The episode opens with Theo Von delivering a Mountain Dew ad tied to America's upcoming 250th birthday, riffing on Fourth of July imagery and the drink's Tennessee origins. He then pivots to introduce today's guest: John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer who became famous as a whistleblower exposing the agency's post-9/11 torture program and who has a new book, The Ultimate Guide to CIA Skills, Tactics, and Techniques, coming out in August.

The conversation begins mid-thought, with Kiriakou mentioning he has applied for a presidential pardon and is meeting with Tulsi Gabbard later in the week. Theo and Kiriakou riff on Gabbard's authenticity and the Democratic Party's historic hostility to genuinely independent figures. Kiriakou explains the superdelegate system — created after McGovern's 49-state 1972 loss — as a mechanism giving roughly 1,500 party officeholders the power to override popular primary results. He walks through how this same machinery was used against Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and how Debbie Wasserman Schultz giving Hillary Clinton debate questions in 2016 confirmed that 'the fix was in' against Bernie Sanders. Both men reflect on how the sense that American democracy might actually deliver for ordinary people has been replaced by a creeping uncertainty.

Kiriakou traces his CIA origin story to a graduate school class called The Psychology of Leadership, taught by Dr. Gerald Post — secretly a CIA officer working undercover. Assigned to shadow and profile a boss, Kiriakou chose the union organizer he worked for, called him a racist to his face mid-observation, and wrote a forensically detailed sociopath diagnosis. Post gave him an A and invited him to the CIA. Kiriakou recalls his early days parking far away just to walk through the CIA's main entrance past the Wall of Honor, nearly crying with pride. He also places himself within a family context: his liberal parents had argued about the 1976 Pennsylvania primary, his father backing Frank Church who had overhauled the CIA. After careful deliberation about the agency's ugly history, a friend's CIA-officer husband told him 'the bad old days are gone' — true for a brief period, before Reagan and Iran-Contra reversed course.

To illustrate the power of well-placed intelligence, Kiriakou describes the Yalta Conference. Stalin's spy in the White House informed him that Roosevelt was gravely ill, so Stalin chose Yalta — one of the most physically remote locations imaginable — as the meeting venue. The exhausting journey (train to Norfolk, boat to Malta, then Cairo, then Iran, then Yalta) further depleted Roosevelt, who died a month later. When the American delegation arrived, Stalin immediately insisted talks begin rather than letting Roosevelt rest. Too tired to negotiate, Roosevelt handed over Poland. Kiriakou calls it a masterclass in using intelligence advantage strategically — 'that's the big leagues right there.'

Kiriakou was assigned to Iraq analysis specifically because, as his bosses put it, 'nothing ever happens there' — it was a training rotation before he'd move on to something interesting like Romania. Then on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. He arrived early, his boss told him not to take his jacket off, and they drove straight to the White House. In the Oval Office, surrounded by President Bush, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, and the CIA director, every eye in the room turned to the 25-year-old junior analyst. He delivered the briefing, then walked out thinking his friends would never believe what he'd just done. The moment captures a recurring theme of his career: being extraordinarily lucky in his timing.

On July 6, 2001, Kiriakou was hosting a routine liaison briefing for a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers when Cofer Black, the CIA's director of counterterrorism, unexpectedly appeared alongside the operations director from the Osama bin Laden unit. Black's message was stark: something catastrophic was coming, the agency was intercepting code words for a massive attack, camp commanders in Afghanistan were on the phone with students crying and saying 'I'll see you in paradise.' He begged the foreign partners for any source inside al-Qaeda. They stared at him in silence. Kiriakou confronted Black afterward — 'Was that just for them or were you serious?' — and Black replied 'deadly serious.' Then 9/11 happened. Kiriakou also describes the moment he saw the World Trade Center burning on a secretary's TV, making a naive remark about a 1930s bomber hitting the Empire State Building just as the second plane hit.

Kiriakou details the 6-week hunt for Abu Zubaydah across Pakistan, culminating in his capture in Faisalabad in March 2002. His confiscated diary — actually a collection of drawings, most classified top secret — contained the cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes. When the CIA demanded access to the princes, the results were swift and suspicious: one died during bariatric surgery, another in a one-car accident on a Saudi highway, and the third of thirst while camping in the desert. Kiriakou is unambiguous: Saudi Arabia killed them. He also notes that CIA Director George Tenet was the only official he ever saw 'completely lose his shit,' threatening Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar that the CIA would start killing people 'named Al Saud' if cooperation didn't improve.

Moving beyond Saudi involvement, Kiriakou turns to Israel with a claim that draws a clear line between his opinion and established fact. He believes Israel — though not involved in planning 9/11 — had intelligence sources inside al-Qaeda and knew the attack was coming. They chose not to share this with the U.S. because they knew what would follow: American military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions of Muslims and permanently entrenching U.S. military presence in the region. He calls the 'Dancing Israelis' — five men detained in New Jersey who appeared to celebrate as the towers burned — still unresolved, and adds that he is 'still mad about it.' He also notes that Israeli commandos toppled Iraqi electrical towers just before the U.S. invasion despite being told to stay out.

The conversation turns to AIPAC's political influence after Kiriakou raises the Thomas Massie primary. Theo reads data showing over $32 million in pro-Israel spending to defeat Massie, making it the most expensive House primary on record. Kiriakou explains AIPAC's core strategy: any member not 100% pro-Israel gets primaried. He illustrates how this can backfire — a New Jersey Democrat who voted pro-Israel 90% of the time was primaried for not being 100% supportive, and the seat ultimately went to a pro-Palestinian candidate. Both men observe that government officials are paralyzed by the fear of being primaried, and Kiriakou compares AIPAC's exemption from foreign agent registration to his own experience of having to register as a foreign agent after writing $5,000 worth of op-eds for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.

Kiriakou confirms that Israel openly conducts intelligence operations against the U.S. — including planting listening devices in gifts brought to CIA headquarters — while a longstanding political decision prohibits the CIA from spying on Israel in return. He describes Israel's reaction to being offered a slightly downgraded F-35: they accepted the plane but immediately tasked their intelligence services with stealing the upgraded avionics. The conversation shifts to Gaza, with both men describing the conflict as a genocide meeting international legal definitions. They discuss the killing of American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper while she wore press-marked body armor, and the subsequent IDF raid of her funeral procession. Theo raises the proposed 2027 NDAA provision that would effectively integrate U.S. and Israeli militaries.

Theo reads ads for Netflix's FIFA World Cup Launch Edition (a phone-controlled football game available to subscribers), BetterHelp (the world's largest online therapy platform with 30,000+ therapists, offering 10% off at betterhelp.com/theo), and CarShield (month-to-month vehicle protection plans with 20% off using code THEO at carshield.com).

One of the episode's most surprising revelations: the CIA had zero trained interrogators when they began capturing al-Qaeda suspects. Kiriakou was simply told to 'interrogate' a prisoner with no training, no rules, and no guidance on what was even permissible. He describes reading the al-Qaeda training manual in real time and watching prisoners perform every scripted resistance technique described in it — fainting, moaning, pretending to lose consciousness. He and his Pakistani counterpart alternated between good cop and bad cop. The first prisoner, a Jordanian with brain damage from the bombing, told the complete truth on the grounds that lying would do him no good — and then invited Kiriakou to convert to Islam. The second raid captured two 19-year-old Tunisian kids who burst into tears and begged to call their mothers. Eventually the Rawalpindi Jail was completely full.

When Pakistani jails filled up with detainees, Kiriakou's team began flying prisoners to Guantanamo on C-12 transport planes. The original plan was sensible: hold them temporarily in Cuba while the FBI determined which federal court would prosecute them under the open criminal investigation from 9/11. Then someone in Dick Cheney's office — Kiriakou suspects David Addington, though he's never admitted it — pointed out that these men had no legal rights in Cuba. Why charge them at all? Why not just leave them there indefinitely? That offhand suggestion created what Kiriakou calls a 24-year nightmare: 770 detainees at peak, 34 still held today, and a plea deal that was constructed, celebrated, and then thrown out under political pressure from the Biden administration and 9/11 families.

Kiriakou catalogues the torture techniques sanctioned by the CIA post-9/11. Waterboarding received the most media coverage, but he argues the cold cell — stripping detainees naked and chaining them to ceiling bolts in freezing temperatures — and rectal feeding (pumping hummus into detainees through tubes specifically to humiliate their cultural and religious identity) were worse. He reveals the entire program was designed by two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $108 million by American taxpayers. Neither has ever been charged. The devastating legal consequence: because every confession was extracted under torture, all of it is inadmissible. There is effectively no prosecutable evidence against the men who killed 2,976 people. The CIA destroyed its own case.

The conversation shifts from torture to the everyday reality of counterintelligence. Kiriakou describes an International Spy Museum bus advertisement claiming 10,000 to 15,000 foreign intelligence officers operate in Washington D.C. — more than any other city on Earth. He recalls his first day at the CIA, when the head of security delivered two messages: the greatest threat to America is Soviet communism (which struck Kiriakou as absurd since the USSR had already collapsed), and the Israelis routinely brought gifts packed with listening devices to CIA meetings, which is why Israeli delegations were no longer allowed inside the building. New CIA officers were also warned never to eat at restaurants in McLean, Virginia because Russian KGB and Israeli Mossad agents frequented them to eavesdrop on off-duty CIA staff.

Moving into the lighter side of espionage history, Kiriakou and Theo uncover Operation Acoustic Kitty: the CIA surgically implanted a microphone, radio transmitter, and wire into a cat for $20 million, sent it to spy on the Soviet Embassy, and watched it get hit by a taxi on the very first mission. From Cold War absurdity, Kiriakou pivots to one of his proudest professional moments: noticing a surveillance target walked his dog every morning at 6:30 a.m. He borrowed a colleague's dog for a week, manufactured daily 'accidental' encounters in the park, built rapport, and by day three was pitching the man as a CIA source. The target became his best-ever recruitment, paid $5,000 a month — though he ran up $800 phone bills on his CIA-issued disposable cell phone.

The conversation turns to the surveillance state. Theo raises the explosion of data center construction across the U.S. — including a proposed 40,000-acre AI campus in Utah — and Kiriakou notes that companies like Palantir, which received CIA seed funding or are staffed by retired senior officers, are heavily involved. He explains that before 9/11, the government needed a federal judge's signed warrant to access anyone's data. The 2016 NDAA replaced that with national security letters — administrative subpoenas served directly to providers with no judicial oversight. Meanwhile, per Snowden and Assange, the NSA's Utah facility can store every American's communications for 500 years. Kiriakou's verdict: genuine privacy is impossible unless you own zero technology.

Kiriakou expands on the 2016 NDAA to include its domestic propaganda provision: previously it was illegal for the U.S. government to broadcast its own propaganda to American audiences, a prohibition broken by the Obama administration when the Dish Network signal of TV Martí became receivable in Florida. Rather than fix the technical issue, the administration changed the law. Kiriakou describes his 2011 Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip to Yemen, where a defense attaché proudly described funding a jazz radio station as a psyop to make Yemenis pro-American — a program nobody listened to and that was shut down after a year. Both men wrestle with whether America can return to being a force for peace, with Kiriakou concluding he still believes it's possible but it will take a very long time and requires abandoning the role of world's policeman.

Theo raises the elephant in the room: why should anyone trust a former CIA officer? Kiriakou's response is his most direct of the interview — he went to prison for telling the truth, and that fact separates him from people still running cover. He describes dismissing the 'once CIA, always CIA' crowd and pointing out that he served 23 months in a federal prison facility after being charged with three counts of espionage for speaking to ABC News and the New York Times about the torture program. The CIA was so furious about his light sentence at a minimum-security work camp that they intervened to have him transferred to a low-security prison with double walls. His wife visited every month with their children throughout his sentence.

Kiriakou's federal prison experience turns out to be a rich source of storytelling. On his first day, two white supremacists with face tattoos walked into his cell and — after establishing he wasn't gay, a rat, or a child molester — invited him to sit with the Aryans. Months later, a Bonanno family captain asked why he was wasting time with 'Nazi retards' and adopted him. He describes Black inmates divided between Crips and Bloods in a fragile peace, and Hispanic inmates organized under an involuntary umbrella gang called Pisces with dozens of sub-factions. The Italian mob, though the smallest group, commanded universal respect. He then describes the most elaborate and darkly comic incident of his prison stay: manipulating a serial killer known as Truck into beating a fellow prisoner who'd called Kiriakou a rat, then walking out of the prison officers' interrogation by making counter-accusations — demonstrating the CIA rule 'admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.'

Returning to his Pakistan posting, Kiriakou describes developing a surveillance detection routine after noticing a red-helmeted motorcyclist — no one in Pakistan wore helmets — consistently staying in his blind spot across multiple sightings. By the CIA's own definition of surveillance (multiple sightings at time and distance), this was confirmed surveillance. He logged it in a database, took evasive routes, and armed himself with a plan: shoot the follower that afternoon. He paused at a safe house meeting to ask his Pakistani counterpart General Mohammed directly, 'Are you following me?' The general denied it, and the surveillance ceased. Weeks later Kiriakou learned the Pakistani intelligence service had assigned their worst surveillance officer to watch him because they thought nobody could be 'that nice' without ulterior motives. The near-miss — killing a friendly surveillance asset — was prevented by a single question. He closes with a reflection from his psychiatrist friend that he shows no PTSD from his career, which the psychiatrist considers 'not good.'

As the episode winds down, Kiriakou promotes his coming-soon YouTube podcast The Briefing Room (subscribe at Real John Kiriakou on YouTube) and his existing Apple and Spotify show John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, which reached number 5 in the history category worldwide. He also plugs his new book — a compilation of his COVID-era CIA guides covering surveillance, lie detection, and disappearing off the grid — due out August 4th. Theo reflects on the value of finding excitement in uncertain times, they say their goodbyes, and the episode closes with Bishop Gunn's 'Shine.'