Imprisoned CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou has advice for Snowden — and a warning for the rest of us.<\/i><\/p>\n
John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who blew the whistle on Bush\u2019s torture program and is now in prison, sent an open letter to Edward Snowden last week warning him not to trust the FBI.<\/p>\n
\u201cDO NOT,\u201d Kiriakou wrote, \u201cunder any circumstances, cooperate with the FBI. FBI agents will lie, trick, and deceive you. They will twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not \u2013 supporters, well-wishers, and friends \u2013 all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy; it\u2019s part of the problem, not the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
These are the words of a registered Republican who voted for Gary Johnson, whom the Rosenberg Fund for Children denied a grant, informing him that he wasn\u2019t \u201cliberal enough,\u201d Kiriakou says, for the award \u2014 and who last year received a birthday card from Jerry Falwell Jr.<\/p>\n
Kiriakou is the first CIA veteran to be imprisoned. It was after he blew the whistle on Bush\u2019s torture program that the CIA, FBI and Justice Department came down on him, at first charging him with aiding the enemy and later convicting him of disclosing the identities of undercover colleagues at the CIA.<\/p>\n
The FBI raided his house in the process. They took his computers. They also took his family photos because, they said, he could have embedded secret messages in them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not start this thing with the idea that I was going to be a whistle-blower,\u201d Kiriakou told Salon in December, two months before being sent off to a low-security prison in Loretto, Pa., with a 30-month sentence.<\/p>\n
I interviewed Kiriakou for about an hour and half at that time, a couple of months before he went to prison, waiting to publish it until he was well into serving his sentence. The idea was to outline the slope of his descent \u2013 his journey from the powerful to the powerless.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this weird, roundabout way,\u201d he told me then, \u201cthe Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA made me the anti-torture guy, which I never set out to be \u2026 But over the years,\u201d despite the initial intentions, \u201cmy feelings have grown stronger and stronger\u201d against torture, \u201cthat torture is not right under any circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recruited by the CIA while in graduate school, Kiriakou spent most of his life on the side of the establishment, leading raids against top al-Qaida officials in Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations, including the one in which Abu Zubaydah was captured.<\/p>\n
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He had said in an ABC interview with Brian Ross that al-Qaida members \u201chate us more than they love life,\u201d that they wanted to kill every American and every Jew because, he said, it\u2019s just who they are.<\/p>\n
That was also the interview in which Kiriakou pissed off the power establishment, becoming the whistle-blower he had never set out to be. He was on Ross\u2019 show defending himself against allegations that he, personally, had tortured Zubaydah. But what he didn\u2019t know was that torture as a state policy had never been confirmed in any official capacity, even though everyone in Washington knew about it.<\/p>\n
Five years before, in 2002, Kiriakou had never heard of \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d He\u2019d just left Greece where he was doing counterterrorism work when the CIA decided to move him to a different office in Pakistan. In the interim, a fellow CIA officer approached Kiriakou and said that they were going to use some of these interrogation techniques on Zubaydah.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had never heard of waterboarding,\u201d Kiriakou said. \u201cSo [the CIA officer] explained to me that it simulates drowning and that we\u2019re gonna keep him up for nine, 10 days at a time, and we\u2019re gonna put him in a dog cage, and \u2013 [Zubaydah] had this fear of bugs \u2013 we\u2019re gonna put cockroaches in the cage. I said that wasn\u2019t something I wanted to be involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kiriakou was alarmed by the proposal. He consulted a senior agency officer who called it \u201ctorture,\u201d Kiriakou said, and then told him \u201c\u2018that this was a slippery slope, that someone would die and there would be a congressional investigation. Do you want that?\u2019\u201d the officer asked. \u201cI said \u2018no.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The officer would later deny that this conversation took place.<\/p>\n
Kiriakou and other officers were told that the CIA rarely used these interrogation techniques. Internally, it was reported that Zubaydah had been waterboarded one time. It wasn\u2019t until spring of 2009, five years after leaving the agency, that Kiriakou found out that was a lie. Zubaydah, in fact, had been waterboarded 83 times according to the inspector general\u2019s report. They had tortured him before getting legal approval, \u201cin anticipation of getting permission,\u201d Kiriakou said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a coverup,\u201d Kiriakou said. \u201cEveryone is corrupt I\u2019ve come to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n
The incident, coupled with all the travel, rubbed Kiriakou the wrong way and in 2004 he stepped down from his position.<\/p>\n
\u201cI resigned to spend more time with my kids,\u201d he said. \u201cI was tired of going off to Baghdad and Kabul and Yemen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kiriakou worked as a consultant for the Big Four accounting firm Deloitte in the years following, before moving on to ABC News as a terrorism expert. With his security clearance gone, he fell out of the loop \u2014 until he got the phone call from Brian Ross.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had been out four, almost four years at that point,\u201d Kiriakou said. \u201cI had stopped paying attention to this kind of stuff. I was vaguely aware that Human Rights Watch had reported that prisoners had been waterboarded and Amnesty was talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was true that the public knew. But Kiriakou went too far when he detailed the approval process. Bush had been defending the administration by saying that any cases of torture were because of rogue officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said no, no, no. This had the signature of the president on it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd not just the president but Condi Rice as national security advisor, John Ashcroft as the attorney general, George Tenet as director of the CIA and about a dozen lawyers from the National Security Council.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t just that one day Tenet signed this paper and then they started torturing people,\u201d Kiriakou said. \u201cIt was every single time they wanted to torture someone, they had to get the [Director of Central Intelligence] signature.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so I confirmed it,\u201d he told me, \u201cconfirmed that torture was a state policy and when I confirmed it, my whole life changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CIA quickly filed a crimes report with the Justice Department against Kiriakou for leaking top-secret information in the interview with ABC. \u201cI read about it on CNN,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department ended up dismissing the charges because the information, it declared, was already public knowledge. Kiriakou was relieved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe learned later,\u201d Kiriakou told me, \u201cthat every time I gave a speech, every time I went on a TV show, every time I wrote an Op-Ed\u201d \u2013 including one that appeared in the L.A. Times in 2008, for which his wife was called in and interrogated (it turns out the \u201ctop-secret\u201d information the CIA accused Kiriakou\u2019s wife of giving her husband was made available on Bolivia\u2019s foreign ministry website) \u2013 the agency \u201cwould file another crimes report against me, even though I was getting this stuff cleared.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CIA was never concerned with protecting classified information. Had it been, the agency would have notified Kiriakou each time a crimes report was filed against him for talking about the torture program as a way of preventing him from continuing to do so. Instead it was encouraging him to keep talking until, during one interview or Op-Ed, he slipped up and said something they could use against him. They weren\u2019t targeting classified information. They were targeting him.<\/p>\n
In 2009, Kiriakou took the position of senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry. His job was to investigate waste, fraud, abuse and illegality and he turned his attention to the 2001 Dasht-i-Leili massacre<\/a>, in which an American-backed warlord had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Taliban soldiers when he ordered them to be crammed into metal containers and then loaded onto trucks bound for a prison in Shibarghan, Afghanistan.<\/p>\n A source had told Kiriakou that Americans wearing T-shirts and blue jeans oversaw the box-up of the prisoners.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to know,\u201d Kiriakou said, \u201cwere these guys CIA officers? If they weren\u2019t, who were they? Were they Defense Department? Were they contractors? Who were these guys? And why didn\u2019t they stop this from happening?<\/p>\n \u201cI interviewed everybody,\u201d Kiriakou said. \u201cI interviewed Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell\u2019s chief of staff and Karl Ford, the assistant secretary, Pierre Prosper, the special rapporteur for human rights. I called Colin Powell.\u201d<\/p>\n Six weeks later, Kiriakou got a phone call from John Kerry asking if he was investigating the CIA.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018Yes, I am.\u2019 [He said,] \u2018I want you to stop right now.\u2019 I said \u2018but we\u2019ve got a story here. This is a serious situation.\u2019 \u2018I want you to stop right now,\u2019\u201d Kerry repeated. \u201cSo I stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n Perturbed, Kiriakou moved on to another investigation dealing with a violation of the cover agreement between the CIA and State Department. He wrote a letter to the CIA asking why a woman included on the list of newly hired State Department officers was going undercover for the first time when she had been with the CIA for 25 years.<\/p>\n \u201cSome time passed,\u201d Kiriakou said, \u201cand then a colleague comes into my office and he says, \u2018You got a letter of response from the agency.\u2019 I said, \u2018I haven\u2019t seen any letter.\u2019 He said, \u2018They classified it top-secret\u2019 and I wasn\u2019t cleared for top-secret. I said, \u2018What\u2019s it say?\u2019 It says, \u2018Go fuck yourself.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The harassment continued. In the summer of 2010, Kiriakou was having lunch with a foreign diplomat who proposed hiring him as a spy. The diplomat offered to pay him in cash if he could provide information on U.S. trade strategies.<\/p>\n Kiriakou refused the deal and reported the incident to the Senate Security Office. The FBI advised him to keep in touch with the diplomat and let him know that he would think about the offer. Kiriakou met with the diplomat five or six times, he says, before finding out that he was an FBI agent and had been trying to get incriminating statements from Kiriakou.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was trying to get me to say something to trap myself,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t bite.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, the CIA and FBI gave up, not on Kiriakou but on charging him solely under the Espionage Act. In the two years that followed the incident with the foreign diplomat, the agencies put together a case against Kiriakou that accused him of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a law that hadn\u2019t sent anyone to prison in 27 years.<\/p>\n In January 2012, Kiriakou was charged and then, in April, finally indicted, losing his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee along with the pension that came with it. In September, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia closed its doors to the public because many of the testimonies, it said, contained classified information.<\/p>\n