John Kiriakou. Photo: Playback/DemocracyNow
Former CIA spy John Kiriakou gave an exclusive interview Center of the World Diary and advocated the dissolution of the US Secret Service. For the expert, countries should develop institutions that do not use the methods of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Check out some excerpts.
Diário do Centro do Mundo: President Lula says that unlike Obama, he had a good relationship with George W. Bush. What do you think?
John Kiriakou: I think it makes sense. You know, everyone liked George W. Bush as a person. Almost everyone liked him as president, but I think a lot of Americans realized that he wasn’t really the president. Dick Cheney was actually the President.
But by all accounts, George W. Bush was a good guy, and you hear that from both Republicans and Democrats. He was someone you wanted to hang out with and have a beer with.
Barack Obama probably not. I’m biased when I talk about Obama because I think Obama sold us to the National Security State.
It was Obama who prosecuted eight Homeland Security whistleblowers and put us all in jail. That’s three times more than all previous US presidents combined, and Joe Biden is an extension of the White House’s and Obama’s foreign policy.
Biden’s foreign policy isn’t even as good as Obama’s. At least Obama has resumed relations with Cuba and Joe Biden has not resumed relations with Cuba.
Which were closed during the Trump administration. So you know how crazy it is that all these years later we look back and say, “Oh, I miss the good ole days of George W. Bush.” It’s crazy.
And let me tell you something else: In the halls of the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, we always marveled at how hard the State Department worked not to talk to our enemies.
If you work in the State Department, if you’re a diplomat, your job is to do diplomacy, your job is to talk to everyone. Their job is to state the goals of American foreign policy, and they’ve worked very hard not to talk to our enemies or engage in diplomacy.
As you said, it was George W. Bush who started the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, but then we have Saint Obama who becomes President and suddenly we are fighting in Syria, we are fighting in Libya, we are fighting We’re fighting in Somalia, we’re still fighting in Iraq, we’re still fighting in Afghanistan.
Well what’s the difference? And we killed Bin Laden and nothing has changed. It was very disappointing.
DCM: The Washington Post said US intelligence agencies received information in midJune indicating that Wagner’s mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was planning armed action against the Russian defense system. Is it possible that the CIA is helping Prigozhin?
JK: It’s entirely possible. If the war weren’t going on now, what probably would have happened is that the CIA would have warned President Putin that something was going on. This has happened twice in the past when either the NSA or the CIA received information that there were legitimate threats to the Russian government and President George HW Bush once warned President Gorbachev as a result.
Then there would be an attempted coup against him, and Gorbachev was able to thwart that coup before it happened. Then, a few years later, the CIA received information that there was an attempted coup against President Yeltsin and warned him in advance so he could react.
So there is precedent for warning the President of Russia that something is afoot. They didn’t warn him this time. And I would have to assume that this message came from a CIA leak. So it’s entirely possible that the CIA helped Wagner’s group in some way or decided to just stay out of it. Because any attempt to attack Moscow would weaken Putin and the CIA wants Putin to be weakened.
I think Prigozhin greatly exaggerated the hand. He said in recent days he has 25,000 men ready to move to Moscow. That just wasn’t true and it was over 2500 men or 3000 men.
That wasn’t true either, he had taken control of a military base in Rostov. He simply lacked the support to back up his rhetoric and threats. And then he got a call from President Lukashenko that he had spoken to Putin and that the Russian President was ready to let Prigozhin go into exile in Belarus.
What we would have seen if he had stayed in Moscow would have been a bloodbath.
DCM: Rebekah Koffler, a former CIA analyst, claimed that Vladimir Putin “orchestrated” the coup with Wagner’s mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin under “classic false flags” to trick the West into believing that his army was weakened. Do you agree?
JK: No, I do not agree. He doesn’t have to convince the West of anything. The West will be convinced one way or another based on what is happening on the battlefield.
That’s a problem I have with many CIA analysts and former analysts. Everything is a false flag to them. Well, you know how difficult false flags are. You know how many moving parts there are in a false flag where everything has to go exactly according to plan to really work.
After 15 years at the CIA, I can tell you that there are a lot of stupid people at the CIA. There are many people who have no idea what they are doing. There are many people who just aren’t able to think longterm. Furthermore, like any large organization, the CIA is a slow bureaucratic organization.
They are unable to make quick decisions to achieve something like this. No, I don’t believe in the false flag narrative.
DCM: Do you think the CIA today uses AI to make decisions or conduct operations?
JK: Definitely yes. 100% yes. In fact, the CIA was already working on it while I was there, when AI was just a tech company fantasy. The CIA invested tens of millions of dollars in what it called the venture capital division.
They used taxpayers’ money to invest in cuttingedge technology. It reached billions and billions of dollars and that’s why the CIA can use this technology. Still in the test phase. I am confident that the CIA was among the early adopters of artificial intelligence, and I hope that many of these decisions that the CIA makes can be attributed to the AI.
Many decisions come from war games. What we are seeing from the intelligence community can be attributed to the AI. I think we’ll see a lot more of that in the future.
DCM: How to improve army with drones?
JK: It’s all connected. Who would have thought 20 years ago that this would raise the scale of drone warfare to where it is today? No one could have even thought of such a thing. But they thought about it at the CIA. Now let’s talk about these robots and robot dogs. You’ve already seen it on Netflix, in the Black Mirror series.
These robotic dogs are now a reality. These automated things, these robots are going to wage wars. In some scenarios there will be no people fighting wars.
DCM: Is the CIA very afraid of the Chinese?
JK: Yes. It’s not just an arms race between them that we’re all witnessing, it’s a technology race. And you know, the United States has decided to spend more on the military than the next largest countries combined, or vice versa, the United States has a larger defense budget than the 144 smallest countries combined.
The Chinese have chosen to spend their money on R&D and international development. And through the Belton Road program and investments in rare earth metals and investments in infrastructure in countries like China itself and East Asia.
And now the United States cannot understand it. How did we end up falling behind the Chinese? Well the answer is very simple. Because we have decided to spend our money on one thing and the Chinese have decided to spend their money on something else, I fear that the United States will lag behind China on these advanced technology issues.
Quite simply because we don’t have the money to do the kind of research that the Chinese are doing on smart cities and so on.
DCM: How much conspiracy theory is there in the CIA’s involvement in international operations?
JK: The CIA’s mission is very simple. It’s about recruiting spies to steal secrets and then analyzing those secrets to help American politicians make more informed policies.
So it’s the CIA’s job to intercept all cellphone communications and emails. To recruit human sources to steal these inner secrets. That’s what they do, that’s how they get promoted.
If you’re a CIA officer, you won’t get promoted because you don’t steal secrets, and you won’t get promoted if you don’t intercept someone else’s cell phone. So yes, they do in almost every country in the world.
DCM: Do you think there is another way to have an intelligence agency without using these CIA methods?
JK: Yes. I’ll put on record that I don’t think we need a CIA. I think the CIA should be disbanded now.
We have other ways of protecting our country, other ways we can make informed policies. We don’t need to steal everyone’s communications and infiltrate their governments. There are better, cheaper and more efficient ways to do this.
And the most important way is through more robust and impartial diplomacy. If the goal of American foreign policy was not to dominate entire countries or regions, but to engage those countries in partnerships, then we wouldn’t need a CIA.
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