vote them out of office and we have to be staunch about it the second thing the second thing is I'm a realist I know that the CIA is not going away it's not gonna be broken up and scattered to the wind like John Kennedy wanted to do it's here to stay so what happens young people like you join the CIA change it from the inside once you've been in there ten years you're gonna be surprised because you're going to be in a position of authority and you can change it and then it'll stay changed so thanks for listening to me best of luck [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 71,130

Rating: 4.8360658 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Ethics, Government, Life Development, Media, Middle East, Security, Terrorism, Truth, Violence, War

Id: fX2YMB6dWJw

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018