Update Oct. 21, 2012: The Kiriakou Conundrum: To Plea Or Not To Plea
Eric Holder, attorney general under President Barack Obama, has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft
Update Oct. 1, 2012: John has been accused by the Department of Justice of crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act, a charge historically reserved for persons who betrayed their country to foreign governments for money.
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This is one of those stories that opens up so many rabbit holes you don't know where to start. And then, once you do start, it keeps getting worse and worse, until you're left feeling duped and useless, and reminded once again of the possibility that if there is such a thing as 'evil' it probably resides somewhere in Washington,
In 2002, with NY Port Authority Detective Tommy McHale, on loan to the FBI, CIA agent John Kiriakou raided the Taliban embassy located in Peshawar, Pakistan. The bloodless action resulted in two van loads of Taliban documents and equipment. A few days after the raid, Detective McHale called Kiriakou to let him know about an incredible find…
"You're never going to believe what I found!" It was a file folder with telephone bills in it. And the telephone bills were written in English. They were Pakistani issued telephone bills. And they documented 168 calls made, from the Taliban embassy to numbers inside the United States, and I mean all over the United States, Bethesda MD, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Kansas City, all over the country. And those call stopped abruptly on September the 10th, 2001, and then started up again slowly, on September the 16th.
So why were the numbers never investigated?
John Kiriakou, author of The Reluctant Spy, shares his story and his frustration in the following interview excerpt from C-SPAN's After Words.
(Click arrow to hear clip) John Kiriakou: Peshawar Taliban Embassy Raid
Link to full Video interview.
In the full interview Kiriakou describes his involvement in the arrest of Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou was instrumental in arranging for the medical care that kept Zubaydah alive. Kiriakou was earlier led to believe that Zabaydah, incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, began 'speaking' after one episode of waterboarding. It later came to be known that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times in the month of August 2002 alone!
The interview includes details about Kirakou's recruitment, and his time as an anti-terrorism agent in Greece. Kiriakou is inteviewd by Frederick Hitz, who was the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1990 to 1998 and is the author of The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage.