Why Is The CIA Compromising Podcasts?

The CIA used to be a faceless organisation. Three letters that conjured images of redacted documents and men in suits who didn't exist on paper. The whole point of an intelligence agency was that you don't know what it's doing. Now, you can't scroll through YouTube without one of them candidly sharing dark secrets about how all of this works. You've probably seen clips of it yourself, like the grey haired American man calmly explaining how the CIA told him to pretend to be gay to recruit a foreign spy. So we reached out

and spoke to him for exclusive insights as after seeing clips like this, it was hard to ignore something weird was going on.

Headquarters says we want you to pretend that you ugliest woman he'd ever seen in my life. Like you want to avert your eyes. Like she came off the side of Notre Dame. She was a stone gargoyle with a giant mole right here with a giant hair coming out of it. That kind of ugly. And my boss says, okay, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to fuck her. And I said, what?

I said, have you ever seen her? And he said, I know, but we're the good guys and you're going to have to take one for the team. Or how the agency dosed random strangers

with LSD in San Francisco brothels. They rented a safe house in San Francisco. They recruited a bunch of hookers and had them go out and pick up Johns, bring them back to the safe house where they thought they were gonna get laid, dose them with LSD, and then interrogate them.

Or how things that were once conspiracies are now just mainstream knowledge.

I believe very strongly that he was an Israeli access agent.

Do you work for the CIA?

No way. The CIA's job is to collect foreign intelligence. What foreign intelligence did he have? He's spying on Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Prince Andrew. That's the Israelis.

And he's not alone. The intelligence community is flooding the podcast circuit right now. Gavin DeBecca, not exactly a former intelligence officer, but the man who runs Anti-Assassination Protection for the World's Most Famous said this about

Epstein.

What he was is a construct. He's a created construct. Money, wealth, private jet, private island, fun, not married, young girls, lots of things. $500 million of money came from Les Wexner, who's a wealthy guy who owns or owned, I don't know what he's doing now, Victoria's Secret, big note to the state of Israel, and $500 million was transferred to Epstein along with power of attorney to use it

and invest it in the ways he saw fit.

He even described a friend who narrowly avoided it.

He goes to meet with Epstein in New York to ask for money for a charity, and Epstein is in a robe, and Epstein situation is where John Kiriakou, a veteran ex-CIA operative, has gone mega-viral

with his bombshell disclosures.

On the diary of his CEO, he went further than he had before. It was the Israelis. Why? Jeffrey Epstein is kind of the stereotypical example that they give you in training for what's called an access agent. If you're a foreign intelligence service and you want information, like close-in information from a former president,

from the CEO of the biggest company in the world, from a member of the British royal family. You're not going to recruit these guys. You're not going to recruit

Bill Clinton. And he's made the same points on so many other podcasts, with remarkable consistency.

I mean, what's the point of running the operation if it's not to collect compromat? It was about

blackmail. It had to have been. I don't understand it otherwise. This

dramatic, cutting and critical of the highest institutions of government. And some of his other disclosures, probably the ones that get less attention because they're harder to meme, are just as unsettling. This video is sponsored by ICOGNY. Most people assume their personal data is scattered around the Internet by accident. But in reality, there's an entire industry built around

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engineer. The revelations feel like they're from a movie or a video game. Why would the CIA want to take over your car? To make you drive off a bridge, maybe? To make you drive into a tree and kill yourself? To make you drive into an abutment and make sure that there's no way you can survive because they've got the thing going 140 miles an hour and you can't control it?

They developed technology to reverse your smart TV to make the speaker into a microphone with the TV still appearing to be off so you don't know that it's broadcasting everything that's being said in your house to CIA headquarters."

And then this one, which is shocking though probably not surprising, yet he's somehow presenting it as a simple fact.

"...theory would hack into other countries most sensitive technological systems and to The way these stories are delivered makes you think they're putting their lives on the

line to tell us, like a noble act for the good of us, the humble public. Access agent, compromise, intelligence peddler, he sounds like an insider decoding the story for civilians. And his career definitely backs this up. But if you look really carefully, you start to see a few deviations that make you wonder what's really going on here. His views evolve but the timing is key. On his earlier

appearances he was strong on Epstein obviously a Mossad access agent. And I said that right here on the show. Now, with the release of this latest tranche of documents, I think he was more than that, and that he was probably not exclusive to the Israelis. We know from these latest documents that he had some sort of association with MI5 and MI6, essentially the FBI and the CIA of the UK. We know that he made an approach

to the German intelligence service. And we know that he tried hard to get a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin.

When he says Epstein was an Israeli agent, that theory had been circulating for years based on Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell's documented Mossad ties. When he describes the hidden cameras on the island, the New York Times had already reported them long before he mentioned them. When he describes the

sweetheart deal, that was one of the most covered aspects of the entire Epstein saga. On torture programs back around the 9-11 and Guantanamo Bay era, John got ahead of the official narrative and paid for it with his freedom. On Epstein, he doesn't take any real risk. On the safest possible question, did Epstein take his own

life? He goes with the consensus. The cameras never work, the guards are always sound asleep. This happens all the time, these suicides, they happen like literally every day in American prisons.

That might be the single lowest risk position on the single most controversial question in the entire Epstein story. He even hinted at how he might not know too much at all.

I said that I was confident that Epstein was a Mossad access agent, and I believe that I've been proven correct."

So he was proven correct by information that became public not by anything he independently knew. Which should tell you how much deeper the Epstein story really goes when even serious CIA whistleblowers can't give you something extra. It makes you ask how absurdly dark it is when those who literally went to prison for whistleblowing only confirm the information drip fed to us. But the aim is not to discredit John, as he's a rabbit hole in himself and that tells you a lot about why the CIA is trying to make intelligence

accessible to the public in the first place. He spent 14 years in the CIA. He led the raid that captured one of the first major Al Qaeda figures taken after 9-11. He was the raids that captured one of the first major al-Qaeda figures taken after 9-11 He was the first US government official to confirm that the CIA was waterboarding prisoners And then he went to prison for it not for torturing anyone But just for talking about torture where John would see 23 months inside of a prison. Did any of the people who were torturing? Other people wind up in jail. Not a single one He studied Middle Eastern studies, got a Masters in Legislative Affairs and as graduate professor a CIA psychologist recruited him into the agency.

And almost immediately he found himself in the room where it all happens. He described being sent to the White House at 26 years old the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

"...and we all sit down, the president tells us sit down. We sit down and the president says, well, now what do we do? And everybody turns and looks at me. I said, Mr. President, as you know, Iraqi troops crossed the border at two o'clock this morning. And I said, actually, he's the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The vice president shouts, Jesus Christ. And then the president says, gentlemen, thank you, thank you. We'll take it from here. And I remember saying to myself, my friends would never believe in a thousand years what I was doing right now.

They wouldn't even believe me if I told them. That's what an analyst does. When I switched to operations, again, the job was very straightforward. It was to recruit spies, to steal secrets. But then if you're involved in counter-terrorism operations,

there are a lot of extras that you have to be trained in. So you go through the normal spy training. This is how you ingratiate yourself. It's something called the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit.

After 9-11, they made him chief of counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan and he was involved in some high-level raids. There's absolutely no doubt that he was in deep. At one of the sites they found Abu Zubaydah, which is the guy he went to prison over building a bomb. He then tries to escape across the rooftops and was shot but kept alive. Then came the offer that would define the rest of John's life. CIA officials approached him and 13 other officers about being trained in enhanced

interrogation techniques. On Carlos Watson's show he explained how that panned out pretty much like the movie scene you can imagine it as.

Well I was one of 14 people asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of what they called enhanced interrogation techniques. I was the only one of the 14 who said no. Besides being immoral and unethical, I thought it was illegal. It

was illegal." A colleague who happened to be a psychiatrist pulled him aside.

He said to me one day, buddy, you know, you know, they call you the human rights guy behind your back. And I said, yeah, I know. And he said, you know, that's not a compliment, right? And I said, Steve, I'm right and they're wrong. And I'm comfortable with my position.

One of his more senior mentors was far more blunt, allegedly telling him.

First of all, let's call a spade a spade. He said, this is a torture program and somebody is gonna go to prison. Do you wanna go to prison?

So you can imagine the stakes you're subjected to as a high-ranking CIA officer. It's simply not normal. You're in the thick of 9-11, the Iraq War and now a notorious torture program. On the Joe Rogan Experience, John lays out

what those techniques actually were. They strip you naked, they chain you to an eyebolt in the ceiling so you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything. You can't get comfortable in any way. They chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then every hour somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you. But we killed people with that technique.

His heart actually stopped during a waterboarding session, and the doctor revived him just so he could be tortured more.

Then in December 2007, his career was about to detonate when Brian Ross at ABC News contacted him, where he discusses this moment with Joe Rogan.

So I called Brian Ross, I said, I'll give you your interview. And I decided that whatever he was gonna ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was gonna ask me, I was just gonna tell the truth. And I said three things in that interview

that changed the course of the rest of my life. Now, here's the twist in John's story. He says Abu

Zubaydah's waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds after which Abu cooperated. But this turned out to be completely wrong. Declassified documents later revealed he was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month. It was much worse than John said. It was brutal, painful, horrific, not quick and easy. So as a whistleblower from within the CIA that's a bad look, as he says waterboarding happened but it wasn't that bad as far as waterboarding goes. His excuse was that the CIA fed him disinformation

internally which the CIA dismissed, so to some it looked like he delivered a soft version of the torture program to the public before it fully leaked. And he barely mentions this at all, he said this on the Joe Rogan Experience.

That's the worst part of this. No, none of it was effective.

There are basically two outcomes. He was either an unwitting propagandist or a victim of a CIA internal deception. But the whole feud was real and escalated when he took on John Brennan, the CIA director at the time.

Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, and says, talking about me, charge him with espionage. And Holder writes back, we got these memos in Discovery when I went to trial. Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage. And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.

And when John talks about Brennan, he describes an apparatus of killing that functioned much like a weekly staff meeting.

John Brennan had the Tuesday morning kill list meetings because the tech got sophisticated enough that you could just write up a list of people that you want to kill that week and you dish out the assignments The teams go out they kill everybody that's on the list and then they meet next Tuesday and get that kill list

On the diary of a CEO he put the human cost on this whole experience which obviously tore him and his family apart

So they arrested me charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. Espionage can be a death penalty case. Charged me with espionage. They waited until I went bankrupt ten months later with two million dollars in legal fees and then they dropped the espionage charges.

So that's why he went to prison and he said that it was terrible for him.

You think you can step back into your life again and you can't. Your life is never going to be the same.

Because?

Because you're not the same. You know, everybody comes out of prison with PTSD. Everybody.

It's a pretty dramatic whistleblower arc and one that gives him a lot of credit, despite one major blip in his credibility, which may be explainable if the agency duped him. And now he's gone viral on TikTok for his podcast appearances, which is either a beautiful irony or exactly the kind of thing that should make you pay very close attention. On the diary of his CEO, Stephen Bartlett asked him directly whether the CIA has a podcasting strategy. Now you can probably imagine what the response might be here.

I mean, the CIA has been influencing the media since Operation Mockingbird all the way back in the 50s. Most shocking was when the New York Times published a massive investigation that revealed the Pentagon had recruited over 75 retired military officers to appear on every major TV network,

all as quote unquote, independent military analysists. Internal Pentagon documents called them message force multipliers. They were given classified briefings, talking points, and free trips to Iraq. Many of them worked simultaneously for military contractors who profited from the wars they endorsed on air. Their program ran from 2002 to 2008 across Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC. It was called Psyops and Steroids by

one of its own participants. And when it was exposed, not a single network covered this. In fact, there was a near total media blackout on a story about the media. So John naturally couldn't deny this question.

Do you think the CIA have a strategy for podcasters and for podcasting. I think, yes, now they do. It took them a little while to get current, but just like they, over time, developed a strategy with Hollywood, sure, they're developing a strategy with podcasters. You know, it was only in the last 10 years

that the CIA opened a branch within the Office of Public Affairs whose job it is solely to liaise with Hollywood studios.

Then he was asked about Andrew Bustamante, another ex-CIA officer who's become a media phenomenon, and gave another motive.

Andrew Bustamante has really made a handsome living out of selling his experience. And he's on every podcast.

And that's true, Andrew is everywhere. But it's a bit of a slip if John thinks people aren't going to eventually file him into the same category. So we asked John to discuss why the CIA is clearly targeting the podcast circuit, and surprisingly he gave an honest response that it's part of the agency's media strategy and a lucrative side hustle for retired spies. He said he's often asked to comment on Fox News and admits that podcasting has become a

career outlet where personal branding and delivery matter just as much in any

other content creation niche. a new media landscape where it's all about podcasting and there's significant money at stake here through advertising. And so there are a lot of CIA people. I'm thinking of, you know, Andrew Bustamante being probably the the leading one who's out there making money on his CIA career, Mike Baker, and there are others, myself included. And you know sometimes it leads to something else. I'm on Fox News all the time, I used to be on CNN a lot, MSNBC occasionally, no more, it's almost strictly Fox. But that's kind of the goal of all of these guys, it's all about self-branding.

Bustamante is the first name to pop into John's head because he's been monetising his ex-CIA role for decades. He built something called Everyday Spy, the first ever digital spy training platform where he teaches civilians the CIA's

recruitment framework. On his first Diary of a CEO appearance he described what the CIA looks He also admitted something that would be alarming coming from anyone else, but gets packaged as aspirational self-awareness that serves your career. There is a tie between childhood trauma and high performance. It's a well-known, it's a documented connection, but CIA has learned, as has MI6 and Mossad and all the other intelligence services of the world, they've learned that when you train someone who has just the right amount of childhood trauma high performance, when you get your hands on them at the right time and the right period of their life, they can be trained to become extremely loyal, highly productive field operators."

John agrees on this point and has said the same thing multiple times, that the CIA actively looks for broken sociopathic yet intelligent people who are comfortable with the world

you're absorbed into. exam. But, because we believe we're the good guys, we're happy to work in legal, moral, and ethical grey areas."

So do you have sociopathic tendencies?

Absolutely.

And what are your sociopathic tendencies?

My sociopathic tendency was to operate in legal, moral, and ethical grey areas.

Andrew's credentials are generally viewed as overblown and when he went head to head with John in a debate, you could pretty much see who was pulling the line and who had something more authentic on the table.

Andrew's credentials are generally viewed as overblown and when he went head to head

with John in a debate, you could pretty much see who was pulling the line and who had something more authentic on the table. Andrew's credentials are generally viewed as overblown and when he went head to head People commented stuff like this. This interview shows exactly what went wrong in the last

20 years. We used to have a country run by Johns and now we have a country run by Bustamantes. And Quote So what we have here is a guy willing to go to jail for his beliefs and a guy willing to change the rules to stay out of jail. Andrew for his part described the CIA's internal culture with the kind of delusionment that

sounds like a confession but functions more like a sales pitch. That's Andrew describing the CIA as a psychologically abusive institution, but his entire brand is built on selling the skills that the institution produces. So maybe it's just personal opportunism, making a career after you leave the agency.

There's actually a whole cottage industry surrounding the CIA. Andrew even wrote a book called ''Everyday Espionage, Winning the Workplace'' subtitled ''Read the Room, Buildt Power and Negotiate with Confidence and Earn the Raise You Deserve. He's selling you the asset recruitment cycle repackaged as a career hack, CIA tactics sold

as LinkedIn content. There are hundreds of books, TV shows and courses tied to so-called top secret tactics. And if all this raises some skepticism, you haven't even seen Mike Baker yet. Baker has appeared on Joe Rogan at least 21 times. 21. His Twitter handle is MB Company Man. His website is mbcompanyman.com. The company man is slang for a CIA officer. He passed off accusations of CIA interference in overseas politics. Of course that's what we're doing, right? Of course we're trying to influence hearts and minds. Of course we're infiltrating politics. Or this classic, where he confesses to stealing

state secrets like it's too obvious to even bother thinking about. It's called a limited hangout. You admit to something controversial but you frame it as so obvious that the admission itself seems facile and normal. And on Epstein, even And the list of former intelligence operatives appearing across non-legacy media is practically endless beyond those we've talked about. Brian Dean Wright, another former CIA officer who worked at Baker's company Diligence, running a daily podcast literally called the President's Daily Brief, using the name of the CIA document given to the President every day. Then there's Mark, 26 years in CIA operations,

co-hosting The Crisis Room, a show openly marketed as The Journalist, The Politician, and The Spy. He recently said Havana Syndrome was a massive CIA cover-up.

And you can see the contrast with the legacy media. You generally don't see these people and the spy. He recently said Havana Syndrome was a massive CIA cover-up.

And you can see the contrast with the legacy media. You generally don't see these people doing long unfiltered sit-downs on CNN or the BBC. They turn up for uninterrupted conversation with minimal pushback. You can also see how they pop up when there's something trending to discuss, an opportunity to step up and give answers. When UFOs become a serious congressional topic and everyone was fascinated in possible cover-ups, the intelligence community again

flooded the podcast circuit. David Grush testified under oath about crash retrieval programs and non-human biology. He then popped up on Joe Rogan. Luis Elizondo claimed the government possesses exotic material not made by humans.

While the Pentagon denied he ever ran the program, he says he led. He also popped up on Joe Rogan. People have a word for the more obvious CIA voices mixing in with the public discourse. They call them Glowies. The term comes from Terry Davis, a schizophrenic computer programmer who created an entire operating system he claimed was dictated to him by God. In a 2017 YouTube video he said CIA agents glow in the dark.

CIA a*****s glow in the dark. You can see them if you're driving. You just run them

over. That's what you do. Adapted as the go-to slang for any federal agent or intelligence officer who's obviously present in public spaces. The joke is that these people are too visible to be genuinely covert. But the joke only works if you assume the visibility is accidental. But what if it's not? What if it's just part of the same game? On Carlos Watson, when asked if he's a good liar, John said After prison, nobody would hire him. He was earning about $400 a week. The Russian state media outlet Sputnik approached him. He turned

them down and then 8 months later with 5 children and no pension he said yes.

Why are you working with Russian state media? Oh, because I've got 5 kids and nobody's beaten a path to my door to give me work. The only people who offered me a job were the Russians."

Which circles back to the question this whole video is really asking. Because there's a fact about every single person we've discussed so far. John, Andrew, Mike and every former CIA officer who's ever appeared on a podcast, written a book or posted a tweet about their time at the agency. They all signed a lifetime secrecy agreement and they all must submit everything they plan to say publicly to the CIA's pre-publications classification review board way before this ever reaches the public. Books, speeches, blog posts, podcast talking points, op-eds, even tattoos. The

regulation says quote any form or means of communication including oral or electronic which mean podcasts are not a free pass. The obligation is also lifelong. As of 2015, the CIA was reviewing 184,000 pages of declarations per year. John told us this is 100% true and that since many of his podcast talking points already appear in his books, they've already been vetted. But he also admits that if there was anything new, he would then have to go to the CIA to

get it signed off. That I would have to of course resubmit to pre-publication review and have it cleared

That means every podcast quote every book every viral clip from every person in this video was read and approved by the CIA Before you ever heard it that also means that by deduction the theory that Epstein was an Intelligence asset is either true and the CIA signed off on it or it's false and the CIA is comfortable letting the public think otherwise. And both scenarios are equally interesting. The world's most powerful intelligence agency is inherently complacent about everything its

officers and ex-officers are revealing. But complacency does not make the revelations truthful by default. You could permit misdirection or false information the same as the truth. All this vetting process is about is protecting classified information." That means every podcast quote, every book, every viral clip from every person in this video was read and approved by the CIA before you ever heard it. So at the top, you've got the official PR layer. The CIA launched its own podcast, The

Langley Files, in 2022. Director Burns said the purpose was to quote, "...demystify a little bit of what we do." Below that you've got friendly formers. Mike Baker, Andrew, who normalize CIA activity, run limited hangouts, make intelligence work sound like a fascinating career rather than an instrument of state power that has overthrown governments,

tortured prisoners and surveilled its own citizens. Then you've got others who might be entirely sincere but create confusion and provide cover. And then there are those in a more genuine liminal space who bring viral moments and charisma to some of the darkest, most awful crimes humans might be involved in and make them sound kind of expected. It's all very validating. A man with a classified career confirms what you've been called a

conspiracy theorist for believing. And it just feels like winning, it creates a strange sense of trust that the public is being listened to. Maybe the normalisation is the operation. When millions of people watch a man describe a Tuesday morning kill list with the same energy as an anecdote about your weekend, it has a profound impact. The CIA spent decades terrified of public scrutiny. Now it has an ecosystem where former officers get millions of views describing exactly how the machine works, and the audience responds not with outrage but with a like

button. You can't say exactly what it is, but it isn't transparency. There's an old intelligence principle. The best way to hide a secret is to surround it with so much noise that no one can pick it out. Every empire in history controlled its narrative. Most of them did it by restricting information. This one might be the first to do it by flooding the zone with so much of it that nobody can This one might be the first to do it by flooding the zone with so much of it that nobody can tell what matters anymore, and every single word was pre-approved from the outset.