Episode 110: John Kiriakou on the DOAC Podcast, Part 1

John Kiriakou is suddenly all over your social media and YT feed. Why? He says that he's ex-C!A and you can trust him because he's a whistleblower who went to jail. 🤔

Me: "I'm trying not to be cynical, but........"

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUNoJ32eLBc&t=1s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou

https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14978422

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14162586

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrold_Post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest

****

My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses John Kiriakou's recent appearance on the "Diary of a CEO" podcast, which has garnered over 7 million views. Kiriakou, a former C!A officer, confirmed the use of waterboarding on al-Qaeda prisoners and was convicted for passing classified information. Causey expresses skepticism about Kiriakou's claims, questioning the authenticity of his stories and the timing of his media rise. She highlights the C!A's historical involvement with Hollywood and the media, and the potential manipulation of social media algorithms. Causey also references David Talbot's book "The Devil's Chessboard" and the concept of "once a spy, always a spy."

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

John Kiriakou, Diary of a CEO, whistleblower, surveillance, predictive programming, conspiracy culture, C!A, enhanced interrogation, social media algorithms, intelligence agencies, political psychology, honey pot scandals, deep fakes, metadata, public relations.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to talk about John Kiriakou recent appearance on The Diary of a CEO podcast. It was released in mid January, and as of this recording, it has more than 7 million views on YouTube. It has been all over social media. I occasionally will watch the diary of a CEO if they have a guest on or they're talking about a topic that I think is interesting, but I'm not a regular viewer by any means. However, even on my social media. I've been seeing clips from this interview, and I'm like, they're pushing this hard. So I wanted to come over here, because the title on YouTube is Charlie India, alpha, whistleblower. They can see all your messages exclamation point. And it's like, well, yeah, no shit. We've known that for years, and I have a different sort of opinion from what's mainstream about what happened with Snowden, because a lot of people are like, Oh, he risked everything, and it's just so crazy. And I'm like, but when we look back at the net effects of that, what really changed? I remember when that news broke and everybody was like, Oh, my God, this is nuts. What even is this? We don't live in a free society, and people who were not in conspiracy culture, which I wasn't at that point in time. So my mind was blown as well. And people stayed mad for about a week. And then after that, it became a joke. It was like, Oh, hey, Obama, I guess you're listening to me. Oh, I just talked to my friend about where we're going on Saturday night. I guess you're listening and I really think this is just my opinion, and it could be wrong. I really think that that's why it was allowed to happen. I don't think it was a big mystery to them that this leak was coming. I think it was allowed to happen as predictive programming, as a way of priming the pump. Like, yes, you're going to be living under surveillance, but nothing's going to change. People are not going to give up their telephones, their televisions, their internet connection, and people who got mad like, I'm just not going to do anything anymore. No, no, unless they really went way off the grid and started to live as a Luddite, which I don't personally know anybody who did that, everyone sort of collectively said, Well, okay, that's the cost of doing business now, that's the cost of living in the modern world. Is that all of this technology is spying on us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so that leads me to the next point, I always like to say, if you have some kind of bias that you are aware of, then I think you should own that. Just say it for your audience, so they know where you're coming from. I do not personally believe in the idea of an ex Charlie India alpha, anything, in my opinion, which, again, could be wrong. I think the agency is like the Hotel California, you might be able to check out, but you are never going to leave. They actually addressed that in this diary of a CEO episode, and you could tell that it makes the man a little bit mad, or maybe he's pretending to be mad, I don't know, but I'm like, I just anytime that somebody goes out in the media, the mainstream media, or on super popular podcasts, and they're like, Hey, I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna tell you a secret. I'm gonna tell you the stuff that they don't want you to know. They can see everything. They know what you're doing, and it's like, okay, so I'm just owning it. I'm coming at this from a skeptical lens to begin with. Nevertheless, it's worth checking out. Can we get anything out of this? Is there anything we can learn, anything new? Is it confirming anything from conspiracy culture that seems to be useful to us, or is this all just part of the psyop? Stay tuned.

Just a reminder. Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next non fiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now, back to the show.

I decided to do this as a two parter because there's a lot of information here. The episode is about two hours long, and I thought even if I go through and just try to hit the high points, I. It's going to take a while, and I don't want to rush anything. I want to really be able to listen and have good commentary. So I'm going to do this as a two parter, out of necessity, for one thing, because the original episode is just that long before we jump into John's explanation about who he is, I just want to hop over to Wikipedia for a moment, his write up there says John Chris Kiriakou, born August 9 1964 is an American whistleblower, author, journalist and former intelligence officer. Kiriakou is a columnist with reader supported news. He was an intelligence analyst and Operations Officer for the agency's counter T word center and a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was also a consultant for ABC News and a co host of political misfits on radio. Sputnik Kiriakou was the first US government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding was used to torture al Qaeda prisoners during interrogations in 2012 Kiriakou became the only Charlie India Alpha officer to be convicted for exposing the agency's enhanced interrogation program. Having passed classified information to a reporter, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Now I think it's important to note that he is not hiding anything about prison. In fact, every five seconds he wants you to know that he went to prison, prison, prison, prison, prison. You can trust me because I went to prison. You can trust me because I paid the price by going to prison. And it's like, Dude, I think we got it. We get it. His book titles include the reluctant spy, my secret life in the Charlie India alpha's war on terror, doing time like a spy, the convenient T word the Charlie India alpha's insider guide to the Iran crisis and surveillance and surveillance detection. At about three minutes in, he says, Well, I blew the whistle on the torture program in a nationally televised interview on ABC. And then also just here, in the past few months, it's like the YouTube algorithm has really blown me up. I'm just everywhere, and I'm like, Ah, I hate to already be this way three minutes in, but I'm trying to be careful of what I say here. Okay, so you know, there was the expose that Bernstein did about the Charlie, India alpha and the media. This is all known, the influence that intelligence agencies possess over the media, especially mass media, mainstream media, it's well known. It's well documented. I'm certainly not saying that his interview was like that. I don't know if it was like that, and that's what I'm really doing here, is just kind of planting that seed of reasonable doubt. Because historically, if somebody was really going to tell something that the government or that the intelligence agencies didn't want John and Jane Q public to know, would they really be allowed to do that on mainstream media? I'm super, super skeptical of that. I'm also extremely skeptical of the idea that all of a sudden, golly gosh, G bank whiz, the social media algorithms and the YouTube algorithm have chosen out of nowhere to blow this guy up. That really just does not happen. I'm currently at the moment. I'll pull the curtain back and be honest with you. I'm currently, at the moment taking some coursework in public relations and media relations, because as an independent author with weird books and weird tastes and being unconventional and everything, in some respects, the onus is on me to get my message out there. It doesn't happen overnight. And the myth of the overnight success is exactly that. It is a myth. So I'm really skeptical of the idea that out of nowhere, wink, social media started blowing this guy up, and suddenly he just became ubiquitous. I don't personally believe that. I'm not calling him a liar, because I don't know he may believe that that's what happened. I'm saying I don't believe that that's what happened. He says that he started off his agency career as an analyst, he started to get bored, so he shifted over to counter T word operations. And he was like, the head of counter T word operations in Pakistan after 911, so the host is like, Okay, explain to me, like I'm a teenager. I've never heard of the Charlie India Alpha. I I don't know what a spy is or what they do. How would you explain it? Which I. Um, you know, yet again, that to me, feels like such a staged and weird question, um, automatically, that really just doesn't pass the sniff test to me, like, how, how many teenage kids, anyway, are going around going, you know, I've never heard of the Charlie India alpha, and I don't know what a spy does? I mean really? I mean maybe, maybe they don't. But already, again, you know, I feel bad, I do. I feel so bad because it'll be an episode where I'm going to get some hate, some jackass is going to be like, you're not even giving this guy a fair shake. And I'm like, Well, I'm trying, but my BS detector is just all over the place. So his response, essentially is that the agency exists to recruit spies to go out and steal secrets, to go after the baddies, to go out and steal secrets so that policy makers can make the best policies possible based on what they think the enemies might be up to before we go any further, and this is another reason why you know this episodes are going to have the danger of running long, because there's a lot to unpack here. I wanted to visit David Talbot's book, The Devil's chess board, and I know at some point I need to make some episodes, maybe even a little mini series of episodes, just about this book alone, because it is explosive in all the right ways. The title is the devil's chessboard, Allen Dulles, the Charlie India alpha and the rise of America's secret government. If you have not read it, I highly, highly recommend that you get a copy. But one of the things that he talks about is how Harry Truman composed an op ed that was in the Washington Post, and it caught fire, and it went all over the place, where he says, like, this is not what we had in mind. I feel like the agency has gone way, way out of hand. And I'll read a little bit from the devil's chess board, he quickly realized, and now he's talking about Allen Dulles. So Allen Dulles quickly realized the danger posed by Truman's explosive piece in The Washington Post, which instantly caught fire and inspired similar anti Charlie India Alpha editorials and newspapers from Charlotte, North Carolina to Sacramento, California, syndicated columnist Richard Starnes a bete noir of the spy agency used the Truman op ed to launch a broad site against the Charlie India alpha, calling it a cloudy organism of uncertain purpose and appalling power. Meanwhile, Senator Eugene McCarthy, another agency critic, weighed in with an essay for the Saturday Evening Post The popular middle American magazine that featured the homespun art of Norman Rockwell, bluntly titled The Charlie India alpha is getting out of hand. End quote. So Dulles basically tries to go to Truman and is like, you need to retract this. I think you spoke out of hand by saying that, hey, we created this agency to protect the country, but they've gone way, way past the point of the original directive. Truman refused. And so then Dulles went around portraying him as some doddering old man with senility that didn't even know what he was saying. So automatically, I bristled this idea of, well, at its most fundamental level, it's supposed to be recruiting spies to get secrets from the baddies so we know what they're up to. I mean, I uh, I guess, if you want to take that with the world's most massive grain of salt, go ahead, back in 1990 he says that he's doing analysis on Iraq, and they're telling him nothing really ever happens there. It's more like a training account. It's a way to just learn some things and get your feet wet. But no big deal. However, then in later in 1990 in August, Iraq invades Kuwait, and it suddenly becomes a big deal. Again, we're taking John's word for all of this. So he says that he gets grabbed up and taken to the Oval Office, and like the President and the Vice President are there, and suddenly he's having this oh my god, shit. Just got real moment. And he describes this meeting, so this would have been Poppy bush and Dan Quayle. And he describes this meeting where Poppy is like, Well, what do we do now? Which again? Okay, wait a minute. We've talked from time to time about Poppy on this podcast, I personally believe, and again, I could be wrong. I personally believe that Poppy was involved with the agency way, way before he became the DCI. I do not think that he just out of nowhere, blipped into the agency as an outsider. I firmly do not believe that that's true. I think that he was involved in intelligence work for a long time before he ever publicly had a role that he could publicly admit to.

So he says that Poppy, you know, who's like, in some respects, a master spy, is sitting there like, Well, what do we do now? So this John tells him, well, the royal family has evacuated, and there's some guy that's involved with the Palestinian Liberation Army that's involved with all of this too. And Dan Quayle, who couldn't even spell the word potato correctly, is screaming out, Jesus Christ. And it turns into this, almost like a sheer panic scene inside the oval. And I'm like, I just don't think I believe this. He could be telling the truth. I All I'm saying is, in my opinion, it just feels fishy. He then talks about spot, assess, develop, recruit, which, whenever you are an operative and you are trying to recruit people to give up secrets, to be a turncoat, really, or to blab in some way, that's what you're supposed to do, find them, assess them, do the finessing, and get them on board. He goes into this story about being in a coffee shop in Pakistan, he's gotten a tip that there are some like mid level al Qaeda guys that are meeting at this coffee shop every day. So he starts going there every day. He says that he's grown out of bushy beard for operational reasons, and at the time, his Arabic was flawless, which it still he speaks some in the in the episode, it still sounds pretty damn good to me. I mean, I'm not fluent in Arabic by any stretch of the imagination, but it still sounds like he's got the touch, for sure. So he goes into this coffee shop, and he takes a newspaper with him, an Arabic newspaper with him, and he says that there's a guy that immediately spots him and makes eye contact. By the second week, he nods. By the third week, he's a regular. They're starting to get used to him being there, and the guy is able to say, Hello. How's it going like to strike up a little conversation? And according to John, this guy is i is remarkably honest about what he's doing. It's almost like, Hey, stranger in a coffee shop, I know you're a regular and everything, but I don't know you at all. And I'm going to start talking to you about how I've been making jihad against the Americans, and I was at Tora Bora, and that was a hideous situation. And I'm like, again, I'm a little speechless because I'm trying not to be a cynical turd. Cynical, sure, but not a turd. I just... I find this to be so far fetched. Now, truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes the most jacked up things will occur and will turn out to be true. So there's part of me that's like, give it the benefit of the doubt, but there's another part of me that's like, I feel like a metronome, right? It's almost like my my bullshit detector is just going 90 to nothing. I mean, do people do that? Do you just like, go up to somebody, some rando in a coffee shop, and you're like, Hey, I've been busy making jihad. I mean, would would somebody do that? I don't know. I'm just asking. The guy also says, I miss my family. I want to go home. This is a lonely life. So John invites him out to dinner and confesses I'm not Lebanese. I'm actually American. Like, would you be interested in flipping and working for us? The guy says yes, and apparently justifies it by saying you're the only person who ever asked about my family. Um, okay, I like, I almost don't even know how to make commentary on that, because, again, I'm like, I This is so not passing the sniff test. For me. It could all be true and I could be wrong. I want to be so clear about that. I just am not buying this. Sorry, guys, if you're a big fan of this, of this dude, Mazel Tov, but I am just not buying it. The host asks, How did you become a spy? Because I'm not really familiar with spies, but when I think about one in my mind, you're not the guy that comes up and he laughs and says, Well, that's a good thing. And I'm like, Well, yeah. Again, that feels like an orchestrated question to me. It reminds me of how, and I know I'm behind on on recording an episode to really ask the question of whether Anton Levay was involved with intelligence work, because I think there's evidence to show that he very well might have been. We know that Aleister Crowley was, and at some point I need to record an episode about that, because there are all of these intersections between the occult world and Satanism in particular, and intelligence work. I plan to release an episode I'm hoping next month, which would be March, about Michael Aquino and some of the things, some of the things that are going on with or. Organizations that present themselves to the public as being so called spiritual and so called Christian and all of that, but it might surprise you who's actually on their board anyway, Anton Levay would always say that someone who is actually a Satanist would surprise you. It's not about the costumes and the pageantry, because what he sort of told people on Front Street was Satanism. Is Ayn Rand with a show floor or a floor show. It's extreme libertarianism with some rituals, iron Rand with a floor show. But I think anybody that has any kind of knowledge about the occult realizes that that's the very much, the tip of the iceberg, and it's not the complete truth. And Levay would always say that a real sickness is not obvious. They're not going around dressed like a goth. They could be the person in the supermarket, they could be the person down the road, they could be the guy at your tax accountant's office. Like it's not going to be obvious to you. And so I feel like it's the same thing with spies, even just planting the question of, well, you don't look like a spy. To me, feels orchestrated. That's that's a long way around with some, I think, pertinent information to say that question to me feels staged. And it's also at about this time where the host brings up the once a spy, always a spy, criticism. He's like, I already know in the comments section you're going to see comments like that, and John rolls his eyes. And he's like, Oh, I hate that. It's so intellectually lazy. And I thought this is another point where I need to just pause and say something, because like in the episode that I recorded about JFK TV, or even going way back to the early days of this podcast, when I talked about Jay weidners theory from JFK X, about using the squib and faking his own death to run off to Greece with Mary Meyer And all of this in JFK TV, the author leans heavy on the idea of it's all fake. Any political murder, any big hoo ha you've ever seen in the media, has been fake. I don't believe that to be true. I think you have to look at each event and decide for yourself what you think. To say that no political murder has been real, like, from what going back to Julius Caesar, like, What do you mean? No political murder has ever been real. I think that's taking it to an extreme. It reminds me of Q anon and the whole JFK Jr is actually Q, and he's going to reveal himself, and Hillary Clinton is on house arrest, and Obama is on house arrest and JFK Jr is going to come back and reveal it all. And you're like, This is dumb. This is this is not even helping anything. It's making anybody that would describe themselves as a conspiracy theorist look like an idiot, because people automatically assume, Oh, are you into that qanon Shit? And then they quit listening. Meanwhile, you might be making completely coherent points, but they just think qanon, and then they zap out of the conversation. It doesn't make sense to me to say any political murder you can ever think of has been fake.

To me, That is intellectually lazy. My use case for saying once a spy, always a spy, is more specific. I just do not personally believe that if somebody trots out in the media, they're not going off somewhere in quiet retirement, shutting the hell up and never being seen or heard from again. Like I survived it. I got out. I'm gone. I'm gonna go live in the woods like a hermit and look to see me. No more these people that trot out for the media, and they're all over mainstream media and super popular podcasts where it's not easy to get booked, and you want me to believe that you're not still in the game. I can't go there, if that makes me intellectually lazy, by your yardstick, sure, the host also is like, well, you know, there's a conspiracy theory that the agency itself is messing with the algorithm to make these so called ex spies be popular. And so then all of us popular podcasters want to invite them on, and we know that we're going to get views. And John is like, Well, I would agree with that. And then he corrects himself and says, I would have agreed with that a year ago. I was like, hmm, is that a little bit of a Freudian slip? So John's defense, essentially is, I am the most anti agency person out there, so they would have no reason to promote me. I disagree with that. I absolutely disagree with that. The reason to do it is to make people think that they're getting a secret. You let somebody see a little scintilla of information. Think about an elephant, if somebody allowed you to see maybe 30% of the elephant. Ear and you thought, oh, wow, I'm getting to see something remarkable. There's a whole freaking elephant there that you're not seeing. That's how I look at it. Here's something else that's making my metronome go crazy. The host asks, like, do you think that they have a strategy for podcasters? And John is, like, I believe they do now, but it's taken some time, just like with Hollywood, it's taken some time. You know, the Foxtrot Bravo India had a relationship with Hollywood back in the 40s, but it took the agency some time to catch up. I don't personally believe that I could be in the wrong. It could be that my opinion is the one that's incorrect, but I do not believe that. I think that the agency has been in bed with Hollywood for a long time. I don't think it's something that's brand new. I mean, even going back to like the OSS days, going back to the early days before it was even called the Charlie India alpha, I think that, let's say intelligence forces, powers that be, have had their finger in the pie of what was made in Hollywood and what wasn't made in Hollywood. And no, I do not think that the agency, only just now, only just recently, in the past year or two, has decided podcasts are worth paying attention to. Here's what that does, in my mind, it's giving you this idea that the people in the agency are a bunch of bass ackwards Idiots, and they're behind the curve. I do not believe that. I hear that a lot from people that are like these politicians and people in government are idiots. They couldn't find their butt with both hands. They couldn't find ice in Alaska. And you're like, ah, that is a stereotype that only serves them. If you think they're all a bunch of morons, it's actually to their benefit. It helps them to fly under the radar and to do really nefarious things if you're busy thinking that they're a moron. So in my mind, if you decide that the agency is full of technophobes who somehow don't understand how podcasts work, like they can intercept all of these secrets, and they can send this guy off to supposedly be so talented that he recruits an al Qaeda guy in less than a month to start selling secrets to him. But yet, they don't know how a podcast works, and they don't know how to get placements and podcasts that they want. I have some oceanfront property here in the landlocked Midwest that I'd be happy to sell you for top dollar. He throws movies like Zero Dark 30 and Argo under the bus, where the agency is clearly the hero. And that's, that's pretty low hanging fruit. I mean, yeah, obviously I would be much more interested to know about cultural manipulations that haven't been talked about out in the public, like the very first episode of this podcast, when I talked about Dave McGowan's book about weird scenes from sign the canyon, where he talks about this manipulation of Hollywood and the counterculture that 1960s hippie counterculture did not spring up organically. It was manipulated. It was designed. Those are the kinds of things that I would be much more interested in hearing about. I don't need somebody to handhold me and tell me, Oh, well, you know, the agency made sure that movies like zero, dark 30 and Argo portrayed them as a hero. Well, you know, shit Sherlock like tell me something a bit deeper than that. The host asks him if you were still with the agency and you wanted to infiltrate podcasts. How would you do it? And he said, Well, you'd have to have a goal, and you'd have to have steps that were traceable to the goal. You couldn't just pay a podcast or a wad of money and then manipulate the algorithm to target, let's say men 18 to 30. You'd have to have a message, whether it's the agency is good, or Iran is bad, or Netanyahu is an anti Semite. You'd have to have some specific message to convey to people. And then he very quickly segues into this is why I blew the whistle on the torture program. So it's like, he says very little about how would the agency manipulate podcasters and podcast guests, and goes right back into here's why I'm awesome about blowing the whistle on torture. And I'm like, Okay, wait a minute. We actually did accidentally get some cool information from that. Another episode that I want to do at some point in the future is about music industry plants and how like but really, it could be an industry plant from from anything. Music is what has been on my mind, because I watched some really cool information about that recently. But it's like all of a sudden somebody pops up, as if from nowhere, and they're getting tons of play. You know, their videos are skyrocketing on YouTube, and they're getting a lot of downloads of Spotify. And you've never heard of this person? You ask friends and family, have you ever heard of this person? No, I haven't. Have you ever heard any of their music before? No, I haven't. Like nothing has happened organically. It's like this person really does seem to define. What I said earlier about there's no such thing as an overnight success. Well, the reason why that's happening is because in real life, there isn't any such thing as an overnight success. But if somebody is an industry plant, if somebody is being backed by the military intelligence complex, of course they can be blown up overnight. Absolutely they can be. So I think it's important to note what he's saying, even though they're speaking in hypotheticals. Wink. You just have to remember that some of these people that have a humongous audience, that have huge backing, that is not happening on accident, and I know this is going to get some rotten tomatoes thrown at me. Oh, man, it doesn't even mean that they're good. Okay. They can be talking about straight bullshit, absolute nonsense. I'm thinking of Billy Madison, Miss lippy's Car is green, and Billy likes to drink soda. And they're just saying stuff that's so banal and stupid, but then you look and they have, like, a million views, and everybody's seal clapping, and it's like this echo chamber of goofballs that does not happen on accident. It simply does not and John, to his credit, in that one moment where we got to hear Him speaking about, well, here's what I would do, wink. You actually got their playbook. I think. You pick somebody out, you pay them a lot of money, you make sure that the algorithm will blow them up so that the public has no choice but to see them. And then you put forth some kind of message. So all you really need there is a talking head podcast host that's viable. You need a talking head guest that is buyable or is one of your assets. Anyway. You get the big tech algorithms to do whatever the hell you want them to do, and kind of slap the public around crazily with all of the they're on Instagram and they're on Tiktok, and they're on Twitter and they're here and they're there, and they're Oh, I can't escape them. And then you put your message out, and boom, there it is. It really is not rocket science. They have this formula, and it's not even difficult.

They go back now to asking John, how did he get started in the agency. He says that from the time he was nine, he wanted to be a spy, and that's all he ever wanted to be. He goes and enrolls at George Washington University, because it's close to the White House, and they have this burgeoning degree program in Middle Eastern studies. So it's like he not only knows from an early age that he wants to be a spy, which, I mean, maybe that that could be true. It's not what you commonly think of that a kid wants to be when they grow up. But okay, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Apparently, he not only knows that he wants to be a spy, but he knows that he very specifically wants to get into spying as it relates to the Middle East hyper specific goal there. So he gets into this degree program, and then he goes on for a master's, and he says that one of his professors was Gerald post. So let's stop for a second here. Go to Wikipedia and look up Gerald post if you're not familiar with him. Gerald Morton post was an American psychiatrist and author. He was an analyst for the agency and the founder of the Center for the analysis of personality and political behavior. Post created a number of psycho biographies on notable individuals during his tenure at the Charlie India alpha, and is credited in some sources as inventing the field of political psychology to skip down now to the career section. In 1965 post was preparing to accept a position at Harvard's McLean Hospital, when, through an acquaintance, he was recruited by the agency where he began developing psychological profiles of world leaders after a career of 21 years at the agency in 1986 post left to found a program of political psychology. But did he actually leave? I'm just I don't know. He left wink to found a program of Political Psychology at George Washington University, where, as a professor, he taught until 2015 he was the founder and director of the Center for the analysis of personality and political behavior. He also maintained a private practice in psychiatry out of his home in Bethesda, Maryland. Now, one more thing before we leave his page and go on post, had kidney failure in his later years and went to a dialysis center weekly. He suffered a stroke in July 2020, and could no longer drive to dialysis. So he took a medical taxi, where it is believed that he contracted the on November 15, he tested positive for he died from the virus one week later on, November 22 2020 the last thing that he wrote was a book called danger. Charisma, the political psychology of Donald Trump and his followers. And it was published one year prior to the 2020, election. Things that make you say, Hmm.

We certainly know that there are many connections between the field of psychiatry, psychology and even medical doctors and the agency. You may remember that back in September of last year, Episode 85 was journey into madness, where I talked about Gordon Thomas and the book journey into madness, the true story of secret Charlie India alpha, mind control and medical abuse. I think the only thing that might have been more attention getting to me in this episode from Diary of a CEO would have been if the guy said my professor was Sydney Gottlieb. And lo and behold, as we get into the episode, John says that post calls him into his office like he has this assignment where you're supposed to shadow your boss for a week and then write a report, write a psychological profile. So he says that his boss at some labor union is a psycho with sociopathic tendencies. Post gives him an A and says, Come and see me after class. So he does. So post takes him into his office and says, I'm a professor here, but not really. I'm actually undercover for the Charlie India alpha. And I was like, I knew it. I freaking knew it. Called it. Told you he takes this assessment. He says that he's been told, don't tell anybody what you're doing, because you may have to go undercover, you may have to have deep cover, and we just can't have anybody knowing. He says that. He tells his wife, because he's like, Well, hey, what are you going to do? She's my wife. Eventually, the wife starts to not believe him, because he just cannot tell her the things that he's doing. He describes a time where he was camped out in a dumpster at night waiting for some guy to throw away a bag of documents. He gets home, and the wife is like, what's her name? I know you're out catting around with some other woman. And he's like, smell me right now. Do I really smell like I've been out catting around with another woman? I smell gross. But he laughs and says, we ended up getting a divorce. And I thought, well, yeah, I mean, I would imagine that to be the case. It would be very difficult if somebody is leaving at odd hours you don't know when they're telling the truth, because that would also make a really great cover for somebody that wants to be a philanderer. I can't tell you what I'm doing because it involves something work related. And then they could be totally going out, messing around. They segue into what from your training could be applicable to other people. And he says something else that I think is interesting. I wouldn't say it's surprising to anybody, but it's interesting. He talks about how the agency likes to hire people with sociopathic tendencies, not outright sociopaths, because they don't feel remorse, they don't feel regret. He says that most CEOs, not all, but most CEOs are sociopaths. They claw their way to the top. They step on the backs of other people, and they just simply don't give a damn. He says you have to have sociopathic tendencies to do something like breaking into a foreign embassy. You're on foreign soil, or maybe domestic soil, but they have sovereignty there. You're breaking into something that's sovereign, that is really not your place to do it. And he says most people would not do that. They don't think it's the right thing to do. But he's like, I would. And the host is like, really, you would. And he's like, so you have sociopathic tendencies? The guy's like, Yeah, I do. Okay. This is a technique of someone using radical honesty, or what appears to be radical honesty, because it's disarming. They're telling you something unflattering about themselves, and that actually, in turn, even though it sounds counterintuitive, it makes you trust them more. This technique has different names. You can call it manufactured vulnerability or strategic self disclosure, and sometimes it's called the confessional tactic. So people will sometimes use weaponized vulnerability, so somebody will share something that seems to be embarrassing, sad, shameful or even self incriminating, whether that's real or fabricated, and it's not about being authentic. It's because they know that you'll trust them, you'll feel safe, you'll feel connected, or think, Wow, well, they wouldn't lie about that. That's so unflattering. This can be also reflected as forced intimacy, the Pratt fall effect, which is like, where somebody reveals a harmless flaw, or they accidentally fall like, Oh, oops, a daisy, look at me. It can be pseudo disclosure, where they're making a vulnerable confession that's crafted for effect and not for truth, and it can just be social engineering via vulnerability. This guy may very well have sociopathic tendencies, as he says that he does, or this could all be something that has been drummed up for this episode. The host asks him like. Really you would do this? And he's like, Yeah, because we're the good guys. And I'm like, Oh God, just roll your eyes. Not saying that America is a bad country to live in. I Please understand it's not me being anti patriotic about the country. It's not me being anti patriotic about John and j and q public that are just trying to raise their family and pay their taxes and live their life. It's the agency that I don't trust. It's not it's not the American public. I just want to be very clear on that when I roll my eyes, it's not because I have something against John and Jane Doe. It's I don't trust the agency. As far as I could throw it, the host presses like, well, maybe we can take some of these lessons into business or in being a good salesperson, because, of course, isn't everything ultimately about that we're supposed to take even lessons from someone who's calling himself a former agent with sociopathic tendencies. Well, how can you help me be a good salesperson? Like, what? What kind of late stage crony capitalist hell is this. So the guy is like, most of the people who wind up trading us secrets are doing it for the money. Like 95% of the people who say, Yeah, this is just going to be a straight business transaction. I give you secrets, you give me money. So the host asks, well, what kinds of things can the Charlie India Alpha get? And he's like, anything. But then he walks it back and says, Well, I mean, not narcotics and not under aged prostitutes. We would never do anything like that. Of course, they wouldn't know. No, they wouldn't. So the guy's like, what if you had, what if? What if you needed a green card? Yeah, the information is good enough. What if you owed a lot in back taxes? Yeah, we can, we can fix that. So, like, what if somebody has ran afoul of the IRS and he's like, Well, I mean, we wouldn't recruit American citizens. We're talking about foreigners. We're not talking about American citizens, because, you know, the agency cannot legally operate in the US, even though they have offices around the country like they don't, they can. They don't, they don't, they can't legally operate here. He says, let's say that you're a CEO or a business owner, and you've recently been to North Korea. When you get back, I'm going to call your office and say, Hey, I'm from the Charlie India Alpha. I know that you just went to x location. Can I come in so we can talk about that. And he was like, 99.9% of people are going to say yes because they're patriots. And I'm sitting here like, yes, some of them are patriots, but other people are going to say yes because they're scared shitless. How could you say no to that? Because if you say no, fuck off, you're probably going to wind up in jail. They are going to figure out that you're not playing ball with them.

You're doing something that they're going to paint even if you went over there and did nothing controversial whatsoever. That's how they're going to make it seem you're just you're not going to be able to tell them. No. He talks about how you get trained to lie and to detect lies, and of course, you have to keep the lie straight depending on who you're talking to. And he says there's a very high divorce rate because who wants to be married to somebody's lying all the time. And I think that's one of the things I'll probably ultimately wrap up. The episodes that I do for this. I will go ahead and do a continuation of this to be released next time. But when you're talking about somebody who's a trained liar, how can you believe anything that comes out of their mouth? Forget about the marriage and divorce component of it. How can you believe anything that they're telling you? This also makes me think of how Marlon Brando described acting as lying for a living. He had an acting workshop that he taught in LA in his later years, and that's what he called it, lying for a living, the better a liar you are, the better an actor you are, and vice versa, and you get paid more to do it. So it's like, how can you believe anything that they're saying when the person's like, I am a trained liar. I've been trained in the art of lying. He tells a couple of weird, long winded stories about how you're not supposed to sleep with an asset. He was told to groom this guy who was gay by pretending to be gay and going out on dates with this guy. And then he says, the guy leans in to kiss him, and then he pulls back in revulsion and is like, well, it's not that I'm not gay, it's that I'm not into hairy guys. I still want to be friends, though, and I'm like the the head games and playing with someone's emotions and showing up and being whatever you think that person needs, or whatever you think that person would find desirable, just to get information he keeps over and over and over, saying, We're the good guys. We're the good guys. And I'm like, Are you trying to convince me? Are you trying to convince yourself? Because I just think that's so gross. And then he also talks about a woman, oh, she was ugly. She was the ugliest woman you've ever seen. She looked like a stone gargoyle coming off of No. True DOM. And when I got back to the office, my superior was like, where you're gonna have to fuck her? And he's that's what he says. You're gonna have to fuck her. He doesn't I, it's not me that's using the Oh, you're using foul language, which I do. It's a nighttime podcast. He says that and and then the guy's like, Okay, well, I'll take one for the team. And the guy's like, No, you don't really have to do that. I was just kidding. I was just messing around. Again. I'm like this just all feels so gross, like playing with someone's emotions, making them think that you like them, making them think that you're interested in them, that you care about them, or that you're like them, when it's all just a plot, it's all just a ploy. I feel sorry for those people to get used. He claims that they do not do honey pot scandals anymore, which I personally do not believe. He says that they tried to set up an Ayatollah. They don't say who it was. Just they tried to set up an Ayatollah, and so they had him have sex with a prostitute, where they had cameras everywhere, and then they show up like, Hey, we've got all these incriminating photos of you start naked with this hooker. And he's like, okay, great. Give me that one in an eight by 10. This one in a five by seven. I want wallet sizes of this. When he just basically told him to fuck off, he didn't care. So they're like, honey pots just don't work anymore, and we don't do them. I do not for one second believe that we can talk about all the stuff in the Epstein files in a later episode. I mean, trying to get through all of them. I shouldn't even say it that way, we can talk about stuff in the Epstein files in a later episode, because there's so much information there, trying to get through all of it, or even a fraction of it is going to basically be impossible, but we can, in general terms, talk about things that have been revealed from the Epstein files, but to say that they don't still lure people in with prostitutes or with women who are trained and they don't have handlers, I don't believe that for one second. He mentions that JFK, or he says, John Kennedy, I assume he's talking about JFK. So according to him, JFK says that the Charlie India Alpha were the best and the brightest. And he says, but we're not. We're really just average, ordinary folks. Couple of things I want to say about that. One is this goes back to the idea of they're not anything special. They're they're just like, like, the the mythology that anybody in the government, anybody who's a politician, is a Nimrod that doesn't really know what they're doing. There's nothing intellectually savvy about them, nothing to see here. People Move along. Move along. The second thing is this idea of the best and the brightest refers to a book that was written by the journalist David Halberstam in 1972 and it refers to JFK, so called Whiz Kids, leaders of industry and academia that were part of Kennedy's administration. It doesn't talk about the Charlie India Alpha specifically. So I'm a little bit wary of what he's saying there. He also tries to convince us that prior to 911 it was so illegal, written in stone that you couldn't spy on Americans. But then after 911 it was like the flood gates opened, and it became this multi billion dollar industry to spy on Americans. I don't believe that either. In another one of the early episodes that I did for this podcast, it was episode 19 fin thread spying before 911, and the shadow factory, I talk about the spying that was going on before 911, and then the write up for that episode, I say we tend to think domestic spying was a post 911, knee jerk reaction. The facts don't show that to be the case. A point he makes that, I think, is intriguing. He talks about Harvey silverglates book, three felonies a day, how the Feds target the innocent. And the thesis is that in the course of a given day, a person might actually commit three felonies, not that they mean to, but just going through loopholes and technicalities they can. And if the Feds really want you, they're going to get you, and all they have to do is buy your metadata from your provider. So it's not like they even have to go get a warrant. They don't have to go in front of a job. In front of a judge and show probable cause. They just get your metadata and start making a case from there. If they really want you gone, they can get you gone. I believe that to be true. Where I'm going to stop for this particular episode before I pick up in part two, next time around, is he says anything can be used against you. And they were told at the Charlie India Alpha never to say or do anything, not to even make a gesture of any kind that they wouldn't want on the front page of the Washington Post. He said, Now, anything that you say, anything that you do, can be twisted around, manipulated, put in isolation, etc. Sara, and I would say, if you add to that things like AI and deep fakes, it doesn't even matter whether you said something or you didn't. It doesn't even matter if you gestured some way with AI and deep fakes, it could be made to look like you did. So I think that over the coming years, that will be another concern that people have is, I didn't say that I didn't do that. How can I how can you prove that you didn't if someone has made a deep fake and I think that that ability with technology is something scary that we all have to think about. It doesn't matter if you're a public figure or a politician or not. Like the concept of three felonies a day, if they've decided they want you, they're going to come after you and get you. I know that I have taken a rather cynical and skeptical look. I'm sure that will continue into the next episode, next time around, because there's just there are things about this that don't pass the sniff test to me. Again, that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong. Obviously, I want you to go and watch the episode for yourself. Check out the body language. Decide, decide on your own what you think that this is all about. Do you find this guy trustworthy? Do you think that he's giving you the straight dope on it all, or do you think that maybe we're being led down a certain path we'll explore more next time around. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others.