- 53 minutes ago
Former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou rewatches 16 spy movies and reveals just how accurate Hollywood’s take on the covert really is. From Sam Mendes’ first James Bond movie in Skyfall to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (yes, the one Tom Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa for), Kiriakou breaks down scenes from the most popular spy movies.Credits:Director: Jeremy ClowneyDirector of Photography: Jack BelisleEditor: Phil CeconiTalent: John KiriakouSenior Producer: Michael BeckertCreative Producer: Camille RamosProduction Manager: Jen Santos, Evie RoopTalent Booker: Jenna CaldwellCamera Operator: Miguel ZamoraGaffer: David DjacoSound Mixer: Sean PaulsenProduction Assistant: Erica PalmieriPost Production Supervisor: Jess DunnPost Production Coordinator: Stella ShortinoSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAdditional Editor: Gerard ZarraAssistant Editor: Andy MorellGlobal Head of Video: Leo FernandezExecutive Producer: Cara MarceanteDirector, Creative: Nick CollettDirector, Programming: Jeremy Clowney
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00CIA people love, love, love to go watch CIA movies.
00:04Not because they love, necessarily, the CIA movies,
00:07but they love to criticize them.
00:09Hi, I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer.
00:12Today, we're gonna break down scenes from spy movies.
00:15This is The Breakdown.
00:22The Man from UNCLE.
00:25We'll leave you two to get acquainted.
00:39I laugh because that's true.
00:42We always overdo it.
00:44I worked for a station chief one time who had never been an operations officer.
00:51She had been a paper pusher, and they made her the chief of a big station.
00:56There was some nuclear scientist in town.
01:00She sent an all-hands email around the station saying everybody's gotta go try to recruit
01:04this nuclear scientist.
01:06Figured out what hotel he was staying in.
01:08And we went to the bar.
01:10Because where are you gonna go?
01:11You can't just ask what room he's in and go up to his room and invite yourself in.
01:14So we're all sitting in the bar.
01:16First of all, this nuclear scientist was from a Muslim country,
01:18and so he's not gonna be in the bar of all places.
01:21And as it turned out, every single seat at every single table in the bar was occupied
01:28by a CIA officer.
01:30And then when we decided this guy's not gonna come in here for a drink, literally everybody
01:34in the bar got up at the same time and walked out.
01:37And the whole thing was a failure and an embarrassment.
01:39What would motivate you to become the CIA's most effective agent?
01:44I concluded it must be to counteract the humiliation of knowing your balls or at the end of a very
01:50long leash held by a very short man.
01:53I know that this movie was a comedy and it was a lot of fun.
01:57But that's also an accurate portrayal of a hostile operational meeting.
02:03We've all been in meetings like that, where you're trying to intellectually one-up each other.
02:08Maybe you'd like to recruit him, he'd certainly like to recruit you.
02:11If you're gonna make a threat, you have to be able to follow through on that threat.
02:15But these kinds of meetings, yes, literally happen every single day.
02:20The Night Manager
02:21If you're content, I suggest we process the second half of the payment.
02:27I'm entirely content.
02:28Good.
02:33Please check.
02:35Pause here.
02:36This to me looks like a clandestine transfer.
02:40Goods for money.
02:41Could be anything.
02:42Could be anything from equipment to weapons to drugs.
02:47But this is normally how something like this would happen.
02:51Let's skip ahead.
02:56Jesus.
03:11I want my money back, Mr. Roper.
03:14Don't you hate when that happens?
03:15In real life, no.
03:17There would never be a situation like that.
03:20In real life, it's very anticlimactic.
03:23Where you're gonna exchange money for the product, whatever the product happens to be.
03:28Usually the payment is the easiest part about a relationship with the source.
03:33The source is perfectly happy to give up whatever information he or she has.
03:38Perfectly happy to put his hand out and take the payment.
03:41And nine times out of ten, it's cash.
03:44And it's a monthly retainer.
03:46So there's really no excitement involved in making the payment.
03:51Usually it's just pro forma.
03:53And you ask them to sign a receipt.
03:54And they could sign Bugs Bunny if they want.
03:57But just so long as there's a receipt that's signed, you have to deal with the accountants back at headquarters.
04:02I was once told by a boss, you never want to mess with medical, security, or finance.
04:10Because not only can they ruin your career, they can get you locked up.
04:15And so you want all the paperwork to be in order, especially when there's money involved.
04:21Spy kids.
04:22I have to take you to the safe house.
04:24My parents can't be spies. They're not cool enough.
04:31That's cool.
04:32Pause here.
04:33There are certainly safe houses all over the world.
04:36Every intelligence service in the world utilizes safe houses.
04:40Sometimes jointly.
04:41There was even a scene in the movie Munich where the Israelis and the Jordanians were in the same safe
04:48house.
04:49Although the Jordanians had no idea that their counterparts there were Israelis.
04:53But yeah, there are absolutely safe houses.
04:57Infrastructures like this, no.
04:59There are no bat caves or hidden layers.
05:03The military is a different situation, of course.
05:05They have hidden facilities all over the planet.
05:08But for the CIA, no.
05:10Let's fast forward.
05:12Unfortunately, there are no high speed submersibles.
05:14There are submersibles.
05:15There's one that's even on display at the CIA headquarters from the Cold War.
05:20You know, little one-man submarines that you can now buy in the Hummock or Schlemmer catalog.
05:25Not for use today.
05:26Not unless you're a member of a drug cartel.
05:30Skyfall.
05:32I'd like to start with some simple word associations.
05:35Just tell me the first word that pops into your head.
05:37For example, I might say day and you might say...
05:40Wasted.
05:42Agent.
05:44Provocateur.
05:45Woman.
05:46Provocatrice.
05:48Heart.
05:49Target.
05:49Pause here.
05:51Bond is undergoing a psych evaluation in this scene.
05:54Something that every intelligence officer has to go through.
05:59You have to be sane in order to go overseas and carry out these operations.
06:03Just after the 9-11 attacks, when one of the CIA counterterrorism center branch chiefs approached me and asked me
06:10if I would go overseas for a short-term mission.
06:13And I said, yeah, sure.
06:15I said, why don't you ask Dave to go?
06:17He covers this issue.
06:19And the chief said, Dave went nuts.
06:22He didn't pass the psych evaluation.
06:26So I saw Dave.
06:27I said, hey Dave, I'm going to go to this country and do this operation.
06:31We should probably huddle and you can brief me on it.
06:34I said, sorry to hear you went nuts.
06:36And he said, yeah, what are you going to do?
06:37It'll pass.
06:38I'll be okay.
06:39I'll be back up and at him in six months.
06:41I was like, okay, whatever.
06:43I mean, I don't know how nuts he was.
06:44Because he was clearly too nuts to go overseas.
06:46Everybody does these psych evaluations.
06:49You have them pre-employment.
06:50You have one three years after you're hired and then every five years for the rest of your life.
06:55Unless you do something overseas that requires maybe a little bit of intermediate intervention.
07:02Like maybe you beat the hell out of somebody at a traffic stop or make a particularly inexplicable, stupid decision
07:09in an operation.
07:11You're going to have to get with the shrinks and work it out with them.
07:15Let's fast forward.
07:17007.
07:22Ticket to Shanghai.
07:24Documentation and passport.
07:27And this.
07:32All the PPKs nine millimeter short.
07:36There's a micro dermal sensors in the grip.
07:38It's been coded to your palm prints so only you can fire it.
07:42Less of a random killing machine, more of a personal statement.
07:45The location of this meetup appears to be the Tate Gallery.
07:50Never, ever under any circumstances would such a meeting take place in public.
07:56Because you constantly run the risk of surveillance, cameras, microphones.
08:02You run the risk of some random tourist who happens to be walking by hearing the conversation.
08:07You would never have that conversation in any public place.
08:12Even out in the open in a park, you run the risk of parabolics, for example.
08:18This conversation would always take place in a vaulted area inside MI6 headquarters.
08:26Standard issue radio transmitter.
08:29That looked like kind of a big transmitter compared to what I've seen in the past.
08:33The transmitters can get very small to the point where they're more like chips about the size of a penny.
08:40But they are not switchable on and off.
08:43They're always transmitting, always sending out a ping.
08:46In some extreme cases, you can even have them implanted.
08:52You know, you have it implanted in your shoulder or in your butt crack or wherever it is that somebody's
08:57not going to notice it.
08:59But yeah, you're going to want a transmitter in case you're kidnapped.
09:02In the 1980s, the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was kidnapped and tortured mercilessly to death.
09:11He had a transmitter.
09:12It was embedded in his belt buckle.
09:14And the very first thing the kidnappers did was they took his belt off and they left it in the
09:19parking garage where he was kidnapped.
09:21Yeah, the tech is out there.
09:22It's just a question of implementing it.
09:26Tenant.
09:35Pause here.
09:36It's almost unheard of for a CIA officer to directly infiltrate a group, especially a terrorist group.
09:43And it's for a variety of reasons.
09:45You don't look the role.
09:46You don't speak the language.
09:48Or if you do speak the language, you speak it with an accent, usually an American accent.
09:52So what is normally done is you recruit a person who's either already in the group or is able to
10:00penetrate the group.
10:01And then you carry out your operations through that person, through that cutout.
10:06So to switch badges on a uniform, that's nothing that I've ever, ever heard of.
10:13Let's fast forward.
10:15We live in a twilight world.
10:18We live in a twilight world.
10:21And there are no friends at dusk.
10:22You've been made.
10:23The siege is a blind for them to vanish you.
10:25What we saw there was an exchange of bona fides.
10:29That's something that is very, very important and is taught practically on the first day of operational training.
10:34If you are under cover or under deep cover, and no one knows or even suspects that you're an intelligence
10:41officer, and another intelligence officer has to make contact with you, there's going to be an exchange of bona fides.
10:48So if I break into the room, I kick down the door, you turn and look, and I have to
10:53say, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.
10:57And then you respond with mares eat oats and dozed oats and little lambs eat ivy.
11:03We both know that we're on the same team.
11:06But if one side or the other doesn't know the bona fides, then anything goes.
11:12It was never, ever my experience that people would panic and not remember the bona fides.
11:19It's so drilled into you in training, you almost can't forget.
11:24And in addition, you have to remember that people hired by intelligence services, any intelligence service, especially in an operational
11:32position, you have to be somebody who has sociopathic tendencies, right?
11:38You have to be very cool undercover.
11:40There's kind of a famous story of the astronaut Neil Armstrong taking over from Buzz Aldrin as they're landing the
11:50Apollo module on the surface of the moon.
11:53Buzz Aldrin's heart was racing and he was afraid that he would crash it into the surface of the moon.
11:58And instead, Neil Armstrong took over and NASA detected that as he was getting closer to the surface of the
12:04moon, his heartbeat actually slowed down.
12:07That's not normal.
12:08But that's the kind of person that an intelligence service would want to recruit.
12:12Somebody who, not just is cool undercover, but is cool under pressure and becomes even more cool under extreme pressure.
12:22The Bourne Ultimatum.
12:24Get some rest, man.
12:25You look tired.
12:29He's looking right at her.
12:33This is a realistic scene.
12:34It's not often that you're going to be so close to a person that you're going to be able to
12:38see them while you're talking to them.
12:40But it does happen.
12:41One of the things that they utilized here that's very effective in real life operations is out of the way
12:47places for static surveillance.
12:49So most people, when they think they might be under surveillance or are concerned that they could be under surveillance,
12:55they're looking behind them.
12:56They're not looking up in the second, third, tenth floor thinking, you know, there's somebody with binoculars up there.
13:02But frequently there are.
13:04And not just one person.
13:05There's one person every block.
13:06A person from five blocks back will run around and assume a second static position.
13:12That actually is common and it's a part of training.
13:16Let's fast forward.
13:18Where are you now?
13:20I'm sitting in my office.
13:24I doubt that.
13:26Why would you doubt that?
13:28If you were in your office right now, we'd be having this conversation face to face.
13:33Breaking into offices was one of the funnest things I ever did.
13:37I enjoyed doing that very much.
13:39You know, sometimes you just want to get through the filing cabinet.
13:41Sometimes it's longer term.
13:43You want to plant a bug.
13:45Or a camera.
13:46Although cameras were unusual.
13:48But yeah.
13:48Breaking into an office?
13:50Sure.
13:50People do that all the time.
14:03Yeah.
14:04Wills.
14:04Check my office.
14:05Requesting a picture.
14:15We need to build security up here.
14:19He's got everything.
14:21God damn it.
14:21At CIA headquarters, we work in vaulted areas.
14:23So the entire vault, the entire office is considered a vault.
14:27With the entire office being a vault, you can just leave stuff out all night long, 24 hours, not a
14:33problem.
14:34Working in a satellite office, working in a station, whether it's domestic or foreign, nothing is considered to be an
14:40open vault like it is at headquarters.
14:42And so if there's nobody in the office, literally everything has to be locked up.
14:47You remove your hard drive from the computer, you put that in the safe, all your paper files, and you
14:51try to keep paper to an absolute minimum.
14:53That's all kept in the safe.
14:55And the safe is one of these like really heavy duty steel, multiple reinforcement kind of, you know, classified safe.
15:03Not like this that you can just, you know, pick it and steal the files.
15:09Agent Cody Banks.
15:13Mary had a little lamb, its fleece as white as snow.
15:20Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers.
15:23Bubblegum, bubblegum in a dish.
15:25How many pieces do you wish?
15:27This is what happens when you design a code book in summer camp.
15:30One of the things that, that struck me was the way Frankie Muniz smiles all the time.
15:36He's so excited to be a part of this operation.
15:39And that's exactly how we were.
15:41The first time I ever went to the Oval Office and there's the president, the vice president, the national security
15:47advisor and the CIA director.
15:48I'm 25 years old and they are there to listen to me and what I have to say.
15:53I couldn't stop smiling.
15:54And I couldn't stop thinking my buddies from high school would never believe in a million years what I was
16:00doing right now.
16:04There most certainly is a world where children are recruited to be intelligence officers.
16:10Not in the United States, not anywhere in Western Europe even or the Western world.
16:15But the Russians have long had a program where children are recruited as part of what are called or what
16:22is called the illegals program.
16:23In my own neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, just two years ago, a group of illegals was broken up by the
16:30FBI.
16:31They were all arrested, charged with espionage and then traded for American spies.
16:36Kind of like the old bridge of spies idea from the Cold War.
16:40They just sit for years until their expertise is needed.
16:46There was a television series on Netflix called The Americans.
16:50It was 100% true to life in following a family in the illegals program.
16:57And toward the end of the series, the children were finally activated.
17:00They were something like 16, 17 years old.
17:03But we wouldn't do it in the United States.
17:05At the same time, the Russians absolutely do.
17:10Mission Impossible.
17:33The dirty little secret of intelligence operations is that almost all of the tech that's used is just purchased on
17:41Amazon.
17:41It's easier, it's faster, and it's far cheaper just to buy something that has already been invented and manufactured than
17:50to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch.
17:52Let's fast forward.
17:59This is just so unrealistic.
18:03It's very cool.
18:05And it's very cool to see it, you know, implemented.
18:08But in real life, this stuff just doesn't exist.
18:11You know, you couldn't buy that on Amazon.
18:12You might be able to get a green screen for 20 bucks, but that's about as close as you're gonna
18:17come.
18:17What would happen in real life is you would spend six months working to recruit the guard.
18:23Or recruit somebody close to the guard so that you could get whatever it is done that you needed to
18:28get done.
18:3124.
18:32I have a big beef with 24.
18:46Yeah, the silent helicopter gets you every time.
18:49It's a good thing nobody could hear that helicopter from 50 feet away.
18:53You know, there are a lot of shows, especially on regular broadcast television, that just don't work.
18:58There was one called Covert Affairs.
19:01Oh, my God.
19:02It was the worst CIA show I've ever seen in my life where this analyst just walks into the Oval
19:09Office and says,
19:10Madam President, I need to take out a hit on someone.
19:13It's like, first of all, you're under arrest for just barging into the Oval Office.
19:17Who do you think you are just walking into the Oval Office like you own the place?
19:21Secondly, you've just committed a felony.
19:23Because according to Executive Order 12333, you can't order hits on anybody.
19:29I hated that show.
19:30Another one, NCIS.
19:31I'm sorry.
19:32I know a lot of people love NCIS.
19:34But NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
19:38You can't be with your guns out in a housing project in LA.
19:42You only have jurisdiction on Navy bases.
19:45And on ships.
19:46Not in the LA housing projects with your gun up in the air again to shoot somebody in the face.
19:50It's the same thing with this.
19:52They're at like the Rose Bowl or something, having a shootout in the Rose Bowl.
19:55Come on.
19:56Everybody's under arrest.
19:57You've all committed felonies.
20:00Burn notice.
20:04If you're going to put prints on a gun, sticking it into somebody's hand isn't going to do it.
20:08Any decent lawyer can explain prints on a gun.
20:11Ow, ow.
20:12But try explaining prints on the inside of the trigger assembly.
20:18I happened to be sitting next to the guy who created and was the showrunner for Burn Notice on a
20:25plane.
20:26We were going from Washington to LA.
20:29I never talked to anybody on planes.
20:31But I was sitting next to this guy.
20:33His name is Matt Nix.
20:34An absolutely brilliant and gifted writer and showrunner.
20:39We struck up a conversation.
20:41And I happened to be a fan of Burn Notice.
20:43So I said, what do you do for a living?
20:45He said, I created a show.
20:46I said, oh, is it something I might have heard of?
20:48And he said, well, maybe.
20:50It's the number one show on basic cable.
20:52It's called Burn Notice.
20:53I said, oh, my God, I love Burn Notice.
20:56I've watched every single episode.
20:58In fact, I ran the credits in slow motion just to see who your script advisor was.
21:04And I didn't see one.
21:05And he said, oh, I've been obsessed with the CIA since I was a kid.
21:10So I've read every book.
21:11And I don't have a script advisor.
21:13By the time we landed in LA, I was the script advisor for season six.
21:18And Matt and I are still friends.
21:20So sometimes writers take this so seriously that they make it 100% accurate.
21:31Zero Dark Thirty.
21:32If you thought there was some secret cell somewhere working Al Qaeda, then I want you to know that
21:41you're wrong.
21:43This is it.
21:46There's no working group coming to the rescue.
21:50There's nobody else hidden away on some other floor.
21:54I was the chief of one of the branches inside the counterterrorism center.
22:01I worked with her.
22:02Just us.
22:03She was actually my immediate boss.
22:05This scene is accurate.
22:07Yes.
22:08And you have to understand the frustration, too.
22:109-11 happened because we failed.
22:139-11 was the worst intelligence failure in American history.
22:17It was worse than Pearl Harbor.
22:193,000 Americans were slaughtered on one day because we didn't do our jobs.
22:25I'm surprised that his language was as clean as it was.
22:29I will say, though, about this film.
22:33Zero Dark Thirty was a CIA propaganda film.
22:36There was so much that was wrong with this film in that the CIA deputy director and the CIA's deputy
22:43director for operations gave Catherine Bigelow, the director, and Mark Boll, the writer, a classified briefing over a classified mock
22:54-up of the Osama Bin Laden house where Bin Laden was found and killed.
22:59That was a violation.
23:00That was a violation of the Espionage Act.
23:01The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, at the time, invited Boll and Bigelow to CIA headquarters for an attaboy
23:10speech in which he revealed the names of the SEAL Team 6 members who killed Bin Laden.
23:16That was a violation of the Espionage Act.
23:18He later said that he didn't realize they were in the audience, so no harm, no foul.
23:23When it was revealed that they were in the audience, the CIA's Office of Security went back through his speech
23:29and ended up redacting 27 lines of additionally classified information.
23:35That was a violation of the Espionage Act.
23:38But the worst part of this movie was that it perpetuated the lie that the torture program led to Osama
23:45Bin Laden's location.
23:47It did not.
23:49If anything, the torture program delayed the finding of Osama Bin Laden.
23:55What led to Osama Bin Laden's location was really great analysis, not the lie that this movie would have us
24:03believe.
24:03When he wants to make a call, he leaves the house, walks a few blocks, and switches on the phone.
24:09We need to keep canvassing the neighborhood until we find him.
24:27We got a shooter.
24:28Pause here.
24:29Yeah, that's right out of CIA counterterrorism training.
24:33Virtually on your first day of CIA counterterrorism training, you are put in this situation where you're in a car,
24:41you're cut off, shooters cut you off.
24:43You have a second to decide if you should run them over and kill them or reverse and, as the
24:51CIA teaches you, get off the X or get out of the kill zone.
24:55Somebody that close, I'd run them right over.
24:58And then I'd back over them if I had to.
25:01But yeah, that is completely real life.
25:03We've lost a lot of people over the years in situations like that.
25:08Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.
25:11Former director Miller warned this committee on several occasions about the threat that President Udo presented.
25:17Ideas that the acting director and I do not share.
25:19And yet you cannot prove that we weren't involved.
25:23Doesn't that concern you?
25:25No, sir.
25:27It terrifies me.
25:29Very powerful.
25:31And in a perfect world, that's true.
25:35We know, though, of course, that the CIA has been weaponized repeatedly over the years by Democrats and Republicans both.
25:43In a perfect world, the CIA would exist only to serve and protect the American people.
25:48But the CIA has a way of pushing the envelope and just waiting for government to push back.
25:54And that's not a reliable strategy because it will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we have a torture
26:04program and a secret prison program and an illegal renditions program and weaponization where they take down their domestic enemies.
26:12The reason why this happens is because we don't have oversight like you're seeing in this clip.
26:17We don't have members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who
26:25are willing to stand up instead.
26:26And I regret that I have to even say this.
26:29Instead, what we have on Capitol Hill are members of both parties who are nothing more than cheerleaders for the
26:35CIA.
26:35So to see a hearing like this where the CIA is actively challenging the deputy director doesn't happen in real
26:44life.
26:45It should.
26:46It should happen every day.
26:47But it doesn't.
26:51Argo.
26:52We need to wait till the weather clears up, then deliver the six bikes, provide them with maps to the
26:57Turkish border.
26:58We have intelligence.
26:58They can ride bicycles or we're prepared to send in somebody to teach them.
27:04Or you could just send in training wheels and meet them at the border with Gatorade.
27:08Tony.
27:09It's 300 miles to the Turkish border.
27:11They need a support team following them with a tire pump.
27:14We were just asked to sharpshoot this.
27:16State is handling the odds.
27:18I'm sorry.
27:18Who is this?
27:20Tony's an exfil special.
27:21He got a lot of the Shaw's people out after the fall.
27:24Sir, if these people can read or add, pretty soon they're going to figure out they're six short of a
27:29full deck.
27:30It's winter.
27:31You can't afford to wait around until spring, so it's nice enough to take a bike ride.
27:34The only way out of that city is the airport.
27:36This is absolutely accurate.
27:38Tony Mendez is a giant in the history of the CIA.
27:41His wife is a giant in the history of the CIA.
27:45And this is one of the greatest operations that the CIA has ever carried out in its history.
27:52It was Tony Mendez who saved the hostages who had taken refuge in the Canadian embassy in Tehran in 1979.
27:59Argo was a crazy idea, but it was once described to me as the least likely to fail of all
28:06the crazy ideas.
28:07And so they went with it.
28:09The original idea to use bicycles was a terrible idea because as he pointed out, it was wintertime and nobody
28:15rides bicycles in the wintertime.
28:17Especially when you're going north into the mountains where it's even colder and with more snow.
28:24The idea that Tony came up with was to create a fake sci-fi movie to be filmed in Iran
28:31in the midst of the revolution.
28:32And that sounds like a nutty idea too, but it actually worked.
28:35These meetings are the kinds of meetings where you can just say the craziest thing.
28:40And if people deem it to be even remotely possible, they'll give it real consideration.
28:47With that said, usually the operations with the fewest moving parts are the ones that are most likely to succeed.
29:05First of all, certainly books like that exist.
29:08They're called CDs or concealment devices.
29:10There are some CDs that you're just assigned.
29:12Like, here are some CDs for you.
29:14Use them for whatever you want to use them for.
29:16Some are big enough you can put a gun in.
29:18So yeah, absolutely they exist and every CIA officer has access to them.
29:22The part where he's looking at the copy of Ulysses is a little, a little bit Hollywood fabulist.
29:30In that he's looking for an anomaly in the placement of the book.
29:33And it was placed just ever so slightly differently from all of the other books.
29:39It looks like, you know, this is a collection of really classic pieces of literature.
29:44But the binding was different. It was newer on Ulysses.
29:48And it was just sitting up ever so slightly higher than the other books.
29:53And so it looked like somebody had been handling that book.
29:56When he took it off the shelf, he was looking for an anomaly in the hardcover.
30:01Just to see if something had been glued or maybe there was something inside.
30:04He could tell that there was.
30:05Frankly, it wasn't a very good concealment device if you can feel it with your finger.
30:09But he could feel it with his finger and then he knew to go into it.
30:12I just wanted to hear something from you that was true.
30:25He was Candace.
30:27FBI, you're under arrest. Stand up.
30:30It's not outside the realm of possibility that he would have confronted somebody directly like that.
30:36And unfortunately, you know, over the last 30 years, this has happened a number of times.
30:42The traitor, Aldrich Ames. The traitor, Robert Hansen.
30:46One was a CIA counterintelligence officer.
30:49The other was the chief of FBI counterintelligence.
30:52And here they were both working for the Russians.
30:54Can you imagine?
30:55The chief of CIA counterintelligence and FBI counterintelligence both working for the Russians.
31:00So it happens every once in a while.
31:03On the other side of that, we talked earlier about the Russian illegals program.
31:08I know an illegal, a former illegal.
31:11He was trained in East Germany.
31:14Sent here as a sleeper.
31:15He settled in Brooklyn.
31:17Lived in Brooklyn for 20 years.
31:19Did what he was supposed to do.
31:21Just get a job as a normal American would.
31:24Didn't speak with any kind of an accent.
31:26But he fell in love with a woman.
31:27And they got married.
31:29And they had a little girl.
31:30And he told me as soon as he saw that baby for the very first time, he knew he could
31:35never go back.
31:36One day, he was activated.
31:39And he didn't respond to the activation.
31:42And so he's on the subway one day right here in New York.
31:45And he said the subway didn't have very many people on it.
31:48But this guy walked right up to him.
31:50Grabbed the strap.
31:52Leaned over and said,
31:53You know that if you don't go home, I'm going to have to kill you.
31:57And he said rather than go to his destination, he went directly to the FBI's New York field office.
32:02And he said,
32:03I am a KGB sleeper.
32:05I've been activated.
32:06And I don't want to go home.
32:07And now he lives here in New York with his wife.
32:10His daughter's in her 20s.
32:11The Russians never tried to kill him.
32:13But, you know, sometimes things like this happen.
32:18Captain America, The Winter Soldier.
32:20Robert Redford was in Captain America?
32:24What are you doing?
32:25She's disabling security protocols and dumping all the secrets onto the internet.
32:29Including Hydras.
32:30And shields.
32:32If you do this, none of your past is going to remain hidden.
32:38Are you sure you're ready for the world to see you as you really are?
32:43Are you?
32:44Ed Snowden kind of did it.
32:46Joshua Schulte kind of did it.
32:48There are catches in place now to make sure that information is compartmentalized to the point that nobody else can
32:53do it.
32:54I would offer up my own personal opinion that what Ed Snowden did was heroic and was bonafide whistleblowing.
33:02What he released was the fact that NSA and CIA were spying on us, on Americans.
33:06In today's day and age, you can't go to just one computer system and just download the crown jewels of
33:14the CIA or the broader intelligence community.
33:16It's just not possible.
33:18Nobody has that kind of access.
33:19Nobody.
33:20Nobody.
33:20When I got out of prison, I served 23 months in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture
33:25program.
33:25When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence.
33:29And I went there to the dinner and I saw a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
33:34And he walked over to me and he said, hey, welcome home.
33:37Congratulations.
33:38And I said, Senator, I have to be honest with you.
33:40I expected more from you.
33:42I expected some support.
33:43And he got angry.
33:44And he said, look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance.
33:50And I said, oh, you're afraid of them.
33:53I thought you were the overseer.
33:55They're all like that now.
33:56They're just cheerleaders.
33:59Kingsman.
34:09Let's skip ahead.
34:15Training is tough, but it's not that tough.
34:40No, no, listen.
34:43Training was a challenge.
34:44I learned skills that I never even imagined existed.
34:50I was proud of what I ended up doing in training, but there was nothing like that.
34:56You're never going to find yourself in a position like this where you're going to need to.
35:00Listen, you need to think on your feet.
35:02Certainly.
35:02I'll give you one example.
35:03We were in driving training and we had to drive a car through this kind of no man's land
35:11that was supposed to be in like the Middle East or Africa or something like that.
35:15Central Asia.
35:16And the instructors remotely shut off my engine.
35:21And then my car just went dead.
35:22I was like, what the heck?
35:23The car just went dead.
35:24Like the battery maybe or whatever.
35:27And then somebody opens fire on me with paint balls.
35:31So they're hitting the car.
35:33So they're hitting the car.
35:33I take my seat belt off.
35:35I crawl across, get out on the other side.
35:38I'm laying flat on the ground.
35:40I pull out my gun.
35:41I look to see where the shots are coming from.
35:43And it's actually a robot that's in a van.
35:47The side sliding door of the van is open and the robot is firing these paint balls at me.
35:51So I'm shooting back at the robot and I can't get a clean shot at it.
35:54I pop up just a little bit.
35:56I shoot out my own windows and then I'm able to shoot the robot and disable it.
36:00And the instructors come out and they said, damn it, Kiriaku.
36:04That was the last decent car we had.
36:07I said, I couldn't get a clean shot.
36:09You're the one who told me, get off the X, get out of the kill zone.
36:12I couldn't shoot the robot from the angle that I was.
36:15You should have cut my engine off later or earlier or something.
36:18What do you want me to do?
36:19That's training.
36:21This is Hollywood.
36:22Thanks for having me, GQ.
36:24We'll do this again.
36:25In the meantime, check out my podcast, John Kiriakou's Dead Drop on Apple Podcasts.
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